Issue 32

Album: rock n roll consciousness

Artist: Thurston Moore

Release: Ecstatic Peace! Records, April, 2017

Within the first two minutes of the opening song “Exalted,” the ever-familiar rhythm of Thurston Moore’s guitar craft comes sweeping through. Throughout my formidable years of youth and college adventures, the New York-bred Sonic Youth buzzed in the background. Albums like Goo, Daydream Nation, and even the later Sonic Nurse mashed into my psyche, and in some strange alchemy, helped shape me into the listener that I am today. Sonic Youth’s songs were/are just plain rad, and the vibe put through the speakers or headphones has always been exciting and different. Sonic Youth formed in 1981 and is made up of Thurston Moore (guitar, vocals), Kim Gordon (bass guitar, vocals, guitar), Lee Ranaldo (guitar, vocals),  and Steve Shelley (drums). Since 2011 they’ve been on a “hiatus” due to the split of Thurston Moore and wife/bandmate Kim Gordon. “The band is a democracy of sorts, and as long as Kim and I are working out our situation, the band can’t really function reasonably,” stated Moore in 2014. Personally, I’ll continue to hold my breath with the hopes of getting a chance to see the group reunite and tour sometime in the future.

There might be something in that sweet, soft water of New York. That something in the old water lines and calcium deposits that haunt the underground, and have since Prohibition. The same something that makes the pizza and bagels in NYC the best. The same something that The Velvet Underground digested day in and day out. The same something that washed the curly locks of the New York Dolls. That same something is in that gritty sound of Sonic Youth. You can’t bleed it out. Don’t want to put a leech on the heel of that sound. Don’t try to wash it off. Like an old jean jacket that just keeps looking better the more you get it dirty; New York rock-n-roll.

rock n roll consciousness is the fifth solo album from Thurston Moore since Sonic Youth split in 2011.  Having heard his previous 4 solo albums, this one is sticky. rock n roll consciousness in its entirety has only five tracks. By the time the fifth track on rock n roll consciousness ends, it feels like it may have been 50. The songs stretch out like a cat doing yoga, and bake for 10 minutes a pop. One of my favorites on the album “Turn On” (song 3) begins with a melodic riff, accompanied with non-distorted electric guitars, and just builds for the next 10 minutes. The pace is pleasant and easy to digest. Thurston Moore’s soft vocals jump in 3 minutes into this jam. Fuzzed guitars blend in and out of the melodic hooks, and the song goes for a long walk from there with a great guitar solo. 10 minutes fly by and I wish the song could would go on for another 10.

The fourth song “Smoke of Dreams” includes production from Paul McCartney and Adele collaborator, Paul Epworth, and is mixed by Randall Dunn in the birthplace of the grunge music scene, Seattle.

The album features My Bloody Valentine’s Debbie Googe on bass guitar and Sonic Youth alum Steve Shelley on the drums. You can almost hear the friendship between those drums and that guitar as the album goes on. On rock n roll consciousness, Moore, to me, sounds comfortable and confident, ready to tackle whatever life throws at him next.  After 20 years of personal enjoyment of everything Sonic Youth, this album reminded me of why I am a fan, and why I should continue to be.

—Dan McCauley

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Album: Pure Comedy

Artist: Father John Misty

Release: Sub Pop Records, April, 2017

I have no tolerance for hipsters—and I work in Boulder, home of organically-grown artisanally-curated  pretentious  preciosity. I was over the whole lumberjack-in-a-$500-shirt look before it even began.  And while we’re at it, I have no interest in hearing the singer/songwriter sons and daughters of orthodontists or college psych profs plaintively moan about just how rough they’ve had it, and how no one understands them.

I understand you, you privileged, pampered little twits. I just don’t CARE.

Phew. I feel better now.

So:  given that mindset, you can predict how I felt about Father John Misty. To be clear: I viewed him as yet another beard in a fedora who had given himself an impossibly-twee fake name. Yippee.

For whatever reason, Josh Tillman donned that new name like a costume. In his former life as drummer for Fleet Foxes, he contributed to sweet, melodic, dreamy music with hints of psychedelic-era Love or Beach Boys. As Father John,  he seems to have adopted a persona which provides him with—well, a pulpit from which to preach.

