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.
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