Pierre Schaeffer & Pierre Henry - Symphonie pour un Homme Seul (1950)

 

If the names are unfamilar, then you'd probably do better to get the background details from someone other than me; but briefly, Schaeffer was an early pioneer of electronic music, meaning mainly electronically reproduced music, working with natural musical and non-musical sounds treated or otherwise altered during playback on either turntable or magnetic tape - a format still very much in its infancy when he was working. This has subsequently defined him as heir to the noise experiments of Luigi Russolo and ancestral to the likes of Nurse With Wound, along with others with whom the common factors are so tenuous as to hardly be worth mentioning*; which is mostly just pattern recognition given that Schaeffer himself was firmly in the classical tradition. His interest lay in the abstraction of natural sounds from their sources, and his experiments in orchestrating these sounds as pieces of music were working towards a new way of hearing. Ultimately he regarded much of his life's work as a failure, from which I presume he imagined musique concrète might, through the agency of improvised juxtaposition, spontaneously arrange itself into something with the depth and resonance of Bach, albeit on its own terms. Consequently, he was scathing of many of those following in his footsteps, including Stockhausen whose work he presumably regarded as expanding on that which he himself had dismissed as a dead end.

Symphonie pour un Homme Seul is a concerto performed on turntables and mixers by Schaeffer and his student, Pierre Henry, with sounds derived from records, I assume including one-off acetates of prepared sounds - treated musical notes, vocalisation, snatches of song, metallic clangs slowed down, played in reverse or by manual rotation; and yes, it does indeed sound like early Nurse With Wound, if you were waiting for that particular reference. It's hard to see how he hoped to get towards Bach from here, but that isn't a problem for me. As is often the case with music of such inscrutable structure, its preservation is possibly essential to its appreciation in that it makes more sense with each playback, eventually accruing a familiarity which might even be interpreted as purpose. At the risk of becoming Alan Partridge weighing in on what Sir John Geilgud should have done instead, I'd suggest Schaeffer's dissatisfaction came from overthinking both his methodology and his expectations regarding outcome through himself being too deeply attached to the classical tradition. He was waiting for music which never arrived and heard only noise, but I'd argue that the minimum requirement for sound to warrant classification as music is that it has a repeatable psychological or emotional effect on the listener, which Symphonie pour un Homme Seul does, particularly once familiarity has reduced the initial novelty of what you're hearing.

Nevertheless, not even repetition or the knowledge of this having been recorded seventy-five years ago can fully dim the unpredictable succession of clipped and amplified sounds, not even as they seem to form relationships and associations with one another, so Symphonie still sounds startling in all respects that matter, and greatly rewards immersive listening. As for weirdy music in general, this is arguably where it really got started and I honestly don't know that this particular failed experiment has been bettered.

*: Fat Boy Slim? Oh just fuck off.

Smell & Quim - Nativity Colostomy (1993)

I'm still to hear anything from Smell & Quim which isn't interesting, at the very least, and I tend to shell out for reissues of things I missed first time around without having to think about it; but even so, Nativity Colostomy has surprised the fuck out of me, not least with the realisation of there being something I regard as the classic line up, specifically Milovan Srdenovic and Paul Nonnen. They're still releasing classics all the time, but there was something monumentally special about the pungent fruits of those early years, some dynamic which suffered as the line-up expanded to incorporate more and more members, none of them Paul Nonnen.

Similarly surprising to me was that I listened to this disc immediately following a compilation of early electronic works by Stockhausen, Pierre Schaeffer, Pierre Henry and others, and after a while I realised that I hadn't actually noticed the switch. I've often thought of Smell & Quim as the result of a Star Trek transporter accident occurring when members of Whitehouse and the Residents beam down to the same planet, but Nativity Colostomy sounds very much like a continuation of the avant garde classical of the sixties, yet without really doing anything that would have been out of place on The Jissom Killers or The English Method. The five tracks of Nativity Colostomy are all instrumental, or at least bearing no obvious resemblance to songs, and the noise is harsh, unpredictable, not always clear and, as with the work of Schaeffer and those guys, they're working with something ugly and rudimentary which hasn't been subjected to technological prettification. It actually makes Nurse with Wound sound prissy by comparison. There's some sampling, although it could be tapes and loops - it's hard to say for sure. Jagged snatches of what might be a cello repeat on the impressively appalling Drinking a Dead Woman's Piss, but the repetition is uneven and not entirely mechanical, and so - as with the very best genuinely experimental music - we're never quite sure of what the fuck we're dealing with and usually need to play it a few more times before it begins to sink in; and this one is a pleasure to hear, over and over, albeit a pleasure akin to having a really good shit after a night on the sauce.

