By all accounts there is a special moment predicted for the Discoteca on Sunday. Endearing innovator Carl Craig will be joined by neo-classical collaborator Francesco Tristano for an exclusive live performance involving a grand piano, moogs and a juno. An electronic-meets-acoustic showcase for our post-digital age. To get an idea of what to expect, check out the video below…
Posts Tagged ‘Avant-Garde’
Francesco Tristano & Carl Craig – The Melody
Wednesday, July 14th, 2010
Field Notes
Thursday, May 20th, 2010
From a cultural history of hearing, we know that hearing, as a sense of information and orientation, was ranked before seeing. The gods, first and foremost, could be heard (if one could set eyes on them at all). From the sounds of thunder and lightning – though one can not see their origin – one reads the wrath of the gods. The invisible fires one’s imagination. Ulysses does not succumb to the singing of the sirens since he has allowed himself to be tied up at the mast of his ship. He does not see the sirens, he only hears them. Its invisibility renders the singing dangerous. It is the potentiality which the invisibility attributes to it, that which is not used, the innominated attender. It is this which drives Ulysses wild. Cristoph Korn
What is the difference between noises and music? Does every sound that is not recorded for scientific purposes automatically become music? Field recordings have only recently been recognized as a bona fide artistic genre. A field recording is generally used to describe any recording captured outside of a recording studio, it often involves the capture of low level, complex and ambient noise. Field recordists and sound artists listen to sounds of the world and record them. They can present their recordings unedited or sometimes collage and manipulate them – arrange them into compositions, create installations and sound sculptures.
Our series on online PDF magazines continues with a publication which focuses solely on the subject of field recording. The first two issues have many interesting articles and essays from a diverse range of artists, philosophers and academics. It also contains some pleasing pictures of locations in which field recordings take place. So go ahead and download those first two issues here. Or check out their website if you would like to download the German version.
Outsider Music – The Residents
Wednesday, May 19th, 2010Being an experimental art and media project, researching The Residents is one of the strangest but most interesting experiences you can have online. I don’t think we’ve even touched the the tip of the iceberg on this one. Their whole project appears to be at once a riddle, a hoax and some kind of high concept obscurantism. To quote from liner notes of the album below, “The Residents don’t support racism, Catholicism, fascism, Judaism, cynicism, realism or journalism.”
the brain-numbing catchiness of pop music is fascism in disguise
The Residents are an avant-garde music and visual arts group largely shrouded in mystery and myth. They formed in 1969 but after several decades in music business, and still actively creating and producing to this day, they have never revealed their names or faces. Their best known device for preserving their anonymity has been covering their heads with giant eyeballs tastefully accented with top hats and tuxedos. On trying to find names for the constituent members of the band you are met with a cryptic message of: ‘If the question is “what are the names the parents gave to the people making up The Residents,” then I would say that those names belong to individuals and not the group. The group doesn’t have names within its structure. If the question is the real “who,” meaning the philosophy and outlook, then that is all clearly stated in the work. I would find it difficult to summarize.’ However the same official website does helpfully surmise that the people who started the group are exactly the same as now although the number of people who have been in The Residents is probably over a hundred at this point and still growing. The FAQ of the website (how many bands have a frequently asked questions page?) explains the disguises and refusal to be subjected to interviews thus: ‘Say you have a tank of goldfish. Say you have given each goldfish a name. A stranger wanders into your house and sees your tank of goldfish and wants to know who they are. Considering that he is a stranger, you tell him it is a tank of goldfish.’
Meet The Residents
Like any artist there is early work. However, they consider anything released prior to 1974 as not being by The Residents, but by people who later became The Residents. They claim some older, unfinished and experimental recordings were stolen from studios and a demo tape sent to Warner Brothers was stolen and bootlegged (and now easy to find on the internet). Legend has it that the group sent this reel-to-reel tape to an acquaintance of Captain Beefheart at Warner Brothers, which was sent back with a rejection letter to “the residents” of the house (giving the band their name). As is true for all artists not just The Residents, they prefer not to release stuff that is unsatisfactory or they feel does not represent them. However, the band obviously appreciate the flaws for the beauty they might contain as they still offer many pre-1974 recordings for sale.
