It's Not There

It’s Not There

By Colin Holter
Before the technical innovation of multi-channel magnetic tape, recorded sound could be captured from a single perspective only: Now, on the other hand…

Written By

Colin Holter

Having been back in Maryland for a week or so, I seized the opportunity last Friday morning to visit the Barbara Fritchie restaurant, a local diner with an enormous metal candy cane out front that I highly recommend. The Barbara Fritchie was named after a feisty Civil War-era Fredericktonian spinster who called out Stonewall Jackson’s troops on some of their Confederate BS as they rode through the occupied town; it’s now a favorite hangout of Joe Bussard, a 78-rpm record collector of some notoriety who lives close by.

For Bussard, acquiring and enjoying recordings of old-time music on an old-time recording medium is the apex of musical engagement. One thing that many of these recordings have in common is that they’re straightforward documents of a performance*#8212;they sound, more or less, like field recordings, not like meticulous studio opuses. In contrast, I just picked up White Wilderness, the recent collaboration between songwriter John Vanderslice and San Francisco’s Magik*Magik Orchestra; unlike many of Vanderslice’s earlier records, White Wilderness is relatively light on overt studio artifice, deploying instead a medium-size ensemble of orchestral musicians alongside a subdued rock complement. Like all of Vanderslice’s albums, of course, it sounds great, but more evident here than on any other of his records is the fundamental paradox of studio recording: Instruments and voices that have no right to be audible above the rest of the ensemble are present and accounted for. It sounds great—but it doesn’t sound like all the instruments are playing their parts at the same time in the same place.

If we wanted to be analytical about this contradiction in a broadly historical sense, we could speculate that it’s a ramification of the dominance over time and space to which the advancements of modernity entitle us. Before the technical innovation of multi-channel magnetic tape, recorded sound could be captured from a single perspective only: Now, on the other hand, we can have one ear next to a nylon-string guitar, as on the Church’s 1982 single “Almost With You,” and the other some distance away from a rock band striding along at full clip. Just as Dutch painters in the early days of mercantilism could conjure impossible bouquets of flowers that could never have been in bloom at the same time, we can—and, indeed, Vanderslice does—make flatly inconceivable listening environments sound perfectly reasonable. In other words, even as high-fidelity a record as White Wilderness—which seems to make use overwhelmingly of acoustic instruments recorded, individually, as faithfully as possible—bends the apparatus of the modern to the task of reproducing an impossibility. For this reason, the distinction between document-like recordings and studio-art recordings is perhaps less tenable than it might seem.