T-rex wrote:Wow, the Toy Tiger - That's a blast from the past. Tell me you wore leather pants when you played there!
And Judas, I totally feel you on the self imposed limitations. I think I said earlier, I totally respect trying to get a more honest representation of music. But from the interview it sounds like she is taking a stance against calculators at least, and they are digital so I may be stretching. . .
Anyway, my point is I am all for everyone doing what they want. As long as no compressors get hurt, I don't care how anyone approaches their art. All I really care about is the finished product On the other hand, because I feel that way, it's kind of a bummer when other people say, "Doing it your way, with calculators, is not a TRUE representation of the music." Maybe it's reactionary.
The funny thing is, in that Pixies book apparently her and her sister have been home recording ever since they were teenagers. I would have thought she would be very eloquent on the subject having had the background in it.
You'd think that I'd be eloquent with a Masters degree (an MDiv no less!) but no, I still sound a complete idiot unless I have 45 minutes and a pen and paper to compose myself. It's like there are too many things floating around in my head for me to figure out which one is the most important... and when I find the thing that's most important it usually doesn't fit the conversation unless I can explain myself for five minutes first. Which is why I try to avoid being interviewed.
One thing I ran into at seminary and keep coming back to is the role of imagination in human thought processes. People tend to think of imagination as the stuff of fairy tales, but really it's the source of abstract thought, which is where things like recording (or any other process not directly tangible) comes from. For some people, the editing flexibility of digital enhances the creative process. For others it kills it. There does seem to be something more visceral about recording to tape, although once you get right down to it there's very little difference between high resolution digital and tape recording, other than which device you use to "read" the stored data. For someone who is very intuitive, little details like this can make all the difference.
Being able to go back and fix your mistakes can sometimes be worse for the creative process than leaving them and working around them until they aren't mistakes any more. That's definitely how I work (with my hum and hiss-filled, weird-@ss analog gear). I used to try to make the noises go away. Now I just let them fill sonic space and work through the noise rather than trying to avoid it. In fact, sometimes
not having the noise there screws me up. (Bearing in mind that I record my own music, not other people's, so the choice is mine to make.) For me, it's not just a procedural difference. It's a whole different mentality. Like in martial arts--Wado Ryu is all about speed and agility, whereas longfist or Kung Fu might be more about strength and flexibility. The end goal is more or less the same thing, but the frame of reference is completely different.
I also tend to get uncomfortable when people say things like "there's only one way to do it right," although obviously there are plenty of times when there is only one way to do something right. In this particular case, rock 'n' roll developed in part because of audio tape, and audio tape became what it was because of rock 'n' roll. So there's something of a symbiosis there. If it's possible to call a Strat a "pure rock 'n' roll machine," then the same thing could be said of tape. That doesn't make analog recording more "honest." It just makes it more true to form when you're recording rock 'n' roll, sometimes.
I can see how if someone was too close to the rock 'n' roll end of things to see the big picture, they might miss important things like that there's more music than just rock 'n' roll, and there's more to rock 'n' roll than Strats and history. I can also see how that kind of thinking isn't going to play well on the TOMB, where there are a lot of people who have an ethical responsibility to ensure that they are capturing artists performances in the most efficient and usable way possible. Worse still, there are probably a bunch of people out there milking bands of their hard-won cash using all sorts of analog hokum when they could be getting similar results twice as fast using digital media. So it's easy to see why this whole thing would be a hot button.
Ah, so Kim shot her mouth off, disparaging calculators and Xerox machines (both of which I love dearly) in the same breath. I mean, it's never nice to be mean to people just because they're doing things differently than you are, but really, what's the big deal? It's not like digital recording technology is going to go away any time soon (although analog just might). If these guys have the star power and the chops to pull it off, I say more power to them. If that helps to bring popular music back from the edge of soul-killing perfectionism, all the better.
Now you know what I could go for right now? A white russian.
