Various Artists

AMPLIFY 2002: balance

Erstwhile Records

I’ve long been interested in the Degas painting, “Dancers in the Rehearsal Room with a Double Bass”.  It’s one of his paintings of young ballet dancers in training, at rehearsal. Maybe it’s the shape of the canvas that draws me; it’s a long, rectangular frame, panoramic, more familiar to this century as CinemaScope.  When I think of CinamaScope, I think mostly battle scenes and Westerns, so it surprises me that such humble subject matter fits in that frame so comfortably. It’s not what you expect from Degas; the colors aren’t as pronounced as in his portraits of folk dancers in this painting, the tones are much more muted, brown abounds, in the floor, and in the double bass that stands in the foreground.

October 2002: Jon Abbey, of Erstwhile Records holds a festival in Tokyo of new improvised music.  Its lineup includes many of the Japanese and European standouts of a niche community, some of whose roots lie alternately in free-jazz and modern composition, two poles of the avant-garde whose difference rests on a structural issue. Modern composition makes structure external, its methods are intelligible – at least in theory they are – and visible, where in free-jazz the structural mechanics are all internal and accessed as such through the intuition (that “brewing luminous,” in the Cecil Taylor sense).   This new improv (third generation free improv?) takes the material concerns of new music avant-garde, and applies to those materials a method derived in part from the legacy of jazz.  The festival proper is three days long, with satellite shows (which included the only non-Japanese or European improvisor on the set, Australian Oren Ambarchi) running before and after through the surrounding days. Out of the festival emerges this boxset.

The subject matter of the Degas painting speaks about the project of which it is a part.  19^th Century painting was, in many ways, an attempt to explain mimesis in terms of the perceptual mechanisms of the viewing subject. Those are the “impressions” that make up the doctrine of Impressionism.  They aren’t necessarily emotional impressions, they are the literal imprint that light leaves on the eye in the form of retinal afterimage (take a second, blink hard, and watch those colors; Jonathan Crary, in Techniques of the Observer, would say that the discovery of afterimages predicates the disjunction between Romantic and Enlightenment era artworks), and thus about the way the body itself shapes one’s image of the world.  In the Degas painting, young dancers-in-training are a way of representing this.  In their betweenness, they celebrate the materiality of light, and the pleasures that it affords.  They become a particularly poignant metaphor for the pleasures of materiality.  In that they haven’t mastered their discipline, they still offer to a viewer some of the untutored, simple pleasures of the movement of the body. This is a casual, as opposed to a rigorous and specifically disciplined, attitude towards material.  It is casual in the sense that it is, in part, unshaped by the area in which it will be employed.  It is like paint that first appears as paint, rather than as part of a figure in a painting.  The dancer in training allows one to see the seams in what will eventually be a seamless performability, and in their awkwardness is a trace of what is unformed and wild still within them.

AMPLIFY 2002: balance is comprised of seven audio cds, and one DVD, a visual document of the festival by Jonas Leddington.  Six of those audio cds are live recordings, made on location, in front of the audience attending the festival.  And there’s “tint”, a studio recording from Toshimaru Nakamura and Günter Müller, carefully constructed, as all of the recordings are on Erstwhile. 

If we would take a leap, and classify the variety of music that is documented in the AMPLIFY 2002: balance box, as “expressionistic”, we immediately run into a problem.  Abstract Expressionism, in particular was, in part, about the subtle interaction of eye, hand and brush.  All mimesis was drained from the act of painting, and gesture was abstracted therefrom.  It was, in many ways, a recording of a particular subjectivity, a recording of interior vision.  Expressionism is about singularity, about one brain, one heart, and one object.  But, in improvised music, solo performances are the exception, rather than the rule.  Interaction with another being, whether it be the audience or a room, seems to be a necessity.  But with expressionist painting, especially of the abstract variety, the idea of a collaborative piece between two artists seems preposterous.  What would a collaborative painting between both Phillip Guston and Mark Rothko look like?  Clyfford Still and Jackson Pollack?  The mind rebels against the prospect.  We then need a way to describe how a pluralistic expressionism would work.

The Degas painting brings to my mind one of the beauties of mimesis, especially of portraiture.  Portraits are a collaborative work: there is the painter, and then there is the person being painted.  This is most commonly seen as a subject/object relationship, in that the painter is expressing their subjective view of the object before them, which is a person whose likeness is rendered on canvas.  But, it always strikes me that there is work being done by that person as well.  They too are expressing, in that they are reflecting (in Renoir’s portraits, one would say “radiating”) light to the painter.  They are exerting the force of their being upon the artist, and in that way, it is the painter’s duty to transform that force into an image on canvas.

In this boxset, we find the following means being employed: acoustic and electric guitars, turntables, analogue and digital synthesizers, laptops, a no-input mixing board, an “empty” sampler, an ipod, a minidisc player/recorder, percussives, voice and the occasional intervention of a clarinet.  But, this is not the totality of what we are talking about when we say “material.”  Those that know me must be tired by now of this Cardew quote by now, but I’ll repeat it again:

“...it is impossible to record with any fidelity a kind of music that is actually derived from the room in which it is taking place - its size, shape, acoustical properties, even the view from the window...”

