Primal Snippets, on Vinyl
August 17, 2009
A few months ago a peculiar item called “Favorite Recorded Scream” began to trickle into New York City record stores. Pressed on 12-inch vinyl in an edition of 500, it has little on its red cover except a list of 74 songs, each linked to a Manhattan record shop.
But anyone curious enough to buy it would find that the record is exactly what it says it is: an audio catalog of scream snippets — each a few seconds long — chosen by employees at various record stores in Manhattan. It begins with the Pixies’ “Vamos” and includes samples of recordings by the Stooges, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, De La Soul, Slayer, Bjork and dozens of others. Spliced together on Side 1 into a continuous, bumpy howl, the whole thing lasts only 3 minutes 32 seconds. Its creator is LeRoy Stevens, a 25-year-old artist who made the album both in homage to his creative hero, Ed Ruscha — whose 1963 book “Twentysix Gasoline Stations” is simply photographs of gas stations from California to Oklahoma — and as a more practical travelogue. Last fall Mr. Stevens moved to New York from Chicago, and to get his geographical bearings he plotted a map of every record shop in Manhattan and vowed to bring to each a questionnaire asking for every clerk’s favorite scream and why.
“For six months this is pretty much all I did,” Mr. Stevens said recently at a coffee shop in Midtown Manhattan. “Every day I’d say, ‘O.K., I’m going to go to these six places,’ and I’d go off by bike or walking. It was tough. A lot of stores would say, ‘We like your project, but please come back another time.’ Some places I had to visit four or five times.”
The project also let Mr. Stevens, who has an easy, boyish giggle and wears a barrette in his long hair, explore a fascination with the scream as a musical element that is as ineffable as it is expressive. It first struck him while listening to “A Change Is Going to Come” by the 1960s soul singer Baby Huey, a version of the Sam Cooke song, which climaxes in a series of ecstatic but painful screeches. “It’s that point where it’s no longer about a word,” Mr. Stevens said. “It’s just an emotional release.”
Experienced as a piece of music, “Favorite Recorded Scream” offers a riveting if unsettling tour through decades of popular music. Buddy Holly’s carefree whoop in “Oh Boy!” goes right into James Brown’s sensual falsetto in “The Payback,” and the Swedish metal band Meshuggah is not far behind with the guttural cry of “I.” Throughout, favorites like the Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again” repeat at somewhat regular intervals, as if cleansing the scream-palate with a spritz of familiarity. The clerks’ ballots (collected on Mr. Stevens’s Web site, leroystevens.info) contextualize the range of expression in the music, from the Slits’ free-spirited “Shoplifting” to the “horrific first-person existential crisis” of Suicide’s “Frankie Teardrop.”
The result is a superb marriage of concept and execution, as meticulous a deconstruction and re-examination of pop music’s formal elements as anything that has recently emerged from the world of sound art. Each play reveals new details and fascinations: the brevity of the screams seems in sync with modern ring tones, while their splurges of noise recall the sessions Extreme Noise Terror and Napalm Death once recorded for John Peel. Playful, jaw-droppingly strange and dynamic, it’s that rare thing: a piece of music that is equally at home in a downtown gallery and at a raucous house party.
On Side 2, the 74 screams are separated from one another by 10 seconds of silence, forming an index not unlike the “breaks” compilations used by hip-hop D.J.’s. The record is for sale for about $15 at various stores in Manhattan; some also sell it by mail order through their Web sites, like Other Music (othermusic.com) and Turntable Lab (turntablelab.com).
Mr. Stevens, who works at a bakery and at the Guggenheim Museum (“building walls,” he said), didn’t get copyright clearance to use any of the samples, but he said that for the most part he was not worried. “I read somewhere that you have seven seconds that you can sample,” he said, adding that every sample except one is seven seconds or less. But the fragment from Pink Floyd’s “Careful With That Axe, Eugene” is eight seconds, he said, “and Pink Floyd seems like a band that might sue you.” Entertainment lawyers said there was no law protecting unauthorized commercial use of samples of any length.
As a conceptual coup and a document of the disappearing culture of record stores — several of the 42 shops that participated have since closed — the album has struck a chord with the collector cognoscenti in New York and beyond. Downtown 304, on Hudson Street in the South Village, offered the album through its distribution affiliate, and orders came in from as far as Italy and China. “It’s an underground hit on a global scale — or however much records can be a hit these days,” said Joe D’Espinosa, a co-owner of the store. Downtown 304 ordered 200 copies, but Mr. Stevens could only supply 100: that was the most he could carry.
Although “Favorite Recorded Scream” would seem to fit in the growing field of sound art, Mr. Stevens instead traces his inspiration in “using the city as a sort of playground” to mid-20th century trickster movements like Fluxus and the Situationists. “Equal emphasis is placed on the process as well as the final product,” he said. In that sense the record stores themselves helped create the work and are also now functioning as its gallery.
They are a world in which Mr. Stevens says he now feels very much at home.
“I just moved here, and didn’t really know anybody, and instantly I sort of had the in at every record store,” he said. “I walk in, and they’re like, ‘Hey, it’s LeRoy the scream guy.’ ”
www.leroystevens.info
but luckly I don't fuck people over like that.
