Each person is in the best seat.
[ John Cage: Composed in America ]

I made a recording of our band at last night's show. It turned out wonderfully. Am I going to share it with you? Probably not. Let me tell you why ...

It is a curious thing, after the show, after the gear was packed and over some victuals, it is curious how in listening to what I'd recorded, several folks, myself included, were moved spontaneously to analyze what they heard, to compare it to what they'd heard before, what they expected to hear, what they would have rather heard. But that isn't the point, is it? I mean, that's not the concrete reality before us, that's not true listening. The truth is, the record is a record of that moment, it is our proof of being there, the shadow of the sounds we played. It is not The Show, it is The Record, and as such, it is innocent, and it is perfect, a High Fidelity witness to what was.

What it was, what it is

The recording is so misleading on so many levels, it begs misunderstanding, it lures us in precisely the wrong directions of listening. Divested of the time-line ambience and context of the hall, we replay over and over our recordings each time, but we don't hear it -- we don't HERE it -- we put it under the glass. We listening for bits, for ripples and wrinkles, for insignificant contrasts and surface features.

We say, oh, that balance should have been or that tempo was or omg that solo line was when the actual and living live and present truth of the performance was not in those here and there moments of adherence or not to our theoretical expectations of the sound, it was those grooves where we 'cooked' and the crowd really dug it and we all of us got swept up and carried along together. That is when it was truly 'musical' and y'know, I don't think the apparatus quite captured the fire of that. Yeah, there's the hoots and hollers and the backbeat handclaps, but the shadow is just a stream of details. Does it catch the wave of the moment?

Sure, nostalgically I remember where the rushes all happened, but I was there, and I'd remember those times anyway, recording or not, because each and every one of them so total an experience that they get etched deep into our memory; it's one of the best reasons to be there, among the real live musicians, because that transcendence happens over and over, and I think that's way more valuable and positively nourishing than whether one chord or another is the sweet spot of the refrain.

By going to sleep, I pound the rice.

And of that wave momenta in the just then pulse of it, does it really matter if we're the band or if its someone else? If the experience, the memorable worth-remembering part, if that mystic force of the immediate then and there transcends the structure of the recordable sounds shadowed on my recorder, then of what value is the personality of the band? Where is the place of style and genre? Penicillin doesn't care who injects it. It's the same wave, just different surfers.

And back to those details, those little bits of information that we so love to fondle and faun over. It's interesting, really, that here, in the twenty-first century, seventy years after John Cage, a full century after Varèse and all the whole parade of sounds and un-sounds and colour and culture and clash that has gone on all around us, how could we not see every sound captured by these ears (and proxy recording ears) as perfectly viable, as messengers of what was that was that we can never actually hold other than as mediated by our imperfect neurally-isolated senses, this is the 'sound' of that 'was', and that was the 'sound' of this other is what we really collected in our ears and transmuted into our percepted moment, no one of them can be any more (or less) than the other than one pixel in a photo can be the right or wrong one for that spot. The malleability happens inside the head, and that makes it very easy to change one's seat :)

Recordings are Hard

It is exceedingly difficult to listen to recorded music; the path is fraught with traps and pits, snakes and demons. On the other hand, it is exceedingly easy and natural to listen to living music and here's a little experiment you can try at home to illustrate this plainly:

I found myself in a large room
filled with many tables upon which were
displayed many species of fungi.
On the hour from a large
centrally-placed loudspeaker a recorded
lecture on the deadly poisonous amanitas was
delivered. During this lecture,
nobody in the hall moved or spoke.
Each person's attention was, so
to speak, riveted to the
information being given. A week
later, I was in Cologne in Germany
attending a concert of electronic music.
There was also an audience and a
large loudspeaker. However,
many in the audience were dozing off,
and some were talking to their neighbors.
[ John Cage . Indeterminacy . 48 ]

In John's first case, listeners are feeding on the essential and personally important information, and that becomes their focus of attention and engagement, a necessity of survival among the mushroom hunters, the pre-selected demographic of the room begets an audience of detail hunters, lured off by their prey. In the alternate case, there is a sound, but with nothing more there save perhaps for those electronic engineers and composition students with a personal detached and professional interest, they become lured away by particular effects, transitions, contrasts and other superficial features of the actual present sound-wave. The 'performance' is empty and ambient to the naturally occurring human being, they try to hold on but they slip off very easily.

Now, take that same electronic music tape and give it a context, a humanly graspable situational grounding, say, by adding a whopping backbeat and ramping it up in a discotheque mingled with the reality-based music of an entangled DJ, lighting-directors, minglers and dancers; suddenly there is spontaneous attention, and a feeding. Often even by the academics; they may try to wander off into the technicals of the production, but they spontaneously return to the then present now, swept there by the 'music' of the whole experience.

The difference? Our 'wave' is back. The wave waves back. We are the waving. We wave.

The quandary and obstacle of perceiving recorded music is in seeing context in the actual present performance. Not in recalling or re-creating some imagined distant performance, not in gaging this standard against that in the war-room of our pre-frontals, but in seeing that device emiting those sounds into this room right then. Like John's electronic music 'performance', the proxied sound is innocently there just as before, like the rose between the Mooske and the Gripes, but the show, the ever-living show has shifted the then humans waving from their studio instruments to those there with us now; the sound-architecture of the audition hall, all of us co-doing the present listening, we may glimpse it now and then, but this is a very hard thing to see sometimes.

Activities which are different
happen in a time which is a space
are each central, original.
ibid

So I don't know if I'll post these tracks. Out of a concern of misleading, out of wishes to sidestep the academic exercises, out of my sincere desire that you go out and immerse yourself in the Experience itself, as it happens, where you are, because, like us, you've already got the best seat.