Perfect Sound Forever: The Secret Function of High End Stereos
If you want to, you can see pretty much any band that ever existed playing live, as long as they aren't too dead. You could see the Doors, with Ian Astbury from the Cult as Jim Morrison or perhaps Queen, without Freddie but with Paul Rodgers from Bad Company. It gets worse: Rick Buckler, the drummer from the Jam has joined a Jam tribute band called The Gift. The whole of rock and rolls back catalogue is on the road, fuelled on pure nostalgia, haunting motorways like zombie ghost ships. It is as though time has collapsed and everything that every happened since Bill Haley is happening right now, somewhere not far from you, with extra nights added due to popular demand. Stuff whose vitality was ephemeral has suddenly been granted longevity, seasoned with reverence. Often, acts will recreate a particular album or experience. The Who - what's left of them - played a replica of the set list of their seminal 'Live at Leeds' album at the very same venue. There is something for everyone: Roger Waters, Sparks, or perhaps Teenage Fanclub playing Bandwagonesque front-to-back. It's as nostalgic as those TimeLife compilations that are flogged on obscure shopping channels in the dead of night, but it also has a heightened sense of event whose subtext is the critical reappraisal of important artists. The venues they play also confer a new sense of cultural value on the artists. London's Festival Hall has seen Brian Wilson, Morrissey, the New York Dolls and all kinds of other pop flim-flam stride (or more likely shuffle) across its stage. The seriousness of proper concert halls provides kudos like white space in coffee table catalogues. (They also provide comfy seating for rheumatic bones.) A cynic might suggest that it is just the music industry maximising return on its back catalogue, rather than developing new artists (an expensive gamble risk that averse accountants who run the industry would rather avoid). Nevertheless, we invite all of this upon ourselves. Perhaps this is because the subtext is actually a personal issue. By ramping up the critical appraisal we acknowledge and mark significance of our teenage years. Some kind of validation conferring historical significance to those carefree moments, which slipped away, like tears in an ocean. It's not the band we want to see, but ourselves. Baby Boomers might want great sound and comfortable seats - but they still want to feel that edgy thrill of their teenage years. Instead of seeking out new thrills with youthful abandon, they have instead refused to let go of that moment. They have remade the world in their own image. You can see it in the deathly serious music magazines, in coffee table books, in the re-masterings, re-issues, re-packaged formats. In McCartney and Jaggers knighthoods. This same impulse finds physical form in the shape of high end Hi Fis. I'm in the South Moulton St branch of Bang & Olufsen where I'm endlessly opening and closing the sliding glass lid of the BeoSound 4 (1650 GBP) by waving my hand near a sensor. Next I'm pressing a brushed stainless steel button that activates the opening mechanism of the BeoCenter 2 (2850 GBP). The metallic crescent facia splits in two, an arm raises a glass disk revealing a depression for a CD. These exquisite pieces of engineering are fetish objects whose aesthetics and mechanics are hypnotic. 'Nice action' I find myself saying to the assistant in admiration of the supple robotics. There is no irony in the listening to bootlegs like 'The Velvet Underground Live at Max's Kansas City' - which was taped on Brigid Polks Sony 124 cassette recorder as she sat at a table chatting to friends - through super-expensive high fidelity Danish systems with gold plated plugs. Don't laugh - it's not ridiculous, it's a forensic replay searching for some moment where we might find ourselves revealed - before we betrayed ourselves, before hollow emptiness consumed us, before we became hideous parodies of our beautiful youth. We use it to chase authenticity, to perfectly reconstruct a moment that has long passed. The BeoSound4 is a way of clutching at time as it washes past you, and quite as fruitless. These B&O devices use design to amplify not just music but also sensation. In spite of their aesthetic minimalism, they turn a simple act into a complex exchange. The triangular relationship between you, the music and the mechanism that delivers the music leaks together into a single indistinguishable experience. As we age, memories of youth become ever more significant in our own personal mythology. Two thousand pound stereos are a way of externalising that significance. Perhaps that's why these B&O machines look like the control panel on a particularly swish time machine. The lightness of touch by which you exert control means it feels almost like your desire is transmitted telepathically. The LED displays illuminate from behind black glass - a conceit which dematerialises the stereos components. It suggests that the machine operates with a different set of physics, that materials can behave in unexpected ways. Maybe it suggests that it can do the same to space time fabric: Rewind: lost loves; Pause: innocent utopian dreams; Play: the sensation of youthful sap rising through your limbs.
Posted by anothersam at August 31, 2006 12:25 PM. 2 Comments
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Contents:
More Scenes In Cartoon Deserta
Generic Powerpoint Template: Delivering Bad News
The Best New Building In London
Book Review: The Infrastructural City
The Michael Jackson Monument Design Competition
Now Showing: John Baldessari Sings Sol LeWitt
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This Concrete 'O': On Serotonin, the M25, and the Motorik Picturesque
Church of the Literal Narrative
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Now Viewing: Married To The Eiffel Tower
Le Corbusiers Image Hoard: Poeme Electronique
Giant American Signs: Original Learning from Las Vegas Footage
Giant Soviet Signs Cut Into Forests
Bricks Melted Into Icicles: Napalm Decorative
C-Labs 'Unfriendly Skies' & 'Bootleg' Volume
2 The Lighthouse: Self Storage & Architectural Hallucinations
Ceci N'Est Pas Une Pipe: Infrastructure as Architectural Subconcious.
Viva Sectional Cinematography!
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Geography in Bad, Festive Drag.
