SOME MORE THOUGHTS ON EVIAN CHRIST, PRE- AND POST-DIGITAL ABSTRACTION, ETC.

A few idle thoughts that spilled over from my review of Evian Christ's "Duga-Three" as I listened to that track again this morning. This is just me thinking out loud, but I'd be interested in seeing if anyone thinks this stuff has traction.

1) Part of what seems quaint/dated about it are its "abstract qualities"--the delayed and overlapping voices sourced from television and radio broadcasts, while a perfectly standard tool in this kind of music, feel like a sound from another era. Radio and television are obviously still a thing in today's world, but it doesn't seem like the kind of polyphonic/chaotic stream of voices and languages pouring into our consciousness primarily comes from television (and not at all from radio). From the graininess of the voices to the very conceit, the piece feels profoundly pre-digital in a way. The echoes of Boards of Canada's aesthetic in the first section are another example--that sound was meant to recall a specific material reality of the pre-digital world, the warping of tape and video by time.

2) The ascent of Glitch in the early parts of last decade (via compilations like the Clicks and Cuts series on Milles Plateaux) seems like a moment of transition into some new conception of abstraction in a digital age, one that has perhaps blossomed fully in the last few years via things like Oneohtrix Point Never's music and the New Aesthetic (and that had already started to come into existence several years before the millennium via time-stretching in jungle and drum'n'bass). 

3) Another sign of this transition might be Brian Eno's albums for Warp, Small Craft on a Milk Sea and Drums Between the Bells, which work in much the same way as his work in a certain kind of pre-digital abstraction (Discreet Music, the albums with Fripp, Bowie, and Cluster, the Ambient Series, Apollo, the Windows 95 theme, etc., etc.), but do so in a showy and frustratingly obvious digital way--each glitch feels designed to call attention to itself as a glitch, as if just to show that Eno has in fact listened to electronic music produced in the past two decades (needless to say, I'm not a huge fan of either of those albums). This also plagued his most recent album with Fripp, though not quite to the same extent (and at times actually wasn't a plague, but made for some quite lovely music).

4) Perhaps another example: the difference between the lines drawn in this list by Mark Richardson and this list by David Bevan about the manipulation of the human voice in music. That Burial and Four Tet are the common denominators seems possibly interesting (a sign of the apparently diminishing-in-value quality of "importance" in their respective musics?).

5) As a related thought on abstract qualities/pre- and (post-)digital abstractions/etc., Ghost Outfit wrote recently, in a piece on Richard Taruskin's The Danger of Music and the necessity of music having an explicit connection to human issues in order to avoid "formalist sterility:"

I still think [Tim] Hecker's music is great but its beauty exists entirely for and of itself. It isn't concerned with the human and, despite all its shimmering construction, suffers from an emotional blankness--a tabula rasa whose sound is gorgeous and unearthly but doesn't relate with the world outside it.

To an extent, I understand where such a reading of Hecker's music is coming from--its emotional content is often ambiguous at best and his catalogue's studied abstraction coupled with this seemingly emotionally distant/reserved nature has led some to call his music academic (read: formalist and sterile)--but I disagree. While I doubt anyone is finding his or her tales of personal tragedy/redemption echoed in Hecker's music the way that he/she might in the music of Xiu Xiu, Momus, or Wild Beasts (to pick the artists Ghost Outfit contrasts with Hecker), I think Hecker's own comments about his music suggest an equally real connection that his music has to the human, to the world outside of itself. His repeated invocations of secular church music is perhaps the big clue to how he conceives of this interaction, but I think his music also connects in its digital/(post-)digital abstract nature. Hecker's music in some ways reflects and in some ways reshapes a digital consciousness--this is attention as snow and static, lost and damaged transmission, corrupted files, bad data (it makes sense he would be obsessed with what he calls "digital garbage"). It's the beauty of those aspects, the way that their drone and thrum form not just a background of our lives, but a significant aesthetic component of them that can be equal parts beautiful and terrifying. 

6) Like the Jameson essay I referenced in my review of Evian Christ points out, though, the present, this (post-)digital realm, is unavailable to us. We cannot experience it directly. What makes "Duga-Three" so affecting, then, is not just the emotional pull of its elegiac tone, but the way that its reminder of another kind of consciousness, another form of abstraction (and I think the formal elements are key here), also allows the present to be set off in relief and experienced. Similarly, in his rendering of those elements that make up the backdrop of the digital world/consciousness into reflections on the very process that turns them into works of often profound power, Hecker's music also makes the present available to us. I understand the moment in which I am situated--and the way sounds function in the spaces of that moment--better because of Hecker's music. I find it "vital, confounding, and powerful" (to use Ghost Outfit's criteria) in equal measure to almost anything I can think of with lyrics.

7) All of the above points in 5) and 6) about why I find Hecker's music and "Duga-Three" so powerful seem related to the shifting sense and experience of time enforced by late capitalism, as outlined by Mark Fisher here.

