Exploring sound art

Browsing in a record shop one day, you might come across a CD called Ticker. It’s an album-length recording of a ticking clock. The tick is fed through an echo, and the echoes get faster or slower depending on the body temperature of the artist, Alvin Lucier. He made the recording with thermal sensors attached to his body. Sometimes, perhaps to avoid charges of anthropocentrism, he puts the sensors on a potted plant instead.

This is sound art. Normally, I prefer to listen to music. Shostakovich, Rage Against the Machine, Ibizan trance. Just listening to interesting sounds has struck me as the sort of thing an ultra-stoned hippy might do, pushing a door back and forth for hours and swaying in addled wonder to the melody of the creaks. Continued →

I’m a Man
by Ruth Padel (Faber & Faber)

When is a guitar not a guitar? Why, when it’s a cock. Throughout this extraordinary book, Ruth Padel suffers from a kind of metaphoric mania: nothing is allowed simply to be what it is. We are told many times that “performing on guitar, the core act of rock, is whipping out your cock”. What Padel doesn’t try to explain is why so many musicians beat themselves up trying to learn guitar in the first place, if they could just be whipping out their cocks to the same effect.

Padel’s avowed project is to examine how the sexuality and theatricality of rock music owes its structural roots to Greek myth. Unfortunately the case of such a link is never argued, merely gestured at. Either we are to take on faith the assumption that Greek myth “underpins our own imagination”; or the claimed connection is so banal as to be meaningless: “Like myth, [rock music] is amazingly transformative”; “Like Greek myth, pop song is about relationships”. The whole book is written in a spatchcocked, febrile prose, a nauseous fusion of the overheated and the blankly demotic. Music “is brilliant at making things feel natural,” Padel chirrups meaninglessly; Greek tragedy is “like a Lloyd-Webber musical”. Continued →

Oops! I Did It Again
Britney Spears

Why is poor Britney so angry? To watch her dance on Top of the Pops, you might suspect that her body has been taken over by satirical aliens and forced to perform a strange ballet of robotic violence. Only a desperate glint in her eyes hints at the depths of her impotent rage.

Her new album will afford plenty more excuses to jerk around (or off, for her male fanbase): with its clinical percussion and huge cornflake-packet snare drums, 80s orchestral stabs and turbine sound effects, it’s invented a whole new genre: retro girlie industrial pop. Throw in a bit of harassed R&B while you’re about it, for a bizarre cover version of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”. (What, still? Even with the new breasts?) Continued →

The rise of the cultural middleman

When the artistic history of the 20th century comes to be written, one remarkable development will stand out. That is the rise of the middleman. As our culture became ever more mediated, we made the mistake of bestowing the aura of artistic genius upon the mediators themselves. The people closest at hand – musical conductors, theatre directors, DJs – became the objects of the awe and admiration that was rightly due to the creative spirits who built the works in the first place.

The most glaring example of this is the invention of the conductor. In the early years of the 20th century, Mahler and Toscanini battled it out for supremacy in Europe, while Theodore Thomas established in America a new template for the conductor as the permanent arbiter of musical taste with the Chicago Symphony. Soon the conductor was not merely a hired hand whose job was to beat time, but a suffering genius swaying in creative ecstasy on the podium. Toscanini, von Karajan, Bernstein: these were the new musical heroes. Continued →

The music of horror

What does a vampire sound like? According to Philip Glass, the undead’s aural analogue is a quivering nest of minor arpeggios, pizzicati and dramatic swoops. Glass has written a new score for one of the mothers of all horror movies, Tod Browning’s 1931 version of Dracula, starring Bela Lugosi. Glass is a name in his own right, of course, but in this, he is only the latest in a long line of film composers who have experimented with the music of fear.

