Deconstructing the Rock Band

Record Production & Phonology

Developed for RMIT Media Arts

GUITARS - TRANSFORMING THEIR RECOGNIZABLE SOUND

While the history of the sound of rock (as predominantly expressed through guitars) may appear to be a continual return to a series of archetypes (the sound of Keith Richards' guitar, etc.), it can also be viewed as a history of continual experimentation in the sound of guitars. Page himself based much of his sonic preoccupations on the period of intense experimentation done with electric blues through the 60s. While those sounds might appear archetypal now, they were originally developed as unique and explorative sounds - which later were endlessly copied and modified. In the 70s, three streams radically explored guitar treatments: Krautrock, Post-Glam and Post-Punk.

EXAMPLES

KING CRIMSON - One Red Nightmare (1974)
Robert Fripp's band prior to going solo and exploring minimalist ideas with tape delays. Basically a live recording, this track explores large scale dramatic shifts in intensity - from extremely soft sections to very hard and loud rock sections. As such it demonstrates Fripp's jazz-derived application of shifting the identity of the guitar sound through the varying degrees of intensity as generated by the performance of the guitar. This type of approach to a guitar sound is clearly influential on Steve Albini's work in Rapeman and Shellac.

CLUSTER - Hollywood (1974)
One of the key Krautrock bands, Cluster exemplify the approach to heavily treating and processing sounds through both designed and custom-modified effects units. Their approach in this way also influenced Eno and his use of the credit "treated guitars" on his early albums.

BRIAN ENO - Needles In The Camel's Eye (1975)
From Eno's first solo rock album after leaving the seminal Glam Rock group Roxy Music. Throughout this album (Here Come The Warm Jets) Eno applied Phil Spector's 'wall of sound' approach to thickly layering the sounds of all instruments in the studio environment. Eno's explorations of guitar textures in this and other tracks from the album have since been influential on much art-oriented guitar noise.

DAVID BOWIE - Heroes (1977)
From the trilogy of albums recorded with Robert Fripp and Brian Eno in Germany (Low, 1975; Heroes, 1977; Scary Monsters, 1979). Note the distortions and layerings of Fripp's guitar work as treated and produced by Eno. The guitar sound is almost abstracted to represent a guitar 'wall of sound' while appearing alien and highly processed. Fripp's atonal chords and riffs complement this alien effect.

WIRE - Practice Makes Perfect (1978)
Wire (along with Ultravox and Japan) make up a grouping of Punk art-school bands who were equally inspired by Glam Rock and Eno's experimental studio explorations. (Eno during this time gave many interviews discussing how he used the studio as an 'instrument'). Wire took the noise experiments of The Velvet Underground and combined it with Eno's notion of 'treated guitars'. (Eno had worked in the studio with the Velvet Underground's John Cale on various projects during the 70s). Wire's 'sheet of metal' guitar chords were also influential on the Pixies and Big Black (both bands being produced by Steve Albini).

LOU REED - Street Hassle (1978)
While Cale had done solo albums with Eno, and Reed with Bowie - forming a brace of Post-Glam Post-Velvet Underground explorations - Reed explored guitar textures and sounds to an extreme firstly on Metal Machine Music (1975) and then on the Street Hassle album. This album particularly focused on live, ambient room recordings of amplified guitars using the Binaural microphone system. Note both the liveness of the guitar and the spatial characteristics of the amplified sound.

GUITARS - REDEFINING THEIR SOUND

A wide range of bands have since applied many of the ideas, processes, textures and treatments of the above. Most 'noise-oriented' groups in the 80s sought to distort guitar textures and presences to new extremes - through detunings, effects processing, spatialization, and so on.

EXAMPLES

JESUS & THE MARY CHAIN - Kill Surf City (1987)
Heavily influenced by The Velvet Underground stylistically and Eno's take on Spector's 'wall of sound' sonically, the guitars in this track are heavily treated to create a true wall of guitar noise. Note the similarities here to Reed's Metal Machine Music and Cale's original Velvets ideas of tonal drones.

THE AGE OF CHANCE - Kiss (1986)
Distilling both post-Punk and Post Glam stylistics into a dance floor cacophony, this track deliberately collides dance beat elements with rock guitars. Note how the 'chord' has been reduced to a monolithic presence - devoid of any fundamental tuning as in Grandmixer DST's scratching of rock chord-bites in Rockit.

TRANSVISION VAMP - Revolution Baby (1987)
Along with The Age Of Chance and Sigue Sigue Sputnik, Transvision Vamp started out as very theatrical deployers of rock guitar sounds. In fact, the sound of the guitar on a track like this - quoting the already-highly-stylized rock guitar of Marc Bolan & T-Rex - could be regarded as the 'sound effect' of a guitar.

LOOP - Black Sun (1988)
Loop (along with other bands like Spacemen Three and My Bloody Valentine) form a network of noise-drone guitar bands who specialized in playing long meandering tracks which carried on a post-Velvets tradition of fuzz rock. In fact, Loop's use of multi-layered fuzz guitars and wah-pedals is like a merger between early Stooges albums and early Krautrock experiments conducted by Can, Neu and Faust.

SONIC YOUTH - Expressway (1988)
The most successful of 80s noise-drone bands, Sonic Youth ironically incorporate Beach Boys harmonic density (courtesy of Brian Wilson's production techniques which were influential on Eno, Reed & Cale) with radical de/retuning of their guitars (courtesy of Cale and Glenn Branca's applications of Lamont Young's drone-tunings). Note how tuning, effects, spatialization and performance all contribute to the strange conglomerate rock effect of Sonic Youth's music.

Text © Philip Brophy.