compact disc 9781501348518, 9781501348549, 9781501348532

Table of contents :
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1: The little disc
Chapter 2: The faithful disc
Chapter 3: The wounded disc
Chapter 4: The undead disc
Postscript
Acknowledgements
Select Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

“

The Object Lessons series achieves something very close to magic: the books take ordinary—even banal—objects and animate them with a rich history of invention, political struggle, science, and popular mythology. Filled with fascinating details and conveyed in sharp, accessible prose, the books make the everyday world come to life. Be warned: once you’ve read a few of these, you’ll start walking around your house, picking up random objects, and musing aloud: ‘I wonder what the story is behind this thing?’” Steven Johnson, author of Where Good Ideas

Come From and How We Got to Now

“

Object Lessons describe themselves as ‘short, beautiful books,’ and to that, I’ll say, amen. . . . If you read enough Object Lessons books, you’ll fill your head with plenty of trivia to amaze and annoy your friends and loved ones—caution recommended on pontificating on the objects surrounding you. More importantly, though . . . they inspire us to take a second look at parts of the everyday that we’ve taken for granted. These are not so much lessons about the objects themselves, but opportunities for self-reflection and storytelling. They remind us that we are surrounded by a wondrous world, as long as we care to look.” John Warner, The Chicago Tribune

“ “ “ “ “

For my money, Object Lessons is the most consistently interesting nonfiction book series in America.” Megan Volpert, PopMatters

Besides being beautiful little hand-sized objects themselves, showcasing exceptional writing, the wonder of these books is that they exist at all. . . . Uniformly excellent, engaging, thought-provoking, and informative.” Jennifer Bort Yacovissi, Washington Independent Review of Books

. . . edifying and entertaining . . . perfect for slipping in a pocket and pulling out when life is on hold.” Sarah Murdoch, Toronto Star

[W]itty, thought-provoking, and poetic. . . . These little books are a page-flipper’s dream.” John Timpane, The Philadelphia Inquirer

Though short, at roughly 25,000 words apiece, these books are anything but slight.” Marina Benjamin, New Statesman

“

The joy of the series, of reading Remote Control, Golf Ball, Driver’s License, Drone, Silence, Glass, Refrigerator, Hotel, and Waste . . . in quick succession, lies in encountering the various turns through which each of their authors has been put by his or her object. . . . The object predominates, sits squarely center stage, directs the action. The object decides the genre, the chronology, and the limits of the study. Accordingly, the author has to take her cue from the thing she chose or that chose her. The result is a wonderfully uneven series of books, each one a thing unto itself.” Julian Yates, Los Angeles Review of Books

“ “

The Object Lessons series has a beautifully simple premise. Each book or essay centers on a specific object. This can be mundane or unexpected, humorous or politically timely. Whatever the subject, these descriptions reveal the rich worlds hidden under the surface of things.” Christine Ro, Book Riot

. . . a sensibility somewhere between Roland Barthes and Wes Anderson.” Simon Reynolds, author of Retromania:

Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past

iv

A book series about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

Series Editors: Ian Bogost and Christopher Schaberg

Advisory Board: Sara Ahmed, Jane Bennett, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Johanna Drucker, Raiford Guins, Graham Harman, renée hoogland, Pam Houston, Eileen Joy, Douglas Kahn, Daniel Miller, Esther Milne, Timothy Morton, Kathleen Stewart, Nigel Thrift, Rob Walker, Michele White.

In association with

BOOKS IN THE SERIES Bird by Erik Anderson Blanket by Kara Thompson Bookshelf by Lydia Pyne Bread by Scott Cutler Shershow Bulletproof Vest by Kenneth R. Rosen Burger by Carol J. Adams Cell Tower by Steven E. Jones Cigarette Lighter by Jack Pendarvis Coffee by Dinah Lenney Compact Disc by Robert Barry Doctor by Andrew Bomback Driver’s License by Meredith Castile Drone by Adam Rothstein Dust by Michael Marder Earth by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Linda T. Elkins-Tanton Egg by Nicole Walker Email by Randy Malamud Eye Chart by William Germano Glass by John Garrison Golf Ball by Harry Brown Fake by Kati Stevens Hair by Scott Lowe Hashtag by Elizabeth Losh High Heel by Summer Brennan Hood by Alison Kinney Hotel by Joanna Walsh Jet Lag by Christopher J. Lee Luggage by Susan Harlan Magnet by Eva Barbarossa Ocean by Steve Mentz Password by Martin Paul Eve

Personal Stereo by Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow Phone Booth by Ariana Kelly Pill by Robert Bennett Potato by Rebecca Earle Questionnaire by Evan Kindley Refrigerator by Jonathan Rees Remote Control by Caetlin Benson-Allott Rust by Jean-Michel Rabaté Shipping Container by Craig Martin Shopping Mall by Matthew Newton Silence by John Biguenet Sock by Kim Adrian Souvenir by Rolf Potts Traffic by Paul Josephson Tree by Matthew Battles Tumor by Anna Leahy Veil by Rafia Zakaria Waste by Brian Thill Whale Song by Margret Grebowicz Exit by Laura Waddell (forthcoming) Fat by Hanne Blank (forthcoming) Fog by Stephen Sparks (forthcoming) Gin by Shonna Milliken Humphrey (forthcoming) Office by Sheila Liming (forthcoming) Pixel by Ian Epstein (forthcoming) Political Sign by Tobias Carroll (forthcoming) Signature by Hunter Dukes (forthcoming) Snake by Erica Wright (forthcoming) Train by A. N. Devers (forthcoming)

compact disc ROBERT BARRY

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2020 Copyright © Robert Barry, 2020 Cover design: Alice Marwick All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Barry, Robert, 1981- author. Title: Compact disc / Robert Barry. Description: 1st. | New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. | Series: Object lessons | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019025886 (print) | LCCN 2019025887 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501348518 (paperback) | ISBN 9781501348525 (epub) | ISBN 9781501348532 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Compact discs–History. | Sound recordings–History. | Sound--Recording and reproducing–History Classification: LCC ML1055 .B17 2020 (print) | LCC ML1055 (ebook) | DDC 780.26/6–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019025886 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019025887 ISBN: PB: 978-1-5013-4851-8 ePDF: 978-1-5013-4853-2 eBook: 978-1-5013-4852-5 Series: Object Lessons Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

CONTENTS

Introduction  1 1 The Little Disc  9 2 The Faithful Disc  35 3 The Wounded Disc  67 4 The Undead Disc  95 Postscript  129

Acknowledgements  135 Select Bibliography  136 Index  141

x

INTRODUCTION

The compact disc is my contemporary. We grew up together. The New York press conference at which the Philips and Sony corporations jointly announced the birth of their new format was just ten days after my own birth, in May 1981. And though my childhood memories are dominated by other formats – by long car journeys fighting for control of the tape deck, my parents’ dust-caked box of records in the garage – I came of age with the CD too. A late developer, it wasn’t until the early 90s that the CD finally overtook its rival formats to claim dominance over the home audio landscape. Around the same time, the first CD player made its way into the Barry household. A chunky black box about the size of a jumbo packet of breakfast cereal, it quickly relegated our old all-in-one system to the attic. There it would remain, unloved, a hulking chrome beast in its own wheel-mounted cabinet with a desultory assortment of records slunk in a built-in compartment beneath the double tape deck: Peter Gabriel’s So, ‘We Are the World’, something by Wham. The new CD player in the front room had a six-disc multichanger cartridge, which seemed subtly science-fictional at

the time. Something like magic. One need scarcely ever get up and touch the thing. It was hands-free. Automated music. A taste of things to come. The same six discs would linger there for weeks, selected by remote control or left to run, creating strange juxtapositions. Dire Straits into Mahler into Kings of Cajun. But this was not my music. Not yet, at least. My jones for the accumulation of recorded media was stoked on tapes. And for a long time, the tape rack at HMV was the object of all my pocket money. Until one day, when it wasn’t. The year was 1994. I was thirteen years old. The compact disc, now shifting nearly two billion units globally, likewise. I recall saying to myself: I am going to get into indie. I’m not even sure if I really knew what ‘indie’ meant, in a musical sense. But, at the start of my teens, the word itself seemed to communicate something to me, as if a style or a sound could deliver by fiat every teenager’s dream of independence. I must have been saving up because I remember that weekend going down to the HMV on Western Road in Brighton and buying compact discs of Blur’s Parklife, Up to our Hips by The Charlatans and Devil Hopping by the Inspiral Carpets. This, then, would be my music. And the CD format, somehow, seemed to imply the requisite seriousness. My first tape deck had been made by Fisher-Price. It was two-tone brown and beige and looked sort of lunch box-like, with its built-in handle and friendly, thumbsized buttons. Somehow the cassette never quite shrugged off this chunky, crayon-ish association. It was music with 2

COMPACT DISC

stabilizers on. Even the sound was kind of smudged in comparison to its shimmering successor. But from its razor-thin edge to its reflective sheen, everything about the CD suggested precision, high fidelity, high-tech. This was the era of NASA spin-off technologies, of products designed for the moon making their way into the home: freeze-dried food and temper foam, Teflon and the Fisher Space Pen. The development of the CD had little to do with the space race (but then neither did Teflon or the Space Pen –  it didn’t dampen the association), but it was infected somehow with this imagery. Philip K. Dick had pictured new electronic audio formats in futuristic novels from the 1960s like The Simulacra, Martian Time Slip and Ubik. In 1997, Barry Sonnenfeld’s sci-fi spoof Men in Black had a scene with Tommy Lee Jones’ Agent K discussing the technology confiscated from extraterrestrial visitors. ‘This is a fascinating little gadget,’ he said, holding up one such example of alien tech. ‘It’ll replace CDs soon. Guess I’ll have to buy the White Album again.’ The thing in his hand looked just like a compact disc, only smaller. The new format was designed and developed in the interval between these two conjectures. It put a laser – an actual zap gun – in your living room. Adverts from the early 80s presented the disc as a flying saucer, a figment of virtual reality, a mirage made of pure light. They promised ‘perfect sound that will last forever’. It was to be the ultimate medium. It finally proved to be just that. INTRODUCTION

3

My friends and I never wholly gave up on cassettes. If a mate had an album you wanted to hear then, sure, they would run you off a tape of it and stick something else on the B-side – another record they thought you might like, or a mix of their current faves. These were things given away without a thought. It was my first taste of a music effectively made worthless. By the time I got to university, CDs themselves were just as nugatory. We would fill our hard drives with tracks downloaded from Limewire or Kazaa, then burn off a disc for a party, quickly losing it without thought afterwards. High street charity shops soon overflowed with CDs whose values had plummeted from fifteen quid-plus to barely a pound. Everywhere people were chucking out collections, long builtup and invested in, now rendered trash. Even the British Library Sound Archive stopped backing up to a physical inventory. Audio dematerialized before our very eyes. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the CD was the architect of its own demise. By making music digital, reducing it to a string of ones and zeroes, it became infinitely replicable. The generation loss that plagued my tapeswapping youth was a thing of the past. The copy became sonically indistinguishable from the original. Everyone laughed when the British Phonographic Institute (BPI) claimed ‘Home Taping Is Killing Music’, but they’re not laughing now. Something, indeed, has died. Not music itself, perhaps – nor, certainly, as some BPI parodists once gleefully claimed ‘the music industry’ – but music’s last physical shell, 4

COMPACT DISC

at least. The body may be dead but the spirit lives on. Music has become eerily spectral. From the aspect of the present, then, the story of the CD would seem to offer a discrete narrative with a beginning, middle and end. It was born, it shot to fame, took over the world, before spiralling into oblivion – all in the space of just three decades. In the first year of the new millennium, CD sales had already started to decline. By 2012, thirty years after the format first hit the shops, revenue from CD sales had been overtaken by digital formats in both the UK and USA. Imagine: chronic senescence from the minute you hit the age of majority. Dead by thirty, the same age as Sylvia Plath, Patsy Cline and Kafka’s Josef K. In its short life, the CD had a profound effect on music. Albums grew longer. In some cases, so did individual tracks. Long-form genres like post-rock and ambient techno feel intimately connected to the format’s golden years. If, in the 60s and 70s, artists learned to treat the album format as a continuous narrative, as a ‘work’ in the classical sense, akin to a novel or multi-part symphony, the arrival of the CD extended the scope of that narrative, stretching the canvas and making it continuous, without the necessity for a halftime break. There would be no interval, now, no need for the listener to stand up, walk over, lift and touch (and so easier, too, perhaps, to walk away altogether, let the sounds become background noise, barely listened to). Those old releases from the 60s and 70s were affected too. Once-rare records were re-pressed on CD and made INTRODUCTION

5

available again. A culture of reissues developed as consumers were enjoined to chuck out their old vinyl and buy it again on the new format (sardonically alluded to by Tommy Lee Jones’ Agent K). And, with it, came a certain luxury, a novel kind of excess in the form of ‘bonus tracks’: rejected takes, alternative versions, remixes, bootlegs, demos and live recordings. As listeners, we learned to pick over the corpses of previous decades, searching for scraps of unclaimed meat. The CD’s promise of eternity encouraged a renewed archival interest in old music and spread it throughout society. At the same time, CDs preserved certain aspects of older formats that today seem quaint or anachronistic. We may be inclined to dismiss things like cover art, sleeve notes, lyric sheets and extensive credits lists as mere packaging, but they provided a context for the music we listen to that may be sorely missed today. The cluster of text and graphics adorning a jewel case booklet – a sheaf of paper with a tendency to grow fatter than any LP inner sleeve – demonstrate that our listening is never just about the music and is always open to influence from a range of competing discourses, that the ear can never entirely be separated from the eye. All too often, contemporary streaming media replace contexts carefully developed and selected by artists themselves with the ulterior motives of advertisers or the cold caprice of the algorithm. The CD, then, represented an industry in transition. It had one foot in the past and one striding towards the future. A shimmer of the virtual hiding in a physical husk. For many 6

COMPACT DISC

consumers, it offered a first taste of the digital landscape in which we now find (almost) all our cultural appetites fulfilled. It was a portal between worlds. Like all such portals, it was destined to be short-lived. But over the last few years, I’ve noticed something strange: the CD appears to be making a minor comeback. Micro-labels pressing short runs of strange sounds onto CD-R represent a new international underground in which the entire product cycle of a given release, from initial conception to production and distribution, might never leave a single bedroom. This is an industry that has been domesticated, with factories and offices bypassed altogether. At the same time, composers and sound artists have found uses for the CD, eking out sounds and experiences unthinkable on any other media. Collectors, grown weary of the fuzzy nostalgia of the vinyl revival – and the inflated prices that come with it – but still harbouring an urge to accumulate, have found in the compact disc a marriage of high quality and low cost sufficient to satisfy a desire for permanence and possessiveness that the likes of iTunes and Spotify will never quench. You’re unlikely to meet anyone willing to bet on a return to the late 90s, when the CD dominated the market to the near-total exclusion of all else. But we may yet never fully shrug off the ghosts of dead media. And perhaps that’s no bad thing. Head into your local independent record shop tomorrow (if it’s still standing) and chances are you’ll still find a small selection of CDs sitting shamefaced alongside racks INTRODUCTION

7

of immoderately priced vinyl records, and perhaps even a sizeable pile of cassette tapes too – with a little cardboard slip bearing a download code falling out of many of them. In an age in which all media are at least potentially up for grabs, the challenge for artists lies in choosing which music is best suited for each format. We can have tape music on tape and CD music on CD. But in order to do that, we may need to figure out what kind of sounds are best suited to the humble disc. What, after all, do CDs want? What is the meaning of the CD?

8

COMPACT DISC

1 THE LITTLE DISC

At the Philips Research Laboratories in Eindhoven, the engineers who worked on the development of the CD had a nickname for their new invention. They called it ‘Pinkeltje’, after a character from a Dutch children’s tale. Pinkeltje – the name refers to the little finger, the pinkie, and was translated as ‘Fingerling’ in English – was first introduced by author Dick Laan in a story from 1939 called De avonturen van Pinkeltje (The Adventures of Fingerling). He is described as a ‘a very, very tiny little man with a little blue cap on his head’. The story tells of how he comes to live in the Big House with a group of mice, in a hole ‘behind the skirting board in the living room, just by the sideboard’. The human family who the house belongs to are unaware of their new guest. But at night time, or when their backs are turned, he will creep out of his hole and pay them small kindnesses: fixing a child’s broken toy or finding and replacing a misplaced sewing needle. Like the tale of the Elves and the Shoemaker, Pinkeltje’s services to his hosts are invisible to them, seemingly the result of mysterious forces. He is like a benevolent spirit,

making their lives that little bit easier. A kind of antipoltergeist. We can see in Laan’s stories a metaphor for a particular vision of technology, increasingly commonplace today: as something not just labour-saving, but seamlessly so. Every transaction so smooth that you don’t even notice it taking place. Frictionless. Which is apt, in a way, since up until the invention of the CD, friction had been an essential component of almost all previous sound reproduction technologies: the friction in a music box between a comb of metal teeth and the pins on a rotating cylinder, between a needle and the grooves in a wax cylinder or polymer disc, or of magnetized tape over playback heads. The CD was different. It involved no more physical contact than there is between my eyes and the laptop screen in front of me. But the engineers at Philips called their disc Pinkeltje primarily because it was small. At eleven-and-a-half centimetres in diameter (later, at Sony’s insistence, growing to twelve), the CD was small not just in comparison to the format it was set to replace: the twelve-inch vinyl record. But also in comparison to its immediate predecessor in those same Eindhoven research labs – the ‘Reflective Optical Videodisc System’, later known as LaserDisc. Though it was never a commercial success for Philips, the twelve-inch audio-visual LaserDisc, more than any other object, prefigured and made possible the compact disc, its younger, smaller cousin. It was its necessary precondition, but not in itself sufficient. Because the CD represented the 10

COMPACT DISC

convergence of two otherwise quite separate technological genealogies – and neither of them had previously had anything much to do with music. On the one hand, the CD was the scion to a history of digitization, a history of computers and code. It is a chronicle extending from Leibniz’s dream of a universal calculating machine to John von Neumann’s realization of that dream at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and beyond, to the ubiquitous computing of the present, via Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, George Boole’s algebraic logic and Herman Hollerith’s punch-card tabulator. On the other hand, the CD came from a line of optical media, a history of the use and control of light by physicists and engineers or artists and illusionists. Without both of these seams of historical development, the compact disc as we know it would have been impossible. Nothing in the development of either made their coming together natural or inevitable. But having been united in the form of a shiny little disc, the traces of each would cast long shadows over the way we listen to music. In a series of lectures delivered in Berlin in 1999, the German media theorist Friedrich Kittler traced the beginnings of optical media back to the first functioning models of a camera obscura built by ninth- and tenth-century Arabic mathematicians like al-Kindi and Ibn al-Haytham, and also, especially, to the use of camera obscura-type effects in the discovery of linear perspective by the Italian artist Filippo Brunelleschi at the beginning of the fifteenth century. THE LITTLE DISC

11

The story goes that in painting his canvas depicting the Baptistery of San Giovanni in Florence, Brunelleschi positioned himself inside the darkened chamber behind the door of the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, just across the piazza. With a very small hole pierced through a board covering the only opening onto the bright, daylit square, he could then project a perfect – albeit inverted – image of the street scene outside and Baptistery beyond directly onto his canvas that he could then simply trace over with his brush. It is precisely this small panel, now lost, and no more than halfan-arm’s length square, that, according to Kittler, established the technical standard of linear perspective later used by Paolo Uccelo and other Renaissance artists. That Brunelleschi’s innovation represented not merely a new style or convention in the arts but a standard is crucial for Kittler, in so far as it is based on a certain appraisal of ‘the abilities and inabilities of visual perception’. It is not ‘fiction’ but ‘simulation’, an operation that has nothing to do with abstraction and everything to do with the measurement of bodies and the calculation of physical phenomena. With this small painting, light is not merely fortuitously taken advantage of but actively marshalled and controlled to particular ends. In a phrase that Kittler attributes to the German physicist Du Bois-Reymond, nature is led to ‘depict itself ’. By channelling the blazing light from the Piazza San Giovanni through his self-made pinhole camera, Brunelleschi inaugurated a new kind of seeing in which the images created 12

COMPACT DISC

by technological prostheses offer a superior supplement to the direct vision of the artist. A little over half a millennium later, the precisely directed light of the laser in a Sony CDP101 would no longer require human eyes to see nor a hand to trace in order to transfer the meanings encoded in its source. Only from the twentieth century would we begin to produce types of images intended solely for the benefit of a machine vision acting as surrogate for the all-seeing eye of God. Forty years after the death of Brunelleschi, when the Venetian Carlo Crivelli painted his altarpiece, The Annu­ nciation, with Saint Emidius, for the Church of Santissima Annunziata, in Ascoli Piceno, he chose to break with the convention adhered to in previous centuries and depict the light of heaven coming down to earth not as a unified or variously diffused field but as a focused beam of light. As Sean Cubbitt points out in his extensive genealogy The Practice of Light, For divines of the Middle Ages and early modernity alike, light was a perfect symbol of God’s presence to his creation: illuminating everything yet itself invisible. It was important then that light, especially the divine light, had to be pictured (the belief that it was too wonderful for human eyes to see was no bar to a visual culture used to portraying God himself). So Crivelli chose to gild his shaft of light, as Cubbitt points out, making it shine uncannily, leaping out of the picture THE LITTLE DISC

13

frame with the reflected lustre of the light in the room where it hung. But by representing God’s light as a straight line, a single gleaming ray direct from heaven to earth, he makes of it something more amenable to the geometer’s rule. We can almost imagine ourselves climbing into that frame with a ruler and measuring the distance between the Holy Spirit and the Madonna. It is somehow fathomable by human reason, in a manner that it is tempting to suggest may be related to the publication of Johannes Gutenberg’s first printed Bible, a serialized and typographically regularized version of God’s word, just a few decades earlier, while Crivelli was a young man. That beam of light in Crivelli’s Annunciation was received like a gauntlet by the dawning age of reason. Witness Francis Bacon, in his utopian fable The New Atlantis, dreaming of ‘perspective houses, where we make demonstrations of all lights and radiations; and of all colours: and out of things uncoloured and transparent, we can represent unto you all several colours; not in rainbows (as it is in gems, and prisms), but of themselves single.’ Bacon’s tale begins in familiar style with a ship lost in the South Pacific, tossed by foul winds, and stumbling upon a remarkable island community, far from civilization and previously uncharted. But where Thomas More’s Utopia a hundred years earlier, had focused on the social life and cultural mores of its imaginary idyllic state, Bacon’s island shangri-la promised a utopia of technological marvels. It is an image of science in the service of technics, of each sense 14

COMPACT DISC

perfectly distinct from the others. There are the ‘sound houses’, ‘perfume houses’ and, pre-eminent amongst them, the ‘perspective houses’, capable of ‘all multiplications of light’, describing something like a Pink Floyd arena show of ‘deceits of the sight in figures, magnitudes, motions, colours’. Following Bacon’s example, the century that followed would directly equate human reason with the production of light, in the form of enlightenment. Bacon’s omnivorous curiosity would catalyse the birth of a new kind of scientific subjectivity founded upon looking. Following Johannes Kepler’s enthusiastic promotion of the camera obscura, Christiaan Huygens’ transformation of it into a proto-cinematic device called the ‘laterna magica’ for projecting and animating drawn images, and Galileo’s pioneering work with the telescope, this would be a vision increasingly aided by technical prostheses. The emphasis on technological aids facilitated the gradual disappearance of the observing subject from optical treatises during the baroque era. An eye that was, in principle, capable of being substituted by mechanical devices could just as well be separated from the body that housed it. For Kepler, the retina was just a screen, no different from the projection surface of the camera obscura. For Bacon’s younger contemporary, René Descartes, sight was the ‘noblest’ of the senses, and rational thought itself becomes a kind of untrammelled vision. He found those ‘inventions which serve to augment its power’ to be ‘among the most useful that there can be’. By 1738, the French philosophe Voltaire THE LITTLE DISC

