gamelan – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 435

An illustration by “Lapthorn” for Little Green Apples: the Chronicle of a Fallen Man (1930) by Geoffrey Moss.

• Jean-Michel Jarre & Michel Granger: how we made Oxygène. “[It] was initially rejected by record company after record company. They all said: ‘You have no singles, no drummer, no singer, the tracks last 10 minutes and it’s French!’ Even my mother said: ‘Why did you name your album after a gas and put a skull on the cover?'”

• “When we ignore or demean consensual BDSM erotica, or stories about female sexual submission, we inadvertently contribute to a cultural legacy that routinely pathologizes, demeans, or erases women’s sexual desires.” Hayley Phelan on why we need erotica.

• “More than a literal reconstruction of an imagined collaboration between Eno and Morricone, Ghost Box opens a door onto a world where ambient music and country-western make for natural bedfellows.” Ghost Box (Expanded) by Suss.

• Peter Bebergal and Janaka Stucky discuss Bebergal’s new book, Strange Frequencies: The Extraordinary Story of the Technological Quest for the Supernatural. There’s more at the Occulture podcast.

• Great Noises That Fill The Air (1988), an album by Bow Gamelan Ensemble, receives its first release on CD next month. Related: the group in 1987 staging one of their pyrotechnic performances.

• Mixes of the week: Bleep Mix #45 by Lawrence English & William Basinski – Casting Voices Mixtape, DJ Food Solid Steel mix by Matt Berry, and The Séance – 13th October 2018.

• “…the social position filled by art and aesthetics is increasingly best understood in terms of magic.” Marina Warner and Eleanor Birne discuss forms of enchantment.

• From 2104: Ten little tales of terror for late of a Halloween night by Levi Stahl.

• Words I Heard by Julian Holter

• The Cosmodrome Futurists

• Urban Gamelan (Pt. 1) (1984) by 23 Skidoo | Chez Les Futuristes Russes (1984) by Aksak Maboul | Oxygen (1997) by Gas

Audio Arts

Audio Arts was a British audio magazine established by Bill Furlong which appeared on vinyl LP, cassette tape and CD from 1973 to 2006. The Tate website has an archive section devoted to the magazine which allows you to listen to each of the tapes, surprisingly when much of the content on the Tate sites is fenced about with copyright restrictions. The contents are as varied as any regular arts magazine: reviews, interviews and so on. An interview with Marcel Duchamp from 1959 is one of the featured highlights. Of greater interest to this listener is an interview from 1981 with Laurie Anderson discussing her epic stage work, United States Parts 1–4. This would have been around the time that one of the songs from that show, O Superman, turned her into a UK pop star for a few weeks.

In addition to a great deal of talk some of the tapes contain recordings of sound pieces or performances. One tape from 1985 features nine works by the Bow Gamelan Ensemble: Ann Bean, Richard Wilson and PD Burwell. The Bow Gamelan Ensemble were at the arty British end of the 1980s’ vogue for making music with industrial detritus, a trend developed and popularised by Z’EV, Einstürzende Neubauten, Test Department and others. I never got to see the ensemble but their pyrotechnic live performances always looked like fun. The tape gives an idea of their uncompromising sound. (Tip via The Wire.)

Previously on { feuilleton }
• ICA talks archived

The Miracle of Bali: Recital of Music

This is a great half-hour film of a type that the BBC used to produce on a regular basis when the corporation was still pursuing the Reithian mission of informing as well as entertaining. The Miracle of Bali was originally a series of three half-hour films broadcast in 1969: The Midday Sun, Night, and Recital of Music.

The narrator is David Attenborough who leads us through a range of different music and dance performances from the island. This form of music is very familiar to me—I have several albums of gamelan music from Bali and Java—but I’ve never seen the instruments themselves presented in such detail before. There’s a taste of most of the main styles of Balinese music, beginning with a furious recital from a gamelan orchestra. Three dances follow, then the film ends with a stunning performance of the Kecak, or Monkey Chant. This is a common feature of recordings from Bali but seeing it staged takes the performance—which also includes dance and theatre—to a different level entirely. Watch it here. Via MetaFilter.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Gamelatron

Ear to the Ground

The name of percussionist David Van Tieghem won’t be familiar to most people, but if you’ve ever heard Eno & Byrne’s My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts, Speaking In Tongues by Talking Heads, any of Laurie Anderson’s early albums or Steve Reich’s Music For 18 Musicians then you’ve heard some of Van Tieghem’s session work.

For Ear to the Ground, a four-minute video piece by John Sanborn & Kit Fitzgerald, Van Tieghem leaves the recording studio to play the city streets of New York: pavements, fences, doorways, etc. This may be a typical product of the NYC art crowd of the late 1970s but it also seems prescient for the way it predicts the urban percussion/performance that would flourish a couple of years later in Europe, a micro-genre exemplified by Einstürzende Neubauten, 23 Skidoo, Test Department, the Bow Gamelan Ensemble and others. Watch Ear to the Ground at Ubuweb.

The Gamelatron

The Gamelatron at Galapagos Art Space March 2009. Photo by Gisella Sorrentino.

A laptop-controlled gamelan orchestra by Zemi17 aka A. Taylor Kuffner. See it in operation here. (Is it Gamelatron or GamelaTron? Their spellings differ…)

The GamelaTron is the fruit of a collaboration between The League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots (LEMUR) and the composer Zemi17: A. Taylor Kuffner.

Modeled after traditional Balinese and Javanese gamelan orchestras, the GamelaTron is an amalgamation of traditional instruments with a suite of percussive sound makers. MIDI sequences control 117 robotic striking mechanisms that produce intricately woven and rhythmic sound. Performances follow an arc similar to classic Indonesian gatherings, where stories from great epics, such as the Ramayana, are told and settings given in words that are continued in music.

Sounds overly-mechanical to my ears but then that’s probably inevitable given the way the instruments are being controlled. The classic Nonesuch Explorer recordings of Javanese and Balinese gamelan orchestras follow less rigid rhythmic patterns. And being recorded outdoors the Indonesian music is augmented by background atmospheres from birds and insects.

For more variations on the gamelan theme, there’s 23 Skidoo’s Urban Gamelan album (recently reissued) and the many chiming electronic exercises by Paul Schütze.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Paul Schütze online
• Metronomes
• Cristalophonics: searching for the Cocteau sound
• Max Eastley’s musical sculptures
• The Reactable
• The Ondes Martenot