Sound toward the light

René Daumal was a mystic and writer in interwar France, a fertile time for the imagination even if it was highly unstable economically and politically for most of Europe. Born in 1908, his early years most famously included a bit of drug experimentation, specifically inhaling carbon tetrachloride, which gave him a glimpse of a higher reality. Although he later renounced external stimulants, he spent the rest of his life searching for the spirit that he glimpsed in his trances. In the late 1920s, he and a few friends created a literary group, Le Grand Jeu, parallel to the surrealists but eventually diverging over Daumal's more spiritual aspirations versus Breton and surrealism's engagement with Marxist politics. After exploring several religious traditions, Daumal found a home with Hinduism, learning Sanskrit well enough to translate some of the sacred texts into French. His spiritual work eventually led him into the circle around G. I. Gurdjieff, whose disciples were Daumal's teachers until his death from tuberculosis in 1944. In addition to many poems and essays, Daumal also published a novel in 1938 entitled A Night of Serious Drinking and left a second novel, Mount Analogue, unfinished. Published posthumously, it later became one of the sources for Alejandro Jodorowsky's allegorical film The Holy Mountain.

Sound artist Michael Northam's most recent release, Solar Night on C40 cassette from the Malaysian label Mirror Tapes, is directly and overtly inspired by Daumal. This isn't the first time Northam has cited Daumal for his music. More than ten years ago, Northam's collaboration with John Grzinich The Absurd Evidence was named after a book of Daumal's essays. The album included as an epigraph "tem gwef tem gwef dr rr rr," the unpronounceable word that Daumal heard in his mystical trances immediately preceding the recognition of eternal truths. On Solar Night the significant quotation is from one of Daumal's early prose poems, given in French on Mirror Tapes' site and recited in English in the music. The texts are set in a passage describing the reversal of the speaker's perceptive faculties, which enables him to see the true world that lies hidden behind the encircling daylight existence.

In many works Northam's primary source material is field recordings, and so with Solar Night. In addition, some of the sound sources are from Northam's live performances during the summer of 2010. I imagine Northam's performances to be similar to Jeph Jerman, who performed in Tucson last winter, and years ago with Northam, and — small, natural objects, rattling and rustling into intricate environmental textures. Remarkably, when I listen to Solar Night, I hear the spontaneous performances, rooted in active and direct communication, quite clearly amidst the various layers. In fact, I thought that there was less processing of the individual layers here than on most previous Northam works. The field recordings, such as the ferocious weather in Bathing in the Golden Wrapper, were detailed and crisp. Other layers seemed to have a more human agency behind them, so I could imagine that it was produced live, in real time. Inevitably, some layers resisted such anthropomorphic fantasies, but I listened to them all the more attentively for the ambiguities.

Solar Night is released only on cassette, with two tracks making up the episodes that comprise each side. Episode A opens with the aforementioned Bathing in the Golden Wrapper, the stormy field recordings subsiding into a watery swamp, getting its complexity from the layering. The first Daumal quotation leads into the second piece, Mask of the Sun, a gentle resonant drone, full of delicate bells and flutes, boundaries between natural and processed completelly blurred. But there's a fire crackling away in the background, more or less audible throughout the whole piece — here we are, sitting around the campfire in the woods, enveloped in Northam's unearthly performance.

Episode B opens with a walk through a Tunnel passing through environments both natural and perhaps not so much. Accompanied by birds and insects, flutes and bells, the walker's steps parallel Daumal's spiritual journey, toward the light. Insect sounds are especially prominent, dancing through the field that needs to be heard on headphones to be truly appreciated. The last piece, Sonorous Skin, sets up a watery nocturnal environment that provides the background for an intense electronic loop, the most alien sound on the tape so far. The album closes with a second Daumal reading, "i am the seer of the night an auditor of silence a silence dressed in a sonorous skin."

Although all four pieces work with shimmering, continuous textures, Northam ends them fairly abruptly, with little twists that open the pieces outwards rather than simply drifting back into nothingness. These endings give the pieces a lift, leaving the listener more suspended and aware. Like Daumal, Northam is embarked on a spiritual journey, for which Solar Night is not only a demonstration, an immersive invitation to find the light behind the natural world.

