Boekie by Micha Lensink

TO ENJOY THE PNEUMATIC DRILLS, POLICE TREE F"ROGS. HE TELLS US TO APPRECIA TEo SILENCE BETWEEN THE SOUNDS ... OCE PUTS TOOP UP THERE WITH ENO AS A THEORIST OF" AMBIENT MUSIC' WIRED 'OAVID TOOP HAS WRITTEN A MUSIC BOOK WHICH F"INOS COMMON SPACE F"OR ALBERT AYLER, STOCKHAUSEN, THE ORB, CHARLIE PARKER, WILLIAM BURROUGHS, THE F"UTURE SOUND OF" LONDON, F"RANK SINATRA, THE VENEZUELAN ~ANA INDIANS AND U2. YOU COULD CALL IT STIMULA TlNG AND BRILLIANT - AND YOU'D BE RIGHT' HOT PRESS 'gYERALL, THIS IS A HUGEL Y OPTIMISTIC BOOK. --WHEN MUSIC WRITERS FISH IN ESOTERIC POOLS OF" ANTHROPOLOGY AND LITERATURE, AS TOOP DOES EXTENSIVELY HERE, IT IS OFTEN A SIGN THAT THEIR ORIGINAL F"EEDING GROUND IS WANING. BUT F"OR ALL ALK OF" SCENTS AND SHADES, PERF"UMES AND TINTS, IT IS THE CAPACITY OF" SOUND TO THRILL THE SENSES THAT COME.S ACROSS MOST CLEARLY I HESE PAGES. DIVE INTO OCEAN OF" SOUND TOO R CKLESSL Y AND THERE IS A SLIGHT RISK OF" OWNING, BUT LET IT LIE AROUND THE HOUSE A AND IT WILL SEEP INTO YOUR BRAIN BY W OSMO ' I EPENDENT ON SUNDA Y AN OF" SOUND BRILLIANTLY ELABORATES BOTH THESE PROCESSES, LIKE SONIC F" ACT F"OR OUR SCI-F"I PRESENT, A MARTIAN CHRONICLE F"ROM THIS PLANET EARTH' THE FACE

*****

-C<

OCEAN AETHER TALK, AMB AND IMAGINARY WORLDS

--I

o o

'A RARE INSTANCE OF A MUSIC BOOK WHICH IS ABOUT MUSIC, BUT WORKS' SUNDA Y TIMES

Praise for Ocean of Sound '. '•• a masterfully innovative andradiaiIWork ... a definite route , ,forWlUd for ~e pop book.' Melody Maker

' •.. as styles of music multiply and diVide at an accelerating pace; (Ocetm qfStnltul) challenges the way We hear, and more importantly, how We interpret what we~ aroml(t-us.' The'Daily Telegraph 'Ocetm qfSourul sbattas consensual reaUty With a cumulative force that's both frighteiling and cOmpelling. Buy it, read it ...d let it remix }'OW" bead.' l-D

' ..• an encydopaedic work, uncommonly knowledgeable 'and wide , ,in its scope ... a rare ~ subVer$iveread.' DJ M. . . .4! , ' ... a scintillating and Uluminatiilg read.' Mojo

'Its parallds aren't muSic books at all, but rather Italo Calvino's 'Invisible CINes, Michel Leiris's Afrique Phant(Jme, WllIiam Gibson's Neuromancer .. . ' David Toop' is oW" Calvino and .our Leiris, our Gibson. 0cet.In qf is as alien as the 20th century, asutter1y Now as the 21st. An essential mix.' The Wire

So"'"'

Ocean

rews

'An extraordinary and reveIatoryJ)()()k, qfSornuI like ,an aI.ternadve history of 20th Century music; tracking the passage of 'ol'gaDised sound into strange and new environments of vaPOW" and ' abstraction.' Tony Herrington ,'At the end of the millennium, we can see two ttends in music, one proactive, the other reactivi: ... Toop's 0cet.In qfSound brilliantly, elaborates both these Processes, like sonic fact for oursd-fi present, a Martian Chronicle from this Planet Earth.' The FaCe 'This Eoc:yclopaedia of Heavenly Music is an heroic endeavour brou8ht off with elegance and ~. The play of ideas is downright , musical and, vitally, the author writes like a mad enthusiast rather than a snob.' NME

~AIways the rigorous pluralist, [ToopJ sees no reason not to expect wisdoms &om rival cultures, tribal or club, nor em.ptinessor stuPidity ,

either. His sense of ~e absurd, of potential darkness and Madness, is Ii bullshit detector never turned off.' ,NeW StafeSman &: Sodety

'..J

Also by Dmd Toop and pubHshed by Serp;mt's Tail Exottc(,l: Fabricated Soundscapes tn路 a Real World

Rap Attack #3

David'Toop is a musician, author and music curator. His first book, Rap Attack, is now in its third edition. Since the . publication of Ocean of Sound in 1995 he has recorded five solo. albums, including Screen Ceremonies, Pink Noi,. . Spirit World and published Exotica: Fabricated Soundscapes in a Real. World. He lives in London with his daughter, Juliette.

and

. ocean of sou-nd . laetJuno talI4 ambient sound and Imaginary worlds

. david toop

Library of Congress Catalog Card NUinber: 00-108741 .A catalogue record for this book is aVailable from the British Library on request The~t

of David Toop to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordafice with the Copyright,DesignS and Patents Act 1988 Copyright ÂŠ David Toop 1995 First publishe~ itl1995 by Serpent's Tail, 4 Blackstock Mews, London N4 2BT www.serpentstail.com First published in this

>star edition in 200 1

Set in 10pt Garamond by Avon Dataset, Warwickshire Printed in Great Britain by Mackays of Chatham, pic 109

a7 6 5 4 3 2

contents.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

acknowledgements

prologue: fragments and mantras

memory if you find earth boring

scanning: aether talk burial rites

content in a void altered states i: landscape altered state$ ii: fourth world altered states iii: crystal world

9 10

altered states Iv: machine

altered states vi: nature

12 .13

theatre of sound

altered states v: lucid dreaming

ocean of soimd bibliography discography index

1 23 33 66 87 130 161 172 195 208 217 252 268 281 287 295

for LeslieJohn Toop (1913-95) andfor

Kimberley (1959-95) ... in a green sun",y~pkice ...

acknowledgements

The raw material for this book has been gathcied over twentyfive. years .of study and music making. Picking out key

individuals who have contributed to my knowledge andexperience over such a lengthy period路 seems arbitrary, yet $Ome names stand out in terms of the subjects I discuss: Madeau - Stewart, now retired from BBC Radio Three, who responded to some eccentric ideas with encouragement rather than dismissal; Brian Eno, who did the same and continues to do so; Paul-Burwell and Max Eastley, who continue to inspire me after all these years of musical collaboration and friendship; Paul Schutze, John Wall and Tony Herrin8ton; who kept tabs on my general condition throughout the writing of the book and then read the manuscript; Jon Hassell, Sheila Hayman, Tom Recchion and Paul Sanders for the aether talk; musicians and artists such. as John Zorn, John Oswald, Steve Beresford, Marie Yates, John Latham, Hugh Da,vies, Evan Parker, Annabel Nicolson and Derek Bailey, with whom I feel privileged . to have shared conversation and collaboration; Mike Barnett, .. David Thompson, Jon Tye, Kevin Martin; Tony Thorpe and all the other recording conduits; all the interviewees; all my friends, neighbours and family for support during difficult times, including Musa KalamuIah, Pamela Marte, liz Stringer, Veena and Nick Ellsworth, Justine Picardie, Neill McColl" Scott and Nick Hall, Sue Steward, Cathy and Andrew Brenner, Nancy Brenner, Sheryl Garrett, Kate Flett, Nick and Julie Logan and so many others. Sections of the book have appeared in different form in-a number of pubHcations, particularly The Face, The Wire and Mlxmag. Some of the editors have already been thanked above for support which has extended far beyond the professional. I would also like to thank Mark Sinker, formerly at The Wire,

and Richard Morriso.n at The Times, both of whom said "yes" to projects which have found their way into this text: In Japan, Nobuhisa Shimodadeserves an especially warm greeting for his assistance and enthusiasm. The earthquake which _destroyed large sections of Kobt! happened after I had written about musical activities in the city; this section should be read with the knowledge that life changed dramatically in those few moments. Gratitude goes to my editor, Laurence O'Toole, who negotiated the territotybetween bluntness and sensitivity with elegance and so helped to make a better book. A number of people who- were vital to different aspects of the _ book died during the time I was writing it. With great sadness: Stuart Marshall, John Stevens, Kimberley Leston andiily - father. The deepesttbanksgo to my daughter Juliette who, ._ in innocence, earths me and helps me to look far ahead..

prologue: -fragments and mantras What follows is a collection of diVerse views, thoughts; experiences: They trace an expansiveness, an opening out of muSic during the past one hundred years, examining some! of the ways in which music has reflected the world back to itself and to its listeners. . This is not a book about categories of music - ambient, electronic, environmental or any of those other separations which lay claim to the c:reation of order and sense but actu路 ally serve bUSiness interests. What I have followed, starting with Debussy in 1889,15 an erosion of categories, a peeling open of systems to make space for stimuli, new ideas, new influences, from a rapidly changing environinent. Then, as now, this environment' included sounds of the world - previously unheard musics and ambient sounds of all kinds, urban noise and bioacoustic signals - as well as experiments in presentation rituals, technological innovations, unfamiliar tuning systems and structuring principles, improvisation and chance. The soUnd object, represented most dramatically by the romantic symphonies 'of the nineteenth century, has been fractured and remade into a shifting, open lattice on which new ideas can hang, or through which they can pass and in- . terweave~ This is one metaphor: Landscape is another -' a conjured place through which the music moves and in which the listener can wander. Musicians have always reflected their environments in Ways which are incorporated into the music's structure and purpose. The unverifiable origins of music are located by most musicologistS either in bioacoustic and meteorological sounds or language. After a subtle ~mjnation of origin theories, Anthony Storr makes the following conclusion in his

~It will never be possib~ to establish the origins of human music with any certainty; however, it seems probable that music ~loped from the prosodic exchanges between mother and infant which foster the bond between them." So sounds which we would describe as ambient, tunc· tional or mysteriously alien· have laid the· foundations of musical creativity. But the day when Claude Debussy heard Javanese music performed Ilt the Paris ExpositioQ. of 1889 s~ particularly . symbolic. From that point - in my view the beginning of the . muSical twentieth century - accelerating communications . and cultural confrontations became·. a .focal point of musical expression. An ethereal culture, abSorbed in perfume, light, silence and ambient sound, .developed in response.to the in· tangibility of twentieth century communications. Sound was used to find meaning in changing circumstances, rather, than imposed as a familiar model on a barely recognisable world. Inevitably, ~me of this music has remained in fragments; some has been moulded from fragments into mantraS and . other solid structures. Much of the music I discuss could be characterised as drift· ing or simply exiSting in stasis rather than developing in any dramatic. fashion. Structure emerges Slowly, minimally or a~ parently not at all, encouraging· states of reverie and receptivity in the listener ~t suggest (on the good side of boredom) a very positive rootlessness. At. the same time,a search for meaningful ritualsrecws 3.gain and again, surely a response to the oontemporary seuse that life can drift ~ death Without direction or purpose. So this is a book about journeys, some actual, some imaginary, some caught in the ambiguity· between the·two. Although the narrative jumps, lQSes itself and,(ugresses, my central image was signals transmitted across the aether. This applies as much. to theJavanese musicians and Debussy in the colonial era of the ninetee~th century as it applies to music in the digital age at the turn of the millennium. This past hundred reus· of expansiVeneSs in

MUSIc and the Mind:

. music, a predominantly fluid, non-verbal, non-linear medium, has been preparing us for the electronic ocean of the next .century. As the world has moved towards becoming an information ocean, so music has become immersive. Usteners float in that ocean; musicians have ~come virtual travellers, crea~路 tors路 of sonic theatre, transmitters of all the signals received across the aether. AUguSt .1995

memory sound and evocatton; Muzak, ambience and aethereal culture; Brian Eno and peifu.me; Balt,

Java, Debussy

_Sitting quietly innever-never land, -I am listening to summer fleas jump off my small female cat on to the polished wood floor. Outside, starlings are squabbling in the fig tree and from behind me 1 can hear swifts wheeling over rooftops. An ambulance. siren, full panic mode, passes from behind the 路 left centre ofmy head to starboard front. Next door, the neighbours are screaniing - ".... tuck you ... 1 didn't ... get out that door ..." - but 1 tune that out. The ambient hum of night air and low frequency motor vehicle drone merges with insect hum called back from the 1970s, a country garden somewhere, high-summer in th~ afternoon. The snow has settled. 1 . can smell woodsmoke. Looking for fires 1 open the front door, peer out into the shining dark and hear stillness. Not country stillness but urban shutdown. So tranquil. Truthfully, 1 am lying in intensive care. Wired, plugged and 路 electronically connecte~ I have glided from coma into a sonic simulation of past, and passed, life. As befits an. altered state, the memories have been superimposed, s1rlpped of context, conflated from seasons, times, eras, moments, even fictions, 路 into a concentrated essence of my existence in the soundworld. These sounds- reconnect me to a world from whidl I路 had disengaged. Sound places us in the real universe. Looking _ahead, I can see it plaDe enliyened by visually represented

david toop

objects. I can tOuch within a limited radiUS. I.can smell a body, a glass of beer, burning dust. But sound comes from everywhere, unbidden. My brain seeks it out, sorts it, makes me feel the immensity of the universe even when I have no wish to look or absorb. There are ear plugs, but then I just hear the sound of my own sheil Not long born, still unable to control most of my own body, .I stared at colour shapes and gripped objects as they came near. Far away, a dog batked. Then there were two worlds. Now I am very old, too old. A stone-deaf baby. Who am I? These people sitting around my bed; who are they? One of them holds my hand. I press the button. Sound pictures wash them away. I am listening to a song in a school classroom: "Oh soldier, soldier ..." Somebody is carrying a radio and an old pop song is playing: "See the pyramids ...." I can hear the metal phase echoes of footsteps moving along an alleyway, wind in drainpipes, a tied-up dog howling. Enfolded in the stillness of ChriStmas lM!, chureh bells; police sirens and domestic rows. Sea sucked back over stones through the narrow rock corridor atQodgy Point, Cornwall. A ~ down on the beach; inside, I sound the echo with a bone trumpet, water dripping in a steady tattoo. Fen<:es rattling in the wind on Dartmoor. Walking after midnight down the long tunnel of an underground station. A man walks .alongside me, bright eyed with chemical joy. Australian vowels. "Hear ~ Sirens. The sound of London." He looks down at my feet as we stride quickly in parallel. "Squeaky boots." A bee trapped in a chimney flue, its buzzing amplified to 1"()Om dimensions. The fizzing drone of a street light. A hotel room in Italy and close by a man and a woman are screaming their way to orgaSm. ~ebody shoutsÂˇin the distance, drunk. Toads belch in the deep night and a motorbike whines by. I have a daughter; sb,~is singing "Daisy, Daisy .â&#x20AC;˘ ;"" Sounds that have remained mysteries for decades: walking by a railway terminal on a Saturday morning and stopped dead by the eerie.

ocean of sound

lament of a train whistle ch9ir. All those horns and whistles blowing at once. The air buckles. Did somebody die? Paradise is so dull. I listen for a moment to the woomph of mortar fire in thick junglc;:, vult1J1"eS. tearing strips from a corpse, car alarms, fire alarms, smoke detectors, house alatms ancl cenient mixers. And then the comfo~ note of aU conditiOning, the slow glide of electronic curtains. My exit, probably. But I still hear the s~d of fleas jumping off my small female cat on "to the polished Wood floor.

soundbites At a conference in cairns, Australia, a scientist member "of the ~can Rock Art Research Association claimed tbilt ~toric cave-painting sites Were chosen by ihe artists for

their rCverberant acoustic character. Steven Waller specidated that each painting site reveals a correspondence ~ the animals depicted on the walls and the nature of any sound activating the echoes in that ~. In caves such as Lascaux, where 1arge animals were painted, the echoes are overwbCtmingly loud, whereas in sites where felines adom the walls, the decibel level of the reverberations is very low. New ScUmtlst, 28 November 1992 Seals ~ fr9m the North ~ into Lincolnshire's RWer Glen ." feast on freshwater fish stocks customarily assumed to. be the natural Prey of local rOach anglers. To drive the seal Camlly back Into the North Sea, the National Rivers Authority have been . playing recordiilgs of JdIler.whale songs under the surface of the Glen. "We playing the "music using hydrophones," ~d a spokeswoman. for the NRA. " The 31 October 1994

are

nmes,

"The best thing that ever happened to backgrouJid music was foreground music," reported Billboard in a special sixtieth anniversary advertisi.ng supplement devoted to Muzate. "If you go into a store. and you think YOU'Je Iiearlng Muzak, it probably isn't Muzak," said Bnlce ~, Muzak progfamming and Hcenclng VP. "1'b.ereare still a couple of companies out then:" " doing t!Jat old-style I,OOI-str1ngs, ruin-your-favorite-song kind of

david toop

tbJog, but we dropped all that in 'tr1;" Since that IIlOJIleIi.rou& JCII', Muzak has IlWitc:hed 11.oflts 12 music channels to so-c:aIled . folqp'ound music (die otJginaI hit reaH'd by the orlgiruil artist). . The 12th is-.calledthe ~ Music channel, 1bis featulesinstrumentaHe-retmdings of those hits. aK far cry from the 'oceans路 of beautifUl music' of the past," BUlbotm:lcontinued, athe new channels are hip, cum:nt and extens1vely resea1'cl1ed." BIIIboarrI, 29 October 1994

. pre-echoes .

In his dazzling novel of Southern californian subculture, The Crying 01 Lot 49 (first pubUshed in 1966), Thomas

Pynmon predicted the replacement of hUman musicians by digital processing. Listening to muzak in a pizzeria, a character one vioJiniSt playing'sharp, "1beyeould dispeDse with live musicians", he suggests. "Put together aU the right overtones at all the right power levels so it'd come out like.a

hears

violin," Pynchon路aIsO foresaw a worId路in which people would get

drunk in electronic musi~ clubs, Stockhausen records pla}'ing on the julrebOx. "We're the only bar in the area, you know, has a strictly electronic music policy", brags the barman of an LA . outskirts bar called The Scope. "Come on around Saturdays, starting midnigbt weha'veyourSinewave Session, that's a live . get~,fellas come in just to jam .from all over the state, , . We got a whole back room full of~ audio ~颅 tors, gunshot machines, contact mikes,everythlng man." ln VermUIonStmds (published in 1971), J.G, Ballard celebrated leisure', artifice,ennul and' ambient drift in his portrayal of a desert resort. AmOng the lotus-eating pleasures of Vennilion Sands ate choro-floristsselling singing plants and sonic sculptures growing on the reefs. The latter are incorporated intOoommetdally available singing sta~es. The ~,a soundscu1ptor; cheats one of his customets by augmenting a statUe's; interactive senSory mechanisms with a tape. Then he finds that the statue has assumed the divinatory properties of a mirror or quartz globe for the rich buyef. "I . / -

ocean of sound

went out one dusk to the sand reefs where the sonic sculptures grow", the sculptor says, emptied by the realisations that followed the sale of his fake. "As I approached, they were creaking.路in the wind whenever the路 thermal gradients cut througbthem. I w;dked up the long slopes, Ustening to them mewl and whine, searching for one that would serve as thesonic core for a new statue." With startling awareness of the evolutionary links between player pianos and路 simulacra (of which more later), Philip K. Dick's We-Can Build You (pubUshed in 1972) begins in Oregon, at the headquarters ofan imaginary musical-instrument manufacturer which is falllng behind in the technological race. Its competitors, Hamnierstein and Waldteufel, make keyboard llistruments whicb exploit brain-mapping research and directly stimulate the hypothalamus. The book's narrator, locked in argument with his partner in the firm, is a sceptic. _ "Like most people", he says, "I've dabbled at the keys of a Hamniefstein Mood organ, and I enjoy it. But there's nothing creative about it. True,. you can hit on new configurations of brain stimulation, and hence produce entirety new emotions in your head which would never otherwise show up there. You might - theoretically - even hit on the combination that will put youinthestate of nirvana. Both the Hamnierstein and Waldteufel corporations have a big prize for that. But that's not music. 1bat's escape. Who wants it?" More than twenty years later, at the close of the twentieth century, a deafening answer roars back: "We want it." And at the end of the nineteenth century, a Parisian writer, clerk and dabbler in magic named loris-Karl Huysmans exploredfln de steele ideas of vicarious (or virtual?) living and neurotic aestheticism through a character called Des Esseintes, A Rebours (Against Nature, published in 1884) _follOws Des Esseintes through his quintessentially Decadent immersion in scent and colour, cruelty and eroticism, OrientaUsm, increasingly refined diets and strange _pleasures. In one Scene, he recreates a_ passage from Gustave Flaubert's

The Temptation of Saint Anthony by settbig up a tableau of two miniatures - a sphinx IJIld a chimera -'in the darketred bedroom. Lying back in reverie, he Usteos as a female ~triJ.O. quist intones a ~dialogue, "like voices from ailother world';, betwe~ the two carvings. AI seek new perfumes, larger blossoms, pleasures still untasted", she chants, and Des Esseintes imagines that F1aubert's words are addressed directly to him, amplifying his "craving to escape from' the horrible realities of life". The scene ends, by impUcation, with路 sex, but ttJe pleasure is nots~ by the ventriloquist. After reading Charles Dickens, Des Esseintes decides to , travel to ~d. Preparing to take the boat, he prevaricates endlessly, ricocheting between cuUnaty and Uterary flavours in taverns, deciding finaI1y that reality is a disappointment, when compared with art. His journey jxogresses no further than Paris. "After all''~ he reflects, "what was the good of moving, when a fellow could travel so magnificently sitting in a chair?" So the couch potato, the sofa surfer, the virtual nomad, was born; Although Des Esseintes absorbs more than he creates, he plays games with his environment. But the intended subtlety of the games is overwhelmed by a heaviness of execUtion. Epitomising the triumph. of mat:eriaUsm over aether, a tortoise is gilded and encrusted wlth unusual gem stones in order to . set off a mobile counterpoint to the iridescent colours of an Oriental carpet. Understandably, the overloaded animal roots 'itself to ,a ,secluded spot. Des Esseintes blends musical corre.. spondenceswith tiny drops of Uqueur from a dispensi.l1g路 device he calls his mouth organ, fantasisingwhole ensembleS from ~e synaesthetic Iinkage.of dry ~ao with clarinets, anisette with flutes and gin with cornets. From long practice, . he could recreate complex musical compositions on his tongue.

' -

Another of his active. skills, or obsessions, is the manipulation of scents. "Afterall,he argued, it was no more. abnormal . to have an art thatconsisted ofpicldng Outodorous fluids than

ocean of sound

it was to have other arts based on a selection of sound waves ..." So, in mounting excitement, he paints an epic canvas in his dressing room with a bewlldering sequence of exotic teas, delicate perfume sprays, sprinkled scents and tubbed pellets of odiferous substances. The final effect of this orchestration is drastic. As he airs the room, other smells crowd back in like a haunting of Medieval spirits. Overwrought and oppressed by his own art,~ Des Esseintes finally faints across his windowsill. Against Nature mixed observations, often satirical, of the artistic and social atmosphere of the period with Huysmans's own adventures in imaginal esoterica. On the one hand, there were performances such as the total-art spectacle of PaulNapoleon Roinard's Cantf.que des Cantf.ques, staged bY Paul Fort at the Theatre Modeme i~ 1891, in front of an audience which included Debussy and the occult-poet Joseph peladatl. > The poetry was augmented by music, colour projections and perfume sprayed rather ineffectually from the theatre boxes and balcony. Fights broke out and shots were> fired near the >ticket office. On the other hand, Huysmans was influenced by French occultists such as the.Abbe Boullan. At one point, he found himself caught up in.a magical war. Despite defending himself with miraculous hosts, he claimed that at bedtime he was being beaten on the路head by "fluidic blows". Some ofthese esoteric pursuits mirror the desire for "pleasures still untasted" characteristic of our own time. "There is talk of 'the sophisticated life' ", wrote Itil1ian design historian Claudia Doni in a 1988 essay entitled "Invisible Design", "of the 'renaissance of subtlety', of 'soft' and 'hard' design, of. 'fluid' objects whose new, 'suggestive' pleasures, associated with smells or sounds or lights,路~ supplanting the old values of aesthetic-form. or litility. There is talk of the object of the future as something evanescent, light, psychic; of immaterial objects akin to images or holograms. On the eve of the twenty-first century, we are seeing an era focused. on the hefghtening of sensation - a devt:lopment provoked by a more

david toop

destructured lJSe'oflanguage. but which will usher in a ,new harmonics."

suggestive pleasures Functionalism and the' ineffable meet in air. Uncon. scious material is coaxed into the light witfl the same cunning employed by the shaman Ame-no:Uzw:ne.no.Mikoto (the Heavenly Alarming Female) when she danced. lewdly and loudly aseighth-century Japanese myth rclat:es.inorder to trick: the . sun goddess out of her sulk in a: cave and bathe the world in Ught once more. .Brian Eno. better known for his successful record production of bands such as U2 than his art installations. created a Work in Hamburg called "The FutureWiB Be llkePerfume". Exhibited in February 1993. the title was a clear indicator of the ethereality of so much contempOrary experience~ Also. he released Neroli (Thinking Music Part IV). an auStere album eVen byEnostandards. This piece, origina:Uy recorded for iil~ sta:Dationsin 1988-and lasting to within a ·tewminutes of one hour. was named·after the orange-blossom scent and related to its relaxing. uplifting. lhOught-clarifying properties. "I never intended to release that pieceoriginaUy". he explains. '"and I made it as a study. I found Ivery often put it on wheal was writing or sitting reading. I never really thought of it as music. in ~cular.· I thought it made a nice space to th!Dk in." Paradoxically. Eno ~imself failed to recognise the musical substance ofNeroli. until the pieCe'was released on compact disc. A coJittadiction arises. . . The previous yeaHJrtan had delivered a~ture and slide installation at Sadler's Wells Theatre. London. entitled "Perfume. Ddellce & -David· Bowie's Wedding'!'. "A coriander kifig". the GUaliliancalled him in its post-mortem of the . event. AolOng 'the,c>bsetvations made and descriptions given during the Pedume section of this lecture were the following: '''0rrIs butter, .a 'complex derivative of the roots of Iris. is. vagUely floral in small ~ounts.butalmC>st·~bscene1yflesby

ocean of sound

(like the smell beneath a breast 9r between buttocks) in quan~ty, or Civet, from the anal gland ·of the civet·cat, is intensely

disagreeable as soon as it is recognizable, but amazingly sexy in subliminal doses." Anal scents: what was ·their relationtoa·cultural shift? In 1975, Brian had begun to talk in press interviews about the prospect of insinuating music into chosen environments as a sort of perfume or tint. Writing fora short-lived paper called Street Life in November of that year, he touched briefly upon changing listening behaviour: "I believe that we are moving towards a position of using music and recorded sound with the variety of options that we presendy.:-use colow: - we might simply use it to 'tint' the environment, we might use it 'diagramatically', we might use it to modify our moods in almost subliminal ways. 1 predict that the concept of 'muzak' , once it sheds its connotations of aural· garbage, might enjoy a new (and very fruitful) lease of life." By 1978, he had shaped these ideas into a manifesto. "An ambience is defined as an atmosphere", he wrote for the sleevenotes of Musk For Airports, "ora surrounding influence: a tint. My intention is to produce original pieces ostensibly (but not exclusively) for particular times and situations with a view to building up a small·but versatile catalogue of environmental music suited to a wide variety of moods and atmospheres." But the idea was to highlight "acoustic and atmospheric idiosyn~ies", rather than muffle them with MuzakGP. "Ambient Music is intended to induce calm and a space to think", he concluded. "Ambient MUSic must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular: ~t must be as ignorable as it is interesting." This last statement, in particular, was anathema to those who believe that art should focus our emotions, our higher intelligence, by occupying the centre of attention, lifting us .above the· mundane environment which burdens our souls. Yet what Eno was doing, as ·often happens when somebody grasps the flavour of the moment, was predicting a movement

,david toop

already in existence, The' measUtable, graspable narrative of ~-contained,

higbIy composed,emotionally engaging sound objects had been shattered by missiles flung from every' point of the artistic and technological COmpass. His words were for prOjecting this ttendtoWards open:Works into the realms of ,deSign (even'S()dal design) and popular music. , Once art became deSign or, 'better still, pop design, designer pop (or any other perm.utation)~ then a radical idea could tum

imPortant

into amedi3.eyent.

In a sense Thomas Pyncllon, J.G. BaIlardandPbllip K. Dick predicted BrianEno: Pynchon with his image of electronic sound as ambient entertainment; BaUard with his scenes of Vermilion Sands' cloud sculptors and sonic, statue salesmen; Dick with his路mUliical reverie technology. And; <as with any ,science-fiction author,' at the heart of his speculations are a collection of present-day realities. Background muSic is every- , where,' most of it carefully selected to reflect the fine tribal and ,class divisions of leisure p1lr$垄ts: a hi-tech restaurant p~ jazz recorded within atime-slice- of 1955-1965; a wood alld posters bar playing SO-Called ~roots"and 路world" music; a pub playing 19705' pop; an Indian restaurant pJ3.ying Bollywood,film songs; a slightly more expensive Indian,restaurantplaying Enya,Sade,KennyG,maybe even The Orb; a family theme-park 'cafe playing standard tunes in pre-1987, lOOI-stringsMuzak style; and so, on. Cable television flickers on the edge of-vision; loops' of New Age music endlessly repeat their soothing arpeggios in sealife parks to accompany the glides andba:ckroQs ofstingi-ays; the~sub..bass and-bass drum of- high-volume jungle tracks, booming from a car bull40zers the air in a moblle fifty-yard radius; music floats around in the"aether of the WorldWide Web, waiting tol?e dowDloaded, hoping to talk ,to somebody, The generalJack of deep engagement with, all this stimulus is disarming, alarmiJig or enthralling~ ,It depends on your mood, 'your point of view, your vested interest in products and solid values, or invisiJ>le, intangible, 'emergent,' shifting

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communications. "We are, in short", Bt1anco.ntinued in his Perfume lecture, "increasingly un-centred,· un-moored, living day to· day, engaged in an ongoing· attempt to cobble together a credible, or at 1eastworkable, set of values, ready to shed it and work out another When t:I1cr situation demands. I·find my- . self enjoying this more, watching us all becoming dilettante perfume blenders, poking inquisitive fingers through a great library of ingredients and seeing which combinations make some sense Jor us - gathering expertence-.the possibility of making better guesses - without demanding certainty." What this book seeks to explore is the path bf which sound (and music, in particular) has come to express this alternately disorientating·and inspiring openness through which all that is solid melts into aether. People talking of killer-whale commUnication sounds as music, or searching for long-absent animal echoes in prehistoric cave-painting sites; recordings on. which sheer noise, minimalism or non-narrative drift is sold and used as a kind of pop music; clubs where the periph- . eral status of the music,· its extreme eclecticism, or its cut-~p diffusion, is regarded as an environmental enhancement; music chopped out and laminated on to thick layered slices of seemingly" incompatible sound events; music constructed from private telephone conversations stolen out of the air (and "private" lives) by means of a hand-held scanner; music ex, ploring the language of physical sensation; music in ~hich a , blankness prevUls, ambient dread or bliss, calm and nearsilence, extreme minimal ism, or" a spacious landscape,a tropic or frozen atmosphere in which the listener can insert her or himself, occupy the foreground, wander the imaginary space for hours at a time. In a 1989 essay entitled "Why MinimaJism Now?", Claire Polin paralleled the emergence of the. minimalist· musical genre, particularly La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Philip Glass and Steve Reich, with minimal American painting of the late 1950s and early 19605 exemplified by Mark Rothlco's huge slabs of muted colour and Ad Reinhardt's black canvases. She

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quotes Reinhardt's outline of the new aesthetic: " ... no texture, no drawing, no light, no space, no movement, no object, no subject, no symbol, no form ... no pleasure, no pain." She goes on to say: "Followers, like· Olitsky, produced works of unnameable luminous mixed colours that appeared to float in infinite space, or in a spaceless infinity, recalling Pascal's words: 'the silence of infinite space fills me With terror'. One ·feels a weariness of the human spirit, a deske to escape into an enfolding quietude from the pressures of a frenetic, discordant world, a world which, according to Carl Andre, 'contains too many objects, and now requires some blankness, some tabula rasa' ... The trance of blankness can invade· us in supermarket aisles, waiting in queues, stuck in traffic, driving fast on a motorway, watching television, working a dull job, talking on the telephone, eating in restaurants, even making love. Jack Gladney, narrator of Don DeUllo's White Noise, hears "an eerie static" emanating from plastic food wrap in his freezer. The sound makes him think of dormant life, moving on the edges of awareness. He searches for certainties, despite ·fearing them, in a sea of shifting, irrelevant information. In the evenings he watches from the overpass as a drama of spectacular, toxically provoked sunsets unfolds: "May the da~ be aimless", he tells himself. "Let the seasons drift." Blankness - at best a stillness which suggests, rightly or wrongly, political passivity; at worst, a numbness which confirms it - may be one aspect of lOSing the anchor, circling around an empty centre or whatever the condition is. But openness, another symptom of the condition, may be more significant. Musicians have .always stolen, borrowed, exchanged or imposed influences, but for the past one hundred years music has become voracious in its openness - vampiric in one respect, colonial in its rabid exploitation,· restless, uncentred, but also asking to be informed and enriched by new input and the transfer of gifts.

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overtones (H]yper-artificiality, through which design is enabled to approach more nearly to the natural, is a,condition at once super-technological and poetic, a condition of whose potential we are still too littieaware.EDdowed with quasi-divine powers speed, omnisience, ubiquity - we 'have become Tdematic Nomads, whose attributes approximate ever more closely ,to those of the andent gods of mythology. Claudia Dona, aInvisible Design" U

Ubud,'Ba1i. A mist of fat raindrops. I shelter under a wooden platform in the tropical darkness, IiSteningto a rubbery lattice of frog voices warping in the rice fields. Some distance away, the lighting for a gamelan performance glows in a magic arc. Wind flurries throw slIvers of gong overtones and buried drumbeats across the water, whipping them in then out of earshot. Rain and humidity, insectS and frogs, darkness and quietude. I had seen Balinese and Javanese gamelan performances before: in a tent at the first Womad Festival in Somerset and, rather more fornially, in two London concert l:J.3.ns. In 1977 I previewed a Sadler's WenS Theatre season of Gong 'Kebyar from Sebatu, central Bali, for Time Out magazine. My VeneZlielan friend, Nestor" acC?mpanied me. We stopped for' a drink after the show, as:i.lways; and the delay awarded us the privilege of seeing a group of Balinese musicians and dancers gathered outside a hole-in-the-waU Chinese takeaway on the ClCrkenwell Road. Not a delicate rice offering in sight. During his B:i.linese S()journ shortly before the Pacific war, the Canadian-Amen.can cOmposer Colin McPhee ex:peri~ encea-ambivalent feelings on hearing the newly developing gamelan musiC ci1led kebyar. "Forever changing", he wrote iti his beautiful Uttle' bookA House In Balt, :ubrilliant and sam-' bre by turil,themoody mu.sic seemed to express a neW spirituaI 路restlessness,'an' impatience and lack of direction, for it was as unpredictable. as' the intermittent piay of sunlight, from' a clouded sky."

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In his time, McPhee was a pioneer among musidans who had fallen, or were to fall,under thespeU of Indonesian music. Varying degrees of gamelan influence can be detected in the work ofJohn cage, Harry PartC;h, LouHarrison, Philip Comer, Olivier Messaien, Steve Reich, Gavin Bryars, Terry Riley, Peter Sculthorpe, Wendy Carlos, Don Cherry, Jon Hassell and, in very recent times, Australian composer Paul Schiitze and london sampling band Loop Guru. A sound akin to Javanese and Balinese gamelan mtered througbdense 1ayersofcontemporary .sources suffuses fearure-fwn~ scores such as Ryuichi Sakamoto's Merry Christmas. Mr Lawrence, Maurice Jarre's The Year ofLIving Dangerously and Yamashiro Shoji'sAldra. Thislast, a Carmtna Burana for the electronic, post路linear, folk-digital age, hypnotically counterpointS a relentlesS dark rush of Manga apocalypse imagery ~ hyperactive percussion, electronics and "Balinese Tantra" (whatever that may be), courtesy of Ida Bagus Sugata. The CD cover hypes the score "music for the 21st century". Perhaps this is not' as trivial as if sounds. Music in the fut:ure will almost certainly hybridise hybrids to such an extent that the idea of a traceable source will become an anachronisQl. On a 1993 Japanese J;ecording of DC$y Komia, the daughter of a Sundanese (west Java) gamelan player, the . entwinement of Javanese pop, traditional and neo-traditional styles, modern AsJan pop and Hong Kong atmoSpheriCS, Japanese studio teChnology and quasi hip-hop drum programming can becalm the listener in an uncharted ocean. The experience is entrancing and dis~ing,like trying to follow a map that changes its boundaries before your eyes. Colin McPhee was not the first afidonado of Southeast Asian music. Centuries before him were the seafaring explorers, traders anel colonial administrators fi:QmHolland, Portugal and England, some of whom were affected positively by the music.路Piloting The Golden Hind around the world iti路1580, . Sir Frailcis Drake dropped anchor off the coast of south Java, where he heard "country-musick, which though it were of a

oceaa

of sQuad

very strange kind, yet the sound was pleasant,and delightfuU".

ThonulSSt3mford Raffles, neutenani-govemer ofJaVa in lS11, returned from Southeast Asia with two mllections of gamelan instnunents.InlS17he wrote: "It is the harmony ~d pleasing sound ofall the insttumen~ ~,路which giVes ,the Pmsic of Java its ,peculiar character among Asiatics." To Kaffles, so~ ofwhat he heard bore "a strong resemb~ce to the oldest music of Scotland". Qeady, be sensed possibilities in this muslcdlat ,in some respectScxtendedthe European tr2ditions ui which he, grew up. "The airs", he wrote, "howeveJ"simple and monotonous they may appear of themselves, when played on the g4mbang k4yu, or acmmpanied by the other ~颅 meD.ts, never tire on die ear, and iUs not unusual for the ~elan to play for~ dayS andnigbts in succession". This ,passing 'mmment illuminates a particular quality of Javanese gamelan and helps to explain, pemaps, wby the rmJSic of ~ a small Southeast Asian archipelago has so strongly influenced music in the twentieth century. In 1937, ~nard HuinZinga expressed the ~ of this quality more poetically. "This music does ,not create a song for our ears", he wrote. "It is a 'state', such as moonUght poured over the fields." , Aside from the sound of the music - a fractal vibration of harmonics which mittaigs immeasurable variety - the transmission of the music introduced to European culture the idea of performance as a kiild of ambience. Colin McPhee vividly described all,night evc;:nts in Bali: hf: would fall asleep as fatigue, overshadowed the spiritCd~cophony of a barong dance, finally ~ at dawn in time 19 watch themnclud~ ing 'movement. The long" rhythmic. cycles and leisurely develop~t within performances of Indonesian music allowed listeners to vary their CQQcentration; in~ focus, eveJla literal en~~t, could be,alternated with periph~ ~li$:n.ing, eating.', drinking or, 1,I).timately, sleep. The ambientmusic~fBrianEno has some origins in ~ ideas, since he was influenced by the music and ideas of tbC'N;nerican mlnimali~. ,In ~~, they~ influencedbyth~

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musical events of India, Bali, Java, Morocco and many other parts of the world, events which might run all night and allow for a less sharply focused style of listening. A Balinesegamelan orchestra from Peliatan performed in Paris in 1931. "Early in 1940", wrote Klaus Wachsmann in a Royal Anthropological Institute lecture entitled "Spencer to Hood: a changing view of non-European music", "the [Amsterdam Tropen] Museum had made USe of Indonesian shore personnel, in the employ of an Itidonesianshipping line, to play gamelan niusic, and their concerts drew thousands of visitors." Then other gamelan ensembles toured Europe and America after World War II.· From the 1950s onwards, gamelan ensembles flourished in museums and the musicology departmentsof American and European universities to such an extent that a new genre of non-Indonesian gamelan music emerged and the purchase of historic gamelans, particularly by American institutions, was· described in 1971 by R.M. Wasisto Surjodiningrat, author of Gamelt:m Dance and Wayang in JOg/akana, as a competition. ··"We have to be proud that the appreciation of the outside world for our gamelan music is increasing", he wrote. "On the other hand we are afraid that this will lead to the loss of our most cherished heritage for the prize ofa mere couple of thousand dollars." The first of the virtual explorers witnessed .a gamelan performance in a similar spirit, in exactly the city and within a few years of the moment in which Huysmans's Des Esseintes was discovering·the advantages of armchair travel. Claude Debussy's father had plans for his son to become a sailor but Claude, at the age of eight, was described by his siSteras spending "whole days Sitting on a chair thinking, no one knew of what". This dedication to a life in the imagination .was underlined by a letter to another Fre~ch composer, Andre Messager, in which Debussy wrote: "I have endless memories which worth more than .reality." In 1888 Debussy visited Bayreuth to hear Richard Wagner's Parsifal and The

are

ocean of sound - -

Mastersingers; the following year he went again, this time to hear 7Wsttm and Isolde; Still under the spell of Wagner's Ger· man romantids1n; he visited the-Paris Exposition UniveJ:seUe, a colonial exhibition hdd in-l889 to Commemorate the centenary of the French~l\itio~.- He heard perforillaJiceSof music and dance~fromJapan, Cambodia, Vietnam and JaVa. A drawing by Rene I.acker shows us theJavanese groUp. Five musicians sit crosslegged in front ofafence·UIre-st:ructure made from _bamboo. One plays a su1ihg flute, one playS the bowedrebab, in the centre is a man poised-with hiS mallet to strike a small, flat·key metallophone (perhaps a saran orskmtem, the instruments which play the melodic theme of the music); at-one end of the semi-circlea kendang drummer plays barehanded, and attheother sitS-a rather dazed-looking player of a hOnang, a tuned ~ophone ofuplUmed bronze kettleswbich elaborates -on the central melody -in _muted tones. None of the instruments looks -partictdarly ornat.eand _the gtoupJS's~,though Lacker may haVe been sketching in haste. The musicians seem to be in a state of semi-concentra· tion, yet all of them shOW signs, some furtive, -same direct, of watching their watchers-; According to one of Debussy's biograp~; -Edward LockSpeiser, the- musicians accompariied bedaya dancers, a performance which somebody compared . with Wagner's flower maidens in Parsifal. Never mind the inappropriate comparisOn; if this _is accutate, then DebusSy was fortunate. The betJt.JyQ (also bedhaya, or bffdoyO) dances - Bedaya--Semang and Bedaya Ketaw3ng- - are sacred, ancient and verybCautiful couttdances fromJOgjakarta and Surakata. Bedaya Seinang, the-story of a-sultan who'goes to live with an utleattbly: queen·in heqwaceat the bottom of the sea, -is said to haVe been c.teat.edat the end of the eighleenth century; Ketawang,regaided as a sacred heirloom, may date as far back as the -mgn ofSultari AgUnglA the fkst half of the seveilreenth century and, acconliJm to Wasisto Surjodiningrat, was daneed e:i:clusively withinJogjakarta palace w.illsuntil 1918.· Per·

formed by. nine female dancers who are prone to collapse from the路 strain of their costume preparations, Bedaya Ketawang has a similar theme to Bedaya Semang: Sultan Agung sees a performance in the underwater Palace of the goddess of the South Sea and converts his inspiration into a terrestrial dance. There are other, less sacred bedaya dances, and perbaps the importation of one of these to nineteenth-century Paris is more likely. But all bedaya music and dances are performed with the slow, eerie grace of a loris and, to my knowledge, all are based around watery themes. In the mid-eighteenth century, the first sultan of Jogjakarta built a water castle of artiflciallakes, tropical gardens and ornate architecture called Taman Sari. Surely this background detail was unknown in 1889, yet how significant it turned out to bj: for Debussy, who compo~ed liquid works such as La mer, Re/lets dans I'eau,'" Jardins sous la pluie and PQissons d'or only a few years after his experience at the exposition. Psychologically, these Javanese myths, along with the music itself, suggest an emergence of dreams and unconscious des~ into the tangible world of consensus reality, the feminine other dredged up into a domain of masculine logic and action. The路compulsive, almost occult attraction of liquidity, the floating world, the ungraspable emergence of reflections, sunlight on ripples, waveforms, the abyssal darkness down (or up) there, was characteristic offin de steele Europe, just as it is now on a global Scale. Debussy found himself in sympathy with the French symbolist writers - Mallarme, Valery, Rimbaud, Huysmans, Verlaine and Victor Segalan - as well as being influenced by the Egyptian craze that followed Napoleon's Egyptian expedition, the Japanese woodcuts of Hokusai and,briefly, the Pre-Raphaelites and Russian exoticists Mussorgsky, Borodin, who路 was inspired by reading an account ofJapanese tortures, and Rimsky-KorsaIrov the. fantasist who inflated folktales into epics. , Debussy was open to a world of sound beyond rules and

ocean of sound

convention. As a-successful but rebellious compositi~ stu,dent in 1883, he-shoCked membets of ano~er class at the Consemitoire by pJaybig a pianJstic impression. fuJI of strange and lmresolval"chords, ofb~ travelling along the Faubourg PoisSOniere_ Hariilony and comiterpoint existed, to be ignored according'to whim and intuition. His reaction to the music he heard at the exposition' was 'interesting, being couched, in terms which appear respectful, curious~ even slightly oVer-awed (although he did write about "charming little peoples-who learned music as simply as one learns to , breathe"). He was affected profoundly by the siinplidty and " emotional power ofa Vietnamese (or Annamite, ait was , known then)dance-dftma. His famous comparison of javanese With Palestrina's 'counterpoint came nventy-four years later, when he WJ.'OteaboUt the exposition experience to his friend, the poet- and author Pierre ,Louys. Along with' Aphrodite, a "cl3ssic" of. Orientalist Soft ,pornography crammed with masturbation, sexual violence; erotogenic philtres, lesbiail flute 'players,' paedophilia and fake antiquity, Louys wrote Chanson de BIlItIs, a pseudo-Greek literary hoax ' which was set to 'music by Debussy and perfortned at the Paris Exposition UDiverseUeofl900.Louys alsO held intellectual salons, aRdneb~heldforth on one of these occ3sionnnth' a prophetic idea: "I would like to ~, and,l will succeed my- -self in produdng, music which is' entirely free from, 'motifS', or rather consisting of one continUous 'motif' which nothing inteiTuptS and which'tiewr turns back on itSelf;... Loriys and DebUsSyseeined to share similai" dreamsofa pagan Cosmos ofmiJt!.1imiuln flautists fucking iil fufest glades. Debussy's revedewasreallsed _in his gorgeollJ lWlude a I'aJris-mtdl d'un faUniJand Syrinx, a flute soloeomposedin 1913 Wbichdepicted Pm justifiably lamenting the路transformation Of his nymplliover into an aeolian reed flute. In AplWodlte, 'LoUyS dCsCribes a garden temple 'of pleasure, popuJatedby 1400 eXotic ~ from all'OVer Asia, Aftica ' and prlinitiveEuropcCWomeil from the most remote regions

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are portrayed as "tiny, slow-moving creatures whose la'nguage no one knew and who looked like yellow monkeys ... all their lives these girls remained as shy as stray animals". Others live like "a flock of sheep" or "only coupled in animal posture". The scene suggests a zoo, a sexual menagerie, perhaps an exposition. The Paris expositions were enormously influential. Not only did they introduce many forms of unknown culture and crafts to Europe, they were also a showcase for contemporary work created closer to home. At the 1889 exposition, Rimsky-' Korsairov conducted a number of Russian works; to celebrate the exposition of 1900 a number of composers, Erik Satie among them, were allotted a few pages for posterity in huge, leatherbound albums of officially recognised art.' A physician named Felix-Louis Regnault, a pioneer of ethnographic docu- , mentaiy, made a film of a Wolof woman making pots at the Exposition Ethnographique de l'Afrique Occidentale in 1895, the same year that the Lumieres publicly demonstrated cinbnatographe films of steam trains and crying babies for the first time. Commercial cinema was born, the armchair traveller was up and lounging, the virtual traveller was seeded and already visible as-a tiny dot on the far horizon. In A Theory of Expositions, Umberto Eco describes collection and assemblage throughout history as a representation of "apocalyptic insecurity and hope for the future". "It was only with the expositions of the nineteenth century", he continues, "that the marvels of the year 2000 began to be announced. And it is only with Disneyland and Disney World that concern with the space age is combined with nostalgia for a,fairyta1e past." These expositions were models of the shopping mall, as well as being the precursors of themed entertainments, trade shows, post-Woodstock I rock festivals and the kind of fast-foods-of-the-world "grazing" restaurant clusters that can be found in Miami malls. In Paris, world cultures were Iald out in a kind of forged map as choice fruits of empire, living proof of conquest and

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self-aggrandisement in the face of immiD.ent decline. Edward Said performed a comprehensive demolition job on the West's obsessive appropriation of the East in Orlentallsm. "Every European traveller or resident in the Orient bas bad to . protect himself from its unsettIjnginfluences", he wrote. Sex , was particularly unsettling for the nineteenth-century Europeans, he added. "But there were other sorts of threats than sex.· All of them wore away the European· discreteness and ration" alityof time, space and personal identity." All, of that sounds like a welcome effect. Debussy's'admiration for the ,"unsettling influences" of Vietnamese drama or Javanese percussion and counterpoint, despite being locked in colonial realities, was a .catalyst for·his break from' the powerfullnfluence of Wagner and, by extension, Wagner's sinister enthusiasm for the master-race theories of Houston stewart Chamberlain and Arthur de Gobineau. . Strolling through the 1889 exposition, Debussy,·the Stay-athome, drifted into unknown sound. zones, discovering answers to impulses which bad already percolated through his European skin.· At the mid point of the twentieth century his legacy inay have been more preValent in overblown featureitlm scores than in the cerebral experimental music of that time, but near the end of the millennium his open, intuitive, impressionistic soundworld seems once more inspirational. Increasing numbers of musicians are creating works which grasp at the transparency of water, seek to track the journeys of telematic nomads, bottle moods and atmospl)eres, rub out ' , chaos and noise pollution with quiet; concentrate on sonic ~croCOsJllS, absorb quotations and digitai snapshots of sound into themselves,avoid form in favour of impreSSion, concoct synthetic wilderness in urban laboratories, explore a restricted sound range·or single technological p,.acess overlong durations, seek to effect physiological change rather than pursue intellectual· rigour, or depict impossible, imaginary environments of beauty or.terror. MUSic that aspires to the condition of perfume, music that searches for new relation-

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ships between maker and listener; maker and machine, sound. and context. Music that leads the listener into a shifting zone which Peter Lambome Wilson has described as the "sacred drift" • a mode of imaginal travel."in which the landscape will . once again be invested with meaning, or rather with a liberatory aesthetics". Various forms of this music have been called, with varying levels of appropriateness, ambient, environmental, deep listening,ambient techno, ambient dub, electronica, electronic. listening music, isolationist, post·industrial ambient, space music, beautiful music, sound art, sound deSign, electronic music without beats, brainwave mUSic, picture music, ambi· ent jungle, steady state mUSic, holy minimalism, Fourth World, New. Age, chill out, or, the useless one to cap them all, new music. But no genre category adds up to much more than media.shorthand or a marketing ploy. Open music might be a more useful catch-all name for what I am talking about, except for the fact. that a proportion of this mUSiC, sometimes a high proportion, .is vacuum sealed, zipped up in a droning Om-zone of dIScarnate reverie resistant to intervention and crackling quietly 'at the back· of the freezer. Besides Claude Debussy and the·bedaya musicians of Java, where did SO<alled ambi~t music and all its bedfellows come from?What follows in this book is more a personal nomadic drift than a detached chronological history. This drift will trace a web of sources. In my biased opinion, compromised by flfSt-haqd involvement, these are the sources that have led to a musical environment which is, despite my reservations, a . hydra ofcreative potentials for now and the next century' There are othersQurces, but those are other books. '

.i ~

.if you fInd '

earthboring ... travels in the outer imagination with Sun Ra

Everybody in the hotel lounge is sleeping; eVerybody except me. Over there in the armchair is Marshall All~n, saxo· phonist, flautist, oboist·and performer on the self-invented ,morrow (as in too), and sitting here in front of me, serene in repose, orange-diedbeard, dressed in a long robe decorated . with star shapes and dots ofdistant galaxies, is Sun Ra.·A quiet yoUng man, hair matted into. dreadlocks, gently touches him on the shoulder. His eyes open. "I am listening", he, says. Space vibrations ~ been keeping SunRa awake for the past month. "The frequency moves so fast", he complains. . Ra had been listening to space vibrations and painting his musical pictures ofinfinity for at least thirty-five years. Sun Ra was probably seVenty-six when I met him. That same year, he suffered a stroke; refusing to allow the fire of vision inside him to be quenched,he.played concerts whllesitting in a wheelchair. Finally, he passed on to other galaxies in. 1993. His life had neVer been easy, either in terms of fmancia1 re. ward, critical support or the rigours of maintaining a large touring Arkestra, complete with otherworldly costumes and personnel, for decades·after·the big bands were supposed to have died. . His first UK performance· with the Intergalactic Research Arkestra, held in ~e Queen Elizabedt Hall in 1970, was one .ofthe most spectacular concerts everhe1d in this country. Not

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spectacular so m~ch in terms of effects, which were low on budget but high on strange atmosphere; spectacular in terms of presenting a complete world view, so occult, so other, to aU ofus in the audience that the only possible responses were ouIrlght dismissaI·or complete intuitive empathy with a man who had chosen to discard all the possibilities of a normal life, even a normal jazz life, in favOllr of an unremitting alien identity. Fire eaters, a golden·robed dancer carrying a sun symbol, tornadoes of p~ion,eerie cello glissandi, ferocious blasts and tendrils of electronic sound from Sun Ra on Farfisa organ and Moog synthesiser, futuristic lyrics of the advertising age sung by June Tyson - "If you find earth boring, just the same old same thing, come on sign up for Outer Spaceways Incor· porated" - saxophone riffs repeated over· and over by Pat Patrick and Danny Thompson as they moved down the seating aisles towards the stage while John Gilmore shredded and blistered a ribbon, of multiphonics from his tenor, film images of Afticaand outer space ... As depictions of archaic futures, shamanistic theatre, ·images of divined worlds,these devices of cumulative sensory overload were regarded at the time as distractions from the music. But those. who concentrated -solely on the music ignored b's role as a political messenger. As with everything else in his life, the formation of his first band· in Chicago was an event surrounded by·deliberate mys· tification. A photograph exists, dated circa 1956, which shows a group called Sun Ra and His Men, smiling for the camera, all dressed conventionally in dark suits and striped ties. Marshall Allen had anived in Chicago in 1952, 1953, he can't remember precisely when. He and.a drutnmer went looking for Sun Ra's band. "When they played- jobs'\Marshall tells me, "they always had somethin' different,Something original on, somethin' ,ahat ....". He joined the band and started 100Jting original himself. "It didn't bother me. I had to get used to that. It was the music, see, that music that I couldn't just, ahh, flow with. But I said, I spent all this time lookin'. This must be it. Itwas good forme. Gave me some discipline." He chuckles,

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as if to say that discipline was not his strong point at that juncture. . . Already, the song titles reflected Ra'sphilosophy: "Tapestry From An Asteroid", "Lullaby For Realville", "Kingdom of Not". "I'~ done it all along",路~ says, "but secretly. 1 used to compose some songs every day for the Creator. Just for the Creator, not for the public. I did that for years, then some got away. It got out of hand, it got to the people and people started listening~ That was it." Bang, a fist on the table. "I had no preconceived notion, just playing sounds. It was fantastic. We was playing in.the Grand Terrace, got the bandstand,got steps on the side for the chorus girls to come out. They didn't much appro~ of what I was doing." He continues With a strange story about being kidnapped in Berlin many yeats later. "I was gone for about an hour and . the band looked for me e~rywhere. We went through the Berlin 路Wall: Then they asked me questions about space, what. kind of fuel on the ships? Then they came .back to the hotel, they televised me,and again, asked me about space travel. Then I路 told them that there would come a day when you wouldn't have to usegl,lsoline. You'd simply take a cassette and put it in your car, let it run. You'd have to have the proper type of music. Like you take two sticks, put'em together, make fire. You take some notes andriib 'em together - dum, dum, dum, dum - fire, cosmic fire." Ra's science-fiction sound paintings of altemati~ destiny could be linked historically with the percussi~ blocks of sounds composed into dark, mythic shapes by Edgard Va.rese, or the jazz composing/arranging of Tadd Dameron and Duke Ellington, particularly Dameron on Fontainebleau and Ellington's wonderful "jungle" band of the late 1920s. Sun Ra . acknowledges the beauty of pieces such as "~reludeT-o A Kiss" and "Day Dream" but claims that Ellington's musicians were not right for him. Revealingly, the judgement is based on social difficulties within Ellington's orchestra, rather than the musicians' undoubted playing abilities. Sun Ravalued hisre-

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sponsibilitiesas a guru, a benign cult leader, more than he valued musical virtuosity. The earliest ofRa's recordings are marked by a strong sense of his first steps towards an artistic rebirth, a shamanistic transformation of himself as the central force in a bizarre and virtually self路cOntained universe. For this reason, he resisted all temptations to reveal'his early life in any detail. By spurning the undermining, sacrilegious effects of biographical archaeology and its fugitive fame, he could better maintain the Sacred integrity of his magical universe. Was he bom on Saturn. or in Birmingham, Alabama? critics would ask. Perhaps Alabama was a stranger place than Saturn in 1914. As we talk he slips out tantalising morsels: "Comic books was telling about all kinds of inventions that they'd done.today. I used to read them all the time. Igo by the Bible in a lot of things. It says God takes foolish things to dum~found the world.'So I consider comic books as foolish things sol read all the comic books. Sure enough, they wrote about the first atomic bomb in a comic book, TV wristwatCh, all these things in the comic books were happening." , We walk slowly from the restaurant to the hotel, Sun Ra telling me about an important meeting in Turkey. He and the Arkestra had performed in Moscow, invited to celebrate the space flight ofYuri Gagarin. Following .aconcert in Turkey, a group of teenagers handed him a typed manuscript. ~I've been 'talking about'space all along", he said as we dodged puddles. "Com~itioDStalking about space, following, you might say, intuition; Talking about things that are totally impossible ,but still holding to it that its true. It's just like being a sdentist. Peopl( think, 'impossible, ~uIdn't happen'; Now I'm talking ~ more impossible things." Walking with: the assistance of a stick, he puIlssome papers out of a plastic carrier bag, dropping some on the wet pavement. Mindful of the fact that these , may save the planet, we scrabble to save them-from the wind. '''I found this proof in TurkeY. It's more fantastic than sdence fiction. My assessment may be biased,since I can only judge II

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the cOntents from Sun Ra's fragmentary description of the contents, but from what he passes on to me, the general drift of this channelled wiSdom 'jS classic science fiction: superior . alien.. beings .wish to raise the consciousness of humans because the mess we ate maIdng is threatening the balance of the Cosmos, so they transmit secret knowledge to a place where the vibrations are right; . America, partiC1.ilarly America, is dotted with eccentrics, psychedelic visionaries,conspiracy theorists and isolated craCkpots who ordain themselves as spiritual leaders of mailorder churches, pouring out phllosophy on energy streams of lunacy channelled direct from passing UFOs, predicting路 the end of the world,. a return of the Golden Age. How was Sun Ra路different? PartlY becaUse of his humorous self-awareness. Ra claimed in one of his drily catchy songs that the end ~f the world had already been and gone, so he knew how to play withthe rules of the apocalypse business. In other respects, . he inatchedthe profile - a folk prophet who col1aged selftaught, knowledge into a crazy patchwork of profound 'wisdom, hokum and glossolalia. The music embraced similar contradictions - .one moment on Sa~n,. the路 next moment back down on earth in a Chicago burlesque club. This irrational divergence was ~to European lOtellectual mystic composerS such as Karlheinz Stockhausen. "It was so highly powered", Stockhausen enthused to Melody Maker in 1971 after seeing Sun Ra perform~ "I tell you, this first 20 min~tes was first-class avant1Plde experlmentalmusic that you can't put in any box, It was inCredibly asymmetric! ... But after thiS piece came some saloon ~hy-washy music. 1 didn't like it at all. Sort of cheap, movie music." One day Sun Ra may be. contextualised in a mystico-political Undercurrent ofbladc American thought alongside Marcus Garvey and the turbaned founder of the ,MoorishScleD:ce Temple, prophet Noble Ali Drew. In As Serious As Your Life, Valerie Wilmer noted that Ra路led. a Chicago-based nationalist orgai1isation, distributing pamphlets about the future impor-

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tance of electronic technology, and there are rumours of his influence on the ideas of Elijah Muhammad, the founder of the Nation of Islam. Wilmer also passes on a story told by saxophonist Red Holloway, who remembered Sun Ra planning to go to New York to buy some books but then, like Des Esseintes, deciding that physical travel was unnecessary. "He said he just sent his body ...", Holloway told Wilmer, "his oh, I've forgotten the words that he used- astral projection? Yeah, that's it. And he said he got the information he wanted;" When others laughed, Holloway would challenge them. "Well, can you prove that he's wrong?" Mocked, belittled, patronised or written out of the jazz tradition, patient in his role as an~unwelcome prophet, Sun Ra believed in the moment of revelation, the thunderbolt conversion. "I've seen incidents where people could", he' yawns, then bangs the coffee table hard enough to blot out the next word, .. ... in one second, just one chord. 1 met a fellow in Chicago named Sharkey. He路 was gonna take an audition. He was sitting in a路booth with his head on the table. 1 didn't know then he was so high. 1 tell you, none of the other instruments could wake him up.路 But as soon as I hit the chord he sat up and say, 'Who's there?' and got up, just from that." The part of his message that could never be understood by Stockhausen came from Ra's experience as a black man in America. "Because of segregation"; he once'wrote, "I have only a vague knoWledge of the white world and that knowledge is superficial. Because 1 know more about black than I do white, I know my needs and natUralness. 1 know my intuition is to be what it is natural to be路 - that is the law of nature everywhere." With sound, light, words, colour and costume,.Ra 'COncocted a moving, glittering 'hallucination of ancient Egypt, deep space, the kingdoms of Africa - Nubia; Ashanti, Hausa, Yoruba, Mandinka, Songhai, Sudan, Mali, MaHnke, Xhosa - a history of the future with which he battled for the souls of his.people.against the legacy of slavery, segre-

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gation, drugs, alcohol, apathy and the corrupting powers of capitalism. An extraordinary film made in 1974 gives us the clearest insight into Sun Ra's perception of his purpose as well as mir· roringmany of the mythopoeic:: ,elements of his life. Space Is the Place, unique as a cosmic blaxploitation Biblical sci·fi fan· tasy, begins in a Chicago club, in 1943. Ra is playing piano for the floor show. A man named The Overseer demands his dismissal. Ra plays strange chords which almost destroy the club. The scene switches to the desert, where Ra and The Ovetseer engage in a magical battle. Ra and his Arkestra then land on earth in a spaceship and sign a promotional deal. Ra is kid· . napped, rescued,plays a concert and then leaves earth before it is shattered by a huge explosion. One scene in which Ra visits a youth community centre, is particularly revealing. "How we know you not some old hippie ~r something?" one woman demands. "How do you know I'm real?" Ra asks in reply. "I'm not real. I'm just like yOu. You don't exist in this society. If you did, your people wouldn't be seeking equal rights. You're not real. If you were, you'd have, some status among· the nations of the world. I come to you as the myth, because that's what black people are. I came from a dreain that the black man dreamed long ago." The periodic rediscovery of Sun Ra's music seems to coin· cide with each new phase of environmental awareness or spiritual hunger. His depictiQn of black cultural history, captured as in a dream and projected into the space age, has an , appeal to anybody who yearns for a life mote dignified and magical than the one they are living. Ra was not discouraged by the peaks and dips of public enthusiasm. "This planet has always rejected innovators", he says. Commercial record com· panies occasionally funded a recording but the majority of his album releases - estimated to be.in the hundreds - appeared under his own imprint. Labels such as Thoth and mSaturn, sometimes recorded in Solar Fidelity or Galacto-Fidelity, cap~. every phase of Sun Ra's d~opment. But records

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cannot convey the unique blend of low-budget spectacle, graVity and sly humour contained within a Sun Ra perform~

ance. Seated at the grand piano in his hotel lounge, dressed in robes and a hat which can best be described as inspired extraterrestrial Oxfamchic,he drifts into a jet-lagged reverie and improvises a solo piece which encompasses impressionistic tone clusters, rhapsodic runs, hints of Harlem stride piano, all built around a melancholy jazz ballad. The image is at once absurd and affecting. No other musician has created a myth of such dogged thoroughness. Little is known of Sun Ra's background. He was bom in Bltmingham, Alabama, where he received a scholarship to help his music studies. "I never wanted to be a leader", he says. -"Even in high school they elected me a valedictorian. I turned it doWn. I didn't want that because I saw what was happening to leaders. I thought leaders were an endangered species." He moved to Chicago and played in Fletcher Henderson's band, cOntributing his advanced harmonies and feel for sound. Eventually, the need to lead -his own band became too strong to ignore. During the 1960s, he recorded 'unparalleled music: albums such as Art Forms From Dimensions Tomorrow, -Cosmic Tones For Mental Therapy, two volumes of The Heliocentric Worlds o/Sun Ra, Atlantis, Strange Strings and The Magic City. Every record was an apocrypha, a vibrant cosmic map of unknown regions, lush solarised rainforests, cold domains of infinite darkness, astral storms, paradisical pleasure -zones, scenes of ritual procession, solemn ceremony and wild celebration. -Space was the place. Noise _and silence clashed in the void; the instruments of darkness sCtualling, rumbD,ng, throbbing - split-note oboe and piccolo, rolling tympani, spiral cymbals bells dragon drums thunder drums warped-in -echo,trembling heterodyning of massed flutes, electronic celestialJootsteps of angels dancing on bass marimbas, bumming-bird cello, the howlermonkey belching roar of baritone saxophones and bass clarine~, outer space explored in the extruded plastic, labour-

.: ."

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saving, swept-fin cockpits of the ClavioHne;. Rock:sichorc;l, FarBsa organ, FenderRhodesdectric piano, Hohner CIavinet and Moog synthesiser. MuSic to PlaY for 5-Dreadingsofmid, , twentieth-century :sci~fi comics and magazines such as Fantastic Adventures, From Unknown Worlds, Wonders 0/ the spi,u:ewo.ys and Tales of Totiwrrow. ' ,

, spell , "'The god comes in.peace', say they who are in the full ' moon; they have given to me' appearings in glory with Ba. , Ascending to the sky,to the place where Rais~" Middle'Kingdom Egyptian coffin text.

eye of Ra/hymn to the setting sun , "Reality is too barsh," Ra ,says. ,"Imagination makes

everyming

nice. Use your imagination and get out of.tbC most drab places by simply holding on to the imagination and making it real." I ask him,ooyou feel optimistic? "~jstic?"

"Optimistic." "Oh, mYstic, you got opti... He laughs. "that could mean 'something else~ Opti-m.ys1:ic. Another word to deal with. Opti of course, you got op, that could be eye. Optimistic, that's very nice. That way, we got something else. You can take a word and move it out intO other planes." " "It could turn around into mystic vision." "Right, that is very beautiful. It's just like taking nÂŤes, tak- , ing them and malting something beautiful." He reads sections from the Turkish/cosmic council manuscript, passages abOut the coding of consciousness, the failings of our leadets, the dImculties of Planet Earth. "Things are moving fast," he mut'" murs,'" 50UDding uncharacteristically bewildered, perhaps , conscious that death is not so far away. "I don't know whether ' the Sun's going round faster but the days are going by so fast."

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Sun Ra's dream "I had a vision that 1 saw some materials that defy description. 1 saw some jewellery that's like nothing you've got on this planet.路 It was like a big supermarket that was the supermarket of the Omniverse.' Eyerything in theOmnlverse was in this market. 1 didn't see any walls. It was so big there were no walls. "I stopped at one counter where they had some socks. These socks were like they were alive.. They were glittering like diamonds.lwolidered hoW that could be. It wasn't like seqUins. This was like they were Qlive. I wanted to know how . much they cost. They said it was ninety doUais for one pair of socks. I said,. 'Well, I've never seen anything like this before. I'd better go ~d see about the patlts.'i went over to the pants and they were .one hundred arid eighty dollars; Finally they said, 'Since you're from another:place, our tax here for everything iseigl;lty dollars.' "I was still standing there trying to figure out whether I wanted the pants or the socks. Then I came back here. I wondered if.1 had paid for them, they'd have bf!en in the bed with me?"

