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Area: “Mela di Odessa”

From the album Crac! (1975)

Active from 1972 to 1983, Area was a pioneering Italian group that creatively synthesized currents of American popular music such as jazz and funk with experimental tendencies in song form and sound production. Led by the Orphic incantations of vocalist Demetrio Stratos, Area featured a rotating cast of musicians anchored by the core group of Giulio Capiozzo (drums), Patrizio Fariselli (keyboards), Ares Tavolazzi (bass and trombone), and Paolo Tofano (guitar).

Crac! is Area’s third album, following Arbeit macht frei (1973) and Caution Radiation Area (1974). Although they disbanded within a few years of Stratos’ untimely death in 1979, the group’s early records earned them a spot on the legendary Nurse with Wound List, a hugely influential catechism of underground music circa 1980.

“Mela di Odessa” (The Apple of Odessa”) opens with a noisy burst of chirping electronic tones, atonal guitar noodling, and a raucous drum solo, leading into a driving jazz-rock texture topped by a piercing electric keyboard solo. Stratos’ trademark wordless vocalizations occasionally double the instrumental parts, leading through a frenzied labyrinth of improvised passagework. About halfway through, the mood changes quite suddenly, as the the drums and bass introduce a funky, off-kilter groove. Twittering electronic noise, Stratos’ spoken words, and brassy interjections—including a quotation of “Taps“—bring the track to a highly ambiguous close.

In his liner notes to the 1990 re-release on Cramps Records, Franco Bolelli writes: “To sink one’s teeth into the Area apple is to experience a taste which is neither the penitential taste of the avant-garde nor the tamed taste of the spectacle. Area has proven that the poetic and the experimental is not at all difficult and suffering. Indeed, it can be energetic and contagious.”

January 25, 2012, 9:39pm

I recently bought an iPad for the primary purpose of exploring the device’s potential as an experimental musical instrument. After about a week of research, I’ve discovered some very promising and creative software that suggests that the iPad can indeed function as a very powerful means of sound control and exploration. However, I was surprised how difficult it was, amidst the glut of cheesy emulations of acoustic instruments and instant techno beat machines, to find apps designed for experimental purposes. So, in the humble hope of aiding like-minded seekers, I offer this small guide to some of the best apps, according to the criteria of conceptual originality and musical open-endedness.

(Note: I am interested here in experimental interfaces, rather than instruments in the conventional sense, where there is a clear correspondence between gesture and musical output. Although it should be noted that there are some really stellar instruments of this type for the iPad, such as Geo Synthesizer, SynthTronica, and Animoog.)

Droneo ($2.99): Very neat little app for creating rich, slowly evolving drone textures. It allows you to fine tune the individual frequencies outside of equal temperament, and has some very nice built in samples. The parameters can be tweaked in a number of ways, allowing you to actually “compose” your drone with some sophistication.

SoundyThingie ($2.99): This unfortunately named app is actually quite cool, taking a widely used concept—converting graphical patterns into sound— and doing something more creative with it. You can make complex branching structures of lines, each of which corresponds to a tone whose pitch varies according to its vertical position. Individual waveform assignments and the possibility of altering the play speed and timing make for a subtly complex instrument.

DrawJong ($2.99): One of many apps that combine sound and visuals, DrawJong is “a two-oscillator FM/wave terrain synthesizer based on chaotic attractors. It is capable of producing wild glitches and weird waveforms, along with a steady stream of gorgeous visuals.” A sensory feast for eye and ear. 

Glitch Machine ($2.99): It was reading about this app that inspired me to take the leap into iPad land. Glitch Machine is a live-coding environment that uses reverse Polish notation to render a constant output of luscious low-bit noise. Actually coding with any intelligence is way beyond me at this point (and the relationship between code and output is highly obscure), but you can do a lot simply by trial and error, and the potential of this app is staggering. It also allows you to easily save and export your work.

