Not all of Joji Yuasa's tape music (or simply tape music in general) works for me, but this collection of two pieces composed in 1959 and 1963 strays far more into the assemblage of an unsettling, murky atmosphere (though crucially aided by the inclusion of some orchestral writing in the second piece, "Mittsu No Sekai [Three Worlds]", my favourite), than the pile-on of more or less random sound effects I usually (however unjustly) expect from the 'genre' or, more specifically, methodology (though the two things can partially but significantly coincide, as certain techniques can by their sound properties and possibilities elicit certain aesthetic strategies, and the subsequent sedimentation of those strategies can narrow the imagination of other potential uses for those tools).
Yuasa's Obscure Tape Music of Japan Vol. 1: Aoi no Ue is kind of testament to my ambivalence, as "Aoi no Ue" offers another disturbingly satisfying 30 minutes of something (this time, crucially relying on processed voices, which sound like they are up to no good), while the other piece consists of 15 minutes of what seemed to me like a relatively indifferent succession of electronic tones and bleeps (which is obviously not to (dis)qualify it as non-music; we're past that; I'm just not obligated to enjoy it either).
As far as this release goes, though, and even contrary to the usual soundtrack fare, not only does it not require being heard in the context of any theatrical drama to give it meaning or feel complete, but it would in itself be a fine reason to go watch something that tried to visually match its dreary aural imagery. It would probably be a more promising starting point than figuring out what totally fresh spin to take on a new production of Hamlet (maybe everyone is a ghost but the King, whose psyche is giving an exculpating dramatic form to the paranoia that had driven him to murder everyone as potential conspirators for his demise; wait, no, that's good, who do I pitch this to? I don't know, I'm too lazy, someone figure it out and get me my percentage), and it's right here waiting. Stage directors everywhere, do your worse.
Rodrigo Leão isn't exactly the type of musician you would immediately imagine going for a solo career: on two of the pivotal bands that modernized the profile of Portuguese music in the 1980/90's while retaining a sense of cultural identity (Sétima Legião and Madredeus), his role in providing the harmonic underpinnings for the music on bass or keys was as effective as it was discreet. However, that he would choose to begin said career by composing earwormy minimalist songs, orchestrated with recourse to a chamber ensemble, synthesizers, and a small chorus singing in Latin, is what would surely make any self-respecting Tarot reader (that hypothetical creature), asked at the time to chime in on the future of his career, to subsequently give up the deck.
It can still be said that, while surprising in his personal trajectory, that career move was nonetheless, at least in part, a fruit of its musical times, even if not of its main branches. Its melodic sensibility and compositional methods do match up with contemporary minimalist forces straddling the line between the avantgarde and pop music, like Andrew Poppy and The Lost Jockey, or Jeremy Peyton Jones and Regular Music.
Theatrum, though, the third and final release with his "Vox Ensemble", is something else; not in terms of its approach, but of its emotional resonance, as it is positively (so to speak) dripping with pathos - the sort that, ironically, tends to afflict people wanting to believe in life being fair, love lasting forever, or that they'll never stop making your favourite ice cream - which makes this like something out of Michael Nyman's nightmares, or maybe, more recently, of Eyvind Kang's darkest moods. The sort of smashing sounds on one of the tracks even remind me of Joy Division's I Remember Nothing, and it doesn't quite feel like just a coincidence.
I don't think Leão has ever been this good again (I lost interest quite a while ago, as he became a more aesthetically well-adjusted individual), but I can understand why he wouldn't want to either. I too might favour not appreciating it as much as I still do, but here we are, all out of ice cream.
If the barrel organ (or, to use its much more interesting french designation, orgue de barbarie) is one of the last instruments that you (as I) would imagine being amenable to an avantgarde approach (despite people like Ligeti having adapted music for it; that might have been a clue), come hither, and meet Pierre Charial.
I must begin by saying that I have always had considerable conceptual reservations towards the idea of mechanical (and, by extension, computer, or sample-based) music, as it displaces the role of performers and interpretation in musical creation and fruition - as if the sounds produced by a musician in a particular moment in time and space didn't have a specificity to them, associated with those subjective and contextual circumstances (an aura, shall we say, to get some Benjamin action going on here), and were instead the replicant equivalents of the same notes performed by anyone, anytime, anywhere. It thus seems only logical that those same reservations should apply to this specific automatophone. However, it was certainly not by accident that Charial was brought in to collaborate in the edification of some of Michael Riessler's magnificent avant-jazzfollies, and the absolute originality of his approach to the instrument does make me question myself (as I enjoy being made to), to some extent anyway (Charial being the exception rather than the rule).