;-,_.

scanntng: aether··talk

ambient In the 199Os; Scanner, John Cage; adil IiouSe, disco; AMM; Telepathk FIsh, Biosphere, Mtxmaster Morris, Land of o.z;. n,.e·Orb,T1teKlP

59-73, 59-73 "•.. and ejaculation and all those sort of . tbitigs .• , right, mixture •• " sub-aqua dial tone triad, low ba,Ss, . hiss crackle, Erik Satte's Vexations running undemeathas unresolved counterpoint, a ride cymbal briefly, subliminal chatter, "oh yeah, oh yeah", a thump like theundenftter preSsUie from the air guns of an on rig, a faster rhythm, the whisper voiCe of PJ"Ofessional sex, "I put two fingers inside '._ • mmm., nice~ .• gently and and down.,. very.nice .• ~", "I. will not be treated like a chUd", "you should know that", "yeah, well I can sum it noW ... would yourespand by talking by writing? ; .. also you might finel it easier to write ...", a ~ ireybOard Hnetbat could have been Ufted from a Terry Riley pieCe,· sibilant voices· distorted intO electronic sandpaper, tadio voices, echoes, ritualistic banging, laughter, the impression of a forest canopy arcing above us, but not trees, rather·signals, transmissions, radiophooic fizz, verbal voyages across time·zones an~ round the curvature of the earth, a telephone riilgs, 'and he gets upset With me . , . thiS ooat has got so be!lUtlful" ... "1,2,3,4~5;6,7,8" ... craclde IIlOVitl8 across the stereo field, "leave it with ya, tata boy" .• .. more radio voic~, muted speech, modulated by. fading signals, th~ nostalgic sound of cold war ' espionage, a fierce burst of trackle across the flatlands, the iron grey seas, "You:ve upset people too much, for the wrong reasonS, that's die problem", pop song, warble, faint high tones, string glissandi, more VexaItons? then crackle, a deep, lazy voice: "naah, I just had a nice easy day today". .. . Scanner, "Mass Obsetvatlon~ (twenty-tour-minute ambientremJxby Robin Rlinbaud, Robert HamPson, Jim

and

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_ O'Rourke) verbalised.

field recordings

Robin Rimbaud snakes out a cheap television aerial across my sofa and times in his hand·held scanner to the invis· ible, private world. Private no longer. Somewhere nearby, a man is talking on the telephone to a woman,· telling her he is about to buy a large loaf of bread in a local baker's. ·Children are singing in a weird heterophonic chorus behind the foreground conversation. The exchange is mundane but then he says "I always wear black to match the colour of my car", and banal talk is revealed as a Trojan hQrse carrying other levels of communication: status, style and sexual promise. As well as otgarusing a London clup ciliedThe Electronic Lounge, Robin makes records based around material snooped, via the scaDner, from telephone conversations. Sounds, atmospheres and sometimes beats are added but the core material is people talking in the mistaken knowledge that nobody else is listening. Hearing these records is a l;ompulsive experience. The voyeuristic urge proVes to be very strong. But in addition to exposing the dynamiCS of interaction, scanners can-also track unconscious desires as they irrupt into the glue of ordinary dialogUe. Uninhibited by physical proximity, blank to the environment, focused on a disembodied voice, the imagination relaxes and allows its less housetrained habitues to scuttle into the light. Hearing these strange conversations plucked out of the air makes me think of an H.P. Lovecraft short story called "From Beyond", in which he wrote about an electrical machine which made visible "the creatures that form what me~ call the pure_air and the blue sky" and that "come out of places where aesthetic standards are -. very different" .- The story concludes with the narrator shooting the machine.. "I've always been interested in field. recordings", ·says Robin. "When I was younger, whenI was thirteen or fourteen, I used to hang microphones out of the window of my family's

SS"

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house and Used to record what was outside in the street. I've got hours of tape - I don't know what YOli would call it. A good way of putting it with the scannet stuff is mapping the city. I don't want to sound like !sit in my little palace, pickingup all the classes, but it's like mapp~g the movements of people during different periods of the day. It's fairly predictable. In the early morning, very quiet, lots of people ringing in saying 'I'll be late for work', or 'goodbye love', all this affection stuff; you very quickly move into the work rota and you're mapping out the-system and the way people interact. You get to a lunch period when things lull and people start ringing up their friends, then it's back to work again. Around six to seven it's people ringing home. Then in the evening, that's where the riot happens. That's when it gets really exciting because all hell gets let loose. The phone rates go ,down and people have the most surreal conversations. "I've always been interested in the spaces in these conversations. From a very early age I've never liked the telephone. I talk a lot on the telephone because it's the only way you can communicate with many people but I just doil't like it. You can't have a natural pause because you just get ages ofstatic. The etiquette's all gone, the organisation. Who's going to talk next? It amazed me with mobile phones, which are much mpre expensive than standard phones - you get these enormous gaps happening. They're the points that really interest me. What's happening in there. What I've often done is sampled these little parts of the background as well. A big part of the work I've done has been sampling a soundtrack in the "background,be it people mOving around the room, a radio on or whatever, looping it, manipulating it, using it as atexture. But that's the point where it really opens up. Interaction be路 tween individuals" really happens at that point, or doesn't happen; "It still shocks me that people ha~ phone sex. With pornography, there is no interaction. They're listening to a tape recording most times. You're listening to somebody listening.

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If you're talking to somebody on the phone, you usually say

goodbye. The pornographic ones are disturbing -because the phone goes dead. You know that's it. They've finish~d up, they've got their Kleenex: and it's done. "A big aspect for me is that it's so random. You never know quite what you're going to pick up. When 1 do a live gig and 1 do an improvisational set, 1 never know whether all I'm going to get is static. That's just as valid. If there's nothing there, there's nothing there." This recalls the notorious first performance of John Cage's four-minute piece for twelve radios - "Imaginary Landscape No.4" - premiered at Columbia路 University, New York, in - 1951. Two players shared control of tone, volume and tuning for each radio. The performance began after midnight when the air waves were relatively quiet. and composer Henry Cowell decided that this had spoiled. the piece. Cage disagreed. His biographer, Davill路 Revill, quotes one of the 路operators, poet Harold Norse: "The effect was similar to an automobile ride at night on an AlP-erican highway in whi<:h neon signs and patches of noise from radios and automobiles flash into the distance." "I remember going to a lecture by John Cage a long time ago", says Robin. "I found it really liberating when he was talking about listening to music at home and there was building work going on next door. Somebod:y said to him, 'Was it disruptive?' and he just had to accept the fact that this waS part of the sound. Once you embrace that, then everything's OK."

orientation What is ambient musi<:? Calm, therapeutic sounds for chilling out or music which taps into the disturbing, chaotic undertow of the environment? There are two separate, quite different moments in the past twenty years which tend to de. fine interpretations. The first moment is Brian. Eno's but, before I come-to that, this is the second one. The story, or my version of it, goes as follows: Between 1986 and 1989, a

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number of import 12nsingles appeared in the UK, almost all of them from either house-music clubs in Chicago, techno musicians of Detroit or garage-house producers from New York; most of them reduced the elements of dance music to a bare minimum in order to explore the new tex~es and rhythms of machine music. Phuture's"Acid Tracks" and "Slam", Larry "Mr Fingers" ,He;u:d's "Washing Machine", "Beyond the Clouds" and "Can You Feel It", Model500's "No UFOs" and "Night Drive ('lbtu-Babylon)", Reese and Santoriio's "The Sound", Virgo's "Do You Know Who You Are", Tyree's "Acid Over", Armando's "Land of Confusion", Lil' Louis's "French Kiss" , Rythim Is Rythim's "Strings of Ufe" and "Nude Photo", Metro's "Angel of Mercy", Truth's "Open Our Eyes"and many others contributed to an emergent movement in Britain, now enshrined in popular mythology as rave. The full scope of that story lies outside this book but its development is relevant since without the Ecstasy-fuelled liberation, accompanying media circus and .subsequent repressive legislatiort that accompanied so-called acid hoUse and rave, the polar opposite - chill路out rooms and quiet clubs for ambie~t listening - might have remained the pipe dreams of a few solitary explorers. Two of the key records that helped to shake British youth into a new phase of hedonism, self-belief and communal dissent were "Acid Tracks" (1987),. produced by Marshall Jefferson, and "Washing Machine" (1986), made entirely by Larry Heard. Both had their origins in the black, predominantly, though not exclUSively, gay路 warehouse clubs of Chicago. Accounts of how these two minimalist machine instrumentals came into being share a similar feeling, if only because both records were a consequence of home experiments which subverted the intended purpose of one ort:wo pieces of music technology. This is how Marshall Jefferson described the moment to me, when I interviewed him in 1988: "Oh shoot, man. 'Acid Tracks' wasn't pre-programmed, man. 'Acid Tracks' was an accident, man, When you get an

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acid machine you don't pre-programme anything. You just hit some notes on a machine, man. DJ Pierre, he was over and he was just messing with this thing and he came up with that -pattern, mari. You know, dah-dah-dah-gwon-gwo~:-8fOWIl-ga~ gyown. So we were listening to it, getting drunk -Man. 'Hey, this is kinda hot, man. This is a great mood, man. Let's put it out. What the tuck?' You know? We played -it at the Music Box, _ man, and everybody was flipping. "When I did Sleezy D, 'I've Lost Control', man that's got screaming in -it. Really, I was trying to get a mood something like the old Black Sabbath records or Led Zeppelin. So that's how it got the -name Acid Tracks, because it's supposed to put you ina mood, you know? For one. thing, the tune is eleven minutes long of the same thing~ Slight changes, but not that - noticeable. Uke when you listen toa real long solo in the old days it's the same bass line going and everybody's doing something different over it. That's -supposed to capture a mood. Now what everybody thought acid house was after that was" a drum machine and that acid machi~, the Roland TB-303, which was not the truth. Acid house was meant to be the capturing of moods. You don't have to use the same machine all the time. You can use different instruments; I hate that machine with.a passion now. Everybody!s路using it wrong. The way they're doing it now it's not capturing any moods. It's disrupt:iJ:1.g thought patterns, man. That just hurts when you listen to it all night. it stabs your brain, man. You hear dohdoh-doh-doh-doh-dit and I liate it, you know, when it goes dit-dft-dit-dit-dit-wheoghwowowweogh. Oh man! It's like scratching a chalk boarq With your finger.tails, manl Man;lhate that;" The basic components of "Acid Tracks" epitomise the principle oUess means more: a Roland 1'8-303 Bassline playing patterns which sweep up and down through fJ;equency and filtering as they run; the thudding, dry bass drum, hi~hat, clap and toms playing straight disco beats from a Roland 909 drum machine; the cowbell and whistle from a Roland 727 -and

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some unidentifiable synthesiser swooshes in the background. Simple, but ferociously effective, particularly if drugs are involved. This was music without narrative; music as function; mUsic as a technical process. Jefferson may have come to regret what he, DJ Pierre,Spankyand HerbertJ put together that drunken evening in Chicago but,for disrupting thought patterns, "Acid Tracks" was powerfully psycho-active" black science· fiction. Larry Heard's "Washing· Machine" was even more direct: a repeating, rolling ~elodic line with unusual intervals, spongy like a rubber ball in texture, bald of recognisable emotion except for occasional moments of musical tension and a slight suggestion of exuberance. Little. touches of reverb introduce fleeting suggestions of j>hysical space around the sounds, there are short silences or.a bar of hi-hat cymbal. The drum programming is more eccentric.than "Acid Tracks", perhaps a reflection of Larry Heard's career as·a . drummer in.Chicago bands playing anything from R.&Band jazz fw;ion to rock. "We did alot of abstract ,rock'" he told me when I interviewed him in 1989. "Yes, Rush and Genesis. I was a drummer so I was really crazy about Neil Peart. It Was good for me to practise off of stuff like that." iBothJefferson's enthusiasm for Black Sabbath and Heard's idolisation of progressive. rock drummer Peart were bemusing at the time. According to stereotypical divisions of taste by skin colour and culture, black musicians were supposed to be listening to·soul. An accumulation of personal histories has .forced an adjustment of that picture: many techno and housemusic innovators. were inspired by a mixture of rock, jazz fusion, industrial'music and the techno pop of YMO, Kraftwerk, Depeche Mode and Gary Numan. The new technology .of MIDI (Musicai Instrume.,.t l)igital Interface}linked, programmable, pOlyphonic synthesisers and drum machines offered an escape route ·from a dying· livemusic scene, a chance to exptrlment in isolation,frc:!e from peer pressure to conform, and a meabsof composing and re-

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cording without using expensive studios. Larry began by borrowing an analogue Roland Juno 6 from a friend who had left town for the weekend. "~ had always been interested in music", he told me. "I had four brothers and they all played guitar. I was, like, kinda left out. So when I did finally pick up an ~trument I wanted it to be different to what they were doing. I started playing drums but I ,had always tinkered around with keyboards 'cos I was fascinated by the sounds of the synthesisers." While his friend was away, Larry wrote two tunes. One, called "Mysteries Of Love", was a moody, inspirational track. The other was.an instr.umental, "Washing Machine". "It was just random sounds running over a beat", said Larry. "I've always been weird in my musical tastes. I always wanna hear something different from the things you hear on the radio all the time, just wanna hear someone venture out, take a chance when they're making music. It sounded weird to me. In the end my little brothers liked it. They thought it was kinda cool." They also thought it sounded like a washing machine, so that became the name. Never happy to be tied down to one style, Heard was capable of writing anything from strange compositions for drum machine, gorgeous mid-tempo ballads, tracks that sounded like Pink Floyd, backdrops for beatnik poetry or electronic 'jazz-fusion instrumentals which depicted lush environments of the imagination. With the dance frenzy at its height at the. end of the 198Os, the potential context for such a broad sweep of quietly non-formulaic music seemed unpromising. Where did Heard envisage people listening to his records? "In clubs, of course, but maybe real latenight things. Some of the stuff, without the drum beats, I feel could be soundtrack-type stuff. Just for listening, everyday listening." As we shall see later in this book, when Brian Eno applied the term "ambient music" to his activities he switched the emphasis away from making music, focusing instead on the act of listening. Inevitably the spotlight returns to the creator,

,'"

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if only for expedient reasons of maintaining a career, keeping up magazine circulations or boosting record-company profits. But many forces were chipping away at the hierarchical, separatedl'oles of producers and consumers. Before Eno's -theorencal dismantling of this relationship, early disco DJs had also .eroded fixed definitioDsof performance, performer and audience. The aim of dancing your ass off, sacred or profane,was in- . spire-d by disco's flow motion, the seamless mix that transformed three-minute pop songs (Phil Spector's little symphonies for the kids) into long-form epics. like an all-night performance of Balinese gamelan or a Central African cult ceremony, the music moved through dusk until dawn. This noctumal rhythm was bisected with sexual rfIYthms and the rhythms 路of crosstown, crosscountry, transworld movement. The futuristic vision of hypnotic living and machine sex was imported !rom Europe: from Germany came Kraftwerk with "Autobahn" and "Trans-Europe Express"; from France-came Jean-Marc. Cerrone with "Supemature" and from the SouthTyrol, crucially placed in the centre of German, Italian and Swiss culture, came Giorgio Morodor with Donna Summer's "Love To Love You BabY" and "I Feel Love". Even The Bee Gees' "Jive Talkirig" was inspired by the rhythm of car wheels bumping over a railway track. Speaking to Giorgio Moroder in 1992, I asked him why he and his co-producer, Pete BeUotte, had decided to extend "Love To Love You Baby" into seventeen mmutes of orgasm theatre.~He laid the blame on the coffin of the late Neil Bogart, . once the notorious president of Casablanca Records. "He liked the song so much he wanted to have a long version of it", claimed Moroder, "and that's when 1 did the seventeen-minute .one. The official story is that he was playing it at a party and peopl垄wantedto hear it over andover. I think the real one was more like the 路bad story.. He was doing some other thing than dancing;" So a revolution in music was catalysed by a record executive's desire for his own personal sexual soundtrack.

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Actually, the story was more compUcated. According to Vince Aletti, writing in RoRlng Stone in 1973, some of the earUe$t records played 10 New York's underground of "juice bars, af~-hours clubs, private lofts open on weekends to members omy, floating groups of partygoers who take over .the ballrooms of old hotels from midnight to dawn" were unusual imports from France and Spain, hybrids of rock, jazz and Afro funk. African, .Latin路 and jazz influences were dissolving the boundaries of rock. In the latter half Of the 1960&, reciprocal motion agitated and emIvened ~usic. Miles DaVis,Sly Stone, Santana, War, The .Temptations, Cream, The Velvet Underground, La Monte Young, Jimi Henc:lriX, Pharoah Sanders,The Grateful Dead and Terry Riley.u indulged in marathon trance grooves, rippUng with strange currents, often stretching beyond theUmits路 of endurance into boredom, but hunting ecstatic release through repetition.

Zen One of John Cage's many famQus stories concerned a music dass he gave In Oriental music. He played a record of a Buddhist service that began with a mi~tonal chan~ and then continued with the repetitious beat of a. percusSion instrument. . After fifteen minutes, one woman In tile claSs stood up, screamed, and then shouted, "Take it off. I can't bear it any longei'." Cage took the record off. Then anothetdassm.embCr - a man - got irate. "Wby'd you take It om" he demanded. "I was just getting interested." John Cage, "Silence"

Bob Dylan may have regarded Smokey Robinson as a great poet, but the effect of oYlan on Motown was more obvious. Whatever it was that Bob Dylan, The Beaties and The RolUng Stones had done by copying, thentransfoniling black music, a lot of black artists wanted the freedom to follow. Motown producer Norman Whitfield's response to add rock - at least to Sly and The Family Stone's rainboW coalition ~on - was

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to produce psychedelic soul for The Temptations and Undis-

,.f'

puted TruthAn Philadelphia, another producer/songwriter Thom Bell ~. was moving in the opposite direction, enveloping a romantic vocal groupcalle~ The Delfonics in a jacuzzi of French horns, flugelhoms, flutes, strings, harps, tinkerbell glockenspiels and even Indian'sitars. As individual developm:ents,both directio~ were destined to run themselves into the ground. Copied ad .nauseam,Whitfield's funk-rock workoutsodegenerated into a monotonous grind,. while Bell's crisp,quasi-classical arranging was caricatured by lesser talents andeventuallymeltedro -slush. Fused, however, they metamorphosed into' a creature that conjured improbable oppositional visions of carnality and sentimentality, motion and stasis,· delicacy and brutality, earth and aether. If ~teenth-century composers such as Mahler, Scriabin, Mussorgsky, Prokofiev and Richard Strauss had collaborated as equalswithmilsicians 'from the' European colorues of Brazil, Cuba,·· Haiti, Nigeria, Ghana, Cameroon, Congo and Indonesia, what a sound they would have made. Or what a sound they would not have made, more likely, since whereas synthetic hybrids often match our imaginings to perfection, human attempts at impossible collaborations often fall short of the· speculative teach of machines. Although disco reached many·high .points in its romanticisation of escape, its enduring legacy is less idealistic, ·yet still utopian.· Disco mixing, the merging of records by a DJ, denied the musician as performer, denied the integrity of any individual.performance, denied the problems of mixing musical styles or cultural difference, denied thecondusion of a work.· Communication, the human problem, could take place in the machine: first, record decks and tape editing; then samplers, then hard-disk drives. Gradually,tbeDJbecame the artist. Gradually, the song, thecomposition, was decomposed. After its first formative.years, during whiehthe global soundbanks were plundered for empathetic records, disco began to work on the prindple of decomposing songs into modular and interchangeable frag-

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ments, sliced and repatched into an order which departed from the rules of Tin Pan Alley. This new order was designed to suit the nocturnal rhythms of a participatory, ecstatic audio ence, rather than any model of consensual, concise, classic proportions demanded by pop listeners. Songs became liquid. They became vehicles for improvisation, or source materials, field recordings almost, that could be reconfigured or remixed to suit the future. Ina humiliating way, musicians became technicians, alongside recording engineers, tape ops,editors and aU 'the other technocratic laboratory assistants cleaning their glasses in the back room. At the front end of the medium was the OJ. ruling the disco, playing music and people. as one fluid substance. Disco embraced the science of possession: motion codified into a biofeedback system of sonic driving leading to a form of trance, a meeting held in the virtual space of the spirit world. The discotheque (the literal meaning of which is record li,brary), evolving over two decades into the club; became an indicator of atomised lives within the city. The club, as a generic concept, had come to synthesise historical strands as diverse as the Cabaret Voltaire, organised in 191; by Dadaists Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings in Zurich, or, less than fifteen years later, the exotic, sexually charged "jungle" floorshows of Harlem's Cotton 9ub. A gathering point and one of the' most significant stages for the theatre of th~ new urban speed tribes,·the club is also a dark refuge where new worlds can be tempted into the light. The OJ (often mistakenly elevated to shaman): librarian, bricoleur, scryer.

chilled out • .. . Chill: African-American slang for murder (1940); the coldness of the dead; cool enough to be close to the dead, detached from the consensus morality of the .living, ·as·in Iceberg Slim, or Texas blues guitarist Albert "the Ice Man" Collins, recordist of "Frosty", "The Freeze" ,"Sno-Cone" - the artist as coldblooded slayer. Cool, the coolest. At an extreme;

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emotionally frozen. Africa: to America. In Flash of the SPirit, Robert Farris Thompson relates the concept of cool· to the West African, Yoruban "mystic cooliless" (Itutu ). "To the degree that we live generously and discreetly", he wrote, !'exhibiting grace under pressure,our appearance and our . acts gradually assume virtual royal power. And as ~ become noble, fully realising the spark of creative goodness God endowe~us with ;.. the shining ororo bird of thought and aspiration - we find the confidence to cope with allkinds of situations. This is ashe~ This is character. This is mystic coolness. All one." By the early 19805, New York dance records were full of ·references to chilling out. Bobby Orlando re, corded abass-heavy underground disco track -. "chin Out" andold;.school hip-hop was·aforum·forjuvenile storytellers who bad taken a chill pill, or were chilly the most. Chilling out was hip-hop vernacular for relaxation.

polaroids

. 1967, The Roundhouse, Chalk Farm, London. Waiting at the head of the queue, late in the evening, then almost first into the building - an emptied, circuIarshell once used for turning steam engines.. The interior has the dark, soaring atmosphere of a ruined·· abbey; an abandoned factory of shadowed, grim comers and fdthy alcoves. Lights are being rigged from the roof of a small hut in the centre of the floor. On stage, men are aimlessly busy, or busily aimless. One, wearing a short raincoat,. blows· soft flurries through a tenor saXophone; one, a man with sharp cheekbones and a"goatee beard; assembles a drum kit, plays crisp rolls on the sna.re,. then disassembles the kit and packs cymbals, stands and drums back in their cases; two men crouch on the floor, wrestlingwith wires, plugs, socketS, devices, a guitar. Loud bursts of noises are emitted, none of them·bavingany perceivable.reIationship to other sounds. Standing at the edge of the stage, looking around me, lean see that nobody else in the audience realises that this is a performance. I have to break through a

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conception of performance to find this realisation myself. Later that night, Geno Washington and the Ramjam Band play musically poor but rabble-rousing versions of "Knock On Wood" and other soul favourites, followed by ~e new (and first) supergroup of Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce and Ginger . Baker: Cream. Shortly after this key event,路 when mod turned psychedelic, brushing against improvisation and the ideas of . John Cage as it revolved, I learned that these seemingly aimless characters on stage were called AMM. They had names. The saxophonist.was Lou. Gare, the drummer was Eddie Prevost, the路 two crouching men.were Cornelius Cardew and Keith Rowe. Geno Washington vanished into lost memories many years ago; although Eric Clapton is now a global celebrityand both Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker are still musically active, Cream is barely known by a new generation of metal fans. One member ofAMM is now dead, one has left the group, but a trackby the latest AMM incarnation was included on Virgin Records' Ambient 4: Isolationism album in 1994. 1994, The Roundhouse, Chalk Farm, London. Chantal Passemonde, co-organiser of Telepathic Fish ambient parties, recalls a different event (same venue but another era): "It was cold, that's the best description. It was traveller people like Andy Blockhead,rather than club people, who had this idea that they wanted to do not a Rainbow Gathering, but a Rain. bow Gathering sort of thing, if you know what I mean, in the Roundhouse on New Year's Day. What with the Criminal Justice Bill coming up and all that, and they felt it was really a poweifuI space to do it in. I knew Andy Blockhead, just from free festivals and partying. They'd been to Fish things and they said would we like to come and do it with them? In the end it turned out to be totally brilliant but the first seven hours were complete hell. I was playing with Paul and we played, we DJd, for eight hours. At the end I had an asthma attack. "One of the guys 路knew one of the. Roundhouse owners and asked for permission and he said yes. Then tlteday before, he said no,then yes... then no, then they wanted a lot of money.

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Eventually we were saying we were going to squat it. Fuck them,. we realised we could get access into it. In the. end he was all right about it. All we saw was a fat Mercedes. We had the owner's permission provided it stayed ambient, because ofthe potential trouble they thought they'd get if it was a full路 . on rave, which they'd had when Spiral Tribe had done stuff there. So that's how the ambient-thing came into it. The whole point was for people to gather after where they'd been on New Year's Eve. We were there all night and then it started at six in the morning. By about seven or ei~t o'clock that night they'dgot in a big heater which made a big difference and then everything started going insanely psychedelic andbizarre. Two bands played - really traveller bands. Pan was one - an insane sort of progressive, psychedelic rock thing. There was loads of shamanic drumming, you know the insanity that occurs. Then Miima~ter Morris played and it went right through the night into Sunday. "It looked ainazing. Do you know Nick Mlndscape, the guy who does Megatripolis visuals? He had these unbelievably huge screens that hung round one half of the circle, like right down, almost to the floor, and they were projected on. Then on the other Side, there were these three vertical drops that were hung so that they were in free form, and they juSt moved, like b~lowed in the wind. There were projections on that. That was when it was dark. Matt Black was there and he was doing stuff. Everyone was really colourful, wearing jumpers and stuff. And during the day it was really lovely because all the ligbt comes through the roof. I remember at one point. we were playing the first track on BI2's Electro Soma album, . it's all very ethereal, and people were blowing bubbles. The whole place was full of bubbles. It did look like a really bizarre, past-apocalyptic, insane thing. People got so cold they were lighting fires. It was like something out of Mad Max. The building is just a shell but it's so powerful. Everyone was gathered in the inner circle of pillars and there was fire jug路 gling. I wasn't on any drugs but it was weird. You just felt that

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there was some magic -.you know tbat .feeIiog you get when somc:tlPng is really special-and it'$ ~le as weU1"

••• to chill out Amsterdam is cold. this Friday night, October 1993. Inside the Melkweg, two men in pyjamas are 'pretendingto . -sleep standing upright. A woman in black high heels watches - television and three men wearing dark suits stand on a table at . '. one end Of the room. A couple encased ilimulti~hued. poly'. vinyl Julian CIary-type outfits camp around in a gloom lit by luminoUs globes wrapped in sheets and bubble lights produced by a·bank of projectors. Garden gnomes sit on green · toadstools, their pointy ears attuned to a background drone of · Indian tambouras and what nJay be the sound ofherdiog SQngS recorded in some. chilly northern climate, -Bored with this tIuowback to eariy'I97Os' audie!Jce participation per:forinance art, I wanderinto the other rooms to hear 1iveperformances of programmed music. The following

night, pUt two of .AIDstenIam's ~ Ambient .Weekend, I

peruse some of the evolving cmiQSities of the ambient club. bing phenoDienon from the balcony of ~ Melkweg. Following a Uve didgeridoo duet (the revenge of the native AustraIian.~ delivered just to one side ofD} decks ringed ~ floweis, Chris and' Cosey are performing. veterans of Throbbing Gristle's early 19805' grey industrial electronica, they loom behind their keyboards like a couple. of ·roonOchromemaonequins. They a1'e static, the music is static,

the· pJaceis packed and DJ Per, who has organised the event · with his brother, is ~ happy. He is also very amused by the irony of the situation he sees below him. Having.finaIly cast out its dopers' mattress, along with a 20 yeIIJ' reputation as the · hippie _~tre ·of Europe, the ·MeIkweg is occupied, once more, by supine cat:atonk:S skunIred outQll.soft furnishings. One of the frequent criticisms aimed at· ~ ambient and electronic music is that -the music·1acks stars, focal points, magazine-cover fodder, dynamic performers. By definition, a

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computer-driven, pre-programmed performance is pre-determined. Only a few operators can transcend the knowledge that they, along with the audience, are passive witnesses to the computer's blind need to. work through a programme from start to cut off. The only error, or danger, is that the machine may crash. ' Saturday night at the Melkweg and all this is true of Biosphere's set. Have Macintosh Power Book will travel, yet with visuals and a keen sense of how to pace the music, he conjures real exdtement, mystery and tension from digital information. Geir Jenssen, the man behind Biosphere, began his career with a Norwegian band called Bel Canto, a Nordic answer to Australia's post-punk, Medievalist ambience band, Dead Can Dance. After abandoiling that ship, he recorded a promising Belgian New Beat/acid album - The North Pole By Submartne - as Bleep in 1989, some of it sampled from radio transmissions, and then released his first Biosphere album, Mtcrogravtty, on Renaat and Sabine Vandepapeliere's Belgianbase,d Apollo label in i992. As Biosphere performs, a time-transported punk,~med with spiked mohican and Exploited T-shirt, sits in the lotus position in front of the stage and meditates, while Saturday night party people scan the prospects, bug eyed, looking to pull. A hippie lying on his back on the mattress in the centre of the dancefloor flicks a used-up but still glowing spliff into the iir, oblivious to the inflammable people around him. A tough audience to please. From the PA, two chi1dren~s voices loop round and round, a sample taken from a feature film to form the basis of a Biosphere track called "Phantasm": We had a dream last night ... we had the same dream. A nagging twO-note ostinato and these two creepy voices build tangible tension in the room. Photographs of earth shot from a space shuttle, acquired from NASA or from Troms0's local science station, fill the screen behind Geir, and when the bass drum finally kicks in, this tough crowd goes wild.

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care

DrinIdog beer witb.·Geir in.the MeIkweg earlier in the evening, I asked him. ifbis hOme environment in Tro.... in. Norway exerts an inffuence on the atmospheres in his music•. On first im~ions an intense, rat;her melancholY ~ul, Geir looks like the kind of character who could have played·well in Hollywood horror maries of the 1930&. This is deceptive. Actually, he is a wistful man who ~ amusing company. TroJllSfl, he expJains, haS no sun ·fot two or three months of everyyear. Wmter la$tsfor seven oteightmontbs. "Ueelat my most. creative when the sun is gone",. he admits.~it'sa Christmas feeling aild it's dark aU the time, you can see the . Northern Lights. You see the houses with allthe lamps inside. It's very cosy." This picture strikeS us as being rather fuony,.bearingin mind the fact that techno avoids ·~ces to community (other than the techno "commtmtty»),security or domesticity, so we talk about signals transtnitted across great distances, of technology and is()latiOn and the draJnatic image of inyisiJ)le connections aCf9SS a void "I think it's great to sit in the dark"

ness With computers", lie muses. "I like this colIlbmation of desolate areas and hi-techequipm.ent.In my home town, if a fishing boat is gOing under,it can send a signal up to a~ Ute and they can see it on~ COOlputer where the boat is.: It happened last week. Five pe9ple were saved because of that. They can. also see if boats are spilUng on lllegaIly." We think about that prospect for a second "Green space", laughs Geir. "You can sit whereyer you want on the planet because you can brlDg. the teclinology. you. can Sit on the North Pole and pick. lip sounds froti:l radios and satelUtes. I have this idea. Ifpossible, I would like to be the fust one makingmusic in the s~~sJiuttle - coIDpOsiog music and. weightless. DoJl'ttell·atiybody this idea. or Jean-MichelJarre .will.u .it." Before·Geir goes OD;·~ to press the first button, he wants to lay OBeDlOte ambient cliche to rest: "I hate it if people use My music as a background. When I was Jisten.. ing to Jon Hassell and Brian Eno,· I was.inspjredtoknow DlOre

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of sound

aboutthe Himalayas or astronomy, Egypt and archaeology. I want people to get inspired to read astronomy or to get another view of the universe. To be curious." . Mountains, stars, satellites, space travel; weigbtlessnessand computers, an escape from the body. The urge to transcend the body is a dominant theme in any conversation about the technological future. Virtual-reality fantasies and the spectacleof the wired world express an alienated yearning to leave the biolOgical prison and transmute into a cyborg state. In the fin-de steele mind, immateriality, spirituality and electronics are synonymous. The body bas become dangerous. "I also think reality is an interesting subject because 1 think we are aU immersed all day every day in reality", said future designer Douglas Trumbull.to future designer Syd Mead (the visual nlusionists who created a dystopian arChaic-future look for Blade Runner) in that bible for cybOrgian transcendentalists, Mondo 2000. "What we seek is super reality, or hyper reality or altered states of some kind I think the attractions in this area that are going to be the most successful will be the most extreme states or out of body experiences." In their view, psychedelic shamanism bas become a metaphorical holy grail, not only in the quest for new identities in a fragmented world, but in the search for theult!ma~ commercial, theme park, drug machine. As glamorous compulsions of advertising surfaces spread in a sweet stickyflood over the subterranean desires and revelations of altered states, . so the future designers rave about humanbrain interfaces and the direct implantation of visions into the human mind

the milky way On the hunt for a psychedelic skinhead acid pixie hue-knuckle backst:reet fighter to cast in your new computer game you could do worse than ink a contract with Mixmaster Morris. Acting, as alwayS, the pugnacious silver surfer of ambient, Morris, The Irresistible Force, DJ, recording artist and tireless advocate of ambient music, elbows the air, screws up

-I

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a physiognomy that is already mashed potatoes and narrows his eyes to Stanley blade slits. " "Who's got some roach material?" he demands, avoiding eyelock with any of the humans in this cold dressing room backstage at Amsterdanl'sMeIkWeg. Morris is not a person to whom questions are addressed. He just rolls out soundbites for the interrogaior to gather up in a shopping bag and reassemble at leisure. A typical example: "We've had sixty,". seventy years of making records. That's stage one. Now we sample them." We路 last met in Soho Ambient during the summer of ambient that was still in "progress in 1993 as autumn turned to winter. Soho Ambient ;was, at that point, a hole-in-the-wall trading post. Lurking at the rear of a hippie emporium hidden "by, the greengrocery of Berwick Street market, this modest enterprise with its limited stock of CDs and viny~ was symptomatic of the peculiar rise of amb.ent. The very first time we met, Morris and I talked at length in the front room of his Camberwellflat. "My dream", he confessed during that sUnny afternoon, "was to get a roomful of people to take psychedelic drugs and to operate samplers and sequencers in front of them, That seemed like an impossible goal six or seven ~ ago. Now it seems rather trivial." In between playing computer games, "Morris's other guest of the day talked to me about making brain maChines. Back in Amsterdam, Morris and I exchange notes on our respective bafflement. Ever since the Land of Oz chill-out nights in 1989,"'plus rare earlysightings of electronic fluffiness from Fingers Inc. and Vugo in Chicago or The Orb and The KLF in London, the ~ron of ambient house - dance music for sitting still - had become accepted into common usage. Ambient had turned into one oftltose polysemous glue words which stick wherever they land. Morris, always on the move, saw ambient ~ in Frankfurt, Hamburg, Berlin, San Francisco, finally to survey an international mOvement in th~ making. Aside from Holland, Belgium and the inevitable Goa,

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he had found embryonic scenes in Japan, Austria, .Finland, evenStPetersburg and Chicago. "I'm happy there's an ambieiltmove~entand not just an Orb movement"; he says. At the very least, there is a new category in the record shops. "I'm much more interested in a revolution than a category" , he continues. "It's definitely a wiridow of opportunity. I can see us taking on artists that nobody in history would have taken on - the really crazy ones. There's a lot of crazy ones following me abOut;.. giving me tapes of really crazy music and ringing me 路atthree 0' clock in the morning, saying, have you listened to that tape .yet that you got in the post this morning? It does drive me crazy but some of these people are the next generation. Even if I never made any more music I would be happY to have路~ena conduit just to let all that stuff through." Ambient had been one symptom of a shift in music productionin the UK. Not a revolution ~e the hippie movement ~r punk, which had songs about revolution, but a sudden reorganisation of all the pieces路 into new formations. As with psychedelia and punk, the big cash might or might not fall from the skies after the main event had blown itself out. But for the moment, there was a.perceptible openness, a sensation of feeling another cultural movement flex its muscles. Something like three in the morning at the Melkweg, Friday night,and Dave Wheels and Bobby Bird of Higher Intelligence Agency are giving a compelling demonstration of one way in which music making is changing. In Chris Heath's Pet Shop Boys versus America book, Neil Tennant comes up with a phrase: ."It's machines playing live." That will do nicely. IDA are in there, on the floor with the dancers like a reggae sound system. The machines are playing live and the atmosphere is white hot. Nobody is pretending to replace machine procesSes with crotch pumping and choreography. There's some knob twiddling, effects路 processing and track muting, along with a lot of concentration, but the purism of the thing, the idea that this music happens in real time as the machiJies spond to messages stored on data disks, is imperceptible

re-

david to~p' except as an intangible energy - a clarity of sound and pur· - pose. "Uve electronics can enbancethe mood of wbere_ it's ' being performed", Dave Wheels explains, "with the energies of the people performing it being-picked up by the people they're working with and going back out to the people they're getting it off." I think: I follow that. "You build it up Uke that", he says•. "That's the aim." Despite persistent associations of New Age Tcllues, most of the new ambient is fiercely urban and now: age. Some clubs double as marketplaces for ineffectual and overpriCed "smart" drugs, Tarot .readers, luminous jewellery, masseurs, digeridoos and "tribal" drumming, but in general.these ele· ments seem to denote spiritual hunger, activism steinming fiom disiJ,lusionment, an alternative econolny or simple social disconteilt,rather than a withdtawal into the etite white light of New Age evolutioniSm. . 21 September. I taIlred to Future Sound of London at their studio in north-west London. We discussed a tra<:k called "Dead Skin Cells" from their Llfeforms album: the huge en· 'largements from microscopic photographs of dust mites, the possibility that emergent bodies. lay in dusty pnes of shed ._ skin. "What we term ambient has been misconstru~", Gary, the talkative half of FSOL, tells me as the. taciturn half, Brian, paces the room, "becaUSe it's- Uke - put on a space suit - I am wclrdbecause I come from outer space. I'm not interested in that. I thinkthts ...." (raises eyebrows to indicate planet earth) ". ; . is a weird place. What oUr ~usic, I thiJ$, represents .is a weird pet'Spective of this space now. It's like a re~uatlon of yourself in your space, rather than escapism." David Morley's first trackf~r Renaat Vandepapdiere's rap. idly expanding Apollo -label was a crackling, blue-label, .lucky-if-you1>wn-one slab of vinyl ca!led "EVolution". Dav,id, bJond,. British bom and self-contessCdlyplagued bynetVOU5ness, mixed baby gurgles so high on one side ofthat particular record that Renaatobjected."It was meant to be a bit stressful", he' admits.. "That's another thing about ambient at the

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minute. It's alWays considered soft, mushy, smooth, which I like as Well, but I think it can also be tense. The word - ambient - just means anything around you that affects you in some way." So people began to talk about dark ambient, and th~p. isolatioJiism, as a contrast to the beatific German electronic. music typified by Ralf Hildenbeutel and Oliver Ueb on Sven Vath's Recycle Or Die label.

networks For Higher Intelligence Agency, it was all about getting something going in Bitmingham. They started their club, Oscillate, in May 1992. "The first Oscillates were above a pub," says Dave Wheels, "the only place we could fmd cheap enough to put it on. You know, everyone was unemployed, on benefit. The first one, I seem to recall, two people turned up. Nobody was interested. Twenty people were there. 路It was so unpredictable." Then they moved the club to a Friday. Ultramarine played there. Mixmaster Morris played an ambient set (nearly getting himself electrocuted by Jonny Easterby's sound sculptures in the process) and then Orbital, one of the few techno acts to make a successt)J1 jump from studio technocracy to outdoor rock festivals, played a one off to test the computer-age resolve of post-industrial Birmingham. The club was jammed. By this路 time, HIA had connected to. Mike Barnett's Birmingham-based Beyond label. "That's another strange story", says Bobby. Resigned to being lone pioneers of their own hybrldgenre, they suddenly heard about a label being launched in their own dty, specificallY to cater for ambient dub. His face still registers astonishment at the absurdity of it all. "We couldn't believe it." And in London, there was Spacetime and Telepathic Fish. Held in a warehouse in Cable Street, London's East End, in 1990-91, the Spacetime parties were organised by techno/ ambient musician Jonah Sharp and holographic clothing designer Richard Sharpe, both of them now living. in San Francisco where Jonah runs his Reflective Records label.

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"They were really experimental", says Jonah. "We used to have Morris playing all night. The whole idea behind the music was that people Would come and talk. It allowed him to try a lot of things out. I used to play live at them. It was people sitting in the comer, tinkling on keyboards. The whole holographic thing is synonymous with what I've done. Richard is an inventor - he invented this fabric and he's totally into visual art. We used to decorate the entire room with holographic foil. There was a fountain in the middle and we had a massive dish with terrapins and a bowl of punch. The entrance Was a bottle of Wine. Two hundred people maximum and it was a lot of fun. Good conversations, which was an important thing. Instead of losing yourself in your own little space, there was a lot of interacti(;m. I thinka lotofpeople met at those parties. that was what made me a~e of the possibilities of the chill-out space. That environment within a . big rave was just starting to happen at that time. I think Alex Patterson was playing at Land()f Oz but I didn't.know about that. For me, the ambient room qr chill-out room was. a platform for live music. I was never interested in DJing at all. The DJ was someone who ftlled in if the keyboard blew up. Morris used to always play live. He had a computer and a little drum machine." After five of these events, The Shamen's Mr C took over the DJdecks. "He~mpletely ripped it up" ,Jo~ laughs. "Spacetime got thrown out the building. The landlord turfed us all out. There were people on the roof. It was mad" Telepathic Fish grew from路sinlilar origins asa small squat party to a growing public event with its ownfanzine, Mind Food. "It's like beiilg insomeone's living room", Hex/Coldcu~ .'Macpunk' Matt Black said to me in October 1993' as we watched somebody step. around the inert bodies, the dogs,on strings and the double baby buggies, carrying a tray ofdrinks and eats. On that occasion, held in Brixton's Cooltan Arts Centre, Telepathic Fish ran from noon until 10 p.m. on a Sunday. You could buy Indian tea and cheese rolls (the latter constructed in situ mtha Swiss army knife) from a low table

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set up in one comer of the .Dam room. This looked for all the world like II. 1960s' arts lab: bubble lights, computer graphics, inflatables, sleepers, drone music, squat aest!tetics. My first and fooUsb action was to sit on a mattress which .. has been out in-the rain for a month. For half an hour, only professional interest keeps me from screaming out of there in a shower of sparks but then I relax.路 No, it's fine. This is ambient in the 199Os- tb.e 1960s'/7Os'/sOs'retro future rolled into a package- too open,-looseand to _be anything other . thanll.-manifestation of real commitment and enthusiasm. Telepathic Fish was started by a group of art students and computer-freaks - Mario Tracey-Ageura, Kevin Foakes and DavidVallade - who lived together in a house_ in Dulwich. Later,路 Chantal Pas~nde- moved into the house, shortly after the parties had begun. Kevin was a hip-hop fan, David Uked heavy metal and Chantal listened to the ambient end of indie muSic: Spacemen 3 and4AD label bands ~ch as This Mortal eon. There were no shared m~ical visions; simply an idea that the environment for listening to muSic could be different. "It all happened one day when Kevin went to get some ~pe off this real bizarre Rast2rar:ianin Brixton", says Chantal.. "He had this whole theory aboUt feeding the five thousand. It was all very unclear, but it was about taking the fish and making it a part of you. It becomes part of your oiind and spirit, and soinehowthat linked up with telepathy. How, I still don't know. They were all trippIng at the time so we never managed to get the complete story. What they did was this b~ ritual . of swallowing a goldfish." Fot the first party, held in the Dulwich house, six hundred people turned up through word of mouth and Mixmaster Morris DJd. Then-they planned a May Day teaparty; The fliers were teabags. MtXmaster-Moriis wanted a German am.bi~ DJ, Dr .Atmo, to play at the party, along with Richard "Aphex Twin" James, a recent addition to Morris's wide circle of friends and felloW psychic nomads~ "We realised that the whole party was

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going to be too big for the place we were. going to have it," explains Chantal, "which basically was a garden, so we rushed around. Morris knew some people and we found this squat in Brixton;.which was rUn by theSe completely insane people. Just real squattie types, right over the edge. It was from Sunday tea on May bank holiday and' people just turned up in drlbsand drabs all through the night. We got Vegetable Vision in to do the lights. We ran around and got mattresses from on the street round Brixton and we had some of my friends d0ing the tea. We made lots of jelly and there was plenty of acid about. That went on for about fQurteen, fi~ hours, with people lying around. That was the first路properTelepathic Fish, May .1st, -'93. Then, there was no su~ 'thing. There probably was on a smallS(:ale, lots of people chilling Out in their bed- '. rooms - thepost-clubbing experience when everyone comes round and you play tunes, but we'd never been to anything like that. We just did what we would like. We'd ail missed Land of Oz, we'd missed evetytblng.it felt like so~thing big was about to happen. You could fed that people wanted it but they didn't quite know what it was." Of the clubs路 and parties that Telepathic Fish and Jonah Sharp missed, Land of Oz路 generated the widest ripples. The ConVetgence of influences found at this short-lived event typified a' .refreshing dissolution of tribal boundaries and , behaviour. Land of Oz was a Monday night house-music club organised at a central London club - Heaven - by DJ Paul Oakentoldin 1989. A chill-out room was added in the upstairs VIP- room. You could chill, but you had to be a somebody on the dub scene. Since there were no ground rules for this type of event, misunderstandings <=:<>uld take on a life of their own.' Steye HiUage, for example, was invited to Land of Oz because he was a friend.ofthe man who designed the.sound system. Better known as a hippie guitarist from Gong and' a successful rock producer;Hillage was discovering that the acid-house upsurge was capable of recharging mOre than one vintage of, battery. Wandering around the chiU-olit room upstairs; he was

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pleased to hear atll£k ttom his awn-RalnoowDinneMusic:k. ~ was sometbin3he· had recorded ten years earlier, a sort

of meditational underscore for the rainbow dome Constructed asacentralfeatufe..ofthe 1979 Festivalfor_Mind.'"!Body-Spirit. Held in. the vast hall of Olympia, London; these spiritual .hypermarkets were early warnings ~ the Californian New Age movement was taking hold in the UK. ~ oo~on these two.lorig.pieces - "Gaiden of Paradise" and."Four Evu RaUlboW" - was Miquette Gira.udy, a Frenchlreyboanl player who .ha4acted-in Barbel scIIroec:ter's 1972 film·18 Vallee, a· oonfused .story ~t in Papua NeW Guinea but given some-commercia1impetus by. Pink Floyd's Obscured _By Clouds' ~

soundb:ack. _ Chiming Tibetan bellS and slow electric pianQ arpeggios

were musical oomponentsthat had been outlawed by every yOuth movement since punk. Hil1age was agreeably surprised, then, to find his work back in favour, particularly adjacent to thewhi~ heat- of house music. He introduced himself to the DJ, Ala Patterson, who had no idea who Hillagewas. At that - time,Patterson was working in an A&:R capacity at EG Reoords, the King's Road oompany that specialised In ambient music iri its first incarnation, releasing records by Brian Eno, Robert Fripp, Michael Nyman, Michael Brook; Harold Bu~ . Jon-Hassell and, int=.d, myself. Patterson knew nobody from this generation. Bn:an Eno once gave him a nod when they passed on the King's Road but that was it. Instead, he was plugging into 1:be British and German dance listening to naS,Cent techno from ~ UK underground, trying to sign . the publishing for A GuY called Gerald in Manchester, travel- -ling to Chicago in an attempt to negotiate a publishing deal with Larry .Heard and, in the process, hearing _Ueard!s drumless remixes. ·-Patterson had met The KLF - Bill Drummond andJimi Cauty.~ and had already started a coUaboration with Cauty under the name of The Orb, releasing a single ~ed "The Kiss"inJuI:f 1989. "eross.over potential: nil" predlcied the

scenes,

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. press release. True enough for that single, but slightly wide of the I1lark by the time The Orb became one of the most successful bands in the UK. Credited to Two Fat Belgians - perhaps a dig at the Belgian New Beat craze (dismally slow, sampleheavy dance records that were failing to export Belgian culnu:e with any success) - "The Kiss" was one of a number of samplemanic, scratch 'n' sniff, blip culture records released at the time: Drummond and Cauty's Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, Coldcut, New York and Miami hip-hop, Bomb the Bass and路 M/A/RIRIS. The same approach could be applied to club DJing: throWing any possible source into the mix and gluing together the disparity with beats. But what if the beats were . taken out, the volume pulled down, the tempo varied or slowed down to stasis, the diversity taken to extremes? This is what Patterson and Cauty started at the now legendary sessions at Land of OZ. "Legendary?" muses Patterson, sitting in the chill-out room of The Orb's studio, tracksuited and smoking one spliff after another. "It was just like a bar, a VIP bar upstairs. We were just given the room every Monday for about six months. I'd met . Nancy Noise, who introduced me to Paul Oakenfold. We were talking about it withJimi Cauty. I think he liked the idea of me and Jimi. We spent the Sundays looping one sample from, like, 808 State or 'Sueiio Latino', or something that was, like, . very obvious - the Hovis advert." At this point, the idea of ambient was not entirely an undergroUnd concept. "Sueiio Latino" was an Italian house-music single, produced in Bolo. gna by the DFC team: Riki Persi, Claudina Collino and Andrea Gemolotto. The basic tune was taken from a strange electronic disco路minimalist album, E2-J!4, recorded in the early 1980s by Manuel GOttsching and released by Klaus Schulze. E2-E4 already had a dancefloor pedigree; it had beeo. a part of the eclectic mix of records played at Manhattan's Paradise Garage club. The simple addition of heavier drums and bass, plus loon sounds (a bird commonly spotted biding in digital sampiers) and a multi.orgasmic monologue spoken by Carolina

8il

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Damas.in Italian; was~1 eno. to send "Sueiio Latino" into the UK charts. Even at this early stage. the elements feed· inginto tbe ambient side of dance music weresurpdsingly varied. GOttsching, for-example, was the guitaristfQ1' a ~~ rock band named Ash, Ra Tempel, co-fOunfJed-ili,1970' with Schulze. By 1977, Ash Ra 'I'empel had slimmed down to Ash Ra. Albums su~as /'{ew 4gB ofBarth epitomisedthedif·

, man

ferencebetween UK and European rock; ,~on,the back afthe album cover, GOttsching was still.dr~sec:uike a 1%.9 hippie-" long hair, flowing scarf, Gibson guitar. The music ti-. ties - "Ocean of Tenderness" in particular - were alien to the post·punk spirit of Britain and East CoastUSA. These were sigrial!i that had been consigtied to the dustbin 9fhistory.But the style·rule in Brltaiil·is to adoptthe.oj,positeQfwbateyer has become entrenched, instituti0naIJ.sed or boring.. , S,? Patterson and Cauty fused the mellow.side of house with slow music, ethereal·music, hippie music (despite the denial), bioacoustic music and spliffllQlSic, feeding them t:hroUgh_ all available montage techniques. Nothing was sacred. ~wit· nesses have reported The Eagles; 'Strauss waltzes,. Brian Eno, BBC birdsong albUms, lOcc's arm. Not In Love". "We'd build , melodies. up", Patter59o, explains, "and then take an eight· track"or~it was a twelve·track, into Heaven, just linking it up to three decks, loads of en players, loadS of cassette5and this . loop, which Would thes:t beCome an eight hour version of 'Sl,leD.oLatino', 'cause there's a loop of it in.there..We used to keep it very, very quiet. We Ilever used to p~ any drumsin therc;:. It'd-be just like, JOt! know, BB(; sound effects, really.~ What was the original ~ction? "We used to get six or seven or eight or nine kids who always used to come, and sit at the tront and just sit there all night and liSten to what we 414, ~re was a hard-core afabout_ nine, maybe ten-m:ople listening...There Wasn't that ~people stayed~re.~ nigllt. And then it gratiually-got bigger. Itdepended. If it was a b~ hoHday then it got packed, people just completdy ()ff their heads escapiIlg all tbe.loud ~ from everywhere else.

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But you needed a VIP pass to get in there, which made it weirdly special. If you could get in and listen to it in the first place路you were lucky. AU the OJs, they liked it because they could sit down and talk work, rather than being in a room crammed full of loud mUsic and sweaty people, trying to get a conversation going behind the OJ booth. NMB started to pick up on it - ~bient house, music for the 1990s - but there was no ambient bands around. They tried to claim there was loads of clubs all over Britain that were on the same network. There was probably three or four clubs, one of them being Mardi Gras in liverpool. ' "The simple reason why it was popular, or became, as you say, legendary in a sense, was because nobody had even thought about doing that in a club since the late sixties, early seventies. And that was playing hippie music, which we weren't at all. I spent four or five hours playing really eariy dub reggae. You don't have to dance to it, you just nod your head to it. It's still ambient to me. Some of the effects on those records - a four-track, in a hut in Orange Street, Kingston, and they'd make sounds like that. It puts us to shame when you think of how much we've gOt to play with. "Land ofOz - it only lasted six months. It's the diversity that created it. We used to play the German version of Kraftwerk, War - Galaxy, The World Is A Ghetto.- 'Four Cornered Room' especially off that album. Ummm ... For All Manktndvldeos. We had white screens so we could put visuals up as wen. We had home movies of ducks in the park. We'd go for everything. It was all 'laying on top of each other - what The Orb later became with foUr thousand people standing watching. This was a little room with a .hundred people in there at.the most." That last point is important路 to路 an understanding of why ambient music is more a way of listening, an umbreUa term for attitUde, rather than a single identifiable style. As Patterson has suggested, the OJ came to the forefront of music. As a semi-anonymous brtcoleur, a cut-up artisan, the 01 could

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montage any form of music to create a mood, an environment. Reco. . began to app~ which reflected this cavalier approach. What had been. a process became identitiable ptQduct.. As Jimi Callty·takI JItIa magazine editor Sheryl GUratt at the time: "People Jreep. ringing me to ask if I want toO} at their New Age night,. tiut I've only got four rec:c>rds!" The KLF released a drwnless mix of ClMadriga Eterna"; still calling themselves The Orb, Patterson and Cautyrdeased CIA H~ Ever Growing PuJsatingBrain That Rules From the Ceiltre· of the Ultraworld" in Decem}ler 1989. Ambient house for the E genetation they called it - a neat marketing p~ which hapPened to be exactly right for a brief time. The Orb single was samptadelic, than drumless: cl1urch bells, babies crying, celestial. choirs, relentless arpeggiated synth sequences in the style of Tangerine Dream., a heavy breakbeat and, at the cen~ of the Ultraworld, th~ late Minnie Rip(:l'tQn singing her touching but nevertheless ratI1er . sicJdyballaci: "Loving You". This was not the first timf:Minilie had been electronically, unwitiingIy transplanted After her death from cancer, ber unfinished vocals were built up through overdubbing and ~ into a posthumous album, a reiteration of music's status as a shiftitig conglomerate of manipulable bits, rather than a finished entity. The dead are no . more·immune tothis·ptocess than the living. . More links were being made here, particularly the ~ec ~on between ambien~music'scalming intentionS and the nice.~d-easy-does-it mood of ~listening. In 1990, The KI.F ~d. two albunis whichcOuldbedescdbed. as ambient. space was an electronic tour of planetary influences, not . quite G:ustav·Holst's The Planets Retformed·on sequen~ synthesisers.. but close enough in the vastneSs of its cosmic ~Ungs and h~ve.Qly ·choirs .tointer such Rick Wakemanstyle-prog-rock concepas. ChtU Out.. on the other manipulated more bits and pieces with a sub1k.tY and focus that has .ilot been evident in their activities either befol'e,or !iince. Two significanUandmarlcs 9f pop muzak were sampkd

rather

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. into the so~dscape: Acker Bilk's "Stranger on the Shore" and ~etwood Mac's "Albatross" along with ruvis Presley's "In the Ghetto" and snatches of KLF singles. A sticker on the front . coverinstriIcted "file under Ambient". Critics received amanifestO with their copy, a list ofeighteen "facts?" which induded the following: 3. AMbient house is not New Age music. 11. Ambient house does flot come to you: you have to go to it..

15. Ambient house is just a Monday,night cliqUe in the VIP bar at Heaven. 16. Ambient house is the first major music movement of the Nineties. All of which were partially true. Whatever The KLF (or K Foundation) have done in the name of confronting musical, artistic or business. conventions and'conceits,.whether buming money, ridiculing art prizes, sampling The Beaties, recording with .Tammy Wynette or making hitsingles,the. music has been treated as a side effect; Their early singles captured the flow of movement associated with outdoor raves orbital travel around the M25, searching for a field somewhere, dancing at "3am Eternal .., life held ,in a perfect moment of time. ChIll Out is movement in the imagination,oscillating in a strange dream space between radio reception and virtual travel. Listening with detachment, I feel simultaneously as if I ani moVing across vast spaces, yet immobilised in one spot in the Gobi desert; Watching the'world go by, tuned in to organic ' and synthetic rhythms normally inaudible to the. human ear without radio receivers, hydrophones,parabolicsound reflectors, satellite listening stations. Trains passing, .a flock of . sheep heided nearby, Mongolian throat smgers fIoat1n8in the air above me, motorbikes and cars roarmg across the soundfield, a pedal steel guitar lament falling like dusk, a black preach~'s hoarse "Get ready, get 'ready ... East Coast, come baCk fat as a rat" ,night inSeCts buzzing, dolphins, waves on

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the seashore, "Stranger on the Shore" ... "A Melody From a Past Life Keeps路Pulling Me Back", "Dream Time In Lake Jackson~, "The Lights of BatOn Rouge Pass By", like Harold. Norse in 1951,. standing 路on a stage in New York 路City after. midnight, tuning a radio for John Cage and experiencing "an automobile ride at night on ~路Amertcan h~way in which . neon signs and patches of noise from radios and automobiles flash into the distance".

burial~rites noise and silence, myth and·reaHtyi electrlcai war and the Futurists; Edgard Vareseand Charlie Parker

In the second volume ofhis Introduction to a Sclence of Mythology,-·From Honey To AsIUn, Claude LeVi-5trauss' associates noise-making insttuments with death, decomposi. tion, social disorder and cosmic disruption.· The instruments of darkness, he calls them. He documents a ceremony of the Bororo Indians of central Brazil. When a chief dieS, his funeral .and the Jnvest!tlu'e of the new chief are marked by a dte'at which individuals personifying the parabara spirits (Parabira beiM the inventor of the bamboo rattling cane used ~. the. ceremony) walk around the grave of the dead man, carrying split ·baJnboos. When the. leader of the ritual announces his artival, the bainboos aretatt1ed. Then they place their noJsemakers on the grave and leave. . Revealing and deciphering the language of myth, Levistniuss analyses many stran.ie stories told by,the Indians of Brazil's AmazOnas rainforest:· jaguars murder howling babies . by fatting in their faces; an Indian on the distended,gaS-fi11ed belly of a dead monkey, making it tart in order to combat the banging, crackliOg noises of demons; a split hollow tree trunk is thrown on the ground - the noise is a trick .<fesjgned to draw an old woman out of her house after she has killed and eaten Indians while tr8nsformed iilto the guise of a jaguar; buUroarers (whirled instruments made from narrow, flat; often fish-shaped pieces ofwood) are played in imitation

m.ums

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of a stinking, mud.covered dyer monster's belk>w - a man dismvasthat he will become a shaman during a dream in which the aquatic spirit (aige)·holds him yet he feels no objections to the fiIth «,stink of rotwhicliclingsto its skin; ina world of permanant daylight, a weI1-sealed palm nut chirpswUh the sound of crickets and night toadS - when the sealisbroken on the nut, living things and inanimate objects are .transformed,. darkneSs falIs·andtwo balls of thread have to be changed into. l1octiJmaland.<.tilWnbirds to·demarcate night from day. -' . . Buriedinaitthropological esoterica, there are descriptions of obsCure,'ritua1 sound makers which coUld match the baUndnatorydesign of the myth instruments. In the early 19308, a man.~ Geoffrey Christian :wttnesseda·(Iemonstration of aninstrument..used on·the Uppel".Purari.river, Papua NewGuinea;' during full-moon dances~ For the ten to·s!xteen days of. thlsceremony, the men ate very tittle but drank. huge aDlO\1JltS Qf water tbrough long bamboo pipes. Five or.six of ~ W()~dthen sitm a~~and.balance1atge, poUshed their t~ knees.. "Each man Ufts his .hardWood disks ~phragm", wrote Christian. "and the edge ()fthe disk ~ thrust deeply into the llitofthe stomach; all then dep~ their diaphragms on. to ~. upper. surface 01 the ctrcumferenceof the~~opentheirmoutlls.AnoldJDan then takesa~ hea4ed hanuner and gently hits the centre ofthe.disk.1'I:1e . sound appears to ~te from the <fist:ended: lungs, and· issues forth·from the mouths ()f the seated men; the effect is a deep booming solind, ~ tc>thesoup.d of the big.~kin~·· hea~' druoJs·of other par.ts'~.". . '. ". other documentations. ofinvetUive.impo~le rit.ual. in• struments used for rites ofpassage. cosmic transitions and the music 'of llQn-humans (SpiritsiancestoJ;S,· ~ faQ1Uia~) ~ C1ude-,~t} foUowing:. ~on: :Opeof the simpl~of called ~oncefoundUi.Etbiopia~ bY shouting'. : .It Uon'sRoar . into a·taP~ hole c:iu8;out oftb.e earth;rockgong co.tnp~ found in sites as far apart as Uganda and Wales ~ringing ~ ~d:bythe so-caUed·"~.marb" of non-random but·

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repetitious striking; African voice disguisers, used at night to simulate the speech of ancestral spirits, made from tubes sealed with membranes of distorting materials such as spiders' egg €ystsor bats' wings; a circumdsion mask named Mask That Eats Water (recorded in 1965 among the Dan people of Cote d'Ivoire), built from a pit dug in the earth, covered with bark through which were passed vegetable fibres which-were -made to groan by hand friction; anthropomorphic wooden trumpets, carved as larger-than-Iifesize human forms, held by the arms and blown through a mouthpiece set in the back of . each, used in funeral rites with dWindling frequency in the mid 1960s by the Ba-Bembe people of Congo; a shaman's clay ocarina,unearthed in Hungary, moulded to the shape of a .. human head with symbolic trepanation (skull perforation) marked on the top; giant slit gongs of Cameroon - both zoomorphic slit gongs used for funerary purposes by male secret sodeties in the Bamileke chiefdoms, and monumental slit gongs. of the Bamum court, some twice as high as a tall matJ., used for signalling war or crisis and left to rot in the .open air after the death of a king. One particularly imposing example was photographed in 1912. A crouching simian, likeET with genitals, squats on top of the wooden gong. On a· more elaborate instrument, a human figure sits above crocodiles and other carvings, a knife in one hand, human head in the other. The explorer who saw it recorded the fact that dried leave& were wreathed around it. Two weeks later, he came back to find the leaves gone and the figure richly encrusted with blood. Intrigued, he askedquestions. Human blood or animal?

purity and danger In The Pursuit of thf# MiUennium,Norman Cohn related the story of a millennial messiah named Hans Bohm. A shepherd who played drUm and pipes for dancing in taverns and markets during his time off from the sheep, the DrWllliler of Niklashausen (as he became known) started a minor sodal

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revolution in his south German viilage. BOhmbegan in 1476 with a .straightforward Virgin Mary vision .- stop dancing, throwaway the golden necklaces and 路pointy shoes, start ~ pilgrimagci;. This escalated swiftly,supported by increasingly large numberS of followers, to ~thardyperennial of possibilities: 'no priests, no class divisions, no taxes, no rents, the fruits of nature ripe and available to all. But as Cohn observed, "the bishops during the first half of the century were wildly extravagant and could pay, tJieirdebtsonly,by levying ever heavier taxes". With his followetsreaching a fever pitch of devotion, the Drummer had to go. An ecclesiastical court found him guilty of heresy and sorcery. His life ended, in flames; tied to a stake, singing hymns to the, Vugin, but his prophesieS began with another symbolic consumption by fire: in front of the parish church he had burned his drum. Away from the naked bodies, biodiversity and communal magic of 'the tropical rainforest,' deep in -the doomed megalopolis, the urban present, noise persistently draws on the metaphorical resource of dark powers. Fin de mmentum visions puncture the skin. In recent times, terms such as grunge,black metal, grindcore, jungle, the darksideor dark ambient, have been tagged on to musics which are fierce, distorted, morbid, malevolent or menacing.' Musics for the dance' of death, in other words, rather tbanthe music of the spheres. Heaven and hell;. in some cases both, in opposition or in balance.I am listening to two jungle tracks.as I ,write this: "The Burial" by Leviticus, and "Meditation" by D]CrystI. Both play moods ofeuphoria off an undercurrent of disquiet, balancing oceanic dreams with the clattering, libidinous rush of body processes and urban mmrement. Less willingly, I listen to the apocalyptic industrial grind of Skinny Puppy's "Dog Shit"- hoarse screams of "jaw hell piss fuck headrest pure acid-hell filthy WOrld mutation laughing hound"-or Nine Inch Nails' TrentReznor shouting into the Void oil "Broken": "Dress up this rotten carcass just tomalre it look alive''. In 1990 I walked from my house in north London

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to Konk Studios, where Trent and路his producer, Flood, were remixing'an album track. Trent talked, fragmented but intelligent, about balancing imbalances, contrasting contradictory signals,working against stereotypical correspondences - "I think there's something cool about electronic music that's aggressive ... There's something'seductive about aggression ... maybe not sing about traditional industrial death lyrics ... For me, 1 think the key is anger-fuelled, something other than fast. or loud" .... neverreachingaconclusion about the symbologyof noise and silence, death and speed, purity and corruption.

extinguished fires Fifty years into th~ imt millennium, the Roman emperor Nero attempted to'improve his singing technique by lying under sheets of lead and administering enemas into his own back passage. For pleasure, he and his male "wife" enjoyed dressing in animal skins and attacking the genitals of men and women tied to stakes; He also anticipated the crowd manipulation techniques of fascism and rock music, using five thousand noise makers to influence the mood of the people during public meetings" categorising the.catalytic sounds into bombi' - HIre bees buzzing, tmbrlces - like rain. or hail on a roof, and testae'- like pots crashing; In his survey of the political economy of music, Noise, JacquesAttali quotes Adolf IDtler writing for the Manual of German Radio in 1938: "Without the loudspeaker, we would never have conquered Germany." We are much more interested in the digital global transmission of combined text, sound and moving image now, but sounds that traversed long distances or spoke with abnormal volume once possessed a special mystique. These properties of sound - 'ascribed to pagan forcessurvived a Christianising influence in Europe" with bells being rung to subdue storms at sea; during a plague in 1625 a doctor wrote the folloWing prescription: "Lett the bells in cities' and townes be' rung often, and great ordinance

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dJscharged thereby the abe is purified. " At the conclusion of the first volume of his mythological epic - The Raw'and the Cooked - Levi-Strauss investigated a European.custom.called charivari, a din made with cooking pots and pans, wash·basinS.im~ other domestic utensils with noise potential. The point of the racket was to express communal disapproval of marriages made between two PeQple of disparate ages, ·women·1Javing affairs with married men and othersocia1 "crjmes". The cbariwri would descend on women _who beat their husbands, though not, apparently, iil reverse circumstances. None of this lies any further back in history than Debussy's experience at the Paris exposition or Erik ' Satie's Musique d'am~ (more later of Satie's furniture music); Thomas Hardy's De Mayor of Casterbrldge was ' first serialised in 1893. In one section of the novel Hardy sketches in a charivari, known in his part of the world as a skimmington ride. "Wb8t do they mean by a skimmity-ride?" asks a man in an inn. "Oh, sir," said the landlady swinging her long ear-rings with deprecatin3 modesty; "'tis a old foolish thing they do in these parts, when a man's wife is - well, not too partiCularly his own." Hardy goes on to list the odd, archaic instruments used for- a skimaiington: "~ din of cleavers, tongs, tambourines,.kits, crouds, humStrums,· serpents, rams'-homs, and other 'historical forms of music". Challenged ,by a magistrate, oi1e of the riders claims he might have heard the wind in the trees making a "peculiar~cal like murmur", all the ~ concealing a pair of kitchen toDg$ and a cow's hom under his: waistcoat. In a diminutive version of the Futurist· idea that machines in factories would be tuned into "intoxicating orchestras", one of Karlheinz Stockhausen's great unrealtsed visions for utopia was a prediction . . . dQmestic appliances - food mixers, washing machkle6,p~ps even coffee grinders .- would one day be sound.-designed to mate pleasing combinations of tones as they whirred, spooandmasticated. Perhaps he under- , estimated the dark coverthistory ofthe kitchen. The Raw and

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the Cooked路1in.ks the practice of charivari 01' skimmington rid路. ing with another noisy occasion - the eclipse of the sun - an event which has been known to predpitate loud crashing and ~ ofkitchenware,dmms 01' gongs allover the world, "The function of noise", writes Levi-Strauss, "is to draw attention to an anomaly in the unfolding of a syntagmatic sequence_" Heno~ situations in which the contrast between sHence and noise became dramatically Significant: "Among the Wan-amunga of Australia, when a sick man was on his deathbed, noisCwas prescribed before his death, and sHence afterward. Correspondingly, the great Bororo rite of the visit of the souls (which is a kind of symbolic and temporary res. urrectionofthe ancestors) begins at night in darkness and in .. total sHence and afteraIlfiri:s.have 楼enextinguished. The souls are frightened of noise;" but their arrival is greeted by a tremendous outburst of noise, The same thing happens when an a,nimal that has been killed during a hunt is biought into the village, and ~hen the shaman invokes the spirits so that they may"take possession of him."

Tipu's tiger Of all the noise instruments in history, one eftlle least equivocaI in its intent is Tipu's TIger. Captured in Iildiaby the British army after the defeat and death by bullet and bayonet of TIpu Sultan in i 799, this large and 3.mazlng object-is now housed in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. The most

sucdnct and evocative description was written by an employee of the East India Company: "ThiS piece of Mechanism represents a Roy.lI Tyger in the act of devouring a prostrate European. There are some barrels in imitation of an Organ, . within the body of the Tyger, and a tow of Keys of natural Notes. The sounds produced by the Organ are intended to resemble the Cries of a person in distress intermixed with the roar of a Tyger; The machinery is so contrived that whne the Organ is playing, the hahd of the European is often lifted up, to express his helpless and deplorable condition."

