Mitski's music is often given the reverb treatment.Experimental music in the early and mid-20th century was the purview (largely) of composers trained either in classical music (Arnold Schoenberg, Olivier Messiaen, La Monte Young, to name a few) or engineers.
While classical music composers such as Schoenberg, Messiaen and La Monte Young drew on non-Western music traditions like Indian classical music and Balinese court music to push the boundaries of Western composition, engineers in post-war Europe began cobbling together spare parts to create their own instruments. As Tristram Cary, a British pioneer of electronic music explains in the documentary What the Future Sounded Like, “When I started to seriously design my own studio, this coincided with the post-war appearance of an enormous amount of junk from the Army, Navy and Air Force… so for someone who knew what to do, even if you had just 30 shillings in your pocket, you could get something.”
Tristram Cary had worked as a radar engineer for the British Navy in World War II. The war had created a huge pool of skilled engineers like him, a small number of whom now turned to electronic music. What united both avant-garde classical composers and electronic music engineers was the dream of a new sound, the dream of pushing music beyond all boundaries, frontiers and norms.
🚨 Limited Time Offer | Express Premium with ad-lite for just Rs 2/ day 👉🏽 Click here to subscribe 🚨
Best of Express Premium
As Tristram Cary puts it in What the Future Sounded Like, “With electronic music you can play any sound, at any pitch and any frequency that you like. Musical instruments can’t do that. Now we don’t need to talk about notes… you don’t talk about C or E, you talk about frequencies…theoretically you can go from the highest notes you can hear to the lowest notes you can hear… the entire audio range.”
A craving for an expanded audio range is probably a good description for the evolutionary history of Western music. What one finds over the longue duree is that given enough time, Western music seems to accommodate and assimilate experimental techniques in order to satisfy this craving.
For a concrete example, you can take a look at the genre on YouTube that goes by the keyword phrase “slowed to perfection” or “slowed+reverb”.
These are fan-made edits of popular songs that are slowed down and drenched in reverb. Some of my personal favorites are Lil Peep’s “Star Shopping,” Slowdive’s “When the Sun Hits,” Mitski’s “Washing Machine Heart” and G-Eazy’s “Tumblr Girls.”
Slowing down the track allows the listener to more carefully and attentively focus on every lyric and every word of these songs – it opens up a space for deeper contemplation and by elongating each riff and every melodic phrase, you are able to pick up on details that you might have missed when you heard the original version of these songs. These fan-made edits also often lower the pitch of the vocals, making the singing and the enunciation of the words deeper and bassier (think Amitabh Bachchan-y), adding pathos that is subdued, less pronounced (or in the case of G-Eazy’s “Tumblr Girls”) entirely lacking in the original.
You experience reverb in spaces where sounds bounce and echo off the walls – old buildings, churches, swimming pools, tunnels or wells. By drowning these songs in reverb, the listener is enveloped within the sounds of the song, and is able to dwell within the song – hearing each drum beat, each guitar riff and each word linger on.
A more extreme form of this experiment can be found in a genre on YouTube that goes by the keyword phrase “slowed to 800%”.
My favorite from this genre is Clams Casino’s “I’m God.” The original track is about four minutes and 39 seconds long but slowed to 800% it expands to 35 minutes and 52 seconds. The song is no longer recognisable – it is impossible to make out individual words as each vowel is stretched beyond recognition. Words that were sung in the original are now heard only as crashing waves of ethereal sound. Even more so than the slowed to perfection tracks, with such extreme manipulation, the listener is fully and thoroughly able to dwell within the song, surrounded by it and cocooned within it.
This idea isn’t new. As far back as 1967, composer Steve Reich experimented with slowing music down. In his book Writings About Music, one finds the following note, “The basic idea was to take a tape loop, probably of speech, and ever so gradually slow it down to enormous length without lowering its pitch. In effect it would have been like the true synchronous sound track to a film loop gradually presented in slower and slower motion… The possibility of a live performer trying to speak incredibly slowly did not interest me since it would be impossible, in that way, to produce the same results as normal speech, recorded, and then slowed down.”
What was once a niche and somewhat avant-garde and academic genre – experimental music has now become a commonplace musical practice. Thanks to the internet and easy access to cheap/freely available audio editing and audio manipulation software, anyone with a smartphone or a laptop can experiment with music.
At one point in the documentary What the Future Sounded Like, Tristram Cary complains that his music was always relegated to the fringes: “People did not take it seriously at first, I couldn’t get any royalties on it for example because people said it wasn’t music.”
The musical innovators of the early and mid-20th century dreamed of an environment without boundaries and without frontiers – they wanted to redefine what music was. It is perhaps only now, half a century on, with the democratisation of technology that the world these early pioneers dreamed of is finally being realised.
- The Indian Express website has been rated GREEN for its credibility and trustworthiness by Newsguard, a global service that rates news sources for their journalistic standards.
