davidtoop

emanation, as if by a charm: Ami Yamasaki

Posted on November 19, 2019 by davidtoop

Ami Yamasaki mouth and nose Surprise is a dubious pleasure, cultivated in the search for musical forms that take the listener into realms of impossible/imaginary. Then suddenly, after decades of searching, the surprises diminish in quantity, often in quality, leaving an unavoidable sense of melancholy, mixed with the treacherous air of nostalgia.

The antidote is to recognise that ‘new and unfamiliar’ has become stale; the truly new and unfamiliar has opened up regions that feel somehow incomprehensible or distasteful. Aesthetic proclivities become old, just like the bodies that shape them.

I was surprised to be surprised, then, hearing Ami Yamasaki perform with Charlie Collins at Iklectik. Charlie plays a low-lying drum kit and his contributions to this duo were correspondingly low, as in subtle. As interventions they added a halo, a subterranean murmur, a transient glow. At times they gave Ami occasion to smile, in itself an unusual event in improvisation, given the more familiar seriousness of facial expressions.

What was the cause of this experience, through which at times I questioned what I was hearing, or my interpretation of it? Her voice is high and powerful, nothing surprising about that, but its relation to her body is strangely ambiguous. At times, this unearthly voice seems to emanate from somewhere around her body, close to but detached, sometimes corresponding to lip movements and mouth opening but at the end of phrases drifting out of sync. It reminded me of sections in the Béla Tarr/Agnes Hranitzky film, The Man From London, in which dubbing goes adrift in such a way that questions about production difficulties or deliberate dislocation battle each other with a clamour that threatens to overwhelm the course of the film.

She also uses, or seems to use, the ventriloquist technique of projecting her voice, creating the illusion of a voice closer to walls or surrounding air than its original source. All of this is a form of echo-location, commonly used by people who are sight-impaired yet hearing enhanced. Human potential, in other words. She becomes a wolf-woman, then holds a conversation with invisible others in which the words escape into themselves, as if holding their contours within the world of sound without symbolic function. You could say she sounds like a bird but birds exist in their own universe. A video on YouTube – Signs of Voices – shows her stroking the fur (made from paper) of an improbably long animal, singing in a whisper as if speaking directly to its unknown consciousness. There’s a relationship to ASMR, reflected in the YouTube comments, but unlike ASMR, which hovers in an intensely private/public space, her voice addresses itself to space itself, and whatever inhabits space (as if a bat locating otherwise invisible moths by the energy of directional sound).

As the set at Iklectik progresses her vocal techniques become more familiar – some ultra-low vocal fry, Mongolian and Tuvan style chord singing, whistling with added melody – but the way she uses them is otherwordly, as if she is experimenting with non-human identities. She strikes her chest, as if shaking loose a sound from its resonating cavity. Of course I’m reminded of other great improvising singers – Elaine Mitchener, Ami Yoshida, Sidsel Endresen, Sharon Gal, Phil Minton, Shelley Hirsch, Sofia Jernberg, Yifeat Ziv and more – but her demeanour is so calm. No visible wrestling with the emotional/physical effort of extreme voice production; just emanation, as if by a charm.

Ami Yamasaki and Charlie Collins performed at Iklectik creative space, London, SE1 7LG, 17.11.2019, alongside O Yama O, Beatrix Ward-Fernandez, Derek Saw and Lauren Sarah Hayes.

Posted in instrumentality, into the maelstrom, live sound | Tagged Ami Yamasaki, ASMR, Charlie Collins, vocal improvisation | Leave a comment

FOLD

Posted on March 24, 2018 by davidtoop

Nine people sitting on the basement floor folding paper into origami birds, four microphones hanging from the ceiling, a loudspeaker pair at each end of the room. A sound going on, unmistakeably but ambiguously emanating from this activity, suggestive of the palpitations of a locust swarm, the feeding of insect eaters biting their way through a bounty of desiccated wings and bleached bones. The white cranes accumulate, piling up in earthbound flocks next to their makers. I am conscious of furniture in the room, the chair on which I sit, the movement of hands, a thin garment hanging loosely on the wall, a vivid red teapot.

