Commissions, Omissions, Strange Emissions
Original position in magazine: pages 7-11
Contents: Steve Roden, Brandon Labelle, Conrad Schnitzler, Henri Chopin, Remora, Martin Archer and friends, Trevor Wishart, Pauline Oliveros, Disinformation, Farmers Manual, Mika Vanio
in be tween noise
humming endlessly in the hush
USA NEW PLASTIC MUSIC NPIB-2 CD (1995)
Steve Roden
Splint (The soul of wood)
USA INTERIOR SOUNDS 3″ CD (1997)
Brandon Labelle
Prima Materia
USA UNIQUE ANCIENT TAVERN CD (1996)
Roden and Labelle are a couple of Los Angeles guys both involved in visual arts, performance, installations and such like – their work has passed me by until this point (though Roden was at the ICA in London). In the last 5 years they’ve taken up music. I was determined these CDs wouldn’t appeal to me (it all looked a bit precious) yet I was won over in time. The soul of wood is a 3″CD of music generated by playing a piece of wood, although not just any old lump of teak; it’s a 1943 Eames splint. Roden bows it, scrapes it and amplifies the resulting soundwaves through electronic devices. Calling attention in a very specific way to the object he uses, it’s almost a surrealist act, a Marcel Duchamp ready-made being put to another purpose. Also the insistence on its concreteness, rather than just using any old piece of two-by-four (as I have seen used by Emma O’Bong in Organum recently); this reminds me of Edward Gorey’s insistence on polished, exacting writing.
The medical uses of this splint set my fertile brain a-fantasising – why you can practically hear some echoes of keening cries of pain in the music he wrings from it, as though all that physical agony of an amputated airman were somehow embodied in ‘the very soul of wood’ – all he need do is release it. A wonderful supernaturalish story I remember (in Punch magazine of all places) involved a nurse looking after an old man by the seaside; he somehow damaged his wooden leg and she searched the beach all day until she found a piece of driftwood that would exactly replace it. By the end of the story, she had ended up replacing the whole man with driftwood; the search for his head was a particularly difficult task. While not suggesting that Roden should set up an entire orchestra of body-part simulacra (that sounds like an EC Tales from the Crypt story) I endorse his approach. I’m sure Roger Ruskin Spear (’Noises for the leg’) would approve also.
humming endlessly in the hush uses field recordings and samples; and on many tracks, vintage toy instruments – eg the 1963 Kenner toy ’scottie bagpipes’. One is reminded of The Residents using Toys-R-Us instruments on Goosebump, although that was for the sake of conceptual unity – nursery rhymes played on nursery instruments. Again, everything is specifically name-checked, indicating that each item was carefully chosen and not just settled on as the nearest ‘found’ object. Marcel Duchamp would surely approve; the heathen cast aside his works as being somehow ‘irrelevant and random’, yet ‘Fountain’ (the inverted urinal) remains an indelible statement to this day; the very act of selection was highly deliberate, and the contextualisation of this choice within the perameters of art gives it its lasting, classical status. The audible results of Roden’s deliberations may not strike you as eventful or even particularly challenging at first listen; but there are many layers at work, carefully organised and edited sound events. Playing it really does have an effect on your surroundings; it’s not a mere background hum.
If however this sounds a bit cluttered to you and you would actually like a background hum CD, then Brandon Labelle’s efforts come highly recommended. He’s attempting to take installation commissions that stage further, actually ‘playing’ the art gallery like an instrument. This is done by placing microphones on the walls and floors so as to use natural sound events as they are created (so the visitors become part of the piece). Sometimes so unobtrusive as to barely register, yet always gently asserting a palpable presence, this one’s a weirdie. I guarantee you will come away from it in an altered state, and probably do something absent-minded as a result, like feeding raw steak to the goldfish. Brandon has stuck on his back cover an old 17th century printed book illustration of a gardener who had clearly learned his lessons from Farmer’s Manual; he has beome a Green Man. He shed a leaf from his skin and posted it in the envelope of this CD.
