Colour - Week 4 class response, T&P.

Listening to the colour of music. We started with an analysis exercise this week, for a track called Lera by Autechre. A disjointed piece of glitchy beats, noise, detuned blips and drones. Listening to the piece critically in terms of colour and form, we draw a pretty strange picture, as the rhythmic shapes and lines - lets say, the geometry - of the piece don't form any solid shape. By this I mean the piece doesn't connect structurally the way a dance/popular music piece is expected to. There's no loops, no repeated pattern or groove. Autechre pretty much establish something and deconstruct it immediately. The colours that fill the spaces in amongst the lines are off hues, almost like watered down ink blots, seeping into paper, or oil dropped in water. The use of static/noise elements in place of harmonic instrumentation adds a feeling of rearrangement, like shuffling the pages of a newspaper around.

We followed it up with Run The World by Beyonce. To begin with, lets comment on that soaking wet snare drum in the intro: WOW. The piece is mostly build with vocal and percussion layers, with elements of noise (similarly to Autechre) shuffling/colouring in the geometry of the vox/snare drums. I totally rate Beyonce.

The track by My Bloody Valentine that we listened too (I missed the title) seems atypical of what I could find online of their work. Everything I found seemed to be pretty conventional rock. The track we heard in class was like rainbow static, distortion with hints of pitch. I really responded to this piece visually. Like something by Fennesz, I loved the use of noise, but felt that this music needed something cleaner in amongst the dirt to really sound complete. I think I prefer things mixed up like that, for example, when Fennesz works with David Sylvian, The clean, perfection of the vocals over the "noise", connects the music with the listener more directly. Maybe. I don't know. Just writing that leaves a dirty taste in my (fingers) mouth. Like I said, I responded to My Bloody Valentine positively and with - a mass of colour in mind - strong visual connections.

I'd like to talk about Scott Walker and Einsturende Neubauten together. Mostly because they both did  similar things for me. I don't really aspire to this kind of thing, but I like what they're about. There's a complete disregard for what's considered as "right" in music production. I really respect that. With regard to Scott Walker, It's Raining Today, beautiful orchestrations, I loved that. It's totally something I do. That suspended dissonance, colouring in the sound. I didn't enjoy the gospel piece as much, but where he's coming from is still really interesting. Comparatively, the Einsturende Neubauten was kind of annoying, and off-putting, but in really interesting ways. The vocals were a particularly clever technique. I felt the whole piece to be a bit contrived. In retrospect it reminds me of Anthony Coleman's version of Gainsbourg's Ce Mortel Ennui (can't find a link as yet), the way the vocals are right up in your face, and the noisy colours of instruments punctuate it, but everything is about soft/gentle themes. I think the literal use of silence was what blocked me to really enjoying the piece.


Klagfarbenmelodie. Continuing a melody across different voices. Jumping from sound to sound, seems erratic and blotchy at first, until the colours blend together, and the really cleverness of the piece takes form. I like it a lot. I'm going to explore it in my own work. In a way this music sounds a bit Looney Tunes. It's likely that Carl Starling was probably influenced by this music. It's incredibly rich with colour. Lots of sounds are happening, and what's really going on, our perception of what we're refering to as "colour" is really just contrast. The tonal contrast gives the sounds a sense of hue against other sounds. These colours wouldn't be vivid on their own, but their relationship within the piece causes vibrations that generate hue. I'm not saying monophony = monochromatic. But in essence, sound needs context before it has colour. Just like a C on it's own doesn't tell us what key we're in until we hear it in context with the rest of the harmony, a pizzicato string on it's own doesn't represent any specific colour until we hear it unfold in context with the rest of an ensemble. I'm not going to try and argue about what colours correspond to what sounds or notes, because that kind of synaesthetic experience is subjective. My point is the vibrations, the tones and hues are generated in a context, and the same sound can colour two pieces differently.


As a final reflection on the class, specifically on the in class task of analysing the synchresis of sound and vision, I must say I loved the piece we looked at, and felt that the 3 of us did a great job of describing it. Mothlight was the title of the film, and the noisy, screechy piece James selected to play with it was a gorgeous accompaniment. The relationship reflected insect nature, and the television static like flashes of imagery with the almost static noise of the track was a great combination. As the colour revealed itself in the video, I found myself hearing new things in the sound. The vision really influenced the listening experience. I liked the film a lot. It reminded me of some Man Ray films, but the fragile beauty of the moth wings on the film gave the otherwise dissonant, or perhaps "ugly", surface nature of the work a natural world connection that made it more pleasant as piece went on.

Pre-class response to set readings/listening - Spectral Music - week 4 T&P

I've never heard this term before, "Spectral Music". The description in the introductory chapter certainly makes it sound interesting. Such a great way to think about tonality/harmonic movement, and by adding timbrel development to the mix, and playing with colour in a way that is usually reserved for melody/harmony, well that's very interesting to think about.

The first of the listening pieces is Lux Aeterna by Gyorgy Ligeti. This piece is probably best known for it's use in 2001: A Space Odyssey, during the "trip" scene. An amazing piece. I've always been fascinated with the vocal timbre, and I've never been able to relate it to anything else. Listening to it in context with spectral music I notice that the timbrel variations in each register resonate, or vibrate, at different relative speeds, which I guess could be due to a serial harmonic relationship. I was aware of Ligeti's concepts of micropolyphony, and his use of cluster chords, and I always related that to colour effect of this piece, and it's relationship to the colourful visuals from Kubrick's film, that I so obviously associate with the piece.

I don't know anything about Gerard Grisey. but I love this music. The harmonic/timbrel interplay, and all the weird overtones make for a sharp, electric kaleidoscope of sound colours. I'm particularly fond of the violin passage towards the middle/end. Some really interesting phrases and timbrel expressions coming from the instrument. It's interesting to me, after the first part of the reading, that the listening excerpts are acoustic chamber music. I was expecting synthesizers, or more electronic sounds. The tones and colours emanated  from these two works are a staggering display of what good instrumental players are capable of generating from their strings, or brass, etc. It's like being trapped in the future sometimes, always thinking in terms of today, and the tools we use now. When really, the electronic tools of now are merely digital representations of the great things about the tangible side of music making history.

Scelsi is another composer who's name I'm unfamiliar with. The piece in the listening has way more going on than the reading excerpt would suggest. The use of varied dynamics and timbre are obvious characteristics, the micro tonal movement and micro-harmonic layering is ear bending, and really messes with the tone of the notes. Probably one of the best things I've heard in ages actually. This is something I tried to play with a lot on my new music to fall asleep to... record. sustaining long notes or clusters on an analogue synth, and slowly moving one of the oscillators tiny bits out of tune, varying little elements of filters on parts of the sound. The idea there being something with a dreamlike, forgettable, yet totally affecting quality. Scelsi's music also reminds me of some Xenakis music for cello and clarinet I saw performed, that uses a similar idea of out of tune unisons to create micro rhythms in the beating of frequencies. That piece also contained a timbrel exploration that occurred through the sustained, detuned notes.

Of Form & Function 2: Relfections on in class listening. Week 3 T&P Part 3

It was great to begin the set of pieces for listening/analysis with Fennesz. As a big fan of Christian Fennesz's work, it helped contextualize the whole focus of the class right away. Being asked to listen to music in a critical way is made easier when you begin with something familiar. The piece we heard was Before I Leave from Fennesz's album Endless Summer, a record that has such an incredible effect on me, an influence on the way I approach sound, guitar playing, remixing, pretty much everything. In fact, I can say that about his entire body of work, his solo work, the collaborative stuff with Ryuichi Sakamoto, and with David Sylvian especially. I've never really looked into his process, in terms of gear or software etc, but his approach to sound, in particular his approach to noise, and it's place/context within the world of music has been something I've, let's say, ripped off in my own music. What I like about his music is that he makes static and distortion and other "noise", and makes you hear them in a soothing, melodic context. The world is full of noise, and it is full of beauty, and Fennesz makes us aware of them as equal, connected parts of the same world. Before I Leave stands out on Endless Summer insofar as it is the more rhythmic piece from the record. When I say rhythmic, it is because the essence of the piece involves micro loops of different content, that create an almost skipping cd effect, or similar to a plug-in with Ableton Live called Beat Repeat. It's as if there is a sweet ambient  sound piece going on, but we're hearing it in tiny looped chunks. The form of the work is simple, there's a chord progression, with lots of variation in the timbre, and each looped chunk plays for roughly the same amout of time. Sometimes the loops feel longer or shorter, but it's an illusion created by the loop points being off center with the sound fragments.  So the function of the repetition in this work is to make something static into pulse, and then to use the inaccuracy of the loop points to create variations within the pulse, and thus create a natural, human effect/emotion/narrative in/of the piece.