Gradually, patterns emerge in the sound, lulls falling mysteriously, overtaken by industrious surges. A Max patch is at work. Now the sound piece thins, leaving a sparse acoustic crackle that exactly matches the quick, concentrated effort of the folders. Their number has grown to fourteen. This is a durational piece – four hours at this point – so some of them have returned from a break. The atmosphere of dedication is the focal point that holds it all within its shape and volition, no obvious breakage points other than the sight of doing and making, the growth of birds.

Upstairs we speak in low voices, respectful of the crackling quiet below.

For a moment I think of Chim-Pom’s installation pieces – Non-Burnable, Real Thousand Cranes and The History of Human – all of which refer to the vast quantities of paper cranes sent from all over the world to the city of Hiroshima each year and to the practice of Senbazuru, folding one thousand paper cranes connected together by strings. According to Japanese legend, a person who folds one thousand paper cranes – one for every year of the mystical crane’s life – will be granted whatever they wish for.

But then I think of the sounds of labour: the physical impact of an axe cutting into a tree, the making of objects by hand, a typing pool (as seen only in old films) or the agricultural workers in Suffolk who would ease the monotony of threshing by mimicking the patterns of bell-ringing, their flails beating the same rhythm on the elm floor as the bells in a church steeple.

There are those records in my collection devoted only to songs and sounds of working: a Folkways 10-inch LP, The World of Man: His Work, which, notwithstanding the title, includes examples of women working: a Norwegian woman calling cattle to the barn to be milked, a Japanese woman spinning thread, women waulking, pounding and pulling tweed in the Hebrides, singing to make the work go with joy and pace. Then more grim than that, Alan Lomax’s recordings of prison songs made at Parchman State Penitentiary, Mississippi, in 1947, and Bruce Jackson’s Wake Up Dead Man: Black Convict Work Songs from Texas Prisons, made in 1965-6, the percussive thud of axes and hammers resounding in hot air as they rise and fall in unison, beating the rhythm of songs like “Rosie”, “Grizzly Bear” and “Early In the Morning.”

Lucie Stepankova’s idea for Fold was to bring together a spatial composition with this physicality, the working of paper and legend, “[exploring] the sonority of the ancient tradition of paper folding (origami), its ritual aspects and meditative potential. It values collectivity, simplicity and the transcendental quality of repetition over a long duration.”

At the beginning of Yasunari Kawabata’s post-war novel, Thousand Cranes, a young woman serves tea to the male protagonist. She becomes known as the girl of the thousand cranes, simply because she “carried a bundle wrapped in a kerchief, the thousand-crane pattern in white on a pink crape background.” The image of a thousand cranes haunts the text. Starting up in flight or flying across the evening sun, their flashes of brilliance momentarily cut across guilt and suffering. “The sound of her broom became the sound of a broom sweeping the contents from his skull, and her cloth polishing the veranda a cloth rubbing at his skull.” Happiness is a wish.

Fold, a listening environment, was performed at Hundred Years Gallery, E2 8JD, during the afternoon of Saturday March 24^th, 2018.

Posted in live sound | Tagged Chim-Pom, Fold, Hundred Years Gallery, listening environment, Lucie Stepankova, One Thousand Cranes, Yasunari Kawabata | Leave a comment

gone to earth

Posted on September 29, 2017 by davidtoop

Maybe a coincidence but during our Sharpen Your Needles event last night (28.09.17) Evan Parker played “Music for Mbale (Ndokpa)”, from The Photographs of Charles Duvelle: Disques Ocora and Collection Prophet, a sumptuous book and two CDs published by Sublime Frequencies. Recorded by Duvelle in Ngouli, Central African Republic, in 1962, the instrument played by two men for the Mbale village festival was a lingassio, a four key xylophone mounted over a pit.

