The new “trans-digital conservatory” Data Garden celebrated its launch yesterday with an ambitious public art extravaganza at Bartram’s Garden, the stately botanical garden founded in 1728 on the banks of the Schuykill river in southwest Philadelphia.  Entitled “Switched-On Garden,” the event was a lovely mix of technology and nature, old and new, experimental art and unpretentious fun. Unfortunately, I had to leave before the live performances began, but I took time to check out each of the four sound installations. 

Right on the banks of the Schuykill, near an outcropping over the river known as Notched Rock, New York-based artists Dan Scofield and Miriam Simun set up a small forest space in which several ambiently placed speakers emitted haunting, disconnected electronic tones. Responding to the information gathered by infrared sensors mounted on trees, the sounds reacted subtly to the presence of listeners.

A participatory work by Brazilian sound artist Vivian Cacurri was set up on a wooden platform called the octagon. Eight tree stumps, each with its own contact microphone, provided seating for visitors to step up and perform as they please. The microphones were run though a mixing unit whose amplification and delay effects served to blur the relationship between the sounds and their sources, creating a sonic anonymity that encouraged even the shy to take part.

In the lily pond near the middle of the grounds, Philadelphia musician Jesse Kudler created a floating sound installation consisting of small speakers connected to mp3 players mounted on four rectangles of styrofoam, which strangely resembled icebergs. The quiet, continuous tones melded gently into the ambient soundscape.

In the upper garden was an array of twittering and screeching electronic gadgets presented by Sam Cusumano of Electricity for Progress, an educational initiative that teaches people about electronics through circuit bending and other experimental endeavors. Nine stations placed about the garden presented various unassuming objects—from a Barbie karaoke machine to a trio of apples— that Cusumano had turned into glorious digital noisemakers. I tried out a number of the “instruments” myself but ultimately enjoyed just taking in the delightful phantasmagoria of uncoordinated sound.

The entire event called to mind an electrified version of R. Murray Schafer’s vision of the “soniferous garden,” a space devoted to communal music-making in a natural setting: ”In one corner of the garden…there might also be a place for a public instrumentarium, consisting of a number of simple instruments…so that the citizens of a community might come together and play together.”  

October 17, 2011, 9:11pm

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The Hub: “Waxlips I” (1991)

From the album Boundary Layer 

This Thursday at Vox Populi in Philly, computer music pioneers Mark Trayle and John Bischoff will be playing in a concert organized by my comrades at Philadelphia Sound Forum. Trayle and Bischoff are both alums of the network music collective The Hub, which in turn spun off from the seminal “micro-computer network band” the League of Automatic Music Composers.

The name “The Hub” was first used in connection with a performance by Bischoff and Perkis in San Francisco in 1985. The group appeared in its six-person form for the first time in a pair of concerts curated by Nicolas Collins in New York in the fall of that year. Breaking up into two sets of three, The Hub performed simultaneously at two separate Manhattan venues, connected via modem. (Kyle Gann dubbed this phenomenon, perhaps the first of its kind, “musica telephonica.”) Ultimately, however, the group opted for “in the flesh” performances, which allowed them to better respond to the unfolding algorithmic structure of the music.

This sephirot-like diagram shows one of the group’s MIDI configurations

In The Hub’s first incarnation, the members’ computers were wired together via a central memory unit they called “the Blob.” Around 1990, they adopted a MIDI interface, which allowed each player to communicate to any other directly, rather than through a common data pool. Later in the decade The Hub would abandon MIDI-connected homemade synthesizers for computer audio languages such as Max, and in the mid-90s they revisited the possibility of simultaneous music-making over the internet.

Waxlips, conceived by Tim Perkis in 1991, provides a great example of the group’s approach to computer-augmented improvisation:

The rule is simple: each player sends and receives requests to play one note. Upon receiving the request, each should play the note requested, and then transform the note message in some fixed way to a different message, and send it out to someone else. The transformation can follow any rule the player wants, with the one limitation that within anyone section of the piece, the same rule must be followed (so that any particular message in will always cause the same new message out). One lead player sends signals indicating new sections in the piece (where players change their transformation rules) and jump-starts the process by spraying the network with a burst of requests. The network action had an unexpected living and liquid behavior: the number of possible interactions is astronomical in scale, and the evolution of the network is always different, sometimes terminating in complex (chaotic) states including near repetitions, sometimes ending in simple loops, repeated notes, or just dying out altogether.