It's interesting and difficult to discuss form when speaking of loop based music. When you look at say, Beethoven, it's easy as there's movements and modulation and lots of phrases that can be grouped in certain ways. Or when you look at jazz, and early pop music, there's verses and choruses and bridges, middle eights. Looking at music like Before I Leave makes you turn on you sonic microscope (oh, the Doctor Who imagery that implies), and you have to listen for form in other places. At least with Fennesz there's a sense of harmonic/melodic progression that can be followed, and repeats recognised, but that brings me to the next piece we listened to in class, by the group Pan Sonic. A minimal synth piece, it follows a predictable pattern of building and layering, with a new sound coming in every 8 counts, there's long sounds and short sounds, long bass drones that cycle through their pitch material half the time to the rumbling sound that opens the piece. A high VCF sprinkler effect that acts as a faster, almost hi-hat part. Everything is pulsating, and when things get dense enough, parts drop out, then come back, the variation of layers becomes the form of the piece. But Pan Sonic are much more elegant and complex than just that. Where the function of the repetitive layers develops the piece through variation of dynamics and textural layers, there's a slowly building layer of sustain rising up beneath the piece. The tension it develops as it coincides with the progression of layering, pushes the music up and over the top. It's a much more interesting sound than simpler minimal (techno) music that uses only the add and subtract process. In this piece by Pan Sonic, the form is articulated differently to Fennesz, but it's use of repetition is the same. Both use the repetition as the pulse/rhythmic function, but where Fennesz has a form built on a progression of tonal material that has it's own development and repeats, and is texturally (more or less) monophonic (although there are complex elements like the different frequencies of static within each sound fragment, the layers cut from one to the next, not overlapping like the latter piece), the Pan Sonic music is built from polyphonic textual density, and a dynamic build across the whole piece which gives it a single form, from start to end without a repeat.

When I think of form, and what it means, it's really hard to break away from the classic definition, as described in the week 1 reading chapter by Schoenberg. I don't know why. I guess I'm a structuralist at heart. I like to have my beginning and middle and end, I like to have narrative, I like things to be clear. I'm also a bit of a surrealist (or let's say, fan of surrealism), and so the music I make is more of an imagined structuralism. Maybe it's because I'm a product of too much fantasy and scifi escapism. I want a story, but I want to escape reality at the same time. I want to be able to follow the form, but I want to get lost in it too. Like lucid dreaming. To use one of my own pieces as an example of what I mean, Girl In The Grip Of The Octopus, which I played to the class last week. The piece has definite sections, and their relationship is apparent across all the musical elements, but the way they connect is amorphous, until the end when the rhythm has built up and solidified itself. While the narrative of the form isn't following and predictable convention, it's still there and easy to follow. Like looking at a Magritte, or Dali painting, where all the elements are what they are, but the context is unusual. It's interesting to add, that this piece is also a good example of my "ripping off" of Fennesz, in the melodic-noise style of the opening soundscape.

So can we apply the notion of organicism to the music discussed above? It's pretty easy to surmise each piece. In fact playing a brief excerpt of either would be enough to give you the full idea, but is it fair to reduce music like this? It may be a functional way to analyze, but does it give true representation of the music's journey. I don't know if organicism can represent a piece's emotional content. In the case of Fennesz, if we were to just hear a 5 second fragment, we'd probably only take it as a CD skipping. The emotional journey is lost. Like waking up and only remembering a few images of your dream, you can remember how it felt, but when you try to describe it, these tiny fragments of  images do little to help convey the same feeling. I implied in my last post that I saw organicism as a subconscious element of a compositional process. Perhaps by doing things consciously the music could lose it's dream-like quality. This could be how process music, and minimalism differ from my more dreamlike structures. I had a chat with a friend at school (Tash from my art history tutorial) who said she liked my intros the most. She said she didn't like surrealism (unprompted, which was cool, because she obviously got what I was about) and would have liked it better if the intros just kept going, admitting she prefers minimalism as a process. I'm not sure how I feel about this yet. I'm not upset about it, in fact that's not what I mean. What I mean is, I'm not sure how I feel about the music having to function as one or the other. In the process of composition for something like Girl... there was lots of minimalist techniques and things that could be called process music. I generally use those as experiments to find interesting new sounds or parts that I can then apply to the form more consciously to paint the picture. I don't think the parts, or indeed the processes on their own are enough, and I like to think of my own music as more thoroughly constructed. Sure there's the methods in which I distill everything down, as I mentioned earlier, but that distillation isn't the music, it's merely how I refine the themes and connect the dots. I certainly am not interested in making music like the violin piece by Peter Arblinger we listened to. I loved the concept, and the analogy of the samurai drawing his sword was a really amazing idea, that someone would create this as a performance piece is cool enough, but I'm totally uninterested in making or listening to music like this. Process music, and indeed minimalism is so academic. It comes across as a study, not an expression. Perhaps it's that paradoxical notion of loving the concept but not loving the result that brings up all the headachey thinking, and like I said, I'm still not sure how it all makes me feel. I don't know if it's even worth over-contemplating. Hang the sense of it and proceed.

The next two pieces I will talk about and compare are by Bernhard Lang, and 3/4 Had Been Eliminated. Bernhard Lang's piece is a (supposedly 3 hour long) opera (I didn't catch the title). I honestly thought for the first minute that the piece was a sample collage. Such a dense assembly of parts, and the use of micro-repetition made the piece almost completely indescribable. Looking up his work to refresh my memory hasn't helped. A piece of his called I Hate Mozart was similar to what we heard in class, but I can't tell. While the whole of the work could be described, or illustrated by a mere fragment of the piece, it's hard to tell if we're still listening to the same piece or not since the phrases and repetitions don't function regularly. That is, they repeat in irregular fashion, and create a jolting from reality. I had to look up more of Lang's work to get any kind of perspective, as we commented in class, it's so dense that it becomes forgettable. The effect of the repetition serves it's purpose, but the music itself doesn't retain any conscious tangibility. I'm Youtubing Das Theater der Wiederholungen, and even as it plays I can't follow it. I'm definitely not saying this as a bad thing. I mean, I listen to heaps of music like this, but Lang takes it to a whole new level to what I'm used to. If I was to compare it to Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, or Ruins, Boredoms, Zappa, or even Naked City and Fantomas, all of those acts have parts and songs that instantly got me hooked. I say hooked in a pop sense. Passages of music that stick in your mind, riffs or melodies that you hum along to or rock out to even after you've turned it off. This is takes that idea of collage, and overloads you with it. I love it. I've been trying to put something like this together for ages. A collection of tiny pieces that have so much going on you explode. I call the project KUNGFUEPILEPSY named after the dance moves you see metalcore kids doing at gigs nowdays (seriously, what happened to the mosh pit?) The plan has always been to construct a heap of less than a minute pieces that have so much going on they feel like an eternity. How this is going to work has been a troubling process, and originally I wanted it to be a band. Lately I've felt it'd work better as an electronic process. Pretty soon it'll be at a point where I can start putting it together, but mapping it out and figuring out the sounds is really challenging. Challenging like the experience listening to Lang's work.

