MP3 Discussion Group: Black to Comm’s ‘Alphabet 1968′
Every week or so, the MP3 Discussion Group gets together online to talk about a recent release. The latest object of our collective, occasionally obsessive, close listening is Alphabet 1968, released on the Type Records label, and recorded by Black to Comm, aka Marc Richter. The album’s 10 tracks range from epic drones to compact minimalism, with all manner of lo-fi field recordings mixed in. Type Records generously streams all its releases in their entirety on its website, and Alphabet 1968 is no exception. Below is the full album, available via the SoundCloud service:
Participating with me in this week’s MP3 Discussion Group are:
Alan Lockett: “I write music reviews and commentary on ambient/drone, the more adventurous end of techno/house, post-dub, and IDM. Based in Bristol, epicentre of the Dub-zone in the Wild West of England, I can mainly be read on igloomag.com and furthernoise.org.”
Joshua Maremont: “I record as Thermal and pursue my musical and other obsessions in San Francisco.”
Julian Lewis: “I write much of Lend Me Your Ears, a UK/Spain-based MP3 blog that appreciates less obvious music.”
Lauren Giniger: “I’m an occasional rock-centric music writer who enjoys the opportunity to flex a little mental muscle deconstructing ambient works.”
The conversation will play out in this post’s comments section.
A little note on MP3 Discussion Group format: This is by no means a closed conversation, so do feel free to join in. The initial posts by participants were all written before they had an opportunity to see each other’s take on the album in question, but after that it’s intended to play out in real time.
More on the album at its label’s website, typerecords.com, and on Richter at blacktocomm.org.
I suppose I’d like to say (to Mark) that I have no problem with density of abstraction in talking about music, and if you’ve read my writing anywhere you’ll be aware of that. My last post was directed more at another tendency (and this relates to Paul’s posts) to apply a ideological-political agenda to criticism, as evidenced by his wielding of the apparatus of Cultural Theory and echoes of Theodor Adorno’s critique of ‘distracted listening’, further underlined by talk of ‘middle class’ and ‘working class’ types or uses of music, which I personally didn’t find either necessary or sufficient in responding to such works. Hence my (semi-humorous) appeal to let the music be ‘un-semiotic’, and represent nothing but its own sound.
Of course, I realise that it’s impossible for a text to remain ‘innocent,’ that any art work is ripe for investing with meaning by this or that reader. I guess I’d want to say that Paul’s comments are just that, though – a *reading*, and as such represent an *opinion* (and, from reading around the writings relating to this album, it’s not even remotely a consensual one at that). To criticise this piece of music for being merely ‘middle class’ background music for people to distract themselves with, for being insufficiently rigorous or risk-taking, may be tenable from a certain ideological position, but if such a position were to be consistently applied, it would write off a whole swathe of the kind of contemporary electronic music presented on disquiet (esp. in the Ambient genre – a soft target for its ambiguous disengagement, from the vantage point of Paul’s Class War) and other like-minded sites as works for the idle pleasure-seeking listener to soundtrack his/her decadent middle class lives.
In re: ambient, I know it’s only middle class background music, but I like it…
To finish at the end seems fair enough since ‘Alphabet’ is such a shaped, deliberate set of pieces, as several of us have noted. Joshua is surely right to highlight how ‘Hotel Freund’ – another candidate for lengthening that is probably best enjoyed as originally presented – works to close & resolve the album’s sequences (long to short & sweet to sour, for example).
Soothing “with its almost too beautiful loops” (what Alan nicely characterises as its “ambiguously elegiac grainy lo-fi orchestralism” & Lauren as “an enticing piece of ambient psychedelia — dreamy, with a muffled theremin popping up in the background”) & exiting to “the same found voices with which the album began”.
Maybe its chimes are a bit glib, too much of a shorthand for the sublime. I’d certainly be tempted to do without them (& guess this is the sort of thing both Joshua & Paul were caveating) – or substitute an element of harder-won, more Xenakisian beauty.
But to these ears the mood is well judged nonetheless – melancholy more than mournful, somewhat cinematic both through the obvious resonances of the strings & the sense of summing-up & fading out: a ‘real’ end to this picture-show…
Alan, thanks for the clarification — I’d entirely misread your comment to be more broadly intended — which had confused me, in light, totally, of what I’ve read by you in the past.
