Last night while I was walking the dog I listened to the late, great, Yellow Swans, and I continued the vibe today as I was working, searching YouTube for live clips. I’ve heard all of their albums and never had the opportunity to see them live. Noise bands have lots of clips on YouTube, so it was easy to find a full show and press play.
Kind of zoning out as one does when listening to music at work (ie. not actually listening closely) I didn’t really pay attention when a very simple and repetitive recording came on next. Ambient music and noise music are tonal colors in the same sonic palette.
My ears perked up however when this unexpected sound came on toward the end of Low Level Listening, Part 3 by Stars of the Lid.
This is of special note because YouTube is a specifically digital medium. It’s not weird to find digitized version of analog recordings on YouTube of course. Virtually none of the music that was previously released on analog format has been digitized; only what copyright owners (usually not artists) thought they could make money from. Since the Stars of the Lid are an independent outfit making music with very little commercial potential, it didn’t surprise me to find someone had recorded their lp and put it online.
As I’ve also seen, YouTube seems to make an effort to identify copyright owners and license these recordings. Despite someone who’s not the band recording and uploading the digitization illegally as well as violating the terms of service of the streaming provider, the platform contacts the owners and asks if they’d like to leave it up there and collect any revenue it generates.
I could guess this is a strategy that portrays the company as acting in good faith for all of the times they generate and collect ad revenue on someone else’s work. And I totally get there are possibly some challenges for them to identify artists as well. Maybe it’s kind of cool?
Except there is a digital version of this recording. I checked Spotify and Apple Music. That version is not this 2nd generation digitization of an lp.
In fact, every digital copy is probably an imperfect copy. We have this idea that digital transmission is perfect and complete reproduction, but more accurate is it’s possibly perfect, likely complete reproduction is what happens. That’s what “sample rate” means. At any given instant, the playback algorithm is pretty sure this is what it’s supposed to do.
We just become aware of when it’s fantastically wrong, when it sounds glitchy, but statistically it’s predictably wrong, some percentage of samples. Our ears just aren’t good enough to hear it.
Digital just make it easier to copy, which means it’s easier to make crappy copies faster. I didn’t notice this recording sounded like a recording because it’s an ambient album by a band that makes washes of sound. It’s quite common for ambient bands to add non-musical sounds or even noise for effect, aesthetic, or any other reason.
But it belies the fact that the second I was paying attention, I realized this is a far inferior copy to any other I could be listening to. The Uncanny Valley just keeps replicating itself out there in the digital surveillance economy, but we accept the convenience of it because, well, in my adult life I remember a time when it wasn’t even possible to get access to an unlicensed live recording of the Yellow Swans. Hell, if you wanted an authorized one that was pretty tough, and most of the labels that have ever released their music are either defunct or dormant. So this is fucking great!
There it was though, generating revenue for YouTube (somehow, I’m sure; my browser blocks ads, but that doesn’t mean someone’s not making money) and maybe, someday a fraction of a cent for band, from a shitty copy of a pretty good copy.