Playlist:
1 – Ryuichi Sakamoto / Alva Noto - Noon (2002)
2- Eliane Radigue - Trilogie de la mort (1990)
3- Biosphere - Circulaire (2004)
4- Tim Buckley - Lorca (1970)
5- Robert Wyatt - Alifie (1973)
6- Robert Ashley - The Park (1978)
7- Jon Hassell - Blue period (2008)
8- Third Ear Band - Ghetto Raga (1970)
9- Nick Drake - Tow the line (1974)
-1-
If you sail from Brisbane towards Lima, after crossing a third of that huge liquid expanse you will arrive to the village of Tiavea, on the island of Upolu.
Its chief Tuiavii, at the beginning of the 20th century, came to Europe and a German friend of Herman Hesse thought it a good idea to publish his observations on the white man. They were no more flattering than the taunts that the “savage” earned by traveling in our “civilized world” (to the point that his book did get unjustly and ferociously attacked).
In describing, in particular, “the machines” Tuiavii noted that these, compared to the creations of the Great Spirit, always suffered from hidden defects (have you ever seen a seagull fall with a broken wing?); they were bad imitations, “toys of the great white child” that perhaps made you get to a place sooner, but what was the point, if they took away the pleasure of wandering and letting the destination come to you, instead of you to the destination?
This B-class technical world comes to mind when listening to Ryuichi and Alva's glitch: beautiful piano notes thrown on the keyboard with very long reverbs and in the background a swarm of noises, scratches and a-melodic repetitions that corrode the Apollonian beauty of the piano - like a perfect body attacked by spots and pimples and tics and posture defects.
That Glitch is the only truly new musical style of the last twenty years is even more true if we consider the term glitch. That is, imperfection, a slip (glitschig = slippery, in German), which appropriately uproots the politically correct narrative befriending a technological world. In its silent quietness, the essence of the glitch expresses a muted scream.
This Noon is therefore perfect music for when it is noon on Upolu - but in our quarters it is late night and some ponder, sleepless, on that sticker seen on a public wall, in Saronno: "You can erase our writings, not our anger".
2- Eliane Radigue - Trilogie de la mort (1990)
Inspired by the Tibetan book that teaches how to speak to souls before they leave the corpse, Eliane Radigue's "La Trilogie de la mort" - the closest thing you can think of to the sound of blood circulating and accompanying your sleepless night - is a palpable music that plunges us into another dimension. Literally.
It is said of many records, but here we are talking about a suite of three movements that is sonic stuff designed to experiment with what we are made of. And we are not talking in metaphors.
Eliane is a Parisian lady who for fifty years made music alone (or rather, together with her cat) and at a certain point she became fond of the ARP like Brian Eno never did. And she studied the ARP - a synthesizer that resembles those old telephone switchboards full of wires and holes.
First of all she removed all the stuff she didn't like, which is to say almost everything. A small section of that arsenal of sounds remained. Then, Eliane explains, it was there that the work of perfecting the sound began, “visually describable as putting a mountain in a cup”.
This music is the most suitable sound commentary for a night that breaks the silence, for a head deflated by will.
In London, during an Eliane Radigue exhibition, “sound beds” were made available and people would lay down inside these flat boxes surrounded by speakers, letting their brains shake to the rhythm of the octogenarian’s music - without apparent rhythm. Of a Zen sobriety, that music literally shook your insides. It kept you awake.
3- Biosphere - Circulaire (2004)
Circulaire by Geir Jenssen, even if it is a track from what is considered the most uncompromising Biosphere album, among these other selected sounds it will come out as a pleasant divertissement, while waiting for the wolf.
Geir, an expert climber, seems to know how to reconstitute the mountain visually compressed in the cup that Eliane was talking about. He does it with drones - and with electrical frequencies. In the album "Autour de la lune," from which this track is sampled, sometimes frequencies resemble very fast drops of mercury splashing on acoustic sheets, but in this Circulaire deep aural regurgitations make your curtains, walls and foundations of your house tremble, if you listen to them pumping up the volume.
Geir always manages (and it lies to his merit) to avoid the sample of sounds from a inter-stellar Love-Boat so typical of kitsch pop-ambient - and he does it elegantly (paradoxically) in an album that is inspired by Jules Verne, using the sounds of a French space station.
The most fascinating thing about these modern ambient musics made in Norway is how much those who listen to them (not to mention those who review them) resort to descriptions of imaginary environments to explain them: “spaceships speeding in front of a starry background” or “the sound of zero gravity”.
Yet, as in this example, plenty of guttural low and very high frequencies, and tides of sounds invest us as if it were a tsunami, and we hear the acoustic reflection of what we are, here and now.
(...)
5- Robert Wyatt - Alifie (1973)
Many years ago Barry Guy, the classical and free bassist, hosted me at his house just outside London.
