Musique Concrète and Electro-Acoustic: Their Trinity Acts, A Mineral Fire
Original position in magazine: pp 36-39
Contents: Vox Candide 1969 compilation LP, Bernard Parmegiani, François Bayle, Luc Ferrari, Michael Prime, Morphogenesis, Jaroslav Krcek
Musique Concrète is 20th century alchemy! Truly the music of the environment, it is the ingenious and simple organisation and transmogrification of recorded sounds into endlessly fascinating configurations; which is the same as any conventional recording technique except Musique Concrete doesn’t use musical instruments as the source. Instead, it utilises sounds from nature. Revelation came to me in the shape of a compilation on vinyl, Musique Concrete, Vox Candide ST GBY 639 (1969). Many of the big names of the Paris-based Electroacoustic 1950-60s school - La Groupe de Recherches Musicales - turned in a contribution, which after only one hearing plugged me into another universe. This old record is simply so organic it virtually smells of newly-turned earth. Such a perception comes with hindsight - nowadays our modern ears are so used to note-perfect, bright, clean, defined, sharp digital sound, that anything as 100% analogue as this music - which is almost entirely to do with the splicing of magnetic tape, played on reel-to-reel tape decks - will announce its difference. Why you can practically make out every grain of oxide leaping off the quarter-inch film and dancing joyously in a microstructural fabric. Even in the harsher moments of crash-collision editing, it creaks with a gentle and certain ageless quality.
Say goodbye to the Grandfather Clock, to your old life of minute-by-minute tramline existence dictated by Father Time. Your perception of the duration of time goes haywire with Musique Concrète. These composers aren’t in any hurry to put their point across, the project will unspool before you for as long as needs be. You learn that beginnings and ends really have no place here. A fourth-dimensional world is being opened up for you to explore, one in which you could somehow spend an infinite time. The grooves on the vinyl are just an entry point - your whole cadaver is drawn in, ears first. They got me body and soul, and a bit of me is still wandering and exploring these fascinatingly alien zones.
‘Terre de feu’ by Francois-Bernard Mache is a ceremony by the seashore involving pots of fresh water and seashells hung on strings under a bright blue sky. A gong struck underwater. Recordings of fire and water were the source - ’sound materials have a life that obeys the same laws [as these elements]’, according to Mache. But all traces of the original source have been obfuscated. This very processing is what Steve Reich didn’t dig about Musique Concrete, and preferred to call a spade a spade - if he composed with tape materials, the sources would not be disguised. It’s a commonplace to state that today’s world of digital sampling owes much to Reich. I suppose Musique Concrète has a certain old-fashioned quaintness in striving to transmogrify its sources to this extent, yet to me this is the very point of it all. If Mache here is dealing with the natural laws of physics, these laws are harnessed to transfer to sound, and they show through in the final composition no matter what he does to the tapes; leaving the listener with a fascinating template which one can then stamp into the raw material of own’s own creative thoughts. Moreover if the laws of physics can be thus disrupted and distorted to such extreme lengths, then what price our belief in a universe governed by stable laws?
All this makes some demands on the listener. The chief advantage to surrendering to their demands is that you are freed from many constraints usually associated with playing records. The most familiar trap which you escape is the narrative one - and I know I’ve bored you with this one before. If a ‘classic’ pop song tells a story - and they all do really - this music by contrast invites you to create your own stories. In fact it may even go beyond that, inviting you to stretch your imagination and creative powers.
Michel Philipot’s contribution is ‘Etude III’, where for a few seconds he almost anticipates the sound of Keiji Haino’s guitar with his high-speed wasp tornado noises. This one’s a very bitty composition of jarring sounds - some recognisable as piano chords played backwards (familiar now after David Bowie, for example) - it verges on the humourous, but proves the composer’s point about working with textures. Echoey and spacey sounds rub up against close-miked cut-off sounds, edited into exciting collisions or even occurring in the same overdubbed passage. This rapid succession of sensations means the listener never sleeps, although Philipot’s extreme abstraction refuses me that brooding elaboration which allows me to get lost in Mache’s world.
One is also struck by those mineral sample photographs on the cover - a most apt image. This music is decidedly elemental, maybe even primordial. The Vox Candide compilation is, I think, only one of many vinyl compilations that were issued in the 1950s and 1960s; it’s hard to find originals of them these days, as the few copies pressed have become desirable for some reason. However, an impressive CD reissue programme is underway, and you can satisfy your thirst for ElectroAcoustic imports by asking for catalogues at These Records or ReR. Although you can find some vintage compilations, those on INA GRM are more recent recordings by the old masters.
Bernard Parmegiani’s La Création Du Monde, Paris INA GRM C1002 (1996) would seem to agree with my feelings about the elemental components. This music is composed of iron and earth, minerals and fire! This recording never fails to cheer me up - it’s like taking a holiday in another dimension. I like it there - there’s lots of air, light and space, and I can wander off into a new unexplored corner every time. My peregrinations always take me to the joyous segment where a cosmic bathtub is draining, emptying all the primordial soup of existence into space; this segues into a pastoral scene, birds twittering suggesting the final touches of the Creator finishing off his new world.
