elimae

Living on Tape: Re-thinking Noah Bracken's "Our Sound" as a Narrative of Mechanical Decay
James Brubaker

My readers should know, I did not want to write this essay. When Phil Richardson called and asked me to pen a retrospective of Noah Bracken's career for 4-Track Magazine, I told him no. I told him I wouldn't write the piece because I'd written a piece on Noah for Tape Op a few months before -- before the news of Bracken's untimely death -- and I didn't have anything else to say. In addition to that previous feature -- which dealt with Bracken's DIY ethics and aesthetics, notably his desire to self-release most of his music on CD-R's and cassette tapes -- I'd written no fewer than a dozen pieces about Bracken and his work. The first piece, an interview I conducted with Noah for Punk Planet in 1999, was the first time anyone secured an interview with the notoriously private musician. Of course, I had no problems getting in touch with Noah. We'd been friends since high school when I first saw him perform at a coffee shop talent show in Ann Arbor. After sitting through an hour of Dave Matthews Band and Rusted Root covers, Noah's song -- a sparse, almost aggressively tuneless folk number about Michigan winters -- was a revelation. I knew I needed to befriend Noah. When I saw him in school a few days later, I struck up a conversation and our relationship evolved from there. To this day, I'm one of a select few music writers to whom Noah Bracken would speak. In all honesty, I thought I'd written all I could about my friend, and the time had come to let him pass peacefully into the small niche of pop music history reserved for fiercely independent musicians who touch their fans' lives and fascinate recording hobbyists.
But then I received a call from Max, Noah's brother, asking if I could join him at Noah's rented house in Ypsilanti to help sort through tapes. I was too broke to travel so I contacted Phil, explained my situation, and asked if he could spot me a plane ticket from Oregon to Michigan. He agreed with the firm and expected condition that I'd write the retrospective he originally wanted. Even then, I had no ideas about what to write. That is, until I spent the weekend in Ypsilanti with Max listening to Noah's tapes. The things we heard will never be released -- Noah obviously didn't want them shared or he would have released them on his own ages ago -- but I was able to glean a good deal of information about my friend's music from listening. Let this essay, then, not be about Noah Bracken's life or death, but about his art.

In retrospect, nothing about Bracken's puzzling recorded legacy should surprise me. He did, after all, introduce me to a number of experimental sound recordings, most notably Alvin Lucier's I Am Sitting in a Room. Bracken introduced me to this piece after I watched him record and re-record a song in his basement for eight hours one summer afternoon in 1999. Though I was only to be in Ypsilanti for the afternoon, and had not seen Bracken for over a year, this is how he decided we should spend our time together -- him recording a song, one piece at a time, me sitting in a worn arm chair, watching. When I asked Noah why he recorded each track individually through microphones, rather than plugging the guitar or keyboard directly into the 4-track, he told me about Lucier's groundbreaking recording. Lucier's premise was simple -- he would record himself reading a short, explanatory piece of prose, record the playback on a second machine, then record this second playback onto the first machine, writing and rewriting his words into the tapes' iron oxide until his voice dissolved into the "resonant frequencies" of the room, itself. At the end of Lucier's thirty-second, and final, repetition, his voice had given way to the room's tonal thrum. The project was designed to illustrate tape's ability to control narrative through sound -- to re-imagine the sonic quality of rooms and reposition the human voice within those spaces. After recording his series of recitations, bouncing his own voice between machines into oblivion, rather than record the content onto a master Lucier spliced the pieces together to avoid the loss of fidelity inherent in the act of copying from one tape to another. Lucier knew that in order to ensure the most accurate representation of his experiment's sound his only option was to splice. In the wake of Noah Bracken's untimely passing, I am tempted to search for meaning in his fascination with Lucier's work -- to try to tease metaphor from the obscured voice and the decay of the subject. For now, however, such avenues seem less than appropriate. Let our focus remain on Bracken's music.

