Garfield Minus Garfield

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“When the Cat’s Away, Neurosis Is on Display.”
– Washingtonpost.com

Natalie Frigo sent us a nice tip, which works well in the context of our little ‘erasure’ program (see previous post). Garfield Minus Garfield is a web project created by Dan Walsh, dedicated to removing Garfield from the Garfield comic strips in order to “reveal the existential angst of a certain young Mr. Jon Arbuckle. It is a journey deep into the mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness and depression in a quiet American suburb.” Surely, fans of Garfield have always found ways to tweak the strip. The Garfield Randomizer lets visitors create their own strips out of random panels. Images of strips with Garfield’s thought bubbles removed or Garfield replaced by a silent, realistically-drawn cat have been circulating online as well. But this concept, as simple as it is, became an online sensation in no time (the site started receiving as many as 300,000 hits a day). Even Jim Davis, who pens the original strip, was intrigued and pleased with the concept, calling the work “an inspired thing to do”. He even went so far as to thank Walsh, saying: “I want to thank Dan for enabling me to see another side of Garfield. Some of the strips he chose were slappers: ‘Oh, I could have left that out.’ It would have been funnier.” Dan Walsh’s reaction: “In an age when the internet gives everyone an opportunity to put their own spin on art, music and literature, it’s a pity more people aren’t as generous with their work – just imagine some of the fantastic creativity we could be enjoying.” Thanks to Davis’ involvement (and the subsequent press coverage), a book version has been published in October 2008. In the book, the original strips are published alongside the ones in which Garfield has been removed.

Go here. Hilarious!

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As Time Goes By

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“All things move, all things run, all things are rapidly changing. A profile is never motionless before our eyes, but it constantly appears and disappears. On account of the persistency of an image upon the retina, moving objects constantly multiply themselves; their form changes like rapid vibrations, in their mad career. Thus a running horse has not four legs, but twenty, and their movements are triangular.”
— Umberto Boccioni, ‘Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto’ (1910)

Discovering the work of Idris Khan (see previous post) – in particular After Eadweard Muybridge ‘Human and Animal Locomotion’ (2005), a combination of Muybridge’s motion studies in a single image (see below) – has triggered me to do some explorations on the condensation and synchronisation of time in photography and cinematography. Khan refers to his own condensed photographs as “a playful emblem of our own departure from the corpse of photography, burdened with what the Futurist Anton Guilio Bragaglia once referred to as its ‘glacial reproduction of reality’.” Bragaglia (1890-1960) is a good starting point to explore this fascinating zone between art and science. Influenced by Henri Bergson’s ideas about the infinite continuity of time, This Italian Futurist created the term “Fotodinamismo” to define the photographs he made with his brother Arturo. Their aim was to look for an alternative means of capturing the essence and sensation of speed and motion than the sequential analysis, driven by Muybridge‘s work (studying motion using several still cameras and taking photos from many angles at the same instant in time) as well as Etienne-Jules Marey‘s so-called”chronophotography” method (using a slow motion camera with the capacity of taking 700 images per second) – which was to lead ultimately to the perfection of the illusion of movement with cinematography.

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Essentially the Bragaglias wanted to “depict movement as an indivisible reality, rather than a sequence of static poses.” “We are not interested in the precise reconstruction of movement, which has already been broken up and analysed. We are involved only in the area of movement which produces sensation, the memory of which still palpitates in our awareness”, Bragaglia wrote in his Futurist Photodynamism (1913). Fotodinamismo would render actions visible “more effectively than is now today possible with actions traced from one point, but at the same time keeping them related to the time in which they were made…”. Bragaglia advanced the theory that speed applied to actions or objects renders them immaterial and invisible: “appearance is replaced by transparency”. Bragaglia’s photodynamics are fluid “visual transcriptions of energy” —not by way of successive pictures (Muybndge) or schematic phases (Marey)- but as a smooth, continuous dematerialization of objects in space. This was accomplished by means of capturing in a single image the flowing trajectories of objects in motion, made visible by long exposure times. Well known studies, pictured here, include ‘Typewriter’ (1911), The Slap’ (1912) and ‘The Cellist’ (1913).

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A similar result is visible in the work of Frank (1868–1924) and Lilian Gilbreth (1878–1972), although their method and motivation were quite different. They developed the “stereo chronocyclegraph”, 3-D photography that traced the path of human motion in pulses of electric light, in order to identify the “one best way to do work.” The Gilbreths wanted to convert their images (“micromotion studies”) into useful data for employers eager to reorganize and increase production. Small electric lights, blinking twenty times a second were attached to the wrists of the workers and one cycle of their motions was photographed in a darkened studio (the “betterment room” the called it). Since the lights traced pearl-shaped exposures on the photo- graphic plate, one could identify the direction of the hand movement. Grids placed in the background, or double-exposed later, measured distance while clocks recorded elapsed time. The distance between the light tracings revealed changes in speed. Of course this methodology of “scientific management” – that led to the standardization of work practices and the development of ‘Continuous Improvement Process’ (CIP) – has been criticised widely: the resulting images, after all, could be seen as portraits of the dehumanizing tendencies of modern industrial labor. One criticist is Mike Mandel who decided to subvert the reasoning behind these efficiency studies. In his book ‘Making good time: scientific management, the Gilbreths, photography and motion-futurism’ (1989), he writes: “In my own pictures I want to turn the Gilbreths upside down and shake them out of my brain. I want to find the “one best way” for the worst of reasons—to analyze motions that have never been measured and don’t need to be. I want to completely reevaluate day- to-day life, distorting the Gilbreth imperative to suit my needs: More waste = more fun”.

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Bragaglia and the Gilbreths of course worked in a time when the representation of motion became a compelling concern for scientists, photographers and artists alike. According to Siegfried Giedion (in ‘Mechanization Takes Command’, 1948) the depiction of motion was the key imagery of the twentieth century: ” the essence of the phenomenal world has been increasingly regarded as motion-process: sound, light, heat, hydrodynamics; until, in this century, matter, too, dissolves into motion.” Another figure who took this concern at heart was Harold Eugene Edgerton (1903 – 1990), an electrical engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), who perfected the stroboscope for use in both ultra-high-speed and still (or stop-motion) photography. This device – first developed by Joseph Plateau – allowed him to take images of a realm beyond human vision. Starting from the 1920’s he manipulated the stroboscope to create two types of images. In one technique, a single, brief exposure documents a specific event in time, and magically captures its effects. In the wellknown photograph ‘Shooting the Apple’ (1964) for example, Edgerton seized the moment just as an apple is pierced by a passing bullet, leaving a cloud of skin and flesh in mid-air. Though only moments later the apple would explode, Edgerton has frozen time to order to illustrate the laws of physics. This effect was also accomplished with the “rapatronic camera” he developed in the 1940s, which was used to photograph the rapidly-changing matter in nuclear explosions within milliseconds of ignition – resulting in utterly frightening or beautiful pictures, depending on the way you want to look at it (see top). Edgerton also used the stroboscope to record the cumulative forms described by bodies moving through time, especially of athletes in action.. In ‘Densmore Shute Bends the Shaft’ (1938), a golfer swings his driver which creates an apparition of a nautilus shell – a perfect form in nature equal to the perfect form and grace of his swing. “Seeing the unseen” – the title of a book on his achievements – is really what is was all about for him: later in his carreer he also created night-vision imaging systems with the Defense Department during World War II, enhanced underwater imaging of the ocean floor in consultation with the National Geographic Society and Jacques Cousteau – accompanying him on numerous expeditions – and even worked with some Hollywood Studios, demonstrating how to use high-speed photography to make movies. He even won an Academy Award for the short film ‘Quicker than a Wink’ (1940), produced in association with Pete Smith (anyone know where to find this?). “Don’t make me out to be an artist”, he said. “I am after the facts, only the facts. In many ways, unexpected results are what have most inspired my photography.” If only he could have witnessed the impact that the “Bullet-time” effect had on millions of movie buffs worldwide, when the ‘The Matrix’ finally hit the cinemas, 9 years after his death (note that ‘The Matrix’ wasn’t the first film to use this effect – Michel Gondry, Dario Argento, Tim Macmillan and others used it years before it came out).

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It’s one of Edgerton’s colleagues at MIT, Gjon Mili (1904-1984), who introduced the stroboscope techniques in the artworld. Mili, who was a photographer for Life Magazine for over 4 decades, took thousands of pictures of dance, athletics, and musical and theatrical performances. He also used some of the methodes in the short film ‘Jammin’ the blues’ (1944), featuring performances by musicians such as Lester Young, Red Callendar, Harry Edison and “Big” Sid Catlett, which is considered as a minor landmark in the way musicians are filmed. He took some impressive pictures of musicians in action – notably of drummer Gene Krupa. In 1950 he also made a new version of Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Nu descendant un escalier n° 2‘ (1912), which was in itself influenced by the work of Marey and Futurists such as Bragaglias and Giacomo Balla. But his most famous photographs must be the one the took of Pablo Picasso, in 1949. Picasso was photographed in the dark. After Mili fired his flash, Picasso sketched a centaur in the air. The result is pictured below. This form of painting with light was later developed futher by people like Eric Staller. In the late the 1970’s Staller made quite a name for himself with his series of long-exposure images shot in the streets of New York City. He set the camera up on a tripod whilst he manipulated light in the frame to make an array of patterns and colours.

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In these examples one can basically point out two ways to visualize structures of time and its relationship to space, using various techniques of photography and cinematography. While Edgerton and others tried to “freeze” movements in images, the “photo dynamists” were more interested in the transgression of synchronized time relations. The resulting effects were dependent on parameters such as the length of exposure, the timing of natural or artificial light and the development time required to expose the film. Some contemporary artists use digital technologies to extend these studies in new domains. One could say that the means of conventional photography serve more or less the fusion and condensation of temporal processes, while digital technology allows a layering and superimposition of individual temporal segments. Heike Helfert gives some nice examples in her essay ‘Technological Constructions of Space-Time. Aspects of Perception‘.”In his photograph series ‘Theaters,’ which he has been working on since the 1970s, Hiroshi Sugimoto exposes the cinema as a site that shapes space and time with light. Usually, the architectural space of the cinema steps into the background as soon as the light of the projector is turned on. Sugimoto, however, condenses the entire film on one photo, inverting the relationship of real space to illusionary space. He exposes his photographs over the entire course of a film showing, and thus returns film to its foundation, that is, light. The entire film is thus contained in a single photo, but due to the long exposure time the screen only appears as a bright surface. All that remains visible is the physical space of the cinema.” Thomas Kellein, in his essay in the book ‘Hiroshi Sugimoto, Time Exposed’ writes:”The white rectangle in the Theaters obliterates the stream of images and captures in a blaze of light the whole time factor of moviegoing. Only thus, as the trace of an illumination, does the cinematic experience have duration for Sugimoto. Light assumes the place of a story, whatever its title, and of the arbitrary, constantly shifting positions of the camera. Not only are individual films transitory; the film medium itself, photography’s great rival, seems to have lost its capacity to survive.”

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A similar goal is pursued by Jim Campbell (a brilliant artist with degrees from MIT, who also holds dozens of patents in the field of video image processing) in his’ Illuminated Averages’ project, a series of images displayed in light boxes in which each image is created by “averaging” all of the frames of a moving sequence. For example the first one created (2000) was an average of all the frames of the film ‘Psycho’. Placing all of the frames on top of each other, he created an image that contains all of the film’s visual data (I would love to see ‘Accumulating Psycho’ (2004), the video that documents this gradual accumulation process, with the sound of the film remaining intact!). “But he works with digital, and not analog, technology”, writes Helfert. “At issue is thus not the duration of exposure that produces a certain amount of light, but the addition of individual film images and their data. Here, image after image are superimposed on one other, producing a concentration of light and contrast that only allow the outlines of a plot to be glimpsed in the less strongly illuminated parts of the image. In this process, time manifests itself as light and the superimposition of different degrees of brightness.” The influence of Bragaglia and Balla in particular is apparent in other works in this series, for which he videotaped movement of several objects – a clock, an automobile, a bicyclist, a cow – for a specific period of time, and then used custom hardware to average the multiple frames into one single image. The result is a blurring effect that gives the appearance of motion.

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There are quite a few contemporary artists/scientists exploring similar ideas. Jason Salavon has used custom made software to “average” sets of photographs (but also music & video) sharing common characteristics, like Playboy centerfold foldouts (in ‘Every Playboy Centerfold, The Decades’, 2002) and late night talk shows (the video installation ‘The Late Night Triad’, 2003). Besides these “amalgamations” he’s also done works with “color-averaged frames”, in which the overall color-value of individual frames of film and video are used to compose abstracted projects. ‘The Top Grossing Film of All Time, 1 x 1’ (2002), for example, is a static image showing all of the frames of the movie ‘Titanic’ reduced to the average color most representative of each frame. In the same vein Antonio Torralba and Aude Oliva ( both @ MIT) made a series in which images containing a person are averaged to reveal regularities in the intensity patterns across all the images. In the series ‘Go Ogle’, Meggan Gould has taken the first 100 responses to a Google image search – like “heart” – and overlayed those images into a single photographic “average.” As Gould herself writes: “The results, a visualization of intersections between Boolean logic and the popular imagination, are more often than not a hopeless jumble of unidentifiable pixels – but occasionally a recognizable form does emerge.” Atta Kim (who holds a degree in mechanical engineering) has done similar stuff in his ‘ON-AIR ‘ series, which consisted of “overlaid” images, as well as extended exposures that record the dissipation of objects and people. Influenced by Heidegger’s speculations on time, along with the teachings of the mystic G. I. Gurdjieff and Zen Buddhist thinking, he bases his work on notions of interconnectedness and transience – time as a quantifiable, linear entity is a mirage. His view of several NY locations leaves all the stationary elements in focus, but reduces traffic to a shimmering haze, a ghost of motion. A couple making love for an hour is a cloud of luminosity.

