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Jim Horton: “Rebirth” (1990)

From the album Numbers Racket

Beginning in the late 1960s, Jim Horton (1944-1998) was an active member of the San Francisco Bay Area experimental music scene.  In the early 70s he studied at the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College under the leadership of Robert Ashley.  With Tim Perkins and John Bischoff, Horton founded the “world’s first computer network band,” the League of Automatic Music Composers, in 1978.  The League pioneered the collaborative use of microcomputers in live improvisation. Many of their “compositions” were driven by game-like interactions between the players.  Around this time, Horton also began using computers to implement alternate systems of tuning, and in particular various forms of just intonation.

These influences are at work in this piece composed by Jim Horton in 1990 and released on a 1992 cassette by the Just Intonation Network entitled Numbers Racket.  The sounds in this piece are vintage 80s digitalia.  Although I’m generally fond of these bright, metallic sounds, the timbre of the piece wears a bit thin by the end of it.  The real interest here is on the level of tuning and form.  

The composer provided the following cryptic notes to “Rebirth”:

The computer, empty of suffering, simulates high-speed attainment of nirvana by playing the medieval Tibetan Buddhist game “Determination of the Ascension of Stages,” invented by Sakya pandita Kunga Gyaltsen (“Whose Banner is Total Joy”). The board shows 104 places of a fantastic cosmic geography.

The game mentioned by Horton is a variation on an ancient Indian board game in which “the player progresses according to the throw of dice from hell states and other inauspicious conditions by way of the Tantric path to Buddhahood and nirvana.” (Amazingly, it belongs to the same lineage as the modern children’s game Snakes and Ladders.)  This strange “program” behind the piece resonates with the cyclical quality of the music, which climbs ever upward only to tumble back down again and start anew.  Each iteration is slightly different, and the various levels seem always to be slightly out of phase, thus creating the overall sense of motion and vitality suggested by the title.

June 10, 2010, 2:32pm

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Mr. Bungle: “Chemical Marriage”

From the album Disco Volante (1995)

Formed in Northern California in the mid-1980s, Mr. Bungle was one of premiere experimental rock outfits of the late 20th century.  The groups’s three studio albums— Mr. Bungle (1991), Disco Volante (1995), and California (1999)— stand as a monumental fin de millennium statement on the death and possible afterlife of rock music.

Their debut album is the most stylistically coherent of the three, perhaps describable as a sort of carnivalesque funk-metal.  The band’s swan song, California, has much of their trademark schizoid charm, but with a dominant exotica vibe and an unexpected tunefulness to many of the songs.

Disco Volante is to my mind the band’s magnum opus.  It is an album without a center, a crucible in which the detritus of a half-century of popular recorded music is amalgamated and transfigured into a fractured masterpiece of ear-melting beauty.

From the epic, multi-part “Carry Stress in the Jaw” (on a text by Edgar Allan Poe), to the (previously featured) pseudo-Arabic electronica of “Desert Search for Techno Allah,” to the cheesy surf-rock turned thrash metal of “Merry Go Bye-Bye,” Disco Volante is a bottomless vessel of auditory delight.  ”Chemical Marriage,” whose title invokes the alchemical fusion of male and female elements (coincidentia oppositorum), is an organ-driven number featuring the virtuosic wordless vocalizations of singer Mike Patton.

April 26, 2010, 4:40pm

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Jonathan Bepler: “Desert Hymn”

From the album Music for Matthew Barney’s Cremaster 2 (1999)

Matthew Barney’s massive, five-part film series The Cremaster Cycle (1994-2002) defies easy summary.  Wagnerian not only in scope (nearly seven hours in total) but also in the glacial slowness of its unfolding and the density of its symbolism, Cremaster is a unique cinematic experience.  It is also an elusive one: the films have apparently been released on DVD in extremely limited numbers, and can otherwise be viewed only in officially authorized screenings.  (It was thus that I saw all the films—in one day!—in Cologne in 2005.)  Of course, such artificial scarcity is difficult to maintain in the age of digital reproduction.

