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Syzygys: “Rimsky Train”

From the album The Complete Studio Recordings (2003)

“A female duo who plays microtonal pop music,” the Japanese band Syzygys is the project of Hitomi Shimizu (keyboards) and Hiromi Nishida (violin).  (The band’s name, presumably an alternative plural of the polysemic word “syzygy,” comes from a Greek root meaning “conjunction.”)

Like all good music, that of Syzygys defies description: it is at once familiar and strange. Many of the gestures are redolent of that ubiquitous but unnameable modern idiom of composition heard in incidental music for popular media, but a subversive and experimental element is also always present— and in this way the music of Syzygys is comparable to the otherwise very different work of, say, Raymond Scott.

The delightful weirdness of this music derives in part from the completely ingenuous fusion of catchy pop song elements with the hauntingly unfamiliar sonorities of a 43-note just intonation scale invented by Harry Partch.  Shizimu plays a modified electric reed organ tuned this scale.  (Across the top of the band’s homepage there is a “playable” 43-note keyboard.  A classy touch.)

If this music sounds like the somewhat deranged soundtrack of a forgotten Nintendo game, it’s not coincidental: Shimizu has done the music for several titles for the Sony PlayStation.  She’s also a prolific composer for film and TV.

August 19, 2010, 12:01am

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James Tenney: Spectrum 6 (2001), for flute, clarinet, percussion, violin, and cello (excerpt)

From the album Spectrum Pieces

In his series of eight compositions bearing the title Spectrum (1995-2001), the brilliant American composer and theorist James Tenney embarked on a new exploration of the musical potential of the harmonic series, a phenomenon that had inspired him throughout his career.

While in many of his earlier works based on the harmonic series, such as his Spectral Canon for Conlon Nancarrow (1974) or Septet for six electric guitars and electric bass (1981), Tenney had methodically introduced the partials in an upward sweep from the fundamental, in the Spectrum pieces the pitches of the series are used all at once.  If the effect of his earlier music had been strongly tonal, thanks to the emphasis on the lower partials of the spectrum, these later works betray their harmonic foundations only in fleeting glimmers; the dominant mood is ungrounded and suggestive.

All the spectrum pieces are written in “time-space” notation, meaning that the duration of each note is determined not by its shape (half note, quarter note, etc.) but by its visually-measured length on the staff, each line of which in this case lasts exactly 30 seconds.  Tenney used a computer program which allowed him to steer the general parameters (density, register, etc.) while the computer automatically generated the actual notes.  This is the principle of stochastic processes, or constrained randomness, which was introduced into music in the 1950s by Iannis Xenakis.

Tenney’s Spectrum pieces sound to me like a distant echo of the most disembodied textures of the early 20th-century Austrian composer Anton Webern: the tones seem to float serenely in a rarefied space, expressive of something profound yet wordless.  

August 15, 2010, 1:00pm

The Tone Generation

Covering the “analogue age,” from the beginning of the 20th century to the 1970s, with a focus on the third quarter of the century, “The Tone Generation” is a 20-part radio series on the history of electronic music written by the British audio-visual artist Ian Helliwell.  Each episode is a 30-minute exploration of a particular scene: the first ten investigate different geographical areas, while episodes 11-20 take up various themes such as “Electronics and Jazz,” “Computer Music,” and “Electronics for Expos.”  This format conveys a sense of the global dynamics of the art form which are too often occluded by the dominance of the France-Germany-USA axis, while also delving into important topics that transcend geographical boundaries.

The music featured is well-chosen and often quite rare (there are several pieces I have not been able to locate elsewhere).  The balance between music and narration is not always ideal; sometimes I wanted more historical context for the sounds I was hearing.  Still, in its ambitious scope and its creative use of the medium, “The Tone Generation” is an impressive accomplishment, and a worthwhile listening experience for those fascinated by the early history of electronic music.

August 12, 2010, 10:07am

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Samuel Beckett: “Molloy I & II”

From the album “…the Whole Thing’s Coming out of the Dark” (2000)

An imaginative recording based on three texts by arch-modernist writer Samuel Beckett (Molloy, Company, and L’Image).

Beckett produced a number of radio plays among his literary works, and he always had an acute concern for the sonic dimension of his writing.   The title of this album is taken from a phrase he used to describe the uncanny quality of radiophonic listening.  Beckett’s disembodied voices sound out the vast, unlit spaces of the existential condition.

March 25, 2010, 9:27am

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The Books: “Tokyo”

From the album The Lemon of Pink (2003)

Although dedicated in spirit to new and experimental forms of music, we at Acousmata spend much of our time rummaging through the obscure corners of the twentieth century.  So we hope to be forgiven for having just discovered this no-longer-new but excellent work by “folktronica” duet The Books.

Combining acoustic string sounds with the splice-happy sensibility of musique concrète, The Books evoke comparison with much older artists such as Henry Flynt, although the musical result is something quite distinctive.  In its frenetic, mechanized quality, this track also recalls Frank Zappa’s late albums such as Jazz from Hell and Civilization, Phaze III.  

