Microcomputer Rehearsal, Chopped Maestros, Barchord Contesso
This is issue number six. Here, we recommend a group of archival recordings, a chopped millennial album and a home economics conspiracy. Thank you for joining us and, we hope you enjoy.
Recommendation: The League of Automatic Music Composers – Archive: 1978-1981
I like to read a few things at once. I am on vacation in Spain, and have put what I was reading in New York on hold in order to kick off a couple new books. I am adjusting my mentality for vacation. I am adding complexity to my own life. I am going back and forth between Dwarkesh Patel’s The Scaling Era, a book of technical interviews with leading AI research lab figureheads, and a new translation of Françoise Dolto’s Dominique: The Case of an Adolescent, a remarkable psychoanalytic case study originally published in 1971. I am enjoying my time on vacation. I am writing this on a train. I am drinking a Nescafé espresso out of a paper cup. But this is not a travelogue: I am suspending the total immersion of my amazing travels to use my phone to write about music.
Earlier, I was listening to DJ Moortje’s “Donna,” but now I am listening to the League of Automatic Music Composers. They were active in the Bay Area between 1977 and 1983. Roc Jiménez de Cisneros released a large selection of their recordings in 2009. Roc is half of EVOL, one of the great computer music projects of the millennium. I recommend familiarizing yourself with his work if you haven’t already.
I am listening closely to “Ear Benefit Rehearsal - Martian Folk Music” and “Ear Benefit Rehearsal - Pedal With Twitter.” The LOAMC utilized microcomputers in live performance, which was a novelty at the time. Each player set up a station, and it fed into the others. Look into how they did it, and what they were thinking about.
These works direct our attention to the place of things. There are few silences. We can hear currents of electricity. There is the sense of a kite being flown. If you haven’t flown a kite recently, I recommend giving it a go. Flying a kite is not like throwing a baseball. The air is either moving or it is not. The kite does not fly if the air does not move. A baseball moves because you throw it, or because of gravity. The kite-pilot must adjust their approach to currents which are far from them, up in the sky, out of reach. (See Deleuze on surfing in his famous control society essay.) Air nearby possesses less unfamiliarity: you can breathe it. Up there, air moves another way, guiding or being guided by a slightly different set of atmospheric conditions.
One gets the sense from listening to these recordings that changing the way things sound is not so easy. A number of variables must be corralled. This is an intuition, though, and it could be wrong: the sound might be incredibly easy to change in a sudden fashion. The increments and frequencies might be tremendously malleable. We do sense sustained focus, fatiguing focus. Autechre didn’t seem tired at all when I saw them perform last weekend. They seemed calm. How hard can it be to fly a kite? It depends on the atmosphere, the ways that energy moves through the environment.
—Alexander Iadarola
Recommendation: The Books - Lost and Safe
I haven’t listened to The Books since maybe 2009. It’s likely that I may not have listened to them ever again. My memory of their sound is particularly repressed, almost erased. A lot of bands from this particular moment in independent music are straight up buried. Even then, as a high schooler in the 2000s, something felt kind of nerdy and embarrassing about the music—the name “The Books,” was too uncanny, overly familiar, not cool. Typing out the duo’s names now—guitarist and vocalist Nick Zammuto, cellist Paul de Jong—does not spark joy. Under these tentative circumstances, I find myself recommending their 2005 album Lost and Safe—a testament to a particular sound that I don’t think could be produced today. Similar to a proprietary union style of brick laying, or forgotten cathedral-building technique, some kind of knowledge was lost from this particular moment of indie sentiment and craft—two things that I generally do not enjoy. I’m allergic to a lot of musical narrative in the form of songwriting—and generally favor the “track” over the “song” almost every time. The ways in which the music of Lost and Safe is carefully considered, perhaps over-intentioned, and the blatant, hushed earnestness of the vocals, the bargain bin quality of the sampled material, would usually cause me to crash out. It’s a bit of a poisoned well for me—culturally and musically. Yet, Lost and Safe contains a track-ness over song-ness. Samples are woven between hyperemotional cello sweeps and knobby kitchen-sink percussion, the velocity of each hit marking the inflection of a vocal cadence or run. The Wire Magazine named it the best album of 2005, a prototype for how accessible bedroom experimentalism might become in the ensuing decade. The music is maybe more Girl Talk than Feist. Or maybe it’s the other way around.
