The Vinyl Record Ethnography Project

I spend a lot of time in record stores. Many would say that I spend too much time rummaging through those dusty bins, that what once began as an innocent consumerist hobby has become closer to an obsession or addiction. 
I think it's more than that.

I see the vinyl record as one of the most material manifestations of the musical immaterial, not just any other consumer object. Music lives in the grooves, canyons and valleys of those black discs, and it changes and ages with each play. When we put a record on, we hear its playing history in pops and scratches, the occasional scrape, skip, or repeat. While these effects sometimes become intrusive, I see them as a part of what makes each individual record unique - regardless of whether it is part of a mass-produced global release or a private pressing.
Each user of a vinyl record leaves their indelible marks on it, on the packaging in the form of writing, bends, wears, tears, sometimes even original artwork, and on the music itself simply by playing the record. In contrast with the now-ubiquitous digital formats of mp3, FLAC, WAV, the vinyl record's identity is forged through the act of playing and listening, while digital files only gain individual "identity" as they degrade in quality through conversion, compression, and other methods of transfer.

I almost exclusively buy old records, because a beaten copy with history is worth more in memories, time, and cultural background than any pristine reissue copy. Plus, the old one with its previous owner's stoned musings written on it probably costs less as well.
A project-exhibit by the artist Rutherford Chang that took place earlier this year elucidates how mass-produced vinyl becomes something deeply personal and strongly individual with time. We Buy White Albums focuses on the blank canvas  of the Beatles' much loved White Album as it becomes colored with age, drawn on with love, scratched, beaten, warped, and worn from excessive play, neglect, or some combination of the two. The project does a fantastic job of demonstrating that each vinyl record has a unique history, tempered and formed by its owner(s) as well as by the artists, labels, distributors, and all others involved in its production.

A beautifully personalized White Album from Chang's collection

And the dusty bin ceases to be just a dusty bin. It is a treasure trove of lost and found loves, musical objects with cultural histories of their own. I never know when I might find what I'm looking for, and I never know exactly what I'm looking for. In the digital age, this cultural materiality and uncertainty can feel like a blessing. I'm always content to while the hours away in crate-digging meditations, in blissful pursuit of those lost and found loves, those pleasures old and new.

This post inaugurates Oblique Acoustemologies' Vinyl Ethnography series, in which I post rips of rare, out of print, or little known records and attempt to recreate their background - the stores they came from, where they've been, the significance of the cultural attitudes expressed in the music and packaging - in as much as much depth as I can. Stay tuned for this series, beginning very soon.

Improvisation - Why We're Listening

In my first post on this blog, investigating the process of creative listening, I finally gave form to ideas that have been stewing in my brain for quite some time. This new shaping of old ideas got me thinking more about my development as a listener, and the scope and content of Oblique Acoustemologies.

To find the roots of my relationship with listening, I must go deep into my own sonic history. Before my relatively recent encounters with ethnomusicology and the academia of the avant-garde taught me showed me the pathways to expressing and understanding my ideas about experimental listening and music in an accepted grammar, I always felt the music and sounds in me. They were there, but I understood them more viscerally, just outside my zone of intellectual comprehension but imbedded in my sonic consciousness.

The zone of disconnect between the visceral and intellectual zones of consciousness is a place toward which I continually gravitate. In it lies the metaphysics of the music making experience, where a synthesis of listening and soundmaking combine to create singular happenings - ephemeral moments in which the music seems to inherit a will of its own.
This brings me back to the core of this blog - why we're listening, and why we're listening in the way we do.

I listen because I'm an improviser. 
Music has always been a phenomenon of spontaneity for me, a nexus of actions and reactions interfacing sound and the mind, unfolding in a malleable but somehow intangible process. I see improvisation as investigation, bound up closely with listening. However, it is difficult for me to reflect on my improvisatory process - I am hardly conscious of what exactly I'm doing, bound up as it is in a lifetime of music listened to, learned and assimilated, familiar patterns and frameworks, and quick harmolodic reasoning. Yet I improvise to make sense of sounds, to contextualize them, to reflect upon their old and new meanings. The greatest feelings I get while improvising come from spontaneous connections to the soundworld or to other improvisers, where something just "clicks" and the result is life-affirming, meditative, and transformative.
I listen because the inspiration for the connection is always there, always changing, always fleeting.
I listen because inspiration occurs in unexpected places, from unknowable sources.
I listen because the meaningfulness of a sound experience is inextricable from its impermanence.
I improvise to experience these elusive moments of meaning.