Imagine my shock as I discovered that I liked his latest album, Pure Comedy. Two things predisposed me to that point of view even before I heard the whole thing: first, he gave a sardonic and self-critical interview to Rolling Stone (yes, I still subscribe—but I get it for FREE), and I’m all about sardonic and self-critical. That interview surprised me, and showed him to be someone who is not just aware, but self-aware—and those are not characteristics I expect to find in the hipster toolkit. Having said that, do I endorse some of his lifestyle choices? Not just no: hell, no. He sounds about as responsible as Harry Nilsson and John Lennon on their lost weekend.

Second, I heard a cut from the album on the radio, “When the God of Love Returns, There’ll Be Hell to Pay”. I heard it without knowing who it was, and learned only by accident who’d  performed it. It was an unexpectedly serious piece of work, both lyrically and musically, amidst the pop pop that preceded and followed it. The somber piano, angry lyrics and somewhat mournful  vocal reminded me of Randy Newman’s early albums from the Van Dyke Parks/ Lenny Waronker era. And that’s not a bad thing.

I’m not going to go through  the album cut by cut; I don’t have the patience to do that, and you’d likely disagree with my assessments, anyway. The opener/title cut sets the tone, with full, bombastic  orchestration (yes, kids: REAL INSTRUMENTS) the likes of which has all but disappeared from recent popular music. “Things It Would Have Been Helpful to Know Before the Revolution” brought to mind Goodbye Yellow Brick Road-era Elton John in both its wistful tone and its lush orchestration.

Just listen. There will undoubtedly be cuts you’ll find smug and overbearing—I did. Who cares? I can’t remember the last time I heard a mainstream record with this much intelligence, even when being infuriating. I also can’t remember the last time I heard a top-100 album that was this beautifully produced. While it’s not an audiophile-darling recording, it is a good-sounding record in spite of some obvious digital echo and artifacts, and it’s a joy to hear intricate, layered arrangements featuring (here I go again) real instruments.

I’m completely shocked to hear myself say this—but for me, this is a piece of work that is far more sophisticated and adult than anything I’ve heard in popular music in years. Give it a shot.

—Bill Leebens

Do you remember that special feeling on the way home from a great concert? If you’re like me, you hardly remember the trip home. Do you remember feeling the concert’s emotional impact the next day?

You do know that special feeling should be yours when you listen to your system, right? If your music system isn’t providing at least some of that effect, you might need to make some changes. Because it should be happening.

“Make changes” in audiophile-speak usually means changing one or more components. But this Audiophile Therapy session is not about changing components – it’s about retrieving greater musical impact from your existing system.

When I’ve suggested that a listener should evaluate a sound system by how effectively he or she is impacted by the music, they are usually skeptical at first. But ask yourself, if you’re not impacted by the music, why do you have a stereo system?

EQ and your system

Nope, this EQ isn’t about equalization. It’s my abbreviation for Emotional Quotient. Every system has one. What’s yours?

Unlocking EQ

Most of my clients have unlocked this aspect from their systems. They use their music systems as “attitude adjusters.” When possible, they make it a point to come home from a stressful day at work and listen for at least 45 minutes or so. They’ve discovered that, when they get home, if they can listen to music for a bit, they can emerge with a whole new attitude.

Regardless of when or why you avail yourself of it, this emotional response is waiting for you. You only have to recognize that it’s possible and to want the experience.

Dynamics

Often, the way a composer or performer “plucks your emotional heart strings” is in the area of dynamic contrasts. For example, think of the times that a section of music ends with the softest pianissimo trailing to silence, or it ends with a huge fortissimo blast of power. Both are emotional punctuation marks, intended to evoke a powerful response in the listener.

By the way, if it’s not happening, the first place I’d look is whether or not the dynamic contrasts are compressed. Does the system sound effortless and alive? Is it interesting when played softly, or does it have to be cranked up? Hint—if it has to be cranked up to come alive, that’s a system that may not be as involving musically, at least from a long-term perspective.

It’s typical to blame a lack of dynamics on a component. However, it’s more likely due to poor placement – especially the listening seat, then followed by the speaker position.Other contributors can be inadequate isolation, uneven response – especially from resonances – boomy bass, missing notes, too many reflections, etc.