As a result of Bracken having introduced me to Lucier's work the two are now inextricably linked in my memory. Like Lucier, Bracken was an adventurous recording artist concerned with the sounds of rooms and their effects on his finished songs. What Bracken explained to me that afternoon when he introduced me to Lucier's work was that by recording each piece of the song separately, and all through microphones, the natural sound of his basement became part of the songs' arrangement. Here, many critics draw a direct comparison between Bracken's work and the early work of John Darnielle's The Mountain Goats or Bill Callahan's Smog. These artists' early songs, like Bracken's, were filled with the atmosphere of recording. Many of Darnielle's early songs, for example, were recorded straight onto tape through a cheap, Panasonic boom box, the machine's turning gears audible on the finished recordings. Still, comparing Bracken to Darnielle or Callahan is not quite accurate.
Despite critics' labeling of his work as lo-fi, Bracken's recordings stand apart from many of his peers' simply because of the meticulous attention to detail he afforded his songs. While the overall sound of Bracken's work might compare to the early recordings of someone like Darnielle, the simple truth is that Darnielle's songs embraced low fidelity in an attempt to present ideas in their purest, rawest forms. This philosophy of recording effectively equates a song's worth with emotional authenticity. By recording quickly and keeping first takes -- just as living, itself, is a first take concluding with death -- songs are not given the chance to develop or grow, but are treated as honest bursts of creativity. Beyond a basic aesthetic similarity, then, Bracken's work, with its many layers and experiments, shares little with the work of Darnielle and other lo-fi contemporaries.

Of Bracken's many recording experiments, the most infamous is his song, "Our Sound." The song evolved over several years and still exists -- or rather, until recently existed -- in a dozen forms. Thanks to Bracken's tendencies to archive his recorded materials, keeping fairly detailed notations on his recording methodologies and the differences between each extant version, I was able to track the song's evolution in an attempt to better understand its impenetrability. While these notes were rarely easy to read, I found an odd comfort in pouring over the written legacy of my dear friend. Such a task would have certainly been easier with his guidance and input, but I believe my reconstruction of the song's history is accurate.
For those unacquainted, then, with Bracken's work allow me to begin with a brief history and description of "Our Sound." The song's only release was on a tour-only CD-R called Sound for the Blind. Only seventy-five copies were made and sold on Bracken's final tour, six months before his death. On this release, "Our Sound" is track number four of seven and consists of exactly three minutes and twenty-four seconds of near silence. Casual listeners will hear nothing; however, the trained ear will detect faint tones and soft bits of static rumbling at the threshold of human hearing. The piece's inclusion is a bit baffling as the other six songs on the release are fairly traditional folk-pop songs that showcase Bracken's usual blend of lyrical melodicism and avant-garde recording techniques. Though these other songs had their presentational quirks -- stray bits of feedback, excessive reverb, etc. -- "Our Sound" was so outlandish that the piece was initially received as a joke of sorts -- a send up or homage of John Cage's 4'33" perhaps, or a self-effacing critique of Bracken's own art, which he sometimes regarded as dull.
Several months after the song's release, and its subsequent spread across the internet via file sharing services, rumors of alternate versions began to swell from message boards. Regretfully, I was largely responsible for this phenomenon. Having heard an earlier recording of the song on one of my visits to Ypsilanti, I mentioned its existence in a review of Sound for the Blind in an ill-advised attempt to explain the song's development. As a result, alternate versions of "Our Sound," became hotly sought after, but never found, commodities. Bracken's fans wanted to know what the song was meant to sound like, to see if they might understand why the song eventually found release in its final form. To this day, no one else has heard the song in any of its earlier incarnations.

