Out again to Trinity Church in Salford for an evening of musical performance from the Miasmah label. “Miasma” was a fitting word for this event since all three artists proved very adept at filling the humid air with great clouds of treated guitar chords, loops and electronic noise.

The aural miasms created by The Sight Below, aka Rafael Anton Irisarri and Simon Scott, reminded me of favourites Main whose Hz album I’d been playing earlier in the day. Main were among the first musicians in the 1990s to extend the sound of the electric guitar through samples and other processing, and everyone at the Trinity tonight was following a similar path, albeit with very distinctive, individual styles. The Sight Below add a pulse of heavy rhythm to their sheets of distortion. Svarte Greiner (Erik Skodvin of Deaf Center) meanwhile, played some great bowed Stratocaster then some even better squalls of Strat feedback. Very impressive all round and the combination of volume plus environment (old church carefully lit and perfumed by clouds of incense) showed again why these kind of intimate performances often trump their recorded equivalents; sometimes you just have to be there.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Deaf Center in Manchester
• Machinefabriek in Manchester
• Trinity rendezvous
• Main

Regular readers will know I’ve enthused before over the electronica of Robert Henke, aka Monolake. The Monolake site recently resumed its monthly free downloads and the offering for this month is a 9-minute piece of abstract video by Dutch artist Tarik Barri. Fascinatingly immersive, this is like a 360º view of the Star Gate from 2001: A Space Odyssey accompanied by ambient drones and rumbles. Henke and Barri are planning on touring this audiovisual experience with a couple of dates already announced on Barri’s website.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Moonlight in Glory

Cover painting by Tom Phillips, design by Russell Mills.

A post for a Thursday.

Brian Eno’s ambient music receives a lot of playing time here, especially Music for Airports, On Land, The Shutov Assembly and, when something really minimal is required, Neroli. But it’s Thursday Afternoon which receives the most attention. Recorded at the request of Sony Japan in 1984, Thursday Afternoon is a single piece which originally accompanied seven of Eno’s “video paintings”, each of them showing Christine Alicino warped and blurred by ultra-slow motion and video noise. Like his earlier static views of the New York skyline, Mistaken Memories of Medieval Manhattan, filming vertically means that proper viewing can only be achieved by turning the TV on its side. The soundtrack is a beautifully rendered composition which uses Eno’s customary process of letting a number of looped phrases form a shifting musical moiré.

Compositionally, Thursday Afternoon belongs to the family of works which also includes Discreet Music and Music for Airports. Like them it is an even-textured, spacious and contemplative piece in which several musical events appear and recur more or less regularly. Each event, however, recurs with a different cyclic frequency and thus the whole piece becomes an unfolding display of unique sonic clusters. Eno has characterised this style of composition as “holographic”, by which he means that any brief section of the music is representative of the whole piece, in the same way that any fragment of a hologram shows the whole of the holographic image but with a lower resolution. (From the album notes.)

Daniel Lanois, Roger Eno and Michael Brook were all involved in the creation and production of Thursday Afternoon and the piece works as well played very quietly as it does at louder volume. When played louder more of the background detail becomes apparent, including some very faint birdsong which is most discernible at the end when much of the music has faded away. Perfect for colouring the atmosphere of a room whilst reading, working or talking with friends. It’s also a favourite of mine for playing in the bedroom with someone special.

Thursday Afternoon was released on video cassette then appeared on CD in 1985. As a single track of 61 minutes, this was one of the first original recordings which made specific use of the extended running time of the CD format. The cover painting was by {feuilleton} favourite, artist Tom Phillips, with design by artist and designer Russell Mills. Ten years earlier, Eno had used a detail of Phillips’ painting After Raphael on the cover of Another Green World.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying that you can now see the original sound and vision version of Thursday Afternoon at Ubuweb. Not ideal by any means but it gives you an idea of the complete work rather than the trunctated versions on YouTube. Eno’s video paintings, Thursday Afternoon included, are now available on DVD should you require them in higher quality. Just be prepared to turn your TV on its side.

Update: Eno’s ambient processes have now reached the iPhone with the Brian Eno and Peter Chilvers app, Bloom.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Tiger Mountain Strategies
• 20 Sites n Years by Tom Phillips
• Generative culture
• Exposure by Robert Fripp
• My Life in the Bush of Ghosts

I love my Buddha Machine, the music release by Fm3 which comes as a set of sampled loops in a plastic case looking like a cheap pocket radio. This is one music work which can’t be downloaded since the physicality of the thing is as much a part of its attraction and purpose as the loops themselves. It’s probably the most playfully inventive “album” since Chöre & Soli (1983) by Die Tödliche Doris, 8 miniphone records packaged in a box with a battery-driven player like those found in old talking dolls.

