Crimes Against Music:
Destruction, Deconstruction, Reconstruction
This is an ongoing project drawing upon sampling practice, sound sculpture, reactive/interactive installation, photography, film, and spatialised acousmatic composition. It is built around the three ideas of destruction, deconstruction and reconstruction of music as sound, and is inspired by the 'Negative Beauty' aesthetic discussed by Johanna Demmers, herself a forensic musicologist, in her book Listening Through The Noise: The aesthetics of experimental electronic music (2010). The project will culminate in a recital/exhibition in November 2015.
1. Exploring the Body
The audience will first enter an antechamber, containing a long table surrounded by a curtain. On the table will be a mock cadaver made from carved-up pieces of vinyl record. There will be two listening stations (headphones and stylus cartridges) with which audience members can investigate the body. The resultant audio output will be sent to a Max patch, which will perform signal glitching/degradation before outputting to a small PA. The signal degradation (Max) will be affected by a spherical Arduino controller, containing Light Dependent Resistors, placed in another part of the room. This room will be an reactive/interactive installation.
Equipment List
1x Scroll Saw (purchased)
1x Angle Grinder (purchased)
1x Super Glue (purchased)
30x Cheap Vinyl LPs (owned)
2x Stylus Cartridges (must purchase)
2x Headphones (owned)
2x Phono Preamps (must purchase)
1x Mixing Desk (owned)
1x Macbook Pro (owned)
1x Powered Speaker Pair (owned)
*Must route headphone signals individually, pre-Macbook, so each person hears only their own cartridge
1x Trestle Table (owned)
12m square Black or White Material (must purchase)
5x Flourescent Photographic Lights (owned)
4x Mock Crime Scene Photos (owned)
?x B&W High-Contrast, Low-Key Erotic Photos (2nd Semester Collaboration with Priera Russell and Gonni Bruekkers)
2x Real X-Ray Photos (owned)
1x LDR Arduino Controller (owned)
A series of mock crime scene photographs printed on "polaroid" photo paper will be displayed above the cadaver, as if placed there by an investigator. These have been vectorised to create the graphical score to the first purely musical piece, Negative Beauty (below), and were the result of a collaboration with photographer/filmmaker Dirk Nienaber. Other photographs (planned, but yet to be taken) and real life X-Rays will also be displayed.
2. Negative Beauty
Next to the mock cadaver will be a monitor screen, listening station, and reel-to-reel tape recorder. The screen will display images of the scrolling score (Decibel ScorePlayer) for my guitar ensemble piece, Negative Beauty, which will be playing on the headphones, and also show images of reel-to-reel tape being shredded/destroyed. The actual tape recorder, with shredded tape, will be present, so that the sound of the piece, once put through this process, may also be listened to).
Equipment List
1x Macbook Pro (owned)
1x Apple Desktop Monitor (owned)
1x Reel-to-Reel 1/4" Tape Machine (owned)
1x Florist's Tape Shredder (owned)
2x Headphones (borrowed)
1x Headphone Preamp (owned)
3. Acousmatic-Surround Performance
The audience will then move through to the main space, in which there will be a 7.1 Surround speaker setup and a projector/screen. A 20 minute spatial acousmatic piece will be played, made almost entirely out of audio samples taken, or generated, from the Negative Beauty recording and graphic score. These samples will have been created using the following processes: raw data sonification (of sounds and images), pitch modulation, PaulStretch time modulation, reversal, bit-reduction/sample-rate-reduction, and combinations of all of the above.
To generate musical passages from these samples, some longer, more droning samples will be arranged on a timeline in Logic Pro or Pro Tools, and some shorter ones will be mapped to a Max-generated sampler pad, like the one used in Hakubutsugaku (2014). Ultimately, these processes will overlap. Even though I tend to work electroacoustically, usually within a DAW, Max/MSP or other programs, I find improvisation to be indispensable. Without it, I lose motivation and my work slows to a standstill. Therefore, much of the music heard in the acousmatic performance will be the result of electronically processed pre-production, sample-based improvisation and DAW post-production.
The visual projections will be one continuous movie file, cut together from photographs and moving images shot during collaborations with Dirk Nienaber, Priera Russell, Gonni Bruekkers and myself. Some Jitter-based manipulation may be included, but not during the live performance. Open source application Blender is being used for the editing.
Equipment List
7x Powered Monitors (borrowed)
7x Speaker Stands (borrowed)
1x Powered Sub Speaker (borrowed)
2x Macbook Pro (borrowed)
1x Projector (owned)
1x Projector Screen (must purchase - frame/stand owned)
30x Plastic Chairs (borrowed)
On the 19th of February I had my first meeting with Principal Studies mentor Dr Cat Hope.
At this stage, I was intent on writing for piano/strings with electronics, as well as exploring conceptual performance art (influenced by Absurdist theatre). I also wanted to explore/challenge the notion of 'genre' and audience-expectation through some of my work. Based on all this, Cat recommended:
John Zorn Snagglepuss score, online – for radio blockform piece Y18842
Chronos Quartet for strings with electronics
Ligeti’s Le Grande Macabre (library) Y21824
Beatfurrer (composer) – string quartets, some with electronics some without
Scelsi (Italian composer) – late string quartets/trios, droning microtonal scored-out improvisations Y21782; 784.2 KLA
Alva Noto & Ryuichi Sakamoto – instruments with electronics – no scores available, just listen
Shostakovic – late string quartets ONLINE Classical Music Library
Cat Hope – string quartets (on website)
Get scores for all – read with the music
Curt Stone 20th Century Notation get a copy of 780.148090
Johanna Demmers An Introduction to Experimental Music 786.7117
She also set me a weekly exercise: A string quartet study – nothing too technical, just a sound world that interests you. She also gave me the following advice:
Decide now which ensembles you want to write for. Get performers now. Team up with another 3rd year and share players/rehearsals. Use friends of friends, find an in.