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Idris Kahn, who I mentioned before, has done some fascinating work. Noteworthy is the series of images he made by superimposing Bernd and Hilla Becher‘s photographs of industrial buildings, while digitally manipulating them to emphasise certain details or to enhance areas of light and shade. He has said: “it’s obviously not about re-photographing the photographs to make exact copies, but to intervene and bring a spectrum of feelings – warmth, humour, anxiety – to what might otherwise be considered cool aloof image. You can see the illusion of my hand in the layering. It looks like a drawing. It’s not systematic or uniform. The opacity of every layer is a different fallible, human decision”. The resulting, strangely transient, images do have quite a bit in common with some of Krzysztof Pruszkowski’s ‘Photosynthesis‘ work, which he started in 1975 – and without the use of digital techniques. Jerome Sans has written: “By subjecting his photographic topics, whether they are taken from the media or not, to “multiple superimpositions,” Krzysztof Pruszkowski demonstrates the limits of the new reality–a reality which dissolves the notion of time picture by picture and, in a way, accounts for the speed which characterizes some video clips, the instant circulation of information and pictures around the world. We are no more in the order of the snapshot. (…) The artist does not interpret the world by establishing its apparent form but rather restores its complexity and places it in a context which reveals the richness of its metamorphosis”

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Others took the condensation of motion in surprising directions. Fiona Banner for one explores the relations between linguistic and visual perception in her “still films”: handwritten, blow-by-blow descriptions of films such as ‘Apocalypse Now’ (along with other war movies in ‘The Nam’, a 1,000-page book, 1997), ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ (‘Desert’, using a vast plane of text similar in scale to a cinema screen – or an expanse of desert, 1994) and ‘Don’t Look Back’ (an installation with the same title screened across three wallpaper panels, 1999). The entire movies can be seen – but not read, because the words pile on so thick that they become too dense to read – in an instant, on a single canvas. For her this transformation is a “stepping back from how the image works on us, yet at the same time still having the image there. It’s a way of being able to work with images without drowning in the deeply complex currency of those images. Hopefully, what’s gained in the process is an original moment of looking at something, or being able to look at something in a different way by side-stepping the image.” In his ‘Cinema Redux’ project, started in 2004, Brendan Dawes explores the idea of distilling a whole film down to one single image by creating unique fingerprints. Films like ‘Taxi Driver’ (see below), ‘Serpico’ and ‘The Conversation’ are processed through a piece of software that samples a movie every second and generates an 8 x 6 pixel image of the frame at that moment in time. It does this for the entire film, with each row representing one minute of film time. The result is, according to Dawes, “a sort of movie DNA showing the colour hues as well as the rhythm of the editing process”. And then there’s also a series of intruiging long exposure photographs by Rosemarie Fiore, taken while playing old video war games. “By recording each second of an entire game on one frame of film”, she has written, “I captured complex patterns not normally seen by the eye”. Seeing the unseen, I guess, is what drives many of these artist/scientists. Their representations of motion make it clear that “the precise, mechanical, glacial reproduction of reality” is not the only way to perceive the passage of time.

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More later. Perhaps.

Sous Rature (extended)

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“Erasure is never merely a matter of making things disappear: there is always some detritus strewn about in the aftermath, some bruising to the surface from which word or image has been removed, some reminder of the violence done to make the world look new again”.
— Brian Dillon

Some more loose notes on (audio)visual erasure (see also previous post), in the context of a little program we’re doing in a few weeks. One part of the program (proposed title: “Without a Trace. Erasing Inscription, Inscripting Erasure”) will be a performance by Pierre Hébert, titled ‘only the hand‘, starting from Meister Eckhardt’s famous quote “Only the hand that erases can write the true thing” (btw: Godard said smth similar – “seule la main qui efface peut écrire” ” to express his thoughts about the incapacity of art and film to discuss the Holocaust). Hébert explores the relationship of this quote with his own workflow, doing live improvised animation, alternately drawing and erasing. Hébert writes: “the animated movement cannot appear without the action of erasing. It also interest me because it relates the question of truth to very physical actions that put the body into motion, that is writing and erasing, and not just to the act of “saying the truth” although speech is always present as a ground. It seemed to me that the impossibility to attribute this sentence to any single author did authorized me to give it a meaning that suited my needs without necessarily discarding all of the possible historical interpretation of it”.

This is an extract of a performance he did in Beyrouth (French version)

This performance somewhat relates to Christian Capurro‘s ‘A.M.P.E.d.S. (Another Misspent Portrait of Etienne de Silhouette)’ project (which will be part of the forthcoming edition of the ARTEFACT festival, titled ‘Behind the Image: The Image Behind’), which involves a mass-collaborative erasure of a 246 page Vogue Hommes magazine. “The magazine has been diminished, emptied of its original, primarily pictorial content and re-inscribed, palimpsest-like, by other energies and with other values. In the process, and while maintaining the basic integrity of its original form – an impersonal, mass produced, and ephemeral product of popular culture – this out of date object with little intrinsic worth was transformed: invested with a significant amount of time (267 hours, 49 minutes, 5 seconds…), of attention, of labour, and propositionally endowed with considerable value (AUD$11,349.18…). The artefact that has resulted from this drawn-out, yet economical mass undertaking could be thought of as a social and/or artistic document of a certain disproportionate investment and disproportionate attention: one that hopefully embodies some of the paradoxical impulses evident within the contemporary politic of images, toward both negation and proliferation”.

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In some ways, writing or painting can already be considered as acts of erasure (see Brian Dillon, ‘the revelation of erasure‘) (just as animation and cinema can be seen as acts of progressive erasure: one image superseding the previous one to create an impression of movement). Every painting, said Picasso, is a sum of destructions: the artist builds and demolishes in the same instant. Which is perhaps what Jasper Johns had in mind when he said of Robert Rauschenberg’s ‘Erased de Kooning Drawing’ (1953) that it embodied an “additive subtraction”: after a month’s sporadic destruction – using about 40 rubber erasers to literally rub-out a drawing that he had persuaded de Kooning to give him specifically for that purpose – what is left is a surface startlingly alive, active, palimpsestic. Rauschenberg himself stressed that the main aim of this work was to find out “whether a drawing could be made out of erasing” – the eraser was used as a drawing tool, working over the top of the old drawing, to create a new work. Soundwise, George Maciunas did a similar thing with ‘Homage to Richard maxfield’ (1962) – erasing a master tape of Maxfield while rewinding. Any form of erasure, however violently destructive, can be seen as constructive in some way – any erasure carries within it the potential for renewal or reinvention, made possible by the knowledge gained through the erasure of the old. For Willem Oorebeek, whose ‘Black Out’ series consists of pictures which are are overprinted with a layer of black ink – so the image is only visible when the light on the black surface is seen from a particular angle – erasure can rescue the image “from a one-dimensional view.” “It subjects it to a momentary form of blankness”, wrote Wouter Davidts, allowing it to resurface again, as an afterimage”. Erasure is a “process which makes the new visible to itself as it redefines what is visible in the old”, wrote Richard Galpin in his essay ‘Erasure in Art: Destruction, Deconstruction, and Palimpsest‘, extending on Derrida’s notion of ‘sous rature’ (under erasure). He gives the example of Ad Reinhardt, who reduced painting to a flat black canvas, which he described as “the last painting which anyone can make”. Joseph Kosuth wrote of his work: “Painting itself had to be erased, eclipsed, painted out in order to make art.”

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Kosuth himself made some works that use erasure/deletion in a less “absolute” way, being more involved with the erased “sign”. In his installation series ‘Zero and Not’ (1985 – 1986, see figure above) he partially erased texts by Freud, as a sort of ironic affirmation of Freud’s theories. The text is printed on the gallery wall, then struck through with black tape, so that it is erased but still insists, remaining more or less readable. Candice Breitz uses a similar strategy in her ‘Ghost Write Series’ (see below). With Tipp-ex she whitens out full sentences, paragraphs or just seemingly sporadic words from the text of cheap romance novels. In doing so she creates a space of possibility and imagination, inviting the viewers to reconstruct the narrative itself or accidentally creating their own.

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In her ‘Ghost Series’ she again uses Tippex to whiten the bodies of women on ethnographic tourist postcards (see image below). This reminds me of Matt Bryans’ work (see below), for which he snips out black-and-white images from assorted newspapers and, using an eraser, rubs away identifying features to leave only eyes, mouths and shadowy silhouettes – which, in a strange way ressemble the defacings in some found copies of the book ‘Ten Years of Uzbekistan‘ (1934) designed by the Constructivists Alexander Rodchenko and Vavara Stepanova, who were driven to obliterate, with ink and paint, the names and faces of those in that book who had fallen from the favour of and been destroyed by Stalin (documented by Ken Campbell). Gert Jan Kocken also documented some defacings in his work, mainly the remains of Reformation iconoclasm in Holland, England, Germany and Switzerland. Dillon writes: “More than any other image, an erased human face remains horribly eloquent. In fact, a face cannot be made to vanish completely: it stays sufficiently human to horrify by its exact lack of humanity.”

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Breitz’ ‘Ghost Series’ also reminds me of Naomi Uman’s amusing 1999 film ‘Removed’, for which she used nail polish remover and household bleach to erase the female figures from an old and forgotten porn film (see still). The wriggling holes in the film become erotic zones, blanks on which a fantasy body is projected, creating a new pornography. Variations of this idea can be found in photography project such as Justin Jorgesen’s ‘Obscene Interiors‘ or John Haddock’s ‘Internet Sex Photos‘, as well as Pierre Bismuth‘s ‘Collage For Men’.
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Oliver Laric (see also previous post) did quite the opposite in ‘Touch My Body (Green Screen Version)’, appropriating a video of Mariah Carey and leaving her figure intact but deleting the background images surrounding her body, digitally replacing it with a flat green backdrop, leaving it open for multiple fillings and interpretations (which are flowing on the internet right now).

Erasure can also be understood as camouflage, like in Paul pfeiffer‘s work. In the ongoing photo series ‘Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse’ he edited out all players from images of basketball games, except one. What remains is not an absent but rather an intensified figure. In ‘The Long Count (I Shook Up The World)’ (2000), he altered the footage of a boxing match by digitally erasing the boxers. What’s left on the ring is their ghostly outline, a transparent aura through which one can clearly see the exhilarating reactions in the faces in the crowd of the match. This editing process is very slow and ultimately very manual and requires going frame by frame, even though to a degree the process is somewhat automated through software tools. “It’s like the computer can only think so much and then the human hand and eye really have to do the rest of the refining work”, says Pfeiffer. Filmmaker Martin Arnold can probably acknowledge that. Since 1997 he has been working on a series of works in which he erases actors and actresses from film fragments – like the shower scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Psycho’. For his video installation ‘Deanimated’ (2002) he literally “de-animated” an old, hour-long Hollywood b-movie (‘The Invisible Ghost’ from 1941) by digitally erasing one character at a time. The increasingly empty scenarios, at times inhabited by actors whose facial expressions have been morphed, “create a ghostly effect that serves to remind us of our own mortality”, reporting the ever presence of abscence. “Essential protagonists of the plot are deleted from the film by ‘digital compositing’, the mouths of couples engaged in a dialogue are morphed closed, orchestral film music surges up to add a dramatic emphasis to non-events. What remains are only traces of events, scanty circumstantial evidence of happenings whose origins are left unexplained: dust whirling up, the sound of gunshots, the horror reflected on the face of a woman recoiling from the void.”

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More digital erasure in, for example, Natalie Frigo‘s ‘November 22, 1963’ (2004), an alteration of the Zapruder footage of the John F. Kennedy assassination with the removal of JFK from each frame (as a comment on the modyfied version that was originally mediatised – frames were missing or destroyed, parts of footage cropped). There’s also Jeannette Ehlers ‘Ghost Rider‘ series. In the last video in this series you see a football game without players, leaving a haunting feeling of absence. Coincidentally or not, Tammuz Binshtock had a similar (but at the same time opposite) idea in 2001, resulting in this video:

More examples. This is a segment (titled “invisible borads”) from ‘Yeah Right!’, a film made by Spike Jonze for the Girl Skateboard Team.

