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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

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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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Étienne Méhul: “Ouverture Burlesque” (1794)

From the album Toy Symphonies & Other Fun

Here’s something a bit more light-hearted, after a few rather intense offerings in previous weeks.  What are “toy symphonies,” you ask?  According to Raymond Lewenthal, curator of this delightful record, the toy symphony is a whimsical relic of 18th and 19th-century domestic music making:

Here was music in which the whole family could participate…the elders playing on “serious” instruments such as the piano, violin and cello, while the children took care of organized noise in the form of peeps, tweets, thumps, and what have you.  Sometimes the elders took all the parts, to the delectation of the children.  Sometimes the children were advanced enough to manage everything, to the vast entertainment of doting grown-ups.  

This lost art of amateur musicking was quite the big deal in the days before ubiquitous sonic accompaniment. Toy symphonies were composed (and no doubt improvised) not only by casual musicians, but also by professional composers.  One particularly famous toy symphony, long attributed to Joseph Haydn, is now thought to have been written by Leopold Mozart, father of you-know-who.

In French, the toy symphony was known as the “symphonie burlesque,” which is the genre invoked in this piece by the French composer Étienne Méhul (1763-1817).  Méhul, the veritable court composer of the French Revolution, created a number of bombastic musical spectacles to celebrate the new Republic, including a performance for the Festival of the Supreme Being in 1794.  For this work, Méhul allegedly marshaled a chorus of 300,000 voices, which was split up into four “armies” which sang the root, third, fifth, and octave of the tonic chord.

The Ouverture burlesque finds Méhul in a much more intimate mood.  This recording prominently features a blown membranophone instrument known in French as the mirliton, but better known among English speakers as the noble kazoo.  An instrument with a much longer pedigree than one might think, the mirliton was discussed in organological treatises by Francis Bacon and Marin Mersenne.  Lewenthal’s assertion that this is the first appearance of the instrument on record, however exciting the notion, must be taken with a grain of salt.

Méhul’s piece ends with the marking “charivari,” at which point the band breaks out in a riotous coda in six different keys at once.  Noise should always be this much fun.

November 24, 2010, 4:22pm

http://mattin.org/

Noise and Capitalism

(Re-posted from Philadelphia Sound Forum)

October 20, 2009, 2:34pm

http://www.bbk.ac.uk/english/skc/noise/

Steven Connor: “Noise”

Thanks to a lead from a friend I just discovered this excellent little series of pieces on noise and sound by Steven Conner, Professor at Birkbeck College in London.  The format is something between lecture and radio-play— informative, clever, and captivating.  This is a great example of a fruitful hybridization of scholarship, art, and entertainment.

September 11, 2009, 6:10pm

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