Where are you calling from? How can I hear you?

"And it came to pass after these things, that God did tempt Abraham, and said to him, Abraham! and he said, Behold, here I am." Gen 22:1

"Where are the two speakers? We are not told. The reader, however, knows that they are not normally to be found together in one place on earth, that one of them, God, in order to speak to Abraham, must come from somewhere, must enter the earthly realm from some unknown heights or depths...

"Moreover the two speakers are not on the same level: if we conceive of Abraham in the foreground, where it might be possible to picture him as prostrate or kneeling or bowing with outspread arms or gazing upward, God is not there too: Abraham's words and gestures are directed toward the depths of the picture or upward, but in any case the undetermined, dark place from which the voice comes to him is not in the foreground."

--Eric Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature pp. 8-9

Since multitrack recording, we don't know where performers are. Were. Are. This is a shiny treasure of an idea still sheltered in the obfuscation-armor of Richard Meltzer's Aesthetics of Rock (NOBODY TALKS ABOUT IT SO IT DOESN'T GET DUSTY OR SCRATCHED). We can't orient them: not in relation to ourselves, not in relation to the space they recorded in (engineer Steve Albini's goal of capturing the sound of a band in a room is a good nostalgic manifesto). Did Jimmy Hendrix face his amp in "Crosstown Traffic"? Was he 20 feet down the hall? What happened when the song got mixed into left and right channels, so now his guitar's moved all up in the drummer's face? What if you're listening to it with your head in the left speaker? What if you're 20 feet down the hall? Dozens of different actual physical relationships laminated into the 5 minutes when you're making coffee and can't hear the stereo in the other room right.

Critics once touted My Bloody Valentine's Loveless as a radical break with previous sound. One of the simultaneously loudest and faintest things I'd ever heard, it made this weird new musical space, at once lifelessly flat and infinitely open, a theme of its sound. A rocket launching 500 feet beneath your feet. Now I have no desire to listen to it: like a lot of things that thematize their cutting edge it aged like shit.

I like to imagine supernatural sources for sound. The feedback just streams out of Ladytron's "High Rise:" I deny the existence of a guitar player. But since electrical amplification, it's become objectively true that sound doesn't need a direct physical source: you pluck a few thin metal strings on a wooden object's neck. Ten feet behind you a tin symphony sounds or a battleship crashes into an iceberg. Sound freed from its physical source.

God spoke to Abraham from out of the picture. Sound without a physical source once implied divine speech. Now that we can make it ourselves, we have to re-imagine the other world. Maybe it retreated somewhere further away, so it's safer from us and we from it.

Maybe it didn't.

The Girls, "Jeffery I Hear You" 7" (Hearthan 106, 1979), apparently about singer/drummer Daved Hild's brother who died when they were young.