REVIEW: CFCF - EXERCISES EP

CFCF - Exercises EP
Paper Bag Records, 2012

With the end of the semester comes a return to blogging, and what better way to kick things off than with a review of this gorgeous EP from Montreal artist CFCF. If you like Tim Hecker's Dropped Pianos (which I very much do), or, perhaps more tellingly, James Blake's Klavierwerke EP, then chances are you will find something to enjoy on this release. Mike Silver, the man who records as CFCF, is a talented enough musician to avoid simple repetition (or outright imitation), though. He trades in Hecker's chilly reverb and stark piano and organ sketches for much more fleshed out "exercises" (hence the EP's title) that utilize not only piano, but also a variety of keyboard and synth tones, some soft beats, and one rather arresting vocal turn. It's the latter that makes me think of Blake--along with the accomplished piano playing throughout--but whereas I found Klavierwerke to be hard, dull, and grey, a difficult piece of music to warm to, let alone to find a way into, Exercises is almost comically easy to fall in love with. Indeed, if the year were ending tomorrow and I had to make a year-end top ten, CFCF would sit in the number two slot (right behind another EP you might have heard...). With the possible exception of Four Tet and Burial's collaboration "Nova," Exercises is the prettiest music I've heard all year, a real treat for the ears that is, for all its potential for cold, academic abstraction given its instrumentation and genre, surprisingly warm and human when you get up close. In short, I'm bewitched.

In the press material surrounding the album, Silver offers a slightly different lineage for the EP's sound than the one I've suggested above, citing Philip Glass and Ryuichi Sakamoto. Perhaps more telling, though, than even this sonic heritage, is a description of the album's contextualizing cues--"institutional architecture and 70s Canadiana"--out which Silver constructs an album of "snowy walkways and long corridors, endless escalators ascending to desolate concrete plateaus . . . exploration[s] of lost memories, studies in nostalgia, exercises in spatial remembrance." It doesn't sound a million miles away from a release on Ghost Box or the Caretaker's latest project, and it wouldn't be hard, I'd imagine, to use the EP as a kind of tool for hauntological explorations. More importantly, in my opinion, these descriptions suggests the paradox at work in this music that makes it so bizarrely affecting: these tracks--"exercises" as they are called--are framed by their titles as at once miniatures, things on their way to becoming something larger and grander for which the EP is only practice, and evocations of large, emotionally resonant concepts like "School," "September," or "Loss." The contradictory tug of their relatively compact structures versus their large emotional payoff means that even those tracks that initially seem like interstitial moments searching for an album or pleasant meanderings missing a song bloom and blossom into something else entirely over the course of a listen.

Opener "Exercise #1 (Entry)" recalls to mind the score for Donnie Darko briefly, but the arcing synth lines behind the piano coat the track in a kind of graceful neon chill, arpeggiated lines twinkling away in the background and providing both colour and melody. Like the best minimalism, the piece feels at once static and incredibly mobile, shifting through its insistent reiterations. "Exercise #2 (School)" is one of the few beat driven tracks, and its clattering, panned percussion adds a propulsive thrust to the ringing, echoing piano at the track's foundation and the whistling, noodling synth leading the melody. It's the middle of the EP that's most impressive, though, with Exercises 3, 4, and 5--that's "Building," "Spirit," and "September" for those of you keeping score at home--offering the true highlights. "Building" is the most overtly Glass-ian piece here, riding a series of repeating piano motifs to an ecstatic climax, brash synth lines voicing a nagging, wistful melody, while "Spirit" takes the opposite approach: moving like sunbeams slowly filling a room with light, it is a graceful and meditative peak (and reminds me of Mogwai's "Tracy" and "Moses? I Amn't"). "September," meanwhile, is the lone vocal track, and, coming in the midst of the other instrumental pieces, its reimagining of David Sylvian's 1987 song of the same name feels almost too large next to the rest of the material here, a culmination of the emotional potency surrounding it in a moment of autumnal pop beauty. The instrumental refrain between vocal sections is unspeakably wonderful, shuddering and wheezing like machines drawing breath.

There's little let down in the EP's final three tracks. "December" opens like "Entry," but as its piano lines gain force and begin to expand, the kind of blooming and blossoming I mentioned above starts to occur. With the synths sounding like accordions, Silver picks out a lovely, falling melody before suddenly shifting into a hollowly metallic synth tone that offers its own weird, plastic beauty. The track slowly recedes, never quite seeming to vanish entirely, hovering on the edges of hearing like the afterimages from staring at a light. The buzzing synths in "Loss" offer the kind of retrofuturist air that would feel quite at home in a National Film Board documentary on institutional architecture, but it pales next to the final track, "Change." The only other piece to feature beats, the chopped and distorted opening gives way to a percussion line that sounds like a machine at work, pistons pumping and valves blowing off steam. As a clap begins to assert itself, the track reassembles into a minimal disco number before the synths return to close out the EP on its harshest, most discordant note.

At just over 26 minutes, Exercises might seem slight. It's a quick, enjoyable listen, though, and it doesn't outstay its welcome, which, for an album of instrumental piano and synth sketches, is a real danger. For all its listening in on a laboratory session set up (the EP as a form naturally serving as a kind of ideal testing ground for new styles or sounds), Exercises is a cohesive listen, a statement as much as it is a question. There's little sense of hesitancy or tentativeness on Silver's part, and he has a fine ear as a composer for both lush sounds and interesting melodic developments. "September" hints at just how malleable the kind of music being worked through here is, and if it's any indication of what's coming next from CFCF, then it bodes well for some real fireworks on his next full-length. In many ways, CFCF is here for me what Oneohtrix Point Never seems to be for others, though his nostalgia is never quite as palpable or overt as Daniel Lopatin's.  While the start of May, and here on the East Coast the return of summer-like weather, might seem a strange time of year for this release, Exercises is both light and airy enough to accommodate spring breezes and solid enough to cut through humidity. I know I'll be playing it a lot in the coming months.