Arcades: irresistible existential bubblegum

Music critic William Dart likes the Arcades – thanks William!

“Arcades is the name by which composers Dugal McKinnon and David Prior identify their partnership. Rattle’s press release spins words about the pair’s subverted pop sensibility sitting perfectly with the label’s penchant for music that follows its own compass. ‘Who’s Most Lost’ is a set of 13 rather tricky pop songs that delight in toying and sometimes mashing our expectations. They’re elliptical pieces, and if we were thinking a paper score, there’d be a lot of white in between the black. Both McKinnon and Prior are known for their weighter works. Prior can boast prizes at theillustrious Bourges Festival – but in ‘You Were Born Into This’ they have furnished me with a gorgeous summertime hit that I suspect will be on high rotate over the next few months. Alt.pop perhaps or maybe existential bubblegum, its wafting scales, modish sonic gristle and cute boyish vocals are irresistible.”

William Dart, The Critic’s Chair, Radio New Zealand Concert, Dec 2011

Cadence – sound installation

Cadence is my new sound installation for the Adam Art Gallery’s “threshold” space, available for audition Jan 24–April 15. A catalogue of final cadences – musical conclusions – generatively recombined to create a cascade of sound that perpetually defers the final barline, engaging the listener in a narrative of endings. MaxMSP programming courtesy of the indefatigable Jason Post. Metronome courtesy of Douglas Mews.

 Cadence

The end. Classical music fell for endings, particularly those that started as beginnings. Beginnings that are already endings. An implacable swoon. “The crash might have been the last bars of a symphony. He lay on his side amid the ruins like a wounded gladiator, a fallen horse” (Jonathan Franzen). The perfect cadence is to fall and become the fallen, the cadaver. But these endings are also recapitulations, signifying the beginning. The irrevocable return. “Now was the Sun in Western cadence low” (Thomas Milton). Beginnings and endings that persist through repetition become cadences punctuating time’s passage. “Walking and falling at the same time” (Laurie Anderson). Tempo. Measured quickly enough time becomes audible. Oscillation. The pulse, the beat ascending into pitch and timbre. Here the liquid cadence, rising and falling as “the general modulation of the voice” (Samuel Johnson). With the voice comes the self. “Listen, says a voice: some being is giving voice” (Steven Connor). The beginning.

Weirding the voice

A second show on the voice for Upbeat, this one looking at technological transformations of the voice in music that sits happily in the shade of popular music.

John Oswald (1988). “Pretender”. Plunderphonics [EP]. RPM facilitates gender-bending (as do reel-to-reel tape machines, samplers, etc etc): “Over the course of this song Dolly Parton gets an aural sex change. Check out the last verse in which she gets to sing a duet with himself. Meanwhile, the arrangement goes from infinitely fast to infinitely slow.” (John Oswald).

Goldfrapp (2000). “Deer Stop”. Felt Mountain [CD]. Alison Goldfrapp’s vocal transformed via Will Gregory’s electronics, rendering the whispery noir delivery all the more potent, as if Gregory’s production tools are microscopes for revealing the sonic qualia of emotion…

Burial (2007). “Archangel”. Untrue [CD]. Burial (Willian Bevan) samples Ray J’s song “One Wish” (2005) – which apparently charted here in NZ –, and uses pitch-shifting and time-stretching to map the vocal to a new melody, a side effect of which is that the voice is androgenized. No more a song of boy meets/loves/loses girl, instead we hear a shape-shifting jilted lover, singing the universal song of being lost in and through love.

Mouse on Mars (2001). “Actionist Respoke”. Idiology [CD]. Voice becomes an electronic instrument, a bionic rhythm machine, thanks to the vocalist’s supper of a sampler and turntable… This track works nicely in tandem with Kodwo Eshun’s book More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction (London: Quartet Books, 1998). Eshun’s afrofuturism might just admit two white guys from Germany (Kraftwerk helped Afrika Bambaataa on his way, so why not?)

The Voice on Upbeat

Another show on sound-based music for Radio NZ Concert’s Upbeat show (to be aired sometime next week). The 20 min slot explores the voice as mediator of inside/outside, self/other, the act of making ourselves through sound – “My voice is not something I merely have… Rather it is something I do” (Stephen Connor, Dumbstruck: a cultural history of ventriloquism). The following works are featured:

• Médéric Collignon, Improbrilation from Blood, Muscle & Air: The Intimate Voice [CD]
• Robert Ashley, She was a visitor from Automatic Writing [CD]
• John Cousins, Tense Test from Sleep Exposure [CD]
• Yannis Kyriakides, pensioner_0496 from Wordless [CD]

Deny Hurricane Irene?

As Hurricane Irene hits Washington, Republicans are doing their best to deny that climate change is the driver for “extreme” (the new norm) weather. Big weather is scary, but this is much scarier: ‘House Republicans are applying a search and destroy tactic to international funding for global warming this budget season. It goes like this: Ax any line items with the words “climate change.”‘ (Solve Climate News)

 

The Arcades – Who’s Most Lost?

The Arcades (after Walter Benjamin’s work), a long slow collaboration between myself and David Prior, will release its first album – Who’s Most Lost? – later this year on Rattle Records. This is very very nice news, not least of all because we’ve worked on it for so long. The cover art may well feature this image, the haze and ambiguity of which gives some loose sense of the concerns of the album.

Sound-based art on Radio NZ Concert

I’ve got a monthly slot on Radio NZ Concert’s “Upbeat” show, produced by Jeremy Brick and hosted by Eva Radich. The first one was broadcast on July 28 and has been archived here. It’s an introduction to soundscape and features Francisco Lopez’s La Selva (though I didn’t mention Lopez’s distate for the concept of soundscape…), David Dunn’s Chaos and the Emergent Mind of the Pond (the sublime rhythmics of aquatic insects), and what might well be the first soundscape composition – or the first work of musique concrète for that matter – Walther Ruttman’s Wochenende, “a film without images” dating from 1930, which is an aural counterpart to his silent film symphonies. The topic for the next show is yet to be decided. Perhaps a look at the work of instrumental composers who have incorporated the soundscape into their work in various ways? Berio’s Voci and Naturale come to mind (if we can accept folk songs as a kind of soundscape), as does Stockhausen’s Orchester-Finalisten (Robin Maconie maintains the instrumentalists play the parts of insects in this piece) and, something more recent, Fennesz’s Black Sea which weaves in and out of field recordings. And of course something by Messiaen featuring birds, though the only technology involved in such works was pencil, paper, and Messiaen’s formidable powers of listening.