Harvesting Studio Affects // From Glenn Gould to Björk
The future is too immense to know, but there is an impulse to read so much of it in Glenn
Gould’s 1955 studio debut, in the black-and-white video of him recording the Aria from Bach’s
Goldberg Variations as his loose-jointed seat protests with each gesture.
After abandoning the stage at thirty-two, the Canadian pianist found his home in the studio,
a space where musical thinking could be elaborated with afforded nuance. What he sculpted
out of Bach’s contrapuntal statement and its thirty variations could not have been created
in any concert hall in the world, because what is articulated on stage—profound though it
may be—is constricted by time. And so, to speak of live performance is to speak of absolute
presence—a singularity that cannot be captured or predicted. It is pre-eminently on tape
that music is re/interpreted ad infinitum and always in the process of configuring itself.
Gould’s records sometimes overwhelm in their aural honesty. Played in distinctive portato, the piano is only one source of sound in a mesh of acoustics. Gould performed each one of his rehearsals, concerts and recording sessions on a foldable chair that his father had modified for him. On most of his records, the worn-down frame can be heard swaying to the metric changes as Gould himself softly sings complementary melodies. In fact, with every session, the humming gets a bit more insistent, the chair a bit more unstable. Each of his recordings carries a distinctive scenography.
From these persisting acoustic interferences, one can almost trace a lineage to the subversive studio practices of our time by both mainstream and alternative artists. I’m thinking of an early song from Björk’s Debut album, ‘There’s More To Life Than This (Live At The Milk Bar Toilets)’, where she walks into one of the bar’s stalls during the second verse and continues the recording from the echoey tight space. I’m thinking of Nine Inch Nails’s Not the Actual Events as Trent Reznor’s distorted whispers keep sinking deeper into the studio’s instrumental abyss. I’m even thinking of Casablancas nudging his drummer to start playing in The Strokes’s ‘Ode To The Mets’ and Eminem asking ‘Where’s my snare?’ in the intro of ‘Cleanin’ Out My Closet’. There is a shared preservationist quality to these recordings, drawing attention to the studio space and revealing its ecology. Viewed as a whole, Gould’s practices are much closer to these artists’ work—albeit in radically different genres—than that of his contemporaries. At the time of his debut, the studio was seen as an effort to capture the sound of the concert hall. To accommodate this illusion, some classical records were even presented with an artificial echo to mimic lines of sound running along high ceilings before diving into the orchestra. But from the beginning of his career, Gould saw the studio as a space that could harvest its own authentic affects. His understanding of music was essentially cubist—disembodied and multiplying realities crisscrossing within a single expression. Musicians like Björk and Reznor who have extensive ly experimented with the studio’s potential speak of the space as a cocoon, an escape into the wilderness of sound. Gould called it ‘womblike’, a place where ‘time turns in upon itself’. Yes, an isolated site, but not a detached one. That is to say, once recorded, a thesis is sent out into the world, allowing listeners to retrieve the space of its creation.
Both Gould and Björk record in almost ritualistic isolation. It is in this state of public privacy that their art reaches its textured stillness. Freed from the transience of live performance, polyphonic arguments bounce off the room’s walls, capturing natural reverberations. Though the spheres of an electronic artist and a classical pianist appear distant (one navigating historical texts, the other constructing sonic environments ex nihilo) their creative theses converge. Fundamentally, what they both record is a dialogue between a place and time that will never be again. An ephemeral truth hewn from the changes in the atmosphere of a room, preserved as a signal. Such a spatial understanding of sound is particularly suited to kinds of music that aim to problematise, to become ‘food for thought’ as Björk puts it. The distance between audience and performer encourages a mode of listening that considers the conceptual whole—the Gesamtkunstwerk—without restrictions. This is how the studio becomes a site of metamorphosis , a liminal space oscillating between origin and destination.