Presence

When you listen, do you get transported into the music venue? When the recording is a small ensemble or soloist, do you get the uncanny feel that the performer(s) are performing for you in your room?

Your system should easily differentiate these two classes of Presence as well as those that fall in between. When you become immersed in the performance, EQ will run high.

It is almost certainly NOT about buying more components. More likely, it’s related to speaker placement.

Tone

In addition to Dynamics, Tone is another major contributor. In this case, Tone is about musical timbre. You don’t have to change components to appreciate this aspect of your sound. If necessary, compromise a bit on audiophile sound effects (imaging, soundstage, etc.), and adjust your placement options to provide more Tone. It’ll pay off in a higher EQ.

The real goal

We’ve all heard that our ultimate goal should be recreating the original sound of a musical event. However, that’s a literal impossibility.

The real—and more achievable—goal should be recreating a musical event’s emotional impact. When we can reach that goal, audiophile therapy is available to each of us.

You can also read Jim’s work at his website, www.getbettersound.com .

I won’t beat around the bush: putting Copper together is a lot of work. I don’t recall my exact response when the idea of the magazine was pitched to me by Ye Olde Publisher, but I’m pretty sure it included the phrase, “are you INSANE?” Or something close to it, anyway.

While there is a lot of effort involved, especially as we continue to add contributors and content, there isn’t the stark terror, the flying-without-a-net feeling of the early days. At this point there is a certain certainty in the process, a bit of a routine. For me, the biggest angst after the launch came from the addition of comments directly on the site…and I’ll tell you why.

This column took its name from my reputation as a snarky analyst of the passing parade. While I am rarely shocked by the human ability to screw up a good thing, I never try to hurt anyone, and only say things in print that I would say to a person’s face. I am aware of my dark side, and am strongly aware that pretty much everyone has a dark side.

Because of that, when I became active online nearly twenty years ago, I decided that I would always, always, always use my real name. It’s not like my name is ‘John Smith’; having been a field manager for the Census a couple of lifetimes ago, I can state with reasonable certainty that there is one and only one ‘Bill Leebens’ in the United States. (My son is also named William, but he doesn’t go by ‘Bill’.)

My point is that I have nowhere to hide. If I say something hurtful or hateful or irredeemably boneheaded, I am accountable, and I sure as hell will hear about it from somebody. Do I feel constrained by that? Yes, but in a positive way: it acts as an extension of my conscience. I assure you that I hesitate before hitting SEND. If that’s not evident, just imagine how much worse I would be without that constraint.

Which brings me to that big angst. I think I understand why monikers and noms de pixel are needed. The unfortunate part is that anonymity seems to liberate the aforementioned dark side of many 3 AM posters, who often mistake “I can” for “I should”. Two renowned social scientists have commented apropos of this: Ron White spoke of his infamous “Tater Salad” arrest, saying, “I had the right to remain silent, but I didn’t have the ability.” And I have often quoted Louis CK to friends who had to deal with comments on their sites: “As soon as you crack your knuckles and open up a comments page, you just canceled your subscription to being a good person.”

As it turns out, my fears were largely groundless; aside from an isolated crank or two, comments on Copper have been unfailingly civil, and largely complimentary and appreciative. Phew.

It could be that our audience is simply mature, and mostly devoid of social maladroits. Or it could be fear of The Wrath of Leebs. I don’t know why our commenters are well-behaved, but I’m grateful.

In the bigger picture, however, I’m dismayed by the rise of incivility in America. Blame has largely replaced sincere discussion in public forums, so I suppose it would be ironic to direct blame at something for this degeneration. If I were to blame something/anything, it would be the rise and dominance of “reality” TV. Anthropologists are aware that being watched changes behaviors, so can anyone believe that such staged programs genuinely represent “reality”? Mimicking the non-star stars of reality TV, we have become a nation of ranters and whiners, seeking to inflame at all costs with verbal Molotov cocktails. The immediacy of response on the internet only fans those flames.