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John Keats saw Tipu's Tiger in the East India Company's offices and later ~d to it ina satire he wrote on the Prince Regent: "t;hat little buzztngnoise, Whate'er your palmistry may make of it, ,Comes from a play-thing of the Emperor's choice, From a Man-Tiger-Orgilll, prettiest of his toys." And when the tiger was first exhibited in the newly opened Victoria and Alt>ert Museum, the public cranked the handle to make it roar with such sadistic, joyful frequency that students in the adjacent library were driven half.mad by the distraction. In a technical analysis of the instrument, Henry Willis speculated that "the intended method of use for the keyboard organ was to run the knuckles up and down the scale to produce the effects of a screaming mail. being killed bY a tiger" . . Because the design and inaterials suggest a European rather than an Indian maker, Willis suggested that the tiger and its victim were constructed by either a t;nalicious Frenchman or a renegade Englishman. But whoever made this wonderfully macabre sculpture, TIpu certainly enjoyed it. He was obsessed . with tigers, for one thing; for another, as a Muslim whose wealth and land had been plundered by the colonialists, he hated the British. Reportedly, he used to circumcise them when he took prisoners. His walls were decorated with scenes depicting soldiers being dismembered, crushed by elephants, eaten by tigers and other fates too obscene for the British major who saw the~ to form a verbal description. "Better to die like a soldier than to live a miserable dependent on the infidels on the Ust of their pensioned rajas and nabobs", Tipu said at his last military conference. Delicious irony: through the preservation of imperial spoils, albeit mute and frozen in the act of mauling within a 8Iass case, the objectification of TIpu's hatred endures.

electrical war Throughout this. century of rapid technological change, the drive of modernism has been harnessed to the dances and songs of machines. In Italy, Filippo Marinetti, the

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author in 1909 of the first Manifesto.ofFuturism, visualised speed.electridty, violence and war as empowering elements. (In 1929 he portrayed Benito Mussolini as a man of "square crushing jaws" and "scornful jutting lips".) "I listened to the lyric initiative of electricity flmv:ing through the sheaths of the quadruple turret guns", Marinetti wrote in 1914, clearly quivering with similar ecstasies after witnessing minor skirmishes from the·trenches. For the Futurists and t:qeir opponents, art was war. During a performance of BralillaPrateUa's orchestral work, supposedly depictitig urban industrial noise, the musicianswere pelted with coal. As .they retired hurt, Marinetti . shouted "Rotten syphilitic" and "Son of a priest" at the perpe. trators. Marinetti was almost certainly influenced by Alfred Jarry, the Parisian "author with pistols" and the founder of pataphysics; the science of imaginary solutions. Following Jarry's example; Marinetti and .the other Italian Futurists stepped up the assault on bourgeois values through the new medium of performance: words as declaimed, intoned sounds partially freed from syntax; music as noise; body gestures; sonic impressions ofbatt1e; the soundsofaboxing match; ti· rades, insults, practical jokes and fist fights. . . Multimedia,·the most overworked term of the late twentieth century, began here;! (or hereabouts). Valentine de Saint-Pont danced her Poem of Atmosphere in Paris,masked andOrientalist, splayed in mock-Egyptian flat relief, colour and mathematical equations projected on to every surface around her, music by Satie and Debussy providing the sound· track to her celebration of sexual freedom; And in Russia, Futurist performance was enacted on a grand scale: a spec· tacular symphony of "proletarian ,music" was played by factory sirens, steam whistles, foghorns, -artillery, machine guns and aircraft on 7 November 1922,.all of these conducted from the rooftops of Baku; One.of the specific aims of-Futurist music was the eradica: tiondf inflated romanticism, particularly that of Wagner.

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"How shall we avoid Parsifal and its cloudbursts, puddles and bogs of mystical tears?" implored Marinetti. For him, the answer lay witheleCtttcal war and a world in which he predicted with fair accuracy that " [t]he energy of distant winds, the rebellions of the sea, transfor~ed by man's genius into many mUlions of Kilowatts, will penetrate every muscle; artery and nerve of the peninsula, needing no wires, controlled from keyboards with a fertilising abundance that throbs beneath the fingers of the engineers". The days of the symphony were numbered. "Now we have had enough of them", wrote Luigi Russolo, "and we delight much more in combining in our thoughts the noises of trams, of automobile engines, of carriages and brawling crowds, than in hearing again the 'Eraica' or the 'Pastorale'." Irrepressibly pugnacious, Marinetti had slipped his own incontinent ideaS into Pratella's sober sounding Technical Manifesto of Futurism. Russolo, a man blessed with h!gh cheekbones and eyes so intense they seemed to bore through the camera lens and directly itito the fdm, had been inspired by a Pratellaperformance - "Perhaps", as musician and reo searcher Hugh Davies has suggested, "just as some musicians (including myself) have some of their best i~eas in the concert hall when listening to music that bores them, Russolo felt that if this was typical Futurist music, he could do better." So LUigi Russolo, a painter of marked Symbolist leanings, began. writing a series of polemical essays which have come to be groupedunde~ the general heading The Art ofNoises. In . company with a painter named Ugo Piattt, he started work also on the intonarumorl. Based on the.scraped string principle of the hurdy-gurdy but alSo combining aspects of the slide路 gUitar and Indian khamak string drum (extremely unlikely that either of these would have been known to Russolo), .the intonarumori sound as if they might have been terrifying. on disc if Russolo had been able to wait until the 19505 to record them. He divided them into categories, all variations on the basic idea, and the names recall the instruments of dark~

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ness: the Howler, .the Hummer, the Crackler, the Burster, the Whistler and the Gurgler. Despite some remarkable ·research (particularly by Davies) and even recOnstructions of Ru$solo's instruments, the una~oidable truth remains that the one recording made of the instruments is ruined by the compositional meanderings of his brother, Antonio. Even without Antonio's inconsequential salon music, the recording ~ol ogy of 1924 was not really up to the task.of capturin3 these growling monsters. . ... i In a live setting, however, the noise must have been ~b ing. "No more!" the audience shouted during a perforimance at the London Coliseum; A Critic compared their soun~ with the "rigging of a ~el Steamer" and DaVies quotes op.e witness, interviewed in 1982 at the age of ninety, whose r¢call of this 1914 concert was sufficiently fresh to ·describe th~ music as "funny burps" ~d "like battleships pooping off". N~t very loud, though, he thought. . . This combination of war sounds with the noise of Jiuman . wind neatly links the instrUments of darkness of B~'S rainforest with their twenti~th-century equtvalent. Like Majrinetti, Russolo wrote about battle sounds with enthusiasm. :Ue was more the academic ortechnician, however, as heanal~d and classified the whistles of-varying .shell calibeq;, the enharmonic Doppler effect ·of falling pitch as. the sheIiIs flew I from cannon barrel to final explosion, the tok-tok-tol4-tok of machine guns,the tek-poom of Austrian rifles, the t,k-taktmk of rifle bolts, the tseeoo of bullets and the phYsics of acoustics. "Modern war Canilot be expressed lyrically Without the noise instrumentation of Futurist free words", he wrote. These free words had been devised by Marinetti during a bat.tle; he ranted and raved with uncomfortably infectious verve about the hygiene of war, not a tenable theory at the best of times, but easier to carry off after a few colonial encounters in Ubya and Bulgaria than after the horror of World War I trench carnage and the subsequent killing grounds of the twentieth century. But, like afibil critic taking notes at a snuff

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moyie, Russolo chills the blood,_ more thoroughly than -Marinetti, justfor the disp8$Sionate poetry, ultimately the ped路 ~try, of IUs observations. S9me of his images are affecting SOldietS wrapping their h9b-nail boots in trencl~ sacks_ for a silt:nt attack - but his prime concern is a hunger for dramatic, enharmonic sound$, particuI8rly glissandi which sweep across a sound fie1c;l, echoes, and violent explosions. Hugh Davies regrets the fact that none of the composers who enthused over Russolo's~oise instruments chose to in- _ corporate them in their work. _If Stravinsky had included growlers and hummers in Le Sacre du Prlntemps, for example, (my idea, no~ Davies's), then Russolo's inventions might not have slipped into the terminal obscurity of being too avant-garde for the-avant-garde. I make the suggeStio~, knowing it was impossible. Stravinsky worked on Le Sacre du Prlntempsfrom 1910, when he had a dream in which a pagan ritC was enacted: a circle of wise elders watched a yoUng girl dance herself to death (more sex, death, paganism. and anthro路 pology). Stravinsky was invited to Marinetti's h~ to hear the noise makers, having expressed some interest in incorporating them in a ballet. "A Crackler cra<*led and sent up a thousand sparks like a gloomy to~t. Stravinsky leapt from , the divan like an exploding bedspring, with a whistle of overjoyed excitement", wrote Francesco Canguilo, a Futurist poet and ~~tor. But this was in 1914, a year after the notorious first performance of Le Sacre du Prlntemps, the concert which set a twentieth-century standard for violent audience reactions to modeni music. Perhaps Stravinsky was thrilled to hear something that might cause an even bI8ger riot than IUs , ownwork. I disagree (very mildly) with Davies, because these grinding, humming, growling pagan noises clamoured in the air without any help from the Futurists. From ~eindustr.tai revolutl,on onwards, function8J. maduneshad -let them loose. Those who composed for the orchestra - particularly Stravinsky in his forma.ttve years_and Varese throughout IUs

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Ufe - could hear the sounds of an increasingly noisy soundscape as music in their minds' ears, and strained to reproduce them. In fact, the English Vortidst Wyndham Lewis deUvered a patriotic and rather snooty dismissal of Futurism during a taxi ride with Marinetti. Machine society was invented by the English, he said, so why should London show any enthusiasm for machine art at such a late stage. Marinetti was apoplectic. Russolotook a' brave step, but only one. Noise,sound, tD,Usicatrules;the growing clamour of mechanised life, the .lines drawn between them were blurring, vanishing into thin air;路 The soUd objects of European composition - the score, the orchestra, the composer,pitch relationships, tuning and harmony, the boundary between music and not-music - were about to be dismembered.

Varese's dream He was in a telephone booth in New York, talking to his wife 'Louise, .who was路 in Paris. As they .spoke his body became lighter, eventually losing all substance and disinte~ grating, one limb at a time. In this non-corporeal form, he flew to Paris where he was reintegrated, the physical self that was Varese rebom'as spirit.

new worlds on earth A photograph: Varese's basement studio in New York City. Abricked-in fireplace, paintings by Mir6; a grand piano littered with gourds, a woodblock, beaters, an African shaker, rattles. Metal frameS on castors, the kind used by the rag trade for wheeling clothes around. Hanging from these functional frames, a large tam-tam, smaller flat and bossed gongs from . Southeast Asia. On the floor, a Chinese drum and, ~er颅 . exposed on the edge of the photo frame, what could bea long hourglass drum from New Guinea. A no smoking sign hangs from the wall Ught. . . Edgard Varese had strong reasons of his own for rejecting LUigi RuSsolo's inventions; Born in Paris in 1883,. he connected

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to the vortex of French and Italian artistic action as a: very young man. In 1900, his grandfather took him to the Paris Exposition UniverseUe; he almost certainly attended the noto· rious first performance of Le Sacre du Prlntemps; he sat and talked with Debussy, soaking~p the fragrance ofasandal· wood sc~en that Debussy kept in front of his fire; he made friends with Erik Satie, met Lenin and Trotsky, Picasso and . Jean Cocteau. He also befriended Russolo, though personal empathy never stopped him from passing harsh Judgemet1ts on the intonarumorl. For Varese, the noise instruments produced "material for the most part of terrifying intractability" . TheY were the equivalent of the Ethiopian Lion's Ro.ar: a lot of digging, then down on ·hands and knees to shout into your hole in the ground. But that was it. Varese had an insatiable appetite for material which rein· . forced his conviction that music should be experienced physically, rather than through the understanding and accept· anceof a harmonic system. Delving into the speculations of Leonardo da Vinci, the hermetic museum of alchemical texts, acoustical studies from. India,China, Egypt and ancient Greece, he absorbed Professor Hermann Helmholtz's ground~ breaking study of physiological acoustics, particularly . the sections onSlrens. Among his many experiments, Hclmholtz investigated the beating of combination tones, dissonance, . sympathetic resonance, the physical nature of intervals and chords, the vibrations of very deep tones,the structure of the ear and various. tuDlng systems,includIng just intonation. On the Sensationso/Tone, first published in Germany in 1862, begins with a distinction between noises and musical tones. .Wind, water splashes and the rumbling of carriages were nOise, whereas· the tones of all musical instruments were music. Helmholtz's distinction rested upon the idea that ambient sounds - ·"the·· rattling of a carriage over granite paving stoneS" - were irregular . and chaotic, but music "strikes the ear as a perfectly undisturbed, uniform sound which remains unaltered as long as it exfflts". Just in time,

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science arrived at a rationalisation for art to contradict.' Critics outdid themselve& in thelrreviews ofV.arese's music. A fire in the Bronx Zoo, they caI1ed it, or saucepan banging and solos for flushing. tonets. Again, the re~t resting places of musical analogy: bowels arid kitchenware. A inusic supermarket called Tower. Every wretched, fourthrate composer in history is allocated a browser bin so thick with producttbat browsing itselfnece$Sltatespulling out a handful of albums to make some .space; VarCse, on· the, other hand. is represented by .not a singleCD-. Paraphrasing· bishero,Edgard. Vuese, Ruben Sano (aka Frank Zappa) printed "The present4ay Pachuco refuses to diet" on the sleeve of Ruben & TheJets.Iwas never entirely convinced by the optimism of ihatsta~t: the present-day composer refuses to.. die. At the end o~ .the cenmnr, when strange tunings, percussion, electronic ·instruments, voice and sound. montages, parabolic. and hyperbolic. curves of' sound, monstrous growling ~cantations, 80nic earthquakes and rivers of noise are the basic stuff ofmusic, Varese, .tbe seer who prophesiedtbis future, our present, ruls almost vailished from the narrative. Without Zappa, this disappearance might be even more complete. . .' In 1967 (or.was it 1968?) I sat in:one of theon-stage seats of the Royal Albert Hall, London, just behind and to one .side of The Mothers of Invention. They played pieces that would shortly appear on Uncle Meat, pieces drenched in Vuese, slimed in Sleaze, a potentfrotbingbrew of jazz.otChestration, loidsation percUssion, improvised ele<:tronics,R&B grooves, ice-cream chords, free jazz saxophone, lyrics about hubca~, fuzzy dice, cruising for .burgers, tbeiconograpby of Los Angeles.· A few.~ndensedminu~·from.tbat concert are included on the album::tbepointwhen aman.j1imped.()D. stage hOlding a trumpet,lookingtojanL .Don Preston.cIimbCd hito the pipe organ loft (who would give arock band tbekey . to, the door?) to play"tbe perfect thing to accompanytbis man's'trumpet": "louie Louie". Another incldent from the

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same occasion,only documented on Uncle Meat by Zappa's acidly sarcastic request to the audience - "let's hear it again fur the LondOn PhUharmonic Orchestra" - was the point when tltteemembets of the LPO stepped from the wings, dressed in . what they believed were appropriately "zany" dothes,m.pIay one of Zappa'S written scores ~th undisguised contempt. As an oblique and misguided act of revenge on orchestral must· dans, I grabbed my opportunity to steal one of the manuscript ~ afterthe concert had finished. Born too early·to realise his ultimate visions, Varese spent all his life envisaging instruments which could exp,-ess. the . soundworld of his imagination. For him, music was art - sci· ence, an· emotional, political and ritualistic force that should vibrate the air, resonate the hunian body, stir the soUl: By com, parlson, the· Futurists were liteta1ists who doggedly searched for ways to reproduce machine sounds which already existed and would soon become obsolete. Varese denied any direct connection between his music and the sounds of nature or industry. 1b.ere were subconscious links, however. During the first performance ofHyperprlsm, his ominous, compact ~m· position .for small orchestra and sixteen percusSion ~ts (including siren, gongs, cymbals and lion's roar - not the Etbioplanhole·in.the·ground but a string drum . sounded by the friction of resined fingers), he noticed that the audience giggled nervously whenever one particular C sharp sounded. That nigb.t:, worldng at home, he heard the sound of .a siren on the river. The pitch was identical. Without noticing it before, he had beenhearlng the siren play that note for the entire period of composing Hyperprlsm . .Stockhausen had his own view of the relationship between Varese's music 'and his environment. In one of a sCries of mid· 1960S' radio lectures entitled "Do you knoW a music that can only·be heard over .loudspeakers?" , he added his image of a "bUbbling caUldron" to a metaphor of urban living - the melt· ing pot - that was increasingly unbelievable: "New Yort, that prime blueprint fora world society, is withoutquestlon an

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indispensable experience for the contemporary artist. Ideas one might have about possible integration, about a coherent unification,.or about possible syntheses of the influences issuing from all parts of the globe, all these mustJ:>e tested against living experience if they are to lay claim to any truth." So New York was not simply an opportunity to jettison the classical heritage. The city also offered Varese important opportunities to meet artists connected to a 路g1ittering variety of musical traditions: Charlie Parker, black American composer William Grant Still, Chinese composer Chou Wen-~hung, Cuban novelist, composer and music writer Alejo Carpentier (the inventor of "magic realism" who wrote of the marvellous reality of Iberian America, where anything you could imagine is always inferior to the magical workings of reality itselt), Russian inventor Leon Theremin and Japanese composer Michiko Toyama, who shared Varese's enthusiasm for gagaku court music. He even spoke to Frank Zappa on the telephone, telling him about the composition. of a new piece called Deserts..They never路 met. Having lived in Paris, Turin, Berlin, New York, Los Angeles and New Mexico, the furthest-reaching zones explored by Varese were imaginary worlds. The culmination came with his Poeme electronlque, a work for three-track tape. This montage of concrete, treated and electronically generated sounds was played on four hundred loudspeakers in I,.e Corbusier's Philips pavilion at the Brussels world Cairof 1958. The architect of the pavilion was Iannis Xenakls. Luckily for . Varese, Xenakis was also a composer and mathematician, since some support from a fellow musician was necessary to keep the objections of Philips at bay. Images of masks, skeletons, cities, human bodies and beasts were projected on every surface but one critic claimed that these images were overshadowed by the music: "By the use of moving sound they have succeeded in liberating the score from die shackles of reality."

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magick paper-made. real "For, some traditional West African Societies printed

memory in the form of records or books is. considered unnatural, even abhorrent. The positive and negative powers of living things,includiog thoughts, memoties and historical events, are understood as embodied in words but, transferred in written as trapped in an undesirable state of rigidity and form, are permanance, a state contrary to life." TIna Oldknow, Muslim Soup

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Varese struggled to deliver music that could incorporate the whole world, that obliterated the equal tempered scale, the written rules of harmony, the predominance of pitch over tiMbre and rhythm. The ear - not numerical systems of rhythm or pitch - was the final judge of music. White people are conditioned out of aU sense of what is true in musiC, Varese thought: "f'at vu des negres de l'Ajrlque equatorlale - venus chez mol - qui ne connatssatent rlen de notre civilisation tndustrlelle, des [ndiens, des Asiatiques, ettous etatent plus sensibles ii ma musique que des blancs, qUi ont toujours vecu dans la vtlle, quiont ete ii l'ecole, qui .ont ete condttionnes." ["I have seen blacks from equatorial Africa - in my home - who knOw nothing of our industrial civilisation, Indians, Asians,who were aU more sensitive romy music than. whites, who have always lived in Cities, been to school, been conditioned."] He composed with basic materials: rhythms, .frequencies, intensities, blocks of sound moving and projecting in space. His first significant work Ameriques - he -described as a symbol of "new worlds on earth, in the sky, or in the minds of men",' and when critics interpreted his use of sirens as a kind of barbarous pro-路 gramme music, a simple S<;luod painting of urban noise pollution, he claimed that his purpose Was-"the portrayal of a mood in music' and not a sound picture". Mood, atmOsphere ... what do those words mean? Debussy's Nocturnes is an atmosphere - "the immutable aspect of the sky and the stow, solemn motion of the clouds ... vibrating atmosphere

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with sudden f~hes of light ..... muSic and luminous dust, participating in the cosmic ~ythm" - but so is Dr Ore's "Nothin' But a 'G' Thaog" in its evocation ~f tyres rolling on jellied asphalt, cold beers smoking in the fridge, the lazy promise of sex~ a heavy odour of cannabis. ''What Varese sought to develop was the superior capacity of all kinds of music to capture emergence in complex phenomena; tran路 s~ent, non-articulated feelings; or what Gaston Bachelard called the Poetics of Spac~, whether t4e aJJlbience of a room, the ribbon of a road or the boundless envelopment of oceanic space. "One finds a bone-setting priest and he, strong in piety towards the gods, re-sets the bones so well one hears .a grating noise as the fiUnto one another." Zosimos of PanopoUs, ak:hemist and Gnostic

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Debussy believed that percussion in Europe was the' art of Listenmg to r:ecordings ofVarese's compositions, . I am' often struck by the iame ~onwith '\\'hich t1iey are played. Barbarians, yes, but a hopelessly meek and fussy tribe. We, hear echoes of Varese's vision of "JDaSSes of sound mOving about in space, each atitsowri.:speed, on its own plane, rotating, colliding, interacting, splitting up, reuniting". These should be star wars" battle cries, sacrificial fanfares, escaping -steam, brooding earth tremors and crunching skulls, yet the executants are women and men who dedicate themselves to the minutiae of playing notes at the correct pitch and in the , correct place; Imagine Noctumal, Equatorial or lntegrales played by Sun Ra's Myth-Sdence Arkestra, particularly the one-hundred strong ensemble Ra once gathered together for a' concert in Central Park' There are stories, perhaps apocryphal, of Charlie Parker following Varese through the 'streetS Of New York, plucking up courage to ask for priyate tuition. Varese played down this not entirely innocent image of the' jazzman curled up at the feet of the European master. "He stopped by my place a' barbarianS.

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number·oftimes", Varese told Robert George.Reisner, author of BIrd: The Legend ofCharlie Parker. Parker wanted to learn strUcture, wanted to be taught how to write for an orchestra and was even prepared to cook for Varese in payment. "He was so dramatic it was funny, but he was sincere" ,said Varese. "He spoke .of being tired of the environment his work reI· egated him to ... 'I'm so steeped in this and can't get out,' he said/' Like Omette Coleman ten yearshter, or Jimi Hendrix twenty years ~, Parker struggled for escape, not only from the harmonic limitations of the blues or the conservatism of jazz, but frOm the expectations of promotors, record companies and the suffocating embrace of fans. UnfortUnately, the closest we. come to hearing Parker's dream is "Repetition", the extended piece he recorded with arrarigerjband!eader Neil Hefti in 1948. Some jazz critics regard this track as an aberration. They can only bear to accept . it by convincing themselves that Park~r's alto saxophone was overdubbed. I hear it differendy. Parker died five years after this session. Those last years of his .life, often suicidal, were when he came to Varese hoping for tuition~ Time was short and Parker's options were few. His own genius for soloing .. over fast tempi and. rapid chord changes undermined his hopes· for absorption into the forests of sound invoked by Varese. As with many aspects ofhis life, there were elements of his work which had moved beyond his control. After a live radio broadcast of "Repetition", compere Symphony Sid chats to Parker about the tides of his tunes. "The other side you called 'Relaxin' With Lee'. Who's Lee?" Sid. "I don't have the slightest idea", replies Parker. "They name those· tunes af· ter I leave the studio." So he pursued a complex relationship . with the pop song and the record business, perhaps hearing beauty and potential pJat'Vels where others heard only banality. On "Repetition",· Hefti's scoring for strings, reeds and brass is refined sugar, halfway between the dance band and Hollywood. Diego Iborra's congas and bongos clop along, so far baCk in the mix that they might have'been recorded with a

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gun mike pointlDg towards Cuba. But Parker's rltytbmic sophis-

tication is awe inspiring. He plays a tumbling line, a long sculpted tendril of breath, intellect and passion, folding back on itself, stretching, freezing, kinking into weird angles and then hanging in the air over a fading chord, the last one at the party. How could Varese have helped Parker? As sympathetic as he was to Parker shaking the cage that enclosed him, Varese suffered his own frustrations, particularly with the tools at his disposal. The symphonic orchestra possessed advantages of flexibility and complexity, although Varese described it as "un elephant hydroptque" by comparison with the jazz band, which was "un tigre". He had turned to percussion, striving to come closer to his feeling in early life that music should be a river of sound, currents of sound moving in chaotic flow like the Zambezi. But ultimately, electronics held the key. Nothing, so far, had blasted music out of its prison; not Russolo's mechanical intonarumori, not even Leon Theremin's electrical Theremin, Friedrich Trautwein's subtractive synthesis Trautonitim., Oskar Sala's Mixtur-Trautonitim, Maurice Martenot's. Ondes Martenot or Varese's own experiments with phonograph turntables. In October 1964, Robert Moog and Herb Deutsch exhibited the first hand-made Moog synthesiser modules, the sounds of which 'would be transformed a few .years later by SunRa into astra-blackness, a sea of sounds, the energy of distant winds, the lyric initiative of electricity, new worlds on earth. Varese died in November 1965. A claustrophobia sufferer in childhood, he left a request that his body should be cremated and the ashes dispersed. Inspired as a youth by Jules Verne, later by sacred texts of the ~ya, t~e Popol Yuh, Varese sug- ' gested, through his music, ecstatic travel in search for the .. magical body. "Deserts mean.to me", he wrote, "not only the physical dc;ser~ of sand, sea, mountains and snow, of outer space, of empty city streets ... but also that remote inner space no telescope can reach, where man is alone in .a world of mystery and essen:tialloneliness."

content in a void Michael Mann and TangerlneDream; Frank , Sinatra; deadzonerecortllngs; Alice Coltrane; Roland Kirk; Jim; JÂŁendrlx; Miles Davis;

Karlhelnz Stockhausen; Bow Gamelan;James Brown; Brian WIlson; Lee Perry; dub; Brian Eno

dream Sitting in a Las Vegas entertainment lounge., Despite being in Vegas, the room looked more like a Barnsley working mens' club: spacious with a hint of plush blit terminally bleak, chairs lined up in lotlg rows, bare walls, exposed stage; The quartet that took the stage was fronted by Elvis Presley. the only other identifiable mettiber being3J!lbient DJ'Mixmaster Morris. Morris was wearing his silver holographic suit, as usual, while Bvis looked fit, tanned and surprisingly boyish. I was amazed by his youth and the quality of his voice. The music sounded like "Heartbreak Hotel"-era Presley crooned over drifting electronic ambient sound. After a while, I be~ came suspicious. Was this really Elvis? Then I noticed that his loafers were scuffed. Elvis:was a fake.

content in a void A number of interpreu,tions of this dream, are possible. Presley's reluctance to vacate the planet has become a bit of ~bore, but his posthumous presence in supermarket queues reminds us of hOW little we knew him when he was alive. The perpetual reconstruction of celebrities through revisionist biographies and tabloid surrealism has an odd effect. Post-war pop culture is so entwined in myth and yet so yo~, that one major facelift or smear job can tilt the entlrepicture.

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As a baby boomer old enough to have been aware of mid-

1950s' rock'n'roll as it happened, I was misled and self-deceived into believing that the lifestyles of the rich and famous. could be deduced from their music and outward image. Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard were wild'n'crazy guys, clearly pursuing lives without shape or restraint, and this ebb and flow, inspired by angels and demons alike, was counterbalanced by a grid of placid order and white picket fences beamed out into the universe by Andy Williams, Perry Como路and Doris Day. "NaiVe, of course, for what could be closer to the edge of twentieth-century alienation (or more ambient, in,their way) than the weird, hermetic, formless existences fashioned in late life by big shots of entertainment central USA such as Howard Hughes and Dean Martin and then imagined into print by, respectively, Michael Drosnin and.Nick Tosches? "Remote control", wrote Drosnin in Citizen Hughes. "There was no need to venture out, not even to stand up_" Jeanne Martin, Dean Martin's second wife, conjures a similar image of free fall, quote<i as saying in Tosches's ])jno: "He was always content in a void.~ . So did my dream resolve certain supposedly oppositional tendencies in popular music - Dionysian!Apollonian,. radical! conservative, underground/populist, plugged/unplugged only to leave me stranded with the comfortlngspectre of fakery and illusion? Perhaps my unconscious was transmitting cryptic prophesy. Was this how music would be in the year 2000? Future mUsic is iniagined in terms of technological hybridisation -' all Winking lights and digital exchanges across' alien cultures. Perhaps I was dreaming up some kind of impossible virtual quartet mailufactured through interactive holography, the equivalent of dream football teams, Rocky Marciano versus Mike Tyson, imaginary all-time supergroups, Charlie Parker recording with Edgard Varese and so on, or the "lost" tracks of Prince with, Miles Davis, Miles with Jimi Hendrix and other vaunted but vaulted collaborations that

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pub bores would contrive themselves if they only had the techri.oiogy. Techno at the end of the twentieth century may come to mean.inept folksingers, lonely bJgots, somnambulenf.flShermen and Christian monologuists on public access cable television; the global coffee hOuse of MTV's Spoken Word Unplugge{l (poetry for the ambient TV generation); Internet conferences on dog training; or cb storytelling. Jm,agine the most likely ·Use for the wired city of the future· not in cyberpunk or megatripolising world music frameworks then, but as a hi·tech campfire. people plugging in to remind themselves of life as it Was when they were plugged out, twisting their isolation into something reSembling community. Floating,amorphous, oceanic crooning (or crooning with attitude) seems to mirrOr the feeling of non-specific dread that many people now feel when they think about life, the world, the future; yet it expresses a feeling of bliss. The bliss is nonspecific~also,coveringa spectrum which ranges from stress management at one end to _spiritual ecstasy at the other. So disquiet hovers 111 balance with the act of escapism or liberation. That tension between the specifics of (the) soul and the siren call of the oceanic led to strange moments in the careers ofMarvinGaye, mind torn between apocalypse, sex, personal disaster·and reverie in his later work, and Nona Hendryx, whose 1989 collaboration with Peter Baumann, Skindiver, dellveredtheintriguing,ultimately depressing compound re- . sulting from a laboratory experiment mixing Tangerine Dteain·with·Labelle. Listening to her album now is instructive; if only to re1l!ember the· ubiquity of·aotbient, Miami·Vke,· Dtva,·9% Weeks, The Big Blue and Blade Runner style duringthe 198Os. Bryan Fetry, Grace Jones, Art of NOise,Sade, Vangelis - atmosphere as Style; style as mood; humidity,· rainfall or hue as content. .

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aqua , The opening sequence of Thief (1981), directed by Miami Vice creator Michael Mann: Streetlights in sharp' perspective, a downward pointing V, like a runway. Night driving, a radio tuned to police frequencies. An interior, deep blue, vivid ultramarine, blackness and highlights. Technical processes, James Caan is cracking a safe. Shards of metal, drilling, hard ,to read what is going on, the tension wound up by unrelenting sequencer music by Tangerine Dream. Exterior. More shades of blue, the city as aquascape, nightpeople as marine creatures, the shock of redness when a car ignition fires and the rear lights conie on. Another Michael Mann film, The Keep (1983). Opening shots:. more driying, the camera tracking a(;1'()ss hillsides, vegetation texture and colour filling the frame. More Tangerine Dream sequencers. Surface as narrative. Edgar Froese, Tangerine Dream founder, has this to say about the link between their music and the Michael Mann aesthetic: "He got involved in our music by listening to a studio record called Force Majeure, which we recorded back in '78. He was listening to a piece called 'Metamorphic Rocks' and so he put it into one of those sequences in Thlefwhen they open up the roof on one of those skyscrapers. The sound mixed so well - that's what he said - that he called us and said, 'Are you interested in doing the rest?' The thing is about Michael . Mann, he's an American guy but he worked for about four years in London so he was very sympathetic with the European way of making films and usiitg caineras. That's whY,he chose a lot of, what I would call French, British or early German shooting sequence~ in his movies. Uke a man like Ridley Scott, who is known as a great American film maker, but in fact is very much British. He has given a big positive push to the, American cinema by using certain European visions." Froese identifies with the idea of music unrolling in a personal mind-movie for each listener. "What your inner thoughts

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are, or what your subjective opinions are, you first- create inside yourself, whether it's a pure brain reflection, a spiritual reflection, or whatever youwanna call it. But it's first inside you. Then, you-somehow see- it or feel it outside yourself and start --reflecting- with what you experience first inside. So through that reflection, you somehow get those inside-outside exclianges...

under my skin AFrankSinatra album cover - In the-Wee Small Hours ~ recorded after Sinatra's breakup with Ava Gardner. Tall, grey buildings, flat and featureless, fading off into a mist of bleached aqua -air. A column, floating rather than planted on the groUnd, like a stage set; Sinatra in the trance of emotional blankness, staring at nothing. The music revels in sotitude, melancholy, quietude, night: glad to be unhappy. In the displacement of loss, buildings look insubstantiai, people feel unreal; fife passes in a dream. The morning before dream #2 I- had been sent a copy of Bono's duet with Frank Sinatra. More than any other duet in this era of improbable and financially motivated collaborations, "I've Got You Under My Skin" seemed to draw together two worlds which orbit in parallel universes. Buried somewhere beneath-the gloss of-celebrity pow-wow were distarit, unspoken connections between a realm of ambient; electronic experimentation and the nice-and-easy-does-it domain of supper-club, Uas Vegas, easy-listening entertainment which the-mundane; fuck-off surrealism of the record does nothing to dispel. Fittingly, these worlds converged in cyberspace. "Liia was recorded iil Brazil", -explained producer Phil Ramonein Audio Media, "Bono -in DubHn, Aznavour in LOttdon,-Gloria EstefaninMiami, Tony Bennett in New York, and Arethaaitd Anita _Baker were in Detroit." Through the BONet (Entertainment Digital Network) of fibre optic tines that connect all of these cities, Sinatra's recordings, made in the capitol- Records Tower studios in Hollywood, were-then

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overdubbed by his duet partners in their studio location of choice.

body snatching Aside from a number of romantic duet albums made by singers who never met in the studio and allegedly despised, each other ~ Marvin Gaye arid Diana Ross spring to mind - I was reminded of dead zone duets: recordings of dead (or. brain-c:tead) musicians augmented by extra instrumentation or new vocals, as mentioned earlier in reference to Minnie Riperton. For newspapers catering to a fortysomething readership, the hot music story in 1994 was that long-awaited reformation of The Beatles, united through technology. in a completion of the late John Lennon's unflnishedsong. Electronic exhumation has a rich history. A few years before The Beatles reunion, Natalie Cole duetted with a recording made by her dead father. More disturbing than the record was the video, an electronic seance replete with Oedipal implications, during which Nat "King" Cole was exhumed from the archives and montaged in seamless drifting communion with his scantily dressed daughter. One of the pioneering works in this field was created when Elvis Presley was raised from the grave by a radio DJ, Ray Quinn of Baltimore's Radio WCBM, to sing his 1956 "Love Me Tender" with Linda Ronstadt's 1978 version. Then Patsy Cline and Jim Reeves were wiggled and wobbled in the studio, despite both of them having .departed for the afterlife after plane crashes, finally finding a mutually agreeable key on "Have You ~ Been Lonely (Have You Ever Been-Blue)?" In the analogue age, duets were difficult, augmentation more common. MGM were releasing embellished Hank Williams 路records by 1957, four years after his death from an . excess of booze and speed. Coral Records worked the same . electronic voodoo on Buddy Holly recordings following his death in a plane crash, although they waited just five months to meddle with the tapes by editing them, adding vOcal back-

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· grounds, strihgs or. a full band. "Ironically enough", wrote Hol1y··biographer John J. Goldrosen, "with the passage of years and the ignorance among newer fans about the post- . ·hunious nature ofthese arrangements, the songs strengthened the impressi()nthatHol1y had been turning decisively away from rock'n'rol1 or rockabilly and towards pop music." A· similar impression could be gathered from Alice Colttane!s addition of strings to recordings made by her late huSband. "Living Space" was originally recorded in New Jersey ili. ·1965 by John Coltrane. Then four violins, two violas and two cellos were added by Alice in 1972, Los Angeles. Jazz buffs regard these sweetened tracks with the same fevulsion aimed at Yoko Ono by Beat1es fans: the integrity of masculine art sctewed up by a woman. With more justification, drummer Rashied Ali, who worked with Coltrane in the lateryears, told Valerie Wilmer: "It's like rewriting the Bible!" Infact, the me10dtamatic Hollywood mystic ~up of "Living Space" could be the Bible on wax, as sWring C~lton Heston or James Earl Jones .

. mystery stories Slicing strings, 5p09ky pizzicato, ostinato creepshow ' organ, .a snaking· clarinet. Roland Kirk declaims over what ·soUnds like a battery operated toy: "the mystery black notes that have been stolen and camouflaged for years ... listen!" he sIiouts ... "Openyour ears ... listenl" A glass is smashed. "I tried to get the feeling of the mystery stories that I heard on the radio a longtime ago", said Kirk for the sleevenotesofLejt & Right, released in 1969. Alice Coltrane plays harp on "CelestiaIness", the third section of a suite entitled "Expansions" ,Kirk playing flute and thumb piano, bells shimmeting on both sides of the stereO picture, the short piece concluded by a: gong stroke and high, pierCing flute note. The other side of the·aIbwn, perhaps the right hand side, features Kirk's lyrical flute, tenor saxophone, stritch and manzello ~deering over luSh woodwind and string arrangements. Even in this

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romantic context, Kirk's purpose路 was strategically political, his selection of tunes focusing attention on black jaZz composers: himself, Charles Mingus, WtlUe Woods, Quincy Jones, Gil Fuller and Dizzy Gillespie, Billy Strayhorn.

earth and space For Jimi Hendrix, who was toying with notions of bigger bands and Gil Evans or Roland Kirk collaborations shortly before his death, the orchestra signified an expansion of texture,.a greater flexibility in the depiction otacoustic space. "I don't mean three harps and fourteen violins", Hendrix told Melody Maker in 1970. "I mean a big band full of competent musicians that I can conduct and write for. And with the music We will paint piCtures ofearth and space, so that the listener can be taken somewhere." Unfinished Hendrix tracks were reworked posthumously. "Cry .0/ Love as the album ended up being called", wrote Mitch Mitcheli in The Jimi . Hendrix Experience, "was a realjigsaw puzzle to put together. You'd fmd, say, a lead guitar part in one key and then a vocal and rhythm track for the same song in a different key and one had to be speeded up or slowed down to match the other." In the mid 1970s, record producer Alan Douglas commissioned salvage jobs for two albums, Crash Landing and Midnight Lightning. Both were constructed around substandard, unfin~ ished and extremely erratic performances. Each. song had to be stripped down to Hendrix's guitar and vocals and then built up again with new overdubs and drop-ins. The drop-ins involved a session musician playing along with an original track, recorded with the same sound and style, the red record button being pushed only for those- sectiollS where the original drifted out of time. Hendrix's. playing had to be copied by another guitarist in路some cases, because he had started a track and then left it unfinished. "I had tovari-speed tape machines and then create little pieces to extend Jimi's notes", reconstruction engineer Tony Bongiovitold the authors ofHendrix: . Setting the Record Straight, memories of impending nervous

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breakdown communicated tbrOughthis professional information. "I would have to copy parts, one at a time, in increments of a quarter inch, to extend a note. This mechanical altering took forever;" At the conclusion of these expensive and arduous sessions _were the -tightest sounding, dullest records Hendrix ever made. Death is n:ot particularly conducive to interaction, although Mitchell claimed that his completion of Cry o/Lovewas helped along by dream converSations with his former boss. No harps and violins. Hendrix made this clear. But one fusion of rock guitar improvisation and expanded orchestration which did emerge from this period was an Alice Coltrane and Carlos Santana collaboration, Rlumtnations. At this point, both of them (along with John Mclaughlin) were followers of a glJru, Sri Chinmoy, and both were intent on resurrecting the spirit of John Coltrane. Despite the presence of inventive improviserssuch as David Holland, Jack De Johnette and Armando Peraza, the resultS were-closer-to kitsch--than deep spirituality, although sporadically enjoyable for all tb.at. In retrospect, Illuminations -comes acro~s as a wish-fulfilment project. Alice would have wished to orchestrate her husband's music in this grandiose style when he was alive; Santana and Mclaughlin both strived to play electric guitar the way Coltrane played saxoph()nes, as their grimly ecstatic Love, Devotion, Surrender album illustrated to excess. Through the matchmaking of Alan Douglas and the catalytic presence -of Miles Davis, Hendrix had jammed with Mclaughlin and organist Larry Young at New York's Record Plant just a few months before both of them (along with Hoiland and De Johnette) _played on Miles Davis's Bitches Brew. little of this fervent creativity is ~ptured to any satisfaction, but some finished records still encourage speculation. John Mclaughlin's Devotion album, a Douglas release wrapped in warped Mylar photography artwork by beat poet, -trance aficionado, traveller and filmmaker Ira Cohen, touched some transcendent moments.u, its exploration of stoned heavy

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metal. Working with dnunrirer'Buddy Miles, bassist Billy Rich (from Buddy Miles Express) and Larry Young, one of the most original keyboard players of his tim.e, on organ and electric . piano, Mclaughlin subsumed his virtuosity under a group sound that climbed through Esctter circles of disquiet, sOaring through clouds of reverb, stereo-panned echo, phasing and disto(t.lon. Devotion was produced by Stefiln Bright, who had recorded Timothy Leary and Last Poet Jalal Nuriddin with Hendrix, as well as an exploratory jam with Helldrix and Dave Holland, regrettably derailed and abandoned after Bright and Hendrix found themselves incapably dusted on PcP. But the unfortunate Tony Bongiovi claims that the session tapes had been damaged in a fire, necessitating a reconstruction:. This was the patch'n'paste job that secured him his thankless Crash Landing taSk. Listen to aU of this p~riod as a patch'n'paste job and the artifice of technological assembly.is reduced in importance. The fire of Hendrix resurfaces in the Miles Davis Osaka and . New York路concerts released as Agharta, Pangaea and Dark Magus, particularly in Pete Cosey's scorching fire streams of guitar. "His lines sizzle into exotic scates distorted to run subterranean channels", wrote Greg Tate in a sparkling critical revision of electric Miles, and in his sleevenotes to the CD issue of Pangaea Kevin Whitehead notes that C9sey was a member of the Chicago-based AACM (AssoCiation for the Advancement of Creative MusiCians). Cosey worked with a table of what the Chicagoans liked to call "small instruments" - bells, water cans, maracas, sound toys, and so on. Variants on the possibilities. boiled up in this Afr0centrically wired cauldron were developed in solo work by . the sidemen: Joe Zawinul's eerie tone poems -' "His LastJourney" and "Arrival In New York"; Herbie Hancock's Buddhist! African influenced albums of the early 1970s - Sextant and Crossings - neither of which sold well, so Hancock distilled their essence into the cool ethno-electro funk of Headhunters and Thrust; even John Mclaughlin's unplugged (but not

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yet unhinge<:l)~My Goal;s Beyond; The flexibility of the Miles Davis' "insaneasylumsJor black and white radicals" (as. Greg

Tate so apdyput it) beComestrarisparentin moments such as the.resurfaclngof McLal.lghlln's DevoUon licks. ill "Thinkin' one Thing and Doin' Another" (On the Comer). McLaughlin moved ontoUfetime,initiallyatrio with LarryYoung,ledby drWD.D)er Tony·Williams. This was improvisatory rock at its lo()Sest. I saw them perform With Jack Bruce on bass at .dan's Marqu~' club' at ,the beginning a'fthe 1~}70s. My impreSsion that riigbt was ,of a music that ~e alight only in brief sparks. Without studio manipulation, the excitem.ent,was dissipated by mis8uided pitches at commercialism andthetendency of ambitious, :-"virtuoso musiciaDs tofo.rget their improvising gifts in uncontrolled situations. The prospect outshone. the reality.

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radio reception ", .• At a deeper level hisattentiontri the upper and lowerfdnges of aUdibility SUggests a further interest in exploring the two fundamental frequency areas of huinan cOnsciouSness: the hiss of the nervous system and the thump of the beart Telemuslk's peai1iar 'stratification of low-frequency bea.ts,niiddle-frequency speeCh patterns and high-frequency . , intermodulation antldpates Hymnen's adventures in memOry. and .percePtUal assImilation,and gives effective expression to the composer's frequently drawn parallel between 'stream-ofconsciousness' mental processes and radio reception." . . Robin Maconle, The Works of Stockhausen

Miles-Davis bad been ~to Hendrix, S.y Stone MdJames Brown, but with a little influence from. Paul Buckmaster (eel· list with The Third Ear Band, purveyors of quasi·~edieval ambi~t to UK hippies), he had been investigating the music !lD.dtheories,ofKarlheInz StockJJausen. In his autobiography, Miles makes Iinb·bet.ween the harmolodic' ideas of Orn~tte ., Coleman, Bach's counterpoint and Stockhausen's use of rhYthm and space. So On the Comer is. not a tight alb1JlD• rhythmically or harmonically; nor is it meant to be~Bass or

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drums hold a pulse, often a very angular, irregular one, and the other instruments dart in and out of the openings. There were Indian influences too - the drone of Colin Walcott's sitar. which Created a tonal centre of its own, and additive tabla rhythmiccydes - alongside West African, Afro-Cuban and Brazilian thythms, free percussion sounds, and possibly even a deconstructing trace of UK improvisation, gleaned from David Holland in the FlUes de KllImanjaro period and John Mclaughlin from In a Silent Way up until Jack Johnson. Tracks such as "Black Satin", from On The Corner, or the live tracks of that period, were microcosms of the fascinations of their time. "It's faith music", Brian Eno says."H you believe in it, I'm sure it will work; I can switch between minds. I can say, 'I believe and I like them' and I can say, 'No I don't, they're just unconnected rubbish, it's just guys jamming and not really knowing what they're doing'." The latter doubt can seem justifiable in times when precision and co-ordination is valued, but totally wrongheaded when falling apart is an existential imperative. There' is ample, evidence elsewhere that these musicians knew exactly what they were dOing. As Miles Davis wrote for his brief but trenchant sleevenotes to Joe Zawinul's lust solo album: "Zawinul is extending the thOUghts that we've both had for years. And probably the thoughts that moSt so-called now musicians have not yet been able to express ... In order to fit this music you have to be 'Cliche-Free'. In order to write this type of music, you have to befree Inside o/your'self ... M'tume's'commercial recordings of the early 19805, for example, were so tight, rhythmically, that they risked immoJjility, ,yet his contributions to the 1972 New York Philharmonic Hali concert documented on Miles Davis In Concert sound wilfully oblique. The rest of the band might be plaYing some kind of angular blues and M'tume is still patter~ ing away at not quite or more than double time on his tuned ft

drums. Can this extreme perceptual subjectivity be explained? One

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persOn - the clasSical music listener - JDight hear the peculiar rh:ythmic dislocations as expressions of StockhaUsen's "momentform'-' - a focus on each moment "as if it were a vertical . sUce dominating over any horizontaiconception and reaching into timelessness"; another - the funk fan - might compare it to Sly and the Family Stone and their increasing tendency to flatten bierarchical rhythmicorganJ,sation in a funk band, assigning· equal importance and discrete spll(:e to eacb instrument (heard to perfection on There's A Riot Gc)lng On and Fresh); a third person - the jazz fan - might hear Ornette .Coleman's ideas of collective blen,ding at work, particularly the simultaneous soloing of bis Prime Time' band.· ' At· the· first jazz concert I attended - the Thelonio1is Monk: Quartet - I felt baffled, then dismayed, by the audience's need to add a full stop to each solo by applauding when it seemed to be over, irrespective of merit or the flow of the music. By . the nlid 1960s, the perpetually fragile relationship audience and performers had succumbed, in certain forms of jazz at least, to a seqUence of stereotypical gestures. This was what Davis sought to escape with his "cUche-free" music, so be felt :vindicated by Stockhausen's conceptions of "unending" duration and perfonilanceas a process. Teo Macero ha.d ~ spUcing tape as early as Porgy and Bess in 1958. By the . late 19605, Davis was catalysing and supervising open-form improvisations which blurred defining principles of structural organisation - improvisations were built around one chord rather than complex resolving sequences; all· insttuments played percussively and melOdically; conventionS such as theme and extem.porisation, solo and accompaniment or beadfsolos/bead were all· thrown out in favour of textural laminates and molten fields of colour; rhythmic cc>ordination became advancedm.atbs. At times on Miles Davis In Concert, everybody except the percussionists seems to be playing through wah-wah pedals, a beteroglossolalic chorus of entombed wil~ cats._ With Macero chopping up this stream of

between

the

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intensities, the listener might be forgiven for suffering queasy reactions to the arbitrary element that emerged as a side effect of the openness. Music that was once structured like an armadillo now took the shape of a jellyfish.

utopia I Agharta and Pangaea were not just names pulled out of the air. Agharta Was the name given to a spiritual centre of power, a land of advanced races situated, according to a bizarre collection of authorities on the unprovable, somewhere under the earth, somewhere under Asia. The theme is a familiar one from james Hilton's 1930s novel Lost Horizon and its filmed versions. As jocelyn Godwin discovers in his exhaustive, clear-headed book~rktos: The Polar Myth in Science, Symbolism and Nazi Survival, the Agharta legend began in the 1870s with a French freethinker named Louis jacolliot. Other writers on the subject described Agharta as a place of contemplation and good, a land of adepts, a hiddenJand ruled by an Ethiopian pontiff and blessed with air travel and gas lighting. A Christian Hermetist named Saint-Yves d'Alveydte described the place in terms which help to suggest why Davis was so attracted to the rilyth: 1'... drowning in celestial radiances all visible dist:inctions of race in. a single chromatic of light and sound, singularly removed from the usual notions of perspective afid acoustics" .. Godwin, a consistently rewarding scholar. of esoteric musical ideas, also mentions Pangaea in Arktos, describing it as "the primordial continent into which all the present ones are ingeniously fitted in jigsaw fashion, its shores washed by the waves of 'Panthalassa,' the one-primo~ ocean. Later, the land masses are believed to have fragmented, first路into super-contiri.ents with names like Gondwana and Laurentia, then eventually into the-six or seven continents of today." The musiC on Pangaea is divided,. probably as an afterthought refleCting Davis's preoccupations of the time, into two titles: "Zimbabwe" and "~ndwana". So, in his mind, this was music inspired by lost civilisations; united

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land masses; utopias of the mythical future and, ItS Kevin . Whitehead suggests, continental drift.

utopia·1I With mid-1960s' tape pieces suchasMfxtur, Hymnen and Telemusik,· Stockhausen depicted global absorption and transmission; the passage of organic materials into the e1ec- . tronicdomain; music, the performer and the composer as a satellite dish (our metapl10rical equivalent of the spirit medium)in the wired world. "E~ry person has all of mankind within himself", claimed Stockhausen. In his notes on Telemustk, composed in Tokyo as an electronic transformation of fragments of recorded music from Africa, the Amazon, Hungary, China,· Spain, Vietnam, Bali and Japan, he wrote: "I _wanted to come closer to an old, an ~r-recurring dream:· to go a step forward towards writing, not 'my' music, but a music of the whole world, of all lands and races." On a related theme, Hymnen is a work which starts with the "international gibberish of short-wa~transmissions" and mixes 137 anthems from around the world. Stockhausen, who was using the term "world music" long before any rock star, broached this vision of "music of the whole world" in an essay entitled "Beyond Global Village Polyphony", written in 1973. "The possibility of telephoning Africa to order a tape recording, parts of which 1 then combine with electronic sounds I produce in Tokyo, is an unprecedented state of affairs, making it possible to create hitherto completely unknown relationships. In earlier times it was only.possible to hear music from Africa if you travelled there - and who had such an opportunity?" Some of his prophesies from twenty years ago are extraordinary, although clearly, he was not thinking ahead to the transglobal duetting of Bono and Frank Sinatra

the worm of Ej~r Bow Gamelanperformance: London, 1990. Infernal shadow: a fl8ure sits on a bicycle and pedals steadily. The bi-

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cycle powers a huge gramophone turntable which revolves at snail's pace, its giant stylus digging into the gtOO'reS of a fourfoot-wide perspex: disc. Slow music from pre-history squeals . . from a hom. Three crocodilian hinged. baths, mated in pairs on top of each other, snap their jaws. A vacuum cleaner plays its Scottish bagpipe lament for the myth of labour-saving appliances. Whirling lights. Arrows fired at suspended beer J>arrels mimic the change ringing of church bells,. A thunderous Burundi drum orchestra of upturned plastic barrels, ,illuminated from within and glowing in mentholated lime and blue like a Polynesian bar from hell. Spoons played in darkness, an echo of that odd scene in Roman Polanski's Repulston when an old man. playing spoons moy(!S crabwise along the street. More vacuum cleaners, blowing smoke through corrugated whirly tunes. Alarms, klaxons, car horns, colliding metal discs, monstrous springs, musical saws attached to light bulbs, heterodyning sirens played at the low end of their range. This episodic display of hypothetical grotesqueries from the Industrial Revolution, a homage to steam engineers and me~hanics whose visions have been suffocated by our soft electronic era, reminded me of Raymond Roussel. Something of a dandy, this French surrealist writer used some of his con路 siderable fortune to travel the world. During these tours, he would go out 'of doors as little as possible, preserving his im路 agination's sense of place from the corrupting effect of sensory input. Impressions OfAjrlca, first published in 1910, depicted a number of brutal scenes, strange machines and other marvels presented at the路 coronation ofTalu VD, Emperor of Po~le and ~ingof Drelshkaf. A chord is sounded by a surgical device which connects a young woman's lung to sounding tubes. In Tropbies Squate;Ejur, West Africa, the Hungarian Skariofszky demonstrates his zither, an instrument activated by a long worm resting ina Dllca trough filled with water. Undulating its body in precise motions, 'the trained worm allowed drops of water to fall from the trough

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on to the strings of the zither to play complex melodies.

animal. body A problem with utopias is that th~ tend to路 be closed systems, frozen in their supposed.perfection and therefore boring, imprisoning andfanatlcal. Like any zealot, KarlheinZ Stockhausen envisages a world changed, improved, even, according to 'his specifications. Body rhythms will have to go, for example, since they arise out of the "animal body" and slow down the evolution of the human race. The diVision of . musical.periodicityinto sound, rhythm and form is a problem of conditioned psychological perception anyway (if we were, crickets, belugas or replicants, things would be different), so Stockhausen proposed micro-rhythms as a replacement. These would tune the most gifted members of society into links with higher beings' and assist in the imminent'development of transportation for humans "through space on a beam of light" , their bodies reconstructed, like Dr Who; on other stars. This relegation of macro-rhythms to a low point on the eva: lutionary scale leads Stockhausen into profoundly' suspect territory. Reading his essay; I was reminded of interviewing composer and ex路AMM路improviser Cornelius Cardewj'shortly before he was knocked down and killed by a hit-and-run . driver. Cardew, whose diametrically opposed position to StOckhausen was underlined in his book Stockhausen Serves Imperialism, was talking about drawing his local commU1lity into themusiche was making with the (frankly abysmal) Peoples' Uberation Music band. The problem for Cardew was living in Hackney, a solid working-class area well' populated by young black reggae fans, which meant bass and drums ,powerful enough to steamroller flat the doctrinaire Maoism and limp music of PLM. "Those rhythms will have to go", ,mused Cardew without a trace of irony. A face-to-face discussion between Cardew, Miles Davis and Stockhausen could haveb.een very amusing. For Miles,rhythm

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had become the 'first structuring principle. of his music, recording studio processes the second. Listening to Bitches Brew, most of the music evolves in a sbnilar fashiOn to the Hendrix jam sessions released posthumously as Nine To the Universe. The big differences lie~With pre路session organisation (no angel dust), superb recording quality, innovative and intelligent post-produc~on ordering of the material by producer Teo Macero, a consistently high level of musical inspiration, subtlety and discipline, a greater variety of texture. "Whoever doesn't like what I did, twenty years from now they can go back and redo it" ,said Teo Macero, recording collaborator with Miles Davis. "Now there's no 'take one' etc,", he told Ian Carr, Davis's biographer. "The recording machine doesn't stop at the sessions, they never stop, except only to make the playback. As soon as he gets in there, we start the machines rolling." As Carr pointed out, additionally: "Miles wouldn't start 'With the idea of set pieces; instead, he would simply explore some fragmentary elements and edit them into a cohesive piece of music afterwards." This is true of all multi-track recording and, as the AUstralian路sound restorer Robert Parker has proved, recorded music from all eras can be tranSformed through technological deaning processes. The most mutable piece of music Jimi Hendrix recorded - "1983 ... (a merman I should turn to be)" - was mixed in various different versions.by Hendrix and Eddie Kramer. An alternative, far less polished mix can be heard on a CD called Live & Unreleased: The Radio Show, where Kramer is heard describing the all-night mix as a "performance". Jimi called the track a "~ng painting", but the painting was not in the song. 'The chords .underpinned an improvisa~ tion depicting the abyssal movement of unidentified submarine objects, the cries of seagulls, a 'descent into. the maelStrom. There are lyrics, although Hendrix, who doubted his voice, might have come doser to the song painting by leaving them off. They outline a prescient theme: escape, via

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Noah-style Ark machine, from war, environmental catastrophe (and personal chaos?), rebirthing into the amniotic fluid of the ocean.

brand new bag Despotic control and -technological deceit are re- . garded commonly as corrupting forces which destroy the authentidtyand communality of music. I remembedondly a cartoon printed in a magazine to which· I subscribed as a young guitarist: a drawing depicting Elvis Presley, seen from behind as he sang and pretended to play an electric guitar in which a radio was concealed. In February 1965, James Brown and -his band interrupted their lengthy bus journey to a show by stopping off at a studio in North Carolina, for barely an hour, to record "Papa's Got A Brand New Bag". The song dr.lgged for nearly seven minutes. as the musidans, including guitarist Jimmy Nolen, struggled with fatigue. The track was · meant to be hip, dance-craze R&Bon the cusp, reaching back through history to the swinging, jazz inflections of Wynonie Harris, Little Willie John and Louis Jordan, looking back even further to rent parties and fish fries, but at the same time grail': ing towards the disco cyborg future. Whatever was latent in those weary ~rooves, somebody heard it, for as Cliff White and Harry Weinger wrote in their notes for the James Brown Star Time CD box of 1991: "In a brilliant post-production de· cision, the intro was spliced-off and the entire performance was sped up for release." A huge pop· hit wasrazor·bladed out of something that started as a flatfoot grind; this taut amalgam of street slang, loping beats and nervous punchy accents, arguably the first moment of modem soul. Qrown's quoted reaction reflected · his.glimpse-into a future, our present, in which songs are titles, source points, initlausations, indicating the beginriing and the reference point for a process of continual transforma-. tion. "It's a little beyond me now", he confessed. "I'm actually fightin' the future. It's- it's - it's just out there." The peculiat

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aspect of the story is that most ofushave only become aware ofthe unpromising origins of this faJ>ulous, pivotal traek more than a quarter of a century after the event. Were it not for the obsession, via CD release, for the altematetake,and hence the release of "Papa's Got A Brand New Bag" in its complete and previously unreleased, unedited, slow form, we would be none the wiser. Once amused, in a patronising sort of way, to learn that one of the guitarists from The VentureS learned to . play by struggling to copy Les Paul's artificially accelerated and overdubbed bionic guitar solos, I now realise that I can be fooled just as easily. But what a privilege to be so easily deceived into pleasure, revelation, motivation. The beauty of exploitation overdubs or dead zone duets is .their. realisation of the potential of studio music as science fiction, theconfigurations which our imaginations whisper but our bodies so rarely concede. A great advantage of working with dead people is that their objections, the objections of habit or fIXed identity, go unheard. In 1988, James Brown sang in that scorched earth scream of his, "I'm real", but editing equipment and tape speed controls had already (decades ago, in fact) thrown that desperate, insecure claim into' doubt.

techn()"glossolalia Whilst Brian Eno and路I were talking during an interview about the impact of technology on our perception of music, be began to enthuse over the enthralling sound of early . rock. and roll records, particularly Dick and Deedee's "The Mountain's High" and Phil Spector's production of "Be My Baby", sung by The Ronettes: "As I started collecting records I started noticing there were distinct trends in. my collection.. The biggest trend of all was certainly towards this wcination. for things that just had their.own sound picture. Like some of the late fifties, early sixties recordS that I had, like 'The Mountain's High' . The moment you put it on, it sounds like nothing else that you've ever heard. Within the first second ofthat song,you're in the place. It's sonically so distinctive. Then,

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'Be My Baby', where you had this enormous, huge.sonic picture with the thinnest voice you've eve!' heard. The voice is like aUttI.e bee Inside there. I got more and moreinterc:sted in that kind of thing ':'and then pSychedelic music ~ an explo. sionof that kind of qJaterlal.". , In passing, he men~oned Br.uik Sinatra:, and the "eroticism" of a vocaUst singing intimaiely Inio a microphone in front of a loud big -band: "I think what happened in. pop. music, because of electronics and recording and other cultural factors asweIl, was that suddenly it became possible to work with all sorts of sounds, to put together things that could

never have been put together before. For instance, just the miC(ophoneenabllng -a. singer to sing very quietly ~t a full orcbC:Stra; This, in itself, was an incredible revolution in eroticism. Frank Sinatra singing in an off-hand, almost intro- '. spective way against a big band was a fabulous breakthrough whiCh could never have happened in ;,my classical ·music because· it'S., physically impossible. He would -have' been. drowned."Brian also talked about bis own production work: for U2 and, coincidentally, the odd semiosis of mismatched vocal styles and social messages that oc~ when seemingly incompatible singers ~rd·duets. " .' "Have you· ever read", Briaqasked me, ."or seeri. this ~ok, I dori'tthinkailyone could ever read it, actually, by Alan Lomax, called Polk Song Style and Culture?" The answer was yes, I ~ aboutI.omax and his olntometiics, IWisys~ for J,neasuring social structure by voCal $lyles. The observations which follow are ramshackle by nOl1DalEno standards, but a fascinating idea is hatching within. "I think it's a great book;', he continued. "It's so interestirig as a concept. One of the things there is that he's looking at culture and saying,one culture has very raspy'naSal singing and,this co~ with the ;pattern of suc;h cultures being maledomin3ted, so on and so on. He identifies those kinds of connections betweensingingstyie and cultural habits in general. BUt when you come to ourcu1- . ture,tbisb~mesmuch-QlOre complex. You heat' arecord

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like ... Joe Cocker singing with some country singer. You hear, on the one hand, her voice, which is very pure, very feminine, distinctly of a culture of Western ... almost路 prurience. Then you hear his voice, which is the lonely, dirty, fucking 10ng-h8ired messy hunker. In the Lomax book, there's no provision for the possibility that you could imagine a cul. ture that plays with the elements of other cultures IiIre that. It dons them like it dons masks. They're guises, really. The whole energy of a song IiIre that - .a pretty shitty sODg, actually - is in playing off these two cultural pictures, which I'm . sure resonate with us in exactly the way that Alan Lomax suggested. I'm sure when路 we hear the Joe CockCr vOiCe, we hear the culture that Alan Lomax would say connects with that but then, in the next line, we hear this other culture in her voice. This is very fascinating to me - that we've become sonic collagists. I think the energy of those kind of combinations has a very long life. It outlasts melodies and rhythms and so .on. It's a very deep pattern that they're talking about." Implicit, also, is the logical extenSion of these illusions and juxtapositions. Performance can never be the same again. One of the first live bands I saw was'The Ronettes, supporting Th~ Rolling Stones on their second national tout. ,On a Ronettes record, teenage life crises were amplified by. Phll Spector's production to the scale of a major metereological disturbance. Uve, encased in iridescent sheath dresses, . stripped of Spector's awesome production, The Ronettes (and the life crises) w.ere reduced to human proportions; Technology has transformed路 us in~ giants, bionic superhumans, stateless satellites, omnipresent speaJrets.in-tongu~. We become bigger than we are, lo,:!der, displaced or multiplied or we shrink, intimidated by the waterfaU of i:Jlf0rmation~ We use technology to protect and isolate ourselves, articulating desires that have been suppressed by technology,t:fying to replace alienation with techno-spirituality, using contradictory messages to express confusions for which our history has not prepared us. "Who's in. the next flat?w,ho's in 14-B?" asks

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psychologistJames HiUmaD. i.nWe'~ Had aH~ndred·Yeat'$ of PsychotheraPY,!-M the W'.orld's Getting· Worse. "I don't know who they are, but, boy, I'm on the phone, phone, . toilet phone,p)ane phope, my mistress is in ChicagO; the othe1- woman I'mwithis.:in D.C., my exwife is in Phoenix, my mother in Hawaii;. and I have four children living all over the Country. I have faxes ooming in day and night,I can plug into all the world's stock prices, commodity exchanges, I am. everywhere, man - but I don't;Jmow who's in 14-B.'·

car

living space Is thejoumey of a fax 8$ iilteresting as (ormorein,ter" esting than) the travel jourmils of Marco Polo, dictated during·

a three-ye&;r ·period.of lridrceration· at the end of- the thirteenth century? Marco Polo "created Asia for the European mind", wrote John MasdleJd, but fax and e-mail, what myste~ rious .zones do they create· for the contemporary· mind? AlienationJromphysical.community may.be ~lrig, yet idealists who. promoteelectrQnic communications suggest that ·they are being used to rebuild shattered communities, rather.than. complete their.destruction. "Some aspects of life in a small community have to be abandoned when you ~ . to an online metropolis;. the fundamentals of human nature. . howeva-, alwaYs scale up", wrote Howard Rheingold in Virtual Community: jin4ing connections ~n eJ eomputerlsetl world. "The fact thatwe need computer networks to re~p-. ture the sense of cooperatlve'.spirit that so many~ peop~ , seepJ.ed to lose when. we·· gained all thisteclulology is a ~·lrony", he admits·· in a chapter entitled Grassroots GrQUpminds. , .• As for· flights from the body, Or·froJri rootedness mthe body, these may tum OuttQhave their positive si~also. Transcendence tbl"ough Chemical drugs and plant psycll~~cs, long stays in cybetspacevia the Internet, or body-Q'fsfs .ru.ns $UCh as n-o,.,. VUleOtlrome ~ Wes Craven's Nightm:are. On Elm StretIt.~d be .interpreted,.in their varicmsway5, as

:nu:

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manifestations of a desire to redefine .the Cartesian iplage of diVided being. By vacating the body, losing the centre in a web of information (whether video game, electronic spectacle, audiojvisual immersion, dream,/nightmare, global information . exChange or so-called plant consciousness), the nott-corporeal part of humanness begins to question its own boundarlesand to challenge the conventional'·belief.that consciousness is housed somewhere within the head. Ask musicians of a certain age·a question: Who revolution· ised the recording studio? Invariably, the response will include the following names: Phil Spector, "joe Meek, Brian Wilson, Lee Pen:y. At critical ~ments of their lives, one common link betWeen all these studio innovators was a state of mind known, for the sake of society's conveniettce, as madness. Duririg a Brian Wilson interview in 1986, we discussed The Four Freshmen and their influence on The Beach Boys. I asked one of those· reflex questions that tends to pop .out during a· telephone interview with a difficult subject. Was it unusual for somebody like yourself to be listening to The Four Freshmen at that time? "No, it wasn't unUsUal", be replied.. "The thing was that I had no real sOurce of spiritual love. My parents were OK but my dad was so hostile that he kinda screwed the family up. So he messed up the family vibrations, you know? So I turned to music as my love, as a sOurce of spiritual ·love. When I heard the Freshmen, I really flipped because I liked the sound I heard, I liked their sound. I analysed their sOund and I learned to analYse their harmottJ.es." . Ustening back to that tape, I feel frustrated that I opted out of pursuing this disarming connection between psychic ill health and sOund. Bootleg recordings of Brian Wilson studio sessions from the Smile era, reveal a musician completely imD1ersedin sOund: a ravishing instrumental dub of a 'Til I Die", just bass guitar, vibraphone and the gradual fade-up of distant organ, then drums, then vocal harmonies, then quiet drum'machine. Another session, called "Geotge Fell Into His French Hom", experiments with brass instruments, sOme of

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~hich sound 1ike11betan ritual music,

Varese glissandi or tree

jazz, some of which fool around with cartoonish evocations of "laughter•. A cOn~n about George falling,into his French" horn, sdddng valves other incompreh~ible stuff, is conducted by musi~ taHdng into their mouthpieces. Sombre growIings, smears, pointilliste brass blats and hee-haws are interrUpted by the serious voice of Wilson, talking from the control room: "OK, one mote time please. A little bit slower moving if we could." An interesting side angle: the Smile bootieg LP inCluded a Mlles Davis/Gil Evans track "Here Comes De Honey Man" from Porgy and Bess - claimed by the label copy as an extremely" rare and unrcleased Beach Boys instrumental called "H,oJidays". - Joe Meek was not mad. A gay man, trying to suppress all signs of his queerness in ·the repressive atmosphere of postwar Britain, attempting to come to terms with spiritual longings (he was a spiritualist who dubbed angelic voices on to trashy'instrumentals) in the priniitivecontext of early British rock and roU,·he killed his landlady, then himself, with;a shotgun. The strain of these forbidden desire! pushed him beyond the point of rational constraints. And Spector, inventor of the "Wall of sound",1a.yeriilginstrumental textures. and echoeS"into a sweet sickness, the depth ofthc"sound drawing yoU down·to subterranean caves of subtle wonders. Spector became a Los Angeles recluse, like Roderick Usher, a1one'and ' hyPersensitive in the House of Usher, eventually producing .~ a gun on the mixing desk. Not so far away was Brian Wilson, grotesquely fat, lying in bed for. two years, emotionaIlyexbausted by The Beach Boys and turned inside out by drugs. In Washington Gardens, Kingston; Jama1ca,after~ of prOducing reggae hitS, Lee Perry had destroyed his Black Ark studio, first flooding it, tm:nburning it down. Coinddence? ·Or did the stnJggleofturning the recording studio &om its documentary-Origins to a virtual chamber ofwonders push the most creative producers past the edges ofself-definition, into the void? A thin1inestands between1:he voices that

and

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torment and dominate a disordered, confused personality-and the not-yet-existent sounds from nowhere which invade the Imagination in daydreams, tempting the sonic -~lorer into finding means todupUcate th(:m. in the tangible world.

dub dream "And be Woke lIgllin, thinking he had dreamed ... Aerol strapping him. ioto a g.web-in Babylon llocker. And then the long pulse of ~on dub." wiUilun -Gibson, Neuromancer

Lee Perry sits next to me, fiddling with a small cassette recorder. Pieces of plastic are breaking off( batteries disgorged. How to offer technological assistance to a twentietb::eentury master of audio recording? Not ~ter, magician. A wiry, wizened man with a mischievous look about him, he wasbom in Jamaica, in perhaps 1935 or _'36, though nobody is sUte. Festooned with coins, pendailts, featb~and badges, he could be an Obeah man empowered with ~e trappings of .Afro.Jamaican folk magic, or simply an -eccentric. The ainbiguity enhances his mythical status among reggae fanatics. -He appears to elijoy the fact that people think: he is quite mad, . although confusion and unhappiness are apparent alongside the inspirational juxtapositions of his-word play. "Rocking and reeling, having .a ball, swinging and singing, strait-jacket IlJld alln, he s~ on a tune Called "Secret Laboratoryn. He belonged to three different churches in his youth: the Holiness Church, the Church of God and the Ethiopian Ortbo. <lox, and tends to describe both musical motivations and the technical processes of recording with imagery that would suit an Old Testam~nt prophet. What cOuld be dismissed as mystical mumbo jumbo makes sense-if related to Perry's music, which has consistently drawnuponJamaicanfolklore and language. Some of Bob Marley's freshest work, for example, was achieved with Perry in the years 1969 to 1971; some songs that they recorded together contain hidden meantn&, referring to the British colonialist era and the proscribed cult practices

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of Jamaican slaves, including their belief in duppies(gb.osts) and spirits. Later tracks transpose and collage potent Biblical, Rastafarian, Afro..Jamaican,comic book and spaghetti-western imagery: theethereaI "Congo Ashanti" chant of The Congos, "Hay Fever" chanted by Jab Lion over the sound of a squeaking door, or Leo Graham's "Black Candle" ("a warning to路 enemies who might seek the help of ~ Obeab man in order to attack the producer", writes Steve Barrow). 路At its heights, Perry's genius has transformed the recording studio. If the original purpose of recording was to document a musical performance,then Perry's approach, as .titles such as "Secret Laboratory" , "Station Underground News" and "Musical Transplant" indicate, lifted the studio intovirtual space, an imaginal chamber over which presided the electronic wizard, evangelist, gossip columnist and Dr Frankenstein that he became. "mectricity is the eye, water is the life", he says. "In a way, electricity reach the high peak. The studio must be likeaIiving thing. The machine must be live and intelligent. Thenl put. my-mind into the machine by sending it through the controls and the knobs or into the jack panel. The jack panel is the br.iin itself, so you've got to patch up the brain and make the brain a living man,butthe brain can take what you're sendinginto it and live. Think of music as life. When I making music I think of life, creating life, and I want it to live, I want it to feel good and taste good." This is alchemist's talk: making living matter from intractable substances. "When we smoke and feel nice," he continues; "eat cornbread with butter. Then it giVe you agood appetite and new vibes. The sound might be sounding sweeter. The sound might be coming from the food zone." A substantial body of influential, extraordinary music was made in the 1970s at Perry~sBIack Ark studio, named after the Ark of the Covenant. Some of these - Junior Murvin's "Police & Thieves" ,MaxRomeo's:"War Ina Babylon", George Faith's "To Be a: Lover (Have Mercy)" - were irresistibly, innovatively

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commercial. With their jump-cut edits and supernatural soundworlds, others - "7~ Skank,;, "Militant Rock", "Roast Fish & Cornbiead" - we..-e more daring than anything else of their time. "I grew up reading comics", he tells me. Perhaps路 . comics, cartoons and film (and now computer games) are more useful tools fora musician's self-education than books. John Zorn has helped to legitimize the rapid dislocations and hairpin structures of cartoon music composed by Carl8taUing for Warner路 Brothers' ciu1:oonS such as Bugs Bunny. In his sleevenotes for The carl Stalltng Project album, Zorn writes that Stalling's music "implies an openness - a non-hierarchl. cal musical overview - typical of today'syOunger composers but all too rare before the mid-l960s. All genres of music are' equal- no one is inherently better than the others ':'" and with Stalling, all are embraced, chewed up and spit.out in a format closer to Burroughs' cut ups, or Godard's film editing of the '60s, than to .anything happening in the '4Os." But listen, also, to some of Brian Wilson's Beach Boys music of the Smile periodand after- "Fall Breaks and Back To Winter" or "Trombone Dixie" - for evidence of c3.rtoon music and Pisney influences mutating into avant~ pop. . Lee Perry explored the potential of sounc;l to hypnotise. "But still the Black Ark was something else," he says, ."because the sound that 1 get out of the Black Ark studio, I don'trea1ly get it out of n.o other studio. It was like ~ space craft. You . could hear space in the tracks. Something there was like a holy vibration and a godly sensation. Modem studios, they have . different set up. They set up a busineSs and a.maney-making concern. I set up like an ark. Studying history, I realised that the Ark of the Covenant is the, top of everything. You have to be the Ark to save the animals anc;l nature and music." The level of inspiration was very high at this point, with Perry pushing limited equipment to extrem.es. His attitude to the .sources of. his inspiration is unorthodox. "It had sOmething to do with the location of the studio", he claims. "Because it was built on a godly plan to make holy.spiritual musiC. I have a plan to

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make music that can make wrongs right. I was getting help

from God, through space,through the sky, through the firmament, through the earth, through the wind, through the fire. I got- supportthrough the weather to make space music."

