October 24, 1998: The (man) who wasn't there

That stupid sound.  Before I got into Rodan, Built to Spill sensitized me to the "stupid" nature of the sound, which at the time seemed to have to do with its repetition, the fact that it kept coming back, and yet every time it came back, I missed it.  Stupid...

These thoughts are old / Let's keep it cold / Draw lines on me / Dry history / Dryology / That stupid sound / That awful feeling / Don't bring them down / And you never will / No it never will ... ("Made-up Dreams")

That was back in 1997, after "Perfect from now on" came out.  I was thinking about all this a few months back, deep within that '90s nostalgia ('90stalgia), when I thought I would look up some YouTube videos of live Built to Spill.  There are of course plenty, but one caught my eye: October 24, 1998, at the 40 Watt in Athens.  Two thoughts came to mind, almost immediately.  First:  Hey ... I was there, wasn't I?  And second:  What if the camera caught me? 

Thankfully the camera did not capture me.  But then I didn't capture the camera either.  Because this is the point:  I also recorded that show with my bulky tape recorder hidden in my backpack.  So I decided to take out that old tape, my recording of Built to Spill's full show at the 40 Watt, late October, 1998.  I listened to my recording, then again listened (and watched) the video version.  What I couldn't stop thinking about was not that sound, not that stupid sound, but the fact that I was there, but not there, in that video:  I was there but invisible; there, but not within the frame.  And then the second fact:  my recording of that show captured the inaudible presence of the cameraman and his friend.  Both recordings bear witness to something very strange:  not something visible or audible, but something a-visual or an-audible.  They bear witness to what is outside the frame, to that commonplace elsewhere that happens whenever we record something. 

But isn't this always the case with the witness?  The witness is always the one who is not there (not an agent on the scene), but who is nevertheless there to record it.  Even when there's another witness there to record the scene, the first witness should not be a part of the scene, insofar as the witness or the one who gives testimony is always "the third man," the tertiary, the testimony-giver.  But we're no longer talking about a man or woman who isn't there, but rather a sensory apparatus or recording device that witnesses without taking part.  The witness intervenes (comes in-between), but still never takes part in the scene.  We're talking about the witness as a recording technology that has no real presence, and yet is there, is present, as a presence-less presence.  I am the X who wasn't there, not just in the video recording, and not just in my own recording of the scene, but even then, at the scene itself, in the moment it was occurring:  the one who is there without being there.

And here's a stupid thought:  Isn't that the sound I was always hearing without understanding, that stupid sound that I always found but never grasped?  Can sound be ... not quite inaudible, but an-audible, something other-than-audible, para-audible, to the side of what can be heard?  What if that stupid sound was not stupid because of its repetition, but rather because it was "dumb," mute, something that cannot present itself through sound.  Fine, an impossible sound if you like.  Isn't that the point?

Here you go then:  One song ("Three Years Ago Today"), one moment (10/24/1998, sometime after 11pm), two recordings (one video, one audio), and innumerable presences that are not at all there:

1) Here's the video of the entire show ("Three Years Ago Today" is the first 5 minutes)



2) Here's my recording, no video of course

July 28, 1994: Where? There.

That sound.  Yesterday I returned to that sound, a sound I first heard sometime in 1997.  Though the truth is I'm sure I heard the sound much earlier, well, at least a year earlier, sometime in 1996, when Eric and I became curious about this band Rodan that everyone was talking about.  Well, one particular person was talking about them, Marc Pilvinsky, a writer for Flagpole Magazine (Athens, GA).  I think Eric must have picked up the CD, and it really didn't appeal to me: too much of a heavy metal sound.  I thought it was odd that this Flagpole writer would have liked the band so much.  I was even reassured that I didn't have to like Rodan when once, at the High Hat Café, I heard some hipsters actually making fun of Pilvinsky ("Marc Pilvinsky likes heavy metal..."). 

But I taped the album from Eric, and started listening to it at odd moments, or maybe the sound (that sound, or just some other sound?) came back to me when I least expected it.  In any case I gradually realized that this band was doing something, or something was taking place on that album that I had never heard before.  And I also realized, listening closer, that that sound was in fact a theme in some of the songs, especially "The Everyday World of Bodies."  It could be that the sound in the lyrics has nothing to do with the sound that I had been hearing and not understanding (hearing because I didn't understand it), but it helped me name it, gave me the words and the affect to designate it:  that sound.

the window is open / the bed is empty / the drawer half open / the clock's unwound / we make the sound / we make the sound / we make the sound / of air / hear it / escaping / something / everything.

