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From a call for submissions:

If your work is accepted, we will then request a three-sentence bio…. We prefer your bio sentences to be more Hemingway than Foster Wallace when considering length.

Hat tip: TuScene.

Pousseur and open electroacoustic music

Three months after his passing, post-war composer Henri Pousseur finally got an obituary in the English-language media. The article mentions in passing a new project devoted to the composer, the Scambi Project at Middlesex University in England. Run by John Dack, a specialist in musique concrète, the Scambi Project is collecting documents relating to Pousseur's open-form piece for tape. Composed and described by Pousseur in the late 1950s, Scambi was intended from its inception to be a mobile form, and Luciano Berio made a version as well as Pousseur's more available realization. Part of the goal of the Scambi Project is to enable new realizations, and the site includes three new versions from graduate students in the Sonic Arts program.

The documents are a treasure trove for Pousseur enthusiasts, and range from scholarly papers by project team members to interviews and transcribed lectures by Pousseur from the last decade or so. His keynote lecture from an Open Work symposiuim at Goldsmiths College not only discusses Scambi, but also his Eight Parabolic Etudes in some detail. This collection of eight long works produced in 1972 (released on four CDs, also available at emusic and iTunes) showcases the possibilities inherent in analog electronic music, and were later reworked by electronica artists Oval, Philip Jeck and Main for a live concert and subsequent CD release.

I've documented by own enthusiasm for Pousseur here on a couple of occasions, and the Scambi Project is a welcome addition to the available material. I still hope for a CD release of Pousseur's piano music, which he composed throughout his career and which would make a varied and interesting recital.

Plastic canons

One of the most thorough electronic music packages I've ever seen is the boxed set of "The Complete Tape Music of Dick Raaijmakers," which includes three CDs and a 200-page hardbound book of bi-lingual (English and Dutch) notes explaining the pieces. The pieces date from 1959 to 1996, and although a lot of analog electronic music sounds a bit dated, I find Raaijmakers' work not only listenable, but very prescient. In particular, I am fascinated by a series of five canons from the mid-1960s, all of which sound much more like static or noise than any of their contemporaries. The canons are artifacts from some fairly intense research that Raaijmakers performed on sound morphology. While the research and its results are explained reasonably well in the book accompanying the CDs, I stumbled across a publication Cahier M from the Orpheus Institute seminars in Belgium, where he goes into much more detail in a series of four lectures subtitled "A Brief Morphology of Electric Sound."

Raaijmakers had two major guiding lights for this research, the artist Piet Mondrian and the pioneering photographer Étienne-Jules Marey. In the 1880s, Marey developed a photographic gun that planted consecutive actions in a single image, which he used to show real-world actions, such as birds in flight and a man jumping off a chair. Forty years later, as a major theorist for the Dutch artistic movement Neo-Plasticism, Mondrian advocated an electronic music structured into sequences of primary tones (characteristically identified as red, yellow and blue) and non-tones (chromatic, atonal noises, black, grey and white), devoid of harmony or any sort of romantic characteristics. From Marey, Raaijmakers took the idea of presenting a single object from multiple perspectives. From Mondrian, he not only took the tonal concept, but Mondrian's spatialization of sound, not merely the horizontal and vertical but a diagonal approach. Raaijmakers wanted to construct pillars of sound that could be viewed from any angle and whose characteristics would change accordingly. Mondrian's work fits into a long history of mixing sonic, visual and architectural metaphors. The 1960s were a fertile time for spatialization as well — think of the work of Stockhausen and Xenakis from this period.

Of course, canonic procedures were nothing new to the 1960s, having a long history back before Bach. But Raaijmakers started from a single point of sound, so short that no specific pitch could be perceived. He strung multiple points together to create larger sound structures, which he then overlaid with each other at different time scales, creating larger and larger blocks. Despite the increased complexity and the archaic titles in Latin, any canonic procedures he uses are largely inaudible, and the raw material sounds like static. Taking inspiration from Mondrian's severe restrictions, Raaijmakers' canons sound like the absence of music. The closest sonic resemblance is the crunchy parts of William Basinski's Disintegration Loops, harvesting the sound from old, decaying tapes. Raaijmakers's first canon serves as a model: spiky sonic aggregates alternating between two channels, without pitch, harmony or any discernable rhythm. Raaijmakers calls the second one a black-and-white copy of the first (it's a canon about printing, a copy of the first with reduced information). The third is accelerated, with the sounds overlaid to create timbral differences, but it is still an extremely restricted sound palette. The fourth is a subtraction canon, where increasingly large holes appear in the original material, again recalling Basinski. The fifth is based on an old LP of Edith Piaf, emphasizing the surface noise at the expense of the underlying sounds — it could easily pass for turntablist/looper Philip Jeck.

