Groove Column: On Sleevenotes (October 2008)

So I’'m on the internet trying to discover which tracks on the new Bloc Party and Primal Scream albums were produced by my buddy Paul Epworth. And I can'’t, anywhere. Not on iTunes. Not on the bands’' websites. I just want to hear what Paul did, but I have no way of knowing except by ringing him or going to the shops and buying the CD which would ruin the point of the exercise and - wait a minute - the Bloc Party is download-only anyhow. Bugger. The download era has left the people behind the music - players, engineers, the backroom boys and girls - less visible than ever. Overworked, underpaid and now largely anonymous. This information could easily be encoded into every MP3 but most come without any kind of electronic booklet or credits at all. Compare movies where every single person who even wandered past the film studio gets their moment of glory at the close. As physical formats disappear, no academic, historian or nerdy fan will be able know where music was made, who banged what, who thanked whom, who designed the - now virtual - sleeve. “So what?” I hear you ask. Well, one of the slightly pathetic reasons why people make stuff is the hope that it will remain after they'’re gone, and in a tentative way, them with it. I’'m trusting the sum of my working life to evolving digital formats, hoping they can replicate themselves in an uncertain future, little packets of musical DNA leaping from fragile hard-disk platter to fragile hard-disk platter. Maybe the ease by which digital files can be copied means that some of them have a chance of surviving. But realistically, we can’'t be certain that anything humans make these days is going to last more than a few decades, apart from toxins and landfill. So instead I buy William Basinski’'s “"Disintegration Loops"”, an amazing suite of ambient records made from 25-year-old tape-loops discovered in a Brooklyn cupboard, that started to slough off their oxide coating as soon as they were played back, and were quickly re-recorded even as they fell apart. The music degrades and crumbles before our ears; art for our evanescent digital age, born of our hopes for posterity even as it demonstrates how foolish they are.

Comments

[dan visel]

What about discogs.com? Producer credits for the Primal Scream album are there, doesn't look like the Bloc Party record is. There are aspects of discogs that I find incredibly annoying - splitting every abbreviation of a name in credits into a new artist's name variation, for example - but it does suggest a way forward. I know that at least some producers are entering the information in discogs themselves . . .

Have you seen Bill Morrison's Decasia? roughly the same concept as Disintegration Loops (released around the same time if I remember correctly?), but done with film. Worth a viewing!

[Bernhard]

thanks again for your column and sharing your opinion. what comes to my mind when i read it (even if my association doesn't follow a 100% the article's direction) was that there's a sort of a loss in haptical perception: vinyl, the packaging sleeves, cd's, the booklet etc... allow to arise haptical feelings during contact with its surface etc. and i don't know whether it is the same feeling by sorting out tracks on a notebook screen instead of taking a vinyl out of its sleeve, reading a booklet and so on... what comes to my mind too was, that vinyl was or is still a peace of art and sometimes you pay more for an artistic cover sheet that for the music itself...

[Joey Hansom]

Very insightful -- yes, it's a travesty that in the "information age" so much info is being omitted.

One thing I might point out -- regarding your comment that "we can't be certain that anything humans make these days is going to last more than a few decades, apart from toxins and landfill." Well, vinyl production produces a lot of toxins, and how much physical filler is floating around in this oversaturated market of commercially released music? That's one thing digitally released music has going for it -- it's "green", although I suppose at the expense of giving proper credit where it's due...

[JP]

I understand your point but honestly, I look at my friends and even in the CD era, they never knew about the engineers then. Not sure why they would know less now that there's mp3s. As someone said, when a project is discovered though mp3's or whatever, I just check on discogs to see who was behind it. I learn names but i have my threshold of things i can remember. When you see that people still can't differ a DJ than a live PA, we shouldn't over-dramatize the recognition situation of technicians, it is just all a lack of education and in some case, culture. Cheer up.

[Thomas Von Party]

Discogs is an amazing tool but the problem is that sometimes the official version sometimes doesn't even make it 'out there'. If the record label doesn't make it their business to say who was on Sax in the liner notes for itunes, then it can easily get lost in the shuffle.

What really steams my clams is that people really lose out on the PACKAGE... bad enough that they're settling for a crap mp3 on laptop speakers!!

It could be a 12", or a cd, or a mixtape, or even just a promo email.... but what matters is that it came from the SOURCE... it was message designed to accompany the music.

Personally, I'd rather people take Turbo stuff for free FROM US but at least have to read the onesheet first.

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