onmymind: david merritt @ openstudio

INTRO

Over the last few years, David Merritt has been collecting music. Not albums, compact discs, or MP3s but song titles, including a list of all the love songs ever written and all song titles that contain the words “you,” “me,” and “on my mind.”  The titles are mostly Western and from last 100 years of recorded music. They are easy to find, in fact, much of his collection is culled from online databases such as Allmusic, Rhapsody, and RCS. These song titles run the gamut of popular music: Jazz, Country, Swing, Rock, Soul, Pop, Metal, R&B, Hip-Hop, Disco, and Balladry. His collection fills binders of space. The titles are repetitive, overwhelming, ironic, and at times sadly funny in their similarities and lack of originality. These titles suggest the narrative of the songs they advertise and are a nod to the era of their popularity and to the musicians who penned their lyrics.

Within the prints, Merritt employs these words as a vocabulary of marks, as locations to draw connections, as mapped territories of lived experience—while triggering memories of our personal knowledge and relationship to popular music.

DUST COVER / 1^st PRESSING

The prints are made by using a needle to scratch words and lines into soft metal plates. The metal plates are then inked, covered with paper, and run through a printing press. They are a stamp, a copy—much like a pressed LP.

When I look at Merritt’s work, I don’t think of tapes, CDs, or MP3s. It is always vinyl. I’m not being nostalgic in seeing them this way; it is their material qualities. The prints are delicate, rather large, printed on slightly transparent Japanese paper, and like vinyl need to be handled with care. The slightest wrinkle, tear, or fold changes the way we view them much like a scratch, a ding, or an errant bit of dust affects the way we listen to a record.

There are very few copies of these prints because the pressure of the press literally flattens out and erases the images inscribed on plates. Through repeated printing, each subsequent image is fainter and fainter until it becomes a shadow of its former self.

SLIP CUEING AND SCRATCHING

In the 1970s, DJ Francis Grasso invented slip-cueing—a method of mixing songs and extending dance tracks—a precursor to the scratching and mixing of contemporary hip-hop DJs. The process involves locating specific sections on a record and slipping or scratching the record back and forth in order to create loops, sound effects, and new beat mixes.[i]

This sense of looping and repetition is paramount in Merritt’s prints. Lines tangle, overlap, and swell into a knot of connected paths leading to the words that make up the song titles they reproduce. Like footpaths during a snowstorm, these lines erase, repeat, reroute as they traverse the paper terrain. It’s as if the looped grooves have literally been pulled from the record and dropped onto the page, leaving the viewer with the impossible, futile task of straightening them out.

KARAOKE

Scanning through Merritt’s prints is like scanning through the song binder at a Karaoke bar where the songs are categorized by title rather than artist. In Merritt’s prints, there are points where you run across song titles you know, and it doesn’t matter if they are your favourites, or your guilty pleasures, or songs you heard in your mother’s AMC Hornet driving to school, or songs you actively hate. The point is you’re taken somewhere else, somewhere outside the Karaoke list and the prints, to the places and people you associate with the songs and even to the sound of the songs themselves. In this way, Merritt’s prints become sound maps that you navigate with your own experience, your own memory.

OUTRO

There are many entrances into Merritt’s work. Where you pick up a line or a word is almost arbitrary. And it’s easy to get lost. But there is a certain reassurance in getting lost or stuck between words and going down pathways that seem vicarious. It is our familiarity with the material—the chance to arrive somewhere new or momentarily return to the past that keeps us going and leads us through.

Originally Published by Openstudio (May 2008)

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[i] For a full description of Francis Gasso’s slip-cueing, please refer to John Oswald’s, Bettered By the Borrower in Audio Culture:  Readings in Modern Music, edited by Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner, pg.  135