WaveShaper ($5.99): Load up a sample and use two fingers on the X-Y pad to mangle the hell out of it in real time. A very clean design and lots of fun to play.

MendelSynth ($1.99): A simple but very clever concept: each circle represents a sound—noisy or harmonic, static or varied—and by “breeding” two sounds, you create a set of offspring that are genetic mutations of their parents’ sonic qualities. It’s a neat and intuitive way of exploring electronic sound. Not playable as an instrument, but you can email your favorite sounds to yourself for later use.

NotePlex ($1.99): Notes are created as nodes on a vast, scalable grid. Pitch is determined not by placement on the grid, but rather by color. Nodes are activated by pulsars, which emit pulses regularly according to the tempo setting. Each node also has a setting which determines how it conveys the pulses it receives—it can send more pulses in all directions, or just one, or none at all. Plus, each node can be given a life-span, that is, the number of times it can be activated before disappearing. NotePlex can be used to create highly complex generative compositions that evolve in unpredictable ways. The built-in sounds are unspectacular, but you can import your own samples.

Anything by Nicholas Collins: His apps are among the best, and many of them are free. (They are unfortunately developed for iPhone, so they’re not ideal for iPad, but they work.) Some focus on live coding in which the user manipulates symbolic objects whose relationship to sonic output is tantalizingly opaque (TOPLAPapp, RISCy, Cryptoclash); others use samples (BBCut, Concat) or photos (Photo Noise, Photo OSC) as the basis for sound experimentation. Collins’ iGENDYN is a lovely multitouch implementation of Iannis Xenakis’ dynamic stochastic synthesis.

Finally, an honorable mention should go out to the following apps: Nanoloop, Soundrop, A Noise Machine, Runxt Life, Monnix, VirtualSynth, and AirVox.

Have I overlooked anything? Please share your favorites in the comments.

January 19, 2012, 10:42pm

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Louis Andriessen: Excerpt from De Staat (1976)

From the album De Staat

While the musical style broadly known as American minimalism comes in many flavors, from the cinematic ear-candy of Philip Glass to the playful psychedelia of Terry Riley and the symphonic bombast of John Adams, these various manifestations have in common a modal-diatonic approach to pitch organization and a tendency to eschew abrupt transitions in favor of gradually unfolding tone-patterns. American minimalism was intended (and in large part received) as a corrective to the overly “difficult” music of the mid-century avant-garde.

When minimalism made its inevitable appearance on the European continent, it took on a very different tone, one conditioned by the generally darker tendencies of European music in the postwar period. The premiere of Dutch composer Louis Andriessen’s De Staat in 1976 signaled a radically new take on the possibilities of musical minimalism.  Jagged, angular, and suffused with lush dissonances that betray the composer’s debt to Igor Stravinsky, De Staat consists of the brusque juxtaposition of highly differentiated textural blocks (Stravinsky again) played at a consistently breakneck pace. 

De Staat is written for an unorthodox ensemble heavily weighted toward winds and brass, plus the distinctive addition of electric and bass guitars. (Beginning in the early 1970s, Andriessen refused to compose for the conventional orchestra, which he saw as a symbol of the conservative musical establishment.) Four female singers intone snippets from Plato’s Republic concerning (ironically) music’s potential to disrupt the social order.

January 15, 2012, 10:24pm

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Ernst Krenek: Excerpt from Spiritus intelligentiae sanctus (1955)

From the album Spiritus intelligentiae sanctus / Klangfiguren

In the third and final installment of a series of posts highlighting the early productions of the West German Radio Studio for Electronic Music in Cologne, we hear one of the first attempts to blend synthetic tones with the human voice. Ernst Krenek’s Spiritus intelligentiae sanctus makes an interesting parallel with Karlheinz Stockhausen’s groundbreaking composition Gesang der Jünglinge, created around the same time.