Listening to "Our Sound"'s evolution from a folk-pop song to three minutes of barely audible noise is enlightening. The song evolved as Bracken attempted to perfect his recording philosophy and process through repetition and experimentation. This is where many of Bracken's staunchest critics take issue with his work's over reliance on production technique and refinement. For aficionados of lo-fi music, nothing is as valuable as the rough core of the song. This is the essence of lo-fi -- the static and hiss of home recording.
Though naïve, such romanticization of first takes is a lovely idea. By keeping first takes, a recording artist can potentially leave a legacy of pure moments in his wake. The moments may not be perfect or convey exact intent, but often, intentions only serve to muddle the truth of whatever it is we are trying to communicate in the first place. Whether or not a song succeeds does not matter so long as the moment of the song's birth is ecstatic, convulsive -- the song must be a living, quivering thing fighting for its life. Sometimes these bursts of truth are elegant; other times the songs are clumsy and raw, flailing into existence. Either way, the formation of the song is entirely sensuous, the un-distilled tenor of the performer's subconscious. Ultimately, by emphasizing a song's first gasp of breath, its childlike newness and innocence, proponents of this philosophy believe that first takes allow us to resist the urge to intellectualize our music.
Perhaps this is why Bracken was not interested in his first takes; he wanted to approach music intellectually, to make each song a carefully crafted text. Even some of Bracken's fans, however, felt that he was sometimes too meticulous. When confronted with a song like "Our Sound," we can even read Bracken as a contemporary answer to Beckett's Krapp, of Krapp's Last Tape, whose primary concern is the constant recontexutalization of his life. Krapp never fully exists in a given moment because he is always recording the narrative of his life on tape. In producing "Our Sound," Bracken appeared to be in the same dilemma, obsessing over the song's development, never pleased with his current work, failing to move forward because he was always looking backward. Perhaps the urge to compare Bracken with Krapp is heightened, at the moment, as Beckett's play ends with Krapp's infamous tape finally running out -- a metaphor for his death, no doubt, the true end to his process of narrativization. Alas, this essay is not meant to dwell on death and dying -- only on how artist's put their art to tape.

There seems to be a valid comparison between Krapp, obsessing over the story of his life on tape until said tape runs out, and the compulsive recording convolutions of my dear, brilliant friend. Tempting as it may be to exploit this comparison, however, I feel we must resist this reductive impulse. Such a reading of Bracken's work -- the evolution of a song into nothingness as metaphor for the end of an artist's life -- is too easy. That would be my narrative, our narrative -- not Noah Bracken's narrative. For me to apply such a narrative to Bracken's work would be disingenuous, would parallel only the manipulability of tape, itself. That's why tape was embraced so readily, was it not? Unlike records, tape allowed the freedom to record, to erase, to fundamentally change the text. Anyone working with tape can become a master of the recorded narrative. Even when tape fails, when it disintegrates and distorts, the decaying narrative is ours and ours alone. I do not want to apply a narrative to Bracken nor his work. Instead, let us tease the narrative from Bracken's tapes. In the tapes, we will find truth.

William Burroughs, regarding his own tape experiments, was quick to note that tape always hears more than artists intend, collecting otherwise inaudible, unnoticed sounds in addition to the intended sound object. There -- our ability to control narrative through tape is not as sound as I previously stated. Such unintended sounds are the premise for what ghost hunters refer to as EVP's -- electronic voice phenomena. The use of these phenomena was pioneered by Attila von Szalay, who allegedly captured such voices using reel-to-reel tape in 1956. Of course, most of us know that EVP's are not really the voices of ghosts, but are instead the result of static, radio transmissions, someone talking softly in a nearby room. Regardless, stubborn as they are, ghost hunters swear that these voices are communications from the dead, saying things like "get out," or "I'm scared," or "I miss him," even when most listeners only hear garbled static or soft breezes. The simple truth is that there are no ghosts to capture on tape. These people hear ghosts because they need to hear ghosts -- to believe in an existence beyond their own flesh, to believe in some connection to a world of lost friends and family members. Whatever their reasons, the one thing of which I am certain is that these enthusiasts are not hearing ghosts on tape.
But that does not mean that ghosts can not live on tape, figuratively, anyway. Is that not what we have, here, listening to Noah Bracken's work, posthumously? In particular, the twelve versions of "Our Sound," are -- or were -- nothing if not positively haunting evidence that not only helps us to understand the final version, but to understand the emotional and intellectual development of one of the most overlooked masters of contemporary folk music.

