Acousmania

Stretch Out Time

Thu, 06 Dec 2007 16:13:29 GMT

It turned out that John Kealey, who wrote a highly critical review (apologies to John - I originally described it as a 'bad' review, which gives the wrong impression) of my book about Faust, is also on the Faust mailing list, so I mailed him this defence:

1) "The problem with this book is that it is written as a fan's view on the band and not as a "proper" book on the band"

I don't believe that 'proper' books about music exist in any meaningful way. A partial, lopsided, idiosyncratic view is the only one that matters - as long as the author is honest about it being so and doesn't posture as having achieved neutral objectivity. Books that have that kind of approach tend to end up being not much more than scrap books of press statements.

2) "Another irritation ... is that despite it being a book on Faust, Wilson spends an inordinate amount of time discussing Frank Zappa."

I use Zappa as a lens through which to talk about music, in relation to Faust. the amount of zappa-talk in the book is not supposed to be an index of how much he 'influenced' Faust.

If I paint a landscape from my window, I wouldn't expect to be criticised for overemphasising the importance of windows (so to say.)

3) Historically / objectively, I think I provide something more interesting than an account of the comings and goings, movements and thoughts of the individuals in Faust. I try to paint a picture of the world of popular/rock music in a way that lights up Faust's place within it. I don't try to psychoanalyse the members of the group or provide biographies, but I provide a (rough) psycho-political analysis of the world that, I think, makes their significance and achievement more apparent.

4) "If Faust made music in a relative vacuum it is counter-intuitive spend so much time discussing influences"

But did i actually do that? I'm not sure that I was at all interested in 'influences' in any traditional sense. I was more interested in historical symmetries and convergences, quite apart from any line of direct 'influence', which tends to be interesting only in inverse proportion to the thing being 'influenced'. No one has ever talked about the influences on God, for example, whereas the influences on Oasis and obvious and manifold ;-)

5) "It is a shame that Wilson did not try to ... carry out new interviews with engineer Kurt Graupner and producer Uwe Nettelbeck"

That was largely because someone else was doing that at the same time, preparing a - ahem - 'proper' book. this has not (yet?) appeared. Even then, i probably wouldn't have tried. I would consider that a job for someone engaged in, let's say, a less interesting view of things :-)

In short, the reason I published the book myself was purely because if I had taken it to a traditional music book publisher they would have insisted that I take out all of the idiosyncratic bits in order to focus it more neatly on a traditional (bourgeois, literalist, ahistorical, pseudo-objective) history that would surely have been useful as a crib on what happened when (as if that really mattered), but, imho, would not be nearly so illuminating (again, you can light up a room from only one corner of it).

What we need isn't a 'proper book' on Faust, but five hundred personal, idiosyncratic, lopsided, hugely over-opinionated books about them.

Imagine that, after the very first Faust rehearsal, one of the group had said; "that's all very well, and quite interesting in it's own way, but what we need to do is start making proper music, with a proper beginning, middle and end, and a normal structure that anyone who has read - sorry, heard - other songs can easily understand"..?

would you have put that guy in charge of musical direction, or packed him off to get a job shuffling papers ;-)

Toothache

Thu, 29 Nov 2007 18:06:28 GMT

Today I have a splendid toothache - pain running up the left side of my face onto the top of my head. Probably an abscess on the way. It makes me want to write poetry. Not nice poetry. Not, like, poesy. Even better, someone is playing Killing Joke on the jukebox and I hear it for what it is, ie., sub fascist howling. Ibuprofen isn't helping.

Sunseastar - Fjaerland

Fri, 23 Nov 2007 16:07:03 GMT

When I had a series of brain hemorrhages a few years ago I had to have brain surgery that almost killed me. For a while it looked like I would probably die, and I decided that, if I lived, I ought at least to write a book and release an album of music. The last time I posted here it was to announce the release of my book about Faust (Faust: Stretch Out Time), and yesterday I finally got copies of the album Fjaerland, which I recorded as part of sunseastar alongside Simon Crab.

According to the sleeve notes: "These recordings are the first result of several years of work. Crab and I had worked together in his group Bourbonese Qualk before starting sunseastar as a separate project with its own agenda. The idea was inspired by listening to Xenakis and thinking about a physicists’ joke about how uncanny it is that nature can solve differential equations instantaneously. The stochastic processes Xenakis uses to construct his music are all around us anyway. From this thought came the idea of taking a short cut around the hard work Xenakis had to do, and making musique concrete based directly on the sound of chaotic processes – the sound of chains rattling, of rain falling, of a field of sheep sounding their bells together, of the sea crashing on the shore, of insects moving through grass."