I only own one Buddha Machine so I haven’t had the opportunity to try creating a choir of the things with each playing a different loop. Robert Henke’s marvellous Layering Buddha album does this with considerable sophistication, processing the sounds through his bespoke digital filters. For those without their own Buddha Machine or Henke’s technology there’s now the Buddha Machine Wall which allows you to not only play with one machine but to also play several simultaneously. This is actually a lot more fascinating than I expected, it’s essentially an ambient music machine for the web, following the Brian Eno model of creating ambient patterns by layering loops. It’s great; give it a try.

• Layering Buddha Live | Two free downloads from Robert Henke

Previously on { feuilleton }
• God in the machines
• Layering Buddha by Robert Henke
• Generative culture

Island Universe (2008).

Island Universe is a new work by American artist Josiah McElheny at London’s White Cube gallery. McElheny’s recurrent use of glass and mirrors would be enough to capture my attention anyway—I particularly like the Modernity piece below—but Island Universe also features a specially-commissioned sound accompaniment by one of my favourite musicians, Paul Schütze.

Modernity circa 1952, Mirrored and Reflected Infinitely (2004).

McElheny collaborated with cosmologist David Weinberg for Island Universe to create abstract sculptures that are scientifically accurate models of Big Bang theory as well as illustrations of the ideas that followed the general acceptance of the theory. The varying lengths of the rods are based on measurements of time, the clusters of glass discs and spheres accurately represent the clustering of galaxies in the universe, and the light bulbs mimic the brightest objects that exist, quasars. Island Universe proposes a set of possibilities that could have burst into existence depending on the amount of energy or matter present at the universe’s origin.

I can’t help but compare that description of McElheny’s new work with another exhibition that opened this week, TH.2058 by Dominique Gonzales-Foerster which will be filling Tate Modern’s vast Turbine Hall for the next few months. Josiah McElheny extrapolates from documentary fact and creates something beautiful at the same time. Ms Gonzales-Foerster borrows from pre-existing works of written and filmed science fiction and has to rely on those works to sustain much of the interest:

It rains incessantly in London – not a day, not an hour without rain, a deluge that has now lasted for years and changed the way people travel, their clothes, leisure activities, imagination and desires. They dream about infinitely dry deserts.

This continual watering has had a strange effect on urban sculptures. As well as erosion and rust, they have started to grow like giant, thirsty tropical plants, to become even more monumental. In order to hold this organic growth in check, it has been decided to store them in the Turbine Hall, surrounded by hundreds of bunks that shelter – day and night – refugees from the rain.

A giant screen shows a strange film, which seems to be as much experimental cinema as science fiction. Fragments of Solaris, Fahrenheit 451 and Planet of the Apes are mixed with more abstract sequences such as Johanna Vaude’s L’Oeil Sauvage but also images from Chris Marker’s La Jetée. Could this possibly be the last film?

On the beds are books saved from the damp and treated to prevent the pages going mouldy and disintegrating. On every bunk there is at least one book, such as JG Ballard’s The Drowned World, Jeff Noon’s Vurt, Philip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, but also Jorge Luis Borges’s Ficciones and Roberto Bolaño’s 2666.

On one of the beds, hidden among the giant sculptures, a lonely radio plays what sounds like distressed 1958 bossa nova. The mass bedding, the books, images, works of art and music produce a strange effect reminiscent of a Jean-Luc Godard film, a culture of quotation in a context of catastrophe.

There’s a list of works used in the Tate installation, nearly all of which are far more stimulating artworks in their own right than the one which is hijacking them into its “culture of quotation”. I’m sure I can’t be the only person to think that the Tate would have been better served asking McElheny and Schütze to expand their work to fill the Turbine Hall instead. Those Island Universes could only get better if they were bigger.

Studies in the Search for Infinity (detail, 1997-1998).

• A PBS feature on Josiah McElheny

Update: Writer M John Harrison reviews TH.2058 for the Guardian and fails to be impressed:

It occurred to me that the biggest disaster in that room is the disaster for art. TH.2058 seems to finalise the hollowing-out of everything into the shallowest of semiotics. Foerster’s reading list is more powerful and important than her installation. Every one of the books on those bunk beds will give you a frisson that you don’t get from the show, so you would be as well just reading them for yourself.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth
• The Garden of Instruments

Harmonia somewhere in the 1970s: Michael Rother, Moebius, Roedelius.