Both compositions combine electronic sounds and vocal timbres, although Krenek’s approach in this regard was relatively traditional in comparison to Stockhausen’s. Both works were also based on religious texts—Krenek and Stockhausen were devout Catholics, and understood their works in the grand tradition of sacred music. Krenek even labelled his composition an “Easter Oratorio.” (This religious sincerity was lost on some critics: the German musicologist Friedrich Blume castigated such works as musical blasphemy in a controversial 1958 lecture portentously entitled “Was ist Musik?”)

Unlike most of the composers working in the Cologne studio in the 1950s, Krenek was a well-established figure in European modern music. Still, his Spiritus intelligentiae sanctus shows a youthful eagerness to explore the new possibilities presented by the electronic medium. Krenek tweaked the sine wave generators to create a slightly “squished” scale with 13 tones to the octave, instead of the customary 12, casting a strangely distended coloration over the music. The combination of pure sine tones, dissonant “tone mixtures,” and angular, ring-modulated vocal lines likewise contributes to an eerie and unsettling musical mise-en-scène.

January 03, 2012, 8:28pm

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Karel Goeyvaerts: Composition No. 4 with Dead Tones (1952)

From the album The Serial Works (#1-7)

In this second installment of a series of three posts exploring the early productions of the WDR Studio for Electronic Music in Cologne, we hear a remarkable and little-known work by the Belgian composer Karel Goeyvaerts (1923-1993).  

Composed in 1952, but realized in sound nearly three decades later, Composition No. 4 comprises a basic sound material of four tones, identical in pitch, timbre, and duration with each appearance. (Hence the “dead tones” of the title.) Technically, these tones are what were called Tongemische, or “tone mixtures”— that is, artificially generated tones consisting of sine waves in non-harmonic proportions to the fundamental frequency. The only variation in the piece is in the duration of the silences between each iteration of the tones, which is altered according to serial procedures. As the interjections of silence between each tone gradually increase and decrease over the course of the composition, the four sonic layers of the piece are brought out of phase and back into phase again. The result is a remarkable phenomenon of motion in stasis, a slowly shimmering stillness that musicologist Hermann Sabbe has anointed the first ever piece of “process music.” For Sabbe, “Composition No. 4” is also an early example of conceptual art, being based on a simple generative idea that could be realized in any number of ways. (Goeyvaerts did not specify the pitch of the tones, only their duration and timbral quality.)

In the early 1950s, Goeyvaerts and Karlheinz Stockhausen carried on an intense theoretical conversation concerning the principles of serial composition. Although the two shared a deep fascination with the technique, they diverged aesthetically: Goeyvaerts distinguished his approach from Stockhausen’s, calling the German’s music “baroque,” and claiming that he based his composition on a preconceived sonic image. Goeyvaerts, by contrast, envisioned music as (in the words of Mark Delaere) “the objectification of a spiritual idea in a structure of sound.” This distinctly modernist form of musical mysticism can be traced to such varied sources as the medieval concept of numerus sonorus—music as “sounding number,” essentially Pythagoreanism made into compositional doctrine—and the vision of a static, painterly “neoplastic music” outlined by Piet Mondrian in the 1920s. Delaere has called Goeyvaert’s early works “the most abstract compositions ever written.”

Goeyvaerts (middle) with Luigi Nono and Stockhausen (c. 1950)

December 22, 2011, 11:52pm

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Herbert Eimert and Robert Beyer: Excerpt from Klang im unbegrenzten Raum (1951-52)

From the album Acousmatrix: The History of Electronic Music VI

Founded in 1951, the Studio for Electronic Music of West German Radio in Cologne was one of the seminal sources of the radical new sound art that emerged in the years following the end of the Second World War. Produced with pure synthetic sound, as opposed the recorded sounds of musique concrete, the works that emerged from the Cologne studio became known as elektronische Musik (“electronic music”), a term that consequently has a much more specific and historically fraught meaning in German than in other languages.

