Day 42: Lou Reed – Metal Machine Music

Well, six hours of this has left me a little bit frazzled. I guess that guy from the Counting Crows was right when he said “don’t it always seem to go/that you don’t know what you got ’til it’s gone?” After listening to this all day I would like nothing more than to listen to Witchcraft or The Forward for even a goddamn second. But no, today is Metal Machine Music.

Metal Machine Music is pretty much the epitome of “challenging” music. It’s still a bit of a mystery what the hell Lou Reed was thinking — the popular story being that he had one album left in his contractual obligation and decided to put out something that would punish all of the fans he suddenly seemed to have while also fulfilling his deal — but separated from the meta-narrative, this album stands on its own as an anomaly. It is an hour (four 16-minute tracks) of pure guitar feedback, with no song structure, melody, rhythm, or music to speak of. It’s horrible and fascinating and sadistic and cold. And it, unlike bands like Emeralds, “noise” is not a genre label, it is a description. It does not use noise, it is wholly noise.

I say fascinating and I do mean it. There’s a real curious aspect to these tracks. They drone on for 16 minutes at a time, the incomprehensible screech sounding like a radio transmission from extra-terrestrial life. Strange, tape-manipulated sounds appear in the howl; strains of noise are switched on and off erratically, emphasizing for a brief moment the contribution of each stereo track; the sheer frequency of the sound has a stress-inducing effect that is nuanced and itself quite fascinating. Listening to this album, it never annoyed me necessarily, but I found it bracing and confrontational. And what has been somewhat rewarding about it is that it never ceased to get my attention. After half an hour or so I felt a meditative focus, not on any one thing, but rather a state of awareness. Attentiveness. It was hard for my brain to not acknowledge this sound. Which is what I found most interesting of all, because that is the direct opposite of how I felt with several albums in the project so far. They fail to engage my mind in any way, and I have to struggle not to tune them out. Where this, the sound of an amplifier shorting out continuously for an hour, actually made me interested.

Which is what’s kind of fucked up about this thing. The old tale about Reed’s contractual obligation, this album being a big middle-finger to his fans, etc, is perfectly plausible, and is probably largely true. The part for me where this theory needs some more questions to be asked of it is in how much depth the album actually has. Feedback (in this case a guitar phenomenon where a guitar placed too close to an amplifier has its strings vibrated by the air moving out of the amplifier, which causes the guitar strings to vibrate at an unnaturally high frequency which feeds back on itself on and on) does have a way of being really fucking interesting. I spoke earlier about noise in music being like a computer’s subconscious — feedback is like the sound of chaos. The opposite of entropic, and kind of uplifting in an abstract sense, as it feeds on itself and snowballs into this monstrous swell of noise. But that is not all that is happening here. There is an apparent level of craft here, as overdubs accumulate and eventually you’re hearing a half-dozen guitars screaming in agony and an old-fashioned alarm clock ringing and some sort of chirping, baby-squealing. The last track (“Part 4”) is a great example, and is the one track on the album that has stand-out moments for me. It is rich with barely-there sounds that you might be able to decode from within the substrate of grating amplifier squeals. The track actually seems to go someplace near its end, as it gathers a seemingly unsustainable amount of momentum and (on the vinyl release) eventually terminates in a lock-groove orbit that leaves the last few seconds of what sounds like a machine dying looping on into infinity, as long as your record player can keep feeding it electricity — how perfect.

I’m not even sure how I felt about it. I will be glad to be done with it. I feel like it would be posturing to claim I liked it, and the sentiment doesn’t even feel wholly true. But it fed my curiosity all day, and never bored me, although a videotape of a bunch of Ukranian soldiers being executed with swords probably would have done the same and made my skin crawl less. Anyway, remind me not to take music that is actually music for granted, even if I think it’s vapid tripe.

Day 35: Emeralds – What Happened

I’ve always liked Noise as a genre, but it’s mostly been a theoretical appreciation. Even though I like and appreciate it, it’s something I find myself hardly ever wanting to listen to. The last time I played a noise album more than maybe twice was Fuck Buttons’ Tarot Sport. I loved to put it on at work, because the propulsive rhythm and catchy melodies let me really move with it, while my mind was free to explore the enfolding layers of noise. Truly a masterful album. But most noise music isn’t really made for dancing. Most I’ve encountered (a limited sample size, admittedly) is absorbing, deep, and puzzling. It calls for an armchair, a pair of cinnamon-roll-sized headphones, a total lack of light, and a handful of prescription tranquilizers.

Emeralds falls into that category. At 5 tracks and 57 minutes long, the album’s real meat is in its 3 long songs. Each builds up very slowly, establishing its own ambiance. As a result the album ends up a collection of explorations, as each of these songs takes its own path so far that it forgets where it came from. This is not necessarily bad in Emeralds’ case, as the 15-minute long epics cover a lot of lovely ground in their time. “Disappearing Ink” opens with a couple of bright organ tones (any instruments named in this review are going to be my best guesses) lapping over each other, jutting out here and there, notes and harmonies finding shape in the haze only to be consumed by ringing dissonance. A deeply submerged guitar arpeggiates somewhere far below this morass, and eventually establishes a line with which maybe it can pull itself free. Massive synths churn tectonically in blow-your-woofer range. You look up and 7 minutes have passed.

In those 7 minutes that just passed, very little really happened. However, over those 7 minutes, a lot of things happened. Emeralds rewards active, focused listening, and throughout the day when I’ve really sunk into it with my headphones and focused on it, I’ve found it to have immense gravity, such as in moments like the crescendo of “Disappearing Ink”, where the noise flares, and the fuzzy chips in the quiet analog synthesizers swell and devour the air around them. Emeralds uses noise as many post-rock bands use guitar, piling layer upon layer, tweaking one knob after another, until the noise is feeding back on itself and it sounds like a galaxy of blips collapsing into infinite density.

Anyone who grew up in the early days of the internet has to remember this:

There was, for me, a mysticism to this sound. Tentative machines screeching at each other, grasping dumbly and finding a connection. Then the sound ramps up exponentially in resolution as what started as discrete pinpricks of noise swell into a roar, each of these pinpricks being the sound of hundreds of thousands of pixels buzzing through the air, coalescing into words, music, pictures of Aerosmith, Beef Wellington recipes, chatrooms — this primordial wail bore along constellations of data. And that’s what I love about noise. It is the sound of computers’ subconsciouses, of ones being carried a decimal place to many and then copied, scaled up, the mathematical aberrations in its DNA metastasizing and taking shape as a monstrosity that rages against control. It is the sound of our calculator, our GameBoy Advance, our cellphone, our computer talking to us; it is the sound of electricity thrashing loose of its circuit restraints. The aptly titled “Alive in the Sea of Information” peaks with what barely sound like voices droning through a torrent of this noise, the voice of man and the voice of the computer trying to interlock, trying to connect. It’s utterly haunting.

This is why I love noise, and I appreciate that Emeralds manage to utilize what is itself a good idea that frequently has trouble finding a practical use. The album is long, and ultimately forgettable due to the almost geological time span over which its ideas unfold. But herein lies some of its charm. It does not try to speak your language, and is thus hard to internalize. And a full day of repetitive listening later, it still surprises me what kind of things I hear within.