davidtoop (original) (raw)

An air current striking the edge of a vessel

It’s not a thing for me to say I make flutes as part of my practice but make them I do, since c. 1971, in fact, when I began to search for new sounds, tunings, a reduction down to the basis of a sounding device: a single sound that can be shaped and modified yet remains itself. I made a new one last week, the one at the bottom of the above image. The bamboo had been waiting for a long time. I needed the impetus to make those small adjustments that transform a length of suitable bamboo into a flute that I can use in performance. The impetus came from two sources, of which more in a second, and in the making there were accidents that forced me into a double flute derived from two distinct groups: transverse with one open end, closed at the other; notched flute with closed end (see photograph below).

The middle flute of these three above reminds me of a lot of things that happened during a formative period of the early 1970s. I was working with Paul Burwell, Bob Cobbing and Marie Yates, among others, and each situation seemed to demand less and less orthodox musical thinking. How could I make the tone of a flute slide, in a glissando, for example, without invoking the ridiculous Swannee or slide whistle? The answer appeared in a book which became my Bible: Musical Instruments of the South American Indians, by a Swedish ethnographer, Karl Gustav Izikowitz.

Originally published in 1934, its re-emergence in 1970 was perfect timing for me. Izikowitz wrote meticulous descriptions of instruments but also supplemented the text with precise drawings. From indigenous Palikur and Galibi people in Guiana (French Guiana) he documented examples of what he called hand-stop flutes, transverse flutes lacking stops but with a semi-concave aperture which could be covered with the whole hand. I tried it, scooping out a wide chunk of bamboo, and found I could work microtonally and multiphonically. The flute I made, probably in 1972, still travels with me for gigs now, 52 years later, still has something to contribute.

Another inspiration came from my friend Ragnar Johnson. Listen to his extraordinary recordings from Papua New Guinea, released on Ideologic Organ (https://ideologicorgan.bandcamp.com/album/spirit-cry-flutes-and-bamboo-jews-harps-from-papua-new-guinea-eastern-highlands-and-madang – for example). When Ragnar was living in the Madang region of Papua New Guinea, making recordings of sacred flute music, initiation ceremonies and bamboo jews harps, he would occasionally post me bamboo flutes in padded bags. Over time most of them split or were wrecked during performances but I still have one, the bottom one of these three below. This is as simple as a flute can be, no stops, closed at one end, no notch or duct to facilitate playing. Just a tube, like a pan pipe, a basic hooting machine to be played in otherworldly ensembles.

So what made me reconsider my flute making, to shift it from a somewhat secretive activity to something fundamental to what I believe in as a person who works with and thinks about the ecology of sound, silence, listening, music and all that hovers around the edges of music? Partly it was a podcast, an interview with Shabaka Hutchings (https://www.mixcloud.com/ElliotGalvin/music-and-flutes-with-shabaka-hutchings/) in which he talked compellingly about the need to think about flute technique in a different way, as an air stream meeting an edge (more or less Izikowitz’s definition of a flute, as an “air current striking the edge of a vessel.”) We can go back 35,000 years, to the Hohle Fels flute, and imagine its tubular vulture bone, elegantly curved and notched, inviting the patience of its maker to find its sound with Ice Age air. For Hutchings, moving away from the saxophone, the difference is ethical and structural: patience and relaxation rather than tension, meditation rather than trance, fewer notes.

A day after starting work on the new flute I visited the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow, for an exhibition called Mingei / Art Without Heroes. Mingei was a post-1920s movement originating in Japan though connected to the international Arts and Crafts Movement. Soetsu Yanagi, author of The Beauty of Everyday Things, believed in what he thought of as the honest, humble, artless, utilitarian and anonymous virtues of everyday things. A beautiful example in the exhibition is the 19th century saddle cover from Iwate Prefecture, Japan (above), made from woven recycled paper. Yanagi spoke about everyday objects being “. . . rooted in the earth, deeply tied to the earthly life of honest, hardworking people, the recipients of the blessings of heaven.” These are not unproblematic concepts but they acted upon me in a curious way, bringing me to a realisation. Can I really say that what I do is useful, in that sense? Is it honest or rooted in the earth? I wouldn’t make such claims and yet the feeling of making something simple that is useful to me for more than half a century is very strong. The act of making flutes (a craft, even though I reject that word) has a centrality to my practice (another term I dislike) that is suddenly impossible to ignore.

At the end of the exhibition I entered a small room devoted to works by Ainu artists and two pieces by Theaster Gates, examples of what he calls Afro-Mingei. As I moved, the floorboards creaked loudly, groaned, fell silent, squeaked, leading me to a columnar stoneware piece by Gates called Portal. With its barrel shape and vertical slit it could have been a gigantic flute capable of making the dramatic creaking sounds of the wooden floorboards (nightingale floor, as they once called it in Japan). I was also reminded of the large slit drums recorded in Papua New Guinea by Ragnar Johnson – https://ideologicorgan.bandcamp.com/album/sacred-flute-music-from-new-guinea-madang-windim-mabu – but of course a portal invokes life online and its debt to metaphors of the spirit. The creaking of floorboards, eminently utilitarian, necessarily robust, anonymous and artless, seemed to me to be an ideal movement-sounding for this gathering of ideas and objects, in itself a variety of flute in that edges and agency respond to patience. Flutes to me are weightless, birds and air, and yet as bamboo they grow out of the earth. The body must listen before it can sound.