On February 23rd I made the following notes:
Noto and Sakamoto - Vrioon
Use of glitchy digital sound objects as percussive and sustained tones very appealing but preferably not all the time (i.e. this is a little more metric than what I had in mind). But the use of repetitive rhythmic patterns does mean longer pieces for less work, which is good). Drone of tonic with consonant harmony modally shifting around it (Ionian – Mixolydian – Ionian), gradual shift away from diatonic to chromatic and back again. Also a little more static than what I would do. Again, this is time-efficient, I know.
Noto and Sakamoto - Moon
More up tempo, and more movement (less static) than Vrioon. More to my tastes but still more ‘pop’ than what I’m thinking of. But the success with which the two different sound worlds are blended into one is a good guide for me.
Sakamoto – Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence (Orchestral Version)
Sweet, unpretentious melody performed by the raw and unaffected solo pianist, with the same melody varied again and again in different incarnations. This is, on an emotional level, the type of melancholic music I would like to create, and how I would like to learn to vary simple material to create longer pieces. The sweetness of his melodies against the rustic chord voicings (low close harmonies resulting in a rumbling dissonance, parallel fourths and fifths, unexpected and unusual voicings on points of predictable resolution) creates a beautiful “diamond in the rough” aesthetic.
At some point I watched Ligeti's Le Grande Macabre:
A celebration of the ordinary - trash, banality. Junkyard found-object aesthetic. Genderless muscle underneath skin, filthy trash over skin. The subjugation of the purpose of melody to within dialogue and dramatic characterisation (Piet's squeaky voice and drunken song). "Oh, God! Now we're all fucked!"
This is more realistic than realism, or more truthful at least. It's somewhere between Absurd and Surreal, with a clear Theatre of Cruelty influence.
Gender subversion and extreme/absurd/illegitimate human behaviours.
I also read Johanna Demmers' An Introduction to Experimental Music and took the following notes (abridged):
Part1: Chapter 1
- Molino's three levels, as applied by Nattiez: Poiesis (creative process, including authorial intentions), esthesis (process of reception, interpretation) and neutral (physical embodiment of the work).
- 'Pure listening' only useful to me in that the four modes (the concern with a sound's provenance) is linked to Molina's three levels (specifically esthesis).
- Levi-Strauss: "...Musical compositions and myths share certain formal attributes [...] effective organisational devices for guiding an audience's responses [...] "The composer must utilise them if a musical work is to have any communicative success"" (Wishart)
- "The best way to achieve esthesis is to refrain from using information that would subsequently need to be bracketed out."
- "When the language of music ceases to be separate from the outside world, and starts to resemble base phenomena that could be heard at any moment in time, the factor distinguishing music from sound or noise becomes irrelevant."
Chapter 2
- Construction, Reproduction, Destruction (with natural overlap)
- "Reproductions... explicitly display the frame enclosing a sound..."
- "Connisuer-based decoding..." [sampling]
- "...Repugnant sounds are the last unmusical ones available."
- "When electronica musicians construct, reproduce or destroy material, they are perpetuating one of the grandest metaphors in all of music history, that electronically produced vibrations not only exist as objects, but also carry with them associations and references."
Part 2: Chapter 3
- "Minimalism could refer to artworks displaying simplicity and lack of adornment, repetition, gestalt wholes as opposed to composite assemblages, or non referential materials."
- "...strategies among microsound artists for creating and manipulating material echo the discourse of "object hood" that minimalist and their critics generated during the 1960s."
- "Microsound... ...uses the smallest, most minimal particles of material to nullify external referentially..."
- "...the distinguishing characteristic of independent microsound is its preponderance of digital noise, so much so that microsound is often synonymous with the genre of minimalist posttechno known as glitch."
- "These sounds of failure are evocative because they allow musicians and listeners to demystify technology, which otherwise threatens to become ubiquitous and therefore unquestionable."
- "Near" grains and "far" drones [Noto & Sakamoto]
- Noto Xerox (2007) "...built on samples that have been transformed... ...on sounds that bear a ghostly resemblance to something heard in the past."
Chapter 4
- "Maximal music - drones, dub techno, and noise music..."
- "...a quality of excess, something appreciable only after long stretches of time."
"...posits a space of euphoric or utopian excess."
- "...appreciable as maximal only in the presence of boundaries..."
"...ultimately reinforce traditional notions of beauty and form."
- "Negative Beauty" - Title of recital
- "These works contain a great deal of noise, and we can hear them as sublime objects because they contain an adminture of beautiful and dreadful elements: simple tonal language submerged in pure noise or extreme dissonance, loud volumes and long durations."
- "...noise, repetition, stasis and distortion shifts to negative beauty, a pleasure that does not conform to Kantian standards of balance and semblance but nonetheless aspires to the condition of beauty."
Part 3: Chapter 5
- "site ...entails not only the environments in which sound propagates but also those that listeners physically and metaphorically occupy."
- "space... (Lefebure, 2000), refers to large-scale sites that could be physical, mental or cultural in nature and either imaginary or real."
- "Place, according to Castells (2000), refers to sites that are local and governed by interpersonal, ecological, or political relationships."
- ...location... sheer physical placement of listeners and sound objects."
- "...site... can refer to acoustics, sound origins, or cultural associations of sound."
- "...situated... inextricably bound to a particular spot or trajectory, whether real or imagined, physical or metaphysical."
- "...schizophonic (when sound is transported from its original cultural context into a new one)..."
- "Graphic Music"
- "...Kittler anticipates the rise of pure data, of flows and streams of information that could be experienced as music, film, statistics or other phenomena."
- "...the choice of which binary codes lead to which sounds is arbitrary..."
- "...there is no one preferred correlation between the images and their sonic analogies."
- "Graphic music implies a source that lies halfway between idea and reality."
- "...graphic music is an anomaly..."
Chapter 6
- "Beautiful art is something that is autonomous and possesses purposive purposelessness - autonomous because its pleasing qualities reside within the artwork itself and do not reflect conditions that led to its creation and purposely purposeless because the artwork does not need to "do" any work in order to justify its existence" (Kant, 2000)
- "Aesthetic listening... also includes the experience of appreciating the characteristics of nonmusical sound as aesthetic objects. [...] It instead means that listeners can contemplate a sound from the outside world for its own aesthetic merits."