Music is especially important in films that are meant to scare us because the soundtrack can slip past the intellect’s guard and act directly on the reptilian brain. Music as a powerful mood-inducer, of course, is an idea that has been around ever since early man started stretching animal skins over wooden bowls and getting off his face on qhat, and in Plato’s Republic, Socrates and Glaucon earnestly discuss the possibly chaotic mental influence of certain musical scales.

Think “scary music” and you might at first imagine big, meaty soundscapes. Spidery low strings, pumping horns, banging orchestral drums and Orffish choirs. But intriguingly, Glass’s score is written for string quartet. Thanks to some studio overdubs, it can build into thrillingly rich, multilayered panic (which in next month’s live performances with the Kronos Quartet will need the addition of Glass himself at the piano), yet most of the time it is eerily intimate, more sinister than directly shocking. Its oozing sonorities blend beautifully with Lugosi’s chocolatey Hungarian accent, and the mood builds in long lines, a pulsing engine of doom. Continued →

The church’s interior is glowing with amber, red and cerulean blue spotlights, hung with sumptuous drapes. Impossibly glamorous dancers smooch around in evening dress with lazy, fluid virtuosity, while from the six-piece band at the side comes an exquisitely haunting soundscape. Two violins alternately caress melodies and scrape vicious, piercing accents; piano and double bass lollop and thunder; and two men pull and squeeze their bandoneons, playing wistful, bohemian cafe tunes or giving off thumping atonal growls. The faces of the musicians emanate a melancholy so deep and powerful that its only expression can be one of glittering lightheartedness. This is the music of Dutch ensemble Sexteto Canyengue, who have hooked up with the Argentinian dancers of the Tango 5 for Destino Tango, one the most fiercely joyous experiences on this year’s Edinburgh Fringe.

Forget everything you know of cheesy ballroom tangos from Come Dancing. No bloody roses between the teeth. Destino Tango’s is an altogether darker, more modernist and more blatantly sexual aesthetic. The band’s twinkly artistic director and first bandoneón, Carel Kraayenhof, explains: “The ballroom tango is a kind of stereotype derived from the original tango, which is really like jazz. It’s an art form — with music, lyrics, dance, poetry; even films are made about it. It’s a really full culture in Argentina.” Continued →

With Eddie Van Halen

You are a young, unemployed American singer who used to play with an extremely successful but rather banal rock band. Now you need a new gig. Surely the last outfit you’d audition for would be the legendary Van Halen, whose 20-year punk-metal career has been marked by an unfortunate tendency to eat up singers and spit the chunks out with acrimonious relish. You’d feel like a drummer auditioning for Spinal Tap after your predecessors had all mysteriously exploded on their stools.

But Gary Cherone, ex-vocalist with Extreme, did exactly that. Now he’s part of the gang: the band has released a new record, Van Halen 3, and they’re a couple of months into a mammoth world tour. On Tuesday the band were in Berlin, holed up in the ridiculously opulent Schlosshotel Vier Jahreszeiten, a toy-coloured castle where oil paintings of worried-looking Prussian generals circa 1934 eye you beadily as you prowl around the Kaiser Suite. I am summoned by the tour manager, a gregarious fellow who collects BMX bicycles and whose odd beard is probably a sculpted homage to the Gibson Flying V guitar. Eddie needs to “sit down” for a moment, so we will begin on the balcony with Gary. Continued →

With the Art of Noise’s Anne Dudley

She doesn’t look like an experimental art-pop terrorist, but then you’d expect them to come in disguise. There could be one sitting next to you right now. The only clue to Anne Dudley’s identity as a founder member of the thrilling 1980s electronic collective The Art Of Noise, when her tall, blonde figure strides into a cosy top-floor London studio, lies in the ascetic, Bauhaus functionality of her clothing. Plain white shirt, slate-grey trousers - the purist colours of a minutely pencilled musical stave.