At a first glance, there is nothing per se avantgarde in the material Charial handles here, adapting classical and jazz tunes; but when it comes to the arrangements, that's a different story, as part of what he does with the instrument (programmatically or not) is tap into the possibilities of mechanical music for going beyond some human limitations in the execution (and, accordingly, in the very conception) of a piece (as in the number of notes played simultaneously, or the rhythm at which they're played, and the very sequence they can thus be placed in), instead of simply using it to duplicate mechanically something that could more vividly, shall we say, be not only reproduced but 'interpreted' by a performer.
This use of the barrel organ, unrestricted by certain limits of what a human being can directly execute on a given instrument (while obviously being constrained by its own technical limits; foremost, when it comes to the possibility of a performance going beyond the notated music, or 'interpreting' it - at least when playing solo, which, as Charial's manycollaborations show, is no inescapable fate), thereby affords a very specific liberty to the expression of human creativity to think musically beyond bodily constraints, allowing the music punched on a string of pieces of cardboard to become much more of a cosa mentale than any sheet music awaiting for its performer could be, as this has to take into account the technical limitations of instrumentalists and of the specific instruments they're written for to be playable in the first place (suffice to think of how often musicians tend to consider the familiarity of composers with their specific instrument a crucial factor for their ability to write more idiomatically for it).
That pathway to a more disembodied plane of musical creation does not imply, though, that the specific nature and sound of the barrel organ is then lost or irrelevant in this process, as Charial also clearly plays with it and pushes it beyond the social limitations that restrained its conventional musical uses. For instance, the density of the arrangements and the velocity of the delivery, full of cascading and jittery notes, can be completely transfigurative of the instrument's sound profile, even giving it secondary percussive properties, derived from the operating mechanism itself, as in a certain register the pushing of air through the organ's pipes can produce a sort of mechanical beatbox effect.
That production of a singular trans-human aesthetic experience is all the more impressive precisely when you consider that it was achieved through an instrument whose genesis and proliferation was linked to the very specific and functional brief of simply making music more portable, allowing for its reproduction in any context, with no need for a skilled performer, and which, since then, got so pigeonholed around a certain social niche imaginary, populated by street performers at fairgrounds - let's just say that if someone did this to the banjo, that's the banjo record I'd be willing to hear (although, in that case, the transfigurative strategy would probably be to slow down the proceedings instead, which, come to think of it, is actually what Low amazingly did in the beautiful "In The Drugs", so, check).
Taking this discussion even further, in the end, I suppose that it might not even be solely, or essentially, the issue of technology that makes music mechanical in the first place. It can easily be argued that there is a drive in many forms of musical creation, execution, and appreciation - namely those of a virtuoso nature - whose platonic ideal is in fact to become aesthetically mechanical while technically human; in which it is the technical feat of turning human into machine that supersedes (or even annuls) other artistic considerations, turning music making almost into something of a competitive sport; just another form of spectacle invested in pushing human boundaries and disciplining bodies and minds almost as an end in itself, and not as the means to pursue something else through it, from which to derive pleasure, beauty or meaning in our lives, without binding it to the fetichization of sacrifice (which is not the same as respecting it, taking into account its purposes, necessity and form).
Now, once more, surely AI is already on its way to muddle all these precarious distinctions, or spur new ones - like making some artists vow never to use it in the name of human authenticity amidst a sea of artificially-generated music flooding the market, or inducing the design of aesthetic Voight-Kampff tests to detect artistic fraud -; but, to paraphrase Lawrence of Felt fame, most of the people whose music I like hearing are those that are dead (or getting there, alongside myself), so that's something for future generations to spend their blade running lives trying to sort out. All I can say, in what concerns the relevant framing of that issue for my extant musical worldview, is that, comparing the musical worth of most people appearing on the greatest-guitarists-ever lists largely on account of their notes-per-minute scores (essentially grading them on the same scale as 1950's secretaries looking for a job - should they be so lucky as to only be graded by their typing skills), to that of Charial, just grinding away with his lever all the music his imagination could encode onto perforated cards, I don't think there's all that much of a competition as to who's more on the "all too human" side.
