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Twin Town High (vol. 8) |
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Fog
Wednesday 07 May @ 10:16:21 |
 by P.J. Morel
It’s no secret that the turntable has had a hard time adjusting to new environs, musically speaking, though it hasn’t been for want of trying. Since hip-hop DJs first realized a record player could be used as an instrument back in the late ’70s, enthusiastic and often well-meaning pop musicians have tried using them in all kinds of music. They’ve tried adding a sample here, a scratch there (and of course many, many played-out dance beats) to the usual guitar, bass & drums formula. The results have been mixed at best, and the recent history of rap-metal has been downright distasteful.
But there may yet be some life for the turntable as an instrument in pop music. Local musician Andrew Broder has been mining a rich vein of avant-garde turntabilism for the last few years in Fog, a project that surrounds them with soulful piano melodies and sparse, spacey beats. Unlike many musicians who have approached the decks from a pop perspective, Broder doesn’t use them to replay music’s most hackneyed moments for the umpteenth time. Instead, his palette of scratch vinyl is a rag-and-bone shop of forgotten sounds: his music feels like it just came out of an old trunk in the basement. It’s mysterious, rich with emotional references that can’t quite be recalled. His songs have the texture of mulch.
Broder’s favorite sounds are often not overtly musical. Fog’s latest opus, Ether Teeth, makes particular use of bird sounds as a unifying element. He snagged his bird songs from what appears to be a crusty old birding-by-ear record. “It is said no two robins ever sing exactly alike,” says crackly voice of the record’s narrator on “cheerupcheerily” before being obscured by a forest of twitters. Bird songs recur at intervals throughout the album, becoming a theme of sorts. But they also inform the performances of many other instruments: Fidgety violin scratches, sampled slide guitar glisses and vocal samples all take on an avian character in relation to the chirping.
Which gets to part of Mr. Broder’s genius as a turntable artist: Because they play back prerecorded sounds, the obvious temptation is to use turntables very literally; to make another piece of music manifest in a new song. That’s been the essence of “sampling,” the sort that’s spawned so many copyright lawsuits. But Broder isn’t content to just play back other sounds. Rather, he has them enter into a dialogue with the other instruments, the vinyl samples eliciting flurries of musical parodies and impersonations from the other elements. On “Apologizing to Mystery,” an owl’s hoot keeps company with a similarly monotonic, stuttering vocal. The vinyl record mimics sound in the real world, and in turn the other instruments mimic the sample.
As a result, there’s an odd and heartening message underlying the music that creeps up on you after a while: It’s as though the whole world is singing to you, if you just pay attention. “The Girl from the Gum Commercial” makes the case particularly well, using the smack of chewing gum as the drum part. The music hangs on these snippets of real sound like clothes on a mannequin, filling the spaces in between like the music in your head. It’s rather beautiful, and very sweet.
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