The radiodiaries.org series outdid itself today. Apparently 75 years ago, on November 23, 1936, two men sat down and had their solo performances documented in audio recordings. These men were Robert Johnson, the legendary blues guitarist and singer, and Pablo Casals, the pathbreaking cellist and master interpreter of Bach. They never met in person, but certainly did meet at the crossroads of antiquity and technology.
Their stories are not parallel, but in some ways that lack of a parallel is part of the story. Casals was famous, while Johnson was unknown. Casals was three decades Johnson’s senior. Johnson was recorded on the fly, shoehorned between other quick sessions — he himself reportedly waxed two separate renditions of eight songs in a single hour — while Casals took his seat in one of the premiere recording studios of the day, the Gramophone location in London later made famous by the Beatles’ Abbey Road. (The radio program refers to the studio as Abbey Road, but it wasn’t named that until after the Beatles recording. I am currently reading Geoff Emerick’s memoir of his work with the Beatles, Here, There, and Everywhere, and he confirms the naming chronology.) Casals completed two of the Bach cello suites in his allotted hour. Johnson would be dead in two years, and following a period of fame his recordings would be largely forgotten until the early 1960s, while Casals would almost make it to his 100th birthday — the latter’s recordings would never go out of print, or style, but his versions helped rescue the suites from their previous popular standing as mere exercises.
And both sessions continue to this day to be among the most revered. They seem archaic by today’s standards, so deep is the imprint of recording technology, the hiss and static and other noises that one learns to listen through, but that at their time were nearly invisible (“inaudible” doesn’t do the trick) to their audience. The Radio Diaries episode (MP3) speaks with a variety of informed parties who help us listen back through history, including blues musician Honeyboy Edwards, who knew Johnson, and cellist Bernard Greenhouse, who studied with Casals (both Edwards and Greenhouse died this year). Also heard are Paul Elie, who reportedly introduced the coincidental date to the producers of Radio Diaries, and musicians Scott Ainslie and ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons. (Elie introduces himself as the author of Sound About: Reinventing Bach, and to my knowledge it has not yet been published.) There are great descriptions of the nature of recording at the time. Greenhouse reflects on the unforgiving nature of wax, which doesn’t allow for splicing and correcting. Also mentioned is how Johnson consciously tailored his songs to the short length of the available technology.
And to tie it all together, Brendan Baker contributed a “mashup,” combining two of the 1936 recordings, imagining the duo as if playing side by side. The term “mashup” suggests a kind of violence, a yoking together, when in fact the result is fittingly lovely and reflective (MP3).
More on the episode at radiodiaries.org.
Like a lot of musicians who explore sampling, who make sounds from pre-existing sounds, JD Zazie finds the fact of the recordings themselves to be worthy of attention. The sounds that comprise her recent three-track collection, Needle Need, are so spare, so thin, so simple, that they suggest themselves to be little more than the fact of recording — as if the act of capturing noise was itself so compelling that delineating the poetry of that event is sufficient. Which, of course, it is. The opening track of Needle Need, “Needpicking,” in particular focuses the ear on the rotation of a turntable, its narrow depth of sonic field giving and taking with the bellows-like regularity of a breath. There appears to be a passing insect, and then the rough sound of needle on vinyl. This is all conjecture, of course. The sounds could be sourced from anything, could be performed live, or captured from various points of origin and recombined (
Often as not, the best moments in a minimal techno track occur during the track’s first few seconds. There will be a delirious mixture of remote noises and beat-wary metrics, all of which almost inevitably, and unfortunately, give way to a routine and stolid pace, to lounge atmospherics that wouldn’t be out of place in the lobby of a third-rate Miami hotel — and when things get really loathsome, to the rote snippet of a female vocal. But occasionally, that opening promise is fulfilled. Take, for example, the track “Nexbiome” by Iqbit, aka Rome, Italy-based Claudio Curciotti. It starts off with a beat that seems to be limping after having done battle, its rhythm shifting subtly with each hit. Various single-beat cues drop in, along with submerged effects, short-circuit rattles, and even vaguely funky asides. But it never gets much beyond its initial, ecstatically simple opening (