And this is a fragment of Martijn Hendriks‘ ongoing video project, based on Hitchcock’s 1963 film ‘The Birds’ from which all birds have been removed (Stephen Fox apparently did smth similar in his video ‘the birds’ (2005), but I never saw that)

Hendriks has recently also started working on This is where we’ll do it, a series of YouTube videos he downloaded, manipulated and uploaded again. He writes: “… the absence of essential elements from widely known images has taken center stage. By digitally erasing exactly those things that matter most, absence, background, memory and doubt are shown to become unexpectedly productive”. This is #6:

Mungo Thomson has used this procédé wonderfully in his ‘The American Desert (for Chuck Jones)’ (2002). He erased the characters from classic Road Runner cartoons, leaving only their barren landscapes. Protagonists and narratives excised, the desert scenes mimic landscape painting. Mostly static, there are only oblique traces of the mayhem that we are used to seeing unfold in these unforgiving wastelands: a train rushes by, we hear rocks tumble down a cliff, a waterfall. As a tribute to animator Chuck Jones, the meditative landscapes also focus attention on the production and iconography of mass media images, how they influence our everyday perceptions, and how they’ve become an indispensable part of Western cultural history. Again, coincidentally or not, a year later Stephen Gray did a similar thing in the video ‘Beep prepared’ (2003).

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The work shown below is very nice as well. This time it’s not based on any photo- or videographic manipulation, but a modification of Nintendo’s ‘Super Mario’ game. Gone is the main character, who the player had to guide through a labyrinth in the original jump and run game, just like the obstacles, landscapes and opponents that lend the game its narrative structure. Artist Cory Arcangel (see also previous post) had to open the cartridge, on which the game was stored, and replace the Nintendo graphics chip with a one on which he had burned a program he had written himself. As the Source Code is available on the net, the work has continued to perpetuate itself via the Internet, and has been replicated and modified in numerous iterations. The duo JODI has also done an “erased” version of the Quake game, as part of the ‘Untitled Games’ project. In this particular modification (there are 12 for Mac and 13 for PC) all graphical element – monsters, characters and backgrounds – have been eliminated. What remains is the interface components and sound (download it here).

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The act of erasing itself is central in the animated films of William Kentridge and Naoyuki Tsuji, which are based on charcoal drawings that are altered and erased in the process. For each film dozens of drawings are made, which undergo continual addition, permutation and erasure, the traces of which are plainly visible. A similar metod is used by Nalini Malani in her first film, ‘Memory; Record/Erase’ (1996), for which she painted directly onto glass, drawing over or erasing the previous images – capturing the ephemeral and unreliable nature of memory and identity.

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And this is a very nice one too (thanks PP): Denis Savary‘s ‘Le Bourdon’ (2004-2007). Here’s an excerpt:Other examples: Jules Engel’s ‘Accident’ (1973) shows a loop of a dog loping left to right, progressively blurred or erased. Nadia Hironaka has a 16mm installation, entitled ‘Camouflage'(2002), which starts with appropriated images of explosions that are gradually transformed with a hand-fabricated looping mechanism that exposes the film to bleaching vapors. As the film continues the cycle, its emulsion slowly fades and the image is slowly washed away from the filmstrip. In Kirk Tougas’ ‘The Politics of Perception (1973 – see Ghosting the Image program) segments from the trailer of ‘The Mechanic,’ an action flick with Charles Bronson, are continuously repeated over a period of a half hour. The sound and image quality constantly deteriorate until both picture and sound assume the status of “noise”. The point of exhaustion that the film implies is a phenomenological reduction that is explained by Tougas’ conception that “film is a process where we take shadows and modulate an artificial sun (by intervening celluloid patterns).” According to Tougas it is like viewing “the history of photography and representation in reverse… slowly”. A variation of this process can be found in JJ Murphy’s ‘Print Generation’ (1973-1974), for which a one-minute piece of film was re-photographed fifty times over. It begins with isolated particals of emulsion that slowly cohere into increasingly complex forms. Once the images are brought up to full color and form, the movie heads back toward abstraction (note that as the image distorts, the sound becomes clearer, and vice versa). According to Scott MacDonald the film “provides an extended exploration of the fragility of the filmstrip and its inevitable entropy over time” as well as “invites the viewers to study the motion of their own consciousness, especially the process of their apprehension of visual information.”

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Erasure can be considered as a ‘surplus’ to the original “text”, in graffiti for example. Roland Barthes, writing in relation to Cy Twombly, who he describes as a “painter of writing”, wrote that “what constitutes graffiti is in fact neither the inscription nor its message but the wall, the background, the surface (the desktop); it is because the background exists fully as an object that has already lived, that such writing always comes as an enigmatic surplus… that is what disturbs the order of things; or again: it is insofar as the background is not clean that it is unsuitable to thought (contrary to the philosopher’s blank sheet of paper)…”. Galpin describes this with the word palimpsest, which originally referred to “writing material or manuscript on which the original writing has been effaced to make room for a second writing”.

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Rosalind Krauss wrote in reference to Twombly’s work : “the formal character of the graffito is that of a violation, the trespass onto a space that is not the graffitist’s own, the desecration of a field originally consecrated to another purpose, the effacement of that purpose through the act of dirtying, smearing, scarring, jabbing”. This could also be said of the films of Cathy Joritz, who uses various direct-on-film animation techniques to penetrate and appropiate the existing images on the celluloid (see Ghosting the Image and Drawn to Life programs), or this (less effective) video by Clare E. Rojas & Jeffrey Wright, titled ‘The Manipulators’ (1999), for which they used sharpie markers and white-out correctional fluid to cover and alter advertising and fashion magazine images.More fun stuff, based on the principle of animated graffiti: a great wall-painted animation by the BluBlu collective.

… which relates to this documentary, Matt McCormick‘s ‘The Subconscious Art of Graffiti Removal’ (2001), documenting and “analysing” (tongue-in-cheeck) the seemingly mundane job of graffiti removal (what graffiti writers call “buffing,” or “getting buffed”). Here’s a fragment:

And as Brian Dillon suggests, excess can be a form of erasure too. Dillon refers to Honoré de Balzac’s story ‘The Unknown Masterpiece’ (1837), in which the painter Frenhofer labours for years at a picture of a young woman, until she disappears, leaving only a tiny, perfect foot looming out of the surrounding chaos. An example of this idea can be found in Idris Khan‘s work. For ‘every…page of the Holy Koran’ (2004) (see image below), he made of photograph of every page of the Koran, which are overlaid to the point of illegibility. “The sacred text overwrites itself until it is a blur of meaningless ciphers, and the vertical gutter between the pages a deep black void”. He has subjected the same superimposition on books by works by Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag and Vilem Flusser, amongst others, and scores of Chopin and Beethoven. Chopin’s ‘Nocturnes for the Piano’ become a frenzied buzz of notes, while Beethoven’s ‘Sonatas’ appear as brooding blocks in which both the overlaid notation and the white spaces between the staves come to seem as meaningful as the dark constellation of notes. By giving the piece the title ‘Struggling to Hear . . . After Ludwig van Beethoven’s Sonatas’ (2005), Khan invokes the composer’s descent into deafness. Notes – laid graphically over one another – produce empty channels fringed by visual buzzing, a strange but compelling visual metaphor for Beethoven’s hearing loss. As David Crowley writes: “here, the technique of sous rature – based on the dynamics of presence and absence – resonates with human tragedy”.

More about Idris Khan and othere in next post.

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Music as Skin Tones

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“the reason I love movies is because I experience them as music”
— Toru Takemitsu

I’ve been intrigued by Toru Takemitsu’s film music ever since I saw Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Woman in the Dunes (1964) for the first time. Takemitsu’s score relies almost entirely on a string ensemble, recorded, rearranged, pitched, distorted, alienated. The sounds, alternately shrill, harsh and menacing, form a perfect soundscape for the austere allegory of the story, written by Kobo Abe – a narrative about a man and woman who are bound to labor together at the bottom of a sand dune, continually digging sand, supposedly in order to protect some unseen village nearby. In Charlotte Zwerin’s 1994 documentary Music for the Movies: Toru Takemitsu (see below), Teshigahara has commented that this film had not two, but three main characters: the man, the woman, and the sand. “The sand has its own identity and without Toru’s help, we never would have been able to realize this fully.” In another interview, the director said “He was always more than a composer. He involved himself so thoroughly in every aspect of a film—script, casting, location shooting, editing, and total sound design—that a willing director can rely totally on his instincts.” Takemitsu meticulously checked all the sounds recorded for the film – the dialogue as well as the concrete sounds. “There are so many different sounds in a film, but he checked every single one and would say, we can scrap this noise and hear music here, or vice versa. Also, we tried to mechanically process the concrete sounds.”Peter Grilli writes about Woman in the Dunes:”‘composed’ music is only part of Takemitsu’s unique contribution to the film. The weird environment is the dominating quality of the film, and, recognizing this, Takemitsu gives life to the sand through sound. It is there at all times, even when a scene seems completely silent. The soft, barely audible sizzle or hiss or patter of sand—dripping, shifting, and constantly in motion—inhabits every moment of the film, as it does every moment of the protagonists’ terrifying existence. And it is through the subconscious quality of sound that the woman’s persistent reply to the man’s fearful questions—“It is the sand”—develops its total, all-enveloping meaning”. And David Toop: “Surfaces are eroticised; rationalism and the bureaucratic order of modern life are pitted against animism and the inexorable rhythms of nature, these transformations and oppositions echoed by Takemitsu’s granular, eerie musical scores of sudden distorted shocks and attenuated, fibrous tones: music as skin tones.”

Fragment:

The three of them – Teshigahara, Abe and Takemitsu – also worked together on Pitfall (1962), The Face of Another (see still) (1966), and Man Without a Map (1968), all powerful works that move fluidly between abstraction and narrative, the multiple echoes of sound and image, exploring issues of identity, human existence, and the alienation of modern man in urban society, symptoms of an existential dilemma that was very present in post-war Japan. “Because of World War II,” wrote Takemitsu, “the dislike of things Japanese continued for some time and was not easily wiped out. Indeed, I started as a composer by denying any ‘Japaneseness’.” Takemitsu, a musical autodidact, first looked to European composers for inspiration: Debussy, Ravel, Berg and Olivier Messiaen, and later also the North-American avant-garde, especially Cage and Feldman (of who he wrote:”Whenever I hear his music I think of its tactile quality, of his ears “hearing” the sounds”). Like them he discovered that organised music, noise and concrete sounds were all part of the musical spectrum. “One day in 1948 while riding a crowded subway,” he wrote in A Personal Reflection, “I came up with the idea of mixing random noise with composed music. More precisely, it was then that I became aware that composing is giving meaning to that stream of sounds that penetrates the world we live in.” This epiphany convinced him that contemporary music was self-enclosed within the systematic rigour of its own language. His incorporation of concrete sound and urban noise was an effort to reach out to people who heard these sounds as part of their daily lives. Film director Masahiro Shinoda – who worked with Takemitsu on films like Samurai Spy (1965), Double Suicide (1969), The Petrified Forest (1973) and Banished Orin (1977) – said: “I believe what fascinated him most about film was his keen interest in the overlap of real sound and the soundtrack along the sequence of the film. The rustling of silk, footsteps, the opening of a shoji sliding door, and notes from musical instruments – they were all “music” for Takemitsu. Even before musical instruments make sound into “music”, there were sound sources, and such sound could turn into “music”, or turn into “film/images”. Teshigahara:”He tried to create a self-contained world that ran parallel to the image yet fused them together.”

Takemitsu wrote about a hundred soundtracks and worked with many of the most interesting post-war “new wave” directors in Japan – including Nagisa Oshima, Masaki Kobayashi, Susumu Hani, Akira Kurosawa, Shohei Imamura and Kon Ichikawa, which, according to David Toop, “allowed him the opportunity to explore the dramatic impact of genre dislocations, anachronistic juxtapositions, stylistic borrowing, gorgeous melody, extreme noise, alienation and shock.” The music he composed for these films was extremely diverse and often unexpected, ranging from harsh prepared piano scrapes and thuds, ravishingly pretty Fender Rhodes jazz piano and German drinking songs, to eerie drones, romantic strings, accordions, and even a Burt Bacharach influence (notably in Kurasawa’s Dod’es-kaden). In The Man without a Map, for example, he used samples of Elvis Presley’s ‘I Need Your Love Tonight’, “torn in gouts of tortured noise out of a landscape of shuddering, groaning drones, intercut with Vivaldi’s Violin Concerto in C Minor”. Takemitsu was also fascinated with traditional Japanese instruments such as the koto, biwa, shakuhachi and sho, which were almost as obscure and mysterious to him as they were to foreigners. He used the biwa – a loosely strung four-string lute fitted with only four or five frets and struck with a huge triangular plectrum – in wonderful films such as Masaki Kobayashi’s Harakiri (1962) and Kwaidan (1964). “The major characteristic that sets it apart from Western instruments,” he wrote, “is the active inclusion of noise in its sound, whereas Western instruments, in the process of development, sought to eliminate noise. It may sound contradictory to refer to “beautiful noise”, but the biwa is constructed to create such a sound.” Toop writes: “The large plectrum, like a sharpened hammer, is appropriate to the creation of ‘beautiful noise’. The entire instrument is difficult. The player must focus on single sounds, their subtle variations, the silence that precedes them, the decay of the note into nothingness. An examination of ma – the Japanese word signifying an interval in time and space – is essential to an understanding of biwa repertoire and the work of Takemitsu.” In Charlotte Zwerin’s documentary Donald Richie comments: “Emptiness is not there until something is in it.” The sounds define the silence. “Something pure only becomes interesting when combined with something coarse”, Takemitsu says in the documentary, “writing music is like getting a passport – a visa to freedom, a liberty passport.”