In contrast with another giant of the world of chanson, Jacques Brel, who navigated the gamut of human emotions and experiences, balancing humor, chagrin and joie de vivre, Léo Ferré tended to be tremendously serious, as only those believing themselves to be avatars of a higher form of art can be, which could be both his strong and weak suit. Even here, in one of his strongest outings, it is clear there is a somewhat stereotypical chanson à texte template framing the whole effort, where the texts, the orchestral backing, and the vocal declamations, are all placed at the service of grand and somewhat facile pronouncements about ART!, LIFE!, DEATH!, SEX!, POLITICS! ET CETERA!, working to upkeep an artiste maudit persona (that yet was somehow capable of enrolling orchestral forces for his numerous records...). However, there is also a well-aged savoir-faire and bravado in handling and combining those elements into an aesthetic whole, that forces all of those attention-seeking things to work in consonance; as well as an unflinching conviction about them that is able to push the whole thing into excess and thrive there - and that's what makes this one of those defining records in a genre that more than being listened to or enjoyed, are to be experienced.
It's interesting then to find that, despite Scott Walker's explicit penchant in his beginnings for Brel as a songwriter (with which I generally concur; especially when it comes to the liveliness and acumen of his everyday poetic narratives, and the nimbleness of his melodic prosody), the more oppressive symphonic arrangements occasionally found in Ferré's work can seem to foreshadow Walker's later period. What's even more interesting, is whether that might causally reflect more the influence of Ferré's work on a broader musical tradition that Walker obviously drank from, or instead, like Jorge Luis Borges discussed about Kafka's 'precursors', the way Walker's towering oeuvre can reshape our perspective of artists that preceded him (even if on a very limited time scale here), whose work, beyond being its own thing, can get a new outlook by way of its retrospective link to future musical history, produced in reverse time - in this case, by sounding partly Walkeresque 'before' Walker, but only being perceivable as such, or having the musical perception of those traits differently highlighted, 'after' him.
As these are so often matters where causal assumptions are empirically-challenged for lack of direct evidence, your choice of explanation in each case will probably reflect your preference for some artists over others more than any form of objective judgement; but either way, it's a line of reasoning that can make us question the general notion that the greatness of artists can or should be measured by their straightforward influence on future artistic production (which so often merely entails inspiring a parade of lackluster copycats), and give weight instead to the alternate conception that perhaps the best hallmark of the true greats is their radiating, physics-defying, potency of retroactively making the very past that brought them forth a more interesting place to revisit (with no risk of ever stepping on the wrong butterfly).
Though
hardly deterministic, the links between culture and territory are, understandably,
integral to the interpretative repertoire that commonly informs our musical (pre)conceptions, even in the more abstract and individualized realms of creation. At least, that's what came to mind when I first listened to this solo improvisational effort by Michel Portal, in the overdubbed-one-(hu)man-ensemble category, and took it as a companion piece to methodologically similar (and equally admirable) albums (like Westering Home, from 1972) by John Surman (who even partnered with Portal on Alors!!!, appropriately issued by the troublemaking Futura label in 1970): whereas the gentlemen from old Albion delivered somber exercises in insular restlessness, le monsieur del’Hexagone offered a set brimming with a sunny playfulness that fully embraces mediterranean sonic tomfoolery. Go figure. Of course, many examples of the very opposite could easily be invoked, but lacking that sense of confirmation we can get from certain music emanating from certain locations sounding the way we (more explicitly or implicitly) expect it to, which is a tell-tale sign that, for better or for worse (as an expression of both a valuation of the sociogeographical diversity of musical creation, and of the cultural constraints we can then place on how that localized music should sound like), even for the most receptive listeners, music appreciation is never an even playing field.
I certainly don't mean to take anything away from other greek artists I so greatly admire, some of whom, like Nikos Xilouris, were vital contributors to Christodoulos Halaris' first records (which felt simultaneously the product of a musical community and of a singular artistic mind); but when I hear any of those 1970's albums, the infinitely vast and detailed tapestries of sound he weaved around the warp of melodies that may very well have been passed on by Odysseus after hearing them from the sirens (as I would happily crash my ship into some rocks just to follow their uber-beckoning call (not being a sailor, I just go around parroting them phonetically instead, with no idea of what I might be missaying)), drawing on his scholarly knowledge of antique music while not being held back by any scholarly adherence to strict musical prescriptions (that would come later), and orchestrating into a shining whole a constellation of arcane instruments and of instrumentalists who were surely having their way with the muses, the only way my mind can process all that insurmountable brilliance, elevating greek folk music to a whole new plane of aesthetic existence, is by paraphrasing one of those lapidary Godard sentences, that managed to be simultaneously hyperbolic, given the big picture they willfully dismiss, and perfectly just, considering the transcendental exceptionality of what's in front of you. And yes, la musique grecque, c'est Christodoulos Halaris. Simple as that.
