My Fuzzy Warbles }{ Disc One }{ Bergweihnacht
Franzl Lang }{ Bergweihnacht }{ 1971
Adorno once wrote, “Only when gramophonic reproduction breaks down are its objects transformed.” Never mind the bickering over whether or not this passage argues the notion of transparency in correctly functioning sound reproduction technology. Let’s get to the transformations! Here’s an excerpt from Franzl Lang’s Bergweihnacht as played back on my malfunctioning Pro-Ject MkII turntable:
Hallelujah! Check out that dip at 0.16, a sudden slide down the scale to settle near perfectly in a lower octave, only to follow one of Lang’s yodel lines back to normal speed at 0.19, the turntable’s fluctuation emulating the form of the music it’s reading. And again at 0.45, this time reinforcing a shift from chest to head register and announcing a decidedly woozy final stretch. As the warbles dance around the root I hear my turntable gearing up (and down) to cover John Oswald’s “Pretender” and reveal the true voice behind Lang’s pretty face.
I thought the turntable needed a new belt. Trips to a few local service shops yielded nothing. So I made the order online, waited for the goods, and finally replaced the belt to no effect. Then I discovered that the problem was, in fact, the Speed Box: a voltage regulator designed to prevent just such fluctuations. Instead, it started injecting these wild shifts seemingly at random. So I took it out of the chain, and we’re back to normal. But all this was well after I needed to have the record – long out of print in any format – transferred to digital and sent to my mom for Christmas last year.
You see, although I grew up in Vancouver we enjoyed German Christmas traditions. One of the most memorable was to play this record in the living room as the family was invited in to view the newly decorated tree at dusk on Dec. 24th each year, followed by eating, gift-opening and music-making (sometimes with masks). The record begins with the ringing of Christmas bells bringing us schizophonically into range of the Friedenskirche parish as defined by the limits of their acoustic profile. This leads into a signature rendition of “Der Glockenjodler,” choral chanting of the words “Bim-bam” building up from a bed of deep bass and ascending harmonies as the bells fade away until the yodel king himself takes up the reins. And the rest is gravy as he works through a set of new and traditional Austro-Bavarian fare.
Der Glockenjodler (with warbles)
There is something simply outstanding about the warmth of the tones produced on this record that lent itself so well to the fuzzy feeling of Christmas Eve. Or was I simply borrowing the feeling from the fuzzy crackles that inevitably came along with the music’s reproduction on vinyl? To which we can now add the warbles injected by my Speed Box, all crunched down to mp3 at 128 kbps – the compression format mandated by SoundCloud, the platform I’ve used to share this with you.
Fast-forward some years and we exchanged the house for a condo, giving up the dedicated living room that formed the centerpiece of our family Christmas. Eventually we kids moved out, my parents took up separate residences, and future Christmas Eves were generally spent at Mom’s. But while Mom is the German in the family, Dad is the vinyl guy and has remained keeper of the Lang record. He made us a tape of the LP, but it wasn’t the same. Although it did come with some of the unique pops and scratches of the family vinyl, I don’t remember those being part of why I liked the record so much – despite that angle of vinyl enthusiast discourse that posits the individuality of each record as part of the format’s appeal. We make it our own by playing it, history writing itself into the music as we move through life, each new scratch or bit of dust a memory trigger embedded in the music’s graphic representation within the grooves. But I hadn’t yet identified such uniqueness in our copy. I just missed playing the record – and the full family gatherings in our old living room in that old house, an absence now felt as ghost pangs following the structure’s demolition just a couple of months ago.
"Mit brod!" I insisted despite my server's objections at a Cologne Christmas Market.
Then I moved across the country and gradually Bergweihnacht drifted into the stuff of memories. I was starting a new life and the baggage I left behind hadn’t yet caught up with me. But when I went to Germany for the first time some years later it happened to be during Christmas Market season. I toured a dozen or so from Berlin down to Salzburg, rekindling my love of the traditions I had grown up with. I bought a wooden tree ornament in the shape of a gramophone, and later stumbled upon a street sale in Frankfurt with lots of used vinyl. I wondered if I might find a copy of the Lang record. I didn’t, and took home a Dutch pressing of Johnny Cash’s The Christmas Spirit instead. But it wasn’t hard to track down Bergweihnacht online upon my return, and soon I had my own vinyl copy to begin inscribing my history upon, like so much inappropriate bread applied to Cologne sausage.
Gramophornament
Which brings us back to last year. The record arrived just in time for the holidays. As my mom’s tape has been lost to the ages I wanted to make a decent digital transfer to send down the wire. But it was right about this time that my Speed Box started to get the jitters, as though operating as an extension of my new life abroad desperate to inform tradition with the particularities of changing context. Perhaps this manifestation was induced by anomalies in the wiring within the house I now call home and in which I am raising my own family, infusing the music with the nuances of my new environs, branding it with the marker of this place before sending it back home. And so a layer was added to the spatial conflation of the record’s opening that once brought the Friedenskirche bells into our family living room.
Ihr Kinderlein Kommet (excerpt with warbles)
These warbles act as a psychogeographic map of this music’s position in my life. Imagine, if you will, the first verse in the above excerpt as the territory marked out by family tradition as it plays out in relatively stable fashion. Then, the sudden drop at 0.26 tracks the jolt of my cross-country move after 26 years of geographic stasis, a moment of sluggishness as I regain my bearings. This is followed at 0.38 by a slide back up to form, though now the verse plays out with troubled pitch, less stable in its new environs, tradition slipping, catching hold, slipping again as I work to situate my heritage within present realities of shifting foundation. All while singing the story of Jesus’ birth as Mary and Joseph were themselves in transition between homes, the beginning of an unsettled life (or so the story goes).
This digital copy is a marker of a particular moment, temporary fluctuations made permanent – as in this warbly bowl I made in high school ceramics class. I love that bowl. Did I mention that my mom was once a potter by trade? Now, if only I could pair her skills on the wheel with my dad’s penchant for sound technologies and track the grooves in this bowl to recall the soundscape of that late 80s ceramics class. What auditory record of my youth would these reveal? And what distortions has my imperfect spinning technique locked within these grooves? Maybe these are why soup always tastes a little better out of this bowl than any of the others.
* * *
Too idiosyncratic? Here’s the full record for your enjoyment, transferred without the malfunctioning Speed Box. Merry Christmas!
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In: Audiophilia, Music, My Fuzzy Warbles, Phonography, Sound Technology · Tagged with: Audiophile, Bergweihnacht, Franzl Lang, German Christmas Music, Pro-Ject Turntables, Sound Theory, Theodor Adorno, Yodeling