a grammar

production

I have to admit I’m not used to thinking about recordings in quite this way— perhaps because of my limited visual vocabulary— although as soon as he explains it, it all makes perfect sense to me, especially the Los Campesinos! example. I’d be interested to hear where Deerhunter/Atlas Sound or the Sincerely Yours crew fit into this, but I’m not sure I can come up with any examples of my own I’d be confident saying are breaking new ground here (Sleigh Bells, maybe?). I’ll keep thinking. And I hope to be reading other people’s responses.

The Sleigh Bells single definitely fits in with the compression issues I was talking about — somehow furthering my sense that the most critical things happening in sound and presentation lately center on this stuff, compression and dynamics and perceptions of loudness. The song has that “face against the glass” quality I was taking about, the one that slowly snuck its way into modern rock production: the feeling that the amount of sound coming through the medium is actually too much for the medium, that everything involved is flattened out on red lines and distorting; it’s hurricane production. It works beautifully for Sleigh Bells because they’re deploying it well; they seem to know exactly how to handle it as an aesthetic effect.

I haven’t listened to the track enough times to have any thoughts on how, precisely, they’re getting that feel — I think it’s achieved in a lot of ways, all the moving parts contributing to one effect. But the “face against the glass” metaphor is mostly about compression, because that’s basically what compression does: it smushes down the really loud bits (little spikes of volume) so that everything lies on a level plane. (This is a basic of most recording — just a way of smoothing out individual sounds so they’re not jumpy and unruly.) The whole “loudness war” application of this has been that the plane the whole track is smushed against is maximum volume — like a bunch of huge people packed into a small car and smashed up against the windows. And I think what’s mostly bothered people about that isn’t just audiophile pedantry or doomsaying, but the fact that it’s been applied to so many things, just as a matter of course, including loads and loads of records where that effect actually works against the music. A folk record shouldn’t sound like it’s clawing its way out of the box of maximum volume, pressed flat against the bars, each sound fighting the others for limited space.

But, you know, after all the complaining about it, there’s all this stuff that supports my confidence in the creativity of musicians — the more the smashed-flat-against-top-volume aesthetic became a common thing, the more some people started doing interesting stuff with it, reshaping it, sorting out what it could do. The huge sucking kick drum in that Flying Lotus track is like … well, it’s like there’s a face smashed against the whole window, and every few beats a big round ball shoves it out of the way for a second, then relents. It uses that whole fighting-for-space effect — turns it from an unwanted side-effect into an aesthetic trick. Same with the Sleigh Bells. Not that plenty of young rock bands don’t go for that overloaded sound, and not that plenty of club music doesn’t use it effectively — but their small, clever deployment is to use it to capture the full-to-bursting euphoria lots of indie/dance tracks go for.

I’m definitely curious what other clever little spins on all this different acts will come up with; there are sure to be lots of them.