Dead Animals Ontologies of recorded songs through the analogue of taxidermy

This paper is written as a way of thinking through the process of reification when recording the performance of song. It comes from the place of practice. I am a songwriter. The possibilities and mediums of the recording environment offer a unique palette to the songwriter who produces (in the vernacular of Popular music), but increasingly, with each wave of technology, the relationship between recording and performance is made more and more complex. My current research is focusing on this relationship and what it means both practically and in terms of the making of meaning and role of performance in the studio. Having established the status of a recording as facsimile of performance through an unpicking of the process of capture and playback, we see the ‘ontological catastrophe’ implicit within it. This is the basis from which the analogue of taxidermy begins to feel like a useful way to make analysis of the recorded performance (if we allow the performance to play the role of living animal). Drawing primarily on Rachel Poliquin’s writing on taxidermy and making use of Roland Barthes, Evan Eisenberg, Kim Cascone and Jacques Attali, the paper seeks to unravel the various and fluxed ontologies of recorded song and the potential for the making of meaning within the production environment. This moves toward an analysis of the effect of production on performance and ultimately how performance can be manifest within recorded media/medium