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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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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

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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

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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

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Jean Dubuffet: “Prospère, Prolifère”

From the album Expériences Musicales de Jean Dubuffet

Best known as a visual artist whose bold, childlike images are among the most striking and identifiable works of the mid-twentieth century, the French painter and sculptor Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985) was also one of the most fascinating outsider musicians of recent times. His musical output consists solely of a number of recordings made in 1960-61 with the Danish painter Asger Jorn, after which Dubuffet abandoned music in order to devote himself fully to visual art.

Dubuffet’s music was composed through a process of edited improvisation: first he played freely on a number of instruments, both conventional and otherwise, then he listened to the recordings and removed the parts that he found unsatisfactory. Like Pierre Schaeffer, for whom the concept of musique concrète referred less to the nature of the sounds employed than to the starting point of “concrete” sound material which was “composed” only after it had been captured on tape, Dubuffet declares that “all written music is a false music,” and replaces the inscription of musical notation with that of the recording mechanism: “It is impossible to write true music except with a stylus on wax.”

I believe that our western music is an avatar among all the possibilities that were offered to music. Now, by an optical error, one imagines that this is the only music possible, while, in reality, it is only a very specious music among millions of possibilities that were available and, without doubt, will be available tomorrow… In my music I wanted to place myself in the position of a man of fifty thousand years ago, a man who ignores everything about western music and invents a music for himself without any reference, without any discipline, without anything that would prevent him from expressing himself freely and for his own good pleasure.

Jean Dubuffet: Virtual Virtue (1963)

Dubuffet makes a provocative distinction between two kinds of music, both of which he attempts to capture by turns in his own work: first, there is the “music we make,” a kind of “permanent music” expressive of basic human moods and actions and derived from the sonorous environment of everyday life. Second, there is the “music we hear,” a music “completely foreign to us and our natural tendencies,” which “could lead us to hear (or imagine) sounds which would be produced by the elements themselves, independent of human intervention”: 

[These sounds] would be as strange as what we might hear if we were to put our ear to some opening leading to a world other than our own or if we were to suddenly develop a new form of hearing with which we would become aware of a strange tumult that our senses had been unable to pick up and which might come from elements which were supposedly involved in silent action, such as humus decomposing, grass growing or minerals undergoing transformation.

Whatever the nature of his musical material, Dubuffet finds himself drawn to “composite sounds which appear to be formed by a great number of voices calling to mind distant murmurs, communities, hustle and bustle and hives of activity.” He seeks a “music without variations, not structured according to a particular system but unchanging, almost formless, as though the pieces had no beginning and no end but were simply extracts taken haphazardly from a ceaseless and ever-flowing score.”

The title of this album, Expériences Musicales, could be translated either as “Musical Experiences” or “Musical Experiments.” Along with a 1971 record of Dubuffet’s music entitled Musique Brut, it can be downloaded from the ever-resourceful UbuWeb.

Dubuffet in his musical studio

June 23, 2011, 3:57pm

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Group Ongaku: Automatism (1960; excerpt)

From the album Music of Group Ongaku

The decade of the 1960s witnessed the sudden proliferation of groups specializing in improvised experimental music performance.  Collectives such as AMM, Musica Elletronica Viva, and Gruppo di Improvvisazioni Nuova Consonanza (to name just a few of the better known) all charted bold paths toward the fusion of various convergent musical Zeitgeists of the era: post-Cageian notions of aleatorics and indeterminacy, extended instrumental techniques deriving from avant-garde European concert music, live electronics, Afro-American-inspired free jazz, and cybernetic theories of feedback and self-regulating systems of action.

Perhaps the earliest such collective was the little known Group Ongaku (“Music Group”), started in 1958 by Shukou Mizuno and Takehisa Kosugi, two undergraduates at Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music. They were soon joined by many other members, but the group, like many others of its kind, was riven by disagreements over aesthetic principles, and it disbanded in 1962. Several Group Ongaku alumni would later join the loose collective of experimental performance artists known as Fluxus.  One member, Yasunao Tone, would attain notoriety as the founder of glitch music thanks to his experiments, beginning in 1985, with physically altering the digital information of CDs  (Tone’s work can be heard on his 1997 album Solo for Wounded CD.)

Recorded at Mizuno’s home in 1960, “Automatism” makes use of both conventional musical instruments (piano, organ, cello, and alto saxophone) and everyday objects (vacuum cleaner, radio, dolls, and dishes).  The music was created spontaneously by performers moving about between the various rooms of the house.  In addition, one of the members manipulated the reel of the tape recorder by hand, adjusting the intake speed and thus the overall pitch and timbre of the recording. 

The three tracks on this album can be downloaded from UbuWeb.

January 25, 2011, 10:28am

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Pink Floyd: “Sysyphus” (excerpt)

From the album Ummagumma (1969)

The late 1960s witnessed the glorious psychedelic marriage of the traditions of rock-and-roll and experimental/electronic music.  The years 1968-69 alone saw The Beatles’ musique concrète-inspired “Revolution 9,” Pierre Henry’s collaboration with the British prog-rock band Spooky Tooth on the album Ceremony, and the release of Pink Floyd’s monumental double album Ummagumma, the band’s fourth album and arguably the most adventurous project they would ever undertake. 

The first half of Ummagumma consists of a set of live recordings of songs from the band’s earlier releases, while the second half is a collection of studio work by each of the band members individually.  Roger Waters contributed the pastoral ballad “Grantchester Meadows” and a bizarre piece of self-described “concrete poetry” entitled “Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving with a Pict.”  David Gilmour’s piece is called “The Narrow Way,” and Nick Mason rounds out the album with his “Grand Vizier’s Garden Party,” the body of which is a studio-created exploration of percussive sonority that evokes Edgard Varèse’s Ionisation.

Keyboardist Richard Wright’s contribution, entitled “Sysyphus,” opens with a minatory theme for orchestral strings à la Mellotron, punctuated by timpani strokes and cymbals.  From here we move seamlessly into a different expressive zone, where Wright demonstrates his classical chops with an ornate, Chopinesque piano interlude that gradually decomposes into a dissonant haze of sustained clusters. The next section, presenting yet another striking contrast of musical style, is a wonderfully disjunct mix of directly plucked piano sounds, percussive interjections, and tape-stretched vocal timbres.  After a bit of a lull toward the end (omitted in this excerpt), a cacophonous orchestral explosion ushers in a noisy sound-field from which the original “Sysyphus” theme slowly rises like a spectral figure from the fog. This is a “symphonic” conception of experimental rock that would be developed further in Pink Floyd’s later albums, starting with their very next release, Atom Heart Mother, whose title track is a 24-minute instrumental work of unsurpassed brilliance.

June 01, 2010, 10:16am