R We Who R We
The Happy Valley Band
Alexander Dupuis

Transient Series I.2 (Cover Bands Edition) is likely the only event to conceptually link Ke$ha and Patsy Cline. But both of these inhabitants of the Great American Songbook will coexist this evening: one cut up by R We Who R We (composer-performers Philip White & Ted Hearne) and the other very carefully notated by a computer and played by the all-human Happy Valley Band — with the ghost voice of Patsy herself. And audio-visual artist Alexander Dupuis covers cellular automata with his performance of Conway’s Game of Life.

R Who We R We is a collaborative composition by Ted Hearne (voice) and Philip White (electronics). In this suite of short pieces, we deconstruct assertions of identity in pop music. We dissect songs by Michael Jackson, Ke$ha, Eminem and others, subjecting them to arbitrary processes applied to both lyrical and sonic elements. Measures are reordered, lyrics are alphabetized, the backup choir is given the solo mic; garbled lyrics become absurd poems couched in profundity, melodies from the processed text become vocal lines, those vocal lines become control voltages in a chaotic electronic feedback system; four-on-the-floor endures, autotune abounds.

The Happy Valley Band is what happens when a computer discovers the Great American Songbook, tries its best to pick out the tunes by ear, then writes down what it hears and demands that human performers try to play it. It uses and abuses machine hearing technology and automated music transcription software to re-contextualize the voice of American popular music. American pop icons — Elvis Presley, Patsy Cline, and more — sing along to microtonal computer-automated transcriptions of their original backing bands. The Happy Valley Band is Alexander Dupuis on guitar, Beau Sievers on drums, Andrew Smith on piano, Mustafa Walker on bass, and David Kant on saxophone and arrangement.

Alexander Dupuis develops real-time audiovisual feedback systems mediated by performers, sensors, musicians, matrices, bodies, scores, games, and environments. He also composes, arranges and performs sounds for guitars, liturgies, chamber groups, horse duos, microwave cookbooks, and celebrity voices, and works to bridge the gap between his waking and dreaming states through 2d and 3d animation. He graduated from Brown University’s MEME program as an undergraduate in 2010, and is now in his second year of the Digital Musics masters program at Dartmouth College.

Conway Quartet No. 2 is a live performance using a four-voice Game of Life-based audiovisual synthesis engine.  Steered by the performer, the four one-dimensional voices interactively manipulate themselves through shifting phase triggers and cellular waveshaping.

An interactive audiovisual feedback loop forms the basis of All Hail the Dawn. The instrument, built from an old computer subwoofer, contains two simple light-sensitive oscillators. A crude spectral analysis in Max/MSP is used to filter the oscillators as well as looped buffers recorded from the instrument. A matrix of the spectral analysis, interactively altered in Jitter using audio data, is projected back onto the instrument and performer as a series of shifting patterns. This setup allows both the graphics and sound to drive each other, creating an evolving audiovisual relationship sensitive to slight changes in position, sound and processing.

I just learned this afternoon that there’s a spot on the last concert for one of my recent pieces to be performed, a trio for piccolo trumpet, violin and contrabass. Except, that particular concert doesn’t actually have a string contrabass but it does have a contrabass clarinet. So I’m in the process now of transcribing and revising the piece for new instruments, which I think is what I wanted to do all along. In anticipation, I thought I’d share what came up when I googled “contrabass clarinet.”

This is choreography. The motion is silent, and the sound is its companion, but not necessary its analog in another medium. And in the same sense, the beauty of the motion is in the work, in the hard labor that is required but hidden. The constant circular breathing into some reed or brass instrument, and the incredible muscle control required to sustain a constant pitch of 197 Hz, ideal for the cloud of tones created: this is a dancer on one leg, arched over uncomfortably, so that grace required strength more than anything.

Except it’s not quite that either. Because the interest in Niblock’s music comes from the failures, from the imperfections in the drone. In fact, the most beautiful moments are moments of erring. The cellist shifts a finger just a bit, or a wind player takes a breath and doesn’t quite hit the pitch again instantly. These create the form of the piece.

Finally, a recent video shot in an Osaka fish market: “There was one man with an axe, chopping a huge tuna, chopping bones away from the flesh. It was amazing, like a sculptor working.”

More later, and follow me @functime

The Dither / Sara Wintz show at ISSUE last week was the first I curated, and I have to say it worked out beautifully. Check out the post on the FMA, but since this might be a bit of a literary crowd, I thought I’d link to some of Sara’s text as well. Shampoo Poetry has something, but if you’re really into it (and in New York) you should come check out Poetry TV! on Sunday, May 16, at Unnameable Books on Vanderbilt in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. There, poets get beamed in via Skype for virtual reading sessions.

Anyway, listen to Dither, hear Sara read to you, and come check out Poetry TV and Dither’s release party on June 12. More on that one later, probably.

