When you hear Roy Haynes’s drum sound on his album Out of the Afternoon, the beats themselves can’t be abstracted from how they are echoed in the room. As you listen, you think of the shape of the space in which the record was made, and you think of what that space looks like and feels like, and you make associations with that space.
It sounds like a space with a vaulted ceiling, which it was: thirty-nine feet high, with wooden slats making a cathedral shape over the drum area. Even for a record engineered by Rudy Van Gelder, who owned the studio and worked with some very powerful drummers there, this is an unusual sound. Beyond the fact of the physical dimensions, the drums are mixed high in the recording, and especially on the snare and bass drum you hear a fair amount of reverb.
Not an excessive amount. There isn’t a nebulizing after-report rising off every stroke; when Haynes plays his dancing patterns on the cymbals, you hear them accurately. The sound doesn’t travel on and on in a way that contravenes reality—perhaps it suggests a slight exaggeration of reality, something that you might hear in an actual enclosed space, if it were thin and tall, shaped like the head of an axe. You can find yourself unusually aware of these drum sounds, almost as if you’re inside them. And being inside them in this case means being above them, floating on the ceiling, because they suggest a vertical space and a rarefied position.
Things are very clear up here, in the land of “Moon Ray,” the album’s first track. Your own thoughts become quickened as you listen; you feel your appetite returning, you have the welcome sensation of knowing what you like. It’s a privileged and clarifying position. “In the attic, fears are easily ‘rationalized,’” wrote Gaston Bachelard. “In the attic, the day’s experiences can always efface the fears of night.” “Moon Ray” is a good illustration of that thought.
A record like this makes you understand music as a representation of physical space. Music is thought of as primarily existing in time; that’s what defines it philosophically. But it also exists in spatial relation to the microphone or the ear, and most of the advances in production and audio technology have had to do with making elements of music sound like they’re in your face or down the hall or next door, around you or evenly before you, flat or tiered.
The Who’s Live at Leeds communicates a sense of music reaching its physical perimeter and scorching it. You hear it in all the breaks of “Young Man Blues,” the cut-off chord Pete Townshend plays before each new verse sung a cappella by Roger Daltrey: an echoed, abrupt seventh chord—brap—and all those cymbals, constant cymbals. The mix is extraordinary: loud and near, except for all that echo around anyone’s singing. The guitar sound has body and presence but the vocals have a distance which keeps them imposing.
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Because of how they boom and resonate, and perhaps because producers tend to suppress their power rather than encourage it, the drums can imply physical space with inspiring directness, particularly the bass drum, and particularly in the right place and circumstances. No other element of sound that eliminates time and space that way brings you into a sense of physical familiarity with the room, even if the music was recorded before you were born. It is in Billy Griffin, the drummer on the Impressions’ “We’re a Winner,” and his great funk playing, the sexiness of his foot making patterns around the crack of the snare. The sound of John Bonham’s bass drum has it in Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy and “IV” and In Through the Out Door, though nothing I’ve heard conveys that sound so well as a recording of him alone, laying down a track in a reverberant studio in Stockholm in 1978: the bass drum comes first and most significantly, the basic unit of the beat. Everything else organizes itself around it. (Others have done similarly: Greg Errico of Sly and the Family Stone, John Stanier in Helmet and Tomahawk, Kyle Spence in Harvey Milk.)
Paul Motian was a special case. He used space and silence so that everything he did on the instrument, including on the bass drum, became equally important—parts of an unfolding event. He didn’t let the bass drum dominate; he dominated it by detuning it, so that it splatted. In the last ten years of his life, because he almost always played in the same room—the Village Vanguard—he calibrated the splat to the dimensions of that space.
