So, having downloaded the new Mogwai album, I put it on in the background, and got down to studying, or something of the sort. It tinkled and twanged in the crappy dorm speakers nicely and glamorously. The guitars on the album are squeaky clean and ringing, produced as hell, no wonder the album is being called genius left and right. If you treat it as a factory-made cake, where the sugar, cream, and other ingredients are in exactly the right proportions, then the epithet has to be admitted as fair.
But the sweet-sounding idyll was suddenly interrupted by strange jerks and stutters. Usually this means that the file is corrupted, and I'll have to re-download the whole album. I was already about to wince, but the strange sound just wouldn't end. Then it occurred to me that one single file from the album couldn't possibly be entirely corrupted, especially since I downloaded a RAR archive, which checks integrity during extraction using the CRC algorithm. As a result, I continued to listen to the track further, trying to understand: did the Mogwai musicians really decide to mock the listener and shove onto a blatantly commercial and easily digestible record a vicious and prickly track, similar to harsh cut-up electronica and partly to the duo The Books. My opinion changed every few seconds, and my brain was paralyzed, because melodic instrumental music, sliced by some creepy dismembering maniac into small pieces, sounded simply mind-blowing.
In the end, I decided that this was the author's intent, and was already about to forgive Mogwai all their sins for such a stunt . But I had enough pedantry to re-download the album anew, just to check. Of course, in the "normal" version of the album that very track Friend Of The Night turned out to be a rather boring single, which nowadays plays even on FM radio, and is by no means a piece of pathological anatomical art. And what I mistook for the stubbornness and mania of the musicians, turned out to be nothing more than a cunning audio recording defect. Obviously, the album was stolen from the studio while still unfinished, which is why the effect, full of psychedelia and magic, appeared.
Now I'll explain why the story has such a title. All this thoroughly reminded me of Andrey Gorokhov's usual talks about how sound quality is not of decisive importance in the perception of music, and that a clear and refined studio recording, which major labels and music craftsmen love so much, sometimes altogether kills the magic and drive. My story is connected to such a point of view only indirectly, but it reminds us of similar things.
About how technical means like sampling have truly opened up new horizons and allowed unprecedented ideas to be brought to life. And about how in sound painting absolutely all techniques are indeed permissible: both noise, and basically any sound can not only be built into a musical composition as decorative elements, but are music in themselves, or can form the backbone of a composition. And about how chance can spawn things in art that sometimes cannot be achieved by long labor and virtuosity.
To me these are absolutely obvious axioms, and it is very strange for me to see when people hold a different opinion.
P.S. With no hope that anyone will support my philosophizing, I'll post the files anyway.
Regular version Amazing version
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