Metal Machine Music

Metal Machine Music
Studio album by Lou Reed
Released	July 1975
Genre	Noise Avant-garde
Length	64:11
Label	RCA
Producer	Lou Reed
Lou Reed chronology
Lou Reed Live (1975) Metal Machine Music (1975) Coney Island Baby (1976)

Metal Machine Music, subtitled *The Amine β Ring, is the fifth solo album by Lou Reed. It was originally released as a double album by RCA Records in 1975. It was reissued on a single compact disc by BMG in 1997 and again by Buddah Records in 2000.

As a radical departure from the rest of Reed's catalog, Metal Machine Music is generally considered to be either a joke, a grudging fulfillment of a contractual obligation, or an early example of noise music. The album features no songs or even recognizably structured compositions, eschewing melody and rhythm for an hour of over-modulated feedback and guitar effects, intricately mixed at varying speeds by Reed himself. In the album's liner notes he claimed to have invented heavy metal music and asserted that Metal Machine Music was the ultimate conclusion of that genre. The album made Reed a laughing stock in the rock industry while simultaneously opening the door for his later, more experimental material. Historically, Metal Machine Music is now considered a seminal forerunner of industrial music, noise rock, and contemporary sound art.^[1][2]

In 2010, Reed, Ulrich Krieger, and Sarth Calhoun collaborated to tour, playing free improvisation inspired by the album, as Metal Machine Trio. That same year, Reed announced his plans to re-release Metal Machine Music in remastered form.^[3]

Style

According to Reed (despite the original liner notes), the album entirely consists of guitar feedback played at different speeds. This can be heard clearly if the album is played at 16 rpm with the balance adjusted to hear either the right or left channel only as each appears to be unrelated. The two guitars were tuned in unusual ways and played with different reverb levels. He would then place the guitars in front of their amplifiers, and the feedback from the very large amps would vibrate the strings — the guitars were, effectively, playing themselves. He recorded the work on a four-track tape recorder in his New York apartment, mixing the four tracks for stereo. In its original form, each track occupied one side of an LP record and lasted exactly 16 minutes and 1 second, according to the label. The fourth side ended in a locked groove that caused the last 1.8 seconds of music to repeat endlessly (as had been done on John Cale's recording of Loop as a flexi-disc accompanying an edition of Aspen in late 1966). The rare 8-track tape version has no silence in between programs, so that it plays continuously without gaps on most players. A quadraphonic disk was also released by RCA.

A major influence on Reed's recording, and an important source for an understanding of Reed's seriousness with the album, was the mid-1960s drone music work of La Monte Young's Theater of Eternal Music (whose members included John Cale, Tony Conrad, Angus Maclise and Marian Zazeela).^[4] Both Cale and Maclise were also members of The Velvet Underground (Maclise left before the group began recording). The Theater of Eternal Music's discordant sustained notes and loud amplification had influenced Cale's subsequent contribution to the Velvet Underground in his use of both discordance and feedback. Recent releases of works by Cale and Conrad from the mid-sixties, such as Cale's Inside the Dream Syndicate series (The Dream Syndicate being the alternative name given by Cale and Conrad to their collective work with Young) testify to the influence this important mid-sixties experimental work had on Reed ten years later.

In an interview with rock journalist Lester Bangs, Reed claimed that he had intentionally placed sonic allusions to classical works such as Beethoven's Eroica and Pastoral Symphonies in the distortion, and that he had attempted to have the album released on RCA's Red Seal classical label; however, it is not clear if he was being serious, though he has repeated the latter claim in a 2007 interview.^[5]

Critical reception

Professional ratings
Review scores
Source	Rating
Allmusic	[6]
Rolling Stone	(not rated)[7]
Robert Christgau	(C+)[8]

On its release, it was reviewed in Rolling Stone magazine as sounding like "the tubular groaning of a galactic refrigerator" and as displeasing to experience as "a night in a bus terminal".^[9] In the 1979 Rolling Stone Record Guide, critic Billy Altman said it was "a two-disc set consisting of nothing more than ear-wrecking electronic sludge, guaranteed to clear any room of humans in record time." (This aspect of the album is referenced in the Bruce Sterling short story Dori Bangs.) However, the first issue of the seminal New York zine Punk, placed Reed and the album on its inaugural 1976 issue, presaging the advent of both punk and the discordance of the New York No Wave scene. To quote critic Victor Bockris, Reed's recording can be understood as "the ultimate conceptual punk album and the progenitor of New York punk rock." The album was ranked number two in the 1991 book The Worst Rock 'n' Roll Records of All Time by Jimmy Guterman and Owen O'Donnell.^[10] The book gives sympathy to legendary record cutting engineer Bob Ludwig for having to listen to the album in its entirety. (In fact, according to the liner notes of the 2000 reissue of the album, Ludwig was "totally into what Lou was doing" and compared the work to that of avant-garde classical composers Iannis Xenakis and Karlheinz Stockhausen.) In 2005, Q magazine included the album in a list of "Ten Terrible Records by Great Artists", and it ranked number four in Q's fifty worst albums of all time list. It was again featured in Q magazine in December 2010 for the "Top Ten Career Suicides" list, where it came eighth overall. The Trouser Press Record Guide referred to it as "four sides of unlistenable oscillator noise," parenthetically calling that assessment "a description, not a value judgment."^[11]