Motian often recorded for ECM, which has put much of its record-label identity into the notion of audio space as an end in itself. What it does may be little more than a classical-music recording aesthetic applied to jazz: there is always some kind of reverb, and always a feeling of separation between the instruments. And sometimes the musicians chosen by the label’s founder and producer, Manfred Eicher, are naturally drawn anyway to slow tempos and the sustain pedal, both of which manufacture the feeling of space. Paul Bley, who recorded one of the first solo improvised albums for ECM, has said that the invitation from Eicher came at a time when he was “trying to be the slowest pianist in the world”; that tendency might have been an outgrowth of having worked with electronic instruments, which led him toward the possibility of artificially long sustain.
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When you listen to music, do you want to feel that you’re in a particular kind of physical structure or landscape? A cathedral, a cube, a club, a desert, a marketplace? Or do you want to understand space in relation to the music being played? Betty Cantor-Jackson, the Grateful Dead’s live recording engineer, has said this about her preferred sound mix: “I want you to be inside the music; I don’t want stereos playing at you, I want you to be in there, I want it around you … When my mix is right, and the space is properly formal, or should I say expanded, I consider that place as getting ‘clear’; when I’m really clear, I can walk around between the instruments.” Her mixes are remarkable for the separation and space among the music’s elements, and what seems like an architectural arrangement of them. In “Dark Star,” from the August 27, 1972, Grateful Dead show in Veneta, Oregon, the keyboards sound like a retaining wall for the rest, which is spread out before you in the right channel, present and articulated and sturdy, in a kind of low semicircle.
Both Cantor-Jackson and Eicher, interestingly, have talked about the beneficial pressure of recording one-take music—concerts, for Cantor-Jackson, and studio recordings, for Eicher. The Jamaican dub producer King Tubby did this, too, in his own way, making new para-versions of vocal hits different enough to feel valuable on their own, varied enough to keep hips and bodies engaged, and dynamic enough to make his records ring out into the night at outdoor dances—through a truck-bed sound system, all deep bass, echo, and cutting crash cymbals. He didn’t achieve his dynamics via composed sections or instruments, but through live mixes of prerecorded material. His art was predicated on quick ideas, on shifting, staying in motion, in order to inject space into the music. He made his mixes directly to tape: what he did is what you get. That’s what gives them their urgency.
Here the ethic of improvisation spreads to the engineer, to the producer, and finally to the listener. Something Eicher often says—or not so often, but often enough, when he consents to an interview—is “Think of your ears as eyes.” That’s part of what we do when we consider audio space in music. We have no vocabulary for aural distance; mostly we only talk about volume. Here, we’re not talking about volume of sound, but volume of space.
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I am listening to “Party in the U.S.A.,” by Miley Cyrus, produced by Dr. Luke. It’s a song about being young and naïve and deposited into a place with a presumed higher level of sophistication about culture, particularly musical culture: the narrator is a Nashville girl being taken to a party in Los Angeles. The party is above her level. She’s closed up with fear; she lacks cultural self-confidence. And then, hearing what she likes, acknowledging it through repetition—not twice but, crucially, three times (“when the DJ dropped my favorite tune / and the Britney song was on / and the Britney song was on / and the Britney song was on…”), she finds a tunnel in the music. (“Nodding my head like yeah / Moving my hips like yeah.”) It’s a song about biding time with low expectations—apprehension, doubt, second-guessing—before entering a physical space of great possibility, and then, once inside the physical space, gaining psychological entry to the music that thrills you. Finally, it is a song about listening: one of the greatest ever made.
It begins with chunked rhythm guitar and moves along with medium-tempo funk drums, tambourine, and the most amazing synthetic swell in the chorus—distended, overmodulated, bass-thickened bloop glissandi that seem to bulge out of the wall, preceded by hissing and shooshing, pushing against your ear. Dr. Luke’s signature is compression, which means a narrowing of the dynamic range of an audio signal (such that the soft sounds and the loud sounds are both loud). So rather than only flicking between soft and loud—which is what we once got with gamelan ensembles, Beethoven, and Nirvana, and what we have long accepted from composers as a useful method of playing with the listener’s emotions—the song flicks between cluttered and uncluttered, or compressed and less compressed. Its softness is fake loudness. Its loudness is only slightly less fake loudness. It all feels close to you, but when it’s really close, it’s almost disturbingly so.