Starting from Mondrian's neo-plasticism, Raaijmakers ends up with a different view of sound than the moving horizontal and vertical waveforms that we see in most audio editors. Mondrian's sound had depth, a third dimension whose appearance (and audibility) altered depending on the perspective of the composer and/or listener. Repetition patterns which may appear orderly and periodic when viewed from one angle may be completely invisible or barely recogizable when perceived from elsewhere. The pattern may be altered, translated ("the shift of a given quality in a straight line with respect to other qualities"), until the pattern morphs into a new shape, a new pattern to be used for the next round of changes. Sound artist Ralf Wehowsky translated a single set of parameters for his album When Freezing Air Stings Like Ice, exemplifying Raaijmakers' deep morphological connections. Neoplasticism combined with Marey's superimpositions, and the resulting abstract, liquid forms anticipated Xenakis' architectural sound sketches and countless graphic scores.

Raaijmakers' work is available digitally, without the explanatory notes, from iTunes and emusic, but the book is a huge asset to understanding this pioneering work. Despite the collection's title, many of the more recent works are recordings of fairly theatrical productions, so enough is lost already without missing the explanations for the absent visuals.

A drummer's confessions

One of my earliest musical memories: in high school in a small town in upstate New York, the local variety store had a small area up front reserved for records, where a tenth grader, already with a penchant for the unusual, finds a striking album cover, a red face with wide eyes and very white teeth, mouth wide open, looking behind in fear, much more effective on the large 12-inch LP cover than its reduction to CD. There began my long fascination with King Crimson. Five albums over the next five years with five different lineups, save for the guitarist Robert Fripp, brought them to a core group whose album Larks' Tongues in Aspic remains one of the rock pinnacles. The drummer on this celebrated album, Bill Bruford, entered my awareness for the first time (I was happily oblivious to his earlier group Yes). Bruford remained with the mighty Crim through the three albums from the mid-1970s, then three terrific albums in the early 1980s, and even into the groups first incarnation in the 1990s. In between Crimson resurrections, he had solo rock albums, then ventured into jazz with his group Earthworks, which itself made ten albums with various lineups over the better part of two decades. I counted on Bruford to make quality music, no matter the surroundings, and followed him to unknown albums whose only recommendation was his presence.

So it was with some sadness that I read of his retirement earlier this year. But after all, he will turn 60 in 2009, which is a fine retirement age, and I certainly know from experience that at a certain age the hands stop doing what the mind tells them to do. But Bruford, whose intelligence has manifested itself in interviews as well as his music, has published his autobiography, loosely in the form of a FAQ, as entertaining and frank a view of a professional popular musician as I've ever read. Bruford has had the good fortune to participate in full-time groups and one-off sessions in both rock and jazz, and his observations on the differences are astute, and not especially flattering to the rockers. But he also provides unusual illumination on the difficulties of maintaining a personal life (he remains married his adolescent sweetheart) and the trivial minutiae of maintaining a stable income as an independent creative performer.

Bruford is unafraid to examine his professional life in light of cultural studies scholars, from sociologists Simon Frith and Howard S. Becker to pop music theorist Richard Middleton. He even cites Chris Cutler, the drummer and theorist from Henry Cow who created a model of self-sustaining independent music with Recommended Records in the 1970s, and whose career makes an interesting parallel with Bruford's. Although he finally returned to an all-acoustic kit in the later Earthworks, in the 1980s King Crimson Bruford was virtually synonymous with Simmons electronic drums, and he considers his experience with them in light of Frith's work on storage and retrieval technologies. The inevitable mismatch between musician and audience appreciation of the musician's efforts becomes a validation of Becker's Outsider, participating in an insular community with loyalty only to other musicians (except when the band is falling apart).

Many of Bruford's admirers will doubtless come to this book seeking gossip on the powerhouse rock groups in which he served, Yes and King Crimson. While there's a bit of that, the autobiography isn't the National ProgRock Enquirer, and gossip mongers may be disappointed. (An excellent source for King Crimson history is Eric Tamm's monograph on Robert Fripp.) Much of the book is about the distinctly unglamorous work to maintain equilibrium for his chosen specialization, which is performing challenging, forward directed music in a group for a live audience. As such, his music is diametrically opposed to my own (solo, static, electroacoustic music created alone in my studio), but Bruford's insights about the frustrations and incentives to make music are an articulate comparison to Susan Tomes' book about performing classical chamber music.

20,000 and counting

My iTunes library reached 20,000 tracks this week with the addition of Black Sleep by Jasper TX, alias for the Swedish musician Dag Rosenqvist. A while back, I wrote about the Polish composer Michael Jacaszek, whose album on the Norwegian microlabel Miasmah was at the time only available electronically at Boomkat and Thrill Jockey. I was pleased to see that Miasmah releases are now available at emusic, so I celebrated with a continued exploration of the music from this fine label.

