Boring Like A Drill.

In Sonic Youth’s imaginative but haphazardly executed album Goodbye 20th Century, their tackling of various Cage and Cageian compositions contained one key insight: electric guitars can be equated with percussion. John Cage first made a name for himself as a percussion composer using various exotic instruments and found objects, but in his later pieces he refrained from attempting to define, or even suggest, what percussion instruments to use. There was just no point, as he had found that no two percussion instruments could be relied upon to sound sufficiently alike. Morton Feldman made the observation that, while the piano, the violin had all reached a consensus ideal through centuries of focused development, the relatively neglected percussion instruments were still a little erratic.

With electric guitars, these distinctive traits became their selling point, each manufacturer promising a unique ‘tone’. This feature was immensely expanded by the introduction of additional technology: amplifiers, filters, effects boxes. With several generations now raised on guitar-centred popular music where no two musicians’ setups are alike, a composer’s score calling for an electric guitar seems vague to the point of being foolhardy… unless they approach it in some way rather like Cage. (It’s an interesting example of one of the ways Cage ceded control of his music to the performer’s tastes.)

A couple of weeks ago I heard the Belgian electric guitar quartet Zwerm play at Kammer Klang. Their set included a realisation of Earle Brown’s December 1952, interpreting the score in terms of pitch, attack, and effect pedal settings. The music was effectively electronic, rather than electroacoustic, with the guitar moved beyond amplification into being a medium for producing and transmitting electrical signals. Prior to this, they performed Joanna Bailie’s Last Song From Charleroi, a piece that combines e-bowed electric guitars with field recordings of abadnoned industrial spaces. With the presence of the four guitarists on stage, it was easy to forget that not all of the sounds you heard were coming from them.

I’ve been hearing a lot of guitars lately. As well as their recent CDs of acoustic guitar playing by Taku Sugimoto and Cristián Alvear, Another Timbre have released a solo disc by guitarist Clara de Asís. I’ve heard her realisation of d’incise’s Appalachian Anatolia (14th century), which was also recorded by Alvear at about the same time. On Do Nothing, Asís plays acoustic guitar, with percussion, but the results are in the realm of electroacoustic music, with their emphasis on the shaping and colouring of sound forming the music’s content. Asís’s playing is as clear and precise as before, with isolated guitar notes doubled on percussion instruments, creating subtle varieties of attack and overtones. Other sections are rolling interludes of mechanically-assisted percussion, acting like a slowly morphing sound sculpture. By the end, bowed guitar tones have been blended with sustained percussion sounds, resembling both but neither.

When Zwerm played their own adaptation of Dowland’s viol music for their guitars, their use of distortion sometimes called up associations with ‘heavy’ music which can seem overbearing and undersophisticated – in a word, cheesy. Guitarist Stephen O’Malley frequently places an emphasis on these dark, dramatic qualities in his playing, which can verge on the ridiculous. I first listened to Rêve Noir, his collaboration with Anthony Pateras, with a little trepidation. Putting the disc in my computer’s CD reader revealed the album was originally titled “Tape Exorcism”. The album is not exactly the live improvisation it first appears to be. Taking the concert tapes from 2011, Pateras has now used them as raw material to play through his Revox machine, cutting up and meseing up the original document. A steadily growing drone is suddenly cut dead by Pateras, just as you think O’Malley is about to break loose. Soaring washes of sound are strangled, a full-flight roar of instruments is spat out in echoing fragments. Guitar static suddenly switches to half-speed piano thuds. The three-part suite is dramatic and ominmous, all the more for keeping you suspended in uncertainty until the very end.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Anthony Pateras, Clara de Asís, Earle Brown, Joanna Bailie, Stephen O'Malley, Zwerm