On the flipside to this, we have 3/4 Had been Eliminated, a piece called Widower. An awesome post rock piece, reminiscent of stuff by Set Fire To Flames or 7 Year Rabbit Cycle. In this piece the repetition was over a much longer scale than with Lang. In fact one could stretch a similar comparison between 3/4 and Lang as Fennesz and Pan Sonic. Where Lang is looping tiny parts and cut/pasting it all together (for lack of a better description) 3/4 Had Been Eliminated develop there repetition over the whole piece, adding and subtracting parts in really interesting ways. The piece maintains it's mood and form across the whole arc, but lots still happens. It's way less dense than Lang. It a great piece in fact to compare because they're both long, and both use an element of collage in their process, but 3/4 sparseness makes it a much more enjoyable - or more so, an easier to enjoy - listening experience. The journey is followable. The shapes and colours stand out. I feel a close relationship to my piece described above. I guess the post rock genre which is often very obvious about it's long repetitive, droney sections, has kind of spawned a new spin off in the sense that bands like 3/4 are deconstructing it. I definitely (if and when I'm forced to) see my music as stemming from the post rock genre. In a literal sense of post = coming after, and taking the elements of rock music into new territory. Most of the time when the term is bandied around it's describing something like Mogwai, instrumental rock that's built on repetition and dynamic build, but I think that may have been where the description merely begins, not the extent of it's scope. There's lots of bullshit talk about genre and sub-genre, post progressive rock and whatever, and all that is totally irrelevant to me. Anyway, I loved this music and am hunting it down to add to my collection.

To summarize this analysis of form and the function of repetition, it's worth noting that while i've said above that I find it hard to break free from the classic definitions of form, listening to music, and thinking about form in process, reducing things down and how that reveals things particular to the piece has been a really challenging and enlightening experience. Things we do when we create sometimes happen without knowing or thinking of the relationship to the history of our art form. This delving in and out of the macro/micro repetitions has deepened my understanding of perhaps where my place amongst all this is headed.

As a post script, I just wanted to comment on something we only briefly touched on in class, to do with composing for live/recorded contexts, and how they might be approached differently. Where with some recorded music, and the 3/4HBE track is a clear example of this, the production is what makes it interesting, and how that kind of music can be translate to the stage. Also, with something like Lang's work, does it translate better as a performance piece, and is the meaning lost when heard on record? Most musicians are conscious that the stage and the studio are very different entities. There are things that you can't do live, just as there are things that you can't capture to tape. So does an artist today have to work in both media. As a class we're all very studio focused. I am too I guess. I have been focusing a lot of attention on writing for the live band. Where if you go far enough into the sky you'll come out underwater was mostly written in the studio, I did take performance into account, and while some things aren't performable live with the band, and other are perfectly performable, there's also an element of adjustment to some piece to get them to work across both platforms. I came to this action from a concept record I put together over 2005-7 called new music to fall asleep to (lullabies by Justin Ashworth). The idea was that people were always describing things I had been making as "beautiful" and "soothing" and "relaxing" etc, and lots of people were described listening to it when they went to sleep. So I thought I'd prompt them, and in a way pull the piss, by making an ironically titled album of ambient music. People, particularly those who reviewed it often didn't get it. Didn't get the irony, didn't listen beyond the title of the record. It's dreamy and soft, but it's not meant to be soothing. I was attacking that notion by exhausting it. However, I wanted to create some kind of live context for the project (which was really hard to do in Melbourne's noisey bogan pub world) and I quickly realised two things: 1) It's near impossible to get people to a show when you call it music to fall asleep to. 2) People tune out if there isn't something to engage them, and the most obvious things to engage a live band audience are drums and vocals. And so some of the music had to change to make it work live, and in doing so, a band, the band I later called Glasfrosch, grew from the process of change, which has developed my music to where it is now. The current direction with Glasfrosch is working on two sets of contrasting yet complimentary thematic music. One set for morning, and one set for night. The process of composition is focused dually on making the material performable live, but also on how to produce the recording s so they give something the audience wont get from a show. Since it's hard with recorded music to engulf the listener in the energy that a live show creates, it's important to create some extended experience to compensate. Or in reverse, where certain production techniques aren't possible to convey with the same clarity from the stage, it is that performance energy that connects with the audience. I think it's probably a moot point, but most of us experience this revelation early on, from seeing our favourite recording artists perform live.

Organicism - Week 3 T&P Part 2.

In this post I wanted to talk briefly about organicism as it relates to my musical process. Specifically the way I approach harmony, melodic structure in composition and improvisation. Basically I have this process, whether it's conscious or not is hard to say, where I distill everything down to really simple relationships. It's usually based on some tonal or modal base, a scale or series of notes. Then, as I progress, rather than following any traditional forms of modulation (for lack of a better term right now) I look for ways to progress harmonically, to evolve the piece, by layering keys/scales, using the original base harmony to link the relationships and make them work.
In my last post I posed a rhetorical question - So is organicism a compisitional technique? - and although I admit readily this process isn't something I've consciously developed, it appears the answer is yes. It's worth noting that what I'm really referring to here as organicism is actually something more like a dumbing down of Schenkerian analysis. I don't set about making a piece of organically structured music, but I do reduce my ideas down and then build them in ways that maintain these very basic relationships. So in that, the process becomes something that can be summarized by the smaller elements that make the building blocks of the piece.
Reflecting on this little tidbit, it makes sense now that there's something to focus consciously on in composition. There's experiments to be done now, and new things to try, and when I'm composing new pieces from now on, I'll have this in mind as I work.

Of Form & Function: Organicism and Process music. Week 3 T&P Part 1.

An interesting class this week. I was really worried because there wasn't any reading set, and I had no idea what to expect. I like the reading assignments because it really helps me get focused for class. It was a really challenging class though. As always, it exposed me to heaps of new music, and really helped contextualize other influences on my work, and particularly the various processes that I've developed and spent time refining over the past few years.

The class focus was on "form and function", with a particular attention to loop based music, or more specifically, analyzing the use of repetition, and how variation of and within that repetition functions with regard to the piece's form. As the approach to this, James introduced us to the notion of organicism. Organicism is the process of analyzing music by distilling it down to it's fundamental parts. In a way, discovering the music's DNA. Often associated with Heinrich Schenker, and his idea that any piece of music can be reduced to a few notes, or minimal musical ideas. The analogy is that a piece of music as a whole can be identified by any of its smaller parts, like saying you can identify a particular forest by a single tree, or that you could identify an individual human by any one of it's cells. So is organicism a compisitional technique? Or is it merely an overly intellectual form of formal analysis? Are the two mutually exclusive?

Segue, and coming at the topic from the other direction, we have process music. When I say the other direction I'm not trying to imply that process music is in any way the opposite to organicism. What I mean is that it's the same discussion, but where organicism is best described in terms of analyzing music, process music, in it's very label, is looking at it in terms of compositional technique. The definition of process music can relate closely to the Morton Feldman article in week 2's readings. In fact, it's pretty hard to think of any music from the 20th century onwards that can't be described in some way as a type of process music. Usually the term is attributed to music where the process of composition becomes the music itself. The example that comes to mind first and foremost is Brian Eno's Discrete Music. In essence it's the Boulez school of thought (from the Feldman article) that he's not concerned with how a piece sounds, as how it's made. Serialism gone wild. Or perhaps the logical progression of it. Or is it? Like the 12tone music of Schoenberg, in Discrete Music, Eno devised a system that controls the outcome of the piece in every way, but unlike serialism, and more closely resembling something Cage might have done, Eno's system makes the process totally hands off. Using an elaborate feedback loop of electronic devices, all highly calculated, and then as sound input Eno uses Pachalbel's Canon in D major. The resulting music has nothing to do with Eno composing or performing anything, but is the result of a process of setting parameters and letting the music create itself. Somehow, through the various arguments/schools of thought on predeterminate/indeterminate musics that came before it, process music is almost the bastard love child of unknown parents.

