I recently saw a movie called Until The Light Takes Us. It’s a documentary (available for streaming on NetFlix) about the Norwegian Black Metal scene, and in it they interview this guy named Varg Vikernes, who is among the founding members of this movement. He was in prison at the time of the interview for some stuff he did that maybe some people would think wasn’t very nice or whatever. But he’s out now, so hide under your bed or something.
Anyway, the part of the movie that really stood out for me was when Vikernes was talking about when he recorded his first Burzum album (his band/project is called Burzum, and I believe he plays everything in it). He said that he asked the recording engineer to give him the worst microphone they had for him to sing into, because he wanted to have it sound as bad as possible, and this was because he was rebelling against “good production” values. This idea of wanting your stuff to sound bad on purpose is interesting, because most people don’t actually want to do that. But listen to your old 1980s American hardcore records, like Henry Rollins’s first band State of Alert, and that sounds like crap, but it’s also great! And if it sounded like it was produced well, it might have taken the rawness away from it. In any case, I am somewhat sympathetic to Vikernes’s aim for low production value, although, I think that it may be better to mix it shitty than to record it shitty, but whatever. (You never know, someday you might want to re-release it for snobby audiophiles or something.)
So this got me thinking, if he really wanted to rebel against “good production”, he could have gone completely whole hog on this idea. He just used a terrible microphone, but as far as I know, he still used it to record into a decent multi-track recorder. If he really wanted to rebel against good production, he could have gone a lot further! Like, for example, he could have used an old Ronco “Mr. Microphone”, and then used the other crappy mic to record whatever came out of the transistor radio the Mr. Microphone was playing through. Or else he could have played his music into an old telephone, and then had it connect to someone’s old Dictaphone tape answering machine over the phone lines, and just record it on that old crappy answering machine. Or even worse, what he could have done would have been to play it into one of those old “brick” cell-phones from the 1980s, and then have the guy on the other end of the phone put it on speakerphone, and then record it into a boom-box across the room. Then he could take that recording, play it back on a lame old tape Dictaphone, and then record it into the multi-track recorder that way, but through the worst microphone the guy had. Now that’s what I’d call rebellion against “good production”!