From Bracken's tapes we can begin to understand his artistic process and how he controlled the narrative of his song on tape. And while, yes, there is much to learn about "Our Sound," and why the song evolved into near-silence -- and this was my sole intent in undertaking this project -- as it happens, I am discovering that the underlying question to the song's development is inextricably tied to the artist himself. That is to say, it is only because we are interested in Bracken's work that our interest in the song continues to thrive. To that end, then, we must also consider the narrative of the artist, regardless of my previous refusals. Let us then finally turn to the tapes themselves so that this project can be realized.

The earliest existing tape -- which, as far as I can tell, is the first recorded version of the song -- was produced in December, 1997. The take consists entirely of Bracken lightly strumming on an electric guitar and singing softly in the background. In this first version, the lyrics are virtually indecipherable as, according to the production notebook, the song was recorded with a single mic placed several feet away from the guitar amp. In fact, the only discernible lyric is, "Don't let me be the last one," which some might be tempted to read as a plea for an early death. However, having heard this first version I can say, with confidence, that the lyrics are of little importance -- the vocal melody, characterized by a somewhat dour croon, delicately permeates the song, lending the piece a wistful, heartbroken air. From this first recording we can clearly hear that the song is about sorrow and transience, and that is all we need to know.
When Bracken revisited the song in the spring of 1998 he recorded three new versions, each one building on the basic elements of the first while keeping the vocals distant and the lyrics impenetrable. The second version of the song was a virtual do-over, only fixing some of the original's flaws. The third and fourth versions, each built directly onto this re-do then transferred to separate tapes, augmented the song's bones. The third version added a descending glockenspiel part over the bridge. The fourth maintained the glockenspiel and added a falsetto vocal harmony behind the chorus. While there is no clear reason as to why Bracken chose to document the song's evolution in this way -- working on a single master tape but archiving each version of the song separately -- I can only conclude that he was unwilling to trust his additions to the song, and preserved them so that he could revisit and scrutinize his previous attempts.
In the Autumn of 1999, Bracken revisited the song once again, this time adding more layers with each version -- minimal percussion, violin, organ, additional guitar parts. Through that autumn, Bracken built the song into a chamber-pop masterpiece. By version ten, the song was a lush, spacious dirge that, despite its difficult to discern lyrics, says everything that a pop song can say about loss and death. The song's mournful tone is nothing if not sensual -- the reason the lyrics, even at this late stage of the song's development, are inscrutable lies in Bracken's desire for the song to communicate directly with the body, to de-intellectualize sorrow. Therein lies the brilliance of Bracken's work -- while his peers focused on the first take as a vehicle for emotional urgency and authenticity, Bracken's meticulous production ultimately transcends the self-consciousness of its own creation. "Our Sound,” at this stage of development, was an intellectual endeavor of such flawless construction that the end result encouraged this listener to lose himself in its wash of sound. The song attempts to understand how the body feels loss without the context provided by thought -- the music makes us shudder, not think. The only flaw with this late version is in the recording's fidelity. Much of Bracken's work was intentionally lo-fi, but here the tape sounds thin, worn out with unnatural static filtering into the mix. From this we can be certain that Bracken was using a single master tape for all of his overdubs, resulting in excessive wear.
By the eleventh version of "Our Sound," the tape's disintegration had worsened, presumably from the passage of time. This new version was not recorded until the spring of 2001. Here, Bracken introduced a trumpet player to perform a subtle melodic line over the song's introduction and conclusion. Though the trumpet contributes an astonishing new texture to the piece, this penultimate version of the song is murky and difficult to listen to -- the cavernous atmosphere contributes to the piece's emotional depth, but it also obscures the melody and production to the point of overwhelming the arrangement's intricacies. Here, the narrative of Noah Bracken's "Our Sound" is almost finished. Recorded and re-recorded into muddiness, the song had been deemphasized. Fidelity's decay became the story of the song.
Revisiting this tape now, I cannot help but think of the apocryphal stories surrounding the creation of Sly and the Family Stone's There's a Riot Goin' On. Allegedly, Sly Stone would invite groupies to his recording studio and have them sing "for the album" as a means of seduction. After sleeping with a groupie, he would erase her effort. From so much use, the tape grew tired and thin resulting in an ugly sounding -- though brilliant -- final product. The decay of the master tape for "Our Sound" is even worse, surely not as the result of Bracken's attempts to seduce groupies -- he did not even have groupies -- but through his own quest for perfection. Perhaps through both of these examples, the primary narrative is not the finished music but the story of why the tapes wore out.
By the time the twelfth, familiar, and utterly baffling version of "Our Sound" was completed, whatever process had been eating away at Bracken's tape was finished. This final version -- silent, except for barely audible white noise -- was completed in June, 2003, shortly before the artist's final tour.

