Perhaps themost unique insight of this captivating book is that nearly all modernrecordings are complete deceptions. Deception has been involved from thebeginning of recorded sound, but the artificiality of what we are hearing hasonly become more prevalent in recent times. The process was hastened with theadvent of magnetic tape, which “taught music how to lie” because it enabledrecording engineers to edit and layer music that never really existed. Throughthe use of tape, musicians and engineers found a way to further the imaginaryworld of the sound recording. Milner includes tremulous stories about earlyrecording sessions that have become such a reverberant part of modern auralculture’s phantom hearing processes.
Milner is atone of his many brilliant moments when he reports that John and Alan Lomax, America’s mostfamous song catchers, took an unknown musician, Huddie “Leadbelly” Ledbetter,and presented him within pop culture as somebody he would not otherwise havebeen. While this story has been told many times, Perfecting Sound Forever reels it off with unusual elegance andamplified indignity. It is this telling, too, that specifies the complexity ofhow making the ideal recording becomes a replacement for real performance. Milneruses Leadbelly as a prime example of the popular search for authenticity in aninauthentic culture.
What makesMilner’s text so invigorating is that so many themes we thought were closed anddecided upon, such as the story of Sun Studio’s “slap-back” recordings, arereopened and expanded upon in ways that settle issues instead of merelyrepeating them. Perhaps the most important area of inquiry is the move fromvinyl to the compact disc and the technology deployed along with the marketing,which ultimately turns in on itself when a new generation embraces thenoncommercial experience of file sharing.
This is nosimple matter, for it ultimately leaves an entire listening audience in controlof major labels’ catalogs, to pillage at will, only to suffer from fatigue andthe realization that what is liberated is not necessarily the best sound.Loudness replaces complexity as more and more music is recorded for file-readytransfer (and theft), and so there arises a new search for an auralauthenticity that may or may not have ever existed, but certainly carries withit a sense of the intense sound of the past. The meta-theme of Milner’s book isthat the perfect sound always is in the past. Sadly, the more one can process asignal, the weaker the music’s emotional presence becomes.