More information here

Buy it from Dirter promotions

Faust Book Launched

Fri, 06 Oct 2006 15:35:03 GMT

The book is finally done. For info see and ordering The Faust Pages

The book jacket reads:

"In 1970 Polydor Records funded an unusual experiment. They gave some unknown German musicians a retreat in the countryside near Hamburg, equipped it with a studio and their best engineer, then left them free to do as they liked. This is the story of Faust and the music they made between 1970 and 1975, music which continues to inspire and confound listeners to this day. Along the way, Andy Wilson recounts the rise of Krautrock and its connection with the social upheavals of the late '60s and early '70s. He also discusses the role of time in music, takes a swing at Frank Zappa and looks in detail at the records Faust made in their heroic years. "

Buy it from The Faust Pages, or from Amazon.uk or Amazon.com

Faust: Stretch Out Time

Sun, 20 Aug 2006 15:08:18 GMT

I've been quiet because I'm spending all my time finishing my book about Faust - Stretch Out Time 1970-75. It's an account of their early years, with reviews of all the early albums as well as essays on Krautrock, time, Frank Zappa and live reviews. There's still a bit of work to do. I'll be updating the Faust Pages with news as it happens.

Celibidache

Wed, 05 Jul 2006 11:38:01 GMT

I'm reading some essays about the Romanian conductor Sergiu Celibidache (1912-1996), who taught Dumitrescu and seems to have had a great influence on him. Many of the big themes in Dumitrescu's ideas are addressed already by Celibidache - Husserl and phenomenology, Zen and so on. He seems like a rare character, very forceful and opinionated. One seismic difference between the two is over the question of recording - Celibidache famously was against his work being recorded, while Dumitrescu considers the recording to be everything (during Acousmania 2006 I overheard him saying that a CD is not a 'copy' of the music but is 'an original')

New Music and Stalinism

Mon, 19 Jun 2006 15:40:29 GMT

Ever since I first worked it out, it has seemed more than coincidence was at work in the fact that Xenakis, Ligeti and Dumitrescu all have their roots in a single country, Romania. How comes three of the most profound composers of the last century shared this history? And how might their circumstances have affected their work?

Why Romania in particular should be implicated I can't yet say, though I am keen to find out, but it seems to me that, certainly in the case of Ligeti and Dumitrescu, one factor might be that the very repression and conformity promoted by the Communist Parties had a paradoxically beneficial effect.

The background to the story is the All Union Congress of Composers held in Moscow in 1948, which endorsed the policies of Andrei Zhdanov, introducing bizarre criteria of what music would be politically acceptable. All this was carried through by loyal party hacks such as Hans Eisler. Ligeti's Romanian Concerto was banned by party apparatchiks simply because it has a passage where an F sharp is heard in the context of F major: one of the guiding principles of Communist stupidity in art was that socialist art would reject dissonance and conflict, reflecting the official lie that dissonance and conflict had been abolished in society. This led them even to condemn the music of village bands as not being 'real' folk music because it too was dissonant. Under Communism music had to be formally uncontroversial, easily comprehended and speaking with 'the voice of the people'. As 'the people' had effectively been demoralised, disorganised and dispersed to be replaced by atomised slaves of the state, what this meant in reality was that art should unambiguously reflect the needs of the ruling party at any moment.

As part of the same mechanisms of control, the 'degenerate art' of the west (they used exactly the same terms as the Nazis to describe modern art) had to be expunged, banned and embargoed, making it very difficult for radical composers in the east to connect with the details of the modernist tradition. Instead, crucially, they had to connect with it largely through their imagination.

Ligeti's wife managed to get a copy of Adorno's 'Philosophy of Modern Music', which helped give him the confidence to develop new ideas about his radically dissonant and chromatic 'black music'. But once the impetus was received he had to develop the resulting music in private and largely in secret. Dumitrescu too talks of how, being cut off from the western music practically, he connected to it in his imagination, attempting in private to keep up with the tremendous pace of change he imagined taking place without him in London, Paris and New York. In a strange way, their very isolation led them to make even more astounding leaps into the unknown.

Ligeti comments on how odd he used to find it when people asked him who he wrote his music for - as his music was unplayed and unplayable in his own country, he didn't write it for anyone but himself. This very isolation, though, meant that he was relieved the burden of having to cater to any particular audience, and this too surely helped him to move further on in his ideas and investigations.

In its own way, the extent of Stalinist repression in art undermined itself. Not flexible enough to incorporate and occupy their enemy, the Stalinists left them alone to plot and plan their schemes for the total renovation of music. To that extent we can might even be grateful to the bureaucrat, Zhdanov, for indirectly feeding these ambitions. The triumph of the new music over the bureaucratic ideals of 'proletarian culture' or 'socialist realism' is part of the 'revenge of history' which Trotsky always claimed was 'greater than the revenge of the Party Secretary'.

