Is that too corny, Blue?
Before a concert at a music conference in Melbourne several years ago I got to chatting with the sound artist Ros Bandt. Her 1981 album Improvisations in Acoustic Chambers had just been tapped for preservation in the National Film and Sound Archive. I admired it dearly. It weaved several threads on exploratory sound, non-idiomatic improvisation, Australian-colonial subtext, and the virtues of sending it in spaces you shouldn’t. It also preceded by seven years the more famous improvisations in acoustic chambers of Pauline Oliveros and her Deep Listening Band. Beautiful to be sure, but marred by its sounds-about-white didgeridoo. In this green room, Ros patiently accommodating my waxing on, I mentioned I’d had a piece chosen to play in an ‘emerging composers forum.’ It seemed a big deal at the time. My first ‘chamber music’ piece. It would be my last. Classical music is funded by torrents of blood. Ros must’ve known this. “Aww,” she rolled her eyes and tilted her head. “So have you emerged, darling?”
In Newtonian physics the void is defined by what it is not. In quantum field theory the void teems. Virtual particles hopping into and out of existence. Electrons creating and consuming photons in perpetuity. Radiation emanating from bodies that themselves absorb radiation. The dissolution of binaries; spacemattering, selfothering. 'Emergence' isn't departing the void but traveling with better instruments and better theory, seeing the void anew. I think I traveled well this year. I made music every morning without variation. Played my scales. Taught new classes. Won an industrial dispute. Obsessed over Fleur Jaeggy’s novels. As such, my sentences collapsed under newfound gravity. I’m less cynical and more joyous. “I’m not really into funny shit,” says Destroyer’s Dan Bejar. “There’s an essay that I wanted to write … called ‘Against Comedy.’ It makes me sound like a jerk, kind of, so maybe I am.” He’s the funniest songwriter I know. Have We Met was my favourite new music this year, but I wasn't looking hard. I like Karima Walker’s new single a lot. Few musicians entangle self and place so nicely. Otherwise, Astral Weeks occupied me the most. I don't know why.
I have a show at Paper Mountain tomorrow with my (nominally new) band Pale Ribbons Tossed into the Dark. Twice in this newsletter I’ve lied about its album being nearly complete. Deadlines aren’t dead. They ought to frolic as they please. Free range deadlines. I’m also debuting live music under a new alias soon. Subscribe to Tone List’s newsletter for that announcement shortly. There are several other music projects ongoing. They bend with the seasons.
“Blue” Gene Tyranny died this week. Pianos everywhere lost their 88th key. No one took the piano more seriously as both a cultural hegemony and a universe of possibility than him. His collaborative spirit glowed. Robert Ashley’s Perfect Lives comes to mind; Blue wrote the music. My favourite work of his is Out of the Blue. It was recorded at Mills College, where I studied for a while, and my mentor, Maggi Payne, played flute on it. In spite of its heady origin, Out of the Blue is a buoyant, breezy, perfect pop rock record. Experimentalism is a pursuit of difference, not a style. That it’s often couched in irony, progress, antagonism, or performative jouissance, doesn’t preclude the possibility of its other. “Your love defines the way you see the life closest to you,” the narrator says in the closing track. The void seen anew. “Is that too corny, Blue? Well, you know, that's how we are here.”
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