Posted in instrumentality, live sound, movement and sound, writing sound | Tagged Afro-Mingei, Bob Cobbing, flutes, Hohle Fels flute, Izikowitz, Marie Yates, Mingei, Paul Burwell, Ragnar Johnson, Shabaka Hutchings, Theaster Gates |

moreskinsound: manifesto

1. Improvisation: responsive, sensing, alert.
2. Listening within the total body.
3. Space has its own intention.
4. Intimacy: mutuality with space, bodies, materials.
5. Ecologies, resonances of inter-dependence.
6. Stillness and silence, breath and the imperceptible threshold.
7. Resonance, happening from a distance.
8. Presence, bringing air to space and materials.
9. Becoming, entering the knowledge of undefined.
10. Moment, care between nothing and not-nothing.

Movement is friction. A large dry leaf skitters along the pavement, sounding movement, high, scratch, stutter. An animal way to enter space, leaving behind nothing, space barely disturbed. The body is altered. This body is quiet, listening, sensing and responding to the space. Two flutes drift: water and wind.

To think about improvisation, in mutuality allowing the intentionality of space, objects and materials to shape and be shaped in each moment. Listening comes from within the total body, sensorially responsive and alert, quick to be slow. Kazuo Ohno spoke about dancing free style, “all the while bearing in mind that our personal feelings colour our reality.” Space has its own intention, a resonance happening from distance.

To work within resonances of inter-dependence within ecologies of physical/acoustic space, objects, materials and time, is to live in mutualities, dwelling in intimacy.

“Improvisation is an absolutely necessary training,” wrote Masaki Iwana. “However, improvisation is not about whatever you want to do, like it is generally understood. Improvisation is a work of precisely choosing actions from moment to moment by preparing as many sensory and perceptive antennae as possible. In a sense, if our antennae grow more numerous as a result of training, an action that might happen by chance comes nearer to necessity (nature).”

From moment to moment, exercising care between nothing and not-nothing, a breath sound of stillness and silence where the imperceptible threshold is encountered. Movement in stillness, sounding in silence, air vibrating. The body is becoming, entering the knowledge of undefined, not-knowing, its presence bringing air to materials and space.

Hidden Body performance and exhibition of photographs, video, drawings, texts by Ania Psenitsnikova / David Toop

White Conduit Projects, 1 White Conduit Street, London, N1 9EL.

Sunday 19th November, 2023.

Exhibition from 5.00pm, performance of butoh dance/music at 7.00pm, close at 9.00pm.

@moreskinsound

Spheric resonances / eggflutes

Ecka Mordecai: eggflute 1

Last September, when social contact was still a desert landscape, Ecka Mordecai cycled to my home to present me with a gift of eggflutes. To describe them (only) as musical instruments would be to reduce them to a functionality that belies their presence as objects, but then this is true of all instruments. They are assemblage, or shrine, or ceremony, or sphere. Painstakingly made and beautifully decorated by Ecka herself, the emptied egg shells sit as if nesting in small ceramic bowls that are themselves reminiscent of half-eggs, the delicate, hard surfaces protected by soft beds of sheep’s wool. Further protection comes from circular wooden boxes in which they are encased. Each egg is pierced at one end with a small, irregular aperture of sharp edges against which, with trial and error, I can seek out strange glissandi of dove and owl-like timbres, some surprisingly low pitched. One flute is white, entirely covered with minute black marks of Indian ink, as if a calligraphic text with no point of beginning or ending, a decipherability that can only be approached by holding its endless page in the hand. The other is smaller, speckled brown, decorated by tiny dog bones or what might be the letter I.

Ecka Mordecai: eggflute 2

Since there were no performance opportunities at that stage of the pandemic, my playing of the flutes was added to the strange texture of contemplative isolation in which everything was both potential/futurity and immediate nowness. In that respect they were perfect because their sound was so intimate, so utterly private and enclosed. I was reminded of Peter Sloterdijk’s words I had bookmarked in Bubbles: Spheres I – “. . . a participation in spheric resonances”, or, set underneath a familiar image, Leonardo da Vinci’s drawing of uterus, embryo and placenta, “On the way through the evasive underworld of the inner world, the schematic image of a fluid and auratic universe unfolds like a map in sound, woven entirely from resonances and suspended matter.” Much as I liked this proximity to Sloterdijk’s ruminations on spheres, bubbles and what he calls the “fetal ear” (unavoidable when listening to a flute made from an egg), I also felt ethical qualms, albeit projected into a speculative futurity of public performance. For one thing, they were Ecka’s invention. My relationship to them necessitated thinking through the notion of the gift, its implication that I might use her instruments within my own sphere of practice, and the ambiguous nature of collaborations in which terms and conditions are not so much small print as entirely unvoiced. The second qualm related to my veganism. This seems to me unresolvable. After all, I play a number of instruments which incorporate animal parts or extracted substances, ranging from an African (possibly Congo or Central African Republic) chordophone of animal skin stretched over carved wood, to the mother of pearl inlays set into certain keys on my alto flute. If somebody has taken sustenance from an entity and then given new life to that entity from its remnants then I can semi-square that with my own life choices.