Continuing the occasional { feuilleton } series exploring the byways of musical culture, this month it’s the turn of German group Cluster, prompted by their current US tour. News of their re-emergence sent me back to the albums and I’ve been listening to little else for the past week or two.

Mark Pilkington has very conveniently saved me the trouble of summing up the wandering history of Dieter Moebius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius in their various incarnations with his introductory piece, Cosmic Outriders: the music of Cluster & Harmonia. Unlike many of their Krautrock contemporaries, Moebius and Roedelius have remained very active, Roedelius particularly has an extensive solo discography. I’ve never been very taken with their work since the early Eighties, however. I have an inordinate fondness for the analogue keyboards which contribute to their early sound; as the Eighties progressed they took to using digital keyboards and their music lost much of its previous charm as a result.

The Cluster discography is very long and confused, encompassing Kluster (pre-Cluster line-up with Conrad Schnitzler), Cluster, Harmonia (Cluster with Michael Rother from Neu!), Cluster with Brian Eno, then Moebius and Roedelius’s numerous solo works and collaborations with other artists. As a result, a guide such as this is useful for the curious. So here we go with another blog list…

Cluster—Cluster 71 (1971)
A timeless racket. Three long noisy slabs of synth distortion that make the first two noisy Kraftwerk albums seem positively melodic. This could easily be passed off as an unreleased Throbbing Gristle or Cabaret Voltaire album.

Cluster—Cluster II (1972)
The second album continues the granular challenge but lets some light and music into the mix.

Harmonia—Deluxe (1975)
I prefer the second Harmonia album to the first, and prefer both to Cluster’s third opus, Zuckerzeit, recorded around the same time as this. Michael Rother’s involvement in Harmonia pushes the sound very close to Neu! in places, especially the more melodic strains of Neu! 75.

Harmonia—Harmonia 76: Tracks & Traces (1976)
Albums of studio outtakes are usually for die-hard fans only but this one is surprisingly good with an outstanding long atmospheric piece, Sometimes In Autumn. Brian Eno was hanging out with Cluster by this point and he contributes a vocal on Luneberg Heath.

Cluster—Sowiesoso (1976)
The most melodic and relaxed of all the Cluster albums and the one which birthed a host of inferior copyists on the Sky label.

Cluster & Eno (1977)
Recorded at around the same time as By This River on Eno’s Before And After Science. Holger Czukay from Can is a guest on the Eno albums.

Eno, Moebius & Roedelius—After The Heat (1978)
Of the two Cluster & Eno albums this is probably the best and ends with three Eno songs which turned out to be his last vocal works until Nerve Net in 1992. Note that the CD reissue has a different (and in my view, inferior) track ordering to the vinyl original.

Cluster—Grosses Wasser (1979)
Produced by ex-Tangerine Dream member Peter Baumann and recorded at his studio which gave the Cluster guys the opportunity to use his superior synth equipment. As a result a couple of the tracks here are very similar to Baumann’s solo work.

Moebius & Plank—Rastakraut Pasta (1980)
This album and its follow-up should be added to the list of works which influenced Eno & Byrne’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. The opening track News, features sampled radio voices (as per later Eno & Byrne) mixed with a plodding rhythm that includes a recurrent synth note that’s the spit of similar sounds used on My Life.

Moebius & Plank—Material (1981)
Genius producer Conny Plank brought out the best in many of the artists he worked with and these two collaborations with Moebius are a great example of that. He had a similar effect with Roedelius on an early solo album, Durch die Wüste, moving Roedelius out of his ambient keyboards comfort zone. The tone on Material is more strident and uptempo than Rastakraut Pasta, especially on Tollkühn which is like some mad techno synth run ten years too early.

Cluster and co. on YouTube
• Cluster 71
• Harmonia—Deluxe (Immer Wieder)
• Cluster—Sowiesoso
• Cluster & Eno—Für Luise
• Brian Eno—By This River

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Avant Garde Project
• White Noise: Electric Storms, Radiophonics and the Delian Mode
• Chrome: Perfumed Metal
• Metabolist: Goatmanauts, Drömm-heads and the Zuehl Axis
• The music of Igor Wakhévitch
• My Life in the Bush of Ghosts

I’ve mentioned before that Robert Henke, aka Monolake, is one of my favourite electronic musicians, and it was great last year when he reinstated his habit of offering a free download each month. Unlike the short fragments or scraps that many artists throw to their fans there’s been some substantial work on offer, such as an hour-long live performance of his Layering Buddha set.