In my pretentious teenage years I formulated a string of  “Leebens’ Laws”, one of which was “Leebens’ Law of Inverse Availability”. I’d noted that back when messages took a great while to deliver—say, from a sailor at sea for a year—the messages tended to be articulate, eloquent, and heartfelt. As communication became more rapid—think telegrams, TV news, and now the internet—there seemed to be less and less to say, less mulling over and more mugging for the camera. In Future Shock, Alvin Toffler indicated that our entire society suffered from PTSD, tied to the rapid rate of societal change. That was in 1970: the last half-century has not exactly seen things slow down in our world.

In our own  insular little world of audio discussion forums, the nastiest flames I’ve ever witnessed have been on digital audio boards. You’d think that the “bits is bits” set would be hyper-rational and careful in their discourse, but discussion sometimes devolves to the “I’m right, you’re wrong, I’m brilliant, you’re a scheisskopf” level of kindergarten-speak.

Maybe our mothers were right: if you can’t say something nice….

Let me tell you about Bernie Leadon.

Bernie came to some notice in the late 60s, as a member, first, of Dillard & Clark, and then of The Flying Burrito Brothers. And then came The Eagles, and he entered everybody’s consciousness.

I saw them on their first tour, opening for Yes (of all bands!). I really liked them — and then heard the albums, which I found pretty disappointing and I didn’t really pay much attention for more than 20 years. He famously quit the band in 75 or 76 by pouring a beer over Glenn Frey’s head with the statement, “I’m going surfing.” He didn’t come back.

In the mid-90s I asked Rick Turner to suggest a guitarist with whom I could form a duet. He could only think of Bernie, but Bernie had moved across the country to Nashville. I encountered him at the AES [Audio Engineering Society] convention in San Francisco in 1998 when I exhibited there as the American distributor of the professional line of EAR (he bought a couple EAR 660 limiters).

In the early 2000s, a drummer friend of mine, David Kemper, was being very mysterious about a project he was working on. It turned out to be Bernie’s second solo album, “Mirror” (the first was recorded 27 years earlier). When they did a barely-announced show in October of 2003, I was there. Bernie opened with a deep, deep song called “God Ain’t Done with Me Yet”. This was my first night out since cancer surgery two months before. I was IN. If he wanted me, I was in.

We hung out the next day, he called a couple weeks after that, and in early December, David and I were in Hohenwald, TN, rehearsing, along with fiddler/mandolin player Tommy Burroughs. So let me tell you about Bernie. Here’s a man who, when he learned I preferred songs with no chord changes (like “Tomorrow Never Knows” or “Within You Without You”), had one written by the next time I came to Nashville. And what a song:

Indian Summer Morning (it’s all goin’ on)

A dewdrop on a blade of grass

Twistin’ slowly on the breeze

Winkin’ rainbow morse code messages

Confidentially (up) at me

Indian summer morning

Fall colors comin’ on

Late blooming flowers bravely rise

Seize their moment in the sun

It’s all goin’ on

It’s all goin’ on

Silence isn’t silent

It’s filled with subtle sounds

The crickets’ 2-stroke engines

(River) white-noise all around

The birds are busy chattin’ up

Their chicks about leavin’ town

For the Mexican Riviera

They say we should come on down

It’s all goin’ on

It’s all goin’ on

And back in town the kids hang out

In a parking lot in a swarm

Bookin’ their rites of passage

Gotta make hay while it’s warm

Testin’ their wings and other things

What with winter comin’ on

By spring she’ll be showin’

(Then) showin’ off off-spring

Nature’s wheel has turned

Mouth to mouth, skin on skin

Heart to heart, hand in hand

In this moment, in this now

In this life, show me how

Give up worry, give up scare

Give up lonely, this is where

Mouth to mouth, skin on skin

Heart to heart, come on in

It’s all goin’ on

It’s all goin’ on

I mean, holy crap. I played this one as invisibly as possible — Bernie played it in an open tuning, moving his hand up and down the fingerboard, and I just tracked his fingers an octave down, brushing the index finger on my right hand back and forth on my detuned lowest string.

I learned a great deal in my brief time with him. I spent most of the time in his truck; we drove together, and the rest of the guys drove in a van. We talked about many things, but primarily spiritual matters. I would say Bernie’s a spiritual person, but to my way of thinking, we all are, and it’s just a matter of us finding our way towards each other.

