Pitchblack Playback: Interview

As a part of the growing trend to enjoy things when the lights are flicked off, what we get when attending the Pitchblack Payback events is something you might call ‘blind screenings’ or ‘slow listening’. Just how this is achieved is understood by Ryan Walker in an interview with Pitchblack Playback’s Ben Gomori. The sonic component of how our senses work best when in overdrive in the dark.

“If you begin correctly, the ghost will follow your lead, usually, and make its wishes known. Particularly this is true when it is of the tearful or helpful variety. If the message is of importance, you must conduct yourself accordingly and listen with an absorbed expression” – The Times, 1921.

The above quote was used in a newspaper with the headline Spirits and the Rules of Etiquette for Receiving Them. It was intended for inclusion in the same year for the First International Congress for Psychical Research in Copenhagen but it’s debatable whether or not it made the grade.

This is obviously not about selling you reasons to believe in parapsychology. Yet the notions of acknowledging the existence of something – the distinct spirit of the musician within the object form, mediated and flowing fully from beginning to end begs the question about this whole connecting to the Other Side business. Conducting ourselves, yes. Absorbed expression, most definitely. The music makes its wishes known. Known as a bundle of emotional states from tearful to angry to humorous and heartfelt.

What we get when attending, the Pitchblack Payback event is something you might call ‘blind screenings’ or ‘slow listening’. Some restorative practice about what isn’t so much lost but just isn’t found as much anymore. A contemporary rejuvenation of what the live experience and the Long Play can unearth within people. A collective session aiming to reach a point of communal appreciation about what is presented around us, an optimal echo from an object that contains memories for some, and none for others.

But, hopefully, they leave here with something impactful and significant: something addressed collectively but reaching the unconscious of each individual attendee hoping to discover something new in something familiar, find something lost or just gone unnoticed either in Portishead’s Dummy, Cocteau Twin’s Treasure or Radiohead’s In Rainbows. For some, these are familiar friends, objects contained within the vaults of their hearts and minds and souls, but for others (like me going to check Kendrick Lamar’s good kid, m.A.A.d city in November), there is the option of being surprised by something you aren’t all that attached to but absolutely curious as to what ways it might move you.

Supported by Richard Russell (producer of Gil-Scott Heron’s I’m New Here – a playback and Rick Rubin), what they do is curate and encourage a collectively listened to sound system, a catalyst for ekstasis and incredibly upmixed to the max when played through all the available industry-standard speakers in the room to create an immersive portal for all to walk through. A public invitation to a branch of transcendentalism through sound that opens up a pool as intense as it is an intoxicating surge of blossoming sonic power. Where the device of choice that populates everyone’s pockets, that plays everyone’s favourite playlists according to what time of day suits it accordingly is perfectly fine. Compared to these curated occasions to listen to things in full (as intended), those circulated gizmos present us with a gossamer rendition of things: gauze; a ghost. Purposeful for the commute and the gym.

There is an unavoidable swell of wonderful sound where everything, even the hidden details in a much-loved song, streaming seamlessly as an immovable, indubitable weave as part of the sonic fabric of the record, its crackles and creases, its melodies and mysteries are pushed to the fore and swirl around us. An opportunity to fall in love with an album (again when exposed in this kind of light) that has been spinning on the turntables of their hearts since the stylus touched groove either fifteen or forty years ago. Surrounded by sonic stars, with a strict policy to refrain from dancing, or singing, everyone experiences the fulfilled, pristine vision of the thing on a classic-stamped LP, unlocking and unfolding for all audiences, from the newly curious cool kids to the age-old superfans alike, both just as spellbound by the entire, timeless movement, the dislodged holy object. Welcomed to appreciate in blissfully chilled, intensely crystalline, and loud, communal reverie.

“When I listen to music, I close my eyes, and it takes me away. The better the music sounds the easier it is to disappear into it. Pick the best listening environment, get comfortable, close your eyes, and really try to feel the music with your body.” – Rick Rubin.

