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Armando Sciascia: “Circuito Chiuso”
From the album Psych Funk 101 (1968-1975): A Global Psychedelic Funk Curriculum (2009)
Played 43 time(s).
February 09, 2010, 10:39am
Played 43 time(s).
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Magma: “Ork Alarm”
From the album Köhntarkösz (1974)
For those who just can’t get enough Francophone prog-rock, and as a follow-up to my recent post on Univers Zero, I offer a sampling of music by one of the bands that seems to be at the root of the western European prog-rock movement beginning in the 1970s.
Founded by classically trained “drum hero” Christian Vander in 1969, Magma has been hailed as ”the ultimate progressive rock group” by anonymous internet oracles. What musical glory could possibly live up to such hype, you ask? How about a concept band whose premise is the future colonization of the planet Kobaia by a group of enlightened émigrés who have fled an Earth doomed to war and destruction? (Perceptive readers will note that this is essentially the same scenario behind Karl-Birger Blomdahl’s 1959 “space opera” Aniara, recently featured on this blog.)
If that’s not enough, Magma’s lyrics are sung in a constructed language called Kobaian. Their music has apparently spawned a sub-genre of global prog-rock known as “Zeuhl,” which is a Kobaian word meaning “celestial.”
Although bearing many of the familiar characteristics of the more familiar Anglophone brand of prog-rock (extended, quasi-symphonic song structures, sci-fi or D&D lyrical obsessions, and a certain bombastic theatricality), Magma’s music is distinctive, accomplished, and significantly less obnoxious than many of its English language equivalents. Perhaps it helps that the lyrics are indecipherable.
Magma also seems to have a more diverse stylistic pedigree than many prog-rock bands, whose classical training is often all too conspicuous. Front man Vander played as a jazz drummer before starting Magma, and has named John Coltrane as a primary, enduring influence. (The album Köhntarkösz includes a track called “Coltrane Sündia”— Kobaian for “Coltrane Rest in Peace.”)
Played 39 time(s).
November 20, 2009, 4:11pm
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Henry Flynt: “Violin Strobe” (1978)
From the album New American Ethnic Music Volume 3: Hillbilly Tape Music
The title says it all: American experimental musician and freelance art-theorist Henry Flynt combines Steve Reich-style tape loops with furious virtuoso fiddling in an ecstatic hybridization of the radically disparate. In fact, the convergence of the extremes of so-called “high” and “low” culture—“the image of the untrained ‘folk creature’ as avant-gardiste,” which Flynt attributes to Ornette Coleman— is at the root of many of the most vital cultural expressions of the 20th century.
“My music is a sophisticated, personal extension of the ethnic music of my native region of the United states. In all of my experimentation, I assert myself as an autochthon (colloquially, a “native” or “folk creature”)—siding with the emotional experience and the musical languages of the autochthonous communities. In particular, I assert that the objective sound elements of blues and country music are demonstrably incommensurate with the categorization of sound in European musicology—as for example in the use of an unaccented glissando on the beat as a “note”—and in non-arithmetical division of the beat.”
Played 68 time(s).
October 03, 2009, 1:41pm
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Conlon Nancarrow: “Study No. 36” (c. 1970)
From the album Studies for Player Piano
Born in 1912 in Texarkana, Arkansas, Conlon Nancarrow was an American composer in the grand experimentalist tradition.
After fighting in the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War, Nancarrow returned to the U.S. but was denied a passport, likely due to his membership in the Communist Party. He moved to Mexico City, taking with him a copy of Henry Cowell’s book New Musical Resources, in which the author speculated on the possibility of new forms of musical writing that would allow the notation of rhythmic patterns in any imaginable temporal ratio. (I have written previously on Cowell’s experiments with the Rhythmicon.)
Cowell mused that many such complicated rhythms could perhaps be performed only by a player piano. Nancarrow took this idea and ran with it: from 1940 until the 80s, he wrote exclusively for this mechanical instrument, meticulously punching tiny holes into piano rolls in order to create music of stunning complexity, often integrating funky dance rhythms and canonic structures.
In its virtuosic precision and expressive frenzy, Nancarrow’s music anticipates trends that would emerge much later with the appearance of MIDI and digital sequencing technology.
Played 42 time(s).
August 19, 2009, 9:19am
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Yellow Magic Orchestra: “Rydeen”
From the album Solid State Survivor (1979)
Yellow Magic Orchestra represents a Japanese take on the fully synthetic, drum-machine driven style of music that emerged in the 1970s and was represented by Kraftwerk, Cerrone, Giorgio Moroder, and early Human League, among others.
YMO has a strong dramatic sensibility that is missing in much other music of this genre, which can easily meld into a pleasantly repetitive sonic wallpaper. Their music also features a tunefulness uncommon to the loop-based productions of the period.
As “Rydeen” demonstrates, YMO forms one of the secret influences behind the “golden age” of video game music (c. 1980-1992), before the style became hackneyed and game companies started importing ready to hand pop songs.
Played 41 time(s).
August 05, 2009, 3:18pm
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Hans Werner Henze: “The Electric Cop”
From the album Voices (1973)
Setting contemporary leftist poetry in German, English, Italian, and Spanish, Hans Werner Henze’s Voices presents a devastating musical summation of the political outrages of the 1960s (Vietnam, Latin America, the struggle for civil rights in the U.S.A.).
Generally, Henze’s songs are more effective when he’s working with an ironic text, such as “Recht und billig” (“It’s only fair”), which sets a poem by Erich Fried about the American policy of paying the families of civilians killed in the Vietnam War. The text is accompanied by banjo and double bass in the manner of a light-hearted folk tune. Where the poetry is of a more sincere and accusatory nature, however, as for example “Screams” by the African-American poet Walton Smith, the music often seems to be trying too hard to match the intensity of the words.