For my money, the best show we did was one that, beforehand, I thought would be terrible: the Tin Angel, in Philadelphia. It was late in the tour, and I recall seeing Bernie walking up the stairs to the club lugging a bunch of guitars, and looking ready to kill. I thought, “Oh, this isn’t good.” In fact, I thought, this is over. David had to literally climb over his kit to get to it; the stage was that small. But: that small stage meant we could play more quietly, we could all hear perfectly, and suddenly we played like magic.

The next show was at Maxwell’s in Hoboken. The soundman told me to turn down my bass. I told him that I set my volume by how hard David played his kick drum. But he pointed to the overall sound starting to feed back. So, thinking about the show the night before, I suggested that he just turn us ALL down. “You mean pull down the master fader?” he asked, incredulous. But again, magic.

We’re still close, though we don’t talk a lot. But when we do, it’s like it always was. I want to leave this with a story about a minor debacle, and again, I learned from it.

On one of my trips to Nashville, we did a radio broadcast from a club. On one song, Bernie forgot his capo. No big deal, right? But I couldn’t hear myself, so I didn’t hear the disparity between Bernie and I until the song was half way done. I instantly dropped to play the song in the key he was playing in. But, to my mind, the damage was done — a very high profile gig, and I was playing it a whole step away from him. Good god.

When my daughter Claire was learning to play piano, I would occasionally remind her of that tale when she was nervous before recitals. No matter how pulled together you think you are, shit happens.

Most aspects of modern life at the personal level tend to operate on the basis of meritocracy.  The better you are at something, the more likely you are to be recognized and rewarded for it.  Of course, there are exceptions and points of disagreement.  And the field in which these tend to be most strongly debated is that of the Fine Arts.

Throughout history, recognition in the fine arts has traditionally come by dint of serious raw talent.  Think of Michelangelo, Rembrandt, or Turner.  Sometimes the extent of that talent is not immediately recognized – the perfect example would be Van Gogh – but that is generally indicative of a re-assessment of the nature of the talent rather than a debate as to whether it existed in the first place.  These days, however, it is all too common for there to be serious debate as to whether an artist actually has any talent whatsoever – the names of Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwell may come to mind.

In many ways, Jackson Pollock is an easy target.  When he started out, his early work did undoubtedly exhibit elements of form and composition.  But as he matured, his methods increasingly shed anything that could be attributed to a considered application of technical skill.  He would throw liquid paint at the canvas in an uncontrolled manner, producing finished works that courted both controversy and adulation.  Check him out on YouTube.  A noted alcoholic, ‘Jack the Dripper’ died at 44, drunk at the wheel, in a single-car accident which also took the life of one of his passengers.

Pollock’s “No 5, 1948” assumed the mantle of the world’s most expensive painting when it sold privately in 2006 for the incredible sum of $140,000,000.  The painting was originally bought from a gallery by a collector, but it was damaged during delivery to the purchaser’s home.  After much to-and-fro, Pollock agreed to ‘repair’ the damaged painting.  He did this by repainting the whole thing, reportedly saying of the customer “He’ll never know”.  The collector, it turned out, knew full well, but expressed himself satisfied nonetheless, even though the ‘repaired’ image was not the same as the original (no record of which is believed to exist).  Check out images of “No 5, 1948” on the Internet.  What do you think?  Worth $140 Million? – and if not, then how much?  Since Pollock is dead, I stand ready to step in.

I’ve always enjoyed photography, although I don’t have much talent for it.  Back in the day, before the Internet, I used to subscribe to a British photography magazine called ‘SLR Camera’.  One recurring theme was readers’ letters which expressed their lack of appreciation for some of the photographs that had appeared in the magazine.  The general gist of the complaints was always “That was not a particularly good photograph – I could have taken it myself”.  To which the reply repeatedly offered was something smug along the lines of “Well why didn’t you, then?”  To me, this seemed to be intentionally skirting what was an obvious issue.  What the reader was really trying to convey was “If I had taken that photograph I would not have considered it worthy of publication”.  Certainly, that was how I saw it.  To my mind that was a serious point that could – and should – have been productively explored.  After all, the skill, such as there is, in taking a photograph is typically far more in the conception of the shot and the appreciation of the result than in the technical aspects of taking it.