In reflecting on Noah Bracken's unreleased tapes, I can not help but consider William Basinski's renowned set of albums, The Disintegration Loops. The collection grew from Basinski's attempt to preserve a series of ambient loops he had recorded throughout the 1980's. As Basinski transfered his tapes to digital files, he found that the tape's ferrite began shedding from its plastic backing, effectively erasing sections of his compositions. As the filings piled up beneath his reel-to-reel he recognized, as he put it succinctly in the collection's liner notes, that "The music was dying." He continued the transfer, anyway. The end result, The Disintegration Loops I-IV is a haunting series of compositions that direct our attention not so much to the music itself, but to the process of decay inflicted upon the music by time. Indeed, Basinski's loops are not acclaimed because they are compositionally engaging. In fact, many reviewers commented on the monotony of listening to the slow disintegration of a single loop for thirty minutes. The reason Basinski's transferred tapes resonate with us is because, in them, we hear our own mortality. No matter how much narrative we build on the medium, tape, like our bodies, is in a constant state of decay. As tape slowly dies, taking music with it, our bodies, too, slowly disintegrate -- even now, slow holes open in our organs and muscles like so many flakes of iron oxide rubbed from plastic bands. Like tape, the human body is strictly residual, always failing from the moment of its inception.
Perhaps Basinski's narrative -- a narrative of mechanical process and decay rather than creative development -- is an appropriate example for how to consider Bracken's "Our Sound." Many of us consider Noah's work as a creative process, attempt to understand his impulses as a writer and a producer. Maybe the lesson we can learn from hearing his tapes posthumously -- after that aneurysm burst in his brain while he was eating a bowl of Cheerios, after he was found by his roommate later that afternoon, his hair splayed out neatly beside the cereal bowl, its contents turned to mush, after I realized I would never hear a new song of Noah's, nor speak to him ever again -- is that Noah Bracken's "Our Sound," was never meant to be a perfect slice of downtrodden pop music. For years, Bracken's fans have waited to hear what "Our Sound" was supposed to sound like; what they don't understand is that, like Basinski's Disintegration Loops, Noah's song was released in its ideal form. Now, it is the only existing form after Max and I took magnets to Noah's tapes when we were finished listening. All that remains now is the final version -- that elegant treatise on the mechanical limitations of the recording process, on decaying tapes. This was the narrative Noah was attempting to document -- not the song, but the way it rots. And there in the static, buried beneath the sound of the room and the tape's degradation is a voice whispering from another world, saying "I'm scared,” or if we listen closer, still, a gentle acoustic guitar strummed by a teenage boy in an Ann Arbor coffee shop.