While the quality of the films I find extremely uneven, ranging from the violent beauty of 2, to the austere, pseudo-operatic 5, to the painfully bad 4, one consistently excellent element in these films is the music, composed by Jonathan Bepler.

Bepler’s music for Cremaster 2, set mostly in Utah, amplifies the brooding atmosphere of the film, which has been described as an “epic avant-garde western.”  The plot (such as it is) centers on the life and death of Gary Gilmore, the convicted murderer who was executed by firing squad in 1977.  ”Desert Hymn” accompanies a scene symbolically representing the trial and judgment of Gilmore in the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City.

April 16, 2010, 10:07am

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Thomas Bloch: Formule (1995)

From the album Ondes Martenot

Invented by the Frenchman Maurice Martenot (the instrument’s name means “Martenot waves”), the Ondes Martenot was first presented to the public in April 1928, though it was begun much earlier.

Like many early electronic instruments, the Ondes is based on the sound-generating principle of heterodyning, in which to very high and inaudible frequencies create an audible tone which corresponds to the difference between the two high frequencies.  One of these high frequencies is constant, while the other (and thus the resulting tone) is controlled by the player.  In the case of the Ondes, the instrument is played by either traditional keyboard or by moving a ring along a wire (called the ruban or “ribbon”), which allows for continuous glissando tones similar to those of the Theremin.

Because the Ondes is monophonic, the player generally uses only her right hand, keeping the left hand free to manipulate the “intensity key,” which controls the amplitude of the instrument.  In order to create a sound, the key must be pressed at the same time as the keyboard or ribbon, allowing for a variety of potential attacks and phrasing.

The intensity key is located in a drawer on the left side of the instrument, along with switches controlling the timbre and transposition buttons (including quarter-tone inflections).  There are also two foot pedals for activating the filter and shaping volume, in case both the player’s hands are busy.

Finally, the sound of the Ondes is routed to up to four specially-designed loudspeakers, some of which employ external resonators such as strings or a metal plate.

More than any other electronic instrument, the Ondes was embraced by contemporary composers such as Edgard Varese and Olivier Messiaen.  As an indication of the cultural standing won by Martenot’s new instrument, Messaien’s 1937 composition Fête des belles eaux for six Ondes was performed on a boat in the Seine as part of that year’s World’s Fair.  Such ceremonial uses of the Ondes were apparently not uncommon, judging by a photograph of an all-woman Ondes octet (plus two pianos) from around 1935.

Representing a recent and decidedly unclassical use of the instrument, this wonderful little piece entitled Formule (“Formula”) was composed by Thomas Bloch, one of the world’s foremost players of the Ondes.

February 10, 2010, 7:59pm

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Univers Zero: “Rouages”

From the album The Hard Quest (1999)

Since the 1970s, the Belgian band Univers Zero has been forging an idiosyncratic synthesis of modern chamber music, pseudo-medievalism, and dark metal.  This example evokes by turn parallels with Bela Bartok, Dead Can Dance, and Morbid Angel.

Another band working in a vaguely similar band is the equally remarkable outfit Art Zoyd.  Both Univers Zero and Art Zoyd were associated with the “Rock in Opposition” (RIO) movement, a cabal of mutually supportive progressive/experimental bands active from 1978.

November 06, 2009, 9:19am

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Boards of Canada: “Telephasic Workshop”

From the album Music Has the Right to Children (1998)

The music of the Scottish duo Boards of Canada occupies a unique and difficult to define stylistic position in contemporary electronica.  It’s a creative mix of (among other influences) IDM, ambient, and a brand of sonically expressed technostalgia that seems to flourish in the British isles.  (See my previous post on Belbury Poly.)

