Fairground music gone berserk

Pierre Charial - Hors Gabarit (1987)

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-jazz follies, 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 many collaborations 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.

Felt - Train Above the City (1988)

One is always quizzical about these apparently self-destructive moves in a musician’s career. Was it meant to sabotage an imposing record company; to free oneself from the aesthetic shackles of fame and fortune; or is it just sheer laziness posing as artistic intent? And why do we care? Well, on the one hand, possibly because we are culturally driven to reaffirm purposefulness as an imperative that should inform artistic endeavours - things must mean something, lest we plunge into aesthetic entropy, and obviously end up eating each other. On the other (simpler) hand, though, we might care simply because we care; just like people can sometimes push others away in hopes to see them stay, and sometimes they do (and other times everyone ends up miserably alone; so you might want to think that through). 

The same applies here, I think. 

We can put out numerous hypotheses on why "just Lawrence", mastermind of a band that had already made a jangle pop name for themselves, would out of nowhere have it release a record of basic loungey jazz in which he played no part. 

From a structural perspective, there was the self-imposed artistic equivalent of a soviet five-year centralised economic plan in play - in this case, both extended and limited to ten years (the band's pre-determined shelf life), to be filled with precisely ten records and ten singles - which had arguably already been at the root of some anomalies in their career to make good on the calendar (if nothing else) - like the equally all-instrumental Let the Snakes Crinkle Their Heads to Death (1986); although, this one was still somewhat recognizably on-(jangly-)brand, so that couldn't be the only explanation, even considering how things get when time's running out, and that creativity is far from immune to getting desperate. 

From a psychological perspective, one could also speculate whether, at the height of some sort of Bloomian "anxiety of influence", Lawrence of no Arabia tried to go for one of Dylan's I'm not there moments and one-up him by taking it literally. 

Even from a game theory perspective, one could argue that removing himself from the picture was in fact a crafty power play out of Sun Tzu to justify his autocratic rule within the band, trying to show how it all would go to crap if he took his hand off the steering wheel - and the first side of this record certainly seemed to make good on that promise. 

Maybe there's a point to all of that but, at the end of the day, phenomenology must always have its own say, because it was only if and when you actually took the leap of faith required to endure the (mercifully short) A-side of the record and still showed the willpower to expose yourself to the B-side, that that other, simpler, hypothesis, would get revealed – that this be perhaps one of the most effective tests for artistic allegiance ever crafted; as indeed, for those proven worthy, on the flip side, the blaze of self-destruction is instantly and permanently dimmed, along with the lights in the imaginary speakeasy where all of this takes place, after the bustling crowd has gone home, and only the familiar downbeat regulars, with nowhere to go, will hazily witness, in the back of their inebriated minds, the musicians being allowed to take off their ties, drop the schmaltzy act, and become one with the sunken atmosphere, before calling it quits for the night, or on life as a project, as soon enough only smoke will inhabit the room anyway. And it's not like this is even a particularly accomplished musical expression of that mood - while anyone who's heard Forever Breathes the Lonely Word knows Martin Duffy was no slouch, the piano-vibraphone interplay here is quite rudimentary - but, ultimately, maybe all those failings are what gives that B-side an extra human dimension, which doesn't necessarily make for good art, but can at times make it extra meaningful. If there's any reason to care about (part of) this record, it's certainly not because it manages to be a successful artistic sublimation of our innermost lonesome feelings; it's because it can somehow make us directly feel, in that atemporal moment recorded music conjures up, transcending the temporal separateness of musicians and their audience, that we are all, at the same time, sharing in the comfort of just giving up together.