Book Review: Live Wires: A History of Electronic Music

There are big books, and little books. Books that are large because they collect myriad examples of "the exact thing you need to know" about a given subject - the volume to which you have gone a hundred times for a hundred different answers.

But there are also volumes that, like the Tardis, are bigger on the inside - books that read well, make their point, and then send you elsewhere - they encapsulate how you think of something. Books you circle around and back to as you continue to chase down the ideas they contain. Daniel Warner's Live Wires: A History of Electronic Music is one of those books.

Many of you may know Daniel Warner from his co-authorship of the reader Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, along with Christoph Cox (the book is now available in a considerably revised edition, by the way). My colleague Darwin Grosse has praised Audio Culture in a previous book review. It's praise I will gladly second.

Where Audio Culture is a brilliant book in terms of collecting primary writings that, taken together, frame and explain the intellectual history of the idea, Live Wires is different kind of beast; it begins with a few ideas instantiated in a few objects - 5 of them, to be precise. The book allots a single chapter to each of the 5 technologies (the tape recorder, the circuit, the computer, the microphone, and the turntable) and then traces how the ideas and the objects were modified by the persons who used them - often, in ways that their creators may not have foreseen.

I have a clothing tag that hangs on the wall in my studio that I picked up at an exhibition of new media work that included the Dutch art group De Geuzen that - I think - neatly sums up the elegant analysis the underlies Daniel Warner's book:

Warner does a great job of discussing the circumstances under which the original objects were created - as with what follows, you get a sense of the original intentions and goals of the tools' creators, and a sense, too, of who it was who actually took the tools into their hands and started working... sideways. It is a book that starts with the history of a thing, and then celebrates those musicians who saw the promise of the technology and created work that followed that promise in idiosyncratic ways that created the world we know.

It's a nice short book, and a good read. If the narrative occasionally seems terse, don't worry - the book is densely footnoted, with each of the references all set to open a new set of questions when you chase them down. I was quite positively impressed with the depth and detail of the "further listening" recommendations, and the book's bibliography is almost worth the cost of the text alone.

But it's also a book I'd give my little brother - or anybody who knows me better than they know the things I am enthusiastic about.

What made Live Wires such an interesting readerly sprint for me - through terrain which I already knew, in part - is the sense that history emerges from the uses to which artists put the tools at their disposal, and that the five technologies that he chronicles function nicely as starting points for making sense of the current landscape in which we find ourselves. As an example that involves not only a short history of what a microphone does, but also the ways in which various users seized upon some feature of it to do something that is rich, interesting, and far more subtle and far-reaching in practice than we might initially imagine (e.g. that sense in which the microphone freed Frank Sinatra to stand before Nelson Riddle's huge orchestra and to effect a quiet and intimate delivery that would never have been audible otherwise).

Of course, you may have some quibbles with specific examples or inclusions or exclusions - How can you go through a chapter on the computer without mentioning Ted Nelson? Why isn't Laurie Spiegel's picture in the computer chapter? But those are exactly the kind of quibbles you want to have with a book like this, since it means that it's done its job; You've been intellectually challenged and had your passions and your own bias set fired up. I commend this book to your attention.