Naturally, the focus in many reviews was on endurance. Steve Smith, of the Times, referred to its “Brobdingnagian length,” while WNYC’s DJ for their classical Internet stream Q2 asked “the obvious question; how do you play for six hours?” But focusing on the matter of the endurance of the performers, and maybe of the audience, is terribly obvious and a little bit lazy. When we say “endurance,” there is the connotation of enduring through something, and most of all of making it to the end. We endure through things we do not like.

This is a little glib, because it’s probably very difficult to sit straight-backed and play delicate repeated figures for six hours. However, listen to violinist and Ne(x)tworks music director Cornelius Dufallo: “About half an hour after your back starts to kill—around four and a half hours in—you hit a gorgeous, new progression of music, and you just sort of forget about that pain…look, people do harder things than this every day.” This is the germ of Feldman’s piece—as Cornelius said to me after the performance, it’s really “a piece about life.” It is physically demanding but, moment-to-moment, it is beautiful if you’re engaged. If you tune out, or if you mentally abridge each fragment, it becomes trite and even a little boring. But if you pay attention, each moment is a sublimely orchestrated chord, or perfectly balanced timbre.

The sections are so massive that it seems as if there is nowhere to go until you arrive. Occasionally, themes from hours earlier reappear, fragmented, but most of the piece seems to be free of any themes whatsoever. The beauty of the length of the composition is that any evocation of a by now well-known theme—maybe two or three notes is all it takes well into the fifth hour—is enough to bring the brain back to associate past memories. And this is Feldman: forgetting and remembering. Yet, it is not a self-reflexive remembering on his part—Feldman does not really “talk” to us—but he causes us to be surprised by our own memories. Remembering requires forgetting; forgetting, if you want to be sure about it, requires a few hours.

One other thing to discuss is the ending of the piece. The second to the last page repeats each bar four times, then three times, then two times, until the final page, which contains no repeats at all. The players just dwindle a little, and the music seems to be evaporating. It reminds me of one of my favorite books of all time (by one of Feldman’s favorite authors, Samuel Beckett), Malone Dies. The book begins as if it will tell a story, but can’t seem to keep a narrative thread going. The story told is largely a distraction from the speaker’s normal life, as he “shall soon be quite dead at last in spite of it all.” But as the speaker becomes less lucid, and begins to blend his own life with that of the story he’s telling, the alternations between fiction and the speaker become less defined and less lucid. The things in his room becomes the things in the story, and it all seems to blend together. I won’t say how it ends.

The trumpeter Nate Wooley recounted at the beginning of his set this interview he administered that day with the composer Tom Johnson in which Tom said a couple of things that Nate recounted for us: 1. improvisers are awful human beings 2. nothing new was happening in music period anywhere, but especially in the U.S.

“It’s kind of freeing to know that there’s nothing that I’ll do tonight that’s new,” which means that he can do whatever he wants. Which means that anything that happens that night is arbitrary, not necessarily confined to a historical period but, of course, inseparable from the current time because of its arbitrary and personal quality. It is not an attempt to progress through history, or to add to a linear history—look to the future, maybe—and it makes no claims. Whatever happens happens, as someone could say.

Nate’s playing is a constant expenditure of energy; there is never a moment when it seems like he is riding on his chops, or playing rehearsed licks. Or, if he is, he interrupts these licks as soon as they become standard, or sub-standard. Exhaustion is theme: maybe physical exhaustion as he circular-breathes for almost a half hour straight, or maybe emotional exhaustion, as the sounds oscillate between serenity and schizophrenia, multiple voices coming from all sides, or intellectual exhaustion, where it’s all been done before anyway so anything new is old, arbitrary, and re-hashed.

Arguing the dialectic of improvisation-versus-composition does not satisfy anything. There is no dialectic if there is nothing new; if improvisation is just re-hashing old ideas, and if composition is just re-hashing slightly different (but basically the same) ideas, then what’s the difference? This, which I’ll repeat as a sort of mantra from somewhere else, is that all the important things have become as one and the differences have disappeared.

Nate never said whether he agrees or disagrees, and this is improvisation; it is taking statements not as conveying information but as commands and as fact: the fact of the statement and not the fact of what the statement might refer to. The statement is fact because someone thinks it, or because someone thought of it once.

From up high

From down low

I walk into the Guggenheim Museum, and there’s a triumvirate of hooded figures with plaster-molded face masks. The masks are white and pocked, and they have these foot-long straight horns that make the three into a few anonymous moon monsters. Each of the trio is posted behind little mounds that look like control panels, except that they aren’t actually twiddling any knobs or beating sample pads like they would be were they at Bonnaroo. Instead, these podiums that they stand at are filled with lights and shapes that seem to always be moving. Looking straight-on gives an almost-clear picture, but any angles cause the whole image to warp. Through all of this, Perez’s projectors are flashing psychedelic and cold images of acid flashbacks on the moon, with LED strobes in red and blue soaking the whole environment.

The transverse temporal gyrus is the auditory world’s gateway into the brain. The eponymous collaboration between the indie band Animal Collective and visual artist Danny Perez tried to reconfigure this. The whole concept of sorting through auditory information has to do with expectations. The band cited Jane Goodall’s discovery while living with chimps in the forest. The animals would all react simultaneously to things they could hear, but that Goodall couldn’t. It was only after her brain reconfigured its expectations of what to listen for that she was able to hear these sounds as well.