Lee Perry's spelf When I clap my hand, duppy appear to me from coast to coast, flying through the night post and through treyholes. SometimeS they melt the key, if-the key is in the keyhole, in a puff ofsmoke --PffffffffL~ ~ When I cut a Stench-Fart, it so loud that it bring up volcano lava, and is more dangerous than a hurricane ... Say "hi" to the lovers of Christ, and "bye" to the lovers of the devil. 'cause I kill the devil with my spiritual leveL MXR Armagideon War. Electrical machine, computer man, the mighty Upsetter, the ghost in the machine. Mad Perry, lightniiJ.g head master, breaker of doom. Dr Fu Manchu, black Fu Manchu. Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! This is a musical curse. Blessed are the Poor, and cursed are the Rich. Hic Hoc; Hic Hoc, Yak Yak. It finish. Yak Yak.

replicant Dub_music is like-along echo delay,-looping through time. Regenerating every few- years, sometimes so quiet that only a disciple could hear, sometime shatteringly loud, dub unpicks music in the commercial sphere. Spreading out a song or.a groOve-over a vast landscape of peaks and deep trenches, extending- hooks and beam to vanishing point, dub creates llew maps of time, intangible sound sculptures, sacred Sites, balm and shock for mind, body and spirit. - -When you double, or dub, you replicate, reinvent, -make one of many versions. There is no such thing as an original niix, since inusic stored on multi-track tape, floppy or hard disk, is just a collection of bits. The composition has _been decOmposed,already, by the technology.- Dubbing, at its very best, -takes each bit and imbues it with new life; turning a

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raUonalorder of musical sequences into an ocean of sensation. This musical revolution· stemmed originally fromJamaica - in particular, the tiny studio once run by the late Osbourne Ruddock, aka King Tubby, in Kingston. "This is the heart Kingston 11", Dave Henley wrote, describing the location of Tubby's studio for a reggae fanzine called Small Axe. "A maze of zinc fence, potholed roads and suitably dilapidated bungalows. After dark, the streets become ~ly deserted (by Kingston standards, anyWay, considering that loafing on the comer is a favourite Jamaican pastime), giving the impression - of an eerie tropical ghost town." Urban, rural, tropic, aquatic, lo-tech, mystical. This was the source mix from which William Gibson drew (sentimentally, some critiCs think) wben:adding the humanising element of Rastafariand dub to his Neuromancer narrative of tech-Gnosis. When King Tubby ·first discovered dub, the revelation Came, ~ so many technological discoveries, through an accident. There ~re other Jamaican recording engineers, of course: Sylvan Morris; Errol T.. Thompson and Uoyd·"Prince Jammy" James helped to created the sound of albums such as Joe Gibbs's African Dub AU-Mighty series, or Augustus Pablo's King Tub~'S Meets Rockers Uptown and4fHca Must Be Free By 1983. But it was Tubby, cutting discs for Duke Reid at Treasure· Isle, who first c:Iiscovcred the thrill of stripping a_ vocal from its backing track and then manipulaUng the instrumental arrangement with techniques and effects: drop-out, extreme equalisation, long delay, short delay, space echo, reverb, flange, phase, noise gates, echo feedba~, shotgun snare drums, rubber bass, zipping highs, cavernous lows. The effects are thet;e for enhanceD;1ent, but for a dubmaster they can displace time, shift the beat, heighten a mood, suspend a moment~ No coincidc;nce that .the·nearestapproximatiQn to dub is the·sonar transmit pulses, reverberations and echoes of underwater echo ranging anfl bioacoustics. No coincidence.. also, that dub originated ina·poor section of a city on a Caribbean island.

of .

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The first moment of dUb has been pursUed by reggae hist0steve Barrow through numerous conversations with important reggae record producers such as Bunny Lee. InDUb Catcher -magazine, Lee conjures· some of the excitement of those btte-l960s, early-1970s' sessions when King Tubby began to experiment With what he termed the "implements of sound": "Tubby's, righe, recalls Lee. "With all the bass and drum ting now, dem ting just start by accident, a man sing off key, an' when you a reach a datyou dropou~ everyting an' leave the drum, an' lick in the bass, an' cause a confusion an' people like it ... Sometime an' 'im talk an' me say, 'Drop out now, Tubby!' An' 'im get confuse an' me jus' draw down the whole a the lever ... you hear 'Pluck' an' jus' start play pure distortion.. Me say, 'Yes Tubbs, madness, the people dem like it!' an' just push it right back up .. ~ An' then Lee Perry do fe 'im share a dub too, ca' 'im an' Tubby's do a whole heap a ting .•. 'im an' Niney [producer nine f1nger Niney 'the Observer'] an' musician jus' play, an' 'im jus' [makes discordant noises and-laughs]. '1m drunk, drunk yunno - the engineer a go stop'im an'[he] say, 'You no hear a vibes? Mad sound dat man.' An' when 'im ·come the people dem like it." Tubby worked with equipment that would be considered impossibly limited by today's standards, yet his dubs were massive, towering exercises in sound sculpting. Legend records that he cut four dubpIatc:s - special, one-off mJxes for his Home Town-Hi-Fi S~em at the end of the 19605. Playingthese instrumental versionS at a _dance, with U Roy toasting verbal improvisations ove1' the m~ic in real time, he was forced to repeat them all night, dubbing them up live as the croWdwent crazy. Tubby worked for some of Jamaica's most creative producers: Lee Perry and Augustus Pablo, in particular, were recording increasingly exotic and distinctive music during the 1970s.0n atbums such as Perry's Super Ape and Pablo's Basta/the River Nile, the mixing board becomes a pictorial instrument, establisrung the illusion of a vast soundstage and then dropping instruments in and out as if rian

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they were characters ina drama~ Lee Perry was a master of this technique, applying it to all his records, whether vocal, dub,- instrumental version or talkover, -all of them rich 1n-his dub signature of rattling handdrumso_and scrapers, ghostly - __ voices, distant hom sections, unusual snare and ~-hattreatÂ ments, groans and reptilian sibilations, odd perspectives and depth illUSions, sound effects, unexpected noises and echoes that repeat to infinity. Dub also ,antidpated- remix culture.- In 1974 Rupie - Edwards, a producer of celebrated Jamaican artists such as I Roy, The Ethiopians and Gregory Isaacs, was the first to compile _a "version" album.,.. Yamaha Skank, twelve different versions of the rhythm of a song called "My Conversation". Although these Were not-dubs, they grew out of the idea of dubbing a track, shaping and reshaping its "implements of sound" as if music wasmodeUing clay rather than copyright property. 0

Prince Far 1'8 vision , ... city of nine gates, magical OlOOn, circling clouds, marvel. of miracICs, twilight world, beauty unfold, in J.iving

memory...

Suns of Arqa,"City of Nine -Gates"

world of echo o After the first wave"of dub albums during the 1970s from King ~by, Lee PerrY, Augustus Pablo, Yabby U, Keith Hudsoll:Â°andthe producer s~bles of Bunny~. Coxsone Dodd, Joe Gibbs and Niney, mariy of dub's innovations were applied to fresh contexts in America -and the UK~ New York dub emerged, almost an ilieV1tabilitj-, from the disco tape editin3 and remixing of DJs such as Tom Moulton and Walter Gibbons. Moulton, -whose hectlc career as the pioneer oof disco iDJxing came to a halt atter ~ serioUs heart attack during a mix, restructured funk tracks with a razor blade, shaping ft>rthe ecstasi~ ~d libido reI~ of the dancefloor; a watter

.' ~

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Gibbons.mix,on the other m.,nd,entered theJistener into the chaotic heart of King Tubby's "implements of sound". Althou~ many of his ~; particularly of material from the Salsoullabel, were relativeiy functional, he could also play Lee Perry-style,tricks with sound balance, sudden track dropouts or perspectival distortions. Ills long remix of Bettye LaVette's: ~Doin'the Best That I can", released on New York's West End label in 1978, redefined the logical hierarchy of inst:runl$tation. Walter Gibbons coUld make a dancefloormove toa glockenspiel ora hi-hat. Acolistant collaborator with the late Arthur Russell - New York singer, cellist, percussionist and minimalist/disco composer- he used sound relatio~hips ratlter than ,electronic effects to create wonderfully.strange mUsic. 1besereach their apex on the Arthur Russell 12" singles: "Let's Go Swimming" and "'l'reehousejSchool Bell" - sOngs of innocence and experience; convoluted slitherings of sharp . . sounds-t chopped and dlslocated;antipathetic to the modular, even-number constructionaf disco; formed in the eternal shape of the self-devouring Uroborus dragon of alchemy, a flow without beginning or end; contrastinJ;lmerging the developmental improvisation'of Indian ragas withthe~ypnotic, ituman~mterlock' accretions of Fela Anikulapo~Kuti's Nigerian Afro-funk. Uke Gibbons, Russell played the studio as an instrument, understanding the freedom inherent in present-day recording. For example, sound recorded in a studio live room or direct on to;ta.pe is unnaturally dry (unless recorded in special reflectiVe rooms), so extraordinary lllusions of distance are possible through contrasting dry, forward sounds with the , . distancing 'effects of a hugetange of echoes. Another point: the nUlllbet of "performat)c~" that can be permutated.from a multi-traCk recording is Jnfinite. World ofEcho, Russell'called one of his Solo albums." Russell siudied at the Ali Atcbar Khan school in San' Francisco, wbere he playCdcello. "Cello is Ali Akbar Khan's.

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favourite instrument" , he told me in 1986. He collaboratedon projects with John Cage, Laurie Anderson, PhiU Niblock, Philip Glass, Fran~ois Kervorkian, David Byrne, Steve D'Aquisto,the Ingram brothers, Peter Gordon, Larry Levan. Allen Ginsberg and many others; poets, fUm makers, disco mixers, pop stars, soul musicians, contemporary composers. Forbidden border crossings. When Russell performed his Instrumentals piece at The :(Gtchen in Manhattan, the use of a drum kit caused a stir. "A lot of people turned off", he told me. "They thought that was a sign of some new unsophistica路 tion, .a sign of increasing comInercialisation. Then if you try to do something different in dance music you just get branded as an eccentric, Maybe I am an eccentric, I don't know, but it's basically a very simple idea. I mrem.tJSic with no drums, too. Partly, I guess, from listening to drums so much. When you hear something with no drums it seems very exciting. I always thought that music with no drums is successive to music with drums. New music With no drums is like this future when they don't have drums any more.In outer space, you can't take your drums -you take your mind."DJs told him that nobody would ever play "Let's Go Swimming". "I think eRfitually that kind of thing will be commonplace"', he said He was路right, but neither he nor Walter GibbOns lived to profit from this new era of sound experimentation. Arthur Russell died of AIDS in 1992. Walter Gibbons died in 1994.

my life In a hole In the ground . The New Orleans torture Scene conjured in hallucinogenic close up by David Lynch in Wild At Heart: a sloweddown Adrian Sherwood production - "Far Away Chant" by African路 Headcharge - adds further dimensions of hoodoo otherness to Lynch's trademarkshadeworld of scx:ualviolence, Prince Far I's warping sandblast vocals rising up from the catacombs ... in this unholy place a steady throb of Rastafarian repeater and funde路 d.rwiJs somehow twisted in the unconsciotJsto draw on archaic fears,fear of voodoo, fear of

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the primeval occult, the old unhealthy fear of Rastas as "menacing路devils with snake nests for halr". Working with a floating pool of musicians in London, Adrian Sherwood, had been pushing reggae deeper into the echo chamber for years, maybe running an entire track.backwards, highlighting strange instruments, layering fugitive ambiences !rpm the elemental simplicity of drum, pass and vocals, creating polyrhythmic ricochets, noise bubbles and chimerical voices. His mixing techniqUes on Creation Rebel's Starshfp Africa, the late Princ~ Far I's Cry Tuff Dub Encounter series of albums, and African Headcharge's My Life In a Hole In the Ground were epic explorations of mood, experiments in bass as an enveloping cloud, premonitions of the maratlion dub and ambient mixes of the 19908. I played flute 'and African thumb piano on Chapter III of the Prince Far I Cry Tuff albums, east London's Berry Street studio boiling hot, air conditioning broken down, Far I (like King Tubby, so~n to become a murder victim of Jamaica's random gun law) solemn and silent, Sitting by the mixing desk wrapped in scarf, hat and jacket as if we were working in arctic conditions. The session was a madhouse of post-punk experimentation, indicative of the roJe dub had assumed as a deconstructing agent, a.locus of crosscurrents from reggae, rock, jazz, improvisation and the extra-human conjectures of technological processes. Sherwood has admitted that his initial inspiration for My Life In a Hole In the Ground was the David Byrne and Brian Eno collaborative album, My Life In the Bush of Ghosts: "I was reading in the paper", Sherwood told Dub Catcher magazine, "where he [Brian Eno] said, 'I had a vision of psychedelic Africa' or something like that. So I had to laugh. The idea was to make a psychedelic, but serious, African. dub record."

bush of ghosts , More laughter, this time from Brian Eno. In the early 1970s, he was holding forth about the genius of l.ee Perry's

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-Bucky Skank" to a rock jo'UmaUst at theNM1!, who responded with SCXJm. Only a year later, Brian recalls with an allowable degree of smugsa.tisfaction, the same ~ was sojOUrn- . ing in Jamaica, smoking -trumpet-sized .spliffs" and filing born-again copy in praise of reggae. In Cyberia ~. Douglas Rushkoff's celebration of cyberdeUc ennui - My Life In " . Bush ·of Ghosts is credited as -the inspiration for the lndustrial, house,and evett rap and hip-hop recording artists who followed". 'Ibis reductive ~on to ~ that underground scenes· (black, Hispanic, 'gay, whatever)·must have their source in artists recognised by white media (i.e, mostly ·white people) is as odious and absurd as the opposite claim . (heard at a hip-bop seminar in 1993) that white people have made no contribution to twentieth-century music. Released in 1981, My Life In· the B~k 0/ G~ was ali. interesting record although itsloose,one-chord jams, dearly influenced by Fela Kud,.have not ~ time as wcII, in my opinion, as Brian's supposedly less commercia1lUnbien~ work of that period. Some of the musicianship ·sounds' dated; but the last three tracks of the album. sequence, predicate fruitful rhythmic possibilities - a kind of segmented, craJ).. wise mOvement of unl()cked rhythm relationships.· - along with the suggestion of a studio-generated music which explores ritual gravity (an dectronic equivalent of Korean ancestral shrine mUsic or Japanese ga~). The idea of sam. pUng radio VOices and tapes of global musics in a rock context, concocting ·ethnic'futgeries or machioe-age cerem0nies, was nothing new. Can's bass player and short-wave-radio Iuim.,Holger Czuby, had been doing this since hisCanems album, co-produced with Rolf Dammers at the Inner Space studio; Cologne,in 1968~ Moreover., when CZukay mbred this kind of S01JrCemateria1into the music, he CIUted integrated fictions, ·impossible musics from unknown worlds, rather .than simply laying voice tapes on top of the funk. TheBfme and Bno co~on bad a secret: historY, anyway. The project was mooted during·~O!is.between

.."'.

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Byrne, Enoand]on Hassell inN~York. At that tiine, Hassell had formu1atedand was pubUshing advance fragments from his future/primitive Fourth World concept: "A proposal for a 'coffee coloure<l' classical musicofthe future - bOth in terms of the adoption of entirely new modes of structul'alorganisation (as might be suggested' by the computer abiUty to re-arrange, dot-by-dOt, a sound or video image) and in terms of an expansion of the 'allowable' musical vocabulary in which one lIlay speak thiS structure - leaving behind the ascetic face which Eurocentric tradition has come to associate with serious expreSsion." "At that time I had done Possible MU$ics", says Hassell, speaking tome from his home in West Hollywood. ~Brian was producIng Thlking Heads ... and I turned them on to a lot of ethnic mUSiC,' in particulat the Ocora label.·After Remain In Light Daytd and Brian came up with this idea that we should go off iilto the desert someplace with. an eight-track recorder . and make a record that, at that time, we were thinking would . be somewhat JUre The Residents' Eskimo - that is tribe, invented, that doesn't exist." At this opportune moment, our transatlantic telephone discussion is interrupted by a Spanish CD radio conversation. '''So we .conspired to do this. together. '. They were goirig to go off to LA to look for a piace. A month or so tater, I gota.~ in the mail and it was an early version of - .~ it 0Um Kalsoum they used £prObablY Egyptian singer Samira TewfIk, on "A Secret ute"}? Anyway, it was enough to send me into .•. Ii wasc;nougl1 tribe quite disturbing." Hassell is proud of the fact that Hank. Sho<:ldee, co-producer of Public Enemy with Chuck D, has acknowledged My Life In the Bush of Ghosts as one influe.ilce on thebectic,cutup, coUaged sound flow of Public Enemy. "We took whatever. was annoying, threw it into a pot, and that's how we came put with this. group", Shocklee told Keyboard magazine, "We believedthat music is nothing but organised noise. You can take . anything - street SO.UIlds,.us talking, whatever you want -and make. it music, by organizing it;!'

aiaux

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curating the world At the dawn of audio recording, a small boy named

Ludwig Koch sat under a piano with:an Edison phonograph, recording the playing.of}ohannes Brahms on to a wax cylinder. This document, made on the cusp of a new era of music and technology, was lost when Koch fled from Nazi Germany, but at the age of eight, he also made the first known record. ing of an animal - an Indian Shama thrush - in 1889. Zoos, museums, expositions, cameras and microphones: collectors, memorisers and curators of the world. "Collecting - at least in the West, where time is thought to be linear and irreversible - implies a rescue of phenomena from inevitable historical decay ~r loss", writes James Clifford, professor in the History of Consciousness Program, University of California "Since the mid-nineteenth century", he continues, "ideas of culture have gathered up those elements that seem to give continuity and depth to collectivee:xistence, seeing it whole rather "thart" disputed, torn, ""intertextual., or .. syncretic. [MargaretlMead'saimost postmodem image of 'a local native reading-the index: to The Golden Bough just to see if they had missed anything' is not a vision of authenticity." CUfford applies the termchronotope, as used by Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin, t() New York City during World War n, a place ~here ~eaIist artists and anthropologists bathed in a "wonderland of sudden opening to other times and places, of cultural matter out of place" . He defines chronotope as "literally 'timespace' with no priority to either dimension. The chronotope . is a fic::tionalsetting where historically specific relations of power become visible and certain"stories can 'take place' (the .bourgeois salon in niO.eteenth~entury social novels, the merchant ship in Coilrad's"tales of adventure and empire)." As technology has changed, so the recording studio has become increasingly virtual. ~ began as" documentation moved into specialised interiors. Soutlds of the world were collected and transmuted at the end of the 1940s by a French sound engmeer, Pierre Schaeffer, who gave concerts' of noises .

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collected from sources such as spinning saucepan lids and whistling toy tops (more instruments of darkness),"steam engine and boat sounds (the Futurist noise of movement), human voices _and percUSsion. Working with composers Pierre Henry and, later, Luc Ferrari, Schaeffer pioneered -" mustque concrete: music made from sound. V~e completed the electrOnic section of Deserts in Schaeffer's Paris studio. By 1951, electronic music experiments were taking place in Germany and America, eliminating the musical performer almost entirely; by the mid 1950s, pop-music producers were applying echo effects with such abandon that -the secure physical image of a band of musiCians, held in the mind during listening, began to disintegrate.- Then multi-track tape and multiple microphone recording separated musicians from each other,eitherin time or space. Electronic effects could be applied more easily to indiVidual instruments or v0cals. Musicians were hidden behind baffle boards or shut in separate rooms. Studio performances could be corrected or updated without changing the entire song, or the song could be remixed endlessly. For the best explication of multi路track recording,the upside and downside, watchJean-Luc Godard's film One Plus One, in which The Rolling Stones wrestle for eternity with the emergence of one song, "Sympathy For the Devil". Fascinating to_ think about,"or describe, but boring to watch and listen. With the introduction of computer sequencing and" digital sampling, the tapeless studio became a possibility, though rarely a total reality. Hard-disk recording, in which all source sounds and effects - electronic or acoustic - could be stored and manipulated in the digital domain, is the current stage of this process, a" point at which, in theory, the studio and its musical" output can exist in virtuality, represented in our world through sound and a visual representation of sound on a computer screen. The virtual" studio, then, is our chronotype, the fictional setting where stories take place. What a disappointing chronotype, though, by comparison with

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Conrad's merchant ships. No saline odours, creaking timbers or screeching steam whistles, but a facsimile of a bloodless operating theatre, a chemist's laboratory lacking in smells or fire.

hard/soft Outside of playingwith small dictaphones - recording toilets flushing and similar primitive musique concrete experiments - my first experiences· of recording took place in eight-track stUdios, particularly Chalk Farm Studios, home of · one of the first eight-track machines in England. Chalk Farm was awned by Vic Keary, a.casually brilliant old-school engineer whose career began with tracks such as Emile Ford's "What Do You Want To Make Those Ey'esAt Me For", one of the earliest black British R&D hits. Keary's partner was the extraordinary Emil Shallet, a fur-coated, cigar-chewing East Etlropean refugee from the· Nazis who fostered UK interest in supposedly marginal musiCS. -. anything from hillbilly, bebop and the New Orleans "Spooky Drums" of Baby Dodds on Melodisc, to R&D and ska, via his Blue· Beat label and singles such as Prince Buster's "AI Capone", central to the mod scene found in Soho's Flamingo club in the mid 19605. Shallet was a record man to place alongside some of the American legends of the business. Notable among his business practices was the scam of selling otherwise unsaleable 7 A singles to pornographers who used them, improbably, as a way of eVadingvlce laws. I lived in his Shepherd's Bush house for one week,· until he threw me out ill a fit of paranoia. In the basement, I found Charlie ~er 78son Vogue, Haitian voo· doo records arid janis Joplin singles. At Chalk Farm, many reggaetecords - "Young Giftedand;Black", for example · were CUt, voiced or overdubbed with .strings played by·middle-aged Jewish violinists who had seen it all. There I met Jimmy Cliff, Dandy livingston and productt Lesley Kong, the man who helped to launch Bob Marley's career arid whose .

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~ ~out:in 1971, his cteath rumoured to be the work of an Obeah man; .. Working at Chalk Farm withpercussionJst Paul BurweHand · a singer/songwriter named Simon Finn, I learned to add and · to redo, playinginstniments I had never touched 6efore,lay~ ering arrarigements with the tape machine. Eight·tracks Were never enough. This was the basis of so much of the progressive ~ of the early 1970s; Add, add, add. For mUsicians and . soundengineers,tape, particularly the 28 wide variety used for twenty-four-track recording, became the equi~ent of paper for a writer.. I remember the anxiety I· felt as recording began to shift from analogue tape to computer sequendng and digitalstorage. Don't go into hard copy; stay soft. HoW sound could bC p$ted on to tape ~far from clear tome, yet this was how it was done. At least tape, curling and uncurling p~t the record heads of the machine, was a linear representation of muSic's duration. Computer sequencing packages pretended to be set up in the same way; but you would have to be stupid to think they were unreeling around the monitor screen, For a·while, a psychological adjustment period, I kit the need to commit music to tape, as if this.was proof that something Was taking place. For musidans, this represents a paradox. Music is intangible, yet recording has added. flesh and p"rmanance, security, "continuitY. and depth to collective existence", as James Clifford wrote. Now musiclans have to learn insubstantiality au: over again. All that is solid melts - ·into aether. .. . . "Electric circuitry, an extension of the central nervous syst.em" , wrote Marshall McLuhan in his 1967 text/image collaboration with Quentin Fiore,The Medtu_m is the M.assage . ."Media,by altering the environment, evoke in us unique . · ratios of sense perceptions.. The extension ·of any one sense alters, the way we think and ac.t· - the way we perceive .the world. When these ratios change, men change."- He meant everybody changes, not just men, but this was the 1960&. So many wild, poorly conceptualised claims ~ being -

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made in this enthralling, unsettling transitioilal period between the era of print (from Gutenberg in 1450 to the present) and the current dawn ofe1ectronic culture, that there

is a ~ temptation to reject them all. Some rejection, or scepticism, is pragmatic. Brian Eno is adamant that he will not have computerS in the studio~ ~I don't use any programs", he .tells me. "Do you know why it~? More than anything else, it's a physical reason. I've got SpundTools in my computer there, which I use as an editing system, but I get so路 fed up atter Worldng on it for'a fewhoUl'S. The only part of my finger that's engaged isOly 路mousefinger and eyes. My body starts to feel

so .~ '. '. oof, I just want to hit something or bounce around on the floor.- MY experience of computer mixing,路which I've had more exPerience of than other fQrms of (X)mputerwork, is that it creates a cautious, perfectionistic way ofwo-:Jdng. I've banned computeis in the studio, actually. It isn't because I'm anti<omputer~ .It's because nobody understands them well , enough. It's happened to me so often thatI'd be in the studio and there's a Computer .there' funning some sequencer aspects. You look round and ~ brow is knotted. Someone's saying, 'I think if we just put, 路the SMPTE in there. Wait a minute, I've got to ID channel four ... ' and you know the session is blown.. Because now the guitarplay~'s gone off to ,make a phone call, the drummer's 'gone to the laVatory, the singer's starting teading.some-magazinearticle.The,whole attention of the thing has gone. For me, the most important thing in the studio is to retain attention." In part; this must be generational. Brian is one year older than me. We grew up in an age when television was a noveltY, reading was sacred, physical education was an obsession. We may be fools to resist, but then the blind acceptance ofVirtua1ity can lead to an airless, sexleSs world of cyber-utopia. Maybe the generationil1 cOnflict can remind us of more significant strUggles: the tepid . image of a smart rocket floating down a street,' guided to its targd in a virtual world, contrasted with photographs of war horrors in the non-virtual domain.

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So virtuality is not paradise. But then Eno describes a process which applies conceptual ordering in the c;lomain to a random sequence of ambient sounds:' "There's an experiment I did. Since I'did it, I started to ~inkitwas qulte a good exercise that lwould reco~end to odrer people. i had . taken a DAT recorder to Hyde Patk and near Bayswater Road 1 recorded a period of whatever sound was there: cars going by, .dogs, people~ I thought nothing much of it and I was sitting at home lis~toit on my player. I suddenly had this idea. What about ifl take a section of this - a 3~minute section, the length of a single - and I tried to learn it? So that'S: what I did.. I put it in SoundTools and I made a fade-up, let it run for 3~ minutes and faded. it out. I started listening to this thing, over and over. Wheneyer I was sittIn8 there working; I would have this thing on. I prlntCdit on a DAT twenty times or some路 thing, so it just kept running over and over. I tried to learn it, ~tly as one woUld a :piece of music: oh yeah,路that car, ac:. celeratesthe engine, the revs in the engine go tip and then that dog barks, and dien you hear that pigeon oifto the side there. This was an extremely interesting exercise to do, first . of all because I found that you can learn it. Something that is as .completely arbitrary~d diSconnectf!d.as that; with'suffi路 cient listenirigs,路 becomes higblyconnected. You c~ really imagine that this:thing was constructed somehow: 'Right, then he puts this bit there and that pattern's just at the eXact same moment as this happening. Brilliant!' Since I've done that, I can listen to lots ofthings in quite a different way. It's like putting oneself in thefC)le of an art perceiver, just deciding, now I'm playing that role." '

diiital

altered states I: landscape Brian Eoo; Bill Laswell; Don Cherry; Derek Bailey; Leo Smith; ambient; John Cage; Ha,.old Budd; Daniel Lanois; Japanese sound design

The WaN Street Journal reports a worldwide crisis amongst teacherS, who claim that The Mighty Morphin Power Rangers television. show has colonised the imaginations of their young charges more completely than any previous childrens' craze. At Kedren Headstart Preschool, Los Angeles, one teacher now plays "soothing music" to dampen enthusiasm for kungju .kicks in theclassroom~

. landscape Brian Eno is talking to me about a man named Louis . Sarno. He describes the stran.ge way iti which Sarnoapparently began to shrink after living with Ba-Benjelle pygmies in the Central African Republic rainforest. Enthusiastically, he describes beautiful audio tapes Sarno made of Ba-Benjelle music, recorded by theunusu:i.l method of sitting hidden in the trees, far away from the central sound sOurce so that the music was subsumed within a wider landscape' of insect and bird voices, domestic sounds from the village, the sound of air and tape noise. Shortly after, I buy a Dutch fanzine, devoted solely to Lee Perry. On a one-page advert for a mail-Order company selling Perry albums~ fQur cassettes of Bayaka pygmy music, recorded by Sarno, are advertised. Finally I fin4 Sarno's book,' Song from the Forest,. in one of the bookshops lining the route between Oxford railway station and the

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extraordinary Pitt Rivers Museum, home of shamanic costumes, false-face masks, fetish objects, spirit sculptures" bullroarers from Devon and twentieth'century ~itchcraft spells, charms and curses from deepest Sussex. Thenrst sentence of the book says "I was drawn to the heart of Africa by a song." Sarno had turned on his radio in Amsterdam and heard the liquid polyphony of Central African pygmy singing. Out of an epiphanic moment greW a desire to travel in search of more of this music. "One quiet night the deep tones ,of a drum cime throbbing through the forest from a great distance", Sarno writes. " 'Ejengi,' Mobo remarked from his hut,and we lay there in the dark, listening to, the faint tattoo that seemed -, to merge with the natural pUlsation ofthe night itself." ' for the 'sleevenotes to On Land' (written 1982, reVised 1986; music recorded between 1978 and 1982), BrianEno talked about a relationship between the psychoacoustic space of the recording studio and the depiction or evocation of land, scape. The potential of usi,ng SoundTools hard-disk editing software for niaking music. out of random, ambient sounds was fomenting back ~en. "When I was in Ghana", he wrote, ~I took with me a stereo microphone and a cassette recorder" ostensibly to record indigenous music and speech .patterns. - What I sometimes found myself doing instead was sitting out on the patio in the evenings ~ith the microphone-placed to ,- pick up the widest possible catchment of ambient sounds from all directions, and Ustening to the results on my headphones. The effect of this simple technological system Was to cluster all the disparate sounds into one aural frame:tbeybecame music." This pushed him towards a new conception of music as a sounMield,and away from the objectincaiion .of sound structures intoflXed compositions. But studio technol- ' ogy had grown out of performance. To Erio's ears,the , dominant trend inrecordirigwas towards "greater proximity, tighter and more coherent meshing of sounds with one another".

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eternal drift at Lizard Point Bass player Bill Laspell remembers those On Land sessions. For one whole summer in New York City, he worked with Brian on material that would be iDlprovlsed, edited, then processed into a part of the album. "One by one he fired everybody and it was jUst me and him", Laswell tells me. "We would go to Canal Street and we'd buy junk - those,hoses you twirl around ~and gravel, put it in a box and put reverb on it. All these weird things to make路s~Unds. We'd be in this bathroom witli these overhead mikes, making sounds for days: A friend of mine was a photographer from Chile [Felipe Orrego]. He got these tapes of frogs and the frogs路 sounded like an orchestra. There was like thousands of the~ b';lt they had it totally hooked up. Occasionally one would start a riff .. it:s like Monkey Chant [Balinese ketjak singing] where one voice will start and the rest will jump in. Eno really was into that tape and that's allover that record."

theatre of signs Don Cherry is sitting on the floor of the front room of his narrow first-floor apartment in San FranciSco wearing a maroon tracksuit and Chinese slippers. On the walls: a Robert Wilson poster, a photograph of the legendary Five Spot jazz club. Floor, seats and tables are covered with musical instruments - an electric keyboard, a tiny pocket trumpet, seed pods from Latin America; Incijan tabla drums. Don's mind and .body dart from one autobiographicall.andmark to the next. He talks about the Watts ToWers - tall, weirdly elegant spikes of wire, scrap steel, pottery fragments built over a period of thirty-three years, from 1921 to 1954, by an Itallan-American named Simon Rodia. "They said he was crazy", laughs Cherry, "then they tried to say he was a spy. That it was anan.tenna, you know, when Mussolini got strong. He'd work at night. I .remember when I was young I used to pass there." He leafs through folders, a suitcase full of unrealised projects, notebooks, scrapbooks -. photographs of Don with. Dennis

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_Hopper; Yohji Yamamoto, John LUrie, Omette Coleman (both - of them wearing-shiny Italian suits), Manu Dibango, Carlos Santana; He taps a cigarette incessantly -but never lights' it; thellhis hands flutter over the tabla; You keep up or_lose his interest. fu the 1960s, Don-lived in Scandinavia for a while, --organising communal music sessions, eating "rown 'rice, ~v ing with Moki, who made banners. The music could sound _HkeTetry Riley,.adeep John- Coltrane meditation, a SeneGambian gr1ot'snarrative, or one of Dollar Brand's (now Abdullah -Ibrahim) heartlifting _tunes. According to Jan - Garbarek, the late Albert Ayler travell(d to the far north of Norway'and-Sweden in search offolk music and shamanistic songs; Gar"arek hears some of that music in Ayler's spirit _ hymns. When Don visited Oslo in 1964, Garbarek and his friends were influenced by Coltrane. The nomadic trumpet play~r from America made them aware- of the. sIgnificance of their own traditions. _"We were invited to do a radio recording", Jiru:bar¢1c tells nle, "and I remember Don was aSking us to bring along a folk-Singer. Of course, we knew,-theSt performers and their music, but to combine it with improvisation in that way was something we had never considered." For: black American- improvisers: such as Don Cherry and the Art Ensemble of Chicago, and at roughly the same time -their European and white ADiericancounterparts in AMM, Musica Electronica Viva, Joseph Holbrook, Music Improvi~ tion Company, Nuova, Consonanza and the Spontaneous MusicEnsemble,a partial n'love -away from, the major instruments of Jazz 'and -classical lllusic, performance was an eXpression of politics as much as music. From the mid 19605 into-the disillusioned 19705, little ilistruments and non-instruments (transistor radios, contact inicrophonesamplifying tiny -_ -sooods'or surface noises extracted from tableS, beards,cheese grate~,_etc.) became-symbols of the drive to.democratise music, to allow_ ac~ess to unskilled players (includingchildren), ~w sound from instruments rather than subjugate them!<> systems, open-,the muSic up _to clUmce events and

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create a sense of collectively organised community as an attempted break from hard professionalism,. particularly the star system that afflicted both jazz groups and classical performers. The atomisation that took place in the wake of the early improvisation groups was interesting in itself: environmental music pursued by Alvin Curran of MEV; music for political resistance explored by Frederic Rzewski of MEV and AMM's Cardewand Rowe; ethnomusicology by MEV's Ivan Vandor; film music by spaghetti-western composer Ennio Morricone, a member of Italy's Nuova Consonanza; Tibetan Buddhism by MIC's Jamie Muir and Christine Jeffries; radical black politics and Rastafarianism by AACM's Leo Smith; .open work and minimalist composing by Joseph Holbrook's Gavin Bryars; extraordinarily wide-ranging composing by Anthony Braxton, another Chicago AACM member; live electronics by MEV's Richard Teitelbaum and a dedication to improvisation from DerekBailey, Evan Park(!r,Eddie P1,"evost, touGare and Tony Oxley. It was as if the ideals of open artworks and open society- converged for a moment, no matter how incompatible their specific intent, and then splintered into more focused, or in some cases more dogmatic,. channel~ which suited the individual rather than thegroup.Fot guitarist Derek Bailey, a participant in this early development of free improvisation as well as a documenter of its various forms in his book Improvisation: Its Nature and . Practiceln Music, improvisation is distingUished by a rare . capacity to embrace such diversity. "One of the things that marks its quality," he s~ys, "and in the right mood I might even clalm its superiority as a mus~cal actiVity, is its scope. It can accommodate virtUally anybody. I first .came to this kind of playing' through working with two musicians with national and geographic similarities, but in every other way totally different characters. That was Tony Oxley and Gavin Bryars. I worked with them for nearly three years and I was struck throughout that time and increasingly as time went on, how

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, , .extnordinaryit was that these two guys could work together. " ,They never have since because their approach to mQSic was quite different. It struck me that the \productiveness of that periOd,:for me, anyway, ,came' from this disparity between aestheticapproaches. This freely improvised aesthetic seemed . not' only to .accommodate' different attitudes -and approaches but it ac~ally produced better re~ults if you had that.' When . you've got ill·fitting elements, it's almost as though the rub· ,bing together of the. 'elements in' order torruike]t ,work ~ the old analogy "-produces a pearl." Was it an accident of history that free1mprovisation, with its embrace of noise, "iUegitimate" instruments, elements of theatre, non·hierarchical organiSation and the chahce inter· , 'Ventions ofenvkonmeiitalsounds,coincided· with the full' emergence of semiotics ..., the science, of signs - asa :recog· , nisedal'ea o( study? Roland Barthes's Mythologies, written,in 19;7 but first published 'in Britain in 1972, Thomas A. Sebeok'sZoosemlotlcs{the. sttidy ofanitnal sounds" ritualisations and other communication forms), published in ,1972,and UmbertoEco's A Theory ofSemiotics, published in preliminary form in. 1967 and then in English in 1976, all dwelled upon ideaS that were being enacted by improvisers;, ' Barthes's anaiysis <if.toys, wrestling and striptease,for 'l?le, or'Eccis assertion - "One can hardly co~cefve of a world . to. which certain beings commUnicate without verbal Ian· guage, restricting themselves to gestures, objects, ,unshaped sounds, tulles or tap-:dancirig;but1tis equally hard to conceive", of a world 'iii' which certain beingsonlYlltterwotds~~: pro" ' vided a ,cOunterpoint to tbe reformation 'of mUSic as a field in which all sounds;'silettces, gestures and'actioils were "the music". Intact, UmbertoEco had written a number· of essays 'on'open form aesthetics in the early.:1960s.. These .were col· lected in one bookentitled17ze OPen Work. "In the modern ' , scientific ~vef!le"" he ,wrote, "as in architecture· and in Baroque pictorial prodUction, the, various component parts are,all endowed With equal~ue:and dignity, ami the Whole

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construct expands towards a totality which is close to tile infinite. It refuses to be hemmed in by any ideal normative conception of the world. It shares in a general urge toward discovery and constantly renewed contact with reality'. " The influenceS which led to a point where music threw aside so many conventions have been fiercely contested and often ~ngly attributed. Each person's contact with reality was very different' yet, for a moment, similar conclusions were being reached. With hindSight, 'it seems simpler to say that established categorisations of art, science, soclety, nature andculture, were inadequate to new needs. "One of things of the time", says Bailey, "was a dissatisfaction with orthodox forms' of music making. They were OK, but there seemed to be a l~tof things they weren't saying. I think t;bat applied to . other people. They were looking for ways of saying things that weren't being said. This was a tiJ.llt: when popular music ~d exploded so it was a bit strange to be pursuing an alternative pJ."actice, although there Was room for it well." Many ideas and methods from the past were interweaving at the same time, e.nabi~g certain barriers to be crossed and certain correspondences to be misinterpreted, both in their 路sources and their intentions. In As Serious As Your Life, Valerie .Wilmer quotes Leo Smith's denial of any influence . from John Cage. Just as Cage seemed unaware or resistant to any correspondences between his innovations and those in . j~, so musicians like Smith saw their experimentation - includinghis use of all kinds . of sound-~ing devices to supplen:leIlt his trumpet playing - as being路 part of a broader African-American tradition. "He also plays s.ealhorn, zither, autoharp, harmonica, recorder, wooden and met~ flutes and whistles", Wilmer writes, "and 'one of those old~fashioned rubber'squeeze' car-horns. He is carrying on. a Southern tradition 路that started with children banging on washboards and tincans, blowing down pie~es of rubber410se and strumming wires stretched between nails on a wall, a tradition deeply rooted in Africa." Roscoe Mitchell's Sound, recorded in

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Chicago ~n 1966 witha~tet that included trumpeter Lester BoWie and bass player Mala<;hi Favors, is an eXcellent exam" pie of the complete departure fri>m free jazz and its propulsive expressionism. "Sound" an(f, "The Little Suite" both explore · cries and whispers at the edge of instruments, many-of the sounds allowed to develop quietly in solo space or oblique · .duets, rhythm used as a colour, an emphasis, part ofan aural . theatre of signs.

complexity January 1975. Striated images banging up and down the screen of a portable colour teleVision, colour layered out of register. The smell of sour milk. Too ill to stand· for long, Brian Eno collapses back mtobed. My first contact with Brian came in 1974, after I had edited a small book called New/Rediscovered Musical Instruments, a brief survey of UK experimental instrument building featririligthe work of Hugh Davies,Max Eastley, Paul Burwell,~van Parker, Paul Lytton and myseH. Madeau Stewart contributed an introduction. As a sound archive producer for BBC radio, she broadcast 'programmes' that listeners like myself found inspiririg - a survey of ritUal imtruments by folk-music authority . .A.L. Lloyd, for example .. She was also responsible for items that other BBC listeners found peculiar, including talks by myself and Max Eastley, and a project of her own which in·' volved rowing out to sea· with a glum engineer employed to record broadcast quality tapes of her flute duets with seals. · After the first of my talks:" a twenty-minute mix: of New Guinea and Brazilian sacred flutes, Balinese genggong frog dance music, ~mazon rainforest chants, Malaysian shaman· ism,. Korean ceremonial mUSic, brainfever birds, beluga and bat sounds broadcast in 1972;.; it letter came from Africa·. A man had heard the programme, presumably on the World Service, and he and his tWo dogs had been greatly puzzled,· I etlvisaged a raddledcharacterin some remote colOnial ou:t~ p<>st, something likeAlniayetin Joseph Conrad's Almayer's

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Folly, one hand on the bottle, th~:other twid,d1ing the radio tuner, hearing Korean music sent-from Lon.don to the African bush. Perhaps this stereotypical image was wildiy inaccurate, yet, even as recently the early 1970s the global mix was a novelty. "Suddenly we are enjoined to hear and listen to our present environment with 'greater attention", l\IIadeau wrote in her introduction t9 New/Rediscovered Musical Instruments. "From , the, materials about us we are encouraged - all of us are encouraged - to conjure up the latent mUsiC. Some of this music would be familiar to people on other, distant continents whose musical life we are so successfully destroying. Where isolated tribes used insects as buzzers attached to or trapped in some casually cut length oflocalwoQd, so the new instrumentmakers - who are also composerS - casually adapt 'a clock: spring or an ex-army shell case as a sound maker. (incidentally, a society surrounded by disposable, 9r throw-away goods'is not new.)." " ' , So Brian and I talked on the telephone atld then he came to see a perforl;llance. Max Eastley performed solo on his own sound sculptures (demonstrating, at one point, die' spectral crackling of a ,Purple RayVitalator, a device from the 1920s Which energised the skin with electricat sparks, allegedly); Paul Burwell and I played an' impt:Ovised duo on percussion, _" flutes and electric guitar. Brian fell asleep, but claimed this was a compliment. For almost every'musician searching for ways ~o step outside the boundaries, an ,.interest in invented or expanded sound technology is inevitable. After leaving Roxy Music; Eno's approach to rock-tech ~d expanded beyond the VC8-3 synthesiser to embrace the notion thatruI devices used to ere'ate music, including the enVironment itself" wer~ musical instruments. In February 1973, for-example, he had contributed a sleevenote to. Basil Kirchin's second album, WorltU Within Worlds. Kitchin was an oddball musician who, like painter Alan Davie,' fioated around the edges of Britain's grow-

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. . ing free h:iJ.provislJtionscene. He had already achieved the Impossible by persuadingEMI Records to release the first valume of Worlds Within Worlds in 1971. 'Rlis mixed amplified,. slowed-down taP~ of animal, bird and insect cries with the playing of Saxophonist Evan Parker, gwtarist Derek Bailey and others.·"I, personally, find that "it helps deliberately to induce a state of self-hypnosis by. playing back somewhat louder than the nonn" , Kitchin suggested on the sleeve of the record. "In mct, as loud as YOll or the equipment can stand! In this 'way one can 'swim. under water' in, and 'breathe in' the music. " His second album was released by Island Records during a period when the company was exploring proto·New Age .and ambient electronica material such as Henry Wolff and Nancy Hennings's Tibetan Bells and David Vorhaus's White ;Noise; The raw materials for this one included gorilla and hombill .vocalisations, noises Qf the docks in H1lll artd sounds made by autistic children. "I first heard about Basil Kirchin", Brian wrote for his sleevenote, "whilst investigating the posSibility . of compiling an album of .music pro~uced on hybrid instruments - h~dbells, steel bands, percussive voices, drinking glasseS~ etc." That album never appeared, but the line be~ tween rock orthodoxy and the future was clearly visible . . Then Brian was· knocked down and seriously injured by·a taxi whilst .cio~irtg the· Harrow Road. While he was recover· ing, I viSited him in his Maid;l Vale flat. Judy Nylon had visited him, he tOld me,; and le(t a record of eighteenth-century harp music; He had put the· Iilbum on the ·deck, dropped the styluS and fallen back into bed. Once there, he discovered that the volume was almost too low·for him to be able to hear the music. One stereo channel was missing also, but since he was . barely able to move, he left it as it and listened. As he did so, an· alternatiVe· mode of hearing unfolded~ Rather than standing out from its environment, like a ship on an ocean, the mUSic became part of that ocean, alongside all the other transient effects oflight, shade, colour, scent; taste and sound, So 8:m.bient was .bom, 10 its ·present ·definition at least:. muSic

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that we hear but don'thear;-sounds ~hichexisttoenable uS bette~ to hear silence; sound which rests us frOm our intense compulsion to focus, to analyse, to ftarile, to catagorise, to isolate.

silence When Death's chauffeur turns on the car radio in Jean the underworld recites disconnected lines of enigmatic poetry and strings of numbers. The first line we hear in t1iC fiInl'1s "Sifence istWic~asfasti backwards ... thrCe times.路 Cocte;tU'S fllm Orphee, a ypice from

John Cage's 4' 33 n was premiered in 1952. The piece required li. musician to present a timed performance at an instrument Without making a sound. David Tud,or gave thisfirstperforpl-ance on'pblno, using a stopwatch to time the three sections, lIlatking the beginning and end of the piece by loWering and finally raising the piano 路lid wIthout ever touching the keys. .For this reason,.thc! workis often assumed to have .be<:n com. posed for piano, whereas Cage instruCted in his Score that a.Qy instrument could be (not) played. The piano is one of the .easiest options, since the exaggerated theatre of 'sitting and preparing to play, practised by most concert pianists and parodied to'perfection by comedian Max: Wall, proVides _a cleru: way of showing that something is being performed.. 4' 33".is oftenreferr~d to colloquially as Silence, on the mistaken assumption that this was a Zen demonsttati.on of -nothingness. But~age.haddiscovered the,non~existence_of . silen~e in fill-rvard -University~S anechoicchainber,.a soun,dproof. room without any reflective surfaces where he sat and heard the high singing note .of his. nervous system and the 'deep pUlsing of his blood. Nothlnghappens"in 4'33" except for a growing awareness of the. immediate sound environment. I have a recorded version,路 peifofmed by pianist Giani'1i-Emilio .Simonettl and release~jby the Italian crainps label in 1974. The idea seems ridiculous yet, for the fi.1.-st time,. 1 listened to the surface noise

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ofa bad vinyl pressing from Italy with interest rather than irri· tation.. In his sleevenotes to Cage's VarlationsIY,Joseph Byrd referred to Morse P~ckham's book, Man's Rage for Chaos;. in particular, his definition of art that is consistent with the rest _. - ofcontemporary life as being "any perceptual field which an individual uses as an· occasion ·for performing the role of art . perceiver" . 4' 33 n directed listeners tOwards this situation and, in its literally quiet influence, this work in which there is no tangible work has done so ever since. Cage's subtle awareness of the silence which· surrounds sounds is at its most refined in his compositions for prepared piano, an experiment which began as an expedient way of creating a percussion orchestra -in a dance space too small for anything other than a piano. "Mutes of various materials are placed between the strings ~f the keys used," he instructed, "thus effecting transformations of the piano sounds with reo spect to all of their characteristics." The brief but exquisite Prelude for Meditation and Music for Marcel Duchamp, or the longer work, Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano, sound sometimes Javanese, sometimes Balinese. Clashing har·· monics ring out, muted wood and gong sounds hang il;1 .reverberation or shadow each other in delicate pursuitswhich quicken and slow, tumble over themselves or abruptly stop, leaving only their decaying echo. The Sonatas and Interludes were written during a period when Cage first began reading works of Japanese and Indian philosophy, . so the piece was an attempt to reflect the "permanant emotionS" of India and their "commQn tendency . toward tranquility". He had also been attending the New School for Social Research in New York, where he became an assistant to composer Henry Cowen for his classesih non· Western, folk and contemporary music. It was Cowell, in fact, who had influenced Cage into preparing the piano. Cowell had played inside the piano, rubbing a darning egg along the strings, and Cage took this further by filling the inside of the - piano with newspapers, magazines, plates and ashtrays. The

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method hadprecederits ~n Indian and African distortions of flute, percussion, thumb piano and stringed instrument so.unds with buzzers or rattling objects such as bottle tops. The voice disguiser, or mitliton, extended this principle toa materialisation of the spirit world, transforming the ordinary human voice into something strange and supernatural by means of vibrating membranes or mirlitons (the instruments of darkness again). In. a sense, Cage was subjecting the identifiable materials of an to a process which transported them to a sacred domain. Later, he refined the method to a point where .preparation with wood screws, bolts and weather stripping might take long periods of precise' adjustments. "My guess is", wrote John Tilbury for the sleevenotes of his 1975 recording of the Sonatas and Interludes, "that Cage simply selected his preparations from the junk he had lying about his apartment and in his pockets. He experimented and, having obtained a pleasing sound, measured the distances. I confess I work in . this spirit.... Tilbury also questioned the credibility of Cage's claims for the "permanailt emotions of India". The claim for "permanantemotions" certainly seems false in the light of Cage's. wider beliefs in chance operations and -non-fixity, yet . his prepared piano pieces transmit to the listener a quality that路 is quite unlike his other work, and powerful in its capacity to induce a calmness of being. Variations IV was another prophetic composition. There are amusing parallels with the idea of the chill-out room, the room in which rilUltiple signals feed into one embalming composite,except for the fact that Cage's piece, realised with, the help of David Tudor, was an indigestible barrage of noise. Recorded for its 1969 record release in two' rooms of an art gall~ry on La Cienaga. Boulevard in Los Angeles, the music is a chaotic DIltz of distorted conversation; distant chat, disconnected musical fragments and room ambience throughout. Traffic sounds were fed in from outside. A spoken introduction to the album advises us to: "Listen closely and you will hearthesoonds of the audience as well as the tinkle of glasses o'

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as the mike over the bar was in use." (A similar idea was used to hilarious effect for The Roxy London WC2 Gan:"Apr 77), -the first live punk' album.) "Records and previous recorded tapes," the drpning voice at thebeginninK of Variations IV , -continues; "as well as radio broadcasts, are mixed in -during the concert ... as John Cage bas- said, 'Music is all_around us. If only we had ears. There would be no need for concert halls if man could learn to enjoy the sounds that envelop him, for example, at 7th Street and Broadway, at 4 p.m. on a rainy day' ..." And Joseph Byrd, writing for the album cover, added the perfect synthesis of ambient theory: "What is happening is a synthesis of the music and sound we normally hear in snatches: the elevator's ride worth of Muzak, the passirig conversation, and the .aulomobileargument all mingle freely with Beethoven and the Balinese gender wayang." -Cage was probably the first to use the expression "Imaginary Landscape", with his series of pieces dating from 1939. These were composed for a variety of sound-making devices: variable-speed turntables, frequency recordings, percussion, __ radios and, in Imaginary Landscape No.5, forty-two recordings . from any source, reassembled in fragments as an electronic tape collage structured according to chance methods determined by the Chinese book of changes, the I Ching. The imaginary landscape,in Cage's world a place in which forms and features are allowed to emerge and coexist regardless of the personal desires of the imaginer, has come -to be a central compositional device in the ambient music that has followed Brian Eno's initiative. Imaginary landscapes figured large in his work after his accident. Music, if peripheral, has the key to unlock new visions in the same way that a dream which eludes us when we try to remember its details may be - retriggered unexpectedly in an Unfocused moment. As Brian's so~gwriting fell away, so _the space was filled by sonic landscapes, evocations of meteorology, natural forms and-their transitional states: the second tape loop albiun recorded with Robert Fripp, Evening Star,with titles such as "Wind On

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Water"and "Wind On Wind"; the. electronic vignettes.recorded with David Bowie on Low and Heroes - particularly "Neukoln", "Warszawa", a Steve Reich-influenced "Weeping .Wall" and theOrientalist "Moss Garden"; the submarine and arboreal tracks on Another Green World; "Slow Water", "Events In Dense Fog" and "Final Sunset" on the Music For Films.album; and his records with Jon Hassell, Harold Budd and Daniel Lanois.

virgin beauty "[C]hiJdren, parents and grandparents gathered by the Grebe, Radiola, or Aeriola set in the radio room and marvelled at the soUnds they heard transported mysteriously from faraway lands ... Radio was hailed as the world's greatest source of knowledge, the' creation of inte.:national harmony, and the invention that would stop all wars. Those who had radio sets spent the better part of their days and evenings tuned in to the voices from ~he ether .. : Listeners who bought radio sets were sometimes disappointed, though. Shrieks, grunts, groans, and . cross talks ruled the airwaves, which were described by some as a hertzian bedlari::t." Gene Fowler and Bill Crawford, Border Radio

. Harold Budd was born in Los Angeles in 1936, and as children . he and his brother absorbed their father's romanticinfatuatlon with the western frontier. Subsequently, they were brought up by another family in a tiny Mojave Desert town named Victorville; a "dogwater town" is the way Budd describes it. "You could walk in any direction as long as you wanted, forever", he says> "It isn't llke there aren't people around; but, you're alone enough, and it's quiet enough, where you can . stand and hear. the sound o(utterly nothing at alt." What fugi-> tive sounds existed'came from a gust of wind oraradio picking up The Sons Of the Pioneers from signals transmitted across the M~can border. Some of this desertbound silence,. spooked by shrieks and crosstalk from other worlds, was later. bottled and resold in albums such as Lovely Thunder (1986) and By the Dawn's Early Light (1991). This was music for a,

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saloon abandoned save for beatnik gunsl~ngers; William Burroughs waving a Coit 45 at the ghost of Geronimo from a table in the comer; Gregory Corso shufflfng cards, delivering drunketimonologues at the bar; the faint echo from outside .. of ~llen Ginsberg's harmonium drifting 'with the tumbleweeds. The music is saturated'with memories of place, but with its myths, also. "I admit that's the~"; says Harold. "I get the same feeling With the music that I do in that geographical situation. But one doesn~t express the other. It's not a oneÂˇtoone relationship." Budd's landscapes were not necessarily Arcadian. Pieces like Dark Star and Abandoned Cities (both 1984), for eXample, were. cold slabs of opaque colour: Rothko paintings as . reworked by A.d Reihhardt; -an ominous drift. Yet his 1978 album for Brian Eno's Obscure label, The Pa.vilion o/Dreams, conjures a gorgeous, translucent mirage. Featuring Marion Brown's attosaxophone, and including compositions inspired . by Pharoah Sanders's "Let Us Go Into the House of the Lord" and]ohn:Coltiane's "After the Rain"; this collection offive pieces reminds'us of a forgotten dimension o.f free jazz, the meditational point of temporary rest where sorrow, battered .optimism, devotion and spiritual ecstasy melted together. Listen to ]ohnColtrane's "Expression", Albert Ayler's "Going . Home" from his 1964 albumofspmtua1s, "Venus" byPharoah Sanders, or a much later example, the spectral cry of Omette Coleman's alto saxophone, floating over Prime Time's strange tunings . and decomposing drum machiries, _along with his own slitlier1ngviolin, on "Virgin Beauty" â&#x20AC;˘ Another source for the post-minimalist imp~vising compOser. In the-late 1950s and early 1960s Budd performed duets with teJiorist Ayler when both of them served in the same army unit in Ford Ord, California. Describing himself as a Jazz snob 'whotracked down Charles Ives or Hindeniith recordings only if jazz musicians mentioned them in -inter- ~. view, ~udd played with Ayler in the marching band, giving _weekly.radio broadcasts from the 'base. "It seemed 'better 1:9

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me than shooting gUfiS", he says. Two strangers in a strange. land, they would make forays·· into the hipper clubs of Monterey and Oakland. Budd played drums,· a consequence of his father'slove for martial music. "My job was to make a wall of sound", he says, "and it was exhausting but of course, being in the army, I was in great physical shape. Later on, when lie used Sunny Murray as a drummer, I got· a better idea about what he was after, which I couldn't do." So, in a momentary intersection of seemingly opposite musical viewpoints, Budd spoke iri tongues with one of the elevated spirits of 1960s' jazz: Albert Ayler, found floating in the East River, New York City, 1970, after taking his own life.

wilderness A London hotel, 1990. Daniel Lanois and I sit at a cramped comer table in a claustrophobic basement restaurant. He claps his hands. "This would be a good place to record." Lanois describes The Pearl, Budd and Eno's collaborative ~bum,as a "chilling record". For Lahois, thisis.a great compliment, .since his talent for creating virtual landscapes in the studio is placed at the service of strong emotional perform. ances. "I've chosen to let people be the driving force"., he says, "rather than a machine. Recording for me these days can happen anywhere, as .long as the place feels good." So with Lanois producing, or cQ-producing with Eno, U2's The Unforgettable Fire was recorded in Dublin's Slane Castle, Peter Gabrlel'sSo in the studio control room and The Neville Brothers' Yellow Moon in a rented warehouse in New Orleans. Whatever the setting, mysterious atmospheres - mystic forests, bayous and swamp, the·.e.choes from sheer cliff walls suffuse the finished resUlts. ..~ . Lanois learned his trade in the basement of his mother's house in Canada. As teenagers,he and his brother, Bob, set up a studio underneath their mother's bedroom and began recording an educational mixture of local folk, gospel, country

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, ' music and rhythm'n'blues. At the end of the 1970s-,Brian Eno heard a tape recorded by Lanois and booked time at the studio. It was the beginning-of a fruitful partnership. Eno enjoyed the cottage industry .atmosphere in which the brothers worked. "It had that feeling of people doing their best with what they had", says Lanois, "which is a great quality in art." Together they worked on ,a number of instrumental albums, creating striking spatial effects byshrotiding sounds in layered echoes. These techniques, developed to enhance such albums as The Pearl, ]onHassell's Dream Theory In Malaya and , Brian Eno's Apollo soundtrack (composed with Lanois and Roger Eno) to For All Mankind,,AI Reinert's film of the Apollo space missions, ,later found a more commercial setting with U2, GabrielandBob Dylan. ' The course of U2's musical evolution is interesting if seen as an integral part of the studio process. Initially, the ~ois spaces and atmospheres enhance U2's stance ,as a "mythical", fIXed unit. For fans (though not me), the band is magisterial, epic, the essence of rock. Gradually, the full implications of opening the music up to studio virtuality erodes this epic solidity. Under the influen'ce of Lanois, Eno and Flood, the band's Achtung Baby and Zooropaalbums deconstruct, somewhat self-consciously, into lurid,lo-ti grab images of urban dissonance and media overload, closei' to Bowie's Low than the hyperbole of The Unforgettable Fire. I asked Lanois if childhood images had shaped his talent for depicting ghostly resonances and far horizons. "The railway tracks, the hydro lines, the paths 'that are cut through the for- ' est to accommodate industrial power cables", he answered. "You'll be in the wilderness and suddenly you come to this 'lpenspace where it's almost like God came down with a haft :lipper and'just cut through the forest and laid ina power Iydro line. Those images are:strong for me. Then ,hearing a rain in the distance and putting pennies on the railtracks. lattening them and going back to look at them. Kid's stuff but ~eat images. TaleIng the boat out on a calm lake. SmokestackS.

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from a distance. In Hamilton, where I grew up, in Canada, it's路 a stee~ city. It's a bit like Pittsburgh~ In the dead of winter at night this area would be lit up like a Christmas tre~. and then. the smoke would be blasting out of the furnaces. Fire and smoke. Because it's so cold, as soon路 as the heat touches the sky, it just bursts into steam. I love those images. Industrial, but still people images."

nature intt) music In 1989, BrianEno was invited to compose and per-

form a new work for the" consecration of the Tenkawa Shinto shrine near Kyoto. The head priest of the monastery was an admirer of Brian's music and owned every record he had. made. In his preparatory notes.f~r the performance Brian considers musical equivalents for the shrine's Significance as a receiver of spirit~al energy. "It occured to me", he wrote, "that it would make sense to think of the performance as a way of receiving and digesting and then re~presenting various acoustic phenomena in the valley. " He exp.ores ideas of am~ plifying and mixing ambient sounds in concentric circles ranging from the very edge of the valley to the focus pomt of the shrine itself; proposing the use of fireworks, little instruments such as路 clickers and whirling tubes, steam, burning fuses, the sounds of work and the hum of lights on dimmers. - . Later, he mentions the approach used to record On Land and finds a congruence in Jos~ph Campbdl's observations on Shinto: "[L]ivingShinto is not the following of some set-down moral code, buta living ingratitude and aweamid the mystery of things ... it is incorrect to say that Shintolacks moral ideas. The basic moral idea is that the processes of nature cannot be evil." "Maybe that's why the head 1ll0nk likes my records", Brian muses. "He feels there's some Shinto in there already perhaps. Certatnly the notion of the continuum from nature into music is very appropriate."路

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continuum In 1977, Paul-Burwell arid I gave a six-hour perform'

ance" in a huge Butler's Wharf warehouse overlooking the Thames. Now the site of eXpensive restaurants and riverside apartments, Butler'sWbarfWas a warren of artists' studios -during the "1970s, where Derek Jarman filmed and musicians ranging from Michael Nymatllo Wayne County & The Electric Chairs and The Rich Kids playe" at parties. The freezing cold at the time of otir duo performance slowed our actions, but the"knowledge that there was no fixed duration meant "that each sound could linger in the silence, sometimes augmented by distant hooting from the river. Darkness closed in until the only light came" from slide projections. Paul stretched piano wires across the enipty space and suspended packing caseS, " milk churns, glass rods arid waSte bins from them. I don't remember the sound, but in"aMelody Maker review, Steve Lake wrote: "BoWing and plucking the wires,or even running the fingers along them, produces the most extraordinary noises. Like howling feedback'or the singing of sea cows (the source, you'll recall, of the legend of the Sirens)." Evan Parker, then increasingly investigating extended durations and continuous music through his circular breathing and inultiphonic techniques for soprano saxophone, came to listen. He proposed_ an idea for a twenty-four-hour concert and this was organised, finally, for the penultimate night of Mus~c/Context, an envi"ronmental music festival I organised the following year. The" group - Parker, Burwell,myself,Hugh Davies, Paul Lytton, PaUl Lovens, Annabel Nicolson "and Max Eastley - played for thirteen hours before runmng into a wall of exhaustion and anoverwhelining feeling that there" was nothing more to add.. . In hindSight, I think there were too many distractio{ls and too " many players. Incus Records released a single albumCircadian Rhythm - edited down from those thirteen hours.

