The Slaughterhouse
“The most powerful element here is its authenticity – an unadorned document that lets the environment and its people speak entirely for themselves.”
Frans de Waard, vital weekly
“The story of recording is often at least as interesting as the recordings themselves.
The sleevenotes of David Michael’s amazing Gruenrekorder disc The Slaughterhouse discuss his visit to an Alabama abattoir and the family who work there, and the latter are leading characters on the disc itself, discussing what their work entails, raising questions about the recording process, and revealing and questioning the motives of both themselves and the man with the microphone.”
Derek Walmsley, The Wire
Liner Notes
In rural Alabama, about an hour outside of Birmingham is a slaughterhouse. It’s a family operation where meat is processed one animal at a time by hand. Mostly custom jobs. A man and his son run the place. They handle most aspects of the daily operations from customer relations to animal processing.
I first visited on a Friday with my wife. We hung out while they cut and packaged a side of beef. They said I could come back on Monday to record the whole process, which I did. On the day I recorded, they processed a head of beef and a young buffalo.
Slaughter is an intensely visual process. Hearing only the sound of the slaughter leaves the mind to fill in almost everything, biased with our own beliefs and preconceptions. While I had intended to make the cow the subject of the recording, it is the young butcher, his father, and the patrons of the slaughterhouse who are at the center of the sound stage.
“With David’s binaural recording techniques doing an impeccable job of restoring the placement of each voice and clatter, headphones are less of an enhancement and more of an imperative; the listener is David Michael, and while the entire experience takes place exclusively through audio, the level of immersion means that touch and smell take on a potent illusionary presence.”