Simulations of Industry: High Tech Architecture and Thatcherism
From The Factory to the Allotment: Tony Wilson, Urbanist
Koolhaas HouseLife / Gan Eden: The Revenge of Architectural Media
Ruburb-ric: The Ecologies of the Farnsworth House
Telly Savalas Looks At Birmingham Redux
Acts of Un-Building: Timelapse Demolitions
Yard Filth: Next Years Hot Look
Stonehenge: A Black Hole At The Heart Of British Architecture
The Popemobile: Mechanised Robes & Motorised Architecture
The Secret Language of Surface
Information Fields: Agriculture as Media
My Bloody Valentine: Sound as Substance
A Cubist Copse: Gehrys Serpentine Pavilion
Spouting Off: Some Thoughts On The Fountainhead
Form Follows Dysfunction: Bad Construction & The Morality of Detail
Vintage Tradeshow Surrealism: International Grune Woche
Moving Houses: Buildings In Motion
Desktop Study: The Strange World of Sports Studio Design
Married to the Eiffel Tower: More Objectum Sexuals
60 Years of The Crazy Horse Memorial
Married to the Berlin Wall: "The Best and Sexiest Wall Ever Existed!"
Inflatable Icebergs: Sublimated Guilt Has Never Been So Fun
The Cinderella Effect: Phantom Architectures of Illumination
Two Deaths and a Retirement: The Strange Shape of British Architecture
If London Were Like New York: Antique Schizo-Manhattanism
If London Were Like Venice: Antique Geo-Poetic Speculations and Hydro-Fantasy
41 Hours in an Elevator: The Movie
NASA: Mapping the Moon with Sport
Lemon Squeezy: Design Tendencies after the Juicy Salif
The Nihilistic Beauty of Weapons Arranged in Patterns
Dogs: Britains Greatest Design Obsession
Detroit Sucks: The Motor Shows Last Gasp
Authentic Replicas: Football and the Franchising of Place
Folk Football: Landscape, Space and Abstraction
A Wishing Well with a Fat Up Pipe
The Camoufluers and the Day-Glo Battleship
Pseudoccino: Instant Coffee Foam
Blown Up: More Inflatable Military Stuff
On Christmas Trees, Folk Forests and Staples Office Supplies
Hampton Courts Shrouded Sculptures
Named Fabric: 20 Sponsored Pieces of Architecture at the New Museum
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Architectural Magazines: Paranoid Beliefs, Public Autotheraphy - More on Clip/Stamp/Fold
James Bond Lives Next Door: Suburban Imagery as Industry
The Ghost of Christmas Futurism
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Shrouded Plinth - Urban Striptease
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Kim Jong II, The Great Architect
Place Faking: Instant Heritage for the Thames Gateway
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Enjoy The Silence: Bose Noise Cancelling Headphones
Telly Savalas Looks At Birmingham
In Search of Britains Vehicular History
Scary Suburbanism: Why Horror is at Home in the Suburbs
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Duplikate: Kate Moss on the Production Line of Individuality
Hollow Inside: Starbucks Foam and the Rise of Ambiguous Materials
Revisions to the Architecture of Hell
Crufts: Dogs, Design and Aesthetic Genetics
Eos Airlines: Executive Bubbles over the Atlantic
Google Earths Vertiginous Mapping
Church of the Ascension and Descension
Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles
Reading Lines: Skateboarding and Public Space
Chris Cornish: Prototyping History
The Most Visited Location in the UK
Anything to Feel Weightless Again: The Cargo Lifter and the Tropical Island Resort
'Its beauty will know no season'
2000 Years of Non Stop Nostalgia. Or How Half Timbering Made Me Whole Again.
Backpeddling into the Future: The Historical-Futurism of British Architecture
Miss Selfridges' Feeling for Fake Snow. The Oxford St. Lights and Why We Need Artificial Winter
New Tory Logo: A Hazy Shade of Politics
Jeff Koons, Rem Koolhaas, Hans Ulrich Obrist at the Serpentine
Celebrity Scents: The Bittersweet Smell of Success
Imperfect Pitch - Football, Space and Landscape
Product Placement: Making the Impossible Possible
Suburban Growth: Matthew Moores Field of Dreams
Perfect Sound Forever: The Secret Function of High End Stereos
A Little Light Product Placement
Some Advice To A Young Designer
Useless Proclamations for a Beautiful City
Topsy Turvy VSBA: Inverted Heros of an Upside Down Avant Guard
Everything Flows: ideological cartography
How Geostationary Was My Valley?
The Psychotic Utopia of the Suburbs and the Suburbanisation of War.
In a Lonely Place - Under Construction
Mach 3 Nitro Gel - Design that's foaming at the mouth.
Marchitecture. Architectural things to do in London this March
What happens when you cross a pen with a car?
Football Pitch: Best of British
The First Cut is the Cheapest - Blenheim Palace: pop architecture that goes for the jugular
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Anatomy of an Architectural News Story
Its All About the Big Benjamins
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The Exploding Concrete Inevitable. Lou Reed and the Casa da Musica
Untitled (Plastic Sack and Timber)
Berlin 1945 - The Obscene Picturesque
Interview: Jeremy Deller & Alan Kane
An Incredible Smell of Roasting Coffee
Langlands & Bell - The House of Osama Bin Laden
Architectural Criticism gets Sharp
Venturi, Scott Brown and my love that dare not speak its name.
Douglas Coupland: Design and Fiction
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Everything Counts - The Sound of Geography Collapsing.
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The drummer from the Jam is actually called Rick Buckler. Not Butler.
And now, I didn't meet him down in the tube station at midnight.
;-)
Amazing how spellcheckers alter names isnt it? Perhaps all names should be vetted by the Microsoft dictionary before being comitted to a birth certificate. Ive edited above - Thanks