Best record review in ages

"I realize I've said next to nothing about the album itself"

Can I ask why you think this review was the best review you had read in ages? I'm not keen on this style of writing myself, but I am curious what purpose it serves.

I thought using Roland Barthes to look at this album was astute. The way he describes the sample of the woman's voice, taking a small detail and spinning it out farther and farther, is excellent writing. Even though Sherburne doesn't write about the album in a typical way, I feel like I got a much better idea of what The Private Press sounds like just by the way he frames his thoughts. It's excellent writing, it's very smart and informed. It doesn't rely on wordplay or snarky writing. It's straightforward. I think it's an extraordinarily strong piece.

Fantastic intro, but record review required - he really ought to have sustained the theory right the way through the album itself. The final paragraph lets the rest of it down, frankly*. Might need someone else to do the second bit :)

*as does the record itself, unfortunately.

"The final paragraph lets the rest of it down, frankly."

I agree, If he ended it by talking about Shadow and the aura, it would have been even stronger. When I reread it, I just stop there.

oh alexander! purpose is so eighties!

why suddenly apply punctum theory to THIS RECORD NOW OF ALL RECORDS? he doesn't explain that very well

It's a fancier way of saying "Shadow lets the ghosts in the music speak," which phrase I seem to have read a variant on in every review of the album. (Most of which also spend much more time on the method of composition than the music itself, probably because the music isn't very good).

The whole "punctum" business seems to be little more than window- dressing. As far as the review is concerned, it's just a fancy word for "something that moves you". You don't get a sense that it's any more relevant to this particular album than it would be to any album that provoked an emotional response from you, which is a rather wide net to cast. I think it would have been more interesting to address aesthetic issues that are more relevant to DJ Shadow's modus operandi such as: appropriation, vicarious nostalgia, and the persistence of physical recordings as a form of mortality.

Well Derrida's use of the concept 'spectres' is more apposite in that...

Hang on, I am SO not going down that road.

Anyway, I would need to scamper back to the textz to be sure but I disagreed with how he used punctum, it was my understanding a person doesn have lots and lots of punctums, or even know if other people can share them. No?

I think the writer thinks his writing serves a purpose (and clearly Yancy does too "I got a much better idea..."), I am still not sure if its an illusion that it can serve a purpose. I liked the Barthes bit I guess, its something I had only half understood / forgotten so I enjoyed the recall and reassimilation into my thought processes - can't help thinking it would be better if it wasn't about the record, it feels like he'd been saving up that idea for the right record to come along. That was what I meant about not liking the style.

I know that I also think all music writers are loathsome whores (present company excluded natch, well, the loathesome bit anyway arf!) but I do like reading them and I can't work out why.

well why does anyone like whores, big boy?

I think there are interesting parallels to be drawn between Barthes concept of the "punctum" in photography and the aesthetic effect of sampling old recordings. The problem is that the reviewer (Sherburne) doesn't give a clear explanation of what "punctum" and he leaves the parallels quite vague. I get a better sense of what Barthes was getting at from this quote, also from Camera Lucida, which he didn't use: "I now know that there exists another punctum (another 'stigmatum') than the 'detail.' This new punctum, which is no longer of form but of intensity, is Time, the lacerating emphasis of the noeme ('that-has-been'), its pure representation."

why suddenly apply punctum theory to THIS RECORD NOW OF ALL RECORDS? he doesn't explain that very well

i don't think it's specific to the record at all, but camera lucida presents a compelling way to think about how art or music or really anything can work emotionally for someone without necessarily relying on usual tropes of sentimentality. there doesn't really need to be a reason for it to be this record of all records because barthes is talking about finding something in usual objects-- family photographs, photojournalism, etc. and i do think it's something more specific than "something that moves you"-- swells of strings can move you, but they are not what barthes is talking. and yeah, he isn't really using "punctum" the same was barthes does, but it still works as a framework to explain the types of pleasures he found in the private press, which i guess reviews him as much as the record (but i like that sort of thing).

and there is no way a record review is going to be able to "define" the punctum-- camera lucida (which i think should read as something other than theory) resists that sort of a thing more than most texts.

