There is, what I presume to be, an old Jewish or Chinese proverb that I first heard from my maternal grandfather when I was only small (now, I am not only small but old too). It reads like this: “If it ain’t broken, it’s something else. But what?” Unlike a motorway or busy airport terminus, these words are something to live by. To suggest something is broken or ailing is to imply that it has but one function and that, once that function is defunct, the item is useless. Specialisation is death, so the good-liver must choose to read, not the instructions, but the possibilities in his ownings. When once I shattered a glass, I could not bring myself to strain and stress over clearing it up. Rather I called the jagged edges and near-by shards object d’art. And, when last I misshaped, the emergency room doctor told me that my arm was not fractured, but newly flexible.
The modern age loves stuff to be thrown out. That way it can be replaced. If items are made cheaply, they cost less to purchase, break quickly and are bought once more at a low price. Having items repaired is more costly than buying the latest model and, as most of the fix-it shops are closing down, it would be difficult to find an able repair man, even if one had the money to spare. The only alternative to the purchase/replace cycle is to fight on valiantly against the function of the product: find a new way of using it or find new ways of enjoying its less than optimum performance.
All headphones are awful. They make one look silly and rude; their wires loosen all too quickly and they impose a false notion of how music should be heard. Should the phones playback with less than RP clarity, if there is crackle, unevenness or occasional silence, the whole system is considered junk. It supports the idea that the authorial intention must dictate the way in which one listens to the piece. Any technical hitch is read as corrupting, lessening or heretic. In this sense, the headphone is truly a “manacle of the mind”, as Mr Blake wrote of. They encage the head with one specific performance, blocking out the colour of the streets and the noises that may feed reflection and analysis, the foam of the phones keeping a distance between the song and the listener. Try to listen differently and you will be admonished, as once my schoolteachers did I, for not listening properly.
Suggesting that science got us into this mess would be as foolish as suggesting that science can get us out again, but yet… I, in the spirit of the Enlightenment, have devised a series of short experiments that any one of us can carry out or, if one is already out, that one can carry back in again. The results (charted on charts one through five, at the book of this edition) may not topple world capitalism and bring about an ideal of independent, yet interdependent, feudal anarchies, but it may change how one hears and enjoys music. One need only listen with a little respect, when one is listening to the Best Of Erasure. Even then, there is a skip bottom.
In preparation for the oncoming investigations, I have assembled the following:
Ms Ono – Airmale
Mr Spector – Back In Mono Boxset
M. Ravel – Bolero
Master Boy George – Freak
The Carpenters – Goodbye To Love
Mr Reich – It’s Gonna Rain
The Hollies – King Midas In Reverse
Ms Bardot – La Madrague
The Drifters – Only In America
The Besnard Lakes – Volume One
The Shirelles – Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?
A set of faulty headphones
Experiment notes…
With the particular headset I am using, the left earpiece doesn’t work. I have employed them for their primary purpose for several months and, for several of those several months, the previously stated departure from the advertised standard has been in evidence. To wire myself for sound, I have to set my head at uncomfortable and critical angles, lest all noise violently and intermittently cut out. This is not as annoying or diverting as one would imagine. In fact, it reveals itself to be surprisingly creative on more than one occasion, especially when Mr. Light’s daring invention, stereo, separates twinned sounds to the panning extremes.
To illustrate this point, I’m using The Besnard Lakes’ debut, ‘Volume One,’ but you can use any record that contains a prominent sustained sound, a Hammond organ perhaps. On my choice, thick, doubled-up guitars are cast into either speaker, enbiggening the noise in directions vertical, horizontal and diagonal. This is enough, surely, to merely enjoy the sounds, but I go three further… I interact with them, in them and around them. A darting glance to the left causes crackle, back to the right and we have momentary sound failure… Do this rhythmically, arhythmically, off-rhythmically and we have counterpoint. In my right ear, one down-weighted slab of hum, fat as a pig; in my left, there is now, by my own design, staccato guitar, equipoised, equipoised… unequiposed. The greatest and the best rhythm guitar-playing since Mr. Nile Rodgers (if we are to believe that he was the best at that sort of thing).
This makes my head feel uneven. The centre of mass is changing constantly. In the middle there are drums and the bricks that the press release tried to fool me into believing were synths. Around it all, the contribution I made: clipped guitars and newly jaunty organ, constructed as easily as a disc jockey scratches one of Mr Brown’s elpees.
