Two Exquisite Corpses (9010DL (2024)), Les Petroleuses (Discus Music)
David Dunn – Music, Language and Environment. Environmental Sound Works 1973 – 1985, David Dunn / various artists (Nyahh Records)
Scratched Earth, N O Moore / Eddie Prévost (Scatter Archive)
Folwen, Thomas Rohrer / Philip Somervell (Scatter Archive)
Lyn Hodnett and Gill Whiteley describe themselves as ‘multimedia improvising artists’. They perform together as ‘Les Petroleuses’, the name being a homage to the women of the Paris Commune. The idea of being cultural ‘arsonists’, setting conventions alight, appeals to them. (That the women of the Paris Commune were arsonists was a rumour spread with the intention of smearing them, but it stuck and the resultant myth did their cause no harm). On their website Hodnett and Whiteley describe how they ‘do a slow burn, kindle the flames and rip it up sonically, visually and vocally on cello, violin, trumpet, hurdy-gurdy, accordions, wind-up record player, pixiphone, scissors, paper, stone, graphite, vocals, things that jangle, assorted objects, other stuff and whatever takes our fancy…’
Two Exquisite Corpses is the end result of a process. Whiteley and Hodnett played out the Surrealist parlour-game, Exquisite Corpse, in which you draw part of a body, fold over what you’ve drawn, then pass the paper on to the next person to draw the next body-part. In this case, they videoed themselves making the drawings and mailed the results to each other. They also recorded – independently of each other – a short solo improvisation for each part of the body they were drawing. Once they’d finished, they burnt the drawings. Whiteley creatively overlaid and edited together both the videos and the improvisations to create the five-and-a-half minute short film released here.
I could say more about it, but the last thing you need in a game of exquisite corpse is a spoiler. Far better to let you watch the film unfold for yourself. All I’ll say is that I found it to be a magical, unforgettable watch.
Irish label Nyahh Records have recently released a collection of San Diego-born composer David Dunn’s environmental sound pieces. Created in the 1970s and early ’80s, they represent, as Dunn puts it, ‘an attempt to articulate an aesthetic of environmental interactivity through sound-making’.
Dunn began composing in his teens: he experimented with serialism and developed an interest in tape music. He contrived, through his choice of university, to make contact with Harry Partch, going on to work as his assistant in the early 1970s (he performed with Partch on the the latter’s film, The Dreamer that Remains). Although Partch’s music was never a direct influence on him, the older man’s readiness to think about music in original ways inspired him to do the same.
One thing that did shape the direction he took was the work of Gregory Bateson. Bateson ‘viewed that all three systems of the individual, society and ecosystem were all together a part of one supreme cybernetic system that controls everything instead of just interacting systems. This supreme cybernetic system is beyond the self of the individual and could be equated to what many people refer to as God, though Bateson referred to it as Mind.’ (Wikipedia). Knowing this, I think, helps us make sense of what Dunn says in the notes to this album: ‘Cage wanted to abstract the sounds and allow the sounds to be themselves. I’m interested in understanding a sound and its context as part of a purposeful, living system with attributes of mind.’ He was interested in the emergence of intelligence from the environment, from individual species (as in Mimus Polyglottos (1976), based on his studies of the mockingbird) to more complex environments. As he puts it, again in the album notes, ‘My interest was in regarding the complex web of environmental sound-making as evidence of complex-minded systems – a way of experiencing what Gregory Bateson has called “the integrated fabric of mind that envelopes us.” Put more simply, his work is an attempt to interact with the ‘spirit of place’ of any given location (and, as the composer Warren Burt has pointed out, after Mimus Polyglottos Dunn’s approach became less quasi-scientific and ‘more metaphorical, more artistic’).
The works included here, although they frequently require musicians to improvise material, are very much compositions. You could say performers are required to read not only the score but the landscape. In Nexus 1, for example, created for the Grand Canyon, the score specifies ‘sound gestures’ which the player has to ‘articulate interactively’ with the acoustics of the environment and any other forms of life (eg, birds) occupying the space. The piece features crows and, hauntingly, what sound like a high-flying aircraft. Entrainments 2 is based on a an area enclosed by three peaks in the Cuyamaca Mountains in California. Three performers recorded spontaneous verbal descriptions of the area. These recordings were combined with drones created using astrological data relating to the time and location of the performance. The results were played back on ‘lo-fi’ cassette machines located in a central performance area, where the performance was recorded. Skydrift, for voices, instruments and electronics, was performed in the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, California. The piece requires the instrumentalists to move out from the centre of the performance space, basing what they play on the environment they pass through, until they reach a point at which they can no longer be heard from the centre. The final piece, (espial), performed by Dunn himself, is for violin, using 21-tone just intonation and ‘lo-fi’ cassette recorders. Listening to it, it’s hard not to be reminded of Dunn’s time with Harry Partch. Although it doesn’t sound like a Partch piece, it’s hard not to be reminded of that composer’s Adapted Viola – his first foray into microtonal music.