15

would boast that, although light was ‘the most subtle of all bodies’, it was nonetheless the most known. ‘It has been traced in its motions and effects,’ he wrote in his Elements of the Philosophy of Newton, ‘it has been anatomized and separated into all its possible parts.’ And yet Voltaire would never hold in his hand nor personally command any light source more powerful than a wax candle. In the catalogue of the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation in Dearborn, Michigan, you will find reference to a wooden stake. A gnarled and uneven thing, cut from cedar and sixty centimetres tall, that stake once marked a boundary and the limits of a claim. But if an old cedar picket seems an oddly low-tech thing for a museum of innovation, for the item’s donor this particular staff represented something far greater than the edge lines of a territory. It was meant as the very image of innovation itself, the spark of inspiration, the gleaming bulb of a bright idea. ‘Fifty-two years ago, Mr Edison, in company with US Army officers and Union Pacific Officials, camped at the Lake, now known as Lake Edison,’ begins the note, sent in 1931, which accompanied the bequest of that particular prospector’s stake. ‘While in camp there, Mr Edison conceived the idea of the incandescent lamp. The Gold Rush occurred just ten years after Mr Edison’s visit and the stake I am sending you by Parcel Post was used at that time.’ Never mind, for a moment, the apparent tenuousness of the link to America’s great icon of invention. Nor that the 16

COMPACT DISC

story itself – of Thomas Alva Edison setting out eclipsewatching in Rawlins, Wyoming, in July 1878, gazing into his campfire and suddenly hitting upon the notion of a burning filament trapped in a vacuum chamber – is largely apocryphal. The image of the light bulb, blinking into life above the heads of cartoon characters since the 1920s, has come to stand as a symbol for all flashes of inspiration, all sudden leaps of the imagination. The Ford Museum’s stake, then, would be modernity’s own fragment of the True Cross, the perfect relic for an era in which faith in science repeats in secular form all the old saws of religious belief. As Kristen Gallerneaux, the Ford Museum’s curator of technology collections, points out, ‘the filament idea was not plucked out of those campfire embers as a readymade idea – it took thousands of hours of labour, money, and experimentation at Menlo Park’. To go even further, the electric light bulb patented in Edison’s name in January 1880 benefitted from some three-quarters of a century of investigation by researchers both in Europe and America. Few of what today we would consider the bulb’s essentials had much to do with anyone based at Menlo Park. Paris, 1881, was the scene of Edison’s great triumph. The International Exposition of Electricity offered for many the first glimpse of a light source that, at the flick of a switch, could compete with the rays of the sun. Alongside displays of new dynamos, electric tramcars and the recently invented Bell telephone, the Palais de l’industrie was also aglow with some 2,500 electric lights. There were incandescent bulbs THE LITTLE DISC

17

from several competing inventors and manufacturers on display. But Edison’s display offered something different. With his powerful new dynamo connected to an elaborate network of switches and feeders, driving current to over a hundred different bulbs, Edison wasn’t just selling another new bulb. He had a whole integrated lighting system, ready to power a town, safely, reliably and efficiently. One of the first companies in Europe to try and commercialize that system on the continent was the N.V. Philips Gloeilampenfabrieken of Eindhoven, in the Netherlands. In the beginning, the company that would develop into the Philips Corporation – and eventually one of the world’s biggest multinationals in the electronics industry – started out with little more ambition than to manufacture and distribute a few light bulbs on behalf of one of Edison’s rivals, Charles Brush’s Anglo-American Brush Electric Light Corporation. Those plans went south within just a few months when Brush abruptly ceased production in the UK and sold out to Edison. Philips, undaunted, decided to press on alone. The scion to a prominent family of Dutch industrialists, Gerard Philips was born in Zaltbommel, in the very heart of the Netherlands, in 1858. But it was in Glasgow, then a pioneering world centre of the shipping trade, that Philips first saw electric light. He had arrived in the Scottish city at the end of 1884 and taken a job on the shipyards. He found there a city already fizzing with the bright glare of arc lamps in the shopping arcades and the Gaiety Theatre. In his day 18

COMPACT DISC

job, incandescent bulbs were starting to make their way onto the boats lining up in the city docks. It was a series of articles published weekly in The Electrician between 26 November 1886 and 26 August 1887 that brought the new source of illumination to life for Philips. Here was laid out in detail every stage involved in the production of a light bulb, from start to finish. ‘Perhaps nothing so simple is so little understood as the incandescent lamp,’ he read. ‘It is merely a piece of carbon enclosed in a globe with the air pumped out; yet it costs 5s., without any obvious reason.’ Reading further, Philips’ eyebrows must have lifted at the author’s suggestion that the relative failure, thus far, of the electric lighting industry was down to a tendency for companies to be run either by engineers with no business sense or by businessmen with no engineering knowledge. ‘Electric lighting,’ the article continued, ‘as a new business, needed men who had technical knowledge as well as business capacity.’ Thinking of his own family’s long-acquired business acumen and his own more recently acquired engineering chops, might Philips have perceived in that statement his whole family’s future, imparted to him as if in a flash? When he finally returned to the Netherlands to set up the Philips Gloeilampenfabrieken as an independent company in 1891, Gerard’s first business partner was his father, Frederick. A respected financier and landowner with interests in the Dutch coffee and tobacco industries, Frederick Philips was, nonetheless, more than sixty years old and quite well tied up with his own affairs by the time he entered into agreement THE LITTLE DISC

19

with his eldest son. He would remain essentially a silent partner in the business. In his heart, Gerard knew that he still needed someone with that ‘business capacity’ spoken of by The Electrician. And so in 1894, he called his younger brother Anton back from a traineeship at a firm of London stockbrokers to take charge of sales. The factory was growing. The electrical industry was booming. The following year, production at Eindhoven rose from 75,000 bulbs a year to more than 200,000. Philips was now set on a path that would lead it to pre-eminence. In 1920, the company was acknowledged ‘to be the premier lamp manufacturing concern in Europe’ by none other than the chairman of the Edison and Swan Electric Light Company. By that time, their sights were already extending way beyond light bulbs. Philips was far from the only Dutch company engaged with electric lighting in the late nineteenth century, but few others would share its illustrious future. Nor did they share Gerard Philips’ Damascene faith in the product itself. One prominent industrialist from Haarlem, sent to the Paris Electricity Exhibition in 1881, would return with a report to the mayor of his city that the incandescent bulb would not be ‘the light of the future’. He could hardly have been more wrong. Even aside from the bulb’s popularity and longevity, it’s what it came to represent. By the time Philips was being feted by the Edison company, the light bulb was the very image of the future, of innovation. And Edison himself – its putative inventor – was the 20

COMPACT DISC

archetypal man of that future, star of fantastic novels like The Future Eve and Edison’s Conquest of Mars. Marshall McLuhan would call the light bulb a ‘medium without a message’ but he recognized in the technology something ‘totally radical, pervasive, and decentralized’, capable of eliminating ‘time and space factors in human association’. It signifies only itself, but in so doing stands in for an entirely new way of life, a whole new world. You can feel it just by leafing through the same pages that Gerard Philips did in 1887. In amongst those old issues of The Electrician, you can sense the growing excitement about electric light. It was just starting to come out of the spaces of fantasy – theatres and shopping arcades – and into more familiar, domestic spaces. Apart from anything else, it was more or less the only real, concrete, practical thing anyone had figured out to do with electricity. Amidst the notices from Edison or Brush, you can also find ads for big hulking dynamos, plans for electric cars and other wild schemes. But the light bulb was the only thing at that time that stood much chance of penetrating people’s day-to-day lives, of entering their homes. The most exciting new force of the century –  electricity – there in your living room. It was Bacon’s dream of the separation of the senses, light without smoke or smell. Victory over daylight itself. Gerard Philips may have glimpsed all of that, poring over those pages back in 1887. And he used that vision of nineteenth-century futurism to build one of the most successful technology companies of the twentieth century. THE LITTLE DISC

21

Caught in a radioactive cloud on a boating holiday, suburban salaryman Scott Carey starts to shrink. Week by week, inch by inch, he gets smaller and smaller, gradually shedding his job, his family, his status and eventually his whole reality. There are many ways to interpret Richard Matheson’s 1956 novel, The Shrinking Man. You could see it as a parable about fragile masculinity in fear of sexual dysfunction. But Matheson himself saw it as ‘a metaphor for how man’s place in the world was diminishing’. At a time of rapid technical change, he could see that ‘the advancements that are going to save us will be our undoing’. At base, it’s a story about advanced technology making things smaller, and harder to grasp. Less than a year after its publication, Matheson’s novel was adapted into the highly successful Jack Arnold film, The Incredible Shrinking Man. That same year saw the inaugural ‘Miniaturization Award’, established by Horace D. Gilbert of Enterprise Miniature Precision Bearings in order to encourage the development of smaller, more efficient industrial products. ‘There was a time when the term “American industry” was synonymous with “bigness”,’ Gilbert wrote in his book Miniaturization. ‘Recently, however, there has been a recognition that this interpretation is not precisely accurate; many branches of American industry are thinking in terms of “smallness”, that is the development of ever-smaller components and finished products, which are maintaining, if not increasing, efficiency and reliability.’ Gilbert recognizes, on one level, that the Lilliputian tendency has been common to hobbyists, watchmakers and 22

COMPACT DISC

‘oriental sculptors’ for centuries. But, more recently, ‘interest in miniaturization has been scientific rather than artistic’. He cites developments in satellites, electronic components, surgical instruments and transistor radios, while the ‘greatest impetus’ towards tininess has come from the defence industry. ‘Every pound we can save in the weight of missiles by miniaturization,’ quoth Lieutenant General Arthur G. Trudeau, army chief of research and development, ‘means greater range and more economical use of fuel, and in certain applications, higher payloads.’ As the physicist Richard Feynman famously said at an after-dinner speech on the occasion of the American Physical Society’s Winter Meeting of the West, ‘There’s plenty of room at the bottom.’ In the age when Philips was first founded, there was an image of invention as something based on pluck, persistence and a kind of horse sense. The avatar of this notion was Thomas Edison, a man who famously eschewed theoretical speculation in favour of late nights, long hours and an utterly relentless process of trial and error. He made things out of the kinds of materials you might find in your garage, like copper wire, tinfoil, solvents and fishing line. The filament inside his light bulb was made of burnt bamboo. He was an autodidact (more or less) and a tinkerer in an age of tinkerers, an era when new high-tech products might be taken apart and reconfigured, tweaked and souped-up by any enthusiastic amateur with an attic room and a workbench. Such, at least, goes the popular image. It became part of a particular mythology about the nature of American capitalism. THE LITTLE DISC

23

But Edison also inaugurated a new approach to technological innovation. With his Menlo Park ‘invention factory’, he created something like the first modern thinktank, in which teams of researchers were pushed relentlessly to solve problems for which they would receive little (if any) individual credit. The success of this production line approach to invention – Edison’s proud record of over a thousand patents – encouraged like ventures to bring together teams of scientists in close quarters. Menlo Park’s successors were not always so singlemindedly focused as Edison was on simply getting something to work, and they could be rather more inclined to ask after the how and the why of a thing’s functionality. Pre-eminent amongst such post-Edisonian innovation hubs was Bell Labs, AT&T’s home for ‘basic research’ out at Murray Hill, New Jersey. It was here that physicists William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain discovered the transistor that Horace Gilbert would credit with kickstarting the miniaturization revolution. But almost as significant for the development of twentieth-century industry was the Natuurkundig Laboratorium – or the NatLab – established by Philips a decade earlier in 1914. That Philips was still, at the time the NatLab was founded, very much focused on the production of light bulbs is clear from its first director, Gilles Holt’s, stated determination to ‘carry out all manner of investigations that will teach us the formula of the incandescent lamp’. But already in this statement there is a marked divergence from the Edisonian 24

COMPACT DISC

method of hurling shit at a wall –  supposedly over 6,000 different materials to find the bulb’s filament – and seeing what sticks. There were very few researchers working at the NatLab when it first opened, no more than two or three for most of the first five years, but all of them were physics PhDs. The list of patents they applied for over those first few years suggests the beginnings of Philips’ interest branching out beyond the electric light: a ‘device for the renewing or refilling of the gas in discharge tubes’; a ‘method for making discharge tubes, light bulbs, vacuum tubes, etc.’; ‘transfer current means for large electrical currents’; an ‘electrical lamp with a capacitor that can be integrated into it’. We find here recipes not just for alternative forms of electrical lighting – variants of the neon signs, or ‘discharge tubes’, already appearing on Parisian shopfronts – but also other applications for airtight bulbs, such as the ‘vacuum tubes’ already beginning to revolutionize the electronics industry. This was the beginning of a process of tremendous diversification at the Philips company, driven by research from the NatLab. It was a change in Dutch patent law that had, in part, provided the motivation for founding the lab in the first place. After the Patent Act of 1910, the accumulation of intellectual property rights immediately became more attractive for the company. But the result, in tandem with developments at Bell Labs and other major research labs at Siemens, General Electric and DuPont, was nothing short of a ‘scientification’ of technological research. Francis Bacon’s dream of sciencedriven technological research stations was coming to fruition. THE LITTLE DISC

25

It marked an end to the age of heroic inventors tinkering away in their sheds and the beginning of an era of controlled research, precisely calibrated laboratory equipment and the specialized application of abstract theory to the concrete needs of capital in terms of efficiency, productivity, cost reduction – and thus miniaturization. From here on, the task of invention was not to think big, but to think small. One day in late summer 1966, a UFO landed in Eindhoven. The Evoluon was an interactive science museum created by Philips to mark the company’s seventy-fifth birthday. It covered almost 6 hectares, had a concrete dome 77 metres across and was supported by 169 kilometres of reinforced steel bars. The pet project of Philips’ new president, Frits (son of Anton) Philips, first sketched out on the back of a menu card one lunchtime by the company’s long-standing design chief Louis Kalff, the Evoluon looked unmistakably like a stock image of a flying saucer. Inside, there were exhibits covering, for example, ‘Life and Health’, ‘Communication and Traffic’ or ‘Vibrations and Sound’. But the most dazzling element of the display was the lighting. As the critic from New Scientist magazine wrote shortly after the opening, ‘if there is one theme that characterises Philips’s ten-year-old flying saucer of a shrine to everyday technology, it is the intriguing use of light.’ So vivid were the Evoluon’s illuminations that a film about the museum’s opening by director Bert Haanstra was for a long time used by the BBC as a test film for colour TVs. 26

COMPACT DISC

By the mid-60s, Philips had expanded to become one of the world’s biggest electronics corporations, with interests in radio, hi-fi, television, medical equipment, domestic appliances and beyond. Aided – and sometimes led – by the stream of patents issuing from the NatLab, the company had diversified by association. From light bulbs to things that resembled light bulbs, like valves and X-ray tubes. And if valves, then amplifiers, transmitters and receivers. If X-ray tubes, then other medical equipment, too. And from there on to research into materials that might support and improve that equipment. Gradually, step by step, Philips branched out from specific elements to the whole system, and from the system to each individual element of the system, which would then branch off into further systems. But the central place still occupied by the light bulb in the company’s collective imagination is betrayed by the origins of the compact disc’s most direct forebear, the laserdisc. The germ of the idea came not from the NatLab but from Philips’ education division. In 1968, Kees Wols, then head of that department, was looking for a new way to combine sound, still images and film on a single medium that didn’t require all the searching back and forth for a particular sequence necessitated by a video tape or film reel. A classroom full of kids requires constant stimulation and Wols was worried that a nervous teacher protesting ‘wait a minute, it’s on here somewhere …’ would leave young minds prey to any number of potential distractions. He took his problem to Pieter Kramer at the NatLab who quickly realized that the THE LITTLE DISC

27

random access problem could be solved by putting the data on a spinning disc, like a record. But how do you put pictures on a record? As it happens, a focus on ‘opto-mechanical registration of images and sounds’ had been one item on a shopping list of core areas identified for future research left by the NatLab’s first director, Gilles Holst, upon his retirement shortly after World War Two. By the late 60s, there was no shortage of suggestions. The first proposal resembled something not a million miles from Huygens’ magic lantern, albeit with much smaller slides. A memo put forward in February 1970 detailed a thirty-centimetre transparent disc printed with some 180,000 images, each no more than a third of a millimetre across. But Kramer had other ideas. He suggested converting the audio-visual signal into electrical signals using the same means as FM radio. The electrical signal could then be imprinted on the disc in a series of finely notched ‘dimples’ of different lengths, to be read by shining light through the spinning disc at a photosensitive cell on the other side. Before the year was out, they had a prototype ready to test. ‘We made a disc, put all the electronics and optics around it, and tried to look at the signal,’ Kramer would later recall. ‘We saw nothing but noise. That was a big surprise. Why did we see noise? We had the best incandescent lamp Philips made illuminating it and a very good detector. We got an even better detector and staged the same test … noise!’ Evidently, they were going to need a more focused source of light. 28

COMPACT DISC

According to Bell Labs’ John R. Pierce, ‘The laser is to ordinary light as a broadcast signal is to static.’ The theory behind the device – whose initials stand for ‘Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation’ – had been worked out one lunchtime in 1957 at the Labs’ Murray Hill facility by Pierce’s colleagues Charles Townes and his brother-in-law Arthur Schawlow. It was based on Townes’ earlier work on the maser (‘Microwave Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation’) at the Columbia Radiation Laboratory, earlier in the decade. In broad terms, it involved funnelling light through a resonant chamber capable of making it feed back upon itself, growing stronger and more focused in the process –  much as a loudspeaker feeding back on itself will produce a loud, clear, high-pitched tone. The first working laser was set up in May of 1960, and by December that year, Bell Labs had figured out a way to make it transmit phone calls. But for American science fiction writers, the laser’s purpose was clear. In the TV series Lost in Space and the pilot episode of Star Trek, the heroes all defend themselves with laser guns. This was the popular image of the laser – as a weapon. It wasn’t far wrong. Townes’ lab at Columbia, where he first worked on the maser, was funded by the US Department of Defense. The question that prompted him to come up with the idea in the first place was posed by the military, and the very first actual laser was demonstrated at Hughes Aircraft out in Malibu, one of the country’s biggest defence contractors. As soon as it existed, the laser THE LITTLE DISC

29

was courted as a weapon against intercontinental ballistic missiles. But, by 1987, in spite of the millions spent on Ronald Reagan’s wide array ‘Star Wars’ defence initiative, the world’s largest market for laser diodes was provided by the compact disc. For Philips, perhaps the two were never so far apart. Advertisements for their first CD player, the CD100, show a gleaming beam of red light shooting from the player into the night sky, striking a compact disc now resembling a UFO (or the Evoluon itself). The whole ensemble, with its straight diagonal line of light extending from the heavens to the earth, recalls nothing so much as Carlo Crivelli’s altarpiece, The Annunciation, with Saint Emidius. There was no necessary reason for the compact disc to take the form it did. Every aspect, from the format’s shape and size to its running time and sampling frequency, were the result of highly contingent decisions, reflecting the particular circumstances of its creation and the individuals who created it. It could have been imagined differently. In Walter Tevis’s novel of The Man Who Fell to Earth, one of the patents secured by extraterrestrial visitor Thomas Jerome Newton is for a new quadrophonic recording medium consisting of little steel balls ‘the size of a pea’. In Philip K. Dick’s The Simu­ lacra, the Electronic Musical Enterprise company employs a recording device called the Ampek F-a2, which incorporates a living being from Ganymede as an essential component. In Peter Sasdy’s film The Stone Tape, a team from Ryan Elec30

COMPACT DISC

tronics go in search of new sound media, only to find a ghost trapped in a ‘mineral medium’ instead. Most of all, we know that the CD format could have been different because an American named James T. Russell actually invented something just like it around a decade before the Sony-Philips model came to market. Russell, a physicist and classical music lover, first sketched the idea for an optical playback medium with digital encoding in one of his lab notebooks back in 1965. It was a rectangular clear glass plate about the size of a paperback novel, read by a big metal-plated machine a foot tall. By 1970 he had a patent for the device, and in 1974 he tried to shop it round to some of the big companies – including to Philips and Sony, both of whom dismissed him, telling him it would never work – because both of them were already working along similar lines. By that time, work on the optical disc at the NatLab had got quite far. Having abandoned the incandescent bulb for lasers, Kramer’s team succeeded in recording a black-andwhite chessboard-like pattern in 1971 and, by the following year, they had a prototype capable of reading colour images from a thirty-centimetre disc, the same size as an LP record. But the more research at the NatLab progressed, the less clear it was what they were going to do with it. The education division had apparently lost interest somewhere along the way, and the video department was still to be convinced. But Lou Ottens, technical director of Philips’ audio division, saw something in what they were working on that intrigued THE LITTLE DISC

31

him. He had a feeling that a video disc that looked like a big glass record would never catch on. But there was something exciting about the idea of a contactless medium, read by a laser. In 1972, he asked the NatLab to start working on an audio-only version of the disc. By all accounts, they were not especially keen. Kees Schouhamer Immink had started work at Philips at the tail end of the 60s. By the mid-70s, he was working in optics research at the NatLab. He remembers working on the video disc in a team of a hundred or more, including researchers specializing in mechanics, signal processing, laser technology and production technics. His specific focus was the servomechanisms that controlled the movement of the laser. In a little side room next door to the video disc lab, quietly beavering away, was a team of just two engineers developing the audio disc. ‘The research management’, he told me via Skype, ‘was not very interested in having a sound-only disc. Their big interest was the video disc. I can remember very well that there was a request from Philips audio to look into this sound-only machine, and the big boss of Philips research just said, that’s trivial!’ And to a large extent, he was right. Which was lucky, really, because the video disc, when it finally reached the market (under the name ‘DiscoVision’, later changed to ‘LaserDisc’) in 1978, was a massive flop. Maybe Ottens’ instinct about the mismatch between shape and expectations was right. Maybe Philips was just outflanked by the superior range of content available on other formats – like the new VHS. (It has even 32

COMPACT DISC

been suggested that Philips was let down by its founding family’s moral stringency. They refused to allow their new medium to be used for pornography, which immediately proved to be VHS’s most popular material). This was not the end for Philips’ relationship with optical media though. Having worked out how to impress audio and video onto a thirty-centimetre disc, producing a platter that held only audio was a simple matter. But Ottens knew that wouldn’t quite cut it. He had already won success with the compact cassette and was convinced there was a market for more miniature music media. He encouraged his engineers to reduce the size of the disc, to think small. By 1977, they had something. A now somewhat expanded audio disc team, led by François Dierckx, produced a prototype optical disc for sound recording and playback. It was seventeen centimetres in diameter and the player was as big and bulky as an old TV. Ottens hated it. ‘It was too big,’ Dierckx recalled. ‘He refused to accept it. He said it could and must be smaller – it must have the size and convenience of a cassette player.’ Dierckx’s team had already pushed the technological paradigm as far as it would go in terms of miniaturization. In order to make their disc even smaller, they would have to leave behind the analogue world for good. It was time to go digital.