My next meeting with Cat was on the 6th of March:
She suggested I read: The Ambient Century (Prendergast), Haunted Weather & Ocean of Sound (Toop) but I found these to be either poorly or demandingly written. Cat also suggested I listen to: Scelsi Quartet No. 4, Gloria Coats and Fusinato (Melbourne), who works with engraved records, as well as traditional scores with radial lines drawn out of them. My weekly task was to orchestrate a 5-minute version of one of the two themes I was considering for strings/piano.
On March 12th I took notes on Cat Hope and Stuart James' Composition Workshop presentations:
Cat Hope
- Decibel Scoreplayer: questions the code that is traditional notation; achieves drone aesthetic freed from metric pulse
- “animated notation” an established method, if not quite its own genre
- Chunk (2013) – “black MIDI” (Google this)
- Collaboration w/ film-makers and visual artists – field recordings used as starting points for installation pieces
- The End of Abe Sada (2014) has great instrumentation
- “Open aspects of performance” – a different set of values/concerns as a composer (“I don’t care how you make the sound heavy, I just want you to do it.”)
- “Comprivisation” new word!
- “Don’t be limited by your tools: serve your ideas – you will be judged on your ideas.”
- Don’t over-rehearse pieces with fairly open performance aspects – they will lose their accidental element
- cathope.com
Stuart James
- The familiar vs. the unfamiliar
- Hold on to your first imagining of the sound, and realise it by any means necessary, rather than settling for something else or less
- Technology can come down to: Mimetic processes (referential, hyperrealism, surrealism), Sonification of data (abstract associations/meaning?), experimentation/tinkering (an important aspect of creation that should never be denied)
- Spatialisation of Spectra (PhD project) – discretely spatialising the individual partials of any sound; building an instrument to do so; terrain shape used to position frequencies across space; style of distribution across the space/terrain is within user’s control; real-world acoustics place restrictions on its effectiveness; about sonic exploration to find effects that are evocative of imagined/creative space
- stuartgjames.com
On the 16th I carried out some Plunderphonics/Vinyl-Sampling research. Will Zachary Brown had suggested I look into an Australian artist/band from the East Coast who released carved-up vinyl records that play back as “beats”. The idea of carefully coordinating the carved lines had occurred to me already, but I didn’t know it was actually possible.
I watched the online video Christian Marclay mini documentary (www.egs.edu/faculty/christian-marclay/videos/christian-marclay-mini-documentary/) where Marclay demonstrates some of his methods. One that impressed me was the cutting of records into sections which could then be mixed and matched and glued together to create “spliced” loops.
Two ideas occurred to me: (1) Smash many records and glue different pieces back together to create “granular” hybrid LPs, and (2) Cut up one LP into thin radial slices and glue these back together in a different order.
I then pulled all the records from my collection that I am willing to sacrifice. The question now becomes one of how to group them, which means one must consider “genre.” Do I want to “theme” my hybrid records or would that destroy the “magic” randomness of the final result? In the above video, its apparent that Marclay was interacting almost acousmatically with his source records, rather than at the level of genre or discourse.
I looked in the book Audio Culture for some more information (Gould, G. (1966). The prospects of recording. In C. Cox & D. Warner (Eds.), Audio culture: Readings in modern music (1st ed., pp. 115-127). New York, NY: Continuum):
- “…I predicted that the public concert as we know it today would no longer exist in a century hence, that its functions would have been entirely taken over by electronic media.” (p. 115)
- Reverence for music has declined as it has become a more regular intrusion into our everyday lives (p. 116)
- “…one cannot ever splice style – one can only splice segments which relate to a conviction about style.” (117)
- “[The participant listener is] a threat, a potential usurper of power, an uninvited guest at the banquet of the arts, one whose presence threatens the familiar hierarchical setting of the musical establishment. Is it not, then, inopportune to venture that this participant public could emerge untutored from that servile posture with which it paid homage to the status structure of the concert world and, overnight, assume decision-making capacities which were specialists’ concerns heretofore? […] There is, in fact, nothing to prevent a dedicated connoisseur from acting as his own tape editor and, with these devices, exercising such interpretive predilections as will permit him to create his own ideal performance.” (122)
This made me think of using a florist’s tape shredder to shred ½” reel-to-reel as an audio effect. The recorded material (perhaps a drone piece) could be instrumental music from the performance. This could form part of a Negative Beauty exhibition in the foyer that also includes the hybridised vinyl records.
I did some internet research and found a DJ/artist/designer in New York (from Barcelona, Spain) called Ishac Bertran who has been “analog sampling” by laser-cutting sections from different records and inserting them into other records. http://www.wired.com/2011/10/analog-sampling/
I also found a forum in which someone posted an alternative to a laser-cutter – a scroll saw (with a fine blade) (https://www.etsy.com/au/teams/7385/techniques-materials/discuss/8629370/) I ordered a cheap one online for $129 dollars (money I recently earned from a gig).
At this stage I was still interested in Absurdist theatre pieces, so I took notes on Robert Hoffman's Professional Management Skills talk:
- Robert's Cabaret work is hilarious – all character-based, featuring popular songs, re-worded popular and canonical songs, and originals.
- Each performance seems to have a connecting theme, a through-line.
- I should think about the through-line for my piece/s
On March 27th I did some research into the photography I was envisaging for my electroacoustic piece. My studio lights and backdrops had arrived – there were two more “fill” lights still coming, which would make two key, one hair and two fill – the basic setup, according to this lighting tutorial (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_Sov3xmgwg). I need these to shoot all video/photography elements in the recital (and for personal use in the the near future). For the imagery I was seeing stark, B&W close-up portraiture using black and silver face paint and “bejewelling” of the eyes, with totally black backdrop (possibly only down-lighting, i.e. only one hair light). I was visualising these images flickering only momentarily up on to dark screens, and having flickering, blurring “glitch-like” effects applied to them.