Solar Night is available directly from Mirror Tapes. Daumal's portrait illustrates this online translation of one of Daumal's essays.

Recent orogenetic activity

If the genre "world music" wasn't already defined as pop music from different cultures, one might be tempted to use it for the ever traveling Michael Northam, whose sound composting methodology has created some deep and resonant drone pieces over the past decade. A look at his discography, approaching three dozen items from nearly twenty years, shows a blend of solo work with a changing group of collaborators, with barely two albums released on the same label. For a pop musician, this would indicate serious interpersonal difficulties, but in Northam's case, it signals an openness to situations and relationships from the most diverse possible origins. Three of his recent releases offer examples of this wide range.

Late last year, the Faria label in Russia released An Opening of the Earth: Recovered, a collaboration with Martin Franklin. Of all Northam's collaborators, Franklin is one of the furthest from Northam's usual environmental and electroacoustic methods. Franklin is a percussionist whose best known project is Tuu, a tribal new-age group with several releases on ambient boutique labels such as Waveform, Amplexus, and Fathom (a sublabel of the seminal new age radio show, Hearts of Space). Northam and Franklin's album predates all of this and is the earliest material that Northam has released. The original session was a three hour improvisation in September, 1991, and this material has been the source for three different versions of the album, all entitled An Opening of the Earth. For the Faria release, Franklin went back to the original source tapes and constructed what appears to be a brand-new release, reputedly incorporating some elements that have not been released in previous versions. In the liner notes, Northam seems to express some surprise at the difference between "the rawness and sustained states" of the original session, compared to shorter events and other (unspecified) characteristics.

Despite its undoubtedly primitive origins and rudimentary recording, the first impression of the recovered album is how contemporary, crisp and clear everything sounds. Although I haven't heard either of the two early versions of this material, I would have expected less than stellar original masters not necessarily preserved with the highest archival standards. While the album doesn't sound much like later work of either musician, in hindsight one can detect the directions that each performer would take. Franklin sets up sustained backgrounds and modal melodies with various synthesizers, a trope that became a staple with Tuu, and which provides an aura of prevailing calm. Northam punctuates the proceedings by tapping, scraping, brushing, and crunching various metal objects, creating intuitive and arhythmic metallic gestures that bring to mind his more recent improvisational work. One of Northam's credit is feedback loop, which perhaps accounts for the occasional squalls and the more noisy static and naked input jack episodes that echo repeatedly into the distance. Each of the eight excerpts (all with titles like Tape 1, Part 1) has its own moods and atmospheres, mysterious combinations of the raw and the cooked.

If Martin Franklin represents a new-age pole for Northam's musical partners, avant-noise percussionist Seijiro Murayama is at the opposite end of the musical spectrum. Murayama was the original drummer in Keiji Haino's seminal noise rock/free improv/psychedelic group Fushitsusha, and has since formed a long-term association with multi-instrumentalist K. K. Null in the group Absolut Null Punkt. Early in 2009, Murayama and Northam released Moriendo Renascor on Xing Wu, an experimental music label from Malaysia, based on recordings and meetings between 2003 and 2004. Moriendo Renascor is their second release together, although the exact chronology is somewhat conflicted. Northam's current web site says that they first met 2003, but the information from their first release together, a mini-CD and download entitled They Stood Around and Watched says it was recorded in 2001. In addition, the music on the earlier release is considerably less processed, exhibiting layers of percussion and flute that could have been the raw feed from a live improvisation. No such clarity is present on Moriendo Renascor, which steers much more towards Northam's composted sound, where layer upon layer is turned, seeded, and activated to become a set of murky, atmospheric electroacoustic pieces.

