Boring Like A Drill.

The number of Volkswagen campers lurking between my house and my local café has cracked double figures, now that this specimen has parked down the street.

Also, the name and subject indices are gradually being updated, having now got as far as mid-August.

Mary Gauthier, “I Drink” (1999).

It must be nearly ten years ago that I took a friend to the abandoned power station in the middle of Melbourne for performace of Luigi Nono’s epic work for violin and tape, La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura. He came away from it exhilarated, saying that it was like the musical equivalent of a film by Tarkovsky.

The last and greatest piece on last Monday’s concert program was Nono’s ‘No hay caminos, hay que caminar’… Andrej Tarkovskij, for seven instrumental groups distributed around the concert hall. Nono described Tarkovsky as “a soul who enlightened me”; both made art that fought against the way modern life dulls one’s perception of the world.

Alison Croggon at Sarsaparilla has recently written beautifully about Tarkovsky, particularly his film Stalker.

Stalker’s beauty is woven out of its limitations, its finitudes. When I watch a Tarkovsky film, I am always aware of the literalness of his medium; he is never doing anything more than making a film. Out of his refusal to aggrandise his medium he forges a profound poetic.

Croggon writes that Stalker is a film about faith: it articulates faith, but does not attempt to explain its meaning or its purpose. The Stalker is a guide, who offers the hope to others of realising their desires, but he cannot fulfil these hopes for himself.

Meanwhile, Daniel Wolf at Renewable Music has also been writing about Luigi Nono, in particular his late string quartet Fragmente – Stille, An Diotima:

… each attempt to write something meaningful about the quartet has failed, and I’m not sure whether my failure lies in my inability to get closer to a work whose distance to my own musical culture is great, or in a more fundamental doubt about the work as a technical and musical achievement.

This is something I hadn’t considered before, but if it is an issue then it strikes me as being of a piece with the other distinctive aspects of Nono’s late music. Nono’s music had always been about struggle, most obviously in the many works dealing with political and social struggle. In his late works the struggle becomes internalised, a matter of personal and spiritual wrestling. The quotation “No hay caminos, hay que caminar” is invoked in several of Nono’s titles from this period. It comes from a graffito he found on the wall of a Spanish monastery; loosely translated, it means “There is no way, yet we must go” – a sort of variant of “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”

The struggle is not just metaphysical, it is also a testing of Nono’s musical ideas and technique. Morton Feldman (who provided the quote for this post’s title) liked to complain that one of the many problems with composers is that they liked to make everything seem so easy: there is always the compulsion to make the music, even at its most anguished, seem to have emerged unmediated from the abstract, unscarred and unruffled. In other words, glib. It’s an important theme in writing and painting, but music pretends it doesn’t exist.

Nono’s music confronts this smoothing banality of technique with denuded musical material, isolated, halting phrases, inarticulate gestures, made from habit and apparently empty of meaning. In the same way, Tarkovsky in Stalker guides his limpid camera over industrial waste and other detritus. “Out of his refusal to aggrandise his medium he forges a profound poetic.”

This method shows itself most clearly in La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura, with its taped part built up out of sounds produced by violinist Gidon Kremer in the studio. Set adrift by Nono without any music, Kremer was left flailing, confusedly making tentative, awkward, disconnected noises; his mutterings, dropped objects, and extraneous studio sounds intrude on the soundscape. When writing the solo part, Nono kept Kremer waiting until the morning of the premiere for the complete score, semi-legibly scrawled in biro. Composer and musician each stripped of language and technique, forced to make sense of what was left.

It’s a world that offers glimpses of an unsettling beauty that flourishes beyond human desires and yet can provide a home for the unsayable, unattainable longing that reaches beyond the confines of the self.

Repeatedly, in the score for Fragmente – Stille, An Diotima, the musicians are confronted by a fragment from Hölderlin, inscribed above the music, silently chiding them: “…but you cannot know that…”

I’ve only been to one Proms concert, to hear Berio’s Coro, a piece so overwhelming it couldn’t be swamped by the Albert Hall’s notorious acoustics. I was sat behind a row of BBC employees whose sole remark upon the music was that it wasn’t a bad effort for a commie.