I found this documentary online, on the YouTube channel of Edward Lawes. The compression is awful, but it’s really a nice introduction into the world of Takemitsu (Charlotte Zwerin (1930 – 2004) is an acclaimed director who has worked with the Maysles brothers). Interview subjects includes Takemitsu himself (before his death in 1996) and several directors, including Masaki Kobayashi (who died the same year), Hiroshi Teshigahara (+2001), and Masahiro Shinoda. It includes fragments from films such as Shinoda’s Double Suicide (notice the turkish flute on the soundtrack), Kurasawa’s Ran (Takemitsu wanted to use stylised voices on the soundtrack, but Kurasawa was too obsessed with having a Mahler sound), Yoji Kuri’s animated film Ai (this soundtrack consists of a magnetic piece for two voices, one male and one female, both repeating the Japanese word ai, or love, in a variety of intonations, speeds and pronunciations), Kobayashi’s Kwaidan (to generate an “atmosphere of terror”, Takemitsu used the sounds of real wood) and Tokyo Trial (a 4 hour long documentary for which Takemitsu only used 9 minutes of music). There are some touching moments, like when Takemitsu muses about the time when he, as a 16 year old junior high school student, was drafted to the mountains to help with the construction of a food distribution base. The war was in its final year and in those desperate times, only martial music and patriotic songs were allowed. One day, secretly, a draftee played a record of a French chanson – Lucienne Boyer’s ‘Parlez Moi d’Amour‘. Takemitsu was so moved that he decided on the spot that, if the war should ever end, he would dedicate his life to composing music. The documentary concludes with a beautiful segment in which he talks about the influence of nature, and especially the sense of time and color in japanese gardens, on his music – underscored by a fragment from the documentary film Dream Window (directed by John Junkerman and written by Peter Grilli). Takemitsu once said about Japanese Gardens: “In the end, each element does not exist individually but achieves anonymity in a harmonious whole, and that is the kind of music I like to create. It glows in the sun, the colors shift when it rains, and the sound changes with the wind.” When asked if he were ever similarly inspired by a Western garden, he cited an experience at the Alhambra in Granada, Spain. “Since music for me is not symmetrical, I did not like the regularity of the garden at all,” he said. But suddenly, as he stood there, a woman walked quickly through the arcade and a breeze riffled the surface of the pool. “Only then,” he said, “the music came.”

part 1

part 2

part 3

part 4

part 5

part 6

Most of the films mentioned are available on DVD now, so I urge you to go find them. Some of the soundtracks were released in the early 1990s, as a Japan-only edition of six cds (a reissue on an earlier vinyl version). In 2006, a box edition, featuring these cds plus one with audio documents and interviews, was released and distributed, again only in Japan. To the best of my knowledge it is already out of print (let me know if I’m wrong!), but some parts are available here. In 1997 Nonesuch released a CD entitled The Film Music of Toru Takemitsu, with ten pieces that were selected by Takemitsu himself, in the months before he died. The pieces were performed by London Sinfonietta, conducted by John Adams. You may also want to check out some of the tape and musique concrète pieces that Takemitsu created in the NHK studio in Tokio in the 1950’s, especially Vocalism AI and Sky, Horse, and Death. About the latter David Toop writes: “The piercing aerial pitches and sudden percussive shocks of Sky, Horse, and Death made a link between the qualities of Japanese instruments such as hichiriki, sho, biwa and shakuhachi, and the radical new possibilities of transforming concrete sounds offered by magnetic tape and studio processing. Created for a radio drama in 1954, the piece is shamanistic in its imagery and intensity, anticipating Takemitsu’s work in cinema through the wildness of its dramatic movement and spatial contrasts, the mercurial sensations of realism that burst through a forest of otherworld sounds”.

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Finally, this is the introduction to the The Film Music of Toru Takemitsu CD, written by Donald Richie…

“FROM 1956 , when he wrote the music for Ko Nakahira’s Kurutta Kajitsu (Crazed Fruit), until the year of his death, forty years later, Toru Takemitsu completed ninety-three film scores. When asked why he chose to write so extensively for the cinema, Takemitsu responded that he loved the movies, and “the reason I love movies is because I experience them as music.”

In film Takemitsu found a structure analogous to that of his own discipline. When he would travel abroad, he always went to the movies even (or especially) it he did not know the language of the country. “I sense something about the people there,” he once said. “In film I can see their lives, and feel their inner lives. As I watch the images on the screen, even without knowing the language, I feel I can understand the people – it’s a musical way of understanding.”

This led in turn to a way into the outside world. “Writing music for films,” according to Takemitsu, “is like getting a visa to freedom.” Not only did films offer him images of a world other than his own, there was also the challenge of matching his vision of this world to that of the film’s director. And there was the task of making the result a whole, where image and sound combined to create a reality where each alone could not.

This ambition admirably fit Takemitsu’s sensibility. He wanted, he wrote in his collection of essays, Confronting Silence, “to free sounds from the trite rules of music, rules that are stifled by formulas and mathematical calculations. I want to give sound the freedom to breathe… In the world in which we live, silence and unlimited sound exist. I wish to carve that sound with my own hands.”

Part of Takemitsu’s strong affinity for the cinema stemmed from the vitality of the medium. “I don’t like things that are too pure or too refined,” he said. “I am more interested in what is real, and films are full of life. For me, something pure becomes interesting only when it is combined with something coarse.” This something coarse but vital provoked an immediate reaction. “As I look at a film’s rushes, if it is a good film – even if there is no dialogue, no sound – I often feel I can already hear the music.” It is this heard sound, the sound that came to him from the moving images of a film, that Takemitsu then sought to capture in his score.

The film director Hiroshi Teshigahara, one of those with whom Takemitsu frequently collaborated, observed the process closely. “Of the many kinds of film composers, most look at a movie only when it is nearly finished, and then they think about where to add music, But Takemitsu immerses himself in the film right from the start. He watches it being shot, he turns up on location, and often visits the studio. His involvement with the film parallels that of the director … In his music he must find something unique for each film he works on. He’s not one of those composers who can simply pull music from a set of drawers in his head … As he watches the rushes for my films, he bounces his ideas off of them. This way his music can more fully enhance a scene: his placement of the music gives life to things that weren’t expressed in the images alone.”

Teshigahara gives as an example the music Takemitsu provided for Woman in the Dunes. “That film had three main characters: the man, the woman, and the sand.” The composer’s task was to find an aural parallel to that environment. “What is important is first to establish a sound,” Takemitsu said, “a sound that leaves a strong impression.” For Woman in the Dunes, the sound was a dry, percussive breathing or hissing, with portamento strings like the sliding sand itself. No pedal points, no security anywhere. “Though I used real instruments, their sounds were altered electronically. By suddenly raising the pitch five tones, the feeling, the atmosphere, was totally changed. That is why music has such a strong psychological effect,”

For other films by Teshigahara, Takemitsu created completely different sounds. The boxing documentary José Torres was shot in New York in training gyms and boxing rings and on the streets of the city, and Takemitsu provided an appropriate urban jazz setting. For The Face of Another, he composed abstract sounds and Weill-like tunes. (Music from both these films appears on this recording in Takemitsu’s 1994 suite for string orchestra, Three Film Scores, combined with the elegiac funeral music from Black Rain, Shohei Imamura’s film about the Hiroshima bombing.) For Teshigahara’s historical film, Rikyu, Takemitsu’s sounds included darkly traditional strings, European baroque court music, and massive pedal points.

To Takemitsu, “timing is the most crucial element in film music: where to place the music, where to end it, how long or how short it should be.” In Masahiro Shinoda’s Banished Orin and in Nagisa Oshima’s Empire of Passion, both melodramas, Takemitsu used music sparingly and evocatively to underline the emotion and, at the same time, to suggest – as with the endlessly turning jinrikisha wheels in the Oshima picture – inevitabilities not to be found in the visuals. He was also capable of supporting the images in the most direct and unambiguous fashion, as in his bright score – all primary colors – for Kurosawa’s Dodes’kaden.

Despite the eclecticism of Takemitsu’s film music, his style (and its techniques) remains continuous. Noriko Ohtake in her 1993 study, The Creative Sources for the Music of Toru Takemitsu, identifies one technique which the composer calls (in a typically movie-like description) “pan-focus.” It consists of melodic fragments used as structural blocks, with placements of sound creating a many-layered color. This sound – what one might call Takemitsu’s elegiac mode – can be heard on this recording, for example, in the music for Rikyu and Black Rain, but it is a technique that occurs in many of his compositions for the concert hall as well.

Yet only in his film scores are Takemitsu’s concerns joined to the intentions of the director. The latter asks a question, as it were, and the composer answers it. He offers his directors a blank page of music and upon this he transcribes their mutual intentions. In doing so, Takemitsu shows as much diversity in his film scores as in his other music, while also exhibiting a similar unity in composition. ”

Minimalist

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I’m a sucker for all-time-favorite-music lists, especially when they are compiled by musicians and/or enthousiasts with a bag full of talent and/or taste. Through some list that Oren Ambarchi once made I got to know Arthur Russell’s ‘World of Echo’ and Dennis Wilson’s ‘Pacific Ocean Blue’ (both reissued in the meantime), Jim O’Rourke pointed me towards the work of Van Dyke Parks, John Fahey and Luciano Cilio, Arto Lindsay tempted me into listening to Little Jimmy Scott, Joao Gilberto and Caetano Veloso, Klakke (ex-Kraak) made me dig up Peter Jefferies’ ‘The Last Great Challenge in a Dull World’ and Dead C’s ‘Angel’ (long version). And Alan Licht provided me with a wonderful introduction into the wide world of so-called “minimalist” music, with his “Minimalist Top Ten”, published in issue 1 of Halana Magazine in 1996. At that time, most of the records he mentioned were very hard to find (the list was always about the rarity of the works in question as well), but the rise of P2P networks did solve that problem to a certain extent. Also, since the end of the nineties we have witnessed a worldwide (re)emergence of interest in historic avant-garde music, so most of those pieces have been reissued, often enhanced with valuable contextualising information, outtakes and visual material (“doesn’t it feel like it’s all gotten a little out of hand?”, asks Simon Renynolds about the overwhelming reissue-mania). In 1998 Licht revisited his Top Ten with a new list of obscure delights (in Halana Issue 3), and, as I just found out, in 2007, ten years after the first instalment, he made another list (this time for Volcanic Tongue). A few blogs have compiled these lists and added links to online copies (if available). I’ve assembled the information in this post. Please consider the audio copies – flowing on the net – as “teasers”: quality is not optimal, and as I mentioned, some of these pieces have been remastered/restored/re-released the last couple of years, sometimes on limited editions – so get them while you can; these labels and artists need all the support they can get. I’ve added a few records that weren’t in Licht’s lists, but were mentioned in some of his interviews or writings (like Arthur Russell’s wonderful ‘Tower of Meaning’, Tetuzi Akiyama powerful ‘Don’t Forget To Boogie!’ and – for me, a recent revelation – Julius Eastman’s ‘Gay Guerrilla’). All notes are by Licht, except where indicated (some I couldn’t find – anyone has the first issue of Halana?). Some of these works have been real ear-openers for me (and still are), so explore and enjoy.

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Charlemagne Palestine
Four Manifestations on Six Elements (Castelli-Sonnabend LP 1974. reissued on Barooni)
Strumming Music (Shandar LP 1974, reissued by New Tone)

“Palestine conceived the record, in 1973, as an art installation, each ‘manifestation’ the equivalent of a wall in a gallery room. He had been very influenced by Rothko, and saw aspects of his music – his Golden Quest among them – as being similar to the kind of purity of expression Rothko had achieved. (…) Put crudely, ‘Four Manifestations On Six Elements’ consists of two ‘drone’ pieces – fragments from Palestine’s Golden Quest – and four piano tracks. All are ‘minimal’ – they do not change or resolve in any recognisable melodic way. They could be called repetitive, though for me that would not be wrong so much as irrelevant. I won’t say anything else about the structures of the music because I am a fool in musicological terms and my understanding or not of what Palestine is doing on the record has little to do with the extraordinary effect it has on me. The sounds let you do the work – on the drone tracks you find yourself heading shifting rhythms, tiny melodies even, your ear trying to make sense of what is happening: when the electronic sounds seem to slip out of phase it’s almost shocking. All drone-based pieces have this in common, though no two are quite identical. The piano works, though, are more immediately striking and more immediately recognisable as Palestine. Compared to his more famous minimalist contemporaries, you notice a lack of clarity in the playing, a willingness to let notes melt and tumble into each other. And Charlemagne is not interested in the kind of phase-shifting trickery and perfect clockwork development Reich or Glass bring to their tracks: changes in a piece once it’s started happen at a micro level. But even so the range of emotion the four pieces evoke is remarkable: stateliness, playfulness, fear, sorrow, resolve, mystery. All done within the simplest of structures and with the lightest of touches – all the more remarkable when I remember how elemental Palestine is live”. (Tom Ewing). “Strumming Music (1974) remains his best-known work. It features over forty-five minutes of Palestine playing two notes on a 9-foot Bösendorfer grand piano with great force, the sustain pedal depressed the entire time. As the music swells (and the piano gradually detunes), the harmonics build and the listener can hear a variety of timbres rarely produced by the piano.” (Wikipedia)

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Terry Riley
Reed Streams (Mass Arts LP 1966, reissued by Elision Fields)

Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band: All Night Flight (SUNY Buffalo, New York, 22 March 1968) (Organ of Corti LP 1968, reissued by Elision Fields)
“‘Reed Streams’ is a reissue of Riley’s first record from 1966, originally containing the ‘Untitled Organ’ and ‘Dorian Reeds’ pieces, remastered here and joined up with a 1970 performance of ‘In C’ by Montreal’s L’Infonie. The two ‘Reed Streams’ tracks were recorded on November 4th and 5th of 1966 in Riley’s New York City studio, and both feature the use of his time lag accumulator. Over the 20 minutes it takes ‘Untitled Organ’ to unfold, Riley creates a whirlpool of subtly-shifting sound via constantly reverberating, well, reed streams. His fingers move across the keys with almost alarming speed, channelling intense flares of organ phrases that after a while start to sound like they’re looping back over eachother. Of course, because the piece is so rigidly executed with an almost mechanical precision, any misstep on the part of Riley’s hands is almost like being jolted out of a hypnosis-induced dream, but luckily (and amazingly considering the accuracy required to make this piece work) it doesn’t happen often, and it isn’t too long before Riley’s echoey undertow swallows you whole and the track is over before you know it. ‘Dorian Reeds’ works a similar pulse but uses soprano saxophone and tape recorders instead, allowing Riley to actually loop sounds instead of just creating the illusion of doing so. The foundation of the piece is a series of fluttery and dizzying saxophone spirals, with Riley using strategically placed notes to punctuate and create a skewed rhythm to work off of. At times the saxophone drones melt together and take on an almost harmonic nature, other times they’re so brash and vibrant it almost stings. Despite using similar techniques, ‘Dorian Reeds’ isn’t nearly as heavenly as ‘Untitled Organ’ (owing largely to the differences in instrument) but still an overwhelming, inspiring listen.’ (Outer Space Gamelan Blog). “The live recording of Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band All Night Flight, taken from a 1968 concert is the perfect trigger for what anthropologist Jean Rouch called “The Strange Mechanism,” the trance state which most of this decade’s electronic music aspires to induce. The immediacy and the spectral filigree—the ‘dervishes’ summoned during Riley’s nocturnal concert—have been faithfully preserved on this CD. (Richard Henderson)

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La Monte Young
31 VII 69 10:26 – 10:49 PM / 23 VIII 64 2:50:45-3:11 AM [aka The Black Record] (Edition X LP 1969)

“Young and Zazeela recorded their first full length album 20 years earlier in Munich for Heiner Friedrich’s Edition X label. It was Friedrich who later found the couple’s Dream House in Harrison Street, New York. A limited edition of 2000, 98 of which were signed and dated by the artists, it came to be known as The Black Record, thanks to Zazeela’s black on black cover and label artwork. Side one is a section of Map Of 49’s Dream, performed by Young on sinewave drone and voice, with vocal accompaniment by Zazeela. Side two’s extract from Study For The Bowed Disc features the duo bowing a gong given to them by sculptor Robert Morris. He had made it for his dance piece, War, and asked Young to play it for the performance. Afterwards Morris presented the gong to Young, and he started to experiment on it with double bass bows. If you follow Young’s recommendation to turn it up and play it slow, the resulting low, thrilling drone is at once spiritual and slightly threatening, as though dark forces are being summoned to the surface. Long before Keiji Haino adopted black to shroud himself and his work, Marian Zazeela was embedding her calligraphic lettering and designs in purple and black. The point is to focus on her artwork while concentrating on the vocal/sinewave drones of Young’s dream music.” (Edwin Pouncey)

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Steve Reich
Four Organs / Phase Patterns (Shandar LP 1971. reissued by NewTone)
Music for 18 Musicians (1976)

“Although Steve Reich has no patience with those who call him a minimalist, he is one of the founders of the minimalist style of modern classical music. This re-release documents live 1970 performances of two of his pieces for organ. It is of particular historical interest. ‘Four Organs’ is an important composition, and Reich and composer Philip Glass are among the performers. Reich began his musical career as a bebop drummer who loved the music of Charlie Parker and Miles Davis, and his compositions still include jazz-like elements. Much of his output can be viewed as the result of a negative reaction to the academic schools of classical composition dominant in the 1950s and ’60s; he believes the musical establishment took a wrong turn when it began demanding overly analytical compositional techniques and lost interest in the effect new works might have on most listeners. He cites Bach as perhaps the most technically proficient composer ever, but ultimately concerned with music’s effect rather than its method of composition. The two pieces here display techniques Reich uses often — duplication of parts and what he refers to as phasing. Part duplication is one way he achieves a desired audio balance. He is so concerned with that balance and the way his music is performed that he tends not to publish his works. Instead he is generally directly involved in performances as both consultant and player. ‘Four Organs’ started with the simple idea of repeating a single chord while gradually lengthening its duration. The four organists collaborate in producing the chord while a fifth musician keeps a steady eighth-note rhythm on maracas. The organists keep holding the chord a greater number of beats, finishing at 200 about 15 minutes after starting. (..) Reich believes that repetition and slow change will enhance the listening experience because they facilitate deeper understanding. At least he believed that earlier in his career. More recent works have greater complexity and even ‘Phase Patterns’ features more variety than ‘Four Organs.’ Phasing starts with a simple melodic element that is repeated in the style of a classical canon or round, except that the repetitions are played at slightly different tempos. This causes the overlapping lines to change their relationships as the piece proceeds. Although the melodic material remains the same, harmony changes and so does the effect. If you listen closely, the differences can be fascinating.” (Ron Bierman) “My whole interest in minimalism came out of hearing the modal Coltrane stuff like “My Favorite Things” and all those records. I took jazz guitar lessons in high school and I asked my teacher if there was other stuff out there like that. He had that this one record that he’d only listened to once that he gave me: Steve Reich’s Music For 18 Musicians. I listened to it and it totally blew my mind. It was like you could tell he was doing some of the stuff that you could hear in rock music like the Velvet Underground with one ostanto figure repeating with changing over it and the steady pulse. So I immediately connected all these different things. Also, just the whole sonic element to it- in LaMonte (Young)’s music and (Philip) Glass’ music, this kind of psycho-acoustic phenomenon happening. I also starting listening to Glenn Branca at a certain point and that was another kind of meeting point between this kind of minimal stuff and the rock music I had grown up with.” (Alan licht)

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Phill Niblock
Nothin’ To Look At Just A Record (India Navigation LP 1979. reisued by XI on ‘YPGPN (Young Person’s Guide to Phill Niblock)’)

“The pieces are instrumental works, made on tape, performed as tape only, or tape with live musicians. The scores are the composer’s mix scores. In perform­ance the live musician plays with the tape, moving around the space, either matching tones on the tape or playing adjacent tones, creating shifting pools of beats and changed harmonics as he moves through the space and a duration of time. The pieces are made in stages. First, the tones are selected. The musician is tuned during the recording session by calibrated sine waves and watches oscil­loscope patterns to tune. Numerous examples of each tone are recorded. These tapes are edited (breathing spaces removed) into blocks of repetitions of each tone and then timed. The timed blocks are assigned to tracks and time slots of the eight tracks. In the score, each horizontal line represents a separate track and a duration of time. Figures above the brackets represent minutes and seconds of elapsed time: within the brackets, above the line is the duration of the event; below the line, the frequency of the tone (the pitch in Hertz). After dubbing up the eight tracks, the top four lines (tracks) of the score are mixed down to one channel, and the bottom four to the second channel of the final stereo mix. The music is architectural – the intent is to fill the space. It is non-frontal music, non-proscenium, anti-stage, not about the ensemble sitting in front of the audience, not about a single sound source. At least four speaker systems are desirable, arrayed around the periphery of the room, saturating the total space, engaging the air. The structure of the music comes from the reproduction of the tape (or CD). The live musician is not a soloist with tape background, but the converse”. (From the original notes)

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Henry Flynt
You Are My Everlovin / Celestial Power (self-released 1987, reissued by Recorded)
Back Porch Hillbilly Blues, Vol. 1 (compilation released on Locust)

“Recorded in ’80 and ’81, two mind-blowing disks delivering flowing, trance-inducing violin solos of extreme beauty and seriousness. In these incredible electronic hillbilly music violin performances, an exalted synthesis of American ethnic music, raga-like lyrical virtuosity, and a deep sensibility takes place–a nod to human culture from the great nihilist philosopher and father of Concept Art. Should be completely world-famous, but only now is this music beginning to the get the attention it deserves. Before the publication of his music, Flynt was most often known as an (often distorted) footnote in art history, as the man who invented ‘Concept Art,’ Flynt’s name in the early sixties for his formal attacks on logical and mathematics, often presented in art galleries. Flynt was initially (1962) a composer of the post-Cage school who quickly turned completely against modernist music and created his own Flynt genres, primarily through radicalizing Southern musical forms like Bluegrass, Country, and Country Blues-elevating them to an enchanted level, much as Coltrane did with the jazz of his time. His music is a parallel stream to his extremely distinct and radical philosophy (his primary work is as a radical intellectual, with visionary, wide-ranging work that is highly intellectually demanding). More about Flynt and his philosophy can be found at his website“. (Forced Exposure). About ‘Back Porch Hillbilly Blues’: “Like a hidden relic from the far side of the Harry Smith catalog, these early 1960s recordings are a splendid collection of High lonesome hillbilly fiddle and ukulele instrumentals that are surely Henry Flynt’s most articulated statements to date of his honest to god, true to life affinity and love for that dry earth choogaloo upper mountain lower boogaloo foot stomping folk music. Standouts include the acid fried 13th Floor Elevators-ish ‘Sky Turned Red’ and the 15 plus minute lazy zen epic hum and strum album closer, ‘Blue Sky, Highway and Tyme’. No doubt, this is Appalachian bruit driving music bar none”. (Locust) “Instead of the bombastic thud of rock, Flynt’s playing included “rollicking”, “forward-sweeping”, flexible rhythms, indivisible by bar lines, creating an expansive, nearly suspended, rolling sense of time.” (Ian Nagoski)

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Tony Conrad
Outside the Dream Syndicate (with Faust) (Caroline LP 1974, reissued by Table of the Elements)
Four Violins (1964, reissued by Table Of The Elements)

“The silence ended here. Made over three days on a remote farm in northern Germany, Outside the Dream Syndicate Tony Conrads historic 1972 meeting with rock visionaries Faust was the composer and violinists debut album and a revelatory document of his central role in the birth of minimalism. Issued only in Europe, it was the first officially available record of Conrads microtonal explorations, initiated in the Dream Syndicate in the early 1960s. This 30th anniversary reissue features a second disk of originally unreleased music from the sessions and restores Outside the Dream Syndicate to its rightful place in history: as the vital link between early minimalism and the rock avant-garde and a gripping testament to the power and beauty of the Drone.”(Table of the Elements) “In the very early ’60s, The Dream Syndicate played epic unchanging chamber dirges with intellectual perfection combined with lots of pre-Hippy Fuckoff! . . . Outside the Dream Syndicate was a heavenly marriage. This long unchanging mantra was epic, dignified and strung out. Like the huge grey and white photo of him on the LP jacket, Tony Conrad was a ghost upon his own record. His violin hung like a spectre over the whole album, but never did it even dip or sway. Much more minimal even than John Cale, here was a musician with a quest from the beyond.” (Julian Cope, in Krautrocksampler) “The most striking quality of ‘Four Violins’ is its instant familiarity: the grating sound of the violin parts imparts a vision of a uniquely American distance, the feel of a continent. It’s a quality also present in the spaces surrounding John Fahey’s or Loren Mazzacane’s rattled notes, the early Sun recordings, the compositions of Charles Ives, the righteous soul-breath of Albert Ayler. With ‘Four Violins’ Conrad moves closer to sound-essence, to ringing out the notes which have always existed in the skies of America. The joy comes from connecting with Conrad’s language, from following its own logic — like railroads roaring out into the Midwest. It’s a landmark recording in every sense, and the fact that this is only the first of many forthcoming Conrad installments from Table of the Elements makes me feel like howling with joy.” (David Keenan)

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Jon Gibson
Two Solo Pieces (Chatham Square LP 1977, reissued by New Tone)

“This is a reissue on CD of Gibsons second LP, which was originally issued by Philip Glass extremely collectible Chatham Square label in 1977. This CD version presents presents five pieces, three of which are unissued. Cycles, for solo organ, uses a seven note melodic progression in four-part harmony exploring various technique on the pipe organ. Untitled, for solo alto flute, is a long melody where the note sequence is indicated while the other elements of the performance (duration, phrasing, tempo, …) are left to the player choices. Both these compositions combine elements of the written structure with elements of improvisation. Then there are three unissued compositions. Melody IV Part 1 is part of a series of «melody» pieces that use the same melodic material in different contest. Another piece of the «melody» series is Melody III, for Yamaha Organ, built around the number 36 and his possible divisions. To close the CD, Song 1 for quartet that echoes, in the sound and instrumentation, a string quartet with soprano sax, violin and two cellos. The inspiration source is almost traditional and the result is very charming and nice. On cello on this track there is the great American composer and performer Arthur Russell. This release offers another possibility to discover the music of composer Jon Gibson and, more in general, of another side of the American Minimal Music.” (New Tone)
btw: also check out Criss X Cross, a recording of a solo concert Gibson gave in the Sorbonne Cathedral of Paris in 1979. It came out on Tzadik in 2006.

