Audio Animation (A Chronological Survey)

Before we move on, I'd like to expand on the idea of there being an audio animation canon. What follows is just a sketch. A test run. But even a woefully incomplete charting of this history may be of interest. I've organized my thoughts in terms of "phases" because different generations have discovered different ways of animating. Of course, there's always diversity within a generation. But the trailblazers who emerge during a certain era tend to share an underlying angle of approach. In the next few posts, we’ll investigate more specific listening principles. But for now, an attempt at taking in the big picture...

Free Flowing Environments: The First Phase

The early masterpieces of audio animation were fever dreams of high modernism. It was during this epoch that the inchoate tradition was least tempered by compromise with conventional notions of musicality. Motion was wild and utterly free. Sound flurries shot at hyperspeed across vast distances; disjointed audio fragments acted as flashing vision-sequences; sounds cascaded up and down, chirped melodiously in mechanical birdsong, and slept in slowly undulating drones, as though they were waves on an alien ocean. The music has a visceral pull, but it’s a physicality that takes you outside your own body. The listening experience is often like astral projection or soul flight, disembodied travel through elemental and supernatural forces. And in the space age imagination, this sort of travel may take you far beyond Earth's atmosphere. As in the cave paintings of Lascaux, the cosmos is foregrounded while the human subject is barely there.  

The simplest form of audio animation is the sound effect. As lofty and uncompromising as this epoch was, its roots were in a more utilitarian notion of diegetic sound. Pierre Schaeffer had years of experience creating effects for radio by the time he formally began the project of musique concrète, and his early collaborations with Pierre Henry often reflect the narrative and imagistic beginnings of his work with sound. The BBC Radiophonic Workshop followed a similar trajectory, with its origins in simple effect-generation evolving into more elaborate musical projects. Tod Dockstader designed sounds for Tom and Jerry during his fledgling years as a composer. Louis and Bebe Barron were also heavily involved in film; their experiments blurred the line between soundtrack and sound effect.

If any of the earliest major institutions appeared philosophically antithetical to audio animation, it was the WDR studio in Cologne. This school of artists, led by Herbert Eimert, tends to be characterized in the history books as dogmatically idealist. A group of fanatics devoted to the conception of electronic music as pure, unworldly abstraction. Yet even in Cologne, the medium's evocative properties were noticed and discussed. In the first issue of Eimert’s flagship publication Rie Reihe, the composer-critic H. H. Stuckenschmidt identifies the same dynamic that we're now discussing:

As spokesman for [the WDR], Eimert has repeatedly drawn attention to the creative possibilities of electrically generated sound, but has disassociated himself from the “fashionable and surrealistic” Musique Concrète produced at the Club d'Essai in Paris, and any incidental manipulations or distortions haphazardly put together for radio, film or theatre music. He is opposed to all metaphorical synaesthetic interpretation—that is, he is opposed to the idea of composition and interpretation by association and reference. Aesthetic understanding of the new art is not facilitated by this attitude. It cannot be denied that this associative effect, which the initiator denies as being of any relevance, has been the principal reaction of the majority of listeners faced for the first time with electronic music . . .

In that nothing pertaining to electronic music is analogous to any natural existent phenomenon of traditional music, associations have to be evoked from elsewhere . . . The sound mixture is heard in such a manner as to associate it with phenomena experienced by any perceptive listener; it is associated with reverberating projectiles from the mineral domain, with sounding metals, with the music of cylinders . . .

Stuckenschmidt’s wise forecast of audio animation—which he terms “the third stage”—was by no means the end of the matter. Compelling marriages of the WDR’s prized formalist rigor with diegetic evocation came from Rie Reihe's coeditor, Stockhausen. At a time when most works of electronic music amounted to intriguing sketches, Stockhausen’s major works offered glimpses into fully formed universes capable of refracting parts of our world under alternate rules of physics. And, for an enigmatic twist that, as far as I can tell, no one’s ever commented on, it was Eimert himself who authored the WDR’s most cinematic work of electronic music, “Epitaph für Aikichi Kuboyama'' less than a decade later—in which bursts of synthetic sound swoop through the stereo field like dive bombers from the future, and distant shards of rustling metal coalesce into a foreground storm filled with synthetic voices. 

