"but Samm, that's the GENRE... "

We chose to overlook the questionable humor value of making the liner notes read as though the CD were a scholarly field recording of "ethnic" music (the kind of idea that sounds funny over a few drinks on Saturday night but probably should've been abandoned by clearer heads the next morning...), but it must be said that those same liner notes had a certain mean-spiritedness to them: you couldn't help getting the feeling that the author was really sorta dissing the music. Even the title of the release indicated that this was as much of this weird stuff as you were ever going to want to hear. The whole package was really kind of demeaning, but hey, these were New Yorkers trying to be clever and arch, which, after all, is not particularly unusual. They can't help it...

Where things got a little weird, though, was when they sent us a few copies of the pre-release CD: promotional copies, largely for going out to the press. We slid one out of its paper sleeve, popped it into the player, and listened. At about a minute and a half into "Shift" there was a huge, hideous burst of digital noise, much louder than anything else in the track, that lasted about 3 seconds. It was jarring, to say the least, appearing suddenly as it did in a track otherwise characterized by a quiet and understated cyclic motion. Once the unwelcome sonic intruder had wreaked its havoc and departed, the track continued its gentle percolation right up to the end. Well, it was clearly a defective CD, surely, so we took another one out of its sleeve and listened. Lo and behold, right there at the same spot in the track, there it was again! Haruna and I were aghast. How could this have happened? How could they not have noticed this? And of course, the very next thought: have these promos already gone out to music journalists throughout the world?

Well, as you might imagine, getting answers to these crucial questions was anything but easy. Repeated calls and emails to our contact at the label went unanswered. The fellow was, for days, either out of town, out of the office, out of the loop, out of wherever. Anywhere but in. And we were, it would appear, out of luck. Those promo CDs had almost certainly gone out. Our music was horribly marred. And would anyone hearing it assume that such a respected label (part of a major...) would have sent out a CD to the press with such a glaring mastering or manufacturing defect? Probably not. More likely the assumption would be that whatever was heard was what the artists created and intended. And indeed, when one review said our track had "all the charm of a washing machine breaking down" we weren't surprised that the reviewer failed to mention that the fault was surely due to a shockingly sloppy mastering error on the part of the label...

Well, I was finally able to obtain the home phone number of our trusty friend at the record company. I actually got him on the other end of the line: Tokyo to New York. Asked him, um, what the hell happened? I learned that this genius was actually there at the mastering session, when the engineer did mention that it seemed a little strange, but, well, he just assumed that this sudden blast of hideous digital skronk was intentional. Even after having had it brought to his attention by the mastering engineer, it never crossed his mind that the DAT tape they were using to master the CD from might have gotten corrupted. And the sound of the noise was classic digital corruption. And keep in mind, dear reader, that "Shift" was a piece which had already appeared on another release. If he'd never listened to it before (sad but obviously true) he still had a reference he could've checked, to actually determine whether or not it was supposed to sound like that. But nothing got checked, stupid assumptions were made, the disc had been mastered like that and it had gone out to hundreds of magazines, newspapers and music writers. Well, there it was, the cast iron fact, but, hey, what're you gonna do, right? I mean, people are often stupid and disappointing, right? They often don't do their jobs as they should be done, right? This is nothing new. But, then... THEN, Mr. Trusty Label Guy said something to me that left me genuinely speechless: something at once so brazen and so clueless that, well, I was left grasping for an appropriate answer. He said: "But hey, Samm, that noise, you know, that's the genre... I've listened to a lot of this stuff, and it sounds just like that!

But there was no appropriate answer to something that stupid. At least, not one you could give over the phone. The closest thing to an appropriate answer would have been a punch in the face.

The label did remaster our track for the release that went out into record stores. That was damned nice of them, don't you think?

this article copyright 2005 Samm Bennett
all rights reserved