The Karnau Tapes Read Free Page B

profound aversion to crude, overwrought vocal phenomena is quite unknown to me. So is the reason for my predilections. Why do I feel so infinitely serene when I sit down beside my gramophone of an evening — at dusk, the twilight hour when none of the lights in the apartment has yet been switched on — and hold one of those black shellac discs in my hands? On the central portion, just between the label and the innermost groove, each disc bears an inscription in an unknown hand: technical particulars such as a serial number and a note of which side is which, but also, in many cases, brief, anonymous messages secreted there by the recording engineer.
    I put the first side on. The turntable begins to rotate, the gramophone is back in commission. The silence in the apartment would soon have become intolerable. I lower the tone arm, and at once I hear the hiss that precedes the recording itself. Then: a baritone voice. How it vibrates, how it ruffles the air! I shall always find it inexplicable that a recorded voice — just the fluttering of someone else's vocal cords — should have such power to stir the emotions. Coco sits down beside me and we listen together.
    The needle leaves its trail across the shiny black shellac, painfully probing and imperceptibly eating away the grooves with every revolution, as if its purpose were to delve deeper and draw nearer to the origin of the sounds. Every playing of the record erodes a little of its substance, an amalgam of resin, soot, and the waxy deposits of the lac insect. Living creatures made their contribution to the disc. Their secretions were compressed so that sound could become matter, just as the sounds engraved on the disc are themselves secretions and vital signs of human origin.
    Black is an essential additive. Only with the aid of black, the colour of night and burning, can sounds be captured. Unlike writing or painting, in which colour is applied to a white ground without injuring it, the capturing of sound requires one to damage the surface, to incise the recording agent with a cutting stylus. It is as if the most transient, fragile phenomena demand the harshest treatment and can only be captured by means of a deleterious process.
    And then the singing dies away, the song is at an end. The tone arm, having reached the end of the recording, is firmly lodged in the escape groove. It emits a loud click every time the needle jumps back and re-embarks on the same circular journey.
    I look through some new, still unheard recordings. Not on sale anywhere, they're rare items from our sound archive. That's one of the few perquisites of my job: access to our collection of special recordings. I often trawl the card index for interesting material after office hours. Almost anything can be heard, strange sounds of almost every conceivable kind have been engraved on wax: bird calls, wind of every type and strength, rushing water and avalanches, passing cars and machinery in operation — even the noise made by a large building as it collapses. Discs of this kind were not cut to be listened to for pleasure. They're used for experimental purposes when testing acoustic recording and playback equipment in the laboratory.
    Most of these pressings are unique. I've brought home some recordings of speech, but also some unusual sounds of human origin. I'm even fonder of the voice alone than of singing with instrumental accompaniment. The quivering glottis and the operation of the tongue can be heard far more clearly when the organ lies naked and exposed to the ear. Purely on the strength of a voice, these records conjure up an entire person in the mind's eye. Like an archaeologist examining a potsherd, one can use a tiny fragment to form a picture of the whole. All one has to do is to listen closely, nothing more.
    It's also exciting when, having first heard a voice on the telephone and mentally provided it with a body, we meet the owner in person and are able to compare the fruits of our