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shadows "What lies within the c:htrkness one cannot distingUish, but the palm senses the gentle movements of-the liquid, vapour rises from within forming ~plets on the rim! and the fragrence carried upon the vapour brings a delicate anticipation." ' ]un'Ichiro Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows

A small party in a Yokohama restaurant: two sound sculptors - Minoru Sato and Max Eastley, a bass player, a theatre manageress, a traditional dancer, a Butoh dancer, two noise musicians _. Masami Akita of Merzbow (as well as the brilliantly named Bust Monster and Kinbiken bondage videos) and Fumio Kosakai of IncapacitantS,plus myself. "Mister David", . says Me Kosakai, the black-suited gentleman kneeling oppoSite me. He bows low and wrestles with a 1~ew words of English, concluding with an inconclusive "Circadian Rhythm". A question? "Incus Records", I reply, getting drunk on sake and beer, slightly queasy after eating natto, a: fermented bean con- . coction of unsettling stickiness and smell. "What do you do?" I ask, inStantly dismayed by my pathetic conversation. "Noise music", he answers, miming what could be the action of dis-. membering a moose with a power saW. "Maximum volume .. But I love nature sounds too." For Westerners, this openness to extremes of noise and quietude is regarded as a contradiction, filed under cliches: Japan, or rationalised. as a consequence of the complex ethical and religious foundations of Japanese beliefs and behaviour; the Shinto belief that "t~e processes of nature cannot be evil"; the Confucian virtues ofimitative learning and social co-operation; the Buddh~t tenet that everything is Buddha. So mor~ judgements an~ oppositional categorisations imposed on noise and silence, or human and m;tchine, are less clear cut in Japan. Trying to understand the Otaku - young technocratic fanatics who collect informatiQn for its own sake - in his Speed Tribes book, Karl Taro Greenfield concludes that "the Japanese maintain a different relationship with their technology than the West. They simply view their PC or

="!..: ",-"

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: television as another object, like a rock or a tree or a kimono, :which is of nature and hence of themselves." This is why encounters with such apparent oddities as shrines piled up with , lavatorybtushes are not uncommon in Japan,orwhyBud, dhist-priests pray for worn·outmicrochips.' Everything is Buddha. Sound design plays an important role in tIte constant movement that characterises Japanese street'society and public si>a<:eS, but natu¢ is' encoded within microchips and the va~ porous world Whose passing was lamerited by Jun'Ic~iro Tanjzak:i is blasted by noise levels of striking insensitivity. Traffic. signals chirp ornithologically or play synthesised. folk tuJ),es; water sounds rush along t\mne1s; sliding gates .on the Shirikansen . "bullet train" platforms play eomputergame melodies; deranged loops of hard-sell hysteria blare from the ' doorways of electronic diSCount shops; brief cycles of back, ground music repeat endlessly in food !!upermarkets, as if to ," create a subconscious time limit between the moment o~pick ing upa basket; shopping then arriving at thecheck-out , to pay; ,in hotel rooms, listening ·muzatc plaYs until si~ tenced and in thecorridol'S~ Mantovanl's "Charmafue" floats in' anCient clouds of sleeping gas. , , Not all Japanese greet these fractures and eatSores with approvaJ.. At NADI sound deSign .laboratory in Kobe, Yoshi1:\iro, Kawasaki recordsiainbient sounds, collaborating with sound artists such as the American Bill Fontana ~dGer. maay'sRolf-]rilius, as well ~:participating in ~, remarkable radiopioject caIied StGIG~ "Irilade sound systems for pu~ lic-spaces" ,says Kawasaki, explail'ling his entry into the sound world. "At the time I thought, how about sound?MusiC has power or force, -or it· says sOmething. Environmental sound has sOD:J.e kind ,of force, but not so strong. I'started tQthink aboUt the sound sUlToUndfug me. In Japan, therear~ a lot of spaces where mUsic plays, like the Muzak system. It's a kind of masking. Now I tltink it's,too much. Now we muSt start to • ~ again about ~n~nm~sound In ·the big station at

and

easY

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Osaka, in the· morning they play bird singing. Somdlmes it is very strange. People rush to their ·companies. They don't speak, they walk like robots. It's.a ~nd of sUrrealistic scene. For me, I am thinking always about sound. When. ~ talk· about sound, moSt people think only of music. But for me, there are many, many kinds of soun4. We are surrounded. I want to keep my consciousness at a kind of flat level so I can Catch sound." A number of Kawasakl's nature recordings have been released on aJapanese CD series entitled Sounds a/the Earth. "It's Very interestllig", he ·says. laughing. "When' I'm making those CDs in the studio, most people fall asleep. Some souild causes alpha waves. A young. assistant had to check for digital. noise so he tried to listen very carefully with headphoneS, but every time, he fell asleep for thirty minutes." Among the tapes made by Kawasaki for St GIGA are hours of Buddbist chanting made in Nara, the seat of Buddhism in Japan, and Koya-san mountain, centre of the Shingon-Mikkyo sect of Buddhism. John. Cage lIlld KarlheinZ Stockhausen both heard Buddhist chanting in situ and found Dluch in these prolonged sound events. that confirmed their·· opposed philosophies. In the Oai Hannya ceremony of theShingon sect, for example, the chanting.of the sulra will be modified according to. seasonal influences. The sutra is six ·hundred volumes in length,and so a part of-the reading is symbolically . a(:compllshed by the monks opening out theirJolded prayer books'and then shuttlng therp noisily. Evil spirits are driven away With other noises, such as door banging, hitting the floor with wooden staffs, the clatter of ru1min:g, crackling fire and the· blowing of conch shells. Kawasaki recorded the ancieilt 'Shuttie (also known as .Omizutori ) ceremony. Which heralds the beginning of sprlng in March each year. "It's a very long ceremony", he says. "For the monk it's very hard work. It'sabout fourteen days. No meat, no fish. Noone can enter this space, only monk." He draws a diagram. "ThiS. space. is only selected people ~ yoU: ask permission. maybe you come. Woman cannot. Here they have screen; You can hear the ,

sound: They wdk.a1'owld. Atthattime, they'put'oilwooderi shdes, so it's avery spedal sOlind. They sing, ~d sometimes sUen¢e, sometimes ring a special belt Sometimes they sing veryfaStjsmgiilgallria:mesof the gods, including Shinto·gods: Atthat·tlri1e, it's very; veri fiist. it;s like Superman. ;MaYbethey' . are in trance. People have only imagination: 'Wbat are they .doing?' That screen,. thf!'yonly use candlelight; so only'sUho:u-ettes' come throug~~ When'~ey come into·the space they' brifig~some very big.lOrch.The sOund causennany itnagi,~tions~"

amniotic fluids . Devised in. 1990 by Hiroshi Yokoi, a'pioneetoL twelltY-four-oour FM radio transinissionin}apan;St GlGA was the flrstJapanese satellite .station. The concept was inSpired by a Kurt Vonnegut story called "The Sirens of Tit;ui", in whiCh. cave-dwelling c~eaturescalled Harmoniums eat beautifulsoundS·and shine with light Theoruywordstheyknowa.re -'"I'm here" and "I'mgladyou're there", thepenect diStillation ofradio's mostbaSic principle. Programmed according to tidal patterns, sunrise and su'!set apd the changing phases of the Q1QOn, rath~r than GreenWich standard time, the station works ··.upon:prindpleswhich·woWd be regatdedmth~lJK assymp. 'tOlllS of<1clusionalnwua.· . '. "The cyclical- patterns created-by these variousnaiural. _forees are combined to forma single line which is used as the . . guiding line for programme scheduling", Writes Mr Yokoi in -the-radio statfonbandbook. "The movements of this 'gUldi!lg. line' are- irregular and,ratherthan conforming to the Green- . wich time line, form a cyclical pattern.based on the natural rhythms that synchronise with human behaviour and emotions. Sounds and music ."lVhich match the wave patterns of .. this guiding liriewin 'be selected andtrarismitted to harmonlzewitli each cyCle. By matching the wave pa~ems of nature . and th~ melodic pattetru! of music in this way, ~ pOwetfuI .and_ deep world of ~Olind wUl be reali~ed. This world of sound,

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filled with the vibrations of nature, will draw people into an unusual mental space where they can experience the sweet beginnings of life itself, reminiscent of the start of existence as an embryo within amniotic fluids ... We are about to en- " ter a period of major hiStorical change not often witnessed in the long history of mankind. I believe that people involved in media have an important obligation to fulfIl. That is to truly grasp the路spirit of the period. And at the same time to use their imaginative powers and practical skills to crel:lte a 'dream tide' ," Those who understand the St GIGA programme best, and thus its main target audience, Hiroshi Yokoi claims, are "Wlborn babies sleeping quietly in aQlI1iotic fluids". A]apanese doctor was the first to release a commercial album ot"womb sounds (track titles included "Aorta" and "Aorta and Vein") mixed with the soporific end of the classical repertoire - Air on a G St~ing and so on. The intention- of Dr Hajime Murooka's Sleep Gently In the Womb, released in . 1975, was to pacify crying babies. Electronic lullaby tapes designed to calm new-born babies or ease birth pains for women are now common, both in Mothercare and in the tape sections of New Age bookshops; Mickey Hart of the Grateful Dead, for example, has released a birthing tape of his own. Anecdotal evidence suggests that if rhythms and beats derived from heartbeat recordings are transmitted to a foetus in the womb throughout pregnancy, then this stimulation may increase the child's learning capaCity after birth_ Coincidentally, the music my daughter hearq, or felt, just five nights i>efore she was路born was a loud performance by Daniel Lanois, with guest vocal on one song by Brian Eno; The consequences are as yet unknown.

water streaming "In the silent meditation, the sound of the gong can be .heard several times. Then the soUnd of a cloud-shaped metill. gong as路well as a wooden drum telling the end of the morning meditation can be heard In a unique rhythm. The sound of gongs

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. and drUms not only awakes sleepy novices or young monks, but alsoit helpsto awake the insight of monks to lead them to the state of enlightenment orSatori in]apanese. All monks start to chimt a sciipwre in wiiso.n as a part of the morning service. . CircumStances and atmosphere -are so silent that one. can hear sounds of the wjnd and watC:r-s~ing very ctearly." Shoyu Hanayama, Zen: Sou.nd & Silence (Nippon . .Phonogram LP booklet)

JohD. Cage was' influenced-profoundly by the lectures of Daisetz SuZuki, who gave classes. in Zen at Columbia Univer· "sity, New York City,from the late 1940s through most .of the 1950s. Cage's biographer, David Revill, wrote in The Roaring .. Silen~e that "the teachings of Suiliki had a startling d"fect on. Cage. He felt that they catapulted him into" conceptual and emotional adulthood." As· for Cage's own thoughts on the matter, the influeIice is apparent from his description of ~e lectutes: "Suzuki never spoke loudly. When the weather was good, the windows were open, and the airplanes leaving La Guardia flew directly OVerhead from time to "time, drowning' out whatever"he had to say. He never repeated what had been said during the passage of the airplane." Whilst sound sculpter Max Eastley and I :are staying in . Yoshihiro KaWasaki'S Kobe apartment, he plays us his tapes of an Eoo.period (1603...; 1867}gatden ~und maker called the sutklnkutsu. This is a large stone basui mounted over an even bigger inverted pot. The pot is sunk in the earth, set in an underground drainage·system of stones. Drips collect "in the . basin, fedtJ:Qm a bamboo pipe, an.d then fall into theresonat· iiig water vessel below. "People can hear the silence" ,says Kawasaki. "That's the point." Anxious to experience, the point, I traVel to Kyoto in the company of Kawasakfs ass~t· ant" Kana Kobayashii "who takes me on a whirlwind tour of Zen temples, stone gardens, moss gardens and patlsserieS.Jn Ninomaru Palace, or~ built by' die first Tokugawa SJ,.o.gun Ieyasuin 1603; weleave our shoes on racks at the door to pad softly around the ~ous chirping ugutsu-bart, the

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"nightingale fl()or". Desi8;ned to reveaI the presence of ninja assaSsins, this artful cOnstruction of 'crampS and nails under the floorboards seems to squeak only when somebody else is moving, leaving me with the',een:e impression that I am float~ iIigon H~roshi Yokoi's dreamtide. But thehigh1igh~ of this Kyoto daytrip is the garden of Zuishun路ln and its suikinkutsu. Swapping our shoes for green gard,en sandals, we. walk: tlu:ough the garden to the water, chime. The sound is minute, so quiet itt fact that we ~ened' .creatures of the-contemporarY world must be provided with a bamboo listening pole; This ,bamb~ adds the typical phasing'drone of resonance in a cyUndrical tube (the "sea" we can . hear by putting an ear to a seashell); after a short period of listening to. the pure, sparse beUtones of r3.ndom drips nng. ing in their und~rground chamber, all audit~ry experiences are heightened. We sit for ~ hour in the garden, eating a green jelly sweet, drinking Japanese tea, watching fish being fed.路the tran,quillity switches open a calm state of mind. Bodily receptors time in to a' f'lickerin~ microsphere:, a butterfly landing on moss, intermittent water droplets, insect drones, , reflections of water ripples on bamboo poles,: the scrape of an old woman digging Weeds fi'om, a path. ,Giant carp jump, .- then flop back into the ornairiental pond.8irdS 'flutter loudly路 as they weave through the bamboo platforms erected to train tree branch~sand foliage into pleasing shapes. A crow, squaws. The environment has been carefully designed to draw this state of mind into becoming.:Afewminutes ago, we were walking along a noisy city street. But the garden isanaes- . thetic, meditational construct, ,an enabling tool Which relegates foreground clutter to, the edges of the picture for a 'brief period and focuses instead on fleetingpattems of light, sha~ow,colour,smell,sound and silence.' .' .' .' . The sUikinkutsu was oftenbullt near the outside toilet. To ' complete the meditation on ',nature and bed.ity functions, , when you came out you cOuld Wt,lSh your hands in water col~ lected.within the stone basin and listen路to its delicate sound.

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Earthy as weUasethereal in his appreciation of. fugitive b~uty, Jun'lchiro Tariizaki, the author of The Secret Life of . ¥usashl, describc;d the pleasure of sittln8 in an old-fashioned .Japanese outside .toilet .and absorl>ing nature: "There ·one can listen with ·such a sense of intimacy to the raindrops falling .from the eaves and the trees, seeping into the .earth as they wash over the base of a storte·l!lDtem and freshen the moss .. about. the stepping stones." This reflection is one. of many .:&lights contained. in his essay on aesthetics, In Praise of . ·ShrJ,dows. Written in 1933, the book captures.a moment of crisis before such extremes of subtlety, already wilting under the glare of technology, were almost completely crushed by the consequences of aggressive Japanese nationalis!D,· postwar American influence and the brute commerce,which followed economic recovery. TanlZaki bdieved that recording technology, originally developed in the West, was unsuited to capturing Japanese music; "a music of reticence, .of atmospher~". In an uncomfortab~~. fit .of his own nationalistic ·ten:dencies, henone'the less shows an acute appreciation of technology's inability to capture and reproduce the subs~ce of silence, or the elusive aether talk of quiet sound and acoustic space. Ironically, Japanese concentration on mass market .', ·hi-fiand musical instrument technology has done very little to, . redress this balance or indeed protect the special qualities of ·non-Western scales and tuning systems against the uniformity of the octave. Quite dgh~y, Tanizaki felt that the loudspeaker diminiShes certain aspects of sound by emphaSising, others. Even the most secluded SP9ts of Kyoto are not immune. At a moss garden temple, a shakuhachi flute plays on tape, and in the tea house of Zuishun·Ingarden, a cassette player J,s,set up to play Kawasaki's recording of: the suiklnkutsu, during the tea ceremony. Writing;tbout the aesthetic sensibility of Japan's Heian era (ninth cen,tury) in Zen ~ulture, Thomas Hoover says: "Beauty was all the more' arresting for, the certainty tluit it must' perish." In the land of hardware that Japan has become, tllis

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. attitude still exists, paradoxically; but only in small pockets of forward thinking that project into aspecuiative, post-consumerist future. Hiroshi Yokoi's St GIGA project is one example. Xebec HaJ,l, sited on Kobe's Port Island; is another. Here, John Cage's absorption of Zen has come full circle. There are other centres for sound exploration - mCAM in Paris and STEIM in Amsterdam - but Xebec is unique in its visionary linking of sound art and consumer research. In the 1980s, the TOACorporation, a company specialising in PA systems for public spaces, celebrated its fiftieth anniver- . sary by building a corporate headquarters on Port Island. Given that such buildings are required to incorporate a public space, TOA had considered the idea of including an equipment showroom in their plans but eventually decided to bUild a concert hall, digital studio and cafe (serving typically excellent coffee) with exhibition space - all equipped to present experimental music and th~ kind of sound art pioneered by post-Cage composerS such asPauIineOliveros, Alvin Lucier; Max Neuhaus, Akio.Suzuki, Alvin路Curran and Annea Lockwood. So -the Xebec Corporation, along with its unique relationship with a parent company; was born. . Travelling on the Shinka:nsentrain between Kobe and Toky? in April, 1993, NobuhisaShimoda, planning-director of Xebec's concerts, workshops and eXhibitions, explained to me the unusual workings of this sound centre. For him, the presentation of sound art, installations and music concerts (experimental, jazz, Asian classical music, Fluxus art and so on) is the most effective and rewarding way to communicate models of a less product-orientated society, a society which directs income more towards time~based enrif;:hment than solid pacbges of entertainment technology. At the. time, the ailing Japahese economy was dedicated to exaggerated demand-creation for such packages. Shimoda's position seemed radical, yet Japanese economists and policy analysts were asking fundamental questions about so-called consumer fatigue (make houses bigger in order to allow more room for con-

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sumer durables,suggested Yukio Ohnum.a, a general manager of Itochu Corporation) and the collapse of Japan's bubble economy (create more life-satisfaction·for workers and more' original products for consumers, suggested political~riter· Taichi Sakaiya). Xebec hlis sOfilethingof a head start in this . reinvention of the relationship between culture and the eco~omy. Its parent company, TOA, is nota musical instru-. ment manufacturer, but a specialist in the more intangible field of designing for optimum deployment of sound in space. The TOAmotto is: "We sell sound, not· equipment." . "CD consumption doesn't make people think how tocreate something inside themselves", says Shimoda."Maybe about five or ten years_ ago in Japanese society it looked as if people chose goods by how good they are .- goods shOUld . have a certain level ofability, plus good design. But it turned tothe next phase. I imagine people would like to have rich life by buying or using some goods to make· their life rich .. When I use the word rich, it's not only for physical things but men. tal or spiritual. "So we have -to shift."· How this possible trend connects with Xebec and its .parent .company remains nebulous. The event which opened Xebe~ in 1989 - a Brian Eno . light sculpture installation;... required an enormous amount of . explanatory liaison between Xebec and TOA. But the principle ·of this particular work exemplified a speculative· area which distinguishes between what people customarily do in the present and what they might benefit fl\om doing in the .future, given the opportunity. "This space urges people to be calm," wrote Eno .for the rust Xebec document. "Regular peo-. pie almost never sit motionless. This is one of the problems of modern society - there are no situations, without actually going to sleep, where people can sit quietly." . Although there are specific situations which require the technological expertise- of TOA itself - the performance of complex digital works, for example - the brief is open. "We should think about art, sound, people, society", says Nobuhisa Shimoda. "That will bring our parent company

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something new. I feel a typical point of many artists is they are not only making a package of sound - they are making a kind of system. The people who 'encounter that system will be re-. minded that there is another rich world there, or inside them. Like John Cage did. He made people listen to the world." Where all this would lead, particularly at a time when Japan, Europe and America were deep in economic recession, is another matter. Clearly, the sound ~ork itself, along with its usually delicate, refined. aesthetic, connects to Japanese customs and devices, such as thesuikinkutsu or the insect sound sculptures ofwhich Lafcadio Hearn wrote at the end of the nineteenth century in Insect Musicians: "But even today, city dwellers, when giving a party, will sometj.mes place路cages of singing-insects among garden shrubbery,so that the guests may enjoy not only the musk of the little creatures, but , also those memo~ies or sensations of rural peace which such music evokes." As Yoshihiro Kawasaki says, "Esp'eciallyafter World War Two, most people forget those kind of things. Recently, I have talked about these things with sound artists from foreign countries and I saw their performances~ r find that . Japanese essence in their performance. Maybe young people in Japan don't know those old things but they find that essence in sound artists of foreign countries. It's a kind of circle." , Packaging is a high art form at every level in Japan, but the intangible qualities of a process, or ceremony, the substance of memories and experierice, have equally deep roots in :Tapanesesociety. Imagining a possible future for TOA, Nobuhisa' Shimoda says,路 "They might fmd,that they don't have to manufacture products any more. They have to think about the design of space for sound. That's just one possibility. To make this kind of thing happen, only this kind of movement Ukein Xebec can change the company thought. Maybe the company , will change, we will be changed, society will be changed."

the

altered states Ii: fourth world Jon HasseY,' PanrJit Pran Nath; Duke Ellington

"Peelingto the le:thargie beatof tumescent music, she _ wore -vivid makeup, glitter in ,her hair and crystaUineclothes, -all hOoks, straps,sequins and secret snappers. The stripper's art needs speciill garments made to tear aWaY like the husk of a pomegranate. So you do not notice the woman as she Is, 1:Jecause you are looking for fulfilment of the mind's eye. You are' eXamining aiÂŁidea - -depravity or pleasure, or their periloUs symbiosis." , David Thomson, Suspects

In a creeping, convoluted trail suggestive of plant growth, David Thomson constructed a novel, or a lattice of biographi~ cal sketches, from the imaginary web of lives as they might have been lived, by ,cinematic characters outside the frame of the _cinema screen. These characters - Walker from Point Blank, Norma Desmond from Sunset Boulevard, EVelyn Mulwray ,and Noah Cross from Chinatown and so on - their previously unknown pasts and futures, snag and pull at each other in this web, implying an invisible 'World occupied by the ragged stories of every fictional identity ever invented. A similar process of dragging icons and overlaying them, -sliced translucently thin, on .to fictional hiStories, has been on~ of the key -devices of technological music. Feasibly, you could extrapolate a novel from the interweaving 'stories buriedwithinJohn Cage's Variations Iv, but richer possi~ilities

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unfolded in the early 1980s when jon HaSsell began to capture, loop and laminate. frl1-gments of sampled sound on albums such as Aka-Darbari-Java. A 'student of Stockhausen who·had recorded with TeriyRiley (Tn C),La Monte Young (The Theatre of Eternal Music),· Brian EnQ, Talking Heads, David Sylvian and Peter Gabriel, Hassell formalised that process by naming his 1994 band Bluescreen, after the cinematic technique of filming foreground action agairist a blue background, "adopting this. metaphor in musical ways, creating magical textures in sound, making something familiar sound· fresh and exotic by separating it from its background and combining it with something new and startling". Finding a review of David Thomson's Suspects in the LAWe~k{y, he hit on this asanothernietaphor connecting to his own search for a music which was'almost psychotropic: in its capacity to activate alien worlds in the imagination through strange juxtapositions. Previous Hassell albums,pllrticularly Earthquake Island, Vernal Equinox, Possible Musics and Dream Theory In Malaya, along with his collaborations with Gnawa trance musicians from Morocco and the Farafina percussionists from Burkina Faso, were made in the spirit of creative anthropology exemplified earlier in this century by the surrealist writer, trilveller; critic and do~uni.enter of dreams MichelLeiris. Writing on ethnographic surrealism in The Pred{cament of Culture,jamesCHfford offers an outline oithe territory: ~I am . using the term SUrrealism in an obviously expanded sense to drcumscribe·ari aesthetic. that values fragments~ curious collections, unexpected juxtapositions.:. that works to provoke the manife~tions of ·extraordinary realities· drawn from the domains of the erotic, the exotic and the unconscious." That could be a preCis ofjon Hassell's a!UVfY!. ButwithAkaDarbari-Java the perfume of ethnopoetics was supplemented by parallels with literatllre .arid the advanced technology .~f hyperreality; indicated through affinities with Latin American magic realist writing and. the video technique of keying in. As for the sound; sluggishsbapes undulated in the depths of a

.'~

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of sound

liquid fog formed frompartic.les of air passed through metal > dectronic transformations> the pitches of an Indian raga> slowly turning variatiom. of a drum cycle from Senegal recorded in Paris > glittering spirals of noise lifted fromgamelan music and anYma Sumac record (already a repository of colonial myths) orchestrated in Hollywood Exotica style by one of the inventors of the exotica genre,Les Baxter. This was a form of music, Hassell suggested, which would leave behind "the ascetic face which Eurocentric tradition has come to associate with serious expression". Taboos were transgressed, notably in the music's sensuality, and its free use of source material, but this was not untutored montage_ The raga - Darbari - can be heard as interpreted by one of Hassell's teachers, the great klrana-style vocalist Pandit PranNath. Recorded路 in New Delhi by Alan Douglas, this was released eighteen years later on Ragas ofMorning and Night. .Though hampered by age and Parkinson's.disease by the mid 19905 when he recorded with the Kronos Quartet, 路Pran Nath's approach to teaching was formidable. "It is necessary to remain one hundred years with the guru, then practice for one hundred years, and then you can sing for one hundred years", he has said. The first time Hassell and I talked, back in 1989, he tugged and worried at the contradiction between lengthy (though not quite that lengthy) study and theinstan.taneity of Xerox culture. "It's a quandary for me", he said, "because I did develop a physical dexterity when I studied Indian music with Pandit Pran Nath. I decided at that point I wanted to walk into a room and have something that.was in my nervous system which I could activate and btiogwith me wherever I went. It's a .vroblem to know路what to do with that in the age of samplirig and audio sleight of hand.. because the audience is looking for the final result, basically. They dOn't care if it took you twenty years to arrive at it or whether somebody sampled it 路off of a record and used it." He had just released City: Works of Ftctton, an idbum produced.with a lot of digital editing, a strong influence from

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Hank Shocklee's Bomb. Squad productions for Public Enemy and a vocal sample from P.E.'s "She Watch Channel Zero?!". City set an industry standard for digitally sliced soundtracks of the city twitching in delirium tremens: chicken sacrifices and dogfights in the basement, bullroarers on the bridges, camcorders at the murder scene, TVs in the lamp posts, sex' temples, knock-down kidneys at car-boot sales, fake preasts, fake Cartier, the smell of a thousand cuisines. As Japanese bass player and composer Motohiko Hamase wrote for the sleevenotes to his Technodrome album: "Ctty ... provides a thorough expression of city music in one of the most remark~~le accomplishments of recent years." The reference points for this album were characteristically broad, mostly extramusical, ranging from Ben Okri's City oj Red Dust, ltalo Calvino's Invisible Ctttes and Jean Baudrillard's portrayal of America as "the primitive society of the future", to Federico . Fellini's custom-built celluloid city of Reggiolo, Salman Rushdie's tropicalised London and Ridley Scott's Los Angeles 2019. In a long version of Blade Runner screened in San Fran~ cisco, a scene later excised from the commercially released director's cut version showed two women, like Japanese Biitoh dancers, mOving slowly on a nightclub stage to the liquid techno-throb that Vangelis envisaged (prophetically, yet still miscalculated by more than twenty-five years) as music of the next century. A fertile texture of images: bodr, machine, global, intimate, expressive, emotionally withdrawn. like Terry Riley, playing saxophone in an electronic hall of mirrors in early recordings such as "Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band", Hassell had created an otherworldly studio sound that had become recognised as his signature. This use of digital delay, combined with pitch shifting, created its own problems. "When 1 started studying with Pran Nath", he said, "I realised that the basic art of raga is, as he says, the music between the notes. That's to call attention to the fact that if you have a grid and each one of the lines on the grid is a pitch level, the art is in drawing precisely a beautiful curve between

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one Ieveland another level It's like calIigraphy~ TAUDpet's a lonely instrument. It's-one vOice. When I realised I could have a repUca of·the ~pet playing with me, then it was as though instead of drawing. the curves with one pencil I-could hold a handful of pencils and dtaw·the curves. In trying to make these curves in raga. a very breathy. vocal-type sound resulted. Basically. it's playing the mouthpiece, not the trumpet. I blow it like a cOnch shell - that's the most-primitive. fundamental aspect ofwbat I do. This is the only instrument, other than the voice that workS that way. The sound is strange to start with, so when I add the electronic eye-shadoW. the mistaken conclusion is that it's an done with mirrors, not meat;" So a voice within seemed to be saying - as it doeS to moSt: trained musidandrom time to time -to bare. the eXpertise behind the plug-in mask, His next project was planned as a solo album. untreated, unadorned, unplugged. . . But the album that emerge<i. eventually. was far from the ruiked intimacy ola solo·acoustic trumpet. There was analred intimacy. or should I say provocatively dressed nakedness, but this ~ absorbed into the assoclatedimagery of the music rather than the instrumentation. M the tide - DressIng For Pleasu.re ..,.. indicated, this was a further footstep in the move .-.y from ascetic aesthetics, into hip-hop, jazz, ragga and the ritualised se:x:ofthemodemprimitivemovement..Dresstng For Pleasure can be.placcd next to all the younger hybrids of hip-hop, jungle, trip-hop and so on, linked by a connecting thread which has little to do. with age or geography. That thread was tenuous. yet it 'constituted a somc assault on musical· fundamentalism. '. An· avid Internet user,JonHassell has soine interesting.observationson ftind~rnentalism: pertinent to the' tensions betWeen·nationalism and tJ'aDSglobalism. Click yourself on to. the Intemet andyou can. find electronic discuSsioil sites devoted to heraldry and folk dancing. "Maybe it will ,become convenient to redraw a map of the world according to interests:and .whowantsto five in which era",he says from his

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home In West Hollywood as we talk on the telephone. ·We could have wars between the fifteenth century and the twenty-first century ... In the past, having been coming from the abstract, inStrumental side of things, music was metalanguage for performing. I always felt~t music toOk off where words stopped. Hip-hop changed that, because hip-hop allowed a new relationship J>etween woi'ds and mUSiC, one that I felt more comfortable with. At the same time, every record I've ever done has always been some 59rt of a fantasy, . an erotic fantasy. They've always been In this same constellation of sensuality, where the Gil Evans sound equals this sense offeeling good at a certain place at a time - maybe post-orgasmic music as opposed to pre-orgasmic.I keep 3sking the central question: What is it I really like? What is it that I real1y want·to hear? And both In·the·p~ realm, the sex fantasy realm, and the ·musical realm, it comes down to shockingly simple things. I love lush sensual atmospheres. I love beautiful chords. I'm in love with harmony. Strangely enough, I've taken the path ofdisciplJnes which didn't have a lot to do with that - at least In· the sense of traditional chord changes . like studf!ngraga. Although there are vast harmonic implications. It is, In fact, very covertly harmonic, but I'm talking about the beautY of haVing one note· and you've got these chords changing underneatli.Withln each chord, that n~te takes on a <Ilfkrent kind of character. It's a different picture . each time, but using the· same fore8r0UDd. Brazilian pop music seem~d to pick up on that ~t away - 'One Note Samba' et cetera. "Why did Brazilians choose tb,is, or why did Gil Evans choose those harmonies out ~f the ~ertoire that existed at that point. There is something going on there, some deep essential drive towards the beautiful. The beautiful is defined here as being that which drags you most profoundly.Without any abstnictconstructs. Without talking yourSelf into what's beautiful.- At the heart of our emergent sense of beauty in the present isa new tonality, which Jon sees as a: development of

certain

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samples being detuned and overlaid, particularly in hip-hop, to create dense, strange ,harmonic, dissonances. To people who don't insist that music lll짜St be Eurocentrica1ly in tune, these are very pleasurable, but to those whose f11"St andforma~ live listening experiences' are hip-hop, this new tonality is normal. Jon sends D;le an essay from Skin Two (issue 14), written by Pat Califia and entitled "Sex Magic; Modem Primitives, Latex, Shamans & Ritual SM". "Moderhprimitives live, fortbe most part. in urban enclaves in the age of the machine", she writes. "We have to find away to synthesise tberhytbms of nature with our electronic lives. A fuzzy-headed, sentimental longing fora bucolic utopia will not save us from toxic waste or nuclear.weapons. We need a world where we can have both computers and campfires." In condemning rDIsguided appropriations of pre-industrial, communal ritual for the post-industrial; private, theatre of sex, this" brilliant essay illuminates some of the murkier" areas of ' Fourth ,World ' theory. And in Dressing ForPlf!asure, there' were musical developments of the Fourth World idea also. "Destination: Bakiff", for example, sampled and chopped snatches ofn~ Ellington's recording of "Bakiff'. Composed by' trombotlist Juan Tizol, the 0rig4J.a1 tune is a heady piece of exotica. "When Ellington and Strayhorn composed the Far East Suite in 1964", wrote Mark Tucker in his notes for the Duke Ellington: The Blanton-, Webster Band boxed set 1\eleased in 1986, "they may have been inspired by their recent visit to the Orient, but surely they drew upon memories of Juan Tizol's earlier studies in musical exotica, among them 'Caravan', 'Pyramid' and the atmospheric 'Bakiff'. Tizol'sPuerto Rican origins seem to have ' little to do with a piece like 'Bakiff', where musical imp~ sionismis the product of its composer's imagination, not his first-hand,' ~eriencewith indigenous Caribbean idioms." , And for EllingtOn, these explorations were stimulated by an ' interest in Africa and the diaspora. "As a student of Negro

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history", he said, "I had, in any case, a路 natural inclination in this direction." In the Fourth World, nothing is simple. "Possible musics, possible cultures, possible architecture, possible lifestyles,. etc."; Hassell says. "This is an idea that boils down to the range of possible relations between individual, tribe and nation in the mass electronic age. Imagine a grid of national boundaries, and on to those project a new, non~physical communicationsderived geography - tribes of like-minded路thinkers. Since a situation like this has never before existed, it follows that old, narrow-band approaches can't work and that new approaches must be creative. 1bat means intuitive and improvisational. 1 would like the message of Fourth World to be that things shouldn't be diluted. This balance between the native identity andtheglobalidentity via~ous electronic extensions is not one that can be dictated or necessarily predicted; One should be very humble and respectful of our lack of knowledge about how those things combine, and be informed by knowledge of the way things used to be in smaller numbers- that's where it becomes very ~eful to look at other cultures, small cultures, and try to develop a moduS operandi for the new age, not New Age."

. Fourth World The stairwell of a Tokyo department store in Shibuya. Clean. Hi-tech. Deserted. A disembodied voice transmits information,overthe public address systein, the words echoing in the exit shaft. A man and a woman are kissing hard, pressed against the wall. Time is frozen. A downpour in Ikebukuro, rain sheeting down. Milky neon kanji glow dimly through the mist, floating in a night sky that has scrubbed out the buildings on wh~ch they sit; . In Atlanta, subterranean tities extend out from under the hotels. In Lake Tahoe, the half of the town that lies in California is dark and spooky at night; the gambling half that lies in Nevada throbs with insomniac, halogen, polyvinyl, slot

lagOCeaa of souad machft,1e lust. Just bef9nd Tahoe city: Umits, birds of prey hover over the ochre ripples of the desert. Itsukushima·Sbrine on Miyajima Island near Hiroshima, a famous Shinto _ w-IlCre gagaktl music and bugaku dance are performed in the open air on New Year's day, ulttamarlne sea runriing over the huge 0-Torti grand gate, then passing under the vermilion posts of the stage; A Shinto priest Wear- . ing stiff white robes walks along carrying' a shiny black . briekase. 1m route·to the shrine, some of the so1,lVeQir:,md cake shops are equipped with voice chips, activated· by dec. tronic eye, which say "bello" when you enter and "thank you" when you leave. At closing time ~thin the shrine, ~e tranmartial synthesiser quillity is blasted. apart· by deafening . .

music.:

The Caracas rubbish dump. A graveyard for hundreds of lorries.which have· been driven to death, finally abandoned at their, destination, rusted, collapsing onto their own axles, . sinking into shit. The poorest of the pick amongst. the waste, looking for saleable scraps. Huge black w1turesgather wherever a human has passed, wings spread incrucifQrm. A cu:dboa1'd box lies unattended on one of the backstreet pavements behind AkiIulbara's department store comucopias~ Ioside.the box, six mecbaoical dogs,lumioous eJeS.prottuding on stalks, their bQdies transparent plastic, their heads the . colour of blood.cJrained skin, tumble over ~ other, scrabbling at the sides of the.box. .A Mexican restaUrantln Hong Kong. A group oH~ilipino musidansdressed in pOnchos and sombreros ~ from table to table, singing Mexican songs to white people who yell ~ythrouih "Guaobnamera"; shake maracas Out of time and throw food. Outside, the roads aregrldl~ by taxis.flying. black peo'}aOfS from their radio aerials in protest ag;imst the Chinese goverrunent killings in Tiaoanmeo SqUare. In the night IIIIIIkd, eds writhe in neon-lit water tanks. Tough guys preside CJVer·fold-open· canl tables.inlaid wi.th maga~oe photographs of fake .-ob~ Cartier,. Louis Vuitton, Prices

poor

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scrawled underneath in felt tip. Tokyo Cat The DisCo Tailor is making up suits at midnight. I buy a Chinese pirate copy of a Japanese T-shin. On the front is printed: PEACE AND LOVE WORLD TRAVEL Avant garde, sephlsticated and a little evolution of the colonial tetro·mediapolis' urban plaids and adventureseeking worl London's Cavendish Square: almost deserted, .a Saturday evening during the hot, rainless July of 1994. Humidity and electrical pressure are intensifying by th~ second. The air is thick with petrol, the sky darkening to a leaden blue haze of surreal clarity. Heavy raindrops fall in isolation, like the last drops squeezed from a dirty rag. As I walk around the square, .I sense at first, tJten hear; a grinding drone rising out of the underground car park. Sitting on a bench in the middle of the square, a man is screamingoa tirade of immitigable harshness to an absent subject:

"Yaaafuckingaraaaghafuckineeearakafuckinagaafauogh..."

Candi Dasa, near Cape Bugbug, southeast Bali. Paradise, basic model, optional drawbacks. Televisi Stasiun Denpassar begins its evening transmissions: first a static, ilXed-ca:mera studio performance of Balinese dance-drama, then an American sit·com: Aif(the one about the cuddly alien ado)'ted by the all·American family). Study this programme and use it to improve your English, adviSes the TV announcer. The following morning, as the tourists begin another day's sunbathing, a posse of young men gather at one end of the beac;:h. Wrapped . in black wooUens and head scarves, .they push huge concrete octagons along the sand in broiling heat, then push them into the sea. Periodically, they stop to rest·and catch sneak glances of bared breasts. On Kobe's Port Island, Japan, the neon logo of the Portopia Hotel dominates the skyline. After dark, the lobby is a phantasmagoric scene from an improbable future. Water cas-

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cades in silver darts and runp,els down a wall of sted;set ona platform in front of this路 synthetic Niagara is a transparent grand piano. Pouring from the baselD:ent theatre comes a crowd ofJapanese raggaand rasta boys wearing baggy jeans...路 high tops, tams for non-citlstent locks, mingling with another crowd ofbody-con girls in leather skirts, flares, high heels and see-through tOps. Across the ~et,路 a Mini Cooper is parked at an angle, dotlls and windoWs ~de open. Sitting on the pavementoutside the Lawson laU:-openconvenience store, a bunch of reggae obsessives drlDk from cans and listen to Buju and Shabba on the booming system of a black Banzai jeep. A warm spring night. Sensuous bass, strange hybrid language, strange dreams~

Baltered states iii: crystal world La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela; Velvet Underground; Yoko Ono, Richard Maxfield, West

, CoastJazz, Indian vocal music, Terry Riley

A theatre restaurant in London. La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela sit together, both dressed in a strange composite of Indian and New York boho~wear路drca'1950. Having listened to loud music for so long, La Monte is obliged to use a hearing aid. At one point ~uring our conversation, he turns it down as the background opera mu~ rises to heights of ecstasy. The conversation goes like this: I wait, pent up with my question: until a brief chink of light parts the eternal flow of La Monte's fascinating, humorous but somewhat unyielding discourse. The conversational style - fluid, detailed but heavy on conjuncQ.ons - fits the music, since for more than thirty years, this has concentrated on long durations of sustained pitch relationships. In Composition 1961, he gave the following instruction: "Draw a straight line and follow it." These are points on that line.

rain, wind, blues A photograph, taken in New Jersey in 1963. La Monte Yo~g sits crosslegged under a tree, wearing dark glasses, black shirt, tight black jeans, playing sopranino saxophone. An axe Is buried in the'tree just behind hIs head. Bottles are hung from the branches. The Theatre of Eternal Music, La Monte called his performing groups. Always involving Marian Zazeela's light and

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mlopr·ilistidlatioos, her singing .and gong bowing, these also indUdedJon Hassell, pl;lyiilg' trumpet in the early 1970s, troJDbonIst Garrett List and, in the mid 19605, AngUs MacIJse playing" percussion, Tony Conrad on boWed guitar~d 'mandola, John Cale playb,lg modified ·viola .. and,~ passing through. WaIter De Maria and 'conceptual artist Henry Flynt (who coined the term. ·concept art" at the end of the 19505). So La Monte has some right to claim a proprietoriaHnterest in huge swathes ofsubSequentmusic. MacUse, Conrad and CaIe were members of The Primitives, The Warlocks or The Falling Spikes, all forerunn.eI:s of the Velvet Underground. interviewed fer What Goes On,' the Velvet Underground. Appreciation Society magazine, Tony Conrad described promotional gigs for "The Ostric:.h", a single written andrecorded by Lou Reed: "The sOng W3S very easy as. they explained it to . us because'an the strings were tuned to one note,which blew our minds. We couldn't believe that they were doing ~ crap just like in a sort of strange etboicaUy Brooklyn style, tunil;lg their~ts to one note, which is what we were doing, too (in Youog'sgroup), so it was very bizarre. In fact we were tuoiiJg to·twO notes·and they were tuobig to only one." Musicians from. the Theatre· of Eternal.Music can be. ~ . . together on anunissuedta.,e from 1964.CaIled "Sunday MOf'Ding·Blues~. a lo9ping~ exuII:ant trance improyisationon which YoUng plays sopi'aoino saxophone (influenced by composer . ...saxophonist Terry Jennings as much as by John Colttane). JohnCale and Tony Conrac:lPIay drones which sound ~ niIy similar to the first V~'s album, particularly "The Black Angel's Death Song" and the intro to "Venus In FU1'S"~ ,Marian ZazeeIa bows a gong and Angus MacIJSe drums in wild, com-

plex: polyrllytlmJL . '

I.alKonteYouog has written. mat MacIJse claimed the ~ as his mainrb.ytbmic influen<:e. Thiseemented a-connedion between diem•. since. La' Monte composec;l according to· Debussy's maxim· -lJstento the words of no man;.1isten only to the.SOl$ds of.the wind·and the waves of the sea,"·MacIJ.se

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was sacked from the Velvet Underground by the irascible Lou . Reed. He recorded trance explorations with hiS various bands - Dreamweapon, Joyous Lake, The Tribal Orchestra - and wrote poetry, made books, acted as the green .mummy in. a Jack Smith film called Normal Love. But tapes tended to be sold for immediate money; tittle survives. In 1979 MacLise died in Kathmandu, aged 41, of hypoglycaemia and drug complications. He belongs with a shadowy group of New York bohemians, shapers and shape-shifters of art movements in the 1960sbefore they became mass movements: poet and photographer Ira路Cohen, painter Mati Kla:rwein, electronic music pioneer Richard Maxfield, vocalist Meredith Monk, film maker and composer Phill Niblock, filmmakers Jack Smith and Ron Rice, and all of the Fluxus performance;: artists, some beginning to -enjoy recognition three decades later. Before the issue of a French album in 1973, La Monte's music could only be heard on a 7 8 flexi-disc issued withAspen mag~e and a limited editionLP extract from The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys. In recent years, CDs have been released of The WeU Tuned Plano, The Second Dream of The

High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer from The Four Dreams of China and, strangest of all, the.justintonation ragablues of Just Stompln' by The Forever Blues Band. Not even these relatively high-profile路 works have dented mass public consciousness, however, so the links which can be made between his pioneering work and various forms of so-called minimallsm,ambient, Fourth World hybrids, the guitar noise symphonies ofRhys Chatham and Glenn Branca, the isolationist drones of Thomas Kaner, Faust's Kraut rock and the wide variety of guitar bands stemming from the Velvet Underground's explorations of distOrtion - Sonic Youth, Band of Susans, J~sus & Mary Chain, Main, Spiritualized, Spectrum, Verve, Slowdive, My Bloody Valentine, and so on - are indirect,路 often disputed, invariably unwitting and unwritten.

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dream house In 1962; he conceived of the Dream House, an envi· ronment in which his music cOuld be played continuously, , eventually tJlutating into a "Rying organism with a life and tra· dition of its own". -

La Monte's dreams and Journeys ' "The-concept of the Dream House ,was very much reo lated to my work; The FOur Dreams of China, whiCh I comJ)9sed in 1962 andwbich is'the first work in which I thoUght about the possibility ,of no beginning and no end. I began to thinkof the silences as including the beginning si. leilce and the -endiitg Silence so that musiciaAs could tatre it up and -if they worked with the same pitches and the same key, let's say, then we could think of each performance as a con· tinuation of the bigger, work.- To ,facilitate that approach I somehow came up with this idea' of a permanant location -where a work-could grow and develop and evolve aUfe 'and tradition of its own. This wasbdore,'l had begun~rking •very much with electronics. So with my various groups - vari· ous sets of performers who comprised The Theatre_ of Eternal Music - I worked towards longer performances within an eVeiling and tOWa:rds biggerinStaIlationS until it reached the . point where we were going on tour in the early seventies, with six to eight musicians, two slide projectionists, a technician, a toad manager and two~ns of electronic equipment, taking a we~k to setup, being on-lo~tion for a week and taking three days to ~ it apart. It was really a bigthing~" . In 1973, Young, MarianZazeela and Pandit Pran Nath were fuvited to the first of a series of Italian festivals called East , West. La Monte proposed a Dream House performance of his , piece of the moment (i.e. th~ previous seven years), called Map of49's Dream The Two Systems ofEleven Sets ofGalacftc Intervals Ornamental Lightyears &acery. The promoter asked for something new, so La Monte laid out the deal. "This is not a supermarket", he told him, "whe,eyou can one

dar.

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buy tomatoes and tomorrow you-buy lettuce and the ac:xt day a quart of milk. This isteally what -I'm working on and this is really wbatJwant to do." OK, said .the promoter, butJcan't afford it anyway. Then: La MontepJayed him a tape of ~ piece-_ that needed a week for setting up, tuning the piano and installing Marian's light~viroruD.ent:The Well TUnI!d Plano. Fine,said the promoter, whO enjoyed the three-bout-long -Rome preIIliere. so much that he comm.issioned_twP PIOfCconcerts-and bought a piano which La- !tI0nte tuned (for perpetuity) and_ then signed.-"Then,-l became-completdy: absorbed in TIie Well Tuned l'UIno", he continues, "and fora wbi1e. it was less eXpensive to produce than Dream House had beeIL'The way we looked at it, it:was_ just the piano and -sort- of,maybe four ofus - me to play, Marian to do the 1igIits, the tuner and a :recording engineer." . As the piece developed in performance, the duration of each C9Dcert crept past-three hours to four. Preparation time

eic.panded toa mop.thoftuning.and practlceinthe.perform.ance space. "If you want to talk about what the pattern of. - some planetary body is, the frequencY of its Orbit, you not . only study it for five years or ten years, you look back into history and see what路 ancient - astronomers:. were saying. Somehow, throuBh the Trio FOrStrlngs and, just before D-ui FOr StrIngs, in- the middle section of Pou" BrOss, I became very inspired to begin writing long sustained tones. I was definitely -hearing In,dian classical music and Ja~ese gagaku music. When Igot to UCLA I was a mUSicology major. They had a student gagaku Orchestra and also, some time at that iimeframe;lheard this first re<:ording ofAB Akbar Khan on Aogel Records-with Yehudi Menuhin announcing, and when I heard that on the radio I Bterally ran out and jJunped in my car and drOVe down to the record store' called Music City in Hol1y~ wood and bought the record and listened to it for hourS and . hours. Actually I was living at my grandmother's house in Los Angeles and she used to get very upset. She used to call it

opium music.

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"When}. was a chlld I used'to love to stand and listen to power plants. Before I waS four years old my father had a job in Montpelier, Idaho, working for my mother's father, Grandpa Grandy, who owned a. gas distribution centre and they would deliver gas all around that area in路big trucks, you know? But right riext to this gas plant was a power station. It was just humming. I used to love to stand there and listen to it and I remember even playing up on top of the big gas storage tanks, sitting there in the hot sun and listening to this thing hum~ I remember standing by other high tension stepdown transfornters in Bern, Idaho, the town where I was born, and I also used to like to listen to the sound of crickets. Of course, the first early sound experience was the sound of the Wind blowing up off Bear Lake around the log cabin I was bom in. I think what really happened was a coming together of all this information which was, I think, then set into place by my hearing of Eastern music and by the fact that the .world had begun to shrink because of the electronic age. "As an ethnomusicology minor. at UCLA I got to listen to a lot of recordings from places like Siam, pygmy music from parts of Africa, gagaku music, Balinese and Javanese music. Then, only years later, the world was becoming smaller in many other ways. When you think of what it meant to Debussy when the gamelan orchestra came to Paris and what an enormous thing it must have been for him and then when you think how easy it is to travel today and that I've been to India seven times and we went with Pandit Pran Nath to Iran. I think that apart from whatever uniqueness there may be . about me, I came from a time when it was possible to absorb all this information and to bring it forth into a new manifestation in which the whole was路 really much more than the sum of the parts. By letting my Inspiration guide me, the way I work, I try to not let my mind get in die way of my, inspiration. It's curious that money gets tied up with this kind of really extraordinary spiritual and learning experience about' the nature of universal structure. God created the body so that

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the ,soul could come to earth to study .music $0 that it could ba.ve a better understanding of universal SIl'UCtUIe. MusiC can be a model for universal structure because we perceive sound as vibration and if you beHeve, as ldo, that Vibration is the key to universal stnicture--you can undefstaDd why I make this statement." -

mblimaUsm -<

路Often, rm askedtO,define minimallsm and I have my

own definition which is that Which is created With the mini路 , mum of means. I guess lUke to think in those broader terms. If one thinks, of minimalism according to my definition, it's able to include the ~dcs of Rotbko and Barnett Newman, as well uthe works ofWeberil'andluJlllu, and a great deal of my Work.;"

crystal world - -"Just as the so-called post.Webern movement was reaching a ceiling of complexity with flocks of notes" ,Jon _ Hassell teUs me, "I was trying to figure out where aU those notes came from, so l went to the centre of it - 'La Monte Young; As a maitetof fact, Stockhausen was the ft1:stperson who ever played LaNQnte Youngf9r .me. rd never heard of him before. La Monte highlighted the point wbere it's a matter ofHsteoing to yourself. If you have a conStant background' Uke a dione, you canprojectyout oWnDel'VOUS system against thatbackground.You become aware of listening high, Hsten路 log low,listening foreground, listeniDg-backgroUnd.-That was the beginnin~ from-which Terry RileY. Steve R.elch, PhilIp Glass, and that whole minima~ist, thing - and me to a certain , extent as well -came frOm. I got.a lot from beJq around La Monte. 'When you'replayiog for four boUts and you're trying to-tune up perfectly on various intervals, occasionally it happens that, out of those four hoUrs ~might get ten minutes when everybody's- in tune. Then you feel the floor JJegin to lift. You hear this,Wonderful ~ world happening In

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the overtones. People are slightly off, and then you're getting these Combination tones as they struggle to reach the same pitch, so there's this incredibiy silvery world going on out there. ~Onie music is not recordable." "From the路beginning of recorded time", says La Mont~, "people have always wanted to understand their relationship to u垄versal structure and to time. Even in as simple a way as where do we come from, why are we here and where are ~ going? I point out that our entire concept of time is dependent on an understanding of periodicity. Time is depending on night and day, "the periodic rotations of the planets, the stars, the periodic functions of our bodies and the seasons, all of these various periodic events,. and without路 them we "really have- no concept of time; TIme is really a very important ~ pect of universal structure. What I have learned is it goes very slowly."

a swarm of .butterflies encountered on the ocean 1968. A psychedelic club called MiddJ,e Earth, Covent Garden, London. An event called Float. Yoko 000 is performing, along with a n~ of othe~ London-based "happening" artists. The only memorable performance, however, comes "from artist John Latham. He is hunched over a large, floorstanding electric saw, the kind you see used by timber meichants. This is connected by contact microphones to an amplifier and he is passing books through the saw blade,sllclng them into Chunks. A monstrous, CrulOtiC, exhilarating drone batters the iIir. 1994. Disobey Club, Islington, London. For forty minutes, Richard James, the Aphex Twin, plays two highly amplified "recOrds" made of sanding discs. The soUnd is augmented by the noisC of an amplified food tnixer. Sometimes the noise is so loud that itblois out all conversation in the room. . 1960. A loft on Chambers Street, New York City. Yoko Ono,the occupant of the loft, is approached"byelectronic composer

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Richard Maxfield with a view to coUaboratiDg on a series of new music concerts curated with La Monte Young. For the first, John cage and ,David Tudor turn up. The following year, Yoko performs at Carnegie Hall. Maxfield provides clectronici; and technical assistance. aPerformers with contact microphones taped to their bodies hauling heavy objects across the pitch路 black stage", wrote Robert Palmer for his booklet essay ., accompanying the CD Onobox.

If Richard Maxfield had not committed suidde in 1969, and if his electronic music pieces were not so difficult to find or to

hear, then our ideas of how music has changed and opened out during the past thirty-five yearS might be very different. His influence permeates the psychedelia of Joseph Byrd's rock band, The United States of America, released on CBS in 1%8. Heworked-WithYokoOno, and although most rock critics attribute a Stockhausen influence to the Lennon/Ono tape experiments of The Beatles' Whiie Album and after, thef are far closer to the work of Maxfield. In 1960, La Monte Young presented Maxfield's work to a group of Bay .Area composers which included Terry Riley. Rlley's 1960 piece called Amazing Grace sampled and treated the voice of a路revival preacher named James G. Brodie; Steve Reich's far better known tape loop pieces - It's Gonna Rain and Come Out - both of which sample black voices,were composed in 1965 and 1966 re~ spectively. In 196{), Joseph ,Byrd and La Monte Young enrolled in Maxfield's electronic music classes at the New School in New York. Ai the heart of avant-rOck, ,hybrid electronics and plund~honiCs, yea: completely obscured by the vagaries of history, is Ricliard M3xfield.

steam Maxfield's Steam IV (1961) was created by tape processing manipulations of steam, recorded from radiatol'S in Maxfield's New York apartment. [1994. Mick Harris, ex:-drum.mer with Napalm Death, now recording unsettled, unmoored electronic pieces under the 'names of Lull and Scorn, sends me

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a letter describing his working methods: "My sounds are , source sounds from fridges to radiators (I'm a big fan of . Eraserhead etc etc that type'ofradlator drone drift sound}.")

. night music , Created from the interaction of an oscilloscope and a tape recorder. "I noticed ,that the electronically generated sounds_I had produced", wrote Maxfield, "were identicalin feeling to thoSe made by_birds and insects on summer nights in Riverside and Central Parks in New York City. After this discovery, I then assembled a snia11 portion of the material which I had made into a multi-channe1 composition intended to evoke this antiphonal chirping of birds and insects on a summer night." [1994. Michael Prime, ecologist and performer of live electronics, sends me his CD - Aquifers - and a manifesto. "In my music", he writes, "I try to bring together sounds from a ~ety of environmental sources into a performance space, particularly sounds which ordinarily would not be audible ... traffic sound may be filtered so that it resembles the. sound of surf, while actual sea sounds may be transformed to conjure up images of an interstellar dust storm ... 1 am especially interested in organic sound sources, such as plants, fungi and the human nervous system ... Short-wave signals interpenetrate oUr bodies at all times, and provide a vast musical resource ... Many of the characteristic路 effects of electronic music (such as ri~gmodulation,filtering, phaseshifting and electronic drone-textures) were first heard in the interaction of early radio broadcasts with the earth's magnetic layer. Perhaps.Gaia was the first composer of electronic music ... At a given location, plants,. fungi,. animals and humans could be used to drive sound sculptures, and receivers could be tuned to radio, gamma and cosmic rays... live musical interactions in anew ecology of sound."]

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bacchanale Maxfield's most remarkable piece, created in 1963. A surreal mix of spoken poetry, read by Edward Field, who also plays clarinet, drum and typewriter; live violin s~ping noise; . Korean kayagum sanjo;·· Spanish f~enco; treated violin sounds; treated saxophone played by Terry Jennings; underwater clarinet sounds; live jazz recorded at the Five.Spot. This eight-minute montage appears.to begin in an·overlapping se" tieS of rooms, then· fall through space into. a subterranean, slow-motion zone .

. the blues according to ..•. Terry Riley, whois:speaking on the telephone from his home in California, his voice strangely reminiscent of Henry Fonda ... In their search for absolutes, a number of music .critics have looked to Riley asthedeimitive starting point for various trends: minimalism, extreme repetition, all-night trance improvisations and titpe-delay systems. Pieces such as In C, A Rainbow In Curved At,. andPoppy Nogood and the Phantom Bandwere important in their time because they signalled two

important .changes in'the. way the worlds of music· and commerceworked. One: a composer was writing pieces which had· grooves and improvised around modes (just like John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Frank Zappa and half the rock bands in psychedelia), that sounded as if psychotropics had been in" volved at some stage· of thecomposttional process, and that . explored new technology and studio processing, Two: the albums were packaged.by Columbia ~ rock albums, despite being on the Masterworks series, so implying.that the razor wire dividing so-called classical, rock,jazz, art and commerce hadbeen cut in a few places. Never mind the embarrassing occurrence of hippie-speak on the In C sleevenotes ~"No preconceptions, you just dig it" ~ the sort of thing that Oliver Stone might exhume for another chapter of his 1960srevision-· ism. The music, asm~icians and sleevenote writers love to

. .,

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say, spoke for itself. EsSentially modest, Riley downplays all of this. After all, his contribution to the late twentieth-century . mix emerged out of collaborative work and inlprovisations with La Monte Young, Pauline Oliveros and Chet Baker. After the first-flush of enthusiasm for minimalism and systems music, Riley and Young tended 'to be dismissed as old hippies; past their peak, while Philip Glass, Steve Reich, John Adams 'and Michael Nyman' slid with varying degrees of composi- , tional . credibility into a new orthodoxy of avant-garde populism. But as Riley says, life goes in cycles. Suddenly, the open works of Riley and Young seem more expansive, more useful to the fractured nature of music in the 1990s than all that knitting-machine repetitiveness and,its mutations. , I am asking Riley about a 1960 composition called MesCaline Mix, mentioned in passing in the explanatory notes for a recent piece, Cactus RQsary. Was there any great Significance in the title? "Oh yeah, the psychedelic movement was just be. ginning thel1~,he says, "but it was definitely happening. I remember Richard Maxfield brought me my first psilocybin mushrooms in '62 or something like that. He was very into psychedelic drugs before he died. Well, all kinds of drugs, unfortunately. He took some very strong things and maybe his death could be explained by that." Riley met him at Berkeley, where Maxfield impressed everybody with his resourceful, ness, using Simple tone generators and spliced tape to create imaginary landscapes. He patiently edited pieces for Riley, displaying the obsessive, perfectionist nature that goes handin-hand with the skiIllike a curse. "He would make several splices per inch" , says Riley. "He was avery top notch editor at CBS. That's what he did. He spliced together performances of Horowitz and all these classical artists. That's where he developed his technique." Mescaline Mix was a piece made when Riley was music director for the Ann Halprin dance company, and was used to accompany a dance called The Three Legged Stool. "It was recorded tape .loops that ~re all ,mixed from people' playing

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the piano, laughing, different soUnds I'd collected here and there, explosions. 1 did it all by overlaying tape loops", he explains. After a lengthy period of composing solo piano works in just intonation and string quartet compositions for the Kronos Quartet, R,iley's 1993 recording of Cactus Rosary seems a return to his sources: jazz, blues, electronic keyboards, ritual. Towards ~e end of the路 piece,路a blues emerges, like a microtonal, itiStrumentalversion oOohn Lee-Hooker's "Boogie Chillun" , a trumpet peeking out from the shuffling rhythm every now 'and again. Riley tells me about the piece. "I've been a very close friend of Bruce Conner, the artist, for . many years", he says. "He sent me this magazine which had an interview with him and Robert Dean. Bruce started out the interview with Robert Dean by holding out two peyote rattles. They were both made by an Indian shaman. One was made with a pepper shaker, an aluminium and one was a traditional gourd type rattle made by the same shaman. He said that something would be signified by shaking each tattle~ instead of him giving an answer sometimes, which, I thought was a very nice way to structure the interview. Then 1 started writing this piece and I thought of making the peyote ~ttle the centrepiece and having the piece kinda having the feeling of what it would be like to be at a peyote ritual; or at least some kind of experience like that. 1 nota~ it differently aild I put it in a special tuning, using the time-lag effect, which I'used to use in some of my earlier music. I was thinking of a pyramid shapewhenI wrote it. The conducter shakes the peyote rattle; He's Sitting in the centre ina t:raJ.lSparenttent, which is lit theatrically, and then the other ptayersare gathered around him." Fond of the music of Bach, Debussy, Ravel, Bartok andJohn Coltrane, Rileywas a Piano player originally. "I started out learning honky tonk and ragtime with Wally Rosen," he says, "a very good dixieland player." He played solo piano in bars, learning how to engage an audience and expand outwards from familiar themes into flights ofimagination, taking the

can,

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innocent listener with him without causing too much discomfort in the process. "Improvisation is important", he insists. "Being able to create music on, the spot and to keep it open. That was the message that kept coming through to me from John Cage: keep it open." His contemporaries - Terry Jennings and La Monte Young ... had both played saxophone since their youth. Riley wrote a piece for a player named Sonny Lewis but then felt the need to learn the instrument just to play his own composition. Under the influence of La Monte Young and John Coltrane, whose soprano playing in the mid 1960S persuaded many tenor and alto players to add the itistrument to their repertoire, Riley took up soprano to play Dorian Reeds,路 Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band and, later, film soundtracks such as Les yeux fermes. The straight hom has close affinities to the'Iridian double reedshehnal and nadaswaram, or the Middle-Eastern flute, the ney, all of which are played with strong vocal qualities. "When I started studying Indian music", he says, "I aband9ned the saxophone because 1 wanted to sing." With his Persian Surgery Dervishes album, two live solo performances f~r electric organ and tape delay system, recorded in Los Angeles and Paris in 1971fi2, Riley became the guru of trance路路improvisation. and meditati"e music. "You can get high by getting in one groove", he says. "You can get high by staying on one note, there's ,different ways but that's definitely a way to ecstasy. Things come around in cycles. I'm sure this has happened other times in history too, even in the West, when people try to organise their music so it can be experienced in a different way. For instance Satieimd Vexations. It probably happens every once in a while. It's a real need to experience music in a deeper, more continuous way, rather than as wallpaper, or a very quick hit.. I've been having young kids come up here to talk to me who are inVQlved with the ra"e, full-moon events here in California. They seem to think there's a big connection between the things I-did then and the things' they're doing now. I think it's fine. I

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think there is a connection." In the repetitive ~ figures of UK add·house records by Baby Ford, A Guy Called Gerald or 808 State, back in 1988, Terry Riley's influence seemed tQ have located itself in an arena of machine-trance and drcadian ecstasy which was not always consdous of his existence. Mixmaster Morris was ~ll a~ of his allnight concerts,however, and claims them as a central influence on his campaign to make listeners "lie down and be counted". Riley recalls this brief·but notorious period of all-night performances: "The fust one I was asked to do was at Philadelphia College of Art. Before that I hitdn't thought about even doing it myself but afterI'd had this experience of playing for people over a period of eight hours and having·them bring their sleeping b;tgS and hammocks, people brought food and spent the whole night. It·felt like a great alternative to the ordinary concert scene. It was '67 and '68. By '68 Ididn't do any more. I was playing Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band and Keyboard Studies. Then later on, Rainbow In Curved Air. It was always the same pieces, but very long, long versions of them. It takes a sense of urgency out of music that you have performing over a short period of time. ThiS way, you could have long periods where the music could be saying not particularly anything, just waiting for a chance to develop. I also felt very comfortable with the audience in that situation, because they came there to hang out for a long time and they ~eren't. coming to get a hit and then walk away and go someplace else. This was gOing to be the whole night's event so you developed a kind of feeling, like you were a sort of channel for the energy that was coining in from the space. You were aU joining together;· which was more of a ritualexp~ri ence." Later, during thefusthalf of the 1970s,he played lengthy solo cortcerts in France and Italy, but none of these lasted aU night. Tansen's enemies were determined to ruin him. "Make him sing

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DeepakRaag. He will bum himself to death'" ... "II" .. , -That's abrlIUant ideal" ...

"TilJs time I'm done for. The hCat ot Deepak Haag's notes tOms tile

-bodf intO ashes!! Nowooder the com1iers look triumpbanL

"Megh Haag brings rain and cools the heat. H someone singstbis nag simultaneously I have a cbanceto survive •.. but who?? .•.w

_Dolly rum, Tansen._ cOmic

"Attbat time, about 1970s," Ten-yRlleysays, "lgot really seriOusly involved with Indian clasSical music, which gOes on all ilight anyway, so by that time I had transferred interest into that. IndJab. classical music was doing the kind of thing that I was-tryirig to produceoo_my own, this kind ofdeep-01Odal drect-that each raga has, -the psychological effect and spiritualeffect that the ragas carry, I was starting to sense in the music lwas producing. When I foond~diari classical music, there _was a great tradition a!mldY developed over several centuries bY at1:ists.There ~ a ~: ~ of work 1 felt ilecessaryto beCOme acquainted Wtthand 'find oUt how they did this ahd jUst how the music worked, because it seemed to assimilate what I trying to do anyway.:-

was

calligraphy The Royal Albert Hall, summerl994. Bidur Mallik and his two sons, -Ramkumar and Premkumar, can be linked to a time when the dhrupad singing stYle to which they have de· , vOted themselves was, cre~with supernatural powers; They daim'that their family can be traced back to 1790, when Radhakrishna and Kartarani MalIik averted a drought by singing Meg" raga. the magical-nag which 'brings rain and 'cools the heat. Those who have never seen this austere, -abStract, music perCormedcan find the experience almost comiCaljyet -die- tiC:auty of tone isprofound~ 'Though a smaIl JJWl, Bidur Mallik swooped down to-very low-pitched, sustalriednotes - ~out-a safety net of'Vlbtato, jumping through outlandish

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intervals as if he was engrossed in an arcane form of audible mathematics, inscribing the physicality of his notes hi the air with graceful hand ~nts. The hands seem to coax the notes, ~w thein out. hold them·in one spot for incrc:dlbIe sustains or float them on their way. Othc:rworldly in its unadorned beauty. the dhrupad style is the closest that vocal improvising comes tocalHgraphy. A~r hearing this grouP. I feel that there is nothing else in the world I need to experience. But then. Rajan and Sajan Misra explore a singleraag in khyal style for more than one hour. Khyal means fantasy. This stYle is lush, develOped in shaded increments that seem Calculated to bring an audience to intense . levels of perceptual awareness, opening in ravishing slow motion like the·birth of a butterfly, rich in ~onic sensuality. Thickly composed of two tambouras, electronic drone, harmonium, supporting vocals and plucked zither, the drone implies a universe of possibilities over which Rajan and Sajan sustain perfectly tuned notes, holding them ·in the air with their hands until every molecule has dissolved into .the infinite sound pool. Tabla drums patter in raindrops. Another world wheels into view, an aesthetic just as enticing as the dhrupad which pre.ceded it. "The note: a taut bow. Syllables: true arrows. Their target: ecstasy", Haridas nagar has said. The virtuosity and grace of allowing pure simplidty to flow in unbroken streams. Many years .ago, I saw the Dagar brothers, Mohinuddin and Aminuddin, the .exalted exponents of dhrupad, singing·in two very different settings; The first, Golder$ Green UJlitarian Church, was attended by a predominantly Indian audience. Disturbin8Iy, they squirmed" gesticulated, sighed and called out with every exquisite parabola, every held note, every tremolando and daring ornament. Despite the severity of the dhrupad style, this physical, vocal appreciation was theresponse they expected. The nagar brothers could trace their famlly back to Vrija Chandra, or Dagurl, a rival of Tansen, singer to the court of the emperor Akbar in the sixteenth and

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. early seventeenth centuries. I· saw them sing·againina more New Agesettirtg in HampStead. Here, the non-IndJan audience was -rapt, sllent, -physically inert and dutifully lotus-posi- tioned, hungry for higher consciousness. At half-time, the Dagar brothers slipped out for qgarettes, smoked fervently in -the open doorway.

resonant intervals For 'Terry Riley, along with laMonte Young,Marian Zazeela; Jon Hassell, Don Cherry, Lee Konitz, Jon Gibson, Henry Flynt and dancer Simone Forti, Pandit Pran Nath·was the teacher. Rlley explains the distinction between ktrana Style and other forms of IndJan classical vocal music: "Kirana . is the most lyrical. It has the attention to the notes that dhrupaddoes, but it has the-imagination and lyrical effect of khyal. Pran Nath ·himself is a synthesis of styles he observed and studied. He has a unique place. Rlley reiterates Jon Hassell's view of Pran Nath's core teaching. "He always ~d the fitst lesson was you go inside the tone. You're in the tone and the tone is in you~ To really feel, when you're singing, like you are that note. It has a physicality about it. That was a very big.thing for me, because it was something,l was approachinganyway." This concern with tone and accurate pitching dovetails _ with Rlley's and Young's move away from twelve-tone equal temperament - the system ·by which- semitones are' slightly adjusted in order to make all the intervals ofthe octave equal.' Wrlttenfor all the major and minor keys,l.s. Bach's The WeUTempered Clavier was one of the earliest works to explore and publicise.the possibilities of equal temperament. Allowingfor nwdulation between keys, the system has dominated Westemmusic since the beginning of the eighteenth century. Fixed-pitch modem instruments such as the piano and organ are tuned to- equal temperament, although many synthesisers now allow retuning; increasingly, both software writers an<i inStrument bullders are explorlngaltemativesto the out.,ofIt -

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tune instruments with which Westerners (and anybody else in the world who accepts European musical standards) have become accustomed. 1he American c:omposer and instrument inventor Harry Partch, havinghimseJf iejected equal temperament, devoted a large section of his weighty but witty book Genesis of a MflSlc to the subject. "With this tuning", 路he wrote in the mid 1940&, "the musiclaD. could rosy around all day long with Completely satisfying.路 undeviating monotony." R.etun,ed keyboards can sound strange on first hearing. despite the fact that theY have been returned to an accord with the physical law!! of nature. But the popularity of blues, or the musics of Africa and Asia, along with the odd tunings that can arise When detuned digital samples are overlaid, has ensured a growing openness to music not .played in equal temperament. "The practice of singing resonant intervals, the intervals that are really in tUne," says Riley, "is probably ~ prevalent in the world than equal temperament. Just in the Western world in. the last hundred and fifty years. It's not . strange really. We've sorta got into this black and white movie and the colour just for a minute there shocks us. And it is very . colourful. In the coining.yeats, the frontier will be tuning." Before recording the alb~ w~ch established his reputation, Riley worked with jazz trumpeter Chet Baker in Paris. In the early 195Os, Baker had played in the Gerry Mulligan Quartet. a piano-less group with Mulligan playing baritone saxophone, Chico Hamllton on drums and Bob Whitlock on bass. Recorded in Los Angeles and hugely influential on the West Coast "cool school", Mulligan's group now sounds. interesting, if slightly tepid, for its exploration of melodic cycles, circling and weaving in improvised coUnterpoint withf,n the - format of popular songs. "Jeru", forcxample, can be imagmed as an acoustic precursor to IUley'sdervish improvisions. Uke Terry Rlley (and The ModemJazz Quartet's John LewJs), Mulligan was inspired by Bach. "I consider.the string bass to be the basis of the sound路 of the group, " .Mulligan wrote, "the foundation on which the soloist builds his line, the main

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thread around wblchthe,two homs weave their conttaP1,1Otal ~terpJay. It is possible with two volc~ to imply the sound of , , or impart the ~ofany ~ or series of chords, as Bach _ shows us so thoroughly and enjOyably in,his inventions;"

This emphasis on th~f~ possib111ties of jazz, whether smaU group or orchestra, resurfaced cont1nuallyamong white' musicians, adding another tension, often a racialopposltlon, within the music;- As Miles DaVis complained in his autobiography: "What'bothered me more than anything was thataJl.the critics ~starting to talk about Chet Baker in Gerry Mulligan's band like he was the second coming of Jesus, Christ... As is still the case" the problem was not so much,the music (thoUghthatcoul<.t be bloodless), or, the musicians, but, ' , the critical'hype Which-surrounded it. Davis himself, George Russell, Andrew Hill,'Chico Hamilton, Johti J.ewis,OJ:nette , Coleman and Eric Dolphy were all exploring areas ofvagudy' common interest. ,Dolphy, for example, recorded tapes influen~ by Indian andJapanese music before his untimely death. in 1964; his Out ToLtmch 'albUni is an enduring example of how eclectic interests can' be integrated into music which sounds ,at once utterly familiar yet from another dimension. And Omette Coleman's:interest in Third Stream,~dent ona number ofmmpositions for ,sUpposedly non-jazz instrumeo:路 tation, has made a ~t1ng impact. His playing with Dolphy, Scott La Faro, Jim Hall and The Q)ntemporary String Quartet on Gunter Schuller's Variants On, a Theme of Thelonlus, ' MOnk, can be-',insttuctive1ycompared with the Coleman/ Howard Shore ~dtrack to David Cronenberg's film:ofNa- " ked Lunch (the best thing about the film incidentally). What was considered an aberration, a heresy, in 1961 becomes the' main theme, to, a major motion:picture in the 1990s.' Yet the list of cOol~l and so-called Third St:reamWhite musicians, wh9SC, music' could gravitate towards ,.a kind' of poUte,formal-experim,entati as opposed to' bard bop's self. co~ousbl~es-rootedness" o~ the more open expression of, free jazz that emerged. ~.the ~ofdle 1950s, is extraoi'dlnary:, .

