(Excuse the length of the review. Summary: Buy it.)

As in his short piece Klangfarbenprobe for the Re Records quarterly many years ago, John here explores in two 30 minute pieces how much variety and structure is obtainable from a single pitch. Western ears are indoctrinated to listen through pitch, to find binding narratives in melody, harmony and their variations, the rest at best is secondary, at worst just colour. The reason so much Baroque music translates so easily to different instruments, including heavy metal guitar, is because it’s the notes that really count. The notes and their ratios and their relationships. Harmony was considered part of a scared mathematics and the relations between pitches expressed absolute, fundamental cosmic realities. Pure music, the music of the spheres related directly to the Platonic forms, the unchanging verities that we can approach but never grasp. That’s why it is the form that matters, the pattern behind the notes, and not the temporary body in which these are clothed. In the age of the Manufacturer and the Usurer — the age of Beethoven and after — while holding to the spiritual in theory, music was progressively seduced by the material. Orchestration came to matter more and more. And once sound recording was invented, the materiality of sound itself became an unegotiable fact. Varese, pre-eminently, relegated notes to a secondary position in his work, pursuing timbre, dynamic, mass, spatiality and contrast, but generally, all the way through to the late 1950s, especially under the sway of post serialism, notes continued to hold their own, even though their grip was slipping. That decade, however, saw two radical responses that recognised and between them reified the dilemma: In the left corner, John Cage shifted his attention to rhythm — which is the organisation of time and which, significantly, is made equally of sound and silence — for him pitch was just material to be poured into structured time; it could be anything — let the sounds be themselves; while, for La Monte Young, in the right corner, pitch became absolutely supreme. John Oswald follows neither route but approaches the problem from a completely different perspective. His work, initially closer to Schönberg’s famous short orchestra piece and Varese’s explorations into dynamic, timbre and spatiality goes beyond these to an exploration of what happens when pitch becomes informationally redundant — or transparent — forcing other qualities of sound to be heard through it, and making thereby what is always missing or suppressed significant. By this simple device — the most original things are always this obvious and one wonders how come it took so long to reach them — the answer is, as always, that it takes a different kind of thinking to see the obvious. By this simple device of removing tonal data by levelling it, John is able to accentuate and make essential parts of hearing we take for granted and, when in art mode, largely ignore. He takes acoustic space, natural and un-natural sound, the outside world and the discourse of music — and by merging and flattening them arrives at strikingly unfamiliar listening aesthetic.

Of course, John’s work with recordings has always been about listening — as well as to a certain extent about perspective, and both concerns are strongly represented here. His method of work involves gradually tuning every sound to a single pitch (an A). There are 10 audible octaves and so 10 degrees of this pitch with which to work. Two human performers are featured, a piano tuner and a cellist, the rest of the material is derived from a library of recorded sounds built up over time — pure sine tones, orchestral instruments playing A’s, voices, environmental sounds: birds, weather, animals, insects, spaces — and so on. It is all — naturally or un-naturally — pitched to an A. This is the material. The second crucial technique employed throughout this piece is morphing: that is, gradually blending one thing into another. A note becomes a storm becomes a flock of birds — think of some of Trevor Wishart’s extraordinary work in this area, except that here the pitch is uniform and the blend can, if desired, be almost imperceptible. A change of object or event becomes simply one of timbres and detail; to morph is effectively to crossfade very slowly. Sounds may gradually turn into one another, or be sunk inside one another like harmonics, to create shifting banks of timbres. An entire aviary of birds winds up at A and A becomes the aether in which they, and everything else, moves.