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Remko Scha
Machine Guitars (Kremlin LP 1982)

“Remko Scha is an artist from The Netherlands who took Glenn Branca’s guitar to a more extreme level. He built machines with ropes that played guitars. He also used metal brushes. Quite minimal music of static guitar playing, but creating overtones. Next to the first Minny Pops one of the most radical LPs from The Netherlands. Scha is these a professor in Amsterdam, teaching computer linguistics.” (433rpm blog). Check out these excerpts from Luuk Bouwman’s film ‘Huge Harry and the Institute of Artificial Art’, in which Kim Gordon & Thurston Moore and David Lynton talk about the early days of The Machines and their influence on Heavy Metal and Grunge. ‘Machine Guitars‘ is also included in David Suisman’s collection ‘Machines Vs. Music’, compiled for wfmu: “Musicians – who needs ’em? Just to prove it, here’s a collection of music performed exclusively or partially by automated machines, from music boxes and orchestrions to mechanical manipulations by Conlon Nancarrow, Pierre Bastien and others.”

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Terry Fox
Berlino / Rallentando (Het Apollohuis LP 1983. ‘Rallentando’ was published on the compilation ‘Ataraxia’)

“Sound is a means of communication, a universal language. It enters the healthy ear without impediments of langage or prejudice It is perceived by every culture in the same way: via the auditory canal. It enters the ear without consent of the listener. It vibrates the eardrum. It requires no intellectuali-zation. No intelligence is necessary. No common language need be spoken. Illiteracy is irrelevant. Sound pauses as pulses in the air. Performance is, for me, an attempt to discover a language or method of communication which bypasses these barriers as sound does. The most important aspect of performance is the elimination of media or mediating or condition. The action is performed live and in front of its receiver. It exists only on these terms and in this context and no other: like eating. My work with the labyrinth led increasingly to the almost limit less sculptural possibilities of sound”. (Terry Fox) “The American ex-pat Terry Fox (resident in Europe for several decades) is probably unfamiliar to even ardent searchers after Minimalist obscurity. He’s far better known in the art world, thanks to his involvement in cathartic performance art alongside Joseph Beuys, and a longterm interest in site-specific installations. Much of his work deals with the specificity of space, drawing extensively on the geometry of the labyrinth in Chartres cathedral. A “sculpture” in Paris saw him open fire hydrants, letting water run through the streets to augment the cobblestone textures. His very occasional recordings document a marked preference for sound art (the organisation of sound in space) over music (sound in time). The excellent but out of print LP “Berlino/Rallentando” includes the very site-specific sounds of an army helicopter patrolling the Berlin Wall (near Fox’s Berlin studio in 1980) and the bowing of a single steel piano wire stretched ten metres across his studio. To Fox, the wire is a sculpture rather than an instrument, and the sound it makes is that of the room (acting as a giant resonator) and not just the wire. He’s far from alone in his enthusiasm for long strings, although other enthusiasts, Paul Panhuysen, Alvin Lucier and Ellen Fullman, are all better known in the music world.” (Brian Duguid) Berlino is a compilation of prerecorded tapes of found sounds and three different piano wire instruments, a kind of aural geography of the Berlin Wall; recorded in San Francisco, Liège, and Berlin between 1978-88. Rallentando was made with three piano wires, attached at one end to a metal radiator and to a wall and stairwell at the other, two cellos and a double bass; recorded live at Het Apollohuis, Eindhoven, Aug. 13, 1988. Also check out ‘Ataraxia‘. Tipped by Alan Licht, but hard to find, is the ‘Linkage’ album (1982).

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Richard Youngs
Advent (No Fans LP 1990, reissued by Table Of The Elements and Jagjaguwar)

“There was no thought for the practicalities of what to do with 300 albums. It was vanity publishing. I would have laughed at the suggestion that original copies would come to exchange hands at inflated prices, that it would be re-released on CD, be performed at New York’s Knitting Factory, gain celebrity endorsements and be the start of some kind of recording career. (…) It is a record by an intense young man. At the time the tempo seemed perilously slow; now it strikes me as quite racy. The vocals are pretty strident, now I sing less forcefully. I would also play the oboe and guitar differently these days. Traditionally, ‘Advent’ is a season of hope; with the apocalyptic outlook of a 22 year old, I never saw it like that back then. But much came out of ‘Advent’. It feels like the real start of my music making and the end of doing maths.” (Richard Youngs) “A three-part composition for piano, voice, and ultra-nasty oboe and electric guitar, Advent indicated signs of life in a genre long dormant in the 80s ‘experimental’ scene. It continues the tradition from [Terry Riley’s] ‘Reed Streams’ on down with gusto.” (Alan Licht)

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Alvin Lucier
Music on a Long Thin Wire (Lovely Music 2LP, 1980)

“A founding member of the Sonic Arts Union, Lucier has had a long career of doing music dealing with acoustic phenomena (his piece I AM SITTING IN A ROOM, which breaks down a tape of his speaking voice into pure room resonances, is a classic). THis double LP is a pretty challenging listen: four twenty minute sides of an 80 foot wire vibrated by an oscillator set on a single pure sine wave. There is no interference by the composer; the system plays itself (like Eno’s ambients or the machine music of Joe Jones or Remko Scha–and unlike the Het Apollohuis gang who play their long wire installations themselves). Often monotonous, the album’s sporadic sonic eruptions (sounding like guitar feedback) reward the listener’s patience.” Read Lucier’s album notes.

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Eliane Radigue
Kyema, Intermediate States (XI LP 1992. Part of the trilogy published as ‘Trilogie de la Mort’ – see also Kailasha and Koume)
Biogenesis (3″ Metamkine 1996)
E = A = B = A + B (2 x 7″ Povertech Industries 2000)

“A one-time assistant to Pierre Henry, Radigue made her mark with quiet, minimal electronic pieces in the early ’70s (which had a pronounced effect on Palestine’s electronic work at the time). She stopped doing music for a while in favor of studying Tibetan Buddhism, then combined the two in a series of records for Lovely Music. I was put off by the use of vocals and texts on those releases, but this CD is an hour of pure tone mixing, much more varied and imaginative than, say, the aural test patterns concocted by that Jliat clown (actually, I like those CDs). P.S. Radigue’s 3″on Metamkine is great too, and there’s a double 7″ from 1969 that I’d really like to hear (two identical singles packaged in a box, designed to be played simultaneously at various speeds, edition of 200).”

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Zoltán Jeney
OM (Hungaroton LP 1986)

“A bizarre record by an obscure Hungarian composer I’d been curious to hear after reading a Tom Johnson article on him in VOICE OF NEW MUSIC. I’ve never been able to find the LP that he reviewed, but came across this one a few years back. OM is a single, hour long piece for two organs: one holding barely shifting dissonant clusters around a drone tone, the other somehow sequenced to generate 14 mostly chromatic notes to correspond to the letters in the mantra “om mani padme hum.” The result is a maniacally repetitive music–it makes Philip Glass sound like Carl Stalling. It also sounds a bit like Miles Davis’s mid ’70s organ work. Maddening, nightmarish, tortuous, almost unlistenable–in other words, GREAT!”

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Folke Rabe
What?? – version 1 + 2 (Wergo LP 1997, reissued on Dextar’s Cigar)

“A fairly neglected Wergo release recently excavated by Dexter’s Cigar. Rabe’s piece is electronically generated and treated drone/overtone stuff, masterfully executed. Unlike much electronic music of the period, no funny noises, blipping, or bleeping is involved. If Sonic Boom heard this LP he would probably go back to playing Cramps covers. Apparently this is Mr. Rabe’s career high and subsequent LPs are not of interest (haven’t heard ‘em). Incidentally, Bo Anders Persson, the composer on the flip side, was also the leader of the fantastic Swedish psych outfit International Harvester, whose SOV GOTT ROSE MARIE LP is my favorite non-US rare psych album ever (and who later morphed into Trad Gras Och Stenar, who had a great archival live CD out last year.)”

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Yoshi Wada
Lament for the Rise and Fall of the Elephantine Crocodile – part 1 + 2 (India Navigation LP 1982, reissued on EM)

“One of the original Fluxus artists, Wada was a key performer in the ’70s Soho new music scene, mostly building his own gigantic adapted pipe organs and bagpipes pumped by air machines. Obviously, on record the physical impact and presence of his music is diminished. Side one of this album is solo overtone singing, which is pleasant enough but not as cool as side two, which combines his voice with 2 of his bagpipe-derived instruments, the Elephantine Crocodile and the Alligator. I’ve always been a big bagpipe fan, and this is the bagpipe drone record I’ve always wanted to hear. Wada’s later LP on SAJ, OFF THE WALL, is a song-for-song cover version of the Michael Jackson album of the same name. Ok, it’s not. It has real bagpipes and percussion but its more frenetic approach is, to me, less effective that the music on this disk.”

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Michael Snow
Musics for Piano, Whistling, Microphone, and Tape Recorder – part 1 + 2 (Chatham Square LP 1975, reissued by Art Metropole)

“Film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum once remarked that Canadian filmmaker, artist, and musician Michael Snow may be the most important living North American artist, and I’m tempted to agree. Snow is best known for 1) his ‘Walking Woman’ paintings which became a mass reproduced image in Canada in the ’60s–the equivalent of Warhol’s Campbell’s cans here and the “star” of his film NEW YORK EYE AND EAR CONTROL, which many of you may know from 2) the ESP soundtrack which features Albert Ayler, Don Cherry, Sunny Murray, John Tchichai, etc. What you probably didn’t know is that Snow instructed them to abandon playing a “head” (melody at the beginning and end) and just dive right into free playing, which makes the album a landmark in the evolution of free improvisation. 3) His landmark WAVELENGTH, a continuous 45 minute zoom from one end of a loft to an extreme close-up of a postcard on the wall at the other end. The film is a favorite of mine and John Oswald notes it as an inspiration for PLEXURE; moreover Stanley Kubrick borrowed the last shot for the ending of THE SHINING. As a musician, Snow played straight-ahead jazz professionally in the ’50s, free improvisation with the Artists Jazz Band and CCMC from the ’60s to the present and released two solo LPs– MUSICS… and THE LAST LP in 1989. The first two sides of this set are a piece called “Falling Starts,” in which a tape of a short piano melody is played first at hyper-speed, then slower and slower until it becomes recognizable and the until each note becomes a thundering, quivering bass boom. Only the Dead C’s RUNWAY cassette surpasses this for low end speaker mayhem. As process music, it resembles Steve Reich’s unrealized piece ‘Slow Motion Sound’ (in which a music phrase would be slowed down on tape without altering the pitch); as it happens, Snow and Reich are friends (Snow participated in two performances of “Penulum Music” in 1969; Reich used a still from WAVELENGTH on the cover of his Shandar LP; and Snow used snippets from that LP in one section of his film RAMEAU’S NEPHEW). As early as 1970, Snow’s films and Philip Glass’s music were being compared (in an article by the playwright Richard Foreman), and this LP was released by Glass, yet despite these associations Snow is seldom recognized as a minimalist musician/composer.The other piano/tape piece here, ‘Left Right,’ features SNow alternating notes and chords in the bass and treble registers in a very repetitive stride piano pattern. The sound is intentionally distorted and a metronome and telephone are heard. As mid-’70s low-fi goes, this belongs next to the Screamin’ Mee Mees or something–it’s pretty brutal. It’s also interesting to note parallels with La Monte Young’s early sixties piano playing, which stretched 12-bar blues structures into indefinite modal passages, and with Charlemagne Palestine’s “Strumming Music,” which also used strict left/right hand alternation to much different effect. Furthermore, many of Snow’s films are conerned with lateral movement (especially BACK AND FORTH and PRESENTS), which makes the title (and the use of a metronome–get it?) a pun on his own art (the totality of his art is kind of an anagram of itself–and not surprisingly, anagrams are a major subject in RAMEAU’S NEPHEW). In fact, he details the many similarities between his music and his films in his extensive liner notes (which cover all four sides of the gatefold sleeve). There was a very limited CD release by Snow in ‘94 which is still available from Art Metropole in Toronto, but Dexter’s Cigar may reissue it in the future, so keep those cards and letters coming.”

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John Lennon & Yoko Ono
Unfinished Music No. 2: Life With the Lions (Zapple Records LP 1969, reissued on Ryko)

“These two need no introduction, but ‘Cambridge 1969,’ which takes up all of side one, is a completely unheralded classic. For twenty minutes Yoko vibratoes her way around a single note while Lennon provides terrifying power-drone feedback accompaniment. This is the ultimate punk/metal take on La Monte and Marian’s BLACK ALBUM (which, considering Ono & Young’s history together, might be both figurative and literal). Towards the end John Stevens and John Tchichai chime in for some free jazz/minimal crossover a la Hermann Nitsch. On side two there’s “Radio Play,” nanosecond snippets of radio played at regular intervals–almost Bernard Gunterish heard in 1997. It’s hard to imagine how betrayed Beatlemaniacs must have felt at the time or since–it’s far more blasphemous than METAL MACHINE MUSIC, but Lou didn’t have a non-caucasian female collaborator for his fans to blame it on. Newly reissued on CD (by Ryko), I maintain that this album is a must for any outside music listener”.