As an illustration of organicism in action, however, Discrete Music is a great example. The music's very process means dropping in on any point within the piece makes it clear what you're listening to, where it's come from, where it will probably end up. This is just to highlight the relationship of the terms. But further exploration of the terms are needed if we're to really apply them to composition in a broader sense. In class we began with Four Organs by Steve Reich. Now "minimalist" music is an easy sub-genre to reduce down. Reich makes his process incredibly transparent. This whole scene was really about that. Maybe that was what made these names - Reich, Glass, Reiley - accepted in the mainstream, while they made some kind of serious art music, their process' transparency perhaps made it accessible to people. Their use of repetition is another factor, and process music, as it stands as a label for a particular sound, is often ascribed to music that uses repetition a great deal, or more so, music that undergoes a process of change through repetition. So with that in mind, let's look at some other Reich pieces (and in doing so, explore minimalism's obvious relationships with process music and organicism). Like the repetitive and gradual deconstruction of a single chord set to a pulse from a maraca in Four Organs, Reich's Pendulum Music is another process piece that uses repetition and variation. In this piece the process is more similar to Eno's in that it takes the composer further away from of the outcome, by letting something natural - gravity - do all the work. By suspending and then swinging microphones across the room, with amps on the floor that feed back as the mic passes over them to create rhythmic patterns of different frequencies or pitches. Another Reich piece, more traditional in it's approach is Piano Phase. A tiny melodic motive played by two pianists on two pianos set close together. While one player holds perfect time, the other phases slightly out, causing the frequencies and harmonics of the instruments to beat and phase in strange ways that interrupt the natural decay of the instrument, and shift the pattern of the rhythm. This piece is (to refer briefly to comments I made in an earlier post) another great example of tempo variation as a compositional device, as the second player isn't varying their part through any metric modulation, but by speeding up and slowing down in tiny amounts. The piece calls for massive control of tempo, something we're mostly taught to control as stability, not as a parameter in flux. In Piano Phase, the actual melodic information is minute. Where the music actually happens is in the variation, which happens through a process of repetition. Hence, the process becomes the music through that repetition. From a perspective of organicism each of these works can be as easily reduced, as the entire compositional process is one of reduction.

From here on, while I will refer to organisim and process music along the way, I'd like to begin to explore how these things relate to form. If we look at one of Reich's contemporaries, Terry Riley, in particular his piece In C, a piece without specified ensemble or duration. In C consists of 53 phrases set to a pulse. Any instruments, and indeed any number there of can perform the piece. Each phrase may be repeated any number of times before moving on to the next, and so on. The piece is titled In C because the piece is in C Major. So how does the form of this piece function if there is no specified duration? The performers work their way through the piece until it's finished. I always thought of it as a scored improvisation. The form of the work can be very different depending on who and how it is performed. If players are moving through some motives faster than others, the function of how some work against others can completely change the experience. Riley throws some modulations in, using some related key signatures along the way, an F# pops up and we find ourselves In G, but sometimes not every player is at the same point. He also takes the phrases into C Minor. Again, this can have a clashing effect. In essence, it's as if Riley has gone through the process of dissecting a clinical approach to western harmonic music, reducing the piece down to very basic expressions of a C major triad, and slowly adding to it, including the aforementioned modulations that represent standard classic harmony. Rhythmically the phrases all build from a pulse, and evolve in an overlapping way. From a grace note crotchet, through to eventually more complex and overlapping phrases and sustained semibreves. It's hard to tell how Riley has come to this arrangement, but the parts all work with all the other parts, all the time. So the ensemble approach to performing the music can be one of independent progression, or of sympathetic listening - that is to say, where the players progress at an even rate through the phrases, listening and following the flow from one motive to the next. Usually it'll wind up a mix of these (depending on the size of the group, and the time restraints on the performance). Sometimes someone will finish long before the rest, or someone wont make it to the end. As a process, Riley has created parameters and input, but has left the mechanics of those parameters in other hands, like renting out your home fully furnished, or even, giving someone else your life to live,  saying "here is my job and these are my interests, be me".

MARCH: LOOP PROJECT

As part of my practice/process I make one of these little 10 second loop pieces every day (here they are each looped 4 times, fading out by the end, to give them some context as a loop based piece). This is something I've been doing since the start of February. The technique involves four instrument layers; guitar, synth, piano, beatbox, plus usually two auxiliary fx sends. These parameters fluctuate from time to time, sometimes adding and subtracting from the template, but this is the foundation of how it works.

In doing this, I've been able to progressively improve my recording and mixing skills, and also experiment with some sounds and processes that I don't normally spend a lot of time on. One of the things I've been experimenting with is guitar playing with an Ebow. An electronic bow device that creates a focused electro-magnetic field that resonates the guitar string and causing it to sustain. Using this to create drones, and processing it through a number of synths, filters, resonators, beat repeaters, and panning fx, both hardware and plugin types, to create different types of ambient stereo guitarscapes.

I've also been using this project to push my knowledge of synthesis, and in particular, my ability to program the MicroKorg, which has some great potential, but due to the interface, patching and programing sounds is a bit tricky. Most people who use these pretty much just knob twiddle on the presets, but I'm totally not into using presets, even though some are pretty cool. I prefer instead to customize a sound more or less from scratch, and then build variations around that to suit my needs in each new song. Those variations might mean cutoff/resonance/lfo changes to suit the melody lines or to fit with a certain tempo, to compliment the other sounds in a mix, or sometimes, just to see what else I can do, I'll re-patch something just to see how it works and sometimes that makes something interesting happen.

In my opinion the piano is the king of all instruments. I wish I could actually play it. I know my way around a keyboard on a rudimentary level. The sound of a piano is just my favourite thing. It's so rich and complicated. Simple melodies just sing and pierce my heart, sometimes a single note is enough. But it's also tough, and when it gets deep, it's a great bass sound. The range of the piano means regardless of what else is going on in various registers, when you need to add colour, the piano will always be able to fill the right gap. That's pretty much how I approach my piano parts, especially in this process, as the splashes of colour that, if it were a painting, would be the ones that attracted your eye the most.

Ever since I could hold a microphone I've wanted to use my voice as an instrument, in particular, a percussion instrument. I don't consider myself a beatboxer, beat boxing is a hip-hop sound.  I don't really like the conventional hip-hop style, mostly because I don't really like hip-hop (I like some, I don't want to get into that here). I consider myself a vocalist on some levels, I sing, I love to process my voice and make sounds that aren't "singing", and I love to play with rhythm. Some years ago I studied tabla with a nice Indian chap in Northcote. I bought a really nice set and had lessons every week. I loved the instrument and I loved the language. I couldn't say I remember any of it now, but it's certainly had an effect of my vocal style. So rather than program "beats" from the multitude of drum samples I have made and otherwise accumulated over the years, I thought the music would sound better if I made the percussive elements more human, and in making this choice, have been able to further develop my beatbox/vocal percussion technique into something more than it was in the past on tunes I made like Black Comedy or Green.

All of this I see as a form of ongoing development. The compositional practice, production practice, and the various sound crafting and performance practice that this process/project creates has been invaluable to me, and has also built up a great sense of discipline. 

In a ten second piece that loops, the only real drawback is the limits to the tempos you can play in. So a lot of these little pieces begin to feel the same, I've played around with odd time signatures to freshen it up along the way, but even then there's still a limit. I don't consider any of these to be finished works of course. Some I'd like to explore further, maybe even mash together to create new larger works. Some exist purely as R&D for sound noodling.

As they exist with the animations that Sophia makes (sophia hanover on vimeo), that is something else entirely; a development of two artists, working separately with a similar practice, marrying the work to show the relationship of process.




Check out the month of February here

Perception of the art student's work - postscript week 2 (T&P)

It's an interesting observation, but I feel I have to comment on it. I felt like everyone in class who played their music yesterday only seemed to talk about the production side of their work, or indeed we only seemed interested in knowing that about each others work - software and plugins, studio techniques and such. I tried to talk more broadly about the practice and themes behind my pieces, and less about the tools, but even I didn't really go into the why as much as i had planned. It got me wondering about how some of us perceive the course, and how it might be different. I chose this course to develop my work in both conceptual and technological ways, and to deepen it's roots into the art world. Also to meet awesome new people and work along side them. I have definitely done that. The people I am studying with know their shit and make awesome and diverse stuff. I feel like we should push the discussion in terms of ideas and the "why" of our craft, as it's obvious that we're all pretty well versed on our respective "hows".