Coincidence because of a social media discussion about the Ocora record called Musiques Dan, recorded in Côte d’Ivoire by Hugo Zemp in 1965 and 1967. Was there an example of an instrument using a hole in the ground for resonance? There are many extraordinary sounds and sound-making devices on that record – whirled slit aerophone, bullroarer, mirlitons, metal basin, the ground struck by big sticks, sieves filled with bronze jewellery, enamel basins filled with gravel, water drum, stone whistles – but maybe the strangest is Mask-that-eats-water, a pit dug into the earth and covered by bark. Fixed into the bark are vegetable fibres that are rubbed by two players. For reasons not entirely clear to me though perhaps explained by the ‘slip and stick’ theory whereby water affects dynamic and static friction at a very fast rate, water is poured onto the fibres by a third player, hence the name of the mask.

A photograph of a different earth instrument appears in Zemp’s book: Musique Dan: La musique dans la pensée et la vie sociale d’une societé africaine (1971). This one is equally ingenious but more elaborate, more conventional. In a chapter entitled Mythes d’origine des instruments de musique, Zemp gives what his informant tells him is the origin of the Arc-en-terre (my translation): “The bow in the ground belonged to an unfortunate, a little unfortunate. This boy had nothing with which to amuse himself; he could neither play the harp-lute, nor beat the drum, nor blow into the trumpet. Then he dug a hole in the ground, covered it with leaves, fixed a vegetal fibre there, and attached the other end to a branch which he buried in the ground. When he struck the rope, it spoke grrrrr grrrr. He says, It’s enough for me to amuse myself. This boy was an unhappy person. It is for this reason that the earthen bow remains with the children. It is not a thing to distract important people, it is for the unhappy.”

One lesson to be learned from this is not to jump to easy conclusions about earth instruments and primitivism. The Dan had other ways of amplifying sound, as the above photograph shows, but terra-technology floated somewhere out on the edges of society, either marginal, in the sense of being a diversion for the melancholy and immature, or spectral, as sound masks emitting the voice of a supernatural being. When I was beginning to research non-western music in the early 1970s unilinear cultural evolutionism was still prevalent. To find any subtlety in the literature you had to read ethnomusicologists like Klaus P. Wachsmann (father of improvising violinist Philipp Wachsmann). In my early twenties I was excited to read his chapter – The Primitive Musical Instruments – in Musical Instruments Through the Ages (edited by Anthony Baines, 1961). “While considering them,” he wrote, “it must be borne in mind that the effectiveness of a musical instrument can only be measured by the degree of satisfaction its sound gives to the people who use it.” He devotes a short section to what he called Ground Instruments: ground zithers, percussion beams, stamping pits, ground bows and, most fascinating of all: “In Abyssinia a narrow, tapering hole is made in the ground and howled into; the vernacular name of this instrument means ‘lion’s call’.”

The reference almost certainly came from French musicologist André Schaeffner’s Origine des Instruments de Musique (1936). In Art, ethnography and the life of objects (2007) Julia Kelly situates such ethnographic objects within the operations of circumstantial magic, as she puts it, “. . . at the boundary between the animate and the inanimate . . .” traversed by French surrealists in the late 1920s and early 1930s. She quotes Schaeffner’s argument, that ethnographers should study musical instruments falling outside recognised categories, for example “the most humble wooden box used to produce sound.” An extreme example from many points of view, not least museology, was a pit dug in the ground. “Schaeffner was also concerned with the least conservable of musical instruments,” Kelly writes, referring to an article on musical instruments from the Trocadéro’s ethnographic collections, “an Abyssinian ‘earth drum’ consisting of two holes in the ground of differing heights. This instrument could only be captured photographically, and indeed was virtually illegible in the dark photograph by [Marcel] Griaule published alongside the article, where only the player’s hands and arms gave any indication of its existence.”