It is like having a set of only two or three faders at a desk in front of you, but these are enough, while listening, to slide in and out element of arrangement that one doesn’t particularly favour. Resequencing on the hoof, I can, if I so choose, remove those cross-rhythmic vocals that underpin, and thoroughly detract from, the song Freak from Master Boy George’s musical Taboo. With their gabbing now absent, I can discern the main lyric in its entirety, which is as good a point as any to fade the schizophrenic distraction back in. Equally, minimising my right ear, while listening to The Shirelles’ Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow, gets rid of those horrible simmering guitar chords, highlighting instead Ms King’s underappreciated, bouncy bassline and its coquettish interplay with the stirring, sterling string section. But, if a stirring string section grows too much or makes you prone to crying, as the reset in The Carpenters’ Goodbye To Love does I, one nod to the left diminishes it to a more manageable choir of Karen backing vocals. It’s nothing can be done about the bomber engine-sound-a-like guitar that quickly follows through. And no amount of contortion will ever lessen Mr Gilmour’s grubby guitar intrusion, which blots the otherwise perfection of Ms Bush’s Wuthering Heights like a punch in the eye blots out a beautiful sunset.
Occasionally, I listen to M. Ravel’s Bolero, but you needn’t. You can listen to Herr Teleman’s Concerto for Oboe D’Amore in A major or M. Saint-Saens’ symphonic poem, Danse Macabre. Orchestral music is not constructed for stereo. It is symphonic, that is sym-together phony-sound. It is polyphonic (meaning many sounds at once), but monophonic because there is only one solid sound overall, much like there being many cogs and gears, but only one machine. The melodies and countermelodies, harmonies and counter-points cohere, as a colleague once stated, like Vaseline-covered stickle-bricks. To pan them and pull them, brass section stretched in the opposite direction to the woodwinds, the whole orchestra drawn and quartered, could only diminish each painstakingly staved note. The symphony is gestalt and, thus, never stereophonic.
Headphones are no great benefit in listening to M. Ravel’s Bolero. Its 13-some minutes of repeated phrasing and crescendo to diminuendo cycling is swirling and immense, but it is not expansive. Stereo would seek to place one in the centre of its tightening Archimedes’ Screw, which would wring and suffocate the listener. Or, it will try tugging the parts to fill the infinite space available to it, breaking it into pieces that fly off in opposite directions, like Mr Larkin feared we all will when we die. Nothing, then, could bring the pieces back together to form the “million-petalled flower of being here.”
However, when I crane my head and broken earpieces, my two monophonic cuts of Bolero swoosh in and out. The left ear lessens and all is thrown to the right. The right konks out and all power is to my left. The Bolero swirls, as it always does, but I am swirling with it, swooping down on the orchestra as they drill and march along. But, rather than being caught in the storming eye (my stereo fear!), I drift, undulating, above the storm, riding the winds. At this point, I imagine myself in a helicopter, which reminds me of Herr Stockhausen’s Helicopter Quartet, a piece in which four string players, each in separate whirlybirds, try to saw and buzz over the sound of the engines and rotors. And how do they hear each other? Through headphones.
I wonder how this would affect one’s listening to Sir Lloyd-Weber’s Miss Saigon, a musical in which, famously, an expensive helicopter replica descends upon the stage. This theatrical extravaganza is, of course, based upon Mr. Puccini’s opera Madame Butterfly, in which no helicopters increase the insurance costs of the performance. Is, then, the difference between opera and musical theatre stereo? Or is the musical an attempt to reconcile the musical with a dangerous split-sound present?
I reach for the P section of my record collection.
There is a step-down from this level of functionality; one phone or other will stop sounding altogether. Like when one has one of one’s heart attacks, it is liable to begin down the left-hand side. That’s exactly what mine has done.
I like to begin with a control experiment, so I place a blank cassette into my walkman-player. Nothing resembling non-silence comes forth, which can mean only three things; each, either or neither of the headpieces is working.
This duly noted, I insert The Hollies’ King Midas In Reverse into the same aperture. Sounding solely from the right, not the back-beated acoustic guitar, red-coated Brit-psyche that usually introduces this slice of trend-heavy commerc-edelia., but, rather, control experiment-like quiet. Not a faintly flanged cymbal or LSD-laced fret squeak is heard. The possibility of the third meant thing (i.e. that neither headpiece works) seems more and more likely until, when all seems lost, Mr Nash crashes in with an eleventh second save. Bulk-bolstered vocals ask “If you could only see me…,” unaided by any other instruments; the acid-bath washes of the original giving way to an a capella trickle. One minute later, he is joined by an entire orchestra, but no genuine Hollies players. Here, within the old recording, lies a new version; the vulnerability of human harmonies and bloat of psychedelic symphonic indulgence hidden away together in one speaker.
