One More Revolution: a Love Song, on Vinyl

One More Revolution, published in 2018 by The Operating System, writes through the intimate, personal practice of listening to music, of living with music. Beginning with self-interrogation into the my growing obsession with collecting vinyl records, the narrative spins out into a meditation on how we come to know the music we love, how voices from the past animate and complicate that knowing, and how the ways we consume music tell a deeper story about the ways that music means. Somewhere between memoir and theory, this book demonstrates that personal revelations can animate the work of analysis, that a poetic voice can make a formal claim, and ultimately, that language can articulate the ways that music moves us.

A short excerpt:

Saint Dymphna

My father ruled the records. I never knew about the etching near the label, A or B, so guess where to begin. Which side looks more like a beginning? Start somewhere.

Damon, her father, the mad king, sends spies. They discover Dymphna in Gheel, near Antwerp. Damon arrives in haste, begs Dymphna to return with him to Ireland, as his bride. Repulsed, she withholds her hand. Enraged, he takes her head.

Drop the needle onto Saint Dymphna. Begin a more protracted violence. Agonizing, no swift beheading. A million ridges scratching smooth, turn by deliberate turn. Sanctify this sound in cutting it down.

Or trying: cycles of machine-noise flood the headphones. I’ve undershot the groove, the stylus stuck in blank space. This is what happens when you miss. Lift the tonearm and try again. The same sound. No music.

Move to lift the arm and try yet again, until something changes: a wooden tap, close to my ears, a stick against the rim of a drum? Then a woman’s scream at a distance, faint. The mechanically repeated snare convinces me: these sounds are really there, pressed into vinyl, intentional. A vocoded voice, the center cut out, a splash of electronics, and the song takes off. The same sound? No. Music:
“Inners Pace” begins Saint Dymphna if you begin on the wrong side. It sounds like what you are doing: boring a spike into tiny grooves on a surface spinning on its axis. Loops keep coming round, as you’d expect from music. But lack of coordination between glitchy unidentifiable treble percussion and murky kick/bass rumble scrambles your relationship to the downbeat, as you’d expect from sonifying a spinning disc. The experience is tactile, objects in space colliding in a particular way. The way a record and a needle collide, the record purchased on a whim, the needle attached to a library turntable.

This short chain of coincidence—purchasing this particular Gang Gang Dance record, accidentally beginning on side B—shows a way that music means. What I hear confirms what I know is happening in the room: a spinning disc with a needle pressed into its surface maps hard onto the cyclic repetition in my headphones. The record sounds like this particular kinesis, these particular bodies in contact.

I used to watch my father’s hands as he tore the keyboard apart. My first impression of music, standing beside his Baldwin upright as he played Chopin, was sight as much as sound. Then, the “Revolutionary” etude meant an elastic left hand. Now, “Inners Pace” means a spike and a ring of ridges. Not a laser reading a disc, not a computer converting digital to analog; neither process calls a sound, inherently, to mind. But I can hear what I can see: a needle’s contact with a slab of rotating contoured plastic. It sounds like this.

What people have said:

Writing about Mazzariello’s book is a bit like writing about music; it is elusive, yet clearly communicates; it is in our hands, not so unlike an LP, and we can feel its contents, believe that we can own it, but it slips through our fingers like sand, leaving a textured impression. And, as with our experiences with music, we learn and grow and feel through its embrace. This is poetic, personal, and full of humanity, it is beautifully written, warm, but with sharp edges, not so unlike the combination of vinyl and diamond-tipped needles that, together, bring “the music itself” to us, with the aid of our ever-learning hands. It is a love song, indeed, for all of us who love music.
-Dan Trueman

A kaleidoscopic blend of ethnomusicology, memoir, philosophy, and poetry, this lyrically soaring meditation on music and identity invites us to reflect, ever so gently, on the ways and reasons we engage with music, love it deeply, and strive endlessly to grok its ineffability with words. These words, chosen with insight, elegance, and grit, add to this human endeavor with unique and unforgettable illumination.
-Sarah Kirkland Snider

“Music is an invitation to experience its own human making”

Writing about music is hard. I would not say that this is because it is ineffable, describing only the motions of the soul or anything like that. In my experience, it is quite the opposite. Music is a tangible, sensory, deeply associative part of our lives. I am constantly suspicious of artists or writers who claim that music has an unearthly quality, because I guarantee that at some point in their lives there was a recording or a performance that left them in shambles or which they couldn’t keep from playing compulsively. This is an everyday relationship, not a Platonic marvel.

In our current culture, I have noticed there are many writers who can wax extensively about what music means to them and to others within a social context, but who lack a deep understanding of how music really works as a craft and a means of making structures. On the other hand, there are many others with extensive technical training who struggle to make their writing seem relevant to the way most ordinary people experience music.

In this book, Andrea has wrestled to address both of these poles of concern, and to me it feels incredibly fresh. As I read his first few chapters, I thought to myself “yes, this is how music lives in both your body and your mind.” On top of that, he addresses technology without the mind-numbing clichés that usually surround that subject. He realizes that the piano is a technology; paper to write scores on is a technology; and yes so is a turntable and an iphone.

Andrea strives to remain radically vulnerable to the ways in which music can surprise even the most educated listener. The simplicity of this perspective is disarming because his erudition is evident. This reflects perfectly what it is like to know him in real life, and now we can all be richer for it.
-Adam Sliwinski