The allure of such an instrument, hole within a hole, absence within absence, Is out of all proportion to its simplicity. One contribution to the above mentioned social media thread came from Ilan Volkov, who drew my attention to Christian Wolff’s Pit Music (1971), published in Prose Collection. The piece could easily be a description of how to make your own version of the Dan earth bow, though that seems unlikely as both Zemp’s book and Wolff’s composition emerged in the same year. As Ilan pointed out, Wolff never intended his Pit to be actually made. Like a lot of things, post-Fluxus, it was an indication of potential (political as much as anything) rather than an imperative. I wrote similarly provisional pieces a few years later, the Wasp Flute that was never put into practice even though the instrument was built, and hypothetical events in which I performed with seals and fish, all of them suggestions of how life might be lived in a world less traumatised by what Timothy Morton has called The Severing (in his new book, Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People).

from New/Rediscovered Musical Instruments (1974)

As Morton makes clear, discussions such as the one I am having now and have been having for nearly fifty years, became taboo, either because they were damned for cultural appropriation, primitivism and exoticism or dismissed for being hippyish, lacking in the detachment and rigour proper to a person who was considered to be permanantly Severed. But ultimately these holes in the ground address a basic problem – how to make a small thing bigger – and by applying the principle of resonance they fashion an elegant solution whose imprint will gradually soften and crumble into an impression rather than a scar. We could learn something from that.

Posted in instrumentality, writing sound | Tagged Andre Schaeffner, Charles Duvelle, Christian Wolff, earth bow, Evan Parker, Hugo Zemp, Humankind, Ilan Volkov, Julia Kelly, Klaus P. Wachsmann, Marcel Griaule, Pit Music, Sharpen Your Needles, Timothy Morton, Wasp Flute | Leave a comment

listening is intimacy

Posted on September 20, 2017 by davidtoop

Within listening is intimacy. The path to intimacy – with phenomena, other beings, objects, time, sensuality, the aliveness of things – lies through listening. A passing through. Seiji Morimoto, holding a rectangular metal box, slight movement, angled towards and away from light, chiaroscuro (as Caravaggio, as Georges de La Tour, as Robert Motherwell), tweaking controls; a small noise emerging, like pond weed in sunlight. Small moths flutter into the light of a table lamp, orbit fitfully, vanish. I thought of the tactical evasions used by moths when they detect the ultrasonic clicks of hunting bats: to emit their own high frquency clicks as a jamming mechanism, to fly erratically, to plummet to the ground as if dead. This is the most intense form of mutual listening, reciprocated clicks bouncing off bodies, clicks fired out into vacated space as one half of the partnership plays dead. Two heads, both strikingly classical in their own way, are in relation to each other; one dips close to the ground, the other is immobile, coaxing signals from a box. Later I remember Victor I. Stoichita’s account of a photograph taken by Gianfranco Gorgoni in 1974, of Andy Warhol and Giorgio De Chirico: “Though probably a snapshot, it nevertheless has the force of an oracle. It is the lighting that makes the photograph so dramatic, so much so that it is difficult to believe the snapshot has not been touched up. In any case, due to the unusual lighting, what could have remained a simple social record becomes an image of a transfer of power: through the freak pose, De Chirico passes his shadow world over to Warhol, together with an entreaty that he be its master (from A Short History of the Shadow, 1997). Trains scream, the hard exhaust of a motorbike passing through, distantly a cover version of Jorge Ben Jor’s “Mas Que Nada” and (again later) I think of Takuma Nakahira’s photographs, street scenes of sooty black, lamp black, blasted by flares and abysses of light. So there are snapshots, nothing else. (Cafe Oto Project Space, evening, 19 September 2017).

listening, the listener listening and listening stillness listening/movement listening listening to listening to listening

Posted in live sound | Tagged Cafe Oto Project Space, listening, Seiji Morimoto | Leave a comment

a distributed conglomerate instrument

Posted on September 14, 2017 by davidtoop

While eating shojin ryori cuisine outdoors at Izusen, Daitokuji temple, Kyoto, in spring sunshine, April past, I reflected on François Jullien’s In Praise of Blandness, the appreciation of blandness or insipidity in ancient Chinese aesthetics and ritual practices. Commenting on a text describing the use of muted music during ritual offerings to the ancestors he says this: “For the most beautiful music – the music that affects us most profoundly – does not . . . consist of the fullest possible exploitation of all the different tones. The most intensive sound is not the most intense: by overwhelming our senses, by manifesting itself exclusively and fully as a sensual phenomenon, sound delivered to its fullest extent leaves us nothing to look forward to. Our very being thus finds itself filled to the brim. In contrast, the least fully rendered sounds are the most promising, in that they have not been fully expressed, externalized, by the instrument in question, whether zither string or voice.

