Around the time Washed Out's "Feel It All Around" first hit last year, the sample source from the track was revealed to be the 1983 Italo song "I Want You" from Gary Low. The bouncy keyboard and twinkly starburst synth of the Low track had already served as the basis for a couple of songs, but Ernest Greene of Washed Out slipped it some downers, cutting the tempo and the pitch and giving it a crackly warble of distortion. That the loop from the original track was, speed aside, relatively untouched did nothing to take away from Greene's re-contextualization: in his hands, with the addition of his voice, it became something else entirely, and something pretty great.
The background on the creation of early Washed Out tracks reminds me of the story of Bon Iver's For Emma, Forever Ago. You'll recall that Bon Iver's Justin Vernon wrote most of his album while holed up in a cabin in Wisconsin, intentionally seeking solitude after the dissolution of a relationship. Greene began making music under the name Washed Out because, as he told Pitchfork, he had moved back in with his parents, to their home on a peach orchard in rural Georgia. He had a lot of down time and nothing much going on, so he channeled his energy into music. It was a way of occupying himself when life got quiet. But while Vernon had his acoustic guitar out there in the woods, Greene had his computer, a machine for listening to music as well as making it. Somewhere along the way, the Gary Low beat made the transformation from something Greene heard to something that was his; he went from jamming Low's song to "playing" it.
Whatever hardware/software setup Greene used on "Feel It All Around" and whatever his songwriting process for creating his own melodies over the loops, what interests me most about his project and projects like it is that it blurs the divisions between listening and making. The indistinct line between these activities stretches far back in time, from Girl Talk to the Dust Brothers to the Bomb Squad and on back. The fact that listening and production can be so closely linked explains why DJs like Dr. Dre or DJ Shadow, who first came on the scene spinning other people's records, can become producers of music, working in studios and telling musicians what to do and engineers how to record them. Duke Ellington used to say that his orchestra was his instrument; it's been said that for people like Brian Wilson or Brian Eno, the studio is theirs. For this other class of musician, in one sense, their ears are their instruments, and the act of listening is the first step in creation.
Things are changing here, too, because the tools used to listen and produce are collapsing into a single thing. They are only separated now by clicks on device sitting in front of you as you read this now. This button is for "listening," this button is for "making," and this button rips the "listening" part of the signal into something the "making" part can use. Last year I wrote a column about Jim O'Rourke and Maryanne Amacher where I discussed the role of context in music, how allowing an artist to control how music is experienced can be a good thing, leading to something rare and special. And I still believe there is much to be said for giving yourself over to someone else's vision. But there's this other thing happening, something that's been going on for 30 years or more but now seems to be accelerating. And it's changing how music is being made and what it means to listen.
I should say here that I consider the act of listening to be almost holy, because for a while now it's been essential to how I've made a living and also to my idea of who I am as a person. I'm a "music guy," right, and music is a disproportionally (possibly comically) large part of my life. And the act of listening is where the rubber meets the road. So everything about it fascinates me, from how it's done to how it changes to what it might mean. And listening to musicians listening has been a part of that. It's one of the reasons I like jazz, because improvisation is usually a collective activity, involving people in a room paying attention to what the other people in the room are doing, hearing how things are changing and answering those changes, or, if not answering them, then leaving them alone for a reason, because that says something else.
There's a moment in a version of the Grateful Dead's "The Eleven", from the Fillmore West 1969 set. On this particular song, on this evening, Jerry Garcia is completely in the zone, peeling off chorus after chorus of inventive, melodic, and joyous guitar playing. For minutes on end it goes, blowing, one measure after another, until the band breaks it down and you can hear them "talking" to each other in music. Pigpen and Bob Weir hint at the lead-in to the short part where the band is to sing the main refrain in unison (it's more than five minutes into the song, after all, might as well start the singing part soon), and you sense them asking with their notes, "What do you think, Jerry? Should we go into the singing part now?" And Jerry answers with a couple of quick scales, saying that he has a few more ideas that he wants to squeeze in first, and then when he starts playing you're glad he spoke up. They are listening deeply to music as they are making it.
All of that, the jazz and the improv and the collective playing, is listening in the moment, guiding the music along as it happens. But there is this other kind of listening-into-making, the kind done in solitude, when there's time for contemplation, in a way that's not so different from how you and I listen to music. In Mark Katz's book Capturing Sound: How Technology Changed Music, he talks about how records changed jazz. "In jazz, the study of recording is considered essential. Much more than classical music, jazz is considered 'ear music,' in which learning from listening is privileged over the study of the printed note." Though you can never be sure, there are moments in music where it seems like you can hear the listening happening, just by how the original material has been transformed. And when that happens, you get a sense of a person's ear, you hear what they hold dear in music, and learn what music means to them and even how they feel it emotionally.
So when I listen to Greene on "Feel It All Around" or take in the crushed guitar jangle of his "Hold Out", also from the Life of Leisure EP, I'm hearing not just samples and loops but a sense of values, and also a document of hearing. From its noisy quality, "I Want You" might have even been listened to on YouTube, with its limited frequency range and poor signal to noise ratio, which gives the music the kind of pinched and queasy feeling we associate with lo-fi. It's often remarked upon how music in Washed Out's sphere reminds people of warped tape, but it also sounds like a bad stream through the cheap speakers of a computer. Which can be a lonely sound. Maybe that's something Greene understood out there in that house in that peach grove.