A fascinating concept such as this must surely have a fascinating backstory. It all starts with an idea, usually accidentally dropped into conversation over dinner when we least expect something revelatory and profound to ignite the voice inside that commands us to make things happen. To find out more, we caught up with Pitchblack Playback creator, Ben Gomori.

He had the experience being a music journalist but during the dying days of that role during 2011, an invitation came his way to attend a press preview of Amon Tobin’s ISAM album that his ex-label Ninja Tune were throwing in the Soho Hotel’s cinema in London. Ben explains: “It wasn’t in the dark – they had some visuals on the screen – but I’d never listened to music in such a focused, distraction-free environment in public before, and it made a real impact on me. They had upmixed the stereo to surround sound so it filled the room, I could feel the sub in my body, and I was extremely comfortable, sat in a big plush armchair. It made me want to listen to all my favourite music like that”.

“Then I thought – wouldn’t it be great if I could bring this exclusive pre-release listening experience that the press gets to enjoy to a small group of superfans? I kicked the idea of doing something similar around for a good few years before I did anything about it. I told some of my friends that I wanted to organise these album playbacks on big sound systems, and they didn’t really get why anyone would bother (not having experienced what I had). But then one of them, photographer Ben Davis, said ”I don’t get it, are you going to do it in pitch-black darkness or something?” I thought, “that’s genius!”

“I just went out there and started doing it. But over the years I’ve found more and more quotes from artists who also believe that listening to the music in the dark is also transformative, which has been very encouraging.” – Ben Gomori, Pitchblack Playback.

It may sound self-explanatory – played something back in the dark. Yet this isn’t just a ‘blind screening’ or a ‘hearing’ – it’s a seance. It requires you to not just physically recline into the plush, luxuriant furniture in either Manchester’s Ducie Street, Hammersmith’s Riverside, Waterloo’s Southbank or Copenhagen’s Empire, but psychologically switch off and melt into air. No ice cream. No rummaging around for popcorn. No slurping sticky drinks to death. No overexcited teenagers in varsity jackets and James Dean haircuts. Everything is ethereal. Everything is dead.

The albums, when played in their full format, are like placing a compilation of different documents, each book a song, each song containing chapters and verses and details that can be discovered between a pair of bookends. We think we know these books. We think we know these old lovers. We are aware of the rumours inherent in the narrative of the stranger we are about to read or to ‘look’ at, to listen to, all of which is suggested possible when attempted by us, blindfolded and seated in their presence. It’s all threaded together as part of the whole. The record as a monument to a certain state of mind, played back here in new contexts, in new orchestrated environments.

But we’re not playing the actual record. It’s a licensed digital file, played in full, and with the sonic tech of a small rocketship to really do it justice – the object is a novelty that can be done away with for a sec.

Regardless of the absence of an actual disc, when the music starts – it washes through your body. Races around your head. It presses a palm against your chest. Nerves reconnected and senses reassembled to form something electric and uplifting. Rumbles the stomach. A warm vibration pulsating on either side of the skull – an attempt to dip into the nucleus accumbens and administering such a woosh, such a rush of timelessly chiming sound, in mono or in stereo, pinch the pleasure centre in the eye of the audiophile’s unconscious zone via this kind of immaculate soundtrack, this fascinating sensory experiment, and turns that identified individual outlet into a collective setting.

The albums in question (this point for what they think is worthy of the classic title) are diverse in their style and era. From Massive Attack’s smoky second Protection to Joy Division’s rough-around-the-edges, explosive-young-goths-as-garage-band live and rarities comp Still, from acid jazz mage Jamouriqui’s Emergency Planet Earth, or Interpol’s zeitgeist-encompassing debut Turn On The Bright Lights that shone a fantastic light, the brightest of lights upon everything still shaking in the knees in a post-9/11 climate when New York suddenly had the responsibility of sonically responding to the entire weight of the world upon its community-oriented shoulders despite being forced down into the ground when faced with collapse.

