In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

110 ARRAYS
register and reproduce sounds. The first Argentinian artist to use the new
technology is tango star Carlos Gardel: beginning on Tuesday, November
30, all his recordings will be produced with the microphone. At the
same time, the Buenos Aires press comments on a change in Gardel's
public presence: "It had been a long time since Senor Gardel had performed
in public. He had been devoting his time exclusively to gramophone
recording, which has made him the most widely known name
among fans of popular music, not only here but also in Europe" (Collier,
86ff.). The introduction of the microphone is the only possible explanation
for the fact that Jorge Luis Borges labels 1926 as the year of the
"degeneration of the tango" (Borges, 96). But why would Borges view
the most important technical advance in the history of sound recording
as a catalyst for decline? What he misses in the most recent recordings
must be the scratchy quality that is inevitable with traditional forms of
sound reproduction. Perhaps to him this scratchiness is the concretization
of a genre-specific perspective by which each tango performance
stages itself at a nostalgia-filled distance from a more "authentic" past
world. [see Gomina] Most artists who perform on radio and on recordings
come to see that the microphone has revolutionized their profession.
Only now do they become fully aware of the fact that their audience is
not physically present while they are performing in the studio. Said one
singer, "My first experience in front of the microphone would have been
horrible, if I had not ... brought my wife and kept her close by me on
a little stool, where she replaced the audience in the most charming way.
After the first few words I forgot that I was addressing an inanimate [yet
uncannily living] apparatus, and I imagined that the audience was as
friendly and warm as my wife always is" (Schrader and Schebera, 185).
Concomitantly, there is a change in the advertising strategies of the
companies that make gramophones. In the September 18 issue of the
Buenos Aires magazine Caras y Caretas, a number of manufacturers
present their "talking boxes" without any variation in perspective or
context. Gramophones appear in tandem with cameras and home film
projectors, and, astonishingly, the descriptions of the record players
regularly omit any mention of sound quality: "NIRONA is the ideal
Gramophone / For its construction / For its reliability / For its size / For
its price." Instead of technical data concerning the sound reproduction,
names and faces of popular artists-such as "The celebrated national