pearls before swine...
do you know who you're writing -to- when you post to idm?
theres a lotta big words there,tionlee
Peter
np: Low Ground- Coleclough/ Potter
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quoted 5 lines From: idm-digest-help@hyperreal.org
>From: idm-digest-help@hyperreal.org
>To: idm@hyperreal.org
>Subject: idm Digest 25 Nov 2002 19:48:26 -0000 Issue 1971
>Date: Mon, Nov 25, 2002, 2:48 PM
>quoted 136 lines Date: Mon, 25 Nov 2002 13:22:23 EST
> Date: Mon, 25 Nov 2002 13:22:23 EST
> To: idm@hyperreal.org
> From: Tionlee@aol.com
> Subject: EVERY ONE NEEDS THIS RECORD
> Message-ID: <de.30da1550.2b13c45f@aol.com>
>
> EVERY ONE NEEDS THIS RECORD
> LOU REEDS METAL MACHINE MUSIC
> http://www.ubl.com/Images/Sources/AMGCOVERS/music/cover200/dre300/e311/e311237
>
> r0ap.jpg
>
> LOU REED -
> Metal Machine Music compact disc
> Great Expectations (PIP DC 023) (U.K.)
>
> In 1975, R.C.A. Records released Lou Reed's seventh album following his
> departure from the Velvet Underground five years earlier. The album was a
> two-record set titled Metal Machine Music and was met with much derision from
> the record-buying public, who went back to their respective record stores in
> droves and demanded refunds, claiming the album was "defective." About a year
> ago [1991], an English record company called Great Expectations re-released
> Metal Machine Music. While the album has been back on record store shelves
> for a year or so now, I have not yet seen any reviews regarding the
> re-released version, so I've decided to review it myself.
>
> Along with Igor Stravinsky's La Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring),
> which caused a riot at its 1913 debut, Metal Machine Music is one of a
> handful of compositions to elicit an almost universally negative response
> from the public. The Trouser Press Record Guide, in its entry for Lou Reed,
> describes Metal Machine Music as "four sides of unlistenable white noise (a
> description, not a value judgment) that angered and disappointed all but the
> most devout Reed fans." The Worst Rock 'n Roll Records of All Time by J.
> Guterman and O. O'Donnell lists Metal Machine Music as the second-worst album
> ever made (with the #1 spot going to Fun With Elvis On Stage). Some have
> suggested that Metal Machine Music consists of nothing more than the results
> of Lou Reed setting up microphones in front of some loudspeakers, letting the
> feedback build up to an intense howl, turning on the tape machine, and then
> leaving the studio. Considering the album's infamy, what on earth could have
> prompted Great Expectations into re-issuing it? And what could have prompted
> me into shelling out $22.00 for the compact disc version of said re-issue?
>
> Well, Great Expectations must have known that somebody would enjoy this --- I
> enjoy it, although it has taken me most of a year after buying Metal Machine
> Music to come to this realization. Admittedly, I can't see too many other
> people getting into this, but on the other hand, I would not call this
> "unlistenable white noise." Nor do I agree with the aforementioned suggestion
> of how the album was made. Yes, there is intense feedback, and if one
> believes the liner notes' statement that the recording involved "no
> instruments," then it could, indeed, be a recording of microphones set up
> directly in front of the amplifiers that they are plugged into.
>
> But the idea that Lou Reed then left the studio is false --- or, at the very
> least, if Lou Reed did leave, then somebody stuck around --- because there is
> a lot happening on this album. It sounds like Lou took some basic recordings
> of feedback and subjected them to all sorts of electronic manipulation ---
> the "Specifications" section of the liner notes lists an Arbiter distorter
> ("Jimi's"), Fender and Sunn tremolo units, a ring modulator, an octave relay
> jump, and a reverb unit. This is probably the basis for the heavily distorted
> drones which dominate much of the album. The drones shift every so often, and
> in fact, seem to be harmonically related (for the most part); the
> Specifications actually note the "avoidance of any type of atonality" (which
> some will find very hard to believe). On top of these drones, one hears
> short, intermittent rhythmic pulses (perhaps the aforementioned tremolo
> unit), occasional high-pitched squeals (sometimes resembling the cries of a
> medium-sized rodent), and very rapid successions of actual notes --- too
> rapid to be discernible, but in an interview with Lester Bangs, Lou Reed
> claims to have inserted "symphonic rip-offs in there, running all though
> it... but they go like --- bap! in five seconds." He then mentions Beethoven,
> Mozart, The Glass Harp, Eroica, etc. I imagine that he's referring to these
> rapid series of notes. All of this is spliced up into an actual composition,
> with certain "motifs" that come and go every so often.