One evening, Barry invited some friends to empty the daily 5-liter crate of strictly room-temperature beer. These included supreme trombonist Paul Rutherford who, after rather enjoying the warm blond nectar, he practically scolded me when he heard that, the following day,
I was going to interview Robert Wyatt.
Paul had some points. Wyatt was guilty of being portrayed as a standard-bearer of alternative music, but he didn't play much free and he was produced by a Pink Floyd.
What Paul 'omitted' was that he had two legs but Wyatt (at the time "only" for seven years) was in a wheelchair (due to: tequila with Southern Comfort + whiskey + ponche + flight from the balcony.) And yet Bob had managed to record, right after his accident, a vinyl that I (of many) list among the five most beautiful records of "pop" music that I know. A desert island kind of record. And a formidable demonstration of cojones.
Recorded exactly one year after the mutilating event, Rock Bottom was perfect, even if not particularly sunny: it was the “bottom of rock”, after all. The album told of a “terrifying” woman described without pleonastic alms (“when you’re drunk I prefer you late at night”, “touch me, when we collapse”, “you’re my lardarium”), as well as the death of the underground scene.
Alifie (from Alfreda = Alfie, his companion) was perhaps the most difficult song, the nadir of the bottom.
First a stammering carol of unfinished syllables (“Not nit/No not nit”) on a carpet of reed whistles, bubbling bass clarinet and respiratory landslides of the talented Gary Windo, climaxing with the liberating tenor solo, of Sheppian rigor.
In short: an ideal throat and the perfect brass for sonic dreams knit in nightmares, during an unbearable half-sleep – as in the awareness of a certain existence.
6- Robert Ashley - The Park (1978)
When I listen to Lovely Music's "Private Lives" (the 1978 initial, and partial release of "Perfect Lives") I can't help but thinking that the record's strong point, the reciting voice, was a miracle born by chance.
The neo-Cageian composer Robert Ashley was indeed looking for some voice to recite his text but couldn't find any - so he says he settled for using his own - and by fate Bob has become a mythical voice in the avant-garde music circuit.
I will not dwell on the musical or conceptual construction behind this “first American Opera” nor on the “libretto” itself. Suffice it to say, on the subject, that John Cage considered that the Koran, the Bible and the Bhagavad-Gita were no longer needed since “now there is Perfect Lives"). Let us instead focus - here - on its psycho-physical effects.
In the deepest hour of the night, when demons roam the rooms, trying to spread their evil fate, rest assured that Bob Ashley will know how to enchant and neutralize them: to the sound of syllables and words that, although sensible, do not belong to this phenomenal world but have always been. Repetition of rituals known to our previous lives: it is no coincidence that reincarnation is one of the many themes that run through "Perfect Lives".
If you want to imagine these sounds, think: tablas, hypnotically struck by Nana Vasconcelos, and organ drones like those of Lorca, but here ethereally dynamic. And on these sound notes a definitive counterpoint, imperfectible, of words in freedom, albeit supervised. Words that want to say everything but mean nothing to uninitiated ears.
It is sheer coincidence that here Bob speaks about Giordano Bruno and the hermetic tradition, or at least that's what Bob said to me - that Bruno's came through his mind out of the blue, without knowing who Bruno was.
Hypnosis is the closest state to that which "The Park" (Lovely - 1978) can induce in those who have the ability to descend into it, for this reason it represents the inflection point of music for insomniacs, well beyond the lugubrious, on the road to redemption that every effort - including that of not sleeping a night - entails.
7- Jon Hassell - Blue period (2008)
“We truly own nothing/What is this competition we feel then/Before we go, one by one/Through the same door?”
It's a verse from Jalaluddin Rumi (1207-1273), one of the greatest Sufi mystics that makes us wonder how much his teachings are followed today. Yet people like Jon Hassell, with albums like
"Last Night The Moon Came Dropping Its Clothes In The Street" (a direct quote from Rumi) help us remember that all the evil in the world cannot extinguish an ounce of light.
Hearing
Blue Period (
here live) for the first time I had no hesitation in memorizing it under: one-of-the-greatest-pieces-of-the-last-ten-years. The ad lib trumpet-whisper and the bass line bathed in sweet sounds - perfect tunes that may only be composed in moments of grace.
And what about Jon's game (played in an obvious way, after the first 6 minutes) to trumpet down the melody of Strangers In The Night, integrating it into the plot - making us understand that really that door through which we exit the scene is the same for everyone; and Sinatra, you, Jon and I we are all made of the same cloth and "it makes absolutely no difference what people think of you." While we - on the contrary - waste our time arguing, as if in a global condo owners' meeting.
The 'blue period' of the title is not the Picasso one, but rather the one Rumi talks about:
"How will you know the difficulties of being a man, if you always take flight towards blue perfection?".
(...)
The hour of the wolf has now ended. (…)
Fear the good deep dark American Night. (…)
America, I am hook’d to your/Cold white neon bosom
(Jim Morrison, Orange County Suite)
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Published in Italian on Blow Up Magazine, April 2014.