Intermission: Extraneous Music from the Residents' Mole Show
Historically, one of The Residents primary obsessions has been the creation of “alternative worlds”. This is usually accomplished with sound, often with live performance and sometimes with video. Their most renowned video project is the world of Vileness Fats. The unfinished film consists of a village, a cave, a desert and a nightclub, populated by one armed midgets. The group spent four years between 1972 and 1976 shooting most of the feature length video. As the project headed towards the final stages of production they suddenly abandoned its “all time underground masterpiece”. The dissolution of the production was put down to internal conflicts, technological challenges and post-production problems. Others point to the fact that, since there were no distribution channels for half inch black and white video in 1976, the group’s original naiveté was finally overcome by reality. There are two versions of the unfinished picture Whatever Happened to Vilenes Fats? and Vileness Fats (Concentrate). Both come across as artifacts from some sort of hellish yet mildly amusing nightmare
Demons Dance Alone
Much of The Residents work can be challenging but a few titles are particularly so. Their early albums have been compared to Captain Beefheart and Frank Zappa’s more conceptual and experimental albums as well as the work of Steve Reich. The music consists of deconstructions of countless rock and non-rock styles which are grafted together to create chaotic and formless compositions. You can download The Third Reich ‘n’ Roll here. It is their second (officially) released album and is a parody of 60s pop music and commercials. The album generated much controversy due to its cover (seen above) featuring a popular TV entertainer of the day (Dick Clark, presenter of American Bandstand – the first US national rock program) dressed in Nazi regalia holding a carrot while surrounded by swastikas and pictures of Adolf Hitler in both male and female dress. The German version of the album was marketed in the 1980s which heavily censored the cover art by covering every Nazi reference with the word “zensiert”. The original album contained only two tracks of intense, deconstructed versions of hits of the day. The band found themselves isolated from mainstream bland radio friendly rock, and soon concluded they had created an album about fascism and in particular, the fascism of rock ‘n’ roll. It’s bizarre collection that will appeal to adventurous listeners who are interested in Picasso’s dictum that all artists kill their aesthetic fathers. Find more outsider music here.
I found her crying in the morning
Sitting in a chair
She was wrapping something up
And wrapping it with care
I did not mean to hurt her
When I fell asleep last night
I was just exhausted
From the act of being polite
Yes, I was just exhausted
From the act of being polite
Outsider Music – Harry Partch
Monday, March 15th, 2010I had been away from the part of the world I generally consider home for six years. In the seventh year I found a studio in the unused Pioneer Hatchery in Petaluma, California. However sentimental or Oriental that many sound, the fact remains: it was the time of falling petals, and this music followed. – Harry Partch
Partched
One of the most individualistic composers of all time, Harry Partch was not only a great composer, but an innovative theorist who broke through the shackles of a tuning system of all Western music which had lasted for many centuries. He created dozens of incredible musical instruments for the specific peformance of his music and was a dramatist who wrote his own texts for dance-theatre extravaganzas based on everything from Greek mythology to his own experience as a hobo. Between 1930 and 1972, he created one of the most amazing bodies of sensually alluring and emotionally powerful music in the 20th century: music dramas, dance theatre, multi-media extravaganzas, vocal music and chamber music – mostly all performed on the instruments he built himself.
Could Chamber Bowls
The picture to the right is of an instrument created by Partch called Cloud Chamber Bowls. The bowls themselves are 12-gallon Pyrex carboys, suspended from a redwood frame on ropes. These difficult to find and impossible to tune glass gongs are played very carefully by a percussionist who risks the anguish of of a shattered disaster. The original bowls were found at the Radiation Laboratory of the University of California, Berkeley, and had been sued as cloud-chambers to trace the paths of sub-atomic particles.
Considering the earlist known letter written by Harry Partch dates from 1931, when he was already 30 years old, very little is knows about his pre-mature life. As a child, living in various areas of the American southwest, Partch was exposed to a variety of influences from Asian to Native American. He spent his childhood in remote tones in Arizona and New Mexico where he heard and sang songs in Mandarin, Spanish and American Indian languages. After dropping out of the University of Southern California, he began to study on his own and to question the validity of the tuning and philosophical foundations of Western music. He believed the standard system was unsuitable for reflecting the subtle melodic contours of dramatic speech, and as a result, he burned all of his early works. Partch was always clear that this burning of his early music was of tremendous symbolic importance to him, and he speaks of it as an act of purification, a ritualistic purging by fire.
