FEINE, Bill Thompson (Scatter Archive)
Elements and Properties, Pat Thomas, Dominic Lash (Scatter Archive)
Live at Day of Noise, Ezra Sturm, Ernesto Diaz-Infante, Marjorie Sturm (Muteant Sounds)
Bill Thompson is a composer and sound artist who has worked with free improvising musicians, the band Faust and choreographer the late Ian Spink, with whom he collaborated in their company, Airfield, which has been described as ‘a meticulous, curiously surreal and sometimes threatening landscape of strange activity’. He believes that the creative possibilities of commercial music technology are limited by the fact that its development is driven by what will sell. He advocates, among other things, hardware hacking or circuit-bending as ways of ‘draw[ing] forth ‘new subjectivities’, new ways of understanding, or organizing our experiences of art, and life in general.’ As he puts it in his Artist Statement, ‘you can be creative as long as you’re satisfied with choosing from a few predetermined options. For me, this is too much like eating ready-made meals. Instead, I’m much more intrigued by the discovery of new experiences, whether they are within art or life, that challenge me, that require me to pay attention, or ask as much from me as I do from the them.’
This is an exciting way of looking, one which immediately reminded me of the world of Petr Valek and his excellent YouTube channel, The Vape, with its home-brewed noise-makers (some mechanical, others electronic). It also took me back to the early days of electronic music, when people were exploring the potential of electronics to make and transform noise, before mass-production kicked in and the possibilities became standardised and market-driven. Okay, the association of electronic music with scifi had been around for a while: Forbidden Planet, the first film with an electronic soundtrack, had come out in 1956; but Delia Derbishire’s realisation of the Doctor Who tune nine years later happened the way it did, precisely because she was ‘intrigued by the discovery of new experiences’. There were few other kinds, as electronic music’s ‘ready meals’ were still in their infancy. I couldn’t help thinking of Daphne Oram’s Oramics Machine, too: if you want to sidestep the choices commercial electronic instruments steer you towards, get right down to the micro-level and draw your own waveforms. (For anyone who’s unfamiliar with it, the Oramics Machine allows you to do precisely this: it renders in sound drawings of wave-forms the operator feeds into it). There are many reasons why it didn’t – not least of which being that it’s inventor was a woman – but perhaps the instrument makers’ drive to provide electronic ‘ready meals’ is one reason why Oramics never held their attention bigtime: if you want to make music that way, you have to figure out your recipes yourself. Like a violin, it will never flatter the person using it: all you get out is what you put in. The original machine, too fragile to be used, stands inert behind glass at the Science Museum, which seems eerily symbolic in this context.
FEINE was recorded in August this year. On it, Thompson is playing Moog guitar, electronics and found objects. The title, FEINE, as Thompson points out, is an archaic version of the word ‘feign’. He cites a number of definitions, one of which ties in closely, I think, with what we’ve been talking about: ‘To give a mental existence to something that is not real or actual.’
The work itself is a single track, developing from what sounds like a sawtooth drone that, as time goes on, flits irregularly between states, interspersed with white noise. The main part of the work is a long, meditative section. I say meditative, but restless random disturbances tend to upset any sense of sonic equilibrium and there’s something almost inhuman (posthuman?) about it. What Thompson creates often sounds, I thought, like the signals a meditating artificial intelligence might send to a router (what happens when AI meditates? There’s a thought). If Bill Thompson is reading this, I hope he takes this as a compliment. It’s meant as such: I was reminded of what he says in his Artist Statement about creating ‘new subjectivities’. To look at it another way, what he establishes has the feel of some imposing Ballardian non-space, all glass and steel perhaps, that draws you in. FEINE is the music that ought to be there, rather than the Muzak that probably is. If you wanted music to accompany a film of such a space, it would be ideal.
Pat Thomas and Dominic Lash have been working together in various ensembles for over twenty years. Elements and Properties, their second release playing as a duet, brings together four live recordings they made in 2023 and 2024. As on their first duet album (New Oxford Brevity (2022)), Thomas, who often plays electronics, confines himself to piano while Lash, usually a bass player, plays electric guitar (an instrument he took up during the Covid lockdowns). Although Thomas occasionally ventures inside the piano and Lash sometimes uses effects, the music is put together from a sound-palette which relies heavily on pitched sounds. This, combined with the in many ways more straightforward dynamics of a duet (as opposed to those of a larger ensemble), gives the album a sense of clarity. Perhaps they had this in mind when they chose the title for it, taken from the longest track. You could say they explore the properties of their restricted selection of elements. There is nowhere to hide – not that Lash or Thomas ever need hiding-places. Some aspects of Lash’s playing owe something to Derek Bailey and Thomas has often acknowledged a debt to Sun Ra, but both are distinctive, characterful musicians in their own right. Sometimes spacious, sometimes busy, always responsive to each other, both players maintain a stream of invention that draws on their wide musical experience. The result is an exhilarating listen.
KSZU Stanford is the Stanford University radio station, broadcasting on FM in the Bay Area. Their Day of Noise is an almost-regular event: the first was held back in the 1990s and this year’s was the nineteenth. The day promises ‘Twenty-four hours straight of live experimentation and improvisation, featuring experimental/noise/drone bands and artists from the Bay Area and beyond.’ I wish I’d known about it: I’ll have to keep an eye out for the next one since, as well as its FM broadcasts, KZSU also broadcasts online.
Live at Day of Noise is the latest collaboration between guitarist Ezra Sturm and his father, Ernesto Diaz-Infante, this time with the addition of Ezra’s mother, film-maker and flautist Marjorie Sturm. The album notes to their previous collaboration (Live at the Luggage Store Gallery) described the music as ‘guttural duetting yet maybe duelling free-form experimental guitar performances’. This time I’d say there was more of the duetting and less of the duelling, as if they’re making more room for each other. There’s less of the guttural, too. This all may have something to do with the addition of the electronics and the flute. Certainly, between them, father and son have developed a knack of creating structures that inhabit an area of shifting uncertainly between drone-like stasis on one hand and constant change on the other. Marjorie Sturm’s flute, with it’s understated, minimal repetitions, is a haunting presence, almost submerged in the monolithic wash of guitar and electronics.
Towards the end there’s a half minute of near-silence. Was it deliberate, or did the set finish early? (They were timetabled to play 1.30-2.00pm). Either way, the music starts up again, a short, frenetic encore to take the radio station up to the hour. If it came about by accident, I’m pleased they left it in: silence is as much a part of music as sound.
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Dominic Rivron
LINKS
FEINE:
https://scatterarchive.bandcamp.com/album/feine
Elements and Properties:
https://scatterarchive.bandcamp.com/album/elements-and-properties
Live at Day of Noise:
https://muteantsoundsnetlabel.bandcamp.com/album/live-at-day-of-noise
New Oxford Brevity (2022):
https://dominiclash.bandcamp.com/album/new-oxford-brevity
KSZU Stanford:
http://kzsulive.stanford.edu/
Bill Thompson artist’s statement:
https://billthompson.org/aka_prof_lofi/artist-statement/
Daphne Oram’s Oramics Machine:
https://youtu.be/QJQUPRPJ8yM?si=OiEs534dvHDpRAmL
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