"No Says The Echo": 2 by Jeff Gburek

Orphan Sounds

Perched atop magazine mastheads and perched upon by both musicians and their fans, musical genres are precarious things. With even the most gentle nudging, they can topple into one another. Play AMM's The Crypt at high enough volume, and people might think you've pulled your Blindfold Test item from the Chondritic Sound label. The song scraps of Will Oldham's Ode Music are similar to melodies Alan Lomax or Harry Smith might have recorded on one of his field trips, but the method to which this material is subjected is pure Phillip Glass. Is Beiderbecke's "In A Mist" jazz or some naive example of Impressionism? Did Mongo Santamaria specialize in a Cuban form of hard bop or a particularly street-wise variety of "world music"? Do the tape experiments collected on the Electronic Kabuki Mambo disc (Locust) receive approbation for what they tell us about the depth and extent to which the essential microtonality of much "Eastern" music was a concern of Bay Area composers active during the middle of the previous century, for being early examples of non-idiomatic improvisation, or due to the fact that they were produced by electronic means? But this is genre confusion as a result of speculation. Genre transgression and genre corruption are often only good for novelties: think of used CD store clearance racks crammed with Marilyn Manson and String Quartet Tribute To... and Pickin' On... discs, each one of which, much like The Rolling Stones' Emotional Rescue, should bear a stamp reading "Seemed like a good idea at the time". However, for serious artists, considered movement in and around genre distinctions can be a valuable component of larger, long-term explorations. One thinks especially of contemporary musical heroes such as John Fahey, Cornelius Cardew, Henry Threadgill, Arthur Russell, and others. Certainly one characteristic of a good many early 21st century musicians is that they favor an intuitive disregard for genre as a basis for culling. "If I like it, I feel free to include it, that's what history is for. Rethinking context is what liberation is all about." I wonder what choice these musicians could otherwise make. Not always trained in the traditional sense, they are often extremely well-informed, and have the benefit of knowing what, musically, precedes them as well as what, musically is happening in places very far from where they live and work. If it has all been done, they the most one can hope to do is reassemble that corpus in the most imaginative, perhaps even personal, way. (Which prompts me to observe that it is easy enough to dismiss Post-Structuralist thought now that it serves as nothing more than explanation for the way in which the world has broken.)

All this prompted by two recent limited edition CD-R releases by table-top guitarist, electronic musician and free improviser Jeff Gburek. Although Gburek's music thus might be most conveniently classified as electro-acoustic improvisation, The Only Escape Is A Dream and The Black Transparency, Volume II provide evidence that not only is this "genre" easy to destabilize, but it also benefits from being disturbed. Gburek applies force from the fringes whose edges have melted to fashion this descriptor, with the result that fissures heave up right through the core of the "style". Not all sound artists are also recordings artists. Many sound artists would consider a recording based on one of their installations or events, packaged for individual purchase and engineered for playback on a conventional home stereo system if not an unhappy alteration of their original work (akin to a photographic reproduction of a piece of sculpture) then, at best, another opus unto itself. Gburek is both a sound artist and a recording artist, and although he is not alone in assuming both roles (Steve Roden, prominently), the present recordings demonstrate that his ideas are big enough and elastic enough to justify his not opting for one medium (or forum?) to the exclusion of the other. For these two rather different projects, Gburek mixes industrial noise and spectral ambience, utilizes field recordings (i.e., captures not strictly intentional processes) and offers instrument-based free improvisation. Expanse as well as enclosure is of equal concern to him, and his music is capable of transmitting a sense of both the hermetic as well as the socially engaged. He interacts not only with sound but also with programmatic elements, such as dance -- Gburek's partner in many ventures is Butoh dancer Ephia -- and architecture. In this same vein, Gburek treats as programmatic what we know about listening (e.g., that music is experienced differently depending upon whether one hears it over speakers or through headphones) as well as what we expect of music (e.g., song-form as musical cipher, what song-form transmits: a message and the key to decrypting that message). Finally, Gburek does manage to extract something whole from the churn of all this disparity, yet his concept of unity rather bravely owes more to an unfashionable Surrealism than those -isms -- Futurism, Minimalism, Conceptualism -- that the highest-profile musicians performing music of this variety have claimed as relevant to their activities.