              - Towards an Ethic of Improvisation

This is one of the primary pleasures of Jonas Leddington’s DVD visual document, “balance beams”, that is included in the boxset.  It offers its viewer “the view from the window”.

Then if there is an ethics to the relationship between the painter of a portrait and its subject, it would be something like friendship.  Both the painter and the subject of a painting are engaged in a project, creating a third term between themselves, which is an image.  If we consider the sound field that is created between musicians in this abstract variety of improv, then the connection becomes evident.  The music remains abstract, in that the facts of gesture are what the music is built out of, but the essence that underlies the music is friendship and its reciprocal relations.  This is the pleasure of the mimetic act, but abstracted from representation.  The performance becomes a celebration of material, of which the audience itself is a part.

“‘How do you prepare for a performance of highly abstract music?’  I think you begin by preparing yourself.  It’s not in the manipulation of the instrument…it’s in the perception of how you see the performance, or how you view performance.  I’m really honest when I say....when [at] a performance I put my guitar on the table, I get it all working, I go off [and] do something and it’s eight o’clock and it’s time to play, and I kind of look at the guitar in absolute horror at that point, and I really don’t have a single idea.  I’ll go further and say, when my hand descends to play the very first notes of a performance, I still don’t have any ideas.  As the hands or the fingers are just beginning to touch the strings, ideas begin to come, and you just take it from whatever begins to happen at that stage....I think what a performance is, is basically focusing on what is happening in front of you.  In order to focus, and to have something worthwhile within you to be reflected, that comes from constantly observing what’s happening around you and scrutinizing your work…looking very, very quickly....”

                 - Keith Rowe, from “balance beams”

Viewed from the perspective of the listener though, this form of interaction is invisible.  We see only the external manifestations of this form of interaction, this relationship as extending into materiality.  In that we hear something like music, we’re hearing a precipitation of all of those material events described.  Electronic improvised music, “balanced improv”, as Abbey once referred to it, grows climactically.  Weather and pressure become a metaphor we can use to describe this external blossoming of the image, in that there is no set form prior to each concert to adhere to.  The musical results are predicated exclusively on the interactions of material conditions.  Each set is a grouping of conditions, which, through the mediation of the artists, plays out within the venues. What prevents this from being cold and sterile is the depth of character of each of these musicians.  Their discipline must be enormous, to be able to keep their heads in the midst of this complex “unfoldment”.  It feels like something alchemical.

This box, then, becomes a course in the combinatronics of the musical climactic instability.  Credit Abbey as the one of the chief meteorologists of this music, in that through his study of it, he is able to bring together circumstances in such a way as to allow the beauty and profundity of this music to coalesce.  We have thirteen groupings of musicians, which span the range from sparse and quiet (Cosmos) to dense and loud (Thomas Lehn/Marcus Schmickler.)  The specific content of each set of music mirrors the diversity of weather phenomena, and so, rather than being puzzling, the vast diversity in the music makes sense.  The unyielding heat of summer and the brittle chill of winter seem diametrically opposed, but they are united in their both being the result of air pressure and the Earth’s position relative to the sun.

Among the many joys of the DVD are the short glimpses of after parties and pre-concert preparations. To be honest, it humanizes the musicians.  When you see Taku Sugimoto with a big grin on his face, twirling his hat on his finger, the yawning valleys between notes in the Sugimoto Guitar quartet seem less about austerity, and more about humility, as per Günter Müller’s comments. 

As it is tied to the circumstances of weather, the variety of improvised music documented on this box defines itself by the atmosphere it creates. We seem to experience abstract music as we experience climate, in that we are reacting internally to external changes in pressure. Abstract music does not have the cognitive currency that music that employs melody does. One imagines that there is basic pattern-recognition taking place, but nothing on the order of perceptual gymnastics that occur when listening to complex melodies and harmonies.

Atmosphere, as precipitation, is not just its outward, visible facts. There are hidden relationships, which are not only mechanical; they are felt as much as they are seen. It is not just the rain that we enjoy, it is the accompanying wind, the smell it brings from the soil, the way clouds dim the sun, the humidity, etc. In a similar way, the dancers in the Degas painting are not just an occasion for paint. It is their relationships; on one level those relationships of the dancers as their physical selves, graceful and lithe, and on the other level, the hidden, invisible relationships - friendships, rivalries, affinities, disinclinations among themselves that structure their outward organization as framed and denoted by Degas. The music described within the AMPLIFY boxset offers similar relationships that are as often as hidden, and as complex as those in that painting, and in climate. The boxset offers us a picture (with well defined edges and frames, it is an image of the festival, not the image of it, one imagines that the participants and immediate spectators have memories that are quiet different than what is documented here) of a system of subtly interacting elements: room, temperament, temperature, etc. It is has a peculiar variety of organization that may be visible to those in the future. At the present, though, any sort of descriptive physics remains unwritten.  It is difficult to describe where exactly the pleasure of this music arises from, but it seems to be akin to the feeling of the sun against skin.