The bar has been set again by Ron Lessard, the great schemer of noise and contemporary art hero, with the release of the RRR 1000 lock groove LP. 20 artists create 50 loops each, all 1.8 seconds in duration that repeat infinitely until the listener manually moves the needle – in essence a perfect skip.  For any sane human being the concept is utterly masochistic and unfathomable. But for those with a sound complex, the various results and approaches can be both daunting and rewarding.  To what degree and duration does a lock groove reveal its merits or personality? Approached from a minimalist standpoint, one could easily site precedent of Lamonte Young, John Cage or even Andy Warhol, as artists who used extreme time expansion as a means to create hypnosis and reveal the character of a sound or image over a period of hours, days and beyond. One could make the argument that it would take 1000 days to fully get the effect of this record, or maybe more.

The history of anti-music, of which locked grooves are a part, can date back to 1903 and Thomas Edison’s invention of the recording cylinder, and on to the 1930s and 1940s when Varese and Cage performed concerts using multiple record players. The 1960s is where the lock groove entered mainstream society when Monty Python used the innovation for comedic effect. In 1975 Lou Reed used lock grooves to make his most impenetrable album Metal Machine Music literally endless, much to the chagrin of critics and seemingly even himself by publicly stating that anyone who gets to side 4 of the album is “dumber than I am”. The first purely lock groove record may officially belong to Boyd Rice in 1978 with his Pagan Muzak album under his long-standing project, Non.

Pagan Muzak is a 7″ vinyl long playing record housed in a 12″ sleeve. It consists of 17 locked/looped grooves, each of them containing a different noise. A second axis hole drilled off-centre doubles the number of tracks; and as it can be played back at up to four speeds – 16, 33, 45 or 78rpm – working out just how many tracks Pagan Muzak effectively offers the listener involves complicated calculations of all the different playback combinations of axis choice, turntable speeds and the grooves themselves. The mind boggles, yet when it was sold as a long playing record, some buyers thought they’d been short-changed by at least five inches. Rice recalls, “Because it came out as a 7″ record in an album sleeve, people used to go, [in a whining voice] ‘It says LP on here. . .’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘LP means long player, and this is the longest player you are ever going to find’.”

Lessard, sole proprietor of the long running RRR record label and store, based out of Lowell, MA since the early 80s has a long standing tradition when dealing with lock grooves.  In 1993 RRR-100 was his 100th release and he wanted to do something special. A 100 lock-groove 7″ seemed appropriate. “I went thru 5, maybe 6 pressings and then one day I called the plant and asked for another pressing and they told me they lost the plates!,” said Lessard. “DAMMITT!! Somehow they misplaced them and adios amigo so I called Paul Brekus, the guy who mastered RRR-100, hoping he still had plates and unfortunately he had nothing and while we were commiserating on the phone he mentioned “Y’know, I figure I can put 250 lock-grooves on one side of an LP” and with those words, RRR-500 was born. I don’t think it was my 500th release but it was close. HA!!! RRR-1000 was also Paul’s idea; one day he said he was feeling itchy and wanted to do a 1000 lock groove record and would I like to put it together? YOU BET!!! It’s not really my 1000th release, but it’s close. HA!!”

So, why endlessly loop and what can we gain from the experience as a listener apart  from a non-traditional experiment? It’s true that loops change over duration or at least their perception does. Sounds repeated change their meaning and very nature.  Variation is revealed but how much of it is an illusion when we know for a fact that the change is non-existent? Is the listener manifesting the change or is it just the idea of understanding a sound, the brain trying to wrap around the texture? By the nature of the loop a rhythm is created that would not exist otherwise, clearly creating a new dynamic for the piece. There is no hard and fast rule on the subject as every person processes such information differently. How a person approaches the LP is entirely up to them, it doesn’t come with instructions. “So far response has been positive, mostly I get comments about how the LP demands active participation, you can’t just listen to it, you gotta play it. “said Lessard. “Sometimes when I’m at home I’ll let a groove play on and on in the background while I’m doing whatever, and back when I put out RRR-100 I set-up portable turntables around the house and let them play all night, occasionally changing the groove ”.

