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Morphogenesis: Excerpt from “Improvisation 11.11.88”

From the album Prochronisms (1989)

Formed in 1985 as a spinoff of a seminar on “New Music” taught by Roger Sutherland at City University in London, Morphogenesis was a collective of experimental musicians who developed a distinctive approach to collective improvisation. The group included among its ranks a number of veterans from the far fringes of the British musical avant-garde: Sutherland was an alumnus of Cornelius Cardew’s Scratch Orchestra, Clive Graham was an occasional contributor to Nurse with Wound, and Michael Prime had worked with David Jackman’s project Organum.  

Morphogenesis extended the “live electronics” tradition initiated in the 1960s by such figures as John Cage, David Tudor, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and the performer/composers of the Sonic Arts Union. More particularly, they worked in the lineage of pioneering ensembles such as AMM, MEV, and Gruppo d’Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza. Like those groups, Morphogensis practiced improvisation using experimental sound sources to create emergent, highly textured musical performances. However, the group’s aesthetic is far removed from the spontaneous sensibility of its forebears. Their sound is darker and more concentrated, closer to ambient and drone than to the free-jazz influences of the earlier groups.

“The group’s aim is to unify and integrate many diverse sound elements, (electronic, vocal, instrumental and environmental) within a context of continual evolution and group dialogue. We construct some of our own instruments in addition to using adapted or prepared conventional instruments - usually violin, piano and acoustic guitar. The range of sounds are further extended by means of filtering and other forms of signal processing. Contact microphones are used to amplify the sounds of bubbling water and other small sounds. All these acoustic sounds are enhanced by electronic filtering etc. One electronic instrument we use is a bioactivity translator which is used to measure the voltage potential of living organisms — including plants, fungi, and the human nervous system — and translate the biological rhythms into electronic sound. Other electronic instruments include a 4 speed portable reel-to-reel tape recorder and a multi-speed CD player, both of which are used to work with short sound samples. We do not use laptops or pre-recorded material for playback.” [source]

The group’s unique sound derives from their characteristic use of synthetic and processed instrumental sounds to generate undulating sonic processes evocative of the primordial phenomena of nature. This biological/telluric coloration is reinforced by the group’s titles for its albums and compositions, such as “Deep Virus,” “Solarisation,” and “Entelechy.” According to Prime, Morphogenesis sought to distance itself from the cerebral associations of avant-garde music, striving instead to address the auditor on a purely sensory plane: ”I don’t think any conceptualization is necessary to appreciate our music. The listener can easily relate to it on a basic level of feeling and emotion, an appreciation of interesting sonic textures and soundscapes.”

February 14, 2012, 9:45pm

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Francis Bebey: “Akwaaba (Welcome)”

From the album Akwaaba: Music for Sanza (1985)

Born in Cameroon in 1929, Francis Bebey was a brilliant musician and public intellectual, and a powerful advocate for African music in the wake of the decolonialization of the mid-20th century. A cosmopolitan who lived for a time in France and the United States, Bebey was an important figure in the global music scene from his first albums in the 1960s until his death in 2001.

Before settling into his career as a globetrotting ambassador of “world music” fusion, Bebey wore a variety of professional hats. During the 60s and 70s he was a radio journalist in France and worked for the information service of UNESCO. Bebey was also an active writer, producing a number of highly successful novels, as well as collections of essays and poems. In 1969 he published an important musicological study entitled Musique d’Afrique.

Bebey’s compositions fused traditional central African elements with aspects of American popular music and, occasionally, European classical music, such as “Kasilane” for the crossover-happy Kronos Quartet. His primary instrument was the guitar, but the sound on many of his records is dominated by the sanza, a plucked idiophone popular throughout Africa, where it is has many different names and variations. It is commonly known in English as the “thumb piano.”

“One day God, dying of boredom in a world where He so far had created nothing, built a sanza according to the counsels of Imagination. When He began to play it, He found that each note created something around Him: the sun, the moon, good weather and bad, the forest, the savannah, the desert, the village; then man, followed by woman, and by hundreds of millions of children of all colors.” (Francis Bebey)

October 01, 2011, 11:22am

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Charanjit Singh: “Raga Madhuvanti”

From the album Synthesizing: Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat (1983)

I’m famously ignorant when it comes to the history of beat-oriented electronic music—which is, after all, what most people mean when they talk about the genre. It’s not that I don’t appreciate the electro/techno wing of electronic music, even less that I dismiss it with Stockhausen-esque disdain (however valid some of his points may be). For whatever reason, I just haven’t absorbed the stylistic lineage, which is much more complicated than an outsider might guess, as shown by the exemplary Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music.

Still, in spite of my ignorance of the finer points of history and genre-development, I know what I like. And this album by the Bollywood session musician Charanjit Singh has absolutely blown my mind. 

