A Brief History of Depraved Indifference, Dave Tucker (Scatter Archive)
Dave Tucker began his musical career back in the late 1970s as a member of the Manchester band Mellatron (spelt, yes, with an ‘a’). He was also, briefly, a member of The Fall, playing clarinet on their EP, Slates (which was, incidentally, cited by Mark E Smith as one of his favourite Fall releases). Since then, he’s worked with a wide range of the usual suspects in the free improvisation scene and created music for film and TV, as well as being a member of the London Improvisers Orchestra.
A Brief History of Depraved Indifference, recently released on the Scatter Archive label, is the latest of three solo albums by Tucker. He describes them as ‘a loose trilogy’. (There are links to the first two instalments on the album’s Bandcamp page: both are well worth following up). A common way of working runs through all three: the tracks are built up in layers, drawing on conventional instruments, voice, foley and field recordings. A Brief History, though, introduces two new elements. As Tucker says in album-notes, ‘I began to realise how much meaning is lacking in the messages we are being told, from social media to political discourse, and that became a motif’. In the tracks ‘Depraved Indifference’ 1 and 2, he explores this through one of the most creative uses of AI I’ve ever come across. As he explains, ‘I used AI for the first time; the voice you hear was an audio recording of electric guitar which I then instructed AI to render as English speech.’ The result is a vision of dystopia in which communication has been reduced to meaningless speech-sounds. You might say it was a case of the message being reduced to nothing but medium, but there was no verbal communication there to mash up in the first place.
The final track, ‘Epicurus would’ve been proud’, takes a more conventional cut-up approach to the text of a political speech. We’re not told which speech or who made it (It has something of Barack Obama about it, but the voice – real or AI? – isn’t quite right). The cut-up speaker makes points that ring horribly true, such as ‘how in the world can we reconstruct and bring our society closer together when we are deliberately permitting people to become lost? We must begin to care enough which we don’t’. However you might cut it up, though, we know, from the synthetic sincerity of the delivery, that the speaker is an advocate of business as usual, of ‘depraved indifference’: as he says, ‘we wish this were not true but it’s the world in which we live’. Feigned concern is just part of the package.
Intriguing and worthwhile though they are, it would be wrong to let these preoccupations with text and meaning deflect attention from the rest of the music. Tucker obviously pays close attention to detail when layering the sounds that go into making it: take, for example, the use of the barking dog just a few seconds into the first track, ‘Hemiola’. The title, by the way, is a musical term for playing three beats in the time of two, an effect that keeps cropping up in the relationship between the repeated patterns that run through the track and the layers laid over it, including the violin which, in this sonic context, sounds oddly dissociated. I was reminded of something Stockhausen said about the use of a familiar sound in an electronic piece of his, that hearing it was like coming across an ash-tray on an alien planet. The second track, ‘All things being equal’ is a similarly absorbing listen, as is ‘Close knit’, which Tucker describes as ‘the nearest I have been to jazz for quite a while’.
If my experience of this album is anything to go by, once you start listening to it, it’s hard to stop. It’s of the kind which, if this were the 1970s, would get talked about, passed around and taped on cassette by late-teen music fans looking for something different. A Brief History of Depraved Indifference, though, is in no way nostalgic: it speaks to us, now. It warrants a wide audience.
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Dominic Rivron
LINKS:
A Brief History of Depraved Indifference:
https://scatterarchive.bandcamp.com/album/a-brief-history-of-depraved-indifference
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