Because of the variety of sources and the individual recording of them, spatiality moves to the fore; there is much work here with soundscape, interior and exteriority, distance and shape. Such work with scale and reflection and with the sounds of weather and nature inevitably invokes a visual response, and John often speaks in narrative and visual terms in his interview, “it’s raining in the piano,” “a conical clarinet curls into a french horn and then straightens out into a didgeridoo,” “like a giant hummingbird” &c. But because the pitch is constant, our hearing is focused in an entirely unfamiliar way. He quotes Stockhausen’s comparison between the filmic model of seeing a variety of things under a constant light as opposed to seeing the same thing continually under differing lights. Perspective, space and scale permeate this work, in a way I can not refer to any other work. In one section all 88 notes of the piano sound as an A. And how are we to hear this? John in his excellent and comprehensive accompanying interview points out that this could usefully be described as a shift in scale: the piano notes do not change, but the size of the piano does; the lowest note on the keyboard sounding the A would be strung in a 10-inch concert grand, the highest in one over 100 feet long. This is in some ways analogous to the effect of light speeds on length and time: the light is moving at a constant speed while objects shrink and elongate and time stretches and expands.

There are two versions of the piece on this CD, which is an indispensable work. Not merely a piece of music — or a parade of organised sounds — but a meditation on listening.

Differente la’rischiosa operazione di Maurizio Martusciello e Filippo Paolini, in apparenza didascalica: fare musica’sulla’guerra. E’noto che trumors’ non significa trumore’bensì diceria.’voce che corre’e in tal maniera si procede, sviluppando sì un calendario storico di eventi — i titoli dei dodici pezzi sono tutti date e luoghi: 28061914 Sarajevo, 07121941 Pearl Harbour e così via… naturalmente c’è scivolosissimo, anche 11092001 New York — ma preferendo dare un sguardo ‘laterale’ all’umanità violata, velando quasi di pietas certi — eventi — quelli in cui più mostruoso appare il baratro. La costruzione del suono è attenta, il digital processing non teme di giungere alle soglie melodia né di tentare la descrizione emotiva: un blip cinico scandisce il tempo che sta per finire, I’innalzarsi della frequenza di un’onda simula l’approssimarsi di un aereo, alla fine un improwiso risucchio d’antimateria, come lo spegnersi in un lampo del tubo catodico (11092001 New York). Si rimane a distanza dalI’orrore, impossibile awicinarsi di più, tuttavia — anzi, proprio in ragione di quest’atteggiamento — i due italiani realizzano un lavoro che, per onestà intellettuale e ‘misura compositiva’, costituisce un importante esempio di ‘elettronica civile’.

La No Type di David Turgeon — ingegno multiforme, grafico, programmatore in Perl, ironico agitatore delle nuove avanguardie scapigliate — è una delle ‘case’ più oltranziste nell’area sperimentale nordamericana. Tra le ultime uscite (nel recente passato vanno ricordati i Book On Tapes e il cd a firma A Dontigny — Diane Labrosse) si annoverano un ponderoso compact canadese ed una produzione di nostri connazionali. I giovanissimi Haiven e Vaughn la danno di cut up-fluxus in trentatré segmenti, scombinando e ricombinando materiali di varia indistinguibile provenienza. Si possono individuare tre approcci alla manipolazione sonora. Un ‘taglia-e-cuci’ veloce ed informale, simile per effetto allo scorrere veloce e ‘brutista’ della sintonia di una radio. Poi un dar di spatola noise in maniera più omogenea e quindi un segmento iperminimalista che ricorda la scuola statunitense anni ’70-’80. Non necessariamente in quest’ordine, né in rigida sequenza. Vi prospettiamo adesso una scelta critico-concettuale variabile che va dall’improperio ontologico e strutturato alia concorde e sorridente accettazione di giudizi già scritti: “Contrariamente a molti lavon contemporanei, Front è una, composizione di 73 minuti che determina niente meno che un confronto tra la vostra percezione del mondo e il mondo stesso! Qual è stata l’ultima volta che avete realmentefatto esperienza di arte?”

