Tuesday, March 09, 2004

Les Paul & Mary Ford, "How High the Moon"
(April 21, 1951)

I want to pay homage to the sounds on this record, because to this day they retain an air of uncanniness, but I can't get anywhere near them. It was one of the first huge hits that used multi-tracked recording in a obvious way (as was "The Tennessee Waltz") -- records where someone in a recording studio created sonic events that seem to have no grounding in the sounds or even live music of everyday life, or relate to them the way holographs relate to black & white film. Yet this is all done quite economically. It may take you a while to realize all there is on this record is voice and guitar (and maybe bass): it's spare but it doesn't feel incomplete, with the jolly clockwork of the guitar getting unsprung into campy poink!s and weeeuh!s at regular intervals. And then there's Mary Ford's cooing voice is doubled, tripled, quadrupled, and at one climactic point, seemingly nonupled into a rainbow arc of mercurial sound.

Unsurprisingly, it sounds like it was made by robots. Sexy robots. 10

(link)