Review - Lou Reed: Metal Machine Music

It’s confusing. You don’t hear stuff like this …ever. Not on purpose; not accidentally. I’ve heard the album questioned a number of times. I’ve had lengthy discussions on the album. I’ve heard rumors, but I also have my own theories. And I’m not really sure that the truth matters. Not for this one. Maybe it’s out there, but I’d rather speak on conjecture to what it could be and might mean.

This is Metal Machine Music. Best listened to at excessive volumes in a small, dark room, this is Lou Reed’s brainchild, consisting of an hour of nothing but modulated guitar feedback. My understanding is that this was recorded by taking two guitars and amps in a room, cranking them, and letting resonant harmonics do the rest. And that doesn’t seem too far from whatever the truth happens to be.

Essentially, it is one of the earliest and most well-known experiments delving into noise music. And this may be one of the rawest examples of noise music. After all, what else would you call an hour of guitar feedback?

But just as importantly as it is noise, I think there is music in there. Throughout the hour you hear oscillations, harmonic resonance, and amplitude swells. Those types of properties are what shape sound and what shape music. Those are some of the key building blocks of what the general public will call “music.” And, for the most part, this is being achieved naturally. Yes, it has a start and an end (sort of; the original record has track 4 drop into an infinite loop), but between those fixed points is nature. It’s the resonance of the room, coupled with the perpetual motion of the amplified string vibrations playing the very strings which are being vibrated.

The whole piece could be summed up by saying that it is energy, in the form of sound, searching for stability. And, in a sense, with the last 1.8 seconds originally falling into an infinite loop, that is how the piece resolves.

When you think about it, mathematically, it makes sense that a) you would eventually reach some infinite loop and b) it would take a long time. Granted, the infinite loop at the end was fabricated, but the concepts still remain. Given two guitars and two amps, you have two systems, each being comprised of 2 (or 3) pickup inputs, which each have a minimum of 6 string (I would assume that 6-string guitars were used) inputs. Those different strings are different gages, are tuned uniquely, and may even have the ability to fall out of tune with the intense resonant forces being placed on them. That resonance comes from the output from the speakers and the geometry of the room, but is dictated by everything down to the outlet voltage and how that fluctuates. Perhaps it could be phrased as "the music of science" ...or physics, or nature, etc.

When you’re talking about music, you’re usually thinking of this pretty sounding stuff. You’re looking for all of the right tonal properties and everything to be acting in harmony with one another. You’re looking for order that is dictated by that harmony of notes and tonal textures meshing together.

And that’s what throws people with this piece. It isn’t that glorious harmony or man and machine. Instead, it’s the process by which natural laws governing machines are able to form that harmony; it’s so much deeper than the crap playing over the speakers today at work.

But that doesn’t mean it’s a fun listen. The first time I listened to this album, I was alone, in the dark, playing it as loudly as I could. It was an experiment. It started out confusing, but ended incredibly disorienting. See, there are methods of torture/interrogation involving sensory depravation involving excessively loud music, darkness, and probably some other weird, messed up crap, designed to make you lose every frame of reference you have. And that first hour was what I would imagine that to be like. I could see where that sort of thing could mess people up.

But I think the strangest part is the silence when it is over. When you're searching for resolution for so long, you lose sight of what resolution is. Silence doesn’t make sense. Lost within the hour of trying to see construct within a wall of noise, the silence ends up as unsettling as the noise. It’s an interesting place to be.

And unless you live under a rock, you probably know that Lou died the other day, October 27. Otherwise, I’m fairly certain that I wouldn’t have subjected myself to this in the middle of my work day. Not that the album isn’t intriguing; it’s just not the easiest listening. At all. After silence stops being so unsettling, I’m gonna stick with that for the rest of the day. But if you haven't had your fill of Lou for the day, check out the album:

Background Noise

We are bombarded by sound. Whether it’s blatantly in the foreground, or passively in the background, there is almost always something, however passive it may be, that is interrupting the intended signal that is reaching our ears.

In most cases, these go unquestioned and we continue on our lives. We become immune to things like the hum of the air conditioner or the rushing of the wind as we drive with our windows down. We’re aware that these sources of noise are present, but we just compensate for them and assume all is well. After all, if you can increase your signal to noise ratio, you should be able to understand more of the signal.

But what I’ve been noticing, and note that this is something I’ve known all along, is that, with music, the noise still has a significant impact on our perception. Depending on what the source of the noise is, it can represent very complex aural interference. All of the sudden, you have areas of frequency response that are muddied and cluttered to the point that everything within those specific ranges seems like it is part of the noise. Accordingly, we filter them out.