THE LITTLE DISC

33

34

2 THE FAITHFUL DISC

Sometime in the mid-70s, on one of several visits he made to Japan, Jean Baudrillard sat down in ‘an ideally conditioned room’ and witnessed ‘a sort of musical perfect crime’. He found himself ‘permeate[d]’ by sound ‘from all sides’, hostage to a ‘perfect restitution of music … that has never existed, that no one has ever heard, and that was not meant to be heard like this’. The experience, the French philosopher later wrote, was ‘bewildering’, ‘obscene’, comparable to pornography. Like some old gallant, he worried about the disappearance of ‘music’s charm’, which he seemed to regard as an effect of a certain necessary distance, some minimal gesture of concealment, as if music – in a timeworn image – were a woman engaged in some perpetual burlesque tease that had gone too far. It was, for Baudrillard, the ‘end of the secret’. Perhaps even the disappearance of music itself. There is, however, always a certain vagueness to Baudrillard’s account of this event, as if he wished to reinsert, in the telling, some element of the secret. He alludes

to the story several times throughout his published works, from its first mention in 1979’s Seduction right up to some of his last published writing in the final few years of his life. But rarely does he enter into the specifics of what, where, when and how. In this respect, the tale recalls another encounter, taking place around a quarter of a century earlier, inside another acoustically perfect room. In 1952 – or perhaps slightly earlier, his accounts tend to vary – the American composer John Cage went to Harvard University and sat down inside a room supposed to be completely silent. The anechoic chamber inside Harvard’s Psycho-Acoustics Laboratory was built during World War Two as an ideal environment for the testing of soldiers’ capacities to follow orders while subjected to the overwhelming noise of tanks, aircraft and gunfire. A roomwithin-a-room specially designed to be totally acoustically dead, the structure is externally soundproofed and the interior walls are covered with jutting foam shapes intended to absorb all reverberation. But in this perfectly silent space, Cage claimed he could still hear two distinct sounds: one high-pitched and one low. Asking the engineers afterwards if there might be a fault in the system, some kind of leak of extraneous noise filtering through somehow, he was informed that the sounds he heard were in fact coming from his own body: the high sound was the operation of his nervous system, the low that of the blood circulating through his veins. Like Baudrillard, Cage felt himself infiltrated by some alien sonic intruder. ‘I 36

COMPACT DISC

was basically a machine,’ he said later, ‘over which I had no intentional control.’ And, like Baudrillard, Cage felt he had witnessed in that room the disappearance of something, its sudden obsolescence. Not music, however, but its apparent obverse. ‘There is no such thing as silence,’ he concluded, ‘until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music.’ From the eclipse of silence to the disappearance of music, more, however, has taken place in the twenty-five-odd years between Cage’s experience at Harvard and Baudrillard’s in Japan. For the acoustic world that Cage inhabited in the early 50s was strictly analogue. It was a world in which recorded music existed in the form of vinyl discs and magnetic tape, a world in which silence really could not exist – not physically, not on record. Not while there was record crackle and AM static and tape hiss to contend with. But by the time Baudrillard entered his ‘ideally conditioned room’ twentysomething years later, all that had changed. For over the course of the decade preceding Baudrillard’s first visit to the country in 1973, Japanese engineers had developed the very first publicly available digital recording system. And with the possibility of a perfect silence encoded in digital media, Baudrillard perceived the collapse of Cage’s certainty in the persistence of music. ‘Technique’, he wrote, ‘digs its own grave.’ Heitaro Nakajima was still a student when sound was first made digital at the Pentagon during World War Two. But the THE FAITHFUL DISC

37

means used by the US military to transmit President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s voice to Winston Churchill, skulking in the basement of Selfridge’s in London, would one day help to earn Nakajima a Purple Ribbon from the Japanese government for his role in creating the CD. The Bell Labs engineers who broke down FDR’s honeyed tones, honed by a decade’s worth of ‘fireside chats’ for CBS radio, and converted them into ones and zeroes for easy transport across the Atlantic did not invent the pulse code modulation (PCM) system they used to do so – that honour goes to a British radio engineer called Alec Reeves – but they were the first to find a practical use for it. That the digital audio revolution took place, initially, in top secret, during wartime, is perhaps not entirely surprising. The history of research into the transformation and encoding of the human voice has always been inseparable from its military application. The Jesuit Athanasius Kircher was explicit about the military applications of his many treatises on voice manipulation and encryption. François Sudre, nineteenth-century inventor of the musical conlang (constructed language) ‘solrésol’, recommended the use of his ‘universal musical language’ to battlefield buglers, to parp out a general’s order, pitches in place of words, unheeded by enemy ears. In the early days of World War Two, the London-Washington link was encoded by a system known as A-3, which split an acoustic signal into different frequency bands, then flipped them and jumbled them up to ensure their unintelligibility. But the A-3’s slice-and-dice approach 38

COMPACT DISC

to sound waves was a relatively trivial thing to crack. It took the German post office about six months to assemble a protosynthesizer of filter banks and ring modulators capable of reassembling the Allied messages into a comprehensible pattern again. What made Bell Labs’ PCM-based system novel was its use of a digital signal, converted into binary code. The voice was not ‘recorded’; in the parlance of the engineers who worked on the system, it was ‘sampled’. It worked something like this: Roosevelt would speak into a device called a ‘vocoder’, invented a few years earlier by a Bell Labs engineer called Homer Dudley. The vocoder – a direct ancestor to the robot voices of Kraftwerk, Afrika Bambaataa and Trans-era Neil Young – analysed that incoming signal and produced a continuous electronic pattern. Pulse code modulation then converted that pattern into discrete digital impulses by counting off the values of the wave against a grid at regular intervals. That digital signal was then intermodulated by a one-off cryptographic ‘key’ shared by both ends of the signal path. The keys in question were actually sixteen-inch phonograph records of random noise. Since these records only lasted twelve minutes each, it was necessary to have two queued up on twin turntables, ready to mix smoothly between the two. The whole set-up was officially called SIGSALY by US Signals Intelligence. But the people who used it called it the ‘Green Hornet’, because the buzzing sound of the intermodulated signal sounded like the theme tune to THE FAITHFUL DISC

39

the WXYZ radio series about a crime-fighting vigilante. When author Dave Tompkins showed pictures of this fiftyfive-ton, 2,500-square-foot behemoth of rack-mounted processing units, twin record decks and a vocoder to electro-funk superstar Afrika Bambaataa, he just nodded in recognition. ‘Yeah,’ he said to Tompkins, leafing through recently declassified papers with a knowing chuckle, ‘that’s bugged.’ Fast-forward to 1977 and a pretty similar-looking system would comprise Bambaataa’s primary arsenal while throwing block parties for break dancers in the South Bronx. But for the Allied forces in World War Two, SIGSALY was not a performance instrument, nor did they ever consider using digital audio as a recording medium. It was a method of transmission – expensive, inefficient, but totally uncrackable. None of which was any concern of Heitaro Nakajima when he first started working on improving sound quality for the Japanese national broadcasting network, Nippon Hōsō Kyōkai (NHK), in the mid-60s, since SIGSALY remained classified, the relevant documents locked up in a secure filing cabinet, until 1976. Nakajima had an idea that digital technology had proved reliable by its use in office computers and some long-distance data transmission. ‘From that point on’, he would later recall, ‘we had to come up with everything ourselves.’ The impetus behind Japanese research into digital audio was provided by the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. Arguably, the com40

COMPACT DISC

petition that summer drove the development of modern Japan, transforming the image of the country from a battered, war-torn nation to a gleaming land of the future. The first bullet train was fired just nine days before the opening of the games. Haneda airport was rebuilt and modernized. New overpass roads and subway lines were opened, extending the city vertically both above and below ground. Eight years later, when Andrei Tarkovsky needed an image of a future city for the opening of his science fiction film, Solaris, he went to Tokyo and simply filmed his drive down one of the city’s new expressways, starting a trend for modelling science fiction cityscapes on the Japanese capital that would explode in the CD era after Ridley Scott’s film Blade Runner and William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer. From that moment, the city of the future almost always looked like Tokyo, and the Tokyo they looked like was built for the Olympics. The games were also a watershed for the Japanese media. There was a domestic boom in TV sales. The NHK acquired new microphones and tape recorders to capture the event. Communication satellites broadcast the games to the wider world. Real-time results and statistics, for the first time, were delivered by computers. Heitaro Nakajima became General Manager of the Acoustic Research Division at NHK the following year and he remembers, in the aftermath of the games, a general feeling of ‘Well, where should the next direction be? What’s the next challenge we should be looking for?’ Emboldened by his new role in the corporation, basking in the country’s optimistic post-Olympics glow, Nakajima THE FAITHFUL DISC

41

steered the division towards the development of digital recording. We strongly felt that FM broadcasting would become the main broadcasting form for sound [he recalled in a 1994 interview with the Center for the History of Electrical Engineering] and as a result we wanted to look into forms of research studying the whole acoustic environment for FM broadcasting. At that time we started to conduct research onto the whole transmission process: from the studio, to the microphone, to the transmission itself, then to the receiver in the listener’s home. We were looking into the whole system, and how to improve it. Nakajima’s priority was sound quality. Having spent his early years at the NHK working on microphones, trying to find ways to more accurately record reality with diaphragms, capacitors and transducers, he had attuned his ears to the minutiae of acoustic sensitivity. He knew there was a limit to the clarity of analogue media. There would always be some degree of noise in the system. With FM broadcasting on the immediate horizon, he didn’t want to leave his employers liable to be caught with their pants down when the improved transmission system came online. As the newly installed head of an established and respected department, he also knew when to listen to his team. So when one of his immediate subordinates pushed for digital, Nakajima didn’t need to be told twice. ‘One of 42

COMPACT DISC

the researchers suggested this and said, very strongly, “This is the way to go”,’ he recalls. ‘That was accepted and was the path down which we progressed.’ They didn’t have much to work with – just a oneinch video tape recorder and a beast of a digital-analogue converter, borrowed from Texas Instruments – but after two years of work, they had something. It was big, and expensive, and ugly, but it sounded good. ‘When I heard the difference between digital sound and analog sound, it was as if somebody had removed a veil out of the way,’ Nakajima recalls. ‘It was a tremendously clear signal, a tremendously clear sound.’ His bosses felt otherwise. Baulking at the cost and practicalities of this hulking monstrosity down at the Acoustic Research Division, NHK management transferred Nakajima to work on colour television and shut down the PCM project. ‘At that time,’ according to Nakajima, ‘the feeling towards sound recording was, “That’s fine. We can live with that.”’ But Nakajima was undeterred. Having once glimpsed behind the veil, he knew one day he would have to find that sound again. If you were to open the first page of the very first issue of the British magazine Hi-Fi News in June 1956, one of the first things to meet your eyes would be a photograph of the inside of an anechoic chamber, much like the one Cage stepped into four years earlier. The advert for Goodmans Axiom Audiom loudspeakers filling up much of the inside cover THE FAITHFUL DISC

43

spread insists that only the 4,500 cubic feet of the Goodmans Anechoic Room, its walls ‘lined with bonded glass fibre to a thickness of three feet’ can provide the ideal testing environment to ‘ensure the supremacy’ of Goodmans speakers. An editorial ‘Statement of Policy’ on the magazine’s contents page emphasizes the ‘years of research and tens of thousands of pounds’ spent by manufacturers in producing ‘high quality’ equipment. ‘We shall recommend nothing’, the statement continues, ‘that does not “measure up”.’ Throughout the magazine there is a mixture of technical diagrams, graphs and consumer guides, in amongst adverts for diamond styluses, FM tuners and ‘orthophonic’ amplifiers. If you wish to hear ‘music in your home’, one ad contends, ‘with concert hall realism’, then look no further. The message is clear: this is serious, scientific, precision equipment, offering a perfectly faithful reproduction of reality. Evidently Heitaro Nakajima was not alone dreaming of perfect audio. Credit for the phrase ‘high fidelity’ is claimed by an English loudspeaker manufacturer named H.A. Hartley who maintains he coined the term in 1927. For Hartley, the expression referred to a kind of acoustic transparency, a system, as he later wrote in his Audio Design Handbook, which would ‘not add to nor take away from the musical signal put into it’. But Hartley was ahead of his time. In the 1920s, the available signals – from AM radio or scratchy Victrola phonographs – tended to be so poor that people did not want them faithfully reproduced. Hartley struggled to sell a single speaker and finally sold the company off to his American distributor in 44

COMPACT DISC

1953. Which is unfortunate, since by the mid-50s the term was starting to become a household word, capable of conjuring up not just a particular quality of audio equipment but a whole lifestyle. ‘Lonely guys with too much disposable income who are nitpicky about their stereos’, in the words of Hollywood special effects designer Byron Werner, who coined the phrase ‘space-age bachelor pad music’ to describe a particular kind of zingy light music made more to show off a system’s stereo and frequency range than to make people dance or express deep emotions. ‘Playboy-reading, pipe-smoking, Eames chair-owning bachelors’, is the equally evocative description employed by hi-fi historian Greg Milner. Think of Oliver Farnsworth, Thomas Jerome Newton’s lawyer and business manager in The Man Who Fell to Earth, who we first encounter making adjustments to the bass response on each of his several preamplifiers while listening to Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet in A Major. Later in the book, he gifts Newton himself with a set of ‘brilliantly accurate, octaphonic’ speakers to play recordings from the little silver balls Newton invented. For James T. Russell, inventor of a kind of optical-digital sound media some years before Philips and Sony announced the CD, the quixotic search for perfect audio reproduction, a determination to get the very best possible sound out of his classical music records, was exactly what led him to create his new format. After years of tinkering with loudspeakers, amplifiers, preamps, turntable cartridges, styluses, he finally realized, ‘this isn’t going to work: we need a better record’. THE FAITHFUL DISC

45

But in the era when digital audio was first being developed, the very meaning of high fidelity’s profession of faith was starting to mutate. As Milner suggests, from the very beginning the term was ‘aspirational’. It had an inescapable class dimension – not just expensive equipment, but couched in a language of luxury and sophistication with the strong implication that the music played through this expensive equipment would be classical, high art music. Behind the notion of ‘presence’ lay the promise of being invited to occupy the expensive seats in the concert hall, to hear and to feel not just the music itself but the very bodies of the musicians as they played. The ‘truth’ pledged by high fidelity was already an invitation to fantasy. One hi-fi ‘addict’ quoted by Milner, who would not be satisfied until ‘he could hear the drop of saliva from the French horns’ is already approaching Baudrillard’s ‘pornography’ of listening. ‘Where is the high fidelity threshold beyond which music disappears as such?’ the philosopher would ask in The Illusion of the End, ‘it disappears into the perfection of its materiality, into its own special effect.’ In 1966, reviewing a concert by light orchestral conductor Mantovani at Carnegie Hall, Robert Sherman of the New York Times wrote, ‘as the sumptuous sounds filled the auditorium, you could almost close your eyes and imagine yourself back home listening to the hi-fi’. The idea of a sound so perfectly, ‘faithfully’ reproduced that it is practically indistinguishable from reality has here passed insensibly into a real, live experience that summons in advance the experience of its 46

COMPACT DISC

reproduction. ‘We have moved, then,’ as Baudrillard would say, ‘from objective reality to a later stage, a kind of ultrareality that puts an end to both reality and illusion.’ With the invention, by engineers at Bell Labs’ affiliate Westrex, of a system for cutting phonograph discs in stereo in 1957, a strange new kind of record started to appear on the market, which presumed to remove entirely the illusion from sonic art, presenting themselves as something between scientific equipment and the pure, unfiltered documentation of reality. Audio Fidelity records of New York first issued the stereo recording of Railroads: Sounds of a Vanishing Era in 1958. Consisting of two sides of steam and diesel engines huffing and puffing from your left speaker to the right, Railroads started a trend soon copied by imprints with names like Stereo Action, Perfect Presence Sound and Phase 4, with records featuring bullfights, ping-pong balls and pistol shots, placing the listener in the impossibly perfect position between the bullet and its target. Here, it is no longer the case that the performance held on a record is being served by a technical set-up with nothing added or taken away; rather, the recorded performance exists purely to demonstrate the technical features of the system. By the late 60s, the pages of Hi-Fi News and its American rival, High Fidelity, were themselves becoming increasingly pornographic. The graphs and technical drawings of earlier times were supplanted by glossy images of rich dark wood panels and gleaming chrome knobs that seem to beckon the reader to reach out and tweak. Technique was becoming a THE FAITHFUL DISC

47

fetish, an icon worshipped for its ability to signify nothing but itself. Baudrillard’s fear of music disappearing ‘into the perfection of its materiality, into its own special effect’ was coming true. It was a fear already recognized by H.A. Hartley himself in 1958 when he cautioned against the figure of the ‘audiophile’ whose ‘major interest is in the means and not the end’. The audiophile, Hartley chided, ‘seems to want to reproduce the sound of a triangle more triangular than the real thing’. Undeterred, consumers continued to long for the perfect sound system. Throughout the 1960s, the market soared – with a growing proportion of the American hi-fi market dominated by Japanese manufacturers. The biggest name in Japanese audio equipment, responsible probably more than any other company for a growing perception in the West that electronic goods from Japan offered high quality at a more affordable price, was Sony. One of the closest and most enduring partnerships in twentieth-century business came together in a radar factory in Tsukishima mere weeks before Allied forces commenced firebombing Tokyo in the late summer of 1944. Akio Morita, twenty-four years old and thin as a rake, was a naval lieutenant with an aristocratic mien; Masaru Ibuka, older and heavier-set, in coke-bottle glasses, was a civilian contractor, the manager of an electrical engineering firm. Both men had been assigned to a special task force – code named ‘marque’ – charged with developing a heat-seeking missile for the 48

COMPACT DISC

Japanese military. They both knew their efforts would prove futile, that the war was already as good as lost. Tōkyō Tsūshin Kōgyō, the company they built together after the war, started off in 1946 in a single room of a bombdamaged building with cracks running down the walls. But the internationalist ambitions of the two founders were signalled early when they opted to change the company name to Sony, after the Latin sonus (meaning ‘sound’) and the affectionate, if rather patronizing English epithet ‘sonny boy’ often applied by occupying Allied soldiers. When future Sony president Norio Ohga first visited the office in 1950 it was still ‘just a glorified neighbourhood workshop’ held together by a loan from Ibuka’s father-in-law. Ohga was still a student at the time, studying to be an opera singer. But when a rep from Tōkyō Tsūshin Kōgyō visited his university with the company’s new G-Type tape recorder, Ohga recognized a machine that could fulfil for musicians the same function as the dance studio’s mirrored walls for a training ballet dancer. There was just one problem: Morita and Ibuka’s tape machine – the first ever produced in Japan – sounded like junk. Ohga, ever the precocious student, let them know. In detail. They were suitably impressed. The minute Ohga graduated, Ibuka and Morita offered him a contract. Ohga had other plans. I’m a musician, he insisted, I’m going to study in Europe, to sing The Marriage of Figaro. No problem, they said. ‘You don’t really have to do anything. We’ll pay you some pocket money, and you can THE FAITHFUL DISC

49

come and talk engineering when you feel like it, just as you’ve been doing.’ So Ohga went to Berlin to study music, not forgetting, every once in a while, to send a postcard home detailing the latest developments from BASF and Telefunken. He returned to Japan three years later and Sony resumed their overtures. But Ohga still had other plans. He wanted to sing. ‘How about’, Morita suggested, ‘putting in an appearance once a week or so?’ It wasn’t long before that ‘once a week’ became twice a week. Before the decade was out, they made him general manager. Ohga was far from alone in his enthusiasm for the possibilities of sound reproduction. Akio Morita was practically weaned on hi-fi. The heir to a wealthy family of saké brewers, he was taught from an early age to appreciate European classical music. When RCA Victor’s early electric phonograph, the RE 48 radio-phonograph, first came out in Japan, with its far superior tone quality and dynamic range compared to the hand-cranked gramophones of the turn of the century, the Moritas were amongst the first to buy one. ‘Starting tomorrow’, his mother said to the children, ‘we want you to listen to music on this.’ But it was Morita’s business partner, Masaru Ibuka, who first grasped the potential of tape. On a chance visit to the US Office of Civil Information and Education – essentially the occupying army’s bureau for peacetime propaganda – Ibuka happened to hear one of the first American-made reel-toreels, fashioned after the German Magnetophon machines 50

COMPACT DISC

liberated from Radio Luxembourg in the final stages of the war in Europe. He was blown away by the sound quality and spent most of the next five years trying to match it. Tape was his obsession. Little wonder, then, that when Heitaro Nakajima joined Sony in 1971 and started talking about an entirely new method of capturing sound using computers, it was not universally well received. Computers were not what Sony was about. They had ducked out of the calculator business just a few years after introducing the transistorized MD-5 at the New York World’s Fair in 1964. Ibuka simply didn’t see them as a household product. Hardly anyone, in fact, saw computers and calculating machines as anything more than office tools in 1971. Even more than the desktop calculator, the computer was still far from domesticated. It was not yet ‘personal’. Most were as big as a decent-sized garden shed. And it was far from a given that these anonymous banks of grey panels, ominously blinking lights and whirring reels of paper tape would define the horizons of technological development for the foreseeable future. In the immediate aftermath of World War Two, when the Hungarian physicist John von Neumann was working on the digital computers whose architecture would provide the model for all those that followed, he faced similar resistance. As George Dyson (whose father, Freeman, worked alongside von Neumann) would later attest, ‘Digital technologies – Teletype, Morse code, punched card accounting machines – were perceived as antiquated, low-fidelity, and slow. Analog THE FAITHFUL DISC

51

ruled the world.’ Outside the high-tech military-industrial world inhabited by Dyson Senior and von Neumann, little had changed two decades later. Science fiction writers imagined many new formats through those years: Walter Tevis’s ‘silver balls’ in The Man Who Fell to Earth, Philip K. Dick’s ‘psionic’ Ampek F-a2 in The Simulacra, the ultrasonic ‘soundstream’ in J.G. Ballard’s short story ‘The Sound Sweep’, or the ‘three-dimensional’ records mentioned in Jack Vance’s novel Space Opera. Each of these imaginary future media worked to surround or penetrate the listener in some way. They were immersive –  even invasive. None of them were digital. But when Heitaro Nakajima arrived at Sony in 1971, after several years in the doldrums of colour TV, he had just one thing on his mind. Quietly poached from his position at NHK, Nakajima’s path to the Sony Corporation would be no less devious – on the part of his new employers – than Ohga’s had been all those years earlier. It seemed to happen, Nakajima would later recall, ‘almost without my personal involvement’. He joined the company in June and was immediately assigned to research and development. What he found when he got there was a company that, behind the well-recognized brand name, was trailing behind its competitors in terms of technological innovation. After a decade spent pursuing rapid international expansion, with Sony offices opening in America, Canada, France and the UK, the company’s audio product range had been neglected. ‘I wanted to get started 52

COMPACT DISC

straight away on digital research,’ Nakajima determined, ‘but it was Mr Ibuka who was opposed to that, in fact.’ Fortunately, Nakajima’s department was housed in a different building, away from Sony’s Gotanda district headquarters, and therefore outside Ibuka’s regular ward rounds. He also benefitted from the protection of a powerful ally in the shape of Ohga himself. The man who earned his place in the company by complaining about the sound quality of their tape recorders was now Sony’s managing director. He heard in Nakajima’s prototype digital recorder a sensation akin to ‘removing a heavy winter coat from the sound’. When Nakajima first joined Sony, he only dared assign two employees – from a division of over forty – to digital developments. A few years later, with Ohga’s backing, he grew more assertive, pulling engineers out of different projects to assemble a special task force. Hiroshi Ogawa was twenty-six years old, just graduated from his master’s degree, when he joined Sony in April 1975. He took a job as an engineer in the technical development lab and in less than a year got caught up in Nakajima’s reshuffle, finding himself newly assigned to work on digital audio. He remembers Nakajima at that time as ‘a kind of god’, imperious and unapproachable. Sony had just released the Betamax system, an analogue magnetic tape-based medium that became their contribution to the brewing video format wars. Keen to avoid producing another behemoth like the NHK machine, Nakajima initially had his team work on converting a Betamax so it could record digital audio, but THE FAITHFUL DISC

53

Ogawa recalls strange ‘click’ noises – ‘burst errors’ caused by drop-outs in contact between the tape itself and the playback heads. It was Ohga who pushed for the move to an optical disc system – especially when he found out Philips was already working on something similar. Having abandoned the variably sized ‘dimples’ of their seventeen-centimetre analogue optical disc in 1977, by March of 1979 Philips had a digital disc small enough – at eleven-point-five centimetres – to satisfy even Lou Ottens and ready to demonstrate to a small group of journalists in Eindhoven. Dimples, now, were replaced by uniform ‘pits’ and ‘lands’. They were there or not there. On or off. The reporter from the IEEE Spectrum (journal of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) noted the ‘unusual sonic quality’ and heralded the arrival of ‘higher fi by digits’. Sony’s engineers had also developed a disc. Like the Philips prototype, it was round, it was digitally encoded by pulse code modulation, and it was read optically by a laser. It was also thirty centimetres in diameter with a storage capacity of thirteen hours and twenty minutes. An impressive feat of engineering. But, Ohga was sure, commercially useless. So when, just a few months prior to Philips’ March 1979 press conference, his old friend Lou Ottens invited him to the Netherlands only to surprise him by whipping a CD out of his pocket, Ohga paid attention. Philips knew they needed a partner. Sony, in many ways, was the natural choice. They had helped Philips establish the cassette a decade earlier. Both companies had just been 54

COMPACT DISC

burned in a format war over home video media. There were other companies in Japan developing new digital audio formats. But the one thing nobody wanted was a clusterfuck of different formats all competing within the same marketplace. There had to be sufficient content available to entice the consumer, some agreement over principles, guidelines and benchmarks. What they needed was to come up with a standard. We live, according to Friedrich Kittler, in ‘an empire of standards’. Since 1880, our world has been governed less by the laws of a sovereign, or by the norms that prescribe and delimit conventional knowledge and behaviours, but rather by technical standards that regularize and ensure the consistency of objects and technical media. The thread of a screw, the current of an electrical circuit, the gauge in millimetres of rail track, the speed and sensitivity of film stock. It took several years of more or less convivial horse-trading, over Dutch genever and hot saké, for the representatives of Philips and Sony to agree upon – and further months of politicking for a panel called the Digital Audio Disc Committee to ratify – a standard known as Red Book, because it was bound in a redjacketed booklet (subsequent standards would be similarly colour coded: Yellow Book for CD-ROM, Orange for CD-R, White for video CDs and so on). The Red Book specified things like the frequency at which audio is sampled by the PCM converter, the bit rate at which it is encoded, the parameters of the laser ‘stylus’, the precise dimensions of every digital pit etched onto the THE FAITHFUL DISC

55

disc surface. But the setting of a standard is not just about ensuring the coherence of makes and models from different manufacturers. As Canadian scholar Ryan Diduck remarks in his book on the history of the MIDI digital music interface, ‘Standards are ultimately about control: control over devices, over markets, and over people.’ They can determine access, demarcate possibilities and entrench particular uses. Ohga’s priority during this process of standardization was neither bit rate nor sampling frequency. The Sony executive was unsatisfied with Ottens’ much-prided eleven-point-five centimetres. When I met François Dierckx, who oversaw the project on behalf of Philips, he remembered clearly, ‘Ohga told me, Mr Dierckx, I want to increase the size from elevenpoint-five to twelve centimetres. ‘I said, why? ‘It is very important’, Dierckx recalls Ohga insisting, because while the sixty minutes afforded by the Philips prototype could comfortably fit both sides of a standard twelve-inch long player, that extra half centimetre in diameter would give the disc a capacity of seventy-four minutes playing time. This would be just enough to fit a particular performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, conducted by Ohga’s old friend from his days studying in Germany, Herbert von Karajan. It was always assumed that the CD listener would be listening to classical music. Kees Schouhamer Immink recalls engineers at the NatLab using Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition to test the dynamic range of the new system. When 56

COMPACT DISC

François Dierckx first heard digital sound coming from a prototype optical disc at Philips, it was the cannon blasts and brass fanfares of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. Before pressganging Ottens into enlarging that disc to twelve centimetres, Ohga in fact listened to more than just von Karajan’s rendition of the Ninth. In his memoir, he claims they ‘conducted a survey of classical music recordings’ and found the slightly larger diameter, with its slightly longer playing time, ‘would accommodate 95 percent of the principal works’. Von Karajan himself was a vital force in promoting adoption of the disc in the early days and proved instrumental in getting other performers, like the Russian-born pianist Vladimir Horowitz, to do the same. Amongst the disc’s principal developers, only Heitaro Nakajima seems to have thought to use it for listening to anything else. Hiroshi Ogawa recalls Nakajima playing the music of the popular Japanese enka singer Aki Yashiro through the system over and over again – so much so that Ogawa himself ‘learned [the songs] by heart and I can repeat it even now’. Considering the projected starting price for a CD player, it is unsurprising that the two companies thought to pitch the new format at older listeners who they expected to prefer classical music. It was conceived as a piece of highfidelity equipment. François Dierckx came from Philips Hi-Fi Division. But the response of the hi-fi trade press itself tended to be more equivocal – even, in some cases, downright strange.