The WDR studio would become virtually synonymous with rigorously serial compositional techniques and a dry or even abrasive sonic quality, as exemplified by the now-classic early electronic studies of Karlheinz Stockhausen. But as Konrad Boehmer argues in his notes for this album in theAcousmatrix series, the various composers who worked in the studio over the span its first decade were anything but uniform in their approaches or their musical output. In the following three posts, I explore compositions from the early years of the WDR studio that demonstrate the rich aesthetic diversity of this music.

Eimert (above) with engineer Leopold von Knobelsdorff

Klang im unbegrenzten Raum (Sound in Limitless Space) is a collaboration between studio co-founders Herbert Eimert and Robert Beyer. Eimert, who would later lead the studio for many years, was a well-established modernist figure in the Schoenbergian line, having published a handbook of 12-tone composition as early as 1924. Beyer, too, had come of age as a journalist and film composer in the heady days of the Weimar Republic. In 1928 he wrote a jaw-dropping essay of techno-futurist speculation entitled “Das Problem der kommenden Musik” (“The Problem of the Music to Come”), which both cataloged the technological achievements of the 1920s and prophesied many future developments.

While the WDR’s later sound would be marked by the use of rudimentary sonic material such as sine waves, impulses, and white noise, the early experiments in the studio made use of the harmonically rich timbres of electric instruments such as the Melochord and the Trautonium. Tones played on these devices were recorded and manipulated—spliced, multiplied, and bathed in artificial reverberation—to create otherworldly soundscapes unlike anything ever heard before. (In technique, if not quite in effect, these pieces resembled the works of “tape music” created around the same time in the United States by Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky.) 

This music can be heard as a realization of Beyer’s fantastic visions, recorded over two decades earlier, of “machines that make it possible to separate the voice from the body and convey it over distances, to let sounds play backward, to traverse a timbral domain of an almost cosmic expanse…machines whose power lies in their unique mastery of the laws of nature; a new objective, whose wonder lies hidden deep in the secrets of science.”

December 16, 2011, 10:34pm

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Igor Wakhévitch: “Rituel de guerre des esprits de la terre”

From the album Hathor - Lithurgie du souffle pour la résurrection des morts (1973)

At once unique and unclassifiable, the music of Igor Wakhévitch exemplifies the kind of work that tends to fall through the cracks created by our slovenly habits of genre categorization. Born in Provence, France, in 1948, Wakhévitch cut his teeth in the 1960s avant-garde music scene in Paris, studying with such major figures as Pierre Schaeffer and Olivier Messiaen. Over the course of the 1970s, Wakhévitch released six albums exploring an intensely evocative and absolutely distinctive world of sound, in which surrealistic, musique concrète-style sound collages and ethereal choirs mouthing wordless chants share sonic space with minatory synthesizer drones and throbbing, quasi-kosmische sequencer lines.

Wakhévitch’s 1973 album Hathor (subtitled “Liturgy of Breath for the Resurrection of the Dead”) is the nightmarish soundtrack for some imaginary black mass. The dark, ceremonial tenor of the music is nowhere more imposing than in this track, ”Rituel de guerre des esprits de la terre” (“War Ritual of the Earth Spirits”).

Although Wakhévitch’s pedagogical lineage places him squarely in the European post-classical tradition, his work shows an undeniable affinity with the contemporaneous progressive rock currents of the time, down to the album art.  Moments on Hathor such as the penultimate track, “Amenthi,” in particular, recall the psychedelic free-for-all of pre-Dark Side of the Moon Pink Floyd. This particular influence was likely channeled through Wakhévitch’s friendship with the American minimalist composer Terry Riley, who was also keen to forge links between the classical/experimental and popular music scenes.

In 1974 Wakhévitch was asked by Salvador Dalí to compose the music for the painter’s “opera-poem” Être Dieu (Being God). The result was a singular work of late-surrealist fusion spanning three LPs. It was re-released on CD in 1992. Wakhévitch’s studio albums from the 1970s received a similar treatment in 1998, being repackaged as a six-CD boxed set (entitled Donc) by the French label Fractal Records.

