Rain Song

Rain Song by entschwindet und vergeht
Digging around on my clogged hard drive I found this recording that I once made. A few years back I experimented for a while with a technique whereby through a process of filtering, certain specific frequencies could be extracted from a source recording, without affecting their timbre. Sounds that had a wide range of frequencies and yet some rhythm and texture were best for this, and the rain was especially useful. This was all pre-hauntology, but the idea was quite similar - melodies could be found that were like ghosts within an existing sound, and the pieces sometimes automatically sounded like faint human voices. Unfortunately this was a very time consuming technique, involving the filtering of individual harmonic frequencies for each note, and overall I had better things to be doing. But here's one for you, created from the sound of the rain during a thunderstorm, I think sometime in 2009.

Romanticising the Riots

Romanticising the Riots by entschwindet und vergeht
You might have noticed that there were some riots recently. I don't really have much to add to the hundreds if not thousands of analyses that have already been contributed, apart from the observation that they all have some element of truth to them.

One of the riots took place right outside my house in "London's Fashionable East End", and as well as going outside to have a look at what was burning (along with a sizable cross-section of the local population), I also, as you'd expect from a pretentious hipster, made an audio recording of the helicopters that were thundering around outside, of which I counted at least four.

Now, it's not as if I couldn't have just left it at that, and had myself an interesting little Chris Watson style audio recording, but I felt it necessary to somehow transfigure it slightly, and the result is the audio that you can listen to here. The helicopters have been combined with a recording of Strauss' 'Im Abendrot' ('At Sunset'), one of his Four Last Songs.

Why? Well, there could be a number of reasons. On the one hand it's a sly gesture towards Stockhausen's 'Helicopter Quartet', but that's by the by. It's also a kind of aleatoric duet - listen to how the doppler effect of one of the helicopters perfectly accompanies the slide from the major to the relative minor! But then it's perhaps about the artistic gesture as such, the impotence, or failure, of any artwork to genuinely transfigure the structure of the world into which it's inserted. The high-romanticism here functions as a phantasmagoric fragment of a world that is not always in the process of collapsing, a fiction that is always drowned out by the harsh sounds of the world in which it is heard. Or, to put it another way, high-camp futility is the mood I'm going for.

Oval at Café OTO

Well I must say that I enjoyed that little concert. Turning up early in order to secure a table, we had to endure two rather amateur and apologetic support acts before Markus Popp took to the stage. He's actually a rather entertaining figure behind his laptop, pulling faces and pouting along to underlying rhythms that often seem to be his alone, and making rather camp swan-neck shapes with his arms as he fiddles around with his computer and mixer.

My companion was totally correct when he said that the performance reeked of ten years ago (I was certainly left thinking of some of Icarus' work from around 2005), and of course Oval is somewhat of a dinosaur, but if you weren't looking for the new wheel then you would be left properly satisfied by the balance between the soft and the raucous, the rhythmic and the chaotic, the harmonic and the noisy. It was the well composed and considered music of a developed artist, and it was a good concert to begin 2011 with.

Coming soon - two seperate performances of Mahler 9, just a week apart. I am trembling with anticipation.

My V*ntage P*rn Soundtrack

Waltz in eb major (vintage pornography) by entschwindet und vergeht

Well! Thanks to Soundcloud and their lack of time limit (at least on individual tracks), you now have the dubious honour of being able to listen to all sixteen minutes of the vintage pornography soundtrack that Kino Fist commissioned from me, more than 3 years ago now (mein Gott!). It was entirely composed and teased out of a single recording I made of the sound of rain, using my own secret compositional recipe.

Chopin, op.35 part III, played by Raoul Pugno

Circa 1903. Thanks to Al for drawing this to my attention.
Apparently "the sound is distorted because the record was cut on a defective turntable with fluctuating speed" (see also)...

'a very discordant demonstration of loyalty'

On 11 October 1851, the last day of the Great Exhibition, some 53,000 people visited the Crystal Palace. Although there was ‘a slight sprinkling of the humbler orders,’ according to The Times, most ‘belonged to the middle and wealthier classes, and consisted of habitués of the exhibition.’ By the end of the day the transept, where people had gathered even more than usual, was ‘packed with a dense mass of black hats’ through which an occasional bonnet could be spotted. Just before five o’clock Osler’s crystal fountain stopped and the crowd grew silent. The organs began to play the national anthem, and those in attendance turned their faces upward and sang along. Because of the size of the building and the distance between them, however, the organs were unable to stay together and so the singing of ‘God Save the Queen’ was, in the words of The Times, ‘a very discordant demonstration of loyalty.’ Then everyone cheered and slowly made their way to the exits to the pealing of bells.

from Auerbach, J, The Great Exhibition of 1851. see also, and also.