ED PINSENT
Conrad Schnitzler
Rot
GERMANY PLATE LUNCH PLATE 01 CD (1997)
Conrad Schnitzler
00/106
GERMANY PLATE LUNCH PUNCH 02 CD (1997)
We had a mad art history tutor at college, whose lectures were only reported to me thankfully, but she apparently once backed herself into a corner defending ‘truth to materials’ in modern art. She wound up claiming the only way to do it would be by exhibiting huge blocks of cast aluminium as art; absolutely nothing else would do. This is not a concept I’ve really understood, but I guess if Renaissance sculptor Michaelangelo is trying to ‘fool’ the viewer into thinking carved marble was to be perceived as flesh or drapery, he is not being true to materials; whereas 20th century Carl Andre, with his non-sculpted steel plates or arranged housebricks, is.
Conrad Schnitzler is however, I would surmise, being ‘true to materials’ on the classic electronic LP Rot, one of the very desirable privately pressed LPs, originally issued in vinyl in a limited edition of 500. Two side-long pieces made up Conrad’s first proper ’solo’ LP (after Kluster) which arrived in a plain red cover. This very welcome CD issue endeavours to reproduce the original package as far as possible (red spine on the case!). The ‘truth to materials’ is in his planning of the pieces and working with his electronic tools, based not on whether it’ll end up sounding good as a piece of music or noise, but on the inherent properties of how these devices behave when you plug them in and manipulate them. Modifications in volume, pitch, wave form, compression etc, are all permissible, provided one does it in a logical, almost algorithmical way. Schnitzler eschews any traditional musical notions of what constitutes aesthetic development, and, through a severe materialist approach, proceeds with sound as sound.
‘Meditation’ accordingly consists of some 4 or 5 unique taped sound events unfolding simultaneously in a highly schematic, organised plan; any variations are based not on intuitive, ‘feeling’ decision, but materialist, mathematical rules. In case you’re expecting a foreboding noise, let me point out there is rhythm going on here – a recognisable pulse beat forms a structure, and some ‘dub mixing’ effects on the tapes lend it a strange dynamic. As to the second piece ‘Krautrock’, here be primitive treated drum machines going insane with slightly irregular rhythms, offset by huge vectors of completely arrythmic electric twittering patterns and ferocious swoops and shrieks. If you think there’s nothing new under the sun, just remember Conrad recorded this in 1972 when most around him were bent on forming rock bands and touring Germany with their warped Pink Floyd impersonations. ‘Krautrock’ just might be his sarcastic riposte to this situation, but it wipes the floor with any piece of laughable ‘techno’ dribble and Rot stands as a classic of experimental electronic music.
00/106 was recorded in 1997 and shows that Conrad appears to have purchased more and better electronic equipment, is in even tighter control of his unique sound sculpting technique, and most importantly that he has lost none of his harshness or intensity. Few concessions here to conventional audience pleasure, although for my part I take great pleasure in exploring this particular mind garden, with its stainless steel flowers and barbed wire grass. A continuous hour of audio-fracture-abstracto-mindmelds, indexed into 23 user-friendly stabs, shining forth with utterly brilliant sound quality – the years have not been as kind to the Rot master tapes.
The cartloads of ‘Ambient’ music I’ve been swimming through have a dubiously facile quality; they slip down the gullet like a tub of melted banana ice cream. Schnitzler resists, and continues to resist, familiarity; I haven’t ever got used to listening to these CDs and don’t expect I ever shall. This man is important; you really are running out of excuses to ignore him and his music when there are CDs like this on the racks not a stone’s throw from where you are.
