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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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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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Nicolas Collins: “Little Spiders”

From the album Ron Kuvila & Nicolas Collins (1982)

A lovely little piece of early digital noise sculpture, “Little Spiders” is the result of a simple performative scenario based on the computer-monitored interactions of two instrumentalists: “A microcomputer examines the gestural styles of two keyboard players whose instruments are equipped with small lights that indicate the finger activity of the other performer. The sound and structure of the piece are generated by coincidences between the players.”

Since the late 1970s, Nicolas Collins has specialized in music combining hacked electronics and improvisatory performance situations.  His work is a continuation of the tradition of “live electronics” pioneered in the 50s and 60s by John Cage, David Tudor, and other American experimental composers, who sought to integrate electronic sound generation with principles of compositional indeterminacy.

Collins has published a book entitled Handmade Electronic Music, which provides recipes for a number of do-it-yourself projects using hacked electronics to create unexpected sounds.  For Collins, this manner of working corresponds to an aesthetics of evanescence symbolized by the fleeting phenomena of dreams:

It’s about creating an experience of the moment of discovery rather than constructing a masterpiece that you would remember when you leave the concert hall. It must be some sort of weird, self-destructive urge that I have, but in a sense my goal is to create a work that you won’t remember afterwards, that will only be an experience while one is immersed in it but that, while you’re immersed in it, will be all-encompassing. It will be like that sort of pseudo virtual reality that comes in a dream. When you have a dream, it’s all-encompassing. You only once or twice get a crack in the dream where you say, oh, it’s only a dream. Until then, for all its lack of reality, it is a completely enveloping experience even though it might be wholly impractical. And when the dream is over, it vanishes. Well, to use a dream as an analogy for a piece of music is hopelessly romantic and tacky and clichéd, but there is that aspect that you can’t deny the power of a dream simply because when you wake up, it vanishes. 

This long out-of-print album, also featuring works by composer Ron Kuivila, is available for download at Continuo’s Weblog.

September 29, 2010, 10:36am

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The League of Automatic Music Composers: “Martian Folk Music” (1980)

From the album The League of Automatic Music Composers 1978-1983

Take the anarchic, self-organizing ethos of free improvisation, add the raw, low-bit waveforms of early computer sound chips, and tie it all together with cybernetic concepts of interactivity and information exchange, and you get the League of Automatic Music Composers.  A product of the uniquely Northern Californian fusion of counterculture and high technology (brilliantly chronicled in Erik Davis’ book Techgnosis), the League pioneered the use of computers in live performance and created music of rare and distinctive beauty.

The League at work: Tim Perkis, Jim Horton, and John Bischoff

The KIM-1, released in 1976 and packing 1152 bytes of RAM, was one of the first mass-market microcomputers (so-called to distinguish them from the massive mainframes that were the most common form of computer at the time).  Jim Horton, an electronic musician who had been active for years in the Bay Area scene, quickly bought a KIM-1 and started exploring the unit’s potential as a musical instrument.  Horton had earlier specialized in building massive, self-generating analog synthesizer patches which he would let run for hours on end— a remarkable parallel with the simultaneous efforts undertaken in Europe by Roland Kayn.  (A late solo work by Horton was previously featured on this blog.)  

It was Horton who conceived the notion of a “silicon orchestra” of human-controlled interconnected computers which reacted to each other’s output in deliberately complicated configurations.  He was soon joined by John Bischoff, Rich Gold, and David Behrman, and this quartet performed for the first time as the League of Automatic Music Composers in November 1978.  

In 1980 Gold and Behrman left the group and Tim Perkis became a member. “Martian Folk Music” is performed by this later lineup of Perkis, Bischoff, and Horton. This track is typical of the League’s trademark sound: pure digital waves spasmodically careening across the sound-field, interacting according to the laws some occult dynamics that lies just beyond the listener’s comprehension.  

A flyer made by Rich Gold showing one of the League’s configurations

August 02, 2010, 1:00pm

Concert review: Tony Conrad and Keiji Haino

International House, Philadelphia, April 26 2009

The pair presented a striking visual contrast: the older, somewhat portly Conrad looking rather grandfatherly in a white suit and hat, and the diminutive Haino dressed in black and sporting distinctive long hair and bangs.

They changed instruments repeatedly over the course of the show.  Conrad began by bowing what looked like a lid to a cooking pot, creating an unbelievably abrasive amplified rubbing.  Later he moved on to a steel guitar and what looked like the world’s smallest violin.  But for the majority of the concert, Conrad sawed away at his fiddle, creating bright bands of sound that often stabilized Haino’s more frenetic contributions.  It may be bias on my part— I find the violin extremely obnoxious and over-valued— but I thought Conrad’s playing became monotonous about halfway through the set.  There’s only so much the instrument can do, even when it’s heavily amplified and run through a battery of effects.

Haino was even more versatile than Conrad.  For the first 15 minutes or so, he crouched out of sight behind a table, operating a bank of processers that were sampling and mangling Conrad’s horsehair-on-glass bowing.  Later he played drum machine, setting up a sparse and erratically funky percussion loop with which he accompanied himself as he shouted indecipherable interjections into the microphone.  For most of the second half of the show he played electric guitar, using his pedal bank to turn his spasmodic thrashing and noodling into sustained, ricocheting sound masses.  Toward the end, Haino sang slow, wordless, minor-key melodies like a demented songbird lost in a thicket of noise.

Overall, the show was an impressive feat of improvisatory noisemaking, but the chemistry between Conrad and Haino was tangibly lacking at times.  Conrad’s violin in particular was a drag on the sonic dynamism of the performance, and it dominated the mix, even against the incredible volume of Haino’s electronics— you could feel the hair cells in your inner ear withering under the onslaught.

April 28, 2009, 11:48am