Metal Lungies

Well, kinda. Let me explain.

Marshall McLuhan was a Canadian communications theorist and writer, who devised the expression, “the medium is the message”. What he means by this: the form of a medium embeds itself in the message, creating a symbiotic relationship through which the medium influences how the message is perceived. (via Wikipedia) In 1967, he wrote The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects, which explained how the effects of media massages the human sensorium. The same year, he released an audio recording of this work on Columbia Records.

The album consists of McLuhan reading statements from the book while repeatedly being interrupted by a variety of speakers: people criticizing his theories, other people reading the book in weird voices, sped-up recordings of McLuhan, odd random sounds and samples of incidental music encompassing different genres and moods. The idea was to create a media pastiche that would evoke TV’s connection of unrelated images in audio form. It foreshadowed many future sound experiments, especially those put together by Steinski and turntablists like DJ Shadow. It’s certainly not the earliest form of sound collage, but it’s striking how close it sounds to modern sound experimentation. It’s out of print now, but you can download it here, courtesy of the blog The Sphinx.

Here’s Side A of the record as a sample.

Marshall McLuhan – The Medium Is The Massage (Side A)