Using the eggflute in a duo with Lucie Štepánková, Cafe Oto, Next Festival, 22.11.21, photo Andrej Chudy

As it turned out, I had ample time to reflect on these questions and allow them to settle. Live performances in the presence of audiences resumed (for me, at least) at the end of July 2021, a duo with Thurston Moore. Since then, they have grown more frequent. Finally I found the setting to play an eggflute in a trio with Mark Wastell and Chris Dowding in a Norfolk chapel. A duo with Avsluta (Lucie Štepánková) at Cafe Oto the following week (22.11.21) offered a context in which those patiently settling conversations with the thickness of objects afforded what might be called a finding place. By that I mean a not entirely dimensional place in which new discoveries are made ‘in the moment’ of live action (which is the reason why performance is a practice of discourse and learning distinct from preparation, rehearsal, practicing, technical development, theorising and all the other activities enacted away from the presence of an audience, whether physical or not). Some people call this spontaneity but I would suggest these moments are sparked by a strange mixture of pressure (to perform) and mindlessness (an unnecessarily derogatory word that describes an enviable and rare condition), plus the working out of possibilities arising from previously acquired knowledge. What I found myself doing was playing the eggflute as a flute, while simultaneously using it as a resonant chamber to amplify sound transmitted through a bone conduction speaker. The sound came from a cassette recording of a Japanese shakuhachi piece called “Water and Stones”, player unknown. I also used my teeth for bone conduction, so there was a feeling within myself (barely conscious, because I don’t like to think too much during performance) of cavities and edges at work together. In itself, this amplifies a more general feeling of working with these elements, forces and materials within this duo; as Sloterdijk has said, a participation in spheric resonances.

Limited editions of eggflutes have been on sale on Ecka Mordecai’s Bandcamp/Merch page. Currently they are sold out but perhaps more will appear in time: https://eckamordecai.bandcamp.com/merch

The universal veil that hangs together like a skin

Aurora consurgens, late 14th century

A rising creature spreads its shadow over hushed land. In the moment of folding its wings, all air leaves the world. All things now operate by friction, stridulation, rough surfaces in contact with abrasion, materials unlike silk or plastic, the working of ground teeth and jaw bones.

Twelfth key, The Golden Tripod, or, Three Choice Chemical Tracts, edited by Michael Maier, 1618

In the blacksmith’s forge, an alchemist sits away from the fire in a clouded spot, observing those transforming states that move from hard to soft, from dull to radiant. From trees a presence emanates, as thick as wet moss and mud. Birds move within it, their shapes only visible with closed eyes.

fermentation, Aurora consurgens, late 14th century

At night, people sleep with covered ears, their dreams haunted by the footsteps of giants, the slow movement of hills, cracks opening in the earth to unleash insect clouds. Houses lack windows, yet light penetrates, if only to mark daily transitions between stillness and movement, heat to cold. If there are bells, they are heard only in memory, as if buried under silt on the bed of a fathomless pond. To sit quietly is rewarded. A shout is impossible.

Aurora consurgens, late 14th century

Every month a door is opened, simply to change the air. This opening may take many hours, the door hinges resistant, anguished, uttering secret words that only the very old and very young can understand. At each opening, a wooden cart enters, another leaves. The ox that pulls one cart looks sideways at the horse that pulls the other, their gaze as deep as the silence through which they pass. As the trembling of the ground subsides, the world returns to itself.

Written for the release of The Universal Veil That Hangs Together Like a Skin, Lee Patterson & Samo Kutin, Edition FriForma, 2020.

In the Cave of Sound

“To him who is a cave in which my shout echoes.” Victor Segalen, from Stèles (1912).

How was it, and when was it, that I encountered Victor Segalen’s peculiar little novel, Dans Un Monde Sonore, published in 1907? Probably when I was writing Ocean of Sound in 1995, researching Claude Debussy, his sensory and aesthetic predispositions, his artistic circle. Perhaps referenced in a tantalising footnote, it was a novel that speculated on life as it might be lived within sound as the dominant sensorial medium. It seemed to me that Segalen – traveller, ethnographer, writer, doctor, collaborator with Debussy – had written a key text in the history of listening, yet it remained largely unknown and at that time untranslated from the French. Finally an English language edition is about to appear, translated by Marie Roux and R.W.M. Hunt with an essay written by me (extracts below), published by Strange Attractor. Segalen had a keen interest in music. From his sojourn in Polynesia he wrote Voix Mortes: Musiques Maories, dedicated to Debussy, and at some point made a note to himself: “One of Debussy’s preoccupations is with the inadequacy of the percussion section. Note: bring back from my Far Eastern trip a set of gongs and cymbals.” I think of Segalen in Beijing, the Imperial system in a state of collapse, perhaps hearing the Confucian Ritual in which ancient instruments were played – bells, stone chimes, globular flutes, lute, drums and the Yu, a wooden percussion instrument in the shape of a crouching tiger, its back a ridge of ‘teeth’ scraped by a striker made from fifteen stalks of bamboo. Perhaps he heard these antique, vanishing sounds; much about Segalen remains mysterious.