>
> If my account of Metal Machine Music isn't descriptive enough, I can actually
> think of a few reference points. One of these, which predates Metal Machine
> Music by several years, is "E.X.P.," the first song on Axis: Bold as Love by
> Jimi Hendrix. "E.X.P." is somewhat similar to Metal Machine Music, if you
> played, say, 8 or 9 tapes of it simultaneously but at different speeds. A
> more recent work which is similar to Metal Machine Music is From Here to
> Infinity, a 1987 mini-album by Sonic Youth guitarist Lee Ranaldo (Sonic
> Youth, in fact, used a small snippet of Metal Machine Music on Bad Moon
> Rising; it's the repetitive sound during the fades into and out of "Society
> is a Hole").
>
> Now that you have some idea of what Metal Machine Music sounds like, you may
> still be wondering how or why anyone could or would listen to it. I like it,
> and I couldn't even tell you exactly why. I thought about a notorious
> psychological experiment in which a dog was confined to a small chamber that
> was divided in half by a low partition. The floor in each half of the chamber
> was capable of emitting an electrical charge. When the dog felt a shock, it
> would let out a little yelp and leap over the partition to the other half ---
> at which point the floor in that half would be activated, causing the dog to
> jump back over the partition. After a while, the experimenters would turn on
> both halves of the floor simultaneously. And eventually, the dog would just
> sort of sit there, no matter what happened, long after having given up on
> jumping to the other side or at least whimpering. In other words, as Harry
> Dean Stanton put it in the film Twister [a film from ca. 1990, not the more
> recent blockbuster]: "I suppose you can acquire a taste for anything, but why
> do it?" Or something like that.
>
> While it's true that, for me, Metal Machine Music is an acquired taste,
> requiring a certain amount of patience at first, I don't think that the
> phenomenon from the experiment which I've described is at work here --- after
> all, I could have simply turned off the C.D. player, taken the disc out and
> either (1) thrown it across the room, (2) sold it to a record store that buys
> used discs (as if they would buy it) or (3) done like the folks did in 1975
> and tried to get a refund. But I didn't --- I really do like this. It's like
> listening to a new idea every three seconds (or less). I think the only
> reason it took me a year to really get into this is because I just assumed I
> couldn't stand the full 64 minutes of it. Actually, I never disliked it --- I
> was always able to listen to several minutes at a time without any trouble.
> It's also a good source of material if you're interested in doing audio tape
> experiments (a la "Revolution #9" by The Beatles): after I learned how to
> splice tape in a radio production class, I spent most of a night splicing
> this up with synthesizer drones and an old recording, played back through a
> distortion unit, of a friend and myself jamming on guitar and bass in my
> parents' garage (I never did finish this experiment...). When I bought Metal
> Machine Music, I knew there was a possibility that I wouldn't like it (but
> only because of what I had already read about it, which were, after all,
> simply opinions anyway). But after reading about the damn album for years, I
> knew that I had to at least hear it. And luckily, as it turns out, I enjoy
> it.
>
> Like I've said, most people will never tolerate this for more than a couple
> of minutes, much less actually like it. I'm willing to bet that at least one
> person has been beat to a pulp, thrown in jail, evicted, or placed in an
> "adolescent center" for playing Metal Machine Music too loudly --- that is,
> loud enough so that someone else overheard it. But I do believe that there
> are people who will enjoy this album. There doesn't seem to be much middle
> ground with Metal Machine Music (although I did just "sort of" like it until
> recently). Either someone will be utterly repulsed by this after five minutes
> at the most, or s/he will become almost or totally hypnotized (I am not --- I
> repeat, not shitting you when I tell you that I felt like I was on the verge
> of hallucinating while I was listening to this the other night --- Like
> watching a dreamachine. Or the very early stages of a lysergic experience:
> that heightened, somewhat paranoid sense of weirdness).
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