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Claude Thornhill, Gil Evans, Lelinie Tristano, Lee Konitz and Warne Marsh, cellist Fred Katz, Jim Hall, Dave Brubeck and Paul Desmond, Paul Hom, Stan Kenton, Bob Brooklneyer and Jimmy Guiffre, Bill Evans, Scott LaFaro, Gil Meu,e (soundtrack composer for The Andromeda Strain), Clare Fischer (later to arrange strings for Prince, The Fanilly and Jill Jones at a time when Paisley Park was ata creative peak), Gunter Schuller and Don Ellis all leaned, with varying degrees of artistic' ~uccess but a generally . high路 level of commercial acumen, towards colouratio~,路 impressiOnism, counterpoint and self-conscious rhythmic experim~tation. This period of jazz, or this sector within this period, has given birth to some interesting developments: ~ composer John Barry studying by post with Bill Russo, a Stan Kenton arranger, shortly before composing Beat Girl, "The JamesJ;lond Theme" and his first Bond scores; Gavin Bryars's admiration for the precise, mathematical bass playing of ScottLaFaro in the Bill Evans Trio; the influence路 of cool school alto 'saxophonists such as Paul Desmond, Lee Konitz and Bud Shank on John Zorn; Jon Hassell's extrapolations from Gil Evans and the Evans, Mulligan, John Lewis, Miles Davis Birth of the Cool sessions; Harold Budd's fascination with pianist Lennie Tristano; and the aforementioned collaboration between Prince and Clare Fischer. Some of these players touched upon.areas later developed into full-blown movements. Don Ellis' was using sitars, clavinets and strange percussion in his' orchestra, playing tru.m.pet through a Corin Multivider with loop delay, Antonin Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty name checked on the album sleevenotes and sttll sounding corny. And. 'Lee Konitz, who later experimented with electric saxophone and overdubbing, participated in Lennie Tristano's free improvisations . -"Intuition" and "Digression" - in 1949. "We .had rehearsals . at Tristano's home", Konitz told me in 1987. "We'd try some of that", he sald, forming his fingers into a joint-holding position. "Have a little taste, you know; arid just start playing. We'd

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bitit right away. We did ,souie of that at the concerts and it was tbriUing.--1n his booklet:notes for OmetteColeman's IJeauty Is a Rare 7hingboxed set of Atlantic recordings; Robert ' Palmet assesses these-early free~ons路.as failures. "It -was anJntriguing experiment-, he writes, "but without a firm grounding in the blues the music tended to simply meander - in counterpoint; without a basis in vernacular rhythms, it failed to really go anywhere." True enough, -although passion C:xistedbefoiethe blues and besides,lIl1l$icnot going anywherebione of the most fertile devdopments ofth!= twentieth century. Perhaps the ptQblem lay with Tristano's style (and the style ofbJs disdples). When deeply moved, Tristano's most . . expressive response was "Wow". His playing was. gripping for being so fluendy obsessive, rather than open-heartedly expressive. Without a channel f~rthat obsession, the fluency became aimles!s and introVerted. ., Not that int.rovcrsion -is such a bad thing either. Chet Bakees introVersion was integral to his appeal. Uke Bill Evans, a . pianJst whoSe pelluddttanquillity made melancholy sound Uke a Zen. state, Chet Baker had qualities which shone through the hype./"<;het was Ii wonderful master of understatement", says Riley. Despite the style-fixation romanticisation ofBaket's heroin addiction through the 19805, the still clarity of Chet Baker Sings and Chet Baker & Strings survives. "He has a relationship to Pran Nath in my mind -. deep lyricism, a lot of - depth in the mUSiC, but immediate appea1.to the listener. Chet .Baker could -ba\Ye been a POP. star; was to a certain degree a ~pstar.Wecame together iii. a ~ stra;nge way. I was Working as a kind ofarrangerofhls music, but the ideas that I had, I started~oping these looping ideas. We were working on a路theatre ptQject.together with Ii director named, Ken Dewey. .When I-wOrked with Chetl recorded his quartet in Paris at that time individually, and then I put it all together ~cally and then they played against it. It's a very .ditJ.'e.rent form. but when you listen to it, ~ can still hear it's Chet Baker." RainboW In Curved Air, recorded in 1968, seemecUi)re a

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.rock record at the time, although CBS also marketed Don Ellis's big band albums- Shock Treatment"and ElectrlcBath - along with Walter Carlos's Moog showcase, Switched On Bach, in the same way. But Rainbow In Curved Air, in par. ticular, exemplified the transition from music which. is interpreted from written instructions on a .score to music which emerges from a combination of composed melodic and rhytlunic elements, improvisation and sonic manipulation through technology. Riley played electric organ, electric harpsichord,rocksichord, dumbec drum: and:tambourine on the album. "The recording was made on the first eight-track machine at CBS", Riley explains. "That was a chance to do a lot of stuff that I had been trying to do in my home studio on my little stereo machine. I could eXpand much more in the studio with overlaying and overdubbing the ideil& that before had been a little bit one dimensional. I remember they just wheeled the eight track in. We were going to do it on four tritckbut the technology hit so fast, cooll1stereo to four track to eight track. Eight tracks at that time seemed like the universe,youthought you'd neverrun out of tracks." He laughs at that naivety. "But I ended up feeding some live tracks into the master. I brought my organ into the mixing room so we fed a couple of tracks in and mixed them live." the machine becoming patt路of the work; encroaching on performance in real time

·9

alt.ered states Iv:· machine RyuIchI Sakamoto; Erik Satte; KrajIwerk

. Technology canrechJcelivl:: perfQrmanceto an anachronism.. In the .past ~de,Computershave· ~livered cybernetic music into realms which re~ beyond human capabilities.. For example, a concert stage in London: Ryuichi Sakamoto is "faxing mC$S1ge5 to ·friends around the globeduring "~p the World", a song in which mac:h!nes oo-moreofthe work than"thehuma.nS. Bl1t anfsense of:diminishnlCntwhi~ may 'come from this new1"OIe of iedQ1ldaht.operator, tends to . . be compensated by tlte satisfaction of feeling connected across great distances. to like. t;Ilinds.Sakamoto, a fOQ1lder member of technO'poppioneers' YcllowMagi~ Orchestra,· is driven by the idealism of this connectedness. "I'm not a representative ofJapanese culture", he insists. "I hate to divide ~ . world ... east and west. is the edge? My muslcismw;h more melting. All the different things are layered at the same . time. It represents a sense 9f utopia My ~ew is always looking outside of Japan. One of my friends, he's a philosopher and Critic~ He m.ac.te a word: oUtem,ationalism. mterDationaIism is stilI based on nationality.. Being outematlonaI is like Moses in the desert. There's no. COUntry. There is just trade, transportation, communication and merchants, but there's nationality. It's a 1Jtopia and I like it. I don't want tobe]apanese. I want to be a dtizen ofthe world. It sounds very hippie but Hike that." .

:where

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mad computer A hi·tech studio in west londOn: blond wood, perforated metal screens, the blaCk padding and chrome rings of a chic S&M dungeon.' A Mitsubishl TV sCreen, ~computer monitors. A lead connecting mainframe to memory, is malfunctioning. Technological ennui. The black ice, as William Gibson called it, meditates. On one screen, moues, pyramids and lozenges mutate; on another, devolving linear rectangles flick clockwise around the frame. The only SQUnd is the soft rattle of computer keystrokes. Outside the control room, the chef is playing table tennis with the programmer. Inside, Ryuichi Sakamoto plays a loud distorted version of Erik Satie's Gjlmnopedles (a recurrent'obsession with the'Japanese: a swaggering bouzouki version turns up during a walking scene in Beat Takesbi's film Vtment CoP). Later, observing the crea· tion of music for his film of The Sheltering Sky, Bernardo Bertolucd walks into a practical joke. In the live room, a com· puter·linked Yamaha grand piallois pJaYing all by itself, the ghost' of a machine. Seeing the keystisiDg' and 'falling, se~ ingly ,without human intervention, ,Bertolucci appears' spooked. After the laughing has died down, he sits with ~sist, ant director Fernand Moszkowitz,both .looking glum and creased on a charcoal couch. ·C'est mo~e, cette com- , puter" ,saysBertolucd. ·C'esttou", Moszkowitz agrees. They -both lapse into a grumpy silence. Moszkowitz's head drops back in sleep.

awkward silences Compos~g music in 1917 fa Parade, a ballet collaboration between Erik S~e, Jean,Cocteau, Pablo Picasso and Leonide Masslne, Satie scored for typCwriter,plstol shots, steamship whistle and siren alongSide 'more'· conventional instrumentS. ·Satie caught the harshness of contemporary life", wrote a Satie biographer, James Harding. "He mixed ragtime and music·hall in, a blend which -expressed both the ugliness of a mechanical, commerdalised age, and the

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spirituality that is crushed beneath it." Thanks to tbe conc(s(: melodic: charm of the Dols GymnoPldles;'his best-known piano work, Satie has ,~n _ embrac:ectby,advertising, ,hisfil'st.Gymnophlle,used itl· ~(!Vi~ slon conuneroials forCadblU"Y's chocolate and,SttepsJIs throat ' lozenges. But despite his acceSsJbllity and the seemingly direct (though often ironic) humanity of his music, I think of Satie as the ~t machine composer. In certaip respect,s,he U~Uke,apmchine: weadng the ~ gfey velvet suits~· day,thenreplacing these '!Ith a uniform of black-suited ~ spectabllity. He drank beer, cognac.and calvadossteadily in Parisian bars and cafes until cirrhosis of the Iivcr killed,him. He devised a p~ise ·timetable With which ,·.artists could re~ their Jives inSpiration from 10.23 to 11.47 ..• I ~ eat white food ••. I only sleep with one eye shut ... I wel,f a white bonnet, white stocking!i and white waistcoat •.." , His Virtuosity with such jokes and satires has left il residue of amblguity. Now,that some ofSatie's most affecting works the Gymnopedles and Trois GnossIennes - veer dangeiously close to being appropriated as cliches of middle-class easy lis-, , ~, hiseiaborate, deadpan ~~nate as blueprints for the·musicofour time. His ~t!'ameublement" for example, is cited ofte'n as a visionary precursor of ambient ' music, Muzak, dinn~ party music; interval niusic, Walkman music, elevatol'music and all the other functionary fill·ins and backgrolinds,highbrow and loWb~, that now accompany our Uves. 'This Kfurnishing music" was devised after Satie ~,friends had been dmen from their lunch ~ loud restau· rant music. As always, Satie'weaved dangerops specUlations with barbed wire. With such a seJf,.p1'QteCtive, VQlnerabIe man, disengaging~ from serious purpose is vinually iDlpwisi. ble. But,in building a theorY of furniture music, a n~ anc;l utiUtarian background for all spaces, and all activities, Satie suggested the second of two, opposingcbaracteristic:s of ~ bient music,. On the one hand tberewas Parade, a ~ri~t~

even

K •••

and

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new styles, sounds and technologies which drew the environmental into itself; on the other there was the furnishing music, a style of composition which blended into any environment. In the former, the environment is transmuted by the composer; in the latter, the composer is transmuted by the environment. "I imagine it to be melodious", Satie wrote of his Muslque d'ameublement, "softening the. clatter of knives and forks Without dOmiriating them, Without imposing itself. It would fill up the .awkward silence that occasionally descends on guests. It would spare them the usual commonplaces. At the same.timeit would neutralise the street noises that tactlessly force themselves into the picture." But even the furniture music, when Satie came to present it, did not conform to my binary formula. During the interval of a Max J~cob play staged at the Galerie Barbazanges in the Faubourg Saint-Honore, Satie organised an experiment in neutrality With Darius Milhaud (later to become a friend of the ModeroJazz Quart~t - a: group that some might see as the ultimate in highbrow路 furniture music). In this instance, the compositional method used by Satie and Milhaud invites "various descriptions - postmodem, for example, or plunderphonic - since the music consisted of snatches taken froO! works by other composers. These were repeated over and over by musicians scattered around the room. The idea of neutrality was ahead of its time, however, since in an irony worthy of his own sarcastic wit, Satie had to rush around the room, commanding the audience to ignore what they were hearing.

ifeel good Del Webb's High Sieqa Casino,Lake Tahoe, Nevada, 1986. At the epicentre of the casino, a shrill nightmare of slots,blackjack, video sports betting, craps and all known arid legal forms of American financial haemorrhage, is a small circular bar. In. the centre of the bar' is a tiny stage revolving around a thick pillar. Inexorably circling, trance-like, in torture of blandness, of slug-like tranquillity, of morbid cynicism,

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ateKdiny and Wayne, who :play a thin, J?arely recognisable coun~t of]ames Brown's "I Feel Good" on electric keyboard and Fender guitar. The bar is ringed by losers, drinking to oblivion, their deadeyes~ nOthing as Kenny and Wayne pass and vanish, pass an~ vanish.. Noboay hears a thing: . .

vexations.

. Satie used the deVice of repeating short, neutralfragments of melody for his soundtrack to Rene Clair's short film of 1924, Entr'acte: DiscontiIluous,' pounded ostiBato cells of repetitive material which go nowhere before giving way to the nexH:heme, they clearly: prefigure the strain of minililaJ.ism reptesented路by Steve. Reich, .Philip Glass and 路MichaeINyman. .Inhis 1974 book, Experlmental Musk, Nyman quoted ROger Shattuck on Satie's Bntr'aCte music: "Satie merely uses eight meaSures as the unit that closely matches the average 路Iengthof a single shot in tbe路tlIm ... The transitions. are as abrupt and as arbitrary as the cuts in the film." In another Satie piece, vteu.x sequIns et vteilles cuIrasses, Satie instructs the pianist to repeat the final passage 380 times, the early equivalent of a locking groove.at the end of a vinyl record. His most notorious (and vexed) explotation in repetition,: boredom and

most

eCstasy,

however, was Vexations.

John Cage discovered the piece in 1949 during a Parisian sojourn. Composed in 1893, this brief passage for piano was . acoolnpanied by an instruction: ':In order tOJ?lay this piece' 840 times the p.,erformer should prepare beforehand in deep silence and serious immobility." James Harding takes this as "exhibitionism", a "laboured joke" t despi~ the fact that so much of Satie's wpm explored extremes of simpHdty or repetition, and despite the. fact that Satie's jokes' irtvartably . concealed a serious purpose~ cage certainly regarded the piece highly, as 'did London-based experimental composers UkeGavin Bryars,ChrlstOpher Hobbs (a member ofAMM dur- . in&the late 19605) andl\{i,cbael Nyman..cage premiered

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VexaUonsin 1963, in a perforinance played in shifts by eleven pianists, lasting from 6 p.m. on 9 September to 12.40 on 11 September. Among the performers were John Cale, working路 that year in La. Monte Young's group. Bryars and Hobbs gave theft own performance of the piece in Leicester in 1971, writing comments during their rest periods. "Uke falling aSleep while driving on the motorway" , is a note made by Hobbs and quoted by Nyman. Another strong arg\I1D.ent to set.againstsceptics is the itpmediate awareness, as soon as the repetitions .begin, that the psychological effect 路of these phrases intensifies as the music repeats. A s4"ange lack of resolution brings the listener back to zero at each new beginning. Where the number 840 from is anybody's guess, but to listen f()ra IOIlg time is more effective than listening just once. Satie had certain interests in common withVarese. He studied alchemy, the occult and Medieval music forms such as plainchant. Vexations turns out to be a heading from a work writteubYParacelsus, the sixteenth-cennu-y alchemical philosopher and physician who wrote repeatedly about "the natural light of man" and the tranquillity of mind that would come at路the conclusion of the alchemical process. In one respect Satie'sprepaottory instruction suggests a meditation through whiCh the ability to play this arduous piece will shine through and be rewarded by illumination; in another respC:ct the demands of immobility folloWed by a need for inhuman self-control and sustained repetitious action suggest an assumptiOn of machine characteristicS,a meditation through which the body becomes robot. By composing a work which few humans would feel capable of 'Q11dertaking, Satie gazed one hundred years ahead of himself to a time when music of aU kinds could not be played by humans without the assistance路ofmachines.

carne

ch-ch ch-ch-ch 1987. Halfway through the eighth bar of a brisk cover version of Kraftwerk's hit tune, "The Model". available ona

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lime-green cassette published by the Saba Kuang Heng Record and Tape Company, familiarity is shredded beyond repair. The tempo is dragged down by about thirty-four beats per minute, the rhythm turns Latin, a beat that in the hands of a vocalist such as Cheo Feliciano ml~t be a smouldering salsa montuno. The electric organ slips back a few decades from quasi-Kraftwerk to the pop-psychedeUa of The Seeds or ? and The Mysterians. nen the singing starts. The singer wears a white blouse with leg-o'-mutton sleeves and a mandarin collar, a white skirt, one black earring and one white. She sings in Thai, so the reason for this drastic segue from Kraftwerk 1978 into Thai pop 1985 via Latin garage-psychedelia 1966 is something of a: mystery. Kraftwerk's RalfHiitter wears a black leather coat. When he takes it off he reveals a black jacket underneath; Black shirt, black tie, black trousers, black shoes. The socks are white. The hair was once all black but now it's going grey on top. He -leans forward attentively in order to hear this singular version of his composition a little more clearly. "It's very good", he says in amused and clipped Eng1ish. "I like it. We should go to Thailand." Kraftwerk: "the original power station, the conductors, the operatives, the sound fetishists. For something like a decade and a half before this interview they had been creating Diisseldorf dance music by allowing machines to speak for "therilselves. "I remember we played a dance party in some arts centre in Diisseldorfin '71 ",says Ralf. "We were. not a fixed group in the beginning and the drummers were changing all the time because they were just banging and they wouldn't do any electronics. 'No! Don't touch my instruments.' One day we. had this gig at the arts centre and I had this little old drum " machine. At a certain moment we had it going with â&#x20AC;˘some "echo loops and some feedback and we just left the stage and joined the dancers. It kept on going for an hour or so." Kraftwer.k: sexual, pure concentration, edible. Constraint with humour. Camp. Boys in uniform. Expression through

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proportion. Emotion through detachment. Inspiration through work. "Machines dance, so to speak, ~ RaIf muses, "and repetition, rltythm,buUds. But that's more an artistic fiction." Minor qualitative differences do .. differentiate the Kraftwerk of Trans-Europe Expras in 1977, The ManMachine in 1978, Computer World in 1981, Tour de France in 1983 or Electric Caje in 1986. With devout classicism, the band aligned and .realigned a miniature collection of melodies and pulSes. "La COte d'Azur et Saint-Tropez, Les Alpes et Les Pyrenees, from station to station, DUsseldorf City~ meet Iggy Pop and David Bowie~ Business, Numbers, Money, People, I am adding and sUbtracting. By presSing down, a special·key pb!ys a little . melody, eln, %WeI, drel, vIer,fUn/, seeks, sieben, acht, Ichi, nl, san, skI, computer love, computer love, I call this number for a downtown date. The number you have reached has been disconnected. Boing Boom Tschak, Boing Boom Tschak." The '' . I' subject matter was thepbllosopby but deeper still was·the obsession with pure sound. Like Fragonard painting satin, Kraftwerk indulged their appetite for the sensuality of surfaces and· their depths in a setting that was contemporary, social and slyly ingratiating. Are}'OU ever seduced by SOund so much that form gets lost? I ask. "Mm" ,agrees Ralf. Your main . problem,l suggest. "No, not problem. Aim," be counters, . "because form we don't catefor too much." Is that the reason for the "travelling" form? "Autobahn", "Musique .Non Stop", "Europe Endless", ."Trans-Europe:Express" ,. "Tour de France". "Ja, ja", be agrees, "Letting yourself go. Sit on-the rails and· ch.-ch ch-ch-ch. Just keep going. Fade in and fade out rather than being dramatic or trying to implant into the music alogical order which I think is ridiculous. The flow· is much more ... adequate;.10 our society everything is in motion. Electridty goes through the cables and people - . bio-units.- travel from dty to dty. At one point they meet and then. - pkwllt. Why then should music be at a standstill? Music is a flowing artform."

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This isbenigtJ. futurism, returning.us to a post·war version of Marinetti dreaming about energy of distant winds, e1ectri· cal pOwer and the Danube running in "a straight line at 300 kilometres an hour" , antiCipating the deification of sporting speed· stars such as JuanFan~o, Ayrton Senna and cyclist Bernard Hinault, prophesying traVel manias and the fetishisation of communication regardless of content: on the ground - the destruction of homes to make way for roads and airports; in the aether - the intangible information infobahn, the so-called superhighway. For their stage show, Kraftwerk's visuals deliver. a deadpan celebration of technological utopia, a deadly efficient parody and confirmation of Germanic effi· ciency. Fo~ "Autobahn", the screens display grainy m.onochrome f"tlms of a golden dawn of motorway driving when roads were clear and happy nuclear families made pic· nics· on the grass verge to break their journeys. In t1ie late 1980s, Atlanta International Airport was, the brochures crowed; "the world's largest passenger terminal and second busiest· in the world. The airport is· the largest private employer in.Georgia, pumping a billion dollars annually into the local economy." Its internal transportation (as America describes anything that moves) was particularly striking to the Kraftwerk fan. While the little electric train burrowed its way from Concourse C to Baggage, a voice droned instructions and information in a Vocoded monotone. As the doors opened, another computer voice of a higher and less authoritarian pitch joined in for a minor symphony of sound poetry. When the American composer Alvin Lucier Wrote his North Amertca.n Time Capsule in 1967 for a Vocoder (de· scribed by Lucier as "designed by Sylvania Electronic Systems to encode speech sounds into digital information bits for transmission over narrow band widths via telephone lines or radiochannels"),the results made for difficult listening. Like much of Lucier's music,· the· theory was fascinating but the sound· seemed to be an inconsequential, unengaging by. product of a conceptualisation. In the. same way that

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Kraftwerkappropriated the doomed art o( sound poetry or evaded theory and transmuted the base metal of German electronic music into gold, so they successfully took the ·new technologies and baptised them in the mainstream of culture. "Industrial societies are today· worldwide", says RaIf. The ideal, he suggests, is· to have "artistic presence also. Not just big corporations, businesS, numbers, money, people; but art, music." Using the innovations, both profound and trivial, of the proliferating technological society was part of their aim to create a new Volksmustk. January ·1984. I'm sitting in the· bar- of New York's Copa Cabana with The Fearless Four, a now long-vanished electrohip-hop band, Their most enduring record, "Rockin' It" , now sampled formid-1990s' rap records, was a shameless and highly· creative reconstruction of Kraftwerk's "The ManMachine". "Kraftwerk - that's our soul group", mumbles The Great Peso over the muzak that mixes into the Copa's air conditioning. RalfHiitter's response to Kraftwerk's popularity in hip-hop reveals another aspect of machine-age thought, a reversal of the received dictum that art should elevate us above our surrOundings and transcend functionalism. "I'm not a musicologist" ,he says, "but I think black music is very environmental. It's very integrated into lifestyle. You can do your housekeeping ..." He scrubs the table energetically and suggests that Kraftwerk music is also good for this function. "When we started", he says, "electronics were either sciencelike- university, big academic titles - or space programme~. Our thing was alwayS to incorporate from everyday life. On the cover of 'Autobahn' is my. old grey VoIkswagenand the sounds also - it's the noise from two hundred or a thousand kilometres of the autobahn." He beeps the pulse code on his black digital watch and laughs. To extent, thiS was a reaction against bourgeois academic culture and the tyranny of theory. "For us it's something that's called in Germany the Intellektuell Ubemau - the intellectual building, sO huge,

20B

ocean of sound

Kafka-esque. For us that was never a problem.. We- came.from little train Sets and Blektrobaukasten - the post~war generation with these -little electric toy boxes. You immediately beconie child-Hlre]nyour approach." RaIf Hutter and Florian Schneider firSt met at a jaZz andimprorisationcourse organised bY the DUsseldorf Conservatory, Ralf with his electric organ and Florian with electric woodwinds and ali echo unit. They were fellow-members of whatRalf describes as thefatherlessgeneratioJl~'''We were born after the war", he says. "It was not inuch of an ~centive to respect our fathers." The Austrian/German heritage of BeethoVen,Mozart, Wagner and Brahms was weighty, yet the pop .world of the late sixties was also restrictive,partlcularly for non-English speakers. "Well organised", Ralfrecalls. "WoodStock-HIre. yOu had to look a certain way. It Was very strict and pre-programmed. We sneaked in -through the back doOr." The two of them played for parties after art gallery openings in tile industrial area of the Ruhr-theColop'e, Do~und; Essen, Diisseldorf beat. Sometimes they linked up with the emergent- free. jazz movement: musicians Such as Karlheinz Berger, Gunter Hampel and Peter BrOtzmann. "We didn't play three-minute singles", says RaIf, unnecessarily."The music would be long - building and Vibrating;" 'I'hey . also encountered the American avant-garde .then-touring-a similar art gallery circuit: La Monte Young, who in 1969 constructed a non-stop sound environment -of sine wave oscillators for thirteen days atthe Galerie Heiner Friedrich-in _ Munich; or Terry -Riley, whose In C had-attracted attention in many areas of music and who was playing concertS ofiengthy - duration in路 EUrope . .It was possible for them to watch 路Stockhausen at'work inColoBne,-as Ralf and Florian once did after taking LSD, live-mixing performances of his own

work.

This was the period when everybody began-to talk about world music. One of the lavish sideshows at the MunichOlympic Games of 1972 was avast exhibition - World Cultures

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and Modern Art - devotedtothe "~coUnter of 19th and 20th century European and music with Asia, AfriCa, Oceania. Afro· and Indo-America;'. So, La Monte Young in one room, Javanese coUrt gamdan musicians in another, with some sport and international terrorism as the main event. For HUtter and . Schneider, the opportunity to see and hear performing musi· cians from Asia or Africa led them to ask themselves some vital (though problematic) questions: "What is our ethnic cul· ture? ... Wasil bombed? We even included bomb sounds in . our m~c at one time. What's our sound? What's our environment? Am I mute?" In the IOing Klang studio in DUsseldorf, seemingly unproductive for many 'fea1'S now, there.are storerooms of historic· technology. Kr3ftwerk_ '70, Kraftwerk '75, Kraftwerk'81, Kraftwerk '87. "We ciIJ. ita ~ situation", says Ralf. "New . things comitlgin. rebuilding. The old mixing with the new depending on the~. We have a nearly organic mix. We are still using that:old cocktail music rhythm box and then, on the other hand, have the Synclavter. Our inst:ninlent is the . studio. It's out little labOratory, our Ekktrospielzlmmer, our toyroom. Post-computer is the new primitivism. Over the last five years you can print or design nwre low frequency sculpture which before wasn't. possible.. It would just be one big boom .. : or glue. That's the art of sfudio techno~ogy. You can sculpture the sound from 20 to 20,000 Hz. We might bammer . ~ granite oneparticuJir sound for-an enormous amount of . . time but thenJatetwe think more in terms of film; With c~. taiti sounds We are fetishistic. One special kltngthen somebody else klang. Modelling this to the utmost." Voice recording he describes inte~ms of physical impact. "They melt. It's like talking drums. Percussions. More can be done. I feel like we're just about to start." In retrospect. this was rather sad, since nothmg neW qnerged from the Kling Klang studio other.than an album of remixes. My last question:· Do you listen to other music? "No", re·· plies Ralf. "Maybe when we wander round. Sometimes when

art

1107

ocean of sound

we go out to daJlce. Sometimes radio. I don't have a stereo at home. We Osten to silence. We listen to fictitious music in our head. Think music."

10·

- ~.

·altered states V: lucid dreaming.· -

dreams, electronics; Aphe:Jc 'PwIn; global ~

The Marquis d'Hervey de Saint Denys, '~uthor of Dreams and How To GuIde Them in 1867, usedmecbanical music as a dream techni~. He WOUld ~ with women he desired during tunes which he: knew were available on musical boxes. Then he·would have the music box play that pieCe of music as he slept, an apparei1t1y.~ method of inducing the woman to appear·in'bis'dream.. \Vrult hap- '. pened, once they had appeared, is uni:ecOrdect .

. bedroom bores 1992. I interviewed RichardJames over the telephone. Still living in Kingston Polytechnic's halls of residence, he admitted that hise1ectronics studies were already slipping away .. as a career in the techno business began to take precedence. He had released "Analogue Bubblebatb 1", a,conversation be. tween simple breathy chordS and a selCction of rich squelches, and ·the follow-up, "Digeridoo", a fast, metallic piece <;lfdectronic minima.lism built around the overblown upper tones produced by. a'didg' (as this native Australian voice tube is now known among legiops of noo-hippledidgeri- . doo players and druminers). The legend wastbis: Aphex: Twin was a mad' inventor from Cornwall ,who b1,1ilthisown synthesisers; Surfing on sine waves, he would lead. a pack of young boffins ou~ of the computer screen glow of their

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bedrooms into the public domain of clubs, shops and' charts,

then back in and out of more bedrooms in a feedback loop of -infinite c:llinensions. So far, all true. "One of my hobbies-is looking into old analogue syn~",James told me then. His enthUSiasm路 for the music of o~er people was restricted to add, hard techno and experimental ambient from impeccably underground sources: Underground Resistance, Jack Frost and the-Circle Jerks, the New Composers of Leningrad. "I just like music that soUnds evil or eerie", he said. His biggest problem in life was the challenge of moving his instnu:Dents to club -PAs. "They ha~'t got cases", he said. "They're just circuits. Ifltook them out at the moment they'd all bust up." Fast-forward to January 1994. We sit in a King's Road restaurant drinkfng coffee. Despite the cold, afan sweeps the air above路us and, when I listen back to the tapes two days later, I hear periodic rumbles of distortion as the circulating air is blown Over my microphone. "If you're into wild stuff, it sounds bettef路.if it's dirty", Richard said; back in 1992. Worlc:~ ing under a variety of label~hopping pseudonyms, The Dice Man, Polygon Window, Aphex Twin, he had made a virtue of distortion. Not since the days-of Throbbing Gristle or the earliest, crudest Chicago house tracks of Farley FunldnKeith and Sleezy D had tape overload been redeemed so thoroughly or celebrated so fruitfuliy. With !heir visceral twitter, clubbing percuSsion and stone-age moans, tracks such as "'3 Yips", "I Keata" ,"Phloam" and "Flap' Head" sounded like reasonably conventional dance tracks that had been sabotaged in the cuttingrOOm by a driller killer. Selected Ambient Works Volume II, on the other hand, was a serene,' disembodied, episodic collection, the aural eqUivalent to a photo album filled with Polaroids of sunsetS and seascapes. James compared them with "standing in a poWer station on add". "Power stations are wicked", he says. "If yoU jUst stand in the middle of a really massive one so you get a really ~ presence and you'Ve got that hum. You'just feel electricIty around you. That's totally dream-like for DJe.". The Comishmancomesout in him. "It's

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just like a right strange dimension." Broaching this subject of dreams, he becomes animated. "This album is really specific", he says, "because 70 per cent of it is done from ludd dreaming." To have ludd dreams is to be conscious of being in a dream state, eVen to be capable of directing the action in a dream; The subject has been explored intensively by Celia Green, Director of the Institute of Psychophysical Research in Oxford. In her book Lucid Dreaming: The Paradox ofConsdQusness During Sleep, pro. duced in collaboration with Charles McCreery, she confirms that co~posing music or hearing music and environmental sounds are not uncommon in lucid dreams. Green's relevance to musicians exploring so-called路ambience, musics路 aimed at stimulating ecstatic states and generated by highly speculative machine-human relationships, was underlined by her agreement to record CDs outlining her theories for the emit series released by Nottingham-based Tune Recordings, spedalists in post-dance technological musiC. She has also written on the . subjects of apparitions and out-of-body experiences. In the latter, a person can look down on her or his own body as if consciousness had located itSelf suddenly outside the physical boundaries of the body. All of these hallucinatory manifestationschallenge consensus views of human perception; Ultimately, they realign us in the environment of ourselves; in tum, they must affect. our conception of environment and ambient. "I've been able to do it since lwas little", James explains, talking in a way which indicates either a serious person who has never been taken seriously or a practical joker who has been taken too seriously for !:po long. "I taught myself how to do it and it's my most predousthing. Through the years, I've done everything that you can路 do, including talking and shagging with anyone you feel that takes your fancy. The only thing I haven't done is tried to kill myself. That's a bit shady. You probably wouldn't wake up and you woUldn't know if it had worked anyway. Otmaybe you would. I often throw

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myself off skyscrapers or cliffs and zoom off rJ.ght at the last minute. That's quite good fun. 'It's well realistic. Eating food is quite smart. Uke tasting food. Smells as well. I make foOds up and sometimes they don't taste of anything -like they taste of some weird mish-mash of other things." , This contributes handsomely to路 the Aphex.Twin myth of the mad inventor, rarely sleeping,lost in boyish obsessions with combat, voyeurism and the internal workings of non-sentient,scIentificallyexplicable machines.路 It also appeals to a new generation ofteenage' mutant phobic white (game)boy screenies. Judged in a more positive light, the Aphex Twfu is staying true to his intuitive sense of the world. This is a world in which words and writlrig are overshadowed by more fluid, ambiguous media. His reason for playing live, which he no longer relishes, is to hear his music loud. Soundcheckirig,he locates the resonant frequencIes of a room.in order to ripple floors with sub-bass and shatter glass with high pitches. The reason for not naming., some tracks is related 'to his synaesthetic ability. Whenever he hears music he enjoys, he sees one of his .least favourite colours, whicJt is yellow. Rather than fix music with words (even invented nouns or numbers), he is searching for a way to identify compositions with colour. "About a year and a half ago", he says, "I badly wanted to dreaoitracks. Like imagine I'm in the studio and write a track in my sleep, wake up and then write it in the real world with' real instruments. I couldn't do it at first. The main problem was just remembering it. Melodies were easy to remember. I'd go to sleep in my studio. I'd go to sleep for ten minutes and write three tracks - only small segments, not 100 per cent ,finished tracks. I'd wake 'up and I'd only been asleep for ten minutes. That's quite mentaL I vary the way I do it, dreaming either I'm in my studio, .entitely the way it is, or all kinds of variations. The hardest thing路is getting the sounds the It's 1lever the same. It doesn't really come close to it. When you have a nightmare or a weird c:Ireaoi, you wake up and tell someone about it and it sounds really shit. It's the same for

same.

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sounds,路 roughly. When I imagine sounds, they are in dream form. As you get better at doing it, you can get closer and closer to the actual sounds. But that's only 70 per cent of it." Before he leaves, Richard explains his fondness for electronic musician friends such as Michael Paradinas, otherwise known as ~-ziq. "They've all got these strange personalities you've never seen in'the pop stardom world, people in their bedr09ms all day long; They make. four tracks a day", he says. "People like, me, bedroom bores, coming into the public ~. That's quite amusing." ,

virtually muzak For the sleevenotes of his first album :- Tango n' Vectif - ~-ziq cribbed liner notes from an album of Dutch low-tohighbrow sci-fi electronic music from a 1962 album, Song of the Second Moon, by Tom Dissevelt and Kid Baltan. "It sounds quite good," says Paradinas. "It's not cheesy. It's really jazzy. '!1tere's really long tracks, and short poppy ones which sound a bit like Thunderbirds theme tunes but more jazzy. It's a bit like Joe Meek. That's what Richard James said when I lent it to him. I haven't heard Joe Meek." In .Incredibly Strange Music Volume II, Jello Biafra describes the record as "avant-electronic-exotica" with an "ethereal '50s sci-fi mood" which sumS it路 up comprehensively. .Most people who read these sleevenotes took them at face value, an indication of some actual connection between 19908' techno recordists and the early pioneers of mustque concrete, tone generator .and tape experiments. "No longer valid is the old music-hall joke about the man who, on being asked what musical instrument he plays, replies, 'the gramop~one'!" the notes begin. "The cheerful melodies ....are served up with an accompaniment that is a fascinating stream of tapping 'sounds, hisses, bubbles, bumps, ratties, squeaks, whistles, moans, sighs, twitters, clanks, muffled explosions and unmuffled, explosions. This may appear to be a c6sy littie chaos, but these works are in fact as highly organised as anything conceived by Schonberg."

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True to form, Paradinas in person is·· painfully reserved. "I'm not too into this old electtollic stuff" , he says,"Kraftwerk have got some good melodies. Tonto's ExpandlngHeadbao:d -that's aU right. It is a bit cheesY. Cabaret Voltaire and stuff like that I could never get intc!. Human League, New·Order, DepecheMode, I used to listen to that stuff in my bedrooiit." Barely a flicker of reaction crosses his features when I pass on James's damlling new category of techno music: the bedroom bores. He knows that all of these musical categOries - intelli.gent techno, intelligent dance mUSic, electrollica, electromc llstelling.music, artificial intelligence, ambient techno - are senseless and divisive, more representative of the pretentious aspirations of fans· and Critics than the motivations of musicians. What they dorefl~ct" however, is an upsurge in domestically composed and·· recorded electronic music, thanks to the increasing a:ff~rdability of compact, userfriendly sequencing software anddlgltal audio recorders during the late 1980s.Atarfmanufactured a computer - the 1040 ST - fitted .with in and out ports for MIDI leads, the communicating chat;lnels that. carry information to and from computer, electrollic keyboards and dnim machines. It was cheap, so Atari became a·standard, both for the·bedroom bores and for the studios which they frequented at times when the limitations of the bedroom were unavoidable.. .For Paradinas, the prospect of being incarcerated in a pr0feSsional recording studio with a trained recording engineer isanlghtmare."You can't distort" ,he says, his body cringing even as he imagines the prospect. I encountered a similarreaction in 1991, visiting the home studio of LFO- Jez Varley . . and Mark Belt Set up in the attic ofa parent's home in . Lofthouse, near Leeds, the studio was full of dnim machines, digital samplers, synthesisers;· a mixing desk, tape machines, all racked and stacked alongside a personal computer. After making a hit single called. with typical economY. "LFO", Bell andVarley tried recording in Sheffield's Fon studio. Home studio· hum was annoyittgthem.·· but at Fon, the results were

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intolerable for being "too polished". So the purview of electronic music, its stereotypical conceits of coldness, detachment, mechanisation - the attributes of robot-mindedness and laboratory clinicism in old-fashioned hard sci-fi - were displaced by a determination to transmute machine sequencing and electronic sounds into organic, changeable, "soft" substances. Speaking in 1989 to Manchester's 808 State, the first UK post-acid-house act to make a long-term pop career for itself, I found the same .attitude. "Some of the best records are shoestring" ; said Graham Massey. Then, later in the interview, key words defined the difference between the emerging .techno generation and most of its predecessors from the 1970s and early 19805- Gary Numan, OMD, Jean Michel~arre, Tomita and Vangelis. Key words and phrases such as "alchemy", "getting your hands in the mud", "accident".

night drive thru babylon But techno's machine-age coldness has a basis in mass prodUction, mass consumption and the human - machine interface of Henry Ford's assembly line, an urban workforce . marshalled and entrained by heavy industry and then left stranded by its relocation in Asia. The central inspiration for European techno came from the black housing projects of Detroit. In the late 1980s, Kirk DeGiorgio, a London-born techno musician who has recorded under the names of FuturejPast, As One and Esoterik, travelled to Detroit as a record buyer. Anxious to路meet his idols - Derrick May, Juan Atkins, Carl Craig - he experienced a shock of realisation. "I remember driving in from Chicago", ~says, "and seeing the hi-tech headquarters for Ford and then I was in the mo~路extreme poverty I've ever seen in my life, five minutes later. There's just no hope at all. It's just complete despair. Young girls on the street. You can really understand the melancholy feel of a lot路ofthose路early Detroit records, the coldness people associate with them. You can imagine Derrick May sitting up in his

',"

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flat and looking out on Detroit. You can really see a city shaping a music." Having groWn up with the-latter-day effects of Fordism,- the Detroit techno musicians read futurologist Alvin Toffler'sThe Third Wave and found that Toffler'ssoundbite predictions for change - "blip culture", "the Intelligent environment", "the infosphere" ,"de-massification of the media de-massifies our minds", "the techno rebels"; "appropriate technologies" -ac~' corded with SODle, though not all,of their own intuitions. First came the George Clinton-inspiredelec~funk of Cybertron,. , a duo of Juan: Atkins and a Vietnam vet named Rick Qavies' who called himself 3070. I am a number, not a name. Their music was explicit in its cold precision and roboticism. Track titleS..;. "Clear", '-"Techno City"; "Cosmic Cars" - dwelledori familiar Futurist themes of transcendence through'movement and immersion in the sniart City, the wired megalopolis. After Cybertron came another Atkins recording pseudonym Model 500 - as well as-DerrickMay's Rhythim Is Rhythim and Mayday, Kevin -Saunderson's Reese & Santonio,Carl Craig, Kenny Larkin, Stacey Pullen, Mark Kinchin and Underground Resistilnce. This was the canon, and tracks such as Derrick May's "Strings of Life" ,Carl Craig's "Crackdown" or Model 500's"InfoWorld" and "Ocean To Ocean" established an intricate, subtle aesthetic that was difflCtllt to match. The repercussions of this music rippled out to European musicians, labels and DJs, particularly in Britain,Belgium, ' Getmany, -' Holland, 'Scandinavia -and Italy -, A ,Guy Called Gerald, Orbital, The Black Dog, MOOdy Boyz, Future Sound of London, Dr Motte, Jam & Spoon, Carl Cox, BiUldulu, Autechre, Redcell, Speedy J; Aqua Regia, Dave Angel, The irresistible Fotce, C.]. Bolland, Frank De_Wulf, Source, Stefan Robbers, Sun Electric, Thomas Fehlmann, Global Communica- tion, -Highet Intelligence Agency, Sweet Exorcist, Seefeel, Bedouin Ascent, Mouse On Mars, Sketch, Oval, and then the next generation of UK jungle producers, whase innovations ' in rhythm. programming and edit experimentation swept

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aside the astral melancholy of techno';' L.T.J. Bukem, Goldie, Foul Play, 4 Hero, Omni Trio, Roni Size, DJ Crystl.This tidal wave of sofware surfers expanded regardless of the market or major-label indifference, their growing nuinbets,pseudonyms and productivity rates precluding any possibility of keeping track. Cottage industrialisation in the digital world seemed to be generating its own needs, its own pace, its own channels of communication. In Frankfurt,PeterKublmannworked under the name of Pete Namtook and ran an independent recOrd label called Fax, . releasing a series of mostly limited-edition CDs at the ~te of two a week. These were either lengthy electronic solo pieces or collaborations and solo albums from musicians such as . Tetsuo Inoue, Ritchie Hawtin, Dr Atmo, Jonah Sharp, Robert Musso, Bill Laswell, Geir Jenssen,路 Mbpnaster Morris, Deep Space路 Network and Daniel Pemberton. By fax, 1 asked Namlookabout the transition from an earlier musical phase, when he had played New Age music with a band called Romantic Warrior. "I'm basically not interested to talk too much about what you call 'Ambient' music", replied Namlook, assuming that this categorisation was accepted by everybody but himself. "I never had an intellectual approach towards this music and I was never inspired by any other musician to do my kind of music. This music comes from my 'heart' . My musical experience was more focussed on jazz and Oriental music. What you call 'Ambient' Was there when I learned to play my firsttwo chords on the guitar in 1974.lwent out with . my father to a journey through Turkey and sat near to the water and 'played' along with it. I tried to pick up the noises and give back my feelings to the e~vironment through my instru路 ment. I never stopped. doing thiskind of music, which for me was very emotional and melancholic. Nature was my main teacher."

11 : altered

nature

states vi:

bionics, shamanism and nature; singing sands; theOrlnoco; ho~ minimallsm and whalesj Pauline Oliveros; reverberation,' AlvIn LucIer and

sound art ."I'm going up on the mountain, find mea cave and talk to bears if it takes me years" . "Wildlife", captain Beefheart

In an essay of film criticism called "Technophobia";Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner argue that technophobic films such as路 TlIX 1138 and The Terminator use technology fear to afrum traditional soda! institutions. Such Institutions declare themselves as a part of nature, the antidote to technologiCal threat, yet technology - from virtual reality to genetic engineering -is in the process of reconstructing ,'nature. "fnechnology represents the possibility that such discursive figures as 'nature' (and the路ideal of free immediacy it COBnotes)", they write, "might merely be constructs, artificial devices, metaphors " ." The hard-body roboticismof Arnold Schwarzenegger (machine impersonating nature or human. in machine form?) emJ:?odies this supposedly unstoppable technological jackboot BllI1'dl. But withPredator, not referred to in the Ryan and Kellner essay, the picture morphed into a new shape~ The predatory creature at thecemie oOohn McTIernan's film gen. erates maximum. fear when integrated into nature, a fliCkering presence distinguishable from the jungle vegetation into ,which it merges only as an interference p8.ttem at the edge of

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perception. Not until the end of the film, when it reveals itself as alien beast/machine in order to go mano Ii mana with Schwarzenegger, does it slip into the comforting realm of ordinary horrors. And after. that revelation, Schwarzenegger permits himself to unveil a brief glimpse of his own human side. About to crush the predator's head with a rock, he is _ stopped by a mixture of compassion and curiosity. In that pause, the predator taps out: a code and blows himself to pieces. Confused messages here: Never allow the.hawk in you to be weakened by the dove, perhaps; some suggestion that humans are equally frightened of nature and machines, despite being part of one and symbiotically entwined with the other. Reading too much into Hollywood,films is an intellectual party game that can shed darkness on an infinite variety of subjects. This uneasy relationship between nature and technology was given a positive boost in 1958 when a US Air Force major named Jack E. Steele coined the word bionics. Steele defined bionics as the science of systems whose function is based on living systems, or which have,characteristics of living systems. The principle can still be found 'in contemporary research: particularly in the development of smart technologies andbiomimetic products,some of which are based on the muscular movements of sea creatures such as starfish and Sea cucumbers. But scientists have always learned from ani.mals. Early examples of bionic engineering would include Leonardo da Vinci's sketch of a flying machine based on a bat, or the post-Titanic disaster suggestion by Sir H.S. Maxim, the inventor of the Maxim machine gun, that the echo-locating ability of bats could indicate ~ of avoiding a similar calamity in: the future. The origins of radar date back to 1793. A professor at Padua University, Lazzaro Spallanzani, was fascinated by the fact that bats can fly and hunt in darkness. He began to investigate and concluded 'correctly that they must emit sounds and then find their way by hearing the reflections 'bounce back off objects

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in their flight path. These sounds are ultrasonic, however, so · radar development was df:Jayed for more than a hundred years, partly because later researchers believed that many"ofthe experiments performed o~;bats were cruel, and partly because they rdused to believe in sounds that they could not hear. So they dismissed the poetic theory that bats see, or maintain spatiaLawareness at least, with their ears. Until the development of an ultrasonic detection system in 1938, the sounds made by bats remamed secrets of the aether. Technology has made us a party to many of the sounds which surround us, as well as adding many more of its own. A question posed by Donald R. GrIffm, an American researcher into the.use of acoUstic orientation by sight-impaired humans, bats, moths, marine. mammals and cave~elling ~, offers another angle on the human fear of nature's alien otherness. "Twenty years ago", he writes in Listening In the Dark, "ba.ts seemed from any ordinary point of view to be . miniature monsters ... Yet there can be no doubt that questionsof the most arresting sort were already clearly posed by the simple fact that these little creatures spend their active fures in rapid and skillful flight through varying degrees of darkness. Why until so very recently did these intriguing que&tiollSattract so little interest? Was it becaUse of the superstition that surrounds the popular image of·a·bat ... ?":

"Matthew, think what it would mean if I could tidk to the • animals ..." . . . Rex;

IDmison, Doctor Doolittle .

The desire to leam froma!"imals and coOlDlUnicate with them is as old as paradise and the hellish underworlds that counterbalance it. The ancient Chinese seven-string fblt lute, the · ch'tn, S<)metim.es appears as a passing symbolic reffd.ence to ma.gic and antique refmement in Hong Kong nlarttiI arts particularly costume dramas such as KmgHu'sTouch of Zen and Ching SiuTung's A Chinese Ghost Story. Finger · techniques for playing. the instrument included ·tOuCheS

fliins,

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described as "a ··crane dancing in a deserted garden", "the Shang·Yang bird hopping about", "a swimming fish moving its tail", "white butterflies exploring flowers", "echo in an empty vale", "a cold cicada bemoans the coming of autumn" and "cold ravens pecking at the snow". Admltted1y, the ch'ln was a repository of etite esoteric lore. One touCh - tln~n - con· sisted of pressing the fingertip heavily down on a string without moving it. According to some handboOks, vibrato was· produced with the pulsation of the plaJer'~ drouIati.on. Strict rules which dictated when the instrument should·Qr should not be played were .formulated in Ming period handbooks. Sitting on a stone, in a high hall or boat, resting in the shadow of a forest or, rather ambiguously, meeting a Suitable person were all·considered good situations. Marlretsand shopsWe1"e . considered to be Unsuitable, and playing whilst drunk, sweaty, wearing strange clothes or after sex was forbidden. But, as detective novelist, diplomat and ch'lnscho1!u" Robert HanS van Gulik.has written, these rules of constraint were "much more precise and severe, and therefore the least obo . served". Unity with nature and the uncluttered mind that came with this unity were fundamental to the appreciation and proper playing of the insttumenLCranes, the Chinese symbol ofton· gevity and, by extension, immortality, were regarded as psychopomps, messengers Which guided souls to ·the domain of the dead. This shamanistic motif figured large i1i the symbology of ch'ln music, P.rticularly during the· period before magical associations were overridden bY .literature and aesthetics. ~e story, quoted by van Gulik in The Lore o/the Chinese Lute, illustrates the c;:onnection between music, al· teredstates and shanuinistic flights to the heavens: "Chang Chih-ho loved to drink wine, and when inebriated Used to play his lute all night 10ng'Mthout resting. One evening there sud· denly appeared a grey crane, which. danced rounc;t about him. Chang then took his lute, and riding on its back, disappeared in the sky."

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Why do shamanistic images appear as survivals in so many forms of music? Pe~ because music is so often a gateway to unusual or ecstatic states of consciousness and because shama.n$ were(and occasiona1lystill are), asMircea EIiade put it, technicians of ecstasy;ShamaniSmflourlshed in animistic hunter-gatherer societies, in Which a comprehensive survivor's knowledge of the natural world was indivisibly linked to the magical technique of i1atUre mimicry. In every hallucinatory journey, shamans would transmute into animal forms. , Travelling to spirit regions and dead zones, often carried by an eagle or riding a drum, they would speak their own secret language - a mixture of arcane vocabulary, strange noises and wildlife sounds - in order to communicate with spirits and;animalfamlliai's. In his classic study of the subject, ShamanIsm, ~de finds many examples of this inter-species sldll, interPreting it as a symbolic return to the primordial, paradisiacal time when animals and humans spoke in a common tongue and lived in harmony together. Like the Chinese Taoists, shamans.heard spirit moslcin running water. "According to the Carib tradition" ,Eliade wrote, "tIiefirst pial (shaman) was a man who, ,hearing a song rise from a stream, divC:d boldly in and did not come out again until he had memorized the, song of the spirit women and received the implements,of his profession with them." But ,'as, this story's imagery of ' death, rebirth, the abyssal unconscious andinspirationaUemale knowledge also suggests, shamans' songs and language were demonstrations of the, fluidity and 1'earlessn~ wi~ which the shaman could negotiate,zones.of remote consciousness and profound experience,

nature ,December 1994. A news agency reports a significant find by Chinese archaeologists: two' xun wind, instrumentS, , es1;i mated to be 6,500 years old, used as decoys by bunters to attract birds'and animals. '

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echo beach I drew a nine foot treble clef in the sand with my feet and recorded the sound on tape. The beach comprises clean, evenly spaced Quartz granules and emits a musical note when walked on.. Palll Burwell, Island of Bigg 1977

"Singing sands are susceptible to changes in atmosphere", Annabel Nicolson wrote in MUSics magazine in 1978. "On a hot dry day walking over the singing sands of Eigg can be noisy. When it is damp the sands are silent and it is hard to believe they could ever be otherwise ... On the cliffs ofBeinn Bhuidhe, facing away from the singing sands, we overlooked another stretch of coast from which came strains of music at sea levd. The purity of tone was sustained over soine distance from the source. The sea was transparently green, reflecting . the light from the surface onto the sea bed. There were rocks in the water which seemed to be close to the so~ce of the sand but not the cause of it." January 1995. Singing sands are reporte<! to be disappearing. These beaches, scattered around the world, actUauy chirp as a person walks across them, making a sound that has been likened路 to Japanese kOlo路 musIC. Walking across a chirping . surface also recalls the Nightingale Floor in Kyoto. Maybe these associations explain the fact that vanishing singing sands (naktzunt, as they are called in Japan) have been investigated by a Japanese researcher, Shigeo Miwa.An analysis of a sample taken from Florida's Pensacola Beach by Dr Miwa revealed路a high proportion of pollutants mixed with the 99.7 per cent pure silica quartz sand, but forty minutes of boiling in water restored the sand to full voice. Dr Miwa's sample is now displayed in the Niwa Sand Museum in southern Japan. In路 Oriental Magic, Idries Shah claimed that the ancient Egyptians took oracles from singing sands. Desert people of the Middle East also believed that singing sands were portents. Just after World War n, Shah was told that a Ubyan dervish had .

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foretold war in 1937, advised preparation for the Western Desert campaigns and predicted independence from Italian colonisation, all based on oracular interpretations of singing sands.

dreaming up nature 1972. I am keeping two small alligators in a small tank in tht? garden. A loud shrieking noise breaks out. The alligators are mating, but at the same time they are eating a large sea snail. Of;her sea snails, monstrous and white, leap in panic across the lawn.

chasm In 1950, a French explorer named Alain Gheerbrant played a Mozart record to Venezuelan Maquiritari Indians during an expedition along the Orinoco, Ventuari and Amazon rivers. A photograph in Gheerbrant's book, The Impossible Adventure, is captioned "listening to Mozart". This striking . portrait shows a man~istening With his eyes closed. His mouth is relaxed, blissful, but his eyes seem squeezed shut, as if the experience is as painful as it is pleasurable. "I do not know if . music is really the universal language people often say it is" , wrote Gheerbrant, "but I shall never forget that it was the mUsic of Mozart to which we owed our rare moments when the chasm which centuries of evolution had dug between us, civilised white men of the twentieth century, and .them, the batbarians of the Stone Age, was almost completely bridged." In 1978, a similar scene was replayed. Pulled up at night on a shelf of flat land attbe edge. of the Orinoco, Nestor and 1 dragged out the suitcase that contained our tape recorder, microphone$, tapes, batteries and bags of silica gel Setting it up, ostensibly to test the equipment,. more truthfully to ground ourselves for a few minutes in a memory of life in London, we played a track from one of our tavourite albums, Marvin Gaye's I Want You. The Maquiritari Indians with whom we.travelled liste"ned, giggled and then turned away to

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continue discussing the forthcoming Venezuelan election. By the late 19705, the racial encodementof Europ~ and Indians into a neat opposition of civilised; individualiSed city dwellers (culture), set against an abstract mass of Stone Age barbarians (nature) was no longer the kind of sentiment to be expressed in books. Having said that, every American missionary we encountered in Amazonas talked openly about the devil-worshipping Indians as children, calling their shamans witch doctors, an expression I don't think I had heard since the 19505. The Maquiritari often referred to their neighbours, the Yanomami, as banana-eating monkeys. As for the Yanomami, yet to be lauded as gentle forest people, they ate earth, drank soup made from the ashes of dead people, played humiliating practical jOkes,waIked miles along a river toflnd a crossing place rather than sweat over building a boat, engaged in perpetual warfare and spent afternoolll! consuming strong plant hallucinogens which made them vomit and drool. I rather liked them. - Writing about Debussy's archaeologist and writer friend Victor Segalen, James Clifford places him in a tum-of-the-nineteenth-century milieu described as "a post-symbolist poetics of displacement". Also locating artist-travellers Paul Gauguin, Arthur Rimbaud, Blaise Cendrals, Michel Leiris and Antonin Artaud within this milieu, CHfford goes on to say that "the new poetics rejected established exoticisms" and "the new poetics reckoned with more troubling~ less stable encounters with the exotic".路 I had read Artaud's account of his search for magic and collective myth in Mexico, along with a number of "impossible adventures", all of which luxuriated in dire warnings of sting rays, piranhas ~d strange little barbed fish which could swim up a stream of urine and lodge in a man's urethra.. Nothing prepared me for the surrealism of Amazonas, however.

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a journey sideways 2 November'1978. We 'tied up our hammocks under ~ roof with no walls at the edge of the Orinoco. The night noises are intense, the sky lit by flashing tracers of light. I sleep fitfully. In the morning, I am woken by a loud; eerie siren chorus of frogs, a sound like lost souls' calling to tempt unwary travellers: "Oy, oy, oy,. oy." I knew this strange call from a record of Venezuelan wildlife sounds released by French bioacoustic recordist Jean C. Roche, who wrote: "The unusual musical ' volume of this tropical country [Venezuela] made its impact on my arrival in town, where the unbelievably shrill chirping of the dcadas overwhelmed me each time I passed under a tree. At nightfall, around even the meanest of ditches filled by the daily rain, myriads of toads and frogs struck up a concert, which, through its sheer intensity, muffled all other surrounding noises. When I penetrated the forest, I could hear bird spedes literally by the dozen and individuals by the hundred, all calling and singing together at dawn and at dusk." I never thought I would hear this chorus in situ, one of the weirdest ,sounds in nature, let alone on the first morning of our journey. Its extra-human quality is reinforced by the chal'acter of each individual voice - a single descending note with no ,front attack, which gains in volume over its brief duration. The effect is quite psychedelic then, like a recording played backwards, but with an added perspectival element. As one frog calls, another answers in the distance, so the overall sonic picture gives the illusion of swelling fOrward, but then constantly f.illing away into the void. I ,lay in my hammock, sticky and stupefied. With ,the dawn, the sound gradually fades. , The name of the Maquiritari, or Yekuana, as they are also known, means "dugout canoe" or "river people". Setting off from Puerto Ayacucho, on .the border of Venezuela and.Colombia, we travelled on a craft seemingly devised for a Terry Gilliam film: three dugout wooden boats lashed side by side, driven by two motors and loaded with a metal filing cabinet and a large cupboard, thirty school chairs, two huge glass-

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fibre water tanks, ten drums of gasoline, aYanomami teenager name<l Pompeo, two Maquiritarifarililies with· their luggage and a dog, and us - myself, Nestor and Odile, the photographer- with our two enormous· truDks full of food and. equipm,ent. The only shelter· is a pitched roof wOven from leaves. The bottom is awash with water, often writhing with foot-long thread worms. 4,Noverilber. Night faI1s and the gorgeous colours of a protracted sunset wash across .the skY, then melt away slowly, as ifto tantaliseand seduce by degrees. The river is still and dark as oil, birds flitting over its surface in their hunt for the insect nighi:shift. A man in a canoe paddles past us very quickly. We have troUble finding a place to camp, since the jungle is very dense; Eventually a place is found, and as we stop, Indians appear on top of a ridge. We cook in the dark, and Simon Garcia, our guide, makes a frame from which we can hang our hammocks. Simon is a Maquiritari, a protege of a famously libetalpriest, Padre Cocco, who took Simon and Pompeo's father to Rome to meet the Pope: He tells us about the time when he took a German woman to the mouth of the Orinoco. The work was too hard, he jokes; she insisted on sleeping in a bunk which had to be constructed every night. As we eat, we hear flutes from a nearby Jaiyibovi1Iage drifting through the forest~ Simon plays us a cassette tape of harvest and hoUSebuilding songSrecordedi,n his own village. Once we fall into our hammoCks; the night noises of frogs, cicadas and insects buildtoa swarming complexity, but enjoying this symphony is impossible due to the itching of countless swollen lIlOSCluito bites. 9 November. "Oh, there are sting rays everywhere in the water", says Simon, "but they"reallright if you don't step on them." We take the Ventuari river for a while, in order to avoid a difficult section of the Orinoco. Liatlas hang down into the water. Birds skim the surface of the river,sometimes making contact in tiny glittering splashes. Silence, then a section of the jungle· will come alive with· the malevolent hissing .of

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insects. After very heavy rain, the day is overcast, the atmosphere·like an evening of supernatural green light. Pompeo sits in the prow of the middle boat, singing quiet guttural songs, voicing bird sounds into his cupped hands, pulling faces and makinghand·signs, barking, pointing hiS bow and-arrow towards the jungle. We stop at a break in the trees and pull up to a cluS1;er.of rocks bUZZing with bees. Pompeo, Simon and his uncle fish and catch ilve piranhas, their-tiny razor teeth jutting-from bulldog jaws. Shortly after we set off, the boats run aground.-We jump out into the_shallows and push but then jump back in as piranha i1sh gather around our legs. At night, We stop at some huts. Fruit drops in a soft tattoo from the palm trees. Simon decides to catch a crocodile. First, he shoots one from our b?at,impaling it on an arrow tipped with a harpoon. Then he takes Nestor and Ion to the river in a small canoe, gliding up close to the crocodile, shining a torch on its eyes, then striking with -an improvised spear armed with theharpoon head and dragging it back to land, still alive, where Pompeo hacks it to pieces, kneeling on the claws as they push · his knife away. The river is narrow here, and the trees high. Every sound echoes in the tense silence of the hunt, as if we had drifted into a cave in another time. 11 November. Our ninth day on the boat. Mist trails on the surface of the water. We-arrive at Tama-Tama - an American Evangelist Missionary training camp - soon after setting off. Deep in jungle, the scene might be transplanted from a Georgia suburb. Artfully arranged: mown grass, flowers, a wheelbarrow, a bicycle, a little stone lavatory. By six in the .morning, the temperature is unbearable. Clouds of tiny mos· quitoes bite any patch of flesh they can ilnd, wrists, ankles, · tips' of ears, lower face and neck being particular favourites. I am reminded of the ghost in Lafcadio Hearn's Kwatdan, which tears off the ears of a musician named Hoichi after his body, save. the unfortunate omission of his ears; is painted with the text of a holy sutra. A loud water pump at the hydrology station is mounted a few yards from a corrugated iron

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building, so the equilibrium of the $CeDe is shattered by a cascade of sharp, fast edloes. 'Ik following night, we' drink' the last olour rum and I record ,night m:ils!c: a bird whi~ whJs. ties sporadically in a descending glissando; huge moths which flap close to the microphones, ~ Wing beats-registering on tape as a low路pitched flutter. 13 November. Nine_large predatory birds cirde above us. We stop at a small village, 'where we the local malariology representative. In his boat are twolargeturtleS, both and ,an executiVe briefcase. We meet the first Y3nomamJ group we -have seen on the river. One of them Whistles a greeting, the sound bouncing off the trees on the,opposite batik. At Ocamo, we meet a Spanish anthropologist and ethno-botanist named Emilio Fuentes, who agrees to help us with recon;ling theshamans of ~ Yanomami village wb.eie he is living. Three days later we reach Continamo Falls after an arduous morning of unloading and rel~ the boat: every time we reach rapids; Our time sense is changing dramatically,路By watch time, each of these stops takes one hour, yet our subjective reckoning is flfteeri minutes. Yellow and blue butterflies, their wing spans close to five inches~ land on out arms and heads and sit there until dis~d. At the Falls we find a big ca.terpillarwhich has -wrapped itself in a leaf sealed with saliva. This _improvised house is-dragged along and the caterpillar withdraws inside if danger threatens. Yellow and black mosquitoes abound here. We set off in a small boat, beading into rapids, the sunset behind us. The river narrows and mist rises from the surface. _ Groups of turkeys take'flight from the trees and flocks of small birds skim the water in front of the boat. As mist envelopS the river completely, the pertumc: and colours of this place rise to a high pitch of intensity. 17 November. Another overcast day, My nausea and giddyness is not hdped by an overpoWering awareness oBbe aliveness of this place. Small biting ants and buge spiders are everywhere. Every surface is wet, parasitic, almost visibly moving through ~ of decay and regeneration. We walk

see-

anve,

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upwatdsthrough. the jungle for four hours at speed in dehydrating heat, crossing log bridges and路looklng out for snakes. .By the finish, I feel closer to death than life, shooting pains in my chest and my heart t:Iu-eatening to burst. Trult night in. ContlnamoVi1Iage, high in the 路~ountains overlooking the Sierra Parima, we drink thick beer made from fermented yucca. Simon and hb. uncle make clarinets from two large Pamboos and reeds. The duets they play on these honking tekeye sym. bolisethesongs and movements ofa pair of mythical animals, 19 November. A Yanomami shaman -arrives in the village, the lower half of his face painted black for fierceness, the upper half painted red, the life colour. He agrees that ~ can tape Ilis hallucinogenic ebima visions so we folloW him with our recording equipment. On the way, we cross a river in a boat but the boat sinks so we wade the rest. On the trall I see a fly the size of a fir cone with a five-inch span of red wings. When we arrive, the man is Jying in his hammock. Somebody has stolen his ebena out of jealousy, he claims. A later counter-c1aim suggests that his family hid it from him, frightened by oUr tape recorder. Nothing ~ do here,so after ten minutes we leave. Oli the walk back to Continamo, the rain pours and Simon's uncle ~ts us umbrellas from huge leaves. Wet throUgh from the storm and wading two rivers; we cOllapse into our hammocks and fall asleep. Waking up in the afternoon, we hear a commotion. A young Yanomami man is clwiting in the village, snorting ebena from a tin p~, dancing with his arms outstretched, making sounc:hi of a.nimaJ spirits.1batDight, I dream that animals are living in-my skin. 21 November. After a day of fishing with poison plants, we leave Continamo, Simon shooting birds as we go, me carrying the two tekeye clarinetS, Nestor carrying a long blowpipe. After nightfall we still in the b()at, now路 ~sted of its . strange-cargo and outriders. The rain is pouring and a thunderstorm lo()ms overhead. No moon this night. the impenetrable. darkness of the sky spHt vertically by fork lightning We shoot . twO sets Of rapids In this theatrical scene, ~ waVe engulfing us

are

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as We pass over the second set of rocks like a funfair ride,followed by internal waves of energy and elation which only subside when we reach Told. The next moming,. I feel tormented by panic attacks of claustrophobia. All three of us look haggard, our faces drawn and shiny with sweat, exhausted by constant travel and probably suffering side effects froID strong malaria pills. That night, we sleep in hammocks on the boat. The dogs of Told start barking and carry on for· ten minutes, each bark echoing at the same volume a split secmid later on the opposite side of the riVer. Sleep is barely possible. A bat is flying about, eltherin the ~ orin myimagination, and nearby I hear an animal snorting loudly like a train. 23 November. My face is .swollen to the size of a football from mosquito bites.· EmilloFuenteshas returned fromOlracas with a message from anthropologist Jacques Lizot, a student of Claude Levi-Strauss. The aUthor of a beautiful book - Tales of the Yanomaml - Lizot had also made a powerful filmed document of Yanomami shamanism - Intttatton o/a Shaman - in collaboration with Raoul Held. W~ can visit the Yanomami groups he works with, so long as no Maquiritari go with us, since the .acculturated Maquiritari wlll exploit the· vulnerable Yanomami if they can. We· travel towards Mavaca, and nearby Tayari-teri, the Yanomami village where Lizot had lived ·for six years and where he had shot Initiation of a Shaman. The journey seems to· take ages. We stop briefly when we pass a group ofYanomami Inc:llims who jump into the boat, pointing at us and laughing. When the light fails, we crunch . to a halt on a small beach where claustrophobia creeps up on me. I eat a meal of rice and c,abbage then walk for ten yal'ds, half the length of this sand spit, to sit and look at the sky. In this void I can see nothing except myself, the faint outline of the boat and a thousand stars. Frogs and toads puncture the stiliness with qwok-qwok drones, bell~like chinking· and bursts of machine-gun .rattling.. Close by but invisible, fish leap and fall back in the river with loud splashes. Even in this

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perfect spectacle of light glimmers and sound fireworks, my head is spinniJlg in a delirium of exhaustion and dislocation. 24 November. At the river's edge near Mavaca, we visit a sbaman named Torokoiwa, 路recommended. by Jacques Lizot. He lives in a small clearing of ~ve shelters with a number of women and children. Pleased to hear that we are Uzot-teri, he agrees to chant and take ebena. This hallucinogen is made from powde.red tree bark of the Vlrola elongata species, mixed with crushed seeds of Anadenanthera. peregrina containing dimethyltryptamines which bear a structural resemblance to serotonin, a neurotransmitter naturally present in the brain. Torokoiwa is anxious to acquire a new hammock. We have none to spare, so a money deal is struck instead. He strips down to swimming trunks ~d squats, A small girl blows ebena powder into his nose through a long tube, enveloping his head in a green cloud, making him wince. and dribble. He chants with a strong voice which jumps to falsetto. Growling and shouting, he paces up and down, gesticulating, sometimes stopping to ruffle my hair or Nestor's, finally squatting by one of the women to perform some healing on her. . After Torokoiwa has eaten some Quaker porridge oats, we travel with him to Tayari-teri. We have a tape from Uzot which . we play to Machitowe, a young man who recorded sound on Initiation of a .Shaman. Machitowe agrees to .take. us to Ocamo, where Emilio lives, but meanwhile, we have arrived at the beginning of a group shamanising session led by a charismatic older shaman, the most powerful of tliis place. After some prevarication, they. decide we can record and photograph. Under the shade of the shabono, a vast circular shelter of sloping palm screens open to the sky in its centre, a group of six shamans take ebena. In the middle of them sits their patient, a sick-looking man wearing shorts. Blown forcibly through long cane tubes, the ebena powder causes retching, spitting, grittlaces, growling and vomiting. Subdued, sporadic chants; the group sends imaginary missiles against their

