Take It With A Grain Of Salt

One of the major structural decisions I made over the summer AND YES THESE ARE ALL AGREED WITH MY EDITOR WHO SAYS THEY AREN’T is to end my book in 2001. There are a few reasons for this (and I’ll reveal some at a later date) but my resolution also tallies well with the seismic changes in the consumption of music and the democratization of recording that occurred in the noughties. It’s always nice to neatly sidestep a squirming and squealing can of worms.

The 90s were boom years for physical product, and for the independently-minded (in [post-rock], that’s pretty much everyone), this often meant insisting on a firm link between aesthetics and music. Many designed their own iconic covers; some went even further. I had a very agreeable chat with Jeff Mueller (Rodan, June Of 44, Shipping News) the other week and, among the music natter, I also found out that he was a letterpress practitioner, something dating from the first June Of 44 album.

 

I was looking for ways to package my music that were interesting, and less plastic-y, I guess. I liked the idea of a paper, or cardboard, package, on recycled stuff. […] I felt that when you got that first Tortoise record, when you got Shellac’s At Action Park, or when you got the first Rachel’s record, it was packaged in something that was so careful, and so conceived, and so realised, I felt that might inform how you might open it up and listen to it.

 

This set me off thinking about formatting more generally and, in particular, about the sequence of Tortoise 12”s released in 1996. Anyone who frequented independent record shops that year is sure to remember their die-cut yellow splendour. Interestingly, prior to then, most of the Tortoise singles had been 7”s and the first two, especially, fit in with the US underground aesthetic of the time – coloured vinyl, wraparound poly-bagged sleeves, retro-tinged artwork. The difference between their first single, and the Djed/Tjed 12”, is acute.

Each of these 12”s offered subtle-to-radical reworkings of tracks on Millions Now Living Will Never Die, or new explorations, often in collaboration with more electronica-identified artists whom they strongly admired. Putting this material only on a 12” – there were none of the usual accompanying CD singles – seemed to be making a statement about the group’s current ambition and, perhaps more pertinently, what they didn’t want to be identified with.

In my efforts to understand the 12” in this context, I recalled listening to this somewhat rambling documentary on the 12” single. Yes, it’s got everyone’s favourite rent-a-bitter-quote Paul Morley ‘presenting’ and self-aggrandizing, but the standard of punditry is high – Tom Moulton, Lucy O’Brien, some bloke who presses 12”s – and Morley generally lets them witter on nicely. One line from it, early on, really remained with me: Morley says to a somewhat piqued New Order that they’ve made a single (1983’s ‘Blue Monday’, natch) with ‘a prog rock length…’ *pregnant pause, as Sumner et al seethe through the radio silence* ‘…which is also the perfect length for a disco track.’ 

I don’t think Ver Order really forgave him, judging by how swiftly they moved on to talking about the record sleeve, but Morley made a good point, and I found it floating up in my head when thinking about Tortoise, and the associations of the 12” single. The links with prog are for another time, but many of the tracks are long, and unless an artist is particularly keen on the James Brown-ish ‘Part One’ / ‘Part Two’ of a 7” (and happy to put up with the inferior sound quality), or has a track that’s even too long for one 12” (Four Tet’s ‘Thirtysixtwentyfive’, Insides’ ‘Clear Skin’), it’s the obvious route. The 12” single, with its rich history in mixing, scratching, disco, dub, and 80s pop remixes offered – above all else – space. Quite literally. Grooves were wider: tracks could not only be lengthier, but bigger in sound, offering greater scope for extremes and subtleties of antagonism, fragility, tension and bliss. And let’s not forget that the visual canvas of the 12", whether busy or stark, offered way more impact.

  

I got excited by my emergent little theory, and I probably expected Ian Crause to say something fitting it when I asked him why Disco Inferno released a series of 12" EPs in the early 1990s. After all, they have (albeit retrospectively) been afforded a consistency similar to those Tortoise 12”s: collated as The 5 EPs and the subject of a Pitchfork oral history.

In fact, Crause told me, yes artwork was extremely important to DI, but the formatting was largely practical. Because the band had amassed a lot of material during the period late ’91–early ’92 (when DI regrouped, and drastically changed their sound), EPs were a good way to keep the momentum flowing and increase anticipation for the forthcoming album. But after DI Go Pop, it was a different story. Crause says

Everyone expected DI Go Pop to be a critical hit and get us an audience, which it didn't, so Geoff [Travis, of Rough Trade] suggested holding off on the next album and making more singles for a year or so. […] Of course from the point of view of record labels, an EP is far cheaper to make and promote than an album, which is a far larger undertaking.

The lesson with [post-rock], again and again, and even with something as seemingly innocuous as formatting: enjoy constructing theories, but never, ever, make assumptions. I love writing this book.