Figure this is probably the best place for this so, here goes.
Since ive been on a bit of a Lou Reed trip this last week or so i decided to have a bash at Metal Machine Music
again. For those who dont know heres the Wiki
Link, its also well worth reading the
A humorous essay on the 25th anniversary of Metal Machine Music as it'll probably give you some insight into why i have spent the last few days doing what ive been doing.
Like most people ive always thrown MMM on for about a minute or two before declaring it one of my more pointless purchases ever, but since im in a Lou frame of mind i thought why not give it a serious try (also the essay kinda inspired me to make a bit more of an effort) so i did.
At the fifth attempt i managed to sit through an entire side, and it wasnt half as bad as i imagined, i think the problem is you kinda have to detune yourself and just let the noise roll over you until your brain starts finding its own patterns and rhythms within the aural assault and battery. once i got this far everything became a lot easier (relatively) and i began to be able to discern something in there still not at all sure what that is but everytime i put it on i find a little bit more, its almost like watching a very complicated movie and each time you watch it you find something new you hadn't noticed before. it is still a far from pleasurable experience though i know its weird saying this after a while it becomes, certainly not comforting, but a familarity in certain passages and structure of sorts. i know it sounds like ive been smoking way to much but i am absolutely sure he wasnt just pissing about and had a serious intent when he made the album.
Still with me? ok. so i started thinking about patterns and things and remembered Aphex Twins Windowlicker EP where Richard James encoded his face into one of the tracks (as well as a few other images) and you could view it using a spectrograph (in fact you can see it in Audition although its a bit messed up as you cant configure the spectrograph correctly) and thought that might be a good place to start.
While visually quite interesting theres nothing really there at all, until you start zooming into the wave then things get a lot more interesting as visually there is definitely patterns and all sorts of odd things going on in the visual data. again nothing i have found so far points to any kind of overall pattern or direction (if its even possible to work out something like that) and until i can be arsed to poke around in there much more its a bit of a dead end.
I've also been listening to the Fripp & Eno album No Pussyfooting which was also made just using tape loops and other editing tricks. on the remastered version Fripp included some new remixes where he had reversed some tracks and then slow other down to half speed and things of that nature, so why not give that a try methinks.
Five mins later MMM is in Audition and i have halved the speed and hit play...
Bloody hell. thats music! ok not in the 'normal' sense of the word but ever listened to meditation tapes? its quite simply the oddest thing ive found in a while you can actually here guitar riffs and other things which sound like people screaming, someone playing an electric glockenspiel, all sorts of single notes and trills and things.
I've only done it to the first side as it takes half an hour at half speed and even longer if you slow it down by x3 where there are again different sounds to be picked up. but i cant wait to have a bash at the three other tracks and try reversing as well.
Absolutely fascinating (at least i think so)
The final nail for me was while reading an interview Lou did with someone about the Zeitkratzer live performance of Metal Machine Music and he talked about a new noise track he had made called Fire Music which came about him asking some audio techs if it would be possible to do something like MMM with digital equipment, their answer was yes but it would be difficult and also why would you want to? so Lou did it.
Every different way ive played with MMM so far i have done with Fire Music and its just noise, multi layered but noise all the same.
I have no final point, i just wanted to share something i've found rather intriguing.