Electronic Music

[Joseph K]

Many thanks once more.



I can't remember whether I wrote about this in the liner notes, but the other pieces on that album are binaural versions of music previously composed to be heard on 8-channel surround systems (so that during the pandemic people with headphones could still get an idea of how they should sound). While remixing those pieces I encountered various limitations and opportunities inherent in the binaural processing software, so that eye-blink (1) was composed so as to be native to the binaural domain - there are actually 24 virtual sources (8 at ear level, 8 above and 8 below) which sometimes additionally appear at different distances, which obviously isn't possible using speakers. Sooner or later I will remix it for 8 speakers, and interpolate eye-blink (2) which will involve the same performers but performing live. That's something for next year probably.

Ahh there will be an eye-blink (2)? Great news!

Yes, the first sentence of the liner notes in fact states that all the pieces except for eye-blink (1) were originally composed for 8-channel surround systems.

[Joseph K]

This is pleasingly surreal...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufNHVl8lN84

[Joseph K]

Just listened to 'Dysnomia' from binary systems by Richard Barrett et al. https://richardbarrett.bandcamp.com/...binary-systems

While I have listened to all pieces from this album many times, it's this first track that I find myself returning to the most, at least recently. I think the electric lap steel guitar offers quite an array of timbres, and here it elicits strange, quasi-oriental melodies whose microtonal and disjointed shape are still made to sound quite - or very - vocal helped by the lap steel guitar's ability to slide and otherwise inflect notes. Anyway, there are lots of trippy underwater effects which seem to engage playfully with the sounds that sound more derived from the guitar (played here by the formidable Daryl Buckley, I should add) and I think a good balance is struck between variety and formal coherence.
It's an ear-opening, consciousness-expanding experience.

[Joseph K]

Since I am travelling up to my grandmother's tomorrow and staying for the best part of a week (since my dad is over) and since this means perforce postponing my journey through the Boulez The Conductor box and also since that in any case I'm not really in a mood to listen to Mahler anyway, I feel like this is due another listen. Uranus, the first and longest piece is on. Lots of these electronic sounds seem to skirt a spectrum between pitched and unpitched; and again it's trippy and phantasmagoric...

[RichardB]

Uranus, the first and longest piece is on. Lots of these electronic sounds seem to skirt a spectrum between pitched and unpitched; and again it's trippy and phantasmagoric...

That is indeed Uranus on the CD cover by the way!

[smittims]

Ah, yes; the problem of definitions when describing music. I suppose that could be a new thread in its own right.

I would say an unedited recording of nature is not a 'composition' as it wasn't composed, i.e. elaborated by a decision-making intellect.

[RichardB]

Ah, yes; the problem of definitions when describing music. I suppose that could be a new thread in its own right.

I would say an unedited recording of nature is not a 'composition' as it wasn't composed, i.e. elaborated by a decision-making intellect.

I'm not sure how this comment relates to the thread... anyway, now playing: Toshimaru Nakamura, No-Input Mixing Board (2000) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWzc1lY3Z9o - actually the first in an ongoing series of similarly-titled albums. The technique invented by Nakamura, for those who don't know, consists principally of connecting a mixer to itself so as to create feedback loops, which can then be controlled (to a certain extent) using the faders and other controls of the mixer. Many creative musicians have subsequently become interested in this instrument, but Nakamura remains its most imaginative exponent as far as I'm concerned.

[Joseph K]

I'm not sure how this comment relates to the thread... anyway, now playing: Toshimaru Nakamura, No-Input Mixing Board (2000) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWzc1lY3Z9o - actually the first in an ongoing series of similarly-titled albums. The technique invented by Nakamura, for those who don't know, consists principally of connecting a mixer to itself so as to create feedback loops, which can then be controlled (to a certain extent) using the faders and other controls of the mixer. Many creative musicians have subsequently become interested in this instrument, but Nakamura remains its most imaginative exponent as far as I'm concerned.

Strangely beguiling. Thanks for sharing.

[Joseph K]

FURT: 'n ("impossible")' from the album FUNCTION.

For me this music provokes vivid surreal and abstract shapes, colours and forms.

[RichardB]

Thank you for your purchase sir!

I was listening to it myself the other day. We don't generally write liner notes, but if there were liner notes for that album, they'd be talking about the origin of a large proportion of the sounds in an "acoustic" recording session, where we set up microphones and various string and percussion instruments in a room, and explored our way around them, while not doing anything that might sound like "playing music". This focus on particular recorded sounds gives the album something of a "musique concrète" feel, although of course there is much processing of sounds into sometimes hardly recognisable shapes going on too. I don't know if you noticed this from the track info on the Bandcamp page, but the first track was constructed entirely in the studio, the second was performed in the studio under more or less concert-like conditions, and the third and fourth are live concert performances from 2016 and 2018 respectively.

[Joseph K]

Thank you for your purchase sir!

I was listening to it myself the other day. We don't generally write liner notes, but if there were liner notes for that album, they'd be talking about the origin of a large proportion of the sounds in an "acoustic" recording session, where we set up microphones and various string and percussion instruments in a room, and explored our way around them, while not doing anything that might sound like "playing music". This focus on particular recorded sounds gives the album something of a "musique concrète" feel, although of course there is much processing of sounds into sometimes hardly recognisable shapes going on too.