THE FAITHFUL DISC

57

One thing that was generally agreed upon was the significance of the arrival. Compact discs, wrote Hi-Fi News’ Jerry Forrest, made ‘the conventional mechanical approach look positively medieval in comparison’. For High Fidelity’s Michael Riggs, this was not just an incremental advance but ‘fundamentally different’ from all previous formats. The format, he insisted, represented ‘the most fundamental change in audio technology in more than eighty years’. Less universally agreed was whether that change was unambiguously for the good. Writing in Hi-Fi News on the eve of the new format’s release, John Atkinson saw the CD as a ‘mixed blessing’. It had the capacity, he wrote, to sound ‘extraordinary’ but at times it could be ‘downright unpleasant’. Similar reservations would prove a persistent refrain. When the first batch of digital releases passed the aural examination of High Fidelity’s reviewing panel, Riggs maintained he could hear ‘a frequency range, clarity, and solidity suggestive of direct connection to the source’. There was a sensation, he wrote, of ‘the lifting of a slight haze over the sound’. Others weren’t so sure. There were complaints that some instruments sounded ‘wrong’ or ‘uncomfortable’. Critic Susan Elliot ‘felt a great deal of discomfort listening to the CD versions’, complaining that ‘the digital results sounded very superficial and sharp to me’. And Harris Goldsmith, likewise ‘felt a kind of cold, discoloured sound where everything is clinically analyzed but very unreal’. The problem, for some, was that for all the new format’s ‘transparency’, it was sometimes felt to reveal too much. Flaws 58

COMPACT DISC

in performance or production, once masked, now stood out glaringly. Sometimes this could be chalked up to an interim stage of ‘hybrid’ media, whether digital recordings pressed on vinyl or old analogue masters released on CD. There was a sense that the digital element in the chain served to render its analogue partner unpalatable in a way that previously would have gone unnoticed. But others spoke of more fundamental concerns. Goldsmith’s ‘cold’, ‘clinical’ and ‘unreal’ would cast long shadows. The digital world was seen somehow as ‘aseptic’, it was ‘colder, harsher’. Synonyms for perfection recurred often: CDs represented ‘virtually perfect replicas’ or ‘exact clones’ like something out of The Boys from Brazil or the replicants from Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. In some cases, this turned into a mistrust of the too pure, of its suspicious lack of flaws. In Hi-Fi News, John Atkinson lamented ‘distorted ideas on how instruments should sound rather than how they do sound’. The normally staid technical journal Studio Sound hired a cybernetics professor as a columnist. ‘Progress is not always along a straight line,’ he warned, adding that sometimes sonic ‘enhancement’ can be just another word for ‘distortion’. Stereo Review went positively metaphysical, speaking of the ‘hyperreal’ quality of some recordings and asking its readers, ‘What is reality?’. Jean Baudrillard had grown just as wary. Since his disorienting experience in that ‘ideally conditioned room’ in Japan, his philosophy had markedly changed tack. Where once the French theorist had used the theories of Karl Marx, Marcel Mauss and Ferdinand de Saussure against themselves THE FAITHFUL DISC

59

in order to decode ‘the rationality of objects’ and deep structures of ‘the consumer society’, by the end of the 70s he had largely abandoned the old terms in favour of a language of seduction, ‘hyperreality’ and simulation. He grew to associate his experience of quadrophonic sound with what he called the ‘virtual’, with an ‘integral reality’ that substitutes the world for its ‘perfect mirroring’. The compact disc format itself he singled out for its ‘lethal illusion of perfection’. Its supposed longevity, that lack of wear and tear praised by the hi-fi journalists, was for Baudrillard ‘terrifying’, a kind of retroactive memento mori. ‘It’s as though you’d never used it,’ he wrote. ‘It’s as though you didn’t exist. If objects no longer grow old when you touch them, you must be dead.’ Amongst the high-fidelity true believers it was always a given that the purpose of a record was to do just that – to record truthfully and faithfully some real sonic event. As one dispatch sent in to the letters page of Studio Sound put it, ‘Your readers will surely agree that the function of a record is to reproduce, as closely as possible, in the listening room the sound of a performance by musicians in a studio, concert hall, etc.’ The problem is that this no longer accurately described the way records were actually made – and arguably never did. As writers from Evan Eisenberg to Jonathan Sterne have pointed out, from the very beginning of recorded music, the nature of the recording equipment was such that it was never really practical or even possible to just transparently record some pre-existing sonic event. The thing to be recorded always had to be staged for the recording 60

COMPACT DISC

apparatus – or even constructed piecemeal out of a multitude of quite separate events. With the advent of digital audio, the pieces got smaller. Sound becomes fractalized, granularized into infinitesimal acoustic particles. There is no longer any necessity to stage the event itself at all. It can be substituted in advance for a simulation that would be perfect in every way. Think of Filippo Brunelleschi hunched up in the doorway of the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, painting over the image projected through a tiny hole in the entrance behind him of the square beyond. There is a sense in which the painting he produced was really the same image as the one projected through the hole in the door. It bore the direct trace of the light coming from the square, reflected off the walls, windows and streets beyond. And though the action of projecting that image through a tiny hole and onto the wall before him modulated that image, making it smaller, more manageable – and might well, with the intervention of different kinds of lenses, have enhanced, distorted or modulated it further – it would nonetheless have taken a dramatic leap of the imagination and a fundamentally different approach to the work at hand for Brunelleschi to, say, change the shape of the baptistery across the square from an octagon to a pentagon. Now imagine there was no hole in the door for the light to pass through, but that Brunelleschi had an accomplice out in the square with a variety of measuring devices. Instead of tracing the projected image on the wall, Brunelleschi listens to his collaborator reel off numbers that he then interprets THE FAITHFUL DISC

61

according to a prearranged set of rules to create his image of the square on the wall of the cathedral. Given a sufficiently precise and exhaustive set of numbers, there is no reason why the resulting image might not be just as accurate – perhaps even more so – than that gained by tracing a projection. But there is also no reason why, given a different set of interpretive rules, those same numbers – the same transmitted message – could not produce a picture of a horse, or a score for a string quartet or a poem. In fact, there would be no way for Brunelleschi himself, stuck in his little stone hollow, to know that his partner wasn’t reeling off the proportions of a poem, a string quartet or an odd-toed ungulate mammal. The presence or absence of the real square, out there, effectively becomes irrelevant. An irreducible gap is opened up between reality and its depiction. Baudrillard seemed to grasp this instinctively. ‘Today’, he wrote in 1981, ‘abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal.’ Long before he was able to connect this emerging zeitgeist with any notion of the digital or with his experience in Japan in the mid-70s, he could already see that new forms of depiction posed a threat to the very distinction ‘between “true” and “false,” the “real” and the “imaginary”’. This is what is at stake in the digital soundscape made public by the compact disc. Not a more-or-less accurate rendering of some prior sounding thing – not even a 62

COMPACT DISC

distortion, modulation, enhancement or augmentation of such a trace – but a new ‘virtual reality’ made from whole cloth, a simulation via mathematical models that renders the very existence or otherwise of any original sonic referent completely irrelevant. John Cage did not approve of recorded music. Like the writers and readers of the various different high-fidelity magazines, he saw records as no more than attempts to reproduce real performances. As such, and following a train of thought that can be traced back to the dialogue in Plato’s Phaedrus, he saw all recorded music as doomed to provide no more than a necessarily inferior copy of the real event they purport to document, fixing the living performance in a static, ‘dead’ physical form. But this didn’t stop many people from recording and releasing works composed by Cage. In fact, he is probably one of the most recorded composers of the late twentieth century, with over 400 commercial discs bearing his name, starting with a pair of shellac 78s released in 1947 by Disc Records (a subsidiary of Folkways). The first digital recording of a Cage composition was released on CD remarkably early, in 1983, by the Swedish label BIS, just a few months after the composer’s eightieth birthday. But as far as I’ve been able to ascertain, the release passed without comment from the composer himself and his thoughts on the new media – if he had any to speak of at all – remain an object of speculation. One of the most frequently recorded of Cage’s works – somewhat perversely – is 4′33″, the composition inspired THE FAITHFUL DISC

63

directly by his experience in the anechoic chamber in Harvard. Having concluded, based on the persistence of sounds in that silent room, that ‘there is no such thing as silence’, he determined to write a piece with no notes – just three movements, each one marked ‘tacet’. The John Cage Trust website lists close to forty different commercial releases of recordings of the work – and there are many more to be found online – with performers ranging from established and respected classical players like Margaret Leng Tan and the BBC Symphony Orchestra to pop stars like Frank Zappa and Billy Bragg for whom the whole thing is clearly a bit of a laugh. If one were to listen to some of the earlier recordings of this piece, such as the one by Italian visual artist Gianni Emilio Simonetti for a 1975 release on Cramps Records, one’s ears would amply confirm Cage’s insistence on the impossibility of silence. Aside from the incidental room noises that the composer hoped to focus his audience’s attention on, there will also be the hiss of analogue tape and the crackle-andpop of worn vinyl to mar any expectations of the void – the latter quite possibly sufficient to drown out the former. But with the invention of the CD and digital recording, another interpretation becomes possible, in some ways quite contrary to Cage’s own intentions. Though the 2010 charity single version, drolly captioned ‘Cage Against the Machine’, is unfortunately marred by the sound of various long-sinceforgotten indie rock groups self-consciously playing with their zips in an expensive Soho recording studio in order 64

COMPACT DISC

to extract the maximum meme potential from Cage’s koanlike composition, in a sense the perfect digital-age response to 4′33″ had already been produced six years earlier by the American sound artist Jarrod Fowler. Fowler’s limited edition CD-R, 70′00″ contained seven­ teen tracks, each one exactly four minutes long, making it a perfectly standard CD album – except that each track consisted of nothing but absolute digital silence. Within this virtual world, Cage’s dictum is overturned. It is, in a sense, nothing but its own parameters. A CD whose sole purpose is to draw its audience’s attention to the peculiar qualities of the CD medium. From the very beginning, the purpose intended for the compact disc was to disappear. It was supposed to offer a perfectly transparent window onto sonic reality, without leaving any trace of its own materiality on the resulting impression. But it opened up the possibility of something quite different, the manipulation and transformation of sound to a previously unimagined degree. Try as it might to evanesce behind its content, the CD remained a thing, an object with a particular set of physical properties and affordances. Jarrod Fowler was not the first artist to recognize a new kind of artistic medium, nor would he be the last.

THE FAITHFUL DISC

65

66

3 THE WOUNDED DISC

At the beginning of the 1990s, Markus Popp could already see the end of music coming. ‘I thought we were in the late age of audio,’ he told me when we spoke via Skype. ‘Like, music’s going to be over soon.’ As he worked on tracks for his group Oval with a one megabyte Atari computer and a twelve-bit Yamaha sampler, Popp imagined himself ‘reorganising the leftovers of sound’. The results, showcased on classic early 90s albums like Systemisch and 94diskont., were woozy and unpredictable, dreamlike but jarring, like music chewed up and spat out. The source of those leftovers, the thing chewing them up and spitting them out for Popp to sift through and reorganize, was his consumer-grade Sony compact disc player. It is necessary to cast one’s mind back. ‘You have to remember …’ Popp kept saying, about this or that, when we spoke. The 1990s do not seem so long ago, all things considered. But so much of today’s media reality, so much of the everyday fabric of what we now find not only familiar but

boring, was then either startlingly new or not yet conceived of. ‘Computers were fairly ubiquitous,’ as Popp recalls. ‘But the computer was not – by far – this all-encompassing terminal where your entire life would happen.’ Much had already changed since Heitaro Nakajima’s days at the NHK and Sony. But expectations always had to be curbed by the reality of things. Popp’s Atari ran an early version of Cubase, the digital audio workstation and MIDI sequencer. Digitalization had made sound almost infinitely manipulable. But processing power remained a major limiting factor. And he had to save all his projects on three-and-a-half-inch floppy discs with a storage capacity roughly equivalent to today’s transport smart cards. His Yamaha sampler had an available sampling time of fifty-one seconds ‘in total – for the entire song’. At the same time, technological developments had created a sense of a paradigm shift. Music that was variously ‘artificial’ – digital or electronic, sequenced or synthesized – was all over the place. The mainstream success of tracks like ‘Stakker Humanoid’ and The Prodigy’s ‘Charly’ made many former ways of doing things – what Popp calls ‘the good old music business’ – seem suddenly old-fashioned. But neither was Popp much enamoured by the functional brutalism of early house and techno, which seemed to him merely to replace ‘creativity with productivity’. It was constraints like these that ultimately spurred his creative breakthrough. Everything was possible – but somehow, in Popp’s eyes, ‘there was almost nowhere left to go’. 68

COMPACT DISC

Popp was still a teenager when his father brought home a Philips CD-204, scarcely a year after the new format was first brought to market. He remembers the family unboxing the new device, setting it up next to the other hi-fi components and putting a Talking Heads CD into the loading tray. At the touch of a button, sound flowed through the speakers. ‘I was kind of impressed,’ he recalls. ‘But in another way, I was pretty underwhelmed, because it was pretty much just the same thing as playing a vinyl record.’ After all the hype, the difference seemed subtle at first. Besides, Talking Heads had never really been to Popp’s taste. ‘It was’, he says, ‘my father’s music.’ But there weren’t so many options. The catalogue of available releases was still pretty limited. It would be some years before most of the bands Popp himself was into started releasing on CD. Limited too was the 204’s feature set. ‘The difference was really only coming down to: you didn’t have to turn the record over. I’m not even sure if this unit had a repeat function or stuff like that. It was certainly not programmable.’ In later years a tendency towards ‘feature creep’ on the part of CD player manufacturers, the addition of options to randomize or reorder tracks at whim, would be an object of grievance on the part of some artists, for whom such sequential plasticity jeopardized the narrative coherence of the album. For others, it could be a source of creativity in itself. American indie rock group They Might Be Giants released Apollo 18 in 1992 with a liner note suggesting users play the disc on ‘shuffle mode’ in order to randomly THE WOUNDED DISC

69

redistribute throughout the playing time the twenty-one short ‘Fingertips’ at the album’s close. A year later, British sound collagists Stock, Hausen & Walkman released their first CD with an array of suggested routes through the tracklisting: ‘Wake up’ (track 1, followed by track 2, followed by track 21, then 4, etc.), ‘Feet up’, ‘Wise up’ or ‘Fucked up’ (shuffle mode). These examples were far from alone, but the artists who chose to exploit this feature set were certainly in a tiny minority. In some respects it’s hard to work out exactly what the manufacturers had in mind. The proliferation of new buttons on the front panel of commercial CD players seems to speak to a desire to compensate for the lost tactility of the digital listening experience: ‘You didn’t have to turn the record over.’ Either way, for Markus Popp, the CD player quickly became an object of play. He compares the motivation behind his own purchase of a Denon DCD1300 player a few years after his father bought the Philips model, despite being fairly nonplussed by the format and the continuing non-availability of much music he actually liked, to that of a teenager today buying a new games console, ‘It was just the thing that held a certain kind of promise’. Oval started life as an indie pop group called Die Lichter in 1989, with Popp, initially, on guitar, alongside Sebastian Oschatz and Silvana Battisti. Within two years, after the departure of Battisti and arrival of vocalist Frank Metzger, they had transformed into Oval. Once or twice a week, Oschatz and Metzger would make their way to Popp’s 70

COMPACT DISC

parents’ house in the village of Pfungstadt-Hahn, a few miles outside Darmstadt in Germany. Popp would run loops off his Atari, sampling fragments from John Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano, which the trio would then use, improvising over the top with live instruments. It became a routine, a regular programme. ‘I was working on things and the two guys at some point showed up,’ Popp recalls. ‘So I had to present them with something on a particular day. I was always working towards this.’ These were the conditions that led to the beginning of Oval’s more interventionist approach to the CD format. It was in this interim, in one of these gaps between practice sessions, that Popp ‘endlessly playing around with this stupid thing and trying to make it spit out some usable sound’, first sampled not the intended content of the CD he was playing, but the frenetic judder of the disc on fast-forward. Capturing this choppy sound burst on his sampler, he then slowed it down in order to stretch the sound out, maximizing the sampler’s limited record time. The results were revelatory, unlike anything any of the three band members had heard before. It was rhythmic, as trance-like and hypnotic as the minimalist process music of the 60s and 70s, yet distinctly digital in sound and utterly unique to the CD medium. They knew they were on to something. Eager to push the idea further, they started intervening directly at the level of the disc itself, scribbling on the surface with felt-tip pens, testing the resilience of the system until it started jerking and stuttering uncontrollably. They sampled the arrhythmic ticks THE WOUNDED DISC

71

and pops and used them as percussion sounds, flickering across languid dreamscapes. This was the basis of the Oval sound, soon showcased on their debut album from 1993, Wohnton. By the following year’s Systemisch, they had abandoned the guitars and vocals altogether in favour of the stripped-back ambience of digital glitches and rolling, wave-like loops. Before long, they were raiding the local library, grabbing armfuls of CDs and gleefully defacing them, mashing up the results into strange new concoctions. In promotional interviews at the time, Popp would claim to ‘deal less with music than with the technical implementation of music, less with concepts and formal differences than with the concrete shaping of its content’. But for listeners, the results were bewitching. In a contemporaneous review published under the onomatopoeic title ‘dechingdechingdeching’, Jörg Heiser discerned the development of ‘a new beauty of mistake’. For Caleb Kelly, author of the book Cracked Media: The Sound of Malfunction, those early Oval albums were ‘mesmerizing and exciting’, precipitating nothing short of ‘a reevaluation of music’. As Caleb Kelly points out, unauthorized interventions into media machines were far from novel in the early 90s when Markus Popp started attacking CDs with marker pens. ‘Sound recording technologies were used extensively throughout the twentieth century as both a compositional tool and a performance device,’ he writes. What Kelly refers to as ‘cracked media’ – technologies pushed beyond their in72

COMPACT DISC

tended uses, variously modified, manipulated, augmented or even broken – ‘forms a significant thread within this broader trend’. Arguably it’s a tradition with roots in the tinkerers of the turn of the century. Much as Edison, in his Menlo Park lab, tested a succession of diverse materials before coming up with the husk of burnt bamboo that became the filament in his lightbulb; so too did John Cage, himself the son of an inventor, carefully audition different substances to insert between the strings of his ‘prepared piano’. But though the concert grand piano is certainly an extraordinary feat of engineering, a qualitative difference takes place when Cage’s attention turns to playback devices themselves. Cage was in the audience in Berlin in 1930, having dropped out of college and jumped on a boat to Europe, when Paul Hindemith and Ernst Toch presented a concert of Grammophonmusik at the Neue Musik festival. Though there was much speculation at the time about the possibility of creating new music by manually etching directly onto the shellac surface of a gramophone record (Bauhaus artist László Moholy-Nagy suggested, for the sake of accuracy, scoring into massively enlarged discs that would then be shrunk for playback), Toch and Hindemith restricted their manipulations to superimposing multiple discs at different speeds, like disco DJs avant la lettre. By the end of the decade, Cage was incorporating similar techniques into his own Imaginary Landscape No. 1, employing test tone records on gramophones with a varispeed clutch. In this fashion, with the single pitch recorded on the discs controlled by the clutch, THE WOUNDED DISC

73

what had previously been a device purely for reproducing recorded sounds became a performance instrument in its own right. Cage was always more interested in the hardware of recording than its software. He may not have listened to records, but record players would feature in a growing number of his works. By the summer of 1960, he was taking them apart and interfering with their parts. Cartridge Music, composed in September of that year, required its performers to remove the needles from several turntables and replace them with pipe cleaners, matches, feathers and wires, using each in turn as a kind of contact microphone, eking out the sounds made from rubbing and striking different surfaces according to an abstruse graphic score. The results could be harshly abrasive and violently unpredictable yet meticulously controlled. Some of those who followed in Cage’s footsteps would take a less rigid approach. Cage first met Nam June Paik a month after the premiere of Cartridge Music in 1960 when the young Korean artist cut off Cage’s tie and emptied a bottle of shampoo on his head as part of a performance in Cologne. Paik’s works included Hommage à John Cage and even a piece called Zen for Film, which effectively repeated Cage’s 4′33″ on screen by projecting a reel of completely blank exposed film. Over the years, Cage would pay close attention to the activities of his young disciple and the fascination soon became mutual – despite being apparently ‘terrified’ by the assault of their first encounter. Even before that fateful October meeting 74