I discovered that the style I’m thinking of is commonly referred to as “dark portraiture” as in the work of Lee Jeffries (UK). However, I was also seeing “low-key, high contrast” as in the work of little-known New York photographer Val Tourchin, who also uses coloured tinting/staining (red, green, blue, etc) which would be easily achievable in Jitter, in a live context.
I asked local fashion designer Priera Russell to collaborate on these images for me, as she’s the only person in Perth I would trust with this level of daring and striking visual design. This will be one of my Semesterly collaborations.
On the 1st of April I had my last meeting with Dr Cat Hope, as her promotion meant she couldn't mentor me any more. We discussed the piece I was writing for the A Love Supreme concert (a semi-serialist atonal work for chamber ensemble: flute, violin, four saxophones, percussion & no-input mixer). Cat suggested I develop different repeated sections, then provide instructions like, “After 5 times, change notes,” then, “Start to freely improvise,” so that sections break down in unpredictable ways (like the NIM does). She also suggested the program notes read along the lines of, "Influenced by chance, NIM, performative gestures, free improvisation…” Her suggested listening for research was Earl Brown (numbered scores – Available Forms; From Here – look in lecture slides, google).
Somewhere in the next three weeks, I abandoned my recital plan. The Love Supreme concert had forced me to admit that I wasn't writing music that I enjoyed, and that I was trying to appease someone else's notion of what good "art music" is. This is why I had writer's block and couldn't complete my piece in time for the concert, which resulted in Dane Yates and I working out a structured NIM improvisation instead (which included as a sample the central motif from the original piece). The performance had technical issues and was a complete failure, leaving the audience confused and almost as uncomfortable as myself. I took this as a positive sign that it was time for a change.
On april 23rd I had my first meeting with Dominik Karski, my new mentor. I told him my new plan - to record a concept album in CMS1, and then perform it with a mixture of pre-recorded playback and live musicians. The style would be contemporary, guitar-based rock, as this is my favourite kind of music to write, play and produce. Influences would include Foo Fighters, The Bad Brains and Flaming Lips, as well as more sampler-based artists such as Big Black and Kucka. We agreed this would result in 'album tracks' using instrumental layers with voice and samples. I didn't want to lose the Negative Beauty aesthetic, and wanted to use the noisiness of guitar-based rock to explore the relationship between noise and pitch. Dominik suggested I research Stephen Kazuo Takasugi. He also pointed out that the techniques/technologies I will be using permit me to manipulate entire 'complete' passages of music (or pop songs), and not just instrumental tracks, to create changing contexts/perspectives on the same material. We both agreed I should for now use the 'scrapbook' approach to generate raw material. Dominik also encouraged me to consider performative actions/interactions based on the intended technical setup and stage layout.
At our second meeting on the 30th, we talked more about the idea of subjugating songs (fragmented or complete) within a larger work, as sound materials and not complete works within themselves. Mixing techniques could be used to do this. The objective was to continue writing complete passages of musical material before deciding what to do with them. We also agreed I should bear in mind the limitations and inexperience of most rock performers (friends), and employ pre-recorded sections if necessary. The live/recorded juxtaposition will be aesthetically interesting. I thought the technical setup should be to line-in as much as possible to PA/desk for maximum sound control, in order to do experimental things with the live sound being performed. Dominik recommended I listen to Gesang der Junglinge (Stockhausen) to observe his precise and extensive utilisation of very little raw material, and his use of voice in a tape-composition context.
After this meeting, I presented my new recital plan at Composition Workshop. Josten Myburgh suggested Harvey Milk's Life: The Best Game In Town, Fantomas, Wumpee (Michael), Te 100% Hits, and Johnny Chang. Someone mentioned that the passages of music (raw materials) could also defy genre-categorisation, so that the overall work could provide, "Different perspectives on different perspectives." Jessie Bach suggested live mixing of guitar levels with a joystick or GUI.
I made the following notes: Hip-hop studio composition techniques (early experimental tape composition techniques applied to popular music) – not just sampling/splicing but ingenious ways of segueing between “tracks” or complete passages of music (either suddenly/jarringly or by using audio engineering techniques to subjugate the music into a larger soundscape or crossfade between different pieces of music). Also, applying a genre-critical “postmodern” perspective to popular music (particularly the strophic song form in all popular stylistic permutations) as in the albums of Frank Zappa
At our next meeting, Dominik suggested Johnathan Harvey's Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco (extended electroacoustic manipulation of limited material).
In early May, I realised the 'dark portraiture' photography/projections should be erotic. This decision was based on the imagined aesthetic that would be created by putting these images to the sounds of sonified data and basically synthesised drum, bass and lead instrument sounds. I also imagined a BDSM scenario that explores the ambiguous duality between victim and persecutor. I specifically saw the high-contrast patterns of rope criss-crossing skin. I put together a visual profile/proposal for the shoot, and made a few demonstration loops by sonifying random files on my computer (Audacity) and sampling from the results (Logic Pro).
When I met photographers Priera Russell and Gonni Bruekkers on the 19th of May, they loved the idea. They had actually been planning an erotic photography collection with a similar aesthetic. Priera showed me the B&W photography of Von Unwerth, and I showed her the proposal and demo music. The music made both of them instantly think of the opening credit sequence of Se7en (1995), and Taking Lives (2004). Both sequences feature 'forensic investigation' montages. Gonni suggested that it ties in with the darkness and moral ambiguity of the imagery, as well as the metaphor of, "Investigating the body."
Priera suggested our friend, filmmaker Dirk Nienaber, who specialises in the crime-thriller/horror genre, should be brought on board to shoot a similar montage of video clips. I met with Dirk the following day, and he was instantly enthusiastic about the project.
At my next meeting with Dominik, it was pointed out to me that the film/photography element ties in perfectly with the compositional practice of, "Investigating the sound."
Recital Working Title: Crimes Against Music
I introduced the ‘old recital’ ideas of analogue sampling through vinyl record sculpture (broken records and human body figures) and reel-to-reel tape shredding to Dominik, who pointed out that they tie in conceptually with the idea of, “Investigation of sound," and the cutting/dissecting of music, which could at once be a crime or the investigation of one.
