Jeff Magnum | Courtesy of dewdoobrefhugmachine.wordpress.com
You know the old cliché: sensitive singer-songwriter, foot of the bed, softly strumming on an old acoustic guitar. The mood is quiet -- but the sound of the apartment bleeds through: old wood floors, maybe traffic outside. There is a conscious understanding of where the singer-songwriter is. For the listener, this is an open door into the artist’s immediate space of recording. The music is not simply a particular moment in time, but a brief aural snapshot of a performance setting. So many albums get dubbed “bedroom projects” because the image alone evokes an environment that is homely, quiet and above all, intimate. Such a tag suggests the listener is not only listening to music, but is transplanting one’s own self into the small space in which the music was performed.
Music that appears to convey intimacy is, more or less, effective at communicating an experience within a specific time and space. In his essay on experimental music, John Cage points out:
“There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make silence, we cannot. For certain engineering purposes, it is desirable to have as silent a situation as possible” (Silence 8).
Often, music creates the illusion of intimacy by manipulating an environment to achieve the desired characteristics of silence. But a room is never totally devoid of the potential for noise. Sometimes walls echo, sometimes they absorb sound. The manipulation of silence, therefore, constitutes the conscious removal of the spatial element of sound. A record like Cat Power’s You Are Free creates the illusion of intimacy by eliminating any sounds external to the instruments and voice. The record is no longer a product of time and space, but only time. Though its quiet demeanor presents the illusion of an intimate environment, the record is founded upon a canvas of painted silence that attempts to extricate itself from human presence.
A record that aims to engage the listener through its intimacy is contingent upon the characteristics of the recorded space. This is why live records are so appealing: they communicate the intimacy of the environment and the circumstances of the performance so effectively that the songs adopt a new meaning. Live recordings consciously include crowd levels in the mix and are deliberate about their spatial characteristics. They signify intimacy by communicating the performance as well as fan affection. A studio allows the recording to be more ambiguous about its spatial characteristics, which in turn encourages subjectivity of the listener. The communication of space, then, is as much of a signifier as time. Outside of external documentation, we can never know when a track was actually recorded; therefore space must be used as the signifier for both space and time. While the silent backdrop of You Are Free may appear to communicate moments of both space and time, it pacifies the physical characteristics of its environment.
Can recorded music ever really communicate genuine intimacy?
The moments of intimacy are the most apparent when they deliberately acknowledge the setting of recording. In a studio setting, spatial elements are made apparent through a demonstration of the idiosyncrasies of the recording space. In your typical “bedroom project” record, this is the sound of the old wood floors or the traffic outside.
Although I recognize that we probably don’t need another article that romanticizes the mythology of Neutral Milk Hotel, this example was too perfect to pass up: at the end of the track ‘Oh, Comely’ on In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, someone in the studio yells “HOLY SHIT!” after the take. This recording exemplifies a moment of intimacy through the communication of time and space for a variety of reasons:
a) The “HOLY SHIT!” is tremendously deep in the mix. Whoever yelled it was not in direct proximity to a microphone. We can assume that he was in a separate room watching on. Therefore, we can also assume that though this performance probably took place in a studio, there existed opportunity for others to view the performance. The recording suggests that the artist was not in total isolation because there was an immediate audience with whom this song deeply resonated.
b) The “HOLY SHIT!” could have been edited out entirely but was consciously kept on the recording. The artist did not wish to remove the room from the recording, but to enhance the room to better communicate the circumstances. From here, we can assume that this circumstance must have been truly extraordinary if it elicited a “HOLY SHIT!”
c) Intimacy in recorded music can never be communicated through total silence because total silence assumes a lack of human presence. Cage points out that “try as we may to make silence, we cannot.” The “HOLY SHIT!” merely proves that the recording is trying to translate a particular moment on record. Rather than use silence to achieve transcendence, the “HOLY SHIT!” establishes the dynamic of the physical space that allowed the performance to flourish.
Space is the blank canvas. Even through its expression of nothing, space still says something. When we think of music as expressing intimacy, such music must reconcile its performance with the audible characteristics of the space. An intimate performance is the moment bound to space and unidentifiable in time. It reflects every characteristic of the circumstances of the performance within a space and does not attempt to detach itself from this.
