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.

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.

Controlled Bleeding - The Drowning (1994)

Controlled Bleeding are one of those bands which somehow passed me by. I was vaguely aware of their existence at least as far back as the album they put out on Sterile Records, and yet I never really intersected with whatever it was they did until my friend Paul stuck a load of tracks on a tape for me - which apparently I liked, but not enough to inspire my rushing out and buying anything. I think I came to view Controlled Bleeding as just one of those many industrial bands seemingly formed so as to bulk up the page count of the review section in Music from the Empty Quarter: Toe Revision, Terminal Necrosis, Stymied Function, Balding Operator, Sexy Hippo - there were a million of the fuckers out there, all frowning away in front of electrical substations, probably distributed by Play It Again Sam or Wax Trax! and no real reason for me to listen to any of it, so far as I could figure out.

Years later, a Controlled Bleeding CD has come to seem one fuck of a lot more exotic when found in a second hand store in Texas, a store of the type which prides itself on stocking both kinds of music - both country and western; so of course I had to buy the thing.

The Drowning does actually sound roughly how I imagined it might, at least in places, but is significantly more interesting than I expected. Whatever it was that Paul taped on my behalf left me with an impression of Controlled Bleeding as being, very roughly speaking, the American Nocturnal Emissions - at least in terms of those early discs, the ones which made SPK sound like the fucking Archies; but this seems to be only part of the picture.

The Drowning actually sounds almost as though it could be a compilation album, such is the variety of musical styles - hard electronics, drifting film score, vaguely rhythmic stuff, pieces hinting at Muslimgauze or Cop-era Swans or the aforementioned Nocturnal Emissions. Ordinarily such eclecticism might seem to verge on lack of direction, or at worse, just plain not knowing what the fuck you're doing - like all those skinny trouser bands with the token unconvincing attempt at reggae on each album; but somehow this set hangs together quite well. My guess is that this would be thanks in part to a great opening track which seems to set up the sheer diversity of the collection as a theme, or at least seems to do so in my small world. It's the generic guitar rock which abruptly pulls the rug out from under the feet of our ears - so to speak - with its sudden transformation into eight minutes of seriously hard power electronics, horrendous noise so distorted as to entirely obscure the source and recorded with absolute digital clarity, so allowing the listener to become lost in appreciation of the texture; and the more you listen, the more it feels like there's some sort of non-verbal narrative here, something which clearly owes some kind of debt to Russolo's noise symphonies. The suggestion of narrative, with certain sounds appearing to respond to each other in some sense, carries on for the duration of the album as the story mutates and is scored to variant genres. What is further quite refreshing here, is that this isn't to say that The Drowning serves as a soundtrack to something, but rather it is the narrative itself; so jolly good.