The download for this month is a perfect soundtrack to accompany the New Year chill, Fragment Endloss, a 30-minute piece of ambient drift from 1992, reworked slightly for 2008.

This is a very personal piece for me, created in a time where I felt quite dark and lived in an appropriate environment. I just had moved from West-Berlin, Neukoelln, to the east, to Prenzlauer Berg, which at that time was not the expensive hippster neighborhood it is now, but the very opposite. I lived in a small place on the ground floor in a backyard, with a coal oven and a toilet outside the building… It was the end of winter, cold, unfriendly, and very dark. Pretty much like on the pictures above.

Musically this is influenced by ‘The Pearl’ (Brian Eno, Harold Budd). Sound design wise it shows that I just go the TG-77 and SY-77, and then there is this one long brass-like sound that I made as a result of listening to John Chowning.

For the free track of the month version I slightly edited the original 45 minute version and added field recordings of Bahnhof Zoo and the S-Bahn here in Berlin which I also captured in 1992.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Live Performance in the Age of Supercomputing
• Layering Buddha by Robert Henke
• New Monolake

Impressions de la Haute Mongolie – Hommage á Raymond Roussel (1974-75).

When I wrote a short reminiscence about Impressions de la Haute Mongolie last March I really didn’t expect I’d be watching it again just over a year later having waited thirty years for the opportunity. But now we can all see José Montes-Baquer’s collaboration with Salvador Dalí, thanks to the indispensable Ubuweb. The copy there doesn’t have English subtitles, unfortunately, but the visuals are still beguiling and not too difficult to follow if you can understand some French and Spanish. It was a curious experience seeing this again, some parts I remembered very well, others I’d completely forgotten about. Most surprising was the soundtrack of electronic music, much of it taken from recordings by Wendy Carlos, including a part of her ambient Sonic Seasonings suite and portions of her complete score for A Clockwork Orange. There’s more about this deeply strange film in Tate Etc.

And speaking of surreal landscapes, it’s worth mentioning that I’ve spent the past few weeks working on a new piece of Lovecraft-themed artwork for an exhibition at Maison d’Ailleurs, the Museum of science fiction, utopia and extraordinary journeys in Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland. The exhibition of newly-commissioned work based on themes from HP Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book will be launched in October 2007. More details about the event, and my contribution, closer to that date. In the meantime, the European edition of TIME magazine has a short feature about the gallery and its ethos.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Dalí and Film
• Ballard on Dalí
• Fantastic art from Pan Books
• Penguin Surrealism
• The Surrealist Revolution
• The persistence of DNA
• Salvador Dalí’s apocalyptic happening
• The music of Igor Wakhévitch
• Dalí Atomicus
• Las Pozas and Edward James
• Impressions de la Haute Mongolie

Technically speaking, not his first ambient work, since the mighty Metal Machine Music is certainly ambient given the way it immerses the listener in 64 minutes of total noise. When you’ve been that far out, why not go in the opposite direction?

We are pleased to announce plans for the release of Lou Reed’s first ever album of non-vocal electronic music for meditation, Body work, and Tai Chi. This album Hudson River Wind Meditations, will be released by Sounds True Records on April 1st, 2007 (www.soundstrue.com). Go to Lou Reed’s official myspace (www.myspace.com/officialloureed) and stream Wind Coda, a new track from this forthcoming Lou Reed album.

Thanks to Eroom Nala for the tip.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Thomas Köner
• A playlist for Halloween
• Main

Magic of Juju. More vinyl rips, music from around the world this time.

Insect & Individual. “an assortment of kraut, prog, free jazz, avant, diy punk, and uncategorizable recordings highlighted by nurse with wound on the legendary/infamous nww list.” Includes the impossible-to-find The Way Out by L Voag. Now you’ve found it.

For those who missed it, here’s the original blog list. Once again, this isn’t definitive by any means, there are loads of these things out there.

Fauni Gena Music Webbernet. Mainly ambient or quiet electronic releases.

À bientôt j’espère. Er…hard to describe, you’ll just have to go and look.

Lost-In-Tyme. Obscure psychedelia for the most part.

Swen’s blog – Artists mentioned in The Wire. What it says on the tin. Very useful if you’re a Wire reader.

Improvisie. Improvised music with an emphasis on the jazz spectrum. Not much there yet but may be worth watching and worth a visit solely for the insane Paul Bley synth album.