The tape shredding evokes the idea of “destroying the evidence”. The vinyl-sculptured human figures evoke the idea of forensic investigation of the body (like Gonni’s/Priera’s idea). The analogue sampling of records is in itself a crime, as they have been used without permission, as well as the obvious use of cutting/splicing/destruction/reconstruction as a technique.
So the whole recital idea finally crystallized in my mind – the audience explores this installation, which introduces the concept, and themes of analogue and digital technologies, forensics, crime, morbid curiosity/investigation. They also hear (part of) a ten-minute electric guitar piece entitled Negative Beauty, which is the source of almost all sonic material used in the main performance. The audience then enters the performance space where sonic and visual materials from the installation are re-used in a multimedia acousmatic-surround performance (along with new materials, of course, extending upon the themes).
Even the visual aesthetics I had experimented with in my “Negative Beauty” presentation (Comp Seminar; Comp Workshop) now work thematically, as they include the idea of the dissected human form, and digitally-glitched/distorted imagery.
I needed to know two things from Lindsay:
Q: Where can my recital be held?
A: Apparently there is a black-box theatre space at ECU, and Lindsay will investigate this for me.
Q: How much time/credit (out of 40 mins) will I get for the sculptures and shredded tape installation, given they've no determinate length?
A: Anything up to 20 minutes, given the Negative Beauty piece is in itself 10 minutes of music, and the examiners don't like recitals going over time.
I organised a photo shoot with Dirk Nienaber to make a collection of mock crime-scene images I could then vectorise to create an abstract graphic scrolling score (vectorised photos, when zoomed-in, look like nothing more than organically-shaped regions of homogenous colour). This score has been performed by an electric guitar ensemble to create the first piece, from which all other sonic material will be drawn (entitled Negative Beauty). These images will also be exhibited on polaroid photo paper at the recital, above the 'autopsy table' where the human-figure sculpture is, as if pinned there by an investigator. This is my collaboration for this semester, which will continue into next semester when we shoot and edit 'forensic investigation' clips.
At its core, my recital is simply a bringing-together of everything that interests me. I will say at the outset that violence and sadism don’t inordinately fascinate me: in fact, they quite repulse me. However, as I hope has been demonstrated, the “forensic investigation” aspect emerged quite naturally through my collaboration with visual artists Dirk Nienaber, Priera Russell and Gonni Bruekers, and ended up being quite a crucial part of the concept.
At this stage, I was intent on writing for piano/strings with electronics, as well as exploring conceptual performance art (influenced by Absurdist theatre). I also wanted to explore/challenge the notion of 'genre' and audience-expectation through some of my work. Based on all this, Cat recommended:
John Zorn Snagglepuss score, online – for radio blockform piece Y18842
Chronos Quartet for strings with electronics
Ligeti’s Le Grande Macabre (library) Y21824
Beatfurrer (composer) – string quartets, some with electronics some without
Scelsi (Italian composer) – late string quartets/trios, droning microtonal scored-out improvisations Y21782; 784.2 KLA
Alva Noto & Ryuichi Sakamoto – instruments with electronics – no scores available, just listen
Shostakovic – late string quartets ONLINE Classical Music Library
Cat Hope – string quartets (on website)
Get scores for all – read with the music
Curt Stone 20th Century Notation get a copy of 780.148090
Johanna Demmers An Introduction to Experimental Music 786.7117
She also set me a weekly exercise: A string quartet study – nothing too technical, just a sound world that interests you. She also gave me the following advice:
Decide now which ensembles you want to write for. Get performers now. Team up with another 3rd year and share players/rehearsals. Use friends of friends, find an in.
On February 23rd I made the following notes:
Noto and Sakamoto - Vrioon
Use of glitchy digital sound objects as percussive and sustained tones very appealing but preferably not all the time (i.e. this is a little more metric than what I had in mind). But the use of repetitive rhythmic patterns does mean longer pieces for less work, which is good). Drone of tonic with consonant harmony modally shifting around it (Ionian – Mixolydian – Ionian), gradual shift away from diatonic to chromatic and back again. Also a little more static than what I would do. Again, this is time-efficient, I know.
Noto and Sakamoto - Moon
More up tempo, and more movement (less static) than Vrioon. More to my tastes but still more ‘pop’ than what I’m thinking of. But the success with which the two different sound worlds are blended into one is a good guide for me.
Sakamoto – Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence (Orchestral Version)
Sweet, unpretentious melody performed by the raw and unaffected solo pianist, with the same melody varied again and again in different incarnations. This is, on an emotional level, the type of melancholic music I would like to create, and how I would like to learn to vary simple material to create longer pieces. The sweetness of his melodies against the rustic chord voicings (low close harmonies resulting in a rumbling dissonance, parallel fourths and fifths, unexpected and unusual voicings on points of predictable resolution) creates a beautiful “diamond in the rough” aesthetic.
At some point I watched Ligeti's Le Grande Macabre:
A celebration of the ordinary - trash, banality. Junkyard found-object aesthetic. Genderless muscle underneath skin, filthy trash over skin. The subjugation of the purpose of melody to within dialogue and dramatic characterisation (Piet's squeaky voice and drunken song). "Oh, God! Now we're all fucked!"
This is more realistic than realism, or more truthful at least. It's somewhere between Absurd and Surreal, with a clear Theatre of Cruelty influence.
Gender subversion and extreme/absurd/illegitimate human behaviours.
I also read Johanna Demmers' An Introduction to Experimental Music and took the following notes (abridged):
Part1: Chapter 1
- Molino's three levels, as applied by Nattiez: Poiesis (creative process, including authorial intentions), esthesis (process of reception, interpretation) and neutral (physical embodiment of the work).
- 'Pure listening' only useful to me in that the four modes (the concern with a sound's provenance) is linked to Molina's three levels (specifically esthesis).
- Levi-Strauss: "...Musical compositions and myths share certain formal attributes [...] effective organisational devices for guiding an audience's responses [...] "The composer must utilise them if a musical work is to have any communicative success"" (Wishart)
- "The best way to achieve esthesis is to refrain from using information that would subsequently need to be bracketed out."