Drone Classics — Night Passage

Decaying telephone poles in the distant Australian outback, a desolate landscape, populated only by a few scraggly shrubs and an unrelenting wind. Into this forsaken desert, I imagine an intrepid scientist with portable recording equipment, capturing the sounds of the wind and the wires before the whole structure collapses into dust. Thus I have always pictured Alan Lamb, a biologist who made a couple of albums for the Australian label Dorobo back in the 1990s, primarily using telegraph wires. Conveniently, the album cover artwork was suggestively vague, which left me free to imagine recording circumstances that were probably wildly distant from the truth.

Long string instruments by necessity are semi-permanent installations, and a few artists have made them a specialty. In the US, the most well-known practitioner is probably Ellen Fullman, who has been building and performing on such instruments since 1981. In Europe, Paul Panhuysen has been mining some of the same territory, and down under, Alastair Galbraith. All three artists build their own instruments, with the strings attached to some kind of resonator. Lamb is unique as far as I know to construct instruments outdoors, with the wind being a primary (although not exclusive) performer. Most of his recorded work uses a stretch of abandoned telegraph poles that he purchased from the Australian telephone company, christening his instrument the Faraway Wind Organ, on which he made recordings for nearly twenty years before the wires were vaporized by lightning and termites devoured the poles. His recordings were not as simple as putting up microphones to record the wind. He attached contact microphones to every possible surface, capturing ants and spiders walking on the wires, cows brushing against the poles, and eventually interactions of his own devising. He built massive bows for the wires, which he has described, but without providing any photographs.

His first album, Primal Image, was released in 1995, containing two Faraway Wind Organ pieces from the late 1980s. The title track, 29 minutes long, is both a gradual unfolding of various natural processes and a catalog of the different sounds available from the wind organ. There's too much volatility to be considered a drone piece, although I don't get any sense of a narrative either. Considering that the wind organ is in the outback, there's not very much environmental sound, a few passages of wind and a very occasional bird call. Sounds fade in and out, and there are a number of percussive events that sound like zaps from a nocturnal ray gun. Continuous low hums blend with piercing high frequency bursts, mid range shimmers, and one passage of fearsome ringing sirens. Its companion, a 1986 piece entitled Beauty, is a much more tranquil affair. The zaps are still present, but quietly in the background like a distant electric crackling, focussing more on overtones fading in and out, lingering aftertones, and sometimes a stretched out modal melody in the upper ranges. Lamb explains in the liner notes that the wires are so long and thick that the fundamental is beneath human hearing, so the overtones in our audible range create second-order frequencies that compete for harmonic dominance. They remind me of the audible equivalent of northern lights.

In a strange sequential turn, remixes from his second album by Ryoji Ikeda, Thomas Köner, Lustmord and Bernhard Günter preceded release of the originals by nearly two years. When the "original masters" of Night Passage appeared in 1998, there were three tracks, two recorded on the same Faraway Wind Organ that he had used for Primal Image, and a very recent one recorded live on an installation at the site of an electron accelerator in Japan. As on Primal Image, the title track is wild and chaotic, but with more enviromental noise than any of the other pieces. The wire vocabulary has expanded from the first album to include a multitude of interwoven scrapes, crashes, whistles, rumbles, creaks and clicks, often layered with a deep harmonic underpinning. The second piece, Last Anzac, is a complete contrast, a slowly evolving exploration of intense spectral frequencies, with infrequent percussive interruptions and ringing high overtone pulses. The final track is SPring 8 from a temporary environmentally sensitive installation, commissioned by the Japanese government to remind us to "venerate Nature and her primal forces no matter how far technology progresses." Lamb's performance on a great bow was recorded live, and ranges from rattles, metallic clicks, booms and scrapes to a rich display of dancing overtones. The Meditation on SPring 8 is the most harmonic piece on the two albums, both a summing up and vision of future possibilities.

The compositions from two different wind organs is the primary reason that I selected Original Masters: Night Passage for the drone classic, although both albums are superb. The original CDs are long out of print, but may show up as downloads. A few short works have been included on anthologies which are available both at emusic and iTunes. Lamb continues to work with installations around Australia, both solo and in collaboration with other artists and musicians, but sadly few recordings of these installations have been released. A joint effort with Dave Noyze is documented here, and includes a detailed description of the instruments, a couple of photos, and an hour-long recording which displays some of the flavor, if not the grand scope, of the telegraph wire instruments on these two recordings.

