John Lavell
' Do you read me ?...Loud and clear '
M, Pop Muzik (1979)
M's 12" UK release featured two 'A' tracks (the other titled M Factor ) cut into the vinyl, side by side to form a double groove with both tracks starting at the outer edge and finishing (naturally enough) in the middle. Which of the tracks randomly played was determined by where the needle hit the lead-in. To complement this format the flip side featured a 'C-side' the natural (and has been suggested punning on seaside) progression from A and B sides.
Due to the fact that M Factor was a shorter track it ended with a long silence as the needle completed its journey along the groove to the middle... an almost silent skater on ice...
Nicholson Baker 1,The Mezzanine (1988) The main protagonist Howie contemplates grooves he has created ice skating.
If you made a negative of that image of my skate blade’s gorge, you would arrive at the magnified record groove—a hushed black river valley of asphaltic ripples soft enough to be impressed with the treads of your Vibram soles; an image cast from a master mold that was the result of a stylus forced to plow through wax as it negotiated complex mechanical compromises between all the various conceptually independent oscillations that stereophony demanded of it; ripples so interfingered and confused that only after a day with surveying equipment, pacing off distances and making calculations (your feet sparking static with each step) are you able to spray-paint “Bass Clarinet” with some confidence in orange on an intermittent flume of vinyl, as workers in Scotchgard vests spray-paint the road to indicate utility lines beneath. Cobblestone-sized particles of airborne dust, unlucky spores with rinds like coconuts, and big obsidian chunks of cigarette smoke are lodged here and there in the oddly echoless surface, and once in a while, a precious boulder of diamond, shorn somehow from the stylus by this softer surface, shines out from the slope, where it has been pounded deep into the material by later playings sworn at by the listener as if it too were common dust. That was needle wear.
1 During the mid-1990s Baker, related in Double Fold (2001), condemned (generating considerable controvesy) the policy of libaries that disposed and destroyed card catalogues and newspaper collections. He is also a devotee of the footnote.
Due to the fact that M Factor was a shorter track it ended with a long silence as the needle completed its journey along the groove to the middle... an almost silent skater on ice...
Nicholson Baker 1,The Mezzanine (1988) The main protagonist Howie contemplates grooves he has created ice skating.
If you made a negative of that image of my skate blade’s gorge, you would arrive at the magnified record groove—a hushed black river valley of asphaltic ripples soft enough to be impressed with the treads of your Vibram soles; an image cast from a master mold that was the result of a stylus forced to plow through wax as it negotiated complex mechanical compromises between all the various conceptually independent oscillations that stereophony demanded of it; ripples so interfingered and confused that only after a day with surveying equipment, pacing off distances and making calculations (your feet sparking static with each step) are you able to spray-paint “Bass Clarinet” with some confidence in orange on an intermittent flume of vinyl, as workers in Scotchgard vests spray-paint the road to indicate utility lines beneath. Cobblestone-sized particles of airborne dust, unlucky spores with rinds like coconuts, and big obsidian chunks of cigarette smoke are lodged here and there in the oddly echoless surface, and once in a while, a precious boulder of diamond, shorn somehow from the stylus by this softer surface, shines out from the slope, where it has been pounded deep into the material by later playings sworn at by the listener as if it too were common dust. That was needle wear.
1 During the mid-1990s Baker, related in Double Fold (2001), condemned (generating considerable controvesy) the policy of libaries that disposed and destroyed card catalogues and newspaper collections. He is also a devotee of the footnote.
My interest is in the journey that words can take us on...
It's wonderful…
Everywhere, so white…
The river has frozen over…
Not a soul on the ice…
Only me skating fast…
I'm speeding past trees,
Leaving little lines in the ice,
Cutting out little lines
In the ice splitting, splitting sound,
Silver heels spitting, spitting snow.
There's something moving
Under, under the ice,
Moving under ice,
Through water,
Trying to get out of the cold water.
"It's me."
Something, someone--help them.
"It's me."
Kate Bush, Under Ice (1985)
Everywhere, so white…
The river has frozen over…
Not a soul on the ice…
Only me skating fast…
I'm speeding past trees,
Leaving little lines in the ice,
Cutting out little lines
In the ice splitting, splitting sound,
Silver heels spitting, spitting snow.
There's something moving
Under, under the ice,
Moving under ice,
Through water,
Trying to get out of the cold water.
"It's me."
Something, someone--help them.
"It's me."
Kate Bush, Under Ice (1985)
‘The game of common etymology makes of writing a cutting movement, a tear, a crisis...the proper tool for writing was also proper to incising: the stylet...this incisive reminder still invokes a cutting operation, if not a butchery: a kind of violence...’
Maurice Blanchot (1907-2003)