collage by Bernard Parmegiani suggesting the journey from studio to mind's-ear landscape

It was the Paris school, however, that instigated the most interesting work in the long run. An early student of musique concrète (albeit an insubordinate one), Xenakis was one of the few composers in the early days operating on a level of imaginativeness approaching Stockhausen's. Over the course of a decade his work scaled up from the intriguing microverse of “Concrete PH” to the terrifying grandeur of “Persepolis”.  Schaeffer’s appointed successor, Francois Bayle, tellingly began his career as a composer with a work entitled “Uninhabitable Spaces". During his tenure, the Paris school became a kind monastic order where advanced knowledge was developed and passed along in secret.

On the other hand, in what would prove to be a tragic pattern in the history of audio animation, many of the era’s most renowned magicians prematurely abandoned their work. Ligeti, who created one of the most vivid works of 50s audio animation with “Artikulation”, never returned to the medium. Berio, who did likewise with the haunting "Omaggio a Joyce" followed a similar path. Stockhausen, as well, pursued other aesthetic ends after the 60s, only occasionally drawing on its power—most notably in composing the aerial battle of the archangels Lucifer and Michael in Dienstag aus Licht.

Premonitions of Motor-Music: The Transitional Phase

As the prevalence of electronic music increased, its free-flowing aesthetics made contact with an antithetical force: the percussive heartbeat driving popular music. This cultural confluence produced an intriguing variety of effects. In some cases, pop musicians would temporarily sacrifice the beat, their guiding principle, in order to dabble with the new medium. More prescient, however, were the moments when the audio animation ethos began soaking into their primary style of music.

While the older generation acted at times as mentors, or at least supporters of this experimentation, there was no need for direct guidance. Sure, there were groups like Can, who had permission to use Stockhausen's studio during his off days. But aside from Can (or The United States of America, or White Noise...) there were other less connected yet equally adventurous acts. Take The Red Crayola, who hailed from the cultural wastelands* of Texas, yet created an audio animation classic with Parable of Arable Land. The album was made with limited technology—just conventional instruments, various noise-making objects (for example, a motorcycle), and extreme use of panning, reverb, and delay. But the results sound like they were recorded near an entryway to a parallel dimension, a space of acoustic overlap in which the central band is constantly interrupted by cacophonies as murky and strange as Art Bell's alleged audio recording of Hell. The previous generation had opened portals to imaginary worlds in a small handful of high tech labs, but by the late 60s this magic was spreading through the air.

It was during this period that the cult of the electric guitar formed a fragile yet occasionally brilliant alliance with audio animation. The alliance was first and most vividly apparent in the music of Jimi Hendrix. “Voodoo Chile (Slight Return)” is a miraculous moment in which lead guitar becomes an airship in blazing atmospheric entry. The giveaway is the use of space: wild panning creates an illusion of rapid movement that would be impossible for a performer to match onstage. Once you’ve heard Stockhausen’s electronic music, it’s tempting to draw comparisons between Hendrix's guitar and moments like the one around 5:28 in “Kontakte”: UFOs morphing in timbre and pitch as they careen through space. The comparison isn't totally arbitrary, either. Stockhausen had a lifelong fascination with the sounds of airplane flight, and Greg Tate describes Hendrix as similarly obsessed:

He was always interested in recreating these huge industrial sounds. Like the sound he heard the wind make when he jumped out of airplanes. The sound those jet engines made. And, I'm sure, the sound you hear of your own body dropping through space when you're parachuting. He was a paratrooper . . . And, then, he also wanted to recreate what he imagined to be the sounds of spaceships and water sounds—all these kind of huge, roaring, environmental sounds.

The most famous case of this being his rendition of "The Star-Spangled Banner" at Woodstock. The overpowering sublime found in the soundscapes of modern war was a huge (if usually more tacit) source of inspiration for both this generation and the previous one.