The seemingly endless succession of small dishes that form the experience of shojin ryori are not bland in the sense of being indistinguishable or boring. Each one has a particular character and subtlety of taste and texture but the cumulative effect is to balance rather than overwhelm the others. The look of them as diminutive sculpture is so striking and their taste so delicate that they leave what Jullien calls “the leftover tone, the ‘lingering’ or ‘leftover flavour’ (yiwei) [evoking] a potential, inexhaustible value . . .”

But another important aspect of shojin ryori is its relationship to time. Green tea mochi, yuba, fried plum, cherry blossom rice cake, sesame tofu, tofu skin, bamboo shoot, tempura, soup with kombu, edible flowers and ferns, bamboo and perilla leaf all follow each other at a steady pace without overlapping. They are specific to a moment yet they constitute a meal. This is consistent with many of the gardens of Kyoto temples – Zuiho-in, Kohrin-in, Oubai-in, Daisen-in, Tofukuji temple, Ryogen-in and Taizo-in. Many of them reveal themselves gradually. A corner is turned; a path is taken; a threshold is crossed. At Ryōgen-in, a small enclosed stone garden called Kodatei lies under the eaves of the study. It has another name – A-un – which represents the inhalation and exhalation of breath, indivisible pairs, positive and negative current. The dimensions of the garden are tiny, its stones visibly linked yet separated (symbolically, at least, and within deep understanding the longer it is contemplated) by a vast body of water.

In my early twenties I was drawn to a book called Animals Without Backbones, thinking that by studying invertebrates I could gain a greater understanding of the so-called formlessness of free improvisation. I was reminded of it, reading an account of “an unprecedented number of Atlantic portuguese man o’war” washing up on the Cornish coastline. Customarily thought of as jellyfish, portuguese men o’war are a species of siphonophore, a multitudinous colony of clone individuals with four specialised parts, all working together as a single organism. They go where the wind and ocean currents take them, often travelling in vast flotillas, which is why such sudden, mysterious ‘invasions’ become news.

At the Meakusma festival, Eupen, last weekend (8-10 September 2017), speaking and playing solo, I spent some hours on Sunday afternoon with Rie Nakajima and Pierre Berthet, chatting, watching them set up, then immersing myself in their installation performance. Elsewhere they have called these performances Dead Plants and Living Objects. Maybe that title was less applicable here. They set up on a hillside, objects dispersed in long grass and running down to the stream. Gusts of wind startled stretched wires and resonators into humming life. For a while I watched a large white balloon slowly deflate as it rocked gently in the breeze. Attached aerophones made no discernable sound but the scene was enlivened by flies landing on the balloon surface as if docking on a barren planet. They sought warmth but if the wind wobbled their puffy globe they would quickly vacate, then return a few seconds later.

Given their modest size, some sounding devices transmitted strongly from distance, a small part of their frequency range carrying up the hill. To walk close to them triggered curiosity, the pick-apart desire to know how they worked, but further away, where they were barely visible, a more open listening displaced this kind of focussed, analytical thinking.

The objects were scattered, half-hidden in the grass, in some cases barely visible (stretched string and wire); they could have come from a shed, a barn, the kitchen or a workshop for the manufacture of indeterminate projects. Without walls and with a cloudy sky as infinite ceiling, the dispersal and linkage of these elements felt more emphatically what I would call a distributed conglomerate instrument, close in its way to the shojin ryori aesthetic of eating, the sculpture of discrete but connected stone gardens or a drifting colony of intra-dependent entities. Muted would be a way to describe its effect; to become a part of it demanded unbeing, shedding all the blocking aspects of a fully operational human, letting go of faculties and ideas of boundedness, to enter into the world of flies as they alight on and take off from soft moving planets.