- "When the language of music ceases to be separate from the outside world, and starts to resemble base phenomena that could be heard at any moment in time, the factor distinguishing music from sound or noise becomes irrelevant."
Chapter 2
- Construction, Reproduction, Destruction (with natural overlap)
- "Reproductions... explicitly display the frame enclosing a sound..."
- "Connisuer-based decoding..." [sampling]
- "...Repugnant sounds are the last unmusical ones available."
- "When electronica musicians construct, reproduce or destroy material, they are perpetuating one of the grandest metaphors in all of music history, that electronically produced vibrations not only exist as objects, but also carry with them associations and references."
Part 2: Chapter 3
- "Minimalism could refer to artworks displaying simplicity and lack of adornment, repetition, gestalt wholes as opposed to composite assemblages, or non referential materials."
- "...strategies among microsound artists for creating and manipulating material echo the discourse of "object hood" that minimalist and their critics generated during the 1960s."
- "Microsound... ...uses the smallest, most minimal particles of material to nullify external referentially..."
- "...the distinguishing characteristic of independent microsound is its preponderance of digital noise, so much so that microsound is often synonymous with the genre of minimalist posttechno known as glitch."
- "These sounds of failure are evocative because they allow musicians and listeners to demystify technology, which otherwise threatens to become ubiquitous and therefore unquestionable."
- "Near" grains and "far" drones [Noto & Sakamoto]
- Noto Xerox (2007) "...built on samples that have been transformed... ...on sounds that bear a ghostly resemblance to something heard in the past."
Chapter 4
- "Maximal music - drones, dub techno, and noise music..."
- "...a quality of excess, something appreciable only after long stretches of time."
"...posits a space of euphoric or utopian excess."
- "...appreciable as maximal only in the presence of boundaries..."
"...ultimately reinforce traditional notions of beauty and form."
- "Negative Beauty" - Title of recital
- "These works contain a great deal of noise, and we can hear them as sublime objects because they contain an adminture of beautiful and dreadful elements: simple tonal language submerged in pure noise or extreme dissonance, loud volumes and long durations."
- "...noise, repetition, stasis and distortion shifts to negative beauty, a pleasure that does not conform to Kantian standards of balance and semblance but nonetheless aspires to the condition of beauty."
Part 3: Chapter 5
- "site ...entails not only the environments in which sound propagates but also those that listeners physically and metaphorically occupy."
- "space... (Lefebure, 2000), refers to large-scale sites that could be physical, mental or cultural in nature and either imaginary or real."
- "Place, according to Castells (2000), refers to sites that are local and governed by interpersonal, ecological, or political relationships."
- ...location... sheer physical placement of listeners and sound objects."
- "...site... can refer to acoustics, sound origins, or cultural associations of sound."
- "...situated... inextricably bound to a particular spot or trajectory, whether real or imagined, physical or metaphysical."
- "...schizophonic (when sound is transported from its original cultural context into a new one)..."
- "Graphic Music"
- "...Kittler anticipates the rise of pure data, of flows and streams of information that could be experienced as music, film, statistics or other phenomena."
- "...the choice of which binary codes lead to which sounds is arbitrary..."
- "...there is no one preferred correlation between the images and their sonic analogies."
- "Graphic music implies a source that lies halfway between idea and reality."
- "...graphic music is an anomaly..."
Chapter 6
- "Beautiful art is something that is autonomous and possesses purposive purposelessness - autonomous because its pleasing qualities reside within the artwork itself and do not reflect conditions that led to its creation and purposely purposeless because the artwork does not need to "do" any work in order to justify its existence" (Kant, 2000)
- "Aesthetic listening... also includes the experience of appreciating the characteristics of nonmusical sound as aesthetic objects. [...] It instead means that listeners can contemplate a sound from the outside world for its own aesthetic merits."
My next meeting with Cat was on the 6th of March:
She suggested I read: The Ambient Century (Prendergast), Haunted Weather & Ocean of Sound (Toop) but I found these to be either poorly or demandingly written. Cat also suggested I listen to: Scelsi Quartet No. 4, Gloria Coats and Fusinato (Melbourne), who works with engraved records, as well as traditional scores with radial lines drawn out of them. My weekly task was to orchestrate a 5-minute version of one of the two themes I was considering for strings/piano.
On March 12th I took notes on Cat Hope and Stuart James' Composition Workshop presentations:
Cat Hope
- Decibel Scoreplayer: questions the code that is traditional notation; achieves drone aesthetic freed from metric pulse
- “animated notation” an established method, if not quite its own genre
- Chunk (2013) – “black MIDI” (Google this)
- Collaboration w/ film-makers and visual artists – field recordings used as starting points for installation pieces
- The End of Abe Sada (2014) has great instrumentation
- “Open aspects of performance” – a different set of values/concerns as a composer (“I don’t care how you make the sound heavy, I just want you to do it.”)
- “Comprivisation” new word!
- “Don’t be limited by your tools: serve your ideas – you will be judged on your ideas.”
- Don’t over-rehearse pieces with fairly open performance aspects – they will lose their accidental element
- cathope.com
Stuart James
- The familiar vs. the unfamiliar
- Hold on to your first imagining of the sound, and realise it by any means necessary, rather than settling for something else or less
- Technology can come down to: Mimetic processes (referential, hyperrealism, surrealism), Sonification of data (abstract associations/meaning?), experimentation/tinkering (an important aspect of creation that should never be denied)
- Spatialisation of Spectra (PhD project) – discretely spatialising the individual partials of any sound; building an instrument to do so; terrain shape used to position frequencies across space; style of distribution across the space/terrain is within user’s control; real-world acoustics place restrictions on its effectiveness; about sonic exploration to find effects that are evocative of imagined/creative space
- stuartgjames.com
On the 16th I carried out some Plunderphonics/Vinyl-Sampling research. Will Zachary Brown had suggested I look into an Australian artist/band from the East Coast who released carved-up vinyl records that play back as “beats”. The idea of carefully coordinating the carved lines had occurred to me already, but I didn’t know it was actually possible.
