Signal, Noise and Everything In Between

Visit Shattered Streams, our month-long experiment in digital music ephemerality featuring William Basinski, Mumdance, John Roberts and more.

There is no such thing as a pure musical experience. Everything you hear is mediated: by context, by expectation, by acoustics, and maybe most of all by the methods of musical delivery. The formats which store and deliver music don’t just affect the sounds you hear in the moment – they come to define the very compositional processes and forms themselves.

The pop song was defined and bounded by the capacity of the 7” single, the extended remix by the 12”, the 45 minute album as standard unit of creativity by the LP – and we’re barely beginning to get to grips with what the practically infinite availability and simultaneity of the internet age is doing for our expectations of musical form. Sonic and compositional parameters were and are defined by the bandwidth and quirks of available technology – whether it’s church organ pipes and their acoustic surroundings, portable transistor radios, ghetto blasters, phone speakers, car-boot subs or Klipschorn rigs, musical choices by composers, performers and producers will inevitably be made on the basis of what medium their music is most likely to inhabit.

Those creative musical decisions are informed as much by the limitations and perceived faults of recording and reproduction media as they are by its abilities. Not only is there no such thing as contextless listening, there is no such thing as true fidelity of reproduction (at least until we achieve total, wired-straight-to-the-brain virtual reality experience, anyway). Every playback, even of the simplest one-mic recording, is an approximation, a simulacrum – in some way, a lie. It’s limited and distorted in multiple ways.

The greatest magic in the recorded music era is generally created when people know and understand this, and are able to manipulate those lies and limitations to create a soundworld that accepts and revels in its unreality. The much-vaunted “warmth” of vinyl, using one endlessly-discussed example, is nothing more than a type of distortion, a limit to how perfectly the grooves in plastic can reproduce soundwaves – it’s certainly less accurate, in the strictest sense, than an uncompressed digital file, which in 99.9% of cases is how the music was recorded in the first place before it was fed into cutting and pressing machines and onto the plastic. But like a sprinkle of salt on food, vinyl features a very particular distortion that people happen to like, feeling that it enhances their experience.

The story of our musical technologies, then, is a story of ongoing negotiation between what is desirable and what is a fault – what is signal and what is noise – on multiple, potentially contradictory levels. After all, how many of the most dramatic advances in modern musical evolution have come from faithful, “correct” use of technology, and how many from abusing it, breaking it or fucking up its signals? Whether you believe Ray Davies’ story of sticking a knitting needle into the speaker cones of the Kinks’ guitar amps, or his brother Dave’s claims to have slashed them with a razor blade, the vicious guitar sound in “You Really Got Me” in 1964 – the sound that transformed rock and presaged punk – was the sound of signal interference, of deliberate non-fidelity, of destruction.

So attractive is this idea that we want to believe it even when it’s not true: The myth that “Acid Tracks” came from a TB-303 whose batteries were running out has been contradicted many times by DJ Pierre and the rest of Phuture, but it persists as a resonant origin story. We want the alien sound of that record to have come from somewhere inhuman, illogical, on the border of chaos.

While spectacular malfunction or intentional vandalism of musical equipment is the stuff of legend, there’s something that runs even deeper in our fascination with the limitations of recording and delivery. It’s impossible to know now how it felt to hear the first Edison foil cylinder recordings in the 1870s, or Landell de Moura’s first radio broadcast of human speech in São Paulo in 1900, but it must have been utterly extraordinary.

Hearing the voices struggling through the crackle and distortion, did those first listeners understand that they were hearing a signal from the future? Did they feel an ancient frisson of coming face to face with magic? Or were they frustrated or unimpressed by the distorted imprecision? After all, in 1906, the composer John Philip Sousa wrote that recordings “reduce the expression of music to a mathematical system of megaphones, wheels, cogs, disks, cylinders, and all manner of revolving things, which are as like real art as the marble statue of Eve is like her beautiful, living, breathing daughters.”

This was the birth of modernity, yet the forms it could convey were as rough and rudimentary as primeval stone carvings. Even if by some miracle an early recording were immaculately preserved, we could still only hear the crackling, warbling, quavering approximations of the voices of the past.

This is important to remember, because we often think of the crackles, fizz and hiss of imperfect recordings as being signifiers of the passage of time, of faulty and failing memory, of the inevitability of entropy and destruction of meaning. This sense is written into the use of decay and distortion in experimental music, particularly in the years since the turn of the millennium. The purest example is, of course, William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops from 2002 – recordings where the very process was the progressive destruction of old, crumbling magnetic tape, with music as such gradually disappearing as the loops of tape pass his tape machine’s read-head. Combined with the video recordings of the smoke and dust rising from the World Trade Center (Basinski’s recordings of the Loops were finished on the morning of September 11th 2001, and he played them back while watching the Twin Towers collapse), it’s natural that discussion of the piece is couched in terms of impermanence and endings.