Posted in instrumentality | Tagged Francois Jullien, In Praise of Blandness, Kodatei garden, Pierre Berthet, Rie Nakajima, shojin ryori, sound installations | 4 Comments

and so it was the blues falling upon us

Posted on August 17, 2017 by davidtoop

and so it was the blues falling upon us . . . like a lot of other people, my head was burning and turning from the reality of an American president in 2017 unwilling after Charlottesville to fully distance himself from neo-Nazis, white supremacists, the KKK and other racists and so it was that I learned of Paul Oliver’s death. My copy of The Meaning of the Blues was close to hand and so it was I came to read Richard Wright’s forward, the conclusion of which said this: “The American environment which produced the blues is still with us, though we all labour to render it progressively smaller. The total elimination of that area might take longer than we now suspect, hence it is well that we examine the meaning of the blues while they are still falling upon us.” This was written in 1959, in Paris, for a soon-to-be architectural historian, English and art school trained, who had fallen in love with the blues and produced a book that was to contribute greatly to the scholarship and spread of a subject almost entirely outside his direct personal experience.

I was a teenager, maybe fifteen, when I read The Meaning of the Blues (in other editions titled Blues Fell This Morning). Oliver’s manuscript was finished in 1958, finally published in 1960 by which time he was on the road in America, recording interviews with an extraordinary range of blues singers, Speckled Red to Little Walter (recovering from a bullet wound), Mary Johnson to Sweet Emma Barrett. Oliver’s writing taught me how to think about music, make connections through to history, context and politics, particularly race politics; how to make some sense of an obscure lyric. In 1967, when I read Conversation With the Blues, the fruits of that field trip to a black America still enduring Jim Crow laws in the south, I began to develop an understanding of how to transcribe the cadence of vivid speech patterns, how to write about the relationship of music to its practitioners, their circumstances and the society of which they are a part.

Lightnin’ Hopkins at the Sputnik Bar, Houston (photo by Paul Oliver)

What I didn’t learn from him was how to write about the sound of the music. That seemed outside his purview, except for some isolated examples in Savannah Syncopators where intense encounters – “[in Ghana] . . . a chorus of women sings in chanting fashion, with one woman leading with vocal lines to which they respond, seemingly without relationship to the compelling rhythms of the adowa band . . .” – demanded description as evidence in a search for answers to questions about African retentions in the blues. How well his answers hold up after 37 years is for somebody else to decide but this approach inspired me when I wrote Rap Attack.

The exoticism of blues to a person like me, growing up in the suburban periphery of London in the 1950s and 60s, was one of the subjects I addressed in Exotica in 1999. After a trip to New York where I’d met Charles Keil, a fascinatingly perplexing track by J.B. Lenoir – “I Sing Um the Way I Feel” – had been on my mind. “Paul Oliver, one of the most eloquent of blues scholars,” I wrote, “had visited Lenoir in 1960, recording their conversation on a heavy EMI tape recorder that disintegrated when he journeyed south into the humid summer heat. Lenoir talked to him about dreams: the dreams of an old devil. ‘somethin’ with a bukka tail and the shape of a bull but he could talk’, that made his father quit singing the blues; a dream his mother had sent him, giving him numbers for the lottery; the musical inspiration that came to him, ‘like through a dream, as I be sittin’ down, or while I be sleepin’’.”

In 1984, Oliver prefaced the collected essays of Blues Off the Record with some cautious autobiographical notes that shed light on his obsession with the blues. As a teenager in 1942 he did ‘harvest camp’ in Suffolk, farm work taken on by teenagers to replace agricultural labourers called up for military service in World War II. Americans were building a base in Stoke-by-Clare, and Oliver’s friend Stan persuaded him to eavesdrop on a gang of black soldiers digging a trench. After a while most of the GIs were marched away, leaving two alone to finish the job. “We stayed behind the hedge,” Oliver wrote, “getting cold. I was getting impatient too, when suddenly the air seemed split by the most eerie sounds. The two men were singing, swooping, undulating, unintelligible words, and the back of my neck tingled. ‘They’re singing a blues,’ Stan hissed at me. It was the strangest, most compelling singing I’d ever heard . . .”