Credited to "Djalma Primordial Science", The Only Escape Is A Dream consists of recordings made as part of a performance installation mounted by Gburek and Ephia in various New Mexico locales (Los Lunas, Fort Stanton and Albuquerque proper). the guitarist describes this recording as an "acoustic documentary... [it] is built from sonically tracing the contours of the various post-institutional asylum sites with microphones and reassembling them." By "post-institutional", one can only guess that Gburek means abandoned structures or, at least, structures which are no longer being occupied per their original purpose. One man's wreck is another man's temple. The titles assigned to the individual pieces (movements?) here, such as "basement 611+" and "kitchen/fntn/jaws*", certainly reinforce the sense that these are interior spaces that are gradually being opened, but unhurriedly and with great care, as if those spaces were bomb cases. Area is transformed into outline, which is not the same as reducing three dimensions to two. Instead, Gburek layers the sonic material -- "taken" from the sites as well as improvised -- in such as way as to reveal the essential contribution one's movement in and through a place makes to the definition of that place. It is significant that Gburek opts for the term "documentary" as opposed to "document", for in know way does his choice carry the meaning of "in actual time". As in a documentary film, accuracy is maintained, but not at the expense of orchestration via the placement of recording devices, the sensitivities of those devices, the use of cutting and splicing, the use of mixing, etc. Gburek takes the listener further and further out of real time as The Only Escape Is A Dream progresses. This represents a real break with the prevailing trends in electro-acoustic music in which improvisation plays a prominent role. The emphasis on improvisation in such music is also a prizing of the instant or sound-by-sound realization of musical form in a mode of unconditioned response. To improvise is thus to be connected to real time, time without rupture. In freely and collectively improvised settings, meaningful events succeed one another and musical dialogue is still rather straight-forward, even when those meaningful events do not involve the generation of new or different sounds but simply the re-positioning of existent sounds, e.g., in an AMM performance in which background and foreground seem constantly to be shifting. No matter how much self-editing an improvising musician exerts upon themselves / what they intend to play -- and the Keith Rowe, John Tilbury and Eddie Prevost are among the most conscientious of improvising musicians in this regard -- the process of collective free improvisation inevitably entails transition, not to mention anticipation. (Granted, much contemporary collective free improvisation substitutes strictly unintended musical gestures, accidents, or sounds produced by attempts not "to play" for impulsive sound. And improvisers are always capable of ignoring their collaborators -- a flatly perverse response -- in pursuit of a musical goal. But such a decision, unless a planned, i.e., agreed upon prior to performance, component of the improvisation's overall design, often results in music that is unsatisfactory to the improvisation's participants, both "on stage" and in the audience. In any case, both strategies are attempts to break the tyranny that traditions of "listening" hold over spontaneous structures. ) Gburek, on the other hand, also operates as a composer; he manipulates his material so that sounds often displace both one another in addition to the very continuity of the musical content. The first look may not be the best look. In terms of narrative, then, the sounds with which Gburek interacts are free to move in additional directions, or they may move in more than one direction simultaneously. When one is self-contained, so to speak, collision can really be a collision and not a temporary concurrence of that which was at variance once and will soon diverge again. The Surrealist welcomes the eruptive and enshrines detritus. The Surrealist abhors tidiness. The Surrealist takes comfort in your uneasiness. But the expert Surrealist is one whose automatism is surgical, efficient and exact, rather than gory. Unlike a surgeon's exposing and severing motions, however, the Surrealist's need not be especially cautious.

That said, consider that The Only Escape Is A Dream's opening track, "rm.315.no.3", features sparse sounds -- high-pitched sine tones, the pops of electrical connections being made and broken, metal rubbing against metal, and ambient throbs, as of motors in precision instruments, or perhaps one's own pulse being checked -- that only gradually achieve meaningful audibility. The need to scan obviates against obvious gestures at first, and the landscape is deceptively bleak. Everything may look as if it is desert, but that is only because the vegetation is sunburned to the same color as the sand, and the sheer distance you are being asked to perceive requires that you protect yourself by blurring what confronts you. Once the readings are taken, however, recognizable guitar textures become noticeable: strum, pluck, scrape, are used very sparingly, a "whang-whang-whang". The real "source" of these sounds, however, is completely open to question. Softly articulated, seemingly random in placement, of very short duration; although they arise from a "musical instrument", they might have been evoked by a hot wind vibrating through the strings as easily as they could have been stirred by hand.

