No Stairway

No Stairway
A guy with a white shirt and gray sweatpants is standing across a variety of electric guitars, with black guitar cases on the floor.
Studio album by Glassine
Released April 17, 2015[1]
Recorded 2014
Studio Guitar Center
(Brooklyn, New York
Baltimore, Maryland)[2]
Genre
Length 23:39
Label Patient Sounds
Producer Danny Greenwald
Glassine chronology
No Stairway
(2015)		 Looking Down
(2015)

No Stairway is the debut studio album of Glassine, the musical project of Danny Greenwald, first released online in April 2015 and issued on cassette by the label Patient Sounds in August. The title is a reference to a line from the 1992 film Wayne's World. The album garnered significant attention from music journalists for its compositional and production technique; in two Guitar Center stores, Greenwald recorded people playing instruments on his iPhone, and used snippets of these low-quality recordings as loops or synth patches, playing some of them through effects pedals or 4-track machines. The "dystopian" environment of Guitar Center shops and his desire to record something without a budget while in New York City is was inspired his idea to use samples of recordings of people playing instruments and build compositions out of them. On Fact's year-end list of best Bandcamp releases, No Stairway came in at number 19.

Background, recording and composition

Raised in Columbia, Maryland, Greenwald first went to a Guitar Center store at age 14 to buy his first electric guitar. However, he had rarely went to the shop, and instead bought equipment from local stores like Atomic Music in Beltsville, Maryland for most of his life.[5] He disliked Guitar Center for its "dystopian" and "unpleasant" environment, which was one of the major parts of him being influenced to make No Stairway: "I wanted to take something unattractive and be able to extract beauty from it. I wanted to make that environment float on a cloud. I wanted to inspect little nuances, capture them, and paint with them."[2] While living in New York City, there was a point where Greenwald became bankrupt and wanted to make a lot out of recording with no budget whatsoever without the need of using samples from a digital audio workstation or other computer software. One day out of boredom, he hung out at a Guitar Center near Atlantic Terminal while waiting for a train, when he heard someone playing a song by Green Day on a guitar and made notice of the instrument's poor tone. He said, "I remember thinking like, 'what if I could feed that through these weird reverb pedals I have at home?' 'Would it sound any different?' and it sort of hit me 'why don't I just record other people playing and then sort of use as my paint'".[6]

Greenwald first tried to take control of the sounds from the expensive synthesizers Guitar Center was selling by recording samples of them, but was unimpressed with the results.[5] On a later visit to the shop, he recorded what would be the first sound that would later be featured on the album; he recorded a guy who "was just going for it on a drum kit", lowering the speed of the sample of the drum recording he used.[5] As he described how he felt when he was editing the sample, "I started to hear some kind of solace in a place that is sonically hellish.”[5] Greenwald started recording of the album in a Guitar Center in Brooklyn, then at a shop in Baltimore.[2] Instead of looking to record instruments specifically planned for a song, Greenwald recorded whatever sound he predicted he could make better quality out of when editing them later on.[6] He ended up with around 40 hours of iPhone recordings to work with at his home, where some snippets were played through a 4-track tape recorder or old pedals and some were looped or used as synthesizer patches.[2] All of these recordings were edited together and EQ'd in Pro Tools.[2] As Greenwald described "There was a lot of panning. There was a lot of trying to connect things that were seemingly un-connectable. A lot of times I would think that a track was finished, but then I remembered that I had some other sound I wanted to use so I would comb back through it and add some fetching little tone somewhere. The editing and the recording processes were married. The studio was very much a part of the instrument."[2]