COMPACT DISC

in Cologne, Paik’s performances had frequently made use of phonographs and smashed records. For his gallery installation, Schallplatten-Schaschlick of 1963, Paik arranged a tower of vinyl discs on a skewer, like a shish kebab, all spinning together on a single turntable with one modified tone arm offered to spectators to choose which record to play from. Upon returning to the USA, Paik, along with several former students of Cage’s Experimental Composition class at the New School, would become closely associated with a group convened under the name ‘Fluxus’ by the Lithuanian artist and impresario George Maciunas. Fluxus’s activities were anarchic, irreverent and often guilty of visiting great violence upon musical instruments and other objects. But few so consistently tampered with actual recording media as the artist Maciunas dubbed the ‘Director of Fluxus East’, Milan Knížák. ‘In 1965 I began destroying records: scratching them, puncturing them, breaking them,’ Knížák writes. ‘Playing them – which ruined the needles and sometimes the whole record player – created a whole new type of music, one that was surprising, jarring, aggressive and funny.’ Later, he went further, ‘gluing records together, painting them, burning them, cutting and pasting parts of different records together and so on, in order to achieve the greatest variety of sounds.’ But Knížák’s prepared platters were only rarely heard and more often exhibited as sculptural objects, as in his Lenin installation for the Venice Biennale. Before the 1960s, he was THE WOUNDED DISC

75

a painter and trained as such. His first record release was not until 1979. By that time, teenagers in New York were taking the manipulation of vinyl records to a whole new level. Grand Wizzard Theodore (né Theodore Livingston) was just thirteen when he started DJing at parties in the South Bronx alongside his mentor, the legendary Grandmaster Flash, perching on a milk crate so his hands could reach the decks. Practising his skills at home one day, his mother burst in to complain about the noise. ‘This particular day I was playing music a little bit too loud,’ he admits. ‘And my moms came and like [banging on door] boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. “If you don’t cut that music down …”.’ Startled by her sudden appearance, Theodore’s right hand nudged the fader up on the channel he was cueing up while his left hand was still sliding the record back and forth under the needle. Wwwwrick–ow-wrick-k-k-oooow. ‘And when she left I was like, “What is this?” So I studied it for a couple of months until I actually figured out what I wanted to do with it. Then that’s when it became a scratch.’ Disc jockeys had been getting their hands down on their records, spinning them round and gliding them into position for years. For radio producers, petrified of ‘dead air’, pinpoint track cueing was an essential skill. Disco DJs like Francis Grasso raised the act of manually beat-matching and slip-cueing different tracks to a high art. But the slurred and distorted sound the groove made as it scrubbed back and forth against the needle had previously always stayed in the DJ’s headphones. For their ears only. Theodore’s mum 76

COMPACT DISC

changed all that. Now any record could potentially become a percussive noise machine, ripe for spitting solos like a jazz drummer’s breaks. Over the following years, DJs like Theodore, Flash, Kool Herc and Afrika Bambaataa would refine and perfect the scratch, making of the record decks an instrument capable of almost infinite nuance. Meanwhile, an art student up in New England was marvelling at the cracked and warped sound of a junked spoken word record. In 1978, Christian Marclay was living in Brookline and regularly walking to school at nearby Massachusetts College of Art. One day, about a block from his apartment, he found a Batman story record lying in the street, unloved, discarded, trampled on and several times run over. For the kid who grew up going to Catholic boarding school in Switzerland, discovering something as precious as a vinyl record dumped in the street seemed to be a symbol of new world American excess, ‘the prevalence of so much waste’. For the art student who loved Cage and Joseph Beuys and even named his band after a work by Marcel Duchamp, the record held the allure of a ‘found object’, a potential ready-made artwork full of sounds that bear the traces of a history that didn’t stop when it left the pressing plant. He rushed to campus to borrow a record player and listen to his find. Marclay had not, at that time, ever heard of Milan Knížák or of the early phonograph experiments of Nam June Paik – nor, despite frequent trips to New York to catch live gigs at the Mudd Club and Max’s Kansas City, had he yet encountered THE WOUNDED DISC

77

hip-hop (though later in his career, he would collaborate with several hip-hop DJs). But he soon found a pair of Califone turntables and a pile of variously mutilated records to be a versatile new performance instrument. Unlike his contemporaries in the Bronx, Marclay saw his twin decks less as an object of precise manipulation than a means of simulating the wild abandon of Jimi Hendrix’s guitar or Brian Eno’s synthesizer in Roxy Music. It was a noise machine, an axe – an image perfectly encapsulated by his invention of the ‘phonoguitar’, a turntable adapted to be strapped over the shoulder like a guitar, its tone arm slung like a whammy bar. Throughout the 80s and 90s, Marclay would continue to play live with vinyl records, even as the medium declined in popularity, developing a frantic, improvisatory style in which damaged, drawn-on and taped-up discs would be mined for bursts of sound and then jettisoned nonchalantly into the crowd. ‘When something goes wrong,’ he said in a 1998 interview, ‘that wasn’t the intention of the recording artist. In that incident, something new and exciting happens. For me, it has creative potential.’ Persistently fascinated by the way records, as living, material artefacts, are able to record their own history – the marks left by people touching, the worn down grooves from each time they’re played, the wear and tear of an object’s everyday life – and spit it back out as sound, it is unsurprising that he never really engaged with the new digital recording media of his day. ‘CDs are part of a different technology,’ he would shrug, when asked. ‘You can’t physically scratch a CD or cut it in half and expect 78

COMPACT DISC

the machine to still play it.’ But there did, he granted, exist ‘possibilities’. And there were, he admitted, ‘people out there experimenting’. When I saw Yasunao Tone perform in London in December 2017, I became acutely aware of a materiality of a different kind – my own physical presence as a human being with two ears. As Tone himself sat hunched behind his laptop in a dark suit and tan fedora, a fierce enfilade of rapid fire whirrs and beeps and buzzes and thunks burst from the tall speaker stacks on either side of him, violent and ecstatic in equal measure. I was impressed, more than anything, by the sheer maximalism of the piece. It seemed as if the computer were determined to project every possible frequency, every amplitude, every wave shape it was capable of producing – and at high speed. To top it all, there seemed to be no discernible relationship between the output of left and right speakers, no attempt to either recreate a real acoustic space or conjure up a virtual one, just a frank display of sounds. All of the sounds. After the concert was over, Tone was tentatively approached by a member of the audience. ‘Would you call that noise music?’ she asked. ‘No,’ he replied. ‘It’s not music. Pure noise.’ Tone gleefully related this story to me when we met up the following day over a lunch of curried chickpeas in the restaurant of a hotel near Paddington Station. Still wearing last night’s fedora, he explained to me that the work I had seen, AI Deviation, was developed using an elaborately THE WOUNDED DISC

79

programmed neural network trained over ‘a very intense five days’ on a corpus of Tone’s own performances in order to simulate a digital model of the artist himself at play. But its conceptual roots lay in a decades-long experimental practice spent intervening at the choke points of technological innovation. Nearly half a century of wringing results from his tools that would startle even their own manufacturers. Born in Tokyo in 1935, Tone came of age during a period of growing prosperity in Japan, rising out of the ashes of wartime devastation, and a burgeoning consumer culture. At the same time as the pre-Olympics modernization project, there was also increasing tension between the governing elites and a grassroots protest movement spearheaded by the Zengakuren student group, in the lead-up to the renewal of the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan in 1960. ‘We breathed this atmosphere like an air,’ Tone recalled in an interview with the curator Hans-Ulrich Obrist. As a literature student at Chiba University in the midto late-50s, Tone was introduced to the work of surrealist writers like André Breton, Georges Bataille, Yamanaka Sansei and Takiguchi Shūzō. It was also at Chiba that Tone encountered a fellow student called Shuko Mizuno. A year older than Tone and already a skilled cellist, in 1958 Mizuno left Chiba and re-enrolled at Tokyo University of the Arts, but Tone continued to see his old classmate at new music concerts around the city. 80

COMPACT DISC

‘There’s a guy like you,’ Mizuno told Tone of a new acquaintance from the art school. Mizuno had started having regular improvisation sessions with a younger violinist called Takehisa Kosugi. They were soon introduced. ‘We met and we talked,’ Tone recalls, ‘and then he said, we’re not the same at all!’ Nevertheless, and despite Tone’s absolute lack of any musical experience, Kosugi invited him to join in with their jam sessions. Tone had never played an instrument before, so he simply bought himself a saxophone and brought that, along with one other thing – a small open-reel tape machine manufactured by a local company that had just signalled its global ambitions by changing its name to Sony. Joined shortly by other students from the art school, Chieko Shiomi, Gen’ichi Tsuge, Mikio Tojima and Yumiko Tanno, the fledgling band called themselves Group Ongaku (gurūpu ongaku, or simply ‘the Music group’). Tone chose the name after the surrealist journal Littérature, intending to do to music what Breton et al. had done to language. The practice they developed together – freely improvised; employing a mixture of traditional instruments, folk instruments from the university ethnomusicology department, and everyday objects like cutlery, stones, books and balls; inspired equally by surrealist automatic writing, the action painting of Jackson Pollock, and the musique concrète developed in the radio studios of Paris by Pierre Schaeffer – was radical, uncompromising and almost totally unprecedented. And though ‘Ongaku as a group was never interested in politics per se’, as Tone said to Obrist, nonetheless he ‘sensed the THE WOUNDED DISC

81

same liberation from the participation in demonstrations as when we worked with improvisation’. One early Group Ongaku piece hinted towards Tone’s future direction, but it was devised by Kosugi. Micro 1 simply requires crumpling a sheet of paper around a live microphone. In practice, what you hear is not so much the paper, as the mic. A device intended to be a transparent conduit of sonic information becomes instead the focus of the audience’s attention: its cracks, pops, clunks and booms as the paper makes repeated impact upon the microphone casing. But Tone seemed to grasp the potentials of digital media early on. Around the same time that the NHK were closing down Heitaro Nakajima’s digital audio project, Tone was composing pieces using a room-sized UNIVAC mainframe at the Tokyo Institute of Technology for the Biogode Process festival of computer art that he co-organized in 1966. For Musica Iconologos, his first commercial album release – a step Tone resisted until 1992, deep in the CD era – he simply captured traditional Chinese characters as digital images, which, read as binary code, were then converted into sound waves. No musical instruments were harmed in the production of this record – no musical procedures, traditionally understood, were employed at all. The piece simply exploited the convertibility of digital media. While Musica Iconologos bore no reference to any performance, Tone’s second CD, 1997’s Solo for Wounded CD, was rooted in a performance practice going back more than 82

COMPACT DISC

a decade. In the early 80s, when compact discs and digital recording were still brand new, there was a whole flurry of books published dedicated to explaining to the public exactly what these things were. Heitaro Nakajima himself wrote two. Another similar book, by Hashimoto Hisashi called Mijikana Kagaku Zeminaru (‘A Science Seminar for the Familiar’) found its way into the hands of Yasunao Tone. In the autumn of 1984, less than two years after the launch of the CD format, Tone was struck by one passage in particular: ‘Digital recording is a wonderful audio technique since it has almost no noise and produces sound very faithful to the original,’ he read. ‘However, when it misreads 1 with 0, it makes very strange sounds due to the binary code becoming a totally different numerical value. So, the digital system has an errorcorrecting program built in lest that happen.’ Strange sounds, you say? Tone’s curiosity, naturally, was piqued. ‘I thought: Great!’ he told me. Having never thought for a minute that he might want to listen to music from a CD player before, he immediately went out and bought two. An engineer friend suggested covering the playing surface of the discs themselves with sticky tape punctured with very small holes. ‘So I did,’ Tone says. ‘But it takes a long time to get interesting sounds.’ His patience paid off. Using commercial discs of Beethoven symphonies or a Tchaikovsky ballet, carefully prepared in advance, the CD players would spit out terse fragments of the original music amidst fidgety bursts of noise and stuttering, irregular rhythms. THE WOUNDED DISC

83

Wildly unpredictable in performance, at the first concert, accompanying a dance suite by choreographer Kay Nishikawa at St Mark’s Church, New York, in 1985, Tone had to abandon his own score in favour of an extempore shuffle back and forth between the two players. ‘I had to rely on sheer chance,’ he said in an interview with The Wire. ‘Playing prepared CDs according to the score was like advancing in a maze where ambush was everywhere.’ A few months later, performing the piece again at Experimental Intermedia, he recalls John Cage laughing throughout only to warmly congratulate him afterwards. An essay by composer Robert Ashley would compare the work to Robert Rauschenberg’s erasure of a drawing by Willem de Kooning. I was curious about what drew Tone to such erratic means, at a time when digital sound was opening up near-endless possibilities for the manipulation of sounds, and versatile, user-friendly synthesizers were finally becoming affordable. ‘If you use analogue synthesizers,’ he told me, ‘sometimes it sounds great, but you have to have control. You have to know what kind of sounds you want. You have to decide. My method is in de-control. There’s something random in it. So it can make a sound I never heard before.’ Christian Marclay and Yasunao Tone played together often in the 1980s and have both spoken admiringly of each other’s work. But the gulf between Marclay’s interest in the creative potential in things going wrong and the random error bursts of Tone’s ‘wounded’ CDs is a difference not of degree, but in kind. The needle might jump out to a different 84

COMPACT DISC

groove or skip in a haphazard fashion, but there remains at least some appreciable relationship between the sound cut into the grooves and the distorted shadow coming out of Marclay’s speakers. In Tone’s case, not so much. The reason for that leap in estrangement can be found in Hashimoto Hisashi’s Seminar: when the player ‘misreads 1 with 0, it makes very strange sounds due to the binary code becoming a totally different numerical value’. As Hashimoto points out ‘the digital system has an error-correcting program built in’ to counteract this. But Tone had figured out a way to overcome that, to spoof the system, tripping it up at the level of the digital code itself. Error correction is unique to digital media. Nothing like it had existed – nor could it have existed – on any prior format. The needle on a record player can’t go back and check it read that right, but the laser in a CD player, effectively, can. The Red Book standard agreed upon by Philips and Sony in 1980 specified a sampling rate of 44.1 kilohertz at sixteen bit twochannel stereo, which is to say that 44,100 times a second, each of the CD’s left and right channels reads a sample of sixteen binary characters – sixteen 1s or 0s etched into pits and lands on the polycarbonate surface. That’s 65,536 possible combinations every 1/44,100 of a second, of which only sixteen successive noughts produce absolute silence. The CD player reads those bits in frames of six samples each. But every frame also contains an additional sixty-four bits of information dedicated to checking up on itself and THE WOUNDED DISC

85

correcting anything that might have been read incorrectly. The code used for that process of error correction is called Reed-Solomon, after the two MIT researchers – Irving Reed and Gustave Solomon – who invented it in 1960. It’s the same code that was used by NASA to send data back home from the Voyager 2 probe. But because the code on a CD is made more robust by scattering it discontinuously rather than in contiguous blocks, it’s called Cross Interleaved ReedSolomon Code (or CIRC). Deciding on that was no simple matter. Before the start of their collaboration, Philips already had an error correction system on their disc. So did Sony. They were not immediately compatible. One of the people Philips dispatched to work on the problem was Kees Schouhamer Immink, who had found himself at a bit of a loose end after the video disc he spent most of the 70s working on proved a turkey. ‘That’s how I came in,’ he told me, ‘because I was available.’ He remembers around seven months of testing, shuttling back and forth between Eindhoven and Tokyo, in and out of ideally conditioned rooms, listening. In order to test the robustness of the different systems, it was necessary to subject their prototype discs to a course of systematic abuse. Discs were scratched, smudged with greasy fingerprints, dusted with chalk until finally one system could be crowned the winner. But, like some ancient rite meant to stave off evil spirits, the ritual scratching, smudging and sullying of the CD surface would need to be repeated again and again. The critics at High-Fidelity magazine ‘wrote on it 86

COMPACT DISC

with pencil and with pencil eraser’, ‘scratched it with a key’ and even ‘smeared powdered coffee creamer on it’ before declaring the new format ‘indestructible’. On the British TV show Tomorrow’s World, presenter Kieran Prendiville rubbed his ‘grubby fingers’ on the surface and scratched it with a pebble. Other TV shows went further, with one early 80s daytime show submitting a disc to the ‘breakfast time test’: spreading it with honey and dousing it with coffee before popping it confidently into a top loading player. Clearly none of these amateur vandals were trying hard enough. In comparison, the group Disc, formed in the mid-90s by Drew Daniel and Martin Schmidt (of the group Matmos), Jason Doerck (aka Lesser) and Miguel Depedro (Kid606), took the misuse of compact discs to delirious new heights. They were connoisseurs of cracked media. As Drew Daniel put it to me, via email, ‘We learned where to cut and where not to cut in the process of using scalpels and razor blades and X-Acto knives on the surface – how deep or shallow, what kinds of patterns did and did not work.’ It didn’t stop there. Live on stage or at home for the benefit of recording devices, they used tape, and glue, and lube – anything to make the discs stutter and start. ‘By the end of a Disc session there would be a lot of broken CDs on the floor,’ Daniel told me, ‘and a general spirit of “fuck it” mayhem prevailed.’ When I asked Daniel if he was aware of Philips’ and Sony’s own attempts at compact disc abuse, he acknowledged he had no idea – but he wasn’t surprised. ‘Testing is what THE WOUNDED DISC

87

audio engineers and companies do,’ he said, ‘but it’s also what musicians do: you tinker with your tools to see how they can work and how they can fail and what the edges are.’ Disc started off as the brainchild of Miguel Depedro, then a teenager living in San Diego with connections to the local hardcore punk scene. His initial idea, as Daniel recalls, was simply to ‘make a record out of just CDs skipping. Don’t make it into music, just let the skipping make the music’. But despite their sparse, abrasive aesthetic, the group’s records – along with releases from the members’ other projects – arguably spearheaded the growth of a recognizable ‘glitch’ movement in electronic music, in which not just CD errors, but all kinds of digital artefacts, from low bitrate mp3s, cheap time-stretching algorithms, and image files converted into audio, were all chopped up and repurposed into a new style of fidgety, lo-fi dance music. At the turn of the millennium, Oval records were being sampled on hit records by Company Flow and Björk, while a sound like a skipping CD (though actually made using the jog wheel on a DAT machine) could be heard on the track ‘What It Feels Like for a Girl’ on Madonna’s album Music. Guy Sigsworth produced that track for Madonna and also worked as a programmer (along with Drew Daniel and Martin Schmidt from Disc and Matmos) on Björk’s Ovalsampling track ‘Unison’ (from the album Vespertine). He remembers hearing Oval’s 94diskont. on MTV one night at 2 a.m. in a residential studio while in the midst of rehearsing with Björk for a tour in the mid-90s. Alone and exhausted 88

COMPACT DISC

in the green room, ‘drifting in and out of consciousness’, he knew immediately that he ‘had to find this track because I just loved it’. Using a phrase he attributes to the American trumpeter, Jon Hassell, Sigsworth calls it ‘perforated music’: this glitchy, fidgety, digital-specific sound, ‘sliced and diced’ into ever smaller sound particles, like the tiny holes in computer punch cards or the pierced sticky tape on Yasunao Tone’s wounded CDs. By 2015, the instrumental use of the CD format had become such common currency that artist Stephen Cornford was able to assemble a CD player trio for his performance at Ftarri Festival in Tokyo. Cornford had been invited to the festival to screen his Digital Audio Film, an animation created by exposing 16 mm film stock, frame by frame, directly to the laser inside a CD player. When the organizers asked him to provide a soundtrack to the picture, he decided to invite sound artists Patrick Farmer and Madoka Kuono to join him, improvising with a selection of variously modified and prepared CD drives and portable Discmans, appended with contact mics and pick-up coils to draw out their electromagnetic resonance and mechanical clunks and whirs. The use of modified CD players as instruments is almost as old as Tone’s wounded compact discs. In 1989, Nicolas Collins discovered that a paused CD player did not, in fact, stop reading information from its still-spinning disc. A chip on the player’s internal circuitry would leap into action THE WOUNDED DISC

89

and mute the locked groove that pausing playback created. Thanks to a service manual acquired from Sony’s American offices, Collins simply disabled that function, releasing, as he puts it in an essay from 2009, ‘a flood of hitherto unheard sounds’. ‘Unlike the familiar metronomic repetition of skipping vinyl,’ he continues, ‘the paused CD “swings”, interrupting its default quarter-note pattern with occasional eighth-note accents that impart a distinctly “musical” feel to the resulting rhythm.’ Experimenting further, he managed to extract a ‘loud squawk’ from stopping and starting the disc, and the sound of ‘a needle being dragged violently across an LP’ from the skip track button. Over the following years, Collins further hacked his CD players so they could be triggered by remote control foot pedals, to be commanded by musicians simultaneously performing on other instruments – as in his string quartet from 1991, Broken Light. He found a chip on the circuitry that halved the speed and dropped the pitch of whatever was playing and added a switch to the front panel to control that, too. When Markus Popp and the other members of Oval saw Collins perform in Berlin in the mid-90s, shortly after the release of their Systemisch album, he recalls seeing the American composer reciting poetry onstage with CDs skipping in the background. ‘We were looking at each other and went like, oh woah …’ he recalls. ‘I think this was the first time that the idea crossed my mind that you could use one and the same idea for completely different ends.’ 90

COMPACT DISC

In the early twenty-first century, Popp himself stopped using CDs as a sound source and developed instead a piece of interactive software called ‘ovalprocess’, which allowed users to generate an endless stream of glitchy, twitchy digital sounds without the aid of any external hardware beyond their computer. Not long after, Yasunao Tone also looked to transfer his own process of gleaning indeterminate sounds from the corruption of data from the compact disc to the new digital format of the mp3. Nicolas Collins’ last work using CDs was 2001’s Sled Dog, for a Discman sufficiently doctored to afford manual control of the laser reader across the surface of the disc. Once a glimmering sign of the future, the format was fast becoming old hat, obsolete. But for Stephen Cornford this new-found superannuation represented an opportunity. For his 2013 sculpture, Archipelago, a ‘nervous machine’ of fifty Discmans spinning jerkily back and forth, their motors powered by feeding back sounds of their own making, he could buy up job lots of the players off eBay for peanuts. Ever since his art school days at the Slade, Cornford has been ‘trawling the skips and making stuff out of rubbish’. Increasingly, his interest turned more specifically towards media waste, determined to ‘take the playback device and turn it into the instrument’. Opening up multiple CD players in the process of creating Archipelago, he noticed, inside, the same little triangular radiation warning sign that he had previously seen on reels of film stock. He began to perceive a sense in which THE WOUNDED DISC

91

the two, otherwise quite distinct media, might ‘talk to each other in this language that we can’t understand’. The work that resulted from this revelation, Digital Audio Film, returns the CD to its origins in the history of optical media, but it also reveals something about the operation of the format, its subtle sleight of hand. As Cornford put it to me, ‘In order to have a noiseless medium, without any scratching or any of the pops of vinyl, you just move the way that the sound is read to another register. They moved the noise from audible noise to visible noise – or, not quite visible noise.’ From the very beginning the goal of the CD’s manufacturers had been the ideal of a perfectly transparent, noiseless signal. But from Yasunao Tone onwards, artists have sought to rediscover that suppressed noise, to find strategies for drawing it out and reactivating it. Cornford’s Digital Audio Film, with its pulsing, flickering, throbbing, ever-changing red blob at its centre, shows how that noise was always there, operating under the surface, deep inside the black box of the player, performing an endless noisy dance for its own spectatorship. While other artists have abandoned the format, Cornford continues to see potential in CD players and their little polycarbonate discs. Having opened the lid and poked about inside, he’s sure ‘there’s really a lot you could still do’. In 2016, he made Constant Linear Velocity for the Colour Out of Space festival in Brighton: a wall of 120 compact disc drives in desktop computer cases, all opening and closing automatically, ejecting and inserting little disc-shaped copper 92

COMPACT DISC

coils, which draw out the electromagnetic frequencies of the players themselves, enabling them, as he puts it, ‘to perform their obsolescence aloud’. With its buzzing, staticky chorus and harsh, metallic surfaces, there is something almost frighteningly inhuman, even dystopian about Constant Linear Velocity. I’m not sure if it speaks to the CD’s obsolescence – or our own. But for Cornford, it’s an ecological cautionary tale. ‘I was thinking a lot about the scale of waste that this stream of digital hardware produces,’ he tells me. ‘Your sofa that you throw away will rot down quite nicely but a few hundred cathoderay tube monitors don’t.’ The CD had become junk, part of a growing global morass of e-waste that a 2006 study by the United Nations estimates at fifty million metric tons. In this context, Cornford’s Constant Linear Velocity feels more like a requiem – or a séance. Welcome to the afterlife of dead media.

