The record that ignited my search for the formless in music was Sly Stone's There's a riot goin on. Specifically, two songs seared themselves into the folds of my brain back in high school, I've had this record in one way or another longer than any other because the questions it begs remain unanswered. In the third track, Poet Sly states his position as adversary. "My only weapon is my pen", he says before lapsing into scarcely mumbled words, falling into silence halfway through the song, which plods along through the mire without the songwriter. Years later an image I ascribe to this is a defeated Nerval wandering his last night through the streets of Paris before hanging himself. The song Thank You For Talkin To Me Africa, a seemingly endless remake of the brighter, more militant Thank you falletin me be mice elf agin, sees the Poet trying to take every word back with him to the grave. If Altamont became the popular symbol for the death of the sixties for white America, one could say this song is the soundtrack for one man's black Altamont. Finally to mention on the original vinyl record, the title track was an empty groove, titled at 00:00. In other words there's nothing going on, it's over. It's not a morbid, romantic fascination, but the feeling of intense loss, of fear felt on this record that pointed me towards an aesthetic of collapse in music for the life it speaks of between the lines.
When not making little songs a few minutes in length, Throbbing Gristle was at their best the sound of rock music decomposing. Their larger pieces, huge, gaseous affairs are nauseating, powerful testimonies to an attack on rock music that coincided with punk. Whereas punk could be termed traditionalist from one perspective in that it embraced the pop form, hardened it in an attempt to reclaim it from the purveyors and put it back into the streets, TG attacked the form of music and embraced the industry by parodying it. Mass production became Music from the Death Factory. The release titled CD1 was in some ways for me an answer to Sly's Riot. Both existed at the tail end of radical movements. They both are quite soupy in production, thick, viscous. In the case of Sly I was compelled to look at his music prior to this record in an attempt to trace what had happened to him, from where had he fallen. With TG the instinct was to look forward, leaving the cadaver of rock music to rot and move towards new things. The Family tree of TG has branches that lead to the banalities of Marilyn Manson, early techno culture, and traces of TG DNA can be found in today's expansive electro/acoustic scene.
In the early to mid sixties John Coltrane's quartet was an incredible catalyst for the transformation of forms, musically and socially. I'm sure it wasn't off the cuff that someone once said the folks into civil rights listened to Miles, those into black power listened to Coltrane. The sounds this group made are unlike any before or after. It seems so vertiginous, like a dervish spinning not to achieve some psychic state, but rather to shed the body altogether. It's the sound of life consuming itself, a feast for an occasion just as joyous as mournful. As the rhythm section stays tight but nearly out of control, Trane's playing exhausts nearly every possible combination of notes around a theme, spitting out shards of melody, examining a thing from all sides before ending a song. His music before this quartet seems only a pretext and the music afterwords forecasts of newsletters from an afterlife. During most of his time on the Impulse label this group was very much a body alive, in complete lucidity of it's place in history, ecstatic and blue, before finally shedding itself. For a fine sample of this group at it's most powerful it might be best to start with the box set Live at the Village Vanguard, which also features the unreal Eric Dolphy playing with them.
By the time John Lennon met Yoko Ono, Art was experiencing the first of it's last gasps (it continues to shudder). It still believed in changing the world, and was not yet the gallery run staging of careers. I think Yoko new the potential in pop music for transformation, and she put her art background to use in realizing that potential. On her first record, Plastic Ono Band, she strips the function of voice as vehicle for narrative and employs it as an instrument, and that instrument as weapon. In the first track, Why? the band simply jumps in a full scale aural assault preceding her jumping in like a machine gun. It's the kind of thing where to treat the subject of horror properly you must match it, anything less demeans it's victims. Given their politics it's easy to see that this merging of art music with pop was an act of war upon war itself. By no means wallpaper, this music is hard to swallow, and the misogyny and vehemence that still greet this record speaks a bit of it's power as well as to the public's ongoing insistence that music be meaningless.
In the 1946 radio play, To Have Done With The Judgment Of God, onetime surrealist, pioneer of drama, poet and theoretician, Antonin Artaud articulated his own contempt for the body and insistence upon it's dissolution based in part on his experience of shamanic ritual in Mexico. Not that the Indians provided him with a model of suffering, his own mental illness, drug addiction, shock therapy and incarceration are well documented, but I think that what he saw and participated in provided a glimpse of a way out of the corporeal. It is the quality of his voice in this recording that communicates his disgust with the body, and this voice is truly haunting. Unfortunately the text of this play is not included, but it can be found in the City Lights translation of his work. The booklet does however include the story of the circumstances of it's broadcast and suppression.