Henze’s setting of “The Electric Cop,” after a poem by Victor Hernandez Cruz (and dedicated to New Left philosopher-rockstar Herbert Marcuse) is a tour de force critique of media-saturated modern culture. The text of the poem, itself semantically fragmented and full of sensational imagery, is accompanied by a cacophonous assemblage of instruments and prerecorded sounds, including a baseball game and a presidential address. As a hilarious non sequitur, the piece ends with a brief and utterly sincere passage for mambo band.
Played 72 time(s).
July 20, 2009, 11:39am
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David Shire: “Main Title”
From the soundtrack to The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974)
I believe I first stumbled upon this music through my still-ongoing quest for examples of twelve-tone jazz. (Recommendations, anyone?) Though the idiom here is much closer to funk than jazz— it was the 70s, after all— the fusion is nonetheless delightful.
The topicality of this post is purely coincidental.
Played 69 time(s).
July 01, 2009, 2:33pm
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Michel Chion: “Requiem Aeternam”
From the album Requiem (1973)
Though he is probably better known as an influential theorist of film music, Michel Chion is also a prolific composer of electronic music in the primarily Francophone tradition of musique concrete inaugurated around 1950 by Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry.
Chion’s music of the 1970s, along with that of other composers working within the Parisian orbit of the Groupe de recherches musicales such as Francois Bayle and Bernard Parmegiani, represents the blossoming of an as-yet undiscovered golden age of electroacoustic art, in which the sonic experiments of the 50s and 60s gave way to a coherent, almost “classical” compositional style, with all the positive and negative connotations of that term.
This is music of a rare and disturbing programmatic intensity. The sound of the speaking voice, so often an annoying gesture of pseudo-philosophical depth in electronic music, is here enfolded into the sonic texture in a virtually seamless manner.
Played 145 time(s).
June 29, 2009, 1:48pm
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Iannis Xenakis: “Melanges” [Mixtures]
From the album Pleiades (1978)
(For A.I.K.)
The Greek-born composer Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001) is usually mentioned in the same breath with other members of the so-called “postwar avant-garde,” a group of composers who came of age in the 1950s in Europe and quickly gained notoriety for the difficulty and perceived esotericism of their musical experiments. The obligatory name-check of this cabal usually includes such men as Luciano Berio, Pierre Boulez, Gyorgy Ligeti, Krzysztof Penderecki, and Karlheinz Stockhausen.
Xenakis was distinct from most of the composers in this cadre in that he worked assiduously to integrate into his music audible patterns and structures of a kind that most members of the avant-garde actively sought to avoid. Especially in his works from the late 1970s on, Xenakis frequently based his music on the establishment and subsequent destabilization and undermining of a basic rhythmic pulse. In the domain of pitch, he developed what he called “sieve theory” in order to construct new and elaborate scales for his music. Unlike traditional scales such as major and minor, Xenakis’ unique scales comprise intervallic patterns that span the entire range of available notes, instead of repeating with each octave.
Although Xenakis cultivated a link with traditional modes of listening through his concern with scale and pulse, his work has little in common with the neo-traditional classical music that became fashionable in the 70s and 80s under the aegis of a family-friendly postmodernism. Even at its most beautiful, Xenakis’ music retains a brutal immediacy that renders it stark and impersonal.
“Melanges,” from Xenakis’ 1978 piece for percussion sextet, Pleiades, deploys the entire battery of instruments to create something that sounds like a collaboration between a gamelan orchestra played by escaped mental patients and a demonically inspired high school drum line. The music’s violent swerving between order and chaos is eloquently explained by the composer:
“The sole source of this polyrhythmic composition is the idea of periodicity, repetition, duplication, faithful, pseudo-faithful, unfaithful copy. Example: a beat repeated untiringly in the same time represents a faithful copy of a rhythmic atom. However small variations in the time produce an internal vivacity of the rhythm without weakening the fundamental period. Greater and more complex variations of the fundamental period create a disfigurement, a negation of the fundamental period that could lead to its immediate unrecognizability. Still greater variations of an even greater complexity, or what often amounts to the same thing, due to the hazards of a particular stochastic distribution, lead to total arhythm, to a massy awareness of the event, to notions of clouds, nebulas, galaxies of the fragmented dust of beats organized by rhythm….”
Played 174 time(s).
May 14, 2009, 8:36pm
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Michael Adamis: Kratima (excerpt, 1971)
From the album Creelpolation 1 (2006)
Because of my host’s somewhat stingy 10 megabyte upload limit, I cannot feature this piece in its entirety. Fortunately, Kratima has a clean break in the music around the midway point, so I’ve taken the liberty of excerpting the second half of the piece. If you have the opportunity, please do subject yourself to the unadulterated 11-minute experience of this obscure marvel of electro-acoustic art.
Kratima, performed by an orchestra, a psaltist (solo vocalist), and tape or (less likely) live electronics, has an episodic structure throughout: distinct sound-collages succeed one another in a somewhat disconnected fashion. However the piece is tied together by a number of recurring timbres or textures, such as the plaintive voice of the psaltist or the frenetic electro-free jazz noodling that surfaces intermittently to jostle the otherwise imposing langor of the music.
The ending of Kratima, if experienced at a sufficient level of volume, is viscerally disturbing.
There is sadly very little information about Adamis on the internet. One available source does offer a solid introduction to his music.
Played 21 time(s).
April 23, 2009, 8:07pm