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Anthony Moore
Pieces from the Cloudland Ballroom (German Polydor LP 1971, reissued by Blueprint)
Secrets of the Blue Bag (German Polydor LP 1972, reissued by Blueprint)

“Two great missing links in the incredible history of Uwe Nettlebeck’s productions at Wumme, Germany. Slapp Happy founder Moore recorded PIECES a month after Faust cut their debut LP (fall 1971) and SECRETS a month before their second (with SH’s debut SORT OF following in May ‘72 and Tony Conrad/Faust in October). Indeed, Faust’s Werner “Zappa” Diermaier and Gunther Wusthoff both contribute to PIECES, which is not a krautrock or artrock LP but a bona fide minimal classic. Side one is “Jam Jern Jim Jom Jum” which as three singers chanting that mantra while Moore plays these odd, luminous repeating chords underneath. The first piece on side 2, “mu na h-vile ni a shaoileas iad,” sounds uncannily like Richard Young’s ADVENT with its quiet piano and piercing bowed sounds, while “A.B.C.D. Gol’fish” could almost pass for the trance rock classic that Moondog never got around to recording. The follow-up, SECRETS, is three pieces for strings and voice all based on the same 5 note melody. It’s more “classical” than its predecessor, kind of what I expected ACADEMY IN PERIL to sound like. How and why Polydor was convinced to release these is beyond me (anyone know the story?) The Japanese CD reissues are expensive but the original albums are unfindable. PIECES is the superior LP, but both are essential if you have any interest in the genre, period, or principals involved. Incidentally, Moore’s later solo pop LP, FLYING DOESN’T HELP, is a must for fans of WARM JETS Eno/FEAR Cale”.

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Arnold Dreyblatt (Performed by The Orchestra of Excited Strings)
Propellers in Love (Künstlerhaus Bethanien GmbH LP 1986 / CD Hat Hut, 1986 )
Nodal Excitation (India Navigation LP 1982, reissued by Dexter’s Cigar)
Animal Magnetism (Tzadik CD 1995)

“This guy is an underrated as they get. Unlike many of the people on this list, Arnold’s actually had releases on (relatively) high profile new music labels (India Navigation, Hat Art, Tzadik) and been on the scene since the early ’70s (he worked as an archivist for La Monte Young and at the Kitchen), yet his music is seldom discussed. He uses acoustic stringed instruments like hurdy gurdy, cello, pianoforte, and double bass to create sharp, rhythmic overtone studies. He’s probably the most rock-influenced minimalist; his pieces usually have drums and percussion and he favors propulsive hard rock rhythms that never seem forced or superfluous, as they sometimes do in Rhys Chatham or Glenn Branca’s music. So why doesn’t he have their crossover artrock audiences? Beats me. This is my favorite of his three albums; it’s tough to score on vinyl but is available on CD from Hat Art with a great collaboration with Paul Panhuysen tacked on as a bonus cut. Arnold’s NODAL EXPECTATION LP and ANIMAL MAGNETISM CD are also well worth investigating. If there were as many Arnold Dreyblatt releases as there are, say, Arthur Doyle CDs, the world might be a better place (but probably not).” “While I really like everything of Arnold’s, especially the more “heroic” parts of Nodal Excitations and Propellors in Love, this is the record that really steps out as the first genuinely new sound in maybe 10 years. It’s as if the Dirty Dozen Brass band got a hold of some of Arnold’s records and decided to give it a go. I cannot overstate how unbelievably brilliant this record is. When played loud, I firmly stand by my declaration that it is one of the 4 or so best records ever made”. (Jim O’Rourke)

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Jim O’Rourke
Happy Days (Revenant 1997)

“Much maligned as a Tony Conrad/John Fahey ripoff (mostly by people who never listened to either until 1995), HAPPY DAYS is actually a fine addition to the minimal canon. The superficial similarities to FOUR VIOLINS and Fahey’s guitar playing are irrelevant because the piece’s construction bears no resemblance to any Conrad or Fahey music I’ve heard. In fact, O’Rourke juxtaposes their sensibilities with his own much more convincingly here than on last year’s Gastr del Sol Fahey cover with Conrad guesting on violin. It starts off with octaves played for some time on an acoustic guitar, which are overtaken by one to four hurdy gurdys in succession, only to return some forty minutes later. What impresses me is the simultaneously circular and linear structure (not uncommon in process music but fairly uncommon in drone stuff outside of some of Phill Niblock’s work) and the remarkable patience and restraint O’Rourke shows as both composer and performer. The timing of each hurdy gurdy entrance is impeccable, and despite the glacial pacing and harmonic stasis of each part, it never gets boring.”

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Raymond Scott
Soothing Sounds for Baby – Volume 1 / 2 / 3 (Epic Records 1962, reissued by Basta Records)

“DOOR PRIZE: I’ve paid zero attention to the Scott “revival,” but these ultra-weird items are surely among the most startling rediscoveries of the digital age. Consisting of extremely repetitive miminal electronics (mostly ondioline and oscillators) designed for infants 1 month to 6 mos. (Vol. 1), 6-12 mos. (Vol. 2), and 12-18 mos. (Vol. 3), these bear many uncanny resemblances to the simple melodic improvs and incessant ostinatos of Terry Riley, and the use of echo on Vol. 3 is much like DISCREET MUSIC and NO PUSSYFOOTING. I’m also reminded of the Silver Apples, Kraftwerk, the Calico Wall, Moondog, and even Suicide (Vols. 1 & 2 especially). The 18 minute track, “Toy Typewriter,” with its interminably repeating rhythm figure that shifts as Scott makes adjustments to the tone controls is as definitive a “minimal” piece as I’ve ever heard… Volume 2 is my fave, but they’re all pretty cool.” Read the liner notes here

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Harry Pussy
Let’s Build a Pussy (Black Bean & Placenta double LP, 1998)
Alan Licht
Sink The Aging Process (Siltbreeze LP, 1994)

“Besides being the best No Wave band of the 90s, Harry Pussy were evidently arch conceptualists as well, based on this release and the brilliant permutations of their VIGILANCE cassette on Chocolate Monk. Here guitarist Bill Orcutt (credited with “mouse’) takes one second of vocals by drummer Adris Hoyos and loops it with his computer, making a drone that goes through various shifts over four sides, trumping my own like-minded, side-long fantasia on the last chord of the Minutemen’s “Polarity” that occupies the first side of my 1994 Siltbreeze LP SINK THE AGING PROCESS. As they say in MOJO, Bill & Adris, phone home!”

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Harley Gaber
The Winds Rise in the North – Part 1 & 2 (Titanic double LP 1976, reissued by Edition RZ)

“This one’s probably more Spectralist than Minimalist (think Giacinto Scelsi, Gerard Grisey, or Horatiu Radulescu), but so be it. Released on a Boston-based record label that specialized in Early Music on period instruments, this is a long (over 100 minutes), sparse string quintet with slowly sustained dissonances that slide around like a pit full of snakes. Gaber gave up music not long after this record to pursue a career as a tennis instructor (!), although several years ago violinist Malcolm Goldstein told me that Gaber had returned to music and art making. Cool Tibetan demon painting cover too.”

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Elodie Lauten
The Death of Don Juan (Cat Collectors LP 1985, reissued by New Unseen Worlds Records)

“This is one of the great lost experimental records of the 80s. Lauten has been around since the 70s, going back and forth between Paris and New York. THE DEATH OF DON JUAN is an opera, in the avant garde sense, but I honestly prefer it to any of Robert Ashley’s operas or the Philip Glass ones (except EINSTEIN). There’s a Fairlight on most of the record, but fear not, as you would never know that it dates from 80s. The first two tracks sound like Joe Jones meets Glass or Steve Reich, with harpsichords, trine (an electric lyre that Lauten invented) and Arthur Russell’s cello. “Death As A Shadow” recalls Meredith Monk’s “Turtle Dreams” but is even more haunting and doomy. Russell’s vocal on “Death As A Woman” even reminds me of MOONDOG 2 and sounds unlike any of his other work. Even the libretto is fab-A+”

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Wim Mertens
Maximizing the Audience (Les Disques du Crépuscule double LP 1985, reissued by EMI Classics)
The Lost Jockey
The Lost Jockey (Les Disques du Crépuscule double LP 1982)

“Two more sleepers from the 80s, both released on the neat Belgian label Les Disques du Crépuscule. These are both prime examples of Pop Minimalism, which took the tunefulness of Reich & Glass and gave it pop base, rather than a jazz/African (Reich) or western classical (Glass) one. It’s primarily a European phenomenon that also has roots in the first generation British minimalists Gavin Bryars (who recorded a nice LP, HOMMAGES, for Crépuscule) and Michael Nyman. Wim Mertens wrote the first full length study of Minimalism in 1983, AMERICAN MINIMAL MUSIC, and went on to a successful recording career (much like Nyman, who also started out writing a definitive book on experimental music and then became a well-known composer; both have also provided scores for Peter Greenaway films). This double LP is easily the best thing by him I’ve heard, outside of one essential cut, “Multiple 12, on the Crépuscule label sampler THE FRUIT OF ORIGINAL SIN. “Circles”, which occupies the first side, is a wonderful additive piece, with reedist Dirk Descheemaeker slowly building up melodic fragments via overdubbed clarinets and sax. Mertens’ solo piano track is Hallmark-city (keep your Kleenex close by), but the title track is the pinnacle of Pop Minimalism. With a charging piano pulse that’s straight out of Roxy Music’s “Do the Strand”, Mertens expertly weaves chattering percussion, operatic female vocals and aching violin/sax lines in and out. The Lost Jockey was a large aggregate of British new music performers who came together on this LP to play compositions by three of its members: Andrew Poppy, John Barker and Orlando Gough. Poppy is the best known of the three-he worked with Psychic TV on their first two albums and made two rather dated EPs for ZTT in the mid-80s-and his pieces here are better than the later works but still forgettable. It’s Gough’s side-long “Hoovering the Beach I & II” that’s worth the price of admission-with piano patterns which gradually elongate into rippling curlicues and Glassian high-pitched female vocals, this is truly a forgotten highlight of second generation Minimalism.”

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Roberto Cacciapaglia
Sei Note in Logica – Six Notes (Philips LP 1979, reissued by Proper)

“Cacciapaglia is an Italian composer with a long career; this early LP is an anomaly in his output and seems to be his take on the then-current Minimal trend, as the music and instrumentation is highly reminiscent of both Fred Rzewski’s “Coming Together” and Steve Reich’s “Octet” (which, to be fair, Cacciapaglia probably hadn’t heard since it came out at the same time as this LP). But the wild card here is the incorporation of computer sounds–pretty novel for the time, and used to awesome effect. A massive influence on Jim O’Rourke (just ask him) and I’ll bet Fennesz is well aware of this disc as well. Ace photo of a tennis court on the cover too (a pretty Minimalist sport, when you think about it).” Roberto Cacciapaglia: “It speaks about the adventures of six notes, quattro bemolle, la, si, re and mi plus the fa and the sol that repeat and combine themselves in all of their possibilities. It is like a microscopic and slow motion vision. It exasperates the analysis of details and eviscerates the mechanisms with which music unravels itself and changes. In this way, awareness is made of even one single note and this consciousness can be lived and maximized.”

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Franco Battiato
Battiato [aka Za] (Ricordi LP 1977, reissued by Artis)

Giusto Pio
Motore Immobile (Cramps LP 1978, reissued by Cramps)

“Two more Italian Minimal masterpieces. Battiato released a bunch of progressive LPs in the 70s, some of which Water has been reissuing on CD in the US (although they can be found as budget CDs in Europe) and found pop stardom in the 80s. The first side of this album, “Za”, is his most explicitly Minimal piece, and it’s a doozy. Pianist Antonio Ballista plays one lustrous chord over and over, but depresses the damper pedal-cutting the attack short, he lets melodies emerge from the sympathetically vibrating strings. After about 8 minutes he changes chords, and repeats the process, then goes back to the original chord. It sounds electronic, but is totally acoustic-just brilliant. Pio was/is (?) an associate of Battiato’s and MOTORE IMMOBILE was his debut LP. On the first side/title track, he uses a droning organ and moves from triad to triad, superimposing the next one briefly before moving on, occasionally expanding the sound with octave doubling and then just as quickly subtracting the lower tones. Intermittent humming and violin provide additional notes. On the second side, “Ananta”, he uses a piano flourish to introduce each triad, landing on the tonic note each time. Very calm, and very mysterious, this record is as overlooked as they come (part of the appeal, of course).”