This brings me to a little post script on the week's reading. The Viola article, which I must admit blocked me with all it's video tape talk, had a nice little theme running through the start of it, and I feel it's relevant to my observation of the class. Viola is talking about the causal and reduced thinking of our total perception. That our very senses are reduced to view the world and make sense of it. Westerners experience the world by reducing it to nothingness, causing a building back up of the universe in components we better understand, and perhaps as we would prefer it. In many Eastern cultures, there is a sense of the universe in all it's magnitude, and then there is a subtraction from it, to highlight a particular feature and to view it as it is in that fleeting time and place. Viola represents this by relating it to the Indian raga.
We do it like good little westerners in art school. We want to know "What is it that made that sound?" We define ourselves in genres. I like to see myself as part of something greater than a list of potential genres, and find a way to be connected to it all at once.
I guess it's just important for us to remain mindful of the connections between all the concepts that are thrown at us all week long. Pretty soon the technological side of our work is going to matter much less than the substance of what our art is saying.

Response to Week 2 readings/listening/discussion (T&P)

*note: I was going to post a before class reflection and post class reflection on the themes of this week's set reading. As this is kind of impossible now that my thoughts and notes are tainted by the linear perception of time, consider this a wibbly-wobbly/timey-whimey approach the topic, skewing between past and present thoughts and covering reflections on the in class listening and discussion along the way.

Four articles were presented for week 2, and pretty soon into the second one it became fairly apparent that the common thread or theme running through them was about perception. Covered in the reading broadly, the first article I tackled was by Michel Chion, from a book called Audiovision. Chion is supposedly an important authority in the realm of film scoring and sound design. A great article, delving into the listening process from a scientific and psychological angle. Chion discusses the different types of listening and the sources for sounds. It's so serendipitous, at the time of reading the article, since this is something we were focused on in Spacial practice this week. Chion's approach to listening involves 3  levels, being causal, semantic, and reduced. This is a separate discussion to the notions of active and passive listening, which I'll get to later.

So to briefly describe how each type of listening works, causal listening is like being a sonic detective. The act of listening to discover what made the sounds we are listening to. It's like passive transcription, and I say passive because I'm a subscriber to the jazz concept that transcription should involve playing an instrument. Causal listening is an "Is that what it sounds like?"  approach to listening. Do I really hear trumpets and car horns? But Chion is quick to admit the depth of the challenge in this form of listening. That sound sources are a complicated thing. The sound of someone writing is a pen on paper controlled by someone's hand and mind. There's a table beneath it, and it's in a certain space. The causal ear, I would deduce, is part of the analytical mind, and it is most commonly the the first reaction we, as modern human's, have to sound.
Semantic listening then, while causal listening is like a deduction of sound sources, a semantic ear discerns the sound's meaning. Like semantics in language, an argument over the meaning of a single word, can challenge an entire concept. Chion says that the semantic ear is part of the causal listening process, the deduction of relationship of sounds in art, the significance of a musical phrase, or indeed piece. This can be something that requires education, to interpret meaning in a work, or to merely be in tune with the concepts presented, or some works may transcend this need for prior knowledge or sensitivity, and speak on a deeper level, in easier to comprehend codes.
Reduced listening is objectively listening to sound as sound. Combating the subjective views that everyone can make up their own minds about what a piece means/says/sounds like, it's a way of reducing the semantic and causal aspects of sound into deal-able quantities. It is more or less a type of formalism, discussing music in a way of adjective, pitch, volume, tonal character, etc.
This type of ear comes much less naturally, especially if we're dealing with sounds where the source isn't known to us.
These 3 types of listening aren't separate things. Passively they are merely the aspects of our perception of sound. Actively they become distinct through their difficulty to separate. I will refer back to here throughout the reflection on the further reading and listening from class.

In Morton Feldman's article, he discusses the perception of sound from the composers point of view. I love how personal he makes it, the way he identifies his art, and identifies it's enemies, on personal levels. His notion that sound should be perceived as it is, and not controlled, is in a sense a reduced listening compositional approach. His antagonists, the Boulez and Stockhausen ilk (and I'll admit to honestly love their music), sought to organise sound by predetermining the parameters that made their music "indeterminate".  The perception there - that the composer is in control of this otherwise seemingly random arrangement of sound - to justify the outcome. Feldman's argument is that the Boulez opinion (that it doesn't matter as much how it sounds, but how it's made), demotes sound to a lower rung, in fact admits that the music they were composing wasn't aesthetically enjoyable to listen to and that the methods were the only way they could justify it to themselves - in a way, almost composing their music out of spite for it. It also perceives sound and music separately, that music has to be organised, otherwise it's "just sound", where Feldman perceives them as one and the same.
While I love the Cage/Feldman approach to composing in an arbitrary, or with "chance", fashion, I seriously question how one can create music this way without deciding something. Today, because of both schools of thought taking their respective methods the distances they have, the effect it has on me is - more or less - as equals. Where Cage composes a piano piece from the I-Ching, it begs the question, what are the parameters that turn the results into notes on the page? And how were those rules conceived? Conversely, to predetermine your music on every level only to set in motion randomly generated music is a logical fallacy, and verging on egotism. The graphic scores and other such chance tools Feldman and his contemporaries employed to take themselves out of the equation, while clever and interpretable on any level, depending/according to how adventurous the performer is, is still being perceived as a musical map of pitch and tone and rhythm etc, and performed (most probably) on a western musical instrument. Does a composer really get the credit for drawing a circle on a page, and writing "play your best tricks here"? On the other hand, is it valid to show your work as music when you admit that the sound is irrelevant to you and you're mostly just showing off how clever your process was. In this sense Feldman's argument is about appreciation of sound over ideas.
Both sides of this argument are valid in different circles, in varying amounts today. In the end, for me there is a balance that the artist needs to strive for. Maybe in the 1950's this balance wasn't an aesthetic necessity, because this was a different time, the time when these challenges and questions needed to be asked and confronted. Today these questions have many answers that can make either argument more or less relevant. For me, controlling sound is my craft, but the degree of control employed depends on the source of the sound, it's musical/formal qualities, and what i want it to say on a particular topic. Simply letting sound be sound, and calling it your own work has "been done" to many degrees. That doesn't discount it as valid compositional technique, but the context in today's world, in the now, makes it trickier to achieve without being derivative, or merely academic, a study piece. Perhaps this is where music and sound art split? Perhaps one set of compositional challenges are "musical" challenges, while the other have distanced themselves to become something else entirely? As it influences my work - and I see myself as musician and artist - being one and the same, in fact I will put it out there that I see sound art as a sub genre of music - I think that these pre and indeterminate methods of creating music are both merely processes for experimentation, and arriving at a completed work still requires aesthetic choices about the end product to be made.

Now, as I have just commented that the Feldman school of thought has mostly "been done", I would like to qualify my opinion by discussing my reactions to two pieces that were played in class, Pole's Armature Double, and Graham Lambkin's Amateur Doubles. Fascinatingly the very first thing I thought when Pole's piece began was "what is that sound?" I seriously caught myself in causal listening. I couldn't figure out if it was brass or strings or synths. There was a lot of sounds coming and going in the first few minutes and it took me a while to identify them. This just goes to back up Chion's argument that causal listening is the most common action for our ears/minds while the reduced listening takes much more active focus. So it's a pretty straight up 70's ambient prog piece. Really cool sounds, really meditative, lots of drones coloured in with cool flute and rhodes licks. Lambkin's piece again activated my causal ear, listening for the connections to Pole, and since what it sounded like was similar, I spent a good part of the time figuring out if it was a cover or a recording of the original recording. As it turns out, it was the latter. A microphone it the car with that Pole album playing. The sound is completely different, and the context is completely changed. But is it valid? I struggled in class to accept the Lambkin piece, mostly because I didn't find it aesthetically pleasing. But upon further thought I have come to really like it. Lambkin has recontextualized the original sound source, he's focused it in time and space, and he's made it new again in a way that perhaps doing a studio recording of a cover version wouldn't have done. But has it "been done" before? Like Sherrie Levine photographing Alfred Steiglitz's photograph of Marcel Duchamp's famous found object, The Fountain, does this piece by Lambkin need to exist? Does it say anything? Or is it simply an amateur double? I think Lambkin is taunting us to accuse him of this, and in such a way, I am afraid to admit, I can't fully get behind the attack on his work. I'm not usually one to hold back my opinion, but he has succeeded in baiting me to call him out, but also hit me with something that I can't quite combat. Hence my earlier comment that this sort of thing is trickier to achieve, but Lambkin has created a context to make it work. Do I have to like it though? Well, no, I don't have to like it, but I don't dislike it anymore.

