Thus is summed up a crucial aspect of this book, which does great work in haranguing some rather evasive concepts. Many musicians and phonographers will tell you that a prime objective in performance is to eliminate discernable indications (perhaps specifically, limitations) of the materials used to render music and recordings, ensuring an "unmediated" artifact. For instance, a recording of a clarinet reproduces the sounds of the musical notes produced by the clarinet, but most often eliminates the sound of anyone pressing the keys of the clarinet itself. Or, in a field recording, levels are adjusted to ensure the microphone noise is not louder than the quietest environmental sounds. In this largely modern paradigm, recordings and performance styles are structured so as to be interpreted as originary or self-producing sound events, thus purposely minimizing the qualities that reveal them as reproductions. From the way musicians handle instruments, to the notes they play, to the manner in which sounds are recorded and mixed, every aspect of the recording is most often meant to play down or eliminate any suggestion of mimesis.
Much effort has been put into diminishing the ways that recordings and musicians betray themselves as living, breathing bodies and technologies, and not as unmediated events. While this may be a chief imperative of contemporary practices in the sonic arts (however futile it remains in practice, such as when the hiss of analogue recordings rendered them unmarketable after the advent of digital recordings), it is not the only one. Just as there are many ways to play a guitar, the same applies to recording technologies, the enormous diversity of which speaks to a plethora of intentions and aesthetic imperatives. Every configuration of technology is unique, and these unique iterations offer strengths and weaknesses to be exploited and sublimated according to the artist's intentions (or lack thereof). The phantasms of recorded sound do not pass by Weiss unnoticed, and indeed for him they are a source of some fascination. The presence of bodies creating sound waves, and of recording technologies inscribing those waves, cannot be omitted from the recordings entirely. Furthermore, the varied ways artists approach this dilemma creates a rubric for the interpretation of their work.