Alan –
Poppycock. There’s no ideological agenda here. Although, in any case, it seems to me you’ve misunderstood the use of the word “ideological”. A class analysis of aesthetics is COUNTER-ideological, insofar as it brings to light the underlying ideologies and class value systems of the means of production and presentation.
One might also point out that such a misunderstanding isn’t exactly unusual, betraying as it does certain class interests. One also notes in passing the idea that consensus is better than objective analysis, and that name-calling against an analysis is better than actually engaging with it and dealing with the material. Psy no attention to the man behind the curtain! You don’t get a lot more middle-class than that.
But in any case, who’s saying that all middle class music is bad? It’s just that there are particular weaknesses in bourgeois art, in that it tends towards the tasteful, and tastefulness is the enemy of beauty; and for that matter, a consistent repurposing of ideas into something dumber, less spicy, and easier to swallow.
And in the case of Alphabet 1968, the music is a classic example of bad middle class music that fails to be either listening music OR background because it’s reaching for the empty aesthetic of taste; and aping other people’s work which it hasn’t bothered to fully understand either in the way the elements interact materially or in the social meaning of its means of production.
Whether it’s the White Stripes or this record, we’re looking at best at children playing dress up in Mummy and Daddy’s clothes. But of course the alienation of the style from its cultural context, simply to make something pretty but meaningless, is the essence of the bourgeois aesthetic. I’m all for recontextualization, but if the juxtaposition doesn’t wind up having something to say (as, say, John Oswald does) then it’s just wallpaper, as empty a piece of genre hackery as a fill-in issue of The Amazing Spiderman.
Fairly obviously, there’s plenty of ambient music that does manage to transcend the wallpaper genre.
Right at the moment, I’m listening to Fennesz’s Venice, which is a GOOD example of middle class music (you don’t get much more bourgeois than a David Sylvian appearance). And there, each of the pieces is rigourously inventive instead of just nicking other people’s ideas and doing nothing very much new with them. The material, and the instrumentation, are developed from what they actually are in themselves; not just lazily and ham-fistedly jammed together because it seemed like a good idea at the time.
The bottom line is that Alphabet 1968 is a three star album; on the one hand there’s the interesting idea of trying to create these 10 different soundspaces by looking at the way particular historical styles might inflect a single chord (or perhaps, rather, deconstruct a single note into its constituent parts), but on the other hand, its a curate’s egg of undigested source material that doesn’t feel it’s way through the way that each of these styles has its own internal processes and meanings beyond just cutting and pasting them into place.
So it’s a good idea for a project that’s for the most part undercut in its execution by a lazy lack of imagination and an unwillingness to engage with the internal processes of the source material.
My motto: if you can’t do something new with the source material that makes it better, better leave it alone.
Quiet music such as Black to Comm’s is sublime — not in the aesthetic-approval sense (“Oh, how sublime”) but in the critical sense.
The best quiet music has an inherent tension built on sublimation, on patience, and on a meditative state.
Those matters of introspection may appear all surface but, as the cliche goes, they run deep.
Three stars or four, Alphabet 1968 reflects a level of attention to compositional detail that I, at least, have found rewarding on repeated listenings.
Paul, I’m prepared to go along with you on the considerable value of maintaining the currency of the somewhat outmoded term ‘Poppycock’, but on little else you say. Since this thread is now moribund, there’s little sense in pursuing a debate about e.g. contending definitions of concepts such as ‘ideology’ (BTW, nice use of a subtle ad hominem there, by commenting in passing that I have ‘misunderstood,’ which neatly suggests that you are the one with the Greater Understanding in these matters) or subjective aesthetic judgments smuggled in as objective ones (another nice trick). And I’m afraid, at this point, I simply can’t be arsed having it out with you about all this, especially this ‘class’ business you seem so keen on continuing to hawk around like an embarrassing elderly relative. So I’m going to be superficial, and offer something glib here like: ‘let’s agree to differ.’ Though this may well be annoying to you, it will at least serve to draw a line under my part in this exchange.