Blaise Pascal

Mon, 19 Jun 2006 14:02:31 GMT

It's Blaise Pascal's birthday (1623-1662). A mathematician, Pascal is credited with first developing the mathematical theory of probability. Later in life he turned to philosophy.

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A vapor, a drop of water suffices to kill him. But, if the universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him, the universe knows nothing of this.
All our dignity then, consists in thought. By it we must elevate ourselves, and not by space and time which we cannot fill. Let us endavour then, to think well; this is the principle of morality."

Pensees #347

Zorn Flops

Sun, 18 Jun 2006 23:47:48 GMT

Tonight was the second of Zorn's residency at The Barbican. Yesterday's results were mixed - the overall picture was messy and unfocussed, but at least we got to see Tony Oxley do his thing for five minutes, which is short but still better than most gigs by anyone else. Miford Graves lent a second breath of life to the proceedings.

Tonight was a tribute to what the MC announced as a major influence on Zorn's work, the 'outsider' Aleister Crowley. Now, Crowley was interesting (if at all) inasmuch as he set out to create an alternate western esoteric tradition. Unfortunately for us he was a failure - not because the project itself was awry but because his character was so shallowly petty-bourgeois at heart that he ended up discrediting the tradition he wanted to build - not the kind of heroic failure you want to celebrate; rather the sort of dismal embarrasment that it might be better to pass over in silence. And what is Zorn's connection with Crowley? As far as I could tell, absolutely nothing beyond the fact that Crowley seems to have kudos as an outsider among people who really need to spend more time getting things into perspective. The fact that Crowley was being celebrated alongside Derek Bailey (to whom the previous nights efforts were dedicated) should casts doubts on Zorn's intentions from the beginning. Still, the work can transcend its inspiration, so it remained to be seen what Zorn would actually make of it all.

There were three, supposedly linked events on offer tonight. First up was a group consisting of Mike Patton (Faith No More, Fantomas) on vocals, Joey Barron (Masada) on drums and Trevor Dunn on bass. They were supposed to present "a hardcore song cycle scored for voice, bass and drums" (already released on Tzadik as 'Moonchild'). Whether they succeeded I can't say, but they turned out to be a decent hard core trio who would go down well turned up louder and playing a sweaty club, maybe The Garage. In The Barbican they looked out of place. I am being generous really: in truth this looked like post-modernist progressive rock; skilled but empty, feeding off the energy of hardcore but adding nothing to it in return.

Next came a film by Crowleyite dimwit and pseudo-rebel Kenneth Anger, about Crowley's paintings. Admittedly I had left the hall by now but I got to catch this section anyway on the handy Barbican TV monitors that let you sneak out to the bar when things get dull, and by this time I was in no mood to spend time with Crowley's daubings. I defy anyone, even the most literally-minded of Thelemic boy scouts, to deny that his paintings are largely dreck. They are even devoid of real biographical significance, as they are too cliched to tell you much about anything, even their author, beyond the most obvious facts. Still, the audience gawped loyally and applauded at the end. OK - maybe they are just very, very loyal.

The clincher came with the last piece, 'Evocation of a Neophyte and How the Black Arts were Revealed unto Her by the Demon Baphomet', which, says the marketing "brings the mystery of Enochian Ritual into the Barbican through a beautiful new work for soprano soloist, mixed choir, harp, contrabassoon and percussion, performed by musicians from the London Sinfonietta, conducted by Brad Lubman". What this meant in practice was a soporific limp through music that would struggle to make it as the soundtrack to the least memorable of Hammer Horror films. The choir and harpist ran through some painful consonances while the percussionists struggled to sound portentious. On a scale of one to ten, I would say that Zorn pulled this out of his arse when he was completely out of ideas. Astoundingly, when it was all over it was met with a torrent of applause, convincing me in a flash that Zorn's fans have the soggiest and most limp of conformist insticts. I believe they were applauding themselves for listening to 'classical music'. Presumably the choir were in shock that this crock went down at all.

I saw Zorn's Naked City play the Bluecoat Gallery in Liverpool almost twenty years ago. That night there was a smack of danger about. Five minutes into an explosive set a quarter of the audience had left. Tonight, not a soul stirred as they were treated to a gobful of hard-core frolics then pissed on from a great height by a musician - I mean Zorn - who has made a name and a career for himself as a maverick but who, at close quarters, seems devoid of inspiration.

Note to Tony Oxley, Milford Graves and George Lewis - ditch your connection with this guy; you don't need it.

Zorn at The Barbican

Sun, 18 Jun 2006 11:02:29 GMT

I went to The Barbican yesterday to see John Zorn, Milford Graves, Tony Oxley, Gavin Bryars, Bill Laswell, George Lewis and Mike Patton play a tribute to Derek Bailey. They played in various permutations, but nothing they did could stop me feeling that Zorn is over-rated. Tony Oxley was outstanding, of course, and Milford Graves is a great drummer too (and I was seeing him for the first time) but, that apart, I thought what was played was generic free jazz (far from being the contradiction in terms it ought to be), with little to distinguish it from lots of other free playing you can see without first being fleeced for £25.