Gould was infamously strict about a room’s temperature, to the degree that a designated technician was in charge of constantly adjusting the thermostat during his recordings. Such interactions with the performance space articulate, to some extent, a personal affect that remains inscribed in the recording. The humanistic geographer Yi-Fu Tuan writes that:
In the early 1970s, Gould began experimenting with the multi-track recorder for the late-Romantics in his repertoire, like Scriabin and Sibelius. Four sets of microphones, positioned at varying distances from the piano, would record their input onto a separate track so that every pair provided a slightly different perspective on the performed piece. In editing, the eight-track tape is merged into a unified stereo result that encompasses various perspectives according to the demands of the composition. This produces an aural impression of movement as sounds flow, expand and contract throughout the work—a panoramic experience that simulates mobility through the poetics of studio recording. Gould’s uninhibited use of inter-splicing transforms the editing process into an instrument of its own—a new way of architecting music. Free to experiment with tempi and hues one would not dare on stage, Gould withdrew to the editing room determined to unveil the platonic idea l of each performance. And since he never used this process to rectify slips in his recording, Gould’s arduous post-taping was purely in pursuit of affect.
When we trace the two stitches that hold the word ‘technology’ together we find τέχνη and λόγος. Which is to say, art through word—artistic utterance, discourse or expression. (It isn’t until the nineteenth century that technology merges with the industrial scene). Björk recorded her third album, Homogenic, in a residential studio in southern Spain overlooking the Mediterranean. ‘You can’t blame the computer,’ she warns. ‘If there’s no soul in music, it’s because nobody put it there. It’s not the tool’s fault.’ Walking along the shoreline with the Moroccan coast faintly visible on the horizon, she samples and reworks the day’s ideas on her portable sequencer. ‘Technology and nature are one and the same,’ she says. ‘It is a matter of perspective.’ What Björk means—and has exemplified throughout her career—is that nature is not as monolithic as we often presume. If we think of voltage as a natural occurrence, electricity becomes an organic source of sound, just like wood, brass and leather have been for centuries. And seeing Gould motion gentle crescendos to the technician mixing Scriabin’s ‘Désir’, we get the impression we are indeed watching a conductor and his orchestra.
Gould recorded the Goldberg Variations once again in 1981, a year before his death. Though the notes played are virtually identical, the performance is infinitely richer. In the original recording we hear a young artist with eager tempi and energetic phrasing. At the other end of his career, Gould’s 1981 Goldbergs express a profundity of spirit, a rumination on the performing self and the flow of time. And like Gould’s career, the variations themselves are punctuated by two nodes: the introductory Aria and the closing Aria da Capo. Counterpoint as a musical tradition is characterised by horizontal rather than vertical movement, which is to say, a theme perpetually sculpting itself through one voice or another. In this repetition, the musical idea introduced in the Aria unfolds in space and time across thirty metamorphoses. In the end, the theme is revisited in the Aria da Capo—a return to the beginning. By the time the initial idea is expressed again, we have known a universe that has expanded all the way back into itself.
In conversation, Gould speaks of his family’s habit of travelling up in the country during the weekends when he was a child. On Sunday afternoon, driving back home to Toronto, they’d tune in for the New York Philharmonic’s broadcast. Even as an adult, he associated the composers that had once been his road-trip companions with endless fields of snow. Beethoven never sounded as good, he says. Not in the Musikverein, the Berliner Philharmonie, or Carnegie Hall. Never as good as he did in a whirring car a mong the passing vistas. Thinking of Gould’s life as one coursing through a series of recordings, from the snowy road trips of his childhood to his final Goldberg Variations, I am reminded of Annie Ernaux writing ‘the distance that separates past from present, can be measured by the light that spills across the ground between shadows’. Perhaps, every so often, it can be measured by the sounds unfurling between an Aria and its Aria da Capo.
♪♫ ♪♪♫ ♪♫♬ ♪♫♪
Irene Bakola is a critic and essayist based in Athens. Her writing often assumes the form of a palimpsest, layering the collective onto the intimate. She frequently collaborates with film festivals in PR and production positions, curates the biweekly newsletter Post-Index, and co-hosts the podcast This Film Exists. You can find more of her work at irenebakola.com.