This must mean that a second secreted track exists somewhere in the left-hand ear. Finding it requires one, as in so many films, to reverse the polarity. This can be done as simply as facing one’s headphones in the opposite direction. Or breaking the last wire first.
In this case, as I’ve said, I have been listening to The Hollies, but you don’t have to. The same effect can be achieved by listening to Cool Britannia, the opening track on The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band’s Gorilla album, although the words will be different.
In each of the above examples, the vocals, both Mr Nash’s and Mr Shanshall’s, are twinned most prominently, speaker-wise, with the brass section. Why mixers should put the two together would require another experiment all by itself. I have few theory of my own (below) and a few reprinted from journals.
When I hear the lubed-up bassline from Ms Bardot’s La Madrague, greased from middle to ear like a bad centre-parting and liberated from its harmonising keyboard and corresponding flute, I begin to whistle new melodies of my own. Each time, having forgotten my previous efforts, I construct something fresh, original and maddening. Or it’s always exactly the same; I don’t remember. It would be interesting to chart the correlation between the moods and modes of these new Bardotian tunes and the ins and outs of what I had for breakfast that morning. This must, I imagine, be how it feels for a disc jockey that has a single loop or sample stretching out like infinity before them, all the possibilities with which to tinker, tamper and toy still intact.
Should friends, colleagues or close ones come around, I will want to put on the most fun music I know. The vast majority of such music was written and recorded prior to 1964 and some 25% appears on Mr Spector’s Back To Mono boxset. Removing the headset from my head and placing it firmly on its side, I can convert the single working headphone into a tinny, barely audible speaker, like those transistor radios found in teen-driven American automotives from the 1950s and 60s. Pocket money singles were produced specifically to sound just swell coming out of these low-end receivers. And so they do too. With Mr Peterson’s Corrine, Corrina blasting loudly, but pathetically, from the little speaker, my friends, colleagues or close ones and I are soon bopping away and making out like it were Beach Blanket Bingo all over again.
It could all as easily be a Lieber & Stroller Best of the Atlantic Years compilation or the mono mix of The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society.
This doesn’t quite fit in with the original plan of ignoring the officially sanctioned way of listening to the piece. But, perhaps, when the purpose is to create a mood rather than create a canonical definitive, this can be over-looked. Or, perhaps, a man should just admit when an experiment has failed. However, when one is dancing freely with one’s friends, colleagues or close ones, are such things likely to matter?
Ultimately, I think my goal would be to create a device that plays more than one tune at once. A separate walkman-player would nestle in each pocket or attach to each belt clip and, from each, only one wire and earpiece. A different cassette playing in either machine would send different music to either ear.
I am reminded of a segment on Resonance FM’s Big Ears show, presented by Dr Tim Steiner and Mr Rhodri Marsden. The Dual Pan Two Hander would see (or not see, as radio often doesn’t) the duo play two different musics simultaneously, usually with hilarious themes, Mssrs Burnett & Norton’s My Melancholy Baby competing with an actual melancholy baby, perhaps.
My preference, though, is for structured pop in one side and amorphous adventure rock out the other. An example might hear Only In America by The Drifters playing alongside Ms Ono’s Airmale, the former adding coherence to the latter, the latter grit to the former. Together they produce a version that, if not necessarily preferable to The Drifters’ songs, is better than listening to Airmale by itself.
If one happens to have two copies of Only In America, or high-speed tape dubbing machine, you could do a lot worse than starting two versions of the song one and a half seconds apart. Skill and luck should see to them fitting together nicely with two bars between them giving the piece the propelled, staggering charm of All Tomorrow’s Parties.
A step further would be to use two versions of Mr Reich’s It’s Gonna Rain, the 1965 composition in which two recordings of a Baptist preacher phase in and out with other. Starting your second recording a few second late (and, preferably, with failing batteries in your walkman-player), another phase variant it introduced with, no doubt, cross-rhythmic consequences.
In conclusion, if any conclusion can be concluded, the results (tabulated in the reverse of this copy) are simply not as important as the experiments themselves. Results that correlate last and for all new ways of listening are the first step in the wrong direction. For it is only through devising new experiments of your own that you can avoid listening to exactly the same song twice. Which, I’ve heard, is your aim.