There is a moment in the film of the 2017 Omemee concert that suddenly made me see the entire Neil Young Archives project in an entirely different light. It happens early on, three songs in, when Neil sits down to the piano to play “Journey Through the Past,” with its refrain: “Will I still be in your eyes and on your mind.” The camera closes in on the piano; and when it pulls back, it’s January 19, 1971, and a twenty-five-year old Neil Young, hunched behind a curtain of hair, is playing the same song, solo in Massey Hall, Toronto. There is something uncanny about the moment, a sense of the past not so much haunting the present, as inhabiting it. It’s like seeing a very tangible ghost.
I think that we can understand the uncanniness of this moment in terms of some of the great works of literature and theatre of the past century. For instance, there is a famous moment early in Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (1913-1927), when the taste of a particular biscuit – a madeleine – triggers a series of involuntary memories that weave through the rest of novel’s seven volumes. The taste of the biscuit is real in the present; but it also belongs to the past, and for that moment, past and present exist together, creating a kind of explosion of memory. As T.S. Eliot writes in the poem “Burnt Norton” (1935): “Time present and time past/ Are both perhaps present in time future,/ And time future contained in time past.”
This may sound like a complex philosophical idea, but we experience it every time we listen to a recording. Unlike live sound, which exists fully in the present (it’s not just presence, it’s present), recorded sound always belongs partly to the past in which was recorded. However, when we play the recording, the sound recorded all those years ago becomes part of the present in which we hear it; in a very real sense, at such moments, the past haunts the present. This is true of all recordings, but usually we just ignore the ghosts, and simply listen to the music.
However, every so often, we’re reminded of the uncanniness of listening to a recorded voice. For instance, Samuel Beckett wrote his play Krapp’s Last Tape in 1958, the year after Les Paul bought his first Ampex 8-track recorder, and effectively pioneered multi-track recording. In Krapp’s Last Tape, the elderly Krapp, on “a late evening in the future”, sits listening to a series of reel-to-reel recordings of his voice that he has made on his birthday every year since he was a young man. “Just been listening to that stupid bastard I took myself for thirty years ago”. For the audience, both the elderly Krapp, live before us on the stage, and the young Krapp we hear on the tape, are both equally present, even though one barely recognises the other any longer. The result is one of the great plays about what it means to experience time passing and time that has passed.
We need to begin to start thinking about the Neil Young Archive in these terms. The NYA is not simply like a very large Spotify playlist with better sound; and listening to a song on the Archive is not the same as listening to that same song in any other format. The whole architecture of the site, from the filing cabinet interface with its year index, to the vintage controls and archival documents, reminds us of that uncanny feature of recorded music that we usually hide from ourselves: that when we listen to a recording, we are conjuring a ghost. This is not new territory for Neil: “Journey Through the Past”, “Helpless”, “Comes a Time”, and “Time Fades Away” are all songs about memory and time passing – and that is only to pick the most obvious examples. However, the NYA is bigger than any one song; it is also more than the sum of all of the many songs it contains. In the NYA, we have the unprecedented combination of an artist who has long been fascinated with memory, but who, unlike most of the rest of us, has been making recordings of his past (with a scrupulous attention to sound quality) for more than half a century; and who now has the technology, in the digital archive, to give structure and form these layers of recorded memories. This is arguably what much of the most compelling art has always done – it has given structure and form to time and memory. But now we have a new kind of art form, the digital archive, in which we can begin to experience and explore the old questions in new ways. The NYA is the pioneering example of this new art form.
Prof. Chris Morash, MRIA, FTCD
Seamus Heaney Professor of Irish Writing
Trinity College Dublin
3 January, 2020