Gould’s records sometimes overwhelm in their aural honesty. Played in distinctive portato, the piano is only one source of sound in a mesh of acoustics. Gould performed each one of his rehearsals, concerts and recording sessions on a foldable chair that his father had modified for him. On most of his records, the worn-down frame can be heard swaying to the metric changes as Gould himself softly sings complementary melodies. In fact, with every session, the humming gets a bit more insistent, the chair a bit more unstable. Each of his recordings carries a distinctive scenography.
From these persisting acoustic interferences, one can almost trace a lineage to the subversive studio practices of our time by both mainstream and alternative artists. I’m thinking of an early song from Björk’s Debut album, ‘There’s More To Life Than This (Live At The Milk Bar Toilets)’, where she walks into one of the bar’s stalls during the second verse and continues the recording from the echoey tight space. I’m thinking of Nine Inch Nails’s Not the Actual Events as Trent Reznor’s distorted whispers keep sinking deeper into the studio’s instrumental abyss. I’m even thinking of Casablancas nudging his drummer to start playing in The Strokes’s ‘Ode To The Mets’ and Eminem asking ‘Where’s my snare?’ in the intro of ‘Cleanin’ Out My Closet’. There is a shared preservationist quality to these recordings, drawing attention to the studio space and revealing its ecology. Viewed as a whole, Gould’s practices are much closer to these artists’ work—albeit in radically different genres—than that of his contemporaries. At the time of his debut, the studio was seen as an effort to capture the sound of the concert hall. To accommodate this illusion, some classical records were even presented with an artificial echo to mimic lines of sound running along high ceilings before diving into the orchestra. But from the beginning of his career, Gould saw the studio as a space that could harvest its own authentic affects. His understanding of music was essentially cubist—disembodied and multiplying realities crisscrossing within a single expression. Musicians like Björk and Reznor who have extensive ly experimented with the studio’s potential speak of the space as a cocoon, an escape into the wilderness of sound. Gould called it ‘womblike’, a place where ‘time turns in upon itself’. Yes, an isolated site, but not a detached one. That is to say, once recorded, a thesis is sent out into the world, allowing listeners to retrieve the space of its creation.
Both Gould and Björk record in almost ritualistic isolation. It is in this state of public privacy that their art reaches its textured stillness. Freed from the transience of live performance, polyphonic arguments bounce off the room’s walls, capturing natural reverberations. Though the spheres of an electronic artist and a classical pianist appear distant (one navigating historical texts, the other constructing sonic environments ex nihilo) their creative theses converge. Fundamentally, what they both record is a dialogue between a place and time that will never be again. An ephemeral truth hewn from the changes in the atmosphere of a room, preserved as a signal. Such a spatial understanding of sound is particularly suited to kinds of music that aim to problematise, to become ‘food for thought’ as Björk puts it. The distance between audience and performer encourages a mode of listening that considers the conceptual whole—the Gesamtkunstwerk—without restrictions. This is how the studio becomes a site of metamorphosis , a liminal space oscillating between origin and destination.
Gould was infamously strict about a room’s temperature, to the degree that a designated technician was in charge of constantly adjusting the thermostat during his recordings. Such interactions with the performance space articulate, to some extent, a personal affect that remains inscribed in the recording. The humanistic geographer Yi-Fu Tuan writes that:
animals, including human beings, pause at a locality because it satisfies certain biological needs. The pause makes it possible for a locality to become a centre of felt value.