Grown So Ugly. “A home for musical gems from the past fifty years, decidedly biased in favor of acoustic instrumentation. From the easily accessible to the challenging listen, quality is the sole requirement for our sharity. We encourage community participation.”

Krautrockteam. Best of the lot where my tastes are concerned. More obscure (that word again…) German music than you can shake an Archangel’s Thunderbird at.

If Main (subject of this earlier post) provide the ideal ambience for hot weather, then winter demands the chill breath of Thomas Köner. Once again, lack of decent interviews means resorting to Wire back issues which is a sign of laziness on my part and an indication of that magazine’s continued importance. For those who may have puzzled over the soundtrack list in my Haunter of the Dark book (which includes Köner’s Teimo), here’s an introduction to a unique sound artist.

The Big Chill

The arctic wastes of Siberia are a burning desert compared to the cryogenically-frozen music of Thomas Köner. Biba Kopf meets a musician whose work redefines our notions of cool.

APPROPRIATELY ENOUGH, it snows the day Thomas Köner arrives in London. If anyone deserves a white carpet welcome, it is this German composer, who dedicates his music to reversing the processes of global warming. Köner’s stunning or perhaps that should read numbing debut, Nunatak Gongamur, describes the last moments of Scott’s ill-fated polar expedition. Its successor, Teimo, takes as its model the cooling molecular structure of the body after death, while his third disc carries the self-explanatory title Permafrost.

Granted, Köner’s new CD Aubrite—meaning a non-terrestrial mineral—is housed in a bright yellow jacket and is intended as a partial relief from the cold spell, but it does include a track called “Nuuk”, after the capital of Greenland.

“It’s my passion, this area where the cold slows down all movement,” explains Köner, who punctuates his conversation with a laugh so infectious he ought to can it and sell it to TV sitcom producers. “The process of slowing down and reaching this border between movement and absolute stillness is, for me, the process of simultaneously becoming very sharp and very unfocused, and that, for me is like a very excellent drug.”

This makes me think of Köner as some kind of flatliner getting off on his own near-death experiences.

“It’s a kind of design question, this temperature thing. In a cold environment, everything slows down, and everything is going towards a stop event And that is my favourite area in sound—just before it stops. It’s an interesting border. It’s the same when people, during kind of philosophical evenings, think about life and its end. That’s also a kind of border where things stop. It’s a deep movement for me, this feeling.”

The development of Köner’s music from disc to disc is as minutely graded as the pieces they contain. The desolate blizzard-swept arctic wastes of Nunatak are created by miking-up gongs, then rubbing, scraping and electronically treating the sounds to the point where their origin is unrecognisable. Teimo is more felt than heard, you don’t so much listen as immerse yourself in it. As your ears become accustomed to its silences, you begin to pick out shapes, the shadowy aural equivalents of towering rock formations just about visible through the storm. They don’t exactly hold the promise of shelter, but they are useful coordinates to fix on to find your way into the music’s desolate beauty.

Exactly where does Köner’s music exist? His press kit carries a glowing endorsement from an Australian Buddhist, but, despite the music’s progress towards silence and nothingness, Köner denies any religious motivation. On the contrary, this confessed non-dancer, who admits the rhythms of his works are far removed from dance culture, feels closest to Techno, which has blasted contemporary music wide open to the point where any extreme goes in its chill-out interzones. Köner evidently feels enough common ground between Techno’s BPM blizzards and the snowstorms of his own music to act as sound designer on the recent Basic Channel related project Porter Ricks, on the appropriately-titled single “Port Of Transition”.

Köner has described the guiding principle behind his work as an Ästhetik der Untergang, or aesthetic of decline, a term Einstürzende Neubauten used to apply to their early performances. Unsurprisingly, Köner applies the aesthetic differently. For him it has to do with the way the natural decay of sound resembles decay in nature. The former leads to silence, the latter to death. In both cases they leave an afterglow that imprints itself on the memory. Köner’s acceptance of the process is not only personally liberating, it frees his music from the futile sense of entropy that pervades much post-Industrial Ambient stuff. Even so, Köner reports that the rare visitors to his Dortmund home see some affinity between the post-Industrial sites of a city that has seen better days and their host’s music.

“They walk around Dortmund and say that it sounds a bit like my music,” says Köner. “There are vast areas where there are no used roads, but you always have a distant railroad or a distant highway, creating an envelope of diffused sounds, so when you walk through these abandoned industrial fields, there is this silence, but with very powerful motorised sound reproducing units in the distance. And I would not give up this. I would never move to the country. Well, it’s sometimes nice to visit; but after three weeks I have to go to the nearest town, sit down and get some good diesel engines and scraping metal sounds. It’s a big pleasure for me.”