These days there are many web sites which run a ‘photograph of the month’ competition, and the quality of the winning entries is seldom short of stunning.  I am sure that there would be unanimous agreement among viewers that those pictures were, if nothing else, at least worthy of submission to the competition.  Rare would be the viewer who would not have been pretty pleased with themselves had they been the one to take the picture.  Most people are in general very appreciative of a good photograph.  They recognize the skill involved in creating the image, which they appreciate may be tantalizingly beyond their own capabilities.  There is always a fine photograph in Copper’s ‘Parting Shot’, and I’m sure there are very few Copper readers who pay them no attention at all.

Although both are images, there are some significant differences between a painting and a photograph.  Chief among them is that a photograph, inherent in its very nature, can be exactly replicated, whereas each painting is a unique entity.  Nonetheless photography forms a useful analogy in making a point I want to make about art.  In the world of Fine Art these days, new art rarely makes a positive impression on the market in isolation.  The artist generally needs to ‘sell’ the piece by presenting a compelling rationale behind the existence of the work.  Imagine how that would work in photography.

Like this, I imagine:  I come up with some elaborate strategy for taking oddball photographs.  I then ‘carefully’ pick one and present it to a selected audience of influential photograph collectors.  I grow a beard (but avoid the hat, which would convey that I was a musician), and come up with some rationale for how the photograph is one of a number of pieces which explore a particular artistic notion and express those principles in such-and-such a manner.  As a finishing touch, I have the word put out that I am a troubled and cantankerous soul, thin-skinned, unreliable and hard to work with.  I don’t know about you, but that sets off my BS meter way into the red zone.  Yet this is how the Fine Art market has operated for most of the last century.

Although both art and music fall into the general sphere of ‘The Arts’, for the purpose of this discussion I shall choose to use the term ‘Art’ to describe only visual art – painting, sculpture, photography, etc, so that ‘Art’ and ‘Music’ have distinct and separate meanings.  I then break both spheres down into separate categories, which I shall term ‘Background’ and ‘Foreground’.

Foreground Art and Music are those specific categories which are intended to be appreciated for their own intrinsic merit as standalone entities.  Foreground Art is something which transcends the mere decorative.  It is something we want exclusively for what it is, rather than for how well it blends in.  Foreground Art is something we make room for.  Background Art is something we only desire because we have a space that we require to be filled.  Background Art forms a background to our lives as we go about them … part of the decor.  Foreground Art are the things for which we pause our lives to focus on our appreciation of them.  Likewise, Foreground Music is the reason we have HiFi systems.  We set aside time to listen specifically to Foreground Music, and when we do we usually immerse ourselves into it.  Me, I like to turn the lights off, which can be unsettling because extraneous noises captured in the recording have the capacity to startle me.

Background Music is a term which is already well established in our lexicon.  It is the soundtrack to our lives.  It has to be harmless, comfortable, and not too distracting … even while it can often be annoyingly loud.  It helps if its rhythms reflect and enhance the rhythms of whatever we are occupying ourselves with.  Background Music has almost become a necessary beat to the dance of life.  Modern movies, for example, often have a virtually continuous soundtrack.  By contrast, Foreground Music is for when we want to stop whatever else we are doing and just listen.  Sometimes we may choose it specifically for the mood it embodies, but mostly we want to appreciate it entirely on its own merits.

In both Art and Music there are highbrow adherents who like to think of themselves as the arbiters and standard bearers of taste and formal appreciation.  Oftentimes they succeed in those endeavors, in that people come to take note of what they have to say.  But it doesn’t mean that the rest of us – you and I – don’t have taste and a valid sense of appreciation.  It just means that when the latest Jackson Pollocks of our age come up for sale we don’t have the desire (even if we had the wherewithal) to be anywhere near the front of the line.  We are, to use a term Richard Nixon popularized for an entirely different purpose, the ‘Silent Majority’.

We – the Silent Majority – tend to be very clear that we expect both our Art and our Music to require a measure of clear and present skill in its conception, execution and delivery.  We’re even willing to take two out of three.  When we see a 30-foot square canvas painted entirely in red in an art gallery, and read that the gallery acquired it for three million dollars, we respond “BS!!!”.  Likewise, we expect our musicians to perform with an evident degree of serious skill or write moving, observant, and incisive music.