ED PINSENT
Henri Chopin
Le Corpsbis & Co
ITALY NEPLESS PS 961 1001 CD (1996)
A recent issue from this Parisian veteran genius of audio poems. Chopin has been working in his unique way since 1955 at least. All this haunting work is produced just using his mouth and a microphone, with the added help of echo and other electronic effects which speed up or slow down phrases. For the principal 36-minute work ‘Le Corpsbis’ Henri yawps his vocal escapades in a variety of international locations, recorded between 1983 and 1989. One of them is recorded in a cavern where his lip and tongue movements become increasingly juicy throughout the impassioned performance, and his saliva becomes a poetic equivalent to an underground stream running through that natural underground cave. The titles of the other pieces, which translate roughly as ‘Fresco of the Intangible Voice’, ‘Echos of the Mouth’ and ‘Major Fresco of the Lips’, may clue you in as to what to expect from old Rubber-Lips. Chopin has developed convincing theories about his entire approach, based on the potentialities of the whole human frame as a sound-maker and resonating device; although not unsympathetic to the Dadaists, he found Kurt Schwitters Ur-Sonate somewhat restrictive as it was based on the limits of the written alphabet – and the human tongue’s approximation of these ciphers. Chopin is more interested in the far greater range of natural noises that the mouth can generate; inserting the microphone into his ‘oral cavity’ is an act as ‘ritualistic as the multi-tonal chants of the people of Tibet and Siberia’.
Chopin edited the magazines Cinquieme Saison, a review for concrete poetry and theoretical texts for sound poetry, founded in 1958; and OU founded in 1964, which was the first (only?) such publication to include records featuring spoken word pieces by William Burroughs, Gysin, Novak, Heidsieck, and the Belgian poet painter and film-maker Paul de Vree. He has also produced typewriter art, some examples of which appear in the booklet to this CD, and had a couple of retrospective exhibitions in this country in the early 1970s. Look out for Audiopoems, a 1974 LP on the Tangent label, which is probably super-rare by now, although a retrospective CD Les Neufes Sainte-Phonies was around a couple years ago.
ED PINSENT
Remora
The Clockwork Ammonite Shells
UNITED KINGDOM WORRY NO NUMBER CD (1997)
Home-made electric noise recordings by solo artiste Ian Middleton, comprising seven truly wonderful therapeutic drones, echo, voices and modified amplifier hum. Seven different shades of black. Many have tried to follow the path mapped out by Steven Stapleton but few have managed to progress beyond releasing bedroom cassettes with grim photo-collage covers. Remora may use similar methods but has his own voice and vision, and backs it up with some of his deliberately Outsider Art-styled pen and ink drawings, some of which are reproduced this issue. A refreshing change from repellent abstract noise or soft-centred Ambient vibrations, the tension throughout makes this compelling listening. Somehow there’s a touching transparency about its simplicity; given the equipment, I suppose almost anyone could set a series of drones going in like manner, but then would they manage to sustain the interest as long as Remora?
ED PINSENT
Various Artists
Sound Gallery Volume One
UNITED KINGDOM DISCUS 9CD (1997)
A showcase comp for Martin Archer and his cronies, and a somewhat variable package but one that will either cater to many listeners, or the changing moods of a single pair of ears. Tim Risher’s the best for my money: he grabs your attention soon enough with his ingenious pieces, ‘The Only Reality is Inside your Head’ and the translucent beauty of ‘In Paradiso’. In his trio Paragate, Tim is joined by fellow composers Tom DePlonty and Ted Stanley, who set out to perform and record electro-acoustic music but restricting themselves to the simplest possible set-up and equipment. Tim’s understanding of acoustics and the recording process are admirably demonstrated by these beautiful cuts. Michael Szpakowski on the other hand is a fairly dull sub-Erik Satie piano player, rendering in sound ‘Three Paintings of Edward Hopper’ – an uninspired opener to this gallery. Nik Bizzell-Browning’s ‘These Hands Aren’t Mine’ is a collaged / sampler mess that made me wish these ears aren’t mine – jumping about from one novel sound effect to another, like a kid who got a Korg workstation for Christmas. Plus composer Dal Strutt with a tasteful clarinet piece, and Archer’s electronic work for an installation by visual artist Helmut Lenke. Tolerable.