THE WOUNDED DISC

93

94

4 THE UNDEAD DISC

To move through Tower Records’ flagship Shibuya store in central Tokyo is to feel oneself subtly guided, directed and steered by sound. The acoustic architecture of the shop – that is, what Canadian scholar Jonathan Sterne, in his study of Minnesota’s Mall of America, refers to as the building’s ‘sonorial circulation system’, the way sound structures the flow of energy through a space as an integral design feature – is here used to divide and stratify the different spaces within the store according to an almost biblical cosmology, from the light, rarefied spaces at the top to the darker, more chaotic atmosphere of the lower floors. At the same time, the environmental music at Tower affords the smooth passage of shoppers from one space to another through a series of apparently seamless transitions, like some sonic Virgil conducting the weary traveller through the circles of some plastic-coated consumerist afterlife. Unlike Dante, I started my journey through Tower Records on the empyrean heights of the seventh floor  – labelled ‘Home’ for ‘Classical, Healing (Relaxation)’. Up here, the space felt light and airy without being dazzling, with soft,

pale colours and oak-panelled display racks. Gentle chamber music at a moderate volume drifted uniformly throughout the room. But as I descended floor by floor, from the sixth floor’s ‘Groove’ to ‘Discovery’ on the fifth, and eventually ‘Party’ on the first floor up, the sounding environment became increasingly loud and cluttered. On the lower floors, dedicated to contemporary J-pop and recent releases, the music got progressively noisier. The blanket wash of background music was forced to compete with multiple foreground musics blaring from individual TV screens or concealed loudspeakers attached to display mounts for specific releases. The strange thing was that at no point did I experience that jarring effect familiar from outdoor music festivals, when walking from one stage to the next and being confronted with the bleed of one act’s front-of-house sound over another’s, creating accidental – often gratingly discordant – spontaneous mash-ups. Whether riding the escalators from floor to floor, or moving amongst the crowded stacks of the lower floors, there was no point when I was unaccompanied by music from somewhere – even for a second – but so smooth were the transitions, so carefully positioned and directed the speakers, there was also no point when I was aware of multiple different soundtracks overlapping or jostling for attention. Though it was clear, by the time I reached the ‘Party’ floor, that the music playing was now considerably louder than it was when I first stepped out of the lift onto the top floor, that volume increase had 96

COMPACT DISC

taken place almost surreptitiously, building increment by increment without my quite noticing. Descending via the escalators, I noticed that the way people shopped, the way they inhabited the space and shared it with others, changed too. ‘Home’ up on the seventh floor was almost exclusively a space for lone shoppers – mostly men – studiously poring over sleeve notes like connoisseurs of fine wine. By the time I got down to ‘Discovery’ on the fifth floor (‘Rock/Pop, New Age, J-Club, Club Vinyl’), these isolated individuals had largely been replaced by younger couples, talking quietly together as they compared prospective purchases. On the very lowest floors, the couples had been usurped by small groups of young people talking animatedly, the racks of new releases now almost incidental to their occupation of the place as a space for socializing. It is odd that Tower Records Shibuya exists at all. The main Tower chain went bust over a decade ago. The persistence of Tower in Japan is owed solely to the fact that the Japanese stores had already long split off from the parent company to become a separate entity, leaving it unaffected by the bankruptcy of the company overseas. The company may have been born in California, but Japan is now the only country on the Pacific with a Tower Records (if it weren’t for two shops in Dublin, likewise long-divorced from the liquidated American original, it would be the only country in the world). There are currently eighty-five branches of Tower Records in Japan, and in 2012, the Shibuya branch expanded, THE UNDEAD DISC

97

now encompassing over five thousand square metres of shop floor space. But probably the strangest thing about the Shibuya branch of Tower Records is the racks upon racks of CDs that still dominate those five thousand square metres. In the middle floors, there are a few little corners here and there selling vinyl records. Elsewhere there are small pockets of DVDs, T-shirts and other kinds of merchandise. But by far the main product on display here is the compact disc. And by the looks of things, judging by the queues still snaking from the cashier desks on a Monday morning in late spring, they’re doing a pretty good trade. Nearly twenty years after the bottom fell out of the CD market everywhere else in the world, it appears, in Japan, to be in rude health. The contrast to the state of affairs I found upon returning to the UK could scarcely be more stark. Tower Records used to bestride London’s neon-lit commercial centre like some canary yellow colossus. The retailer took over number one Piccadilly Circus in 1985, after the closure of the giant Swan & Edgar department store, which had occupied the space since the days when its very first illuminated sign was lit by incandescent bulb at the beginning of the century. ‘Tower was very much a CD store,’ recalls one former employee at that Piccadilly branch. The very first Tower store had opened in Sacramento, California, in 1960. But its growth and international expansion was largely confluent 98

COMPACT DISC

with the rise of the CD, with the first non-US store opening in Japan around the time the CD standard was first published, followed by the big London beachhead in the same year Dire Straits delivered the format’s first million-seller in the shimmering blue form of Brothers in Arms. By the mid-90s, when the CD dominated the market, Tower had branches in Hong Kong, Israel, Mexico and Malaysia. Sales frequently exceeded a billion dollars a year. But while the CD raised the company up in its heyday, it also participated in the retailer’s downfall. In August 2000, Tower – along with presumed compe­ titors turned co-conspirators Musicland and Trans World Entertainment – were charged with price-fixing. The claim by attorney generals in forty-one US states charged the retailers with artificially inflating CD prices. In 2002, the retailers jointly settled for a cool three million dollars. By that time, everyone was cognizant of what USA Today called ‘a continuing industry slump’ usually attributed to the postNapster explosion in mp3 sharing. By 2004, Tower was filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. In 2006, stores – including the one in London – started closing and the company went into liquidation. You could still buy records at number one Piccadilly Circus for a few years. The former Tower branch was rebranded, first as a Virgin Megastore, then as Zavvi, before finally closing its doors in January 2009. At the time of writing, that space is currently left vacant. What should be one of central London’s prime retail locations has closed its doors. The building still THE UNDEAD DISC

99

stands but its windows stare out dead-eyed and greyed-out across the now digitally controlled LED illuminations across the roundabout. In fact, more or less all the old big box high street record shops I grew up with have now closed down. The HMV and Virgin Megastores on Western Road in Brighton that I frequented as a youth are long gone. So, too, the big Virgin store near Tottenham Court Road tube station on London’s Oxford Street. Up until 2013, HMV still maintained a sizeable, albeit increasingly desultory emporium a few blocks down at 150 Oxford Street. But since then they have downsized to more modest apartments, further west at number 363, a few doors down from Bond Street station. Oxford Street’s remaining HMV seems, today, to be oddly aware of its own anachronism. It has even restyled its name to the self-consciously fogeyish His Master’s Voice, eschewing the long-established three-letter abbreviation, and it prominently features the old dog with ear cocked beside a gramophone logo. Rarely seen during the 90s CD boom, the image is here restyled in neon tubes against a stark black and white grid, like something out of 1920s New York. Inside, on the walls lining the stairwells, there is more black-and-white: vintage photos of old record shops, earnest-looking chaps in flannel suits and starched collars covetously handling 78s. Even the music on sale has gone retro. London’s HMV is far smaller than the Tower in Shibuya – smaller, too, than the HMV I remember from the livelier 100

COMPACT DISC

eastern end of Oxford Street, which closed down in 2013. There are only three floors, of which just one – the top floor – is dedicated to music. Elsewhere, and en masse, there are DVDs, T-shirts, books, mugs, headphones, turntables, mobile phone accessories, comics, figurines – even novelty door mats. What the shop is selling, on the whole, is less a listening experience than a lifestyle, a particular kind of cultural mode focused around a small number of stock ‘cult’ figures and iconography. Batman comics, films by Edgar Wright, the music of Radiohead or Blink-182: easily reconfigurable sets of signifiers that continue to trade off a certain countercultural cachet, miraculously unhindered by a global audience in the millions, social markers of an elite in-group that nonetheless encompasses everyone, everywhere. On the highest floor, the only one dedicated to music, there is still more prominently placed, ‘essential’ and ‘recommended’ old music than new. Alighting from the escalator, I immediately saw archival releases from Aretha Franklin and Husker Dü, the soundtrack to a thirty-year-old film by Quentin Tarantino, before I saw any contemporary pop. Most of these releases were vinyl records, a format that seems to vastly outweigh the CD numbers here – except in the small, out-of-the-way corner of the store dedicated to classical music and easy listening. There was one other thing that struck me about the Bond Street branch of HMV: apart from a small number of tourists, all of the shoppers here scanned the shelves alone, THE UNDEAD DISC

101

the vast majority well over thirty. The only people I saw talking together were the pink-T-shirted staff who vastly outnumbered the browsing customers. As I was putting the finishing touches to this manuscript, in February 2019, that shop, too, closed its doors for the last time after the company was put into administration, bringing the brand’s near-century long presence in London to an apparent end. Along with the big beasts, the Virgin Megastores, the Zavvis, Our Prices, Tower Records, HMVs – all of which shuttered dozens, in some cases hundreds, of branches – more than 500 independent record shops closed down in five years, between 2003 and 2008, in Britain alone. In the USA, the number of closures was significantly higher. Leafing through the pages of Garth Cartwright’s history of UK record shops, former proprietors offer a number of different reasons, but most of them involve the word ‘digital’ in some way. It’s because of online retail, or it’s because of piracy and file sharing, or it’s because of CDs. ‘The decline started when DJs stopped making dubplates and started making CDs,’ claims Dave Piccioni of former Soho dance music specialist, Black Market Records, which closed a few years later in 2015. ‘There was a lot of stigma about DJs playing CDs but as that started to decline we were fucked.’ For the big chains, ‘CDs were the steroids swelling their big profits,’ Cartwright concludes. ‘Inevitably, dysfunction set in and the muscular megastores found entropy overtaking 102

COMPACT DISC

their systems. When the public no longer wanted CDs, the chains were revealed as muscle-bound, impotent.’ Either way, the decline is inseparable from a broader sense of crisis overtaking the music industry as a whole in the early years of the twenty-first century. Sales fell, revenues declined, labels went bankrupt. ‘Has music had its day?’ asked the Irish Times. ‘The consequence of free music downloads could end up destroying not just the shops that used to sell music, but an entire industry.’ By 2007, The Wall Street Journal was reporting a ‘seismic shift in the way consumers acquire music’ after seven years of declining CD sales and little sign of that slack being picked up by revenue from downloads. The Globe and Mail saw ‘an industry in crisis’. Even the French president Nicolas Sarkozy warned of ‘a genuine destruction of culture’. These were the doldrums. The end of an era for modern pop. But it wasn’t the first time. Twenty-five years earlier, when the CD was first introduced, there was also talk of crisis. At the end of the 1970s, the bottom fell out of the record business. Sales took an eleven per cent dive in 1979. Shockwaves rippled through the industry. ABC Records, home of the Four Tops, John Coltrane and Steely Dan, hit the skids, got sold to MCA and then rapidly discontinued. Arista Records, too, was sold to the German Ariola label. PolyGram took on venerable British label Decca and disco stalwart Casablanca – only to report losses of $220 million the following year. Industry insiders variously blamed the spectacular bursting of the disco bubble and the coke-addled excesses of the 70s finally catching up. They even blamed the THE UNDEAD DISC

103

cassette tapes that had made Lou Ottens a star at Philips. Apparently ‘home taping’ was ‘killing music’. But it would be just as reasonable to look to the oil crisis of 1979 and the United States’ ‘double-dip’ recession. Things were not going to improve for some time. By 1982, the American economy was the worst it had been since the 30s. CBS closed two factories and laid off 300 employees. Warners braced for their worst year ever. Columbia lost their legendary 30th Street Studio, birthplace to Kind of Blue, Bringing it All Back Home and Pink Floyd’s The Wall, and now found themselves embroiled in a payola scandal involving several million dollars and a shadowy cartel of hit pluggers called The Network. The music industry’s saviour turned out to be a shiny little twelve-centimetre plastic disc. But it was not universally welcomed. Stan Cornyn was a vice president at Warners in August 1982 when he was called to the Manhattan office of David Horowitz, chief of Warners’ whole music operation. When Horowitz introduced him to the new technology he had committed the company to, Cornyn’s reaction, recorded in his memoirs, was typical of many in the industry when faced with another innovation, after the initially unspectacular performance of the cassette tape, eight-track cartridge and quadrophonic records. For this we’d flown to New York? He held up this little flying saucer. … It looked odd, felt too small, came in a plastic box that was a bitch to open, and did not smell 104

COMPACT DISC

like petroleum. It didn’t even have grooves. None of this mattered to Horowitz whose job had turned into a search for salvation for his Record Group. The compact disc was one prayer; for us, it became temp religion. If Cornyn was nonplussed, other reactions would be more extreme. In 1981, Philips appointed their executive Jan Timmer as director of PolyGram, making him the tech giant’s point man with the wider music industry. When he and Sony’s Norio Ohga brought their new disc to the International Music Industry Conference in May 1981, he recalls Jerry Moss – the ‘M’ in A&M Records – ‘screaming’ his objections. Even more adamant was Walter Yetnikoff, the notoriously pugnacious boss of CBS. Philips’ François Dierckx remembers him putting up ‘one of the biggest oppositions’ to the new technology – despite the long-standing partnership between Sony and CBS. ‘He was against it. And I remember, I had a meeting with him in New York, together with [Norio] Ohga, in order to convince him. But he was against it, and he tried to convince all the other partners not to do it.’ John Briesch, a Sony vice president at the time, was present at one such meeting and he recalls the CBS president employing ‘a lot of four-letter words – he used more than I’d ever heard of ’. It was Billy Joel that finally convinced the suits. America’s piano man released his sixth album as a solo recording artist in October 1978. Recorded on analogue tape at New York’s A&R Studios, 52nd Street’s original vinyl release was an immediate success, winning Album of the THE UNDEAD DISC

105

Year at the 61st Grammy Awards and hogging the number one spot in the Billboard album charts for eight weeks. Four years later, the album was reissued on compact disc in Japan in the very first batch of commercial CD releases (comprising fifty different releases, of which Joel’s record had the earliest catalogue number, hence its popular designation as the ‘first’ CD). But at least one CD copy existed a year prior to that because Sony’s director of product communications, Marc Finer, spent 1981 touring the major labels armed with a copy and a brand new Sony CDP-101 player. As Finer recalls it, the opening track ‘Honesty’ proved a ‘guaranteed showstopper’ in every boardroom in Manhattan – though he concedes some executives seemed equally impressed by the sight of the little tray opening and closing at the touch of a button. Either way, it’s a good job – for the labels – that Finer’s demo came off. As David Braun, the brand new PolyGram chief who missed the meeting about the new format in 1981 only to find himself quickly edged out in favour of Jan Timmer, would later ruefully admit, ‘the CD saved the industry’. When Kees Schouhamer Immink talks about the pre-CD music business, he calls it the ‘black disc industry’ as if it were an entirely different infrastructure – which, in a sense, it was. ‘The black disc industry was dying,’ he recalls. ‘All but dead.’ But he still remembers the ‘battle’ to convert the moribund patient to the benefits of changing. It was never, after all, the classical music that Immink and his colleagues had spent months testing the format on, that won that battle. ‘Only, finally, when the management decided to go with pop 106

COMPACT DISC

music on CDs,’ he recalls, ‘the world changed also.’ No part of the world changed more than the music industry itself, which leveraged the new format as a means of completely transforming itself from top to bottom: new contracts – not to mention new, lower royalty rates – for the artists; a new focus on singles and short-term hits over albums and longterm careers; and new structures of ownership and control. At the dawn of the CD era, five companies accounted for fully half of all global music sales: Thorn-EMI, CBS, PolyGram, Warner and RCA. Up until that point, Wall Street had largely ignored the music business, frankly baffled by its appeal and more or less convinced this thing called pop music would probably be over by Christmas, like flagpole sitting or the hula hoop. Mergers and acquisitions were rare, and a company like RCA could trace its history back to the dawn of recorded music. But by the mid-80s, with record company profits rising to unprecedented levels and the world of high finance now staffed by people who grew up on Elvis and the Beatles, things began to change. A new kind of pop music was emerging, targeted directly at a baby boomer generation now grown to middle-age and maximum earning potential: acts like Billy Joel, sire to the so-called first CD, and Dire Straits, whose Brothers in Arms provided the format’s first million-seller, an album supported by a world tour fully funded by Philips’ marketing department as a promo for the new disc. A little over ten years later, by which time the CD was the dominant format in the music industry, there were only four major labels left, and THE UNDEAD DISC

107

almost all of them had changed hands (the main exception being Philips-owned PolyGram, who despite breaking few major acts had retained its dominant position by gobbling up profitable back catalogues from labels like Island, Motown and A&M). Together, they now controlled seventy per cent of global music sales. Today, there remain just three major labels: Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group and Sony Music.  And despite nearly two decades of being told that the internet will destroy the majors’ hold on the music industry, they still account for about three-quarters of worldwide music sales. It is late summer in 2018 and I am walking through parched hills on the island of Ugljan, a short ferry ride from Zadar, in Croatia. As we wind our way back towards the coast from the hilltops, a glint of light catches my peripheral vision. Leaving the path to step through the brittle maquis shrubs, I find myself in an olive grove. From several of the small trees, spinning in the breeze and gleaming with reflected late afternoon sunlight, hang compact discs, tied to the branches with string through holes punched in the rim. Back in 1990, when Jennie Garth’s spoilt teen Kelly Taylor fanned her just-painted nails with a compact disc in an early episode of Beverley Hills 90210, it was a means of establishing her decadence and wealth. To use such a luxury item – then still priced at $15.95, twice the cost of an LP, despite years of promises that the price would fall – in so frivolous a fashion was a mark of Versailles-levels of extravagance. Today, the 108

COMPACT DISC

same item has become so commonplace and disposable that it makes a suitable alternative to the old rags and straw stuffing of a farmyard scarecrow. The first time I became aware of the CD format’s new-found expendability was at the Reading Festival in 1998. In between sets by the likes of Arab Strap and New Order, I found myself by the main stage when Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry started his set. The legendary Jamaican dub producer was on electrifying form, extravagantly dressed with a peaked cap festooned with CDs. ‘CD explain who I am,’ he clarified in an interview with The Independent newspaper the previous year, holding up his hat to make the discs glint in the light. ‘When you look in CD, you see I. I am CD.’ Elsewhere he has claimed his attire possesses magical properties, like ‘telepathy’. But at the time, the scene recalled more a magpie’s nest of gleaming detritus. That was the year the home recordable CD-R dropped markedly in price. It was originally introduced by Philips and Sony in 1988 under a new standard, set out in what was called the ‘Orange Book’ (to sit beside the original CD format’s ‘Red Book’). But to begin with CD ‘burners’ – as well as the discs themselves – were prohibitively expensive. From about 1992, CD-ROM drives started to become part of standard computer hardware, but blank CD-Rs still cost more than buying a new professionally produced CD. All that started to change in 1998, when a large number of new companies entered the market and started ramping up production. CD-Rs began to sell for around $1.50 – a fraction of the cost of a new CD. By the end of the decade they could THE UNDEAD DISC

109

be bought in bulk for pennies. Combined with a growing trend for magazines giving away free cover-mounted discs, it contributed to a growing sense of the format’s ubiquity. Yesterday’s luxury item was suddenly a dime a dozen, a state of affairs vividly illustrated by stories of millions of Robbie Williams CDs crushed up and shipped to China to use as road paving material. Kees Immink was one of the people at Philips who worked on the development of the writable compact disc in the early 80s. I must say, in retrospect, I admire the management at Philips Research [he told me] because the managers within the Audio Department were selling this new carrier as something so complicated that copying was almost impossible. But at Research, we said, we will come up with a product that can be copied. It’s amazing, actually, that we were allowed not only to do this work but even to advertise that work within the academic community. It might initially seem foolhardy of Philips to develop a product that could pose such a threat to the inviolability of professionally distributed albums and singles. But Philips sold its record label, PolyGram, relinquishing its vested interest in the health of the recorded music industry, in 1998. The following year, 1999, saw the highest recorded music sales of all time. It was the peak of a decade-long CD boom. But it would be short-lived. 1999 was also the year that an 110

COMPACT DISC

eighteen-year-old college kid at Northeastern University figured out how to make sharing music files over the internet really, really easy. The invention of digital music using pulse code modulation had made music into data, into strings of ones and zeroes, ons and offs. The CD embodied that transformation in physical form. And with the release of the CD-R (‘Orange Book’) and CDROM (‘Yellow Book’), that fact was inescapable. No one could carry on believing in forms moving in tones or a language of feeling. The stuff on these discs was information – ‘bits’ – and it might just as well be pictures or text or an Excel spreadsheet. It wouldn’t make any difference. It was all read the same way. Digital data made of fixed-length binary words is ideally suited for one purpose, the very thing that it was invented for in the first place: being sent down a wire to somewhere far away. Clean, fast and error-free. The moment that music – the thing that music is – was reduced to a digital code, it was inevitable that someone would start transmitting that digital code, whether down the telegraph wires that carried the first fixed-length binary words in 1874 or the fibre optic cables that were already crisscrossing the globe in 1999. It was perfectly possible to send and receive music before then – there were Internet Relay Chat channels, UseNet groups and several other sorts of file transfer applications. What Shawn Fanning did from his Boston dorm room in June of that year was simplify that process. You didn’t have to know someone in advance. You could just search for the THE UNDEAD DISC

111

track you wanted. He made it so your mum could download music, so that your idiot baby brother could send and receive mp3 files as easily as switching TV channels. The following year global CD sales fell by five hundred million dollars. The year after they dropped by a further three hundred million. By the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century the worldwide music industry would be worth nearly forty per cent less than at the beginning. And it was still falling. This proved to be a genie that no amount of lawsuits could stuff back into its bottle. At a certain point in the 00s, it became a reasonable question whether you would even bother releasing your new album on a CD or a record or anything, whether you might just as well upload the files to iTunes and Spotify and a half-dozen similar web-based platforms and then be done with it. In 2008, Coldplay’s ‘Viva La Vida’ became the first single to top the UK charts without being released on any physical format. By 2016, Chance the Rapper could reach number one on the American Billboard charts based on streaming data from subscription services alone, without even selling digital downloads. Not only have CD sales declined so much that several top manufacturers have stopped producing the players and new cars and new laptops now rarely come with CD drives built in; the format is essentially irrelevant to any official barometer of popular taste in most of the world’s biggest music markets. In January 2006, a blogpost by Mark Fisher asked, ‘Is pop undead?’ Today, we might just as well ask if the CD is undead. Pop was not dead, Fisher argued, because ‘nothing 112

COMPACT DISC

ever really dies, not in cultural terms’. But at a certain point cultures ‘cease to renew themselves, ossify into Trad. They don’t die, they become undead, surviving on old energy, kept moving … only by the weight of inertia’. It was important, he argued, to ask the question of whether pop music had lost its ‘capacity to define a time’ because as soon as such questions no longer feel worth raising ‘we can be sure that Pop really has reached its terminal phase’. The CD, likewise, is not dead media, in the sense behind science fiction writer Bruce Sterling’s Dead Media Project. It has not gone the way of ‘the phenakistoscope. The telharmonium. The Edison wax cylinder. The stereopticon’. Several billion dollars are still spent on compact discs around the world every year. But those sales are buoyed, not exclusively but significantly, by older listeners, older styles of music and old forms of prestige. A hip, young, forwardlooking musician in 2019 is probably not dreaming about their first CD. When I speak to people who remain dedicated to the format, the word that comes up the most is ‘still’, as in ‘It still sounds better than …’, ‘It still offers …’, ‘I still believe …’. The format lingers on. It persists. In the 1972 BBC drama The Stone Tape, a group of British engineers decamp to an old country mansion in search of ‘the big one’. Their express purpose, as declared by the group’s head Peter Brock (played by Michael Bryant), is to ‘put the boot in old Nippon’ by coming up with a ‘completely new recording medium’. THE UNDEAD DISC