François Bayle’s Erospheres, INA C 3002 (1990) contains two suites: the first ‘Tremblement de Terre très doux’ starting with a totally non-musical source, metal boules rolling around in a metal tub, close-miked and treated with phasing and ring modulation. This piece is electrifyingly intense - you can almost taste the air singing with metallic particles, like a mouthful of loose change! The second suite ‘Toupie dans le ciel’ makes some concessions to rhythm and melody (it might use keyboards) and each segment repeats a soothing figure, exploring its inner space thoroughly.
As for Luc Ferrari’s Presque Rien, INA C 2008 (1995), this is virtually a series of simple environmental recordings with apparently little or no intervention from the impish Luc himself. It’s one of the most beautiful records I’ve ever heard. Particularly affecting are the sounds of the tractor engine in the countryside, and the natural rhythms and drones of the ‘insects mysterieux’ apparently recorded at night - there are also fragments of a murmured conversation between a French couple going on. It segues into a terrifying thunderclap sound, which after its first explosion is fed through some electronic filter, each time becoming something quite new and unheard. Nature into Music, via the medium of electronics. So you might well ask why is this different from one of those Relaxation-Therapy New Age environmental recordings of the Amazon rain forest? Perhaps it isn’t, but surely there is artistic invention going on in the selection of the recordings and their juxtaposition. The intervention may appear minimal (Almost Nothing, indeed), yet Ferrari manages to invest each episode with atmosphere, tension, and depth; and to some extent, editorialises his materials to suggest meanings. You don’t get that from a Relaxation CD, which is just raw material, marketed solely for a consumerist purpose and extrapolates no meaning from the sounds at all.
Additional Adepts and Acolytes
Michael Prime is a living UK musician who could be said to have inherited some of the methods and processes of Electroacoustic, and remains true to its principles with no danger of becoming a tape-alone luddite. I mentioned Aquifers last issue which contains a deal of environmental recordings, as does his newie Cellular Radar, Mycophile SPOR 01 (1996), even allowing such pre-programmed events as a girl reading a poem. City Street noises, and atmospheric Weather sounds, are also deployed. ‘Finis Terra’, with a deft touch of the volume faders, puts the sound of human breathing on an equal footing with that of the wind blowing - an aural disruption of scale is created. Titles ‘Climb down the ladder of carbon’ and ‘Nocturnal resort’ add further to my hinted themes of elements and safe havens, although the latter resort is a very spooky place.
Michael Prime is also a member of the 7-piece Morphogenesis, a combo of UK players roughly in the area of electro-acoustic, except that everything they do is performed and recorded in real time, with no overdubs. That’s an important distinction; if editing and tape manipulation end up producing a species of cultivated garden, then the Morphogenesis technique is to generate each separate sound world, from a variety of semi-controlled sources, and let everything grow like a wild forest. If this style of husbandry appeals then glom their CDs as soon as you can. Morphogenesis have a library of tapes, and periodically issue highlights from the collection. Two CDs worth bending an ear to are Solarisation, Germany Streamline 1006 (1994); and Charivari Music, Paradigm PD02 (1996) issued by Clive Graham, the second issue on his Paradigm label. Of the two I think Solarisation is slightly better - it has more tension than Charivari, more abrasive surfaces. (I’ll never forget playing it to my four year-old niece - ‘it sounds like Ice Giants marching!”) Morphogenesis never fail in their unique capability, every time slowly building up a world that envelops the listener with individual, elemental characteristics. Michael Prime is usually occupied adding the water component, be it condensation or ice crystals. Another player adds radio dialogue samples in stuttering bursts, the rudimentary speech of this world’s strange populace. Elsewhere, building blocks are assembled and strange temples are constructed, towers built of wood swaying in the breeze. At least four of the key players are also visual-arts inclined, judging by the four photographs of equally abstract ambiguous beauty adorning Solarisation.
Then of course there’s this monstrous gloomy Czech record Raab, Recommended RR 23, that has finally worn down my resistance and now inhabits a niche somewhere in my being. Jaroslav Krcek recorded it in Prague in 1970-1971. It uses the techniques of ElectroAcoustic in the service of a dramatic production - a bit like a more articulated version of a Radio 3 play with help from the Radiophonic Workshop. However this doesn’t just add background sound effects so much as integrate the tape manipulation into the performance, and the listening experience; so dialogue and exposition itself is regarded as fair game for such treatment. It seems to be a depressing story (the text is by Zdenek Barborka) and probably doesn’t lend itself to immediate comprehension by Western European ears - starting from a biblical text, Joshua 6 and the Fall of Jericho, there may be a grim political message behind it all - but I’d recommend it in spite of these obstacles.
ED PINSENT