ED PINSENT
Transient V Resident
Electrical Shroud
UNITED KINGDOM DISCUS 7CD (1997)
Chris Bywater and Martin Archer slug it out with their analogue machines with generally rewarding results. They rarely lose themselves in the pleasure of their own sounds, or allow submersion in the synth bubblebath, preferring instead to stay awake and keep the moment moving along all the time, according to a very unprogrammed agenda. Whenever things get too polite, they’re always prepared to throw it all in the melting pot and dirty up the sound, or simply derail the smooth passage of the train – even at the expense of losing the thread (and that’s my day’s quota of mixed metaphors out of the way). This attitude is adventurous and good. Assuming that these are real-time improvisations, it has to be said they sustain interest well, particularly on the first long track – although this fades and dwindles sadly away after achieveing many moments of abstracted drama. Not every track pulls it off; track 6 has Archer footling with his ‘amplified objects’ (which could be anything from a Korg electrical egg-slicer to a bag of Roland digital marbles) against a bog-standard drone. Still, a mean quibble – you’ve only to play this against any given slice of experimental techno vinyl and you’ll likely find Transient V Resident win every time, scoring full marks for inspired and dangerous chaos, illogical sudden stabs of noise, and creative use of drum machine. Fantastic recorded sound quality; you can almost hear the machines thinking.
ED PINSENT
Martin Archer
88 Enemies
UNITED KINGDOM DISCUS 10CD (1997)
Solo works produced with sequencers through a Proteus grand piano, resulting in a completely bonkers stream of music filled with overlapping sounds and ultra-fast arpeggios which no human could ever play. Very akin to Frank Zappa’s rather cold experiments with the Synclavier machine, eg Civilisation Phase III. Not a great success for me, and as for the musical peers he claims have inspired him in this direction…well Conlon Nancarrow maybe, but Morton Feldman? Still, it’s Archer’s ‘personal favourite’ so you should give it an audition and stay with it.
ED PINSENT
Trevor Wishart and Friends
Menagerie / Beach Singularity / Vocalise
UNITED KINGDOM PARADIGM DISCS PD 03 CD (1997)
Three rather variable pieces for the price of one. ‘Menagerie’ is about the best for my money, although not exactly a satisfying listen. It was planned as an art gallery installation event, with sound pieces by Leeds-born composer Trevor Wishart to match up with strange assemblage objects by some English artists. Photos of some of these are thoughtfully provided in the booklet. Mick Banks’ ‘Still Life’ pitches his precariously balanced teacup on top of a stack of paperbacks about to fall over, against a worrisome soundtrack of a housewive apparently screaming herself to death as she listens to Tony Blackburn over domestic sound effects of boiling kettles. Michael Scott’s ‘Musical Box’ is an old broken record played by a phallic carrot to entertain two Barbie dolls; guess what innovation Wishart devised for that canard…that’s right, a skipping old broken record! This is probably making ‘Menagerie’ seem more interesting than it is; a visit to such an installation might have seemed radical in 1974, but now seems merely quaint. The artists need to go back to their Joseph Cornell cribs (they have none of that wounded US surrealist’s pathos, humour or invention). Wishart’s tape-collage sounds are diverting enough, but don’t really stand up by themselves.
‘Beach Singularity’ we had best draw a veil over – or at least a white canvas tentflap. Wishart went down to the seaside to perform on beaches in Lancashire in 1977 along with his Palm Beach Orchestra – a virtual German oompah band (Tuba, sax, clarinet, horn) of his friends dressed in funny shorts and little bowler hats. The resulting ‘avant-garde’ versions of ‘Surfin Usa’ and ‘A Life on the Ocean Wave’, treated with live tape collage mixes, are ghastly; it’s a bit of English whimsy trying to say something about English whimsy, and I suspect deeply patronising to its intended audience. Only the dreaded Promenaders come close to this ironic ’serious-hilarious’ pomposity.