Books on Tape was recently nominated for an award in the L.A. Weekly in the uncategorizable category. Although it didn’t win (many publications called it a robbery), it stands alone on top of the electronic heap. The brainchild of Books on Tape, Todd Drootin, composed, performed and recorded all the music contained on this disc. Upon first listening, I was absolutely floored by what I heard. Uncategorizable is a complete understatement! Comprised of complete electronics, this disc takes you on an unexplainable ride into everywhere and nowhere all at once. There are so many sounds and noises throughout you have got to wonder how this one guy came up with all this and put it together the way he did. This definitely is not for everyone and is definitely not hardcore by any stretch, but it’s uniqueness is one of the main reasons I like it. Nine Inch Nails and Pavement fans take notice! There is a new electronic project on the block that is above and beyond anything you might have heard, and it’s name is Books on Tape.

Metaxu’s first album [Metaxu, 2001, Plate Lunch] is disappointing, but their second [Rumors of War, 2003, No Type] is a very different affair. The claustrophobic electro-glitch of the 2000 eponymous CD has transformed into a lush set of romantic sample-based constructions. Obviously, the main theme is war. The 12 tracks are titled after key 20th-century historical events of a belligerent nature, from Sarajevo, June 28, 1914 to New York, September 11, 2001. Throughout the album, the music expresses melancholia, mourning and sadness as filtered through the prism of romanticism. Samples of piano and guitar motifs, chants, orchestral music, historical speeches and intimate voices have been assembled to create strongly evocative tracks. Compared to the dryness of the first album, Rumors of War is downright a crowd pleaser. The sound palette is varied and rich. The electronic textures are used as an accompaniment to the sampled instruments, preserving a certain warmth and a “song” structure. One thinks much more of Tibor Szemzö’s emotional evocations of past memories than of any member of the experimental ambient community (the label’s press release is prone to mention Fennesz and Ekkehard Ehlers, but Metaxu’s music is here even easier to absorb). And despite the fact that some followers of Maurizio Martusciello (one half of Metaxu) since his departure from the group Ossatura will be quite surprised by the accessibility of this music, the project is a success. Each piece proposes a historical reading open to interpretation, a precise evocation of the event, and a powerful emotional charge. Highlights include: the quiet fragmented electronics in Hiroshima; the delicate water sounds providing the basis for Falkland; and the Arabic melody heard in the distance at the beginning of New York, a hint to the fact that this event would have as big (if not bigger) an impact on the population of the Middle-East than on Americans — and there is no other way to describe the finale of that piece than to say that it literally collapses on itself. Recommended.

In the notes he supplies to shed light on these two versions of Aparanthesi, Canadian sound alchemist John Oswald enthuses over A, the single pitch used to make the piece, and he talks excitedly of the relevant frequencies measured in Hertz. Yet there’s nothing abstract about this remarkable music. On the contrary it engages with some of the countless potential incarnations of that pitch, from a thunderstorm rumbling across a prairie to Joan Jeanrenaud’s Intensely focused sounding of a cello.

The opening A is a monolithic chord, an Ayers Rock (aka Uluru) of an A. Like that Australian landmark, it then appears to change colour in response to changing light and atmospheric conditions. Oswald’s material undergoes more extensive and fundamental change however. Mass, texture, shape, dynamics alter too as one embodiment morphs into another. A piano tuner at work melts into the weather, a foghorn bellows, rain falls, a mosquito whirrs, sine tones drone, an aviary of birds emerges from a low hum, and miraculously flocks to A. Oswald recalls how, as he morphed the sound of wind instruments, he imagined “the physicality of the instrument transforming, so a conical clarinet would curl into a French horn for instance, and then straighten out into a didgeridoo.”

Aparanthesi could be approached as a philosophical investigation of identity and correspondence, or as a meticulously crafted guide to the intricacies of listening. But those options might be unnecessarily arid. High levels of technical skill and fine judgment are invariably accompanied in Oswald’s music by a clearcut sense of dramatic possibilities, and an awareness of tensions that give form to sonic events and radiate from them to involve his audience in active relationships with evolving structures of sound. Even in a piece that gravitates continually and predictably to a single pitch, strange things happen that spark unexpected images and open up unfamiliar spaces. His generous commentary elucidates but doesn’t even begin to exhaust the fascinating metamorphic drama Oswald has discovered in A.