In this volume David Grubbs considers the work of a selection of composers and performers who practised at and across the borders of popular music during the 1960s. The central thesis revolves around the question of how we experience and evaluate their historical recorded artefacts unshackled from the time and context of creation. Specifically this involves recordings as products which by nature of the source material were often at odds with the objectives of their originators, of whom John Cage was among the most disdainful and volubly hostile to the medium. Having experienced at first hand the challenge of recording pieces by many of the composers discussed, and even on one occasion the group AMM, the volume for me was of some practical as well as scholarly interest.
While Grubbs indicates early on that his work does not fall into the domain of PMS, he notes the benefit of presenting to both scholars and journalists in the field during his preface and the tone is balanced accordingly. Mixing anecdote, observation and theoretical insight, the result is an engaging historically slanted musicological excursion into the problematics of avant-garde and experimental music reception in our age of instant, effortless, streaming. The volume complements and builds upon Robert Adlington's politically focused edited work, Sound Commitments. For the reader, an Internet connection, subscription to a music streaming service and some good quality listening equipment are highly recommended, as a significant proportion of Grubbs' primary research material exists online, is accessible and is well worth checking out.
Beyond an introduction which gives the context for experimental and avant-garde music recordings in the 1960s, the initial focus is upon Henry Flynt, an intriguing and prospectively mediagenic character. A Harvard dropout, he performed at Yoko Ono's Loft sessions, learnt guitar techniques from Lou Reed, and played a few gigs with The Velvet Underground. He had work in his name composed by La Monte Young and led street protests against Stockhausen. His home spun recordings, dating back to the early 1960s, went without commercial release until 1986, two years after he'd quit music. Grubbs' point here, made effectively, is around the ‘leveling of musical hierarchies’ (p. 42). Over five decades the contrast between Flynt's avant-garde hillbilly and Cage's elite tradition European art music has softened if not entirely dissolved. Thanks to the existence of hitherto lost and unwanted recordings from the 1960s, either – or even both – might find themselves sandwiched comfortably and unremarkably in a 21st-century smartphone playlist.
Cage was a major figure of the time, and if their brief encounter prompted self-exile for young Henry Flynt, his redemption from obscurity (or retrieval from the archives) owes at least something to the halo of association. Grubbs explores this phenomenon more broadly via the effect that Cage had on other practitioners across the arts field, through some of the myriad responses his legacy provoked. The contention here is that, given Cage's strident views, sound recording was a locus of distinction, a means for younger composers to get past his influence. Concrete example is found in the tape piece Presque rien ou le lever de jour au bord de la mer by Luc Ferrari, although there is a sense here in which Grubbs marginally dilutes his argument by invoking parallels with the art of photography. If anything, the piece is more performative than credited: the reflexive search of the microphone as lens for sound, constantly shifting aperture and focal length, might place the work as cinematic template rather than photographic document, narrowing rather than extending the distance to Cage.
Grubbs' brief overview of the terms chance (method) and indeterminate (outcome) was particularly helpful for Chapter 3. This looks more closely at John Cage: perceptions and receptions of some of his most noted recordings (The 25-Year Retrospective Concert of John Cage, Indeterminacy and Cartridge Music) and the apparent contradiction which lay at the heart of his practice. Why did someone who really didn't like records make so many of them – and in the process do so much sound recording? Using Glenn Gould's search for perfection as foil, Grubbs separates the use of recordings as elements of instrumentation from the object of Cage's apparent antipathy, in that records reified performances of his indeterminate (no definitive version) compositions. This leads the discussion on to continued analysis of the use of indexical media (sound recording, film and particularly photography) in the representation of chance. Did Cage get it wrong? A wry conclusion leaves a degree of indeterminacy, though little doubt that Cage's studio-based innovation has been enduringly influential.
Attention then turns to free improvisation, first in the form of guitarist Derek Bailey, then AMM and sometime member Cornelius Cardew. As with Cage, Grubbs explores the compelling contradiction of concurrent hostility to the recorded product and engagement with its creation. Among many nuggets finds AMM, largely undifferentiated, on the same bill as Pink Floyd and rantingly anti-record Bailey being co-founder of an artist-led label in 1970, long before such entrepreneurial practice became commonplace. It says something for the time that both recorded for established labels (Elektra and Deutsche Grammophon). Here Grubbs' descriptive powers come to the fore in giving textual form to a sound which, for the less trained ear (such as mine), often resembled near impenetrable inverted sonic anthropomorphism. The central thesis finds support through a cross-generational free improviser – Jim O'Rourke – who worked with AMM, actively preferring recordings to live performance, on precisely the grounds for its originators' rejection: the facility to repeat, analyse and parse the otherwise indivisible.
Much of the music discussed in Records Ruin the Landscape has emanated from archives of one form or another, which in their own evolving, transitional state make a fitting subject to close the work. Prior to discussing two case studies, Grubbs posits some fascinating ideas. The growing mass of readily available archival material negates the idea of the singular definitive recording to which Cage and others so objected: the abundance of versions can make repeat listening superfluous. Opening archives erodes the landscape to reveal a ‘flatter, busier’ (p. 143) topography of avant-garde and experimental music. Grubbs draws on Benjamin, Foucault and Derrida to question the category of the archive and its future form and function. In this respect, UbuWeb and DRAM (Database of American Recorded Music) represent two very different ideals (and experiences): the former, free, open, unfettered access with, surprisingly, institutional support; the latter a model of copyright observance, closed, streaming only, subscription based with, unsurprisingly, institutional support.
This is not a work with clear relevance to PMS: the only Frith you will find in the references is Fred. Nor is there any sign of Caves, Becker or Bourdieu and socio-economic slants on artists and their artworks. This shouldn't be considered a weakness, quite the contrary. Grubbs' study has something of the Burgess Shale about it, hinting at potentially epistemological relevance to scholars of PMS and a broader context in which to appreciate the book Records Ruin the Landscape. As a practitioner I was perhaps a smidge disappointed that the sound recording in the title really meant the sound recording – object not process. Thus little is said of those artisanal technicians who would have first encountered these musics and committed them to tape and disc. This is a small quibble, for while it is possible, if problematic, to appreciate music of this type and period without the backstory, the in-depth understanding derived from Grubbs' contribution significantly and commendably enriches the experience and thus very much underlines the premise of his thesis.