It is more complicated than that (not to get into a whole discussion on the validity of the establishment of aesthetic canons, which is an inevitability in any social world; it's more a matter of how they get established, and by whom), but one of the mind-numbing proclivities of the classical musical world is clearly the rigidity of the repertoire musicians are supposed to devote themselves to, to prove their stuff and to please the more stuffy concert-going crowd, who tend to like their music as they like their furs: moth-balled. One of the hopes of accelerating the glacial pace at which that repertoire is renewed is precisely when artists and composers not at the center of that world tap into their distinctive local resources, and that is exactly what Papandreou expertly did in this recital, with exciting pieces by Nikos Mamangakis, Mikis Theodorakis, and fellow guitarist Vangelis Boudonis (first I've heard of him, and I would gladly hear some more), that make it one of the best in this long series of guitar records released by Naxos. But hey, by all means, you guys keep on playing your transcriptions of always the same Bach lute suites (not the best example, J. S. 4ever, but you catch my drift); I'm not yawning.
I'm not sufficiently familiar with Theodorakis' music to hold any solid opinion on it, but like a lot (not all) of music heavily entangled with its times (in his case, ranging from politicized oratorios to Hollywood soundtracks), most of what I have heard (regardless of my own political views) tends to be a bit too emphatic for my taste (again, not all; Το Άξιον Εστί, for instance, is interestingly weirder than what I would have expected), particularly when it assumed the form of some sort of symphonic folk, which constitutes something of a musical oxymoron if you ask me (I know you didn't, so I'll leave it at that). This, however, is on the other side of the spectrum; a side to which I didn't even know Theodorakis travelled (so he may have had other surprises up his sleeve). Being a soundtrack to Michael Cacoyannis' film adaptation of the classic tragedy Ηλέκτρα [Electra], it assumes a very sparse and slightly verisimilar approach to the diegetic context of the play (in contrast even with other work of the same genre he did; for instance, for Ιφιγένεια [Ifigenia], also by Cacoyannis, in which he followed a more orchestral route). More than full compositions, this harbors essentially a collection of cryptic sonic gestures and ominous dramatic cues, mostly made with an assortment of traditional instruments, winds and percussions, to conjure an antique soundworld assimilable to greek tragedy, and in that may reside both its virtues and limitations: taken by itself, this hieratic approach might not make for an entirely self-sufficient listen (while I seem to remember it being quite effective in the film); but, unlike melodic content, which has much more associative power, getting attached to specific experiences and contexts, that's precisely what can make its soundtracking qualities more easily transferable to other artistic objects, whose immersive enjoyment it can also complement and enhance. As such, when you feel like dusting off your Euripides, don a chiton, and sip some retsina (oh, is that not how everyone reads the classics?), why not put this on, let its archaic atmosphere set in the background, and maybe take the opportunity to acclimate yourself anew to the chthonic chaos the world is hellbent on devolving into? It might work like a charm.
Futuristic pop, played by a true "mensch-maschine" consortium (yes, that is a (post-Ralf & Florian) Kraftwerk slam), that included, among many other self-made gadgets, not a drum machine, nor electronic beats, but a real drum-kit played live by a robotic device (or Jaki Liebezeit's dream come cybernetically true); an idea that should have earned Octant an immediate cult following by itself, but which, as a most welcome bonus, was then put at the service of proper catchy tunes, whose sound profile reinvigorated the increasingly impaired perception, in post-industrial societies (more precisely, societies which have offshored their industrial production), of the magnitude of real world resources and physical infrastructures our daily lives (including its artistic manifestations) depend on.
It is easy to realize that the advancement of any civilizational process entails the expansion of socially invisible dimensions of social organization; that greater expands of everyday life are taken for granted, as if everything we need to go about our way materialized everyday out of thin air. Yet, that is something the non-survivalists of us are only briefly reminded of when systemic shit hits the fan, after which we immediately go back to sublimating that stress-inducing awareness via whatever alienating means at our disposal, including doomscrolling, binge-watching apocalyptic fiction, or writing amateur music reviews; and that obliviousness can be felt in musical creation too, as an expression not only of individual creativity, but of social dynamics and technological conditions as well.
Not to disparage specific genres or modes of musical production wholesale, what differentiates this record for me is the way it actually incorporates the materiality of mechanisms and circuit boards, of the hardware involved in making it, instead of just relying on the abstraction of code, zeros and ones. That gives it a real analogical feel and weight that a lot of electronic or (more to the point here) "indietronic" (ugh) music increasingly came to bypass with its digital software and sampling shortcuts, lacking any kind of physical grounding to make it feel real and alive instead of a form of simulated escapism into some sort of musical metaverse (particularly when it tries to mimic that very physicality, as in the turn of the century overuse of samples of scratchy vinyls played on old turntables to automatically evoke times gone by; nothing as ever sounded more lifeless and artificial to me).