Jason Noble is the lead singer on that song.  He died of cancer on August 4, 2012.  It's not too sentimental to note simply that "The Everyday World of Bodies" (released in 1994) was both a recognition of a cancer to come (a cancer, some kind of cancer, some kind of uncontrollable effect of the body) and a negation of cancer as such.  The song ends with a performative utterance, an address to whomever:  "I will be there / I swear / be there / swear," but this oath can never fully erase another repeated phrase in the song:  "my body is undone" and "everything changes / everything changes."  I will be there.  Where?  There.  Where?  There.  And each time:  there.  I swear. 

It is a sworn statement.  He will be there.

And of course he's there.  He's on Vimeo and YouTube and elsewhere, above all elsewhere.  It's that sound that we hear, because that sound is our sound, the sound of air that is always about to transpire or expire. 

My point now has nothing to do with the way Jason Noble died so young (40), but really only has to do with that sound.  When is the sound?  When does the sound take place?  Here?  There?  But also, if there's a there, there must also be a where:  where then?  There.  Where?  There.  And we can add:  I swear.  I swear that that sound is not here.

Here (it's right there -- click it):  Rodan, "Everyday World of Bodies"

Or... the way the lines fragment at the end, dropping the subject ("I"), thus turning the performative statement (I swear) into a demand:  "Be there!  Swear!"  Like the ghost in Hamlet, enjoining Hamlet Jr. to exact vengeance:  "Swear!"  It's a demand, from the addressor, that the addressee swear with the addressor:  swear with me!  And together the sworn statement becomes a conjuring (a swearing-together).  A conspiracy of sorts (a conjura or conjure, a conspiracy that is formed by swearing together), yes, but not a conspiracy of silence or disappearance, but rather a conspiracy to appear, to be there, a conspiracy that conjures up the very appearance of those who have sworn together.  How to respond to such a demand?  How to swear before a ghost, not a ghost that you have conjured up, but rather a ghost who conjures you, who demands that you appear, that you be there?  "This is our sound."

[Photo above via http://killingtechnology.wordpress.com/2008/07/01/rodan/]

July 19, 1995: B.O.B. Live

90s nostalgia: that's the theme of this blog.  The point is to document the way the 90s is continually slipping into the past, and remains there, loosely recorded, a sound that barely comes through the transmission.

In the summer of 1995 I moved to Athens, GA after graduating from Emory.  Athens was cheap, not just the living but also the live shows.  But it didn't start there (what's "it"?).  It started in Atlanta, perhaps in 1993, but most likely in 1994.  "It" was something I kept hearing, something that was already getting transmitted over long distances (spatial, temporal), something I couldn't grasp, and for that very reason something I could not let go.  And then it became something that I looked for, that would force me out of my room at around 11pm on a Friday or even a Tuesday, something that then (in Atlanta at that point) I found sometimes at the Point, but more often at a little place called Dottie's.



Dottie's (or rather Lenny's, as it changed names a few years back) closed in 2010, and the building was just leveled in December 2013.  The photo above seems to make it present again, but to me it's unrecognizable, in part because it was always so dark when I was there, but more importantly because Dottie's for me is a memory that is stuck in the mid-90s and cannot be noiselessly projected into my own time, right now.  When I think of Dottie's, I hear noise, not just guitar noise and distortion, but the unintentional noise of bad transmission, the noise of something not quite coming through.  a bad recording. 

After moving to Athens in June 1995, I sometimes went back to Dottie's in Atlanta, now with a backpack, and inside my backpack was my old tape recorder (ok, it wasn't really mine; I borrowed it from my employer at the time).  It was as if I already knew that the present -- the very presence of the present -- was already slipping away into nostalgia.  That was the sound I heard, the sound of something that was not fully present, the nostalgia of the present as it passes away.  And this is what I hear now, when I capture this song from one of those tapes back then.  Here's the band B.O.B. when they played Dottie's on July 19, 1995, sometime after 11:30pm.  "Raise Electric."

Photo via:  http://clatl.com/cribnotes/archives/2013/12/10/the-old-dottieslennys-has-a-date-with-a-wrecking-ball