The disc's other tracks are all similarly animated. That is to say, throughout, the accepted elements of what Gburek has expressed in an interview (with Jerry Kranitz) as "the consciousness of pleasure in sound that we then call music" (rhythm, melody, harmony) are present in attenuated and half-effaced forms. Moreover, those musical scraps are buried or pushed into recesses, or concentrated around certain objects, like the stone surrounding an imprint made by a once-living thing, making a fossil. Music thus haunts these rooms and passageways. Music, made by human beings and not some fortuity of nature in force, is effectively wandering spirit. Like a ghost, sound here is disembodied and yet it behaves as if it were corporeal. The blurts of synthesized speech on "kitchen/fntn/jaws*" will no doubt turn off some listeners for whom intelligible utterance is the worst intrusion. Nonetheless, its presence, answered in a clipped hush by the reconnoitering musician, serves Gburek's interests perfectly. Choppily spouting fragments of what sound like instructions ("leave the server on"?), this non-singing voice is that of a human intelligence in search of patterns, patterns that will beget further patterns. As if vitality is locked within those patterns, or to take residence within a pattern, even one that has fallen into ruin, is to guarantee the solidity of one's reality. Yet so much living is predicated on habit, when habit is, like a recurring dream (and not matter how puzzling or distressing) is a form of stasis, and eventually death. It is a theme on which much uncanny literature is based: some pasts are impossible to reclaim, and will only claim the one who delves into them body, mind and soul. In these eerie places, customary music and music-making are evidence of a pathology, or are types of necrophilia. The challenge Gburek has set for himself is to situate himself as an improviser in such a way that he can avoids the dangers presented by the habitual even as he calls attention to the fact that the aesthetic alternatives he has chosen are the most interesting under the circumstances, and, ultimately, the most humane means of discovering sounds that, in his words, "evoke states of physical transformation".

So "underneath" or perhaps "between" the scrapes, waves of feedback (recalling Skip Spence's "War In Peace", of all things, but there's always a band fooling around in the basement...), and up-way-past-the-fret-board pinpricks of guitar tones on "basement 611+" there is a low, sustained frequency that might be hymn-like -- resonating in the chest as opposed to the head -- in a different context, but here recalls the sing-song of air entering and leaving the mouth of a slumbering or sickened person. And we could be inside of a mouth here, which is a sort of cave. We might also be in the midst of a lullaby, a tune that can lift and re-orient noises so that they become more "musical" than their origins would predict they could be. By the time we have moved to "kitchen/fntn/jaws*", this inhaling / exhaling is no longer drowsy and groaning but somewhat desperate, whistling. The tines, concavities and blades of cutlery jangle against one another. The gestures on this track are of rifling, as if something very important has been mislaid. At one point, it sounds as if someone is trying to tip pills out of a bottle. "(t)raum: basalt, granite, limestone" commences with what sounds literally like a trawl across a huge and littered (small stones, bones) and cratered floor. Around the seven-minute mark, there is a loud crack, exploration ceases, and noise rushes in. The microphone that previously extended our perceptual abilities can suddenly be seen as another kind of barrier. Howling and "red lining", amplified static promises at several points to overwhelm, yet the piece ends with a fade-out on the sound of water dripping, running out, running away, and the creaking of what could be a rocking chair or a door swinging back towards closing on rusty hinges. In other words, with the regret clinging to objects left behind and with the pathos of ebbing.

