Despite their increasing notoriety for doing bad things like killing people, machines can be pretty awesome. It's the summer and it's hot, and I like the fact that I have a machine in my house that keeps my brews nice and cold. For how awfully dependent we are on machines, and for how often they can screw us over, think about how incredible it is that, at any moment, we can log onto the Internet and see a free photo of a naked guy or girl, or perhaps both, together. We have machines that, when we put round discs in or on them, make pretty fantastic sounds.
Player, Player is a celebration of awesome machines, of machines at their most beautiful. The album hearts the fact that the metal within, if only because it is touched and molded by our hands, maintains some level of our humanity. kpt.michi.gan (aka Michael Beckett, aka the short, bearded third of the Schneider TM touring brigade who recently earned a reputation for appearing in the middle of The Faint's set and poking the band members in the butt with a microphone stand) does not, as so many other electronic artists do, try to create beautiful music despite his electronic machinery. Rather, it's as if Beckett is exploiting the beautiful music of machinery itself, recreating what we all might imagine our CD changers, turntables and iPods might sound like if microphones could record the melodies and harmonies of the atomic level. Indeed, Beckett is "playing the player," and we are privy to one man's vision of the awesome electronic concert that happens every time we turn on our stereo receivers.
The very first sound we hear on "Solong S-20" is a sine tone, harsh and abrasive, before it's subsumed into a more deeply lush, slowly pulsating wave. The tone occasionally regains its dominance, but ultimately Beckett keeps the wave at the forefront. He moves beyond sound prima facie, and for the rest of the track we're amidst those very atomic gears that process sound.
Listened to one after the other, "Jimi" and "Derber Papa" operate as "Solong S-20" did, but on a wider and more varied scale. "Jimi" is thirty-seven seconds of piston-like mechanical pounding (for the complete effect, I recommend listening to this on headphones). A romantic type might imagine the sound of a turntable, its drive belt slowly turning, the needle being dragged against a record's grooves, occasionally tripping over a speck of dust or a piece of hair. It's the least pleasant sound on the album, but its presence is perhaps most important: without the sonic nit and grit of machines, we cannot have-- let alone appreciate-- the more beautiful ones that we demand from them.
The abrasiveness of "Jimi" is matched only by the first thirty seconds of noise that opens "Derber Papa". Slowly, though, Beckett motivates what is Player, Player's coarsest barrage of noise into a fast pulse over which he lies a sound that's uncannily similar to the sound of the human breath. It's a slow breath, and a pained one, but it persists, and for me, it's the paradigm of Player, Player's humanity-within-machinery motif.
The album closes with "Hey Brother", which, with the exception of a faint electronic drumbeat, is entirely composed of Beckett singing along to acoustic guitar accompaniment. The quasi-folk song seems out of place on what is in many ways an academic electronic album, but de facto concludes a ring structure introduced by the sine tone of the first track: sound sandwiches meta-sound. On Player, Player, kpt.michi.gan pulls us into our speaker cones and through our wires, shows us how beautifully sound is processed, and brings his tour to an end as our stereos, in a breathy Beckett voice, ask us with tongues in cheek: "Hey brother, look at me."
