LUCY RAVEN was born in 1977 in Tucson, Arizona. She lives and works in Oakland, California, and New York.

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Still from RPx, 2012 (in progress). Video, color, sound. Collection of the artist

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In 1952, Kurt Vonnegut published Player Piano, a dark humanist satire on the advent of a mechanized society. (Two years later it was pub-lished as a science-fiction paperback called Utopia 14, still seven years before Catch-22, another satire about people being crushed by ma-chines—numbers are scary!) Player Piano was published sixteen years after Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Repro-duction,” nine years before Eisenhower’s warning about the “military-industrial complex,” eight years before Jean Tinguely’s Homage to New York and Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player, fifty years before William Gaddis’s posthumously published Agape Agape, a post-humanist Ber-nhardian rant against the mechanization of art and society using the player piano, again, as a symbol, and twenty-five years before the birth of Lucy Raven.

What does all this mean? Perhaps not shit, not without Raven’s framing. It’s a motley chronology, some moments more associated than others, the numbers probably wrong. It’s a string of thoughts about technology, the history of human tool-making, or the making of humans we might dismiss as “tools,” a take on time (“Time will take you on,” sang James Brown), a timeline of time signatures, a brief strip of punch holes to consider, some information to process, numbers to crunch, some tunes to shuffle.

Raven’s connections, made not just through meaning but through the music itself, make us hear the song and the implications of its in-terpretations. We listen in joyous realization that the “natural,” the “ar-tistic,” is coming to slimy life out of a vent in the counting machine! Gather the data, gather ’round, it’s time to dance yourself clean—of sin, of toxins, of dumb reduction (mind/body? human/machine? disco/rock? jazz/disco-rock?)

“I don’t believe I’m this wildly original individual,” James Murphy has said. “I do believe I am a very good manipulator of sound.” His manipulations, often on synthesizers, punch emotional code in us. His music reminds us of older music while becoming new music. This isn’t rare. It’s the basis for the popular form. Murphy’s brain is the machine, as is Jason Moran’s. Moran plays with the roll, expands it. Dyer’s ma-chine jabs the required holes. If it’s all about the space between the notes, then it’s also about the holes between the spaces.

So go and dance yourself cleanGo and dance yourself clean, yeah,You’re blowing Marxism to pieces,Their little arguments to pieces. Show.It’s your show.

Put your little feet down and hang out.Every night’s a different story,It’s a thirty car pile-up with you.Everybody’s getting younger …It’s the end of an era—it’s true.

The bourgeois individualists dance to an ecstatic and purgative state that frees them from the bonds of … Marxism? No longer quite the

looming threat, those “little arguments” that can be obliterated by “lit-tle feet.” Here is a sly slide in itself. Murphy chuckles with despair. Or despairs of his chuckling. Either way, he explodes into the ecstatic. The true dance experience in this context may look communal, all those asses shaking on the floor, but really it’s about the individual’s deliver-ance. There is no time to overthrow the machines if you are dancing yourself clean. Moran’s interpretations interrupt this inexorability. We can’t get so feverish with his versions. We sink into the beauty of his playing, of course, but suddenly we’re thinking of, say, Scott Joplin, which places us in History. Motherfucker! I was almost clean! Moran’s interpretations slow dance with Murphy. The piano (upright, after all, finally ready to be human) strides along with Moran.

We are consumers of music, yes, but we are also conduits of the art, the arguments, the communions, we seek. We are the machines, Raven might be saying, the player pianos playing ourselves. We slip the scrolls into some flesh notch. Please don’t shoot us. “Nobody loses all the time,” says Warren Oates, the unclean piano player in a movie about a pending decapitation. But that might not be true anymore, and if we do start to lose all the time, don’t fault the machines, the soul-less replacements of ancient holistic harmonies. Blame you and me for not building them well enough to protect ourselves from ourselves, or to leave ourselves behind (though we have plenty of technology that makes it seem we can). We put a man on the moon four decades ago, and yet we still die? That’s pathetic. A real obscenity. No, machines are only good for one thing now. They can teach us how to feel.

Roll, Piano, RollALEX ABRAMOVICH

Sam Lipsyte once referred to his friend James Murphy as “the only current Grammy nominee in his category able to quote freely from The Recognitions.” I’m bringing that up today because I’ve been wondering, lately, about what the author of The Recognitions might have said about Lucy Raven’s contribution to this year’s Biennial.

William Gaddis spent fifty years working in fits and starts on a his-tory of the player piano. He worked on it in the 1940s, when he was employed as one of the New Yorker’s fact-checkers. He worked on it in the 1950s (“I’ve written a history of the player piano,” says an otherwise anonymous character in The Recognitions. “A whole history. It took me two years, it’s got everything in it”) and 1960s. (Portions of Gaddis’s own unfinished history turned up in his 1975 novel, JR.) He gave up on it in the 1980s, deciding that he’d “overresearched.” But he returned to it a few years before his death, in 1998, recasting his efforts, yet again, as fiction. Gaddis’s fifth and final novel, Agape Agape, is a Bernhardian riff on the instrument, which is also the through-line in a posthumous essay collection called The Rush for Second Place.

“I see the player piano as the grandfather of the computer, the an-cestor of the entire nightmare we live in, the birth of the binary world where there is no option other than yes or no and where there is no refuge,” Gaddis wrote, in a passage that turns up whenever you look him (or the player piano) up in any given search engine.

