Marconi’s Drift, Transatlantic Trance Map (False Walls)
The Trance Map Project began life in 2008 as a collaboration between saxophonist Evan Parker and sound designer Matt Wright. Together, they created Trance Map, an album which combines Parker’s sax-playing with Wright’s live processing, turntable scratching and cassette-samples. Since then, it has expanded outwards (becoming, in 2014, Trance Map+), Parker and Wright playing together with other musicians in performances in both Europe and the US. Over the past few years these have involved ambitious networking and streaming projects connecting musicians in different locations in simultaneous live performances. The networking angle is now a major preoccupation, running alongside the sampling of archived sounds. As Matt himself put it, it has provided ‘not only joyous musical encounters, but a chance to think about the connections between music, thought and technology and to reflect on how archiving (and particularly archiving sound) is no longer merely a documentary pursuit, but a provocation towards a new creative act.’
Networked music has been theoretically possible since the 1870s, with the invention of Elisha Gray’s ‘musical telegraph’. However, it wasn’t until the 1960s that people began to take these possibilities seriously. Maryanne Amacher and John Cage both produced works involving musicians or sound sources based in different locations. The most famous example of networked music is probably Stockhausen’s Helicopter String Quartet, first performed in 1995.
Interestingly, musical networking can be more difficult to achieve using digital means than analogue. Although it takes a mere three-hundredths of a second for an analogue signal to travel between the UK and the US, digital communication systems usually involve a significant time-delay, or ‘latency’. However, a lot of work has been done to reduce this to a minimum: the SonoBus open source software – used by Trance Map – has virtually eliminated the problem. Pre-internet, the problem with radio was availability: governments tend to strictly control what can and can’t be broadcast (radio amateurs, for example, are forbidden from discussing politics on air or broadcasting music). Digital communication, of course, despite the latency issue, has the advantage that it’s almost universally available, which led to many musicians resorting to the various platforms available online to work together from different locations during the pandemic.
If networking is about transcending the limitations imposed by space on music-making, sampling – Trance Map’s other major preoccupation – is about transcending those imposed by time. Unlike networking, sampling has, technically, become far simpler since the advent of digital technology. Analogue sampling – famously, in the case of the Melotron – was a cumbersome, electro-mechanical business. Musicians, though, going back way before any of the technologies we’re talking about, have always been keen to push back against spatial and temporal limitations. There is a strong shamanic element to what all musicians do (in this case, one need look no further than the project title!) and they often talk about what they create as coming from another place. Repetitive rhythms can induce timeless, trance-like states; longer repeated passages and the processing of earlier material can create the illusion that one can revisit the past (or at the very least, bend time into a spiral) through the structuring of a particular piece. However, these days, with modern sampling technologies, sound can be archived, retrieved from the relatively distant past or retrieved and processed in a matter of moments, making possible the ‘new creative act’ Wright talked about. There is a danger, I suppose, that technology can replace vision and invention, but this is not a trap Trance Map ever falls into.
Marconi’s Drift consists of music from a networked live performance and webcast that took place in 2022. It involved two groups of musicians, each playing at a different venue, a septet in the UK, and a sextet the US. The two ensembles were put together from prominent performers in the UK and US scenes. The Hot Tin in Faversham, UK, is an arts venue based in an 1885 Victorian flat pack tin church, Roulette Intermedium is a performance space in Brooklyn, NY. As Evan Parker explained: ‘I made a simple scheme for the concert which set out a sequence of combinations – mostly duos and trios, with the option to accompany and interject as impulse and the evolving context suggested.’ The album is a result of Matt Wright’s post-production work on the 24 tracks recorded at the time.
The music consists of one continuous, 55-minute track. It ebbs and flows in a stream of invention, the electronics sometimes expanding the timbral possibilities of the instruments, at others, adding unique dimensions of their own. It’s a compelling sound world. Listening to it, I kept coming back to what trombonist Jim Staley, one of the founders of Roulette back in 1978 (and who only retired from leading it this year) said of that venue: ‘The whole aesthetic and direction was founded on the two Johns: John Coltrane and John Cage. … I’ve always felt that if you’re talking about the American avant-garde, don’t just talk about Cage or the Downtown minimalist scene; you have to talk about the avant-jazz scene, too. There’s just as extensive a scene going on in jazz as there is in the new music, classical, electronics world.’ The aesthetic point he’s making, about the merging and intermingling of traditions, is one that could have been made as much about Trance Map as about Roulette. There never has been a satisfactory word for complex, serious music that is as rewarding as it is demanding of the listener (‘art music’?) but, whatever you call it, Trance Map is it.
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Dominic Rivron
LINKS
Marconi’s Drift: https://falsewalls1.bandcamp.com/album/marconi-s-drift
Evan Parker: http://evanparker.com/index.php
Matt Wright: https://www.matt-wright.co.uk/
Paths Through Pasts (The Navigable Archive in Trance Map+): https://echo.orpheusinstituut.be/article/paths-through-pasts