Thursday, February 17, 2022

Transfigured States

How does the this world’s reality differ from our everyday reality?

This isn't a question of specific content so much as a question of how reality itself works. It's about the extent to which the storyworld depicts events, beings, forces, etc. invisible from within the normal world, bringing the invisible into sight There are infinite possible answers. (Perhaps musical diegesis is always an altered state of some kind.) So we’ll focus on just two forms of departure from our everyday reality.

The Voice of All Things

Luffy and Momo hear the millenium-old elephant Zunesha's voice

Zones without people, at their most expressive extreme, veer beyond the picturesque into animism. At this point, the assertion that “nature, machines, data streams . . .  sing songs of their own'' is more than a cute turn of phrase; it's a literal description of what’s happening in the music. What you discover in this state is the unvoice: a layer in the mix that’s not a human voice, yet has an eerie resemblance to speech. It's a matter of both timbre and movement, of the sound's articulation of vowels/consonances and its rhythmic cadences. Reaching this level of mimicry without electronic means is difficult but not impossible (c.f. two moments in John Fahey's "Voice of the Turtle"). As a listener, you’re free to interpret these moments of sonic pareidolia as coincidental or in more fantastical ways. The latter is of course more fun.

Basic Channel - Lyot Rmx is a vision of a world so posthuman it feels like another level of reality. There are no traces of nature as we know it. Buildings are distant geometric shapes with bases that must span miles. Energy fields and floating trains of machinery snake through them against the pitch black sky, like clouds moving through a mountain range. Arcs of electricity run in parallel to the moving skyway that carries you along. Each element drifts independently, yet they’re all in perfect sync; the world’s now a completed puzzle. But Lyot Rmx is more than a 12 minute establishing shot, it’s a meeting. We hear the unvoice first as an ephemeral murmur in the distance, perhaps an auditory hallucination. After a minute it reaches the foreground and becomes more constant, allowing us to better discern its texture. Instead of resolving anything, this close encounter heightens the mystery. Whatever’s speaking isn’t some cute 90s computer voice, nor does it possess our mere squishy vocal chords. Its speech pops and fizzles and above all resonates in irregular yet calm, thoughtful cadences. It’s probably not speaking to you, too insignificant to merit attention; it’s speaking beyond you—you’re simply allowed to hear. This being is a denizen [or perhaps guardian] of a world in which all traces of dirt and decay were expunged, transcended long ago. Although it’s devoid of emotional “fire”, Lyot Rmx offers an incredibly vivid depiction of a certain archetype of dream-utopia, rendered in a perfect color palette. 


Tetsu Inoue - “Low of Vibration” in another product of the analogue “filter science" of the mid 90s, but occurs in a different sort of transcended world. Here the earth is still intact: you hear chimes, bubbling water, and occasional rumbling deep underground. Starlight shimmers off a lake, and sparks of prana cast wispy, slightly delayed bursts of steam. Shadowy, undefined shapes dart in and out, most notably a minor deity that speaks in gurgling tones. This universe doesn't move in a master design; it’s a universe of happy accidents. You spend a long time waiting, still and observant. Then finally, the moment comes; something's here. When the unvoice shows up, you immediately grasp its importance. Whereas the being in “Lyot Rmx” was indifferent toward you, this one cares about you. It wants to heal you. It sings a slow, repetitive lullaby, a song of the earth and waters. 

In / Away: The Magic Portal  

There are magic moments in which the portal opens or closes. It’s here that music’s ability to evoke a different kind of reality most comes through. The world around you bends, stretches, changes color, changes substance, switches to somewhere else entirely; previously undetected forces and beings become perceptible on entry, melt away on exit. The process itself can range from a violent shock to a gentle wake up. 