Victor Segalen in China, 1914

In its surreptitious and proliferating nature, resonance may be described and experienced as sinister. Sound waves are disturbances, invasive, often inexplicable in their invisibility, hauntingly transient (except in memory). Imagine a reverse world in which reality is imagined or designed as this vaporous flux of vibration and resonance, in which words dissolve into shimmering echoes, physicality becomes diffuse, almost lost in a dream state of aurality. Victor Segalen’s short novel, Dans Un Monde Sonore (1907), wrote into being a world of that kind.

Marie Roux – Cave mouth, Fife, Scotland

The book’s origins lay in the ruins of a collaborative project with Claude Debussy, an opera based on the Orpheus myth. As their project drifted, Segalen remained poignantly hopeful but Debussy prevaricated. He was critical of Segalen’s libretto and moved on to a new obsession, the possibility of an opera based on Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher. Segalen also moved on. During these fruitless discussions he wrote and published Dans Un Monde Sonore. Coincidentally or not, the opening paragraphs are reminiscent of Poe’s story. A narrator approaches an isolated house in order to revive an old acquaintance. In both cases there is a woman in the house and the men that the narrators meet both suffer from what Poe describes as “a morbid acuteness of the senses”; Roderick Usher has developed an intolerance of all but the most insipid sense impressions, though he can listen to “peculiar sounds” from stringed instruments.

David Toop – Yu, crouching tiger clapper percussion, Beijing

André, Segalen’s equivalent of Usher, is described as harmlessly mad, though the way he has chosen to live is radically disconcerting. As Monsieur Leurais discovers, the room to which his old friend has retreated is so prominently resonant that his account of collecting sensory data from indigenous Papuans in the Straits of Torres is transformed as if passed “through a harmonizing orchestra.” Even this constant droning effect is insufficient for André’s hypersensitive, ‘adjusted’ hearing. He intensifies the effect to create a prolongation of spoken syllables, a “bush of whispers”, buzzing echoes and delays.

Marie Roux – cave with Chinese joss paper for ancestral worship

The scene anticipates by more than sixty years Alvin Lucier’s I am sitting in a room, in which a spoken text become unintelligible as resonant frequencies within the room gradually blur the sense of its words, but it also responds to the synesthetic effect of Stéphane Mallarmé’s poetry, in which words and their music saturate the properties of the other. “Music of colour, music of words – such were the slogans of the day,” wrote Debussy biographer Edward Lockspeiser. In a ‘theoretical fiction’ entitled Mallarmé’s Nose, Allen S. Weiss describes the fin de siècle obsession with perceptual transferences as a delirium of potential, an intoxication in which all that is solid melts into air: “Mallarmé now knew that not only did the world exist to be transformed into a book, but that the book could also exist to be transfigured into a perfume! Per fumum, through smoke! Poetic alchemy. He would sublimate L’Après-Midi d’un Faune into perfume!”

David Toop – stone drums, Confucian Temple, Beijing

A similar delirium has infected André: the desire to live within sound; to defy the tyranny of sight. Harps and resonating cylinders line his room; two singing flames flicker in glass tubes, closely tuned to produce beat frequencies. There is a banality to it, pure physics, Leurais realises, as the apparatus of the installation reveals itself from within the mist of sound. Segalen was clearly aware of nineteenth century experiments in acoustics. Similar devices can be found in Hermann Helmholtz’s pioneering study, On the Sensations of Tone, first published in Germany in 1863. Among its contents were sections on resonators (illustrated by drawings of globular and bottle shaped resonating vessels), the mechanics of sympathetic resonance, combinational tones and beats, the composition of vibrations and the musical tones of strings.

David Toop – stelae, Confucian Temple, Beijing

By living within sound André both disembodies himself (the signs of change are evident in his face, its ‘blind gesture’ and unnaturally active ears) and plunges himself into an echoing underworld of resonance and vibration. His wife, Mathilde, is lost to him because she refuses to relinquish sight as her primary sense. “She can not hear in the dark,” he laments. Darkness is the domain of the listener. Segalen overturns received ideas about the seductive degeneracy of sound, making sight the perverted, reverted sense, the primitive sense of sharpened sight that allowed prehistoric humans to tear apart their prey.

David Toop – barrel drum and stone drums, Confucian Temple, Beijing

At this point of loss in Dans Un Monde Sonore, the Orpheus myth is made explicit by Leurais in his narration: “I readily imagine Orpheus, the singer of hymns, abandoning the world of a thousand lyres, and descending to the infernal caves – by which one can take to symbolise exactly the brute material world, mute and deaf, this is the most ignoble and truest of all Myths that men have configured.” Echoing Debussy’s words, that Orpheus is not a human being, living or dead, Orpheus is understood as an allegory whose apogee was to enable a vision of what it might be to live in sound. Base materiality dissolves in this imagined world, but then so does music (a process begun by Debussy, as much as any other, through his explorations of the resonant interior of the piano).
Segalen’s narrator asks the question: what is the true world? Perhaps he was aware of Herman Helmholtz’s insight into the inferential nature of the senses and their role in creating our sense of reality. “From the very heart of the matter,” Segalen wrote in June 1908. “I imagined that things were speaking.” They continue to speak, yet their sense is partially lost in buzzing, echoes, resonance, a forest of whispers.