September 19, 2011, 10:38am

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Sun Ra: “Space Probe” (excerpt)

From the album Space Probe (1970)

In 1968, the visionary afro-futurist musician and bandleader Sun Ra moved his Arkestra from New York to Philadelphia, where the band took up residence in the Germantown neighborhood in the northern part of the city. “To save the planet, I had to go to the worst spot on Earth,” he later recalled, “and that was Philadelphia, which was death’s headquarters.”

But despite his initial disdain for what he called the “city of brotherly shove,” Sun Ra eventually made himself at home in Philadelphia, and became a fixture at the city’s libraries, record stores, and radio stations. He lived in Philadelphia until his death in 1993, and the Arkestra remains based in Philly to this day, led currently by saxophonist Marshall Allen.

Space Probe was among the first Philadelphia releases on Sun Ra’s own Saturn label. Like many of his recordings from this period, it was put out in limited numbers and available only at performances. The title track is an 18-minute odyssey of synthesized pyschedelia created on a prototype Minimoog. (The thick, layered sound was probably created by multi-track recording the synth, which was monophonic.) This was Sun Ra’s first recorded work with the Moog, an instrument that would become a regular part of his setup. It is a stunningly experimental piece of music whose throbbing electronic ecstasies bear a remarkable affinity to Henri Pousseur’s 8 Études Paraboliques of 1972. (Was the Belgian composer inspired by Sun Ra, perhaps having heard him during the Arkestra’s 1970 European tour? Anything’s possible.)

John Szwed’s biography of Sun Ra, Space is the Place, provides a taste of the Arkestra’s performances circa 1970:

“At Gino’s Empty Foxhole, the basement of a church [St. Mary’s episcopal] on the edge of the University of Pennsylvania campus in Philadelphia, he used lighting combined with industrial fans to create solar storms that sent the musicians’ capes billowing as if the Arkestra was in flight. Then Sun Ra disappeared into his own cape, his face outlined against the windblown fabric, and, while a space chord howled, he tore a hole in the cape and poked his head through, as if he were ripping an opening in space itself. To members of the audience who came prepared by hallucinogens and stimulants—as they did more and more often nowadays—the spectacle was magnified beyond belief.” 

May 05, 2011, 3:34pm

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Electronic Music in the Junior High School: Original Compositions by Students of the Julia R. Masterman School (1968)

From the album Creelpolation 1

In November 1967, Virginia Hagemann, a teacher at the Julia R. Masterman School in Philadelphia, received a $316 grant from the superintendent to launch a laboratory for electronic music for students in grades 6 through 9. Hagemann documented this remarkable undertaking in two articles published in the Music Educators Journal.

In the first meeting, Hagemann’s electronic music class studied the different types of scales (pentatonic, diatonic, and twelve-tone) and the distinction between semitones and quarter-tones; listened to a recording of microtonal chant sung by Tibetan monks; was introduced to the pure sine wave; and considered aesthetic concepts such as musique concrete, aleatoric techniques, silence, and graph notation. The session closed with a group listening to two electronic compositions: Lemon Drops by Kenneth Gaburo and Futility by Herbert Brün. Hagemann describes the children’s reaction:

Lemon Drops, because of its delicacy, was deliberately chosen to ease the listener gently into this new world of sound. Futility, on the other hand, was selected to test the reaction of the group to the harsher elements of electronic music. One might conjecture that the children would immediately reject the second composition as a meaningless conglomeration of noises, utterly foreign to their accepted ideas of music. The reaction to Lemon Drops was favorable, but when Futility was played, the response was somewhat akin to a standing ovation. At the unanimous request of the audience, it was repeated.

With very simple means—little more than a frequency generator and a tape recorder—the students then set out to make their own music. The studio was used as a means of democratizing artistic activity, based on the principle that all people have inherent creativity that can be tapped under the right conditions. At the same time, students were encouraged to perfect their artistic technique and apply rigorous intellectual discipline in their work. (A handful of the students used John Cage’s Silence as a kind of class text.) As demonstrated in the short pieces in this recording, the children had no trouble getting a grasp on the basic techniques of electronic composition, and were quite comfortable with a musical idiom that most adults of the time still refused to accept. The project stands as an inspiring model for experimental, project-based music education.

March 18, 2011, 5:16pm

Concert review: John Zorn at Christ Church, Philadelphia (March 6, 2011)

There is something irreducibly strange about contemporary music for the pipe organ. Perhaps more than any other instrument, the organ is indelibly associated with deep cultural traditions: its sound evokes ceremony, worship, and divine cosmic order—all very well suited to the grandeur of a Bach fugue or Mozart mass, but not so much to the spirit of most contemporary music.  But on the other hand, on a technical level the organ can be seen as the ideal instrument for 20th century music: long before electronics, it allowed allowed the creation of synthetic timbres, and its sheer sonic force lends itself readily to clusters and “wall of sound” effects so dear to many modernist composers.