‘Vocalise’ is Wishart solo having a stab at the Henri Chopin style of making mouth music in an extended vocal improv performance; a leftover from Howards and Andrew Jacques’ 1991 Recommended Records shop gigs which I don’t think made it onto the These CD Release. When you read that Wishart is a composer whose work ’spans a number of genres’ (see sleeve note to Hyperion A66060, 1983) you should realise this is polite critical parlance for ‘a Jack of All Trades’.
For what it’s worth these pieces are rare, originally only available on a 1979 privately pressed LP.
ED PINSENT
Pauline Oliveros
Electronic Works
UNITED KINGDOM PARADIGM DISCS PD 04 CD (1997)
What interests me about any early-ish pioneering electronic music is the very difficulty of effecting it. Look at Stockhausen hand-splicing hundreds of pieces of tape for three months to produce the jigsaw puzzle of Kontakte…Edgard Varese labouring over his taped ‘Interpolations’ for Deserts in 1954…Tod Dockstader compiling a library of taped sounds…any INA-GRM musique concrète pioneer working only with magnetic tape and a Revox. Which isn’t to try and make a fetish out of the limitations of 1950s equipment and hardware, nor to promote a Protestant hard work ethic – but having something you have to push against can often spur the creator onto greater heights. Despite the fact that those named above had good ideas, there was an elaborate and disciplined structure behind their music-making which distinguishes it from the swamplands of modern Ambient dribble. A medium that doesn’t challenge you can result in soft-centred, lazy work; modern music computer banks become like Sony Playstations.
What then of Pauline Oliveros, coming to terms with sine tone generators, oscillators and tape recorders to produce some of the most beautiful music man has ever heard? These pieces, dated 1965 and 1966, come from a time before binary algorithms were commonplace, in the twilight zone just before the commercial availability of the Moog synthesizer. ‘I of IV’ is played in real time, using amplified tones and tape loop repetition…a more sophisticated version of Frippertronics, given that the sound sources are quite elaborate tone generators. Most important is that she did it ‘live’ without using overdubs or tape splicing; no after-the-fact tweaking and correcting for this plucky explorer. The piece is dramatic, a true battle of wits, a split-second decision making process involving a massed army of unpredictable, intractable sound events. For Ms Oliveros to pitch her talents against these machines is an unequal struggle of Julie Christie vs Demon Seed proportions (there is something innately masculine about electronic equipment, don’t you think?). Pauline wins, re-educating this monstrous configuration of forbidding humming boxes to speak a musical language without it even understanding what it’s doing, and at the same time reinventing its machismo circuits into something more feminine, compassionate even.
‘Big Mother is watching you’ is a piece you owe yourself to hear before you check into the funeral home. This is a work of terrifying beauty, of primal forces barely under control. If you are comforted by the rain outside your window but find thunderstorms alarming, stay well away from this recording. Otherwise by all means tune in to a raw and elemental composition. The fearsomeness eases off eventually, to glide into a soaring flight over a lunar landscape, only to recur in the closing passages of gigantic inhaling and exhaling. Like ‘I of IV’, ‘Mother’ uses techniques which Oliveros worked on at the San Francisco Tape Centre, but recorded in Canada (Toronto University).
More than merely an important electronic composer, Oliveros is a writer and philosopher and (like film-maker Maya Deren) has worked with myth and ritual, with performances spilling over into areas of choreography, music theatre. She is also founder of The Deep Listening band, developing a meditative approach to all aspects of music. A number of recent recordings are available through the Lovely Music label in America. She also contributes to the Driftworks CD set which I have reviewed in The Crackling Ether section.