Producers and mastering engineers of the pre-’90s mentality often warn against compression for two principal reasons: because it erases the thrill of real dynamics, which is probably the first and most crucial element that anyone notices about music of any kind; and because it leads to what is now called “fatigue,” meaning that the ear and brain can’t distinguish nuances on a record, and finally can’t accept any more information at a sustained level. But I think this ignores how the power of a song like “Party in the U.S.A.” draws on its own suggestion of audio space—fake or not, fatiguing or not. It finds new criteria for dynamics, possibly forcing you to think beyond merely loud and soft.
An earlier, precompression example of space in music might be Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, from 1973, a record designed to portray movement around an audio picture. On Dark Side, all sounds seemed to become visible as well as audible. It had some things in common with “Party in the U.S.A.”: the emphasis on sudden swells, enveloping sounds, a sliding guitar glissando instead of a synthetic keyboard one. The record is about the passage of time and memory; so it is likewise about encountering new things and leaving old things behind. And the effects on the record—in the intros and outros, outside the meat of the songs—affirm that notion. There are back-masked cymbals rising up in the mix like sudden geysers; audio recordings of planes flying overhead and other doppler, phase, or panning effects, strobing alternately into the left and right sides (as the producer Teo Macero had bounced John McLaughlin’s guitar-playing among channels a few years earlier, on Miles Davis’s “Go Ahead John”); hectic mixes, like the one in “Time,” with its distant drum kit, water-wave background-vocal oohs, and hyperpresent organ; the sudden doubling and tripling of vocal tracks; the cross-panning journey of the delay-repeat keyboard phrases in “Any Colour You Like.” The sounds are often moving toward you quickly and audibly receding from you.
A self-titled record from 2013 by the American-Japanese drone group Ensemble Pearl, which includes the guitarist and composer Stephen O’Malley of the band Sunn O))), seems an update of Pink Floyd’s ideas of space without the songs. The notes—on malleted cymbals, on loud electric bass, on echoed and phased and tremoloed electric guitars—move away from the position of their sources, the places where they’re struck or strummed, and travel outward in sustained ripples; the cycles continue until something alters your perception of space again. In “Painting on a Corpse,” it’s a sudden entry of twin jets of feedback at a level louder than the rhythm cycles, and then another entry of something else again—a stick or a bow dragged across a cymbal—at an even louder level. In “Wray,” it’s a close-miked viola string rubbed and bounced carefully and slowly over a bed of guitar tones treated to sound like vibraphone bars, or resonating glass bowls. Having listened to the mysterious, heavily echoed glassy guitar tones for more than a minute—it’s hard to know exactly what made them or what was done to them—you’re conditioned to think of them as loud; the tiny blips of gut string may not be louder, but they are clearer, more distinguishable, more present. You experience them as physically closer to you.
Likewise in “Brando,” from Sunn O)))’s collaboration record with Scott Walker, Soused, a first guitar line sounds broad, cool, and majestic, at one with the wide-angle Bierstadt grandeur of the mix: Walker’s operatic voice belting “Ah, the wide Missouri / Dwellers on the bluff” with an organ-in-a-cathedral sound. Then a second guitar line responds, nearly 20 decibels louder, distorted and staccato, uncool, drowning everything else out, implicitly humorous. (It’s like an oaf stepping into a film shoot and blocking the camera lens.) These aren’t just two sounds: they are two characters in a drama, a kind of disembodied opera, with dispositions of sound standing in for characters.
Both Pink Floyd and O’Malley—Teo Macero, too—got some of their ideas about audio space from the electronic and musique-concrète composers, including Pierre Schaeffer and Karlheinz Stockhausen. (Teo Macero studied with Henry Brant, some of whose works using acoustic sounds in real time and real space—such as Ice Field, for one hundred musicians and church organ—were so enormous in aural-spatial scope that they couldn’t be adequately recorded.)
