Full-Length Debut for Electronica’s Arranger

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

In the liner notes for Memoryhouse (Late Junction), composer Max Richter explains the name of one piece, “Last Days,” as follows: “The title refers to the concept that our culture is living beyond the end of history.” It’s evident from the record’s outset that when Richter says “culture” he means “Western classical music,” for which Memoryhouse is a requiem — or, better yet, a much-needed kick in the pants disguised as a requiem. Richter is no throwback. His orchestrations graced the drum’n’bass of Roni Size’s In the MØde, and he handled various old-world musical duties for Future Sound of London’s psychedelic album, The Isness. His brand of composed music is “post-rock” in the purely chronological sense. John Cage is dead, his wizened recorded voice heard here in a scintillating setting, on “Garden (1973).” The minimalism of Philip Glass is not an idiosyncratic style but a rich form ripe for adoption, whether in a piano duet (“The Twins [Prague]”), or full orchestral grandeur (“Last Days”). And baroque music, as Richter notes, will more likely remind listeners of the Beatles’s Abbey Road than of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. He seems obsessed, to our benefit, with how the past is a matter of perception. On one track, “Quartet (1908),” he plays his music through a valve amp to simulate a 78-rpm record; on another, “Untitled (figures),” he pumps out modern digital pulses to accompany a celesta, thus making that antique sound utterly contemporary. Richter has the ability to reconcile a conservatory-trained composer’s attention to melody and counterpoint with a sound designer’s attention to timbre and production, a rare combination of pursuits and skills. He challenges us to listen through raindrops on “November” in order to focus on his light, sustained string arrangements, and we follow him through the haze, in a splendid trance.

This album review appeared, in slightly different form, in the spring 2003 issue of e|i magazine.

Music for 8 Blessedly Servile Guitarists

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

On 8 Guitars (Quecksilber), the music chugs along like a minimalist locomotive. It builds steam within minutes, and then maintains its pace intently. Fans of the monastic repetitions of Steve Reich and Terry Riley, not to mention of Philip Glass and Gavin Bryars, are sure to recognize here a pop-music analog to those composers’ late-period classical inventions. As in their work, 8 Guitars functions as a Western gloss on Eastern conceptions of space and sound — a realm in which melodies and tunes and linear development are given over entirely to timelessness. But instead of Glass’ opera orchestrations and Bryars’ chamber arrangements, we have the iconic tool of rock’n’roll: the electric guitar. And we have it in large amounts. The name on the album sleeve is that of Scott Horscroft, though he doesn’t play any of the guitars. (Horscroft is probably the guy pictured on the record cover seated at a mixing board.) The eight guitarists — among them Oren Ambarchi and Brendan Walls — play with such selfless devotion to the mantra rhythms assigned them by Horscroft, that their interlaced patterns often suggest as many as a dozen more guitars. The sounds chime and shimmer, they huff and whir, so many strings working individually and collectively — not according to the organized flight pattern of an orchestra’s string section, but with the tightly controlled mayhem of a hive mind in action.

Now, the guitar symphony, for that is what this is, is nothing new. Glen Branca organized them as early as 1979, and groups as distinct as the Allman Brothers, with their Southern-rock jams, Judas Priest, with its hard-rock twin leads, and Sonic Youth, which inherited Branca’s New York art-world torch, have done much to promote the sound of guitars working in unison. Horscroft owes these folks a debt of gratitude, and not just for their having suggested such an experiment; there’s a naturalness to the sound on 8 Guitars that has to do with it simply having come long after these other musicians had broken new ground, and then let the ground settle. It goes without saying that the electric guitar served rock well, but it can be refreshing to hear it in a different context. And the difference between Horscroft’s intent and that of, say, AC/DC guitarist Angus Young is clear. In the traditional classic-rock song, the peak moment is a uniform and consensual resolution, a single instance primed by a standardized sequence of alternating verses and choruses, shared by all listeners at the height of a given riff. On 8 Guitars, an epiphany may occur at any moment — and, if the listener’s ear and mood are so attuned, for an extended moment.

tangents / Crossfade, Linkin, Mieville

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Quick Bits: (1) Though an exhibition of French sound experimentation has since closed, it continues to be available online. The Crossfade website (crossfade.walkerart.org) is hosting “33 RPM: Ten Hours of Sound from France,” curated by Laurent Dailleau and exhibited at the SFMOMA in San Francisco earlier this year. The online exhibit breaks the music down into 10 hours of sound (“03 Computer Music, Then Laptop”; “04 Some Bands”; “07 Rhythm Today”) and features work by dozens of musicians and groups, including Pierre Schaeffer, Luc Ferrari and Art Zoyd. … (2) A fantasy novel drenched in the sounds and images of London’s drum’n’bass club culture has been licensed by the DJ from the hard-rock group Linkin Park. The DJ, Joseph Hahn, intends to make a full-length film of the book, King Rat by author China Mieville, it was reported today by MTV News (mtv.com).

Quotes of the Week: John Cage, Tom Phillips

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The BBC has published online a brief feature, with audioclips, about music experimentation, titled “Sex Drugs and Four Minutes of Silence.” To borrow a now infamous bit of BBC phraseology, the title unnecessarily sexes up a story that stands on its on merits. It’s an interesting collection of brief interviews, including the late John Cage recounting the epiphany he had as a result of entering an anechoic chamber, an entirely soundproof room. It’s an oft-cited anecdote, but rarely does one get to hear it in Cage’s voice, with that mix of whimsy and wisdom he shared with fellow period stand-up philosophers Andy Warhol and Marshall McCluhan:

Going into the anechoic chamber at Harvard University, I expected to hear no sound at all, because it was a room made as silent as possible. But in that room I heard two sounds. And I was so surprised that I went to the engineer in charge … and said, There’s something wrong, there’re two sounds in that room, and he said describe them, and I did, one was high and one was low, and he said, the high one was my nervous system … and the low one was my blood circulating. So I realized that … I was making music unintentionally continuously.”

(Click here to hear the full Cage tape.)

There are also recordings of John Cale and of Tom Phillips, a fine conceptual artist and painter who was Brian Eno‘s art teacher. Says Phillips,

The whole idea of art schools is that they were a sort of a very nice dustbin for anarchic elements of the population, where people without proper qualifications could go and study something and keep off the streets.

Prog-rock fans will know Phillips’ work from his covers to albums by Eno (Another Green World) and King Crimson (Starless and Bible Black); he also did one of the images on the poster that came with the Who‘s Face Dances (also involved in that Who project were David Hockney and R.B. Kitaj). (For the full Phillips anecdote, click here, and for the full BBC article, click here; the program aired on BBC Radio 4 on April 26.)