In other words – these are classic albums. Classic in the sense they have endured so much. Classic in the sense they are giants amongst all others. Endlessly appraised. Lauded to the point it’s exhausted and feels like we just have to find reasons to mention an anniversary, or the human race will end tomorrow. These albums are monoliths that mean more upon each passing year; each candle blown out atop the birthday cake to commemorate and celebrate a certain cultural mood. These sessions provide the ability to suture differences and delve deep into those landmarks; subjectively so or generally pinned into place as a long-lasting masterpiece, Classic with a capital C. For Ben, the idea is clear:

“A true classic for me is one that transcends its genre to seep into a wider collective consciousness. There are classics of genres which may hold high esteem with genre die-hards, but the real golden ones manage to break out of their niche and become a more far-reaching phenomenon.”

On determining what makes the grade as being an album given its very own event; it’s the mixture of what is popular and the shameless, occasional spout of personal indulgence that when such a combination can be trusted enough; sends a visual to Ben who can confidently see it working wonderfully and really come alive in the set-ups specific to each venue.

“It’s increasingly informed by album release schedules and anniversaries as we do a lot of sessions to mark an album’s landmark birthday,” he says. “We still do pre-release premieres too. Labels reach out to us with offers or requests, and I do the same if there’s something I want to feature. We tend to steer clear of most full-on dance, underproduced ”in-the-room” rock and very ”in-your-face” commercial pop as they don’t tend to fulfil these criteria and can feel like quite a fatiguing all-on-one-level listen that doesn’t really work for us”.

Ben asks himself questions with an almost-anthropological, investigative eye. Leaning his ear against the period and if what is heard on the other side is decent enough to drag into the present tense; it will be played as a dignified homage to the original – a hybrid of past and present to provide a full-on glance at where the future is dancing.

Is the album going to somehow reveal more of itself in this very concentrated listening environment?” he asks. “Are people going to hear hidden details they haven’t noticed before? Does the production have interesting layers or qualities? Or are there organic vocal or instrumental performances whose nuances can really be heard and felt when you play them in these environments?”

Not that they care much, as we will find out later, about the binary of analogue/digital as the driving force for what they do; not about genre for ”it’s a very broad church, it’s about mood”. It’s just a cool idea boiled down to a few bits and pieces; a staging of an externalisation of their passions by reaching inwards and incentivising people to do the same; but their motive is making something happen, a desire to adhere to the structures and seismic impacts of the albums that they were originally scripted to flow as. Now as is often the case (depending on who you are/where you are/what you do); structure is butchered. Shuffled to nothing. Reduced to what is convenient as a companion to the workings of the everyday, the playlist to a party.

The length of the long player has been circumcised from 50 or so minutes into a succession of snippets at our fingertips. Physically usurped by something invisible and insular and tidy and designer. There is something labour-intensive, something physically vital and invaluable that comes from the full stretch of the entire design. Forget vinyl/digital – just in terms of length; in terms of attention; in the events that PP are responsible for, there is a desire to introduce people to each other; to the full orbit of our own internal earth around this musical Sun.

“Going back to what we were talking about earlier, I think the main thing is really doing yourself a kindness but giving yourself that time and space to just do one thing and do it properly. For a lot of our older crowd, and myself, it takes us back to how we used to listen to music a lot more pre-internet. That’s not to say we didn’t use to multitask back then—I remember listening to my favourite album, Fugees’ The Score on a loop while my brother and I played computer games, for instance—but it’s definitely been something that has been dying out.”

Each to their own.

And who the fuck am I?

Again, this isn’t a debate about taste, or about medium choice (they have compiled playlists on Soundcloud and Spotify; mixtapes for the general mood permeating the room you are in); for they are all tools we use in our own way; fit for our own desired purposes depending on where, physically or emotionally, we are. It’s about the immunity to the incessant whirlpool of stuff swimming around us; a seizure-inducing blizzard of images and signs and our abilities to easily drift away, to drop off; as individuals isolated from each other hypnotised by the fierce artillery of devices in all shapes, unable to escape the advert of all sizes and for all possible occasions.

