“Painting on tape”: A review of Peter Gutteridge’s “Pure”
My review of the recent vinyl reissue of the late Dunedin musician and Snapper founder Peter Gutteridge’s album, “Pure”, first released in 1989 on cassette tape. Originally published in Prop Records’ newsletter in Sydney.
I have known a handful of losers, all in their twenties, who have only wished they were Peter Gutteridge. Big sunglasses; leather jackets; guitars; a “stage presence” that is not of their own making so much as the drugs that curdle their brains. And, absolutely without fail, an ability to seem caught off guard when a photo is being taken.
Besides the fact that emulating the dead is, for me, the height of disrespect to the truly creative ones who have passed on—as well as proof of one’s inner dullness—there is the fact that the most iconic and recognisable synecdoches for Gutteridge (e.g., the big sunglasses, the leather jackets, etc.) are merely false appearances. They are much less interesting than the music he made.
That is, Gutteridge, on the level of style, was only a copy of a copy. This is not to say that he was not original, as anyone who has immersed themselves in Snapper's oeuvre knows. But if the Dunedin musician had one thing over his imitators, it was his tape machine.
Shiny side up: That is how you know you are correctly spooling a strip of magnetic tape into a reel-to-reel tape recorder. The ferric oxide particles must enter into communication with what is known as the recording “head”—a small metallic cuboid device that, via electromagnetism, causes sound to emerge from your speakers just as it was encoded into those tiny particles of iron. This is how sound is reproduced. What’s more is that the technological reproducibility of music has presented an obstacle which has, itself, copied itself ad infinitum.
Take some well-bandied icons of the “DIY” or “lo-fi” or “tape recording” era, for example. With a guitar recorded onto a warbling cassette, Martin Newell becomes The Cleaners From Venus. With a variety of Casios and glockenspiels transmitted onto a reel-to-reel deck, Alec Bathgate and Chris Knox are transformed into the Tall Dwarfs. Indeed, would we be so invested in the conventional and formualic mass consumer product that is pop songwriting were it not for the sheen emitted by its means of reproduction? With the release of the TASCAM Portastudio, the first domestic four-track cassette tape recorder, in 1979, unshapely sonic byproducts proved to be, for enterprising young musicians like Newell, Bathgate, and Knox, no longer a matter of checking your stereo or turntable for causes of hum, rumble, and noise. Instead, the artefacts became the recording process.
Were the songs recorded by these icons of DIY stars in the night sky, astronomers would struggle to trace them. In the cosmos of analogue audio, celestial bodies move not in circles, but in oblong paths. Orbits are unstable; objects threaten to fly off their axes. This much is known by recording engineers who remember the analogue era. With the vast amount of machine parts (rubber degradation, spring tension, dust presence) and environmental variables (humidity, temperature, atmospheric pressure) influencing the playback of tapes and records, playback is subject to inevitable deviations in speed. These cause fluctuations in pitch—slow changes are called "wow", fast changes are called "flutter". Interestingly, these, which seem at first no more than accidental byproducts of the technical means of sound reproduction, reveal a deeper quality that is fundamental to all music. That is, the difference between pitch and rhythm is only a matter of the speed of playback (or performance). Hold your thumb to a spinning turntable as it plays a solo flute instrumental and hear that, as you increase pressure upon the platter, the slowing playback (if you are careful not to destroy the machine) will turn the high-pitched instrument into a sub-bass frequency that pulses rhythmically. A piccolo becomes a drum machine.
To be clear, there is no flutter and wow on the latest reissue of Peter Gutteridge's Pure—its digital reproduction has destroyed that possibility, guaranteeing that all copies will reach the listener’s ears virtually sounding the same. One thing the album has not lost, however, is another unmistakeable quality innate to the cassette medium it was originally recorded on. That is, compared to digital recording, tape results in a greater multitude of resonant frequencies (i.e., “overtones”, or notes that ring out in sympathy whenever a note is struck, giving a sound source its “timbre”, or “character” that differentiates it from others). Music is often described in terms of space, and instruments that sound “distant” from one another in a digital mix will sound more “together” on tape. The complexity that tape “saturation” adds to the mix will fill in the gaps between instruments, replacing sharp, defined edges with a gentle gradient.
This not only aids the overall mix’s cohesion, but is said to sound more pleasant to the ears, or "warmer". This effect, known as harmonic distortion, is intensified on narrower tape widths—such as cheaply-available mass-produced cassettes. This tendency for analogue to “distort” the signal explains why it is known as "low fidelity" (or "lo-fi") recording, where fidelity means trueness to the source: Sound, in real life, does not always sound so warm. Whereas for some musicians, all except their favoured recording method is liable to pervert the “quality” of the audio (or even “degrade” it), others conceive of quality in more robust terms. If the source of the sound you are recording—say, a cheaply-made guitar amplifier—produces shrill, unpleasant frequencies, your cassette recorder can attenuate these frequencies, adding warmth. More than that, you might do away with your amplifier entirely, as analogue recording devices offer an input by which your guitar can be plugged straight into your machine. Distortion, for that matter, is as simple as turning up the input gain knob, and it sounds much nicer than your cheap amplifer, too.
