https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/the-grateful-deads-anthem-of-the-sun-10-things-you-didnt-know-2-700628/
2. Relations between the band and producer Dave Hassinger broke down when Bob Weir requested the ambient sound of “thick air.”
Having produced the band’s debut, Warner Bros. staff producer Dave Hassinger was drafted in to record its follow-up a few months later. But with the band exploring decidedly more experimental territory on Anthem – not least telling Hassinger they wanted to record environmental audio of both the desert and the city – the producer jumped ship. “I was describing how I envisioned the song, and [long-term Dead sound engineer Dan Healy] and Hassinger were hassling over something,” Bob Weir said in Oliver Trager’s 1997 guide The American Book of the Dead. “I announced, ‘Right here I want the sound of thick air.’ I couldn’t describe it back then, because I didn’t know what I was talking about. I do know now: a little bit of white noise and a little bit of compression. I was thinking about something kind of like the buzzing that you hear in your ears in a hot, sticky summer day.”
^
Nice. I'd read about the "thick air" incident with Dave Hassinger, yet had not come across Bob's concluding follow up (my bold above). He turns it around and quantifies it, translating the poetic woo-woo head-speak into clearly descriptive audio terminology.
In the end, both the colorfully poetic and dry technical aspects are woefully incomplete descriptions on their own without reference to the other. It is finding a meaningful relationship between the two which is essential to achieving a successful realization of musical art via a technical medium. Music technology is an unavoidable convergence of art and science. It becomes most fully actualized when its practitioners are able to relate to both realms honestly, which requires thinking and communicating using the different ideas and different terms of very different mediums. It is a translational art like language interpretation, which requires a sufficient understanding of sub-contexts in both mediums to be able to successfully convey essential meaning, rather than a rote word-for-word translation that strips away the essence of the message. Command of the technical allows actualization of the artistic. It enhances the subjective artistic experience rather than diminishing it, but therein lies the fears of those who confine themselves to just one side without the other. Science needn't and shouldn't displace faith nor faith science when each is able to provide a useful illumination of the other.
Most of us are able to recognize this, if only subconsciously, and that exposes snake-oil sales hype as an "essentially meaningless bad-faith translation" which in turn provides entertainment value in its obvious falsities. "All your bases are belong to us"
So easy to poke holes in the less-loss blackbody thing. The part I found especially funny is how they go on and on about how it so perfectly
absorbs the entire electromagnetic spectrum.. while displaying photos of a shinny chrome-plated thing super-adept at
not absorbing the visual portion of that spectrum.