The brilliance of this foray into guitar-led audio animation was never duplicated, but its aesthetic tendencies were extended further by krautrock bands like Neu!. The notion of “motorik” drumming seemed to pick up on a latent implication of music like “Voodoo Chile (Slight Return)” and "1983... (A Merman I Should Turn To Be)": if you could hear the guitar as diegetic, why couldn’t you hear the drums that way? Hendrix surely would've approved of the flanged jet engine guitar in “Negativland". (He'd instantly recognized flanging as a revelatory technique, perhaps for how it simulates the rapid movement of air.) Yet just as important to the song’s diegesis is the unflappable forward glide of the drums: machine-like rather than human. Of their contemporaries, Kraftwerk developed this new line of imagination the farthest. The utopian journey of “Autobahn” still retains audible roots in familiar styles, particularly its doo-wop chorus. Yet the sense of motion the song conveys is perfectly in sync with its highway muse, right down to the simulations of cars zooming by. The spirit of audio animation never left rock music entirely, surviving at its peripheries. But a more old-fashioned sort of virtuosity was prioritized in shredding culture. Overall, the 60s and 70s generation proved amnesiac of its audio animation powers. After Kraftwerk, the most exciting developments would happen elsewhere.

The Electric Body Installed: The Second Phase

track-sketch by Autechre

 

 

In the 80s, audio animation became folk music. The epoch was characterized by two major shifts. First, the motions produced by new technology became more rigid, giving the resultant audio a more robotic character. And second, for this generation (which was by far the largest and most diverse yet), the heartbeat pulse of dance music was a matter of first principle. The beat, rather than the stuff around it, became the center of experimentation and advancement. The combined result of these changes was a new style of audio animation that didn't render an environment so much as an avatar: an enhanced mechanical body enfolding the listener. At times these structures hovered in stasis, but mostly they took you on a ride, hurtling eternally forward. It wasn't always clear exactly what these machines were—cars? spaceships? mechs? But regardless, their construction was endlessly varied. Like Iron Man’s suits, the early marks were heavy, lumbering, and awkward, while the later marks were dizzyingly fluid, flexible, and light. Some barely held together as they moved, others maintained motion with total precision. Some could rearrange into new forms mid-flight, or attack their surroundings with slashes and gunfire. Whereas first phase music coveted naturalism, second phase music went for maximum style, conveying diegetic motion the way wildstyle graffiti conveys language.

The question of who invented the electric body is unsolvable, and all the more fiercely contested because of it. The style’s evolution would have been vastly different without the influence of 20th century titans like James Brown and Parliament. But for all the influence their sensibilities had on audio animation, their music was still something older. On the other hand—there’s no shortage of experiments retroactively hailed as proto techno that, however prescient, had little or no impact on its development. In this respect, Kraftwerk are particularly interesting. Although “Autobahn” was a milestone, it was with “Trans Europe Express” that they fully arrived at motorik avatar animation. Less lush and nuanced in its motion-rendering than “Autobahn”, the track streamlined their aesthetic into a pitiless, angular exoskeleton. A closed circuit of axle bearings and pistons, lit up by rhythmelodies and punctuated by vast doppler effect chords. And yet “Trans Europe Express” would’ve been just another intriguing experiment if not for its resonance in cities like New York and Detroit. The connection with Detroit was particularly deep and long lasting. As Kraftwerk's Ralf Hütter put it, "the industrial sound of Motor City and Kraftwerk on the autobahn, there’s a spiritual connection. Automatic rhythms, robotic work, robotic music — all kinds of fantasies are going on." Even if Kraftwerk and Afrika Bambaataa and Cybron hadn’t spread this newly possible marriage of groove and sci fi mechanism, it's likely that the broader shift would’ve happened anyway. But, contingent or not, these artists were catalysts, and their breakthrough moments retain a special aura. The electric body template would be modified in every possible direction afterwards, made more and less austere, simpler and more complicated, slower and faster, squishier and sharper. “Trans Europe Express” wasn’t so much an origin point as a bottleneck, an aesthetic narrowing after which a new body of music expanded outward.

