Paul Nataraj - You Sound Like A Broken Record

ATTN:Magazine

It’s an appropriate time to be writing this review. Recently I’ve been thinking about how the listener impresses themselves upon the listening experience and vice versa. I’m planning to include a new section in the ATTN:Newsletter this month, where an artist writes a few sentences on a particularly memorable listening experience from their past; a moment at which an album chimed perfectly with circumstance, or offered a glimmer of consolation in a moment of misery, or simply found itself loitering in the background of an unforgettable event. While the presence of music can reframe or galvanise the significance of experience (see also: almost every film ever made), our own experiences can also instigate a reframing of music. I have records in my collection whose melodies now carry various haunts on their backs; no longer mere configurations of vibrations and wavelengths, but instigators of vivid nostalgic re-living. William Basinski’s “d|p 4” now triggers the memory of stranded at Brighton train station after my first big break-up, while Automatic For The People by R.E.M. takes me back to long car journeys – the motorways, the Cotswold hillsides – on the way to seeing my dad every other Saturday.

You Sound Like A Broken Record is, in part, an exploration of this intrinsic link between listening and personal experience. Volunteers gifted some of their most treasured vinyls to Nataraj, who then inscribed the owner’s memories and anecdotes on the surface of the record. In doing so, he remarks on the vinyl as an outsourcing of memory, as much a sonic medium as a reservoir for nostalgia. The needle passes over the music written into the grooves, but also the pops and crackles of written subjective experience; those thoughts and images whose presence is as potent as the musical instruments themselves, forcing original artistic intention to feud with the interruptive dents of new meaning.

There’s a final step in the process. Nataraj has collated both the output of the vandalised records and the audio of his interviews with his volunteers, using this material as the raw fabric for an entirely fresh compositional work: slicing up beats and voices into new rhythms, sending split-second fragments into stuttering loops and new melodic motifs, blending the rustling recordings of one volunteer with the anecdotal retellings of another. I hear fragments of stories without beginnings – songs sung about roses and tulips, single words dislocated from grand narratives – strung through stumbling hip hop beats and the crackling residue of flutes and retro electronics, or welded to glitching fractions of anthemic choruses. A paradox emerges. In part, this audio is reverted back to its original state – a semantically vacant blotch of colour, ripped away from its source context and free to be used within a brand new patchwork. Yet once I know the process behind Nataraj’s work, it’s impossible to not hear the traces of haunt and love and intimacy within his collages.

You Sound Like A Broken Record resides at the two extremes of the spectrum. On one end, it perceives sound as a vessel for personal significance and a map through annuls of memory. On the other, it lays the semantics to waste, reducing sound to husks of source audio that can be ruthlessly chopped, delayed and reversed into new shapes. As such, the final product is both a homage to potency of subjective listening experiences, and the audio equivalent of coming home to find that someone has turned your childhood photo album into a cut-and-glue abstract collage, using the blues and reds of beloved toys and favourite clothing for their colour profile alone. It’s a sentimental work. It’s a nihilistic work. It’s a lot of fun to think about, and a lot of fun to listen to.

A Closer Listen

This is one of the coolest projects we’ve encountered all year.  Seeing these slices of vinyl makes us feel jealous, wistful and humble.  This PhD project has already been displayed at an art center in Glasgow and a symposium in Germany.  Physically beautiful, philosophically inspiring and emotionally resonant, You Sound Like a Broken Record is one of the year’s true originals.

We wish we were one of the fourteen volunteers were asked to make the ultimate vinyl sacrifice and were rewarded with the ultimate vinyl gift.  Yet given the chance, would we have done so?  Would I have parted with my original copy of Split Enz’ laser-etched True Colours or The Hues Corporation’s “Rock the Boat” 45, the first record I ever purchased?  And furthermore, would I have allowed someone to write on them?

Given the fact that the actual records we own ~ especially the oldest, most cherished copies ~ are often played over a designated period of time before being filed away forever, they become more powerful as memory tokens than as actual records.  I love the records mentioned above, but I haven’t played them for years.  Instead, I’ve played the digital versions, afraid to worsen their already abraded sound.  (The 45 is particularly scratchy as it was played over a hundred times on a portable red and white Fischer-Price turntable.)  But Nataraj likes the scratch, the static, the stuck groove.  In these metamorphosed productions he brings such patinas to the fore.

The volunteers were interviewed about the connections to their vinyl.  These interviews were then etched on the records and integrated into sonic reconstructions.  The repositories of memory have now become objets d’art. Past and present mingle; time folds back on itself.  The physical records represent the ways in which our favorite songs and albums become overwritten by our invisible impressions, evaluations and experiences, from simple associations (first kiss, summer’s end) to complex, even conflicted feelings (“I can’t stop playing this song, even though it makes me sad”).  As Nataraj writes, “The idea of death and loss inherent in the record seems to be a constant in the ethnographies I collected.”  Everything is ephemeral.  These objects are disintegrating as our memories are evaporating and our clocks are running down.

Paul Nataraj’s music ~ and yes, it’s appropriate to call this his music ~ sounds fiercely of its time.  In many cases, the originals have been sampled and looped beyond all recognition.  Snippets bubble to the surface from time to time, enough to remind us of what once was, like the nostalgia of nostalgia.  Some tracks flirt with drone, others with pure abstraction.  The wobbly segments remind us of Kid Koala, the juxtapositions of Felix Kubin.  Once upon a time, sampling was seen as a clean insertion of snippets; Nataraj dirties it up, creating a series of sound collages.  “Lil Louis” is transformed into futuristic techno, “Duran Duran” into something more “Beat Box” than “The Wild Boys.”  The percussive tracks are especially effective, introducing new ways of dancing.  The prominent drums of “Badgewearer” are powerful enough to punch through the aluminum foil. “Tru Thoughts” includes the sample, “started playing around with sound,” operating as a 21st century version of M|A|R|R|S.  In “Nicki Thomas,” the needle at the end of the groove is just as important as the needle in the center.

One wonders if the streaming generation will ever understand the tactile bond between record and owner.  Younger music fans realize that something has been lost, and have responded by contributing to the resurgence of vinyl.  You Sound Like a Broken Record is a love letter to vinyl and its fans.  It’s also a statement that beauty can lie in brokenness.  In 1974, Chong screamed to Cheech, “You ruined my record, man!”  44 years later, Paul Nataraj makes ruin sound like eloquence.  (Richard Allen)