Stockhausen’s thirteen-minute Gesang der Jünglinge, from 1956, seems on some level an effort to compensate for its root elements: if your building blocks are only a boy soprano singing alone and sine-wave tones, and you want to make a music that’s not defined by its material, you’d better figure out some great things to do with them. Stockhausen not only serialized the singer’s tones—which is to say, he built a composition of ordered notes that used each of the twelve tones equally, making a music not specific to any key—but figured out a system to serialize the spatial elements of the composition, through constant edits. And thus what you hear in “Gesang” is an almost manic liberation from the I-am-sitting-in-one-place listening experience. You are hearing the boy soprano on the left, on the right, in an abrupt or slowly moving arc, at a great distance, up close. (It is surely part of our self-protective brain functioning that we tend to think of specific distances when we hear it: The boy is five feet away. He is six inches away. He is overlapping, in two places at once. We do this because we need to know how much time we have to raise our fists or run.) It is a recording that enlarges your sense of space, or of the possibilities that space can promise for music.
Perhaps he was thinking of earlier complex vocal music that dizzies the listener naturally, and suggests spatiality without special recording devices—such as Thomas Tallis’s sixteenth-century motet “Spem in Alium,” for forty voices divided into eight choirs, bouncing the different sections around. In a sound installation realized in 2001 called “The Forty Part Motet,” Janet Cardiff captured each voice separately in a recording of Tallis’s piece, and directed each through a single speaker. The speakers were arranged in an oval that the listener could pass through, creating spatial effects by walking and listening to the forty voices. Stockhausen figured out how to do it with one.
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The safest place to be is up high. Let’s get back to the attic. In 1966, TTG Studios, in Los Angeles, used eight tracks and tube circuitry for recording. (Soon, Tom Hidley, one of the engineers at TTG, would build one of the first 16-track, 2-inch tape machines. But he hadn’t yet.) During that year, in March and May, Hidley recorded the Mothers of Invention’s Freak Out! and the best parts of The Velvet Underground and Nico (the songs “I’m Waiting for the Man,” “Venus in Furs,” and “Heroin”). Those recordings sound like living beings today. The room was a rectangle; the ceiling was twenty-six feet high. Because the musicians didn’t have to be acoustically isolated, as they soon would be with double the number of audio tracks, there were not that many microphones. The point is that in both cases you can hear broad, strange, surprising, jabbering music, with broad, strange, surprising, jabbering dynamics, interacting with the sound of the room itself. The air around the music becomes an almost tangible quantity, like the artist Rachel Whiteread’s solid casts of empty space; the air suggests the dimension of the room, especially its height. Sometimes it does sound as if you’re above the band: in the angry dance of the Mothers’ “I’m Not Satisfied,” the sinister drip of the Velvets’ “Venus in Furs.” As negative and paranoid as these songs can be—both these records invented versions of paranoia in pop that became persistent if not permanent—they sound high and summery, still. They efface the fears of night.
ROY HAYNES QUARTET, “Moon Ray,” from Out of the Afternoon, 1962
THE WHO, “Young Man Blues,” from Live at Leeds, 1970
THE IMPRESSIONS, “We’re a Winner,” 1967
GRATEFUL DEAD, “Dark Star,” from Sunshine Daydream, 1972
MILEY CYRUS, “Party in the U.S.A.,” 2009
PINK FLOYD, “Time,” “Any Colour You Like,” from Dark Side of the Moon, 1973
MILES DAVIS, “Go Ahead John,” from Big Fun, 1974
ENSEMBLE PEARL, “Painting on a Corpse,” “Wray,” from Ensemble Pearl, 2013
SCOTT WALKER AND SUNN O))), “Brando,” from Soused, 2014
KARLHEINZ STOCKHAUSEN, Gesang der Jünglinge, 1955–56
JANET CARDIFF, “The Forty Part Motet,” 2001
MOTHERS OF INVENTION, Freak Out!, 1966
The Velvet Underground and Nico, 1967