As a musician playing an electrically amplified instrument, I’ve always struggled with the vocabulary we use to communicate about sound. To describe music, we can use and combine different systems of notation, and rely on the common knowledge we all have of how traditional instruments sound. When it comes to the sound of electric, electronic or digital instruments for which the choice or the creation of new sounds is essential, and the potential modifications are infinite, even after almost one century (the first electronic instrument – the theremin – was created around 1927) we are in an open field of incommunicable subjective sensations. Worse, the logic of modernist (also a century old concept) music is to make previous sounds and the attached vocabulary obsolete. And when it comes to what I’d call ‘informal’ music – that is music that aims at being free from any preexisting forms – in terms of rhythm, harmony, melody but also of sound –, the problem is even bigger.
A few weeks ago I was recording with the improvisation guitar orchestra Soft Power Ensemble of Vienna in the RadioKulturhaus studio in Vienna and we were re-working a song I proposed to the ensemble, a challenging parametric improvisation piece that is quite purely raw sound. The Soft Power Ensemble of Vienna comprises 10 electric guitars and this piece is mostly based on the continuous fast strumming of undetermined chords – that is 60 strings playing a random combination of amplified and distorted notes in the fastest pace possible – topped by cymbal rolls. Far from being a static chaos, the song evolves within its sonic mass with slight rhythmical and harmonic variations improvised by the musicians, tonal modulations created by electronic guitar effects, involuntary incidents, frequencies collisions, etc. – so each time we play it, it can be quite different within its constraining limits and this means also that the quality of its execution can vary enormously. We’ve been playing the piece – whose unsubtle but eloquent working title is Razor Wired Wall of Sound – for a few months now, in the studio or on stage, and we had to find a way to discuss it. Tell when the song was good, why it was good and what we had to do to make it good, when the starting instructions keep as simple as: 'fast strumming of a random chord with distortion for x minutes' (there is more but that is the core of it).
There is a story, or a myth – one could call it a meme nowadays – that is often told jokingly amongst noise and improvisation musicians – who easily claim that they believe it, or at least act as if they do … I don’t remember if it’s originating in some ancient mythology, mystic philosophy, music history, visionary science fiction or pseudo-scientific esotericism, probably all of it. It says that since the universe is made of vibrations (that is not untrue, though an oversimplification of quantum mechanics), music and sounds are able to recreate a universe and the more frequencies they develop, the more complex the universe, independent of the music itself but as an effect of some magical physics (where analogical thinking makes sonic frequencies and energy waves the same thing). And the far-stretched logic of it is that if you can play an infinity of frequencies at the same time, you become the demiurgic creator of a new universe, or you are even creating the actual universe itself in a kind of ultimate feedback. And the louder, the better! Like I said, nobody really believes this but isn’t this what mythology is: an unconscious cultural subtext to all human activities? I can’t help thinking that when I propose to the ensemble a piece such as the one I evoked before, this kind of idea is in the back of my mind, as a joke as much as a childish wish that magic would exist for real.
When we started to play Razor Wired Wall of Sound it was necessary to find a vocabulary that would allow me to express the nuances I expected for something that might seem devoid of any (it has been once described by a member of an audience as '10 minutes of white noise' – it must have been a bad version that night), and it happened to work when I used somehow 'mystic' words. Once I had described the piece as 'contemplative' or 'meditative' and asked the musicians to aim at 'plenitude' and 'fulfillment', the piece settled down. Though it would still be 10 guitarists strumming vehemently their instruments and 2 drummers beating their cymbals and none of us becoming suddenly adept of Buddhist wisdom. Would I fail to remind us of these few words before we play, we would easily produce a brutal and noisy cacophony – I voluntarily blur here the distinction between playing instructions and sound instructions as there are almost no other musical elements in this work than sound. Maybe the words I use there have a certain truth that come through, maybe I just exploit a meaning they acquired as mere clichés and I could talk about a big chocolate cake to reach the same result, but they help me to achieve the sound I’m looking for – without even mentioning sound.
The infamous Japanese musician Keiji Haino has been quoted saying that the reason why extreme loudness is a key element of his sound is because God is speaking through his guitar. I don’t know what God he’s talking about, and I don’t know whether he believes in this or not – but it doesn’t matter because it is perfectly clear in term of sound and music and it shifts the aesthetical issues to a completely different level.
published in Paradigmata n°12, May 2015
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