Long wire instruments are unusual and spark listeners' imaginations simply from the scale of the instrument. Lamb's outdoor installations combine this fascination with a primal connection to the environment, too often displaced in an urban museum setting. The half-hour durations of his albums' title tracks are immersive, even though they are spliced together from hours of recordings stretched across several weeks. Telegraph wires present enough of a story to further the images, without revealing too many performance secrets. Despite the rugged outdoor environmentalism inherent in Lamb's installations, the music stands on its own, a reflection of mysterious natural processes that confront us when we step away from the urban world long enough.

Scriabin the miniaturist

My recently confessed immersion in Alexander Scriabin's music is because he, like Federico Mompou, is one of the great composers of miniatures for piano. The Russian composer-pianist wrote a large number of miniatures, atmospheric little pieces that presage Stockhausen's moment form better than Mompou's. Scriabin's various extra-musical activities may be better known, such as the development of a color keyboard and the grandioise, mystical musical apotheosis that remained in sketches at his death. Musically, a handful of large-scale pieces, ten sonatas and a half-dozen large orchestral works, gets the most attention from critics and virtuoso pianists, but his short works are technically accessible, musically very interesting, and have the additional advantage of being somewhat outside the standard repertoire (unlike the Chopin preludes, the easiest of which are among the first real pieces that piano students are taught). Except for the orchestral works and a couple of juvenilia that were never published during his lifetime, everything he wrote was for piano.

Scriabin's definitive biography in English, Scriabin: A Biography of the Russian Composer, 1871-1915 in two volumes, was published in 1969 by Faubion Bowers, who also saved the Kabuki theater in Japan after World War II. Its writing style is a throwback to an earlier era of scholarship, with virtually no footnotes and a minimum of jargon. Bowers describes Scriabin's life in all of its soap-operatic detail, and he includes extended translations of Scriabin's notebooks and mystical poetry, but there isn't much in this book about the music or Scriabin's relationship in the turbulent culture of his time (the book clearly predates the cultural studies fashion). But in Scriabin's centennial year, the Soviets opened up some of his archives to western authors, and in 1973 Bowers published a second and much shorter book, The New Scriabin: Enigma and Answers. Only 200 pages instead of the biography's 650, The New Scriabin skims Scriabin's life in the first half, then spends the second half on his mysticism, his commentators and his music.

Unlike Mompou, Scriabin concertized throughout his life, playing his own music across Europe and even for an American tour. My speculation about moment form for Mompou's small pieces was much more of a reality for Scriabin. Although most of his published opus numbers were collections of short pieces, only one of them (opus 11) was a recognizable cycle, and he seems to have published collections based on financial need rather than anything inherent connecting the pieces. On his concert programs, Scriabin treated each piece as an individual to be juxtaposed freely with any other piece, intermingling the sketches with one or two sonatas over the course of the concert. All-Scriabin Russian concert recordings from the 1950s and 1960s suggest that the groupings of short pieces were treated as multi-movement works, and that breaks for audience applause occurred only after larger works such as the sonatas. This practice can create a pleasant sense of drift, as each piece has its own self-contained atmosphere. In my own playing, I combine Scriabin's miniatures with Mompou's and Stockhausen's (the Tierkreis zodiac melodies).

The turn of the 20th century was a pivotal moment for western art music when the late romantic harmonic language lost all tonal bearings. Scriabin's music exemplifies this shift, from his early works which are very much in Chopin's mold, to his late works which are among the first atonal compositions. He claimed to have a complete harmonic system all worked out, but scholars still debate what's going on harmonically in Scriabin's late work. Although his tonal works have attractive melodies, I find myself drawn to his middle period, when there was still enough tonality to have a resolution, but the coloring is so languid that fatigue doesn't set in. When I hear too many of the early preludes strung together, there's too much tension and resolution, and I find myself rapidly weary. With too much from the late period, I don't hear any points of reference at all. His harmony has a lot in common with jazz, and I stumbled across a big band inspiration from some of Scriabin's late pieces that is a much better album than the name (Scriabin's Groove) and label (Super Bad Trax) would suggest.

I noted a while back that classical albums aren't sequenced for the best listening experience, but act instead as an encyclopedic reference. This is especially true for a composer like Scriabin. There are a number of complete sets available of Scriabin's sonatas, but they are such dense and complex pieces that I can't listen to 70 minutes of them back to back. The miniatures are grouped together and presented as units as well. Often this circumstance drives me to the download sites, but the miniatures are so short that they are a pretty bad deal on emusic — I would spend my entire monthly allowance on one and a half CDs worth of material. So Scriabin remains somewhat of a guilty pleasure, a composer for performing more than for listening, for savoring in the privacy of my studio.

The photograph of Scriabin at his piano is by Alexander Mozer, the physicist who worked with Scriabin developing his color keyboard.