No Stairway is an album comprised solely of manipulated field recordings taken from a Guitar Center, and that somehow doesn't even make it unique. There are two such projects currently floating around, both by artists who seem not to have heard of each other before beginning their work. Noah Wall, who has been a conceptual artist since the late '90s, garnered some notice earlier this year for his project Live at Guitar Center, which he recorded by surreptitiously wandering and capturing sounds in his local Guitar Center, archiving the furtive soloing and jamming of the customers testing amps, plinking at keyboards, fumbling out drum rolls. It was a noisy, blasting mess, and purposefully so, meant to evoke the sort of public-space cacophony that could make any agoraphobe tense up.
Danny Greenwald, working under the name Glassine, arrived at the same idea, completing his project a full year before Noah Wall's was released. He took his samples from two Guitar Centers, one in Brooklyn and another in Baltimore, where he lives and works, and produced a glimmering, soothing album from the results, with the jokey title No Stairway. The coincidence is remarkable, and Patient Sounds, the label issuing No Stairway on cassette, noted the remarkable fact of the two projects' coexistence in its press release.
But apart from the freaky timing, the two albums feel mostly like a testament to the sneaky centrality of a place like Guitar Center to much of young American musical life. For millions of instrument-playing kids, Guitar Center was a sort of local YMCA, an imperfect but important testing ground for life pursuits and passions. If Noah Wall's project felt a bit like an encroaching panic attack in a mall, Greenwald's feels like the dream of someone who fell asleep in the food court bench. It is murmuring, mostly soothing, verging on ambient. Greenwald is a composer, and he treats the samples he has collected as clay, conscripting them into a different context than they came from.
Truthfully, you can learn nothing about the nature of Guitar Center, or what it's like to spend time there, from listening to Greenwald's album, and that is a good thing. You can squint at the deep, hollow knocks of percussion on a track like "Human Shield" and imagine they came from amps being plugged in, microphones being clumsily brushed. But to do so seems to miss the point of listening entirely. This is an album to dilate the senses, not sharpen them. No Stairway is woozy and dreamlike, a collection of undulant and wordless pieces that pulse gently in free space. If the album has a genre, it would be somewhere between experimental dub—those reverberant percussive hits can't help but evoke sound-system associations—and new age. The fact that all of these sounds were compacted out of an unruly stream of data is impressive, and even a little bewildering, but the knowledge proves unnecessary.
The revelation of No Stairway turns out to be hearing how Greenwald coaxes these scuffs and shuffles so that they bloom quietly into pop songs. "Hornet With a Halo" and "Sunruse Bench" have lovelorn, sighing melodies, and sound like what Caribou might be doing if he worked in lo-fi cassettes. The radiant ripple of keyboards on "Human Shield" turn out to be several layers of sound stacked on top of each other, some patched through old synths and played again and some looped. It is a remarkable simulation, built painstakingly from a thousand scraps, but it rings out in space as simple and immediate as a hand pressed down on keys. The major-key melodies are warm, generous, and refracted through a fisheye-lens mix so that they feel slightly love-drunk. If you've ever closed your eyes in a room full of family and friends, letting the chatter blur so that you sense the surrounding goodwill more than you pick out the words, then No Stairway will have an uncannily familiar feel.
Like many late-'90s big-box music retailers—Sam Goody, Tower Records—Guitar Center is a relic of a different, largely pre-Internet commercial era. Wandering into one today, you feel the same sense of impending economic doom you get from pushing open the glass doors of a Best Buy or Radio Shack. It has been in grave financial trouble for years, and is on pace to die a slow, ignominious death. Projects like Greenwald and Wall's, then, provide a slight redemptive note to the timeline, quiet reminders that millions of music-loving souls passed through those big doors at one point or another.