I touched on a concept a few paragraphs earlier of a split between music and something called sound art. This  is a segue into the article by Bruce Russell. Before I comment on his article, I should contextualize my response to it with this, The Fundamentals Of Sonic Art & Sound Design by Tony Gibbs. A book I borrowed from the university library on Monday and read a bit, only to (more or less) throw it away in disgust. Aside from the practical flaws to the books presentation/layout etc (which I wont get into here), Gibbs is addressing us from the perception of "sound art" being new and exciting and proving that sound can be more than just a secondary art form, as it has existed in the music world, the film world, etc. He then goes on to define it more or less in a musicological way. I admit I don't know how or where he takes the concept because i found it obnoxious and put it down around page 30.
Bruce Russell on the other hand makes a clear and present argument on how he sees the distinction for sound art vs music. Now I really liked this article when I read it, and in class that was challenged, and with a fresh perspective I might see it with the same hypocrisies as Gibbs' book. But Russell beings his writing with the (convenient) disclaimer that he isn't trying to define a separation between music and sound art, but that he is discussing how they are different to him, or perhaps in his work. Now I did say that when I read it I liked it, but I must stress that I did not agree with it. As I touched on earlier, I don't see sound art and music as separate. Russell's analogy was nice though. That sound art is to music, what abstract painting is to classical/representational painting. I propose that they are more closely linked with the same analogy -  Sound art is a sub genre of Music, as abstraction and representational are sub genres of painting. It's a nice try on his behalf, but again it comes back to how we perceive our work, and how we perceive sound. There is an element of needless semantics to this argument, and I also think it's something that needlessly pigeonholes artists and alienates audiences. This perception that many (indeed some of those in this very course) have that audiences are unable to comprehend, and therefore unable to accept certain sound practices as "music" (and this has gone on for years) has pushed audiences away and created a gap between genres, or perhaps created a high brow and low brow thinking. But is it that black and white? Music is nice and sonorous and anything else mustn't be music, so we'll call it something else. I totally disagree. In the end both work with sound, and both set about achieving some semantic and aesthetic discourse. What I like about Russell's article is that he is looking for his place in amongst all this. And I think that's all we can ever really do. Allowing it to remain in flux is probably better than defining yourself and fixing it in time, an artist needs to allow for growth if he/she hopes to continue on the path, or indeed this could be said about life in general. This brings up a zen parallel. That allowing for growth, or "having an empty cup", as a follower of zen would say, is the only thing you really need to follow your path. You should remain open to all possibilities, and this definition of sound artist vs musician is too much of a road block for my craft. I have vexed it from my process, and can see myself in either light, happily. I will let my audience decide for themselves how they prefer to see (or indeed, hear) my work. That is, for me, what is more important.

Response to Ornette Coleman interview (week 1 Reading, T&P)

Ornette's an interesting one. I've heard a lot of his stuff, and I've heard a lot of players and composers who are influenced by him. In the jazz world, or more specifically the world of undergraduate jazz performance study, a world I spent a bit of time in many years ago, he isn't as highly regarded as other saxophone players, and is often seen as a bit of a farce. Some people put up walls when presented with free music. It's a challenge, and something that I was in love with at first sight. Coleman's playing has always sounded fresh to my ears, and artists like him and maybe Sun Ra were both instrumental in my continuing passion for jazz music, and also both reasons why I kind of "fell out" of the young jazz scene that I was surrounded with in 2001.

Ornette (in this interview) seems little interested in defending his own playing. He's aware of public perception of his work, but has always preferred to let his work speak for itself. I think this shows a really strong sense of self, and self resolve, spending 20 years of a career hearing constant comments that undermine your expression, and continuing to compose new work in the face of that perception.

It's a long interview, and I don't want to go reading into things that probably aren't there, or aren't relevant, but the crux of the exchange seems to be about relationships. The composers relationships with the music, the ensemble, and audience, and about people - human relationships - in general. Ornette sees these as part of the same thing, and this is what's important to him. In his explanation of his working practice with his ensembles, he describes a very personal process of collaborative teaching with his players. He's also very aware of keeping things fresh for people working with him, to challenge and stimulate them into wanting to make the music their own. His opinion that jazz players have little regard for the "composer",  instead wanting to lay claim to the work by trampling all over it, is very true. Jazz players learn the inner workings of music in a practical way so to dissect a composition on the fly, and traverse it's structure according to their own expression. Knowing this, Ornette challenges them, by providing frameworks that are looser than the traditional forms of jazz harmonic composition. Forging a human relationship with your ensemble deepens the core of the  music's potential energy. How many bands fall apart because the human relationship fell apart?

This is just a common thought, but I have a band, and the piano player (Adam Rudegeair) and I are best friends. We've know each other for about 11 years, and been playing various forms of music together, really learning a lot of new things together, pretty much from day one. The role of drummer in this band has had a few players come and go. The latest and present (and hopefully permanent) guy on the kit (James Wingard) is still really in a getting to know you phase of the relationship. But I auditioned close to 15 or so drummers over about 6 months to fill the spot in the band, and James was the only one I actually gelled with as a person. I too have tried to write as much new material since his joining the band. I agree with Ornette's opinion that when you play old material, new band members are less enthusiastic. Obviously we wanted to keep a couple of older favourites in the set, but working on new stuff right away has not only engaged James' involvement , but revived our focus as a unit.
On a personal note, we've both made an effort to get to know each other personally, today we went to see his girlfriend's new band, the other week we went to see BIG A little a at the workers, there's an age gap of about 11 years between us, but it doesn't really come into play, because we are relating on both a musical level, where we are partners, and on a basic human level, where we are equals.

From a compositional standpoint, Ornette Coleman talks a lot about finding his place in the world. From a literal traveling around the US, to finding his "harmolodic" sound, fitting in with bebop, and finally fitting in with an orchestra's structured hierarchy. It's a funny thing, but the main reason I chose to re-read this interview this evening, and comment on it is because the two main themes of it relate directly to a conversation Alice and I had today, about the role of art being to bring people together. I'm talking about at a base level. Somewhere deep in the core of art's DNA is this contagious need to have others become a part of it. Art is there, like language, to facilitate a  relationship. Alice commented today that art is culture, you can't have one without the other, again we're talking on base levels. What has it been about the world over thousands of years that has brought us to this globally connected relationship? An interest in sharing our cultures. We're all finding our way in the world, and sharing something with someone. Even if we don't call ourselves artists, we are still creators and participators in some form of relationship, whether directly with another individual, or with the world, whether through an ambiguous means or language like sound, or art, or it could be science, it's still the same sharing of culture.

Regardless of why and what you create, being aware of your place in the world, your relationship to the past, connection to present, and to people, establishes and shapes the culture of the future.

Response to set reading, week 1.

The following is a reflection on some of the set reading from week 1 of Techniques and Process.

Two similar opinions with differing perspectives were offered up in the form of writings by Arnold Schoenberg and his pupil John Cage. Both discuss elements of form and organisation in composition.

Schoenberg offers us a deconstruction of the various levels of musical meaning of the word form. Relevant to his day, the hierarchical formalism to this understanding of form has devalued over the twentieth, and into the 21st century. That a piece must be of a particular form, that includes sub forms to facilitate comprehension demeans the audience. That a piece that disregards these "logical" methods of organisation must be unintelligible is old fashioned by today's understanding of the terms. However, his opinion  that a comprehensible form requires logic and coherence still holds on a deeper less genre specific level. That constructing a composition is an act of organisation through problem solving. This logic of which Schoenberg speaks in his early 20th century understanding of the act of composition isn't the same one that I hold to, but that's not to say it isn't part of the same argument. Does that mean that a poorly composed piece is one that fails to represent it's form to the listener? Is ambiguity a formal element? Does one strive to compose an "amorphous mass"? If so, there is a formal approach to it.