The Wire, issue 145, March 1996.

See also: koener.de

“A trap for dere Santa”. From How to be Topp by
Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle (1954).

That time of year again. Here at { feuilleton } we prefer to acknowledge the solstice-based traditions that pre-date the usurping rituals of Middle Eastern sky gods. The old pagan business of lighting fires and creating artificial light and warmth still makes sense when you’re in the depths of another dreary English winter, with seemingly permanent grey skies and a smear of daylight that vanishes at half past three in the afternoon. Christmas used to agitate me too much and too often until the year the TV finally gave up the ghost. I realised a lot of the prior aggravation had been caused by the deluge of trivia that popular media creates at the end of the year; keep away from TV, avoid the crowds and the collective hysteria become a lot more manageable.

This page will be quiet while I visit the family for a few days but the archive feature will be active should you be seized by a sudden desire to read my words or look at some pictures. If you’re sat in front of a monitor over the coming week—and for some this may be a necessary escape—I’d suggest looking over some of the mp3 blogs that have been coming online in the past year. These are from people (usually anonymous for good reason) posting whole albums for download, many of which still haven’t made it onto CD. Hard to say how long this phenomenon will be allowed to continue in its current form—a lot of these places are using Blogger, so may be shut down by Google eventually—but for now its an encouraging trend. A by-no-means-definitive list follows below. These are only the ones I’ve run across recently, liked and bookmarked; if you know of any other good ones, feel free to leave a tip in the comments.

Fauni Gena Music Webbernet. Mainly ambient or quiet electronic releases.

À bientôt j’espère. Er…hard to describe, you’ll just have to go and look.

Lost-In-Tyme. Obscure psychedelia for the most part.

Swen’s blog – Artists mentioned in The Wire. What it says on the tin. Very useful if you’re a Wire reader.

Improvisie. Improvised music with an emphasis on the jazz spectrum. Not much there yet but may be worth watching and worth a visit solely for the insane Paul Bley synth album. (Thanks to Gav for the tip!)

Grown So Ugly. “A home for musical gems from the past fifty years, decidedly biased in favor of acoustic instrumentation. From the easily accessible to the challenging listen, quality is the sole requirement for our sharity. We encourage community participation.” (Thanks to Jay for pointing me to this one.)

Krautrockteam. Best of the lot where my tastes are concerned. More obscure (that word again…) German music than you can shake an Archangel’s Thunderbird at.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The music of The Wicker Man

77 Million Paintings by Brian Eno, Laforet Museum, Harajuku, Tokyo.

Brian Eno is in the latest Wire talking about his forthcoming DVD-ROM, 77 Million Paintings. He also mentions coining the term “generative music” in 1995 to a resounding silence. 77 Million Paintings continues the generative project:

This will be available later in the year as a DVD-ROM (which will play on most modern computers) and a DVD featuring Brian talking about the project. It also includes an extensive booklet covering Brian’s long and successful career as a visual artist.

The name 77 Million Paintings comes from the possible number of images that can be created from a huge number of combinations. Anyone familiar with Brian’s audio-visual installations will instantly recognise the inspiration behind the project. The music is from Brian’s installation collection.

Ambient stuff for the eyes, in other words. I’d be looking forward to this if I still had a TV (mine packed up a few years ago) as I used to program my primitive Spectrum computer (which still works!) to generate simple patterns, turning the TV screen into an abstract artwork for a few hours. The difference with Eno’s project, of course, is the greater variety, quality and degree of intent involved. I saw one of his installation works, The Quiet Club, at the Hayward Gallery in 2000 which used similar audio and visual processes. With 77 Million Paintings you’ll be able to turn your living room into a quiet club of your own.

In a similar generative vein, there’s WolframTones: “A New Kind of Music – Unique cellphone ringtones created by simple programs from renowned scientist Stephen Wolfram’s computational universe.” Too complicated to explain; go and play around with it.

Main seem somewhat neglected now despite being in the vanguard of a particular brand of ambient abstraction that emerged throughout the 1990s. To redress the balance slightly, here’s a David Toop interview from The Wire conducted just as the Hz project was getting underway.

Main’s multi-layered, mud-encrusted textures suggest everything from radio interference to insect chatter. The group’s Robert Hampson talks to David Toop about reinventing the guitar and the mystery of electroacoustics.