So, to gratuitously trash another band in this context, I'll be repeat-listening to this long before I succumb to the latest retro-space-age dilettantism of the likes of Stereolab.
More than that, if this were any indication of how life under our future robotic overlords would sound like, I might even be willing to let Skynet (or whatever we're calling it these days) take over already, no questions asked; though it is far more likely that this record was just an endearing glitch in the matrix.
Whatever the case, I do at least hope there is one last thing humans and machines can firmly agree on before the fall: no more Terminator movies, please; they have been useless.
I remember reading somewhere, at the time this came out, that Robert Wyatt wrote to Asher congratulating her for it, and if that happens to check out (which I can't be bothered to confirm, perhaps by willingness to print a harmlessly pleasant legend), that should obviously be all the recommendation you need. All I can add is that that highest of accolades is, or would be, a well deserved one indeed.
If, thematically, Asher was already fully committed in this, her debut, to discussing beyond partisan bias (but in no uncertain terms) the practicalities of the problem of evil in the world, in its manifold manifestations (war, incestuous pedophilia, AIDS, take your pick) - something which the confrontational title and cover clearly announced -, her aural strategy to call on us to listen to her was still somewhat based on seduction, not the all-out aggression that would ravage most of the following Spears Into Hooks - and apparently the rest of her work up to the present; logically, as history has yet to deliver the human condition from being shaped at best by an ebb and of flow of cruelty, suffering, and indignities.
In fact, while always fraught with some tension, and relatively stark in its resources, the music here can still be reasonably described as quite engaging, with its highly effective rhythmic pulls and instrumental mood setters, like a didgeridoo here, or a harp there. It's only if and when you start to realize what's going on underneath (which means you either understand Hebrew or have the booklet at hand) that its musical appeal begins to reveal itself more clearly as something of a deceptive device, a way to slowly confront you with hidden or distant horrors, instead of making you immediately turn your ears away - like we turn off with our fingers, or not even that anymore, just tune out in our desensitived minds, all the massacres, tragedies and bombings that have long become a visual side dish to the daily bread of those privileged to be exclusively on the receiving end of those images.
Perhaps there is then a theodicy inherent to Asher's aesthetic trajectory: to begin by presenting us a thing of apparent beauty, to then scratch and forever forsake it, as if saying this is what humans do. I suppose that could make this the Paradise Lost of her oeuvre. That the remainder of it seems to have become a more literal and endless iteration of Une Saison en Enfer (though it's Artaud's Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu that she's turned to more recently), can't help but feel both regrettable and inevitable. We may not 'like' that - as we are not supposed to -, but maybe the foremost question - before any purely aesthetic considerations -, when by design, denial, or omission, humankind continues to afford art so much pained material to work with, is whether we deserve any better in the first place.
When it comes to prepared piano music, I think there are mainly two ways to go, and none of them exactly your more academic John Cage way (even if it got the ball running), or Pascal Comelade's disingenuous musique naïve: you either go for atmospheric timbral explorations, forfeiting notation and composition in any rigid sense of the word, or you go for real childlike abandon with a brand new toy.
The joy of more or less arbitrarily sabotaging a highly evolved musical instrument is not only to extract different sounds and textures, but to really open it (and the music it can offer) to happy accidents, embracing unpredictability. To then reign it all back in, in the controlled form of written music, and pass it off as a studied form of art, seems to me close to an inherently fraudulent proposition. When you add to that the puerile sounds most 'preparations' tend to emit, ending up with an artistic blend of calculation and children’s toys, then the whole thing threatens to turn into a most perilous social enterprise, a musical breeding ground for evil geniuses.
François Tusques' approach, thankfully, does not feel calculated for a minute, despite its heavy-handed political pronouncements and imagery, which don’t really have any sort of musical bearing. He just seems to go for it and see where it leads him - which is often to sound like a drunken one-man gamelan ensemble, thanks to all the microtonal deviations of the piano notes that he hammers non-stop, in a sort of rhythmic trance, while playing with different ranges and thingies and such. That’s it.
It might not exactly be revolutionary (pun intended), but it does make me feel like a toddler watching a buffoon magically draw wacky sounds out of a large piece of furniture, and apparently I am still not mature enough not to be reasonably entertained by that.
