Laura invited me yesterday to some bar at José Enrique Rodó 1830. Some of her friends were playing music, along with two other acts: a guy who played the guitar kind of experimentally and did the Hun-Huur-Tu thing with this throat (but more skillfully than Hun-Huur-Tu themselves, it seemed to me) and another one I missed forever because it was time to catch the bus back home.
It was 100 pesos for the entrance (~31 pesos to a euro; when I got here 4 weeks ago it was 29—I’m rich!) and another 100 pesos for a strange kind of alcoholic beverage people drink a lot in Uruguay that tastes very much like Fisherman’s Friend. Imagine that, with coke.
A few minutes after I got my drink, her friends started playing their music. The whole concert reminded me of the very first venues in Rock Band, when you first set out and play the easy songs, where supposedly only your friends and some of their friends, at best, come and see you. They were amateur musicians, you could tell: their songs were mostly uncomplicated, and they had a bunch of different instruments, such as unusual percussion (e.g. the lower jaw of a cow, complete with teeth) and types of guitars I would imagine the likes of Inti-Illimani would always keep within arm’s reach. One or two of them were more skilled, but the group as a whole was not. They would go in and out of tune in their polyphonic segments etc. Nevertheless, they left me with a positive impression. I thought they were an interesting group, doing what they enjoy, not caring about perfection and not being scared to experiment in front of an audience.
Then, from the minute I woke up today on, one particular song from yesterday keeps playing in my head. It’s the one in the media player above. It’s a recording I made with my smartphone, that is why the quality is abysmal (I can hear my H2n’s vindictive laugh from the corner—that’s what you get for not having proper sound recording equipment with you ALWAYS ). I can tell that what they’re singing in the chorus is probably “esto no es café” (this isn’t coffee), and I can catch some of the rest of the words but the quality of the recording is so bad and the skill level required for understanding sung language is so high I’m not even bothering.
All that’s nice and good, but something soon dawned on me after listening to his recording a couple of times: I will probably never listen to this song in better quality. This is it.
In this day and age where every original song has a proper recording done in a studio and posted on Youtube, problems like one-off performances, live recordings or poor reproduction quality due to technical reasons seem absurd and things of the lo-tech past. But here we are: an earworm of a song I will never listen to in better quality. If this band never played again, this song would live in posterity in the form of this shitty recording. This realisation gives me similar vibes to listening to the world’s first recording of a song (but not the oldest sound recording in general, that’s too creepy, man). Suddenly you realise it’s a recording; somebody recorded it, it was there and then suddenly thrashed into infinity. It wasn’t born from nothing the way contemporary music makes me think about it sometimes. Somebody was recorded who, after the job was done, left and went on with his or her life. The difference in quality makes me aware of factors I’m sure were invisible for people playing the music. “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”, anyone? What about “Any sufficiently advanced observer will be able to distinguish between magic and technology?”
You know what though? At least I’m better off than with that Häxan projection with a live soundtrack by No Clear Mind. That was music that rocked my world. I have no recording of it and I will most probably never have the chance to ever even listen to for a second time in my whole life. It makes you wonder what’s important in the end in this art form which has changed so much and has become so very incredibly complex and meta ever since the internet became speedy for cheap, which is actually true for most about everything humans do.
The song is very catchy. The polyphony is excellent, even if not technically perfect. And what’s this genre of music called, if it even has a name? It must, right? There’s an obscure genre for everything. Anyway, I want more!
PS: After I finished writing this post, I started looking around for more info about this group, starting from the address of the place, and step by step I actually found their SoundCloud. Okay, now I sure feel stupid for writing this whole post above! But here it stands, perhaps as a testament to my beautiful, romantic self-delusion and my tendency to make a story out of limited data and believe it if it sounds good enough? Maybe, maybe. Enough playing philosopher for tonight; here’s a good recording of Rocotó’s music. Enjoy!