the uneasy life of the remaster

Sometimes, an artist claims a remaster enables them to realise the album they originally intended to make — a historical corrective to earlier impositions by the label, the producer, the market, the engineer &c. &c. – Whilst thoroughly sympathetic to this position, it is slightly dubious. The artist imagines themselves as essential and dehistoricised. The consolidated aspects of the artist as they know themselves and have peddled a living, made a name, made enemies, and mitigated or navigated the capitalist circuits of exchange, is at once part of their identity and possibly part of the identity of adoring spectators – or at least the small of coterie friends willing to entertain the flights of fancy or wayward exuberance, concomitant with ‘playing out’ (read: playing live). I am also sympathetic to this, as I know personally that the fragmentary impulses that both suffuse and catalyse creative endeavours leave a further fragmentary residue. Which is to say, in the creative labour of “releasing an album” there is the person/s, the act of creative labour, the product, and aspects of the product that have a life of their own. Death of the author and all that noise Roland Barthes was on about. But I’m not jotting this shit down for yet another hagiography of “the artist” – that sage and seer-cum-spokesperson of a generation or something thereabouts. I merely wish to reflect on the fact that one can create something and it holds a certain resonance — for better or worse — within one’s life and maybe even reveals something approaching a truth about one’s life. But truth is a weighty concept and slightly besides the general point here. And creation is thoroughly polyphonic, even if one can’t account for all of the voices. The type of remaster I’ve alluded to at the start is an attempt to make one voice – the artist’s – louder than the rest in a sort of wrestling with history and narrative.

The other impetus for remastering that springs to mind is one that is decidedly more forthcoming about the historical contingency of a work. In an effort to renew interest in a product (that is to say an album or single or artist) of a bygone era and adjust its sonic character to be in accord with contemporary ears, the master tape is revived from death — surely springing from either from the hand of the outmoded (i.e. old technology with its idiosyncrasies) or the incompetent (i.e. a “badly” recorded original) or both. This “updated” product is often repackaged with new or additional contextualising (or recontextualising) linear notes, photographs, &c. “for a new generation of listeners” – or so it goes in a quite predictable manner.

*          *          *

I’ve never been a big fan of The Ramones, but I do periodically yearn for a spin of their first record and have a copy on my shelf. In my teenage years, I had friends who listened to their self titled LP and I still get a visceral tingling deep in my spinal column when I hear the breakdown section of Loudmouth. This morning, it was Judy is a Punk (unquestionably, the apotheosis of that tune are the subdued, trailing aaays –that I assume come from Dee Dee– following the joined the Ice Capades / joined the SLA lines). In the sweeping era of streamed content, I attempted to play the first Ramones album on Apple Music™ and when the trademark hey ho, let’s go came in on the album’s first tune (Blitzkrieg Bop) – drenched in reverb, I experienced a sudden and acute disorientation. Reverb? For The Ramones? Arguably one of the driest, whitest seasons ever? Surely not. I rewound – a decidedly material term, from a bygone era in and of itself – and found I did not mishear. Ah, yes – it’s 2024, ergo I’m listening to a remaster. I confirmed my suspicions by putting on the LP just before sitting down to write this. The experience made me question my past listening-self and my memory of the record. But above all, it made me question, why remaster? Why change it? Alea iacta est, man.

To be fair, I can concede that there are good sounding remasters. Better than the original, even (the recent remasters of Universal Order of Armageddon from Numero are the first that spring to mind). But again, this raises questions about ontology and origin (in the urtext sense). I would go further to suggest, there is an argument to be made that the remaster is a derivative, yet still ontologically distinct from. Adorno made virtually the same argument concerning music being broadcast on the radio. There is a weight and redemption to be found in the historicised object. It validates the experience of living with it and through it — to bearing witness (“…you had to be there, dude!”). The late Fred Jameson laments the loss of historicity, that for him, is emblematic of postmodernity. And surely, as a practice and as an idea, remastering is thoroughly postmodern in its updating, dehistoricising impulse.

Despite the conservative and even slightly reactionary contours, there is something to be said –relished, even— in the original album/song. So I say, contra remix, contra remaster.

To riff on the Soviet poet Aleksei Gastev:

We will not aspire

to these idle heights of heaven

that are called ‘remasters’

in spite

of the label, the manager, or

revisionist artist

with their techno-cultural conceptualisation

of “how

it is supposed to sound”

let us descend downwards!

—

Further reading:

Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author” in Image, Music, Text (London: Fontana Press, 1977), 142-148.

Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984) especially, chapter 1.

Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), especially the introduction.

Jens Gerrit Papenburg and Holger Schulze, “Introduction: Sound as Popular Culture” in Sound as Popular Culture: A Research Companion (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2016), 1-17. The bit on “audiopietism” is especially germane.