Taking Sides »

Digital music has eroded - indeed removed - the whole concept of a “side” of a single or album. I reckon there’s a sense in which the medium has had an artistic effect on the message...

In the vinyl days singles and albums were inherently games of two halves. Unless your masterpiece was complete within the capacity of a single side (case in point: Rush's "2112") there had to be a split down the middle. A pause, a break. Something that’s easy to forget now we can have hundreds of hours of music literally in our pockets: audience participation was required.

In the break you had to act - to flip the LP, or turn the cassette around. It was like an interval in a theatre show, though of course you didn’t have to pop out for an ice-cream or extortionate gin and tonic. The disruption was lessened, but not removed, by such inventions as auto-reversing cassette players, and I’m sure some folks had record players capable of flipping the LP over. (1)

An artist's awareness of this structure would show up most keenly in concept albums, and I recall Marillion's “Misplaced Childhood” having a distinct “End Of Act One” climax (the end of "Heart of Lothian"), and a rattling, back up to speed Act Two opener with... whatever the first track on side two was called. (Tangent: I reckon concept albums erode one’s caring as much about individual track names... or perhaps I’m just forgetful. Occam’s Razor on standby.)

So though auto-reversing cassette players took the labour out of an album flipping, there was still the pregnant pause as the tape hissed to the end, the silence as it played through its leader, then the click chunk as the mechanism reversed. A few seconds later the hiss of the empty tape before side two began. Tension, house lights down and the chattering of the audience stopping (hopefully). This was dramatic structure, there were choices to be made as a recording artist - which track should close side one, which should open side two...

CDs ended all that. It took a while of course - longer than expected I’d imagine. I reckon it was probably only after the industry stopped releasing albums on cassette that artists were properly free to exploit having an uninterrupted 74 minutes of space, and the big divide in the middle was history. Concept albums, for those still determined to make them, could run uninterrupted! Non-stop dance remix albums were now really non stop - for 74 minutes.

Then the mp3 came along, and now we’re in the tail end, perhaps, of a similar change of structure. The difference this time is that there’s almost no practical limit, beyond the storage space of servers and players. A concept album could stream live and never end, a non-stop dance remix could actually be just that - non-stop. In practice of course the need to chop stuff up into saleable bits means there are still such entities as albums, but this is now largely convention. Once physical media is gone the last barriers will fall away and artists will be utterly free to make an album that lasts an hour, or lasts a year (though their fingers might get very sore in the latter case). Also, the concerts would surely get dull for even the most hardened fan.

"What did you do last year?"
"Went to the John Cage duet with Robert Wilson."
"Any good?"
"Well, March was a bit dull..."

To be more realistic there’ll always be a sense in which the idea of an “album” exists - artists will mostly have to decide the scope of their work, the amount of time they can spend creating and refining material, and the final length that will best suit their material.

Which brings me to another thing - the ability to buy and play music track by track, moreso perhaps than the removal of media limitations, is what’s truly threatening to the idea of an “album”. There was and remains an artistry in choosing the order you present your songs in - the ebb and flow of your work. Many albums show clear signs of structure: a catchy opening or a slow build, then often two or more of the singles you’ve released before the album came out (another pattern that’s changing...), some less immediately commercial tracks, some surprises, some songs that comment on each other by their juxtaposition, and then all the extra tracks the drummer wrote and you wouldn’t have normally included but it’s his garage you rehearse in...

An album was a performance - it had to sustain your listeners all the way through. Who out there remembers an “album track” that didn’t grab you at first but grew into a favourite? Now it’s all too easy to skip straight to the songs that hooked you into buying the whole album in the first place, never giving the slow burners a chance. Or why buy all those songs you don’t know? Why not just get the two tracks you’ve heard already?

It’s something of an act of discipline nowadays for me to listen to an entire album. It's something of a novelty to even listen to music that isn't on shuffle, as with endless choice comes paralysis. But it’s something that I fight especially on two occasions: when I get new music I try to listen to it all in order at least once - to give them all a fighting chance. Then it’s off into the big melting pot of shuffle. The other occasion is when the album’s structure demands it - Hybrid’s work tends to reward linearity, and there are always the non-stop dance remix albums.

Oom tish oom tish oom tish

(1) As I picture this, the room that such a device is in has a deeply disturbing amount of purple velvet on the walls. (2)

(2) Note to statisticians and interior designers: the quantity of wall based purple velvet to qualify as "deeply disturbing", rather than merely "disturbing", is this: any.

Comments

[David Ripley]

Hi Tim

The other thing that was lost, initially with CD and now with download is the time induced discipline of vinyl. At most you had 45 minutes at your disposal to really make an impression so it had better be the best 45 minutes you coud create.
With 74 minutes of a CD avialable a lot of crap that would have been cut was released (interestingly at first any tracks over the 8 tracks/45 minutes rule were 'bonus' tracks) This made people lazy and in fact the onus was to fill the CD rather than saying this is our best and it's as long as it needs to be. In terms of singles (remember them) this meant all the stuff that would have been 'B' sides appeared on the album, diluting the whole in many cases
There are still albums being made that aren't just a collection of singles and fillers but as you say the whole pacing of a 'suite' is largely a forgotten art. Also there was the enforced interval so that the album needed to be looked at as two acts. This meant that you had to make the listener want to flip the album as opposed to changing it for something else and only the best tracks played in the right order could do that.
Plus ca change I suppose but as I said above I think the result is a lot of stuff that many bands probably regret having out there - possibly not as much as we regret having to pay for it!
More music isn't always a good thing