Compost is an apt metaphor for this collection, whose title means "In dying, one is reborn," a sentiment common to many religions as well as gardening, and here expressed in a nearly extinct French dialect. The album is full of complex ambient drones, barely audible voices and little murmurings occasionally audible, but mostly exhibiting gentle undulations of natural processes brought out through Northam's composting. These drones provide the backdrop for wooden rustlings, stone scrapings, high-pitched whistlings and swishing, occasional bells, and various small details extracted from field recordings. There are few traces of overtly electronic sounds; even these may dissolve into a more natural provenance. The pieces have their own internal cycles, not exactly a narration, but movement from loud roars to very quiet, with sharp internal transitions that belie the track separations (which are inconclusive anyway, with four tracks identified as I, IV, III and II, and ordered differently on the back cover and the inner sleeve). Murayama and Northam use these quiet ambient drones to focus the attention on mysterious foreground activities, whose origins defy elucidation even as they draw in the listener. Drones drift through the pieces like streams through a forest, creating a remarkable sonic environment that reflects the natural ones in Jura and rural France where Murayama and Northam created the work.

January 2009 also saw the release of a solo piece entitled Memory of A, a mini-CD on the Parisian label Taâlem. This is Northam's first solo release since Go in 2006, a tribute to his father, which was also his last release using the mnortham alias which graced nearly all of his previous work. Memory of A is based on recordings that Northam made on a "microtuned tubular zylophone" at the Adishakti Center in Pondicherry, India, in December, 2007. It feels like a new direction for Northam, where the original unaltered recordings intermingle the composted sounds. The dramatic opening, an intense buzzing vibration, is pure timbre, not clearly tied to a zylophone, but it evolves into a full, quietly evolving harmonic drone, with the first unprocessed tones showing up about five minutes into the piece, just as the buzzing is fading out. Northam comments on the unusual winter rain during the recordings, so doubtless this became part of the constant background drone. Crows and crickets show up, giving a sense of space to the music. The relatively constant zylophone tones, alternating the stereo field and hanging limpidly like a mobile, act as the background to a brief sections of unrecognizable origins, scrapes and a rush of tumbling white noise, eventually luxuriating in a series of low tones that seem to resonate forever. The harmonic spectrum widens in the last few minutes, including what sounds like some kind of primitive horn. The progression of the piece from the initial harsh tones through the drifting middle section to the annunciation of the horn provides a sense of narrative, rooted in Northam's own experience but open for the listener's personal illumination.

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An Opening in the Earth: Recovered is limited to 500 copies and comes in a full color wallet with three postcard inserts. Faria has somewhat limited distribution, but I got mine from and/OAR. Moriendo Renascor is available from many of the usual suspects (and/OAR, Erstdist, Mimaroglu, etc.) and comes in a gatefold sleeve made from recycled paper. Due to a printing problem, a handwritten poem by Lionel Marchetti on the inner sleeve is virtually invisible, but is available as a jpeg at Xing Wu, or in plain text at Northam's site. Neither of these releases is available as a download, but with their first releases of 2009, including Memory of A, Taâlem is making their releases available in lossless FLAC format, with full artwork.

Nomads

I suppose it was inevitable. After less than two years of living in Tucson, I have started reading historical and cultural books about the Southwest. My mother tried to interest me in westerns when she moved to Phoenix in the late 1970s, but they seemed irrelevant when I lived in Ohio. Perhaps it's the wide open spaces that we see as soon as we drive out of town. Perhaps it's the amazing but true fact that Tucson closes the public schools for the annual rodeo parade. No doubt there's a big chunk of mythology planted in me by years of watching Hollywood westerns. But it's one of the behavioral trends that I see in myself and have to stand back, scratch my head, and wonder why.

Two recent books from the vacation reading have prompted these reflections. In one of them, Cities of Gold by Douglas Preston, two greenhorn cowboys recreate Coronado's initial exploration into the southwest, riding over a thousand miles on horseback from the Mexican border south of Tucson to the Pecos Pueblo near Santa Fe, New Mexico. The book is equal parts riding story and history lesson, covering not only Coronado's initial contacts but whatever we know about pre-Coronado native civilizations and their subsequent demise in the wake of the American conquest in the nineteenth century.

The second book is by Richard Grant, a British ex-pat who was living in Tucson when he wrote American Nomads. This book has more general interest than Preston's, not being limited to residents of the southwest (although cowboys, historical and contemporary, participate in his tale). Nomads, people of no fixed abode, live way off the grid, and include an amazingly wide spectrum of contemporary American society, albeit mostly unknown and undocumented. In addition to rodeo cowboys, Grant also visits the annual Rainbow Family gatherings, the annual gathering of retirees in RVs at Quartzsite, Arizona, the tribal headquarters of the largest group of nomadic Indians (the Comanches), and even the Freight Train Riders of America, formerly known as hoboes. It's a fascinating array of tales of wanderers past and present, with occasional references to nomadic philosophers Deleuze and Guattari, whose seminal work A Thousand Plateaux spun the image of a eternally outside nomad war machine across a dozen different knowledge domains.