This generation, far more than the previous one, were at ideological odds with the first generation and their disciples. It's tempting to dismiss the latter as mere snobs, eggheads who couldn't comprehend the urge to dance. Yet only a couple of decades earlier, the first phase pioneers had been far more receptive to audio animation’s reach into popular culture. (Pierre Henry, evidently, even felt there was enough aesthetic affinity between rock music and his own work to combine the two in compositions like "Psyché Rock" and "Machine Danse"; Francois Bayle later noted that everyone in his circle in the 60s had been listening to the likes of Hendrix.) So what was different this time? Most likely, that audio animation’s aesthetic departure from their early conception of it was now complete. During the transitional period, beats had been introduced, but the unbounded conception of motion so obsessively developed by the first generation had still been primary. But now the loop-logic of the machine had taken over. From the first generation’s perspective, audio animation had not advanced in these new hands, but regressed. Stockhausen, tellingly, compared Aphex Twin’s track “Didgeridoo” to Pierre Schaeffer's earliest train-loop experiments, describing it as “old fashioned”. Contrary to his reputation these days, Stockhausen was a believer in dance music (even recommending that would-be composers go dancing several times a week). How to reconcile that with his dismissive attitude towards techno, and deeper conviction that we are “imprisoned in our bodies”? Perhaps what was so offensive to the older generation wasn’t so much the proposition of the electric body as the claustrophobia of being eternally stuck inside it.

And yet, as the second phase progressed, it did recover a certain freedom of movement. The production of motorik exoskeletons continued. But these transport vehicles became more and more complicated. Even in the early to mid 80s, when the electric body was at its clunkiest—the slashing sound-arcs generated by scratching brought an otherwise absent flexibility of motion into the mix. This effect had a profound impact on many of jungle's lead animators. Former b-boys like Dj Hype, Aphrodite, and A Guy Called Gerald integrated turntablism's agility into the central frame. As jungle led to drum and bass, drill and bass, and IDM, the electric body gained supersonic propulsion and ultra-finetuned steering capabilities. Comparing Aphex Twin's remix of "Box Energy" to DJ Pierre's already exemplary original illustrates this drastic increase in firepower. Motion reached heights of nuance unheard of since the first phase—making it unsurprising that around this time, the likes of Aphex, Squarepusher, and Autechre started citing old masters like Dockstader and Parmegiani as influences. (Aphex Twin's track "Gwarek2" is an unmistakable pastiche of first phase animation.) Autechre, in particular, developed a unique synthesis of first and second phase aesthetics. Their music become intricate enough to compete with the first phase on its own terms, yet remained steadfastly loyal to early hip hop at its core. Dispersed and complexified to the point of secrecy, the electric body remained the underlying template.

However, like the previous generations, this one was desertion-prone. Kurtis Mantronik held out long enough to upgrade “King of the Beats” to a more advanced model called “King of the Beat 3.0”—but eventually came to view his early acts of kinetic wizardry as played out party tricks, rather than the foundations for a new kind of music. Other luminaries like Ann Dudley, Robert Haigh, and Photek went further, leaving the frontiers to compose orchestral soundtracks and piano music. 4hero likewise moved away from animation efforts like Parallel Universe, especially “The Paranormal in 4 Forms”—returning back down to the concert hall after their pioneering joyride in space.

Other Phases, Past and Possible

All the above only brings us to the turn of the millennium. And even then, it glosses over major developments, particularly ambient, dub, chill out, industrial. While these areas of exploration produced audio animation classics (some of which are mentioned in subsequent posts), my intuition is that the phases identified above were the central developments. For now, we won't get into the first quarter of the 21st century. But it would be a mistake to assume that no more upheavals have happened since the 90s. 