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enemies with invisible blowpipes路 and bows, invoking路 and calling under control the hekura spirits which live within their chests; then the shaman picks up real weapons - a bow with its seven foot arrow, a large machete, finally an axe - and starts his dance, marching back and forth, chanting rhythm!cally, voicing the sounds of spirit animals and birds, transforming into a hekura spirit. The rhythm erupts into screams. He shapes his body into extreme angles, walking the path of the shororl, described by Jacques Uzot as "water demons and masters of subterranean fire~. The hazards of this journey break through into our world. He rolls in the dust, rubbing his body as the demonic hdlt burns his skin; His chant to the motorerl, the leaf of the whirlwind spirit, breaks dOWn in shrieks and an eerie, quavering falsetto. As the ebena takes its full effect, the other shamans join in with the chanting - glassy-eyed, spitting, retchingy vomiting loudly, strands of snot hanging from their noses and streaking their chests. Then some of them run to the other side of the shabono, tearing at the ground, striking at the high palmscreen walls, .shouting and screaming In a state of near hysteria. Mutual massage follows, as they calm each other. All . aspects of this. hekuramouare symbolic. The mucus is not Wiped away, fot example, because this is believed to be the路 excrement路 of those spirit& living in the shaman's chest. Demo~.are thieves who are sent by enemy shamans to steal the noresht, or spirit parts of human souls, especially those of children. As sorcerers who can voyage through the four levels of the universe, plunging into.actUalisations of myth and history, floating in free space and time, the shamans undertake the burden of responsibility ~thin their community to retrieve these souls. Healing is an intense psychodramatic theatre of Clilelty, in which the sick become a battleground for the gruesome antagonism of tamed and malevolent spiritS. Skin burns or oozes blood, the wind blows as the sPirits move about, the shamans massage their patient; drawing out evil spirits through an ext:remity and then throwing it or vomiting

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it far from the unhealthy woman or man. This is the only form of medicine traditionally used by the Yailomami. As the American anthropologist: Napoleon Chagnon has written: "They rely exclusively on the cures that the shaborl [the shamans] effect, fighting supematural.ills with .supematural medicine." Both the shaman and.his own resident hekura spirits enjoy the effects of the ebena. Encounters with the spirit world need not depend on hallucinogens, yet the initiation of a shaman is a lengthy and traumatic process of death and rebirth, a reprogramming which introduces the human individual into secrets of an otherwise complex, invisible and volatile uni. verse. The necessity for a shaman to. maintain dangerous spirits within his own body, subdued yet ready to be unleashed; has an obvious psychological interpretation. The world is coherent but precarious, and for human society to remain in balance with the rest of the cosmos, the shamanic specialists must confront and absorb images. of chaos, terror, disgust, wonder, fear~ violence and fierce beauty. Plant hallucinogens, chanting, movement, poetic and occult language and the framework of origin myths are the transitional gateways, the technical means of access to a state of consciousness and an arena of action which the young shaman is taught as if it were a negotiable 3-D map, a synaesthetic virtual world, complete with colour, sound, smell, danger and pain. 25 November. We leave Tayari before 5 a.m. with Machitowe and another small boy from the village. As the light comes up, the river radia~ the mystery of a Kurosawa film. Mist hangs in shreds from the treetops and rises off the surface of the grey river in short columns and high wisps. We pass by Ocamo mission at speed for fear that the Yanomami living there might see us and attack their Tayari enemies. No signs of human life, but many parrots, large herons and fluo~ent blue butterflies. In the hot sUn I fall asleep in the boat~路 Towards the end. of a seven-hour journey we startle a group of naked Yanomamiwomen路 by the river's edge. Arriving at Wabutawi-teri, we find Emilio waiting for us. The people here

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are friendly and inquisitive. Where did Emilio find us? He tells them he found us in Ocamo, looking 'for music, but the music near the mission was so bad that he told us to come to Wabutawi-terl where the music was very good. That night I record a circular dance, performed by the Women and young girls for a fe3st. During taping, all the men gather 'round me, . peering at the machine. They all shoosh each other to keep quiet but somebody fiu1:s and they all break up laughing. Then Emilio persuades two men to perform aniniprovised duo exchange, usually done when another group visits. 1befunctlon is to exchange greetings, news and views, but the speed of this rhythmic vOcal counterpoint is breathtaking. The recording seems to be going but Emilio bursts in angrlIyand stOps them. What they have beel1 saying is that the' foreigneJ:s are stupid to want to record their .music and they are going to con lots of presents from us. Keeping a straight face is very difficult.. Then some boys step up to sing a song which alternates soloist and a choruS of tones pitched so closely that they generate beat frequendes. That night I go to sleep listening to someone chanting a myth in the distance. 26 November. Emilio's trunk tun of documentary notes has , "been StoleJ1 so we accompany him across the river in a searclt to find it. As soon as we go ashore, a group of about thirty Yanomami appear out of the trees. They have walked. from Brazil to visit this village, they tell Emilio. All of them are very small, their faces'so tiny that the tobacco'wads crammed undertheir lower Ups. dominate every expression. One of them is carrying some kind ofwhite worm at centipede - about a foot !ong .,. on a stick. They pull our hair with .much amusement. As we get back in the ilpat, an older warrior begins to shout at Machiwwe, waving his bow ~d arrows. Two other men jumP. in. the wale( and pull our boat, back to shore~ "What's your family name?" the man is shouting. "DOn't touch . the engine. Come back here to ~"The look on Machiwwe's face suggests that talk will"l~ to his death. Emilio路shouts back in a mixture of determination and fear and we pull away

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before the situation can escalate. That evening we are taken to see ebena and the ashes of the dead being consumed in a rite of ancestral communion. No question of recording this. We stand in awed silence at the edge of a shelter as. the porridge of the spirits is eaten to the sound of quiet mass sobbing. Inside, the light is too low to See anything other than silhou· ettes. After so much drama, this dignified ceremony is very moving. When night falls, I record the same docular dance as last night, this time performed by the young men and boys. By now, nobody is interested in the technology. TOnight, the sky sparlcles with stars. The shabono is dark save for a few flickering fires; a frog calls qwok-qwok-qwok and ·insects hiss. A brief disturbance as a big bird-eating spider runs past a fire. One of the women snatches up a bUrning piece of wood and bashes it down on the spider which will be eaten later. The men shuffle around their wide circle, each circumnavigation taking five minutes or so, pUnctuated by a Swell then a fade ofheterophonic singing and high-pitched whistle. I sit on the ground for more ~an one hour, wearing headphones, listening to the sounds move to my left and diminish as they reach the far point of the circle, then grow louder on my right until they return to the centre. The effect is magical. Later, I fall asleep to the sound of the chanting, the frog's qwok-qwok.the night-insect buzz; after dawn, I awake to birdsong, a woodpecker's drumming and a different chant. 28 November. Emlliois going to a petroglyph site today to collect plants so he arranges for us to record the old shaman ofWabutawi-teri taking ebena. The heat is intense and we lie in our hammocks, sweat·pouring in streams. When we take the reco.rding gear to the shabono we· quickly realise that none of the shamans are· happy with our presence at their helmramou so we leave. A -little later, one of the young men comes to teU us that we can record the hekuramou after aU. We pick up-everything and walk back to the shabono, only to be greeted by more hostility frQm the old shaman. We leaVe again. Then the young men come back once more to kUus,

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really, this time will be fine. They can barely contain their mirth so we stay- put, listening to'shamanic roaring and:~足 log in the distance. When Emilio teturns, he investJgatesand finds'that the old man had, changed his mind and decided that he would ~ to recording only if Emilio was 'present. Our acceptance of the siiuati,onse prudent when We learn that the women hide all weapons when the old man shatt'aolses and the men make a circle around him as a precaution against the violence which can erupt ,when he chooses to unleash demonic spirits~ 29 November. Machitowe is bored. Our last day here. Rain. An old man squats by Emilio's desk, holding his ~ and long arrows, sucking 'on a tobacco wad~ I record him singing rain ' sOngs. Despite his fierce ,appearance he claims to be SM', so a guard has to be posted on, the path. Rain songs are improvised, usually sung privately in a hammock, the tempo changing according to the rhythm of the rain. As we leave, flocks of birds burst from the trees above our heads, calling with a SOUQ,d like sleigh bells, wheeling in all directions; parrots scream as they take off, their taus streaming oUt behind them; eagles hover above and turtles basking on logs collapse into the water as we approach. That night we stay at the medi~ cal station at Mavaca.Rigging up, a mosquito net' I disturb a huge spider, its white body the size of a hard-bolledegg spotted with black markings, its legs four inches in span. Four days later we are stuck in Tama-Tama mission, forced to endure mosquito bites and the smell of Sewage, army and missionary interrogations, Maquiritaricomplaints that nobody studies theb: (vanishing) culture, tirades from the doctor against Lizot, who he claims has published "lies" about the genocide of the yanoDwnt. By now, I am deaf iD. one ear, my back is painful, I have ulcers on my tongue and mouth, my teet are blistered, my ankles arecovCred in bites, I want t.o kill all missionaries. I lie in mY hammock, watching a picture postcard tropical sunset, the sky a bruise of black, blue and faded yellows. Thunder, lightning and tOrreiltial rain follow. Two Maquirltari

ems

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IIldlanswa1k in, carrying a tape maclline whicltplays The Bee: Gees' "Staying Alive" and "Boogie Oogie Oogie"byA Taste of Honey.1belatterbad beett a UK hit-in June, so I sink into a discOrevcrie ofhomesicktiessinixed with the plea$ute of to~ displaCement. 4 Deceniber: Travelling back through rain, fog, high winds and:dense clouds of white winged flies. The boat is loaded Witha consigonient of bananas. As we rea.cltthe confluence , of theoiinoco and the Atabapo, the watetSflow side by side Without mixing, one bJue~grey, the other greenish-brown. When we stop at San Fernando de Atabapo, -we find everybody is drunk. Herrera has won the election. We go to a shop whicltseUs fluffy dogs, clOCkwork divers, plaStic mermaids; plastic cowboy boots and other essentials, Dioclt of it veiled by spidet'S' webs. Coming thto~here on the way into the - jungle we' bad seen soldiers water skiing on the river. Retr0spective thoughts of Robert Duvall's surImg obsession in ApOcalypse Now (not released until the following year); or Joseph Coritad's Hea1'toj Darkness, are impossible to disCOUilt. SOme days later,we arrive back at our 0rigiliaJ. starting point, where we load "a truck which drives us to Puerto Ayamclto; On dry land, my perceptions seem distoited, SOme dudS at the side oftheioad look as if they'coUld be four feet talt Any zoological aberration has become eminently feasible. In the town we help Simon to deHver his bananas and go With him to ihe'sbacks'whereMaquiritari Yanomami urbaniteS 1!ve: dank sheds'lined With newsprint;' prison cells draughtproofed iii spurlOusinfoi-mation. That night'Soylent (J1'een-is showing at the dtiema. We kill time by drinking beer, watchingsoldiers armed with automatic weapons arrest Indians. Dogs'sleep in the dnema aisles, ,salsa booms from the club Ddrtdoor,lo11dspeakerhum obscures the dialogue oftbe fiIDl, but the message is clear. ,After the breakdown of society, peapie subSiSt on a substance called soylent green. As Charlton Hestondismvets; this oompound is manufactured from recy- , cled -corpses. Six~een.y'e1l1'S Iaterthe -prospect_seems -less

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far-fetched, now that we know the Japanese have perfecttxi hamburgers made from. detoxified human shit. At the time, however, our minds drifted back to the emotional ceremony at Wabutawe-teri, and the eating. of human ashes mixed with hallucinogenic plants. The next morning we leave for the airport. The taxi is driven by a grotesquely fat man wearing a plastic apron. The accelerator of his car is made from wood and attached by string to the dashboard. He believes we are missionaries. When we arrived in this town at the end of October, there were no television sets. We pass a shop. Outside, another fat man is sitting in a chair, watching television, presumably deciding whether to buy or not to buy. His family stand around him, waiting for his decision. Wlien we reach the small airport, we discover that a French entrepreneur made a dealwith the Venezuelan air force to transport TV sets into Amazonas.

listening below/the surface Nightfall. A sound recordist sits in a small cabin, is0lated in the frozen wastes of Antarctica. He drops a' hydrophone through a small hole in the ice, then sits by his tape-recorder, headphones buried under layers of thermal clothing. He presses the record switch and suddenly, dramati- . cally, he is, projected into a dark, submarine, ice-vaulted - cathedral of clicks, echoes, white noise and the tumbling melismatic whistles, of high-frequency Weddell seal calls. Like time-lapse photography and microscopy,a~dio recordingrevealed inaccessible worlds, if not for路the first time, then in graphic and retrieva~le detail. froz~n

words

, In Gargantua and Pantagruel, a serial satire written by Fran~is Rabelais between 1532 and 1534, the captain of a ship tells his crew not to be afraid when they reach the edge

of the frozen sea. Sounds of a bloody battle between the Arimaspians and Cloud-Riders had been froZen and are now

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meltiDgas sPring approaChes. Pantagruelfinds some that have not yet thawed, fro%enwords and jokes which look like crystallised sweets. and throws them on the deck where they lie, oo,lourful-but inert. Warmed betWeen the hands. they melt, soundiilg-theirwordsaS they do so. One, a frozen cannon shot, explodes like an unpricked chestnut thrown on to afire. Others are battle cries which melt together in a riot of sound poetry- hin;crack, brededitl,bou, bou, trac, trr-rr - that re. calls Marinetti's Futurist free words, fruits of the inspiration of machine war. SOunds ofnature provoke strong emotional and mythic responses in humans, often generating strikingly similar images _and storicliwhich bridge time and geographical location. Sounds-which originate underwater yet can be heard on land are particularly mysterious. During the mating _season of the toadfisb, the male of the species roars like a foghorn or kazoo every thirty seconds, loudly enough to be heard above water. Native- Americans interpreted the humming -as spirit voices and battle sounds which had been frozen in air and were thawing noisily. In Sausalito, -California. sleepless and somewhat spookedbouseboat owners launched a toadfishfestival - complete with aquatic costumes and a kazoo.blowing parade - in June 1988~after being driven to distraction by this annual droning. Prior to discovering the true source of this nightly chorus, the tesidents of Sausalito came up with a number of fanciful theories to explain the drone: a sunken Japanese ship 10adedwitheIectric massagers, theClA-pumping nerve gas into the bay, the Sausalito City Council humming into storm

drains. echo return -"Nature is the sUpreme resource", composer Olivier Messiaen ()ncesaid in a lecture~ Few nature solJOds have captured Public imagination so thoroughly as the --humpback whale songs recorded by Roger Payne. Originally available on disc -by mall order from a Det-Mar, California, address, the

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recordings were issued by Capitol Records on Songs of the Humpback Whale (1970) and Deep Voices (1977). In those ~n

years, the first album sold more than 100,000 copies. Not particularly impressive, perhaps, when compared with the phenomenal sales of Gregorian chant from Silos Monastery, shifting more than 1,000,000 units in 1994 to a neo-spiritual market niche otherwise occupied by Enya, Le Mystere des Voix Bulgares, Jan Garbarek with the Hilliard Ensemble and the so-called holy minimalists - Arvo Part, John Taverier and Gorecki. But discounting the Singing Dogs, Pinky and Perky, Big Bird and other anthropomorphic oddities, these were the first non-human recording stars to dent the mass market. The whale songs were imitated by musicians or incorporated into electronic music, folk songs, contemporary classical pieces by Tavener and Alan Hovhaness, countless feature films and television documentaries; then the New Age movement appropriated them, almost as a central icon. The magisterial, weightless calm of these sounds became synonymous with technologically enhanced meditation, floatation, dolphin therapy; crystals and New Age videos. A new genre of functional music emerged: whale songs augmented by nearsubliminal New Age noodling. Then the whales became fashionable. again, as post-acid rave merged with the neo-hippie traveiler aesthetic. By 1993, their cries could be heard echoing under the frantic beats of otherwise resolutely urban jungle tracks, s,uch as L.T.J. Bukem's "Enchanted". Humpback whales had evolved from great l~thans into the cliche that . could not be stopped. Marine biologists and submarine crews had been recording underwater sounds for decades and sailors had been hearing them for centuries before this outbreak of whale路song fever. "Oh yes, we U&ed to, you know, put1he wooden paddle in the water", one arctic hunter has said, "and press it against our ears. That way we can hear the different types of animal that we want to go and hunt. My people have heard it for four thousand years." So why, in 1970, did these echoing flock calls

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capture the public imagination? After all, one eminent marine bioacoustician has suggested that some whale sounds may be non-mystical gastric rumbles. Roger Payne began his career as a biological aCoustics researcher by studying another type of spatially, sensitive animal call that could only be heard to its full extent through sop~sticaied recording technology: the ultrasonic sonar of bats. He moved on from bats to owis, birds which use· acute hearing abilities to catch their prey in dark· ness, and then a pivotal incident shifted his work to what became a lifelong study of whales. Working at Tufts University in America,lte heard on the radio that a dead whale had. washed ashore. Never having seen a whale before, he drove out to Revere ~, Massachusetts, at night in the rain. There he found an eigltt-foot porpoise lying on the sand,. its rain-slick curves shining in the torch beam. "Someone had haCked off its flukes for a souvenir", Payne wrote, "and two other people had carved their initials deeply intoits side. Someone else had stuck a cigar butt into its blow-hole; I removed the cigar and I stood there for a long time with feelings I can't de· scribe." Confronted with this macabre little tableau of eco-vandal~m,· Payne made a decision to turn his scientific knowledge toa didactic purpose and, as he wrote, "to use·the first possible opportunity to learn enough about whales so I might have some effect on their fate". His decision was timely. In 1970, ecology, conservation and animal liberation were issues of growing public· concern. During that year, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London hosted a series of twenty-two lectures entitled Ecology In· Theory and Practtce, covering subjects ranging from sewage and ocean resources to Raymond Williams's overview of the concept of nature. Payne's experience on Revere Beach added a vital component to ecology's scientific biaS. The whale songs he came to record were mysterious and strangely moving, the sheer beauty of their solitary, echoing moans encapsulating· that same poignant sense of loss and alienaiionthat would drive

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coDservation into mysticism, politiCal activism and sabotage. "I am receiving mail frOm spiritualists who purport to chan- , ne1 dolphins in squeaky, sixteenth centlUy, Biblical accents" , writes Jim Nollmanis his book Spiritual Ecology. Behind the faintly weary bemuseJilent, he 'probably accepts his role as a focal point for such bizarre correspondence. Nollman is an American musician who has 路foUn~d路 a company called Interspecles Communication; "the first organisation dedicated to promoting dialogue between humans and Wild animals". H!ving developed techniques and technologies (such as an electronic underwater sound system) to cross this great divide; he has played music with wolves, whales and many other species, and as his book recounts, he is sometimes embroiled in situationS which give him cause to think long and hard about the contradictions which' wcll-meaning ecologists can precipitate. In 1988, for example, Greenpeace persuaded him to join an Alaskan adventure, an attempt to free three gray . whales stuck in an ice hole. Not entirely convinced that the whales should be freed to satisfy the whims of conservationists and a resulting media circlis, NoUman added his musical input to a variety of expensive and路supposedly more rational mechanical interventions and succeeded where th~ had failed. Informed by shamanism; by Gregory Bateson's insistence that the exclusion of"things" from their context distorts our view of the interconnectedness of the world, and by the philosophy of deep ecology, NoUman still challenges some of the terminology and basic aSsumptions of ecology's, outer fringes. "[T]hat adjective; deep", he writes, -"has always confused me because it tries too hard. to imply a secularized version of what the deep ecoloPits themselves comprehend as a spiritual relationship to nature;" ,

deep

lis~ening

"Deep ListeningTM is a trademark of The Pauline Oliveros Foundation, Inc: it says on the cover of a CD called The Ready Made Boomerang. That sounds serioUs. Luckily.

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there is a photograph of four members of The Deep.Listening' Band - Pauline Olive.ros playing an accordion, trombonist Stuart Dempster, clarinettist William o. Smith and sound designer Panaiotis-placedjust underneath this implicit threat. They look like a quartet of sea.dogs, just home from hunting the great white whale, holed up in a shoreside bunker and.improvising some underworld shanties. . Pauline Oliveros began making music as a group impmviserin the early 1950sinSan Francisco, playing French hom With Terry Riley, who played piano, and Loren Rush, who doubled on string bass andkoto. In .1961 she began making electronic pieces,but was. drawn more towards tJieatre, mixed-media and other expansive environments in preference' to the laboratory conditions of the studio. "I was a young person in a field in which everybody was hiding in technical considerations", she says, talking路 from her home in upstate New York. "Hiding their feelings, hiding their motivations. It still goes on - the techno-jOcks that are out there. Technocracy feels so safe. I had to prove myself, prove I could be ajock too." As a logical culmination of this outward-looking orientation, she now leads workshops in sound, health and deep listening, and collaborates on mixed-media presentations such as Njinga the Queen King: Return of a Warrior. In recent years, she has also released The Readylttade Boomerang and Deep Listening, both .albums recorded in the huge路 underground resonating space of Fort Worden Cistern in Port Townsend, Washington. The musical exploitation ofcavernous resonance is ancient, perhaps as ancient as any other form of sonic experiment. At the beginning of this book I gave one example of an. archaeologist who believes that the animistic cave paintings .of pre-history wen: created in sites where there路 was a correspondence between the 路echoes and the animal depicted. There is some documentation of the awe induced by echoing geological and meteorological sounds among the rainforest Indians who lived close. to the Ecuadorian and Peruvian

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Andes. The signal drum of the Jivaro was said to be an imitation of a giant drum played by the 19uanch~ a shaman who had died, become spirit and caused otherwise inexplicable booming noises within the mountain whenever he was annoyed. But noise - the instrument of darkness - is used to scare away the unknown and unseen, also. Many musics have delighted in noise, seemingly to inflate the diminutive human body to a scale which can cope with the vastness of its surroundings (both physical and spiritual). This vastness, whether natural, architectural or digital, inevitably suggests mystery, sadness or loneliness. Many Chinese poems, for example, were devoted spedficallyto the eerie hoots of gibbons, echOing across river gorges. IiJ. his book The Gibbon In China Robert Hans van Gulik Writes: "The graceful movementS of the gibbon and his saddening calls are referred to by nearly every poet who wrote from the 3rd to the 7th century." He gives examples of some, such as Shen Yiieh's: "I do not know whether their calls are . near or far, for I only see mountains rising after mountain. The gibbons love to sing 'on the eastern range, waiting for the answer from those on the western cliff." Reverberation also invokes the sacred. Recordings of Buddhist and Gregorian chants are made in their intended settings of monasteries, cathedrals or mountains; some ethnographic field recordings of ritual have been pepped up by post-production reverb, in order to imbue them with added mystery. A fairly well-known Ocora recording of a Burundi praise singer named Fran~ois Muduga, who accompanies his appar~ntly sinister whispered vocal on the inanga zither,sounds as if it was recorded in the deepest, darkest" cave of Central Africa. IiJ. fact, a photograph slJ.ows him playing in bright sunlight in the open air, the only reflective surface in sight a skinny tree trunk; Since the whisper .. whiCh makes Mr Muduga sound like a distillation of gris-gris period Dr John, Howlin' Wolf, Captain Beefheart and Can's Damo Suzuki - is a co~on technique for making parity between the volume levels of voice. and zither, the extra echo can only be regarded

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as a sensationalist deception. But whether the echoes are syntheticor natural - Jamaican dub, a north African call to dawn prayer shattering the early morning silence as it blasts out of a . tower-mounted .. loudspeaker, Elvis Presley's "Heartbreak Hotel" oraJavanese gamelan recorded under the high roof of a royal palace - there is noeseaping their power to suggest actual, virtual and fantasy spaces. "The instrumental items of the [Tibetan] Buddhist liturgy originally were outdoor features", writes Walter Kaufmann in his book, Tibetan Buddhist. Chant. Discussing the sound symbolism of Tibetan instruments, he says: "The rag-dung drone is primarily of ritual nature, representing fearful, rumbling, . and threatening sounds related to the terror deities while its purely路musical function is of lesser importance." The photographs and sleevenotes to another Ocora album, Milsique Sacree Ttbetaine, paint a vivid 'picture of loud, outdoor instruments used deliberately to vibrate cold air and fill every reverberant geological hollow with sonic dread. In a description of the ceremony of welcome, sound recordist Georges Luneau writes: "Four monks posted at the edge of the terrace of the monastery courtyard scan the far reaches of the valley. As soon as they glimpse the guest of honour they sound their enormous路dun-chen horns, whose deep bass 路tones rev.erber" . ate in the steep, w.hite heights of ,the mountain. The silent snow captures and amplifies this extension of the human voice as it rings out to welcome the guest. Simultaneously a fire of sweet-smelling herbs is lit. Soon afterwards the rgya- . . gUn oboes are heard. The lama climbs slowly upwards and the music does not cease until he has crossed the threshold of the monastery"" Other musicians and composers have explored the properties of acoustic echoes. In the late nineteenth century, Charles Ives's father, George, used to play路 musical instruments over the pond in Danbury, Co1'lnecticut. He' was, Frank R; Rossiter wrote in Charles lves & His America, "captivated by the tone quality of the echo that returned to him across the water - an

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experi(Ilce that his son attempted torecapture,years later, in. .his chamber music piece The Pond." Charles Ives was in· spired by Henry David Thoreau's belief. in the "tonic of wildness", expressing a wish to "hear the silence of the night ... the silence rings; it is musical and thrills me". In one of his compositions, The Housatonic at Stockrldge, he depicted the singing·from a church across the river, heard through leaves, mist, running water. As forindoorechoes, if the building is in, then the exercise translates as impressive outside seamlessly from architectural acoustics into marketing con· cept. Jazz flautist Paul Hom's Inside the Taj Mahal andInstde the Great Pyramid are superior precursors of New Age music in their meditative, quasi·Eastern feel. Not only reverbera· tions,but the buildings themselves invest the playing with apparent significance. In 1610, MonteVerdi simulated echoes in his Vespers; Alvin Lucier's composition for pulses reflected by room echoes, written in 1968, was given the same title for reasons which, as Lucier has explained, are pertinent both to .biomimetics and the awe inspired· by resonance: "The title Vespers was chosen for the dual purpose of suggesting the . dark ceremony and sanctifying atmosphere of the evening service of the Catholic religion and to pay homage to the com· . mon bat of North America of the family Vesperttlonidae." Ecology, anthropology, physics, semiotics, land art and con· ceptual art levered mUSic into an area where sound and listening couid take precedence over the intention of the com· poser. Alvin. Curran, Evan Parker, David Dunn, Pauline Oliveros, Stuart Dempster, Albert Mayr, Paul Burwell, Hugh Davies, Michael Parsons and the late Stuart Marshall investigated other aspects of echoes and the articulation or mapping of space, ranging from the peculiarities of indoor acoustics to echoes across water and distance and naturalamphitheatres. David Dunn has described one of his own pieces·as follows: "Nexus Iwas realized four miles into the·interior of the Grand Canyon in Arizona. ;Three trumpets responded to scored events· in relationship to the environment resulting in

,,.

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stimu1ation of the extended resonance characteristics of the space and its life-forms." In Xebec's Sound Arts, composer . Mamoru Fujieda· has written his impressions of an Alvin Curran piece,heardat the SoundCulture 1991 audio festival, held in Sydney: "The event that left the deepest impression on me was the performance·called Marlttme Rites by the American experimental composer Alvin Curran, which occurred on thefinal day of the festival. In thisone·hour perfonilance using all of Sydney Port and its harbour as a backdrop, boats and ferries which happened to traverse the bay became the instru~ ments. In addition to this, two boats were specially prepared with a group of musicians playing two of Australia's native instruments: didgeridoo and the conch shell. From various directions, the sounds of the fog horns rang out in uruon,a magnificent sound echoed all over the harbour." . . Stuart Marshall and I· shared a work table during our first year as art students at Homsey in 1967-68. My conviction was that contemporary composition was arid; his equally fervent prejudice was that ;azzequalled the commerdaltrad of Kenny Ball. So he told me about La Monte Young and I loaned him my copy of Ornette Coleman's This Is Our Music. Mutual listen.: ing blockages were cleansed and, with our hearing refreshed, we went out to hear music that dwelled at, that crossroads, particularly the improvising of AMM. During the i970s he spe!lt some time in America studying with Alvin Lucjer. "Western music has traditionally demanded the repression of space", stuart wrote in a Studio International article called "Alvin Lucier's Music of Signs In Space". "Most music is performed for an audience who are all in the same seat. To a certain extent music pedormance mUst address itself to the performance space but only to subjugate its specificities." Written in 1976, his conclusion seems more relevant than ever: "Lucier's most recent work' poses important questions about the relationship of the subject to music as a Signifying practice. It focuses attention literally on the posttton of the subject. In· no sense can an audience'member be considered

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the mere passive recipient of musical meaning" In these pieces the stress on the articulation of perception makes the subject active as the place where musical meaning is created. Everything in is motion and no one can perceive the work as totality. This is路 a new notion 路of musical temporality which is intrinsically linked to musical space." . Alvin Lucier presaged many current concerns with his computer simulations of fantasy spaces (The Bird 0/Bremen Flies Through the House. o/the Burghers),路 drones and harmonics (Music On a Long Thin Wire) and explorations of biofeedback (Clocker, apiece in which the rlIythm of a ticking clock is altered in realtime through electrodes connected betweentbeperformerand a lie detector, and Music For Solo Performer, the ill'St musical路compositionto use amplified brain waves asa sound source). There is an air of dry pseudoscience about some of these pieces, however, almost as if they were lifted out of the gilt-edged pages of a late-Victorian acoustics textbook. Pauline Oliveros was one of the biofeedback activators on the recorded version of Music Por Solo Performer. For her, there are bigger issues at stake, some of which can be related to the sound ecology programme of Canada's World Soundscape Project, and some of which concemourpsychic and corporeal health.lask her to define the Deep Listening concept. "In 1988, that's when we went into that big cistern and recorded. Then we discovered we had enough material for a CD.. When I was trying to write the liner notes, I was trying to come to some conclusion about what it was we were actually doIng in there. The two words came together - deep listening - because it's a very challenging space to create music in, when you have forty-five seconds reverberation coming back at you. The sound is so well mirrored, so to sp~, that.it's ruird to tell direct sound from the reflective sound. It puts you in the deep listening space. You're hearing the past, of sound that you made; you're con- . tlnWng it, possibly, so you're right in the present, and you're anticipating the future, which is coming at you from the past."

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She laughs. "So it puts you into the simultaneity路 of time, which is quite wonderful, but it's challenging to maintain it imd stay concentrated. So that's what I thought we were <laing, and listenitig to one another as well. The space itself ' becomes a very active partnetinthe creation but how you Jis. ten to it is how it gets shaped. Once I had made that discovery of putting those two words ,tQgether - dee~ ljstening - it felt like a nice logo to make a connec~onto the work I had been doing all these year&and continue to do.", She describes aweSome resonant spaces as otherworldly. "cathedrals were constructed for that purpose, to have sound which haS a: supernatural presence. We have enough of them. Grand Central Station is a tremendous reverberant space. Railroad StatioDswere 'built like'that - big pyramids. Both-Stuart Dempster and I had been interested in reverberant spaces over a lifetime. Both of Us being hom' players: I play, the French hom as well as the accordion, S~ playing the trombone and digeiidOO. As a young perf'orm.et lwas aware of the kinds of rooms I was playing my instrument in~ I noticed, of course, , that in a very dry space the tone didn't sound so good and in a more reverberant space, I began to get a more full, round,. rich tone." ' From the early 19705, Paulthe Oliveros has been: writing "sonic meditati~ns". She gives me an example. "The very first one was called Teach Yourself To Fly. The instrUction goes something like this:

, Observe your breath and try to remairi ,an observer of the ,breath when you feel in tune with the breath cycle gradually let the breath become audible 'Without trying to place your voice just let the bteath vibrate'the voCal Chords ~ and gradually increase the intenSity it comes to the point when it's time to decrease then go back to the breath."

until

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sonic healing/pharmaceutical method In 1990, the.manufacturer of Nurofen, a pain relief product, used two pieces of music for a television advert in a classic "before and ,after" formulation. 1he headache half of the commercial was illustrated by a piece ofJapanesegagtiku, the elegant court music which dates back almost unchanged . to the beginning of the eighth century. Headaciie relief comes when the gagaku is replaced by Mike Oldfield's comically twee yet distressingly clumsy slice.of exotica kitsch, "Etude",

taken from his soundtrack to The Killing Fields.

listening below the surface From Pauline's deep listening logo and the sonic meditations came another idea: the deep listening training sessions. "Every year I lead a retreat in New Mexico, in the Sangre de Cristo mountains in June", she explains. "People come to spend a week together to do different things which I -call deep listening, or we try to find out what deep listening is; because it opens OJlt, you know? It Jmplies listening below the surface and also listening itiwan1ly; So in these sessions with people I try and provide guidelines so that different forms of-attention can be practised. So that you can come away with a fuller sense of the variety of experiences that you can have by listening and not tuning out. That's what it's abouL "In these sessions I try to get into the mQre subtle vibrations of the body, as dose to the cellular level as possible and even . the vibrations of the energy that goes through the body. And then also working on sounding. Sounding to increasesensitivity to the more subtle vibrations of the body. SoUnding vocally - I always do these sessions without instruments because it gets real fundamental with vOcansing." I ask her if she feels there is a relationship between these vibrational investigations and shamanic teChniques of ecstasy. She laughs. "Well, it's the in thing right now. You can be a weekend shaman, take a course in being a shaman. We have a spiritual supermarket going where all these different tastes of different traditions are

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being presented in different ways. It's not necessarily bad. It depends on the motivation. There's a value to gaining some understanding of "practical traditions. I think the shamanic journeying practice is very powerful, very reWarding and rich in terms of galning access to the inner world and getting valuable messages from the inner teachers iliat are there. I'm very interested in that. We do journeying almost every night at the retreat - journeying lit different ways, say journeying for oneself or journeY!ng for a partner or journeying on a theme. I want to connect with listening in the broadest sense; not only listenin8 to sound and vibrations but understanding that we are vibrations. We're made of it. It's working back to a spiritual development. Sound is the leading energy in that development. "

12 theatre

of sound·

World SoundScape Project; Thomas Kaner; Hans Jenny;. Plunderphonlcs; progressive rock; Paul SchulZe

digital archaeology In a hitherto neglected muSeum basement a cupboard

is opened. Uritouched since Victorian times, it contains the

preserved· drone of a mosquito. The digital restorer gently shifts acoustic dust and grime from this frozen moment of ·sound with a virtual toothbrush. 'The drone-grows stronger in the surrounding silence but the sound is old and impossibly fragile. It disintegrates suddenly and the digital restorer wakes with a start, sitting upright in bed in a cold sweat.

theatre of sound "This j>lurring of the edges between music and envi· ronmental sounds may eventually prove to be the most striking feature of all twentieth-century music", wrote com· poser and World Soundscape Project founder R. Murray Schafer in his book The Tuning of the World. Based at Simon Fraser University, British ColUQJ.bia, the World Soundscape Project was, and is, dedicated to the study and documentation of sounds in their environment. A double album and accom· panying book released by the PrOject - The Vancouver _ Soundscape - includes recordings of air horns and steam whistles, mournfully blasting and hooting across cold land· scapes. _"One of the strangest things happened a few years back when we had a very cold spell", a Vancouver llghthouse

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keeper told WSPresearchers. "There were patches of ice all over the Bay. When the echo came back from the路 ice it , sounded like somebody ripping a large sheet of cloth." Singular memories and vanishing sounds are the stock-intrade of the project. "Perhaps the only animal sound'in the Vancouver area that can compare in intensity with the mechanical operations of the sawmill is that of the Hoolack gibbons, recorded in the Stanley Park Zoo, where it was measured at a peak level of 110 dBA", say the album sleevenotes. Another WSP publication,European Sound Diary, notes sound impressions garnered during a trip from Sweden through to Scotland in 1975. The book can seem obsessional, though the fact that a written audio diary is unusual and a photographic record is commonplace says something about our attitude to sound. Everything from car horns to street conversations comes under the scrutiny of the WSP diarists. "I think I'm going to have a heart attack", one of the researchers says as they emerge into the noise and dirt surrounding liverpool Street station in the mid 1970s. Didactic and conservationist,.equally focused on acoustic philosophy and practical sound des~, the project under R. Murray ~chafer leaned to~ nostalgic yearnings for a preelectronic, even pre-industrial sotindscape. Throughout all WSP material, the strongest hatred is reserved for Muzak (or Moozak, as they term it). Schafer must have shuddered to see himself quoted in }osephLanza's pro-Muzak/easy listening . polemic, Elevator Music, yet the concentration on sound events is highly subjective. .Distant ambulance sirens.may be one person's purgatory anq another's poetry. "If we have a hope of improving the路acoustic design of the world", Schafer Wrote .in The Tuning of the World, "it will be realizable only' after the recovery of silence as a positive state in our lives. Still the noise in the mind: that路 is the first task - then everything else will follow in time." Under bombardment from increasing noise pollution levels, we can sympathise with Schafer and long for a wOrld free of road drills and excessIVely loud

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barcode reader bleeps without sharing his desire to return to an Edenic state of pure, permanent quietude.

notation -MusicolOgist Samuel Akpabot notates a kara flute ensemble of the Birom people innorthem Nigeria as follows: . Player 1 stops to do a little dance; player 2 stops to bloW his nose; player 3 stops to urinate and spit; -player 4 stops to laugh at'player 3 and chat with the Crowd; players 3 and 4 stop to argue; player 5 stops to tune his drum. Notati~nis the critical word. Similar notations ofmtisical events appear daily in newspapers and magazines, except they are caIledreviews~

thresholds "Intrinsically non-visual, most of Max Neuhaus's works exist on the threshold of perception - sound sources are placed

so that they cannot be .seen and ·the sounds become a natural element of the space - ever·present yet almost imperceptible." Sonorita ProspetUche: Suorio Ambiemeimmaglne (catalogue of sound art (!Xbibited in Ritnini, 1982, dedicated to Athanasius Kircher, the seventeenthcentury science·magic explorer who devised speaking statues, mechanical organs and the megaphone, studied acoustlcs.and no~ted birdsong) .

Paradoxically, unusually quiet music highlights the suppos~ edly polluting sounds of our environment. A recording studio is a quiet place until you attempt to record sounds· on the· . threshold of bearing. "The more· you try and achieve· this mathematical impossibility, the more It recedes" , says Max Eastley, creator of sound sctilptures which can be audible but aIinost invisible or visible but almost inaudible. He cites Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart", a story of hypersensitive hearing, faint moans and creaking hinges in which the central protaganist silences an old manbyrnurdering him, only to hear a beating sound, like a watch wrapped in cotton, the noise of the buried heart beating louder and louder in the

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acoustic space of his gullt.. "YOU have to accept what's there. To hear nothing, you have to be dead." Felix Hess assembled a soUnd installation of fifty robot "sQund creatures" at Xebec Hall, -Kobe. Called Chirping and Sllence,the installation was inspired by the communication ,eco-system of frog choruses. Since the sound was interrupted by extraneous sounds, silence in the gallery was vital. The following description appeared in A Document On.Xebec : 路We Jlad -imagined that the foyer, on ~ afternoon when nothing wasbdngheld there, was extremely tranquil, but not even one of them began to call out in response to any of the . othet5. So first we turned off the air conditioner in the room, and then we turned off the one on the second floor. Then we turned off the refrigerator and the ele~tric cOoking equipment in the adjoining cafe, the power of the multl路vision in the foyer, and the power of the ven~ machine in a space about ten metres away. One by one we took away these continual noises,whicl) together created a kind of drone there ... Hess was very interested in this and said thiligs like, 'From now on maybe] should do a performance of turning off sounds'. By presenting us with srrulJ.I, delicate sounds, Hess's work rapidly opened up our ears." , "Whilecomposiilg ~d developing a piece, my pasSion for 'inaudible' sOU11ds is a guiding' principle", ~tes Thomas Kaner, creator of threshold reco~ngs produced with gong sound, contact microphones and studio processing. "I choO$e, and build my music from elements which cannot be perceived by the normal ear. Perhaps'these sounds that are 路so closely relatec;l to sUence路 transport some of thefr origins into the music, like a memory." He talks about diffusion of light, sound sources that can't be lo~ised, which shift in focus. A1tother oompoSer, PaulSchiitze, wrote in The Wire magazine about Kaner's fugitiVe music: "Recently listening to Thomas Kaner's Permafrost, 1 found that by the end of the disc my sense of aural P.erspective was so altered that the music seemed to con: tinue in the sounds around me. TUbe trains passing beneath

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the building, distant boilers, the air conditioning, and the elevator engines had been pulled into concert. This effect lasted for'about forty minutes during which I could not get anything·toretum to its· 'normal position' in the 'mix' of my flat."

soundhouses The leaf.hole cricket chews a pear..shaped.hole near . the centre of a 'leaf, rests its forelegs on the sUrface of the leaf and scrapes its elytra, so increasing the amplitude of its song. The mole cricket digs a 10udspeaker·1ike burrow and then sits insid~, rear end airwards,· and .stridulates, so increasing the amplitude of its song. The howler monkey hasgreatiy enlarged hyoid bones which form a resonating chamber iil its throat, . so increasing the amplitude of its song;

boundary and surface "Context is .half the work", artist John Latham once. wrote, and as the terrifying noise of an ampiified electric saw .. ripping through books demonstrated to me long before I·had come across this epigram, to give 50 per cent or more over to context is to open mUsic out into an immersive environment, a theatre of chaos and complexity.· Counterbalancing moves to rationalise music into finite, controllable sequences of numbers (whether digital, Pytbagorean,Qabalistic or the serialism of Milton Babbitt and Pierre Boulez), a large proportion of music made .during the. past hundred years· has iDiplicitly. or violently' rejected absolutes: the absolutes of political or religious dogma; the expedient. absolutes of copyright; the beginning and end of a piece; the distinction between composer and performer, performer and audience, music and surroundings; the rejection of absolute boundaries and standardswith which one piece of music· can be judged against another.

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theatre of illusions "The magician is assisted by a boy, to whom (in the dark) he speaks at a distance through a tube formed of the windpipes of cranes, storks, or swans ... A skull is made from the omentum of an ox, Etruscan wax, and gypsum and is connected with the windpipe of a crane through which an .assistant speaks. Then burning coals and incense are put around it,and the skull vanishes (by the wu: melting)." Various magical tricks from nearly one thousand years ago,路 documented by Hippolytos in the Refutatton of aU Heresies. SimUar ventriloqUial deceptions, primitive prophesies of the wired city,. undid the Wizard of Oz.

wave forms

;

In Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors, anthropologist Victor Turner wrote that "man is both a structural and an antistructural .entity, who grows through anti:-structure and conserves through structure". Open structureS which begin as revolutions often deteriorate into master plans deSigned to encompass ... the universe and autocratically eradicate all anomalous forms of music. So a return to listening, to hearing the world, is the most radical structure of all, since it is hard . to envisage a master plan emerging out of such an amorphous, unControllable路 method. This is not to say that cosmological and social inferences cannot be drawn from observing the effects of sound. A Swiss scientist named Hans Jenny studied experimental periodicity for many years, taking remarkable photographs of otherwise hidden effects of vibration, sound, speech,even Mozart and Bach, on liquid masses and powders. Collected in his book Cymattcs (the stUdy of wave forms), these enlarged images of mercury drops, gases, silver salt, lycopodium powder and solidifying pastes seem to show lunar deserts, Tantric diagrams, bubbling viscous swamps and creatures from the notebooks of H.R. Giger. Hans Jenny regarded his work.as part of a greater study, described as "a triadic world model (the

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trinity of configuration, wave, power)". Jenny, who died in 1972, was a painter, musiCian, sCientist and colour路light designer for the theatre. Inspired by researchers such as Chladni, who vibrated sand with a violin bow in 1787 and declared "the sound is painting", he saw affinities between the rhythms created by vibrating liquids with sound and the rhythms of history, human relations, biorhythms, the rhythms of poetry and music. "But it must be stressed", he concluded, "that these affinities are not merely metaphors or analogies but involve the recognition of homologous systems." Cymattcs was dedicated to the memory of Rudolf Steiner,. the Austrian founder of the anthroposophic school of mysti路 . cal thought, and Jenny's work turns up in a Steiner路published book by Theodor Schwenk, Sensitive Chaos. Introducing his study of flow motion inwater,air and clouds, Schwenk makes ' suggestions for "a way on beyond pure phenomenology, to路 wards an ability to 'read' ... Through watching water and air with unprejudiced eyes, our way of thinking becomes changed and more suited to the understanding of what is alive." A 1960s precursor of the chaos maths fractals of the 1980s, Sensitive Chaos recalls the exhortations of John Cage, Pauline Oliveros or Roland Kirk to listen (without prejudice). Even the book jacket illustration is almost identical in its blue colour and swirling forms to Richard Pedreguera's cover art for Sun Ra's Cosmic Tones for Mental Therapy album, released on Ra's EI Saturn label at around the same time. The only significant difference is that in Pedreguera's painting, a head - almost certainly Ra's - is forming in the centre of this vorocallandscape. Musicians can find' material. which matches their own discoveries in these searches for universal harmony among vibrations and wave forms. Butan art based purely on observing nature should make us look back to ancient China, when Confucianists accused Taoists of immersing themselves in nature at the great cost of ignoring the social. There is a Rudolf . Steiner school just around the comer from where I live. For a

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time, paintings from the school were pinned around the walls of the park cafe - delicate;-amorphous, controlled abstractions based on the wave forms ~ocumented by Schwenk andJenny. Attractive at fit'st viewing, these painting$ began to seem oppresSive to m.e in their rigid, formulaic exclusion of representation, drama, contrast, variety or direct reference to anything more substantial than pastel-shaded aether.

theatre of the world The year after Antonin Artaudwrote with delirious enthusiasm about the -Balinese dance-drama he had seen performed at the 1931 Colonial Exhibition in Paris, he published the first manifesto of his Theatre of Cruelty. -Artaud proposed an inner theatre of dreams, fantasies and obsessions, activated by masks, lighting like a "flight of fire arrows", ritual costumes, violent physical images of horrible crimes and famous personalities. "It must be aimed at the system by exact means", he wrote in another manifesto, No More Masterpieces, "the same means as the sympathetic music used by some tribes which we admire on records but are incapable of originating ourselves." He also envisaged new musical instruments, used as objects on stage andprodudng "an Unbearably piercing sound." Just as Sir Francis Bacon's frequently quoted passage from his utopian New Atlantis of 1624 - "Wee have also Sound-Houses, where wee practice and demonstrate all Sounds and their Generation. Wee have Harmonies which you have not, of Quarter-Sounds .. _Wee represent and imitate all Articulate Sounds and Letters, and the Voices and Notes of Beasts and Birds ... Strange and Artificial Echoes ; .. meanes to convey Sounds in Trunks and Pipes, in strange tines and Distances" - seems to us like a prediction of music and teleC9tI1fi.1unications in the twentieth century,' so Artaud'~ manifesto of cruelty sounds cruelly reminiscent of half the rock videos on MTV.

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theatre of illusions ··11 Tokwit, female war dancer of the northwest coast Kwakiutl Indians, entered a false-bottomed box during the winter ceremonials. She was apparently burned to death. Mak· ing an exit into a previously dug trench, she would communicate from the. underworld through a series of kelp (seaweed) speald.ng tunes.

the electronic forest. Media has turne~ the world into a theatre. Music reflects this environment (what Jon Hassell has called the electronic forest) and, inevitably, many musicians create work which is lost and helpless in the forest, musics from which they disappear, leaving a vacuum at the centre of empty formlessness.If I listen to the New Age end of post-Fourth World/ ambient composing - albums such as Steve Roach's Dreamtime Returns or David Parsons's Yatra - I hear a false-frontage polyvinyl reproduction of nature and myth. The construction of this theatre is so transparently thin that I, feel I can look behind the image to find the composer, inactive and supine; blissed out by his own airbrushed update of all those vulgar myths, carniverous plants, stinging bugs and natural disasters. "Research into albums that have featured Pipes and similar sounds have shown that it is the sound and the music content that has sold the album, and it is NOT necessary to have a named artist playing the instrument." PolyGram Press release for Pan Pipe Moods, January

1995

Others create work which throws a stream of theoretical and ethical questions (problems, ~ome would say) into the mix. Sample and turntable specialists such as John O~d, John Wall, Nico~Collins,· David Shea, Phillip Jeck and Christian Marclay avoid most of the draconian copyright enforcements enacted on hip-hop and house samplers, yet by using the work of other musicians as raw material, they focus attention on

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appropriation (or plunderphOnics~ as John ,Oswald has, called , it) as a" or the, central issue of the process. Representatives for Michael Jacksonatld SonyRecotdswere incensed.by Oswald's reassenlblYQf-]ackson's "Bad" . and his use of Jackson's image (collaged on to a naked female body) for the cover of Plunderphonlc,"his not-for-sale CO of reconfigured Stravinsky, James Brown, Beatles, Dolly Parton, Glenn Gould, MetalUca, 101 Strings, etc. Oswald liVes in Toronto, soJackson's people exerted pressure on the ean8rlian Reconliog Industry Association,whichin tum compelled Oswald to give up, all remaining copies of his album to be physically . crushed. Sampling is the most extreme contemporary examPle: Qf a musiCÂˇwhich absorbs intoitselfthe music 'whichSQl'l'UUnds it. 1t1rst'm~ Oswaldin New York.Cfty in 1979, having travdled there with improvisers Steve Beresford and Nigel Coombes. Without theorising it beforehand, Beresford, Coombes and I 'were pla:ying music that jumped across stylistic boundaries with little regard for synchronicit'f or "good taste~-the~ of instant jump-cutlmprovising that some critics. would ,call post-modern. In New York we met and played with other musicians who felt exactly the same way: Oswald, John Zo~, Eugene ChadbOW1ie, Polly Bradfield, Charles K. N~ â&#x20AC;˘. Bob 'Qstertag and Toshinorl Kondo, among', ~ein., EUgene:: Chadbourne, for, example,had formed a band, whiq,. combined country music' (which he loved) with manic ,!Me improvisation. ZQrn ~ explained itas a generational thing of growing up with a diVCl'Se record collection. As a teenager he began takiitg the effects he liked from Elliot Carter or Charles Ives pieces and slotting them into his 'own COlDpositions. "It 'WQ, almost Uke a William Burroughs cut-up technique" ,he . S!ddto 'QJ.e in 1988. "I'm ~~:a tblef..1bere's no hierittchy, where if you listen ~classica1 music you do it drinking champagne and, if you listen to blues it's with a sho.t of whisky in a dirty Uttle bar. n.'kind of attitude - that one is dirty and the other is clean - is rldictilous." ,

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In.N~ York, Oswald drank beer with bourbon chasers. Although he played slippery alto saxophone and danced, his mind was on fantasy reconstructions of gender and identity through technological manipulation. As early as 1975, he had snipped, restitched and collaged Led Zeppelin with a crazed radio preacher into a prophet,ic piece called "Power". During a visit to London to promote his plunderphonic reconstruction of the Grateful Dead's "Dark Star" on Grayjolded,we got together to talk about the Issues raised by sampling. Sampling is neither a technically nor an ideologically homogenous process. Some composers - John Wall, for example - manipulate CO-sourced raw material in a digital sampler to create an integral aesthetic that is both referential and utterly unfamiliar; others -Christian Marclay and Phillip Jeck - oVerlay records by other artists, exploiting the icoQ.ic cultural significance and technical idiosyncrades of vinyl. For Oswald, there are many conceptual parameters beneath the obvious issue of~pyright theft. "I was really interested in that idea of legitimate quotation, which isn't built into the system", he says. "You don't have quote marks in musical no~ tation or in recordings, for that matter. But you can annotate your sources. I tend to' call the portions of things. that I use Electro-quotations. The thing that's perhaps perverse in the analogy with literature is that I'm very rarely just quoting. Although I tend not to filter or distort the sound, I transform it so much in time that it's not just free' quotation. It's some sort of elaboration. Ifs like the commentary is built in. What you usually get in journalism or literature is that the quotation doesn't usually represent the whole essay. It's something that's used as a trigger point for a commentary or elaboration. In mUSic, I think you can do kind of things simultaneously. You can have all sorts of things happening where the quotation is recognisable as itself, even though it's been transformed' in some way. So that's when you get into'- this Electro-quotation thing, when the source is still familiar. It's Electro-quotation.if you're making an electronic quote of

those

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something and it's .Plunderphonies if you're screwing around with that quote." Sampling outrages those who believe in the sanctity ofauthorship and ownership. But, at the opposite extreme, musics which attempt to make a nostalgic, exaggerated ~ to the . nineteenth century before Debussy, the huge symphonic expressions of the composer as a single god, at the cen~ of creation and in control of all his works, Can only seem ludi-· . crous .at a time when computers think faster, .clone replications at will and spread information over vast distances in intricate,often unidentifiable webs. In 1975; a colleague of mine - Jeffery Shaw, now a virtual artist (or artist of virtuality, perhaps) -was commissioned to provide Rick Wakeman with inflatable castle turrets for his extravaganZa, Myths and·Legends o/King Arthur, staged. on ice at Wembley. He passed me a free ticket and I can still recall my fascinated horror, watch- . ing blade-footed damsels and unsteady knights carrying cardboard swords circle the transported, caped Wakeman as he executed scalar flig~ts ~m top to bottom of the banked keyboards at which he - Liberace and Superman - Was the epicent:te. Wakeman played the fool in this milieu, of course, but many of his colleagues in progressive rock and jaZZ rock believed in the regressive philosophies of command-centre grandiosity, replete with lengthy solos, meaningless timesignature changes, conspicuous dexterity, narrative develop-. ment and the mystico-sexual inevitability of symphonic climax.. The progressive ethos of the genius conducting ·from the mountaintop also lies at the heart of much New Age music. Kitaro, for example, was originally influenced by English progressive rock and the German synthesiser music of 1970s bands such as Tangerine Dream.· Uke most New Age musicians,·he objects to the term, though not as strongly as some European exponents and functionaries of the .genre, such as Hugo Faas, the German manager of Swiss New Age harPist Andreas Vollenweider. "New Age sounds not good translated into German", Fass told me. "It sounds liJre the fascists." Kitaro

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once believed that the atmosphere of music should be created through the exclusive use of beautiful sounds. Born into a small farming community in central Japan, he. played in Tokyo-based bands until sick of Spinal Tap-style internal strife. After going solo, he transformed so-called "classic rock" into a kind of cosmic muzak, full of pomp, melodrama and titles . such as "In theBeginning"and "The New Dawn". In 1990, he told me that he was building a recording studio in America's Rocky Mountains to escape from the noise and crowds of Japan. "I don't want to be a business", he claimed. "I can spend . time in a deeper place. I want to meditate for a whole year and then after that I can compose music." Progressive路 rock drew from programme music, a type of composing which portrays ,specific scenes or events. In a sense, Debussy could be described as a programme composer, yet like the paintings of Turner, his descriptiveness tc;nds to dissolve the subject; implying the non-fixity that is more characteristic of the twentieth century. Programme music was the precursor of synthetic electronic ambience - the Environments series of albums, for example, which were designed to insinuate tranquil rural moods into the stress zones of indoor urban life. Among the most famous, distinguished and enduringly popular, not to say overworked, examples of programme music are Mendelssohn's Fingal's Cave, Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony, Vaughan Williams's The Lark Ascending, Sibelius's Finlandia and Richard Strauss's. Also sprach Zarathustra. Strauss's "astonishing orchestral virtuosity tempted him, to a parade of realism that in its extreme form led to bathos" chides Leslie Orrey, author of Programme Music. Bathos was mistaken for profundity by the likes of Emerson, Lake and Palmer and even now, the most unlikely pop, rock or swingbeat star will signal the big entry with dry ice, retina-blistering white light and the blasting fanfares of Also sprach Zarathustra (in all proba~ility believing it to have been written by a film compo~r such as John Wil1iams . for 2001: A Space 04Pssey).

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sound design Despite all these caveats, the process of composing by imagining, then depicting, inner landscapes and scenarios which 'remain private to the composer can create striking re路 suits. "It's something I do" , admits PaQl Schutze, once an Australian-based soundtrack composer for cinema" now the London路based creator of albums such as Apart, The SurgtP'Y o/Touch; The Rapture 0/Metals and New Maps o/HeU. !'But it's hard to know whether I do that because I spent so ,long doing film or whether I gravitated to fUm because I do that first. Interestingly, I think the reason ,I stopped doing film, is because, even though film potentially facilitates the total design of a pan-aural event by induding musical and non-musical sound, itdoesn't really take advantage of that. With the few exceptions that we all are acutely aware of; like Alan Splet's work with David Lynch, Walter Mirch's work with Coppola and Scorsese, and a very few other individual 'isolated examples such as the Coenbrothers' films like Blood Simple and Hudsucker Proxy, film doesn't allow this. It's logical, because, . film is a massively expensive medium." But cinema is a theatre of exaggeration in which every minute, sound we hear is foregroundedwith hallucinogenic clarity: the harsh scrape of a beard as Henry Fonda is shaved or the interplay between tiny sound events and. Ennio Morricone's music scores in Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns; the hugely amplified no~ of kicks,pUliches, even the passage. of arms through the au- in Chinese martial arts film; the tense creak of boat timbers, the squish ofa knife into flesh, the ricochet of bullets off rocks in countless westerns. "There's a wonderful story about Taxi Driver", says Schiit:ze. "I think it was the ~ and only film where, when the censors saw the film, the only requirement they had in order to pass it ' for a screening certificate was a sound cut. What completely freaked them out was the fact that Walter Mirch had taken the. ,idea of the gun',W'hichis a tremendously symbolic and disturbing thing, andhe put ciln!loit fire ~derneath'the gunshots. So

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these gunshots are nota pop; these gunshots are like your lungs are blown out through the back of the theatre, which is probably what it would {eel like if you were holdiltg the gun. 1 think the censors .realised ·that this was subjective sound from the character's perspective. You were feeling the recoll because you were holding the gun, therefore you were empa· thising with Travis Bickle which is a deeply disturbing thing. . to realise you're dOing. 1 think this is a controversial thing to say, be~ause the music score [by Bernard Herrmann] is so highly regarded, but 1 think it's almost expendable. The sound that there is so powerful that if you took the music scoreaway you would actually make the film more disturbing, not .. less. . . "With a lot of scores, music scores interpose themselves .between the visceral quality of the film and the audience. Eraserhead is a brilliant ~ple of runDlng a film on abstract sound design. What Alan Splet did'for films, he tOok abstract 'space' music - the whole idea that anything abstract was air· borne - and he grounded it, rubbed its face in the wet cement and said, 'Look, this is where you are, this is what you know about, this is really what scares you. This is your reality. It's terrifying and it's incredibly beautiful at the same time.' So suddenly, that film gave a voice to the whole industrial, land· grounded, earth·ambient genre - everyone, from Zoviet France, to Coll, to Lustmord. There are hundreds of them and it also provided the backdrop from a lot 'of industrial bands like Front 242 and Hoodlum Priest. 1 think you'd be hard· pressed to find a iuny developed example of this that predated that film .. 1 could be completely wrong on this and have my theory blown out of the' water." Having grown up in a cinematic environment, in which film's hyperrealtheatreof sound animates everyday noise out· side the cinema, some musicians are influenced into a rrophetic form of composirig which is not so much soundtrack for an imaginary film as sound design for an imaginary life. "I think there's a veri strong sense in a lot of

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Contemporary music tha,t the formal musical elements are路die legitimate bones of the .composition and the rest of .it is decoration or icing.or bridge passages", Schutze路concludes. -It's fairly rare to hdlritamatgamatm msnCh.a way.3Soae isn't given precedence over-the other, aSide from the fact that . a listener's earwiU give p~ce to something-that is more structurally coherent, Whatever that means. So I actually think the real arena for this is outside rum."

ocean of sound David Lynch; John Lilly; Kate Bush; David. Sylvlan; shamanism; ambient; Information ocean

"I feel a little bit strange," says David Lynch. Well, what else? We are sitting in a large; L-shapedroom in his .home. One wall, vast as a drive·in movie screen, is glass; be· hind it lies the vegetal mystery and darkness of the Hollywood. Hills at night. Lynch lost his dog in this darkness,eaten by coyotes, he maintains. The room echoes with our voices and explosive snaps from a log fire, spearing the cold air,ricochet· ing off the walls and ceiling. Three iterDs of 1950s' furniture occupy the broad exp'anse of floor, megalithic in ·their hap· less,solitary.arrangement. Lynch may well have deliberately placed these few chairs at shouting distance from each otherin order to make relaxation and intimacy as difficult as possible. Although Twin Peaks, designed by Lynch and writer Mark Frost for ABC·TV, degenerated into aimlessness, the original pilot contained m~ents of genuine strangeness, particularly the music and the red·curtain ending. The otherworldly qual· ity of this latter scene came partly from the fact that it was shot in reverse. "The whole thing was shot backwards",· says Lynch. "You start at the end and work to the beginning. All the camera m~, therefore, are backwards. All their walking is backwards and all their talking is backwards but the whole idea of it, of course, is that it will not and it should not look exactly realistic but it should look somewhat realistic. We had

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to rehearse路all that. There were路just two actors and.they had to learn tbeirlines backwards. They had their lines printed on a tape backWards and they'd just listen over and over to it. Some sounds backwards are just impossible.to duplicate. I wanted to do more 路of this thirig - it's really ;aniftylook and feel. The timing is funny." . This nifty mood, reminiscent of ectoplasmic spiritualist seances, carried over into the music,. which was sung by Julee Cruise and created by Angelo Badalamenti with Lynch writing lyrics. Lynch sent Badalamenti a column offorty words, written on an envelope. Badalamenti recalls this envelope when I talk to him on the telephone. "He sent tile a lyric called 'Mysteries of Love' ", says BadalariJ.enti. "It was like six lines of poetry. I called him and asked him, 'What do you Want me to do with this? What kind of music?' He said, -'Make it like the waves of the ocean. Make the music like a beautiful wind and like the songchantirigthrough time. And cosmic.'So I said, 'Oh, I'm glad you told me' ." Mfruitful partnership went on to produce performance pieces, television c6mmetcials and an album - Floating Into the Night. If Chet Baker had sung lyrics over Nino Rota orchestrationS of Santo and Johnny's "Sleepwalk" and The Chantays' "Pipeline" then the resultS .. might have sounded similar to Julee Cruise's oceanic crooning.

the mediumship of the tape recorder Dr Konstantin Raudlve, once a student of Carl Jung and a former professor of psychology at the UniVersities of Uppsala and Riga, believed that a tape recorder left runnirig in record mode in a quiet room can capture the voices of the dead. This phenomenon, if it exists, was路 prophesied by Thomas. ~n; inventor of the phonograph, but disoovered by a: musician and film producer named Friedrich JUrgenson . at the end of the 19505. Taking a tape recorder out to the Swedish counttyside to record birdsong, he also picked up faint conversations which, coinCidentally or not,. Were

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discussions ofnoctumal bird vocalisations. JUrgenson published a book, Voices From the UnIverse, which alerted parapsychologists. In 1971, Pye Records (the same company that released many. important pop and R&B路records in the 196Os) participated in experiments aimed at testing the theory. During an eighteen-minute recording, the engineer heard nothing over his headphones, although the VU meter indicated conStant signals. At the playback, those present heard over two hundred "voices". These "psychophonic" voices sound 1ilre swarms' of aural garbage, the aether talk of subliminal toadfish captured in the global babble of deadcity radio transmissionS that fills our so-called silence. Perhaps they are spirits trying to tell us something. But what?

immersion . "Postmodem humans swim in a third transparent medium now materia.liSing. Every fact that can be digitized, is." KevlnKelly, OUt 0/ Control: the new biology 0/ machines

Oceans and islands. Two of the most common metaphorical . images at the end of the. millennium. Islamic activists in Iran seek to ban satellite dishes, alarmed by floods of Western decadence flowing in on a sea of electronic cultural imperialism. John Perry Barlow, cyberspace guru and Grateful Dead lyriCist, describes the emergent electronic connectedness as an ocean of information. On our watery planet, we return to the sea for a diagnosis of our current condition. Submersion into deep and mysterious pools represents an intensely romantic desire for .' dispersion into nature, the utlconscious, the womb, the chaotic stuff of which life is madC. As a genteel, chlorine-scented expression .of this primordial longing, the popularity of swim-. ming as recreation is a路 relatively modem obsession. "Ever since George mhad set the mood by swimming off Weymoutbto the accompaniment of a chamber orchestra" , writes Charles Sprawson in Haunts-oj the Black Masseur, "a string

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_of resorts had grown up along the coasts of England." Now-a replica of his bathing machine sits in Weymouth's Sealife Centre, and in the buildings which surround it, rays and sharks glide and wheel in their tanks to soundtrack loops ofNew Age music,- divorced from the rhythms of the sea, -out oftime. Kings and queens have always had their ambient music: the _symbol of ultimate power and wealth, a soundtrack orchestra to smooth transitional moments, ease sleep and digestion, mollify the gods of disorder, dramatise- rites and pomp. This was their own- personal Muzak system and sleeping piUprescription. But with the advent of the Walkman, the Oiscman, the OATman, the car radio, tape and CO player, we have ali become monarchs, at least in the sense that we can cut ourselves off from our surroundings, or, as Aldo Morita envisaged when he co-designed the Sony Walkman, our families. The image of bathing in sound is a recurrent theme of the past hundred years:OebussY's Images and Ravel'sJeux d'eau ripple around the listener; Arnold Schoenberg's The Changing Chord-Summer Morning By a Lake-Colours wraps us in flickering submarine light; Gyorgy Ugeti's Atmosphh'es envelops us in steam; Morton Feldman's Durations drips down in a slowly configuring tatoo of sonic colours; Toru Takemitsu's film scores bathe us in the shadow world of Jun'Ichiro Tanizakl; Gavin Bryars's The Sinking of the Titanic sinks us into the abyss of fading echoes, rusting treasures and bloated corpses. In a more commercial sphere, liquid musics that fall somewhere betw~enexperiment and easy listening teeter on the edge of formless ambience: Les Baxter's "Sunken City"; My Bloody Valentine's "Loomer"; Reload's whale sounds and samples from The Deep on A Collection of Short Stories; The Cocteau Twins' Echoes In a ShaUow Bay EP; Bolger Czukay's "Cool In the Pool"; The Beach Boys' "Cool, Cool Water", which moves_ from cool finger-snapping surf, pool and suntan culture into a-swirling, glossolalic droWning section, created for Smile at a tinie When Brian Wilson was descending into a

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deep dark trenchof~licincapadty and Mike Love was fasting and meditating with such fervour that he began to believe that he might be able to talk to the birds. In fact, of all the Beach Boys, the one.who came closest to the oceanic,was Dennis Wilson, whose -solo 'album ~ Padflc Ocean Blue hovered compellingly between surfer's ecstasy, nature wor. ship and alcoholic sentimentality. Six years after that album, Dennis Wilson drowned in Marina Del Ray, his diving capabilities blunted by alcohol, Valium and cocaine. After special dispensation from PresidentRonald Reagan, he was bUried in the Pacific. In 1993, I found myself flat on my back in the total darkness of a floatation tank,listening to ambient techno tracks by Black Dog, B12; Derrick May, Aphex Twin and The Orb. This promotional gimmick, dreamed up by-the record company as a way of making a compilation album into a news story, underlined, other connections' between ambient music and floatation., Some years earlier, I had written a story about a floatation centre-in South London called Lux Aetema, named after the Ugeti piece that features in the soundtrack of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. Aimed at the informed yuppie, perhaps a person not unlike the Mickey Rourke char-' acter in9% Weeks with his Nakamichi tape deck and ambient musical backdrops, this -now defunct establishment played Brian Eno albums in the background as you waited for your float sitting on Tom Dixon chairs. -And in Tokyo in 1993, a poster advertised an event organised by Eden In the Sky Code: 05/Space Lab Yellow, called Respect To John Ltily. "Ambient Underground Movement - party for next generation", it promised, with a schedUled seminar and workshop with John Lilly from 20:00 to 21:00 and then ambient dance with DJ Mooky, interactive VJ Sato and space direction by LF-Research, More than anybody, John Lilly forged links between- dolphin intelligence, sensory deprivation, immersion and psychedelics that have resurfaced in the culture which surrounds ambient music. has been carlcaturedin two films,

He.

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The Day of the Dolphin and Altered States. With his schemeS for reprogramming the human biocomputer, Ully has moved from being the scientific equivalent of Dr Doolittle to being the unscientific equivalent of Dr Spack - learning to communicate with dolphins, then immersing himself for extended periods in sensory deprivatiori tanks under the influence of powerful hallucinogenics and finally becoming a guru for the rave New Age. A monologue by Lilly, excerpted from his book The Centre of the Cyclone, is accompanied by the ambient electronic music of Ryoji Ikeda and Yoshio Ojima on a Japanese CD entitled'Silence. And on a Danish CD compilation of ambient, entitled Boredom Is Deep and Mysterious, Opiate have a track called "John Lilly In Loop". Immersion is one of the key words of the late twentieth . century. Bass is immersive, echoes are immersive, noise is immersive. With massive volume and density, categories barely matter: Neil Young or The Cocteau Twins heard live, Philip Glass in his early days, Slayer, Suicide, Phill Niblock, Brian Jones's post-production ultra-phasing of Joujouka's trance musicians, the Velvet Underground's "I Heard Her Call My Name", Saw Throat's Inde$troy, "And The Gods Made Love" by JimiHendrix, the' Burundi drummers, Peter Brotzmann'sMachine Gun, aJah Shaka dub session, Eric B & Rakim heard live. MusiC is felt at its vibrational level, permeating every cell, shaking every bone, deralling the conscious, analytical mind. Opiates, floating free (as The Byrds sang in "Dolphins Smile"), vibrational bliss. Eviden~ here is a nostalgia, or a yeanling, to float free in a liquid world of non-linear time, heightened sense perceptions and infinitely subtle communications, as opposed to the everyday world of divided time, building路 blocks, sequential language and objectification which we must negotiate with our awkward, upright, two-legged stance. Psychology returns us inevitably to our foetal condition, sleeping gently in the womb, or to a pre-mobile infant state when the world is colour, sound, smell and touch.

