Cerebral Rift

So I haven’t managed to get anything posted for several days now. Durn that “real” life for getting in the way.  This is a post to cover a few miscellaneous topics that I have been rolling around the back of my mind since last week.

I have finished listening to The Faust Cycle, but haven’t had the time to write up any further notes and thoughts.  Honestly, it is taking more time than I expected because the ending is more attention demanding than the rest of the piece.  Unfortunately, I won’t be making it to a 14 part review as I had originally planned.  At this point, I am planning to write two more pieces, for 10 in total.

I started listening to some releases from Music Trade.  I am quite impressed with the releases on this label.  They set a very different standard for Net Label releases.  I will talk a bit more about them in a few future articles.  Another label that I have started listening to is Pavillon 36 Recordings.  I already reviewed the release from Pharmacore a while back.  I will be living with the few releases I have on my system for a bit, then reviewing them.

I don’t intend to keep this site totally about music.  It’s really supposed to be about Free (Libre) Art, Culture, and Music.  Hopefully over the next couple of weeks, I will be adding more content about free literature, and other subjects.

I am also thinking about adding some of my own fiction and poetry to the site.

I am still trying to figure out what is wrong with the RSS feeds, so if you were following the site via RSS, I will be working on fixing it.  (Something has broken a couple of things, and I am still working them out…)

There’s a few more things, but it’s maybe a bit too early to talk about them…so I will leave on a little mystery note, just to say that I have a lot more ideas in mind for the site, and a lot more content that I am developing.

Please, if you have any ideas or comments, let me know either via the comments to this article, or by using the Contact Me form.

Thanks for hanging in there!

Cover: I Step Into The Advent

Title: I Step Into The Advent

Artist: Mikael Fyrek

Label: Kahvi Collective

Release Date: 11/10/2009

Catalog No: Kahvi 276

License: Creative Commons BY-NC-ND-SA

Mikael Fyrek is another example of one of the extremely fine electronic musicians that has been on the net for quite sometime.  This release is his fifth on the Kahvi Collective, and it exemplifies what one person can do with a home studio and more than a dash of skill and creativity.

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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)

So today’s listening was a turning point on The Faust Cycle for me.  Actually, it wasn’t a single turning point, but rather multiple turning points.

First was the introduction of The Faust Cycle Podcast.  My first impression about this was: what a wonderful thing to do.  Sharing this work with a group of kids, getting them the experience of making free-form music, and experimentation.  Getting them excited about the process of recording this type of work.  It’s a completely wonderful way to expand these kids horizons, but also extend the community of the Creative Commons and Libre Culture to another generation.

The inclusion of their podcast in The Faust Cycle itself adds another, very interesting, dimension to the piece.  Those who are familiar with the writings of Jorge Louis Borges, Kurt Vonnegut, Douglas Adams, and James Joyce, to name a very few (it can be argued that I am referring back to Laurence Sterne again as well),  have undoubtedly heard of the term meta-fiction.

Meta-fiction is typically fiction about fiction, or at least is self-aware in one way or another.  The introduction of the podcast in this context adds another type of meta-fictional element: this is now an audio piece that is aware of itself, aware of the elements that have gone into it’s production.

Of Kinetoscopes & Dung

Now, back at the main piece we arrive to the next twist of the narrative: Ergo finds that he has become human again and is no longer a puppet.  He realizes that he has no idea what amount of time has transpired: hours, days weeks?  And he realizes that he’s about to burst, and sets off to find a lavatory to relieve himself.  And, after finding an appropriate room, with one enormous push he is emptied.

While this activity is normal and necessary, he has a realization that he feels more empty than normal, that something is wrong.  While playing a harmonica, trying to figure out what is wrong, he hears wailing from the pipes beneath where his soul has gone with his bowel movement.  After noting the irony, Ergo realizes that he must get his soul back and thus flushes himself down the pipes.

What transpires in the sewage system below can only be described as hellish in ways we haven’t encountered thus far. Ergo watches several kinetoscopes of films about Lucifer, but is unable to decide what they mean.  However, after the 2nd film, he hears a piano off in the distance, and decides to follow the sound to find his soul.

The piano we hear, is the same James Nye piece that has been used throughout: An Evening In Hell.  Ergo finds himself in a ballroom, where many people are dancing and humming.  As he stands in the corner, where only the piano has noticed his presence, he suddenly hears a voice in his ear reciting nonsensical poetry.  He looks around to find the source of the voice, only to find a pig, which when patted squeals and expands to the size of the room then falls to pieces.

Lonely Violin music, and an interpretation of “Le Tango Perpetuel” and “An Evening in Hell” close this section of the piece.

Onwards…

Artist: Ergo Phizmiz

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

When I left off yesterday, I stated that I wanted to have a separate download of “Improvisation for Cello & Electronics” by Bela Emerson.  It is such a captivating piece that I mentioned that it reminded me of a Karlheinz Stockhausen piece, alas I didn’t mention the title: Mantra.  I also mentioned Klaus Schulze & Rainer Bloss, but didn’t mention that I was thinking of the 2nd half of the Audentity album.

I’ve re-listened to the Bela Emerson piece, and still hold to my words.  However, besides Stockhausen and Bloss, I knew there was more that I was thinking about.  The next section of The Faust Cycle was to bring the connections to other music that I have listened to throughout the years to the foreground.  Hell Kebabs by Angela Valid brought into my mind some of the really classic electroacoustic pieces I’ve listened to throughout the years…  One of the better compilations of such pieces can be found in the Archives GRM collection, which features composers / artists like Pierre Boulez, Edgar Varese, Iannis Xenakis, Olivier Messiaen, Luc Ferrari, and  Francois Bayle just to name a few.

It also occurred to me that this is one of the things that I am not hearing a lot of the electronic micro-tonal / marco-tonal works that are coming out on netlabels like Resting Bell…  While the electronic works are detailed, well structured and thought out, they tend to not have the level of text and detail found in the earliest electroacoustic works from the 1950’s and 1960’s.  It’s definitely something that sets The Faust Cycle apart from other works.

After Hell Kebabs we return to a more narration oriented section, although this time, there is some meshing of the electroacoustic work in the background of the narration, even when a tango and waltz are mixed over the top of the abstract and complex texture of Hell Kebabs, which finally fades into the background as we are introduced to “Gretchen”.

Ergo, still in his wooden puppet form, watches Gretchen, and listens to her as she whispers in his ear.  She eventually slips into sing chanting portions of Anything Goes. We listen to a a small ensemble perform for a bit, then “Improvisation for Cell & Electronics” is re-introduced behind Gretchen.  This is a wonderful bit of meta-audio-narration as the familiar chirping of birds are re-introduced, the mixture of the string ensemble with muted trumpet, and several themes re-emerge.

After the conclusion of “Gretchen” we are cast into “Chronicles of the Suspicious Gentleman”.  This section starts with a piece sung by a small ensemble, and then Gretchen narrates the story as depicted by puppets.  The story revolves around the Gentleman and Madiana.  Much of the stroy is told through musical interpretation that mixes elements in a unique form, sounding like modern electronica, a 1920’s victrola and a carnival barker before giving way to an unusual interpretation (mashup?) of Fever, which gives way to another unusual interpretation — I can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch).  This gives a whole new meaning to the context of the song, bringing out the elements of jealousy and insecurity.

This section is a little more successful, or at least a little more obvious, when it comes to linkage between the music and the narrative elements.  It’s either that, or  I am getting some of my chops back for listening to a more complicated work such as this.

Onwards…

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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