Impossible Music/2 [78s, 45s, EPs, LPs]

The needle points the way (Tao) the energy (literal, manifest, i.e., Chi) goes, flows, circulates into the coils of ear

Of precious stones the diamond is preferred, its aspects cut & faceted as the disc itself

(Is the disc its self?)

The medium of recording: ghost oracle

What’s on the disc, in it, was first netted on tape
Sound trapped on tape is faster than its encoded approximate in the disc
A process, a procedure, of approximations
It creates illusions
We make them real through listening
Tape moves straight ahead across the tape-heads
Tape can be moved backwards & heard backwards, tape is more circular than disc, disc moves around in circles
Do we hear in circles?

Music coming out of speakers
But who speaks music?

We don’t hear music we hear the record or tape
In/on tape a hiss that hints of Eden

In/on records a variety of sounds, pops, pulses, shatter created variously, either imprinted during manufacture or the decomposing time does wearing-down the disc’s surface
Wrinkles
Counterpointillism

Tape’s the thread where time & tone weave into a record, or as diamond, the cut
Forget real or unreal time, it’s a collage, a graft of time splices, a weaving

Art in a circle demands tiers of decoding
Each disc as different as how it’s heard
when it’s heard

Ghosts powered by electricity

•

A record of something that didn’t happen

Dust gathers around the needle

•

Circular fingerprint

What comes off the record does not return

Dervishes dance in opposition to the turntable
Many musician study circular-breath techniques
But the tape loop does away with breath

Waiting to hear the sound of air the bow cuts into, listening to a Bartok quartet on highschool hi-fi player

•

The “medium,” mask hole intones spirits out of the circle
His Master’s Voice

A Side
B Side
Or flip side, yet only one side at a time
With tape it’s possible not only to hear the music backwards but also all at once, sonic geology—two different works, each on its track, in its time & pitch, played simultaneously
What’s heard? The AB Side?

•

You can alter the turntable’s speed
You can alter the record’s sound via various controls on the tuner
Whenever I read ads in music magazines I wonder why a record in so perishable if the playback equipment is “state-of-the-art”?
Who has state-of-the-art ears?

•

Bartok recording Hungarian peasants on dictaphone tubes
Wire-recorders remind me of Medusa or Elsa Lanchester’s voltaged wig as Frankenstein’s Eve

Roll, spiral, disc: circle game
Square-note singing; circle of 5ths
Circle 8
Circulate the sound of music in the room I left