Probably the most sympathetic appraisal of Metal Machine Music was given by rock critic Lester Bangs, who wrote that "as classical music it adds nothing to a genre that may well be depleted. As rock 'n' roll it's interesting garage electronic rock 'n' roll. As a statement it's great, as a giant FUCK YOU it shows integrity—a sick, twisted, dunced-out, malevolent, perverted, psychopathic integrity, but integrity nevertheless." Bangs later wrote a tongue-in-cheek article on Metal Machine Music titled "The Greatest Album Ever Made", in which he judged it "the greatest record ever made in the history of the human eardrum."

Many fans of Reed's more straightforward rock efforts returned their copies of Metal Machine Music to record stores, believing that the droning grind which allots for the album's entirety was actually the result of defective vinyl.^[12][13]

Despite the intensive criticism (or perhaps because of the exposure it generated), Metal Machine Music reportedly sold 100,000 copies in the US according to the liner notes of the Buddah Records CD issue.

Track listing

Side one

1. "Metal Machine Music, Part 1"  – 16:10

Side two

2. "Metal Machine Music, Part 2"  – 15:53

Side three

3. "Metal Machine Music, Part 3"  – 16:13

Side four

4. "Metal Machine Music, Part 4"  – 15:55

On the original vinyl release, timings for sides 1–3 were stated as "16:01", while the 4th side read "16:01 or ∞", as the last groove on the LP was a continuous loop. On CD, this locked groove was imitated for the final 2:22 of the track, fading out at the end.

References

• Bangs, Lester (1987). "How to Succeed in Torture Without Really Trying". In Greil Marcus. Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 0-394-53896-X. 
• Fricke, David (2000). Liner notes. Metal Machine Music by Lou Reed, 1975. Buddah Records 74465 99752 2 (reissue).
• Guterman, Jimmy and Owen O'Donnell (1991). The Worst Rock 'n' Roll Records of All Time. New York: Citadel Press. 
• Eno, Brian (1996). A Year with Swollen Appendices. London: Faber and Faber. ISBN 0-571-17995-9. ISBN. 

Citations

1. ^ "Lou Reed Defends 'Metal Machine Music' Ahead of Album's Re-Release". Spinner. 2010-04-21. http://www.spinner.com/2010/04/21/lou-reed-defends-metal-machine-music/. Retrieved 2010-08-02. 
2. ^ Paul Morley (2010-04-11). "Paul Morley on music: Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music | Music | The Observer". London: Guardian. http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/apr/11/morley-lou-reed-metal-machine. Retrieved 2010-08-02. 
3. ^ "Lou Reed is back with experimental music of 1970s". Reuters. 2010-04-20. http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE63J47O20100420. Retrieved 2010-04-20. 
4. ^ The album listed (misspelling included) "Drone cognizance and harmonic possibilities vis a vis Lamont Young's Dream Music" among its "Specifications": text copy, image copy (reissue).
5. ^ "Pitchfork: Interviews: Lou Reed". Pitchforkmedia.com. http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/feature/45431-interview-lou-reed. Retrieved 2010-08-02. 
6. ^ Allmusic Review
7. ^ By James Wolcott (1975-08-14). "Rolling Stone Review". Rollingstone.com. http://www.rollingstone.com/music/albumreviews/metal-machine-music-19750814. Retrieved 2011-08-17. 
8. ^ "Robert Christgau Review". Robertchristgau.com. http://www.robertchristgau.com/get_artist.php?name=Lou+Reed. Retrieved 2011-08-17. 
9. ^ Wolcott, James. Rolling Stone Review. 1975-08-14.
10. ^ "Rocklist.net...Steve Parker...Slipped Discs". Rocklistmusic.co.uk. http://www.rocklistmusic.co.uk/steveparker/slipped_discs.htm. Retrieved 2010-08-02. 
11. ^ "Lou Reed". TrouserPress.com. http://www.trouserpress.com/entry.php?a=lou_reed. Retrieved 2010-08-02. 
12. ^ "Lou Reed - Metal Machine Music (Gyrofrog review)". Gyrofrog.com. http://www.gyrofrog.com/mmm.php. Retrieved 2011-08-17. 
13. ^ Holmstrom, John (January 1986). Bob Guccione, Jr.. ed. "Great Moments in the History of Punk". Spin 1 (9). http://books.google.com/books?id=O8JuDPDsl1gC&lpg=PA4&dq=spin%20magazine&pg=PA63#v=onepage&q&f=false. Retrieved 2011-05-06. 

Further reading

• Morley, Paul. "Metal Machine Music". Words and Music: A History of Pop in the Shape of a City London: Bloomsbury, 2003. ISBN 0-7475-5778-0

External links

• A humorous essay on the 25th anniversary of Metal Machine Music
• Section on Metal Machine Music from Sangild article about (minimal) noise
• Lester Bangs' review of the album for Creem