Oliver’s influence, though not his acuity and depth of knowledge, is plainly evident in the first review I ever wrote, 600 or so words about a Realm LP – Dirty House Blues by Lightnin’ Hopkins – published in a self-produced school magazine called ONE, circa 1965 or 66. Much of it was cribbed from the LP sleevenotes and where my own opinions surface they are embarrassingly naïve. I was searching for something, comparing “Everything Happens To Me” to James Brown’s version of “Why Does Everything Happen To Me” without knowing anything about the convoluted origins of that song (and I still don’t know much), also finding “affinities, strangely enough” between a Hopkins solo on “Long Way From Texas” to the “fast clusters of bent, cascading notes” played by Otis Rush, Magic Sam and Buddy Guy. Strangely enough I don’t hear those affinities quite so clearly now. What we hear is determined by what we search for.

Dogon ancestral shrine (photo Corrie Bevington)

Oliver’s main job lay in architecture, specifically vernacular architecture and the symbolic significance of shelter. In other words he was interested in structure and those symbols, rituals and beliefs that “identify, seek or invest meaning” (as he wrote in his introduction to Shelter, Sign & Symbol, published in 1975). This may be why (excepting the example above) he kept himself and his subjective responses to the sound of blues out of his music writing. But he was acutely conscious of the problematic aspects of a white man from Britain writing so extensively about African-American culture and was prescient in 1966, if somewhat mistaken, to think that the music’s future was bleak.

The circumstances of his death are unknown to me but presumably he was unaware of the weekend’s violence in Charlottesville and its continuing repercussions. If he had been able to follow these events, I imagine he would have felt profound sympathy with Black Lives Matter, since that was the motivational force that led him to write about African American life through its music, back in 1951 when he was exasperated by the attention given to jazz at the expense of gospel and blues. And knowing of a US president recklessly tweeting threats of fire and fury he might have dreamed himself back at the beginning of his book publishing career, to the violence unleashed upon Freedom Rides, and to the Cuban Missile Crisis, which threatened to kill us all. As Richard Wright said, this may take longer than we think, and so it was the blues falling upon us.

Posted in writing sound | Tagged blues, Exotica, J. B. Lenoir, Lightnin' Hopkins, Paul Oliver, Rap Attack, Richard Wright, vernacular architecture | 4 Comments

Acetylene snares

Posted on August 10, 2017 by davidtoop

“Raygun gothic,” William Gibson called it in The Gernsback Continuum, his term for the ‘tomorrow that never was’ and still the most vivid description of a certain style of retro-futurist, space age classicism exemplified by Frank R. Paul’s 1920s artwork for futuristic magazines like Amazing Stories. In 1911 Paul illustrated Hugo Gernsback’s novel – Ralph 124C 41+: A Romance of the Year 2660 – a book whose enticing title is belied by its contents. “Ralph then attached the Telautograph to his Telephot while the girl did the same,” is a typical sentence, making it fair game for the stigma of being “surely the worst SF novel ever published” (according to writer Martin Gardner) though since most of us now spend a considerable slice of our time attaching Telautographs to our Telephots, this seems a little unfair.

Yesterday I was attaching bone conduction speakers to snare drum wire – twenty strands of quivering silver steel, like curling hair – resonating the whole set up with a drum bought in Chiang Mai and a bell bought in a Japanese shrine, the reason for the latter being its iron clapper, useful for magnetically attaching the tiny speaker within the bell’s inner cavity.

I tried playing old cassettes through this instrument-without-a-body: spirit medium séances of Malay indigenous people, a herd of wildebeests, trance dances of Laos hill tribes imitating the sounds of dog, monkey, goat, sheep and cat, and finally an interview I recorded with my grandfather and uncle in 1979. That gravitation toward a kind of spectral oral history of distorted voices – human/animal/spirit – makes sense to me; the bone conduction elements of this configuration was developed for me last year by David Bloor for an installation, The Body Event II, that played back my conversation with John Latham through objects (books and their pages, representations of books, a howler monkey skull, my late father’s oil can, as in a Vanitas painting), into the space where I recorded it shortly before his death.

