Musical Situation, Trance Preparation, Density Practice
Hello again. We recommend considering a certain collapsing of song-writing labor in AI-generated music, the trance of preparation towards orchestration, and the beauty and conceptual density of Eliane Radigue’s work.
Recommendation: Three 6 Mafia - “Tear Da Club Up (DJ Herb’s Crunk & Tear It Up Remix) (Radio Edit)”
I saw a tweet the other day describing a novel musical situation. From @UrbaneUrban on June 20:
took a lyft in philly yesterday and no joke the driver generated an AI pop song about me and him - both of us by name - hanging out on a drive together
A number of currents run through this post: hospitality in the “sharing economy,” contemporary tensions between alienation and social connection, the automation of creative labor, the reterritorialization of the aesthetic experiential commodity, the amount of engineering talent and GPUs required to make such an event possible…
I’m stuck on the strangeness of creating a song about someone you don’t know and will never meet again. A song about an isolated economic relationship, about the furnishing of a single instance of a transportation service. A situation in which service industry social codes – friendliness, helpfulness, free bottles of water – are enforced by a rating system in the semi-private space of someone else’s car. Music has long been produced to facilitate economic transactions, this is not new. But it’s odd to consider a song being produced to facilitate a single transaction, a song that will probably never be listened to again.
I thought about this while lying on my Shakti mat, listening to DJ Herb’s remix of “Tear Da Club Up.”
—Alexander Iadarola
Recommendation: Wei Zhongle - Nu Trance
I’m cooking food for a large number of people this weekend. The scale of preparation at times exceeds my ability to understand what it is I am actually producing. I have cut corn, juiced limes, boiled potatoes, pickled various things, washed greens and herbs, and roasted vegetables. And in the midst of preparing, I look at the array of tomatoes, fruits, grains, breads. I have a plan, of course, but when confronted with the material aspect of these things, the picture shifts. There is much processing to be done. And once the processing is done, there will be cooking to do. And more processing and more cooking, among other things. There is an area of contingency that appears when the element of planning and the imagination of a product drift into the details of creating the necessary components.
I’m cooking from a friend’s house in the Connecticut woods, with the doors open. There’s a smell of trees and flowers, and the summer humidity that reminds me of when I was younger, living in the North Carolina mountains, producing bespoke experimental music performances for DIY shows with friends. And I recalled the music of dear old friends Wei Zhongle: the longtime song-writing vehicle of Rob Jacobs with crucial orchestrational contributions by clarinetist John McCowen and percussion by Sam Klickner (with a few other touring iterations at times). Listening to their 2015 release Nu Trance brought me back to the potency of a certain cosmic experimental rock that I’ve really missed. There’s a conceptual intensity carried in Rob’s form of Li Bai style wine-drunk poetry alongside the affecting, freaky timbral formalism of his vocal performances. The minimal texture of guitar with John’s varyingly overdriven and delayed wind counterpoint, blaring at times with polyrhythmic interjections and drifting beneath the texture as a sin wav embedded in the trance. Sam’s almost orchestral organization of the drums sustain and drive the edgier interactions within the texture through their cyclical forms.
Beholding my quart container of cut corn, considering the trance of preparations, of the textures which will combine in a set of meals for the myriad - the 10,000 - eaters of the weekend, I feel nostalgic for that particular moment in time. Connecting the mystery and poetry of repetition into exciting, digestible forms that stimulate the intellect and open the heart. Things were Nu then. Maybe they can be Nu again.
—Alec Sturgis
Recommendation: Éliane Radigue - Trilogie de la Mort
I’m in rehearsals this week at work for a brilliant play by Georgica Pettus. I’m writing this at 6am as the sun comes up as a result. There’s not really any room for other thoughts this week. I’m enjoying the cyclical aspect to these rehearsal days—recalling summer camp or more youthful time-structures. Even though the rehearsals fit within my own labor routines, processes, rituals—there’s something that feels outside about this specific week. I’m outside of concretized and strict adult routines and mental models; I’m within the memory of a more adolescent, scripted discipline. Both are still practices; and, there’s something formal to how time is structured as a mental architecture built through practice. This feels musical to me.
The composer and conductor of the play’s score, Marcello Palazzo, and I have been chatting off-and-on between our various responsibilities throughout the rehearsals. Through talking about classical and experimental music history in New York City, I briefly mentioned French composer Éliane Radigue. Her work is the only music I’ve reached for this week. Radigue’s music feels simultaneously subtractive and additive in the way a practice does—encroaching a zero point, itself a practice, informed by Buddhism. I can be emptied out with two functioning brain cells vibrating to her music, and go in a number of directions from there.
Éliane, who passed away earlier this year in February, created Trilogie de la Mort between 1985 and 1993. The work is an extended (nearly three hour) sonic meditation on death informed by Radigue’s dedicated engagement with Tibetan Buddhism, as well as the passing of her son, made up of three hour-long ARP 2500 synthesizer compositions recorded to tape: Kyema, Kailasha, and Koumé. Her underlying recording and synthesis practice is tied to a meditation on the transcendental aspect of death as part of a perpetual becoming. The work was premiered in November 1993 at the monastery at Cimiez in Nice where the sound, according to minimalist composer Tom Johnson, “oozed out of the walls.”
In Alien Roots, an anthology about Eliane’s work compiled by Blank Forms, the great cellist Charles Curtis refers to Trilogie de la Mort as “a dense and monumental requiem.” It takes a knowing mind like Curtis’ to call this music dense. To most it would feel sparse, porous, even. I agree with Curtis, the work is maybe the densest thing I’ve ever heard—completely full of “imperceptible transformations that purposively unfold to reveal the intangible, radiant contents of minimal sound—its partials, harmonics, subharmonics and inherent distortions”
Curtis writes on Radigue: “As a woman, working largely in what might now be described as a ‘DIY’ mode, continuing to produce work after work despite her underground status, she has come to be revered [...] her semi obscurity offered her a kind of freedom: freedom from self-assertion, from the pressure of commissions, from the tyranny of deadlines. Her music is inwardly directed, projecting an indifference to outward effect or attention-grabbing spectacle. One could go so far as to call her music insular [...] unassimilable to genre or movement.”
But the practice was still there.
—Nick James Scavo