It is a perfectly logical process to compose in small parts and delineate a relationship from there. This is how I compose. I don't hear every note in order in my head, and simply put it down in one go. That kind of genius isn't even something I aspire to. Beginning with phrases and sound bites, or riffs, and developing them, exploring, fixing and refining these ideas is part of the process I use. Sure I conceive the piece first sometimes. Sometimes conceptually, but without a music. Mostly in words. The words dictate the form, and the approach. But sometimes there's already some musical ideas floating around. Things that, until a certain and appropriate concept forms, don't have a home. The process of composition insofar as the conceptual form of a piece is often independent of the musical composition.

Where an idea, title, story, something non-musical is the basis for exploration - we can take, for example, a piece I'm currently working on called Gyokuro - an exploration further into my personal attraction to aspects of Japanese culture, something that started long ago from reading about John Cage, and then discovering Basho and Yukio Mishima, reading about zen philosophy, Kurosawa films, and just loving the extreme diversity of Tokyo pop culture. This compositional exploration is done in by researching ideas, absorbing information and trying to encapsulate a concept concisely. An earlier piece I wrote some years ago that I called Requiem, was my first real flirt with this influence. I composed a song dedicated to a friend's band who's tour bus crashed and the singer and tour manager both died, this happened almost the same week as the singer from my old band dying in a motorcycle accident. While trying to find the right words to express what I wanted to say, I read through an anthology of Japanese Death Poems. The concept that a haiku poet, or zen monk, or really just anyone, should leave a final goodbye in the form of art is a beautiful view of the world. In the end, I adapted 3 poems from that book into the lyrics for the piece. In Gyokuro, the inspiration is from Kakuzo Okakura's The Book Of Tea, and again, I've adapted the lyrics from this text. Musically though, very little of the music relates to the book, or to the era of Okakura. While some of the melodic motives and phrases are decidedly Japanese sounding, lifted from the scales used in music like Sakura Sakura, the rest of the piece focuses around influences from J-pop and Japanese punk bands like OOIOO and Melt Banana. The idea that tea is about beauty and restraint, while Okakura, it's biggest proponent at the turn of the last century, wrote his book as a fierce attack on the western view of Japanese culture being quaint.

All this logic and formal assembly aside, the musical assembly of Gyokuro has happened independent of the conceptual. Beginning with experiments with a small music box I bought from thinkgeek.com and then promptly broke. The melody I created as a result of accidently breaking the music box became the foundation for the piano motive in the opening section of the piece, but only after a long and consuming experiment with various bell and music box sample replacements that were rejected. That rejection lead to experimentation with the sounds elsewhere, and I created an artificial Cicada sound, which became the sonic foundation of the beginning of the piece, as a nod to Basho's famous Haiku, the piano melody fitting in from there. Certain electronic experiments, some resulting in "noise" and others more "beautiful" ideas have both slowly made their way into the piece.

What Cage says about noise fascinating us is so true for me. Where in the past (and still today) artists have used "noise" elements as the sole source of their work, I prefer to marry these ideas with traditional instruments. I like seeing art and nature and technology and history, mythology, all aspects of life, come together and resonate as one. It's what I love about Bjork's Biophillia album. She has gone out of her way to highlight these relationships, quite successfully. Her new album transcends Cage's image of the future of music. Not that I think Cage was off the mark with his assessment. Considering what he knew of the world he did a good job. In particular his perspective on the future of percussion music, which if you combine that with his passion for electronics, and look at the state of popular music today, it is electronically created percussion music that is the strongest feature of today's culture. We call it "beats" now, but drum and bass, hip hop, techno, IDM, glitch, electro, whatever it is, is usually characterised foremost by the drum sounds, and particular rhythms. Dance music, whether we mean today's electronica, or bop, swing, african drumming circles, tabla music, or latin dance, the percussion, the beats is what identifies the genre/form.

With that in mind, the drum part to a song is more important that just playing a back beat, like in rock music. The sounds used and the part performed need to be as iconic/specific to the song as the melody and harmony. How many bands I saw at one music festival who all opened their sets with the same drum beat. "Oh that beat is sooo hot right now", I said. This is where the genre becomes the form unto itself, and the composer is now constructing from a template, like Schoenberg states in his exposition about dance forms, minuet etc...

The problem that Cage's view has today is that he sees these new sound/music options as having to be separate from tonal music. He seeks to free sound from western musical convention. This happened, and it was awesome. But like Bjork has illustrated in her new biophillia work, and like the science fiction authors like of the 1980/ 90's explored with cyberpunk, from William Gibson's idea of cyberspace to the Matrix, to Warren Ellis' Transmetropolitan, this notion - humanity having to coexist with technology, no matter how advanced it gets, the same way we have to coexist with nature no matter what she throws at us, and how all 3 become components of our culture, and expressed as part of a story, built on history.

I used to feel like after Cage there was no point to music making anymore, because everything that could be said, he said it first. Nowadays, I feel he said a lot, and most of it was cool, but there's a new future that's beyond his vision, and that's cool too.

Getting Started: an overview/brain defrag, RMIT Fine Arts week 1.

Art school is an information overload. Don't get me wrong, I love it. I've tried to come with an empty cup, but drinking what goes in each class has had me in brain meltdown a couple of nights this week, and man, I'm sure it's only going to get harder. The first day of classes was great, left me feeling on top of the world, but by the end of the week, I'm not sure where to really start putting it all together.

I came in today (Friday) even though I didn't have any classes. Prior to that, I spent the morning cleaning and rearranging my studio so I could come home to work in a nicer space (which has proven a success - yay). I went into school to borrow a Zoom field recorder for a project for Audio Tech 1a. The crux of the project it to compose/arrange a piece from field recordings. The idea of just going out and aimlessly gathering sounds really doesn't appeal to me. So I'm trying to plan something, and then go out and find the precise sounds I need to make it. I'm also trying to take on board and apply the myriad concepts that I've already been exposed to this week. Particularly this idea of objective discourse, which was a big part of the Spatial Practice subject on Wednesday, and I'm still struggling to get my head around the concepts from that day. The notion of composing from field recordings isn't new to me. I've done this before. I've gone out (using an old mini-disc recorder - remember those) and recorded cicadas at night for a poetry/spoken word CD I made. Years back, I wandered the city, recording the city cliches, none of which ever really made the transformation into musical expression. I embarked on making a nonsensical sound poem a while back where I  randomly approached people in the CBD and recorded them reciting lists of words. The idea there was to reassemble it into it's original poetic form and collage it with other sounds. I guess at the time the equipment I was using was just way too primitive for something that required that much editing in post. I'm unsure if I still have the recordings anywhere, but the piece was abandoned in the end. I think the last time I did any kind of field recording was with a friend for sound design for a play, a while back now, we drove to the airport, and quite illegally, found our way into some parts of the airfield/flight path to record the sounds of planes landing and taking off. The sounds were used pretty literally in the play, but the recordings turned out pretty cool. It would have been fun to make something more from them.

I think the direction of this first batch of field recordings will probably involve people. I like the idea of asking questions, and piecing together the answers.

Another thing that has made an instant impression on me this week was also in Audio Tech. This concept of recording in 24bit. Something I guess I knew, but hadn't ever thought to put it into practice. I've recorded at 48K, but hadn't changed the bit depth before. I feel like such an amateur. So I went into the Bunker this afternoon, after grabbing the field recorder, to do a bit of work. I want to get used to using the uni spaces for work. I bumped into Michael, the sound tutor from Spatial Practice, and we had a little chat, he really helped unblock me. Basically he reassured me that I wouldn't lose myself, that "what I do" isn't in any danger by trying other things with confidence. I guess I have nothing to lose. I just like to put everything in place mentally in terms I can understand, and when I don't understand, the walls go up. Anyway, the work I went in to play with was the February Ritual Loops. A project that I started in collaboration with animator friend Sophia Hanover. We're also doing it in March. The idea is we each make a 10 second loop based piece everyday, and put them together. After February was completed, I wanted to edit the parts and arrange a mix of the month into one connected piece. Something simple, not a crazy remix, just something that progresses from one piece through to the next with cross fades and stuff. Something I really noticed after listening to all those parts for a few hours (these are all parts recorded in 16 bit, and many of them crunched down to 8 bit) is how freaking awesome 24 bit sounds. I've recorded the March Loops at 24bit 48k. They sound a billion times better.

