‘Uncompressed Merle Haggard’
The artist: Michael Galbreth
Where: michaelgalbreth. com
Why: Michael Galbreth has always known time is of the essence. But after he almost died last year from a brain aneurysm, he started pondering it with a different sense of urgency.
Best known as one of the Art Guys (with his friend Jack Massing), Galbreth has been taking stock, which is not so easy for a conceptual artist. It’s not as though he’s got a warehouse full of paintings, drawings and sculptures to show after all these years.
These days, at least, nothing goes undocumented by people with smartphone cameras. Plenty of people recorded Galbreth’s new “Nose Corner” at Lawndale Art Center during the opening of “The Big Show.”
That performance piece can be done by anyone, anytime, anywhere, for any length of time, for any reason: All one needs is a nose and a corner, and the willingness to lie on one’s face.
Another new Galbreth piece now resides on his new website. With “Uncompressed Merle Haggard,” the artist tries to undo a recording he made in 1983 using a ping-ponging playback technique with two reel-to-reel tape machines.
Even as a student, Galbreth felt culture was spinning too fast for comfort. He wondered how short he could make a song before it couldn’t be heard anymore.
“I figured that music needed to hurry and catch up,” he writes. Wouldn’t it be great, he thought, if he could accelerate a listening experience? “Think of the time savings!”
So Galbreth turned on a country radio station and hit the record button when Haggard’s “My Woman Loves the Devil Out of Me” came on. He didn’t love country music; he just wanted an easily digestible song that was “as unartful as possible.” (Guess he never learned to two-step.)
“Compressed Merle Haggard” contains 0.3 seconds of hissing and noise. It’s over before you could even get up from your chair to make your way to the sawdust-sprinkled floor in a smoky dance hall.
Galbreth also wondered what would happen if he used the same technique to stretch the compressed recording back to the length of the original song, which is 2:46. It only took him about, oh, 34 years to get to that.
But he has finally completed his circle with “Uncompressed Merle Haggard.” This time around, he used digital audio technology. In just a few minutes, he was able to numerically recalculate the recording and reset it to its original pitch.
But it still sounds nothing like “My Woman Loves the Devil Out of Me.” There’s no discernible melody. Galbreth couldn’t be more pleased.
“For me, there’s some poetry to all of this, and it echoes my ongoing interest in the underlying structure of things, including paradox, incompleteness, emergence and entropy,” Galbreth writes. “Everyone knows you can’t go back in time, and even if you could, it wouldn’t be the same.”
He’s still scratching his head a bit over why he got Merle Haggard involved. He’s not even sure if Haggard ever recorded “My Woman Loves the Devil Out of Me.” Moe Bandy made the song a hit. And for what it’s worth, it was written by the late Bobby P. Barker, whose other hits include Bandy’s “I Cheated Me Right Out of You.”