Books and Magazines
Original position in magazine: pages 63-64
Contents: Gravikords, Whirlies and Pyrophones, Resonance Retuning Radio
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Gravikords, Whirlies and Pyrophones: Experimental Musical Instruments
By Bart Hopkin
USA ELLIPSIS ARTS…BOOK AND CD ISBN 1-55961382-3 (1996)
This is a beautifuly packaged CD and book boxed set. The book is a mini-survey of strange and unusual musical instruments, some past but mostly present, with snippets of information about the creators of the instruments and how they arrived at realising their devices. There are some stunning photographs of these, including two beautiful pictures of the Theremin, Futurist Luigi Rossolo’s famous intonanumori, and Reed Ghazala’s devices resembling expensive executive toys. The CD, naturally enough, contains samples of what the devils actually sound like, one track apiece - although not everyone is represented.
Bart Hopkin compiled it and he lives in California, whence he issues his unique magazine EMI devoted to this sort of thing. The intellectual dilemmas are posed at the introduction of the book: musical instruments have not been allowed to evolve, runs the thoery, due to the constraints of the classical orchestra’s requirements. Even most electronic instruments can’t get away from the 88-key piano keyboard, or emulating the sound of extant instruments. Our resourceful inventors therefore look to new ways of designing instruments, perhaps improving on a basic model, or reinventing fundamental aspects of the physical act of playing. Keiji Haino I think has commented on the basic limits imposed by muscial instruments; it’s hard to get away from the determined movements such as hitting, plucking, scraping, fingering or blowing. His personal solution was to develop a complex system of extreme dance-like body movements that would radically alter his whole approach to playing the guitar. Not too far away is Godfried-Willem Raes’ Pneumaphone here - which requires the player to sit on a big inflatable pouffe and thus squeeze air through the reeds and chanters.
But for some reason I find this whole thing intensely annoying. For me, there isn’t really enough art or music going on here. Oh, there’s plenty of novelty - Incredibly Strange Music has a lot to answer for in that department. The people in this book are craftsmen first, musicians second (or not at all). Most of the instruments here are wonderful examples of very finished sculptures, or art-objects; some are interesting snapshots of an electrical experiment in progress. But as to their function and use as musical instruments, well…perhaps that work still has to be done. Tom Waits, in his introduction, gave me plenty of hope in that direction, detailing with relish his collection of megaphones and how he plays dumpsters and objects in hardware stores. But whatever you think of Waits, at least he’s a songwriter with stories and ideas; a studio veteran who has a notion of what sounds he wants and how to get them. These inventors for the most part are not so steeped in the inflexible practicalities of the music industry; allowed to indulge their whimsical pursuits, they have evolved almost like musical Outsider Artists.
Maybe some time in the future a musical visionary will pick up the gauntlet and compose whole arias for some of these instruments. But I somehow doubt it, because the projects represented here seem very closed-off, hermetically sealed - the creators have satisfied their own urges or curiosities, and somehow led themselves into a creative cul-de-sac. You never sense these ideas are going to lead back into the continuum of music making. A few quotes from the text will illustrate how precious some of these people are…’Building a Guitar is Meditation’…’I started moving into a kind of nurturing or loving space in the sound’…’there are magical sounds to be heard in small metal objects’…’a self-intensifying web evolves from the combination of possibilities between individual functions’. Self-indulgent, West Coast-y piffle.
We make an exception of the great Harry Partch (who is represented here), but that’s because he was so exceptional. There was a focussed mission to his instrument making, linked to his personal philosophy about art and life. He needed these instruments to realise his musical ideas, because he simply wasn’t getting what he needed from the conventional orchestra. That driven quality, or pioneering vision, is something I can’t detect in most of the other projects described here, interesting or attractive as the results may be. Rather, it feels like they just wanted to try something a little different, with no idea of what use their novel devices might be put to. At the end of the day, the creators here simply aren’t musician enough to live up to the promises of their own inventions.
Thus the CD amounts to little more than a fascinating catalogue of some weird sounds you’ve never heard before. Fun the first time, but ultimately very unsatisfying.
ED PINSENT
Resonance magazine, Volume 5 Number 2
52 pp, ISSN 1352-772X (1997)
I recommend a squint at the Retuning Radio issue here - more than likely a personal triumph for commissioning editor Phil England, who also conducted most of the interviews from a starting point of ‘a naive enthusiasm for artists’ engagement with radio’. This fascinating survey is the result. Some of the pieces have hardly anything to do with music, but everything to do with ideas - and above all, the idea of freedom. Perhaps broadcasting to thousands is the most effective and subversive way to affect peoples’ minds? The overall theme is the untapped power of broadcasting, and here are extremists, terrorists, radicals, pranksters, pirates of the air, conceptualists and weirdos of every possible stripe who are doing their best to maximise that potential. If you ever thought one of those wacky Radio 4 plays (with overlapping voices and music from the Radiophonic Workshop) was somehow ‘experimental’, you’re in for a surprise. Unfortunately these freedom-mongers - be they playful anarchists or committed Marxist libertarians - can be thwarted by the very people they are proposing to ‘liberate’. Thus if Don Joyce proposes an uncensored freedom-of-speech phone-in for his listeners, 90% of them are flummoxed by this notion and probably the best they can come up with is on-air obscenities. Still a lot of consciousness-raising to be done, it seems. Then, there’s the prankster element: Lance Dann (Noiseless Blackboard Eraser) tricked the public into phoning in their ideas for a bogus David Bowie project. An elaborate nasty joke which proves very little, and his contempt for humanity is revealed out of his own mouth: ‘Every day I’d just go in and download these lunatics and desperate, sad people that thought they were David Bowie, or wanted to be David.’
Also of interest - the story of John F Muir, a producer who tried to do something different at the BBC, including the early Radio 1 show Night Ride…the very depressing idea that ‘culture’ no longer matters at all in the Western 20th century is put forward by the Belgian Fluxus artist Willem de Ridder. More positively, he encourages a form of (albeit absurdist) activism in the usually passive radio audience with his semi-confrontational, subversive strategies…Peter Lamborn Wilson is an American broadcaster, very politically aware and caught up in every Leftist’s dilemma - ‘the media have become an exact mirror image of Capital…Capital is structured as a chaos and media is structured as a chaos.’… and for you diehards who still want music, Keith Rowe’s stories of his use of the shortwave radio in AMM performances are highly encouraging and inspiring. The use of the found object interested him from his Art Student days and of course it continues as a valid aesthetic everywhere today, although he traces its origins to the early 16th century. He used radio samples transparently and sparingly and when he did, magic moments and joyously synchronous events were the order of the day.
This ish is a bit pricey (£7.00) as you’re likely paying for the CD taped to the cover, which for me was a tad disappointing - not quite as disturbing as the texts had promised. Still, thematically and conceptually here’s one of the best issues from this LMC periodical.
ED PINSENT