Syd Senior, my mother’s stepfather, was short and feisty, given to playing the jew’s harp and telling risqué stories after a beer. A talented Sunday painter in watercolours, he worked in the print; when I was a child he walked me around the City of London, took me to see paintings, Hawksmoor churches, the inner sanctums of print works and courts, a Dickensian world. By 1979 the stuffing was knocked out of him. His ruminative, gravel tones reveal a way of speaking now almost extinct, the way a working class north Londoner would say “gorn”, “old whasname” and “most interesting”. “I remember when old Queen Victoria died,” he told me, voice dropping to a whisper. “By god, you daredn’t say anything. They were very patriotic in those days, you know, 1914, all that lark . . . it was a very high class kind of thing. If you was common you wasn’t wanted, know what I mean?”

Recently returned from Venezuela where I’d recorded Yanomami shamans, I needed work. There was a chance to do some paid research for Artist Placement Group, for what was known as the Reminiscence Aid Project, placed with the Department of Health and Social Security. Initiated by DHSS architect Mick Kemp, it was developed by an APG team that included Ian Breakwell, Bill Furlong and Hugh Davies; for their input alone it should occupy a significant place in any credible history of sound arts. Shut down in 1979 by the election of Thatcher’s government, which put an end to long-term research in the DHSS, the Reminiscence Aid project was an early practical experiment in what is now called ‘reminiscence work’, a therapeutic tool with internationally proven efficacy in the care of elderly people suffering from dementia, memory loss and other effects of old age. Among other things I tested the Reminiscence Aid Project slide show in care homes and researched smog, the killer pea-souper fogs that blanketed London until the Clean Air Act of 1956 enforced smokeless zones.

So we talked about smog, Grandad Syd, Uncle Bob and myself, Bob returning again and again to acetylene lighting, the way its gaseous glow from his bike lamp lit a path through smog as he cycled to work at the Belling-Lee factory every weekday, or the acetylene flares burning holes of visibility from within the toxic murk. Through a now irritating oversight I neglected to ask about listening in smog, how a person might use sound to find their way or how sound was affected by all those soot particulates and was the dirty air of smog different to fog in its acoustic aspect? Nineteenth century physicist John Tyndall investigated the behaviour of sound in fog and found counter-intuitive results. The Duke of Argyll lived close to shipyards in Greenock, on the Firth of Clyde. “Shipbuilding goes on there to a great extent,” he told Tyndall, “and the hammering of the caulkers and builders is a sound which I have been in the habit of hearing with every variety of distinctness, or of not hearing at all, according to the state of the atmosphere; and I have always observed on the days when the air was very clear, and every mast and spar was distinctly seen, hardly any sound was heard; whereas on thick and foggy days, sometimes so thick that nothing could be seen, every clink of every hammer was audible, and appeared sometimes close at hand.”

To hear the dead speak through objects, living on borrowed resonance, their voices thinned, abraded and hazed by host materials and the lack of a tangible body is uncanny. The radio of things, it might be called by a raygun gothic enthusiast. Bone conduction was pioneered by Hugo Gernsback, publisher of Modern Electrics, The Electrical Experimenter and Amazing Stories. Nicknamed Hugo the Rat for the way he cheated the science fiction writers published in his innovative magazines, Gernsback filed a patent in 1923 on what he called the Osophone, a hearing aid that transmitted sound vibrations to the osseous tissue of the body. Clearly he had a thing about sound, also inventing a helmet device called The Isolator in 1925, a self-contained, oxygen-fed, deep air diver equivalent of the soundproof rooms constructed by Victorian writers such as the anti-democratic, pro-slavery historian Thomas Carlyle. As an aspirational state, the definition of silence to men like Carlyle was misanthropic: world, shut up!

Where the Osophone was a legitimate ancestor to technologies like Google Glass, The Isolator seems more like a bizarre antecedent to John Lilly’s 1960s deprogramming experiments with flotation tanks and LSD. Implicit in all of this is a deeper theme: the tension between humans as isolated or social beings, connected or disconnected, cut off by atmospheric or neurological conditions, deafness or personal experimentation, in the dark or lit by flares, lost to history and death or given revenant vibration by attachment to matter.

Posted in instrumentality, writing sound | Tagged bone conduction speakers, David Bloor, David Toop, Hugo Gernsback, John Latham, John Lilly, listening, Osophone, reminiscence work, smog, William Gibson | 2 Comments