While there are many great moments of portal-opening in electronic music (for example, the first ten seconds of Laserdisc Visions - "Mind Access"), it's rarer to get an unforgettable moment of Closing. Take “Bohor” by Iannis Xenakis, which is a 20 minute field recording of a haunted treasure room. You hear strange bells and shouting in the distance, implying that the room itself is incredibly vast, and that there's a ceremony of some kind happening on the other side. This cacophony seems to draws closer at times, but it's not an event you'd want to be caught intruding upon. Still more concerning are the beings roving through the pyramids of metal trinkets around you in sinuous paths. (Their motion doesn't seem to be that of human footsteps.) There are many other flickers of otherworldly activity. So when you first hear a rippling noise in a far corner, you don't quite realize what's happening. It's only when the process spreads to other regions of the cave that it becomes apparent: the mirage is dissolving. This process continues until, for the last few minutes of the piece, you're left in a cold wasteland decorated by sheets of plastic roaring in the wind. With it's title's allusion to a lesser-known Arthurian knight, "Bohor" employs modernist aesthetic sensibilities toward a mythical vision. The space you've spend 20 minutes (or much longer) in floats, invisible, throughout the world in which this story occurs, materializing and soon disappearing at unexpected places and times. To find it (and there must be some good reason to want to reach a place so terrifying), you have to wander deep into the tundra of plastic and hope a miracle occurs.


As far as Openings go, the soundscape compositions of Barry Truax offer both a beautiful realization and a cautionary tale. By the late 80s Truax had made a name for himself in the world of academic electronic music with experiments like “Riverrun”, a James Joyce-themed work of granular synthesis macro-evolution. But it’s his work with field recordings in the following decade that's really interesting. Beneath their academic facades, these compositions stem from a yearning to travel off the map, reach lands never glimpsed beyond a small grainy photo buried on page 847 of a geology textbook…  obscure, lush climates with no memory.

A resident of the Pacific Northwest, Truax must’ve felt the call of the Pacific Ocean (with its gray infinity, ant-sized cargo ships on the horizon, prehistoric canoe routes)—the same feeling I got as a kid looking out at it, the feeling that something’s out there awaiting you. It’s the mystery of this force that he brilliantly evokes with “Pacific Fanfare”. The piece begins with a bricolage of shipyard sounds. It’s a compelling soundscape, but more or less everyday reality. Suddenly, after 30 seconds of this, you’re
in: the opening foghorn returns, but this time its texture is strangely different, and instead of ending the sound elongates into infinity, setting in motion a continuum of coarse yet diaphanous textures that envelops your surroundings. The continuum changes with a slowness approaching complete suspension. From its fractal depths voices murmur. Certain sound events moving at a more human speed pass by; at times recognizable from the dockyard, but in altered forms. Finally, another nautical horn from the opening sequence returns, now in a lower register, coalescing into a brief yet majestic melody that signals the journey’s end. Just as the vision's fading away, you hear the most beautiful sound yet, an unchoir on the horizon. Despite all that’s been revealed, the mystery remains, calling you from farther still beyond the coast.

“Pendlerdrøm”, composed the following year, explores the same basic premise in a different setting. By Truax’s own account, the piece follows a train ride away from Copenhagen in which you, the commuter, drift out of reality, into a dream-state, and then wake up. (This happens twice.) Whereas “Pacific Fanfare” is the length of a 60s pop song,
“Pendlerdrøm” is spread out over 12 minutes, and much of that time is spent on the mundane: train doors opening and shutting, luggage being stowed, footsteps, small talk, someone blowing their nose, etc. And the dreamstates themselves are underwhelming, never reaching the strangeness or beauty of “Pacific Fanfare”. With it’s easily discernible narrative, “Pendlerdrøm“ was no doubt the more carefully constructed piece. But sometimes a deeper magic reveals itself in the tossed-off, unclarified, and intuitive. On “Pendlerdrøm”, Truax makes the mistake of confusing a basic tenet of how we perceive electronic music for the idea for a specific composition. It’s a reminder that none of the concepts we’ve discussed are enough to justify a work of music on their own. For the listener and the creator alike—they’re the dream-making tools, not the dreams.

No comments:

Post a Comment