Release and reception

No Stairway was first self-released on Bandcamp and Glassine's official SoundCloud page on April 17, 2015,[1][7] Patient Sounds distributing the album on cassette on August 6.[8] The title of the album is a reference to the line "No stairway, denied" from the 1992 comedy film Wayne's World.[2] Live at Guitar Center, an album by Brookyln musician Noah Wall that also used Guitar Center recordings, was released slightly before the Glassine album on April 6.[5][9] When Greenwald and Patient Sounds accidentally found out about Wall's record, he almost didn't want to release No Stairway, feeling "gutted" someone had already made an album with identical concept to his project.[2] However, when the label made Wall aware of Greenwald's release, he was very excited about the album and his support got Greenwald motivated again to distribute his record.[2] Greenwald has not sent No Stairway to the company despite suggestion to do so from his relatives.[2]

A Tiny Mix Tapes journalist praised the album's style as "some post-vaporwave produced faux melodic ambiance that’s all at once subconscious music and next-level field recording. And the esoterica and nostalgic level of listening here is completely outta-whack when paired with the idea that NONE of these samples are realmed in the same genre or created (potentially) by the same person."[3] Critic Jesse Locke featured it on his column for Aux "No Rest for the Obsessed", suggesting that listeners will wanted repeated hearings of Greenwald's album unlike Live at Guitar Center.[10] Jayson Greene, reviewing No Stairway for Pitchfork Media, called the album along with Wall's record "slight redemptive" reminders of Guitar Center's commercial success during the 1990s pre-Internet period to a current time where the chain of retailers may shut down quickly due to extreme financial decreases.[4] He called Greenwald's editing of such low-quality sound recordings as "impressive and even a little bewildering, but the knowledge proves unnecessary."[4] In May 2015, Fact magazine honored the record as one of their favorite Bandcamp releases for the month of April,[7] and on their year-end list of "20 best Bandcamp releases", it was ranked number 19.[11] In The Fader's "Top 2 Reasons Guitar Center Still Shreds", No Stairway was number two, Live at Guitar Center topping the list.[12]

Track listing

No. Title Length
1. "intro.vultures.refuge"   5:45
2. "human shield"   4:06
3. "an open window"   1:23
4. "great star"   2:11
5. "hornet with a halo"   2:42
6. "sunruse bench"   4:46
7. "parchment rise"   2:46
Total length:
 23:39

References

  1. 1 2 "No Stairway by Glassine". Glassine Official SoundCloud Page. April 17, 2015. Retrieved April 30, 2016.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Dunlea, Reed (July 13, 2015). "This Guy Made an Album Recorded Entirely at Guitar Center, and It Actually Kind of Rules?". Noisey. Vice Media. Retrieved April 29, 2016.
  3. 1 2 3 C Monster (May 11, 2015). "Glassine – No Stairway". Tiny Mix Tapes. Retrieved April 29, 2016.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 Greene, Jayson (August 20, 2015). "Glassine: No Stairway". Pitchfork Media. Retrieved April 29, 2016.
  5. 1 2 3 4 5 Beta, Andy (September 15, 2015). "What does Guitar Center sound like? These guys secretly recorded customers to find out.". The Washington Post. Nash Holdings LLC. Retrieved April 29, 2016.
  6. 1 2 Mckone, Jonna (September 25, 2015). "An Album From Glassine Recorded At The Music Store, Guitar Center". WYPR. Retrieved April 30, 2016.
  7. 1 2 Bowe, Miles (May 7, 2015). "Name Your Price: April’s best Bandcamp releases". Fact. The Vinyl Factory. Retrieved April 30, 2016.
  8. ↑ "PS073 – Glassine – No Stairway". Patient Sounds Official Bandcamp Page. Retrieved April 30, 2016.
  9. ↑ "Noah Wall – Live At Guitar Center". Driftless Recordings Official Soundcloud Page. April 6, 2015. Retrieved April 30, 2016.
  10. ↑ Locke, Jesse (August 21, 2015). "Montreal's Johnny de Courcy serves up slinky glam". Aux. Retrieved April 30, 2016.
  11. ↑ Bowe, Mile (December 7, 2015). "The 20 Best Bandcamp Releases of 2015". Fact. The Vinyl Factory. Retrieved April 30, 2016.
  12. ↑ "Listmania 2015!". The Fader. December 22, 2015. Retrieved April 30, 2016.
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