Inside/Outside Music
There are albums which have an ‘inside’ feeling to them and albums which are more ‘open’. The inside albums feel darker, cooler; they bring to mind a nicely air-conditioned recording studio or rehearsal room. The outdoor albums sound more like an open-air concert. This distinction is pretty crude and it probably just originates in my having listened to a few different albums which very obviously include traces of their surroundings. For example, Band of Gypsies — an outdoor album, of course — or John Coltrane’s Sun Ship, which recalls the experimental, stop-start, slow tempo of a studio session (because that’s what it is). While this is the likely origin of my sense that there are these two fundamental types of album, I think each category extends a bit further and captures more than the obvious differences between live and studio recordings.
The question I’m subconsciously asking when I categorise albums in this way is probably just ‘How live does it sound?’ Or, slightly more subtly, ‘Is this performance the result of multiple takes which developed through an unfolding process, section by section, in the dark seclusion of the studio?’ ‘Does this recording sound like it’s the first time the song has reached this state of completion, or was it already a finished, polished thing which is now being performed for the umpteenth time? Is this a song which is already part of a live set, which will be performed over and over again whether or not there are recording devices present?’ (Needless to say, both of these types of music are good.) It’s tempting to inflect these questions in a slightly different way by adding another one: ‘Were the performers indifferent to the recording apparatus?’ ‘To what extent has the recorded performance been shaped by the presence of the recording medium?’ ‘Was this composition simply written in the old-fashioned way, i.e. with a live audience in mind?’ These questions about intention seem to impose themselves on the work and change its sound, feel, atmosphere etc., irrespective of whether the performers were fully aware of all the implications of the act of recording. It happens behind their back; it’s an inescapable effect of the technology.
The albums Miles Davis recorded with Teo Macero (the obvious ones in particular — In a Silent Way, Bitches Brew, A Tribute to Jack Johnson) are all drenched in that secluded, inside feeling. Davis and Macero took the tape recordings of experimental studio sessions and spliced them together into longer compositions — these albums are some of the earliest examples of this way of working, something which is at once improbable and logical considering the importance of live performance and improvisation in jazz.
Would a purist’s idea of a jazz record be one that seemed indifferent to the recording process, i.e. a record that aimed to be equivalent to a typical live set? The improvised solos on each track would then serve as representative, ideal solos: even though improvisations necessarily differ from one performance to the next, the recorded solo only has to be a particularly good example which implies all the alternatives. The trouble is that recorded solos on this sort of record do actually become fixed; they overshadow the live performances of the same songs; they don’t sound like just one possibility out of many; they don’t always imply the unrecorded alternatives. A record — a mechanical reproduction — captures and then kills spontaneity. The Davis/Macero records, built out of fragments taken from much longer studio sessions, do a better job of distinguishing themselves from a live performance: they always imply a huge mass of unheard, additional, possible material. As to whether these are the best examples of sequestered-sounding studio compositions, I think they are: even the livelier bits of Jack Johnson sound cool, cloistered, inward. At the other end of the spectrum are warmer recordings like Davis’s In Person at the Blackhawk or Oscar Peterson’s The Trio. Those albums sound like the nightclubs where they were recorded, and the tempo is on average quite fast — so the suggestion that they sound ‘hot’ or ‘busy’ isn’t especially radical. What’s interesting is how you can hear (in a general way) all of the stresses and exigencies of live performance in these recordings — the jostle, stress, and tight tolerances of touring are audible in the grain of the recorded sound.
Another example of an open, outward album is something like Eric Dolphy’s Out to Lunch — the product of a studio session, but an album that still sometimes sounds like other live performances in halls, on bandstands, or in empty auditoriums. This isn’t strictly anything to do with Dolphy’s compositions but rather with the production — the perceived space between the instruments, and between the instruments and the walls. (It sounds like they’re in a big room — is that all I’m getting at here?) Carla Bley and Charlie Haden’s The Ballad of the Fallen is also quite open and live-sounding, maybe because there are a lot of performers involved. The self-titled 1978 album by the Cecil Taylor Unit is similarly spacious and light — each performance sounds huge, too big for the confines of a studio — there are too many notes moving in too many different directions — but this recording is actually the product of a four day studio session.
What about rock music? On the Beach and Time Fades Away by Neil Young have an outside sound (the latter is a live album after all); Tonight’s the Night has a more private, grimier feel, like it was recorded in a cellar or bunker. (Do all recording studios remind me of bunkers?) Then again, On the Beach has at least one heavy, dark studio song (‘Motion Pictures’). Is it unusual for classic albums to be inconsistently close, open, walled-in, expansive?
If there are deeper mechanisms involved in this process of classification they may have something to do with the specific quality of the quiet passages on every recording. Every album contains silences, near-silences, and background noise. Listeners don’t usually focus their attention on these parts of the recording but there’s actually a huge diversity of possible silences, and they always colour the music one way or another. All silence sounds the same, but silence is a condition we approach asymptotically. (When discussing background noise there’s less reason to be theoretical in this way, but background noise is on the same continuum as silence.) Wolfgang Voigt made good use of noise on Gas and Pop. Those albums both sound like the product of studio equipment, but they aren’t sterile: there are plenty of seemingly contingent details that originate in the environment and in the inessential parts of the process of the sound’s production. You believe you can hear the functioning of the equipment, which preserves an important stochastic element sometimes missing from electronic music. (And all of this is true even if the noisiness of some of the Gas recordings is really something deliberate and artificial, which in fact it is.) What would be a good example of electronic music that has an outdoor sound to it? The three albums Black Dice released between 2002 and 2005 — Beaches and Canyons, Creature Comforts, and Broken Ear Record — which include a lot of compositions that have always sounded to me like they were recorded outside: ‘Island’, ‘Seabird’, ‘Motorcycle’.
Is there any value to this kind of exploratory writing about other art-forms? On the one hand: it feels good trying to work out the logic of what may be nothing more than a weird prejudice of mine. On the other: it could turn out to be incomprehensible to nearly everyone else; everyone has subconscious tonal mood boards associated with these albums, and if they don’t line up with my own then the ‘logic’ will seem to make no sense.
But then every taxonomy is really just an excuse to fixate on, to return to obsessively, to pick over our unquantifiable to responses to things. Sense-making isn’t the goal.