During and after the Great Depression, he was a hobo and itinerant worker, riding trains, all the while keeping a musical notebook of his experiences named Bitter Music which he later set to music.The entries frequently included overheard bits of everyday vernacular speech. Partch always said his reason for developing his microtonal scales was to try to replicate and demonstrate verbal expression.
Corporeal creations
In 1930, Partch broke with Western European tradition and forged a new musicology, based on a primal, corporeal integration of the elements of speech with music, using principles of natural acoustic resonance (Just Intonation) and expanded melodic and harmonic possibilities. He began to first adapt guitars and violas to play his music, and then began to build whole new instruments based on his new microtonal tuning system. Over his lifetime he built over 25 instruments as well as numerous small hand instruments and became a brilliant spokesman for his ideas. Largely ignored by the standard musical institutions and industry, he criticised concert traditions, the roles of the performer and composer, the role of music in society, the 12-tone equal-temperament scale and the concept of “pure” or abstract music. To explain his philosophical and intonational ideas, he wrote a treatise, “Genesis of a Music” which has served as a primary source of information and inspiration to many musicians for the last half century, considered the standard text of microtonal music theory and takes the concept of Corporeality, the fusion of all art forms with the body, as its central focus.
The album we’ve uploaded for you to download and listen to here is the most extended all instrumental work by the microtonal guru. The Haiku-like title may sound metaphysical but has a prosaic explanation. In 1962, Partch returned to California after six years in the Midwest. Returning to his roots in the seventh year was like a sabbatical. He was getting tired of frequent moving: “The spectacle of me and two tons of musical instruments wandering around the country is becoming almost comical. He had to find a spacious and cheap studio and living space, and his former landlord in Sausalito, California in September 1962 allowed him to use an empty chick hatchery. When he visited the building the walkway leading to the place was “… strewn with petals – roses, camelias, and many others” and the title of the new work came to him. “It was a time of falling petals and the music followed.” He had to attract a group of committed musicians who could be relied upon to put in the time, learn how to play the unusual instruments, learn how to play the written parts (in special notational systems), develop the ear to play music where there are many “extra” notes besides the familiar 12 they had learned, and finally learn to play their parts.
Partch was notorious for going beyond instrumental and intonational uniqueness. He communicated to the members of his ensemble the “extra-musical” attitudes and actions he felt lead to an experimental performance. He would show how to approach an instrument with the proper physical inclination, not unlike the motivation of an actor for his part. The physical approach would reflect both the nature of the notes and phrases themselves, and the dramatic or musical intent of the passage. He taught respect for the instruments and how to coax the best and worst sounds out of them. In doing so he wanted to see a transformation of his musicians from passive translators of his scores to active, engaged participants. Partch would often speak of not only “caressing the instrument, but raping it too.” The physical relationship between player and instrument is crucial to the corporeal performance. The musician must transcend their role as instrumentalist and become more fully formed performers, ready to move, act and live the part. To create the corporeal performance.
Partch and some loyal supporters recorded most of Petals in 1964 while the premises they were recording in was literally being bulldozed around them, often begging operators to stop for a minute to make a take. Often the duets are played by Partch on both parts, through overdubbing. The recording was resumed in San Diego in 1966, and the tapes were painstakingly overdubbed for a CRI records release. This results in a useful introduction of the sound of Partch’s instruments. But Petals suffers a bit from its form. At one-minute intervals the music comes to a stop, and half the time resumes in the same tempo and with the same harmonic patterns. Performance and tape synchronisation problems involved in the production of this recording were of an extraordinary level of difficulty, calling for more than a hundred hours of editing. Although the rhythms are wonderfully irregular, this predictability offsets the fascination of the wonderful sounds of Partch’s instruments.
Dirty Harry
So download the album here, check out our other favourite Outsider music here. And remember what Harry said…
This is my trinity: sound-magic, visual beauty, experience-ritual.
