This is a photo that I like and come back to for various reasons. It's one of my street photos—things noticed on the periphery and in the flow of everyday life that can sometimes have metaphorical value. When I took the photo I was thinking about the force of some heavy large object (like a large heavy truck) scraping against it and the loud sound that would have been produced. It's a record of an event. We don't know if it happened in 10 seconds or was the result of scraping over a long period, making a series of mostly soft sounds. That's what geological strata are as well, such as the Holocene or Anthropocene: there are lots of huge events in the layers but all we get is the silent stratigraphy (All the Silent Plastic, or Loud Plastic—great song titles). But it's a Record.
I see albums as records of life, a diary essentially. (Bowie's Blackstar Joni Mitchell's Blue are prime examples). This is how they can have more intrinsic value, although singles (or shorts) can have the same impact as a small portrait in a frame. It's how we frame what's in a frame. They can become Curios.
"Record" is another word for "Album", a metaphor perhaps taken from a book-making. I think they are both and can have the same function for memorialization as a photo album would—as Iron Age pottery encodes the Earth's Magnetic Field. "It's kind of like a tape recorder," Ben-Yosef says.
Albums can take anywhere from a few days to months or years. Peter Gabriel became known as someone whose albums took as long as film productions or writing a book, 2-5 years. Whatever the duration of the production, ultimately only one definitive mark is made—like a layer in a geological record. It's the "exposure" if using a photography metaphor.
A Record can also be embedded in other media. The cliche in film is the cutaway shot to a framed photo on a table where the camera zooms into the world of the photo. It's called the "Journey Through the Eye" shot. Another obvious example is the film score and/or soundtrack. It "scores" the experience. But this happens in everyday life when sights and sounds encode memory in moments with high "triggering" value. There is a coupling effect that takes place at one "node" in time.
There is a power of embedding one thing in another. It's a form of recursion or mise en abyme. It puts records inside of records, creating a stronger memory "alloy". It's one of the things the Metaverse might allow us to do, so it has some archival value. There could be many memory triggers taking place in a VR environment. An example is a room circa 1977 where Wish You Were Here is playing with blacklight posters on the walls. Boomers have an actual memory of this, then other generations will have a memory of that memory, albeit a copy. Pink Floyd has a different memory of making it and are perhaps bad memories. Things were happening in their individual lives, which feeds the overall experience for them as a band. So if you use something from that album in another medium, all that is there in some way.
Frequently I'll use mise en abyme in my audio productions to embed history. They are my Audio Snapshots. They were inspired by an Ed Ruscha interview where he thought certain Walker Evans photos had an "audio" to them. The snapshots are a spin-off of Music For Photographs. On a few of the pieces, I added cinematic audio treatments to evoke places and situations. The March on Washington photo has two places: one in Amarillo Texas where a radio program is playing a radio program about someone's memory of the event against a photo of the crosstown buses he was describing. The photo of the Standard gas station was taken in what might be fairly close to the time of the 1963 march. Music has a way of hiding easter eggs in terms of memory touch-points, so you have to get in a more mindful space when viewing or listening. This could be one of the upsides of "Metaversal" experiences.
History Embeds
Embedding is a way of strengthening existing objects; It "inherits" all the ways it was transformed over time. Very often I'll re-arrange something I did ten years ago, and take it completely out of its genre: from something ambient or on solo piano and make it a loud and heavy piece—a "pole shift" as it were. Even though they sound completely different, the original essences are still there. It inherits the form(s) in the original, which I think are immutable. In some ways, the contents are the same—it's the container (genre) that's different. It could be that the substance is in a ceramic cup, a water bottle, or a wine glass. As in music, the production counts for almost everything, and consequently why music is the way it is. It's all made as a sonic experience, and when you turn the power off the piece disappears, or can't be re-shaped. It's all just air. Influence is also an inheritance in some ways because "inhaling" other things with everything else. If I'm influenced by this or that player, I'm also inheriting that person's influences. Or if I cite one person's book I'm perhaps citing the books that they relied on. I don't think we can be choosy about those kinds of things in certain aspects of life. There's more evidence that you inherit the traumas of your parents, as did they, and so on. We're all Records of Records and it's difficult to separate it out into discrete units. Everything is embedded or enmeshed in some way.
But you can't force an object to be a container of memory. Political art in particular is perhaps more powerful as a memory object because its initial intentions don't necessarily have to be political. Like geological epochs, everything ends up compressed in the same layer as a Record. As an artist, you can move from genre to genre, but it’s all one Record in many ways. As I recently read in The Generation Myth, all living generations are contributing to one big “Collected Works” album.