Don’t get confused by the latest pop, rap, and lounge superstars.  That’s not foreground music.  That’s background music.  We may like it, we may not, but either way we don’t care so much about it.  Way back when Milli Vanilli were being outed as being a fake pop band, whose music was actually recorded by session musicians, I don’t recall there being any real consumer outrage.  It was only the embarrassed industry insiders, whose carefully crafted aura of taste, expertise and fine judgment was very publicly pricked, who made all the noise.  Today, for example, would you care if you learned that Ariana Grande doesn’t actually sing on her own records (which, just to be clear, I’m pretty sure she does)?

Me?  I was happy to score tickets to see Rodrigo y Gabriela at the Montreal Jazz Festival.

If a ukulele makes you think of 1960s Hawaiian kitsch pop, then please have a listen to Hannah McPhillimy. The Belfast-based singer-songwriter uses that maligned instrument to bittersweet effect, accompanying reflective poetry and plaintive melodies.

McPhillimy is just getting started on her career, but this is an indie to watch; I predict great things in her future. Her first EP, Seeing Things, came out in 2013, but its five tracks already show originality, intelligence, and delicate taste in musical arrangement. It’s also clear that the composer has a background in the folk music tradition of her native Northern Ireland, plus some classical training on the piano.

And that ukulele! In the song “Kindness,” there’s nothing but raw plucked strings and McPhillimy’s voice serving up self-aware lyrics: “Oh, human kind, be kind to me / I am much more than you can see.” The (uncredited) sound production on “Kindness” is so intensely intimate that McPhillimy almost whispers more than sings. You get the sense of her speaking from inside your own mind.

A similar but more sophisticated song from Seeing Things is called “Homecoming.” It’s a development of the underlying musical concepts in “Kindness,” and opens with that same quiet voice lilting in triple time over the uke. But soon this piece expands into a surprisingly rich sonority as a bowed double bass and cello join in.

The first verse of “Homecoming” contains an example of a McPhillimy quirk I find by turns charming and annoying. Often she will blatantly accentuate a weak syllable in a word: “Hop-ING against HOPE will take LIFE from your YEARS.” That first -ing ending has no business being stressed. Poetic license, I suppose, but it always makes me think of Beckmesser’s hilarious aria in The Meistersingers of Nuremburg, which Wagner purposefully peppered with exactly this kind of metrical misappropriation.

Besides her own song collections, McPhillimy has also done projects for others. It’s always fun to see what songwriters come up with when prompted by new circumstances. The 2014 Disappear Here contains songs inspired by a work of fiction. A friend, Jan Carson, was doing a book tour for her novel, Malcolm Orange Disappears. She asked McPhillimy to join her, singing songs that helped set the scenes or explore the characters.

The novel focuses on residents of a retirement village who meet every week to sing their favorite songs so they won’t forget them. One track, “There’s Worse Places to Leave Your Wife,” is in a comic musical-hall style quite out of McPhillimy’s comfort zone. But the other four songs are more typically gorgeous and mournful. They muse about aging, singing, forgetting, and remembering. Unfortunately, the recording suffers from poor sound balance. The keyboard sometimes overwhelms the voice. The EP can be purchased here for download from Bandcamp, with proceeds benefiting the Alzheimer’s Society.

While most of her lyrics deal with how people relate to each other, McPhillimy has also used her songwriting powers for political commentary. In 2015 she created a number for the &yet conference in Washington state, which proposed to deal with “the intersections of technology with humanity, meaning, and ethics for people who believe the world should be better and are determined to make it so.” McPhillimy’s song, “Just Wait,” warns about humans’ destruction of Earth: “And while we hesitate, we hesitate / not much is left for us to decimate.”

Her latest record, Wind Machine (2016), got some valuable help from well-known producer Julie McLarnon, founder of Analogue Catalogue Studios. This British recording engineer is sought after by folk and indie types for her ability to capture an artist’s unique sound. And the name of her studio means what it says: she uses only analogue recording equipment. Hi-fi geeks, rejoice!

