Sound engineers would go to great lengths to eliminate feedback from recordings or concert settings, positioning microphones so they didn’t pick up signal from the speakers, and thus cause the infinite-loop screech of feedback. Yet once again, one man’s malfunction turned out to be another man’s music, as artists such as Jimi Hendrix or Led Zeppelin—and later punk experimentalists like Sonic Youth—embraced the sound in their recordings and performances. In a real sense, Hendrix was not just playing the guitar on those feedback-soaked recordings in the late 1960s, he was creating a new sound
...more