December 06, 2011, 5:02pm

Mexican bandleader and musical genius Juan Garcia Esquivel

December 02, 2011, 10:40am

Joseph Paradiso's Massive Modular Synthesizer

Joseph Paradiso is professor of Media Arts and Sciences at the MIT Media Lab, where he is co-director of the “Things That Think” workgroup. Paradiso is trained as a physicist and electrical engineer, but in his spare time he has built one of the world’s largest modular synthesizer configurations, a creation known simply as “Massive Modular Synth.” 

In the age of computer music triumphant, the towering banks of modular synthesizer units often seen in histories of electronic music are typically portrayed as relics of a technologically obsolete era. But these physically clunky devices continue to exercise a powerful allure on experimentally minded musicians, as shown by the recent resurgence of interest in custom-built analog components.

Paradiso, who has been building his own synthesizers since 1974, approaches his instrument not as a means of creating static “sounds” to be played by means of a keyboard or other kind of interface, but rather as a sophisticated form of “hands-on” composition:

I don’t play this rig any more as a keyboard instrument. My main use for it now is to make gigantic sound installations with huge patches that I continue building over several hours, until I run out of patch cords. The process is perhaps closer to sculpture than music, where one starts with a small “seed” patch that expresses a simple musical process that is progressively augmented and refined as the patch builds. It is a large, complex feedback system, with signals that control the modules fed back to their inputs through a massive network of digital and analog processing . The resulting sounds are mainly autonomous, babbling and droning on for hours and days, as each patch achieves a distinctive groove or atmosphere without really repeating.

This approach strongly resembles the so-called “cybernetic music” of the German composer (and Acousmata favorite) Roland Kayn (1933-2011). The act of wiring the components together becomes itself a form of composition, expressed not in musical acts or notation, but rather in the distinctly technological language of oscillators, filters, sequencers and logic gates. Although some of the components of Paradiso’s synthesizer are digital, there is no computer involved, and Paradiso sees his instrument as a testament to the aesthetic values of tangibility, ephemerality, and unpredictability possessed by analog electronics.

November 26, 2011, 1:51pm

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Richard Lerman: Travelon Gamelon, promenade version (1978)

From the album Travelon Gamelon: Music for Bicycles

Richard Lerman (1944-) is an American composer and sound artist best known for his use of piezoelectric microphones to record minute natural sounds such as the falling of raindrops on blades of grass or the march of ants across the desert floor. Beyond his artistic production in this domain, Lerman has worked for decades to popularize field recording by educating people about the technical and aesthetic principles of the practice.

Lerman’s most iconic composition is something quite different: Travelon Gamelon, conceived in the late 1970s, is a clever musicalization of the common bicycle. The work exists in two versions: concert and “promenade.” The concert version calls for three bicycles turned upside down and each “played” by a performer. The piece is carefully written out using a combination of conventional and graphic notation, directing the performer to create sound by plucking and bowing the spokes of the wheel, applying the brakes, and striking the frame. All these sounds are miked and subjected to live electronic modification.

The promenade version, by contrast, is relatively free in structure, the sounds being generated by the impact of the spokes against various inserted materials (similar to the classic playing-card noisemaker familiar from childhood). The rhythmic whirring is captured by tiny homemade pickups, which send it via battery-powered amplifiers to loudspeakers attached to the bicycles’ handlebars.

This recording is an excerpt from a 45-minute performance of the promenade version of Travelon Gamelon, recorded on July 2, 1979, on the occasion of the opening of the Boston Museum of Transportation. The recording, of course, cannot do justice to this perambulatory piece of public art; it provides, at most, what John Cage called a “postcard” rendition of the event itself. Nonetheless, one can get a sense of the spirit of the piece, which has been performed many times all over the world since its premiere.

Travelon Gamelon was first released by the always-adventurous Folkways Records in 1982, and you can download the album and view the liner notes on the label’s website. It was re-released along with other Lerman compositions by Japanese label EM Records in 2006.

November 16, 2011, 1:27pm