Resonance FM
Thursday, March 11th, 2010
Although in the past we have featured only online radio broadcasting, this time we look at a station still doing it on the airwaves in London. Resonance104.4fm makes public those artworks that have no place in traditional broadcasting. A radio station like no other, that is an archive of the new, the undiscovered, the forgotten, the impossible. It is an invisible gallery, a virtual arts centre whose location is at once local, global and timeless. And that is itself a work of art. Imagine a radio station that responds rapidly to new initiatives, has time to draw breath and reflect. A laboratory for experimentation, that by virtue of its uniqueness brings into being a new audience of listeners and creators. All this and more, Resonance104.4fm aims to make London’s airwaves available to the widest possible range of practitioners of contemporary art.
The service includes “radio artworks” made especially for and exploring the medium of radio. The music based output places an emphasis on alternative and experimental music with a bias towards the avant-garde (how many broadcasters are willing to devote programming to found sounds and field recordings?). The speech based output includes discussion, alternative news, documentary and literary spoken word. Subjects covered include anything from cultural theory to pensioners’ rights and mental health to visual arts. The station provides a service for practising artists and engaged consumers whose interests fall outside the mainstream media or for those whose access to media is restricted or limited due to cultural bias or lack of formal training. The multicultural service transcends age barriers, it’s youngest regular broadcasters are 16, it’s oldest 77, from communities as diverse as Brazilian, Serbian and Congolese who are encouraged to initiate and realise their own programming.
You can hear nonsense sound poetry recorded halfway up a mountain on the Isle of Jura, a preacher in Glasgow or a Babylonian Jewish Choir, a huge variety of unique spoken word radio basically. That’s not to mention great specific music shows such as Is Black Music, featuring maverick black musicians who are involed in non-commerial, alternative outside of the industry mainstream. The program broadcasts Black folk, country, avant-garde, classical and rock music. It encourages the promotion of unusual black music such as Urb Alt and Afro Punk, and is a good way to challenge industry, artist and consumer stereotypes.
Resonance104.4fm started broadcasting on May 1st 2002, established by London Musicians’ Collective. Its brief? To provide a radical alternative to the universal formulae of mainstream broadcasting. Resonance 104.4 fm features programmes made by musicians, artists and critics who represent the diversity of London’s arts scenes, with regular weekly contributions from nearly two hundred musicians, artists, thinkers, critics, activists and instigators. You can also listen online or download one of their various podcasts for maximum aural pleasure.
Andy Warhol – Empire
Monday, February 8th, 2010A musical event took place in New York yesterday, 8 hours of solid sound – a live accompaniment from Hanno Leichtmann, Andrew Pekler and Jan Jelenik to Andy Warhol’s Empire – a film notorious for its one, unchanging shot of the Empire State Building. The eight-hour, five-minute film, which is typically shown in a theater, lacks a traditional narrative or characters. The passage from daylight to darkness becomes the film’s narrative, while the protagonist is the iconic building that was (and is again) the tallest in New York City. Warhol lengthened Empire’s running time by projecting the film at a speed of sixteen frames per second, slower than its shooting speed of twenty-four frames per second, thus making the progression to darkness almost imperceptible. Non-events such as a blinking light at the top of a neighboring building mark the passage of time. According to Warhol, the point of this film – perhaps his most famous and influential cinematic work – is to “see time go by.”
Angry dragon
The shot was filmed from 8:06 p.m. to 2:42 a.m. on July 25-26, 1964. Empire consists of a number of one-hundred-foot rolls of film, each separated from the next by a flash of light. Each segment of film constitutes a piece of time. Warhol’s clear delineation of the individual segments of film can be likened to the serial repetition of images in his silkscreen paintings, which also acknowledge their process and materials. Warhol conceived a new relationship of the viewer to film in Empire and other early works, which are silent, explore perception, and establish a new sense of cinematic time. With their disengagement, lack of editing, and lengthy nonevents, these films were intended to be part of a larger environment. They also parody the goals of his avant-garde contemporaries who sought to convey the human psyche through film or used the medium as metaphor.