The first sounds that are most apparent in the museum are the sounds of the crowd of people. Museum members, mostly in nicer suits, stand at the edges of the ramps. A younger crowd, dressed sometimes in nicer evening wear and sometimes in flannel with eye markings harking back to Peter Pan’s Lost Boys, weaves in and out. Many people came ready for a concert and went away disappointed, but some of the ones who were willing to see it through were appreciative. “Just coming through and playing a great concert would have been counterproductive,” one Animal Collective fan said. More than just reconfiguring auditory expectations, the band was reconfiguring expectations about itself, particularly among its younger fan base.

Standing at the bottom of the spiral, ethereal noises begin at the top and corkscrew down through speakers mounted throughout the ramp. By the time the sound reaches the bottom it’s a low bass rumble, more environmental than directional. Moving up the ramp changes the perspective entirely. From the middle levels, higher-pitched sounds, and voices like radio interference start to come through, as they’re no longer lost in the reverberation of the room. At the top level, there is no more bass rumbling, but instead just reflections of signals off of the ceiling of the museum. The whole thing seems distant, weird, and indistinct, as the individual strobe flashes just get washed together into nondescript shapes on the circular ceiling. The change is gradual, but eventually the sound of the crowd becomes the background noise, and the environmental sounds themselves start to come into focus.

The band may not have a chance to do this again with quite the same effect—like Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, there’s a certain play on expectations at work—but it opens up, and sometimes explicates their work in a way that may not have been possible through the normal pop music channels. In any sense, their willingness to play with expectations even at the risk of alienating some of their fans is a remarkable move for one of indie rock Brooklyn’s crown jewels.

There were a few wrinkles, structurally, to the Elliott Sharp and Andrea Centazzo guitar/percussion duo, but I won’t talk about those.

Instead, I’ll talk about the very last improvisation, only a few minutes from the end, when Centazzo began playing repeating melodic patterns on his hanging gongs, and the decay of the gongs never really meshed with the next attacks from his yarn mallets. Looking at a spinning wheel that looks like it is beginning to spin backward could be an analogous effect, where no percussive hits really make it through–they’re coming too quickly–and instead the focus is not on the actual attack, but on the point at which the tone from the gong becomes audible as a tone. This takes a half-second or so, by which point Centazzo’s already made it just about through his loop.

As the attacks quiet down, and as the mallet sounds soften, the inharmonic sounds take over, and draw ears in. All important things become as one and the differences have disappeared.

Sharp’s playing is always enveloping, a virtuosic display not meant to impress, and a rarity of form and ethos among musicians. Too often, those with the technique comprimise because they can get away with it, but Sharp is into his own territory.

The other thing about vocals is that no one is under any illusion that the singing is improvised in any large degree. The words are on a page, and the singer sings them. This is not at all true for the guitar, particularly during guitar solos, intros, and transitions where the melodies might veer into the semi-melodic and particularly angular, as if mistakes were being made. In fact, it is often impossible to tell if many particular guitar phrases are improvised until they are repeated. This process of repeating something that may seem strange upon first listen must cement it as “right”–right, because it happened twice–and then the guidelines have to be rewritten.

It is also important to say that the projections behind the musicians were the only light in the room. Maybe for this reason, the projections were mostly splotches of noisy black and white and some greys, but what was clear is that the projections were important in their aggregate. Consider this: in sound, a bar band must cut through the noise of the crowd in order to truly matter at all. They’re playing Journey covers becuase when Steve Perry (or his temporary stand-in) hits the high notes they can be heard through the conversation-yelling happening throughout the bar; we hear the note and the melody, because it different from the layer of noise we have taken for granted. In contrast, a concert that occurs in silence should be concerned with the entire extent of the sound. This sound happening on stage is the only sound that we hear, so our ears adjust. Likewise, when the projection is the only light in the room our vision adjusts.

This has potential power, because of the way that our vision or our ears are controlled by the sound and aggregated light. When our ears are tuned to be sensitive, they are also vulnerable to unexpectedly loud sounds. Likewise with light, as anyone who has sat in a dark movie theater when the screen flashes from black out to all white knows.

But the room never went completely white or completely black until the end. This would be too expected, so it never happened. As the guitar melodies angled off into acute corners, the light shifted around on the wall: shifting, but not quite changing the whole of things.

I’m writing this at risk of sounding like I’m extending the performance too far, or maybe getting away from the performance: I was listening to Morton Feldman’s Second String Quartet (the six-hour one) the other day, and it struck me how the sound just happens, then changes inexplicably. It doesn’t change in a logical way, like the harmonic or aural motion of minimalist process or in an illogical (extra-logical?) way like the stochastic Cage. It’s a difficult pill to swallow in the 20th (even 21st) century: the arbitrary change. So, I’m willing to say that this connection between Matthew’s songs and Feldman’s succession of wonderful string phrases occurred arbitrarily in my head, without any real attachment to what may have been intended, or even been there.