Created using the cutting-edge technology of a Roland Jupiter-8 analog synthesizer, a TR-808 drum machine, and a TB-303 bass sequencer, Singh’s album is a visionary fusion of the sinuous melodic improvisations of Indian traditional music with the pulsing rhythms of electronic music. Though not entirely without precedent (the Italo-disco of Giorio Moroder is cited as a likely influence), Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat was a formative moment in the global development of techno. 

The album was re-released by the label Bombay-Connections in 2010.

September 15, 2011, 10:19am

Steve Porcaro of Toto tweaks the band’s massive Polyfusion syntheszier “Damius” (1982). From Mark Vail’s Vintage Synthesizers, p. 155.

September 09, 2011, 10:58am

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Information Society: “Growing up with Shiva”

From the album Apocryphon: Electro Roots 1982-1985

My introduction to Information Society constitutes one of my very earliest musical memories. In the early 90s, my family acquired an ill-fated Sega-CD add-on to the Genesis console. The unit was a horrible flop, but I will always remember the cutting-edge CD+G disc included with the system, which contained two songs by Information Society: “Walking Away” and “Pure Energy”—not coincidentally, two of their biggest hits. The futuristic synthetic sounds of these tracks opened my imagination to new dimensions of musical possibility. (The band’s allure for me was heightened by the fact, later discovered, that they hailed from the ancestral land of my conception, the twin cities of Minneapolis-St. Paul.)

And to think, we abandoned this look for jeans and flannel.

The compilation album Apocryphon is a remarkable document of the band’s early years in the first half of the 80s. It features re-releases of their albums The INSOC EP (1983) and Creatures of Influence (1985), plus a disc of early miscellany entitled, none too humbly, Prophets without Honor.

“Growing up with Shiva,” featured here, is a driving anti-nuke statement created in the shadow of the near-apocalypse of 1983. (Note the quasi-rap vocal delivery in the breakdown section. Not too shabby for some white Minnesotans!) “Get up (Away from That Thing)” is an awesomely unabashed disco groove with an anti-TV lyrical message, while the more polished and sequencer-driven sound of “Running” anticipates the band’s aforementioned radio hits of the end of the decade, as well as manifestations of freestyle such as Stevie B.’s 1988 classic “Spring Love.”

Connoisseurs of the genre should check out the previously featured Units, a less successful but more experimental early American synth-pop outfit from San Francisco.

August 28, 2011, 9:05pm

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F.M. Einheit and Genesis P-Orridge: “Riots / Information”

From the soundtrack to the film Decoder (1984)

Featuring a who’s-who of early 80s industrial music and underground culture, including F.M. Einheit of Einstürzende Neubauten, Genesis P-Orridge of Psychic TV, and the American writer William S. Burroughs, Decoder is a strange and powerful film from the early years of the cyberpunk movement. The plot of the movie centers on the use of music as a means of social control and disruption:

Muzak, the artificial music product created by scientists and marketing experts to increase efficiency and enhance wellbeing, irrigates men everywhere. A young punk and hobby sound mechanic decodes this music and creates an antidote to provoke disturbances not only in the burger joints where he found this music. By recruiting street pirates to spread his twisted sounds via tapes (an idea directly taken from Burroughs’ cut up manuals) the tumults turn into violent streetfighting (with real footage from Berlin’s infamous anti-Reagan riots). The big corporations can not tolerate this and engage a shady agent to stop the antimuzak movement. (Source: Karagarga)

The soundtrack of Decoder is a tour de force sampler of early industrial music, as illustrated by this track by Einheit, who also plays the film’s unnamed protagonist. At the end of the track, you can hear a snippet of P-Orridge’s prophetic monologue: “Information is like a bank: some of us our rich, some of us our poor…all of us can be rich.”

Aside from its cinematic merits, the film makes for an excellent time-capsule of the techno-dystopian depictions of the 1980s. For a great zine article providing more background to Decoder, as well as a brief clip from the film, check out History is Made at Night. More information, as well as a YouTube video of the film in its entirety, can be found at The End of Being.

June 03, 2011, 10:11am

The League of Automatic Music Composers: Live

Check out this fantastic video of the “world’s first computer network band,” the previously featured League of Automatic Music Composers. (This is the post-1980 lineup of Perkis/Bischoff/Horton.)

May 09, 2011, 9:38am

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Vivenza: “Modes Réels Collectifs, Part I” (excerpt)

From the album Modes Réels Collectifs (1983)

For the French sound artist Jean-Marc Vivenza (born 1957 in Vinay, near Grenoble), “industrial music” is something quite literal: his work is based entirely on the recording and arrangement of the cacophonous sound world of factories and machinery. An unreconstructed futurist, Vivenza sees his work as a direct continuation of the artistic and intellectual tradition stemming from the early 20th-century work of the Italian Futurists and Russian Constructivists and their project of creating an artistic expression of the technologized world.

Although his music first emerged in the early 1980s, more or less contemporaneously with the rise of acts such as Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire, and SPK, Vivenza rejects any affinity with what is generally known as industrial music, which he characterizes as “dominated by psychological cliches and full of pathological behaviors…executed poorly by repetitive and systematic singing, ritual screaming, moans, cheap thrills, fear, torture, a world of tragedies…a sick tradition of the Anglo-American scene.” Accordingly, Vivenza disowns the label “industrial,” preferring to call his aesthetic ”futuristic bruitism” (from the French word for “noise,” bruit). 

