Records Ruin the Landscape: John Cage, the Sixties, and Sound Recording

by David Grubbs

John Cage's disdain for records was legendary. He repeatedly spoke of the ways in which recorded music was antithetical to his work. In Records Ruin the Landscape , David Grubbs argues that, following Cage, new genres in experimental and avant-garde music in the 1960s were particularly ill suited to be represented in the form of a recording. These activities include indeterminate music, long-duration minimalism, text scores, happenings, live electronic music, free jazz, and free improvisation. How could these proudly evanescent performance practices have been adequately represented on an LP?

In their day, few of these works circulated in recorded form. By contrast, contemporary listeners can encounter this music not only through a flood of LP and CD releases of archival recordings but also in even greater volume through Internet file sharing and online resources. Present-day listeners are coming to know that era's experimental music through the recorded artifacts of composers and musicians who largely disavowed recordings. In Records Ruin the Landscape , Grubbs surveys a musical landscape marked by altered listening practices.

Genres: Music, Art, Nonfiction

248 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2014

About the author

David Grubbs is Associate Professor in the Conservatory of Music at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, where he also teaches in the M.F.A. programs in Performance and Interactive Media Arts and Creative Writing. As a musician, he has released twelve solo albums and appeared on more than 150 commercially released recordings. Grubbs was a founding member of the groups Gastr del Sol, Bastro, and Squirrel Bait, and has appeared on recordings by the Red Krayola, Tony Conrad, Pauline Oliveros, Will Oldham, and Matmos, among other artists. He is known for cross-disciplinary collaborations with the writers Susan Howe and Rick Moody and the visual artists Anthony McCall, Angela Bulloch, and Stephen Prina. A grant recipient in music/sound from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Grubbs has written for The Wire, Bookforum, and the Süddeutsche Zeitung.

Reviews

[Troy S · Rating 3 out of 5]

Firstly, I have never thought of David Grubbs as an academic. Certainly as a smart fella, but never as a critic with such a niche thesis. His punk nature certainly shows through, which I was thankful for, especially in the more autobiographical snippets- his days as a fanzine king teenager in particular. I was also really, really happy to read such a particularly nuanced understanding of John Cage. And by nuanced, I don't mean that David Grubbs just eats Cage's shit in a different dish- his is often quite subtly, but harshly critical of Cage. We recognize that Cage is a total genius and revolutionized the way we hear and understand sound, but he was also kind of a pontificating prick that's deceptively stupid views on recorded music offers most of what Grubbs argues against.

It seems like no coincidence that in the midst of fluxus and in the heyday of happening-as-performance the process of recording would begin to proliferate. It also seems puerile that Cage would be so opposed to records. But Grubbs spends his time well offering more views than one on the subject. The most interesting comes from Derek Bailey who offers the beautiful sentiment of "imagine how much we would hear if we were to only be allowed to listen to a record once." (paraphrasing)

While interesting and careful attention is paid to improvised music and its world, and to the history of the painstaking archives that people have left of it, the prescient topics that almost seem made for this inclusion (memory, piracy, digital sound, the complex incorporated nature of recordings of popular music vs. the small money-less imprints described near the end of the book) are left out. Perhaps they are beyond the scope of Grubbs' noble project, or maybe they have just already been done into the ground. Both respectable reasons.

[brigs · Rating 4 out of 5]

i was unsure what to expect going into this, my knowledge of john cage stems from my education as a classical pianist - partially that of fear (i mean, he put screws and shit in the piano) and partially that of respect for his tongue in cheek approach to composition. there is also the eye-roll factor, which at a certain point you want to say. okay john, i get it. you've pushed past the boundaries in such a way that i feel i can firmly define the limits just by watching you. certainly not what he had in mind, but that's how i framed him personally.

i feel like i got a good picture of cage, complete with contradiction and idiosyncrasies, in the context of his relationship to the recorded medium. his disdain of recordings is especially fascinating given his early use of them within his works, but i did at times find the arguments compelling enough that i felt guilty playing classical music in the background while reading. so out of respect i committed to reading in silence, it was the least i could do. i do firmly take the points about the oversaturation of the streaming era of music transforming music from active to passive listening, i have often thought about this as i realize i've zoned out and listened to hours of music while working without really hearing any of it. as a musician, that should be some kind of crime. i have also mourned the death of the album and the death of real classical music that demands something from the listener and that cant simply fade into the background. especially, people do not have the patience to sit down and listen to a classical concert. that is background music, at the very least they would like to read or get some work done while it happens. sitting in a seat and just listening, sober and without dancing, has become a lot to ask.

