Mtx forever, the sequencing
By: Frank Portman
Tags: Vinyl, Music, History, Spotify, Rock

So sequencing. How do you sequence an album? What makes a good sequence? Historically it is rather interesting, because the aesthetic of the rock album, like the aesthetic of many of the elements of popular music, and indeed the music itself, was largely determined by the technical parameters and limitations of the engineering involved in producing “canned music,” going back to the beginning. Why are pop songs two to three ish minutes long? Now, it’s because it just feels right for them to be that length, but the historical reason, in part, has to do with how many grooves per inch could be effectively inscribed on a 78 RPM ten inch disc in 1910. 45 RPM 7" singles and better technology improved the sonic quality but the aesthetic remained, and remains to this day largely. The pop song has its parameters, technically determined by engineering limitations, but carries on as its own art form to a great degree even in the all-digital world in which grooves per inch don’t enter into it at all.

The rock album emerged in the same sort of way, with the long playing 33 RPM record providing a way to present a sonically acceptable program of a collection of songs (still quite often two to three minute pop songs, though they didn’t need to be that length anymore.) Eventually, as is well known, artists started to conceive of these as discrete works of art, as cohesive aesthetic statements as a whole rather than a collection of individual songs aggregated because they could be “stored” that way.

But this format had limitations as well, some obvious, some lesser known. It’s two sides, for one: you have to listen to five or six songs, then pause to turn over for “part two” and this influences your experience of the music. The final track of side A lingers in the mind while you amble over to the turntable to stop the thump-thump thump-thump and turn it over. Then the next song you hear is, in effect, a new first song, an opening to the second act. What you put in these positions matters because of how they’re listened to. (Another weird aspect of that is that many people have a short attention span, and a life where things just, you know, come up, and they don’t always manage to go on to side B after listening through side A: I’m one of those people myself, and it’s rather shocking to me, when I think of my favorite albums how much better I tend to know side A.)

There’s also a length limitation per side, having to do with the grooves per inch again. The more minutes there are, the less space there is, and the more trouble you run into with sonic quality and fidelity. 17 minutes, give or take, is ideally the length to shoot for on a side. Longer can present problems, though it is often done. That’s why albums have five or six songs on a side, generally, unless some of them are longer than two to three minutes, in which case you have to have fewer, say four songs on a side. And that why I projected 24 songs for the Mtx forever double album, because my songs do tend to be two to three minutes, with some exceptions on either side of that, and that’s how the math works.

There’s also a stranger issue that can come up with 33 RPM LP sides, even when they are within the recommended length parameters, which is that the sonic information inscribed in the inner grooves can tend to distort, and you’re much better off with songs in this position that are less sonically dense. And this is why so many of your classic albums end side A with an acoustic song, and also tend to have minimalist or spacious arrangements in final tracks as well. (Though the tendency to want to end the show with a great bit elaborate bang sometimes over-rides this concern, as it often does with me — doesn’t change the risk though. Sometimes you make a decision that you’d rather run the risk of some distortion for the sake of making the grand statement, but that’s part of the technically-influenced aesthetic, too.)

(Just as an aside, you’d think the problem would have been solved completely in the CD and digital era, and I guess it sort of was solved, however at great cost. The album aesthetic persisted, in a way; but, with less restrictive parameters, a lot of the inherent logic that contributed to the effectiveness of the two sided rock album tended to fly out the window. And soon many people just dispensed with the album aesthetic entirely, and even forgot what it was. The balance between side A and B was largely left behind. You wanted your best, most accessible, most effective songs front-loaded at the beginning of the single, practically interminable side, after which you just piled on the tracks. Albums became very, very long. And then there were the “loudness wars” where the sonic information was compressed severely to compete with all the other severely compressed tracks out there with the result that recorded rock music, as presented to the public, lost most of its subtlety and dynamics. And a digital album now is just… indistinguishable from the flow of scattered “content”. No matter how high the fidelity or how great the substance, it means less, somehow. Which is why a return to vinyl is so refreshing to people like me, as artists as well as as listeners.)