Some of Boards’ music is a bit too close to the “sonic wallpaper” aesthetic that, even now, after so many barriers have fallen— I recently learned to love the music of Dolly Parton— I still have a hard time getting into.  I will write more about this later, perhaps after I have undergone a regimen of Brian Eno-dominated musical “reprogramming” a la A Clockwork Orange.

But at its best, I hear this music as the throbbing heartbeat of the technologized world.  Like much of Boards’ music, “Telephasic Workshop” is based on a quasi-minimalist repetition of sound material: in this case, a drum loop, evocative harmonic samples, and strange vocal fragments that never quite turn into speech.  Upon careful listening, one perceives the subtle and almost organic mutation of these basic forms, which allows them to breathe, and— perhaps paradoxically— strengthens the overall effect of incantation through obsessive restatement.

September 04, 2009, 9:19am

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Ulver: “Plates 21-22”

From the album Themes from William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1998)

Here’s a little taste of the Norwegian band Ulver’s epic prog-metal interpretation of William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. The album’s modest title suggests a loose connection between the book and the music, but in fact Themes includes the entire text— spoken or sung— of Blake’s brilliant and influential work.

Plates 21 and 22 of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (quoted in full below) are devoted to an extended smackdown of the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, an erstwhile idol of Blake’s whom he later renounced.

I have always found that Angels have the vanity to speak of themselves as the only wise; this they do with a confident insolence sprouting from systematic reasoning:

Thus Swedenborg boasts that what he writes is new; tho’ it is only the Contents or Index of already publish’d books.

A man carried a monkey about for a shew, & because he was a little wiser than the monkey, grew vain, and conciev’d himself as much wiser than seven men. It is so with Swedenborg; he shews the folly of churches & exposes hypocrites, till he imagines that all are religious, & himself the single one on earth that ever broke a net.

Now hear a plain fact: Swedenborg has not written one new truth:
Now hear another: he has written all the old falshoods.

And now hear the reason. He conversed with Angels who are all religious, & conversed not with Devils who all hate religion, for he was incapable thro’ his conceited notions.

Thus Swedenborgs writings are a recapitulation of all superficial, opinions, and an analysis of the more sublime, but no further.

Have now another plain fact: Any man of mechanical talents may from the writings of Paracelsus or Jacob Behmen, produce ten thousand volumes of equal value with Swedenborgs, and from those of Dante or Shakespear, an infinite number.

But when he has done this, let him not say that he knows better than his master, for he only holds a candle in sunshine.

August 08, 2009, 6:18pm

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Frank Zappa: “Amnerika”

From the album Civilization, Phaze III (1994)

Finished shortly before his death, Civilization, Phaze III represents in my mind the apex of Frank Zappa’s remarkable musical production.  I admit that I have some trouble getting into the aesthetic mood of his grittier, more rock-influenced music of the 1960s and 70s, but Zappa’s later albums— especially Civilization, Phaze III and his 1986 release Jazz from Hell— consistently manage to blow my mind.  In these late works, Zappa made extensive use of a groundbreaking digital sampling technology called the Synclavier, which allowed him to unleash the spasmodic, mercurial musical creatures that were bouncing around in his head.  The sound of the Synclavier— plastic, artificial, and perhaps even self-consciously “cheesy” and cheap— forms the perfectly bizarre vehicle for Zappa’s musical expression, at once sincere and outrageous.

June 30, 2009, 1:41pm

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Mr. Bungle: “Desert Search for Techno Allah”

From the album Disco Volante (1995)

One of the very first albums to “do the nasty to my ears” (in the words of Mister Señor Love Daddy) was Mr. Bungle’s incomparable 1995 release Disco Volante.

This album opens up a wormhole to a higher plane in which all the music of past, present, and future is sewn into a single transcendental fabric by the thread of genius.

It’s difficult to annoint a single exemplar when every track is brilliant and no two sound alike, but I decided I couldn’t go wrong with “Desert Search for Techno Allah.”  You’ll understand when you listen.

April 21, 2009, 3:30pm