Marie Roux – path, Sichuan

In a Sound World is published by Strange Attractor:

In A Sound World

David Toop, Marie Roux and R.W.M. Hunt will be discussing In a Sound World at Cafe Oto on Sunday 8 August, free afternoon event, 2-5:

https://www.cafeoto.co.uk/events/strange-attractor-press-presents-in-a-sound-world/

Posted in Uncategorized, writing sound | Tagged Alvin Lucier, Claude Debussy, Dans Un Monde Sonore, David Toop, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Helmholtz, In a Sound World, Marie Roux, Orpheus, R.W.M. Hunt, Strange Attractor, Victor Segalen |

head peelers

Extracts from a collaborative text written by David Toop and Marie Roux, published in Marie Roux’s photobook, The Head Peelers, published in an edition of 40, 2021.

A wandering adventure was my starting point. This is what I find exciting. I looked down at the earth between my feet, studied the transparent tea in my cup and found the furthest island off the coast of France. Its name was Ushant, written on my chart by an invisible pen. When I checked the paper map, only an Ile d’Ouessant was visible, though some faint blemish of the paper’s surface suggested that my island had once existed or perhaps existed to those who believed it could be found, perhaps by a swimmer who had lost all hope and prepared themselves for drowning, only to find sand under their feet.

There is nothing there except tourism in the summer, nothing except grasses, tangled fibres, a sweeping line in the sand as if a giant had leaned down with a stick, in one fluid move drawing a line to curb the incoming sea. There is nothing there except for dry, bleached leaves and stalks, twigs whose music in the wind is like the sighing of animals too thin to be seen by a human eye. There is a seaweed culture, tractors blocking the roads, carrying their slimy cargo towards a vast complex where the slippery fronds will be burned in open stone coffins, its brittle pungency later to be pressed into chocolate or made into a tea in which islands that escape the cartographers can be seen by those whose sight is conditioned by solitude and an affinity with the sea. The goémoniers who collect the seaweed sleep in hollows they carve out from the sand. From generations of this work they are black, they glisten; shy of observers, their monkish forms were only visible at those moments when they sensed the water retreating from the land. Because I was alone I saw them many times, though never approached.

There is nothing there except for black bees, makers of honey so pure that when I was cut, falling on rocks that were piled haphazardly, the way a child throws wooden bricks in a tantrum, the honey sealed the wound as I watched. A beekeeper on the island collects this honey and sells it to those who would live to be ancient while remaining young, though I never saw her or her customers during my walks. Maybe they had become so crystalline as to be invisible. Once I heard music on the beach. A piano was sinking into the sand as high tide approached, its sound thrown around by high winds.

Winter was raw. I smoothed black bee honey on my skin, wrapped myself in seaweed to keep warm. The wind and light shifted so much that if I noticed something I knew it was going to be different again very quickly. Intent on studying these constant transformations I would stumble into sheep. They seemed to belong to nobody, were constrained by no fences. Often they walked into my path deliberately as if to slow my progress, forcing me to study my feet, to notice that dry land and its plants were no different to the plants I saw under the sea. Sheep are not stupid. They wanted me to stop, to gaze at spiders whose webs were stretched across the paths. In their quiet, stubborn way they demanded I ask of myself, what was I seeing in these tangled remnants of green life; was it a script that I could read?

I fell into a rhythm on Ushant and the silence grew in me. On frosty mornings there were no longer footsteps to mark where I had walked. I no longer spoke, so the clouds of mist that formed around my mouth as I sang to myself were now part of the sky. They no longer belonged to me. Whatever could grow on the land was blurred in my sight, disappearing the way the trees had disappeared when they realised the wind was too strong. I could no longer see the whole of the land and the sea, or even myself, only slices, flashes of perception that came and went, like the beam of the deserted lighthouse. The smell of seaweed lingered in my nostrils for that final night and into the next morning. I could sense its fading potency as a reversal of what I see in the red dark as an image forms gradually on paper to become a fixed thing. This transience, I understood, lay at the heart of my reasons for being there, its brevity was what I sought.

Photographs: Marie Roux

on&on&on&on: Daniel Blumberg

Daniel Blumberg drawing 1

“And now he was playing, alas, the piano,” the first sentence of Robert Walser’s short prose text written in 1925, “making it sound like a deep and intimate promise, which isn’t at all the way to start a novel.” An absence of pianos throughout Daniel Blumberg’s On&On&Onetc, the title of which has the potential to be as long or longer than the famous word invented by James Joyce in Finnegans Wake to sound out the catastrophic fall of a once wallstrait oldparr, makes it easier to enter its world of cords and fibres. Songs, it could be said, were invented to exclude the sound of rooms. They formulate an enclosed world. In the same way that a line of a drawing immediately proposes a hierarchy between mark and ground, the scrape of a string announces itself as the most compelling of airs within a room. At that moment, it hovers between room and song.

