"My week is your year": Side A of Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music

For the blog entry on reviewing an electro-acoustic piece, I've wracked my brains wondering which piece to do, until the obvious hit me: the infamous collision between the worlds of pop-rock and experimental sound as exemplified by songwriter and former Velvet Underground member Lou Reed's cacophonous Metal Machine Music, released in 1975.

For an artist with a formidable backlog of lyrical works, putting out a double-record album with no vocals and drums, consisting only of swirling feedback tones which last over an hour, nevertheless generated a great deal of speculative and mostly negative text from the burgeoning rock lit-crit community who had been previously intrigued with his deadpan deliveries of stories about transexuality and illicit drug use. The album's front photo no doubt fed into misconceptions that this was another live album of his (as in the cover of Lou Reed Live).

Although the album contains no vocals or lyrics, an accompanying set of writings by Reed, shot through with amphetamine-derived sentence fragment babble and alcohol-fueled take-it-or-get-lost antagonism (Reed was a notorious abuser of both drugs) served in a similar capacity. As it turned out, very few of the tens of thousands of people who bought the album stuck with it to find out whether Reed's commentary was indeed a possible lyric sheet; soon after its release, record stores were deluged with customers seeking to return their copies, and magazines like Rolling Stone proclaimed it one of, if not THE, worst albums of 1975. Yet it nevertheless found an influential backer in critic Lester Bangs, who cheekily proclaimed it the greatest album ever made, beating out Kiss' Kiss Alive. Record cutting engineer Bob Ludwig, who oversaw its pressing to vinyl, listened to it in its entirety and compared it favorably to works by Karlheinz Stockhausen and Iannis Xenakis, both of whom Reed was aware of and revered even before his days in the Velvet Underground. It also proved extremely influential to the nascent industrial music scenes in countries like Germany and the explosion of noise music acts hailing from Japan, and it's even been referenced by name by acts as well-known as Smashing Pumpkins.

So just what does it sound like? Limiting myself to Side A of the first record, it sounds as if it behaves in perfectly logical fashion: the beginning sounds like any sort of regular intro to a sound piece, rising from initial sounds to sustained drones that relate to each other in ways that approximate a major key. Scattered high squeaks intermittently sound at the onset, then fade away, only to return at various points. Different textures move in, linger, and then are replaced by slightly different ones. A sense of space is created via the modulation and "beating" of certain frequencies. Little linear melodies dot in and out, never to be repeated. Bits that sound vaguely atonal are treated as almost passing tones, bent slightly out of a relative key and then returned to rough normality. By side's end, the music concludes much as it began: the inaugural sounds make a return appearance to bookend the first half of the first record

How did he do it? There've been many questions to that effect, and Reed himself was for a time interested in tweaking journalists' perceptions: he once maintained that he deliberately inserted bits of Mozart and Beethoven into the sonic fray. As an acousmatic work, something that wasn't conceived as being performed by a live band, a true recording-as-THE-work, it really shouldn't matter as to how he did it. The sounds ought to be what really counts . . . except on the back of the album he put the words "No Synthesizers," as if to ground an otherwise extreme conceptual leap in a vague reassurance that, "Well, at least he isn't using THOSE!" Seeing as Reed immediately undercut the acousmatic linings of MMM, I feel less conflicted about revealing in this entry that he used two guitars tuned in a certain way, each one leaning up against its own amp in order to feed back on itself (notions of Reich's Pendulum Music here), recorded them into his 4-track in his apartment, split them into four channels and manipulated the sounds, probably similar to how he manipulated lyrics and arrangements in his more usual fare, as the sounds appear to follow a certain logic. It supposedly took him a week to do, and his final comment in his original notes of "My week beats your year," instead of being a boast of a sleep-deprived speed freak, speaks more to the actual production of the album (and also the means by which he flouted a yearly record contract).

In the last couple years, Zeitkratzer, a German group dedicated to playing the "new" music of the 20th century, worked up a score derived from MMM and performed their interpretation of it live in Europe, inviting Lou Reed to add a heavily-processed guitar solo over the last minutes of the piece. Having by then passed the age of 60, he obliged.



A 30 second clip from the beginning of Side A can be heard here