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Damn I wonder why I broke up with that fuckin’ chick? UffieIn the song First Love, Uffie (Anna-Catherine Hartley) reflects on the painful learning curve of an early relationship. One of those life lessons that haunt the history of songs and poems, first love is both the spirit that refuses to let go and an opposing force that blocks every step we would retrace. I wish I could remember that first day/First hour, first moment of your meeting me, begins Christina Rossetti’s Sonnet. But it can’t be done, so unrecorded did it slip away. First Love is also the title of a verse by another nineteenth-century English poet, John Clare; an intense reminiscence of his lost muse Mary Joyce, who continued to inspire much of Clare’s work, not as part of his life but as if from a place inside his words. She seemed to hear my silent voice, Clare tells us, as feelings for Mary transcend the usual powers of speech to become something more euphonic: Words from my eyes did start/They spoke as chords do from the string. In Uffie’s twenty first-century version, produced by electro-house musician Mr. Oizo (Quentin Dupieux, a robotic vocal fiend with an Atari 1040), we hear the words spoken through the chords of a computerized keyboard. No problem with memory now. A voice is still essentially both a live feed from the very experience it describes – And when I met you long ago I was so alone /My heart was beating so fast I had to write this song – and a form of mediation with its own drop-down menu of aesthetic effects. Oizo (pronounced monsieur wah-zoh, like a bird in French) merely increases the level of system anxiety. Phrases peal off into choral harmonies or flicker on as single pulses of breath. Lines collapse together like overprinted text or smudged ink. At one point in the song, the word ‘real’ sounds like it’s being crunched in the desktop trashcan. But any remains of the singer’s actual storytelling heartstrings are swept along by a violent force field of reverberations that shatter not only the surface of love’s language. The voice is also breaking up.I love it when you whisper in my earYou say the sweetest things that I wanted to hearA song might not be the best psychological measure of the voice, yet they both share a sensual basis in the emotional spectrum of pleasure and pain. Feelings can be extended in the elaborate speech of song. Or exorcised. In his book A Lovers Discourse, Roland Barthes cites a fifteenth–century French love song, Trop penser me font amours (Love makes me think too much) to introduce the idea of the loquela, a symptom of pain that forces the victim to keep talking about it, to keep reenacting its cause: ‘a fever of language overcomes me, a parade of reasons, interpretations, pronouncements. I am aware of nothing but a machine running all by itself, and which is never silent.’ In fact, the impression of a mechanized madness with its own instinct for survival, even its own songs, describes language at the best of times. The human voice also seems to carry a distant memory of separation. And isn’t history supposed to have begun with the lapsarian fallout of first love? One uncanny feature of so-called modern times is a sense that history and the voice have begun their ghostly reconciliation. If not exactly to repair the lapse, then to at least re-enact some of its causes. Think of the phantasmic litany of famous first words. From Thomas Edison singing Mary had a little lamb (1877), to Alexander Graham Bell’s Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you (1877); from the first tentative radio voice – One, Two, Three, Four-is it snowing where you are Mr. Thiessen? (Spoken by Mr. Reginald Fessenden from Washington DC, December 23rd, 1900); to the sudden blizzard of voices in cinema. Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain’t heard nothing’ yet! cries Al Jolson, whose first line of spoken dialogue ever heard in a feature film leads the band into that classic song of first love, Toot Toot, Tootsie, Goodbye (1927). And in 1968, the year before Neil Armstrong’s inaugural moon-talk, Stanley Kubrick provides cinema with a far more melancholic contribution to the re-animated voice of history. In the movie 2001: A Space Odessey, the dying Hal 9000 computer regresses back through a simulated memory of youth via a synthesized rendition of another song of first love, Daisy Bell. It wasn’t entirely fictional. In 1962, on a tour of Bell Labs, 2001: A Space Odessey’s author Arthur C. Clarke had been shown an IBM 704 programmed by physicist John L. Kelly to sing the first song ever performed by a computer. Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer true/I’m half crazy all for the love of you. In the course of a century, the voice re-emerges, like a creature first sensing the world around it, stumbling through early adulthood and crashing under the pathetic bandwidth of its own emotional limits. As a regulated mode of expression, the voice had been reformed into a typographical specimen. I’m off to search for a new lover, with the chance I might find betterEarlier this year it was announced that the first known recording of a human voice was made by a French typographer named Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville. Produced two decades before Thomas Edison’s ‘invention’ of the phonograph, the recording itself was only a by-product of what Léon Scott was aiming for. In a direct fusion of typography and the voice, he was simply looking for a way to make typesetting easier. The recording, dated April 9, 1860, was found in an archive of a Paris patent office, the Institut National de la Propriété Industrielle. Etched onto a sheet of paper blackened by smoke from an oil lamp, a fragile human voice is heard singing the eighteenth century French folk song, Au Clair de la Lune. At first thought to be Léon Scott’s daughter, the discoverers of the recording, after listening to it at different speeds, now believe it to be the singing voice of Léon Scott himself. The lyric, which takes us back to the fading lamplight of nineteenth century Paris and to thoughts about the technologies of writing and speech, turns out to be a song of first love. Under the moonlight, Pierrot replied /I’ve no pen; I’m in my bed./Go next door, I believe that she’s in… If not quite the missing link between voice, memory and inscription, first love at least establishes an allegory of the changes implicit in shifts of technological development. John Clare was so obsessed with his first love that she became his imaginary wife and the mother of their phantom family. But Clare is greatly appreciated as a writer because of the formal qualities of his written voice. Known for resisting the standardized English grammar that we now associate with the arrival of print culture, his use of local dialect, folk songs and colloquial descriptions of rural working life are a direct engagement with the social upheavals of the industrial revolution. Clare’s stubborn retaining of the unreconstructed voice in his writing is echoed in modern recordings that intentionally misconstruct the voice as a kind of rough facsimile of text. Besides which, taking nothing away from Léon Scott’s incredible first recording, forensic tests to name the father have usually been to serve history’s main purpose, of satisfying our need for something to believe in. Lies and deceptions, the promises of fidelity and intimacy, have always been part of its worldly charm. From Uffie’s perspective, the point of recording technology is to find a life beyond that old loveable, dishonest voice.You are the one that I always think aboutMy first love that I made this song aboutPaul Elliman is artist and designer, Londen.