There's a different class of music with interesting lines between listening and making and which raises questions about authorship. Over the last three or so years I've been an occasional collector of disco edits. Disco edits, broadly speaking, are remixes/reworks of existing tracks that most often focus on extending breaks or making intros longer, thereby extending the utility of the record in a dancefloor setting (either by turning a non-dance record into a dance one, or making it last longer with more danceable bits). So maybe Crosby, Stills and Nash's "Marrakesh Express" will have its peppy beat emphasized in a disco edit, and all of a sudden it seems like something you might dance to. Or a lost disco classic is smeared with echo and the bass is pumped up and now it sounds out of time and newly forceful. The disco edit tradition stretches back to the earliest days of disco, when people like Walter Gibbons and Tom Moulton would sit down with reel-to-reel tapes and a razor blade in an attempt to turn good tracks with a solid beat into epic floor-fillers that left plenty of time to absorb every sound. Computers obviously make disco edits easy-- if you know what you are doing in any number of commercially available software programs, cutting and pasting a loop to extend a break is a something that just takes a few minutes. And now that tracks can float so easily around the ether, there are hundreds of people re-working thousands of tracks, mostly, it seems, for fun. Someone doing an edit of a song might goose it a bit, give it a little something that emphasizes the rhythm, put a cape on it.
There's a term I've seen used to credit disco edits that I love: songs are identified as being "touched" by the editor. Based on the evidence on my hard drive, the term would seem to imply that little was done, and that you might not even be able tell that you are hearing a disco edit instead of the proper version unless you are listening closely. I have a version of the Who's "Eminence Front" that is said to be "slightly touched by AJ"-- I think the opening synth bit might have been extended by a few bars and maybe the tiniest bit of equalization was applied. But the choice of terminology is telling. A track that has been "touched" has passed from one person to the next. It implies that the editor handled it a little, which inevitably changes small details if you look closely enough. There are fingerprints, which are evidence of listening-- the editor played the song and heard something that he or she wanted to change. So a track that's been "touched" can in a sense be heard with the ears of another.
In my limited experience combing the web for disco edits, one producer's work stands out: Norwegian producer Terje Olsen, better known as Todd Terje. His edits/re-kuts/remixes/dubs (he's used all these terms) are usually identified under the names Tangoterje or Wade Nichols. Terje's edits range from simple extensions of opening bars, like his take on Stealers Wheel's "Stuck in the Middle", to serious re-thinks that transform the original song in profound ways, like his chopped-up and folded-in-on-itself version of the Rolling Stones' "Under My Thumb". But one thing I've noticed with the Terje edits (the majority of which, based on the three-dozen or so that I've collected, he did in 2007 and 2008) is that they almost always start with tracks that have a lush and gorgeous surface. He favors spacious tracks that were recorded beautifully in the first place as a starting point. Terje also loves dub-style echo (so do I), and he knows where to stretch the parts that should be stretched. As he told Resident Advisor in an interview a couple of years back, "I'm recording straight-up intros, extending them, and doing equalization and maximizing it so makes records easier to play out. It's more like I'm just tailoring music for myself." Most of the Tangoterje edits I've found are encoded at 320kbs, so sound quality seems important all the way down the line. Where Washed Out finds meaning in distortion, Terje's listening unearths sounds both exquisite and precise.
Indeed, the beauty of the tracks Terje chooses to edit is so consistently apparent that the fact that they caught his ear might be more significant than what he actually does with them. He hears something special in the details of songs like America's hoary country-rock standard "Horse With No Name" and the Bangles' "Walk Like an Egyptian" and jazz pianist George Shearing's cover of "Age of Aquarius" and funk diva Marsha Hunt's "The Beast Day". Even when he goes further afield, to the a cappella rendering of Bach's Fugue in C Minor by the 60s group the Swingle Singers or "Friendly Children" by August Darnell, which is mostly just kids singing a catchy "La-la-la-la" with some handclaps, piano, and percussion, you notice the sensual qualities of the music in new ways, how hands scrape across strings and percussion echoes off of walls. His batting average on edits is extraordinarily high.
The song that got me into the Tangoterje edits, which is probably the most well-known of his unofficial re-works (Terje does plenty of official remixes, too, for people like Studio and Lindstrøm, in addition to making his own music), is his take on Paul Simon's "Diamonds on the Souls of Her Shoes". This is one of his more radical interpretations. He keeps the essence of the rhythm part of the track intact, but indulges (and I mean, really indulges) his fondness for dub and sets Simon's voice loose in an echo chamber. Single syllables-- "I could say-ay-ay-ay-ay-ay-ay-ay-ay-ay-ay-ay" seem to carry on forever, and a small bit of a repeated "sh" becomes a Steve Reich-like exhibition of how speech can become music. I've listened to the "Diamonds on the Souls of Her Shoes" edit many dozens of times in the last few years, and I can't remember the last time I've listened to the original, as great as it is. Terje's ear for the song, what he heard in it and what he thought made it special, has become my ear, and in a very real sense, for me, it's his song now. I am going to listen to it just as soon as I finish writing this-- I keep it in a playlist called "Terje".