In fact, no one was ever quite sure who The Art Of Noise were, as they refused - a viciously clever stroke, in the heyday of New Romanticism - to pose for publicity photos. But Dudley has found a quite different fame lately, as the only British artist to be honoured at this year’s Academy Awards, for her musical score to The Full Monty. When the news broke, Dudley was out of the country, but a gang of craven hacks from the Express found out where her parents lived and camped outside their house, harrassing them for quotes. She finds the sudden media interest bizarre. “People always want a soundbite,” she observes, colouring the last word with a subterranean disgust. Continued →

Teaching computers to play jazz

Can a computer swing? Sure it can, if you hang it up by a rope and kick it hard enough. No, man, what I’m saying is: can a digital cat play jazz? Jazz, the apotheosis of cool, the fiery crucible of 20th-century musical authenticity, the spontaneous outpouring of one man or woman’s artistic self-expression through the irreducibly physical medium of a sax, a trumpet, a piano, a double bass? Yeah - nice. Ah well: that’s one citadel of humanity, surely, that could never be stormed by the creeping hordes of artificial intelligence. Continued →

Why do we ignore artists’ final wishes?

The author is dead. The Barthesian battle-cry of the 1960s is ever more relevant today. For the notion of the artist as a Romantic individual with sole dominion over his or her own work is unravelling. This month has seen two “completions” of works left unfinished by their creators. Elgar’s Third Symphony, which at the composer’s death existed only as sketches, has been magicked up into a concert score by Anthony Payne, performed last week by the BBCSO with Andrew Davis. And Thrones, Dominions, the last Lord Peter Wimsy mystery which Dorothy L Sayers abandoned (having not yet reached the crime) 21 years before she died, has been “completed” by Jill Paton Walsh and published by Hodder. There is no pretence in either case of this being “the real thing”. But what is odd is that, in the reviews of these hybrid artefacts, no one has confessed to ethical twinges about the appropriation of private artistic work-in-progress, that form of possession which the philosophers of the French Revolution enshrined as the most sacred and the most personal of all property. Continued →

With Hammer composer James Bernard

The composer-in-residence at the house of horror is back in business. Writing music to make your flesh creep is his speciality, and he is rumblingly passionate about it: “If Dracula’s approaching a victim, and there’s a lovely nubile lady in bed, and she’s tossing and turning and restless, and the window’s open, and she’s got the maid to come and take all the garlic flowers out of the room - suddenly you cut from her to the window, and there is Christopher Lee as Count Dracula… You’ve got to have a great ‘Oh-Woaaah!’ at that moment. If you try to be subtle, it simply doesn’t work - if you say I’m going to be very clever here and just have a little ‘ee-oo-wee’, it sounds terribly weak, you know…”

Resplendent in a green jogging-suit and wide-collared floral shirt, the dapper, silver-haired speaker leans back on his sofa, sips at a glass of blood-red wine, and gives a little low chuckle. This man is James Bernard, an unsung giant among film composers, who wrote the supernatural soundtracks for countless cult-classic Hammer films in the 1950s and 1960s. Now he has written a beautifully lush and brooding new score for the dark prince of horror films, FW Murnau’s silent masterpiece, Nosferatu, which had its premiere 75 years ago in 1922, and took its director and star, Max Schreck, to Hollywood. Continued →

For most of its history, the art of film music was neglected — even sneered at — by the academic musical establishment, even though cinema posed problems that composers had never previously faced. They needed to work in harmony with visual novelties, such as jump-cuts and special-effects panoramas, that had literally never been seen before. This week, however, sees a possible belated rapprochement between the two musical camps. John Williams, the Juillard-trained former jazz pianist and technically supreme composer of Spielberg’s biggest tunes (not to be confused with the Australian guitarist), will be conducting a short season of his film work with the London Symphony Orchestra. Williams, winner of four Oscars for Jaws, Star Wars, E.T. and Schindler’s List, is arguably the best film composer of the last three decades — but he’s only the most visible example of a long and stellar tradition. Here, then, is an extremely biased and selective guide to movie music through the years. Continued →