Karlheinz Stockhausen - Stimmung (1968)

I'm not entirely sure how I'd heard of Stockhausen back in May 1982, but I assume his name may have come up in something written about Throbbing Gristle. I had a couple of their albums but had only just begun to dip toes in such waters and was still to hear what Cabaret Voltaire sounded like - for example. Anyway, I found this at my local record library and vaguely recall being disappointed that it didn't sound anything like as electronic as I'd hoped although there was nevertheless something fascinating about it. Then a couple of years later, having left school and signed up for beer studies at Maidstone College of Art, I was lucky enough to see Stimmung performed at the Barbican as part of their Stockhausen week. That was January, 1985.

Meanwhile, back in the present day, I've discovered another used record store in San Antonio, one called Crazy Rhythm which I'd passed many times, but never as it was open. When a random break in my usual routine deposited me outside Crazy Rhythm during its opening hours, I went in and immediately noticed that one of the racks was marked avant-garde classical, and I noticed this because I always look for that section in whichever used record store I happen to enter but never find it. I always look for that section because it's not quite familiar territory for me and is therefore likely to yield surprises; and accordingly the first record I encountered as I began to browse was Stimmung - same Deutsche Grammophon edition, even the same cover as the one I'd borrowed from the library in Stratford-upon-Avon nearly forty years ago. It was ten dollars and is in wonderful condition, so I also picked up Stockhausen's Gruppen and Carré while I was there. It was all I could do to keep from giving the cashier a big old Frenchie. Stimmung isn't quite where it all started for me, but it's pretty close.

It's a lengthy piece, over seventy minutes and sounding clear as a bell on this single album - somewhat calling into question recent boutique vinyl reissues expanding supposed classics to six fucking sides of a triple album in ten minute helpings. It's also entirely choral, having been scored for six vocalists, hence my being disappointed that it didn't sound more like Second Annual Report back in 1982; and at least one of those vocalists - specifically Wolfgang Fromme - is one of the people I saw on stage back in '85. Stimmung is mostly vocalisation with words, phrases and names - mostly of mythological figures - here and there for the sake of punctuation. It's scored but with some leeway for the performers to react and improvise within the whole. Perhaps what takes the most getting used to, is how much Stimmung relies on vocalisations amounting to the sort of weird noises we probably all made as children when left to our own devices, weewah and oyoyoy and that sort of thing, which aren't the sort of sounds one expects to hear on a record, being mostly too peculiar to work as anything cool or emotive in the conventional sense; so I suppose one might term it sound poetry, or at least acknowledge that Stimmung is a relative of the same. However, the harmony of Stimmung is strong, generating a semi-hypnotic drone within which the more unorthodox vocalisations become texture, weaving together so well as to distract from this even being a vocal performance; and over seventy minutes, the cumulative effect is emotionally very powerful.

Most surprising of all is how well Stimmung has lasted. If it has a strong sense of the sort of post-Dada theatrical experimentation one associates with the sixties, it nevertheless sounds fresh, like something new and unfamiliar experienced for the first time.

Stockhausen remains an approximately controversial figure. Referring to the events of September the eleventh, 2001 as the biggest work of art there has ever been probably wasn't the greatest career move, and Cornelius Cardew famously denounced him as a tool of capitalism - which might have carried more weight had the same not taken to wearing a flat cap and affecting a Lancashire accent so as to be down with the mans dem - but fuck it, on the strength of his work, Karlheinz really was a visionary and probably a genius, if that term actually means anything.

Marcel Duchamp - The Entire Musical Work of Marcel Duchamp (2017)

Aside from being a big deal in terms of Dada and anti-art, Marcel Duchamp could probably be regarded as the father of post-modernism through being the man who arguably introduced choice to the art world as a technique in its own right. Duchamp chose a urinal for one piece and it therefore became art, thus doing away with all of that mucking about with brushes and canvas and so on. Duchamp is therefore probably directly to blame for Damien Hirst and all of the other useless wankers who missed the point in much the same way that Malcolm McLaren missed the point of the Sex Pistols. The urinal, the bicycle wheel, the bog brush - it was provocation, a massive fuck you to the establishment delivered by refusing point blank to play its game, to acknowledge either its aesthetic or its values. If it was art - and the answer to that one is sort of inherent in the term anti-art when you think really fucking hard about it - then it was art which dared you to reveal yourself as a complete arsehole by treating it as such. The continued canonisation of found art therefore seems akin to the collective retort of the herd in Life of Brian.

Yes, we are all individuals.

That's my take on it anyway.

All the same, Duchamp was responsible for some great art, albeit great art which was massively unconventional by the standards of the time, not least of these being the Large Glass. It could be argued that his anti-art was exploratory, just one avenue of research. This was another, and one of which I was only dimly aware before I found this record in the racks of Half Price.

