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RRR 1000
 The bar has been set again by Ron Lessard, the great schemer of noise and contemporary art hero, with the release of the RRR 1000 lock groove LP. In the making of this release, twenty artists each created 50 loops, all 1.8 seconds in duration, which repeat infinitely until the listener manually moves the needle-- in essence, a perfect skip. For any sane human being the concept is utterly masochistic and unfathomable, but for those with a sound complex, the various results and approaches are infinite and daunting. To what degree and duration does a lock groove reveal its merits or personality? Approached from a minimalist standpoint one could easily site the precedents of Lamonte Young, John Cage, and even Andy Warhol, as artists who used extreme time expansion as a means to create hypnosis and reveal the character of a sound or image over a period of hours, days and beyond. One could argue that it would take one thousand days to fully get the effect of this record. Maybe more.
The history of anti-music, which locked grooves are a part of, could date back to 1903 with Thomas Edison’s invention of the recording cylinder, or to the 1930s and 1940s when Varese and Cage performed concerts using multiple record players. The 1960s is when the lock groove entered the mainstream of society. Monty Python used the innovation for comedic effect while Lou Reed used lock grooves to make his most impenetrable album, Metal Machine Music-- literally endless-- much to the chagrin of critics and seemingly even himself. He publicly stated that anyone who gets to side 4 of the album is “dumber than I am.” The first purely lock groove record may officially belong to Boyd Rice’s1978 Pagan Muzak album under the name of his long-standing project, Non. Rice describes the release as follows:
”Pagan Muzak is a 7″ vinyl long playing record housed in a 12″ sleeve. It consists of 17 locked/looped grooves, each of them containing a different noise. A second axis hole drilled off-centre doubles the number of tracks; and as it can be played back at up to four speeds – 16, 33, 45 or 78rpm – working out just how many tracks Pagan Muzak effectively offers the listener involves complicated calculations of all the different playback combinations of axis choice, turntable speeds and the grooves themselves. The mind boggles, yet when it was sold as a long playing record, some buyers thought they’d been short-changed by at least five inches. Rice recalls, “Because it came out as a 7″ record in an album sleeve, people used to go,[in a whining voice] ‘It says LP on here. . .’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘LP means long player, and this is the longest player you are ever going to find’.”
Lessard, of the long running RRR record label and store based out of Lowell, MA since the early 80s, has a long-standing tradition when dealing with lock grooves. “In 1993 RRR-100 was my 100th release and I wanted to do something special, a 100 lock-groove 7" seemed appropriate,” said Lessard. “I went thru 5, maybe 6 pressings and then one day I called the plant and asked for another pressing and they told me they lost the plates! DAMMITT!! Somehow they misplaced them and ‘adios amigo’ so I called Paul Brekus, the guy who mastered RRR-100, hoping he still had plates, unfortunately he had nothing and while we were commiserating on the phone he mentioned ‘Y'know, I figure I can put 250 lock-grooves on one side of an LP’ and with those words, RRR-500 was born. I don’t think it was my 500th release but it was close, HA!!RRR-1000 was also Pauls idea; one day he said he was feeling itchy and wanted to do a 1000 lock groove record and would I like to put it together? YOU BET!!! It’s not really my 1000th release, but it’s close, HA!!”
Why endlessly loop, and what can we gain from the experience as a listener apart from a non-traditional experiment? It’s true that loops change over duration, or at least their perception does. Repeated sounds change their meaning and very nature. Variation is revealed but how much of it is an illusion when we know for a fact that the change is non-existent? Is the listener manifesting the change or is it just the nature of understanding a sound, the brain trying to wrap around the texture? By nature of the loop, a rhythm is created that would not exist otherwise, clearly creating a new dynamic for the piece. There are no hard and fast rules on the subject, as every person processes such information differently. “How a person approaches the LP is entirely up to them, it doesn’t come with instructions-- so far response has been positive, mostly I get comments about how the LP demands active participation, you cant just listen to it, you gotta play it. Sometimes when I'm at home I'll let a groove play on and on in the background while I'm doing whatever, and back when I put out RRR-100 I set-up portable turntables around the house and let them play all night, occasionally changing the groove,” adds Lessard.
