Shearwater’s Jet Plane And Oxbow is an album that looks backward—to the recording technologies and sounds of the early ’80s—in order to interrogate the present and to contemplate the future. Shearwater’s moody, thoughtful style, built around Jonathan Meiburg’s dramatic, beautiful voice, turned toward rock with 2012’s Animal Joy, which now sounds like a stopover in the flight path toward Jet Plane. Meiburg used period-specific instruments; his guitar playing alludes to Adrian Belew’s work with David Bowie and Robert Fripp’s with Peter Gabriel; he integrates the stark sounds of Joy Division and early New Order. But the goal wasn’t nostalgia. Jet Plane doesn’t sound retro, nor does it sound like an homage. The allusions are there to create a sonic parallel to our time. Meiburg will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our new Shearwater feature.
Meiburg: This anthology is the most inspiring and hair-raising collection of sounds I’ve ever heard, and probably the only set of albums that deserves to be declared a UNESCO World Heritage site. If you know Harry Smith’s wonderfully bizarre Anthology Of American Folk Music, which folk troubadours of the ‘60s liked to name-check but sometimes forgot to listen to, this project is similar. It collects recordings of musical performances, most of them made in the field, from the earliest days of phonograph recording to about the mid-1940s.
Unlike Smith’s anthology, however, The Secret Museum’s scope is the whole world, in an era when recorded music barely existed in most places, and enterprising recordists went in search of far-out sounds to feed a market eager for novelties. The result is stunning: It’s like a snapshot of the entire human musical world before recording changed the way we thought about music. It’s easy to forget that before the phonograph, music was so perishable that it couldn’t exist outside the present moment; either it was being made in front of you, or you were making it yourself—those were the options.
Our guide through the museum is collector Pat Conte, who (like Harry Smith) is a rabid fan, not an academic. Several of the volumes are incredible, globe-hopping mixtapes; others focus on a single country or region if there happens to be a superabundance of riches from there (Madagascar, North Africa, Central Asia). I’m hoping the series isn’t yet complete, and that there are more still waiting in the wings. The recordings themselves, lovingly salvaged and remastered, are surprisingly detailed, and always musical.
Video after the jump.