Wind Machine demonstrates a change in McPhillimy’s compositional style that I’m curious to watch unfold over the coming years. Tonal melody now plays less of role, causing the songs to resemble chants, or poetry recitation, or maybe prayers. You can post-bebop jazz influence in the polyrhythms and free song structure. The track “Heart” has this freedom, seemingly shaped more by the text’s emotional content than its syllabic rhythm. The rich and sometimes virtuosic cello playing is by McPhillimy’s usual collaborator, Elizabeth Donaghy, and percussionists David Stockard and Peter McCauley contribute to the song’s longing mood:

One reason I wanted to write this indie column for Copper was to bring talented artists like McPhillimy a little more exposure. Her YouTube videos tend to have under 100 views, so there’s plenty of room for audience growth. As she said from the stage to a 70-person crowd when I heard her at the Irish Arts Center in New York in early 2017, “It’s not often I get to play to more than two people, with one of them being my mother.”

If there’s a more contentious topic in audio than that of horn loudspeakers, I don’t know what it is.—Okay, that’s not quite true: cables are a more contentious topic. I’m just not going there.

We’ve spent a lot of space in this column exploring the history of moving-coil loudspeakers from their creation by Jensen through their development at Bell Labs/Western Electric, the development of the acoustic suspension enclosure and dome drivers at AR, with detours through Weathers, Stan White, and Spica. We’ve also looked at electrostatic speakers from Quad and Acoustat, and those funky plasma drivers. It’s only fair that we take a look at horns through the years—and that will require revisiting Western Electric and its offspring.

Writing about the history of any field is a feat of genealogy in which family branches mysteriously break off, enlivened with a sprinkling of illegitimate offspring. Audio is like this, only ever so much so more so. Paths will cross and re-cross; familiar names will pop up again and again.

In order to understand horn loudspeakers, a little knowledge of their antecedents may be helpful. Going way back, the first horns used for sounding or making noise—I would hesitate to call them musical instruments—were formed from animal horns. The  “trumpets” mentioned in the Torah, the Old Testament, and the Quran were not the brass, valved instruments of modern times, but likely a shofar or something similar.  Generally made from a ram’s horn, a  shofar is more like a bugle, really, as it is valveless and the player’s embouchure is the only control of the horn’s pitch.

The word “bugle”, interestingly enough, is derived from “buculus”, which is Latin for a castrated bullock—so the origins of bugles are clear. Like a bugle, a shofar has a conical bore, meaning that the inner sound-chamber is shaped like a cone, whereas flutes and trumpets (among others) have a cylindrical bore.

The first horns most of us encounter in  life are also of conical bore: megaphones, including the rolled-up-paper versions often made in grade school. And of course horns can be used both ways—the hearing horn dating back t0 who-knows-when was essentially a megaphone in reverse.

The seventeenth century saw a number of polymaths appear in the worlds of science and engineering, and two in particular focused their attention on horns: Athanasius Kircher was a German Jesuit scholar who seemed to have studied almost everything, including microbes under a microscope. Kircher supposedly built “speaking trumpets” and proposed the use of room-sized horns to amplify the sound of musicians—although it’s not known if such giant horns were ever built.

 

A proposal by Kircher for use of a horn to “broadcast” the sound of musicians playing.

Kircher’s English counterpart was Sir Samuel Morland, who created a series of large speaking horns used by church choirs or orchestras. One such horn, known as the “Harrington Vamping Horn” (p. 154, right hand column) was said to be fully five feet in length, and still exists at its original church. Two other examples were said to be five and a half and six feet in length.  Morland also worked in hydraulics and developed mechanical calculators and cryptographic machines.

A similar tin horn, possibly not made by Morland, is still on display at East Leake church in Nottinghampshire. Eight feet long, it is clearly not of conical section, but is roughly exponential. It was supposedly in use by the church choir until 1855.

In the eighteenth century, theoretical work by Lagrange, Bernoulli, and Euler described the propagation of sound waves through horns, but contributed little to the development of practical devices. The nineteenth and early twentieth century saw conical megaphones used to amplify voices in public gatherings and in the military; such devices were usually of simple conical section.The term “megaphone” apparently was first associated with a device created by Thomas Edison around 1878.Edison was partially deaf and combined two hearing-horns with a central speaking horn in a single, cumbersome device. In the decades that followed, we saw the beginnings of horns associated with phonographic playback, with recording, and with playback by loudspeakers, as in the Western Electric horn shown in the construction plan atop this page. We’ll continue our discussion of horns in the next issue of Copper.