This Heat – Health And Efficiency (ep,1980)

I suppose one can come to accept (it is harder to embrace) the flip side of this EP, "Graphic/Varispeed", as a kind of zen-inducing aural mechanism, but it's one of those pieces of sonic art I think most people need to find a rationale for, to somehow appreciate (these days, calling it drone apparently helps). 

The concept of designing a vinyl track that could be played at different turntable speeds, artistically exploring the physical properties of the record medium itself (as others have with, say, locked grooves or scratching; albeit with widely varying degrees of artistic success and cultural traction), was certainly valid - suffice to think of how the very physical properties and specs of film stock and the cinematograph, which (quite incidentally) allowed for that continuous strip of sequential photographic images to be projected backwards, all of a sudden (right from the pioneering Lumière brothers, with Démolition d'un mur) visually shaped and materialized the conception of literally turning back time for human culture (and the psyche of anyone who has ever called out an ex's name while having sex with a soon to be another ex). 

Unfortunately, in this case, as Graphic/Varispeed plays out, not only is it hard to identify any revolutionary or particularly (un)pleasant cultural takeaways from it, but time itself, or more precisely the technological transformations in music distribution that accompanied it, have rendered the experiment largely anachronistic, lest you can get your hands on a vinyl pressing, and even then, it can't make the same sense under so different a material musical culture. Some CD reissues only feature the track at 45 rpm, implicitly recognizing that as the standard speed (and even more implicitly suggesting that spending the extra time required to listen to it at 33 rpm was somewhat akin to getting caught in a cultural ruse), other digital releases feature it played at different speeds as different tracks; but as its entire rationale was predicated on the technical specificity of phonograph records and players, at a time and place when and where that medium was (still) dominant in that culture, those workaround versions can only stress how this has essentially become something of an archaeological artifact, requiring historical contextualization and adaptation to make some sort of sense and be experienced today. 

As such, in this day and age, I would mostly take it as an example of the type and array of experiences these guys had to go through to produce unique sounds and then (like turning musique concrète into song) be able to technically coalesce them into the disjointed complexity of pieces like the title track, which very much is a clear example of just how evolved This Heat must have sounded back in the post-punk primordial soup (to say nothing of the "pre-post" one - and with their legacy still going "post-post" strong).

Nonetheless, as the imposing availability of music being force-fed to humanity has turned so many of us into sonic bulimics, ceaselessly consuming musical products, mostly without considering for one second how they came to be and came to us, it's good that, once in a while, a musical head-scratcher like this can still stop us in our tracks, make us briefly contemplate some simple but sometimes willfully ignored notions - (good) music is (usually) hard work; our aesthetic perceptions are as culturally/historically contingent as all the works of art we so often briskly appraise regardless of how equipped we might be to properly appreciate them; the medium through which we experience a piece of music affects the nature of that experience and its conditions of existence - and leave us to ponder how that should be present in the way we relate to it. 

And now, here "it" is on youtube...