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Henry Flynt: “Violin Strobe” (1978)

From the album New American Ethnic Music Volume 3: Hillbilly Tape Music

The title says it all: American experimental musician and freelance art-theorist Henry Flynt combines Steve Reich-style tape loops with furious virtuoso fiddling in an ecstatic hybridization of the radically disparate.  In fact, the convergence of the extremes of so-called “high” and “low” culture—“the image of the untrained ‘folk creature’ as avant-gardiste,” which Flynt attributes to Ornette Coleman— is at the root of many of the most vital cultural expressions of the 20th century.

“My music is a sophisticated, personal extension of the ethnic music of my native region of the United states.  In all of my experimentation, I assert myself as an autochthon (colloquially, a “native” or “folk creature”)—siding with the emotional experience and the musical languages of the autochthonous communities.  In particular, I assert that the objective sound elements of blues and country music are demonstrably incommensurate with the categorization of sound in European musicology—as for example in the use of an unaccented glissando on the beat as a “note”—and in non-arithmetical division of the beat.”

October 03, 2009, 1:41pm

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Vladimir Ussachevsky and Otto Luening: “Incantation for Tape” (1953)

From the album An Anthology of Noise & Electronic Music / Second A-Chronology 1936-2003

Luening and Ussachevsky were two of the primary movers in the New York “tape music” scene, America’s answer to the roughly contemporaneous movements of musique concrète in Paris and elektronische Musik in Cologne.  The American experimenters were less doctrinaire in their choice of sounds than their European counterparts— the French favoring “found sounds” and the Germans insisting on the purity of synthetically generated signals such as white noise and sine waves— but their style is no less distinctive.

The title “Incantation” is appropriate, not only for the vaguely religious mood of the music, with its tolling bells and backwards, chant-like vocals, but also because this piece signals the historical moment at which electronic music as we know it was called into being.  This music quietly announces the age of disembodied sound.

“Incantation” can be found on a superlative collection assembled by Guy-Marc Hinant and released on his Sub Rosa label.  Each of the four two-disc sets contains a fantastic cornucopia of electronic and experimental music, much of which is previously unpublished.

March 18, 2009, 12:17pm