Perhaps this back row brigade of insiders is the target audience for the protracted music festival “Luigi Nono: Fragments of Venice“. The lifelong Red has been slowly regaining the attention he deserves since his death in 1989; for a while he was pigeonholed amongst the B-team of post-WWII serialists, distinguished by his explosive temperament and expressive vocal writing, usually for revolutionary texts that had not aged well (“UNCLE SAM WANTS ‘YOU’ NIGGER. Join the best paid army of negro mercenaries in the world! Support White Power, take a trip to Vietnam and win a medal!”*)

There is talk (and there are talks) about Nono’s politics and how it shaped his music in the program, but not too much of the music itself. Apart from a few notable exceptions (particularly a performance of A floresta e jovem e cheja de vida) the series focusses on Nono’s late works, less overtly political and more spiritual in nature.

I don’t know exactly why this is bugging me so much. These late works include many of his greatest pieces, his most haunting and mysterious music. Usually I can’t stand art that tries to sell a message. In part, I think it’s because of the faux-edginess of the program: at Monday’s concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall there were university students “responding live to the music by literally writing on the (foyer) walls”. That last bit was written on the back of a blank postcard us punters were handed as we entered, upon which we were invited to doodle and affix with blu-tac upon approved sectors of the foyer walls. I’ll spare you the five paragraphs of ranting I had written on the triteness of this gesture, “inspired by Nono’s ideas of protest through art.”

Also, I think I’m mildly annoyed at how many avant-garde composers are now gaining prominence under false premise of being some sort of proto-“Holy Minimalist”, like highbrow New Age music, all wafty spirituality and hushed tones of reverence. Besides obvious choices like Part, Gorecki, and Tavener, less tractable composers like Cage and even Webern are now getting gentle, mellow recordings of works that were once rightly considered prickly and demanding. Late Nono, with its pauses, long durations, and sense of ritual, seems to be the latest candidate for being co-opted by this movement.

Luckily, Nono’s spirit and soundworld is combative enough to resist this type of treatment, but I still wish there were some of the earlier, more confronting pieces on the program, like the monstrous, jawdropping Como una ola de fuerza y luz, which I’m sure spooked not one, but two of my housemates into moving out after they came home when day when I was playing it a little too loud.

I’m due down the pub, so no time to write about the concert now. Sorry, maybe next time!

* From Contrappunto dialettico alla mente (1968). The text is taken from a “pamphlet distributed by the Harlem Progressive Social Club”.

György Ligeti, “Hungarian Rock” (1978). Adapted for barrel orgran by Pierre Charial.

Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, pp.118.

The sound of someone starting to believe the critics who say his ideas are more interesting than his music.

I’m compiling a list of albums I love to bits but cannot be bothered going out of my way to find out about anything else by the same artist. So far I’ve got Highway 61 Revisited and this.

The Guardian is a newspaper which occasionally lapses into worryingly consistent periods of self-parody (like in the opinion pages over the past month or two) but how can you not love a widely circulated, national morning paper which publishes items like this review of James Blunt’s new album:

Elsewhere, songs ruminate about celebrity, among them the deeply peculiar Annie, on which the titular heroine’s failure to achieve fame is bemoaned -“Did it all come tumbling down?” – and Blunt, gallant to the last, offers her the opportunity to fellate him as a kind of consolation prize: “Will you go down on me?” More bizarre still, he offers her the opportunity to fellate him in the kind of voice normally associated with the terminally ill asking a doctor how long they’ve got left: tremulous, replete with pregnant pauses, suggestive of brimming eyes, etc. The overall effect is so bizarre that it overshadows anything Blunt may have to say about the fickle nature of fame. You come away convinced that the song’s underlying message is: give me a blow job or I’ll cry.

For years now, I’ve been making electronic music which can be performed live, without using computers, synthesisers, samples, or preset sequencers. This generally involves setting up a table full of guitar effects pedals bought at pawn shops or cadged off friends, all connected with a rat’s maze of cables, to produce feedback loops. It’s inconvenient, but it’s fun when it works.

This type of feedback system, made without using anything designed to actually produce sound by itself, is often called the “no-input mixer”. Sketch for “A”-16 is a new piece I’m working on, my first attempt to make a piece for a no-output mixer.

The fundamental premise for the piece is a principle used by David Tudor in some of his compositions: that many electronic audio components have jacks that can be used for either input or output. I’ve used this aspect in my recent live electronic works, but Sketch for “A”-16 is the first piece I’ve made which is entirely based upon this property. It can only work if the inputs for each circuit are simultaneously working as outputs.

