The City in the Distance: Looking back on Lake Mokoan and the geography of old music technologies

This Must Be The Place Podcast

“Things fall apart- it’s scientific” is a line from the Talking Heads song “Wild Life”. Like most Talking Heads songs, including the one from which the This Must Be The Place podcast takes its name, the lyrics are a bit bookish. “Wild Life” seems to be a reference – one I haven’t actually fact checked – to popular scientific accounts from the mid 20th century, theorising the trajectory of the universe and of life in it. Entropy, or the second rule of thermodynamics, refers to the “general trend of the universe toward death and disorder”. And in 1944’s “What is Life”, Schrodinger put forward the idea that life itself is a kind of negative entropy machine, defined by a temporary state of order-from-disorder. Aside from sometimes passing on copies of our DNA, however, the ends of our lives are as apparently inevitable as that of the universe. Meanwhile and despite this cheerful thought, our lives are temporarily put together from bits and pieces, material and digital. People attempt at various times to curate, purge, hoard, systematise or selectively narrate piles of memories and things and files. Friends and relatives might do the same for us after we pass away. Music, and the changing technologies through which music is created and duplicated, forms one part of this. In “This is your Brain on Music”, Daniel Levitin writes about how music can connect people to times and places long after their more practical memories have faded. Side note – the music we remember the most vividly tends to be from when we are 14 years old. I was not 14 years old, but I remember the first time I heard the Talking Heads song “This Must Be The Place” because it was on the soundtrack to the film “Wall Street”, which I watched on a rented VHS tape in 2001 before I first travelled to the US. David Byrne of Talking Heads later discussed the effects of a century of music technology in “How Music Works”. The study of technology and media as part of the social and historical record is not new – in coining the term “the medium is the message” Marshall McLuhan in 1964 proposed “communication medium itself, not the messages it carries, should be primary focus of study”. Radio and records are central to Ken Burns’ History of Country Music – previously, songs were reproduced and adapted through live performance. The Carter Family’s early recorded songs were said to have been “captured, rather than written”. But what of the music so many people now record themselves, and which does not form part of the broader popular or cultural memory? How do people give order to their own songs and recorded music over the course of decades, during which mediums for recording and sharing music have come and gone, and changed fundamentally? The topic has been more in my mind and conversations of late in light of the recent death, from Motor Neurone Disease, of an old friend of my husband. Two decades ago, they and others spent years writing and recording music together in garages and warehouses. But you can’t always find, let alone access old recordings. Listening to a song is one way of putting yourself into a place and time. Music is geography and is also technology. In the shift to digital, each new technology promises less physical stuff, less clutter, perhaps even a kind of longevity. It’s an illusion – the archiving and curation of our own music is contingent on constantly changing technologies and media which are as fallible as the material world. There are extremes to navigate – you might have only one copy of a song, or you might have hundreds of copies of lurking old CDs. I’ve put together a rough chronology of different technologies for recording and sharing music that I’ve used, over the 1980s to 2020s. I’ve included example songs where I could find them – its own saga. Radio, cassette, VHS, studio and home recorded CDs, social media, digital releases, vinyl, the cloud, and back to a missing hard drive – and a song about the ephemeral artificial Lake Mokoan.