DRAW A STRAIGHT LINE on sand, water, skin, steam (and follow it). Main is texture: the interiority of the guitar. The electric, effects-augmented guitar is transitional technology, a mid-point between the dextrous physicality of traditional instruments and the imaginative space of the electronic studio. But also a return to the untempered crystal world of harmonic complexity, a reversal of the pure, precise clarity of classical acoustic guitar, back into the droning resonant strings of an Indian tamboura, bottle tops rattling on a Shona thumb piano, or spider’s egg sacs buzzing on gourd resonators lashed under a Central African xylophone.

Listen to “Corona”, the first instalment of Main’s new one-a-month six EP series called Hz (Hz being an abbreviation of Hertz, or cycles per second the physical measurement of periodic frequency, or pitch, in sound.) Of course the music exists in time, so drone is an appropriate description. The score for La Monte Young’s Composition 1960 No 9 was published as a straight line on a file card: draw a straight (or thickly textured, erratic, convoluted) line and follow it, which “Corona” does. Yet the music also gives the impression of rotating in viscous solids, iron filings, rattlesnake bones or television interference. I think of the photographs published in Cymatics by the late Hans Jenny, a Swiss scientist/mystic who investigated the effects of sound and vibration on solids, semi-solids, gases and liquids photographs which are gorgeous in their own right and more simply expressive of musical force than huge quantities of verbal analysis.

Your music is like nature, part of the natural world and its processes, I suggest to Main’s Robert Hampson. Rock group as geological strata. This is a tricky one. Shortly before one of his DJ sets at London’s Electronic Lounge club last year, I had heard Robert fire laser beams of eminently justifiable invective at the flood of Ambient records awash in the sound of burbling water. But hey, peace, man: now we are sitting in my garden, initially discussing burglary and violent pubs. Birds stalked by cats are broadcasting alarm calls, planes roar overhead, a sander is being operated over the road. He finds the ambience peaceful, not remote from urban noise but every sound in its place. Just like his work with Main, in fact.

I broached the comparison with nature partly because listening to Main had pulled me to that conclusion, but only after listening to Robert talk and gradually confirm my feelings. “Dense passages of mud,” he says, groping for an analogy that sums up the sound of earlier Main recordings: Dry Stone Feed, Motion Pool, Firmament, Firmament II and the remix CD, Ligature. Not brown mud, however. This mud is rich in mineral deposits, highly radioactive, striated with lurex ridges, glass fragments and iridescent fish scales, swarming with stridulators.

Draw a straight line, quickly. Improvisation and spontaneity counterbalanced with precise, considered sound design. “We’re trying to record as close to the release date as possible,” Robert explains. “We found after Motion Pool that we were getting trapped in the studio. I’m such a terrible perfectionist. After a while, I think I was going back to stuff unnecessarily. The looseness, the more improvisational sense of what we were doing, was starting to go. We were taking multitracking to extraordinary lengths, just layering and layering guitar sounds. On some tracks we had 48 guitars, meshed in but all meticulously worked out so that the frequencies would not interrupt each other. It was so time-consuming that we thought we would go the other way and basically play live to the multitrack, maybe overdub a couple of little pieces where we felt it needed something.”

Draw a straight line and chop it to pieces. “We also decided to change our way of editing ourselves,” he continues. “We went for the concrete textures of very fast editing, very sharp, for the new stuff. The pieces are still quite long but you don’t really get a chance to get a grip on the actual parts. Each CD is split into parts, into relative movements.” The reference to musique concrète is noted but ignored. Although this music is clearly informed by the disc and tape experiments of early electronic music, there seems very little point in discussing a relationship with Luc Ferrari or Karlheinz Stockhausen. “Corona” comes from a different universe, in which the market, along with audience awareness, critical feedback, promotion, packaging, the carrier medium (CD) and a refined sense of style and context all play significant parts. As one example, Main’s release schedule (a factor of business needs) acts as a conceptual edit (a factor of creative possibilities). The incision of the razor blade comes as the music ends; then a month of blank tape; then the music resumes with the next release.

Draw a straight line; add nothing. It’s hard to be simple, I suggest. “It really is sometimes,” Robert agrees. “That’s the beauty of AMM, which I don’t think many other people touch upon. It’s so painfully simple. The way that John Tilbury will take aeons to get from one note to another is beautiful. Hopefully, as Main mature, we’ll get more into that thing of not wanting to put so much in there all the time. But that was one of the original ideas anyway, when we formed—to make very dense soundscapes of totally intricate sound. You probably wouldn’t hear a lot of them, but to us, they were there and to us, they were important.”

