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.
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