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When multitrack recording became more sophisticated in the mid-1960s, what artists were doing was more like film editing. Like a film, it is shot out of sequence and assembled over weeks or months, such that in the end it's consumed as one contiguous experience. The metaphor can be extended further into the manufacturing process (as a dangerous metaphor): it doesn't matter how the choreography was rehearsed, people only see the result of how it was all stitched together.

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1/9/2024

While watching the coverage of the Boeing 737 Max issue with the door that blew out, I was thinking about the just-in-time manufacturing process. As I've been doing the mastering for Nostalgia Galaxy, I realized this is how I made the album--tiled together as a mosaic. I wasn't always looking at the overall picture other than the concept. The actual recording process took place over a year in bits and fragments whenever I had time--which is different from the usual way of doing an album which can take perhaps a few days or months. But when it starts to take place over a year, it starts to feel too disjointed. Now that I'm doing the mastering, I'm finding the rough areas that need smoothing. This smoothing and polishing could go on indefinitely and at some point you have to set it free, but obliviously, not something you can do with a commercial jet.

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A city is what  it is because of the ability to get minute fragments from anywhere on the globe. Without the ease of transportation we'd be constrained to constructing ziggurats from only local materials. If you didn't have a way to make glass locally or get it from somewhere else, we wouldn't have skyscrapers, and might just be obelisks made from limestone. 

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Art historian Kirk Varnedoe circa 2003:

"In an interview with Julia Brown, Michael Heizer spells out the distinction between what he calls "megalithic" and "piecemeal" societies, that is, societies that express themselves in single, whole forms, like the carvings in the Ajanta caves, versus societies that express themselves by constructing things from little bits and fragments/ He specifically includes modern society, with its assemblages of steel modules, in the latter category, in contrast to the grand solidarity of the old stone cultures. Heizer is drawn to forms linked to the material of the earth itself, and to forms simplified by time: things that have eroded, things that have lost all excrescences, ruins that are stumped down, as are the ball courts, to their basic underlying form."