N times M

1973. In August, in the rec room of a building on Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx, Clive Campbell¹ plays his sister's party and does the thing you do not do with a record: instead of the song he plays only the few seconds where the drums are alone, and when they end he plays them again, off a second copy of the same record. The break on a loop. A record played wrong, N times, to turn three seconds into five minutes. Nobody records it, because there is nothing to record: it is a way of playing other people's tracks. For six years it lives only in the room and on tapes from the room, paid for by the room. The label that finally presses it does so in the autumn of 1979, to cash in on a fad before it passed; the owner said so plainly, later. The fad did not pass. It became a method: take someone's seconds and repeat them until they are yours.

1994. Three men take compact discs, mark them with a felt-tip pen, and load them into a player built so it would never make a mistake. The laser loses its place, the disc skips, sticks on a fraction of a second and repeats it, and what comes out is supposed to be music. The band is called Oval², the record "Systemisch". Radio will not play it, because radio plays songs, and this is the sound of a medium dying. But someone releases it, in Frankfurt, on a label named after a book by two French philosophers, and for a few years pays for enough such records that you can line them up and name them. The name arrives six years later, from America, in an academic quarterly: the aesthetics of failure. From then on the player's error is a sound. Today it sells as a plugin, with a slider for how much of it you want.

1995. I was three years from being born, and Warsaw already had all of it: BMG for two years, Warner and PolyGram for one, and that year Sony arrived and EMI, which bought Pomaton. Five subsidiaries³ in a market where two years earlier nine records in ten had been pirated. A subsidiary has one job and does it well: it takes a finished format from head office and sells it in the local language. It does not pay for six years of parties in a rec room, because head office paid for those, elsewhere. When the garbage starts to sell, the subsidiary will buy it; that summer BMG released a rapper from Kielce and half a million copies moved by December. But first it has to start selling. The link that used to pay was a state one, and it was ceasing to exist. I have sat inside this since birth: Polish music does not lack hits, it lacks shit. The kind that does not sell yet.

1998. The device is called Auto-Tune⁴ and has been on sale for a year. A man who worked on seismic data built it to correct pitch inaudibly: the singer is a little flat, the box pulls her up, nobody knows. In a London studio two producers set the correction speed to zero, past the range the box was designed for, and the voice starts jumping between notes like something that is not a voice. Cher, "Believe". The February after, a trade magazine asks how they did it, and they lie: a vocoder, a guitar pedal. The error has to be hidden, because it is shameful, and shame is a good sign. That is a standard ten years before it is a standard. Ten years later the same error is on the radio without a break, set on purpose, with a name in the box's own manual: the Cher effect. The box now does two things at once, the one it was built for and the one it was broken into.

2002. The track is called "Glitch My Bitch Up"⁵ and that is how I remember it, though I checked and it is called something else. Kid606, a kid from San Diego, downloads "Can't Get You Out of My Head", the biggest hit of the year before, takes almost all of it, breaks it in a few places and releases it on a label that breaks the law and that he denies running. A reviewer will write that he barely did anything to Kylie. That is true, and that is the crime: the garbage was theft as much as glitch. I read about it before I heard it, in a book by a Polish critic who wrote of the Kid that he gives the media back what he got from it, which is garbage. I took him on credit, pressed play, and called it unlistenable shit. Then I came back. I still do not know whether it was my ear that came back, or the credit.

2021. In November the company BABY Audio gives away a plugin with one button. It is called Magic Dice⁶: you click and you get a random reverb and a random echo, always lush, never twice the same, they promise. N reduced to one, because the first roll has to be enough; nobody sits through ten thousand rolls, that is what the algorithm is for, the one that knows what is pretty. Ten years earlier the same industry sold the glitch as a button, repeat and stutter, with a patent. Oval's error with a slider. An ear handed a die that rolls only pretty stops needing the ugly and starts naming it. The phrase "unlistenable shit" I said first myself, in headphones, about the Kid, before my ear caught up with the book. I am not quoting the internet. Contempt for noise is the ear's factory setting, mine included, and since November 2021 you can download it as a plugin.

<p>2026. Pro Tools open, a homemade plugin on a track. It is meant to do what none of the ones I own will: degrade the sound in a way I cannot control, a die that rolls only ugly. A language model writes the code, I say what to break, and I check whether it broke. Checking looks like this: build, quit Pro Tools, open Pro Tools, wait for it to scan the plugins, insert, listen, no, again. <span className="fn-green">I know no better method<sup>7</sup></span>, and as it turns out, for this program there is none; for every other one there is. It ran. I rolled once. What came out of the speakers was shit that stayed shit, and that is okay: one pseudo-random roll is nothing special. To be something it would have to be rolled N times on M files, all of it heard, all of it paid for in hours nobody gives back. I did not pay. I closed the session.</p>