God Games

“His machines are extensions of his body that give him superhuman powers, he frankly admits that working in his studio, ‘it’s like your own world and you become like the god’. . . With its synaesthetic textures and three-dimensional, audio-maze spatiality, Gerald’s music anticipates virtual reality.” Simon Reynolds

“Additional acoustic dimensions are created as settings the Sound Stars inhabit, the environments they meet and interact in—the changing acoustic atmospheres of their world.” Maryanne Amacher

Now our focus can zoom out from individual characters to the world level. When you listen from this vantage, a kind of meta-character emerges. This meta-character, which we could call the storyworld's god, doesn't appear to the listener directly, but implicitly, in the cumulative shaping of what you can hear. It comes through in the storyworld's underlying conditions. Whether its constituent sound characters roam freely or adhere to set structures. Whether their actions are independent or interdependent. Meta-character also comes through in how world conditions change perceptibly over time. The most abrupt changes register as intervention, while the most gradual changes register as evolution. In a moment of intervention, the inaudible hand of the storyworld god reaches into the music, throwing events off their natural course. Over a period of evolution, the governing deity adjusts the greenhouse settings and waits.

In the early years of the second phase, turntablism was the premier method of divine intervention. Both versions of Trevor Horn's "Hobo Scratch" (1 2) construct an electric body around which free-floating sound characters appear and disappear. What's most striking about these characters, often human voices, is their violent malleability; it's as though they're being twisted like play-doh by telekinetic force. The disorienting effect of "Hobo Scratch" was intensified by DJ Yella in "Scratch Party #1". The mix opens with "Hobo Scratch" running on one side while more reality warping occurs on the other, generating a stereo-field-spanning storm. As the second phase continued, turntablism went the way of the electric guitar. But not everyone forgot about its disruptive potential. New manifestations of scratching can be heard in tracks like Autechre's “curvcaten”, which establishes an advanced, constantly adjusting electric body, and then ruptures it. From 4:32 on, it's as though the structure is being attacked by some hungry outside force, pushed and pulled but never destroyed—an added excitement to the ride.

There are many styles of environment design. The simplest, but often most effective, is to make space for natural drift. A sustained climate of subtle fluctuations, where sound characters emerge and recede on their own timescales. Worlds of this kind can be found in longform Chain Reaction works like Vainqueur's Elevation. “Elevation 1” opens with the brittle pulse of a machine still running even as it sparks and sputters, then generates vast, billowing phosphorescent winds, and a pressurized forcefield that bounces and sways slowly in midair, counteracting the winds like a mass damper. For the remaining eighty percent of the track, no new characters are introduced, leaving you alone in a power station on Olympus Mons. 

A more sophisticated approach is to create specific inter-character relationships, and then allow them considerable freedom of motion, creating aural butterfly effects. In Bayle’s “Mimaméta” several forces are organized in lead-follow patterns: one character makes a move, then a chorus of similar characters respond with their own multiplied version of the move. This is especially apparent in a section from about 4:38 to 7:12, where lead flute plays a quasi-birdsong, and a flute chorus responds at a higher register with dense avian chatter—a blurring of source-recognition that’s intensified once “real” birds reappear. The result is a paradise in which pastoral chime and flute song and the sounds of the forest flow together, an ecosystem out of Ovidian myth.

Another advanced approach is to establish a climate and then flip the dials—shaking up world physics and letting consequent evolution unfold. In Stockhausen’s “Gesang der Jünglinge” the climate settings are radically changed three times: a sky-world becomes a sea-world, then a sort of nowhere-world, and finally outer space. In various moments throughout “Kontakte”, a centripetal force emerges, pulling surrounding characters into its vortex like a tornado. Perhaps most unusual of all, “Telemusik” features a parallel world in the uppermost frequency range. Sound characters heard in the main dimension can be faintly heard passing through the upper world. About halfway through, a rapture occurs. Every sound character shoots up one by one. After a moment of lower-world silence (except for a straggler, an innocuous character that speaks in short arcs), the miracle is reversed: characters can be heard swooping down from the heavens. 

There's also the possibility of creating responsive continuum. A static forcefield that's interrupted by rapid events which, rather than simply disappearing, alter the continuum in some way. The attacks are what cause the garden to grow. Parmegiani explains his use of this technique in De Natura Sonorum:

These incidents are "foreign bodies" that interfere with the development of the sound; taken from a material different from the continuum (for example a crystal strike in a long metallic resonance), the foreign body perturbs the continuum in different ways; in general by modifying the harmonic web, thickening, doubling, … sometimes completely changing the continuum.

In the work’s opening movement, this world design is tested in a simplified form. Then it's reused in the second movement, which features a much wider array of attacking sound characters, with the forcefield pressured much farther, until its initial stasis is replaced with protean instability. A similar yet more serene organization shapes Michel Redolfi’s “Too Much Sky”, in which sound characters flit in and out of a resonance continuum that shifts in their wake. There’s a sense of being in a wide open space on another planet, with UFOs shooting through the peripheries of the sky and leaving subtle changes to the planet’s atmospheric conditions in their wake. Responsive atmospheres can also be found in Laurie Spiegal’s Unseen Worlds. Tracks like “Sonic Space II”, “Sound Zones” and “Riding the Storm” include a sound character that has the texture of an instrument yet gets fired off in impulsive bursts. As the pitch and acceleration of the instrument changes, so does the air of a vast space. It’s as though a kind of harpsichord machine gun is being fired off to adjust ozone conditions.

An especially powerful deity may cast a spell on the sound characters of its realm. Something like this happens near the end of “Kontakte” when various characters gain a purer harmonic character, as though imbued with transcendent energy after their trials. A similar spell is cast in the final third of “Sud” by Jean Claude Risset. Several highly naturalistic sound characters from the opening section take on a strange resonant harmonicity. It's as though the seas and birds have turned into gold. Another form of spellcasting is present in the opening moments of Francois Bayle’s La Main Vide. The incidental rumbling of what sounds like a miniature windstorm is gently allowed to unfold—then abruptly stopped and restarted twice. You can almost imagine a wizard summoning the sounds you’re hearing, creating a contained storm before the palms of his hands, then finding something unsatisfactory about the results and starting over.