The live soundtrack / concert / event kicked off the Unsound festival. Krakow’s Unsound festival is working with local cultural institutes, organizers, curators and venues in New York to produce Unsound Festival New York. This 12-day event involves concerts, club nights, specially commissioned work, panel discussions, workshops, exhibitions and video screening. It will take place across Manhattan and Brooklyn, revealing connections between music genres and audiences, ranging from experimental to club orientated music. Later this week We Love… favourite Carl Craig will be performing a live electronic soundtrack to Warhol’s 1964, Factory shot, 35 minute long silent film Blowjob which depicts the face of an unaccredited man as he receives fellatio from an unseen partner.
Other acts appearing at various venues during the festival are Untold, Petre Inspirescu, Newworldaquarium, Moritz von Oswald and Vladislav Delay.
Outsider Music – Moondog
Wednesday, January 20th, 2010Machines were mice and men were lions once upon a time; but now that it’s the opposite, it’s twice upon a time. – Moondog
Viking of 6th Avenue
Young Louis Hardin b.1916 (later to call himself Moondog) started playing home-made cardboard drums at the age of five, during his childhood he was exposed to the Native American instruments and rhythms that would shape his music. At one point Hardin’s father took him to a Native American Sun Dance where he sat on the lap of Chief Yellow Calf and played a tomtom drum made form buffalo skin. He also played drums in highschool before losing his sight in a farm accident involving gunpowder, aged 16. Principally self-taught, he learned the skills of ear training and composition. In 1943 he moved from his native mid-west to New York where he met classical luminaries such as Leonard Bernstein and Toscanini aswell as legendary jazz performers like Charlie Parker and Benny Goodman, who would influence Hardin’s work.
Howl at the moondog
In 1947 Hardin adopted the name “Moondog” in honour of a dog “who used to howl at the moon more than any other dog I knew of.” He developed and embraced a worldview that embraced Norse mythology and Viking culture as the pinnacle of human civilisation. From the late 40s until 1974 Moondog lived as a street musician and poet, busking in Manhattan. Because of his proximity to the nightclub strip of 52nd street, he was well known to many jazz musicians and fans. In 1949 he traveled to a Native American gathering at the Blackfoot Sun Dance in Idaho, where he performed percussion and flute, returning to the Native American music he first came into contact with as a child. It was this Native music along with contemporary classical and jazz mixed with ambient sounds of his environment (traffic, ocean waves, babies crying) that created the foundation for Moondog’s music. In a search for new sounds, Moondog also invented several musical instruments, including a small triangular-shaped harp known as the “Oo”, another which he named the “Ooo-ya-tsu”, and (perhaps his most well-known) the “Trimba”, a triangular percussion instrument that the composer invented in the late 40s. His many hours on the street were his way of connecting with the sounds, voices and rhythms of the city. Taking inspiration from these street sounds, Moondog’s music tended to be relatively simple but characterised by what he called “snaketime … a slithery rhythm, in times that are not ordinary … I’m not gonna die in 4/4 time.”
Working in braille and often composing under his cloak and Viking costume (which included a horned helmet) he was prolific and eclectic, writing in an impressively wide range of styles: percussion-driven exotica, avant-garde jazz, folkish madrigals, neo-Baroque rounds and canons for both chamber and symphony orchestras. His layered minimalism went on to influence young collaborators Steve Reich and Philip Glass. In 1989 Glass invited Moondog to conduct the Brooklyn Philharmonic Chamber Orchestra, stimulating a renewed interest in his music. Acceptance as a recognised modern classical composer has always eluded him. The ancient and ancestral streak symbolised by his Viking helmet and garb can be heard in his music which was melodic and tuneful in an age where atonality in classical music often ruled.
In 1974 Moondog was invited to give two concerts in Frankfurt and visited Germany for the first time. He felt comfortable in the land of his music ancestors and despite having little money and knowing no German, he decided to stay until his death in 1999. He was, to the very end of his life, vital, active and creative. It is hard to define musical genius. Is it the quality of their music? Their role in history? Or simply hindsight? In this case it is a combination of Moondog’s unique story, unique mode of composition and unique way of looking at the world. It seems sad that it has taken the world this long to begin appreciating this sensitive musician. His music has recently appeared on Henrik Schwarz DJ-Kicks series and Ame, Dixon and Henrik Schwarz recent Grandfather Paradox album, both of which are highly recommended in their own right. You can download Moondog’s seminal self-titled album here.