I should add that it was something of a treat to see George Lewis play. I've seen film of him before which didn't have a great impact, but tonight there was a sort of poetic integrity to his contributions, as well as a light touch (quite welcome after Laswell's ham fisted efforts). By coincidence, on the day of the concert I happened to be reading his essay on 'Improvised Music After 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives', which struck me at first as just Black Nationalist special pleading but, the more I read it, the more convinced I was about the *extent* to which European art music embodies a reaction to innovations in Jazz (which Lewis claims works as the 'epistemological other' of European art music). I mean, I know there's a debt, but he really emphasises how crucial Jazz was to these changes, as well as showing how, eg., Cage tried to supress the debt.

Ligeti Dies

Wed, 14 Jun 2006 19:43:25 GMT

The great Hungarian composer Gyorgi Ligeti died yesterday. His music was full of detail and (a new type of) movement, and he developed a number of ideas and techniques about timbre and the non-tonal aspects of music. Others can comment on his life and music, but his death made me think again how odd it is that he was eclipsed in the popular imagination (give or take his contribution to A Space Odyssey) by the likes of Steve Reich, Philip Glass and John Adams and, even more antiseptic, Michael Nyman or Gavin Bryars.

There should be a campaign to turn the tables and promote the tradition of Ligeti and, even more so, of Xenakis and, today, Iancu Dumitrescu. We could get really militant about it and protest outside the venues for minimalist performances, getting into trouble with their supporters. If anyone gets the manifesto together, I'll join.

Mullahs and Miners

Wed, 14 Jun 2006 18:06:40 GMT

I see that the British Socialist Workers Party (SWP) this year at their annual Marxism event have added a prayer room, presumably for the benefit of their new allies from the Muslim Council of Britain. Strange - they never catered to any other religion in the past. The old Communist Party's Popular Front used to be condemned by Trotskyists as an alliance of 'Bishops and Brickies', but times have moved on, and now we have the new phenomenon of 'Mullahs and Miners'... if only they could get some miners involved.

Web 2.0

Wed, 07 Jun 2006 12:56:38 GMT

Yesterday I was at a conference about Web 2.0, with speakers from MySpace, Yahoo and more. The gist is that the marketing industry is terrified that something is happening they haven't yet branded, and they are desparate to 'increase mind share' and 'leverage the values of traditional media into the new social networks'. I may have to write an article about it.

The most interesting argument was from the Yahoo! speaker, who had done years of research at MIT on computer vision. His epiphany came when he realised 'why create computer vision when there are millions of people out there with real eyes that you can put to work for you' (i'm paraphrasing). Well, that's the plan - corporations will spend money creating enticing environments where you are put to work (maybe unknowingly, but somehow willingly) categorising and tagging content for them, helping them refine their products, and all the rest of it.

"O brave new world, that has such people in't!"

Bucharest

Fri, 12 May 2006 09:35:53 GMT

Bucharest is great - nice people, mad architecture, cheap. I went to the Museum of Modern Art, on three stories, and was the only visitor. It was like entering another possible world, where the Impressionists were all Romanian. The buildings are either Communist monoliths in concrete or charming but dilapdated Mediterranean piles, with crumbling brickwork and trellises.

Acousmania the festival was astounding. The highlights included Earle Howard doing Cage's Radio Music (esp. the bit where you could hear Sandy Shaw singing Puppet on a String), performances of Dumitrescu's 'Antimemoires' and Avrams 'On the Abolition of the Soul', Tim Hodginson's and Robert Reigel's solos, Gustavo Aguilar's piece, and some of the films shown at the end. There was so much music - twelve hours over three days - I will have to write an essay or something. First I'll edit the recordings I made and listen to it all again. Perhaps I will do a radio program on Resonance or something to play some of the music.

Avram and Dumitrescu are the worlds best hosts - looking after me throughout, with the help of the young composer Petru Teodorescu. I just listened to a collection of his work on CD.... noisy and active.

Acousmania

Thu, 04 May 2006 11:55:45 GMT

Tomorrow I'm flying to Bucharest to attend the Acousmania 2006 festival, an international festival of electronic music, where there will be music by: Iannis Xenakis, Rainer Boesch, Pierre Henry, Iancu Dumitrescu, Ana-Maria Avram, John Cage, Edgar Varèse, Chris Cutler, Costin Cazaban, Tim Hodgkinson, Fred Frith, Octav Nemescu, Gérard Pape and others, as well as video art and films. Maybe I will get a chance to report on the festival as it happens.

If you don't know, here's a good description and explanation of what is Acousmatic Music