Thanks for the info. I also got the Live in Amsterdam album so shall give that a listen some time today too.

I don't know if you noticed this from the track info on the Bandcamp page, but the first track was constructed entirely in the studio, the second was performed in the studio under more or less concert-like conditions, and the third and fourth are live concert performances from 2016 and 2018 respectively.

I was about to say "no, I can't see that info on the page" but then I realised you can click on each individual track for info. Thanks for bringing this to my attention.

[RichardB]

Today's listening: albums by Beatriz Ferreyra - Huellas Entreveradas, Canto+, Echos+. Highly sophisticated work in the musique concrète tradition, with especially attractive and original use of recorded voices.

[Joseph K]

I've been indulging in purchases of music a lot recently, perhaps too much, but since it's Bandcamp Friday -

FURT - Message

[RichardB]

I've been indulging in purchases of music a lot recently, perhaps too much, but since it's Bandcamp Friday -

FURT - Message

It's a pleasure doing business with you.

Here's a paragraph or two about the "making of", from my currently ongoing book project:

At the beginning of March 2020, Paul Obermayer and I were engaged in a residency at the Electronic Studio of Radio Belgrade, which houses a restored EMS Synthi 100 modular synthesizer originally installed in 1971. The residency culminated in a performance which was broadcast live but without an audience (the studio was too small to accommodate anyone apart from the two of us plus producer Svetlana Maraš and the engineer). This seemed at the time a somewhat strange situation to perform in – little did anyone know that it was how most live performances were going to be given for almost two years after that. This composition was in one way a departure in FURT’s activity, in that it involved getting to grips with this unfamiliar vintage technology whose underlying philosophy was quite different from our concentration on complex networks of sound-objects. On the other hand, over the years the balance in our work between “concrete” and “synthetic” sound materials has been shifting in the direction of the latter. Experimenting with and recording unfamiliar instruments (and non-instruments) and technologies – usually while preparing materials rather than in live in performance – has been an important aspect of FURT’s work right from the very start in seeking out unusual methods of sound production.

Our exploration of the synthesizer involved recording the output of various patches which would then be used for playback during the performance as well as for constructing sound material for the computer instruments. The majority of our time was spent improvising on the synthesizer in search of sounds and structures, which might involve both of us working on it at the same time, perhaps one on the patchbay and the other on the upper panels where all the continuous controls are, or one on oscillators and the other on filters. As a friend observed when shown the photograph above, most of what this enormous synthesizer can do could be done just as easily with a phone app these days; but of course (and this is a crucial factor behind the contemporary interest in modular synthesizers and NIMBs) the music we produced with it was decisively conditioned by how its sonic parameters are incarnated in its internal architecture and external interface.

The patches we found most useful and attractive, and whose output we recorded for use in the performance and in our computer instruments, were mostly those with some kind of unpredictable evolution that required no human intervention once set in motion. During the performance we had one such patch running continuously so that its output could be mixed into the music at appropriate moments. It has a “solo” beginning around 26’45” in the recording, although what it does isn’t particularly strongly differentiated from what happens elsewhere – it could be said that the patch was constructed so as to emulate the way Paul and I play anyway, although at the same time our playing itself has developed, over many years, in response to the characteristics of electronic and sampled sound materials, so it’s probably not possible to disentangle one direction of influence from the other.

As can be heard from the released recording (an unedited performance made the day after the live broadcast), the music concentrates more on articulations and temporal structures than in exploring a wide range of synthetic timbres. But the composition message isn’t exclusively made up of synthetic sounds: their “abstract” nature is placed in relief by constantly changing combinations with a second category of sound material, derived from spoken voices in many languages. (Other sounds also occur incidentally but the vast majority derive from one or other of these two sources.) While the “message” (if any) of the spoken voices is completely obscured by various forms of processing applied to the vocal materials, the synthesizer often seems to tend towards pseudo-linguistic forms as if some other kind of “message” might be encoded in them. The improvisational aspect of message often seems to focus on extending some random incidental moment in the ongoing confrontation between sound-objects and -layers, putting a moment under a microscope, arresting its headlong evolutions for a few seconds or more, before allowing them to continue. The spontaneity here, the way that moments are transformed, is initially a spontaneity of listening, to isolate and magnify instantaneous perceptions into sound-forms with distinct shapes. While this is a feature of FURT’s work more generally, the particular circumstances and timbral focus of message brings it more clearly into the foreground.

[Joseph K]

Thanks, Richard for these paragraphs! And the pleasure is mine - though I was somewhat more tired than usual last night, not having had enough sleep the night before, so perhaps not the best state of mind to enjoy Message. I was actually going to comment on the music - I did notice the recurrent use of voices which I found very expressive - but was slightly sullen in my sleep-deprived mind. Also the description in the last paragraph you quote rings true, about putting a moment under a microscope, which I would have described as riffing on a particular idea for a certain time before it being submerged into the general flow, or something.