“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

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.

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?)

• 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]

Felix Hess, It's in the air (1996)

Felix Hess’ It’s in the air must beg the question “is it?”. A silence which draws the auditor to the horizon of sound. “Tens of tiny paper vanes move with the imperceptible eddies of air pressure fluctuations in a space. Anecdotal evidence suggests that this installation can create both a heightened sense of hearing, or an awareness of complete silence.”

Tristan Perich’s Breathing Portraits (2005-2010) use sub-audible waveforms to drive naked speaker cones (we all know what these look like, but there’s a photo below) so as to visually represent the breathing patterns of the subjects of these portraits. Sound is cut from its source and reproduced, inaudibly but visibly, and out of this emerges the invisible life-force, the pneuma, that drives the loudspeakers in the first instance. The loudspeaker cone ceases to be the reproductive source of a spectral presence (the invisible source-cause) and becomes an uncanny thing, a hyperobject, the affective power of which derives from its ontological distribution across visible presence (moving loudspeaker cone) and audible absence (human breathing). This, to appropriate Steven Feld’s take on Gregory Bateson’s term, is a rare form of sonic schismogenesis and very beautiful it is too. [and what a shame I can't embed video without paying for a WordPress video upgrade...]

Tristan Perich, Breathing Portraits – Chris and Tom

Lilburn in the Victoria University EMS

Douglas Lilburn’s electronic music continues to fascinate. I’ve written about it in a number of (offline) contexts, and this Wednesday evening will be helping to present a concert marking the 10th anniversary of his death – 10 years ago today. Here follow notes towards programme notes for the electronic works in the concert, which explores the links between his lesser known piano works and the electronic work. Lilburn’s complete electronic works, by the way, are available as a box set from SOUNZ.

God Save (1972, 1:00). A familiar melody, transformed into wonky bagpipe filigree and, later, towards those birdlike forms so prevalent in the electronic work. It  is no doubt a republican snipe, not least given Lilburn’s focus on the “the discovery of our own [musical] identity” (Lilburn, 1946), and delivered with irreverent antipodean wit.

Five Toronto Pieces – Sings Harry (1963, 5:06). One of Lilburn’s earliest electronic works and it presages many of the features of his mature works in the electronic medium. There is a sparseness, a concern for inharmonic timbres (so characteristic of the technology of the day), a structure defined by refrain (song is never far away in Lilburn’s music), and the sudden opening of the texture into ebullient melody (birds and bagpipes again). Then at the end, somewhat unexpectedly, there is Lilburn, giving voice to a different reading of Denis Glover’s poem. This might be understood as Lilburn revising his own history which in 1963, as Lilburn embarked on a journey into the nascent electronic medium, was still largely defined by the success of the other Sings Harry (1954).

Soundscape with Lake and River (1979, 11:00). Without doubt Lilburn’s best known electronic work. It remains a singular statement, juxtaposing and overlaying field recordings made near Taupo with electronic textures that reflect and refract the natural world of New Zealand which Lilburn held to be key to his aural imagination. Aside from its sheer beauty, the reasons for the work’s significance are best articulated by Lilburn: “I think the last piece that I did [Soundscape with lake and river] really brought me full circle to what I’d been wanting to do all the time: take the natural sound of the river and lake at Taupo and weave it into the texture of the electronic sound and fuse them in some way.”

Triptych (1977, 11:00). This work presents something of summary of many of Lilburn’s signature sounds and techniques, and as ever bears relationship both to his instrumental work (melody always hovering close by) and his engagement with the natural world (birds around tangled horizons). To a contemporary ear, it has an appealing quirkiness and grittiness, which is one reason why these pieces grab the attention of those who are as interested in electronica as Elektronische Musik. More than this though, it is in soundworlds such as this that, as Frederick Page put it, ‘the strangeness, the remoteness, of our world, finds its sound’ (1970).