The most well-known musical nomad was Harry Partch, who spent formative years riding the rails as a hobo, participating in the loose and unstructured society that flourished for a brief period during more sympathetic, less dangerous times. Partch's unique musical system based on a 43-note scale (rather than the usual twelve) lies fairly far outside any mainstream, although his maverick status finds him at the headwaters of some kind of tributary that continues to contemporary microtonal composers like Kyle Gann and Ben Johnston.

Drone composers have a nomad representative in Michael Northam, whose resume reads like a fifteen-year travelogue. His very occasional blog posts are separated by several weeks and thousands of miles. While it's easier to make a case for an audible nomadism in Partch's music than it is for Northam's, I hear a powerful yearning for stability in the way Northam combines dozens of layers of source material, a constant that permeates the delicate and timeless texture that he constructs. But this is an aspect that I bring as a listener — Northam's concerns as expressed in interviews and his own writings tend more to complex systems, meterological phenomena, and the complex layering in tiny molecules. But for all the imaginative stimuli that come from a contemplation of nomadism, I would be hard pressed to identify a nomadic aspect in Northam's work that wasn't present in other drone artists. But southwestern landscapes, rootless nomadic wandering and slowly moving journeys like Preston's are growing in my personal symbolisms, which inevitably colors the way I listen to and perform music.

Drone Classics — :coyot:

Although mnortham's solo album :coyot: was not my first exposure to his work, nor the first album I'd heard that used Aeolian harps or their derivatives (that would have been Alan Lamb, but that's for another post), it resonated with me immediately and has stayed with me over the years. Its base sounds are from an installation on Suomenlinna Island near Helsinki, Finland. Michael Northam installed seven Aeolian harps on the roof of an old gunpowder bunker named "kaponieeri coyet". He also made additional field recordings at various places around the island, including the resonance inside an old and massive cannon barrel. He worked for a year on all of the resulting tapes, finding the patterns in the continuous sounds, and slowly layering them together, before he compiled this album of three tracks, each around twenty minutes in length.

One of the most unusual features of :coyot: is the inclusion of a ten-page essay by Giancarlo Toniutti on (Sámi-Suomi) Geocultural and Ecosystemic Patterning. Toniutti is a paleo-linguist, a researcher in anthropology and morphology, and a composer of fascinating electroacoustic sound works known mostly by reputation because they are generally released in extremely small quantities. The essay documents some of the ways that the wind forms part of the indigenous Scandinavian cultures. He also attempts to discern the overlays of the early European ethnographers, whose worldviews distorted the perceptions of the underlying cultures, overlaying them with romantic or Christian beliefs. Referring to the shamanic images on Sámi drums, Toniutti projects instead a porous boundary between natural and cultural processes, of an entirely different nature than the terms 'spirit' or 'god' might suggest.

Taken in the context of Toniutti's essay, :coyot: positions itself as an expression of Toniutti's porous boundary, as well as a different kind of overlay interpreting Finland's wind and water. The wind played the harps, but the sound of the harps had to be extracted with technology. The different natural sounds, of the harps and other field recordings, are presented simultaneously, combined into layers in the studio in a way that simulates the elemental forces that Northam captured in his recordings. He makes the elements audible. The sheer duration of the sounds promotes a sense of timelessness. The strong wind noise at the end of "Effects Of Atmospheric Pressure On Air-Born Particles Of Solids And Liquids," for example, has a gentle undulation in the overtones to the single low pitch which makes me think of ocean waves. The combination of the two sounds reminds me of times when I've stood on the shore and felt a big wind blowing off the ocean. The natural rhythms of the piece bring a sense of slow immersion into the environment.