113

‘Tape is finished,’ Brock declares. With a possible nod to the little silver balls in The Man Who Fell to Earth, he wants the whole of Wagner’s Ring cycle on a ball-bearing. He did not know – and neither, presumably, did the show’s writer, Nigel Kneale – that ‘old Nippon’, and the Dutch Philips Gloeilampenfabrieken, were already working on just that. Well, if not quite the Ring on a ball-bearing, at least Beethoven’s Ninth on a twelve-centimetre polycarbonate disc. But the British team soon discover more than they had bargained on. The house where they are barracked is haunted. Ever resourceful, they determine to ‘analyse’ the ‘spook’. They blast it with frequencies, scan it with a laser and tabulate it all by computer, determined to treat their spectral visitor as ‘a mass of data’. For here, they imagine, is the very thing they have been looking for – psychic imprints in the very stone of the walls and floor, received directly by the brains of the audience. A completely new recording medium – a stone tape. Kneale’s teleplay is a brilliant exploration of the conflict between the kind of ‘fundamental research’ practised by Brock’s team (and nurtured at Philips’ NatLab) and the grubbier applied research represented by the encroachment upon the mansion of Reginald Marsh’s character Crawshaw and his automatic washing machines. But it is also about the uncanny nature of all media, their ambivalent presence, somehow both there and not there, and the sneaking suspicion that they might be remaking us in their own 114

COMPACT DISC

image, rendering their audiences inert receivers compelled to repeat without redress. ‘All recordings are ghosts,’ wrote Mark Fisher in a 2003 blogpost about The Stone Tape. ‘But are we really more substantial than they?’ More specifically, The Stone Tape presents a remarkable foretoken of the CD itself: a new recording medium, of unprecedented storage capacity, composed of ‘a mass of data’ drawn from analysis by laser and computer. We tend to think of ghosts as analogue phenomena. Since the early dawn of electronic communication in the 1840s, media technologies have provoked strange flights of the imagination: tales of spirit telegraphs, psychic telephones and radio contact with the dead, many of which are detailed in Jeffrey Sconce’s book, Haunted Media. Edison saw his phonograph both as a means of preserving the voices of the dead and also as a potential aid to ‘psychic investigators … an apparatus which may help them in their work’. For the Latvian writer Konstantīns Raudive, the hiss of magnetic tape masked the possibility of ‘electronic voice phenomena’ –  communiqués from the beyond, buried under static. So intimately acquainted are analogue media and supernatural fiction, from Charles Dickens’ The Signalman to 70s Dr Who, that author Adam Scovell perceives an ‘almost obsessive recurrence’. The portal to the other side, he suggests, is an ‘analogue gateway’. But digital media was supposed to have banished all that, exorcized it with the cool rationality of numbers. Sconce’s Haunted Media speaks of no more modern technology than the television. THE UNDEAD DISC

115

There is something about the noise of analogue media, its suggestion of something buried, a signal beneath the signal, like a palimpsest, that seems to call towards the spectral, to evoke the dead and their return. The sound of ‘crackle, the surface noise made by vinyl’, writes Fisher, ‘is perhaps the principal sonic signature of hauntology’. At a certain point in time coincident with the decline of the CD medium, from roughly the mid-90s of Portishead’s debut album Dummy to the arrival in the mid-00s of dubstep producer Burial and electronic music label Ghost Box, the sound of ‘crackle’ and other artefacts of analogue media like tape hiss and saturation, became associated with a series of styles that conspired to unite a kind of well-versed self-referentiality with a mood and tone of melancholic reflection, as if music were mourning itself. For several writers – Fisher amongst them – there was a contemporaneous tendency in music writing online and in print to describe these artists with reference to the notion of a possible hauntology. This term – ‘hauntology’ – was a pun when originally employed by the philosopher Jacques Derrida, indistinguis­ hable in spoken French from ‘ontology’. More than just a play on words, hauntology points to the very core of Derrida’s understanding of the meaning of existence. Through a careful reading of several works by Sigmund Freud, William Shakespeare and, especially, Karl Marx, Derrida develops an understanding of the spectre’s paradoxical ‘sensuousnon-sensuous, visible-invisible’ nature that cuts through the standard oppositions of Western metaphysics: between 116

COMPACT DISC

being and nothingness, presence and absence, the real and the virtual, the living and the dead. All of these stark binaries are undermined – or at least made rather fuzzy – when you start to think in terms of ghosts. ‘To haunt’, Derrida writes, ‘does not mean to be present, and it is necessary to introduce haunting into the very construction of … every concept, beginning with the concepts of being and time. That is what we would be calling here a hauntology.’ Take sound recording itself. One can imagine a musician might hold up a vinyl record and, pointing to its grooves, say, here is my latest album, here is my music. But were they to hold in their hands instead a compact disc, could they gesture in the same way with the same confidence – especially when that same music, essentially unchanged, can then be transferred from the disc in their hands to the laptop in front of them or pass through the ‘cloud’ of online file transfer systems to another place entirely? The substance of the disc starts to take on a strangely insubstantial quality. It takes on the qualities of a body only contingently possessed by some phantom content. And though of course we can listen to a CD, it is much harder to hear the CD itself. In the language of engineers, it is a ‘transparent’ medium – unless and until that transparency is disrupted by the kind of ‘wounds’ inflicted by someone like Yasunao Tone. But what the CD does make possible is the ability to hear the recording media that preceded it. It can make apparent what The Wire’s Ian Penman once called the ‘re’ of recording, the gap between a presumed event and its representation: THE UNDEAD DISC

117

the hiss and saturation of tape, the pops and clicks of a vinyl record. ‘So many hauntological tracks,’ Fisher writes, ‘have been about revisiting the physicality of analogue media in the era of digital ether.’ He could be talking about music by Burial or contemporaries like The Caretaker, Philip Jeck or William Basinski – all of whom have released music on CD that employed the artefacts of analogue recording as an element in a composition that would risk disappearance if released on any previous format. For Fisher – as for Derrida –  this effect is uncanny, just as it was for those critics at High Fidelity magazine tasked with reviewing the first CDs based on analogue masters. All they could hear, suddenly and brutally exposed, were the defects of older media. You might say that the CD is not itself a ghost, but it made audible the phantom qualities of all recorded music, its inherent untimeliness. Even long before the CD’s slow ‘death’ in the wake of Napster and its many imitators, the format was compared unfavourably – especially by musicians themselves, like the Neil Young-fronted coalition of Artists Against Digital – to the ‘vibrancy’ of LPs, the ‘warmth’ of analogue. But if much of the polemic over the CD at the time of its release already echoed similar quarrels from much earlier in the century around the beginning of electrical recording – pitting nature against artifice, faith over infidelity – this only serves to underscore the asynchrony of the medium. A ghost is nothing if not a revenant and every haunting is a return. The CD was presented as a thing of the future – pictured as a shimmering saucer flying through space – and 118

COMPACT DISC

simultaneously of the past, a revival, reissue and museum piece. ‘The structure of the archive is spectral,’ writes Derrida. One thing I learnt when I met François Dierckx from Philips was that the CD’s notorious ‘jewel case’, the oft-maligned plastic box that discs came packaged in, was designed specifically for archival purposes. This was a selling point that Philips’ marketing teams were encouraged to push: that people with a large collection could easily read the label on the spine at a glance (unlike the slimmer sleeves of LPs). A weird logic of collection and accumulation started to go mainstream during the CD era, egged on by the likes of Reader’s Digest, The NPR Guide to Building a Classical CD Collection, The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, and endless ads in the backs of glossy magazines for the Columbia House CD Club: ‘Build Your Compact Disc Collection. Join the CBS Compact Disc Club and Take Any 3 Compact Discs for $1.00.’ Labels encouraged listeners to repurchase their records on CDs. Reissues of old LPs – and even things that never made it to LP, like demos, rejected tracks, remastered shellac 78s – proliferated. The CD boom was built as much on back catalogue as it was on new releases, as the success of labels like Philips’ own PolyGram ably demonstrate. CDs may have been small, but their sheer quantity – ‘this proliferation of ghosts’ as Derrida says – meant they took up more space than ever before. The CD era was also the era of the big box record shops, of high streets dominated by HMV, Our Price and Tower Records, their shelves THE UNDEAD DISC

119

overflowing with plastic discs. Tower Records at Piccadilly Circus, London, covered nearly 25,000 square feet. HMV at Oxford Circus was more than double that size, the biggest record shop in the world, offering unprecedented volumes of recorded music. One day in 2002, Bill Drummond walked into that Oxford Street HMV and saw ‘aisle upon aisle of CDs, rack upon rack in every genre possible’. Drummond had already lived a storied career. Having run Zoo Records, managed the bands Echo & The Bunnymen and The Teardrop Explodes, and worked as A&R consultant at WEA, he went on to co-author the satirical step-by-step guide The Manual (How to Have a Number One the Easy Way) with Jimmy Cauty, with whom he formed the group The KLF. After a string of UK chart hits in the late 80s and early 90s, in an act that may either have been intended as a satire on the wanton profligacy of the late twentieth-century music industry or simply one of those things that sounded like a good idea at the time, Drummond and Cauty burnt a million pounds in cash on a remote Scottish island. But on that spring day in Oxford Street at the dawn of the new millennium, Drummond wasn’t on the verge of any performance or prank. He had some time to kill and just figured he’d ‘have a look around, maybe get something for one of my children’. ‘I remember walking through the door and just felt such a dread,’ he told me. ‘I don’t know how many thousand CDs they’ve got there. But I thought, I know whatever I get here, when I get it home, it’s not going to be real, it’s not going 120

COMPACT DISC

to open another door in my head.’ That night, back home, sitting at his computer, he grew increasingly depressed. ‘It was as if every piece of recorded music from the whole history of recorded music was behind that screen laughing at me. It was saying, go on, download us!’ He had a problem. Nothing seemed worthwhile. Nothing seemed ‘new enough’. He needed a radical solution. ‘We’ve got to start all music again,’ he finally proposed. ‘I got into this fantasy in the end: wouldn’t it be great if all music had disappeared? We knew music had existed, but the CDs were blank. You’d go to the piano and you can’t do anything. Drum kits don’t work. It’s all gone.’ Drummond was far from alone in his fantasy. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the notion of some euterpean apocalypse was surprisingly widespread. Fisher’s blogpost, ‘Is Pop Undead?’ was itself a response to several articles and message board threads on similar themes. Back in 2003, Wired magazine had already announced ‘the year the music dies’ and by 2009 composer Glenn Branca was joining in, with a piece on ‘The End of Music’ for the New York Times. ‘For more than half a century we’ve seen incredible advances in sound technology but very little if any advance in the quality of music,’ he wrote. ‘In this case the paradigm shift may not be a shift but a dead stop.’ Of course, music carries on, people continue to sing. Nothing ever dies, in cultural terms. But somehow the end of the CD, a presumed end for music in physical form altogether, made it possible to imagine, briefly, the end of THE UNDEAD DISC

121

music. We have been living with the psychic consequences ever since. My friends and I sneak into stores that used to be big music retailers years ago and put our CDs on the shelves. We even got an old shrinkwrapping machine from eBay so we can make them look right. We’ve been thrown out so often, banned. The stores hate us because people get excited and say ‘Oh, how much is this thing?’ Of course if you scan the code on the CD you get the music free, but having it sitting there between two boxes of diapers really surprises people. It’s a way of saying – this stuff, physical music, used to be mainstream, not just something collectors care about. Cursor Daly works in a musical genre called ‘ghostwave’, playing with the phantom sounds of low-bit-rate CD-Rs. He is just one of a growing number of artists and fans intent on rekindling the dwindling compact disc medium. Reece Maclay is the host of a club called the 74 Sessions. Too young to remember the heyday of CDs, he and his friends nonetheless echo the actions of Oval, Disc and daytime TV’s breakfast time test by turning up with their own home-burned discs and smearing jam all over each one before playing them, marvelling at the inner ‘mystery’ of fixed media. Inire Wolfe runs the Hall of Mirrors label, which delights in the ‘secret architecture’ of the CD format, hiding tracks in a maze of split folders or spreading them across multiple discs to be played simultaneously. 122

COMPACT DISC

The year is 2022 and the CD revival is in full swing. In March 2010, as the music press at large marvelled at the public’s renewed interest in old analogue formats like vinyl and tape, Pitchfork’s Tom Ewing used his regular ‘Poptimist’ column to write this fiction speculating on a future renaissance for the digital audio disc. In doing so, Ewing emphasized the medium’s disposability, its fixity and its physicality. He projected this comeback twelve years in the future. It would prove unnecessary to wait so long. Already, in August of 2018, The Guardian reports on a ‘CD resurgence’ brewing as the mid-90s ‘Generation Z’ cohort slides inexorably into the ‘nostalgia zone’. Two months before that, The Quietus had argued ‘in defence of the CD’, finding in the format a set of qualities almost diametrically opposed to those of Tom Ewing’s future hipsters: permanence, convenience, high fidelity (and new-found low cost). Back in 2016, Rolling Stone’s David Browne had already come to the same conclusion, wondering, ‘Why, again, are we abandoning these things?’ The tone of these articles is tentative, almost apologetic. But they contain details that should give pause to anyone intent on dismissing the format out of hand. Like the Carolina record shop owner quoted by The Quietus who noticed enough of an uptick in CD sales to ‘rethink my buying habits for the medium’. Or the report from online record marketplace, Discogs, registering a twenty-eight per cent growth in the format’s sales. There’s a Buzzfeed piece from around the same time that quotes a young mother with THE UNDEAD DISC

123

a basement full of boxed-up CDs in the New Jersey suburbs, ‘Part of me hopes that one day my son will bring home a dusty CD player from the thrift store and be super excited to listen to It’s A Shame About Ray.’ Maybe it’s not such a fanciful wish. In the midst of all these articles, one October day in 2017, a small cafe in Tokyo’s Kōenji district hosted the first ever CD-R Store Day. From lunchtime till evening, tables were set up to sell discs, a sampler of songs extracted from the various wares on sale was played on the cafe’s stereo system, and bands performed on a little stage in the corner of the room. Just two rules governed the range of stock on offer: every CD had to be made new, especially for the event itself; and everything had to be priced at 500 yen, the same price as a glass of beer. ‘I set that price deliberately,’ the event’s organizer, Ian Martin of Call & Response Records, says, ‘because if you charge a hundred yen for something, people don’t take it seriously. But if you’ve paid 500 yen, you might actually listen to it.’ Martin planned the event less after forebears like Record Store Day (the name, he says, was always a bit of a joke) and more after small press comics fairs. There was a friendly, slightly ramshackle vibe to the day with people manning the stalls with scissors and glue in hand, still putting together their homemade CD sleeves, and much of the audience made up of artists with their own CD-Rs to sell. But the venue was full, with people coming and going or hanging out for several hours and the audience clearly enjoyed themselves. ‘I’ve had people come 124

COMPACT DISC

up to me since saying, are you going to do it again?’ Martin tells me. ‘A couple of friends have formed a band specifically so they can make a CD for CD-R Store Day this year.’ As I write this, in January 2019, I have just received a Facebook invite to the next CD-R Store Day in Kōenji at the end of the month. ‘For me, there’s something about the way CDs were suddenly automatically treated as completely irrelevant almost,’ Martin says. ‘But don’t you remember how awesome CDs are? Anyone can make a CD!’ Japan remains the one major world music market where CD sales never quite fell off a cliff in the early twenty-first century, with album sales in 2010 still comparable with those from twenty years earlier. In 2012, sales actually went up a bit. Yuko Tanno, from the Recording Industry of Japan, puts this down to fans wishing to show ‘their endorsement and enthusiasm for artists whom they love’. But Martin, whose book Quit Your Band delivers a potted history of the Japanese music scene, has a slightly different explanation. Those sales, he claims, were significantly skewed towards singles by idol groups ‘built on a business model based around hardcore fans buying multiple copies of the same CD in return for access to the group members and participation in special events’. For Martin, the relative buoyancy of CD sales is less a sign of audience dedication and more a result of the industry’s own machinations: bundling CDs with ‘golden tickets’ to meetand-greets, and exerting an almost tyrannical control over every aspect of the music industry (to the extent, in some cases, of blocking even images of their artists from appearing THE UNDEAD DISC

125

online), particularly on the part of the biggest player in the Japanese record industry: Sony. In March 2018 I travelled to Tokyo and visited the Sony Archives museum. A stark modernist building in white tile and concrete curves up a hill in Shinagawa, inside the air is still, everything silent but for the hum of the air con. Throughout, an atmosphere equal parts space station and mausoleum. In amongst displays charting the company’s historic successes, from the transistor radio to the Walkman and beyond, I finally found a sleek, cuboid vitrine containing the CDP-101, the world’s first commercially available CD player, with Billy Joel’s 52nd Street perched on top of it, as if playing eternally on shuffle. Upon leaving the museum, I walked down the hill to Sony’s corporate headquarters, a short distance away. Scarcely a decade old, the building was crystalline in the spring sunshine, sheer glass walls rising hundreds of feet into the sky. But previously, on the same spot, had stood a carparklike edifice where, decades earlier, Heitaro Nakajima had worked on the development of the digital audio disc for Sony. I was met in the lobby by a man named Takanobu Kishi from Sony Corporate Communications. He showed me a lavish hardbound book, published for the CD’s twenty-fifth anniversary, back during the boom of the 1990s. From its pages the proud faces of Nakajima and his team beamed out at me in black and white. Do you think the CD will ever make a comeback, I asked Kishi. Can you see it becoming a dominant medium again? 126

COMPACT DISC

He smiled and shook his head, ‘No.’ The Japanese CD market’s 2012 blip had proved to be just that: a blip. Since then, sales have resumed their slow, inexorable decline, in keeping with the rest of the world. Nor did Kishi see any great prospects for another physical format to come and replace the disc. The company had moved on to other things. ‘We are currently concentrating on a high resolution playback device for music,’ he told me. It would play files, not discs (or ball bearings). ‘I don’t personally think that other physical media will appear for music.’ But there is one sense in which the CD survives – in spirit if not in flesh. Most of the digital music we hear today, all those files that replaced CDs in the 00s and since, whether purchased from Amazon, iTunes or Google Play, or streamed on Spotify, Tidal or Deezer, still play back at the Red Book standard of 16 bit and 44.1 kHz agreed by Philips and Sony back in 1981. Those numbers were more or less arbitrary then. They were convenient for the technology that existed at that point of time, the minimum you could get away with. But today, after nearly forty years of improvements in processing power, they could easily be exceeded (and cinemas, for instance, as well as some audiophile stereo systems will play back audio at significantly higher rates – I have personally seen sound engineers sneer at the 44.1 kHz sampling rate). The physical shell may be dead, but the ghost lives on.

THE UNDEAD DISC

127

128

POSTSCRIPT

I am sitting in my flat in London. The windows are closed and nobody else is home. A CD is playing but there are almost no sounds: just a slight creak from a chair, a gust of wind, the distant rumble of a passing aeroplane, and then, as if from within the plane itself, a single long, low note from a trombone. Some two and a half minutes have passed since I pressed play. I am listening to one of my favourite releases from the last few years, a duet of sorts by the Austrian trombonist and composer Radu Malfatti entitled One Man and A Fly, released on CD-only by the Oxfordshire-based independent label Cathnor Recordings. For a continuous fifty minutes and nine seconds, we hear the room in which it was recorded, the buzzing of a fly about that room, the wider environment outside, Malfatti’s own body shifting in his seat or adjusting his instrument and, every now and then, playing a note or two on his instrument, unhurried and without fanfare. ‘I like him,’ the cellist Anton Lukoszevieze, a frequent collaborator of Malfatti’s, said to me when I mentioned my fondness for this recording, ‘because he waits. And then when he makes

a sound, it’s like he’s been waiting to make that sound for about a year.’ It’s hard for me to imagine this album on any other format than CD. It’s not just the length, which would be forced apart into two halves on an LP, but something about its intimacy, the demands it makes on the listener, its capacity to subtly transform any space it plays in, and, perhaps above all, its quietness. It is one of the ironies of music history that the compact disc, a format with a far wider dynamic range, a far greater capacity for hushed sounds, than any that preceded it, would precipitate instead what in 2001 was christened the ‘loudness war’. Throughout the 1990s, recording engineers took to mastering pop records at higher and higher levels with a smaller and smaller dynamic range, pushing every frequency on the spectrum to the max until the graphic depictions of the waveform for every hit song resembled the same solid black rectangle. ‘There used to be a spec in the Red Book that prohibited having anything going over level,’ explains mastering engineer Kevin Gray. ‘Up through 1990 or so, that rule was pretty hard and fast. Then around 1991 you would have to send an affidavit to the plant saying that the producer, the engineer, and the artist had approved the fact that there were over-levels. And then by about 1994 or so, nobody cared anymore.’ One Man and A Fly, along with the many other quiet, careful releases by colleagues and collaborators of Malfatti on labels like Editions Wandelweiser, show another way. 130

COMPACT DISC

For the American guitarist David Grubbs, the renewed interest the 90s expressed in the work of the equally sparse and contemplative New York School composer Morton Feldman is also ‘unquestionably’ related to the CD format. Many, many older artists received renewed interest during the CD era. Reissues made economic sense. It’s part of what led to the extraordinary plenitude of recorded music that greeted record shoppers like Bill Drummond by the century’s end. But the CD birthed new offspring too, artists who we might – at least instinctively – attribute to the format: the ‘perforated music’ made by Guy Sigsworth with Björk and Madonna, the ‘glitch’ of Disc and Oval, the ‘hauntological’ sounds of Burial and the Ghost Box label, and equally the high-gloss AOR of Billy Joel and Dire Straits, and battery-farmed singles artists like *NSync and Britney Spears. When I met with CD-R Day’s Ian Martin he pointed to the big post-rock groups of the late 90s, like Mogwai and Fly Pan Am, with their extended durations and exaggerated dynamic shifts. Then there are groups like Australian experimental jazz trio The Necks who, between 1989 and 2010, released fifteen albums, each one CD-only, most of them consisting of a single hour-long track; and composers, like Wandelweiser founders Antoine Beuger and Burkhard Schlothauer, who since 1992 have released a steady stream of digital discs, each one teetering on the brink of a silence only made possible by the format.

POSTSCRIPT

131

But perhaps the more profound effect of the CD was on the way we listen. When I met Andy Hamilton, a longstanding contributor to the magazines The Wire and Jazz Journal, he suggested that the CD represented the ‘summit’ of a particular mode of music appreciation: ‘It was hi-fi,’ he said. ‘You listened on good equipment and you paid attention.’ But for Baudrillard, writing at the dawn of the digital era, there was something suspicious about this very perfection, which was ‘no longer the play of form, but the actualization of a programme’. For the French philosopher, the effect on the listener was to be ‘exactly programmed too’, as if the very fullness of the sound stymied the imagination, precluded the audience from filling in the smudged details. The meaning of the CD has changed. For its inventors and first audience, it was its high-quality sound, its permanence and hard-wearing invulnerability that made it attractive. They were drawn to its absence of noise, its small stature and convenience, and the playful, tactile qualities of an interactive menu and automatic loading tray. But for the fictional enthusiasts of Tom Ewing’s fantasized future revival – as well as the very real participants in Ian Martin’s CD-R Day – it is precisely the opposite qualities that are prized: a certain immediacy and ephemerality, a fixity and solidity that forces you to engage differently, to acknowledge its peculiar presence. The CD is no longer quite so present in the lives of music listeners as it once was, but nor has it quite disappeared. It will continue to have its defenders, just as Thomas Jerome 132

COMPACT DISC

Newton ends The Man Who Fell to Earth releasing his music on one of his own little silver ball-bearings, even though the format has now been consigned to the ‘closeout’ bins of the corner drugstore. It has always been an in-between medium, with one toe dipped in the virtual waters and one foot determinedly placed on solid land. The promise of the CD was twofold and contradictory. On the one hand, it promised permanence: a medium that would last forever, unafflicted by wear and tear. At the same time, it pledged a kind of evanescence, vouchsafing its own disappearance to become a figment of pure light, pure sound, leaving no apparent material trace. It was finally the CD’s own perfection that proved its downfall. It served up a copy so immaculate that even the copies of that copy were impeccable. As a thing already perfected, it could neither evolve nor be replaced. None of the new hand-held formats that came after it – the DAT, the Digital Compact Cassette, the MiniDisc, slotMusic – were able to maintain a foothold. And though it is not quite true to say that the music object has now completely dematerialized – after all, every WAV, mp3, AIFF and FLAC is stored some­ where, taking up real physical space on a hard drive or server in some building out in the world. Nonetheless, the capacity to hold in one’s hand a particular musical work and to feel a sense of ownership towards it has irrevocably changed. In a capitalist society in which our sense of identity remains inextricably tied to consumption, that can hardly fail to have consequences for the way we relate to music. As Derrida POSTSCRIPT

133

wrote a quarter of a century ago, at the very moment the CD became the dominant audio format worldwide, ‘to possess a spectre’ is also ‘to be possessed by it’. The arrival of the compact disc may have changed music profoundly, but its disappearance changes it more.