The arrangement of familiar sounds (plucked guitars, human voices) in unexpected juxtapositions lifts this music above the monotony that afflicts many productions of so-called electronica.  

March 19, 2010, 10:45am

“Another world is possible”

Peter Ablinger’s “speaking piano” declares the Proclamation of the European Environmental Criminal Court.  A stunning piece of work—conceptually, technically, and emotionally.

March 03, 2010, 10:19am

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Georges Aperghis: Avis de tempête (2004)

From the album  Avis de tempête

Avis de tempête (Storm Warning) is an early 21st-century opera by Greek-French composer Georges Aperghis. The first of the opera’s 13 tableaux, presented here, seems to begin in medias res, with a kaleidoscopic array of electronic whooshes, distorted guitar noodling, jagged woodwind fragments, and schizoid vocal interjections. The middle portion is dominated by a throbbing electronic soundfield, a kind of radio static through which shimmer enigmatic and fragmentary transmissions from another plane.  As the fiercely spinning centrifugal force set in motion by the opening section begins to dissipate, the piece winds down with a duet between a dolefully descending Shepard tone and a disturbed female voice reciting a bizarre macaronic text.

The libretto, written by Aperghis and Peter Szendy, is a patchwork text that includes fragments from Melville, Kafka, Baudelaire, Shakespeare, and Hugo. Another collaborator, Sebastien Roux, is credited with “computer sound design,” including an implementation of granular synthesis conceptually inspired by William S. Burroughs’ “cut-up” technique.  Burroughs’ influence is also at work in Roux’s effort to musically realize the concept of virus through the use of digital clicks and glitches (with a tip of the hat to Yasunao Tone).

Fluids, sounds, images, information: they all pass through us and it becomes very difficult to focus on any one thing.  Electronics enable me to realize this state of perpetual transition, to jump from one world to another.  An abstract sound becomes the voice of an actor, a phoneme becomes running water, a character may be divided up and then reconstructed elsewhere.  (Georges Aperghis)

February 20, 2010, 4:43pm

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Masanka Sankayi and Kasai Allstars feat. Mutumilaya: “Wu Muluendu”

From the album Congotronics 2:  Buzz’N’Rumble from the Urb’N’Jungle (2005)

Noisy, funky, lovely sounds from the ”electro-traditional” music scene of Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.  I was hooked as soon as I heard the amazingly synth-like timbre of the overdriven electric likembe, “with its pickups made of copper telephone wire wound around crushed car alternator magnets.”  The Congotronics series (comprising three releases at the time of this writing) and its enthusiastic reception by American listeners have been intelligently discussed by Mike Powell at Stylus.

December 18, 2009, 1:03pm

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Laibach: “Contrapunctus 1”

From the album Laibachkunstderfuge (2008)

What do you get when you mix the Slovenian industrial band Laibach with the German Baroque composer J. S. Bach?  A bizarre yet undeniably appropriate musical hybrid that only the young 21st century could create.

Bach is almost certainly the most frequently “covered” composer of the European classical canon, among both 20th-century art music composers (see my earlier post on Anton Webern’s arrangement of a piece from Bach’s other late magnum opus, The Musical Offering) and popular musicians.  Because Bach left The Art of Fugue without directions as to what instruments should play the various parts, the work has presented later musicians with the ideal tabula rasa for “remixes” of various sorts.  Laibach envisions Bach’s contrapuntal permutations in The Art of Fugue as a premonition of the music of the electronic age:

Since the work is very much based on mathematic algorithms, Laibach decided to use computer and computer program as the key »instrument«, providing a very special electronic interpretation and showing that J.S. Bach with his work could as well be understood as the pioneer of electronic, techno, and computer music.

December 06, 2009, 11:09pm

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Crlos: “City of Fluxes” (2003)

From City of the Future, a project of microsound.org

Andrei Tarkovsky’s legendary 1972 sci-fi psychodrama Solaris features a remarkable sequence about 30 minutes into the film, in which the character Burton speeds in an automobile through a vast, labyrinthine metropolis.  (The scene was filmed— where else?— in Tokyo.)  In an already strange film, this passage— entitled “City of the Future” in the DVD chapter headings— is a staggering and experimental gesture: nearly five minutes of montage evoking the dense, alien beauty of the modern urban experience.  The sound mix for this scene is what really makes it work: Tarkovsky’s longtime musical collaborator, Eduard Artemyev, creates a slowly building collage of industrial whirs and rumbles that makes you feel you are traveling not through the city, but into its throbbing concrete heart.

In the spring of 2003, sound artist and curator of microsound.org Kim Cascone invited members of the group’s email list to create remixes of the sound file extracted from the “City of the Future” scene in Solaris.  One of these tracks, “City of Fluxes,” was featured in Past Forward, the audio companion to issue #13 of the fabulous Cabinet magazine, entitled “Futures.”

October 18, 2009, 12:57pm