“If you could only play a record once, imagine the intensity you’d have to bring into the listening.” – Avant-garde guitarist Derek Bailey

In the 1960s, experimental music was all about the moment. Improvisation was common, and compositions often involved interpretation and chance; no two performances were alike. As a result, some musicians disdained commercially-released recordings, since a record can’t change—it freezes music intended to be open and indefinite. 

At the time, John Cage insisted that “records ruin the landscape,” pulling attention away from the surrounding environment, a vital element of his famous “silent” composition “4’33””. “When I read Cage’s book Silence, I was growing up in Louisville, Kentucky,” says writer David Grubbs. “For me, records were a mode of time travel and geographic travel, interfacing with a much larger world. So it seemed antiquated and backwards that Cage would be so down on them.”

Grubbs became increasingly fascinated by Cage’s stance, and eventually decided to explore it in his book Records Ruin the Landscape: John Cage, the Sixties, and Sound Recording. Though Cage is Grubbs’ primary focus, he also traces the era’s record-averse bent through “hillbilly blues” violinist Henry Flynt, guitarist Derek Bailey, and free-improv group AMM.

Grubbs is also fascinated with the contrast between the intentional scarcity of the 60s and today’s endless music stream. As he puts it, “Only a few of the recordings that are widely and immediately accessible today—many of which have become canonical representations of the period—actually circulated at the time they were created.” How that shapes current notions of 60s experimental music is a question Grubbs grapples with, especially when discussing two online resources: the meticulous, subscription-based Database of Recorded American Music, and the more anarchic, free Ubuweb.

Grubbs is currently an Associate Professor in the Conservatory of Music at Brooklyn College. He was a founding member of Squirrel Bait, Bastro, and Gastr Del Sol, and continues to make solo records; his most recent is last December’s Borough of Broken Umbrellas. He spoke to me about his book via phone from his home in Brooklyn.

"Records have always been the most extraordinary form of time travel for me, and that’s why it matters to know when something was circulated, and if it had an audience of five or 50,000."

Pitchfork: How did you get the idea for Records Ruin the Landscape?

David Grubbs: It was submitted, in a fairly different form, as a PhD dissertation in 2005. As a dissertation, it was a project about 60s experimental music; as a book, it's about encountering 60s experimental music in record form in the present. I found myself thinking about the distance between the 60s and today through certain moments. Like the Henry Flynt interview with [Ubuweb founder] Kenny Goldsmith on WFMU, where he talks about how he was scarred by how proud John Cage was to be ignorant of popular music. Goldsmith says, "Nobody thinks twice nowadays about listening to everything!" Something that had seemed so uniquely, radically syncretistic in Flynt's day seems much more commonplace now. That was one of the first moments that led me to think about measuring the distance from a period in which sound recording played a peripheral role, to nowadays, where so much of people's experience is vectored straight through recordings.  

Pitchfork: You focus on Flynt’s album I Don’t Wanna, which was recorded in 1966 but didn’t come out until 2004.  

DG: Yeah—you listen to it now and think, "Wow, it really seems of its particular moment." But it hardly participated in that moment. 

Pitchfork: Why do you think it's important to know that?

DG: Because otherwise the history just gets completely flattened out, and people imagine that everything was always available and accessible. One of the things that struck me was the way in which the landscape of experimental music seemed different at different points in time, on the basis of where one was situated geographically, if one had access to live performances, and what was released at a particular time. It’s a kind of optical illusion to think of I Don't Wanna taking its place at the table in 1966. And yet, it is also so profoundly of 1966. 

There’s part of me that is a strict materialist, and thinks of I Don't Wanna as first circulating in 2004, being contextualized through other releases on Locust and other things released in 2004. Yet records have always been the most extraordinary form of time travel for me, and I Don’t Wanna has the texture and the sound of 1966. That’s why it matters to know when something was circulated, and if it had an audience of five or 50,000.

"The word 'archive' seems so reassuring, but I have a lot of
concern over the longevity of documentary materials."

Pitchfork: Cage and Bailey both openly disliked records, yet Cage made many, and Bailey had a prolific label. How did they reconcile that contradiction?