The music here was composed through numerous ingenious and peculiar means of generating random numbers, wooden balls dropped into the cars of a toy train set as it passes beneath a funnel and so on, with each wooden ball representing a different note. The notes were transcribed, presumably back in 1913, then performed on a variety of instruments - piano, voice, flute, trombone and so on. As one might imagine, the numerical sequence yields notes but has nothing much to say about intervals, timing, or emphasis, so these details were left to the performers.

Comparisons with Beethoven are inevitably a bit of a waste of time, and this music more closely resembles the experiments of Stockhausen and Xenakis in terms of chance notation and anti-melody; but the strangest thing is that for all the momentary clashes and passing dissonance, Duchamp's music - thus credited having been generated by the man - is surprisingly pleasant and even relaxing, possibly thanks to the even tempo at which random piano notes fall from the instrument. I may be simply admiring the formalistic properties of the fire extinguisher mounted on the wall next to the gallery's exit, but Duchamp's music is actually sort of beautiful, even powerful, and enough so as to change the nature of the space in which one listens.

Needless to say, it was also about a million years ahead of its time, foreshadowing degrees of experimentation which few would consider for at least another couple of decades; and it was easier on the ear than Russolo's noise machines.

Aphex Twin - ...I Care Because You Do (1995)

So here I am catching up once again, having a listen to things which somehow passed me by at the time. Obviously I was aware of the Aphex Twin throughout the 1990s. He regularly appeared on the cover of everything on account of having single-handedly invented an entirely new kind of music. I was a Melody Maker reader for most of that decade, mainly because David Stubbs' Mr. Agreeable column was a work of genuine inspiration, something not to be missed regardless of whatever crap was then clogging up the other pages, The Liberties, The Shite Stripes or whoever. My frustration with the non-Stubbs derived content of said weekly would occasionally boil over into testy and probably grammatically ham-fisted missives thrust in the general direction of the letters page, one of which was actually printed. Why you no write about experimental band, I demanded to know, reeling off a list of names of artists who had been around for ages, who sold records, had plenty of fans, played well-attended gigs and yet remained ignored within the pages of the mainstream music press. We do indeed cover the work of interesting and innovative musical pioneers, came the reply, but the bold leaps of which you speak are occurring on the dance floor and within the DJ booth rather than with the sort of miserable industrial fuckers you seem to like.

I always assumed they meant Aphex Twin and his ilk, but I'd never heard any of his music. My friend Carl, once thumbing through my copy of Melody Maker, found a photograph of a grinning Richard James pulling a scary face, underlit and glowering at the reader from beneath portentously furrowed brow. 'That tells me all I need to know about his music,' Carl announced, and although he may not have been right about everything, in this instance I suspected he was close. My friend Andrew Cox was similarly underwhelmed by the Aphex Twin. Andrew was often described as a recluse, had grown up in Cornwall, and had been making electronic music with his own home-built synthesisers since the end of the 1970s, and was perhaps justifiably resentful that no music paper had ever stuck him on the cover as creator of the most wildly innovative music ever conceived.

Now, many years later and relatively impressed by the Come To Daddy video - even if it is just an old Hellblazer comic with a load of drum and bass sprinkled on top - I take the plunge and buy this; and  realise that I was right all along.

There are twelve tracks here, and nothing terrible, but - fuck - it's hardly a new kind of music. The names that sprang immediately to mind include Esplendor Geometrico, Nagamatzu, Pseudo Code, Nocturnal Emissions, Human Flesh, Kopf/Kurz, early Chris & Cosey, and Konstruktivists Black December album. In other words there's very little here which hadn't already been done, and been done better by about 1982 when the German Datenverarbeitung label put out their Sinn & Form compilation. I realise that nothing exists in a vacuum or without precedent, but most of ...I Care Because You Do could have been knocked up on a decent four track with a monophonic synth and an Alesis Quadraverb, and there's at least one number here which would have been someone tapping out a plinky plonky nursery rhyme on a Casio VL Tone had it not been drowned in a ton of reverb. I suppose this stuff may have sounded improbably futuristic in 1995 if this was the first electronically sourced album to find its way into your collection of Oasis and Morrissey records, just as fifth century yokels will believe you're a wizard if you flash your digital watch, but fuck...

This is the guy who changed the musical history of everything ever, whom they wheeled out to meet Stockhausen like it was some sort of clash of the titans rather than Michael McIntyre having a beer with Lenny Bruce? I prefer James' own assessment:

I'm just some irritating, lying, ginger kid from Cornwall who should have been locked up in some youth detention centre. I just managed to escape and blag it into music.

Well, hyperbole aside, ...I Care Because You Do is a thoroughly listenable album providing you keep in mind that it really shouldn't have been that big a deal even in 1995. It does what it does very well, which is fair enough, I suppose.