Moreover, the process of improvisation is so central to my life that it informs the way I understand human existence.
The improvisational process, with its focused listening and quick, almost unconscious reactions and adaptations, is vital to the survival of the human species. The great improvisers have an evolutionary advantage - sharp senses and quick reactions allow them to pick up cues from their environments and turn signals into meaningful information. Just like the musical improviser, the life improviser draws upon a lifetime of experience with every (re)action. As a life improviser, you have a library of responses to environmental and interpersonal stimuli that you access without conscious thought. You know from experience that fire is hot, to use a common example, and that excessive heat is damaging to the body - so when you move too close to a fire, you are repelled by your body's time-honed reflexes. 
Improvising musicians operate by channeling the consciousness of their idiom (or lack thereof), the fundamentals of their instruments and physicality, and their musical pasts and presents to create the sonic future.
Improvisation and being-in-the-world are process, journey, destination, (re)action, working within and without infinite subtlety, microstructure and macrostructure.
In Improvisation I find the meaning and joy of life, as one phrase within the joyous collective improvisation of civilization.

Introduction: We Are Listening

¹ oblique

 adjective \ō-ˈblēk, ə-, -ˈblīk

2. a : not straightforward : indirect; also : obscure

2 acoustemology

 noun 

  1. a : a portmanteau of the words "acoustic" and "epistemology" - the study of acoustic  

         knowledge. Coined by ethnomusicologist, anthropologist, and linguist Steven Feld.

Sound is one of the fundamental building blocks of all human experience. As we go about our lives, we hear - but when we focus, we listen. When we listen deeply enough, something beautiful happens. We compose the sonic events around us into an aural landscape, and thereby situate our internal and external selves in relation to the environment.

By exploring "...ways in which sound is central to making sense, to knowing, to experiential truth..." (Feld 1996:17), we can arrive at a deeper knowledge of our place in the world.

Listening is simultaneously an investigative and a creative act. Though the ideal of the aural sense is to process the totality of sound, it is impossible for us to register the subtleties of all the sonic events occurring around us simultaneously. Listening therefore necessitates focus, a shaping of the soundworld by each mind within it. We all compose the soundtracks of our experience, but we will go deeper: we strive for virtuosity in listening.

To become virtuosic listeners, we immerse ourselves in the worlds of experimental music and the avant-garde - the obscure, the difficult, the chaotic, the oblique- and this trains our brains to perceive and create strands of order within dense cultures of sound. Experimental music thrives on contextualization: putting unfamiliar sounds in familiar contexts, and familiar sounds in unfamiliar contexts. Drawing from the processes of experimental music, we can contextualize and compose our soundworlds as musical pieces through musical listening and field recording, and place ourselves within the soundscape by sounding our bodies or our surroundings in dialogue with the environment.

This is the Oblique Acoustemology, in which we use virtuosic listening to expand our knowledge and awareness of our sonic environments, of sound itself, and of the duality between the sonic self and its surroundings. 

We seek the obscured sounds within the known and familiar, as well as the familiar sounds within the obscure. 

We seek the truths within sound by listening for harmonic and enharmonic overtones and partials.

We seek outstanding and astonishing acoustic phenomena in unlikely places, and delight in the the sounds that lie outside the scope of our understanding. 

We make sounds of our own - shaping the sonic worlds of our experience and the experiences of others. We use our voices, sonorous objects, and musical instruments to blur the lines between indivi-duality and the sonic totality.

These goals inform the essence of this blog, centered on the music and musings of our (extra)ordinary lives. You can expect to see many different kinds of posts by me and other contributors over the coming days, weeks, and months, varying in scope and subject but always with reference to the concepts stated above. Types of posts will include: field recordings and field improvisations, unconventional instrumental discoveries, musical explorations of resonant spaces, concert reviews and bootleg recordings, rips of rare and out of print vinyl, musical object ethnographies, and other ongoing projects.

Thanks for taking the time to stop by, to read and listen.

Wherever you go, keep your mind and ears open.

Matt Chilton