On Sunday, March 6, New York-based composer John Zorn came to Christ Church in Old City Philadelphia to play the church’s pipe organ in the final event of the Blindspot festival, a ten-day series of contemporary dance performances and organ concerts co-presented by Bowerbird and Ladybird. Zorn was originally scheduled for a single appearance on the festival’s opening night, but he came back at the end for an encore performance.

Zorn’s playing was effortless, joyful. As expected, his performance was rich in juxtaposition: the music passed from angular atonal counterpoint to bright chordal blasts of sound; gently flowing melodies over modal ostinati gave way to huge, glorious clusters that shook the windows of the church. What was so remarkable about the performance was how self-evidently all these elements seemed to fit together. In Zorn’s hands, the contrast of this heterogeneous material was anything but forced or bombastic; he convinced the listener that these sounds belong together by nature.

The leadership of Christ Church has declared its commitment to establishing an ongoing connection with contemporary music, and their hosting of the Blindspot festival certainly shows they mean business. Here’s hoping the collaboration continues and grows stronger in the future.

March 07, 2011, 7:05pm

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Crash Course in Science: “Factory Forehead”

From the album Signals from Pier Thirteen (1981)

Behold the latest installment in my ongoing archaeology of the weird music lineage in Philadelphia, this piece by the apparently short-lived electro-pop trio Crash Course in Science.

I recently watched the superb BBC documentary “Synth Britannia,” about the synth-pop/early industrial scene in the U.K. circa 1980, and I’m wondering if CCIS represent a parallel movement in the United States.  Although they seem to be more indebted to the deliberate crudeness of the punk aesthetic than are their British counterparts, the band’s sound is as noisy and synthetic as anything I’ve heard by early Human League or Cabaret Voltaire.

An excellent video of the band performing on TV can be viewed at WFMU.

November 28, 2009, 8:41pm

Concert review: The Gonzalez Cantata

6 September 2009, Philadelphia

Part of Philadelphia’s 2009 Live Arts Festival / Philly Fringe, The Gonzalez Cantata has taken the world by storm through an apparent triumph of viral marketing.  I was fortunate enough to get tickets to the last performance in its premiere run.

The music of Gonzalez, by the young Austrialian-American composer Melissa Dunphy, evokes the tradition of 18th-century dramatic genres characterized by huge choruses, effusive arias, and speech-like recitative used to convey the plot.  Dunphy’s music is a deft combination of historical reference and modern verve, animated by a musical sense humor consistently impeccable in its timing.  The music is frequently ironic in its juxtaposition of classical grandeur against the inadvertent absurdity of the libretto, but what is more impressive is that Dunphy’s score creates moments of sincere and un-ironic pathos, where the political drama is transcended for an instant by the poignancy of the human condition.

Hearing Gonzalez was for me— and I imagine for many in the audience— a cathartic encounter with the traumas of the recent political past.  Alberto Gonzalez, a relatively benign figure in the Bush administration’s menagerie of monsters, stands in for the collective venality of that group, and for the enduring national shame of the Bush years. What is best about Gonzalez is that it ultimately portrays its subject not as a “bad guy” to be reviled, but as the unsuspecting avatar of a systematic political catastrophe.  Christ-like, Gonzalez died for the sins of the American electorate.

September 06, 2009, 4:38pm

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Reverend Jesse Alexander Harding: “Perfunctory Punk Factory Funk Factorial!”

From the album I am an infinite scrutiny.

Today, some more “home-grown” music from Philadelphia.

Apparently Rev. Harding (of the Church of Rube Goldberg) and I have been eavesdropping on the same cosmic radio station. How else could he have discovered that the secret to sonic enlightenment lies in the alchemical synthesis of brutalist noise-bombs and shamelessly grooveable synth-pop saccharinity?

Much more music can be heard (and downloaded) at Harding’s website.

August 09, 2009, 12:37pm

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The Wiggly Tendrils: “What Birdies Dream”

From a pirated master tape (2009)

The Wiggly Tendrils are an enigmatic Philadelphia music collective rumored to consist of 20-30 members operating out of a basement workshop in a condemned building somewhere near Baltimore Avenue.  Their style veers virtuosically between introspective voice-and-guitar soliloquies, rollicking earworm-infested sing-alongs, and hyperactive synth-pop microsymphonies.

Listen at your own risk— you may not be able to stop.

May 24, 2009, 3:01pm