This brings to mind the ramification of the lock groove. If one loop of only a few brief seconds is to be theoretically played infinitely in a row then what does that mean to the composer? What a demand to have to make a statement so brief contain such content to merit being locked in time.  How much can a moment contain? For sound artist C. Spencer Yeh, a RRR-1000 contributor, chance takes an important role in the process. “There’s so much dependent on the physical aspects in some ways you just have to kind of “guess” as there isn’t always a strict guarantee it’ll work out, however, some people seem to have a better mastery of it than others in anticipating, and incorporating the potential for chaos etc. into a lock groove. Depending on what/where the lock groove lands, you could just rely on the fact that it’s a locked groove to create the composition for you because in a sense, the composition has already been decided”.

The person who decides is Paul Brekus who cuts the physical grooves and ultimately edits the source sounds and perfects the loops in painstaking detail. “We pick out the best 1.8 seconds of the track provided via a computer editor,” said Brekus. “We then have to be certain that the end points are at zero crossing, and aiming correctly to be certain there is no pop at the repeat point. There are times we have to take out 1/2 of a wave, (a very small fraction of a second) to avoid the pop, than stretch the track back to 1.8 seconds. 1.8 seconds is the exact time it takes for a 33-1/3 rpm record to make one full turn”.

Overall it’s up to the composer to set his own standard in regards to the effect and success or relative failure of their own lock groove. As a curator Mr. Lessard handpicked a specifically chosen few to execute their personality in such a format. In keeping account with style he made selections that represented experts and asked for “aggressive” and “harsh” contributions. With each groove so closely related to the previous spatially, distinctions between artists can blur but it’s clear to see each artist take their own spin at the process and demonstrate their specific strengths as sound artists. The line up of the record is allotted by degrees of categories defined by the curator using genre, geography, generation and relations as defining principles.

This process serves to show diverse compositional statements from the artists and fully reveal their dynamics. Not surprisingly you can often tell the author by the sound. So in effect the grooves teach us about the fundamentals of the artists. Can you get the effect of the Incapacitates in micro-installments and begin to understand the overall effect of harsh noise? Yes, yes you can.  Sudden Infant on the other hand offers many entry points to their highly refined action edits and surrealist tendencies. From the lulling ambient tones of Francisco Lopez to the crushing power collage of the New Blockaders to the fluxus-like absurdity of GX Jupitter Larson the sounds mirror the personality of the performers and are diverse enough to continually engage the listener. Certainly a looped scream from Prurient retains enough of the composers humanity that it becomes recognizable as sample.

The philosophical ramifications are endless like the locks themselves, spiraling into a vortex of repetition that can either be immobilizing in its atmosphere or crushed by the weight of its inherent frequency or tone.  Perhaps the locks are a trap, dead ends of sounds rather than the ultimate manifestation of what those sounds can mean.  At this point all people in contemporary society have adapted to a constant stream of repetitive electronic sounds and noise from common day appliances and modern living. These sounds have become an inescapable backdrop of society to the point where most industrial noise is barely noticed by the average person unless they are directly confronted by it. To enter into the world of the lock groove is in a very real way a direct confrontation with everyday life and how extreme and affecting this audio information is to our psyche.

However it is the listener who dictates the process and commitment to the task at hand. Looked at from a sound art point of view certainly the RRR 1000 LP makes a case for inclusion among the most important experimental works of the new century and is unmistakably unique among any statement, be it from the towers of the academies or the pits of basement cassette culture. That Lessard is able to straddle those polemics without distinction or pretense is a success all its own. It’s a fine line between brilliance and stupidity, one can hear Lessard’s cackle looped to the end of time as he again walks the tightrope.

by STEVE LOWENTHAL on 10/15/2009 in Features | Tags: Aaron Dilloway, AMK, C. Spencer Yeh, Carlos Giffoni, Dimuzio, GX, Incapacitants, Kevin Drumm, KFW, Lescalleet, lock groove, Lopez, Marhaug, Noetinger, Otomo, Paul Brekus, Prurient, R+G, RLW, Romero, Ron Lessard, RRR 1000, Sudden Infant, TNB