I hear a room, its air and the disturbances that ricochet between its surfaces, then I hear a song, as if a ship has slowly emerged out of sea mist, its form coalescing into coherent shape for the sake of memory. Doors open and close. At a given moment of life, songs may come to seem silly, Daniel muses, but then a song comes along, a country song perhaps, to articulate that cluster of emotions indelible within loss, fatigue of the spirit, a faltering of life. The song sounds a deep and intimate promise, to be fulfilled or honoured. If we go back in history, then air, or ayre, or aria, was a term through which a certain kind of musical style or accompanied song was known. To go back to Dowland, for example, or Purcell, and hear the febrile physicality of plucked and bowed strings in close wood-lined rooms. In the absence of pianos, On&On is characterised by a similar stringy physicality, reminiscent of chicken feet, a spider’s web, loosely woven fabric or grasses moving in a breeze, fibrous ligaments, claws and sand, insect stridulation, Violin, cello, bass, guitar. Then there are drums, like rats running over an unbrushed floor, disturbing matchboxes and loose quantities of steel shot in the haste of their purpose to avoid a snare. Behind the snare drum’s head there are strings, steel now, once fibrous.

Daniel Blumberg drawing 2

There are wet cords of voice and dry cords of string; then a harmonica, filleted air bent out of shape by thin brass tongues not unlike the tongues of geese or swans. All of these instruments share an ancestry in their parts. Robert Walser argued that horses are unduly put to work, having no voice with which to express dissent. Similarly, fragments of cat, tree, goat, calf, elephant, bamboo and other entities were once unduly put to work in the service of music, unable, as Walser put it, to negotiate. Some of this unbalanced relationship, its intensity and violence, persists in the music as an echo, a dry echo, a whistle of friction that might be a ghost in the dark. Then there are other strings, collectively played in concert, as if a window has opened and the song also rises on thermals and cloud shapes.

There is no speaking about where a song begins or ends, says Ute Kanngiesser. It’s not important. A song may move around, expand, come apart in its limbs and joints and skin to sink back into the room space, where strings are vibrating, snares rattling. A string is a line drawn taut. Ute speaks about the sessions in Wales during which this record was produced: “A strong memory is of me spending what remained of the night on the porch and watching the lunar eclipse. January 2019. It was the wolf moon and the super moon and the blood moon and it was eclipsing. I watched the moon getting darker, a sepia colour, and the moment it disappeared completely, the owls started a choir from the forest. It was incredible.”

Daniel Blumberg drawing 3

A string is a kind of line, and just as a string may become a song so a line may become a curious figure, displaced head, limbs, face and brightly coloured clothes, all bent, scattered and tumbling in air space. Like the ghost notes of a country shuffle, they fall in and out of worlds. “If I sit at the piano or I’m on the motorbike, I hum songs,” says Daniel. Between improvisation that comes into being in a room and songs that have come into being on a motorbike, there is another music, waiting for its cue in the forest. A song may come and go, on and on and on and on.

Written for the release of Daniel Blumberg’s LP: On & On (released July 31st, 2020)

emanation, as if by a charm: Ami Yamasaki

Surprise is a dubious pleasure, cultivated in the search for musical forms that take the listener into realms of impossible/imaginary. Then suddenly, after decades of searching, the surprises diminish in quantity, often in quality, leaving an unavoidable sense of melancholy, mixed with the treacherous air of nostalgia.

The antidote is to recognise that ‘new and unfamiliar’ has become stale; the truly new and unfamiliar has opened up regions that feel somehow incomprehensible or distasteful. Aesthetic proclivities become old, just like the bodies that shape them.

I was surprised to be surprised, then, hearing Ami Yamasaki perform with Charlie Collins at Iklectik. Charlie plays a low-lying drum kit and his contributions to this duo were correspondingly low, as in subtle. As interventions they added a halo, a subterranean murmur, a transient glow. At times they gave Ami occasion to smile, in itself an unusual event in improvisation, given the more familiar seriousness of facial expressions.

What was the cause of this experience, through which at times I questioned what I was hearing, or my interpretation of it? Her voice is high and powerful, nothing surprising about that, but its relation to her body is strangely ambiguous. At times, this unearthly voice seems to emanate from somewhere around her body, close to but detached, sometimes corresponding to lip movements and mouth opening but at the end of phrases drifting out of sync. It reminded me of sections in the Béla Tarr/Agnes Hranitzky film, The Man From London, in which dubbing goes adrift in such a way that questions about production difficulties or deliberate dislocation battle each other with a clamour that threatens to overwhelm the course of the film.

She also uses, or seems to use, the ventriloquist technique of projecting her voice, creating the illusion of a voice closer to walls or surrounding air than its original source. All of this is a form of echo-location, commonly used by people who are sight-impaired yet hearing enhanced. Human potential, in other words. She becomes a wolf-woman, then holds a conversation with invisible others in which the words escape into themselves, as if holding their contours within the world of sound without symbolic function. You could say she sounds like a bird but birds exist in their own universe. A video on YouTube – Signs of Voices – shows her stroking the fur (made from paper) of an improbably long animal, singing in a whisper as if speaking directly to its unknown consciousness. There’s a relationship to ASMR, reflected in the YouTube comments, but unlike ASMR, which hovers in an intensely private/public space, her voice addresses itself to space itself, and whatever inhabits space (as if a bat locating otherwise invisible moths by the energy of directional sound).

