Can’t Stop Won’t Stop

An article about an NYU professor creating “time-lapse phonography” of Billboard chart hits. So you grew up reading Allmusic guides. So you want to learn about pop history. All of 1978 sounds like a few jet engines spliced together. While it’s a canny move from that perspective—all abridged all classic favorites pill form swallow!—it also plays on another time-obsessed project, William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops. In Basinski, though, the tapes bled until they crumbled; they’re like the Malone Dies of head music. Or take Alan Licht’s Plays Well, where Donna Summer’s “Dim All the Lights” is cut up into hundreds of frames that loop over and over again, stretching two minutes out to nearly twenty, because, in the memory-wrecked rhetoric of my friend Brandon, “The guitar on that song is so fucking awesome and he wants to make sure you know how fucking awesome it is so he will let you soak in how fucking awesome it is bit by bit.”

DuBois’s music is immortal. Time gets compressed to the point of unintelligibility. I used to play this weird game with my brother where I’d make him say the second syllable of a two-syllable word and I’d say the first at the same time; neither of us could understand anything. Imagine fifty. Imagine it’s the pledge of allegiance. Splitting the verbal atom. I could dork out for pages, but in the spirit of the project: O//X! bip—

(The results of my own time-lapse phonography studies:

Joanna Newsom’s catalog: A footfall in the snow and then the sound of, I think, a fox’s tear splashing against an ebony nightstand.

Om, Conference of the Birds: A bong rip and then a mountain quietly exploding into gold dust.

Charlemagne Palestine’s “Strumming Music”: A fire alarm going off in what sounds like your brain.)