In 1967 Glenn Gould was commissioned by the CBC to compose a radio documentary of his choosing. World famous for his piano playing, he eventually stopped performing because of what he perceived to be an inherent dishonesty in the relationships of the performer, the music and the audience. Quite a deed for the world's best. Anyway, he kept recording, and developed an intensely reclusive life. He rarely saw people, but spoke to them for hours, often in the middle of the night over the phone, showing a need to communicate but a distrust of direct communication. He would at times venture into Canada's northern, extreme geographies, developing his fascination of it as a metaphor for solitude. The three radio documentaries he eventually completed are collected as The Solitude Trilogy. Composed of interviews with people living in solitude, he painstakingly removed any traces of questions and spent hundreds of hours splicing these voices into constructed conversations. The first CD deals with theory, the idea of north, and takes place on a recreated train trip into the Canadian interior. The conductor of the train becomes the conductor of these conversations, which at times are layered voice over voice into a verbal labyrinth, the subjects range from idealism, racism towards the country's Indians, and suburban growth. On the second disc, he focuses on the isolated individual in Newfoundland. Whereas in the first the voices are paired with the sounds of train travel, on this is the simple sound of water lapping against the shores of this island. The topics veer from the plausibility of grassroots anarchy to the meaning of creativity or fashion to an outsider. By the third and last of the trilogy, he tackles the notion of a community of outsiders, specifically Mennonites. What you hear in these documents is the overriding need of the hermit to communicate, a famous hermit whose retreat from the world was in great part a moral decision describing a rift between the terms he set for his own life and those the world set fore him.
Another outsider, filmmaker Jack Smith is represented on the archival subdivision of Table of the Elements. On the CD Les Evening Gowns Damnes, we get a glimmer into the everyday life of the pre-Warhol New York underground. No careerist bullshit here, just Jack and his creatures. You can almost see them cutting speed on the coffee table, or smell the pot in the air, feeling like you're in the room with these drag Queen misfits. A superficial listen will provide alot of camp, but a deeper listen and you begin to hear their values bleed through. The parody of colonial exoticism in the over the top morrocan adventure on the second track to the heartbreaking and warm description of the relationship between two queens on a night out that is the last track testify to a subjective radical politic. The CD features Tony Conrad and Angus Maclaise, two members of the Primitives, which was the kernel of what would become The Velvet Underground, though both of them left before that. Many of Jack's friends would leave him for Warhol fame, indeed Warhol and a number of 60's hipsters owed alot to Jack, who really didn't seem to have it in him to get famous on those terms. It's such a joy listening to the wit, humor, intelligence of this group of friends and the love between them before the 60's took them over.
Tony Conrad can be heard again on a four CD set of violin drone where he recreates the minimalist music that has been suppressed for over thirty years by onetime collaborator, Lamont Young. The accompanying booklet gives us a sense of the times, a context for the art scene of the late fifties and early sixties, often working class, and where not explicitly political then definitively antisocial, which is one term Tony uses to describe some of the music they made back then. It places the importance of the impact Eastern music had on these people, on Jazz and Pop. It's a coercive music, harsh and beautiful, forcing the listener to really listen. Four violins playing one note for what seems an eternity while waiting for the smallest change for makes for incredible suspense. In the booklet Tony mentions that everyone's life should be so full as to know that the greatest pleasure is in wasting time. It's really more like laying waste to time, hanging out, punching holes in boredom until you realize there is nothing you should be doing other than being.
Jim O'Rourke answers this with his release, Happy Days. It's another drone thing, but begun with the simplest acoustic guitar line that slowly morphs into a county blues riff of sorts before layer upon layer of hurdy gurdys swallows the guitar, building into a pulsating, massive drone like masses of insects on a hot summer night. The guitar returns at the end, but quicker, the way your heart beats after the best night in your life. In another strange way, this piece seems an abstract cover of that Big Star song about hanging out.
Of all the methods used to extort new sounds out of a piano, the music of Henry Cowell strike me as the warmest, most human, not theory driven, avant classicism. A Smithsonian Folkways recording captures him playing his own music. His techniques employed playing with fists and forearms, while using another hand to develop a melody, or bowing and scraping the strings of the piano. These ways of playing are utilized in service of the songs, not arbitrary or flashy. The songs are coherent, lyrical, melancholy. An 18 minutes of him talking at the end adds to the warmth, and provides a contextual framing for the songs. He coaxes out the soul of the instrument, or maybe it plays him, regardless it's one of the strangest and beautiful piano recordings that I've heard.
Though I've strayed a bit, what I have traced here is a rough chronology of my own search for a challenge to form, or a will to formlessness in music. These are Terminal Documents as spoke of earlier in that either the emotional content or the methods of their execution push or dissolve the strictures of accepted forms.
There's A Riot Goin On/Sly and the Family Stone/Epic
CD1/Throbbing Gristle/Mute
Complete Live At The Village Vanguard/John Coltrane/Impulse
Plastic Ono Band/Yoko Ono/Ryko
To Have Done With The Judgement Of God/Antonin Artaud/SubRosa
The Solitude Trilogy/Glenn Gould/CBC
Les Evening Gowns Damnes/Jack Smith/Audio Artkive
Arsenic/Tony Conrad/Table of the Elements
Happy Days/Jim O'Rourke/Revenant
Piano Music/Henry Cowell/Smithsonian Folkways
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