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J.B. Smith
Ever Since I Have Been a Man Full Grown & Two Other Prison Songs Sung Unaccompanied (Takoma LP 1965)
Eddie “One String” Jones
One String Blues (Takoma LP 1960, reissued by Gazell records)

“A solo vocal blues album. Smith only uses one, 5-note melody for the whole thing-2 10 minute tracks on side one, and a sidelong piece on side two-the only changes are in the lyrics, which describe his imprisonment and other fun life experiences. To my mind, this is hardcore Minimalism, and shows the blues as one of the genre’s truest sources, a notion which has only been acknowledged by La Monte Young (forget the Forever Bad Blues Band, find the bootlegs with “Bb Dorian Blues fifth day of the hammer” or better yet, consider the one sound installation he did where each chord of a 12-bar blues was sustained for an entire day over 12 days!), Henry Flynt (check out the BACK PORCH HILLBILLY BLUES CD-Volume 1, not Volume 2–on Locust), Jonathan Kane (his FEBRUARY CD on Table of the Elements is a bit rockist in execution for my tastes but pretty solid conceptually), and Tetuzi Akiyama (see the one-chord “Fast Machine” and the post-Hooker droned out boogies on the classic DON’T FORGET TO BOOGIE LP). Another Takoma LP, ONE STRING BLUES is also of note here, at least for Eddie “One String” Hazelton’s tracks, played on a homemade one-string instrument. Finally, any fan of Minimalism (or of Loren Mazzacane Connors) must hear Junior Kimbrough’s “Baby Please Don’t Leave Me”, a solo demo posthumously released on MEET ME IN THE CITY (Fat Possum) which is a monstrous overtone study.”

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Tetuzi Akiyama
Don’t Forget To Boogie! (Idea LP 2003)

“The name of Tetuzi Akiyama will be familiar to purveyors of the potent Japanese Improv scene, whether its playing in Keiji Haino’s Nijiumu, or at the monthly OFF SITE gathering. But this, his third solo album of guitar, will smoke newcomers and familiars alike. Capturing the squirming spirit of John Lee Hooker, Silver Apples, and the Pink Fairies, Don’t Forget to Boogie! is an individualistic one-stringed ego trip that shifts from high-octane fuzz churning to loner tape-collage damage back into the one-man drone cycloningthat recalls the third-eye throb of Tony Conrad’s Four Violins as much as it does that singular lingam wiggle of the Crawlin’ King Snake himself. Recorded straight, with no overdubs, no backing band, the thirteen tracks presented here are rough chunks of the endless rock edited together by Toshimaru Nakamura into an album of weird interludes and epic chug, embodying the most visceral of musics, from Delta blues to Japanoise. Opener “It’s a Boogie Thing” is as messy and greasy as Billy Gibbons’ beard and knuckle hairs, while “With Black Thompson” has a sliding, off-the-cuff feel. “Dead or…” burns and chars like a focused black leather laser for ten solid minutes. There’s more at work than bombastic licks & blooze drone, the etheral beauty of “She’s a B-Girl” shimmers and sustains like the opening of Tim Buckley’s “Lorca” reworked for an Angelo Badalamenti soundtrack. “Way Over the Bridge” is part Angus Young hammer-on, part John Fahey string structuring, whereas end track “City of Gold” is as lucid and pastoral as a John Hurt theme. While similar in approach to the ambient blues assimilation Keiji Haino achieved on the legendary first Fushitsusha, Tetuzi Akiyama’s Don’t Forget to Boogie is more than mere reminder, it’s a monolith of rock.” (Idea Records)

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Earth
Earth 2 – Part 1 & 2 (Sub Pop 1993)

“In a world with Maryanne Amacher and EARTH 2 there is simply no reason for any sober human to listen to Sunn 0))), but if you’re drunk and you like druids and/or dry ice I suppose they’re serviceable…anyway, this is the record that initially inspired them. Unlike a lot of more recent noise underground stuff, which (to me) is relatively factorable, this is technically boggling drone music–the sustain is achieved not just with distortion but through overdubbing, and there’s clean guitars in there too–even on headphones it’s hard to tell what the fuck they’re really doing. On this album, Earth set up a drone and place a few choice metal riffs against it over the course of forty minutes, at which point they just let the drone chord ring for another half hour. I remember standing in a record store looking at this CD’s awful front cover and goofy fake consumer endorsements on the back, then thinking back to Byron Coley’s glowing review in Forced Exposure and asking myself “Is this really the right record?” It was. Hard to remember how completely unfashionable this was in the heyday of grunge, even with the SubPop connection (my copy was bought used, not long after it came out, for $7 and I don’t think I ever saw a new copy at the time), but it sounded great then and holds up quite well now.”

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David Rosenboom
Brainwave Music (compilation released on A.R.C. 1976, reissued on EM)

“Rosenboom was a 70s New Music guy who performed with La Monte Young and helped organize the first important show of sound sculpture in North American (documented on another release on A.R.C., THE SOUNDS OF SOUND SCULPTURE). This first rate LP was beautifully reissued on CD by the highly intriguing EM label in Japan last year. The sidelong “Portable Gold and Philosopher’s Stones (Music from Brains in Fours)” uses brain waves to trigger synths. A spiralling, oozing piece, it’s the best analog synth Minimalism I’ve heard this side of David Borden, Horacio Vaggione’s “Ending”, or Keith Fullerton Whitman’s recent release on Heavy Tapes. The other tracks, “Chilean Draught” and “Piano Etude (Alpha)” use rapid-fire, repetitive piano figures, like Fred Rzewski on speed or something, combined with an odd and effective text about environmental disaster in South America on the former and more brain waves on the latter.”

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Julius Eastman
Gay Guerrilla (1980, available on the compilation ‘Unjust Malaise‘, New World Records 2005)

“In 2005 New World gallantly released a 3CD set of Julius Eastman’s music, UNJUST MALAISE, which contains a fine recording of his four-piano piece “Gay Guerrilla” (one of my favourite pieces of music ever, period). The set is superb but I’ve heard stuff that didn’t make it on which is even better than some of the released selections.” “The music of those who die young is often difficult to retrieve, but Eastman was a special case. Not only was he disorganized to begin with, his possessions had been scattered when he was evicted from his apartment. Many of his scores will likely never be recovered. He is rumored to have written a symphony: Does it exist? If so, can its notation be deciphered and implemented? Like so many composers on the Downtown scene, Eastman did not notate in neat,conventional ways. His style came partly from the tradition started by Terry Riley’s In C, in which isolated melodic fragments are to be repeated any number of times the performer wishes. The Downtown scene was a scene of composers performing their own music, and (as with the piano parts of Mozart’s concertos) there was no reason to notate every detail,since instructions could be communicated to the performer; also, the minimalist trend led to works whose exact notation would be cumbersome and contrary to the spirit of the music. Downtown music was something of a compromise between classical music and pop, with identifiable structures whose details were left to the performer or even to chance. (…) The multiple piano works are all made up of repeated notes or figures, with timings given to indicate when the pianists move to the next section (in the Minneapolis performance, I held up time cards to indicate the beginning of each new section). The organic form is less obvious than in Joan D’Arc because there is no regular aural cue as to the beginning of each section. Through most of Crazy Nigger, for instance, a new phrase begins every 90 seconds. The pieces modulates imply by the addition of new pitches and the eventual subtraction of old ones, creating dissonance and ambiguity whenever more pitches are present than fit in one key. The distinguishing feature of Gay Guerrilla is a propulsive “badadDUM, badaDUM” rhythm, heard in counterpoint with a slower motive of alternating whole- or half-steps. Eventually the music begins to move through harmonies at a quicker rate in that rhythm, and finally through the tonal fog appears Martin Luther’s hymn “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” in octaves, cumulatively multiplying in counterpoint with itself and being quite subversively transformed, given the intention implied by Eastman’s title, as a gay manifesto. The piece dies away in canonic lines rising at different times in each piano.’ (from the liner notes by Kyle Gann)

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Arthur Russell
Tower of Meaning – part 1 & 2 (Chatham Square LP 1983, reissued on the compilation ‘First Thought Best Thought’, Audika 2006)

“Before disco, and before the transcendent echoes, Arthur Russell wanted to be a composer. His journey began in 1972, leaving Iowa to study Indian classical composition with Ali Akbar Khan in Northern California and ending two years later in New York at the Manhattan School of Music. In that brief period Arthur met and worked with several musicians and poets that would guide his work throughout the remainder of the decade: Allen Ginsburg, Christian Wolff, Jackson MacLow, Rhys Chatham, Philip Glass, Elodie Lauten, and Ernie Brooks. First Thought Best Thought collects Arthur Russell’s out of print instrumental and orchestral compositions along with over 45 minutes of previously-unreleased material on two CDs. Initially intended to be performed in one 48 hour cycle, ‘Instrumentals’ was in fact only performed in excerpts a handful of times as a work in progress. The legendary performances captured live in New York at The Kitchen and Franklin St. Arts Center include the cream of that era’s downtown new music scene including Ernie Brooks, Rhys Chatham, Jon Gibson, Peter Gordon, Garrett List, Andy Paley, Dave Van Tiegham, and Peter Zummo. Included here is the previously unreleased ‘Instrumentals’ Vol. 1 along with ‘Instrumentals’ Vol. 2 that has been out of print for over twenty years. Originally released in 1984, sections of ‘Instrumentals’ Vol. 2 were incorrectly mastered at half speed, and have been now corrected for this compilation. ‘Reach One’ is one of Arthur’s earliest compositions dating back to 1973. The hypnotic soundscape was written and performed for two Fender Rhodes pianos, and is previously unreleased. One of the holy grails in Arthur’s discography, ‘Tower Of Meaning’ is a beautiful and stunningly moving orchestral work. Conducted by the late Julius Eastman, ‘Tower Of Meaning’ was originally released in a limited private edition of only 320 copies. ‘Sketch For The Face Of Helen’ shares only the same title as the previously released excerpt from 1981. Inspired by his work with friend and composer Arnold Dreyblatt, this previously unreleased version was recorded with an electronic tone generator, keyboard and ambient recordings of a rumbling tugboat from the Hudson River.” (Audika Records)

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Maryanne Amacher
Sound Characters (Tzadik 1999)

“Tzadik released Maryanne Amacher’s SOUND CHARACTERS in 1999-a mere stereo CD can’t really do her sound art justice, but it’s reasonably representative”. “Marianne Amacher is one of electronic music’s truly legendary mavericks, whose music has been presented almost exclusively in huges spaces and installations for the past twenty years. This diverse collection of electronic soundscapes and “ear-dances” was chosen by the composer especially for Tzadik to work in the more intimate settings of compact disc. Spectacular acoustical effects take you to expansive worlds of dancing difference tones and psychedelic sonorities. A rare release by one of the most reclusive and elusive of today’s musical visionaries”. (Tzadik)

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various Terry Jennings recordings
“Jennings appears on vol. 3 of John Cale’s NEW YORK IN THE 60s set on Table of the Elements, lending his sax to a piece called “Terry’s Cha Cha”. Cale (Jennings’ one-time roommate) plays a kind of cha cha blues on organ, and Angus MacLise does his best to hold his free spirit in check long enough to keep time on tambourine. Jennings’ fabled “Piece for Cello and Saxophone” appears on the new Charlotte Moorman CELLO ANTHOLOGY 4CD box set on Algha Marghen, a duo performance that Moorman and Jennings did in 1964 at Judson Hall. Lasting less than 4 minutes, it’s a quick dash through the piece, but then again I’m used to the La Monte Young/Charles Curtis version, which can last up to 90 minutes.”

In Charles Curtis‘ words:
“Jennings’ music manages to combine a bleakness, an austerity, with a kind of tendernes, that is indescribably poignant. The word bittersweet is rarely as accurately applied as it is to his music. It is a state that very few composers have ever captured; first and foremost, there is Schubert of the Winterreise; and then there are moments in Bach, in Purcell, in late Chopin, and occasionally in Debussy; and almost nothing else comes to mind. Perhaps the particular element that Jennings captures is one that is not familiar to the more forthright, dramatic, spectacular composers. Perhaps his reticence, his impossible personality, his personal problems, made him privy to a fleeting moment of beauty that is revealed in such detail to only a very few.”

Does anyone has recordings of Charles Curtis versions?

By the way: DO check out Charles’ performances of Morton Feldman’s 80-minute cello and piano work, Patterns in a Chromatic Field, with pianist Aleck Karis (on Tzadik), as well as pieces he did by Lamote Young (Just Charles & Cello in The Romantic Chord, Unofficial Release), Alvin Lucier (Alvin Lucier, out on Sigma Editions/Antiopic, in collaboration with clarinetist Anthony Burr), and Eliane Radigue (Naldjorlak – which I organised at Argos last year – has recently been published by Shiiin). Wonderful man, wonderful musician. See him at work live when you can. Interview here.

addendum: Also check out Sharing A Sonority, which recently came out on Alga Marghen. These previously unavailable recordings document some collaborations between Charlemagne Palestine, Terry Jenning, Bob Feldman, Tony Conrad and Rhys Chatham in he 1960 and ’70’s. It features a great duo for piano and sax performed by Charlemagne Palestine and Terry Jennings in 1974. “The two composers happened to play together in very private concerts at Cal Arts, but never recorded those sessions, until a special day when Charlemagne happened to have a little tape recorder around. The recording was considered lost for more than 30 years, when finally a copy was found thanks to Tony Conrad.” The disc also features a duo by Palestine and Feldman playing electronics and flute, recorded around 1967. The last track is the first 30 minutes of a recording by The Fundamental D Flat Group performing in Db. “During one trip back to NYC from Cal Arts, Charlemagne Palestine was invited by Tony Conrad (together with Rhys Chatham) to Albright College in New Jersey for a Sunday afternoon concert. That was the first and last time The Fundamental D Flat Group played in public (Tony Conrad: violin, horn, string drone; Rhys Chatham: flute, organ, string drone; Charlemagne Palestine: voice, pipes, snifter). Although the piece lasted all afternoon, the first 30 minutes were the only portion recorded during the performance”.