It’s midday in a busy square at the heart of the city. A man stops in the middle of the crowd and bends to the ground. Few notice. It only becomes clear what he has been doing once he rises and steps back, holding a stick of white chalk in his right hand. He walks off alone. In a fleeting moment before the throng of pedestrians closes back in, one can make out on the ground in large capital letters: JESUS, OUR SAVIOUR.
This may or may not have happened. And if it did, it probably didn’t happen in quite such dream-like slow motion as it does in my imagination, each movement weighted with stifling significance. I was 17 when a friend relayed this story to me following his visit to Montreal as part of a family road-trip around Canada. And in the years hence, it’s a scene that’s continually returned to me, surely distorted further away from its original telling — let alone the originating event — at each reappearance. My imperfect memory and affective investment have bestowed the episode with a yearning romanticism, an invented nostalgia, even though this sort of po-faced display of religiosity would have my stomach churning and lip curling at most any other time.
Why has this story continued to haunt me? At the time I was deeply fascinated by Montreal, or I should say the idea of Montreal. As a late-teen growing up in the middle class suburbia-sans-city of Chester, my only hope of engaging with musical culture — aside from listening to production-line acoustic U2 covers at the local open mic — was to latch on to fragments of other times, other places. And one of these was Montreal and Constellation Records, the home, most famously, to post-rock figure-heads Godspeed You! Black Emperor. Receiving CDs through the post from this label, my address handwritten in blocky capitals on brown packaging, afforded me a glimpse of uncharted terrains. The monochromatic solemnity of Godspeed’s anti-rock symphonies, Eric Chenaux’s abstracted balladry, and Carla Bozulich’s blues hauntology conjured an indistinct sense of Montreal as a place loaded with the mystical in the quotidian, its very fabric saturated with crumbling majesty.
In his recent book Records Ruin the Landscape (Duke University Press), David Grubbs discusses precisely this process of attempting to understand, and even attain some authentic connection with, a distant locus of artistic production via recorded media. Taking as its focus the plurality of avant-garde musical practice of the ’60s — now only accessible through archival releases, reissues, and online archives like UbuWeb — the book’s title is adapted from one of John Cage’s characteristically pithy comments made during an interview with Daniel Charles:
DC: Records, according to you, are nothing more than postcards…
JC: Which ruin the landscape.
And although his stance towards records can actually be read as knowingly self-contradictory (being himself a prolific recording artist), the negativity Cage expresses here seems emblematic of the attitude of the broader milieu. According to many of Cage’s contemporaries, recording violently forces chance into certainty, erases the specificity of time and place, and reifies the ephemerality of sound into a bourgeois cultural object primed for stockpiling and repeated consumption.
“But these ‘postcards’ were all we had at the time, and they’re certainly all we have now,” came the objection from Grubbs and the three other panelists at Records Ruin The Landscape’s June 2014 launch event at Cafe OTO in London. Joining Grubbs for the discussion were Will Prentice, archivist at the British Library, Jennifer Walshe, composer and creator of “fictional archives”, and Mark Harwood, a sound artist who composes specifically for the recorded medium under the name Astor. And although their obvious bias towards the record — whether as a mechanism for storage or as an artistic muse — should be noted, the group’s aversion to Cage’s rhetoric is understandable, and perhaps convincing.
Sure, something intangible is lost in music’s conversion from live performance to captured sound, but for anyone unfortunate enough to be geographically or temporally separated from the originating artistic activity, records have invaluable utility. The records that these panelists bought during the ‘60s in their hometowns, cut off from the cultural centres of New York and London, and those they buy now, 50 years after the fact, provide a connection, however tenuous and obscured, to the heady creative energy of, say, Yoko Ono’s series of loft concerts or Derek Bailey’s trailblazing free-improv performances.
But such claims seem to afford unnatural primacy to the record’s function as message-carrier and chime somehow dissonantly with my own experience of receiving CDs through the post from Montreal. These records weren’t postcards; or if they were, then their allure resided in that which lay outside the frame, just off the edges of the neat rectangular canvas. Rather than creating an illusion of connection, what records like Carla Bozulich’s Evangelista or Eric Chenaux’s Dull Lights provided for my 17-year-old self was more a sense of disconnection, of incompleteness. The objects frame a space for projection, for the construction and destruction of fictions.
Who is Carla Bozulich, Sandro Perri, or Eric Chenaux? It wasn’t so much that one was forced to imagine answers to these questions than it was that any attempts to find such answers seemed, essentially, beside the point. The mystique was in the unknowing. The music, the cryptic album artwork, and Constellation’s own perfunctory written statements all provided signposts, a skeletal framework of understanding, yet they always withheld far more than they ever revealed. As such, these artists, and Montreal itself, were realised in my mind only in the abstract, as a messy assemblage of potentialities. And despite their haziness, these vague figures were never wholly absent; indeed, they framed my every contact with these records. The separation of these sounds from the time and place of their production had thus served only to bring forth a host of other spectral forms from the fissure.
So if records really do ruin the landscape, as Cage contends, then they can also conjure new ones out of the rubble. These new landscapes are positively alive in their indefiniteness and mystery. There’s an informative parallel to be had here, perhaps, with Tate Britain’s recent exhibition Ruin Lust, which provided a snapshot of the numerous depictions of ruins in visual (and audio-visual) art from the 18th century to the present day. Throughout the gallery space, the ruin was presented as emblematic not of loss but of an uncanny form of renewal. The spaces between an abbey’s crumbling archways exerted a seductive pull, new forms arising from the demolished or eroded. These ruins are haunted by that which is absent, just as for me, as an adolescent poring over the artwork of the latest CD to drop onto my doormat, the music of Carla Bozulich was haunted by the non-presence of its creator, and the entire output of Constellation Records by my incomplete notion of Montreal.
Indeed, in this sense, there seems to be an ironic reversal of the roles for which Cage argues: it becomes the real-life encounter, if and when it ever arrives, in which the magic, the ephemerality, is undone, once and for all. In such an encounter, the abstract form of the artist, the place, or whatever is, in an instant, tethered to actuality: in the materialization of the thing, all other potentialities are lost. What was once a simultaneity of both anything and nothing becomes a mere something.
And, of course, this “something” contains in itself an almost infinitesimal nuance, the totality of which would be impossible to grasp in the fleetingness of a live performance, or indeed ever, at all. Earlier this month, Carla Bozulich performed at Cafe OTO, the same space in which Grubbs had conducted his conversation a couple of week prior. And her performance of the noir blues of her latest record Boy was infused with details, accidents, coincidences: balletic orientations of bodies in space, fleeting inflections and waverings of tone. Yet, the experience of being confronted, after so long, with the actuality of this artist, this real-life singer-person, where there had once only been enigma and ambiguity was undeniably tinged with a sense of loss, if not quite anti-climax.
And I’m sure the same would be true were I to realize my adolescent dreams of visiting Montreal in the search of some artistic nucleus, some creative source, from where these records — these not-quite-postcards — were set loose to travel to me across the Atlantic. Presumably, I’d be disappointed by the roads, the people, the buildings, the sheer existence of the place, its irreducible materiality erasing the mystique in which it is shrouded in my imagination. So do I wish I could have seen for myself this scene in the square that was so evocatively described to me? Once he had finished relaying his story, my friend paused and said: “I wish I had filmed it.” I wish he had, for perhaps that would’ve made a fitting addition to the records through which I have constructed my fictional and amorphous sense of the place: another partial, distorted fragment with which to (re)construct a ruinous Montreal.