Despite his handicap and under difficult circumstances, Moondog stubbornly struggled as a free artist, committed to his own ideas of life and music, regardless and yet as a consequence of the world around him. He was a true artist who wrote a most beautiful and peculiar music that still amazes listeners all over the world to this day. If nothing else who should be exalted for providing a tangible link between the somewhat genteel world of contemporary classical music and those on the margins of society. Moondog, we salute you.
Bill Drummond – A History Of Music: Part 19, 3 of 4
Monday, December 14th, 2009This is part 3 of Bill Drummond’s critique of the music industry, you can find the first 2 parts here.
Around this time the long player which we later learned to call the album was fast becoming the format that most people listened to recorded music on. On this long player up to forty minutes of music could be contained, on the old 78’s we could only get a few minutes on either side of the disc. Fast forward again, this time mid 60’s. Around about then, two incidents took place that were to symbolise yet another massive shift in our relationship with music. Each of these incidents happened on separate continents and in totally different disciplines of music. One was in Canada the other in England. In 1964 a young Canadian classical pianist who had already made a name for himself in concert halls around the world decided for various reasons to never play as a soloist in concert again, but dedicated himself to making recordings. This pianist was Glen Gould. The vast majority of music he chose to record was music composed in the pre-recorded era. 18 months later, in 1966 a young English beat group who had rapidly become the biggest thing since Stalin, the first beat group to fill sports stadiums – even Elvis did not do that – made the decision to never preform in concert again. The beat group was the Beatles. The difference between Glen Gould and the Beatles was that Glen Gould wanted to record his interpretation of old music that he considered to intimate to be exposed to the concert platform. Whereas the Beatles wanted to create new music that could only ever exist as a recording. For both of them to go out and attempt to play their music live infront of an audience would have compromised the music. Thus make null and void the complete raison d’etre of the art they were making.
Savage young Beatles
There had been pop record producers and avant-garde composers who used the recording studio as their primary musical instrument before. But Glen Gould and the Beatles were the first two major artists to make the decision that what they did as artists was from then on only going to exist as recordings. Before that historic point in the mid-sixties recorded musics prime reason for existing was to promote the live careers of music makers. Recorded music has been made so that the listener could have the illusion that they were actually listening to the musicians playing in their front room. That they were at the concert where it was being performed. But 1966 was, to use the now tired cliche, a tipping point. I was just going to say tipping point but a friend of mine read through this and said, “You can’t use the word tipping point, that’s the ultimate cliche. Anyone talking about American politics now will talk of the tipping point. But I wanted to keep it in”.
From here on in or at least until the end of the 20th century, more and more of the music performed live was only done so to promote recorded music. We now judge the careers of almost all music maker by the albums they have made. Whether it was Herbert von Karajan, Miles Davis, Bob Dylan, Fela Kuti or whoever the rock and roll sensation of the moment was. Thus all ambitious young music makers aspired to get recording contracts so they could be allowed to make albums. The recording of and the subsequent release of an album gave complete validation to the their ambitions. The whole of the world wide music industry was based on a business model built around the recording and selling of albums. Radio stations, music magazines, concert tours, music videos all existed for one reason, to sell more albums. It was in nobodies interest to question the restrictive elements of the album format to closely, while the business model still worked and we still loved to own them. Very few of us noticed that the physical restrictions of the album format was turning all music into almost exactly the same thing. From wherever the music on these albums came from in the world or whatever tradition be it classical, jazz, world, rock, pop, etc. it all ended up as recorded music. We could walk into a major HMV or Virgin Megastore and choose from upwards of 300,000 albums. Every type of music known to mankind would be represented. Every year there were thousands more of these albums being recorded as our tastes became more refined we stumbled across undiscovered continents of music. How could we ever tire of it all?
But this sense of limitless choice was an illusion. The reason why all this music from every corner of the world, from every musical discipline was becoming the same thing was that it was all brought to us in a roughly identical length, equalised within the same narrow band of frequencies, broadcast through the air to our ears via similar electronic speakers. Close up all this music may have sounded different but take a few steps back and you notice how similar and one-dimensional it all is. The technology that had evolved through the 20th century to record and produce music had morphed it all from just being a convenient and marketable format into one mega all encompassing genre – that of recorded music.