* * *The player piano’s actions are controlled by the holes a piano-roll puncher punches in a roll of paper. Joseph Marie Jacquard’s loom, Charles Babbage’s difference engine, and Herman Hollerith’s tabulat-ing machines are none-too-distant cousins. You could argue that com-

Notes Toward Not Shooting the Player PianoSAM LIPSYTE

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pact discs, which are encoded with very long series of zeroes and ones, have more in common with piano rolls than with vinyl records. And one small, satisfying irony of our post-industrial age is the fact that record stores that still sell vinyl records seem to have outlived Tower Records, HMV, and the Virgin Megastore. Weren’t vinyl records supposed to have gone the way of the player piano? What happened instead is that, by transforming its products into very long series of zeroes and ones (all of which were totally indistinguishable from the zeroes and ones we could—and did—download from P2P networks, torrent sites, and MP3 blogs), the music industry we’ve known has rendered itself obsolete.

Bill Gaddis would have liked that.

* * *The piano makers had something in common with the record compa-nies in that they, too, came very close to putting their whole business out of business. I’m looking over the notes Gaddis assembled for his projected history:

1904260,000 pianos built; 252,000 uprights; 7,000 grands; 1,000 players

1919Players outnumber straight pianos, were 53 percent of industry output: 341,652 total.

1929 For 20 years the industry has been advertising, Why play the piano with your hands when you can pump it with your feet and hear the artist? In those years, a whole generation grew up which took them at their words and could not play with their hands. Consequently sales figures above, and the radio in 1926 which was recognized as a threat… Today the industry is constantly being bothered by inventors who present themselves with new “featherweight” player actions &c., the manufacturers know that if they started it again, the new generation which had grown up without players would go off their rockers with delight, as they did in 1912, but they are wiser after the way they paid for going on with their fad to such a degree that they came close to killing the whole piano industry.

And yet, here we are in 2012, listening to a player piano play three versions of “Dance Yrself Clean”—a song James Murphy wrote just a few years ago for his band, LCD Soundsystem, which appears on the band’s third and final album, This Is Happening. What are we hearing, exactly?

At the most superficial (but also not-so-superficial) level, we’re hearing one of three performances the composer and pianist Jason Mo-ran programmed, via MIDI keyboard, in the spring of 2011. (Another small-but-satisfying irony? Programming piano rolls turns out to be one of the things that MIDI is still good for.) The longest performance, which synchs almost exactly to LCD Soundsystem’s studio recording, is a straight transcription of “Dance Yrself Clean.” The shortest, an in-terpretation for stride piano, plays the instrument’s history, and sounds like something James P. Johnson might have programmed in the 1920s. In the third version, which falls somewhere in between, Moran plays his own highly personal interpretation of Murphy’s composition.

Why Jason Moran? It might have to do with Lucy Raven’s appreciation of the pianist’s

2002 solo album, Modernistic, which took its name from James P. John-son’s signature song, “You’ve Got to Be Modernistic,” and included a radical (but instantly recognizable) reworking of Afrika Bambaataa’s hip-hop touchstone, “Planet Rock.” There, contra museum pieces like Ken Burns’s Jazz, he showed us that jazz had not, in fact, gone the way of the player piano. Here, he shows us that even the player piano has not gone the way of the player piano. (The piano-roll puncher might be another story; Julian Dyer, the Englishman who punched these rolls, is one of six remaining piano-roll punchers in the world.)

Why “Dance Yrself Clean”? Perhaps it’s because one of the things we hear in LCD Soundsys-

tem’s recording is James Murphy’s awareness of time’s proverbial arrow: his way of setting elegiac lyrics against urgent beats; his insistence on present-tense pleasures as a way of resolving the tensions that ensue; finally, his awareness of the sustainability (or lack thereof) of the whole enterprise (which is also his own, human life). Or, it’s because LCD Soundsystem, live, was a near-perfect approximation of a near-perfect machine, the sort of thing that wouldn’t have been possible if drum-mers (Murphy started off as one) had never learned to play like (and, eventually, beyond) the drum machine.

Or, you might have entered the room when the piano wasn’t play-ing anything at all and watched one of its human operators rewinding or setting up another roll. In which case you’ve seen a person do the kind of work we now associate with machines, while a machine geared up to do the kind work we’ve long associated with humans. This is the sort of thing that fucked Gaddis up, for five straight decades, as he worked, or tried to work, on something that was much more than a history of the player piano (even as it pretty much remained a history of the player piano).

“Gaddis wasn’t merely displaying an elitist reaction to the democ-ratization of the arts,” the literary critic Steven Moore wrote in regards to that history.

[I]nstead, he was concerned about the growing demand for imme-diate gratification and for the willingness to accept a mechanical reproduction over the real thing. It’s the same trend towards the elimination of the human element that was going on in assembly-line production, whose growth took place concurrent with the heyday of the player piano. Mechanization of the arts ran parallel to the mechanization of people by means of efficiency studies, standardized testing, and various methods of measurement and evaluation more suited to machinery than people.

Moore goes on to note that Gaddis didn’t read Walter Benjamin un-til very late in his career. (“Benjamin had already clearly, concisely, brilliant[ly] and briefly covered the ground,” Gaddis wrote, in a 1992 letter about the player piano project.) And, of course, Benjamin’s ghost is another thing you’ll hear rattling around in Lucy Raven’s piano. But if Raven’s work is anything to go by, Benjamin was dead right about “the aura of the work of art” and less right about mechanical reproduc-tion. Like Gaddis (and the rest of us), he was on the right and wrong track, and going around in circles.

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Simpson/Meade, If Now Then (Seeing Better), 2011

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