A strain of pained isolation symptomatic of our reliance on those devices to the extremes, and how both streams we swim in, often at once can provide a service that each finds satisfying without, and it’s not like this will happen because…well because of the power of individual consumer preference and the intense density of the reasons behind the motives behind that preference; bullying the other into a generational abyss.

“While things have moved in an increasingly singles-focused direction on the industry side,” says Ben, “I think the album format has had a renaissance as the streaming market has matured and vinyl sales have boomed – both of which I think are a reaction to the disposability of music en masse these days and since the Napster era”.

Nor does Ben consider music to have become a utility; an accidental ambience in the wake of where such rampant calibres of tech have taken us, simply seeing what he and Pitchblack Playback do something to “make people happy by playing other people’s music in public environments, both with Pitchblack Playback and as a DJ”.

Moreover, it’s important to recognise that what Pitchblack Playback does isn’t executed as some sort of clever protest to pitch a tent firmly in camp Analog. They aren’t pining for the habits of the 1960s because that era is buried. It’s the experience of the album that counts. The undisturbed distribution of mood. It’s about space. Some act/art of negotiation playfully at work to strike some sort of equanimity (if there is such a thing) and reveal the voice in all things that do more than just entertain us, but actually, at the end of the day, do nothing more than that. It’s important to understand they try and relocate the missing pieces of sanity (if there is such a thing), mangled balance, and appallingly mauled order in the grotesque disorder of awful, dogged noise. It’s all platforms, all products, and all possible ways to assure the peak of the listening adventure is met time and time again. About a brief repose from the constant buzz and hissing undercurrent of the interconnected networks of the postmodern world, the edges of which, we are pushed to, or fear exclusion.

It’s an innovative project by contemporary-minded people aware of how they can orient themselves in the technofied landscape, a landscape sliding between transe/trance and extase/ecstacy; always active, enthralled in the throes of perfect sound (and the thick, ringing silence that returns to the room after the album has been unleashed), listening suspended in sleep; echoing the ideas of Michael Bull on mobile sound technologies stating that they ”inform(s) us about how users attempt to ‘inhabit’ the spaces within which they move’’.

It would negate PPs fantastic plans as something, some spirit that ‘inhabits’ spaces if they solely relied on a piece of plastic, some black flat earth to move us in its mountainous wake. It would be perhaps contrary to their own agendas whereby vinyl doesn’t even enter the equation compared to just wanting to revel in the fine details that have been supplanted by something else over time leaving a few scraps and scrapings of groove residue of the throttle and thrust of the whole album (vinyl or not) on the plate with Ben confirming: ” Personally I don’t believe that listening to a modern album with lots of higher frequency detail is optimal through vinyl as you lose dynamic range response in the highs so you’re not getting the full picture.”

‘Only through perfect freedom (from the physical fetters) can the soul become cognizant of its own objectivity in every and through every sense’
– Henrich Friese, 1883.

It’s not so much about positioning yourself on the analogue side of the debate (between analogue/digital formats) but it’s positioning yourself with deep listening to the entire work, about removing yourself from the constant bombardment of technological distraction. For Ben, it is a clear concept:

“We’re all about trying to provide a space where people have the time and serenity to take a break from the outside world. Just like going to the cinema, ultimately, which is part of the reason most of the spaces we use are cinemas. With regards to analogue vs digital, I think there is space for both as they each have their own strengths. Broadly speaking, I think there’s something to be said for opting for analogue for music that was made in the vinyl era and produced sympathetically for that medium’s limitations and sonic characteristics. For our events, we use digital as it provides a more stable and consistent experience on the whole, with the full picture given.”

In a way, it’s strange how we have to stage ‘events’ that almost provide reminders that an album is a long player whereas it was once common practice (as still is obviously) to simply play all of the albums, from start to finish, rather than some of the albums which is just a customary practice. We steer clear of the word ‘pure’ or ‘authentic’ because how can we castigate someone’s social life and the music integral to their survival as being an impurity or an inauthentic facet of their existence? We can’t.

