I haven't done a good music philosophy post in a while, so here goes.
Walking around the city today my iPod switched over from Clipse ("Chinese New Year) to Dream Theater ("The Silent Man"). Now I was really enjoying the Clipse song. Ben turned me onto him a little while ago, and I think it is one of the more interesting commercial hip hop albums I have heard in a very long time. Granted I am not an expert on the subject, but I like the blend between the abstract and the booty shaking. The Dream Theater song starts as simple as can be, with a strummed acoustic guitar. Which sounded beautiful. Absolute beauty. Hot puppy sleeping in the grass on a lazy summer afternoon kinda of beautiful. You could hear the care that went into the room and mic placements. Then the voice comes in on top and everything is in a beautiful space. It sounded like Petrucci and LeBrie were sitting on 14th street performing for me in a cavernous yet acoustically precise theater.
Clipse had no space. Clipse has no instruments. Everything is completely virtual and compressed up the wazoo. Clipse doesn't want to be the quietest mp3 on the iPod. Listen to any recent metal album from the last 2 years. Hell, listen to a lot of recent indie releases like that Arcade Fire abomination. Can you envision where it was recorded? Can you see the room? The downside of freely available high quality recording solutions is we have lost our sense of space. I am 100% as guilty of it as anyone else. Listen to my music. It sounds like it was recorded somewhere in the Matrix. You can't envision my environment. There isn't an environment. My music is made somewhere between lines of code in emulation software. The most my music breathes is when I use drum samples that were blatantly recorded in a real drum room.
No wonder a higher quality music format was never accepted by the public and we all collectively took a step back with mp3s. What would you even want to listen to in high definition audio? All my favorite DVD Audio discs are 20-30 year old albums. People have started working very hard to make albums sound louder and bigger and heavier and more epic. But who is striving to make music sound *better*? Who is the next George Martin? Glyn Johns? Tom Dowd?
Shit the Gods of Fire aren't even using real DRUMS on the next album. And we were seen as relics for using a real kit on the first record. There are a lot of problems with Wrath of the Gods, but you can hear where it was recorded. You hear imperfections in my amp. You can hear the natural inconsistencies in the drumming. Unfortunately it is a losing war. I have shamefully stepped back from all of my analog ideals in favor of louder bigger and heavier.
How are you supposed to get kids to go to rock concerts if they don't even know what a rock room is supposed to sound like? I was pretty shocked the first time I saw a band called Death by Stereo use severe vocal and full mix compression during their set opening for Mastodon. The Bowery Ballroom no longer sounded like a concert venue. There were just pretty dudes sounding like the iPod. I'm sure I wouldn't survive a Linkin Park or Good Charlotte show, or any of those people. Trying to make your music "sound like the records" now means to do as much as possible to remove the live environment as possible. So when you are in a space, you are still in a virtual world.
As I plunge deeper and deeper into the matrix and forget everything I originally loved about recorded sound I hear a beautifully played acoustic guitar reminding me that we all feel relaxed with a little bit of space.
