One of the hazards of listening to your entire music collection is that it prompts ideas of other music that you really ought to own. One of the hazards about blogging about your entire music collection, is that other people suggest music that you really ought to own. Fortunately I've kept my profile low enough to avoid too many suggestions, but back in 2007 Inverarity "recommended" Sun Blindness Music on these pages back in 2007, and his (he must be a "he", right?) blog is such a good bellwether for all things Cale that I was easily persuaded.
And, though I'd forgotten the uncompromising terms that Inverarity used ("if epiphany via extended noise is what you're after", "essential if you're into barely listenable noise"), I can't pretend I had no idea what I was letting myself in for. A fews days ago I also downloaded and listened to an album by Charlemagne Palestine and Terry Jennings. So I've had a good dose of extended noise recently (leavened by some exquisite folk music). Here's Inverarity again (from this blog post):
Questions I wish I could answer:
- Is it music?
- Is it really meant to be listened to?
- Was the performance the point and the recording just chaff?
- Is it some kind of practical joke? (Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music undeniably has a significant "joke" component, but this stuff was recorded before the Velvet Underground, before John Cale had anyone to piss off except his friends and neighbors.)
- If you listen to eleven minutes of the same electronic organ chord, distorted this way and that, are you opening your mind or boring a hole in it?
Digging around, I found all of Cale's "New York in the 1960s" albums are on Spotify, so I listened to a bit of Volume 3. It is true that, after a while, your ear loses its sense of shock. Or perhaps Inverarity had it better when he invoked the title of this album: your retina is so blinded by sun that it's no longer sensitive to the light.
Still, I have some other questions of my own. One is semi-economic: what role has the internet played in making it possible to reach a sufficient audience to make extreme noise available economically when it wasn't before? (OK, I know that, in the case of the New York in the 1960s releases, the tapes were actually believed lost until about twelve years ago, so obviously they couldn't have been put on the market earlier, but that's not the case with other examples of the "genre".)
The other questions are more socio-anthropological. Who are the people that buy these albums, and how do they listen? Are they all, like me, curious dilettantes who dip in once or twice just to see what it's like? What of those (like my friend Eric, who counts Charlemagne Palestine as one of his favourite artists) for whom this noise music is centre, not periphery? Do they listen to this kind of stuff every day? On their commute to and from work? How closely do they attend on each listening?Is it a kind of meditation practice, or the opposite (whatever the opposite of meditation might be)?
MusicBrainz entry for this album
Comments