This diminishing, however, is echoed in the rain that falls on "fort stanton walk". Where "(t)raum: basalt, granite, limestone" seems to penetrate the deepest, to the point of pulverization, this final track seems to place us on the roof. Somewhere an alarm sounds. The most guitar-centric of these works, it is also the least conventionally "musical". Gburek coaxes penetrating whines, obnoxious beeps, and high, thin, often descending and grating slurs (a bow or tube of glass or metal being pulled perpendicular to the string) from his modified instrument. Still, overall, the (relatively brief) piece is not so much harsh as detached. It possesses a floating quality, but as of sediment that has condensed into a buoyant mass that remains opaque as well as obdurate. It recalls a painting with which I'm sure I'm familiar † in which a huge toxic block sits like some off-center mushroom cloud at the top of the canvas, connected to the landscape below by a column that is either a tail or a plume. As such, the initial feeling of release, aided by the reflex that reads the image from bottom to top, turns ambiguous. Is this matter rising in defiance of gravity, or it is about to drain back down to the ground? The Only Escape Is A Dream is a work rich in implications. Is configuration identity? What relationship does the reconstructed really bear toward that which originated it? What are the connotations of "site": a place to be surveyed? cordoned off from its surrounding environment? a place to be exploited? something momentous happened there? has the potential to happen there? Can we simultaneously celebrate and mortify the body? While creating, what qualifies as a valid use of people --including oneself -- and what counts as using people poorly? What is it to be dead is not less than human? But what it is to be more than human other than dead to this world? Suppose there really did exist electro-biological organisms that made electro-acoustic sound? Would these organisms, no matter now animate, truly be alive? What sort of mind might this being have? Would it have a mind? (Would "it" be an "it"?) Sentient or not, is such a being's inalienable rights primarily moral or aesthetic? What do we do once we encounter a product of evolution -- which is transformation in its ideal state, isn't it?

On the second installment of his Black Transparency series, Gburek returns to solo free improvisation and restricts himself to sounds sourced from "electric guitar, looped board interface, [and] signal processing." An, as if to provide one set of answers to some of the questions articulated above in connection with The Only Escape Is A Dream, the result is a recording that instead of expanding, with the extravagance characteristic of a fevered imagination, upon a theme instead progresses from multiplicity to austerity. The Black Transparency requires of listeners that they be able to endure, more so than that they willing not to reject what they are witnessing. Much like a Glenn Branca "symphony" or portions of The Hafler Trio's How To Slice A Loaf Of Bread, here a single instance of euphony may be sustained for so long that it is deformed into dissonance, or dissonance pushed past certain limits becomes euphonious. Inside the loop or drone, patience is constitutive of drama, cessation in a mere interval, and complexity is a system in which simple entities -- single pitches, or mutating cells of musical material -- connect with one another via repetition. The object of such music is not to lead the listener through an ingenious labyrinth to the treasure that is kept safe therein, but to reveal to the listener how that treasure is inherently without center. What has been refracted cannot be plundered; it has been scattered, is what encloses, is the obfuscatory rumor of its very existence.

So much for heroism. Not that Gburek seems to mind, or that we should, either. The fourth track on The Black Transparency (all are untitled) is 22 minutes of feedback and signal overload the musician describes as "utter compression, constriction... like heating a fluid to the boiling point and then covering it quickly, so that the [B]rownian motions shudder and ding the sides of the pot." This reviewer would liken the experience of listening to this piece to that of watching a laser beam focus and break apart as power surges through it. Sometimes the photon stream veers away from you, and you lose sight of it, and sometimes you are its target. Of all of the music to be heard on these releases, this is the performance that calls to mind the stances (as opposed to the concepts) of the Butoh aesthetic, with its emphasis self-contortion and self-infliction in pursuit of metamorphosis, metamorphosis being one means of reconciling the inner with the outer. Gburek again: "although it seems loud [I] might point out I recorded [it] with headphones only, the sound does not come out of the amplifiers, very internal dimensions..." Surmounting and conquering are of no consequence now, yet neither is passivity: we just to resist long enough for the endorphins to kick in.

The difference, though, is that this pain is not actual. It is not simulated, either, as these sounds are often ear-splitting and nerve-wracking. But the pain is largely metaphoric, a glimpse into those realms of consciousness that are normally inaccessible. And the opening track on The Black Transparency prepare the listener for this experience. Here, Gburek actually conjures the space, and lets us know that we settling in for something. Volume swells, electronic tones, a chattering buzz: they augment and subvert each other. At one point, this listener could swear that those locust-like sounds are directly behind him. These sounds operate like vertical and horizontal lines that, if they intersect perfectly, point the way toward this vortex's vanishing point. On the third tracks, Gburek fashions guitar figures into loops that quickly decay. This method allows him explore the depth of the sonic field without erecting permanent or even semi-permanent constructions. That is, he does not chase himself, thinks only one or two sounds ahead, and, with the help of a delay effect, strives to make very unlike sounds co-exist as long as they can. Each gesture, not one of which would benefit from being called supple, nonetheless has its own function. Yet more to the point seems to be the trial-and-error combination of these functions.