DG: For Bailey, records were a large part of making a living as a working musician. And it's much more consistent with the ethos of free improvised music to release a large number of audio documents, so that you don't get the sense that each one is something Bailey has been building towards for a long time. As there are more online archives of improvised music, it becomes more like the daily practice of playing it. It lessens the idea of there being masterpieces of improvised music through benchmark recordings. 

In Cage's case, he reveled in contradiction. He said everything negative he could about how records aren't music: "I once heard of a jukebox that smashed records; isn't that the most marvelous thing?” Yet when he made a decision to record, he was concerned to make records that were unlike records anyone else had made, like the blind superimposition of multiple takes on Cartridge Music. That's the first record where multiple takes were stacked up, and people performed takes without reference to previous takes. But Cage didn't particularly trumpet those achievements, because he thought that records just weren’t music. Part of the pleasure in writing the book was to go deeper into his contradiction and appreciate it, rather than to call him out—"John Cage is contradictory!" That would not have been telling him anything he didn't know.

Pitchfork: Bailey claimed he bought less than a half dozen records in his life. Do you think that’s true, or did he and Cage exaggerate for effect? 

DG: I interviewed Bailey in his house and I did not see any records out. If it's an exaggeration, it's probably not so great an exaggeration. I recall [improvisational drummer and composer] Michael Evans telling me a story of someone who had the opportunity to meet Cage and give him a record, and Cage just smiled and said, "You know I have nothing to play this on?” 

Pitchfork: How do you think Cage would react to music's vast availability now?

DG: I assume it would further intensify his dislike of recorded music. There's a book of interviews with him by Joan Retallack called Musicage that was finished the summer that he died, in 1992. And in one of the last interviews, he was very excited to talk about nanotechnology. There’s real technophilia from him, a kind of utopian embrace of the idea that nanotechnology will free people up to do what they really want to do.

Pitchfork: You mention that a fundamental objection experimental artists had to records is that they don’t change. But you also argue that records themselves offer potential for chance – that “recording makes accidents happen.”

DG: My experience that undergirds that observation comes from punk, where people might have scraped together the money to be in the studio for an afternoon to make a record. Punk isn't a music that you think of as chance-based, but exigency has a lot to do with it. Chance doesn't have to involve the I Ching or rolling dice or throwing yarrow stalks. It can involve an out-of-tune guitar, or other impossible-to-replicate moments of awkwardness—even more so than an awkward, out-of-tune live performance, because there's something incredible about the way that an out-of-tune guitar becomes part of the song on a record. I won't be precious and say it's part of the composition—that's nonsensical—but chance occurrences are so crucial to what's distinctive. It's the fingerprints all over so many of these recordings. 

Pitchfork: You discuss how use of the word “archive” has changed since the 60s. What do you think of what the word means today? 

DG: There's a kind of whistling-in-the-dark quality when people talk about backing things up as “archiving,” or the “archive” of a particular radio station or venue or musician. I have a lot of concern over the longevity of these documentary materials. I'm looking at a huge stack of CD-Rs right now that have live recordings, Pro Tools files, unreleased stuff. I hope that, ten years from now, it'll be possible to retrieve the data from them. 

The word “archive” seems so reassuring, but I'm not sure about these things that are now being called archives. Is anything lost by the fact that the word has come to mean so many more things, and that there's such a proliferation of amateur archivists? Kenny Goldsmith from Ubuweb describes himself as an amateur archivist, and people can download files from Ubuweb—it's not a streaming service. But it’s a miracle that it's still online and they're able to make it work through the donations of server space and volunteer efforts. 

Pitchfork: Ubuweb doesn’t seek approval from artists whose work they host. What do you think of that approach?

DG: The one real error for Ubuweb was when they briefly had this thing called the "wall of shame" to shame anybody who asked them to take something down. I'm entirely sympathetic to people asking for things to be taken down. But as somebody who very early on volunteered to have Ubuweb host out-of-print records of mine, I've had nothing but a great experience with it. I've given them some real odds and ends that were never pressed on record, things like a weird radio documentary I made about Coney Island. And that has probably been listened to many more times than records I made for Drag City that I worked on for months, because it's free. What a strange thing—that musicians grant permission to places like Ubuweb, and then because it's free, it'll probably be listened to more often than something that is still wrestling with this idea of making a profit.