Every room has affects pooling in its centre. Can we say that we feel the temperature of Gould’s studio in his renditions of Bach or Scriabin? Can we hear Björk’s wooden microphone? Reznor’s studio, chock-full of modular instruments? There is certainly something of these atmospheres preserved in their recordings—a colouration of sound produced within the four walls of that specific time, in that specific studio, sent out into the world. In vinyls, CDs and cassettes, this musical scenography is then transmitted into a listening network as real and engaged as a live audience. Gould repeatedly criticised the concert hall for seeking to appeal only to the select few who could afford entry to the circulation of culture—‘I’m not at all happy with words like “public” and “artist”; I'm not happy with the hierarchical implications of that kind of terminology’. For him, exhibitions of virtuosity on stage are divorced from a critical viewpoint, serving only to laurel the genius of the prodigy and comply to the ‘presumed demands of the marketplace’. But just as Björk unchangingly refers to herself as a pop artist, Gould’s disdain was reserved for the crowd not the individual. In fact, he hoped to reach the latter through the incomparably vast paths of recorded music, urging home-listeners to trace new passages through the dials of their own record players.In the early 1970s, Gould began experimenting with the multi-track recorder for the late-Romantics in his repertoire, like Scriabin and Sibelius. Four sets of microphones, positioned at varying distances from the piano, would record their input onto a separate track so that every pair provided a slightly different perspective on the performed piece. In editing, the eight-track tape is merged into a unified stereo result that encompasses various perspectives according to the demands of the composition. This produces an aural impression of movement as sounds flow, expand and contract throughout the work—a panoramic experience that simulates mobility through the poetics of studio recording. Gould’s uninhibited use of inter-splicing transforms the editing process into an instrument of its own—a new way of architecting music. Free to experiment with tempi and hues one would not dare on stage, Gould withdrew to the editing room determined to unveil the platonic idea l of each performance. And since he never used this process to rectify slips in his recording, Gould’s arduous post-taping was purely in pursuit of affect.
When we trace the two stitches that hold the word ‘technology’ together we find τέχνη and λόγος. Which is to say, art through word—artistic utterance, discourse or expression. (It isn’t until the nineteenth century that technology merges with the industrial scene). Björk recorded her third album, Homogenic, in a residential studio in southern Spain overlooking the Mediterranean. ‘You can’t blame the computer,’ she warns. ‘If there’s no soul in music, it’s because nobody put it there. It’s not the tool’s fault.’ Walking along the shoreline with the Moroccan coast faintly visible on the horizon, she samples and reworks the day’s ideas on her portable sequencer. ‘Technology and nature are one and the same,’ she says. ‘It is a matter of perspective.’ What Björk means—and has exemplified throughout her career—is that nature is not as monolithic as we often presume. If we think of voltage as a natural occurrence, electricity becomes an organic source of sound, just like wood, brass and leather have been for centuries. And seeing Gould motion gentle crescendos to the technician mixing Scriabin’s ‘Désir’, we get the impression we are indeed watching a conductor and his orchestra.
Gould recorded the Goldberg Variations once again in 1981, a year before his death. Though the notes played are virtually identical, the performance is infinitely richer. In the original recording we hear a young artist with eager tempi and energetic phrasing. At the other end of his career, Gould’s 1981 Goldbergs express a profundity of spirit, a rumination on the performing self and the flow of time. And like Gould’s career, the variations themselves are punctuated by two nodes: the introductory Aria and the closing Aria da Capo. Counterpoint as a musical tradition is characterised by horizontal rather than vertical movement, which is to say, a theme perpetually sculpting itself through one voice or another. In this repetition, the musical idea introduced in the Aria unfolds in space and time across thirty metamorphoses. In the end, the theme is revisited in the Aria da Capo—a return to the beginning. By the time the initial idea is expressed again, we have known a universe that has expanded all the way back into itself.
In conversation, Gould speaks of his family’s habit of travelling up in the country during the weekends when he was a child. On Sunday afternoon, driving back home to Toronto, they’d tune in for the New York Philharmonic’s broadcast. Even as an adult, he associated the composers that had once been his road-trip companions with endless fields of snow. Beethoven never sounded as good, he says. Not in the Musikverein, the Berliner Philharmonie, or Carnegie Hall. Never as good as he did in a whirring car a mong the passing vistas. Thinking of Gould’s life as one coursing through a series of recordings, from the snowy road trips of his childhood to his final Goldberg Variations, I am reminded of Annie Ernaux writing ‘the distance that separates past from present, can be measured by the light that spills across the ground between shadows’. Perhaps, every so often, it can be measured by the sounds unfurling between an Aria and its Aria da Capo.
Irene Bakola is a critic and essayist based in Athens. Her writing often assumes the form of a palimpsest, layering the collective onto the intimate. She frequently collaborates with film festivals in PR and production positions, curates the biweekly newsletter Post-Index, and co-hosts the podcast This Film Exists. You can find more of her work at irenebakola.com.