Until track 4, then, the nature of this location is truly mysterious. It is not empty; it contains a secret. The Black Transparency's fourth track reveals how this secret responds to the threat posed by interrogations of it. It dismembers those questions, transforms those questions' basic impertinence into monstrous phantoms, and unleashes them with indiscriminate force. Musically speaking, this is not that outlandish a notion. Gburek refers to such possibilities when he says "in the improvisatory field... we question silence with out sounds and silence does not, at first, respond." Or imagine what it might sound like if all those lovers who have been jilted, stripped naked, kicked out, kissed off, vituperated against, all those ex-s who have had to listen while only one side of their story is told in song after song decided, all at once, to protest their treatment? It might sound something like this track 4, and not Fleetwood Mac's Rumors or The Magnetic Fields' 69 Love Songs-- which, hurtful as they are, are nonetheless accompanied by their own alleviation in the form of romantic rationale.

The artist responsible for such a reply and such an outcome may have been prepared for it, but the listener may not, at least not upon his / her first audition of this recording. (Orphan Sounds' slogan? "Giving the creeps back to the system.") Does this mean the music loses potency or lacks surprise with each replaying? Not necessarily. The Black Transparency does lack some of the amenities of The Only Escape Is A Dream. True, it also delivers more in terms of what it risks than how it rewards. Ultimately, however, The Black Transparency is the less gripping of these records. Perhaps Surrealism lets Gburek down. Perhaps there is no grace in abomination, and maybe there is no Utopia whose capitol lies in the irrational. Paradoxically, though, as long he remains true to the Surrealist tradition and assents to the value it place upon the bewildering juxtaposition, Gburek can entertain this option. That one of the best ways to prove a hypothesis wrong is to follow its steps perfectly. To do it up right. Revision, then: "Ultimately, however, The Black Transparency is the less emotionally gripping of these records." Perhaps the emotions themselves, being in the main negative (revulsion, terror, agony), are at fault. Gburek does not attempt to excuse his inclinations by invoking catharsis. That cure will not take. What after all does catharsis mean to someone interested in primal energies, in "crossing and re-crossing imaginary boundaries", and in being "deliberately and confrontationally eclectic"? As Antonin Artaud ‡, the arch-Surrealist and Ur-eclectic (world traveler and amateur anthropologist... what an odd muddle of Puritanical and permissive adventures Artaud embarked upon...) whose name appears prominently at the Djalma website, believed, mind is division, therefore torment, selfhood is madness, and catharsis but a spectacle deserving only of reproach. For Artaud, there is always something greater, some totality that transcends all that is fleshly -- including appearance, including genre -- and to which his work refers, but in referencing betrays. Which is just as well; you probably don't want direct access to this authenticity, or want to admit this authenticity access to you, anyway. Best to stick with the accepted violence. I recommend the not-so naked lunch. It really is quite good here.

~ Joe Milazzo

† Now that all my research has not panned out, I'm convinced that I only imagined this picture. I can find nothing in the canons of modern art that corresponds to the description given. But the image itself, and occasionally its colors -- taupe, scumbled red, black flecking -- is now a phosphene no amount of blinking will dispel, and it haunts, as much as latency haunts, every early Rothko, every Helen Frankenthaler, Antoni Tapies, Adolph Gottlieb and Joan Mitchell abstraction I see.

‡ Artaud was actually excommunicated from the Surrealist movement in 1927. To place this break in historical perspective: it would take André Breton another two years to write and to publish the overtly Marxist Second Manifesto, and almost a decade would pass before the remaining Surrealists found their vogue in New York. Even if we accept the deep and abiding antagonism he held towards language -- associations of Surrealism with visual hallucination aside, the "word" was Breton's and Louis Aragon original path to l'infini -- Artaud endures as the purer occultist. For Artaud, his failure to ascend to the condition of what Breton described as "mental matter... different from thought, of which thought [is], perhaps, just one special example" was much more than a noble but doomed rebellion. It was his damnation. From this perspective, then, and despite his fate, Artaud was the true believer, and his former colleagues the heretics.