The obsolescence of The Books’ sound—particularly the sampling and layering techniques—are the lost art here. I can hear the cuts of the samples clearly and precisely. They are “hand stitched.” The project combines electronic and acoustic music—something that isn’t particularly novel even at that time within the wave of the Folktronica movement. But, The Books have a “touch” that goes beyond a general found-sound-folk-pop-collage style. With Lost and Safe, and really their entire catalog, they’ve found a knack that I think could teach us something about producing electronic music with samples today. The album’s snippets of audio from “obscure” sources like bargain records, thrift store finds, and old home videos are the obsolescent aspect. Sampling from the internet has made this IRL scavenger hunt style not necessary. Or, if one were to do it, you’d really have to go for it—embark on excursions to collect tapes and records, scouring through them to find some preacher giving a wild monologue or high school teacher yelling at their students. You’d have to splice the emotional resonance of these finds into some kind of form, maybe add some banjo plucks, run your voice through a vocoder with a ring modulator, and then pontificate your feelings into some strange songcraft. Just ten years ago this didn’t seem like such a fruitless pain in the ass.
The Books feel like a time capsule containing the rudimentary circuits of a media space that’s fully expanded now. Something is emerging on Lost and Safe, appearing in a half-light of generational and technological change—all brimming with sentiments we still possess but that have mutated. The chord progressions feel like they could chorus an emotional breakdown on Grey’s Anatomy. The music is “chopped” in the material sense and in the slang sense—weird and “over.” The way these sampling techniques intersect with a conservatory musicality is a bit rank—containing a Star Trekkie awkwardness—but maybe that’s why I like it. The awkwardness of the music gives way to something tangible for me. The interiority of the record feels flattened, muted. It’s music that I would usually consider overwrought, but the intention of its introspection and empathy open up—both in the transitional nature of its technological moment, and its emotional candor. Everything has the quality of being slightly anonymous.
On an autumn post-work commute, I listen to the sample from the track “Venice.” A painter (“Maestro”) throws paint on a canvas. A narrator/journalist states “Maestro has just thrown a bunch of gold paint … which has not only hit me in the face … but has gone across the canvas to the applause of the crowd below.” It’s apparently an homage to the Lion of St. Marks. Kalimba and fretless bass shred on—the maestro, unknown.
—Nick James Scavo
Recommendation: Stock your pantry
I’ve made an effort recently to prepare food and ingredients that I can eat throughout the week. The first order of business has been to stock up with batch production of dips, sides and sauces: baba ghanoush, salsa (made from the last, tasteless tomatoes in my garden bed), a green herb sauce, and kimchi. These are intended to compliment a twice-weekly cadence of main dishes: roasted chicken, fried cutlets, big tray chicken, coq au vin, (mostly chicken I guess) and whatever else the case may be. Nice. Some good structure to aimless hours of indoor time that have accompanied the cold weather. Some honest projects going in the background. And while I do basically endorse this sort of general meal planning, my recommendation here is really about developing a conspiratorial operation with your future self. I want to open the fridge, having produced and forgotten the array of offerings, and select a delicacy from my ample stores - as if raiding a stranger’s pantry.
Conspiracy is a very dramatic way to describe what is essentially a staple of the home economics curriculum. But for my purposes, there’s an important dimension of contingency – and in a manner of speaking, secrecy – that I want to emphasize in making preparations of any kind. You don’t exactly know how good, how useful, or how substantive these preparations will prove to be. For example, I’m working on learning my friend Peter Horses’ songs at the moment, in order to accompany him at a show. I’m preparing; I’ve got my particular way of learning and interpreting. We’ll see where those preparations land. The anticipatory leap that the preparer makes is in imagining the conditions of a future circumstance that are in many ways beyond control and subject to change. Preparation signifies a pragmatic comprehension and projection of future needs, but can’t predict or account for the aesthetic contingencies of that future. “I believe I will not only eat, but will enjoy eating 2 quarts of home-made Kimchi this month.” We’ll see about that boss man.
It’s within this aesthetic contingency that I’m suggesting the element of secrecy or inscrutability that affords, in my recommendation, a conspiracy with oneself. Most of my favorite musicians and artists operate with this air – knowingly exposing, with varying results, the sheer affect of a preparation that is becoming extruded and transposed from some theoretically sound premise into a raw, actual, conflictual and generative media application. Conspiracy depends on some covert coordination within the margins of a system, such that the system itself and its functionaries (including you, the artist, the home chef), may not fully grasp the machinations, meanings and implications of those actions.
In reflecting on this kind of “based” barefoot contessa proposition, I found myself doing some freestyle etymology: contessa (Ina Garten, or, [in Italian] “the wife of the count”) shares its root with contessere. It literally means, “to contract a friendship using tokens.” Whether conspiring in the future of some unknowable, unforeseeable sandwich concept, or a musical/improvisatory capacity that becomes pulled from the pantry shelf of practice, there’s a valuable and practically mysterious dimension of creativity to be cultivated in preparing tokens for someone (probably yourself). These tokens appear, are consumed, perhaps questioned, combined, iterated upon, but most significantly they are accepted and deployed as a fulfillment of the inscrutable agreements we’ve made with this particular future.
—Alec Sturgis