Through the Looking Glass

The Beatles experimented with tape loops for sound effects, on such songs as "Tomorrow Never Knows" and "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite". But loop-based recording is something new entirely, an offshoot of all of the efforts put into sampling in the 1980s. In loop-based recording, a song is constructed by building up a combination of repeated "loops" of music layered on top of each other, taking a collage of pre-existing parts and creating something entirely new, which hopefully is greater than the sum of those parts. A loop of a drum machine, or a real drummer, will sound entirely differently when it's overdubbed with a guitar and bass parts played like Motown, or like the Beatles, or like Led Zeppelin. Or if it's layered with loops of Vangelis-style synthesizers. It makes recording a bit like building a jigsaw puzzle, except that the parts can be assembled a hundred different ways, instead of one correct way.

Unlike postmodernists, I'm a pretty hardheaded, objective kind of guy when it comes to believing that reality is quite real. But what is reality when it comes to recorded music? The modernists jettisoned any ties that painting had towards reality when they began to explore impressionism, cubism, neo-plasticism, and the like. The theater was "real" in the sense that you watched live actors in front of you. But film's techniques have left theater in the dust. While journalistic-inspired realism is powerful tool in writing, the medium itself is pure artifice, as Tom Wolfe noted in the 1970s. Music long ago ceased being about capturing a live performance. But when you bought a Beatles or Zeppelin album (to use the examples above), you felt as though each band member was contributing to the recording. It felt real-but it was really hyper-real; realism on steroids: all the mistakes of a live performance have been edited out. Everything's perfectly in-tune. All the musicians are perfectly in time with each other.

Today's music technology goes far beyond that. At what point has a recording gone through the looking glass? Does the listener even concern himself with these issues? And if he doesn't, should I?