That’s the idea behind noise-cancelling headphones; we want to get rid of those sources of audible sludge. We want to cancel out the AC or the roar of a plane on a long flight. In general, headphones help with these sorts of noise sources, but sometimes they’re not an option and sometimes they still don’t do the music justice.

At that point, all the more you can do is try to eliminate the sources of noise. The difference will be surprising.

I’ve had the latest August Burns Red album playing in my car lately. I wanted a place to listen to it the whole way through and unfortunately I can’t just sit down at home with that sort of time; driving is often times the best opportunity. So I’m listening to it in my car. It’s got a good sound system, but nothing too great. I can deal with that. The big thing, though, was that I started to listen to it on a nice day, with my windows down.

Wind blowing in your ear, cascading between panes of glass, especially when coupled with the purr of the engine, destroys your mid range frequencies. I could crank the volume up as loud as possible, but vocals, chuggier guitar riffs, and a lot of tom work was just non-existent. Eventually, I rolled up the windows. Granted, there was still some car and road noise, but it cleaned things up that it was like listening to a whole new album; the difference was staggering. There was newfound clarity that so many others would have probably never even thought about.

And we don’t think about stuff like that. Music is considered background so often and is treated as such. Just this morning (Tuesday, i.e., country day at work) I was trying to block out the music in the office. It was working pretty well, sinking softly behind the hum of the AC. Then, for the first time in months, the fans shut off. The deafening silence pushed the music to foreground to an inescapable level; I had to reach out to my ipod.

But again, this idea that noise is dictating how we perceive music was thrown in my face. You probably have no idea how much richness is being choked out by a low signal to noise ratio. Not everyone has the resources to make an acoustically sound listening room to listen to music in perfect isolation. Not everyone can afford a $600 pair of really good headphones. But there are little things that make a huge difference, if you're willing to seek out change.

But if it’s an anomaly that even the bad music is void of such frequency convolution, how do we get good music to cut through?

Noise

Maybe you've been wondering what I've been up to for the past two weeks. It seems as though I just dropped off the face of the planet. I haven't blogged, haven't been on facebook much, and haven't tweeted quite as often as I usually do.

The past two weeks have included: graduating, getting a job, looking for a place to live, and moving. Actually, that's all been within the past week, but senior week prior to that was jam-packed with friends and whatnot. Sometime soon there will be a post dedicated to all of these events.

In the meantime, I have a more normal post.

Today, as I completed the setup of my new room, I decided to play guitar and bust out the good 'ole pedal board. Right now, that's a Boss GT-10, Boss RC-20XL, and a PreSonus TubePRE preamp.

This was just a for-fun time for me. A chance to play around with some new sounds and experiment. It wasn't about practicing and it wasn't about writing. It was about sound and music.

I list sound and music separately for a reason. Music is notes, rhythm, meter, and structure. Sound, in this case, is how music interacts with its environment. There is a lot of overlap between the two, but it is important, in this look at things, that they be viewed separately.

As far as the music side goes, I began with some riffs that I have been working on. This includes some real neat math jams as well as some live looping. Once I got into the live looping, as it often times does, it got out of hand.

One of the beauties of live looping is that it allows structure alongside chaos and meshes them seamlessly. When you have effects out the wazoo, you can incorporate this into your jamming. And it's beautiful. The structure/chaos coupling is the basis of a lot of experimental music, including more experimental post-rock.

This is stuff that I live to play. And I use "play" rather loosely. By the end of the jamming, "play" included things like heavily processed feedback loops, rubbing the neck of the guitar on the amp, etc.

This is where music and sound begin to diverge and is why a lot of people don't get or can't handle this type of music.

The music began as the notes and continued as the looped material. The whole jam was music, but only loosely through that structure.

As the jam progressed, parts of it diverged from music to only be sound. The way a guitar feeds-back with delay, reverb, vibrato, and distortion is often times noise; sound free from music. As the sounds build on themselves and take shape, though there are musical undertones in the looped material, the vast soundscapes in the foreground are what you feel.

You feel the music in the sound, but, more prevalently, you feel the sound. It's almost a form of sensory deprivation in that it is all that you sense. You hear sound and connect so deeply that you forget to smell or taste - you only hear.

And then you remove the droning; you turn off the amp suddenly or stop the loop. And there is silence. You go from being entrenched in the sound to being overwhelmed by silence. The noise ends so abruptly that it disorients you and the silence becomes a part of noise.