134

COMPACT DISC

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

F

irst of all, I would like to thank the many people who agreed to be interviewed for this book: Stephen Cornford, Drew Daniel, François Dierckx, Andy Hamilton, Kees Schouhamer Immink, Takanobu Kishi, Ian Martin, Hiroshi Ogawa, Markus Popp, Guy Sigsworth and Yasunao Tone. I would like to thank my editor Christopher Schaberg and my friend Andrew Bulhak for reading through and making comments on various drafts. I would also like to express my gratitude for invaluable conversations, both online and off, during the course of preparing this book with Ryan Barkataki, Brian Brandt, Leo Chadburn, Philip Clark, Graham Dunning, Oliver Dutton, David Grubbs, Joe Harling, Sylvia Hallett, Darren Hayman, Richard King, Anton Lukoszevieze, Dave McMahon, Darren Moon, Paul Khimasia Morgan, Carl Neville, Antonio Poscic, Sean Price, Daniel Robson, Tim Shaw, Yoni Silver, Yuko Tanno, Derek Walmsley and Michael Zakes. Most of all I would like to thank Thanh Mai Nguyen.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bacon, F. (1938 [1627]), ‘The New Atlantis’, in The Works of Lord Bacon, Vol. 1, London: William Ball. Baudrillard, J. (1990 [1979]), Seduction, Singer, B. (trans.), Montreal, QC: New World. Baudrillard, J. (1994 [1981]), Simulacra and Simulation, Glaser, S. F. (trans.), Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Baudrillard, J. (1994 [1992]), The Illusion of the End, Turner, C. (trans.), Cambridge: Polity. Baudrillard, J. (2013 [2004]), The Intelligence of Evil, or The Lucidity Pact, Turner, C. (trans.), London: Bloomsbury. Boast, R. (2017), The Machine in the Ghost: Digitality and its Consequences, London: Reaktion. Brewster, B. & Broughton, F. (1999), Last Night a DJ Saved My Life: The History of the Disc Jockey, London: Headline. Cage, J. (1961), Silence, Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press. Cartwright, G. (2018), Going for a Song: A Chronicle of the UK Record Shop, London: Flood Gallery. Chanan, M. (1995), Repeated Takes: A Short History of Recording and its Effects on Music, London: Verso. Chun, W. H. K. & Keenan, T. (ed.s) (2006), New Media, Old Media, New York: Routledge.

Crowley, D. & Muzyczuk, D. (ed.s) (2012), Singing the Body Electric: Experiments in Art and Music in Eastern Europe 1957–1984, Łodz: Muzeum Sztuki. Cubitt, S. (2014), The Practice of Light: A Genealogy of Visual Technologies from Prints to Pixels, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Derrida, J. (1994 [1993]), Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning & the New International, Kamuf, P. (trans.), New York: Routledge. Derrida, J. (1996 [1995]), Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, Prenowitz, E. (trans.), Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Descartes, R. (1965 [1637]), Discourse on Method, Optics, Geometry, and Meteorology, Olscamp, P. (trans.), Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill. De Vries, M. (2005), 80 Years of Research at the Philips Natuurkundig Laboratorium, 1914–1994, Amsterdam: Pallas. Dick, P.K. (1964), The Simulacra, New York: Ace. Diduck, R. (2017), Mad Skills: MIDI and Music Technology in the 20th Century, London: Repeater. Dyson, G. (2012), Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe, London: Penguin. Fisher, M. (2014), Ghosts of My Life, London: Zero. Fisher, M. (2018), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004–2016), London: Repeater. Foege, A. (2013), Tinkerers: The Amateurs, DIYers, and Inventors who Make America Great, London: Hachette. Freeberg, E. (2013), The Age of Edison: Electric Light and the Invention of Modern America, New York: Penguin. Gallerneaux, K. (2018), High Static Dead Lines: Sonic Spectres and the Object Hereafter, London: Strange Attractor. Gertner, J. (2012), The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation, London: Penguin. Gilbert, H. (1961), Miniaturization, New York: Reinhold.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

137

Goodman, F. (1997), The Mansion on the Hill: Dylan, Young, Geffen, Springsteen, and the Head-on Collision of Rock and Commerce, New York: Random House. Gronow, P. & Saunio, I. (1998), An International History of the Recording Industry, Moseley, C. (trans.), London: Cassell. Grubbs, D. (2014), Records Ruin the Landscape: John Cage, The Sixties, and Sound Recording, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Gross, J. (1998), ‘Christian Marclay’, Perfect Sound Forever, http:// www.furious.com/perfect/christianmarclay.html. Hartley, H.A. (1958), Audio Design Handbook, New York: Gernsback Library Heerding, A. (1985), The History of N.V. Philips’ Gloeilampenfabrieken, Vol. 1: The Origin of the Dutch Incandescent Lamp Industry, Jordan, D. (trans.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heerding, A. (1988 [1986]), The History of the N.V. Philips Gloeilampenfabrieken, Vol. 2: A Company of Many Parts, Jordan, D. (trans.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kahn, D. (2003), ‘Christian Marclay’s Early Years: An Interview’, Leonardo Music Journal, Vol. 13. Kelly, C. (2009), Cracked Media: The Sound of Malfunction, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kittler, F. (2010), Optical Media: Berlin Lectures 1999, Enns, A. (trans.), Cambridge: Polity. Knopper, S. (2009), Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009. Krukowski, D. (2017), The New Analog: Listening and Reconnecting in a Digital World, New York: New Press. Laan, D. (1960), The Adventures of Fingerling, Cambridge: Lutterworth. Lanza, J. (1995), Elevator Music: A Surreal History of Muzak, EasyListening, and Other Moodsong, London: Quartet. 138

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Martin, I. (2016), Quit Your Band: Musical Notes From the Japanese Underground, New York: Awai. McLuhan, M. (1964), Understanding Media, London: Sphere. Milner, G. (2009), Perfecting Sound Forever: The Story of Recorded Music, London: Granta. Murphy, G. (2015), Cowboys and Indies: The Epic History of the Record Industry, London: Serpent’s Tail. Nathan, J. (1999), Sony: The Private Life, London: HarperCollins. Nayak, P. N. & Ketteringham, J. M. (1994), Breakthroughs, San Diego, CA: Pfeiffer. Ohga, N. (2008), Doing it Our Way: A Sony Memoir, Miller, B. (trans.), Tokyo: International House of Japan. Paciorek, A. (ed.) (2018), Otherworldly: Folk Horror Revival at the British Museum, Durham, UK: Wyrd Harvest Press. Peek, H., Bergmans, J., van Haaren, J., Toolenaar, F. & Stan, S. (eds) (2009), Origins and Successors of the Compact Disc: Contributions of Philips to Optical Storage, Berlin: Springer. Philips, F. (1976), 45 Years with Philips: An Industrialist’s Life, Poole, UK: Blandford Press. Rogers, J. (2013), The Death and Life of the Music Industry in the Digital Age, London: Bloomsbury. Sconce, J. (2000), Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Silverman, K. (2012), Begin Again: A Biography of John Cage, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Smith, R. G. (2010), The Baudrillard Dictionary, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Stanley, B. (2013), Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Story of Modern Pop, London: Faber. Sterne, J. (2012), MP3: The Meaning of a Format, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Tevis, W. (1999 [1963]), The Man Who Fell to Earth, London: Bloomsbury. SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

139

Tompkins, D. (2011), How to Wreck a Nice Beach: The Vocoder from World War II to Hip-Hop, Brooklyn, NY: Melville House. Tresch, J. (2012) The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon, Chicago, IL, & London: University of Chicago Press. Voltaire (1967 [1738]), The Elements of Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophy, John Hanna (trans.), London: Frank Cass & Co.

140

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

A-3 system  38–9 Afrika Bambaataa  39, 40, 77 analogue  analogue versus digital sound  42, 43, 59, 64, 84, 115–16, 118 analogue versus digital media/recording  33, 37, 43, 53–4, 105, 118 anechoic chamber  36, 43–4, 64 Arnold, Jack Incredible Shrinking Man, The  22 Artists Against Digital  118 Ashley, Robert  84 Atari computer  67, 68, 71 Atkinson, John  58, 59 Audio Fidelity Records (New York)  47 Babbage, Charles  11 back catalogue  5–6, 59, 108, 119

Bacon, Francis  21, 25 New Atlantis, The  14–15 Ballard, James Graham  52 Bardeen, John  24 Barry, Robert  1–8 Basinski, William  118 Baudrillard, Jean  35–6, 37, 48, 59–60, 62, 132 Illusion of End, The  46–7 Seduction (1979)  36 BBC  26 Beethoven, Ludwig van  56–7, 83, 114 Bell Labs (AT&T)  24, 25, 29, 38–9 Westrex affiliate  47 Berlin  73, 90 Betamax system (Sony)  53–4 Beuys, Joseph  77 Beverley Hills 90210  108 Björk  88, 131 Boole, George  11 Boys from Brazil, The  59 Branca, Glenn  121

Brattain, Walter  24 Braun, David  106 Breton, André  80, 81 Briesch, John  105 Brighton  2, 92–3, 100 Browne, David  123 Brunelleschi, Filippo  11–13, 61–2 Brush Electric Light Corporation  18, 21 Brush, Charles  18 Burial  118, 131 Buzzfeed  123–4 Cage, John  36–7, 43, 75, 77, 84 4’ 33”   63–5, 74 Cartridge Music (1960)  74 Imaginary Landscape No 1  73–4 Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano  71 camera obscura  11, 15 Cartwright, Garth  102 cassette tapes  2–4, 8, 104, 123 Cauty, Jimmy  120 CBS  104, 105, 107, 119 CD player trio  89 CD-R  7, 55, 109–10, 122 CD-R Store Day  124–5, 131, 132 142

Index

CD-ROM  55, 109 classical music (‘high art’)  46 reason for CD size  56–7 Coldplay ‘Viva La Vida’ single (2008)  112 Collins, Nicolas  89–90 Broken Light (1991)  90 Sled Dog (2001)  91 compact disc (1981–) evanescence promise  133 issue at stake (‘virtual reality’)  62–3 permanence promise  133 price  108 ‘saved industry’  104–6 size (reason)  56–7 ‘transparency’  117 undead  112–127 wounded  82–93 compact disc, effect on music production effect on albumcomposition  5 effect on listening  132 ‘new kind of artistic medium’  65 re-formatting of vinyl records (with ‘bonus tracks’)  5–6 renewed interest in older artists  131 compact disc, format  30–1

CD-R  7, 55, 109–10, 122 CD-ROM  55, 109 booklets  6 plastic box, ‘jewel case’  119 compact disc, history and development changing meaning  132 decline and fall  112, 133 hostile reception  104–5 laboratory experimentation  24–6 ‘loudness war’ (2001)  130 miniaturization, data storage formats  9–11, 27–33 origins  9–13, 26–33, 38 peak (1999)  110–11 rise, fall, minor comeback  1–8 sales  5, 99, 103, 107–8, 110–13, 123 compact disc player  30, 67, 83, 91 CD player trio  89 CD-204 (Philips)  69 CDP-101 (Sony, 1981)  106, 126 Denon DCD 1300  70 early models  1–2 fast-forward feature  71 ‘feature creep’  69–70 initial press response  58–9

paused (continues to read information)  89–90 price  57 production terminating  112 shuffle mode  69–70 computers  51, 67–8, 114, 115 concert hall  44, 46, 60 Cornford, Stephen Archipelago (2013)  91 Constant Linear Velocity  92–3 Digital Audio Film  89, 92 Cornyn, Stan  104–5 cracked media (Kelly)  72–3, 87 Crivelli, Carlo  13–14, 30 Cross Interleaved ReedSolomon Code (CIRC)  86 Cubbitt, Sean  13–14 Daly, Cursor  122 Daniel, Drew  87–8 Depedro, Miguel  87, 88 Derrida, Jacques  118, 119, 133–4 hauntology  116–17, 131 Descartes, René  15 Dick, Philip K.  3 Simulacra, The  30, 52 Dickens, Charles  115 Diduck, Ryan  56 Index

143

Dierckx, François  33, 56–7, 105, 119 Digital Audio Disc Committee  55 digitalization  4–5, 68, 71, 83, 102 error correction  85–6 faithful disc  45–65 Dire Straits  2, 131 Brothers in Arms  99, 107 Disc (group, mid-90s)  87–8, 131 disc jockeys (DJs)  76–7 Discmans  89, 91 Discogs  123 downloads  4, 103 Dr Who  115 Drummond, Bill  120–1, 131 Du Bois-Reymond, Emil  12 Dudley, Homer  39 Dyson, Freeman  51–2 Dyson, George  51–2 Edison, Thomas  20–1, 23–4, 73, 115 light bulb  16–18 Eindhoven  18, 20, 54, 86 Evoluon (museum)  26, 30 Philips Research Laboratories  9–10, 32, 110 Eisenberg, Evan  60 Electrician, The  19–21 144

Index

Elliot, Susan  58 Elves and Shoemaker  9 error correction  83, 85–6 Ewing, Tom  123, 132 eye  15 Fanning, Shawn  111–12 Feldman, Morton  131 Feynman, Richard  23 Finer, Marc  106 Fisher, Mark  112–13, 115–16, 118, 121 Fisher-Price tape deck  2–3 Florence  12 Fluxus  75 FM broadcasting  42, 43 Ford Museum  16–17 Forrest, Jerry  58 Fowler, Jarrod  65 friction  10 G-Type tape recorder  49 Gallerneaux, Kristen  17 General Electric  25 geometer’s rule  14 German Magnetophon machines  50–1 Ghost Box label  131 ghostwave  122 Gibson, William  41 Gilbert, Horace D. Miniaturization  22–4 Glasgow  18–19

Globe and Mail, The  103 God  13–14 Goldsmith, Harris  58 Grammophonmusik  73 Grand Wizzard Theodore (né Theodore Livingston)  76–7 Grandmaster Flash  76, 77 Grasso, Francis  76 Gray, Kevin  130 Group Ongaku  81–2 Grubbs, David  131 Guardian, The  123 Hall of Mirrors label  122 Hamilton, Andy  132 Hartley, Henry Alexander  44–5 Harvard University  36–7, 64 Heiser, Jörg  72 Hi-Fi News  43–4, 47, 58, 59 high fidelity  44–8, 57, 60, 132 High Fidelity  47, 58, 86–7, 118 Hindemith, Paul  73 Hisashi, Hashimoto Mijikana Kagaku Zeminaru (‘A Science Seminar for the Familiar’)  83, 85 HMV  2, 100–2, 119–21 Holst (or Holt), Gilles  28 Horowitz, David  104–5

Horowitz, Vladimir  57 Huygens, Christiaan  15, 28 hyperreality  59–60, 62 Ibuka, Masaru  48–51, 53 IEEE Spectrum  54 Immink, Kees Schouhamer  32, 56, 86, 106, 110 Independent, The  109 internet  108, 111 inventiveness  23–4 Irish Times  103 Japan  40–1 CD market (relative buoyancy)  98, 125–6 Jazz Journal  132 Jeck, Philip  118 Joel, Billy  107, 131 52nd Street   105–6, 126 John Cage Trust  64 Kalff, Louis  26 von Karajan, Herbert  56–7 Kelly, Caleb  72–3 Kepler, Johannes  15 Kircher, Athanasius  38 Kishi, Takanobu  126–7 Kittler, Friedrich  11–12 ‘empire of standards’  55 Kneale, Nigel  114 Knížák, Milan  75–6, 77 Lenin  75

Index

145

Kosugi, Takehisa  81 Kramer, Pieter  27–8, 31 Laan, Dick De Avonturen van Pinkeltje (1939)  9–10 ‘lanterna magica’  15, 28 laser  3, 29–32, 54, 85, 89, 114 LaserDisc  10 light  16, 28–9 light bulb  16–21, 24, 73 Littérature (journal)  81 London  98–102 Lost in Space (TV series)  29 loudspeakers  29, 43–4, 45, 96 Lukoszevieze, Anton  129–30 Maciunas, George  75 Maclay, Reece  122 McLuhan, Marshall  21 Madonna  88, 131 Malfatti, Radu One Man and A Fly  129–31 Marclay, Christian  77–8, 84–5 Martin, Ian  124–5, 131, 132 Quit Your Band  125 maser  29 Matheson, Richard  22 146

Index

Menlo Park  17, 24, 73 Metzger, Frank  70–1 microphone  82 MIDI digital music interface  56 MIDI sequencer  68 Milner, Greg  45, 46 miniaturization  9–11, 22–3, 24–5, 27–33, 54 Miniaturization Award  22 Minnesota: Mall of America  95 Mizuno, Shuko  80–1 Moholy-Nagy, László  73 More, Thomas  14 Morita, Akio  48–50 Morse code  51 Moss, Jerry (A&M Records)  105 mp3 files  111–12, 99, 133 music  35, 37, 46, 48 demise of physical media (but ghost lives on)  127 ‘end’  67, 121–2 music sales  107–8, 110 musique concrète  81 Nakajima, Heitaro  37–44, 51–4, 57, 68, 82–3 Napster  99, 118 NASA  86 von Neumann, John  11, 51–2

Nippon Hōsō Kyōkai (NHK)  40–3, 52, 53, 68, 82 Nishikawa, Kay  84 Obrist, Hans-Ulrich  80, 81 Ogawa, Hiroshi  53–4, 57 Ohga, Norio  49–50, 53–4, 56–7, 105 Orange Book standard (for CD-R)  55, 109, 111 Oschatz, Sebastian  70–1 Ottens, Lou  31–3, 54, 56–7, 104 Oval  67, 70–2, 90, 122, 131 94diskont.   67, 88 Systemisch  72, 90 Wohnton  72 ovalprocess (software)  91 Paik, Nam June  77 Hommage à John Cage  74 SchallplattenSchaschlick  75 Zen for Film  74 Paris  17–18, 20, 25 Patent Act (Netherlands, 1910)  25 patents  24, 25, 30 Penman, Ian  117–18 ‘perforated music’  88–9, 131 Perry, Lee ‘Scratch’  109 Philips, Anton  20, 26

Philips, Frederick  19–20 Philips, Frits  26 Philips, Gerard  18–21 Philips Corporation  1, 45, 105, 107 CD abuse  86–8 CD development 26–33 education division  27, 31 origins  18–27 partnership with Sony  54–7, 85–6, 114 Philips Corporation: units audio division  31–2 Natuurkundig Laboratorium (NatLab)  24–5, 27–8, 31–2, 114 video department  31 phonoguitar  78 Piccioni, Dave  102 Pierce, John R.  29 Pink Floyd  15, 104 Pinkeltje  9–10 piracy  102 Pitchfork  123 Plato  63 Pollock, Jackson  81 PolyGram  103, 105–8, 110, 119 Popp, Markus  67–72, 90–1 postscript  128–34 price-fixing allegations  99 Index

147

Prodigy ‘Charly’  68 pulse code modulation (PCM)  38–9, 43, 54, 55, 111

Riggs, Michael  58 Rolling Stones  123 Roosevelt, Franklin D.  38, 39 Russell, James T.  31, 45

Quietus, The  123

samplers  67, 68 sampling  39, 71–2, 88 sampling frequency  30, 55, 56, 85 Sarkozy, Nicolas  103 Sasdy, Peter Stone Tape, The (film)  30–1 Schaeffer, Pierre  81 Schawlow, Arthur  29 Schmidt, Martin  87, 88 scientification  25 Sconce, Jeffrey Haunted Media  115 Scott, Ridley  41, 59 Scovell, Adam  115 servomechanisms  32 Sherman, Robert (NYT)  46 Shockley, William  24 shopping (modes)  97 Siemens  25 SIGSALY (‘Green Hornet’)  39–40 Sigsworth, Guy  88–9, 131 silence  36–7, 64–5 Simonetti, Gianni Emilio  64 simulation  12, 60, 61, 62–3, 78, 80

Radio Luxembourg  51 Railroads: Sounds of Vanishing Era  47 Raudive, Konstantīns  115 Rauschenberg, Robert  84 RCA Records  50, 107 RE 48 radio-phonograph  50 Reading Festival (1998)  109 Reagan, Ronald  30 record crackle  37, 64, 116, 118 record labels factory and studio closures  104 mergers  103 record players  74 record shops  7–8 closures  102 Record Store Day  124 Red Book standard  55–6, 85, 127, 130 Reed-Solomon code (1960)  86 Reeves, Alec  38 Reflective Optical Videodisc System  10 retina  15 148

Index

solrésol  38 Sonnenfeld, Barry  3 Sony Archives museum  126 Sony Corporate Communications  126 Sony Corporation  1, 10, 13, 31, 45, 48–57, 81, 90, 106 CD abuse  86–8 origins  48–9 partnership with CBS  105 partnership with Philips Corporation  54–7, 85–6, 114 Sony Music  108 space age  3 ‘Stakker Humanoid’  68 Star Trek  29 Stereo Review  59 Sterling, Bruce Dead Media Project  113 Sterne, Jonathan  60, 95 Stock, Hausen & Walkman  70 Stone Tape, The (BBC, 1972)  113–15 streaming  112, 127 Studio Sound  59, 60 Sudre, François  38 Talking Heads  69 Tanno, Yuko  125

tape hiss  37, 64, 115, 118 tape recorders  50–1, 53 Tarkovsky, Andrei  41 Tchaikovsky, Pyotr I.  57, 83 Tevis, Walter Man Who Fell to Earth, The  30, 45, 52, 113, 133 Texas Instruments  43 They Might Be Giants Apollo 18 (1992)  69–70 Timmer, Jan  105, 106 Toch, Ernst  73 Tokyo  124 Tokyo Olympics (1964)  40–1, 80 Tōkyō Tsūshin Kōgyō  49 Tomorrow’s World (BBC)  87 Tompkins, Dave  40 Tone, Yasunao  79–85, 89, 91, 92, 117 AI Deviation  79–80 Musica Iconologos (1992)  82 Solo for Wounded CD  82–3 Tower Records  119 bankruptcy (USA, 2006)  97–8, 99 Tower Records: branches  98–9, 102 Dublin  97 London  98–9, 120 Tokyo  95–8, 101 Index

149

Townes, Charles  29 Trudeau, Lieutenant General Arthur G.  23 United Kingdom  5 record shops (closures)  102–3 United Nations  93 United States  5, 104 US Department of Defense  29 US Signal Intelligence  39 UNIVAC mainframe  82 USA Today  99 vacuum tubes  25 Vance, Jack Space Opera  52 Venice Biennale  75 VHS  32–3 Victrola phonographs  44 video disc  31–2, 55, 86 video format war  55 vinyl records  10, 37, 69, 75–8, 105, 117 demise  106–7 LP packaging  6 revival  7–8, 98, 101–2, 123 stereo (1957–)  47 ‘vibrancy’  118

150

Index

Virgil  95 Virgin Megastores  99–100, 102 vocoder  39, 40 Voltaire  15–16 Elements of the Philosophy of Newton  16 Voyager 2 probe  86 Wagner, Richard  113 Wall Street Journal, The  103 Warner (Music Group)  104, 107, 108 Werner, Byron  45 Wire, The  84, 117–18, 132 Wired  121 Wolfe, Inire  122 Wols, Kees  27–8 World War Two  37, 38, 40, 51 Yashiro, Aki  57 Yellow Book standard (CD-ROM)  55, 111 Yetnikoff, Walter  105 Young, Neil  39, 118 Zengakuren student group  80