Entschwindet und Vergeht - Never Knew Such Silence

This is a short electroacoustic piece, recorded probably between 2005-06. The instrumentation was a laptop and live 4-track mixing. It's in the noisier end of the spectrum, shall we say, but I think there's an agreeable delicacy to it. Hope you enjoy...

E&V - November Song / Goodbye Song

Trio x 3 - New Jazz Meeting

On the subject of fusion, there's another release we have that is far more successful. The 'New Jazz Meeting', as it is called, represents a fantastic synthesis of disparate elements from a number of fields into a remarkably cohesive artistic statement.

Involved in the project are, as the name suggests, three trios. Representing the field of Improv, there is the late Steve Lacy, Peter Herbert and Wolfgang Reisinger. The second trio are 'New Musicians', Marcus Weiss, Phillipe Racine, and Paulo Alvares, and the third trio are electricians; Philip Jeck the arch-hauntologist, Bernard Lang, and Christof Kurzmann the E.A.I. maestro and member of The Magic I.D.

The foundation of the project is a composition by Lang, entitled Differenz/Wiederholung 1.2, which is performed 'straight' as part of the release. This, as its title suggests, is directly inspired by reading Deleuze. The Deleuzian-generated artwork is something we have had serious problems with, due to our exposure to Architecture's plundering of Capitalism and Schizophrenia over the last few years. Then again, Deleuze and Guattari do describe their work as a toolbox, to be utilised as one sees fit. Of course, this is an issue of fidelity - is it a faithful response to D&G when it is war-mongering, as in the IDF, or right-wing quasi-intellectual capital, as in architecture? Can we even describe Hardt & Negri as being faithful to Deleuze? We would suggest not, but that is a very large question in itself. On the whole, though, we are wary when an artist follows a literal approach to philosophy, the worst case we know of being the architectural response to The Fold. Lang's composition veers towards this approach, although in a far more humble manner than the examples above. Reading Difference and Repetition encouraged Lang "to break out of my former methods and plunge into the investigation of repetition, and the exploration of loops." This is not a statement that his work embodies the concepts, merely that he was suitably inspired by them to work forwards (although his latest works are named 'Monadologie', which suggests his forward motion may not be so forward as one might think). The composition itself is exciting and of course repetitious, properly addressing the issue of looping that 'New Music' often has trouble with. By breaking up fragments of a previous piece, we get to experience, in the context of acoustic performance, the effects that normally we expect from electronic or minimal music, namely patterns, superimpositions and syncopations. This combines with a gestural performance style to create a piece that swiftly shifts in dynamic from near-groove to all out chaos, all the while with a hypnotic phase-patterned quality.

Contra to usual improvisation practice, the musicians were all allowed to prepare extensively for their meeting. The laptop artists were given a previous recording of D/W 1.2 to experiment and perform with, and Jeck had dubplates of the piece made for his old turntables. The New Musicians had to perform the piece at the concerts, and the improvisers were given the opportunity to study it. This serious preparation allows the work as a whole to complete itself, to create a closed space of reference where everything is related inwards to another part of the experiment, without reducing the number of sonic potentialities given by the material. In doing so, deficiencies or restrictions normally experienced by each musical typology are overcome, or at least re-formulated, allowing for a rich and rewarding programme of experimental electroacoustic improvisation.

Over the generous (2+ hour) recording, there are numerous combinations of the artists, ranging from solo efforts from Kurzmann and Jeck, through duos, trios and quartets, and one track featuring all nine of the artists together. As mentioned before, the textures range from subtle overlappings of gesture to high powered blow-outs, without ever descending into macho posturing. Particular highlights are the duet of Jeck and Lacy, a highly stimulating clash of twisted haunto-funk and searching soprano saxophone, another example of that small genre of successful improvised communication between acoustic and electronic musicians. The track where Jeck goes up against the improvisors trio is exceptional, slowly rising into an aggressive crescendo of noise, the unhinged drums working surprisingly well against the turntables' locked grooves. Christoph Kurzmann is also excellent in his solo slot, again managing to be remarkably individual with his delicate palette of high pitched tones and clicking loops, and the nonet is excellent, everyone making adequate space for each other, yet still working powerfully with the source text.

Overall, the best aspects of this recording are the myriad intelligent blurrings that occur throughout. Each musician (at least the ones that we know well) is recognisably themself, yet they are also supple and submissive towards the overall structure of the piece. As an example of complex and structured improvised music, with a definite collective identity and intellectual direction, there is little I know that has surpassed it.

Last Exit / Sonny Sharrock

Last Exit are the truth of the Mahavishnu Orchestra.



I wonder if we get any points for noticing that DJ Shadow sampled Sonny Sharrock's '27th Day', from 'Monkey-Pockie-Boo' on the track 'Napalm Brain/Scatter Brain'?
Thought not.

p.s.- this video seems to get very Christian Marclay-y at the very end.