On top of this, there is yet another way in which tape recording reduces the perceived “distance” between its sound sources. The more advanced home recording musician might make room for more instruments by "bouncing", i.e., a technique which combines two or more already-recorded tracks by taking their output signal and routing them together into a separate, empty track. This frees up the original two tracks to be erased and recorded with new instruments. The flipside of this technique, though, is that it permanently fuses together the “bounced” tracks. Additionally, it means a slight loss of higher frequencies, meaning that with every “bounce”, the fidelity to the source slowly deteriorates.
If harmonic distortion blends together instruments, and wow and flutter demonstrate the natural fluidity of rhythm and pitch, bouncing offers yet another proof that tape recording is a means to bond musical ingredients together into a state of permanence. We might compare the tape recording session to the creation of a fresco, during which the artist’s paint is mixed in with wet plaster as it dries. What began as a mere fancy at the moment the “record” button was pressed eventually congeals into a fixed, no-longer-sculptable product. Through this process of creation, the musician experiences in protracted form what is familiar for the ordinary listener witnessing a completed work. Whether hearing a symphony, a physical recording, or a radio broadcast, the listener apprehends that the music is no longer a work in progress, but the real deal. Its production can no longer be reversed; nor can it be deconstructed other than in the mind of the listener. Hence, it is “finished”, not only in the sense that it is complete, but that it has acquired its finish, or sheen. By its glistening veneer, the observer is attracted to its immediate, outer qualities. Obscured are the hours that went into the product’s creation; minimised is the degree of the author’s labour. The artwork has taken on an autonomous character, standing for itself, as though it has arrived readymade. It awaits judgement as either as shallow or deep as the listener decides.
True, all modern artworks tend towards this appearance of finality. The reasons are historical, requiring a lengthy explanation of the industrial revolution, modern aesthetics, and the commodity form. Suffice it to say, however, that analogue recorded music fulfils the principle to its realisation. Whereas the digital recording artist maintains, in theory, ready access to their original recordings to remix them as they like, the analogue musician's creative process is much less elastic. Sounds are not so easily manipulated once they are recorded onto tape, other than by incidental playback factors. Likewise, even the slightest wobble of the listener’s turntable guarantees that they will never hear the same recording exactly the same way twice. For the truly creative home musician, this presents not so much a shortcoming as a task; an opportunity to take responsibility for how these "distorting" idiosyncrasies might be accommodated—or even wilfully procured—to lend, not detract from the music. Thus, whereas the talented digital engineer is proficiently separates instruments and minimises unwanted frequencies, the cassette musician is challenged with knowing the hidden value in their inability to do so. This is all to say that it is a matter of intent: Does the musician want to remain true to reality, or hang a question mark over the source? Further, analogue methods enable the musician to grasp that no process of recording is a pure act of replication (read: “fidelity”), but creation. Hence, whereas there is an old quip that Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys used the "studio as an instrument", by Gutteridge (neither a millionaire nor a genius like Wilson) demonstrating how to use the Portastudio as an instrument, we might judge that there is an unseen liberating quality promised by the sheen of ferric oxide.
*
Given what I have just spent 1,400 words describing, precisely how the creative method might be liberated by a medium which distorts and destroys by its very process of reproduction—resembling capitalism generally—might yet remain obscure. Yet, what we know already is that cassette recording lends itself to the proof of free fancy known as the demo. Unburdened by the expectations attending its opposite form—i.e., the "official" release—the demo can stand in for the musician’s consciousness, expressing itself as a draft, an unfulfilled vision, or merely a private, personal attempt. It is not goal-oriented, as with a song concocted for an eventual "official" release. Hence, its efforts are never at rest; never possessing the self-assurance that comes with an implied conclusion. Nor does it know where it is going. It wanders freely, questioning itself along with the prospect of whether it will ever see the light of day. The demo is like a self-portrait that never leaves the artist’s studio. In this opportunity to hear themselves in the act of the “free play of imagination and understanding”, as Kant called the creative process, the musician has an opportunity to interview themselves. As their mistakes are captured on tape, errors bleeding into form, the question might be considered unshapely—or pregnant: How might music become different?
Pure undoubtedly falls into that paradoxical category known as a “demo album”—its 21 tracks are a giveaway—but whether Gutteridge initially intended it to ever be released is unclear. Never is an idea stuck with for long on Pure. As a practitioner of Qigong, Gutteridge was more interested in “energy” and “vibrations” than calculation, which helps to explain the hazy drone that courses through Pure’s 21 songs. That, or a cocktail of pharmaceuticals.
Just as the 1980s cassette revolution had usurped well-worn sound reproduction methods (i.e., those which went from the microphone to the reel-to-reel deck to the mastering lathe to the electroplating bath to the record press to the consumer), new advertising campaigns threatened to dethrone the new king of sound reproduction. Looming over the cassette was the motto “Perfect Sound Forever” attached to Compact Discs, and whose sales would eclipse tapes only a few years after Pure’s release.