If you can't define "punctum" to at least some extent, then you have to wonder how useful it is as a term.

i am just grumpy becuz part of my book is abt barthes and the punctum and edison cylinders, but i spend so much time posting piffle on ilm that p.sherburne got the idea into print first

well camera lucida is more poetic than useful anyway, right? and using barthes to talk about music is tricky business-- i tried it in a will oldham review for pitchfork a couple years ago & got kind of slammed.

i think camera lucida defines it very well, actually, but it does so by a sequence extended but palpable examples rather than memorable phrases => i think it is a highly usable concept in ref. real-time recording => viz a tape my mum has of an old lady, long dead, who used to live across the road who got taped by mistake when she dropped in to see us

the punctum of this recording wd be not the content of the chat (which was negligeable village yatter) but - for example — the actuality of her speaking accent, an unavoidable emotional fact for anyone over a certain age from certain regions of the UK, insofaras NO ONE NOW LIVES who speaks in this way...

(Alexander is right about Derrida and spectres, also, in regard to this...)

by "memorable phrases" i suppose i mean "phrases easily transferred elsewhere" => ie i think the method of studying for punctum is easily transferred w/o it being easily described-defined in the abstract

i think camera lucida defines it very well, actually, but it does so by a sequence extended but palpable examples rather than memorable phrases

oh, i agree. when i said "resists definition" i meant more of a description it's properties or a "why"-- but the quality his examples are pointing to is transferrable to other examples or at least familiar to the reader.

The examples in this thread, including the examples from "The Private Press" imply that the effect of "punctum" is akin to a sense of lost time. Perhaps "punctum" is nothing more than a quiver of our own mortality as we confront the photographic (or phonographic) illusion that a moment of time can be frozen in perpetuity.

"i've seen attack ships in flame off the shoulder of orion... i've seen things you wouldn't BELIEVE... all those... moments... lost... like... tears in the rain... time to die"
*batty dies*
*the dove, released, flies up through the teeming rain to a point above the endless LA murk, where the sky is suddenly bright and clear*

A much-sampled film, of course ;) My favorite: Tricky, "Aftermath"

Sherburne's needledrops is just one big marriage proposal to everyone reading, isn't it? So beautifully written, the teenage poet.

It's a nice review, but I don't see what the concept "punctum" adds to it. If Sherburne had left it out altogether and looked into his mind and worked out his own explanation of how bric-and-brac can jump him by surprise, the piece would have been stronger. (But then, I haven't read the Barthes, and if I had maybe I'd be able to plug his images into Sherburne's gaps.)

I doubt that Alexander Blair is telling the truth in the second clause of the sentence "I'm not keen on this style of writing myself, but I am curious what purpose it serves."

i am a big fan of the art critic "hal foster", especially how he begins his lectures on mechanically reproduced art by showing a photo of andy warhol (actually a page from vogue that's an advertisement for vidal sassoon) that some artist (whose name i forgot) has glued onto cardboard and then repeatedly slashed and punched with a pair of scissors.

(point at the holes) "now THAT's punctum, boys..."

I think Blair means "what the fuck do you lot of asses see in it?!", and I can understand why... ;o)

Why?

Oh, you know! The usual... ;o)

Frank, with some time having passed since writing, I'm quite in agreement with you (and no, this isn't a marriage proposal). I'm sure this isn't the first place I've used a literary allusion or theoretical trope as some sort of lever where I could've just rigged up my own pulley system, but it's probably the most egregious.

Cozen, I can't tell if you're kidding or not (I'm 32, hardly teenaged - although Luka is encouraging me to get in touch with my inner teenaged poet, which I'm sure would be a really dreadful idea for all concerned), but that's probably the funniest thing I've ever read about my own writing. In a good way. Color me Walt Whitman.

I'm not kidding. Color me a potential suitor. Move to Glasgow! (Don't.)