ED PINSENT
Disinformation
Antiphony
UNITED KINGDOM ASH INTERNATIONAL ASH 3.4 2 x CD (1997)
Joe Banks hasn’t been listening to music for the last two years – in fact he’s been trying to avoid it. His interest as Disinformation probably lies outside music altogether, and even the recording process itself seems to disappoint him as it cannot faithfully capture the extraordinary sound events that he alone knows how to locate and monitor. His sophisticated radio equipment monitors electrical disturbances in the national grid, emissions from the sun, or lightning bolts happening on some other part of the globe. These are naturally spontaneous, or man-made generated events, which when registered on these devices do produce some sort of sound, although even that would seem to be incidental to Banks’ purpose. Angels passing overhead. Hence presumably the interest in the ruined 1920s Sound Mirrors at Dungeness, and the graphic of the radar screen. He flies like an Angel over the globe, selecting what he may from the air. A live event at Disobey gave him the chance to generate, in a completely ‘non-musical’ manner, a naturally-resonating approximate G chord and play it over a rock-sized PA system; his ears still haven’t recovered, but what of the helpless audience whose bones were shaken?
Early records of Disinformation were documents, reportage of his research. Titled Stargate, R&D and Ghost Shells, they have sold out and there is no possibility of a repress. Antiphony purports to be ‘remixes’ of these materials, although there are cases, such as the version by John Duncan here, where virtually no intervention whatsoever has taken place. Other tracks feature no Disinformation source material at all. The graphics, map references, photographs and other materials on the sleeve inserts here set enough of a conundrum to any visitor to Banks-World; there is definite encouragement for us to go and visit these sites ourselves, Richard Long style, and find another piece in the jigsaw puzzle. In any case, here are two CDs worth of abstract noise, featuring such artistes as Beekeeper and CD mutilator Bruce Gilbert, extreme performance artist John Duncan, Chris and Cosey, RLW, Kapotte Muziek et al. Despite all the apparent ‘nothingness’ involved, there is a tremendous amount going on; at times it’s almost too much to listen to. It is also profoundly spooky, atmospheric, mysterious and wonderful. All the things so many young contemporary electronic manipulators are aiming for, and often failing miserably.
ED PINSENT
Farmers Manual
Fsck
UNITED KINGDOM TRAY # 2 (1997)
More playful and even at times trivial than the above related releases, this is a clever little CD which may ultimately beguile you. You need an excellent memory: each succeeding play cancels out the previous ones. Swatches of changing techniques run thorugh it: a ludicrously clunky form of techno background music, with all the nuts and bolts of its construction laid bare; near-empty minimalist burrs and buzzes; seconds of ‘tasteful’ chord changes; chaotic noisy fragments of hospital equipment being thrown down an escalator; and randomly-programmed silent passages. If this music were actually used as a Farmer’s Manual, agriculture would go mad- the world would be transformed into a gigantic field of cherry orchards transplanted with bean-shoots, hemmed in by a garland of evil-looking weeds. On the other hand, the booklet photographs show only too clearly what a mess we’ve made the world grow into; reaping a bitter harvest of the wreckage of old aeroplanes.
ED PINSENT
Mika Vainio
Onko
UNITED KINGDOM TOUCH # TO:34CD (1997)
Mr Vainio should be familiar to you as half of Panasonic, the great Finnish electronic extremists – if so you might have an inkling what to expect, a soothing pattern of vibrations and tones. Abstracted to infinity, no worrisome ‘hidden meanings’ to tease out of this particular release, one of the most enjoyable and approachable ever to have been recorded in the name of minimalism or digital noise. If we can indeed compare this to ‘cellular patterns as they face the scrutiny of a high-powered microscope’, then perhaps the sound somehow aligns itself with a very fundamental human rhythm – the inner pulse of amino acids, or something. This is the best way to account for how this music is able to enter your bloodstream ten times faster than a dose of Nurofen – it vibrates its way into the very grain of your being. Take more olive oil in your diet; one reason it’s not fattening is because the cells of its carbohydrates are a very close match to those manufactured naturally by the human body. If so, Onko is a bottle of supreme quality Extra-Virgin first pressing!
ED PINSENT
[2004 additions: Steve Roden lists 'bruit secret' among his sound sources on back cover of NPIB-2; this may have inspired name of later French label A BRUIT SECRET. I understand Roden also coined the term 'lower case sound', later used as title for a compilation and still persisting today among music journalists as shorthand for any form of quiet music.]