I watched the online video Christian Marclay mini documentary (www.egs.edu/faculty/christian-marclay/videos/christian-marclay-mini-documentary/) where Marclay demonstrates some of his methods. One that impressed me was the cutting of records into sections which could then be mixed and matched and glued together to create “spliced” loops.
Two ideas occurred to me: (1) Smash many records and glue different pieces back together to create “granular” hybrid LPs, and (2) Cut up one LP into thin radial slices and glue these back together in a different order.
I then pulled all the records from my collection that I am willing to sacrifice. The question now becomes one of how to group them, which means one must consider “genre.” Do I want to “theme” my hybrid records or would that destroy the “magic” randomness of the final result? In the above video, its apparent that Marclay was interacting almost acousmatically with his source records, rather than at the level of genre or discourse.
I looked in the book Audio Culture for some more information (Gould, G. (1966). The prospects of recording. In C. Cox & D. Warner (Eds.), Audio culture: Readings in modern music (1st ed., pp. 115-127). New York, NY: Continuum):
- “…I predicted that the public concert as we know it today would no longer exist in a century hence, that its functions would have been entirely taken over by electronic media.” (p. 115)
- Reverence for music has declined as it has become a more regular intrusion into our everyday lives (p. 116)
- “…one cannot ever splice style – one can only splice segments which relate to a conviction about style.” (117)
- “[The participant listener is] a threat, a potential usurper of power, an uninvited guest at the banquet of the arts, one whose presence threatens the familiar hierarchical setting of the musical establishment. Is it not, then, inopportune to venture that this participant public could emerge untutored from that servile posture with which it paid homage to the status structure of the concert world and, overnight, assume decision-making capacities which were specialists’ concerns heretofore? […] There is, in fact, nothing to prevent a dedicated connoisseur from acting as his own tape editor and, with these devices, exercising such interpretive predilections as will permit him to create his own ideal performance.” (122)
This made me think of using a florist’s tape shredder to shred ½” reel-to-reel as an audio effect. The recorded material (perhaps a drone piece) could be instrumental music from the performance. This could form part of a Negative Beauty exhibition in the foyer that also includes the hybridised vinyl records.
I did some internet research and found a DJ/artist/designer in New York (from Barcelona, Spain) called Ishac Bertran who has been “analog sampling” by laser-cutting sections from different records and inserting them into other records. http://www.wired.com/2011/10/analog-sampling/
I also found a forum in which someone posted an alternative to a laser-cutter – a scroll saw (with a fine blade) (https://www.etsy.com/au/teams/7385/techniques-materials/discuss/8629370/) I ordered a cheap one online for $129 dollars (money I recently earned from a gig).
At this stage I was still interested in Absurdist theatre pieces, so I took notes on Robert Hoffman's Professional Management Skills talk:
- Robert's Cabaret work is hilarious – all character-based, featuring popular songs, re-worded popular and canonical songs, and originals.
- Each performance seems to have a connecting theme, a through-line.
- I should think about the through-line for my piece/s
On March 27th I did some research into the photography I was envisaging for my electroacoustic piece. My studio lights and backdrops had arrived – there were two more “fill” lights still coming, which would make two key, one hair and two fill – the basic setup, according to this lighting tutorial (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_Sov3xmgwg). I need these to shoot all video/photography elements in the recital (and for personal use in the the near future). For the imagery I was seeing stark, B&W close-up portraiture using black and silver face paint and “bejewelling” of the eyes, with totally black backdrop (possibly only down-lighting, i.e. only one hair light). I was visualising these images flickering only momentarily up on to dark screens, and having flickering, blurring “glitch-like” effects applied to them.
I discovered that the style I’m thinking of is commonly referred to as “dark portraiture” as in the work of Lee Jeffries (UK). However, I was also seeing “low-key, high contrast” as in the work of little-known New York photographer Val Tourchin, who also uses coloured tinting/staining (red, green, blue, etc) which would be easily achievable in Jitter, in a live context.
I asked local fashion designer Priera Russell to collaborate on these images for me, as she’s the only person in Perth I would trust with this level of daring and striking visual design. This will be one of my Semesterly collaborations.
On the 1st of April I had my last meeting with Dr Cat Hope, as her promotion meant she couldn't mentor me any more. We discussed the piece I was writing for the A Love Supreme concert (a semi-serialist atonal work for chamber ensemble: flute, violin, four saxophones, percussion & no-input mixer). Cat suggested I develop different repeated sections, then provide instructions like, “After 5 times, change notes,” then, “Start to freely improvise,” so that sections break down in unpredictable ways (like the NIM does). She also suggested the program notes read along the lines of, "Influenced by chance, NIM, performative gestures, free improvisation…” Her suggested listening for research was Earl Brown (numbered scores – Available Forms; From Here – look in lecture slides, google).
Somewhere in the next three weeks, I abandoned my recital plan. The Love Supreme concert had forced me to admit that I wasn't writing music that I enjoyed, and that I was trying to appease someone else's notion of what good "art music" is. This is why I had writer's block and couldn't complete my piece in time for the concert, which resulted in Dane Yates and I working out a structured NIM improvisation instead (which included as a sample the central motif from the original piece). The performance had technical issues and was a complete failure, leaving the audience confused and almost as uncomfortable as myself. I took this as a positive sign that it was time for a change.
On april 23rd I had my first meeting with Dominik Karski, my new mentor. I told him my new plan - to record a concept album in CMS1, and then perform it with a mixture of pre-recorded playback and live musicians. The style would be contemporary, guitar-based rock, as this is my favourite kind of music to write, play and produce. Influences would include Foo Fighters, The Bad Brains and Flaming Lips, as well as more sampler-based artists such as Big Black and Kucka. We agreed this would result in 'album tracks' using instrumental layers with voice and samples. I didn't want to lose the Negative Beauty aesthetic, and wanted to use the noisiness of guitar-based rock to explore the relationship between noise and pitch. Dominik suggested I research Stephen Kazuo Takasugi. He also pointed out that the techniques/technologies I will be using permit me to manipulate entire 'complete' passages of music (or pop songs), and not just instrumental tracks, to create changing contexts/perspectives on the same material. We both agreed I should for now use the 'scrapbook' approach to generate raw material. Dominik also encouraged me to consider performative actions/interactions based on the intended technical setup and stage layout.