It performs as a site for social activities to occur. It enables an experientially rich shelter for the microsocial, musically-minded folks to forcefully come together and think about/feel for things in new, unexpected ways bringing to mind DeNora’s words concept of “affordance” as something that can capture music’s role as a “mediator” of the social. It highlights music’s potential as an organising medium, as something that helps to structure such things as styles of consciousness’’.

In a bespoke milieu either up North or down South, in the comforts of some inner city symposia, music can arrange and organise people as the prime, moving motivator. As the principal producer of mood in these cool, encouraging theatres of coexistence; whereby music presented to this kind of intimate, immaculate level somatically affords the audience a special slice of something that brings together hardcore fans and newfangled recruits interested in participating in the gimmick or just fancy listening to Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged or Jon Hopkin’s Music For Psychedelic Therapy to its technically realised potential.

All of this is done without the ignorant kinds of nastiness and elitism attached to wanting to listen to music on a streaming service mind you. He says: “We should ”run a mile from the word ‘pure’ and its religious, fascist connotations! It’s none of those things. It’s all about passion. I started it because of my passion to see this concept exist in the world.”

Done so whilst keeping in mind how passion of a visceral sort is the preferable, substantiating difference between what is so ephemeral and throwaway as an argumentative smell lingering within the nostrils, and what you can’t help but cling to as a source of stability for the agentive attendee, the attentive listener, affiliated in their own unique ways with the work, the object; or specifically here – with the idea of what the object was intended to functionally provide: an experience.

That’s what they want. They want it explained. They want it readymade. They want it tasted, tested, teased. Like they have themselves in their private chambers, away from the world, curtains closed to assure that no emotion is concealed but allowed to pour itself through the floodgates with the desired soundtrack. In these events, they wish to see how their precious object; ‘their’ LP let loose, played long but disembodied, in new atmospheres, on new legs, in front of new faces.

In Ben’s part-humble and part-vitriolic hyperbole: “I’m glad to see that we’re part of a growing trend of these sorts of experiences. I see us as being adjacent to the ‘slow food’ and ‘slow tourism’ movements. Along with things like the vinyl resurgence, they are all signs that we as humans will push back against relentless technological ‘progress’ and find ways to hold on to the objects and experiences that provide us with meaning, that keep memories strong and tangible, and give us an increased sense of collectivity amongst a capitalist political system that both actively and insidiously seek to divide and silo us.”

With what PP is currently up to, the splicing together of different lives, appreciating the magnitude of one idea in one place to responses that border on the wonderous, the rapturous, the atmospheric; the possibility of what can be called classic is in an exciting phase…i.e. Sleaford Mods, Prodigy, Pil, Blur’s eponymous album, Gorillaz, Aphex Twin, Dead Can Dance, The Fall’s Oranj, Bowie’s Blackstar, Bauhaus’ Mask, Talk Talk’s The Party’s Over, Moby’s Play, or World Eater or Blanck Mass. All potential contenders are worth considering to get a special slot.

Our ears haven’t stopped working. It just takes a little rewiring to refocus the fragments and in turn – the fantastical will be magnified. In the era of irony concentrated enough to replace running water, where eye contact and instant communication have been replaced by an option of images, an endlessly ripe bouquet of subscribed, interaction apps and ideas about what can incarnate that kind of contact – switching off, shutting up, sealing away; that itchy section of our fragmented selves should be an essential part of the day. One of the five. So bright it blinds. So loud it deafens. It’s all a blur. Fuck breakfast.

Momentarily separated from the twists of the city; there is no argument to be had, just an open dialogue. This idea of the dark is a hot one.

Pitchblack Playback | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | Spotify

~

Ryan Walker is a writer from Bolton. His online archive for Louder Than War can be found here.

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Source: louderthanwar.com