I’ve uploaded some examples of how the work’s going so far. They’re more of a proof of concept than a finished composition, but still work quite nicely as music, each with its own mood and sense of form. What you hear in these tracks is the combination of two simple bi-directional feedback loops. Future versions of this piece will use a greater number of components, to produce a greater and more subtle variety of sounds.

1. Sketch for “A”-16, take 1 (part 1) (3’48”, 2.97 MB, mp3)

There is no editing, overdubbing, mixing or other post-production of any kind on these three pieces. Each was recorded directly to hard drive, with all sounds produced by analogue electronic feedback loops, created with closed circuits of effects boxes and an 8-input mixer.

(More about Sketch for “A”-16 and other music.)

Stuffo & Beth Alphett, “BLD2” track 7 (2006).

With larger increases in temperature and increases in rainfall pasture production increased by 2030 in the north, but not in the south, and results were not as positive by 2070.

As it turns out, the “Old Europe” is prepared to serve in the relatively peaceful northern parts of Afghanistan, but not in the south, where active combat is the norm.

Over fifty years after the practice was first defined, the Canterbury Block is still thriving.

The constitution contained many present-day Dutch political institutions; however, their functions and composition have changed greatly over the years. The constitution was accepted in the North, but not in the South.

Dry season adults were consistently larger than wet season adults in the tropical north, but not in the south.

From agriculture to international relations, biology to constitutional politics, there is no field of endeavour to which the Canterbury Block can be applied without immediately enhancing and expanding upon the sum of expert knowledge.

In the North Fore, but not in the South, the corpse was buried for several days, then exhumed and eaten when the flesh had “ripened” and the maggots could be cooked as a separate delicacy.

In Ghana, female headship was associated with poverty in the north but not in the south.

A quick search on Google finds choice examples of the Canterbury Block bolstering opinions around the world, informed and uninformed, in a variety of languages. I am beginning to suspect that if there is a grand unified theory of everything, then one of the fundamental building blocks will be the Canterbury Block.

Sinn Féin will probably gain some ground but are not likely to make it into a governing coalition due to a curious double standard that sees the party as fit for government in the North, an increasingly foreign and alien place, but not in the South.

Time is running, but not in the South.

(Crossposted at Sarsaparilla.)

If you’ve taken the Magic Listener Advisory Group survey as I suggested, you might want to go back and take it again. The preliminary questions are all the same, but they’ve updated the list of songs to give you something completely different. Better still, this time they’ve thoughtfully uploaded audio samples of each song in case you don’t recognise the title.

Once again, its a clever mix of solid gold classics and the unexpected esoteric: highlights include “Chattanooga Choo Choo” by Harpers Bizarre (which I have’t heard Magic play, although they do seem to like band’s cover of “Anything Goes” an awful lot), Vicki Lawrence’s “He Did With Me”, the “wrong” Gibb brother, the non-ironic-quotes-wrong version of “Jolene” (Olivia Newton-John?), some Freddy Fender, Johnny Crawford’s “Petite Chanson”, back-to-back versions of “Puppy Love” for your analysis and comparison (Paul Anka and Little Donnie Osmond*)… and if Magic has to pick a Supremes hit, well, it has to be “The Happening”.

As with the last time, there’s also one song so odious that it must be given the thumbs-down, and it’s not the Kevin Johnson track.

* Yes, that’s how they list him on the survey.

This was supposed to be a post recommending you go look at the videos posted to Youtube by a guy or girl called Spoonfedcornbread. SFCB had a strong, clear vision: point the camera at the record player turntable, put on an old single, drop the needle, and watch the record go round while the music played. Eight hundred and fifty times.

If you’ve ever played lots of little pieces of vinyl in succession I don’t need to tell you what a beguiling experience this can be, listening to the music while the record spins and the tone arm gradually draws in towards the centre. In a way it emphasised the little self-contained world the 7-inch single created. SFCB’s virtual recreation of this phenomenon was strikingly vicarious.

The music was good too, being a collection of over 800 singles from the late 50s to the early 70s – all A-sides, from what I could see. There was a Magic-like variety, ranging from R&B to easy listening, from the more obvious Beatles and Stones to people like Keith (a Magic favourite), or Liz Damon’s Orient Express.

Sadly, Spoonfedcornbread’s account has been suspended by the forces sworn to make the world a meaner, sadder place; but not before some 20,000 people got to watch and hear “Some Velvet Morning” whirling round – more than twice the number of viewings of the second-most popular video.

In the meantime, try Office Naps for your old 7-inch fix. Sadly, no streaming video of the records going round. Yet.