Via The Fall Website, we bring you the only comic to compare Mark E. Smith to Michel Houellebecq:
The choreography of Mark E. Smith is as startling as that of Michel Houellebecq waiting in line at an orgy.
Fair enough, even if Houellebecq doesn’t translate to music quite as well, even if “Le rock est ma couture!”
Back in the days of Appleworks and WordPerfect, we all had dot-matrix printers. As far as anything of the sort can be, they were pretty musical. You had the constant hum of the printer head, the rhythmic chunk at the end of each line, and a variety of sounds depending on what was being printed. For normal text, it would usually come out as undifferentiated chattering, but I used to get a visceral thrill from the sharp ring of a divider line, and was irritated when bold type made the entire casing rattle with a deep roar.
The User’s Symphony for Dot Matrix Printers, from last year, downplays the more obnoxious noises and sticks to the cleaner sounds of simple characters like dots. “Control to Efficiency” really makes something out of the resonance of heads just moving along the track, not printing. The other two excerpts are reminiscent of glitch-style electronica–you could tell me it was Farmers Manual and I’d probably believe it–and are for me less interesting. You can use dot matrix printers as rhythm machines, but with everything on earth already having been sampled for rhythm, it’s not as noteworthy.
The other instance that I know of is Hugh Davies “Printmusic” from the mid-80’s. Davies is probably best known for being a member of the Music Improvisation Company in the late 60’s and early 70’s with Evan Parker, Derek Bailey, and Jamie “If we carry on like this we’re gonna end up like King Crimson” Muir. Muir abandons the rhythm aspect as much as possible and focuses on the variety of timbres and unclean tones that his Epson LX-80 printer can produce. In the 80’s, I owned an Epson L-series printer, and despite its sturdy ordinariness, Epsons had one distinguishing characteristic: they were loud. You could hear it anywhere in the house once it started going, and Davies’ result is much harsher than The User’s, and closer to the sound source. It could be a different instrument. It’s not any more musical than his other work, but it isn’t especially less so; he gets a lot of mileage out of it over five minutes. (The composition is one page long, for those of us who forgot how slow these things were.) But the best experience is to be had from following the printed score as it plays, as lines like these are translated into recognizable sounds:
Why the Met? Evan Parker is the closest thing to a celebrity that the European improvising scene has thrown up, but the high art world has always been much slower to pick up on this less prestigious and less trendy little world that has, in large part, been funded by arts councils rather than by patrons or prizes. The last time he was in New York, Parker played at the Tonic, much more in line with his audience and with those he has influenced (that would be Zorn, among others). So how did he end up with a considerably higher profile show at the Met? Through an association, it seems, with photographer Thomas Struth, who was having a retrospective there, and evidently managed to snag a show for his friend as part of his exhibit. The Met was half-hearted about the presentation; here’s the program blurb:
Hailed by the authors of The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD as “one of the finest and most virtuosic instrumentalists working in improvised music today,” Evan Parker creates mesmerizing, spontaneous music using the technique of circular breathing pioneered by saxophone legend John Coltrane [sic]. Both precise, free, controlled and relaxed [sic], Parker’s uninterrupted sheets of sound share a special spiritual affinity–in terms of concentration, focus, and openess [sic]–with the photographs of his friend Thomas Struth, whose work is currently the subject of a major mid-career retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum.
I get it; they don’t care. I overheard a few other downtown types ridiculing the text as well as most of the audience, but I was more worried that indifference and antipathy on the part of passholders and Struthians would make the large, cavernous auditorium completely unconducive to the focus and intimacy required for Parker to soar above his technical skills. (In an interview I can no longer locate, he speaks about nights where his playing hooks on to some higher plane, and nights where the audience must be satisfied with a merely technical performance.) And after the second piece, having realized that the rest of the show would be of a piece with what had gone before, a few dozen people fled the concert hall. (One guy stuck around just to force Struth, who was in the audience, to autograph a book at the end of the concert.) But most of the audience, who probably filled up about 2/3 of the orchestra, were receptive, and Parker managed to fill the room without having to fight them. He was cheered on to three encores and given a standing ovation, and it didn’t seem so much out of obligation as appreciation and surprise. I found it uplifting.
It’s true that most of Parker’s solo work is more accessible than most everything else that emerged from the British scene at the same time. It has repetition, it has flow, it has its own harmony and rhythm. It also is still not to most people’s taste, and I believe that after the show, most of the audience remained people who would not want a Parker album in their house. But this isn’t so bad, since under the right circumstances, it came off for them. It became, briefly, a public music, and I think it’s Parker’s ability to at least adapt to that situation that has let him in for some criticism by his successors and old cohorts. It’s true that Parker’s solo style has settled in the last 15 years on one particular mode of performance, while the 15 years before that were far more varied, but his route towards being an inimitable icon led to that place, and to rest at one unique pinnacle–to become a reference point–is not a creative fault. He’s still instantly recognizable, and the two players who I feel come closest to mimicking his style at points–Ned Rothenberg and Jon Lloyd–exist far more in the jazz world than in Parker’s freer idiom. The free players that followed him–Urs Leimgruber and John Butcher are two of the more paradigmatic–always run the risk of being defined in relation to Parker, but it’s Parker’s clear identity that helps define their own idioms. It works both ways.