You can usually recognise (or, at least, pigeon-hole) smells, the feel of rock, sand, or the sun on your face. You know where you are with a photograph or a straightforward field recording: most of the time, you can put into words the things you see or hear. Dunn’s music works in a very different way. However, it may be fanciful, but, listening to it, it’s hard not feel that the processes he employs really do convey something about the environments the pieces are based in, a quality you can’t quite put your finger on, but which is nevertheless real. You could call it a point of contact between us and the Earth – to which, of course, we truly belong although, too often, we’re not aware of the fact. These pieces might’ve been made forty years ago, but they’re more relevant today than ever.
Scratched Earth is the latest collaboration between Eddie Prévost and N O Moore. Prévost, of course, was one of the founders of the seminal improvisation group AMM back in 1966 and was still a part of it when it disbanded in 2022. Disbanded or not, my first thought, listening to this, was that if someone had played it me and told me it was an AMM album, my eyebrows would’ve remained exactly where they are in relation to the top of my spectacles. All this is hardly surprising, since not only are Moore and Prévost regular collaborators but also ‘AMM’ has always represented a philosophy, a way of doing things, rather than a specific group of people. Perhaps, on one level, it’s impossible to ‘disband’ it. (As for the philosophy, as Cornelius Cardew, himself a member of AMM for a while, once said: ‘We are searching for sounds and for the responses that attach to them, rather than thinking them up, preparing and producing them’).
The album consists of a single, 24-minute track. In the notes which accompany it, Moore talks about music as a pursuit of the elusive sacred: ‘The distinction is scratched into the soil. Improvisation is always making a new mark, scratching again … The same process every time but, … a different outcome every time … Scratch a line in the earth; the sacred is always on the other side of that line.’ This is music made by explorers, not map-readers (or, for that matter, map-makers). In this case, a series of sounds are sustained or repeated, somehow seeming to expand outwards, while staying in the same place. Moore’s guitar becomes more agitated, attempts to break out of the process, only to be drawn back in. There are further escape attempts (as Moore says in the notes, ‘personally, what I prize most is when the energy is ambivalent, not through confusion, but because it isn’t quite clear what the mood or feel is’), until the exploration of the tension between stasis and change becomes the norm. It’s a great listen.
Based in São Paulo, Thomas Rohrer is a musician with an interest in both Brazilian regional music and improvisation. He regularly works with fellow-Swiss keyboard and electronics player Philip Somervell. Here, Rohrer is playing soprano sax and rabeca (the rabeca is a Portuguese fiddle, commonly used in Brazilian folk music), while Somervell is playing piano. Both also play a selection of objects. Folwen, which marks ten years of collaboration is, by my count, the sixth album they’ve made together. It was recorded at the Complexo Cultural Funarte, an arts centre in São Paulo. The title is Middle English for ‘to follow’. There are nine tracks and I was curious to figure out the meanings of the titles. The first, Campos Eliseos, refers to the neighbourhood in which the Complexo Cultural Funarte is located. Most of the others are words in different languages that sound very like ‘folwen’. Once I’d figured out what they meant – if what I found on the internet is correct – I discovered they create an enigmatic narrative which might, I thought, describe the story of the making of the music itself. And, as for that music, the sound-world Rohrer and Somervell create for us is one that explores a wide range of possibilities, from stasis to movement, from noise to rich, pitched complexities. An album to keep coming back to.
Dominic Rivron
LINKS
Two Exquisite Corpses:
https://discusmusic.bandcamp.com/album/two-exquisite-corpses-9010dl-2024
David Dunn – Music, Language and Environment. Environmental Sound Works 1973 – 1985:
https://nyahhrecords.bandcamp.com/album/david-dunn-music-language-and-environment-environmental-sound-works-1973-1985
Scratched Earth:
https://scatterarchive.bandcamp.com/album/scratched-earth
Folwen:
https://scatterarchive.bandcamp.com/album/folwen
Les Petroleuses:
http://bricolagekitchen.com/les-petroleuses/
Lyn Hodnett’s website:
http://lynhodnett.co.uk/lh/illustration.htm
Gill Whiteley’s website:
https://bricolagekitchen.com/
Environment, Consciousness and Magic, interview with Michael Lampert, Perspectives of New Music 27:1 (Winter 1989):
https://www.davidddunn.com/~david/writings/interv1.pdf
15 Questions – an interview with Eddie Prévost:
https://www.15questions.net/interview/eddie-prevost-about-originality/page-1/
15 Questions – an interview with N O Moore:
https://15questions.net/interview/no-moore-about-improvisation/page-1/
Thomas Rohrer:
https://thomasrohrer.bandcamp.com/album/tamangur
Philip Somervell:
https://philipsomervell.bandcamp.com/music