Through the 2000s, whether directly influenced by Basinski or not, sounds variously allied to ideas like chillwave, hauntology and hypnagogic pop – as well, of course, Burial and all those who imitated him – made a feature of interference or degraded sound. And this again was often read as being about decay, defeat, entropy: most of all, Burial’s distant echoes from a mythical rave era shrouded in crackles and hiss, evoking not just dusty, dirty, worn-out record surface noise but sheets of rain. It seemed to be yearning for something that couldn’t be recovered, only seen through misted half-memories. It was easy to see these tendencies as a regression after the hyper-evolution and technological optimism of electronic music and rave culture in the 1990s, and, combined with post-9/11 fears, it was in turn possible to roll together into a general feeling of cultural defeat, a sense that innovation was ending and only decay remained.

But to return to those first-ever sound recordings and transmissions: Obscured, distorted, low-bandwidth sound reproduction doesn’t only have to represent destruction – it can be about the magic of decoding what is coming through the noise, or even just the beauty of the noise itself. For most of the 20th century, popular culture was in part a tale of how signal and noise danced around one another.

While certain music – prog and disco, for example – was written with high-quality reproduction in mind, the core of pop music as such from beginning to end has been created with the frailties of technology and the noisiness of real life in mind. From tiny transistor radios picking up AM signals to RealAudio streams, MySpace players and phone speakers, there is always something breaking down the signal of the music, and the smartest business minds will always work out how to exploit that.

Every development in pop has been about achieving maximum sonic impact through the available channels. Berry Gordy of Motown used to refuse to rely on what sounded good in the studio, and would insist on mixes being played through tiny radio loudspeakers before committing them to vinyl. The term “ringtone rap” may have been derogatory in the 2000s, but in fact, while the piercing melodies and hiccuping autotune of modern rap / R&B (as well as Afrobeats and bashment) evolved out of necessity for maximum traction and dissemination through omnipresent phone speakers, that pressure has created some of the most gloriously weird innovations in modern music.

Recent electronic artists regularly play deliberately with the glitches and ghosts of low-bandwidth digital music, too – evolving not because they’re fighting against the low quality reproduction, but evolving because they’re going along with it. Actress may or may not have been joking when he tweeted about uploading a track to MySpace music player and then ripping it again before mastering it for release, but it’s entirely plausible – his whole sound plays games with what’s sonically “right” and what’s not, making sound engineers break out in hives but making absolute sense for anyone who grew up discovering new music via MySpace and terrible 96kbps RealPlayer rips on filesharing sites. This deconstruction of the hi/lo-fi false dichotomy can be found throughout music now, from a million weird vaporwave uploads through to Arca and Oneohtrix Point Never.

It’s the same sense of inseparability of music and medium that – for British ravers of a certain age, anyway – makes listening to Rinse FM in the car while driving through London areas with variable signal an enhanced experience: This is how pirate radio was always supposed to sound. For those of us who grew up with mixtapes meaning mixtapes, it’s the thing that made us identify with the needle drops, crackles and pause button clunks in our lovingly handcrafted tapes as part and parcel of the musical experience. Indeed, for many over-30s, there are certain songs that just don’t sound right without that little bit of hiss or moment of bleed-in from a track that had previously been on the tape and not properly wiped over.

Whether it’s inadvertent (the deranged, drug-damaged sound of Sly Stone’s There’s a Riot Going On – every edge of every sound scuffed and bruised by cocaine-crazed overdub after cocaine-crazed overdub) or deliberate (any one of hundreds of short-lived No Wave acts at the end of the 1970s, or outsider electronic producers on Not Not Fun or L.I.E.S. for whom tape hiss and cheap microphone compression are part of the aesthetic), degraded sound can speak to us of all kinds of profound things. Certainly, it can be “about” inner and outer destruction, as in the way Sly’s descent into personal hell got tangled together with the death of his hippie-era egalitarian dream. But it can be just as much about the joy of communicating despite barriers and interference in the way; it can be about delight in human adaptability and willingness to turn obstacles into tools; it can be a Proustian trigger that takes us back to the worlds that VHS cassettes or low-res MP3s first created for us – and most profoundly, it can be about exploring that fractal fringe between chaos and control, human and inhuman, self and other, where all the most interesting things happen.

Think of Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting in a Room, from 1970. As much of a touchstone for understanding degradation of sound as artistic device as The Disintegration Loops is, it’s a piece created by self-referential iteration, where a recording of the reading of Lucier’s text for the piece – which describes the process it is undergoing – is played back into a microphone and recorded again, the process endlessly repeated until the intelligible speech is gone and all that is left is the harmonic qualities of the voice and room. The concept can be seen as scary, like an obliteration of language and meaning, but the actual experience can be a truly beautiful thing. In each iteration we are brought face to face with the boundaries of language, but also the audience witnesses representational recording being transformed into abstract art in real time: The shapes of the room around them, the ambient noise (including their own fidgets and mutters), are incorporated into the disappearing sound that blurs them all together into a final result as ephemeral and lovely as a wisp of smoke. As with so much in the history of recording and transmission, destruction of source material becomes a sublime creative act.

Visit Shattered Streams, our month-long experiment in digital music ephemerality featuring Kuedo, Oren Ambarchi, Wolf Eyes and more.