Cerebral Rift

Artist: Ergo Phizmiz

Title: The Faust Cycle (or The House of Dr. Faustus)

Today’s section is “The Abduction of the Object”. By this point, I have lost most of the narrative thread of the story, only to say that I do know what the object is, and was surprised by this turn of events, as it represents possibly the only aspect of an actual plot line that isn’t part of the setup, or a set of narrative twists and turns.

Ergo is chasing a Linnet in a part of the house he doesn’t recognize.  He doesn’t remember what he did with the parcel, and now imagines that if he happens on Dr. Faustus, he doens’t relish telling him that he’s lost the package.  As he chases the Linnet he finds himself in an auditorium with a cross dressing person on stage, reciting odd sing-song-ish poetry than rolls on and on endlessly and barely making any real sense.  The audience is a bunch of (again) people dressed in bird suits.

It’s after the cross-dresser that Faustus appears on the stage, wheeling out what appears to be a life size doll: Eloise. With the emergence of Faustus on the stage, we are presented with a series of processes for the construction of an automaton. I won’t explain here, however this section links together several of the more unusual recurring elements of the piece to give us an idea of how Faustus has accomplished a miracle:  Eloise is an automaton.

While we and Ergo have been introduced to Eloise before, now she is quite appealing to Ergo.  She has become a thing of beauty, something desirable.  So desirable that he storms the stage, knocks out Faustus (with a trombone he steals from the orchestra) and grabs Eloise and runs away with her.  And thus ends chunk 4 of The Faust Cycle, with possibly one of the most standard plot points of a narrative.  However, it doesn’t seem like a cop-out.  It works, we have seen Eloise before, and by now (nearly 12 hours into the piece) couldn’t have imagined that this was going to happen.

Much of the music and sound collages in this section were put together by James Nye & Ergo Phizmiz. And in this case, the majority of it has been used to illustrate the construction of Eloise and automata’s.  This is possibly one of more distinct and specific examples of an interweaving of the narrative elements with sound collage techniques.  Part of the sound collage reveals another source of the elements of The Faust Cycle: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

Onwards..

Artist: Ergo Phizmiz

Title: The Faust Cycle (or The House of Dr. Faustus)

The subtitle for this section is “The Bird Machines”.  I listened to part of this section over the weekend, and the whole thing again today.

This section starts with Ergo waking up in a hallway, observing Marcel Duchamp teaching a group of small birds.  A gramophone approaches, music playing, baboon like legs clanking against the floor.  Ergo watches from a corner, not wanting to interrupt the happenings.  He watches as the gramophone changes records via it’s fused in record changer.  The new record is “Dr. Faustus Book of Birds”.

The selection that is presented next is a musical interpretation / narrative of this selection of birds.  When the record ends, a book is extended from the bell of the gramophone.  Upon opening the book, Ergo finds himself in another hallway full of doors, with a film projected at the far end.  He looks through the peep holes in the doors, which is accompanied by a rather lengthy sound collage. There is a narrative about ducks, followed by another sound collage, before going into a song.  When the song concludes we are taken into another lengthy sound collage: first of birds, then bells, chimes and carnival music which concludes this section of the piece.

My attention to detail may not be quite as great in this section, as I said I listened to it twice, but was so lost in the collages and the musical interludes that I didn’t pay as much attention to the narrative relationships.  The  one thing that I did notice was the restoration of Ergo to the main house now, instead of being in the sewers or the ballroom.

The other thing that impresses me in this section is the emergence of the birds.  I’ve been thinking that many of the creatures and animals have some form of symbolic meaning.  Obviously, this is all the stuff that dreams are made of, but frequently dreams are a manifestation of our real lives.    No matter what, these narratives are thickly layered with all sorts of things that can be interpreted.  But the task of trying to assemble and interpret all of this would be a daunting task.

Onwards…

Artist: Ergo Phizmiz

Title: The Faust Cycle (or The House of Dr. Faustus)

This is day two of listening to this extremely experimental piece.  I have to say, some of the things that I initially suspect are coming true.  The narrative is turning into a twisting and turning shaggy-dog story.  As I mentioned on my day one piece, the grandfather of this type of piece is Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman.  This is a book I have attempted to read numerous times throughout the years, and have never been successful.  The problem with reading the book isn’t the narrative form or style, rather it is the period in which the novel was written.  I always seem to not quite get a lot of the jokes, an therefore some of the tangents that the narrative is going through.

The other most notable novel which this piece may be compared to is James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake.  However, unlike the Sterne novel, I have never attempted to read the James Joyce novel.  However, I have read several other works by James Joyce, and have enough respect for those works to know that it would take an extremely long time to read, and fully understand.  I know there are scholars who have dedicated a substantial portion of their careers to this one book.

My current experience with this piece is similar to my attempted readings of Tristram Shandy.  I seem to be losing track of some of the narrative elements as we twist through the layers of sound collages and musical interpretations.  I suspect, however, that I may be able to understand the piece better if I could focus on it completely.

I did, however, review the release notes on the Headphonica about this piece, and can see now where there is another perspective to the whole concept.  This can also be seen as an audio form story cycle.   This does make it easier to accept that there are different segments to the piece, and that it isn’t necessary to link each segment to the overall piece.  However, I still have my suspicions that there is more to this piece as even Tristram Shandy can be seen as a story cycle.

As it is, even without completely linking the narrative to the sound collages, I am enjoying the piece.  Whether I am in a narrative section, or in the musical sections, I am enjoying the piece.

This time I’m focusing on Netlabels.  What are Netlabels?  Well, like the Kahvi Collective mentioned in the first article they are community organizations that have decided to release collections of music either by individual artists, or in compilations in a way that is analogous to what the large record companies do.  Many Netlabels release these recordings for free (as in without $$$ charges), and under a Creative Commons license, or a license that is very open.

The other aspect of Netlabels is in their history.  Many of  the Netlabels have been around for quite a few years.  They derived from the Demo Scene: a group of hackers (hackers in the good and correct sense of the word) who work with computers at the lowest possible level to produce demonstrations of what the machines can do. In some cases you would be quite astounded by what could be done with an Apple ][ or Commodore 64.  A lot of the music that these intrepid hackers wrote for the demos were initially released as “tracker” files, which predated MP3’s.  Eventually, with the rise of the Internet and MP3’s these intrepid multimedia artists started releasing music on their own for the world to listen.
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I was concerned when I listened to the first track of the album…  “Nitro” was something of a jumbled mess to my ears that really didn’t go anywhere. I was left thinking, “sheesh, this might be the first time I write a negative review, and here the artist actually approached me and several others to write reviews!” But, the second track “I SuJAZZt you” somewhat revised my opinion of this release.

Not quite dZihan & Kamien, not quite Thievery Corporation, or even Kruder & Dorfmesiter. Once I got past the first track, I was instead reminded of James Hardaway, A Forest Mighty Black, Jimpster, and Taran — all of whom have worked in a more groove oriented style with very raw samples (scratches and all) used as the basis for their pieces.  (I am thinking specifically here of a compilation called After Hours: Miles Away which remains one of my all time favorite discs.)

That being said, I won’t say that this release is in the same category as any of the artists I’ve listed above.  There are too many differences between what Bielebmy does and what any of them are doing.  But this isn’t necessarily bad.

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