At our second meeting on the 30th, we talked more about the idea of subjugating songs (fragmented or complete) within a larger work, as sound materials and not complete works within themselves. Mixing techniques could be used to do this. The objective was to continue writing complete passages of musical material before deciding what to do with them. We also agreed I should bear in mind the limitations and inexperience of most rock performers (friends), and employ pre-recorded sections if necessary. The live/recorded juxtaposition will be aesthetically interesting. I thought the technical setup should be to line-in as much as possible to PA/desk for maximum sound control, in order to do experimental things with the live sound being performed. Dominik recommended I listen to Gesang der Junglinge (Stockhausen) to observe his precise and extensive utilisation of very little raw material, and his use of voice in a tape-composition context.
After this meeting, I presented my new recital plan at Composition Workshop. Josten Myburgh suggested Harvey Milk's Life: The Best Game In Town, Fantomas, Wumpee (Michael), Te 100% Hits, and Johnny Chang. Someone mentioned that the passages of music (raw materials) could also defy genre-categorisation, so that the overall work could provide, "Different perspectives on different perspectives." Jessie Bach suggested live mixing of guitar levels with a joystick or GUI.
I made the following notes: Hip-hop studio composition techniques (early experimental tape composition techniques applied to popular music) – not just sampling/splicing but ingenious ways of segueing between “tracks” or complete passages of music (either suddenly/jarringly or by using audio engineering techniques to subjugate the music into a larger soundscape or crossfade between different pieces of music). Also, applying a genre-critical “postmodern” perspective to popular music (particularly the strophic song form in all popular stylistic permutations) as in the albums of Frank Zappa
At our next meeting, Dominik suggested Johnathan Harvey's Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco (extended electroacoustic manipulation of limited material).
In early May, I realised the 'dark portraiture' photography/projections should be erotic. This decision was based on the imagined aesthetic that would be created by putting these images to the sounds of sonified data and basically synthesised drum, bass and lead instrument sounds. I also imagined a BDSM scenario that explores the ambiguous duality between victim and persecutor. I specifically saw the high-contrast patterns of rope criss-crossing skin. I put together a visual profile/proposal for the shoot, and made a few demonstration loops by sonifying random files on my computer (Audacity) and sampling from the results (Logic Pro).
When I met photographers Priera Russell and Gonni Bruekkers on the 19th of May, they loved the idea. They had actually been planning an erotic photography collection with a similar aesthetic. Priera showed me the B&W photography of Von Unwerth, and I showed her the proposal and demo music. The music made both of them instantly think of the opening credit sequence of Se7en (1995), and Taking Lives (2004). Both sequences feature 'forensic investigation' montages. Gonni suggested that it ties in with the darkness and moral ambiguity of the imagery, as well as the metaphor of, "Investigating the body."
Priera suggested our friend, filmmaker Dirk Nienaber, who specialises in the crime-thriller/horror genre, should be brought on board to shoot a similar montage of video clips. I met with Dirk the following day, and he was instantly enthusiastic about the project.
At my next meeting with Dominik, it was pointed out to me that the film/photography element ties in perfectly with the compositional practice of, "Investigating the sound."
Recital Working Title: Crimes Against Music
I introduced the ‘old recital’ ideas of analogue sampling through vinyl record sculpture (broken records and human body figures) and reel-to-reel tape shredding to Dominik, who pointed out that they tie in conceptually with the idea of, “Investigation of sound," and the cutting/dissecting of music, which could at once be a crime or the investigation of one.
The tape shredding evokes the idea of “destroying the evidence”. The vinyl-sculptured human figures evoke the idea of forensic investigation of the body (like Gonni’s/Priera’s idea). The analogue sampling of records is in itself a crime, as they have been used without permission, as well as the obvious use of cutting/splicing/destruction/reconstruction as a technique.
So the whole recital idea finally crystallized in my mind – the audience explores this installation, which introduces the concept, and themes of analogue and digital technologies, forensics, crime, morbid curiosity/investigation. They also hear (part of) a ten-minute electric guitar piece entitled Negative Beauty, which is the source of almost all sonic material used in the main performance. The audience then enters the performance space where sonic and visual materials from the installation are re-used in a multimedia acousmatic-surround performance (along with new materials, of course, extending upon the themes).
Even the visual aesthetics I had experimented with in my “Negative Beauty” presentation (Comp Seminar; Comp Workshop) now work thematically, as they include the idea of the dissected human form, and digitally-glitched/distorted imagery.
I needed to know two things from Lindsay:
Q: Where can my recital be held?
A: Apparently there is a black-box theatre space at ECU, and Lindsay will investigate this for me.
Q: How much time/credit (out of 40 mins) will I get for the sculptures and shredded tape installation, given they've no determinate length?
A: Anything up to 20 minutes, given the Negative Beauty piece is in itself 10 minutes of music, and the examiners don't like recitals going over time.
I organised a photo shoot with Dirk Nienaber to make a collection of mock crime-scene images I could then vectorise to create an abstract graphic scrolling score (vectorised photos, when zoomed-in, look like nothing more than organically-shaped regions of homogenous colour). This score has been performed by an electric guitar ensemble to create the first piece, from which all other sonic material will be drawn (entitled Negative Beauty). These images will also be exhibited on polaroid photo paper at the recital, above the 'autopsy table' where the human-figure sculpture is, as if pinned there by an investigator. This is my collaboration for this semester, which will continue into next semester when we shoot and edit 'forensic investigation' clips.
At its core, my recital is simply a bringing-together of everything that interests me. I will say at the outset that violence and sadism don’t inordinately fascinate me: in fact, they quite repulse me. However, as I hope has been demonstrated, the “forensic investigation” aspect emerged quite naturally through my collaboration with visual artists Dirk Nienaber, Priera Russell and Gonni Bruekers, and ended up being quite a crucial part of the concept.