Listas mejores discos 2021

people don't know how music is made
(preliminary note: I wrote/'produced'/released this album; accordingly, I'm not "rating" it. personally, I don't rate music; I make and listen to it. I'm not grandstanding against "rating culture" or whatever, but I do think it bespeaks a certain orientation to recordings that as a practitioner of music & recording I constitutively cannot share)

I'm here to illustrate a lack of correspondence between what this album materially is and how this album is being materially heard. why? just for kicks, I guess, and because I'm feeling scholarly (back in school for the first time in over a decade).

it's likely that no one who writes about this album, whether here or in whatever press, is going to refer to the must fundamental thing about it: it was recorded 100% live to mono 1/8" tape (marantz cassette) using two cheap microphones (one condenser mic to capture 6-7 instrumentalists, one dynamic mic to capture ma's vocals). the resulting single-track recordings are largely unmixable. this constraint differentiates this set of recordings from likely 99% of albums you have heard, and it's even more unusual in 2021 for such an album to reach you via, for example, its foregrounding by a music journalist. you could say these are field recordings of rehearsals. whether you like it or not, we at fievelcorp are pleased and surprised that anyone is treating "god's trashmen" as an album that is like other albums circulating today, instead of being circumscribed by its status as basically an uncrafted set of moments. but I'm starting to realize why that is: as soon as something begins to circulate as a musical product in this hyperaccelerated global marketplace, its singularity and its contingency is stripped away and it is reproduced as just another "1", a Product-Unit whose identity is provisionally ascribed to imaginary relations with disparate musical products that are also just other interchangeable nodal Product-Units in a global marketplace (i.e. the RYM person who thought this has something to do with yves tumor or this heat). keep this in mind because I'll return to it...

this is both a cause & effect of the fact that, by and large, even the most erudite music consumers don't know how the stuff is actually made. I don't think that's deplorable, I think it's interesting, and as a presumably erudite or aspirationally-erudite music consumer, I would argue that you should too. as a musician, evaluating a recording is a typically intuitive process that necessarily entails contextualizing it as something produced under specific circumstances using specific tools. this process is extremely foreign to "rating culture" (both on this micro-, sous-authoritative ostensibly-'rhizomatic' user platform and in macro-, sur-authoritative music writing published by hierarchically structured institutions). it's in this capacity that I would argue contemporary "rating culture" doesn't understand recordings of music; instead, it overstands musical products. if the latter is what everyone wants, that's fine -- but I'm not so sure people realize that there's any alternative!

so what are these recordings, really, in the strictest sense of how they came to be available to your ears? they're unmixable mono field recording representations of temporally simultaneous group interpretations (performative representations) of charts which are themselves representations of specifically-voiced songs I wrote on the piano in 30-60 minute writing sessions that I consider to be performances. these recordings are part of a body of work of 70+ songs we've so far recorded in completely different ways: for example, we also have a body of comparatively hi-fidelity overdub recordings made on reel-to-reel tape machines + digital DAWs, and we also have a body of highly mixable and very hi-fidelity live recordings made at professional studios using a huge array of microphones and outboard/inboard processing equipment. these different recording methodologies involve completely different representational techniques and temporal conditions which are absolutely -material- to any understanding of the results, but which are absolutely unassimilable to an overstanding orientation.

remember how I said I'd come back to the reproduction of these (contingent, singular) recordings as a fundamentally interchangeable Product-Unit in a global marketplace, a unit that constitutes the proper object of "rating culture"? well, this relates to the circumstances of production on a musical level as well. when bands are recorded live (it's worth noting here that many recordings described as "live-in-studio" actually involve overdubbing vocals and sometimes solos or mistake corrections after the original "live" performance) in professional studios, engineers typically eschew simple mono or stereo microphone setups (i.e. 1-ear or 2-ear input) and instead capture the performance via a huge array of microphones (ears) whose individually captured signals are then painstakingly mixed together into a final product usually rendered in stereo (2-ear output). some of fievel's studio recordings, for example, are comprised of over 20 tracks (20-ear input). as I mentioned, "god's trashmen" used 2 microphones (2 ears) which were recorded to 1 track (1-ear output). our overdub recordings were made 1 ear at a time but not in temporal simultaneity. so let's do some hypothetical representational math: "god's trashmen" is 1+1=1. the 20-track studio recordings are 1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1=2. to render the "math" of the overdub recordings in the same way would be misleading because the individual "1"s are not ears that share spatial/temporal coordinates but are actually just coincidentally -mapped- onto the temporal coordinates of the recording itself -- so something like the jungian treatment of synchronicity or leach's methodological note about demarcated boundaries taking up actual space enters into my thinking about the essential difference in kind represented by overdub recordings. way too much to get into here.

right, so back to Product-Units. well, I think it's interesting to note that this professional recording studio methodology where a huge number of 1s (ears, units) are added together to = 2 involves a similar logic to that of "rating culture," in that they're both predicated on the interchangeability of a hypothetical infinity of units. the "liveness" of studio recordings produced in this way, then, is one circumscribed by a representational politics that might be expressed as "the more ears, the better." like "rating culture," this formulation elides the singularity and contingency of each ear and instead submits each ear as an interchangeable unit that can be used in the service of the whole of the finished recording (the "rating culture" parallel being provisionally: one's taste or membership in a community thereof, a shared conception of a canon, or a personal collection-of-favorites). point is: this is really different from how "god's trashmen" collection of 1+1=1 recordings works! I hope I am illustrating a difference that is everywhere operating in music production, one that materially matters.

anyway, I'll close with a note on why we opted to release these 1+1=1 recordings instead of our ample others that are materially more assimilable to the global marketplace of Product-Units. we're not popular musicians with a big platform or expecting to ever have one, so the stakes are low, limited basically to an aesthetic expression of my/our (operational/aspirational) form(s) of life ("aesthetics" here referring to the older concept explicitly tied to form-of-life rather than the more bounded use of "aesthetics" circumscribed by alienation under capitalism, i.e. one's personal style, taste, "brand"). I wanted to release these recordings first because to my ears & mind they're excitingly successful in their representational politics: their near-total uneditability forecloses the very tinkering in the truth of their status as Events (in the sense meant by badiou: the results of interventions that changed the rules of a given situation to create something singular in its multiplicity) which "rating culture" inflicts on them by stripping away context in the name of Unit-interchangeability and which the representational politics of professional studio recording would rationalize away as subtended to the questionable "infinity of Units in the service of the Whole" paradigm. the latter state of affairs is precisely "the mess" that "god's trashmen" are jokingly here to "right." (oh and: why not release the overdub recordings? simple answer: they're not finished.) I've said a lot about these recordings' uneditability, but of course nothing is uneditable just as nothing is unenframed, and I totally did edit a few of these recordings exactly because transgressing against my own representational procedures is part of my whole thang (i.e. not drinking the kool-aid and getting too high on one's own supply). if truth ("liveness") can only be half-said, I think these recordings half-say their truth as Events in ways adequate to my "we jam econo" goals.

thanks for reading this. even if you think it's stupid, high-handed, or ill-conceived, I hope you enjoyed it and it made you think about how albums are made under vastly different circumstances and using completely different procedures invested with very different representational politics. same goes for the album. in my experience, privileging the understanding of musical processes over the overstanding of musical products has helped me enjoy music more. and sheer sound, which is really what we're modeling when we produce what we call "music" whether by playing or hearing it.

- zach phillips, brussels, january '21