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Abstract music is like the weather. No surprise to those of us who spent
large amounts of time on long car trips watching rain on the windows, or
those for whom fog was a special treat on a Saturday morning.
Keith Rowe, a member of the seminal group AMM and a frequent
collaborator in new electroacoustic experiments, referred to the
influence of the atmosphere in the program notes for his album
Duos for Doris.
"I have become increasingly preoccupied with atmosphere. Somehow I
wanted to move what I'm doing (intention) towards this notion of
atmosphere, an activity where we're not aware of technique, of
instrument, of playing, of music even, but instead as feeling/sensation
suspended in space, perhaps what Feldman meant by music as time,
energising the air, making the silence (unintention) audible."
For Rowe, the sounds become like water particles, absorbed in the air,
manifesting themselves sometimes as clouds, sometimes as rain, and
sometimes as hail. In the continuity of a stream of music, we can hear
the of pockets of silence like the space between clouds; the air between
is saturated with water, just not in a way that is perceptible to us. If we
think of it this way, the relationship of clouds to the sky then stops
being a relationship of presence/absence of water, but rather of visible
water/invisible water. It is less of a difference in kind, and more of a
difference in degree, here in temperature (the particles in clouds are
visible because they're cooler than other ones in the air, we see them in
their condensed state.) The silent parts of music could be looked at as
the air around a cloud, and the musician as a condensing force; when
the musician prods the air, it becomes sound.
This becomes less abstract when you consider this batch of releases
from the Brooklyn-based Antiopic. In the press release for "Spectral" by
Joyce Hinterding, it is noted that some of the music on the record is
"based on celestial field recordings of magnetic fields and weather
satellites made with custom-built antennae." Rather than an implicit
principle, weather becomes an explicit source of material for Hinterding.
She takes bits of physical atmosphere and transforms them into an
aesthetic one. And, even more simply, what we hear when we play the cd
sounds like recognizable phenomena of weather: drops of
water, the whistling of the air through trees, etc.
Need Thomas Windham's "Employment Patterns" sounds like the
application of the Edward Lorenz butterfly effect (detailed here: http://
www.zeuscat.com/andrew/chaos/lorenz.html) If we simplify what is
actually a very complex, subtle hour of music with an intriguing use of
silent passages, you could see it as a butterfly effect in action, where
small gestures are introduced, slowly building up chaotic value, and
eventually realized at the end of the record with low, slow
undulations, reminding one alternately of thunder or of an earthquake.
Such a framework, however, superimposes upon the record some sort of
causal structure that I don't really think is actually there. It's quite a
mysterious piece of work, to be frank, with a sly elision of tension/
release and presence/absence, easily exemplified by looking at the
bottom of the cd under an artificial light. There, you see what look like
record grooves, so spread apart are all of the sounds on the album.
To round out the lot is a 20 minute composition, "Ching" by
probably my favorite musician in NYC right now, Dion Workman, based
upon an impressive appearance at a concert at bpm in Williamsburg.
This is the piece that won the Max Brand Prize, awarded by the Austrian
Cultural Forum. "Ching" feels like the poetics of pressure, an analysis of
barometric force, where movement is the slow loss of pressure and
buildup of climatic instability, which suddenly rights itself, whereupon
the crickets come out to sing. Which is a cheap metaphor for a
staggeringly inventive piece of music. Yep.
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