Future Shock
Future Shock is a bimonthly column that appears in the online improvisational journal Point of Departure that explores the vicissitudes at the intersection of improvisation and electroacoustic music.
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The October 2009 issue of Point of Departure has Kevin's take on the electroacoustic improvising duet of FURT , A.K.A. Richard Barrett and Paul Obermayer. In this column Kevin explores dealing with complexity and the impossibility of silence.
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You have to be engaged to listen to complex music. Otherwise, you may be prone to think about it in terms of deconstruction or literary analysis, instead of listening to it. Part of the difficulty stems from the one time, real time nature of music performance. Music is experienced: it is sensual; it touches you; and it is fast – 1125 feet per second fast. That speed can work against the kind detailed engagement required to pull a piece of music apart, if we are indeed we are even meant to do that. Dense, difficult music begs the question of whether or not it is possible to fully hear the music as it happens. That is also a challenge for the performer(s) as well.
Few electroacoustic improvising ensembles have met this challenge like FURT, the duo of Paul Obermayer and Richard Barrett. There is a structurally reinforcing aspect to every sound they produce. This intrinsically compositional impulse is unsurprising given that Barrett has stand-alone cred in contemporary music. Barrett was already pursuing composition when FURT was formed in 1986 – Obermayer was finishing university. Barrett is now renowned as part of the so-called “New Complexity School,” where dense, extremely difficult compositions for acoustic instruments that use unconventional playing methods challenge performers to the point of impossibility. (Brian Ferneyhough also considered a “New Complexity” composer has tempo indications such as “faster than possible.”) But, applied to FURT, “New Complexity” seems vacuous.
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This column is about the structural implications of improvising with listening instruments, or real time processors that are designed by one musician to interact with another. The specific example I explore is the work of Joel Ryan in the context of his duet with Evan Parker and the Evan Parker Electro-Acoustic Ensemble whose new release The Moment’s Energy just dropped from ECM.
Zips, cracks, dings, blips, zaps, screeches and scratches – but that is only one side of the story; long, elegant, just-pierced silences rising into a swarm of cicada hovering over layers of crumbling concrete, rebar exposed, slouching towards mayhem and growling through speakers … These dense, synthetic, and complex sound worlds have a way of suggesting dramatic, imagined landscapes with the quick, sharp, gestural sounds becoming strides across that strange terrain. Textures and gestures collide, creating layers and obscuring any one player's voice, until this undulating mass gives way to silence.
"I always liked what Andrew Pickering referred to in 'The Mangle of Practice.' That science does not proceed from the head alone, but requires an intervention in nature, a mangle," says musician Joel Ryan of the way he thinks about the software instruments he designs and uses with the Evan Parker Electro-Acoustic Ensemble. "I don’t think music can emerge from the head alone, either. You constantly make and apply new tools but this feeds back to change the very nature of the thing you were to get a hold of. After numbers became electric, music could never be the same. And this is nothing new, bronze and the science of measure surely altered radically the possibilities sound and music for our ancestors"
for more..... visit FUTURE SHOCK
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POD 23 :: Future Shock 01
The first column is about the 40 year anniversary of STEIM and the contribution Michel Waisvisz has made to our discipline.
Michel Waisvisz 1949-2008
Franca Lohmann©2009
In the ever expanding root structure of improvised musics, the rhizome of jazz still tethers a tight circle of sprouts, buds seemingly more like each other with each generation. This self similar, fractal like expansion, however, from time to time creates mutants – even cyborgs. It was 1969 when a collective of composers and improvisers based in Amsterdam formed the STudio for Electro-Instrumental Music, or STEIM, the mutant offspring of powerful Dutch improvising and composing personalities. The founders, Misha Mengelberg, Louis Andriessen, Peter Schat, Dick Raaijmakers (who has a monograph coming out in English in September of 2009), Jan van Vlijmen, Reinbert de Leeuw, Willem Breuker, and Konrad Boehmer, were attempting to organize themselves and find ways to generate support for their particular compositional and improvisation style – what they considered to be the future of Dutch music. Managing and organizing the numerous pieces of electronic hardware, including mixers and loud speakers, required to work with live electronics at the time demanded a collaborative style. Some of STEIM's first work was supporting untamed electroacoustic theatre and the improvisations of the Instant Composers Pool. So began a venerable institution that this year celebrates its 40th anniversary.
for more..... visit FUTURE SHOCK