this book is delightfully written, i really appreciate the clever sentences and engaging anecdotes throughout. i was afraid i would find a dense tome of self congratulatory john cage worship in this, but grubbs handles him appropriately i think - that is, gingerly, with a subtle amount of irony, and without the hero worship or vilification that cage manages to draw out of people.

not to any fault of the author but to my own fault i was sometimes lost in a sea of names, titles, albums, and references that extended far beyond my listening and reading experience. ironic that really understanding these discussions concerning the argument recording music would have been much more enlightening to me was i *more* of a devotee to the thing cage saw as a problem.

the comment that recorded free jazz essentially makes it a composition was new and potentially convincing to me.

also, my hatred of spotify grows on a daily basis, this book has only magnified that. i keep saying i'm going to delete it all and start buying records, cds, and tapes so i'm really forced to think about the art in my life. do i think we should go about smashing vinyls to save society? no, john was a bit of a curmudgeon (well, and so am i sometimes) and an extremist. but he wasn't entirely wrong.

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

It should be noted that one thing David Grubbs' dissertation gets entirely wrong is that Cage's Sixties recordings reflect on a paucity of professional recording of the so-called "new music" or "non-idiomatic" music (read: white music; it was only the whites who got to be so un-marked) of that period; when the truth of the matter is that the Sixties are the period of the birth of amateur recording on magnetic tape, so we just don't know whether such a paucity of professionally recorded music exists -- that stuff is still in private archives. Grubbs sees a vortex: in our present moment, everything new music gets recorded and steams, so circulates; so the radial capacity for new music becomes endless; while at the historical tip for magnetic tape, Grubbs presumes there's less, but I don't share the presumption since all that home recording fad-tape of the late Sixties is out there, though it hasn't yet been converted to digital. Just last week, home tapes from a 1965 recording (semi-pro) of the Coltrane's septet doing A Love Supreme was released on Impulse. Non-idiomatic it is not; amateur it is not; but part of the fad it is.

This is a book about catapult -- the feeling for historical adjacency. If fans of free improvised, or non-idiomatic music have increasingly more such music archivally available to them in the tech revolution of the digital "archive," then how will the feel for the period (the Sixties)'s adjacency ever be encountered? How will free improvisor (record disdainer) Derek Bailey, in Grubbs' account, ever be experienced as a live musician once his "works" in digital format suffer the indignity of seeming ever more like "compositions"? Grubbs' answer to this is that the more Bailey that is streamed, the less likely it will be that completists have a personal bandwidth to play the "work" more than once. This pretty much defines the "nearness" that gives adjacency its terminological "buzz." Catapult. (Did we miss anything?)

What Grubbs does so effectively is offer this meditation on the kinds of adjacency technological shifts enforce on us. His topic is Cage, and in particular Cage's aversion to records and to a lesser extent, recording. The bother is that by 1967, Cage was impresario of a dance company, the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, that was gaining increasing renown but was in debt. By the time 498 3rd Ave. was released debt had a least partially been made whole. The documentary film suggests that Cunningham wasn't as averse, perhaps, as Cage was to record -- the film was one of a string of efforts to help the company solve the debt. The Cage Sixties recordings might be viewed the same way. Cage's seriousness can't quite be extricated from these struggles. Performance and record can't be distinguished.

[Jay Hinman · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was an inescapable premise for me and my interests in the collision between music creation and music consumption: How has the experience of experimental music listening changed, especially that of the 1960s, since digital technology has afforded its lengthy pieces a consumption experience not granted to it in the LP-only days? Grubbs threads a lot of thought and quite a bit of history into multiple stabs at this question, with John Cage (a famously biting critic of recorded music, as opposed to live performance, and who claimed to never own any records), AMM and Henry Flynt at the center of some of the answers.

The book looks at how the 45-minute LP was insufficient to the task of documenting the ephemeral and ever-changing nature of outré music’s leading 60s practitioners, not merely because of its two-sided limitations, but because its snapshot nature was so insufficient at conveying the music’s improvisational nature. There was a bit of pomposity afoot for sure – records are what rock musicians make – but you can see their iconoclastic point. What Grubbs is even more interested in, however, is how this reluctance is now flipped on its axis by the liberational smorgasbord of the internet, where archives like UbuWeb and DRAM have many thousands of taped, one-off performances by all manner of heretofore-undocumented sound practitioners from the 1960s and beyond. We’ve moved dramatically from an era of recorded scarcity, in which deeply experimental music’s canonical improvisational moments were more read about and talked about than actually heard, and where one or two LPs that did happen to squirt out (say, AMM’s AMMmusic) contained music no more or less “representative” than the performances that either preceded or followed it.