I guess the easiest class so far has been Art History and Theory. Probably because I've spent ages collecting and reading books. I do go to a lot of galleries and shows and talk art wank with all my art wanker friends. I do love history. I like knowing things. The stories behind it all. I like to know the connections between artists, and the contexts of the work. I've picked Varese's Poeme Electronique for my Formal Analysis WIKI. It was that or the Doctor Who theme. My friend Evan Carr, who has a PBS radio show called The Art Of Bleep, lent me a pile of early 20th century electronic music to sink my teeth into, including several albums by Delia Derbyshire, who is was the BBC Radiophonics genius behind the Doctor Who sounds. I do love this era of music, the late 1930's - early/mid 60's. I love the enthusiastic combination of electronic instruments or sound techniques coupled with traditional instrumentation. That's something I've always tried to do. Find a cool and unusual instrument/sound source, and let that lead the band.

So to bring the week to a close, is Techniques and Process. The class I'm actually writing this blog for. It's a pretty heavy class to end the school week on. I'd love to be able to to do it on Monday. Fresh and ready to rock. The concepts raised this week were many. The general 'getting things started' approach. It's funny, the way certain people contribute more readily in class. I knew I'd be a talkative one. We started with a bunch of words on the board. And I guess it's too early to really absorb them all. Some of the tunes James played were killer. In particular I loved Mars, and Donkey's Tail, and Mamoru Fujieda. Mars was like listening to Boredoms cover Public Image LTD. I frakken love that music. I love the idea that people who have no formal training on an instrument have the passion to make music. After all the years I spent at Monash and Box Hill, practicing my instrumental technique, and learning jazz theory and harmony, and busting my arse to play well, all I ever really wanted to do was play my own weird music anyway, and those courses were so wrong for me. When I hear music like this, I remember one time when I was trying to describe my music to a third party, my friend Matt said he always thought of what I did as punk, or at least, a bit punk. I'd never thought about it that way at all, but I love bands that really ball their fists up in people's faces, bands who use their music to offend. I mean, I love people who can play too. But there's something about that raw, unashamed naivety, coupled with that erratic energy, and expression of angst. I'm such a born again teenager. I just want to rock out to OOIOO or BIG A little a, and dance with hot hipster chicks like it's a cheap Joy Divison film clip ripoff, and drink cheap beer.
I loved The Donkey's Tail for the same reason. It's like the films I love, and the same can be said about all the forms of art I relate most strongly with, are the ones that most resonate with my childishness. I don't know why my art is such a long, arduous, intellectual affair. My favourite films are films like Labyrinth, City Of Lost Children, Pan's Labyrinth, Brazil, I love science fiction and surrealism, anything that feels like it shouldn't really be. I'm a big fan of the "Low Brow", or I guess you could call it "pop surrealism" type art, and collect a magazine called Hi-Fructose. Donkey's Tail reminded me of my friend in Montreal, Victoria Stanton, and her little weird songs, and her weird band The Capital Of Plastic Daffodils. I got to stay with Victoria for a while, and she had a huge impact on my work, she was so encouraging. She's a performance poet/artist, and as a singer she's pretty quirky. She's got a cool sound. I heard her sing/perform the first time in Melbourne, years ago at Bar Open, it was a gorgeous piece about being underwater. Victoria is a big fan of Residents, and I got into them through her. Donkey's Tail reminded me of them too, that theatrical type of nonsense, completely against the conventions of most popular musical forms.
I was surprised to hear Keith Jarrett. I pretty much put up a wall as soon as I saw his name. I know I shouldn't be so closed minded, but I usually don't like his music. I think he's a boring improviser/soloist. The head was apparently in an odd number of bars. I didn't notice. I really did like the melody though, and the sax player's tone was awesome. So the reason I hate Keith Jarrett is (well partly because his music doesn't really speak to me) because of a story about one of my older mentors, who went to the US and arranged to have a piano lesson from him. Paid him up front and jumped through all the appropriate hoops, and on the day when he arrived for his lesson, the story is that Keith opened the door, asked who he was and what did he want, "I'm Steve, I've come from Australia for a piano lesson" insert reference to correspondence etc... Jarrett's response was "You want a piano lesson, here's your lesson: Get your own style, stop ripping off me". And that's why I can't like Keith Jarrett.
 I missed the name of the Singaporean pop singer, but I loved this track Lunar New Year (oh, I hope that's right), particularly the middle section. I loved the way the tempo sped up (whether intentional or not, it felt really good), and as we discussed in class, I love tempo changes. One of my favourite stories about tempo comes from back when I tried studying at Monash in the late 90's. The head of school or similar had to go pick up a guest performer from the airport. The guest performer was from Java, I think (I possibly think that because of the great Gamelan program they had) but either way, it serves the story. While driving the Javanese artist back to Monash, the staff member put on some Mozart. "what's this?" the guest asked. "Oh this is Mozart, he's the most famous and greatest composer of all music and Blahblahwoofwoof etc..." The guest listened and after a while he was asked what he thought of the music. He replied that he thought it was a bit boring. When asked to elaborate, he commented that the tempo never changed. That story always stood out, because music that uses tempo as a device for movement is rare, and when it happens it's really surprising and great. Tunes like POW by Beastie Boys, or Bubblhouse by Medeski Martin And Wood are probably the first 2 that come to mind in popular music, or more recently Battles, who use speed up/slow down moments in a few songs. Since in Glasfrosch we do everything to click tracks, there isn't much room for tempo changes. I need to figure out a way to program Ableton Live to handle it. Back to the Luna New Year, there was a cool Tarrantino film vibe to the song. I would never have appreciated this kind of music if it wasn't for his films. Well, I say that, Tarrantino, and Secret Chiefs 3. SC3 would be the perfect soundtrack collaborators for Tarrantino. They're both the masters of genre mash up. Of doing some other period's shtick better than it ever was, and they both draw from similar influences, particularly the 60s/70s cult/exploitation/shlock soundtracks, and Spaghetti Westerns. SC3 have done a few songs with the singer from Dengue Fever, who is Cambodian, and I was reminded of this from the Singaporean singer. It also brought to mind the recent (kind of recent) Damon Albarn/Jamie Hewlett Chinese Opera of Monkey. I guess as a western boy, it's probably an obvious connection to make and maybe Chinese, Cambodian, and Singaporean people wouldn't see the similarities I do. I am passionate about other cultural musics, but I'm trying just to enjoy it, not to be an expert on it. That would be a different degree.
With that in mind, the piece that we heard on Thursday that affected me the most, was the one that stood out as the least like anything I do. Mamoru Fujieda's Patterns of Plants. I loved the use of out of tune notes, I couldn't even tell what the instrument was, because the in tune notes sounded like a harp or koto, but the out of tune notes sounded like they were on a zither or guqin. I was really impressed that such beautiful music could be made from such a, lets say "artificial" technique. Usually that sort of process music all sounds the same to me. Like serial music and mathematically generated pieces, computer generated scores and such, it isn't usually this concise and emotional. It had a real sentimental feeling that made me want to sit and play it over and over again while I thought about the sadness of old happier times. The short form also impressed me. I wish I could say everything I wanted to in as little time as that. An expression I like is "Don't use 10 words when 5 will do" (something I'm afraid probably wont be happening on this blog). I'd love to be able to say "I'm a man of few words", but it's just not true. We discussed in class the elegance of the piece's form. The simple 3 parts, each looped 4 times. What I felt in the piece was growth. The middle phrase/loop/section used the idea of the moment prior to, but also built up to the final section beautifully. It gives nothing away, but includes everything that's needed to get there. I loved the little bass movement in that piece. It was like traditional Japanese meets an Icelandic band. It sounded like something you would hear Aniima or Kaada do, only they'd do it with a whole string section, and keep everything in tune. Anyway, I'm totally finding this record and listening the pants off it.

Feels good to blog a whole weeks worth of classes in one sitting. As the year goes, I will write a lot more regulary on here, specifically about the Techniques and Process course and concepts. For now, to set the scene, I needed to included a bit from my other uni experiences, and may still in future, but I'm looking forward to delving into the concepts behind composition further, and developing my work further as a result.

If you read this far, you're awesome!