Parker being Parker, it is the forceful, concentrated presence of the man that provides much of the meat of the performance. So while I was worried that seeing Parker do his thing would seem a bit predictable after listening to dozens of his albums, the public nature of the event and the specificity of that night, that concert hall, and that audience marked the performance emotionally, even if I couldn’t have detected that from a recording of the performance.
And since High Fidelity had been on television earlier that day, here’s my top 10 chronological list of Parker albums that tower over their peers (based on Parker’s playing, not always as albums in themselves):
1. Monoceros (solo, 1978)
2. Tracks (Parker/Barry Guy/Paul Lytton, 1983)
3. The Hearth (Parker/Cecil Taylor/Tristan Honsinger, 1988)
4. Elf Bagatellen (Parker/Alexander von Schlippenbach/Paul Lovens, 1990)
5. Nailed (Parker/Cecil Taylor/Barry Guy/Tony Oxley, 1990)
6. Portraits (London Jazz Composers Orchestra, 1993)
7. Duo (London) 1993 (Parker/Anthony Braxton, 1993)
8. Sankt Gerold (Parker/Paul Bley/Barre Phillips, 1996)
9. Most Materiall (Parker/Eddie Pr鶯st, 1997)
10. Live at Les Instants Chavirés (Parker/Noel Akchote/Lawrence Casserley/Joel Ryan, 1997)
A very entertaining conversation between the two, probably after having drunk too much coffee. Two main points of interest:
(1) They spend much of it talking past one another and seeming as incompatible as their respective music would suggest, Feldman with his “human” and “emotional” concerns and Xenakis with his “structural” and “architectural” ones.
(2) Xenakis is quite pithy about clearing out some of the baggage that muddies his creativity:
I prefer artistry instead of psycho-analysis because in psycho-analysis… In fact what you do is, you’re trusting on some traces of your memory, something different in your story, and when you think you have left that story, you’re building something different and it becomes your new past.
And this made me think of Stig Dagerman, who had more traces in his memory than most. (See link for details.)
The piece is ten minutes long. Over some distorted, inconspicuous bells and static, Cynthia Liddell details the story of a rape from the victim’s point of view in mostly (but not totally) descriptive terms. Ashley describes his aims as follows:
My instructions [to friends] were simple: just describe a sequence of events, without any moral or psychological interpretation of those events, but include your sensory perceptual role in the events.
Ashley found all submissions unsatisfactory and subjective, and he wrote this one himself. He says:
The recording of this particular “description” got a lot of attention. Curiously, compared to some of the stories I heard, it has always seemed rather tame to me…It is the description that disturbs.
Well, no. Ashley certainly puts together an unsettling piece of music, but not for the reasons Ashley believes. The writing is unremarkable, but because of the subject matter, it’s memorable. Most people don’t want to read or hear ten minutes of this sort of thing:
His mouth was very wet. I remember he tried to touch his tongue as far down in my throat as he could reach. It choked me. I couldn’t swallow and I couldn’t breathe.
These are the same tactics used by horror writers: the intrusion of foreign forces, the narrator’s lack of control, the chance of rescue continually growing more distant. Ashley pulls a few tricks to extend the effect, which is to make the “description” entirely passive on the woman’s part. He even cheats at one point by having her say, “I felt hollow.”
Ashley’s words are part of an American literary tradition whose most famous exponent is John Updike, where vernacular and obviousness act as a pipeline to truth. The danger is that such concerns can be used indifferently simply to play on common experience and evoke bathos. It is the fate of someone who, in Robert Musil’s terms, “had not learned how to think based on the experience of his own imagination, but rather, with the aid of borrowed terms.”
The words are, however, considerably more effective in the recording. The story is unpleasant, but the urge to stop reading isn’t as strong as the urge, when listening to Liddell, to get up and turn the thing off. It’s Liddell more than the description. It is her hesitant, vulnerable, nearly blank voice that is chilling. It invests the piece with all the emotion that Ashley claims to have removed from the text. It is not the voice of detachment; it is the voice of dissociation and vulnerability. It is the voice of a victim, of someone in a psychological state so fragile and private that you feel uncomfortable listening to her. Ashley has dealt with the notion of societally unacceptable speech in other works, and it’s hard to believe he’s not aware that it’s the voice rather than the words that has the dominant effect here. When there is a gasp towards the end, it gives away the game: Liddell has been pulling you along emotionally by the nose. The relation of facts, opinions, emotions, or anything in this style of speaking would sound dissociated and creepy.
If it sounds like I have a problem with “Purposeful Lady Slow Afternoon”…I do. I find it cheap. Liddell is not subtle, but she is effective, and she is at such odds with Ashley’s stated intention that it drags it down to the level of shock. A good chunk of the history of music (not just pop music) is singers giving weight to uninspired texts. “Purposeful Lady Slow Afternoon” is notable for the failure of its atypical literary pretenses and the arrogance in its manipulation.
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