The Voice in the Headphones

<i>The voice in the headphones says you're rolling . . .</i><br><br><i>The Voice in the Headphones</i> is an experiment in music writing in the form of a long poem centered on the culture of the recording studio. It describes in intricate prismatic detail one marathon day in a recording studio during which an unnamed musician struggles to complete a film soundtrack. The book extends the form of Grubbs's previous volume <i>Now that the audience is assembled</i> sharing its goal of musicalizing the language of writing about music. Mulling the insight that studio is the absence of pushback-now that no audience is assembled-<i>The Voice in the Headphones</i> details one musician's strategies for applying the requisite pressure to the proceedings for making it count. <i>The Voice in the Headphones</i> is both a literary work and a meditation on sound recording delivered at a moment in which the commercial recording studio shades into oblivion. It draws upon Grubbs's own history of several decades as a recording artist and its location could be described as every studio in which he has set foot.