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But does it end there? After ten years of studying dolphin communication in the Virgin Islands andHawaii, Gregory Bateson, anthropologist, psycholOgist and cyberneticist, wrote the following passage in a'l966 essay published in Steps To An Ecology of Mind: "I personally do not believe that the dol,phins have anything that a human linguist would call a 'Lailguage' _ 1 do not think that any anim:Jls without hands would be stupid enough to .arriveat so ou~dish a mode of communication. To use a syntax and category syskm appropriate for a discussion of things that can be handled, while really discussing the patterns and contingeJides of relations, is fantastic. n . For anybody who uses a computer, things that can be handled begin to vanish from the world, increasingly represented by 2-D icons on a screen. The panic is on. Hard copy is disappearing. All sound - acoustic or electronic - can be manipulated in the digital domain. Books are disappearing. PaclG!gingand paper are said.tobe disappearing (thougllno sign of that yet). If you live in the Wester1l world, then industrial-era hard labour appears to be disappearing (except for a vague awareness of distant deadening toil taking plaCe in factories dedicated to new technology manufacture). At Xebec Hall in Kobe, 1 discover a paper entitled ."The. Future Form of Visual Art" written by Toshiharu Ito. "In contrast to human beings who have invented tools to make things and in d~ing so invented a culture", he write:s, "whales and dolphins may have established a culture without objects, consisting only.of communication. Moreover, thdtcultural structure may have a property which is sympathetic to the new media society which has begun to surround us. This could be indicating ~ opening of a new civilisation 'that is totally different to the conventional form. Naturally, such a .forOl would change the significance of art itself. An information network is permeatinginto our daily life environment and new direct linkage media like holophooics and phosphotron are advancing to the next stage of development. In one sense, mankind which is

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placed in such· an informational· environment can be com· . pared with the dolphins or whales in a new kind of sea."

a wicked voice "Singer, thing of evil, stupid and wicked slave of the voice, of that instrument which was not invented by the human intellect, but begotu;n of the body, and which, instead of moving the soul, merely stirs up the dregs of our nature! For what is the voice but the Beast .calling, awakeOing that other Beast which all greafart has sought to chain·up,·asthe archangerchains up, in old pictures, the demon with his woman's face." Vernon Lee, "A Wicked Voice", in Supernatural Tales

And how does the wicked body, the human voice, survive in the information sea? Kate BUsh serves me tea and toast in a private roOOl of a London pub. I had alWays felt that her music was five years behind public taste, definitely a long way from my taste, but, in retrospect, The Dreaming album of 1982 anticipated all tllat would blossom into· credibility in the . 1990s:.didgerid()os, buIlroarers, imitations ofaniinal vocalisa· . tions, simulations of native Australian clapstick rhythms, Indian vocaiised drum rhythms, jazz bass lines,passages of free improvisation accompanied by insect sounds, Irish and Greek folk instruments merged with digital technology and . sampled fito new alchemical compounds.

dream-text "From scattered parts of the world are also found instances of ceremonies, danceS and songs which appear to originate in the sought or unsought dreams and Vlsions of .primitive peoples." }.·Steward IJncoln, The Dream In Primitive Cultures As I have suggested before, recording is a dream·text, a vision

of possible w()rlds, with the studio (despite the mundane knobs and faders, the racks of ~chnology, the bland carpets and utility chairs, the teak and vinyl) as the otherworld. I put this idea to Kate BuSh. "I think that all art deals with dream·

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worlds", she respon~,· "because I think most of it is creating illusion. It's creating an illusion to affect someone in a spe.' cific way, which is to reach out to people. Technol9gy should be there to make things easier to ttans1atetbings on to tape, but it's not the soul of the music. The human element - that's the soul. I thiilk that computers, particularly, could lead us into a completely new age of spiritualism. This hi-tech world . can encourage ·.and embrace very old music. Maybe computers are going to ieach us a ~dous amount aiJout ourselves and the planet, because in some ways it's the nrst objective viewpoint we'll be taking that has Ii very lUghintelligence. I think it could be fantastically exdting if we pUJ; the combitlation of soul and computers together.". .. In Celtic myjho~the. ninth wave was a boundary! a divide betweell homeland and alien~rlds. Beyond the ninth wave wasexi1e. Hounds of Love, ~te Bush's 1985 album, .was two rdeases in one. The first side had its hitsingles"Ooudburst:ing","Runrring Up That Hill", "Hounds of Love".; the second side was "TheNin~ W~", with its seven reflec- . tions on drowning~ floating on the sea or drifting in space, . witch trials, exile, emergence and rebirth. The cover photographs emphasised tbis schizophreriia. On the front, Kate is the cOnfident, sensml,· "public" pertormer - pouting red mouth, pink Skin againSt: violet fabric, franied by dark red hair, bedded by two sleek, soft, honeyroated gundogs. On the . back, she appears in monochrome, either drowning face-up or ·~from water, her arms. draped with seaweed, her eyes averted· !rpm:. the public's (voyeur) gaze. Also on the back cover was an extract from one of Alfred Tennyson's romantic eulogies for the Celtic hero of British legend, KIn8 Arthur:

"'wave after wave, eaCh mightier than the last,

'Tn ~·a ninth one, gathering half the dec!p

And run of vOices, slowly rose and plunged Roaring, and the wave was in a flame" .

Oceanic, incandescent, ecstatic. Sex and pagan spirit. Birth

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and death. "Although there's a lot of ethnic music that I find really moving" , 'she says, " there's something about Celtic music that really does touch me. The sound of Irish pipes - it's the sound of elation. It's like a' big wave. I do get this very oceanic vision. Big waves rolling in." A corrCIation between ocean, islands, birds, music and the unconscious can be found in Celtic myths dating back to before ,the ninth century. In The Voyage of Matldun, 'the travellers hear a murmuring confusion of voices at a distance. Following the sound, they eventually ~ome to an island - the Isle ,of Speaking Birds - where huge numbers of brown, black and speckled birds are shouting and speaking in human tongues: In other stories there are islands of daZZlingly colourful birds, saidto be the souls of holy men, singing fairy mUSic, and demonic swans, which chase and torment flocks of screaming birds, .the souls of people who have committed crimes. In Pagan Celtic Britain, Anne Ross makes reference to birds whose magical music sends people to sleep so that lovers can enjoy better sex; shrieking ravens that emerge from the sea; death coming as a screaming black nocturnal bird or a bird without wings or feathers; raven goddesses which could , prophesy; children who transm"-.te into swans, blessed with the gift of singing so beautifully that those who hear their bird music fall into deep sleep. Ever since post-acid-house techno-paganism took hold a lifestyle option, shamanism has been invoked in a routitie 'way, as if swallowing Ecstasy and dancing all night to techno records, let alone taking a weekend course in shamanic journeying, can transform the beleaguered, profane urban body into a shamanic state overnight. At a Wire magazine seminar on techno, held at London's ICA in 1993, a memorable exchange took, place between Fraser, Clark, self-proclaimed pro-psychedelic guru of the zippie (Zen-inspired professional pagan) movement and Derrick May, guru (self-proclaimed and otherwise) to all'disciples of Detroit techno. According to Clark, rave Culture (which be claims to have invented)

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brought the youth of Britain closer to the earth. All-night dancing in -the open air was shamanic, he insisted. More than that,it was African. "H that's African dancing", May responded, "then my ancestors needed their asses kicked."- Without wishing to join the _bootcamp of fundamentalist animal-skin s~c academics, 1 have serious doubts about automatic assumptions that the kind of free-floating ecstatic states induced by drugs, dancing and probable dehydration are identical to .shamanism's cosmologically centred spirit journeys. In 1994, 1 was commissioned to:write database material on shamanism and associated subjects for The Sbamen;s CD路ijCDROM. I spoke with psychedelic plant guru Terence McKenna and The.Shamen'sColin Angus at路the time that The Shamen released "Re-evolution", an ambient single featuring McKenna's monologue on shamanism, the ~haic revival and plant hallucinogens. After decades of boiling up infusions of psychotropic leaves and fungi, McKenna bad become a bornagaiil techno freak. "You require electronic instruments to invoke and duplicate the kinds.of acoustical'phenomena you encounter on psychedelics", he maintained (a false distinction, I think; unless he includes software and digital sampling in his definition of "instruments"). "The instruments are being used to invoke a ~ature that has almost slipped from our cognition. We don't live in that kind of nature. To us, nature is a park. Real nature is very much like the ambience of dense electronic 路music." But a rock-sbaman convergence goes back further. In 1988 I was asked to write an essay for DaVid Sylvian's In Praise of Shamans world tour. In _~nversations, Sylvian. made a number of statements Which suggested the method at the root of his music''S openness. Fishing in the dark Was one of them. "I think one of the strongestqua1ities 1 have is my ability to create atmospheres", he said in one of these discussions. "I think that music has to enable the listeners to reflect upon themselves. I want my imagination to be given free rein and

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hot be dictate4 to by the music. I try not to dictate with music." So the, audience is half the work, perhaps part of the reason-why Sylvian has such an obsessively devoted fan base. Mystery tantalises the listener into believing that there are answers somewhere at the end of the mysterious tunnel. With records such as "Ghosts", BrllIlant 7rees, Flux + Mutability and In Praise of Shamans, Sylvian found ways to deconstruct the pop song into relatively open works, seIDi-collectively created by musicians drawn from some of the key areas of music making of the past twenty-five years - from ECM-style jazz improvising, from Can and Azimuth, from ambient, electronic and Fourth World. Listed, the names are revealing: Holger Czukay, Markus Stockhausen, Jaki Liebezeit, Danny Thompson, BJ. Cole, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Kenny Wheeler, Bill Nelson, John Taylor, Frank Perry, Mark Isham, Jon Hassell, Robert Fripp, Percy Jones and m!!mbers of Japan. It was as if Sylvian wanted to draw into himself all the potentials suggested by these musicians and reforge them in his own-image. Shamanistic cosmologies are strikingly uniform. There is the sky, or heaven; the earth, on which ordinary mortals live; and the underworld, the place of the dead. Shamans can travel through all these zones, though the journeying is not neces,sarlly pleasant or easy.. Studies of shamanism document physical illness, psychOSis, visions of dismemberment, being eaten and regurgitated by spirits, trial by fire, drowning, mutilation, mystical death and rebirth. Shamans, as portrayed by Oliver Stone, may gaze serenely into the middle distance as rock stars commune with the Dionysian mysteries of beer, -but archive photographS and films of shamans from Siberia, Mon_ golla and Amazonas sbOW grizzled, haunted characters, -lined with knowledge after travelling to hell and back. Ambient music is regarded, sometimes with comic militancy, as an escape from the unpleasant realities of raw emotion, psychological crisis, body meSs and political discontent, but -if ambient means only white-light bliss, then the musicians are . mere functionaries, slaves to cool the brows of overheated

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urban info.warriots, rather tbanshamans who travel to grue~ some corpselands in order to mug demons for wisdom. This demand that sound should bow to escapist needs is a rejection of the potential implicit in music's unf()ldlng permeability over the past. hundred yeats. Music - 路f1uid, quick, ethereal, outreaching, time-based, erotic and mathematical, immersive and inlangible, rationa! and unconscious, ambient and solid - has anticipated the aethe:rtalk of the information

ocean.

memory Sitting quietly in never-never land, I am listening to SUJDDler fleas hibernating on my small kmalecat ... . London, 1995

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Beyond the Object, Ed. John Thames 'and Hudson,. London, 1988. ' -- . Drosnin. Micbael, Citizen Hughes. Arrow, London. 1986. Beo. Umberto. A Theory of Semiotics, Indiana University Press, . 1Hoomington, 1976.' . - . FaIth In Fakes. Seeker &: Warbmg. London, 1986. - . 71Ie Open Work. HutcbinsoJi aadius. London, 1989. Eliade. Mircea. ,Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Bcstasy. Bout1edge &: Kegan Paul, Londoo..l964. , Fagg, WiIiiam.. 71Ie Raffles Gamelan: AHtstorical Note, The BritIsh ~,London.I970.FJaubett, Gustave, The Temptation oj-Saint Anthony, Seeker &: Warbu:rg. London, 1980. Fletcher. Ian (ed.), IJect:ldence and the 1890s. Edward Arnold, London. 1979. , Flint, lL W. (ed.).Marlnetll: Selected Wrlttngs.. ·Seclret &: Warbmg, London, 1972. Fowler, Gene and Crawford, Bm.Border RadIo, Texas Monthly Press, 1987. . . Geary. Onistraud M., "Slit Gongs JntbeC8meroon: Sights and Sounds of Beat¢f and Power .iilBrincard,Marie-Therese, Sounding .J1onns:·Afrlcan Mu.stcalinstruments, The American Federation of Arts, New York, 1989. GCranlin, Lucien, Bionics, Weideofeld and Nicolson, London, 1968. Gbeerbrant, Alain, The Impossible Adventure, Victor GoUancz, London, 1955. GIbson,.WiIUam, Neurom.aru:er. Victor Gollancz, London, 1984.. . Godwin, Jocelyn,Arktos: 71Ie PoIa,. Myth· In Science, Symboltsm and Nazi Survival, Thames and Hudso.,., London. 1993- , Athanastus Kircher, Thames and Hudson, London, 1979. -:-.HamumiesofHMtJen andBarth. 'fhamt!s and Hudson, London, 1987; . GoldbeJg,RoseLee. Perj"ormani:e:Ltve Art 1909 to the Present, , Thames and Hudson, LOndon. 1979. Goldrosen, John J., Buddy Holly. Charisma Books. London. 1993. Green,.Celia and McCreery, c.barIes. LucId Dreamhig: The Paradox of Consciousness During Sleep, Routle.dge, London, '1994. Greenfield, Karl Taro, Speed1Wbes, Box Tree, London,I994. Gregory, Lady, A Book Of Saints. and Wonders, Colin Smythe, Gerrards 1971. GriJIin,'Dooald lL, Ltstentng In the DadI, Dover, New Yolk, 1974• . Hardiog,J8oles. Brik Salle, Seeker &: Warburg, London, 1975. D

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Hadcb-Scbneider, Eta, A History of Japanese Muslc,Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1973. Hardy, Thomas, The MayorofCasterbrldge, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1987. Heath, Chris, Pet Shop Boys versus America, Viking, London, 1993. Helmholtz, Hermann, On the Sensations of Tone, Dover, New York, 1954. . Hillman, James and Ventura, MiChael, We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World's Getting Worse, Harper .San Francisco, San Francisco, .1992. Hilton, James, Lost Horizon, Macmillan, London, 1933. Hoover, Thomas, Zen Culture, Arkana, London, 1989. Huysmans, Joris-Karl, Against Nature, Penguin, London, 1959. Je1lis, Rosemary,Blnl Sounds and their Meaning, BBC Publications, London, 1977. Jenny, Hans, Cymatjcs, Basillus Press, Basel, 1967. Jung, C. G., Alchemical Studies, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1968. Kaufinann, Walter, Tibetan Buddhist Chant, Indiana University Press, Bloomington; 1975. Kelly,Kevin, Out o/Control: The New Biology ofMachines, Fourth Estate, London, 1994. Kuhn, Annette (ed.), Alien Zone, Verso, London, 1990. Kunst,Jaap, Hindu-JavaneseMusIcal InstrUments, MartinusNijboff; The Hague, 1968. -,Music In Java, .Martinus Nijboff, The Hague, 1973. LanZa, Joseph, Elevator Music, St Martin's Press, New York, 路1994. Lee, Vernon, Supernatural Tales, Peter Owen Ltd., London, 1987. Levi-Strauss, Claude, The Raw and the Cooked, Jonathan Cape, London, .1970. - .,Introduction to aScietice ofMythology: From HOnej1toAshes, Jonathan cape, London, .1973. UUy~ John C., The Centre of the Cyclone, Marion Boyars, London, 1990. . -,The Scientist, Ronln, California, 1988. 1Jzot, Jacqu~, Tales offhe路Yanomamt, cambridge Studies in Sodai Anthropology, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge,. 1985. Lockspeiser, Edward, Debussy, J. M. Dent, London, 1936. I:.ouys, Pierre, Aphrodite, Panther, London, 1972. Lovecraft, H. P., "From. Beyond", in Crawling Chaos, Creation Press, London, 1992. McDermott, John with Kramer, Eddie, Hendrix: Setting the. Record

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Straight, Warner Books, USA, 1994. McLuban, Marshall and Fiore, Quentin, 17Je Medium Is the Message, , Penguin, London, 1967; McPhee, CoHn, A House in BaH, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1979. . Maconie, Robin, The Worirs of Stockhausen. . Masotti, Franco, Masotti, Roberto, Rizzardi, Veniero and Tatoni, Roberto (curators), Sonorlttl Prospettiche: Suono 4mblente Immtlglne, Commune di Rimini, Italy, 1982. Mitchell, Mitch and Platt, John, The J~mi Hendrix Experlence, pYramid Boo~; 1.00don,' 1990. Moyle, AliceM"AborlgInal Sound Instruments, Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, C8.nberra, 1978. Needham, Joseph, Science and Civilisation In China, vol. II, Cambridge UniversitY Press, Cambridge, 1956. Nichols; Roger, Debussy Remembered, Faber and Faber, London, 1992. NoIlman,Jim,SpIrlhUllBcoIOD, Bantam New Age Books, UsA, 1990. Nyman; Michael, Bxpmmental Music: Cage and Beyond, Studio Vista, London, 1974. Olciknow, 11oa, "MusJio1. Soup·, in Brought to Book, ed. Breakwell, Ian !UldHammond, Paul, PCnguin, London, 1994. . . Orrey, LesHe, Programme Music, Davis-Poynter, London, 1975. OUellette, kmand, Bdgard V".we, catder &:.Boyars, London, 1973. Partch, Harry,' Genesis ofa Music, Da capo Press, New York, 1974. Partington, J. It, A History of Chemistry, vol. I, Part I; Macmillan, London, 1970. .. Poe, Edgar Allan, Poe's Tales of Mystery and Imtlglnatlon, J.' M. Dent, London, 1908. Polin, Claire, "Why Minimalism Now?·, in Music and the Politics of Culture, ed.Christopher Norris, Lawrence arid Wishart, London, 1989. _ PynChon, Thomas, The Crying ofLOt 49, Bantam Books, QSA, .1967• . Rabelais, Fran~, Gargantua and Pantagruel, Penguin, London, 1955. R,eisner, Robert GeoIge, Bird: Thelegend ofCharlie Parker, Citadel Press, New York, 1962. Revill,David, .",e Roaring Silence, Bloomsbury, London, 1992. Rheingold, Howard, The VimIal Community: JlindlngConnections .in· a Computerised World; Seeker &: Warburg, London, 1994. Rossiter, Frank Ro, Charleslves and His Atnerlca, Victor.Gollancz, London, 1976.

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1966. RUdorff, Raymond, Belle Bpoque, Hamish路Hamilton, London, 1972. Rushkoff, -Douglas, .Cyberla:Lf/e .In _the Trenches of Hyperspace; , Harpeicollins, New York, 1994. Russolo, Luigi, -The Art ofNoises, Pendragon Press, New York, 1986. Said, EdwardW., Orlentallsm. Penguin, London, 1985.

Sales, G. and Pye, D., Ultrasonic Communication byAnimals, Chapman and Hall; London, 1974~ Sarno, Louls-, Song from the Forest,Bantam Press, London, 1993. Schafer, R. Murray (ed.), Euro/Jean SoutulIJiQry, A.R,C.Publications, Vancouver, 1977.- , The Tuning of the World, Alfred A. Knopf,.NewYork,.1977. - , (ed.) The Vancouve,. Soundscape, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada, 1978. Seh~, Theodor,- Sensitive Chaos, -Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1965. Sebeok, Thomas A. (ed.), Animal Communication, Indiana . University Press, Bloomington, 1968. - , zoosemtotics: At the Intersection ofNature andCultur.e, Peter DeRidder 路Press, Netherlands, 1975. Shimoda, Nobuhisa, 2010: The Centrifugal Force路 Of spaCe; Soutul &People: A Document on Xebec; TOA Corporation, Japan, 1993. Sprawson, Charles, Haunts of the Black Masseur.: The Swimmer as Hero, Jonathan Cape, London, 1992. Steward IJncoln, J., The Dream in Primitive Cultures, The Cresset Press,London, 1935. Stockhausen, Karlheinz, Towards a Cosmic Music, Element Books, Dorset, 1989. Storr, Anthony, Music & the Mind, HarperCollins, London, 1992. Surjodiningrat, -R. M. Wasisto, Gamelan Dance atul Wayang In ]ogjakarla, Gadjah Mada University Press, Jogjakarta, 1971.TaniZaki,]un'Ichiro, In Praise of Shadows, Jonathan Cape,London, 1991. Tate, Greg, Flyboy In the Buttermilk, Fireside, New York, 1992. Thakara; John (ed.), Design After Modernism, Thames and Hudson, London, 1988. Thompson,. Robert Farris, Flilsh of the SPirit, Vintage Books, New York, 1984; Tisdall, Caroline and Angelo Bozzolla, Futu,.ism, Thames and Hudson, London, 1977. Thomson, DaVid, Suspects, Seeker & Warburg, Lolidon, 1985.

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Torgovnick, Marianna, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modem Lives, University .of Chicago, USA, 1990:. Tosches, Nick, Dino, MinerVa, London, 1993. Turner, Victor, Dramas, Fields, and Metap1iot'S, Co~n University Press, Ithaca and London, 1974. van' GuIik, Robert Hans, Hsi K'ang and his Poetical Essay on the Lute, Sophia/l'utde, Japan, 196ft - , The Gibbon in China, Brill, Leiden, 1967. - , The Lore of the Chinese Lute, Sophia/l'uttle, Japan, 1968. Wachsmann, KJaus, Spencer to Hood: A Changing View of NonEuropean MUSic, Proceedings Of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, London, 1973. Wichmann: Siegfried (exhibition director); World Cultures and Modern Art (catalogue), Bruckmann Publishers, Munich, 1972. Wllmer, Valerie, As Serious As Your Life, Quartet, London, 1977. Wilson,. Peter Lamborn, Sacred- Drift, City Ughts, San Francjsco, 1993. Womer, KarIH.,_ Stoclihausen: Life and Work, Faber and Faber, London, 1973; Yokoi, Hiroshi, St GIGA, Japan, 1991. . Young, La Monte and Zazeela, Marian, Selected Writings, Heiner Friedrich, Munich, 1969.

discograPhy The following alphabetical Jist relates simply to this book. In"tended as a selective, personal guide for readers who wish to hear some of the music I have written about, rather than a definitive discography of supposedly essential recordings"it, could prove frustrating. Better to inClude deletions, vinyl limited editions, CD obsciuities'and interesting but awful records, hoWever, than restrict myself to currently available, quality controlled releases. On the other hand, this is not a discography aimed at trainspotters, completlsts, original pressing . fetishists, vinylnianiacs, CD pulistS or record collectors interested solely in market values~ My apologies in advance, then, to anybody who sets out-to buy certain items below: the catalogue numbers are taken from a mixture of deletions, new issues, reissues and barely issued and should be regarded as a - starting point only. Where no artist name is, appropriate but the nature of the recording is obvious, I have listed the title. Needless to say, no correspondence can be entered into regarding the author's record collection. For further adVice, These Records mail order service - 387 Wandsworth Road, London SW82JL - may be helpful. African Headcbarge, 'Great Vintage Volume 1, On-U CD2. Akira (soundtrack by Yamashiro 5OOj1), Demon DSCD 6. AMM,. AMM Music, Elektra EUK-256. Apbex Twin, Selected Ambient workS Volume n, Warp CD 21. Asb Ra, New Age 0/ Earth, Vugin OVID 4 5 . ' Ayler, Albert, Swing Low Sweet Spiritual, Osmosis 4001. Baker, Chet, Chet Baker Sings, Pacific Jazz PJ-1222. Bali: Gamelan Musicfrom Sebatu, Archiv Produktion 2723 014. Blrxter, Les,Jeweiso/the Sea, Capitol ST 1537. BeaCh Boys,Lantllocked, IING-I0 (bootleg). - , Smile, 5T 2580 (bootleg). - , Pet Sounds, Capitol CDP 7 48421 2. - , Smiley Smile, Capitol CDP 793696 2. The Beatles;Whlte Album, EM! PCS 7068.

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Biosphere, MicI'ogrr;IvUy, Apollo AMJ.KD 3921. The Black Dog, Temple o/Ttwnsj1arenl Balls,GPR IP ,. Bow GaJneIan Ensemble,-Audio Arts cassette. Bowie, David, Heroes, EMI EMD 1025. - , LOW, EMI EMD"1027. . Brlanjones Presents the Pipes of Pan atjouJouka, Coc 49100. Brown, James,. Startlme; Polydor 849 108-2. BrOtzmann, Peter, Machine Gun, FMP. Bryars, Gavin, The Siflldng 0/ the 'IitaniC, Obscure 1. Budd, Harold, Abandoned Citles/TheSerpent (In Quicksilver), LAND 08. . . - , f.ovely Thundlw, EG EGED 46. - , The Pavilion of .Dreams, Obscure ODS 10. Burroughs, William, Break Through In Grey Room. Sub Rosa CD 006·8. Bush, Kate,· The Dreaming, EMI EMC3419. - , Hounds of LQve, EMI lU 24 0384 1• . - , The Sensual World; EMI COP 7930 7 82. BuIrem, L T. J., Musk/Bnchantetl, Good Lootd08 Records 12" single .

GLR 004.

cage, John, jo!Jn Cage, Cramps CRSLP 6101 .. - , Mr john Cage's Prepared Piano, Decca Headline HEAD 9. - , Musk For Keyboard 1935;'1948, CBS CM2S 819. - , Variations 1Y, Everest 3230. _ - ; and Tudor, David, Indeterminacy, Folkways FI' 3704. Cherry, Don; Organic MUSk,. Caprice RiKS DLP 1. - , Relatlvity Suite, JCOA/Virgin J2oo1. Cocteau Twins, Echoes oj a Shallow Bay, 4AD BAD 511. Cohen, Ira, The Poetry of Ira Cohen, Sub Rosa Aural Documents SR62. . Coleman, Ornette, Beauty Is a Rare Thing: The Complete Atlantlc Retordings;Bhino R2 71410. . --, VIrgin Beauty, CBS Portrait PRT 4611931. CoIttane, Allee and Santana, Devadip Carlos, lUuminatlons, CBS ·69063. Coltrane, John, Infinity, Impmse .\5-9225; - , Transition, ImpUlse AS-9195._ Cruise, Julee, FloatIng Into the Night, Warner Brothers 9 25859-2. Curran, Alvin, CantI e Vetlute del GIardino Magnetlco, Aoanda no. 1. czukay, Holger and Daminers, Rolf, Canaxts, Spoon CD 15. The Dagar Brothers, A MiISkaI Anthoiogy 0/ the Orient: 1ndia m,

288

ocean of sound

Daren Beiter M1ISic:aphOD.BM 30 L 2018. David, Mik:st Agluwta,Columbia COL 467897 2. '-" The Birth 0/ the Cool, Capitol CAPS 1024. - ,, BItt:hes Brew, (:QS~22.; , - ,, InConcerl, CoIumbla,COL476910 2. - , On the Comer, CBS 6524.6. , - , Pangaea, CBS 467087 2. - , Sketches 0/ spain, CBS 32023. Debussy, Claude, Chansons de BIUIis, CandIde cE 31024. -, lmages/BstatnJJesIiJeux~, Supraphon ,0110699. -',,La mer, CBS 72533,. "

- , ~lude a l'a~s-mldi d'un /aune/Jewt/Noctumes; CBS/ Odyssey 32 16 0226.

-I' RaYel," Maurlce; String {JuarteIs, Deutsche Grammophon 445 509路2. , Deep Ustening Band. The Ready-Made Boomerang, lIJCW Albion NA044CD. . Deep Voices: The Second Whale lIBcotrl, Capitol ST-11598. Dolpby, Eric, Other As}Jeds, Blue Note BT 85131. - , Otato Lunch, Blue Note BS'tMI63. Dr John the night tripper, GTi$"Grl$, Atco SD 33-234: 808 State, Ninety, ZIT 246461-2Ellington, Duke, The BlantOn-W~ Band, muebird ~59-1-RB B1Us" Don, Shock '&eatment, Columbia CS 9668. Boo, BrIan, Ambient 4: On Land, EG EEGCD 20. -,, Another Green World, IsJandJLPS 9351. ,'" . ...:-, Ajiollo: AImospIIeres &~, EG EGLP 53. , - , Musk For Films, Editions EG EEGCD 5. - , NeroU, All Saints ASCD 15. - , TIu!.rsday Afternoon, BG ,EGtD 64. ' - , and Byrne, J)ilvid, iI(y Uje ltitheBusho/GhosIs, BG EGCD 48. Bnvironnumls: The MitgkofP.Sychoat:tlve Sound, Syntonic~ Inc., SD 66010.' Ev.ms, JU1I, Spring Leaves, Mi1estQne CA 271. Feldman, Morton, Trkulfe Aiemorles, SUb Rosa SUBCJ)OI2?5. 4-Hero, Parallel Univet'Se, IteiO.fcm;ed l.PCJOO4. " . Fripp, Robert/Eno, Brian, TheBssentl8l Frippimd Bno, VJisin BG CDVE92O. Future ~ ofLondoDo,ISDN,VirginCDV 2755. le GattleJanBalinMs de Lolring. CBS 88059. Gaz7.elloni, ~;Pl_ WmfIsby~ Varise, . .,Heliodor , Wergo2549 002.

290

david toop

GOttscbing. Manuel. D-lI4, Rac:ket Records RRK15037. Hancock. Herbie. The Complete Warner Bros. Recordings. Warner Archives 936245732-2. . Hassell, Jon. Aka/Darbarl/Java (.MagIc Realism). EG EBGCD 31. -:.... City: Works of Flctlon. Opal/Wai'Iler Bros;.9 26153-2. - . Dream 7'h«Wy in Malaya. EG EEGCD 13. - . and muescreen. DressIng For Pleasure. Warner Bros. 9 45523-

2. - / Eno. Brlan.Pombie MUsks. EGEBGCD 7. Hassell. JonvS. 808 State,Vokeprlnt,AIl SabitsASCD17. ·Heleura: Yanomamo Shamanism fromSt?uthern Venezuela. !Quartz 004. . . Hendrix.]Imi, 1I1ecIrlc Ladyland. Track 613 010. - •. Live & Unreleased: The Radio Show. Castle Communications HBCD 100. _ .• Nine To u,e Unhierse. POlydor,SUper Pols 1023. Higher Intelligence Agency. Coif)ur}'orm. Beyond lmAOCD5. Bi1Iage. Steve, RaInboW Dome Musick. Virgin CDW 1. Horn. Paul, Inside, Epic BXN 26466. Human Arts Ensemble, Under 7'he Sun. Universal Justice Records TS 73-776; Indian Ocean (Arthur Russell). School Bell/D'eehOUSe. Sleeping Bag · 12" single SLX-0023X. . Irresistible·Foree (MhaDaster Moms). space Is the PlatxI.lUsJng High. RSN5. · Java:Betloyo Ketawang. Gallow;IyRecords. MUSique Do Monde 7. The Jesus and MaryCbain. PsychO Ca~. Blanco Y N,egro 240 790-

1. King Tubby. Dub Gone Ctt:uy. Blood &:FIre BAFCD 002. - . King 7Ubby's SjJecial1973-:-1976. Trojan TRLD 409. Kirchin. Basil, Worlds Within Worlds. I!MI Columbia sex 6463. · - . WOrlds Within Worlds. Island Help 18. . .. Kirk. Roland. Left & Right. Atlantic· 588 178.. The KLP. Chill OUt. JAMS IP 5.

leaner. Thomas,. Permafrost. Bat:ooni BAR 009. KrattWerk, Autobahn, EMf Auto 1•. - . COmputer Worltl.EM! EMe 3370. - . Electric Cafe. EM! EMD 1001. . - . The Man-Machine. ClIpitolB-ST 11728; ~. Trans-Europe B:xptess. EMI B-ST 11603. ~, Detty, Coyor Panon, Flame Tree FLTRCD519. LFO. Prequendes. Warp cD· 3. .

291

ocean of sound

Loop Guru, The Third Ch4mber. Loop CD 001~ Luder,Alvin;MustcjOrSoIo Pef;/Ormer.Lovely Music VB. 1014•. LulI,. Cold Summer, Sentrax SNTX 490. Marday, Christian, RecOrd Without a Cover, Recycled Records. Maxfield, Richard, Electronic Recordings, Adwnce RecordingsFGR8S . .- , Reich, Steve, Oliveros, Pau1ine,NewSounds InJJJearonkMusk, Odyssey 32 160160. . . May, Detrick, Craig, Carl, Atkins, Juan, Pennington, James, Relics, Transmat/BUZZbzzlp 106106. Mclaughlin, John, Devotion, Douglas 4. Meek, Joe, The Joe Meek Stpty, Decca DPA 3035/6. Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence (soundtrack composed by Ryuichi Sakamoto), Virgin V2276. Messiaen, OHvier, Oiseaux e:JWtiques, Supraphon SUA ST 50749. . MEV/AMM,LivelJlectrtmkMustclmprovlsed, MainstreamMS/5002. Mr Fingers (Larry Heard), Amnesia, Jack Trax PING 2_ ~tche1l, Roscoe, Sound, DeImark DL 408. Model 500, Night Drive (Thru Babylon), MetroplCX/Macola 12~ single MRC0994. The Gerry.Mulligan Quartet, Gerry MulUganQuarlet, Vogue LAE 12050. The Music Improvisation Company, 1968-1971, Incus 17. Musk o/the Venezuelan. Yekuana Indians, folkways FE 4104. A Musical Anthology of the Orient: Japan V, Baren· Reiter Musicaphon BM 30 L 2016. MUSikfiir Ch'in, Museum Collection Berlin~C7. Muslque du Burundi, Ocora OCR. 40. Muslque sacree Tibitalne, Ocora OCR. 71. IJ-ziq, Tangon'Vecttf, R.ephlexOI3. My Bloody Valentine, Lo~Iess, Creation CRECD 060. Namlook, Pete, Silence, FAX PK 08/25. Niblock, Phill, Four Full Flutes, Experimental Intermedia Foundation Xl 101. Olseaux du Venezuela, I:OiseauMusiden Gil. OUVeroS/Dempste.rtpanaiotis, Deep Listening, New: Albion NA 022 . CD, .. 000, Yoko, Onobox, ltyko RCD 10224. The Orb, A Huge Ever Growing Pulsati.ng Brain That Rules From the Centre o/the Ultraworld,W.A.U. MrModo 12D single MWS·

.;!

- , The Kiss BP, W.A.U. Mr MQdo ldWS 0101'.

292

david toop

Oswald, John, Plunderphonk, (not-for-sale CD). Pablo, Augustus, East of the River Nile, Rockers ProductIon. Parker, Charlie, Bird WithStrlngs: Live at The Apollo, Carnegie HaU & Birdland, CBS 82292. - , The Verve Yean (1948-50), Verve 2610 026. Partch, Harry, The World 0/ Harry Partch, CBS MS7207. Perry, Lee, The Upsetter Box Set, Trojan Perry 1. Phuture, Add 7racks, Trax 12째 single TX142A. Pink Floyd, The Piper At the Gates of Dawn,EM! sex 6157. Pran Nath, Pandit, Earth Groove, Tran.<ladantic TRA 193. - , India's Master Vocalist, Shandar, SR 10007. - , Ragas of Morning & Night, Gramavision 18-7018. Prime, Michael, Aquifer$, RRR-CJ>.09. _ Prince Far-I, Cry TuffDub Encounters Chapter IiI, Daddy Kool DKLP 15. . .

Psyche (Carl Craig), Crackdown, Kool Kat/fransmat 12" EP KOOLT 603. Public Enemy, It Takes a Nation ofMillions To Hold Us Back, Def Jam 462415 1. . Reese and Santonlo, The Sound, KMS/KOOI Kat Kool T15. Reload, ~ CoUection of Short Stories, Infonet inf 4 cd. Riley, Tent, A Rainbow In Curved Air, Columbia MS 7315. - , Happy Ending, Warner Brothers 46 125. - , In C, CBS 64565. - , Persian Surgery Dervishes, Shanti 83,501. - , Shrl Camel, CBS M 35164. The Ronettes, Sing Their Greatest Hits, Phil Spector International Super 2307 003. Russell, _Arthur, Instrumentals, Another Side' of Les Disques Crepuscule, Side 8401. -:-, Let's Go Swimming, Rough Trade 128 single RTT 184. - , World of Echo, Rough Trade 114. Sakamoto, Ryuichi, B-2 Unit, Island/AJfa ILPS 9656. Satie, Erik, Piano Musk Volume I, Decca Vox STGBY 633. - , VexaNons, 'Harlekijn Holland PrOdukties SAT 001. Saw Throat, Inde$troy, Manic EIirs ACHE 019. Scanner, Scanner, Ash 1.1. Schoenberg, Arnold, 5 Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 16; Sony SMK 48 463. SchUlze, Paul, Apart, Virgin AMBT6. - , New Maps of HeU, Extreme XCD 015. - , The Surgery o/Touch, Sentrax SNI'X 175.

298

ocean of sound

~ Prophet/l'heMIssIon, Pod 025 12" single. The Sheltering. Sky. (soundtrack by Ryuichi Sakamoto; . Richard HorowitZ; etc.), VIrgIn. mv 2652. ' Shomyo - Buddhist Ritual fromJapan, Dat Hannya .Cenmwny.--:ShIngon Sect, Philips 6586 021.. . ... Shore, HOW81'd and Coleman, ~, Naked Lunch, Milan 262 732•. Sinatra, Prank, ·[n IheWee Small Hours of the Morning, Qlpitol CAPS 1008. . Skinny Puppy, V1Vl$ectVl, CAPlTOLCI-91040. Songs of the H.~ Whale, capitol 51'-620. Sounds and the ~ ofthe Bottle-Nose Dolphin (recorded by JotullJlly), Folkways PX 6132. Spacetime COntinuum with Terence McKenna, Allen ~me, Astralwc:rks ASW6107-2. Spontaneous .Music ~le, Karyobin, ~pe CPE 2001- . .~.

.'.

St GIGA/Sound of the Bartbserles, Ambient Soutu:lsc4pe H: Pmyers ... for the SpIrit ofNatr/.t'rI. Dfsques Kinza (Japan) TOCI'$20. stalling, Cad, ThB Carl StaIlingProjed, Warner Bros. 9 26027-2. Stockhausen, KadheiDz, TelemusIII, DGG·137012. suefio Latino, Suefio latinO, BCMReconis l:za si.ilgle BCM'323. Sumac, Yma, Voice ofThe xtabay, CapitolSM-684. Summer, Donna, Love To Love You Baby, GTO GnP 008. Sun·Ra, Angels and Demons at Play, Satum 407. - , Art Forms 0/1JhnensIofts Tomorrow, Saturn 9956. -.,·CosmIc nmesforlllentalTherapy~ ElSatum KH-2772. - , 'Cosmic VisIons, maStPirst BP PP 101V. - , HeUoctmtrIc Worlds Volume I, ESP 1014. - , HeUoctmtrIc WorI(Is Volume 2, ESP 1017. - , The Magic City, Satum 403. .- , The Nubktns of piutonkt, EI Satum 406.. - , Strange Strings, Satum 502. - , Sun Ra Volume 1, Sbandar SR 10.001. SylvJan,David, W~, DSCDI • .- 1 and Czukay, Holger, PlIght and PremonItIon, VIrgIn Cl)VB 11: Symbols and InstrumCms, Mood/SderU:e 0/ Numbers/Tear Drops0/ yestenlay, Netwotk/KMS 12" single NWKT 5. Takemitsu, Toro. Film lIluslcby 7bru TakemUsu, JVC VICG-5127. Throbbing Gristle, 20 Jazz Punk Greats, Industrial TGCD 4. TrIstano, Lennie/DaDlerOn, Tadd, C~, Affinity APP 149. nutn PeaIIs (soundtrack by An8eIo BacJalamend),Warner Bros 9 26316-2. . . .

2911路

david t()OP

The United States of America, The Untted SkItes of America, CBS

63340.

The UpsetteIS (Lee Perry), Super Ape, Mango 260858. U2, Achtung Baby, IsJand emu 28.

- , Zooropa, Island CIJ)U 29: . The Vancouver Soundscape, World Soundscape ProjectBPNl86. Varese, Edgard, Noctumal/Bcuatorlal, Vanguard VSL 11073. - , Intlgrales, etc., Vox candide STGBY 643. . . ~,Arcana, etc., Decca SXL 6550. . . 路Various, Ambient 4: IsoIatfonIsm;, Virgin AMBT4; - , (ArtlftdallntelUge,u:e11), Warp CD 23. - , CWcadlan Rhythm, InCus 33. - , (Fluxus sound artists), Flux Tenus, Te1lus c:assette '24. -,Futurism & Dada RevIewed, Sub Rosa SUBCDoI2-19. ---,Silence, Spiral Editio~(Japan) 36CJ);N020. The Velvet Vnderground,.WhtteLtght;Whtte Heat, MGM SVLP 9201. WilsOn, Dennis; Pacific Ocean BIue,cadbou CRB 81672. Wolff, Henry and Hennlngs,路.Nancy, TIbetan Bells, Island HELP 3. Young, La Monte, The secOnd Dream 0/77u1 High Tension Line

Slepdown Transformer from The Four Dreams o/Chtna, Gramavlslon R2 79467; . . '-, 12164 AM NYC Iheftrsl twelve Sunday Morning B.,ues, (unreleased tape).

- , and Zazeela, Marian, The Theatre Of Bttimaz MusiC,路 Shandar 83.510. - , and Zazeela, Mariant 31 VII 6910:26-10:49 PM, Edition X (limited edition) Miinchen~ Young, NeD andCruy Horse, Arc-Weld, Reprise 7599-267~2. Zappa," Frank, Uncle Meat, 'Bizarre/I'ranSatiantic TRA 197. Zawinul, Joe, Zawtnul, Atlantic SD 1579. Zoril,}ohn, FUm Works, Eva WWCX 2024.

index AACM, 96,134 Adams, John, 183 . African Headcharge,12o..121 Agharta, 100 A Guy Called Gerald, 59, 186, 215 Akpabot, Samuel, 254 Aletti, Vince, 42 Ali, Rashied, 93 Allen, Marshall, 23-24 Ame~no-Uzume-nO-Mikoto, 8 . AMM,46, 133'134,199,247 Anderson, Laurie, ·120 Andre, carl, 12 Angel, Dave, 215 Anikulapo-Kuti, Fela, 119, °

122 Aphex Twin (JUchardJames), 57, 179, 208-213,272 Aqua Regia, 215 Armando, 37 . Artaud, Antonio, 192, 224,

259 .Art Ensemble of Chicago, 133 .Art of Noise, 89 AshRa,61 Atkins, Juan, 214-215 Attali, Jacques, 70 Autechre, 215 Ayler, Albert, 133, 145-146 Azimuth, 279

BI2,47,272 Babbitt, Milton, 256 Baby Ford, 186

Bach, J.S., 184, 189-190, 257 Bachelard, Gaston,o.84 Bacon, Sir Francis, 259 Badalamenti, Angelo, 269 Bailey, Derek, 134-136,139 Baker, Chet, 183,190, 193, 269 Baker, Ginger; 46· Bakhtin, Mikhail, 124 Bail, Hugo, 44 Bailard, J.G., 4-5, 10 Band of SusanS, 174 Bandulu, 215 Barlow, John Petty, 270 . Barnett, Mike, 55 Barrow, Steve, 113, 117 Barry, John, 192 Barthes, Roland, 135 Bartok, Bela, 184 . Bateson, Gregory,· 274 Baudrlllard, Jean, 164 Baumann, Peter, 89 Baxter, Les, 163, 271 Beach Boys, 110-111, 271272 Beatles, 42,64, 92, 180,261 Bedouin Ascent, 215 Bee Gees, 41, 237 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 264 Bel Canto, 49 Bell, Thom, 43 Bellote, Pete, 41 Beresford, Steve~ 261 Berger, Karlheinz, 205 Bertoluccl, Bernardo, 196 °

296

david toop

ffigBird, 240 Bilk, Acker, 64

ffiosphere, 49-51, 216 Black Dog, 215, 272 Black, Matt, 47,56 Black Sabbath, 38-39 meep,49. Bogart, Nell, 41

BOhm, Hans, 68-69 Bolland, CJ., 215 Bomb the Bass; 60 Bongiovi,Tony;94,96 8ono,91 Borodin, Alexander, 18 Ekndez,Pie~,256

Bow GameJan, 101·102

Bowie, David, 8, 144, 202 Bowie,Lester,137 Bradfield, Polly, 261 Brahms, johannes, 124 Branca, Glenn, 174 Brand, Dollar (Abdullah Ibrahim),133 Braxton, Anthony, 134 Bright, Stetim, 96 Brook, Michael, 59 Brookmeyer, ·80b, ·192 Brotzmann, Peter, 205, 273 Brown,JameS,97,105-106, 199,261 -- . Brubeck, Dave, 192 Bruce;jack,46,97 Bryars, Gavin, 14, 192, 199- . 200,271 Buckmaster, Paul, 97 Budd, Harold, 59, 144-147, 192 Bukem, L T. J., 216, 240 Burroughs, William, 114, .145,261 . Burundi c:IrummeIs, 273 Burwell, Paul, 127, 137-138, 149, 222, 246 .

Bush, Kate, 275-277 Byrd, joseph (United States of ~erica), 141, 143,180 Byrds,273 Byrne, David, 120-123 Cabaret Voltaire, 213 cabaret Voltaire, The, 44 Cage, john, 14, 36, 42, 46, 120, 140-143, 152, ISS, 158, 16().161, 185, 199, ·258 Cale, John, 173, 199 caJifia, Pat, 167 Calvino, Italo, 164 Campbell, Joseph,l48 can,122,244,279 cangullo, Francesco, 77 Captain Beefheart,217 CanIew, CorneHus; 46, 103 Carlos, Wendy (Waiter), 14, 194 . Carpentier, Alejo, 82 Carter, BIliot, 261 cauty,jimi, 59-63 Cendr.us,BbUse,224 Cerrone, Jean-Marc,41 . Chadbourne; Eugene, 261 Cbagfion, Naporeon, 233 .. Chantays, 269 . Chatham, Rhys, 174 :Cherry, DQn, 14, 132-133, 189 . Chladni,258 Chris and Cosey, 48 Christiali,· Geoffrey, 67 Clair, Rene, 199 . CIapton, Eric, 46 Clark, Fraser, 277-278 Clifford, James, 124, 127, 162,224 Cline, Patsy,. 92 Clinton, .George, 215

297

ocean of sound

CoCker,Joe, lOS

Coeteau, J~, 79, 140, 196 Cocteau Twills, 27t, 273 Cohen, Ira; 95,'174

Cohn, Norman; 68

eon, 266 Coldcut, 56; 60 Cole, BJ., 279 COle, Nat "King"; 92 Cole, Natalie; 92 Coleman, Omette, 85, 97, 99, 133, 145,191, 19k 247, , Collins, Albert, 44 'Collins, NicolaS, 260 Coltrane, Allee, *)3, 95 Coltrane, John, 93, 95, 133:, , , 145, 173, 182, 184 Como, Perry, 88 '

Congas,I13 Conner, Bruce, 184 Conrad, Joseph, 124, 126, 137,237Conrad, Tony, '173 Coombes, Nigel, 261 Comer, Philip, 14 Cosey, Pete, 96 " Cotton Club, 44 Cowell, Hen(y, 141 Cox, Carl, 215 Crajg, Carl, 214-215 Craven, Wes, 109 ,Cream, 42, 46 Creation Rebel; 121 Cronenberg, David, 191 Cruise, Julee; 269 Curran, Alvin, 134, 158, 246247 Cybettroni215 Czukay, Holger, 122,271, 279 Dagar Brothers, 188-189

Dameron, Tadd, 25' Dammers, Rolf, 122 Davie, Alan, 138 Davies, Hugh, 75-77; 137,

149,c246 ' ~, Miles, 42,

88, 95-100, 103路104, 111, 182, 191~ 192 Day, Doris', 88 Dead Can Dance, 49 " Debussy, C1aude,nxii, 1619, 21-22, 71, 74; 79. 8384,173,177,184,263264,271 Deep Space Network, 215 DeGiorgio, Kirk, 214. DeJfonics, 43 DeU1lo, Don, 12 Dempster, Stuart, 243, 246, 249 . Depeche Mode, 39,213 Desmond, Paul, 192 Deutsch, Herb, 86 DeWulf, Frank, 215 Dick and Deedee, '106 , Dick, Philip K., 5, 10 " DisSevelt, Tom (and,Kid - Baltan), 21? DJ Crystl, 69, 216 DJ Mooty, 272 DJPer,48 DJ Pierre, 39 Dodd"C~ne, 118 Dodds, Baby, 126 Dolphy, Eric, 191 ~,CIau(Ua,7,13

Douglas, Alan, 94-95, 163 Dr Atmo, 57, 216

DrDre,84 DrJohn,244 Dr Motte, 215 'Drake, Sir Francis, 14 Drew; Noble Ali~ '26

298

david toop

Drosnin, Michael, 88 Drummond. Bill, 59

Fischer, Clare, 192

Dunn, David, 246 Dylan,Bob,42,147

Fleetwood Mac, 64 Fluxus,174 Fontana, Bill, 151 Forti, Simone, 189 Foul Play, 215 Four Freshmen, 110 4 Hero, 216 Fripp, Robert, 59, 143,279 Froese, Edgar, 90-91 Front 242, 266 Frost, Mark, 268 Fujleda, Mamoru, 247 Fuller, Curtis, 94 Future Sound of London, 54, 215

Eagles, 61 '

Easterby, Jonny,55 Eastley, Max, 137-138, 149150,155,254 拢CO, Umberto, 20,135-136 'Edison, Thomas,.269 Bd~,RuJde, 118 808 State, 60, 186, 214 EHade,NHrcea,221 ~nt~,25, 167 Ellis, Don, 192, 194 Emerson, Lake and Palmer, 264 Eno, Brian, 8-1l, 15, 36, 4041,50,59,61,98, 1~ 108, 121-123, 128-129, 130-132, 137-139, 143, 148, 154, 159, 162,272 Eno, ROger, 14 Enya,10,24O Eric B & Rakim, 273 Evans, Bill, 192, Evans, Gil, 94, Ill, 166, 192 Fruis, Hugo, 263 Faith, George, 113 Farafina, 162 Farley 'Funkin Keith, 209 Faust, 174 Favors, Malachi, 137 Fearless Four, 204 Fehbnann,Thomas,215 Feldman, Mo~on, 271 Felieiano,Cheo,201 Fellini, Federieo,l64 , Ferrari, Lue, 125 Ferry, Bryan, 89 Field, Edward, 182

FIaubert, G\Istave, 5-6

Garbarek, Jan, 133, 240 '

Gardner, Ava, 91 ' Gate, LOu, 46 , Garratt, Sheryl, 63 Garvey, Marcus, 27 Gauguin, Paul, 224 Gaye,Marvin,89,92,223 Genesis, 39 Gheerbrailt, Alain, 223 Gibbons, Walter, 119-120 Gibbs, Joe, 116 Gibson,~~, 112,116 Giger, H.R., 257 Gillespie, Dizzy, 94 GilmOre, John, 24 Ginsberg, Allen, 路120, 145路 Giraudy, Miquette, 59 ~,PhWUp, II, 120, 178, .. 183, 199, 273 Global Communication, 215. Godard,Jean-Lue, 114, 125 Godwin, Jocdyn,100 Goldie, 215 ' Goldrosen, JohnJ., 93 Gong, 58

299

ocean of sound

GorecJd; HCnryk, ·241 GOttSchJng, Mattue1,60-61.GraIwD., Leo, 113 Grateful·Dead, 42, 154, 262, 270 Green, Celia, 210· Griffin, DonaldR., 219 Guif'1'n:, Jimmy, 192 ~1im, 191-192 .Hamase, MotohikD, 164 Hamilton, Chico, 190-191 Hampel, Gunter, 205 Hampson, Robert, 33 Hancock, Herbie, 96 . Hatc:ty, Th.Omas;71

Harris, Mick (Scorn, Lull, Napalm Death), lso.181 ·Harris,~oEde, 105 Harrison,Lou,14 -Hart,Mickey, 154· _ Hassell, Jon,14,50,-S9, ·123, - 144, 147, 16z.;168, 178-" 179,189,192,260,279 Hawtin, Richie, 216 . .Heard, Larry"Mr Figgers.(Fmgers Inc), 37, 3940. ' 52,59 Hearn, Lafcadto, 160, 227

Heath, Chris,

Hefti, Neal, 85· Hebnbokz,Her~,79

HendersOn, Fldchet,.30 Hendrix, Jimi, 42, 85, 88, 94-

. 97, i04-105, 273· . Hendryx, Nona, 89 He~nings,

Eminy, 44_

Hennings, Nancy, 139

HeJlry, Pierre, 125 HerbertJ,39 . Herrmann,Bernard,266 Hess, FeUx, 255 Higher Intelligence Agency,

. 53·55,215 Hildenbeutel,RaIf,55 mn, Andrew, 191 HiIlage, Steve, 58-59· Hillman, James, 109 Hitler, Adolf, 70 _ Hobbs, Christopher, 199-200 Hokusai; 18 _ HoUand, David; 95-96, 98 Holloway, Red,.28 Holly, Buddy,92-93 Holst, Gustav, 63 Hoodlum Priest, 266 Hooker, John Lee, 184 Hom, Paul, i92,· 246 Hovbaness, Alan, 240 . Howfu.1' Wolf, 244 . Hudson, Keith, 118. 0

Hughes, Howard,· 88· lJuinzinga, Leonard, 15 Human League, 213

Huysmans, Joris-Karl, 5-7, 18 ·Iborra, ~go, 85 Iceberg sUm, 44 Ikeda, Ryoji, 273 . Inoue, Tetsuo, 216 I ROy, 118 IrresJstible Foree (see Mmnaster Morris) Isham, Mark, 279 Ito,Toshlharu, 274 !Ves, Charles, 245-246, 261 .. Ives, George, 245

Jack Frost and the Circle

, JerlaI, 209 Jackson,Michael,261 . Jab Uon, 113 Jab Shaka, 273 Jam8cSpoon,215 - . Japan, 279 Jarre, Jean~Michel, SO, 214

300ciavid toop

Ro~;

Jane, Maurice, 14 Jarry, Alfred,

KiIk,

Jeck,PhUUp,260,~2

IOarwein, Mad, 174

Jefferies, Christine, 134 Jefferson, MarsbaIl, 37-39 Jennings; Terry, 173, 182, 1.85 . Jenny, Hans, 257·258 Jenssen, Geir (~ Biosphere, Bieep) '. JesUs &: Mary Chain, 174 John, Uttle Willie, lOS Johnette,Jack de, 95 Jones, Brlan,273 . Jones, Grace, 89 Jones, Perey, 279. Jones, Quincy, 94 Jordan, Louis, 105 . JqsephHolb~ '133-134

'. Julius, Rolf, 151

Jung, Carl, 269 .. JUrgensen, Friedrich. 269 Justified Ancients ofMu Mu, 60 KaIsoum, OWn, 123 Katz, Fred, 192 ' Kaufmann, Walter, 245 Kawasaki, Yoshihiro, 151·

.153, ISS, 157, 160 Keary, Vic; 126 Keats, John, 73 . Kelly, Kevin, 270 KennyG,10 Kenton, Stan, 192 ICervorkian, ~is., 120 Khan, AU Akbai-,119, 176 Kinchin, Mark; 215 KiDgHu, 219 KiDgTubby (O$boume ~), 11~119

KUcher, Athan a sius,.254 Ki1'Cbin,- Basil, 138-139

93·94-> 258 .

~,263-264

. KLF (K Foundation), 52, 59-' 60,63-65 . Koch, Ludwig, 124 Kondo, Toshlnori, 261 KOner,Thomas, 174,2;5-256 Kong, Leslie. 126 Konitz, Lee..I89, 192·193 Kosakai, FuQJio (IncapaCitants), 150. . ~39, 41,62,200207,213' . Kramer, Eddie, 104 . Kronos Quartet, 163,184 ICurQia, Detty, 14' Labelle, 89. Lacker, Rene, 17 La Faro, Smtt, .191·192 . Land of Oz, 52, 56, 58-63 LanoJs, Daniel, 1~148, 154 . Lanza, Joseph, 253 . . Larkin, Kenny, 215 Laswell, Bill, 132, 216

.. Latbanl,John, 179,256 LaVette, Betty,. 119 . Leary,1lmothy, 96

LeCorbusier, 82· . Led Zeppelin, 38, 262 Lee,BUnny,117 ~,VemOn,-275

l.eiris, Micbd.16~, 224 . ~n, John, 92, 180 . Leone,Selgio,265

Uvi-Strauss, Claude, 66, 71, . 72 Leviticus, 69 Lewis, Jerry Lee, 8$ Lewis, Wyndbam, 78 LFO, 213-214 Ueb, Oliver; 55 .

301

ocean of sound

Uebezeit, Jaki, 279

IJfetimC, 97

I.Igeti, Gyorgy, 271-272 W'Louis,37 Ully,lohn, 272-273路 ~ UttIe Richard, 88Uzot, Jacques, 230-232, 236 lloyd, A.L., 137 Lockispeiset; Edward, 17 Lockwood, Annea, 158 LomaX, Alan, 107-108 London Philharmonic Orchestra, 81 - _ Loop Guru. 14

.LoVe, MikC, 272 LoveCraft, H.P., 34 Lovens, ~, 149 Louys,PiCrte,19 Lucier, Alvin, 158, 203, 246- 248 Lumiere brotherS,-- 20 Lustmord, 266 - . Lynch, DaVid, 120, 265,268" _ . 269 Lytton, Paul, 137, 149 ~,Teo,99;104

MacLise, Angus,173-174 McKenna, Terence, 278 -. McLaugblln, Jom, 95-98 McLuban, M~hallt 127 McPhee, Colin, 13-15 Mc11eman:Jobn,217 MmIer, Gustav, 43 -MaJn,-174 Mallik, Bidur; 187-188 Mann, Micbael~ 90 -. Mantovani, 151 Marchly, ~-260,路262 Marinetti,.Filippo, 73-78 Mar:Iey, Bob, 112, 126

M/A/RIRIS,60 Marsh, 'Yarne, 192

Marshall, Stuart; 246-248. Martenot, Ma1lrJ:ce, 86Martin, Dean, 88 -Martin, Jeanne, 88 Maxfield, RiCb8rd, 114,179183 May, Derrick, 214-215, 272, 277-278 -

_Mayr,A1bert;246 Mead, Margaret, 124 Mead, Syd, 51 Meek,Joe, 110-111,212 Melle, Gil, 192 Mendelssohn, Felix, 264 Merzbow (Masami Akita), 150 Messagf;1", Andre, 16 Messaien, Olivier, 14, 239 Metro, 37 MrC,56 Miles, Buddy, 96 ~ud,~us, 198 Mingus, -Cbarles,94 Mitch, Walter, 265 Misra, Rajan and Sajan, 188

- Mitchell, Mitch, 94-95 . Mitchell, Roscoe, 136 Miwa, ShJgeo, 222 Mixmaster Morris (The Irresistible Force), 47, 5.153, 55-57, 87, 186,215- 216 Model 500, 37, 215 ModernJazz Quartet Gohn Lewis), 190-192,198 MOnk, Meredith, 174 Monk, 1beloDious, 99 Monteverdi,- 246 Moody Boyz, 215 Moog, Robert, 86 Morley, David, 54

Morodor, Giorgio, 41 Morricone, Bonio, 134, 265

302

david toop

Mouse On Mars,215 Moulton, Tom, 118 Muduga, Fran~ois, 244 Muir,Jamie, 134. Mulligan, Getry,I90-192 Murooka, Dr Hajime, 154 Murray, Sunny, 146 . Murvin, JuniQr, 113 Music Improvisation . Company, 13~134 Musica ElectroniC! VIVa (MBV), 13~134

Musso, Robert, 216 Mtume, 98 MTV,89 Muhammad, Elijah, 28 Mussolini, Benito, 74 . Mussol'gSky, Modest Petrovich, 18, 43 My Bloody Valentine, 174, 271

Oakenfold,Paul, 58, 60 Ojima, Yoshio, 273 Okrl, Ben; 164· Oldfield, Mike, 250 Oldknow, 'tma, 83 Olitsky,11 Oliveros,Paullne. 158, 183, 242~243, 246. 248-251, . 258 OMD,214 OmniTrio, 216 . Ono,Yoko,93, 179 Opiate, 273 Orb, 10, 52-53,59-60, 62-63, 272 Orbital, 55, 215 Orlando, Bobby, 45 . O'Rourke,Jim, 34 Ostertag, Bob, 261 Oswald, John,260-263 Oval, 215 Oxley, Tony, 134

Namlook, Pete (peter . Kuhlmann), 216 Pablo, Augustus, 116-118 Nelson, Bill, 279 Palestrina, GiOvanni, 19 Nero, 70 Panaiotis,.243 Neuhaus, Max, 158, 254 New Composers of Pangaea, 100 Paradinas, Michael, (p=-zlq), . Leningrad, 209 212-213 New Order, 213 Parker, Charlie, 82, 84-86, Newman,. Barnett; 178 126 . Niblock, Phlll, 120, 174.273 Nicolson, Annabel, 149, 222 .• Parker, Evan, 134, 137, 139.~ 149,246 . N'me Inch N~, 69-70 Parsons,~d,260 Nolen, Jlm,my, 105 Parsons, MicWtel, 246 Nollman, Jim. 242 Part, Arvo, 240 Noyes, Charles K.. 261 Partch, Harry, 190 Numan, Gary,39,214 Passemonde, Chantal,· 46-48,. Nuova Consonanza, 133 57-58 Nuriddin, Jalal, 96 Patt~n,Arex,56,59-63 Nylon, Judy, 139 . Payne, Roger, 239-241 Nyman, Michael,~9. 149, Paw, Les, 106 183, 199-200

303

ocean of sound

Peart, Neil 39

Reeves, Jim,路. 92

Peckham, Morse, 路141 Pedteguera,Richard,258

Regnault, Felix-LOuis, 20

Pemberton,Daniel,216 Peraza, Armando, 95 Perry, I:rimk, 279 Perry, Lee, 11()'115, 117-118, 121, 130 Pet Shop Boys, 53 Phuture,37路 Piatti,Ugo,75 Pink Floyd, 40, 59 Pinky and Perky, 240 Poe, Edgar Allan, 254 Polanski, Roman; 102 Polin, Claire, 11 Polo, Mateo, 109 Pran Nath, Pandit, 163-164, 175, 177, 189, 193 PrateIla, BraIiIla,74-75 Presley, mVis, 64,87, 105, . 245 Preston, Don, 80 Prevost, Eddie, 46, 134 Prime, Michael, 181 . Prince,88,192 Prince Buster, 126 Prince Far I, 120-121 Prokofiev, Sergey, 43路 Public EnemY, 123, 164 Pynchon,Th6~,4, 10 ? and The MysterlaDs, 201 Quinn,Ray,92

Rabelais, Fran~ois, 238-239 Raffles, Tho~ Stanford, 15 Rrunone, Phil, 91 Raudive, Dr Konstantin, 269 Ravel, Maurice, 184, 271 . Redeell, 215 . . Reed, Lou, 173-174 Reese & Santonio, 37, 215

Reich, Steve, 11, 14, 178, 180, 183, .199 Reid, Duke, 1.16 Reinhardt, Ad, 11-12, 145 Reisner, Robert George,85 ReIoad,271 Residents, 123 Reznor, Trent (see Nine Inch Nails)

Rhdngold, Howard, 109 Rich, Billy, 96 . Rice, Ron, 174 Riley, Terry, 11, 14;33,42, 133, 162, 164, 178, 180, 182-194, 205, 243 Rimbaud, Arthur, 18, 224 Rimbaud, Robin (see Scanner), 33-36 Rimsky-Korsakov, NikoIay, 18,20 Riperton, Minnie, 63, 9Z Robbers, Stefan, 215 Robinson, Smokey, 42 Roche, Jean C., 225 Rolling Stones, 42, 108, 125 Romeo,Max,113 Ronettes, 106, 108 Ronstadt, Linda, 92 Ross, Anne, 277 . Ross, Diana, 92 Rothko, Mark,l1, 145,'178 Ro~,~nd, 102 Rowe, Keith, 46, 134 Rush,39 Rush, Loren, 243 Rushdie,Sahnan,l64 Russell, Arthur, 119-120 Russell,George, 191 Russo, Bill, .192 . Russolo, Antonio, 76 Russolo, Luigi, 75-79, 86

304

david toop

RythUn~RythUn,37,215

Sherwood; Adrian, 120 ShUnoda, Nobuhisa, 158-160 Shock~,Ehu1k.123, 164 Sade,10,89 Sibelius, Jean, 264 Said, Edward, 21 Sinatra, Frank, 91, 107 Saint-Pont, Valentine de, 74路 Singing Dogs, 240 Sakamoto, Ryuichi, 14, 195Size, Roni, 215 Sketch,215 196 Sala, Oskar, 86 Skinny Puppy, 69 Sanders, Pharoah, 42, 145 Slayer, 273 Santana, Carlos (Santana), 42, Sleezy D, 38, 209 Slowdive,174 95,133 . Santo and Johnny, 269 Smith, Jack, 174 Sarno, Louis, 130-132 Smith,Leo,134,136 Satie, Erik, 路20,33,71,74, Smith, William 0., 243 196-200 Sonic Youth, 17~ Sato, Minoru, 150 Source, 215 Saw Throat, 273 Spacemen 3, 57 Schaeffer, Pierre, 124-125 Spacetime; 55 Spallanzani, Lazzaro, 218 Schafer, R. Murray, 253-254 Schoenberg, Arnold, 271 SPanJcy,39 Schroeder,Barbette,59 Spector, Phil, 41, 路106, 108, 110-111 Schuller, Gunter, 191 . Spectrum, 174 Schulze, Klaus, 60 .Spiral Tribe, 47 Schutze, Paul, 14,255-256, 265-267 Spiritualized, 174 Schwarzenegger, Arnold, '217Splet, Alan, 265-266 Spontaneous Music. 218 Ensemble, 133 Schwenk, Theodor, 258 . SpraWson, Charles, 270-271 Scott, Ridley, 90,164 Scriabin, Alexander, 43 Sri Chinmoy, 95 Stalling, Carl, 114 Sculthorpe, Peter, 14 Steele, Jack Eo, 218 Sebeok, Thomas A., 135 Steiner, Rudolf, 258 Seeds,201, Steward Lincoln,J., 275 'Seefeel,215 . Stewart, Madeau, 137-138 Segalan, Victor, 18, 224 .Still, William Grant, 82 Shah, Idries, 222 .Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 4, Shallet, Emil, 126 27-28; 71, 81, 97, 99, 101, Shamen, 56,278 103,152,162,178,205 Shank, Bud, 192 Stockhausen,~,279 Sharp~ Jonah, 55-56, 58, 2i6 Stone, Oliver, 182, 279 Sharpe, Richard, 55 Stone, Sly (Sly and The Family Shea, David, 260 Rzewski, Frederic, 134

305

ocean of sound

Stone), 42, 97, 99 Strauss, Johann, 61 Strauss, Richard, 43, 264 Stravinsky, Igor, 77, 261 Strayhorn, Billy, 94, 167 Sueiio Latino, 60-61 Sugata, Ida Bagus, 14 Suicide, 273 Sultan Agung, 17 Sumac, Yma, 163 Summer, Donna, 41 Sun Electric,215 -Sun Ra, 23-32, 84, 86, 258 Suns of Arqa, 118 Surjodiningrat, R.M. Wasisto, 16-17 Suzuki, DaiSetz, 155 Suzuki, Daino,244 Sweet Exorcist, 215 Sylvian,David, 162, 278-279 Symphony Syd, 85

\--

. Takemitsu, Toro, 271 Takeshi, Beat, 196 Talking Heads, 123, 162 , Tangerine Dream, 63, 89-91, 263 Tanizaki, Jun'Ichiro, 150-151, 157,271 Tansen, 186-189 Taste of Honey, 237 Tate, Greg, 96-97 Tavener,John, 240 Taylor, John, 279 .Teitelbaum, Richard, 路134 Tdepatbic Fish, 46-48, 56-58 Temptations, 4243 Tennant, Neil, 53 . Tennyson;AJfred,276 Tewfik, Samira; 123 Theremin, Leon, 82, 86 This Mortal Coil; 57 Thompson, Danny (J>ass),.

279 Thompson, Danny (saxophones), 24 Thompson, Robert Farris, 45 Thomson, David, 16.1-162 Thornhill,<laude,192 , 3070 (Rick Davies), 215 Throbbing Gristle, 48, 209 Tilbury,John, 142 . Tipu Sultan, 72-73 Tipu's Tiger, 72-73 Tizol,Juan,167 _ Tomer, Alvin, 215 Tomita, 214 Tonto's Expanding Headband, 212 Tosches, Nick, 88 Toyama, Michiko; 82 Trautwein, Friedrich, 86 Tristano, Lennie, 192-193 Trumbull,Douglas,51 Troth,37 1\1dor, David, 140, 142 Tung, Ching Siu, 219 Turner, Victor, 257 Tyree,37 Tyson, June, 24 U2,8, 107,146-147 Ultramarine,55 Underground Resistarice, 209,215 ,Undisputed Truth, 43 URoy, 117 Vandepapeliere, Renaat, 49, 54 Vandepapeliere, Sabine, 49 Vandor, Ivan, 134 ' Vangelis,89,164,214 van Gulik, Robert Hans, 229, 244 Varese, Edgard, 25, 77-86,.

" 306

david toop

111,125 Vath, Sven, 55 Vaughan WiIIiams,Ralph, 264 Velvet Underground, 42, 173174, Ventures, 1p6 Verne, jules, 86 Verve, 174 Vmci, Leonardo da, 79, 218 Virgo,37,52 VJ Sata, 272 Vollenweider, Andreas, 263 Vonnegut, Kurt, 153 Vomaus, David, 139 Wacbsmann, Klaus, 16 Wagner, Richard; 16-17, 21, 7+75 Wakeman, Rick, 63, 263, Walcott, Colin,98 Wall, John, 260, 262 Wall, Max, 140 War, 42, 62 Washington, Geno (and the Ramjam Band), 46 Wen-Chung, Chou, 82 Wheeler, Kenny,279 Whitfield, NOrnian, 42-43 Williams, Andy, 88 Williams, Hank, 92 Williams,John, 264 ' Williams,TollY, 97 Wllmer, Valerie" 27,93, 136 Wilson, Brian, 110, 114, 271272 Wilson; Dennis, 272 Wolff, Henry, 139 Woods, Wtllie, 94 World Soundscape Project, 248,252-254 ' Wynette, Tammy, 64

Xebec, 158-160, 247, 255, 274 XenaIds,Iannis,82 YabbyU,1l8 Yamashiro, Shoji, 14 Yokoi, Hiroshi, 153-154, 158 YMO (Yellow Magic Orchestra), 39, 195 Young, La Monte, 11, 42, 162, 172-179, 183, 185, " 189, 200, 205-206, 247 Young, Larry, 95-97 Young, Neil, 273 Yiieh Shen, 244 Zappa, Frank, 80-81,182 Zawinul, joe, 96; 98 ZazeeJa, Marian, 172-173; - 175-176, 189 Zom,john,114,261 ZosimosofPanopolls,84 Zoviet France, 266

.r~