As the set at Iklectik progresses her vocal techniques become more familiar – some ultra-low vocal fry, Mongolian and Tuvan style chord singing, whistling with added melody – but the way she uses them is otherwordly, as if she is experimenting with non-human identities. She strikes her chest, as if shaking loose a sound from its resonating cavity. Of course I’m reminded of other great improvising singers – Elaine Mitchener, Ami Yoshida, Sidsel Endresen, Sharon Gal, Phil Minton, Shelley Hirsch, Sofia Jernberg, Yifeat Ziv and more – but her demeanour is so calm. No visible wrestling with the emotional/physical effort of extreme voice production; just emanation, as if by a charm.

Ami Yamasaki and Charlie Collins performed at Iklectik creative space, London, SE1 7LG, 17.11.2019, alongside O Yama O, Beatrix Ward-Fernandez, Derek Saw and Lauren Sarah Hayes.

FOLD

Nine people sitting on the basement floor folding paper into origami birds, four microphones hanging from the ceiling, a loudspeaker pair at each end of the room. A sound going on, unmistakeably but ambiguously emanating from this activity, suggestive of the palpitations of a locust swarm, the feeding of insect eaters biting their way through a bounty of desiccated wings and bleached bones. The white cranes accumulate, piling up in earthbound flocks next to their makers. I am conscious of furniture in the room, the chair on which I sit, the movement of hands, a thin garment hanging loosely on the wall, a vivid red teapot.

Gradually, patterns emerge in the sound, lulls falling mysteriously, overtaken by industrious surges. A Max patch is at work. Now the sound piece thins, leaving a sparse acoustic crackle that exactly matches the quick, concentrated effort of the folders. Their number has grown to fourteen. This is a durational piece – four hours at this point – so some of them have returned from a break. The atmosphere of dedication is the focal point that holds it all within its shape and volition, no obvious breakage points other than the sight of doing and making, the growth of birds.

Upstairs we speak in low voices, respectful of the crackling quiet below.

For a moment I think of Chim-­Pom’s installation pieces – Non-Burnable, Real Thousand Cranes and The History of Human – all of which refer to the vast quantities of paper cranes sent from all over the world to the city of Hiroshima each year and to the practice of Senbazuru, folding one thousand paper cranes connected together by strings. According to Japanese legend, a person who folds one thousand paper cranes – one for every year of the mystical crane’s life – will be granted whatever they wish for.

But then I think of the sounds of labour: the physical impact of an axe cutting into a tree, the making of objects by hand, a typing pool (as seen only in old films) or the agricultural workers in Suffolk who would ease the monotony of threshing by mimicking the patterns of bell-ringing, their flails beating the same rhythm on the elm floor as the bells in a church steeple.

There are those records in my collection devoted only to songs and sounds of working: a Folkways 10-inch LP, The World of Man: His Work, which, notwithstanding the title, includes examples of women working: a Norwegian woman calling cattle to the barn to be milked, a Japanese woman spinning thread, women waulking, pounding and pulling tweed in the Hebrides, singing to make the work go with joy and pace. Then more grim than that, Alan Lomax’s recordings of prison songs made at Parchman State Penitentiary, Mississippi, in 1947, and Bruce Jackson’s Wake Up Dead Man: Black Convict Work Songs from Texas Prisons, made in 1965-6, the percussive thud of axes and hammers resounding in hot air as they rise and fall in unison, beating the rhythm of songs like “Rosie”, “Grizzly Bear” and “Early In the Morning.”

Lucie Stepankova’s idea for Fold was to bring together a spatial composition with this physicality, the working of paper and legend, “[exploring] the sonority of the ancient tradition of paper folding (origami), its ritual aspects and meditative potential. It values collectivity, simplicity and the transcendental quality of repetition over a long duration.”

At the beginning of Yasunari Kawabata’s post-war novel, Thousand Cranes, a young woman serves tea to the male protagonist. She becomes known as the girl of the thousand cranes, simply because she “carried a bundle wrapped in a kerchief, the thousand-crane pattern in white on a pink crape background.” The image of a thousand cranes haunts the text. Starting up in flight or flying across the evening sun, their flashes of brilliance momentarily cut across guilt and suffering. “The sound of her broom became the sound of a broom sweeping the contents from his skull, and her cloth polishing the veranda a cloth rubbing at his skull.” Happiness is a wish.

Fold, a listening environment, was performed at Hundred Years Gallery, E2 8JD, during the afternoon of Saturday March 24th, 2018.

gone to earth

Maybe a coincidence but during our Sharpen Your Needles event last night (28.09.17) Evan Parker played “Music for Mbale (Ndokpa)”, from The Photographs of Charles Duvelle: Disques Ocora and Collection Prophet, a sumptuous book and two CDs published by Sublime Frequencies. Recorded by Duvelle in Ngouli, Central African Republic, in 1962, the instrument played by two men for the Mbale village festival was a lingassio, a four key xylophone mounted over a pit.