Many (if not all) of Northam's projects use the patterns in natural phenomena for inspiration. As a result, I get a strong sense of nature from :coyot:, but at a deeper level than a straightforward field recording. The patterns that Northam found in the wind and waves on Suomenlinna Island are all around me, but their time scale is different from the one in which I live. Admittedly, my time scale has gotten slower since retirement, but still.... My admiration for Northam's work continues with his other releases, which I'll save for other posts. But he gives articulate and thought-provoking interviews, which are available on his web site and at Kaon records, a French label covering several sound artists who use field recordings extensively.

Drone Classics — Ora

One of the first albums that got me hooked on drones was by the elusive British group Ora. Amalgalm was a 2-lp set released in 2000, sometimes called Amalgam, but the Ora discographies at both Brainwashed and ICR use the former — FWIW, the label website says Amalgram. I should say a word about the packaging — two clear lps, each in their own clear plastic sleeve, and both lps in a larger clear plastic wrapper, along with a full-size double-sided color insert that went between the two lps. Naturally, the pictures available on the internet don't do any justice, and I had to sell all of my vinyl when we moved to Arizona, so I can't produce a cover scan any more. The work was released on editions …, a label based in Georgia (USA) which released a number of treated field recording works, but which appears to be dormant for the last couple of years. The label's motto is "...we are not cognizant of the state of our own surroundings," and works like Amalgalm help make us cognizant by introducing a degree of strangeness into our natural surroundings.

The group for this collection included Ora stalwarts Colin Potter and Darren Tate, with the participation of Michael Northam. This album was probably my first exposure to Northam, about whom I'll have more to say in a future post. Northam brought to Ora a consciousness about place for this one release in which he worked with them. Even though Potter and Tate are both pioneers in using field recordings to create drone pieces, I have no other release by either one where the locations of the field recordings are provided on the album. On Amalgalm, each field location is identified by a Greek letter, and the letters are then keyed to each piece. For example, the piece "Crop" has the symbols θ and ε. Checking the key tells us that θ means "Inside a watertower in Lancashire" and ε means "Under the water table of the glacial lowlands west of the White River". (Every piece on both lps uses θ; the Watertower is the name of Potter's studio in Preston, Lancashire.) Interestingly, all of the locations mentioned have a connection with water, whether it's the watertower in Lancashire, a location near a river bank, or other large body of water (Gulf of Finland and Puget Sound are mentioned).

One of the most powerful characteristics of this music is its polyphony. On a piece like "Crop", for example, there are four distinct layers, all moving at their own pace. The first sound we hear is a kind of white noise. It could be ocean waves, although this is understood more because of the rhythm of the oscillation rather than its actual sound. Then, a much slower and deeper oscillation starts, rich in overtones, more of a proper drone, which underpins the remainder of the piece. A third voice is mysterious but fairly rapid, almost functioning like a lead voice except that its pitch content is microtonally centered around a tight frequency range. Its rhythmic contours suggested an origin in human speech, but if so, it is so altered that no specific vocalizations are recognizable. Finally, a second long-running drone, similar to a cymbal roll, rumbles in, eventually replacing the oceanic oscillation that opened the piece. Ora gives each of the layers some time to itself, so they remain perceptible throughout. This pattern extends to most of the other pieces on the album, where a layer of sound will be set into play with other layers. Some of the layers are pretty static, and some have quite a bit going on. Ora's artistry is that the resulting piece is a sculpture in sound, giving the listener enough time to wander around the piece and hear it from multiple angles.

Amalgalm was a personal harbinger for drones made from field recordings. I was marginally aware, by reputation only, of R. Murray Schafer and the soundscape artists primarily located in Canada, their pioneering efforts starting in the late 1970s and their work in the acoustic ecology field. I was enough aware to join a Yahoo discussion group for "phonographers" that kicked off in 2000, which was one of the first serious attempts to gather up field recording artists into a wider community. The phonographer aesthetic was somewhat different from soundscapes, based more on Cage than on Schafer, and thus more closely aligned with my own interests (southern Ohio didn't have many interesting soundscapes). As for Amalgalm, despite the list of recording locations, there isn't that much in this album that says "soundscape" aside from some sheep on "Pan". But there's enough of a suggestion of the world in Ora's music to direct my attention outward, but enough resonance to tune into the frequencies and become immersed in the music.