Vivenza credits his childhood in the heavily industrialized region of Rhone-Alps with attuning his ears to the sonic power of machines. But his fascination with industrial sounds is not simply an aesthetic predilection; instead, he hears this material as the acoustic manifestation of the very essence of reality: ”Through work and in the forces of work, in the sound magma of industrial society, in the heart of the forges and barrages, the mills and power plants, the reactors and artificial intelligence, nature reveals its dynamic character.”

Like the original futurists, Vivenza connects modern technology with the metaphysical penetration into the core of being. For him, as for Luigi Russolo, ”the art of noise is a realistic form of ‘awakening’ the hidden forces that rule the world.” This apparently paradoxical conjunction of machinery and metaphysics is explained by the fact that the technological world-order of modernity has established itself as the new cosmos of human life. While earlier in human history, we built little islands of technology in a sea of nature, in modernity the relationship is reversed, as nature becomes the exception in a lifeworld that is ever more artificial. This development complicates the very distinction between culture and nature, for as Vivenza states, ”the technological achievements of the world are a dialectical manifestation of nature.”

In addition to the influences from the early 20th-century techno-avant-garde, I perceive in Vivenza’s project a connection to a distinctly French tradition of the “machine intellectual”: from the Encyclopedists, who went into the factories in order to unite philosophical understanding and technological reality, to the 20th-century development of the discipline of “mechanology” pioneered by thinkers such as Jacques Lafitte and Gilbert Simondon.

Around the turn of the millennium, Vivenza seems to have turned his attention from music to academic pursuits. As documented on his personal website, Vivenza is an established scholar of philosophy who has published a number of books on such figures as the German Christian mystic Jakob Boehme, the French Counter-Enlightenment thinker Joseph de Maistre, and the third-century Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna. 

This excerpt is taken from Vivenza’s first offering, the album Modes Réels Collectifs, which was recorded and mixed in 1981 and released in 1983 on Vivenza’s Electro Institut label. In 2010 the album was re-released by French label Rotorelief.

April 10, 2011, 5:49pm

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Henryk Górecki: Concerto pour clavecin et cordes, op. 40 (excerpt; 1980)

From the album Rhythm Plus (1990)

Here’s a piece of “power minimalism” from Polish composer Henryk Górecki, an interesting figure best known for his hugely successful Symphony No. 3 (1977), a mournful but relatively accessible composition that was re-released in 1992 and became a surprise hit, selling over a million copies. This piece was by no means representative of Górecki’s music, however, and his larger body of work remained heterogeneous and largely unknown.

The Concerto pour clavecin et cordes (Concerto for Harpsichord and Strings) is based on pulsating harpsichord figures and underlying string tones, both outlining a stark minor scale. The effect is overpowering, though unavoidably cinematic in association (thank you, Phillipp Glass). In its rough, punchy texture, this piece recalls the minimalist music of the Dutch composer Louis Andriessen, and perhaps points toward a distinctive European spin on what is generally regarded as an American phenomenon.

Górecki’s piece, like most of the others on this disc, was written for Elisabeth Chojnacka, a brilliant Polish harpsichordist who through her virtuosic playing and advocacy for new music has positioned herself as a veritable court musician of the European avant-garde. In addition to Górecki, composers such as Xenakis, Ligeti, Halffter, Ohana, Donatoni, and Bussotti have written pieces dedicated to her.

March 30, 2011, 12:03pm

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Organum: “Drome Part 1”

From the album Drome (1989)

For nearly 30 years, Organum has been the primary musical outlet of David Jackman, a British musician, artist, and alumnus of Cornelius Cardew’s Scratch Orchestra. Variously identified as a representative of ambient, industrial, experimental, and drone musics, Jackman describes the sound of Organum simply as “oceanic noise.”

Though primarily a solo project, Organum has also featured collaborations with a veritable who’s-who of the British experimental music scene, including Steven Stapleton (Nurse with Wound), Michael Prime (Morphogenesis), Eddie Prèvost (AMM), and Z’EV.

Jackman’s music, although more “underground” in its distribution and aesthetic associations, belongs to the same orbit of such classically trained and institutionally supported drone composers as Roland Kayn and Eliane Radigue. Organum is perhaps among the more accessible exemplars of drone music, since its tracks tend to be in the 5-15 minute range, as opposed to the hours-long sonic escapades of Kayn and Radigue.

Many of Jackman’s pieces are even short enough to qualify as “drone miniatures,” a seeming paradox in a genre whose effect is so often dependent on the longue durée of musical time, but it’s something that undeniably works, as shown for example on the 1989 album Drome (created with Michael Prime), which consists of two “radio friendly” three-minute tracks. (It feels like much longer.)

March 23, 2011, 9:41am