Coincidence because of a social media discussion about the Ocora record called Musiques Dan, recorded in Côte d’Ivoire by Hugo Zemp in 1965 and 1967. Was there an example of an instrument using a hole in the ground for resonance? There are many extraordinary sounds and sound-making devices on that record – whirled slit aerophone, bullroarer, mirlitons, metal basin, the ground struck by big sticks, sieves filled with bronze jewellery, enamel basins filled with gravel, water drum, stone whistles – but maybe the strangest is Mask-that-eats-water, a pit dug into the earth and covered by bark. Fixed into the bark are vegetable fibres that are rubbed by two players. For reasons not entirely clear to me though perhaps explained by the ‘slip and stick’ theory whereby water affects dynamic and static friction at a very fast rate, water is poured onto the fibres by a third player, hence the name of the mask.

A photograph of a different earth instrument appears in Zemp’s book: Musique Dan: La musique dans la pensée et la vie sociale d’une societé africaine (1971). This one is equally ingenious but more elaborate, more conventional. In a chapter entitled Mythes d’origine des instruments de musique, Zemp gives what his informant tells him is the origin of the Arc-en-terre (my translation): “The bow in the ground belonged to an unfortunate, a little unfortunate. This boy had nothing with which to amuse himself; he could neither play the harp-lute, nor beat the drum, nor blow into the trumpet. Then he dug a hole in the ground, covered it with leaves, fixed a vegetal fibre there, and attached the other end to a branch which he buried in the ground. When he struck the rope, it spoke grrrrr grrrr. He says, It’s enough for me to amuse myself. This boy was an unhappy person. It is for this reason that the earthen bow remains with the children. It is not a thing to distract important people, it is for the unhappy.”

One lesson to be learned from this is not to jump to easy conclusions about earth instruments and primitivism. The Dan had other ways of amplifying sound, as the above photograph shows, but terra-technology floated somewhere out on the edges of society, either marginal, in the sense of being a diversion for the melancholy and immature, or spectral, as sound masks emitting the voice of a supernatural being. When I was beginning to research non-western music in the early 1970s unilinear cultural evolutionism was still prevalent. To find any subtlety in the literature you had to read ethnomusicologists like Klaus P. Wachsmann (father of improvising violinist Philipp Wachsmann). In my early twenties I was excited to read his chapter – The Primitive Musical Instruments – in Musical Instruments Through the Ages (edited by Anthony Baines, 1961). “While considering them,” he wrote, “it must be borne in mind that the effectiveness of a musical instrument can only be measured by the degree of satisfaction its sound gives to the people who use it.” He devotes a short section to what he called Ground Instruments: ground zithers, percussion beams, stamping pits, ground bows and, most fascinating of all: “In Abyssinia a narrow, tapering hole is made in the ground and howled into; the vernacular name of this instrument means ‘lion’s call’.”

The reference almost certainly came from French musicologist André Schaeffner’s Origine des Instruments de Musique (1936). In Art, ethnography and the life of objects (2007) Julia Kelly situates such ethnographic objects within the operations of circumstantial magic, as she puts it, “. . . at the boundary between the animate and the inanimate . . .” traversed by French surrealists in the late 1920s and early 1930s. She quotes Schaeffner’s argument, that ethnographers should study musical instruments falling outside recognised categories, for example “the most humble wooden box used to produce sound.” An extreme example from many points of view, not least museology, was a pit dug in the ground. “Schaeffner was also concerned with the least conservable of musical instruments,” Kelly writes, referring to an article on musical instruments from the Trocadéro’s ethnographic collections, “an Abyssinian ‘earth drum’ consisting of two holes in the ground of differing heights. This instrument could only be captured photographically, and indeed was virtually illegible in the dark photograph by [Marcel] Griaule published alongside the article, where only the player’s hands and arms gave any indication of its existence.”

The allure of such an instrument, hole within a hole, absence within absence, Is out of all proportion to its simplicity. One contribution to the above mentioned social media thread came from Ilan Volkov, who drew my attention to Christian Wolff’s Pit Music (1971), published in Prose Collection. The piece could easily be a description of how to make your own version of the Dan earth bow, though that seems unlikely as both Zemp’s book and Wolff’s composition emerged in the same year. As Ilan pointed out, Wolff never intended his Pit to be actually made. Like a lot of things, post-Fluxus, it was an indication of potential (political as much as anything) rather than an imperative. I wrote similarly provisional pieces a few years later, the Wasp Flute that was never put into practice even though the instrument was built, and hypothetical events in which I performed with seals and fish, all of them suggestions of how life might be lived in a world less traumatised by what Timothy Morton has called The Severing (in his new book, Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People).

from New/Rediscovered Musical Instruments (1974)

As Morton makes clear, discussions such as the one I am having now and have been having for nearly fifty years, became taboo, either because they were damned for cultural appropriation, primitivism and exoticism or dismissed for being hippyish, lacking in the detachment and rigour proper to a person who was considered to be permanantly Severed. But ultimately these holes in the ground address a basic problem – how to make a small thing bigger – and by applying the principle of resonance they fashion an elegant solution whose imprint will gradually soften and crumble into an impression rather than a scar. We could learn something from that.

Posted in instrumentality, writing sound | Tagged Andre Schaeffner, Charles Duvelle, Christian Wolff, earth bow, Evan Parker, Hugo Zemp, Humankind, Ilan Volkov, Julia Kelly, Klaus P. Wachsmann, Marcel Griaule, Pit Music, Sharpen Your Needles, Timothy Morton, Wasp Flute |