Now, Grubbs rightly maintains, it’s far easier to get a bead on just what these weird tape collectives and underground spaces were truly up to just by clicking around for a few days; he also fears drowning in a hard drive bursting with all of this this newfound knowledge, to say nothing of the many thousands of hours more to be heard (or not) via streams. He writes cleanly and mostly unlike the Duke University academic he is, and humanizes the whole process right up front by documenting his own collector/accumulator/experiential journey into these worlds from 1980s hardcore punk/indie rock beginnings. (You may remember Mr. Grubbs from their own once-fandom of his rock bands Squirrel Bait and Bastro; I certainly do). I liked that he conceived this fairly off-center topic out of whole cloth and owned it so meticulously; it’s an enlightened, chin-stroking sort of read, even if, like me, you haven’t yet begun trawling the interweb archives to pinpoint the Great and True History of the Experimental Pioneers.

[University of Chicago Magazine]

David Grubbs, AM'91, PhD'05
Author

From our pages (May–June/14): "Until someone invents a time machine, the only way to hear experimental and avant-garde music from the 1960s is via a recording, whether vinyl, magnetic, optical, or digital. Yet many musicians at the time—John Cage most famously—considered sound recordings antithetical to the fleeting, unpredictable, in-the-moment performances they most valued. David Grubbs, a recording artist himself, explores this dilemma and how it is magnified in our age of widely available archival recordings."

[Tara Brabazon · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is amazing. It offers a clear understanding - from the perspective of 2014 - on John Cage. The role of 'the random' and improvisation in Cage's work is explained, while also presenting a history of recorded sound and sound recording.

David Grubbs has provided a great service for both scholars of John Cage and sonic media theorists. A fine, well researched book.

[Matthew Lederman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting subject matter and taken from a relevant and often overlooked perspective (how music consumption can affect how we understand it, how it could affect composition, etc). But it is written too much like a doctoral thesis for my tastes. Extremely dry.

[Ray · Rating 4 out of 5]

The title quotes composer John Cage who had no interest in his own recorded works. Similarly, guitarist Derek Bailey accumulated less than a dozen vinyl albums, although he issued close to a hundred and had his own record label.
There's great chapters on Henry Flynt, AMM, Cage, U.K. improvisers. I most enjoyed the authors overview of modern access to experimental music through the internet, especially for compositions that would have remained obscure without the digital medium. He also addresses the conundrum of modern listening habits- online listening is usually tied to surfing the internet at the same time. Whereas listening to vinyl or cd might inspire listening while untethered to media. There's a great quote from Bailey about how if you only had one record album, just think of what you as a listener would have to bring to the experience.
In the book, Jim O'Rourke is quoted as saying that improvised music concerts are not as interesting as the records by the same performers. His reason being is that the musicians bring so much information in their performances that it gets lost. Whereas a record can be listened to over and over again to get a full understanding of the brilliance.

[Jacob Wren · Rating 5 out of 5]

David Grubbs writes:

Henry Flynt’s newfound enthusiasm for recordings of blues, jazz and rock and roll soon found an interlocutor in the person of John Cage. In February 1961, Flynt performed his own music in two concerts at Yoko Ono’s loft. Following one of the performances, he had an exchange with Cage that loomed large in his choosing to exit the scene. Flynt had attempted a piano piece – by his own account, unsuccessfully – that was inspired by Ornette Coleman’s free jazz. In their conversation after the concert, he and Cage found themselves speaking two entirely different languages. When pressed to explain the piece, Flynt told Cage of his interest not only in Jazz but also in the rock and roll and rhythm and blues of Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry. None of these names rang a bell for Cage, and someone had to explain just exactly who these people were that Flynt was talking about. Flynt recounts: “Cage said, ‘If that’s what you’re interested in, well, what are you doing here? And he was right, actually.”

[モーリー · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book sets up interesting questions about how we historicize periods of time based on the record available to us -- in this case, literal records. It also questions how our listening experiences are different depending on how we encounter recordings (including in the space of a live performance). But it gets bogged down in the details and doesn't offer coherent answers to those thought-provoking questions. I lost interest 2/3 of the way through and couldn't finish.

[Kurt Gottschalk · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read my review in the January issue of the NYC Jazz Record, available in print around town or available as a free PDF at http://www.nycjazzrecord.com/