Music which picks its way slowly, almost imperceptibly, through the crystal world of overtones and distortion is subject to caricature. Is all slow music necessarily spiritual or gloomy? Can slow, thick music be ecstatic, joyful, sexual? “So many people say that they find Main really hard to listen to at certain times of the day,” Robert admits, regretfully. “They can only listen to it at certain times, or when they’re in certain moods. A lot of people have said it’s too dense to the point where it can be depressing. People find it too dark.” Yet I remember listening to Motion Pool twice in a row last summer, late afternoon sun painting a streak of light across the floor, dust particles floating in the air, clusters of invisible amplified string overtones immersing me in the pleasure of pure sensation. Centred, for a moment, in nature.

Draw a straight line, over and over again. Study it intimately. Main is rather obsessive: the attitude of a fan, extrapolated into the exploration of sound “Unfortunately, the music industry dictates so much…” Robert’s words tail off, nothing quite adequate to describe the gap between business and the relentless pursuit of a creative ideal. “It doesn’t really fit into the old way that I perceived music years ago. When I was a kid and getting into punk rock, you’d go and buy your records on Saturday afternoon. On the way home on the train or the bus you’d be getting them out the bag, just absorbing every single piece of information you could get before you even got home. Put ‘em back and five minutes later they’re out again. I like those kind of emotional ties. Even now, you hear a piece of music and you warp straight back to some moment in time, either when you first heard it or you bought it. I hope people feel that way about our music.”

Precious little to absorb from Main packaging, or perhaps a great deal? Lo-resolution colour fields, chopped by hard lines. Type, bold yet tasteful. Catalogue numbers, credits, barcode, logo, titles evocative: “Crater Scar”, “Liquid Reflective”, “Pulled From The Water”; or titles enigmatic: “I”, “II”, “Ill”, “IV”. A clue: “Drumless Space”. “I like a little bit of mystery about it,” says Robert, smiling. He suspects that his own adolescent enthusiasm for musical minutiae, his approach to music listening as a near religious experience, a dedicated act of absorption, has all been lost in some cultural development of the times. Maybe so, but who can tell, once they have become a professional?

Live is another problem. Nattering for one thing. “I hate playing and hearing people talking over what we’re doing,” he complains. “We can play extremely loud if we want, but all the delicate pieces and the natural balance go out the window.” Half-seriously, he blames the rave generation. Problem two: “I’m what promoters call ‘a temperamental artist’. I find fault in everything.” Robert and Scott Dawson, both guitarists in Loop, now form the core of Main, so problem three: studio music. “Originally, when we started out, we never really had the intention of playing live. We thought, we can manage. We can both do bass duties if need be. There was an element of being a control freak with both of us as well. We didn’t want drummers. That idea of percussion had completely left us. We still have to use a backing tape because of all the samples. Maybe if finances get better we might start taking more of our computer gear outlive.”

Take a straight line and amplify it. Main percussion: chains and stones, amplified by contact microphones; increasingly, all guitar generated sounds. “I even sing through the guitar,” says Robert. Musique concrète, free improvisation and electroacoustic music aside, Main’s roots are located within the history of the over-cranked, non-theorised, distressed guitar, from Paul Burlison, Ike Turner and Link Wray to Bo Diddley, Johnny ‘Guitar’ Watson and Lou Reed, from Jimi Hendrix, Elmore James and Hubert Sumlin to James Williamson, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, Neil Young and Buddy Guy. “The working aesthetic was that we were still using something that was such a rock icon,” he says. “The guitar. To get people to look at it in a different way. I really hope that people listen to it and say, ‘Is that a guitar or what?’ I think that’s like a modern approach to electroacoustic music, the way that the sound of everyday utensils was masked.”

Draw a straight line until it becomes a circle. “My mum, she was into such cool music,” Robert says with pride. “Her and her brother were just total music freaks. My gran’s got a picture of the family sitting around the table at Christmas and in the middle of them’s Sonny Boy Williamson. My uncle was a big blues fan and he knew The Yardbirds really well. They used to put up Sonny Boy Williamson when he was in the country. To me, punk rock was the bee’s knees but then your uncle comes along and goes, ‘listen to this’, and gives you a Stooges album and a Velvets album. You listen to it and it’s mind-bogglingly beautiful.”

Draw a straight line. Draw a jack plug on the end of it. Plug it into a fuzz box. Play.

The Wire, issue 137, July 1995.

See also: roberthampson.com