ABSTRACT
The line sounds like it comes from Tommy. It doesn’t. Speaking to his followers, John the Baptist says of Jesus: ‘He must increase, but I must decrease’ (John 3:30). His declaration could function as a motto for record producers, at least until the success of Phil Spector made conspicuous production – the visible producer – a possible, though seldom-exercised, pop-music option. To summon music with presence – music that ‘animates the body of the signifier and transforms it into a meaningful expression’ – the producer effaces himself.1 Otherwise, he’ll become the artist. Or more precisely, using techniques at his disposal, the self-effacing producer inhibits the emergence of ‘the producer’ as an animated body – a self or subjectivity who breathes life into sound. The withdrawal of the producer perpetuates what Jacques Derrida famously labelled a ‘metaphysics of presence’: the emergence of subjectivity in the guise of ‘musician’. The self-effacing (or invisible) producer’s job, therefore, is not a simple matter of capturing music. What we hear as music is not merely determined by which sounds get recorded and which ones don’t. Rather, producers have to work hard to enable and to record sounds that, when listeners hear them, convey the impression of having escaped (better, of not needing to escape) the clutches of production and the constraints of recording technologies. A ‘metaphysics of presence’, founded on Romantic notions of musicianship, requires no (audible) production.