My favorite interpretation, advanced in Neon Screams, is that we're reached a new phase of animation centered on the voice. I've argued before that "vocal psychedelia" can be found throughout the history of electronic music. But in the first and second phase, voice-animation usually had a depersonalizing effect. The voice was just another sculpting material. Whereas the "humanized future" that Neon Screams identifies does the opposite, enhancing the vocalist's idiosyncrasies until they reach deity level. Rappers become "radiant and radioactive". Lil Gotit becomes a mutant whose lower jaw is melting off; Travis Scott becomes a posthuman made of vapor and light; Playboi Carti's voice echoes amidst the chattering spirits of the polyconscious Cloud. Neon Screams posits an audio animation in which every master of ceremonies is made out of a different glittering alloy and encircled by different psycho-atmospheric conditions. First animated environments, second animated avatars, third animated selves.

Adverse Reactions

Throughout all this, audio animation hasn't always gone uncriticized. It seems only fair to let the critics get a few words in before we go back to callously ignoring them. So here are just two examples. In 1968, Morton Feldman expressed his aversion in the following terms:

I couldn't use electronic music, or electronic sounds, because they are not anonymous in character. . . Everytime you hear electronic music it's as though you always have to hear something. And sometimes I like a content that doesn't have the significance of something. That physical world of electronic music gives the impression that something is always happening.

[But do you think that's really due to the quality of electronic music--or just the people who produced it?]

I think it's inherent in the quality. It's that kind of: WOW. It's very "thingy." ZING and ZANG and WOW!

In 2016, Mark Fell took a more pointedly anti-animation stance:

Seeing the medium as a way of representing something else is not something I really do, like the idea of using paint to represent a landscape. I would rather get a bunch of colors and put them on the canvas and see how that works; just a presentation of shapes and colors. Representational aspects creep into music production in terms of how sound is processed to create the illusion of space. . .  But in the end, it’s a kind of ideological stance. Like if an architect is building a wall out of concrete, they wouldn’t go and paint bricks on it to make it look like bricks. If I make something that exists in a computer environment, why make it sound like it’s in a cathedral or something?

[So reverb is kind of the trompe l’oeil to the abstract expressionism of pure synthesis?]

Yeah. It’s like the “Truth to materials” slogan in architecture. But in academic electroacoustic music, the approach is very different. If you read Denis Smalley, who’s a prominent electroacoustic composer, you’ll see he talks about sonic forms in terms derived from real world landscapes—for example a river with points of bird song along it, and things moving in and out of focus, et cetera. What I do isn’t entirely formal—rather, it’s a critique of that kind of approach.

Feldman's take strikes me as the wiser of the two, because he acknowledges that the problem lies in the medium itself. Fell is less imaginative. He associates audio animation with only a narrow set of techniques explicitly intended to be representational. As Fell surely knows, it is possible to hear a "cathedral" reverb setting as nothing more than a bunch of frequencies generated by a computer—it's just that the temptation to hear it through the animation lens is usually there. But the same goes for electronic music that doesn't use reverb. This applies to a lot of the music we've covered, and it applies to Fell's own music, too. I once asked Version (as an avowed Fell fan**) to describe what he heard in one of Fell's tracks, and he offered this highly evocative description: “the whole thing sounds like a sheet of metal folding in on itself and being repeatedly compressed, like a piece of metal with the qualities of both metal and rubber.” Fell's scrupulous avoidance of reverb does little to prevent representational associations from emerging in his music. He might intend to "critique" such illusions, but his music still creates them.

If anything's hindered the canon's development, it's not criticism but defection. This tendency we've noted for animators to return to the musical logic of the concert hall becomes concerning in aggregate. You might even take this as evidence that audio animation's merely a novelty. But there are artists in each generation who keep going, and they tend to create their best work in the process, which suggests otherwise. As does the generational cycle of rediscovery and renewal that we've been investigating. It's possible that a contributing factor is shortsightedness. When you're doing something different, it's easy to mistake the one small section of the new territory that you've found for the entire thing. In other words, maybe there comes a point at which many animators feel that they have nowhere to go except back. Who could blame them for finding inspiration and comfort in the old ways? But the truth is that even at its most uncompromising, the best audio animation goes forward while drawing on inherited musical wisdom. The most beautiful results are probably still far beyond us. The task isn't to replace music, but to make it three dimensional, to finally bring it to life.

 

* no offense Wes  

** I think, right? I mean, if you're not, can you at least go along with it so I don't have to change this part