This brings to mind the ramification of the lock groove. If one loop of only a few brief seconds is to be theoretically played infinitely in a row, then what does that mean to the composer? How demanding, to have to make a statement so brief contain content worthy to merit being locked in time! How much can a moment contain? For sound artist C. Spencer Yeh, chance takes an important role in the process. “There's so much dependent on the physical aspects in some ways you just have to kind of ‘guess’ as there isn't always a strict guarantee it'll work out. However, some people seem to have a better mastery of it than others in anticipating, and incorporating the potential for chaos etc. into a lock groove. Depending on what/where the lock groove lands, you could just rely on the fact that it's a locked groove to create the composition for you because in a sense, the composition has already been decided.”
The person who decides is Paul Brekus who cuts the physical grooves and ultimately edits the source sounds and perfects the loops in painstaking detail. “We pick out the best 1.8 seconds of the track provided via a computer editor,” said Brekus. “We then have to be certain that the end points are at zero crossing, and aiming correctly to be certain there is no pop at the repeat point. There are times we have to take out 1/2 of a wave, (a very small fraction of a second) to avoid the pop, then stretch the track back to 1.8 seconds. 1.8 seconds is the exact time it takes for a 33-1/3 rpm record to make one full turn. For a 45, it's 1.3333 seconds. (seconds = 60 / rpm)”
Overall it’s up to the composer to set his own standard in regards to the effect and success, or relative failure, of their own lock groove. As a curator, Mr. Lessard handpicked a specially chosen few to execute their personality in such a format. In keeping account with style, he made selections that represented experts and asked for “aggressive” and “harsh” contributions. With each groove so closely related to the previous, spatial distinctions between artists can blur, but it’s clear to see that each artist takes their own spin at the process and demonstrates their specific strengths as sound artists. The line up of the record is allotted by degrees of categories, defined by the curator in his own words.
50/50 = old/new
old = GX, TNB, Incapacitants, R+G, Sudden Infant, AMK, Lopez, Noetinger, RLW, Dimuzio
new = Dilloway, Giffoni, Prurient, Marhaug, Drumm, Lescalleet, Romero, KFW, Yeh, Otomo
50/50 = noise/experimental
noise = TNB, Incapacitants, Prurient, Dilloway, Marhaug, etc etc
experimental = Lescalleet, Lopez, RLW, Noetinger, KFW, Yeh, etc etc
50/50 = USA/Intn'l
USA = GX, Prurient, KFW, Yeh, Lescalleet, etc etc
Intn'l = TNB, Sudden Infant, Incapacitants, Otomo, etc etc
50/50 = people I always work with/people I never work with
always = GX, TNB, Incapacitants, Prurient, Lescalleet, etc etc ,
never = Drumm, KFW, Giffoni, Lopez, Marhaug, etc etc
This process serves to show a clear compositional statement from the artists and fully reveal their dynamics and, not surprisingly, you can often tell the author by the sound. In effect the grooves teach us about the fundamentals of the artists. Can you get the effect of the Incapacitates in micro-installments and begin to understand the overall effect? Yes, yes you can. Sudden Infant offer many entry points to their highly refined action edits and surrealist tendencies. From the lulling ambient tones of Francisco Lopez to the crushing power collage of the New Blockaders to the fluxus-like absurdity of GX Jupitter Larson, the sounds mirror the personality of the performers and are diverse enough to continually engage the listener.
The philosophical ramifications are as endless as the locks themselves, spiraling into a vortex of repetition that can either be immobilizing in its atmosphere or crushed by the weight of its inherent frequency or tone. Perhaps the locks are a trap, dead ends of sounds, or the ultimate manifestation of what those sounds can mean. At this point, all people in contemporary society have adapted to a constant stream of repetitive electronic sounds, from everyday day appliances and modern living. These sounds have become a fundamental backdrop of society to the point where most industrial noise is barely noticed by the average person unless they are directly confronted by it. So to enter into the world of the lock groove is in a very real way a direct confrontation with everyday life and how extreme and affecting this audio information is to our psyche.
However it is the listener who dictates the process and commitment to the task at hand. Looked at from a sound art point of view, the RRR 1000 LP certainly makes a case for inclusion among the most important experimental works of the new century. It is unmistakably unique among any statement, be it from the towers of the academies or the pits of basement cassette culture. That Lessard is able to straddle those polemics without distinction or pretense, is a success all its own. In a fine line between brilliance and stupidity, one can hear Lessard’s cackle looped to the end of time.
by
STEVE LOWENTHAL on
9/5/2010
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