In light of the coming CD revolution, which promised listeners that digital audio was the Real Deal, Pure is obviously an ironic title. Or was it? As Peter Jeffries, another Xpressway musician who knew Gutteridge personally, writes in the liner notes, "That's what's so good about Pure. Not only the songs, but the name, the name for the recording. It is as pure as you can get [...] when it goes from nothing to something and he catches it on his machine." Gutteridge’s own liner notes to the 2014 reissue, however, beg to differ:
Once in a while, I believe u become a kind of channel, even if slightly muddled. The tainted shamen? I don’t know. What I can say is this record yer hopefully holding in hand had its genesis long b4 I ever picked up a guitar. Ive always loved a dirty drone. Notes corrupted and split apart by the miracle of the sympathetic note- ie. Bagpipe, chanters, organs, piano’s, ad infinitum. Throw a few clear notes in and you achieve creation on yr own terms. Link it up 2 the background hum of the universe doing its thing and u have hypnosis in a sound. Shmaya.
Not only does Gutteridge sustain his impurities on the level of grammar, but he suggests that the sound is “muddled”, “dirty”, “corrupted’, and “split apart”—the very principle of destructive creation that is central to both the sheen of ferric oxide as the music recorded on it. Or, to put it in Peter Gutteridge’s own words, “painting on tape”.
Clearly, purity all depends on how one measures it. One listener will covet the wow and flutter emanating from an original 1989 cassette tape of Pure, played on a rusty machine. Another will pay seventy dollars (I kid you not) for its latest vinyl incarnation at the Flying Nun record store on Karangahape Road in Auckland. Yet, to grasp why anyone will pay that much money for it requires apprehending what purchase Pure has on the imagination. This requires knowing it as a myth.
This is the curious thing about understanding music as a replication process. So long-mythologised has been Dunedin, along with its cottage-industry of bands that came out of it in the 1970s and 80s. These were not boy geniuses with stage parents (not Brian Wilson), but teenagers receiving a mass product—in this case, mail-ordered copies of the NME and various seven and twelve-inch records—and then replicating the proven formula in question (e.g., three chords, leather jackets, or whatever). In this sense, the Flying Nun generation were no different from their overseas contemporaries on Factory, Postcard, Creation, SST, or Rough Trade, but another replication of the latest stage in musical aesthetics. The much-alleged wellsprings of the Dunedin Sound—e.g., "isolation", frigid air, cheap rent, and generous dole packets—were not inciting causes so much as incidental factors that merely affected its presentation.
Hence, if one is to listen critically to the sound of New Zealand history, one must not be sucked in by the hypnotic, inviting drone that permeates Pure, nor seduced by its playful-but-contradictory “demo album” character, which, together, are glued via the idiosyncratic qualities of the tape medium. Rather, the truly critical mind is tasked with hearing it more carefully. One must ideally balance oneself between not being distracted by the music’s seductive appearance—its sheen—but also give the latter its due credit as a responsible agent in sweetening the idea, the thought-content, of the music.
Here is the question, then. Is it really original? Was Peter Gutteridge a shaman, or a fraud? We might never know; it could be both. What is clear, though, is that it would not have come into existence without the help of Xpressway records, the 1980s label helmed by Bruce Russell of The Dead C. Rejecting Flying Nun’s turn towards the international music industry in the late ‘80s, Russell favoured releasing cassettes for their cheapness and availability, meaning that even the most carefree dalliances by his friends could be communicated to the world authentically and with a greater degree of immediacy. Russell’s dual emphasis, here, could be bound up in a word: Immediacy. Or better yet, purity. This might be conceived as the “purity” that Peter Jeffries testified to in his liner notes quoted above. Gutteridge, in an interview before his death in 2014, said that he is only invested in giving audiences a “true experience”. But we already know that the cassette medium, as a replica of a replica, comes not bearing purity, but the sonic evidence of its generation loss, just as a cow bears its branding. In order for there to be the mere idea of purity—i.e., authentic, spontaneous, immediate, “free” sound—it must first find a vessel that contains it, just as it confines, constrains, and distorts it for mass consumption.
That is the riddle of purity. If we argue that purity is simply that which spontaneously occurs, we must also accept that it cannot exist without its inverse in thought. For Hungarian Marxist theorist György Lukács, all of society is predicated on the exchange of commodities, and thus can, itself, be said to have the “dual character” of a commodity, split between its use and its exchangeability. So, like the commodity, society is continually at odds with itself, in a continual contradiction of capital and labour. Following Lukács, we might extend the same logic to commodities as ordinary and commonplace as albums. How does Pure express the contradictory character of a society in crisis? Well, that is for you, the listener, to figure out. For now, you might start with the few available clues, among which is the fact of this release—a collection of demos—coming into the world in 1989 as an album, and then later reissued on vinyl. Or that it maintains the "official" status attending a conventional musical release while expressing, in its contents, a smattering of drafts. Or that Xpressway records took this up as its business model, which defied its fate by being copied by record labels all over the world in the decades since. These are the real “truth”.
The only thing that is pure is contradiction. Hence, music tasks the listener with appraising whether it is a collection of scribbles, or blueprints. A simple dalliance, or a songbook. A home recording, or a mass product. Awaiting passive consumption, or active listening. This is where you, the listener, come in.