The Condimental Op

by Andrez Bergen

  Concurrently, in Germany, Herbert Eimert established the leading European studio for electronic music in Cologne and was soon joined by Karlheinz Stockhausen. In opposition to the principles of musique concrete, Eimert and Stockhausen set out to create what they called ‘Elektronische Musik’: music generated exclusively by electronic means, without using natural sources of sound. Stockhausen’s ‘Studien’ (1953-54), for example, was an attempt to mimic the sounds of an existing source, such as a piano, by superimposing the requisite pure frequencies obtained from oscillators, and alternatively by composing entirely new sounds by creating combinations different from those emitted by any natural instrument.

  Stockhausen’s next venture was one of reconciliation. Composed in 1955-56, his ‘Gesang der Jünglinge’ (Song of the Youths) sought to bring together Elektronische Musik and musique concrète by combining purely electronic sounds with natural ones — those of a child’s singing voice — and the result was a fusion of electronic music with language.

  Concurrently in the United States the film industry encouraged the new electronic music medium.

  Louis and Bebe Barron had set up a private electronic music studio in New York to provide suitably strange and eerie sound-tracks for science fiction films like Forbidden Planet, and it was in this studio that John Cage composed his ‘Williams Mix’ (1952) — a collage of all kinds of material, from purely electronic sounds to pre-existing music; from amplified “small sounds” (Cage’s own term for the barely audible) to city noises.

  From 1948 to 1954, therefore, the technical and aesthetic foundations of electronic music had been firmly established. In particular the advancing technology and experiments by people such as Cage, Schaeffer and Stockhausen had opened up four new approaches to musical composition: using natural and machine-made sounds, altering the sounds of traditional musical instruments, creating new sound material, and constructing overlaid collages.

  The concept of the collage harks back to the Dadaists, and it was only natural that electronic music coming from the experimental community would have a leaning towards similar theatrics and mixed media orientations.

  This collage, or synthesis as it became known, was developed into the 1960s; mostly it was an attempt to bring together diverse styles within a single work, often using references — or samples — of music from the past to bring an ironic accentuation to the modern condition of abundant variety.

  It was also the means for some Dada-inspired experiments with sound. The recordings of Cage’s ‘Variations IV’ (1964) includes scraps of sampled music and speeches of different kinds, all willingly admitted in a free-for-all montage. Cage himself declared that the work was his own personification of the fact that “Nowadays everything happens at once.” Yet in spite of the technological and artistic advances of this time, by the first half of the 1960s it was apparent that electronic music had reach limitations.

  Stockhausen’s ‘Kontakte’ (Contacts, 1958-60) — which was composed for four-channel tape and generated a whole new world of sound from the simple basic material of electronic pulses — was symptomatic of the restrictions faced. It took two years to complete. Too many hours were necessarily spent in the studio, experimenting by trial and error with equipment never intended for musical composition.

  Many of these affected composers and electronic technicians therefore concerned themselves in the search for their own Holy Grail of the time: an effective electronic music synthesizer.

  The first such functional instrument was the RCA Synthesizer built by Harry Olsen and Herbert Belar — a gargantuan assembly installed at Columbia University in 1957 and capable of producing and altering a wide variety of sounds — but an invention of far wider significance came in 1964 when Robert Moog constructed the first sound devices responsive to control voltages.

  Moog had developed the twin elements of a voltage-control oscillator and a voltage-control amplifier.

  Whereas previously it had been necessary for a composer to ‘tune’ his equipment by hand in order to obtain the desired pitch, volume, and so on, it was now possible for this to be done by electronic signals, thus increasing the speed and precision with which sounds could be created.

  This in turn paved the way for the development of an instrument for sound synthesis, and with the simultaneous miniaturization of electronics and the evolution of modular systems, a synthesizer could finally be produced.

  In 1966 synthesizers developed by Moog and Donald Buchla became commercially available, and in 1968 the release of Walter Carlos’s Switched-On Bach — an album of music by Johann Sebastian Bach performed entirely on a Moog synthesizer — brought the innovation to global public attention. Carlos went on to produce the music for Stanley Kubrick’s film A Clockwork Orange (1971) which, along with the electronic-inspired soundtrack to Kubrick’s other film 2001: A Space Odyssey, confirmed the synthesizer’s place and electronic music in general as an increasingly accessible and relevant medium.

  Until the mid ‘60s, however, electronic music experiments had been confined to the studio; as the decade drew to a close it began its fractious assimilation into popular culture and progressive music styles.

  Influenced by Stockhausen’s work with his own ensemble on such compositions as ‘Kurzwellen’ (1968), rock musicians like Frank Zappa, Pink Floyd, the Velvet Underground and the Beatles began to make use of live electronic techniques and more experimental sound nuances, while with their album Anthem Of The Sun (1967-68) the Grateful Dead played on the development of electronic rock by drawing on references of musique concrète in between songs.

  However, in the first half of the 1970s there was a conscious shift away from the abstraction, discontinuity and non-harmo-niousness that hallmarked the 1960s. Assured, often sophisticated techniques of recording, and of integrating electronic music into this process, was the hallmark of British bands Yes, Roxy Music, the Matching Moles and Emerson, Lake & Palmer, yet in general the use of synthesizer was often relegated to instrumental imitation and nothing definitive.

  Aside from the more adventurous offerings of Brian Eno and the German-based dabbling of Tangerine Dream, Neu, Can, and Kraftwerk, music in general had relegated machine-based sounds to a more subservient position.

  While punk’s arrival in the mid ‘70s was a subversive way in which to combat the excesses of pomp-rock, there was an equally defining and vital underground that surfaced in Britain under the moniker of “industrial music”.

  The principle protagonists in this movement were Cabaret Voltaire and Throbbing Gristle, bands as much influenced by Dada and the Beat generation writers as they were by Stockhausen, Schaeffer, Brian Eno, basic sound iconoclasm, the new electronic music technology coming through…and James Brown.

  These bands had more in common with Germans Kraftwerk, Can and Karlheinz Stockhausen than they did with anyone else in the UK, but they made an enormous impact upon the emerging ‘hip’ new British media cartel that included fledgling magazines like The Face and NME.

  What made Cabaret Voltaire unique in their early records — in particular Mix-Up (1979) and The Voice Of America (1980) — was the manner in which band members Richard H. Kirk, Stephen Mallinder and Chris Watson created unique, sometimes obscure soundscapes and grooves through the use of a collage of effected sound-sources and spliced-up tape loops; for their live shows the band integrated a multi-media approach that included slide-shows and political imagery, for an all-encompassing effect and an often deliberately heavy-handed message.

  There was a reason behind this, apart from basic visual aesthetics: in 1983 Mallinder reflected that “People react a lot more immediately to a visual image than to an audio one. Audio can be far more subconscious, more subliminal, but audio doesn’t have the immediacy of the sense of sight.”

  Industrial music as an autonomous artistic putsch effectively sputtered to a halt around 1982, and bears very little resemblance to the music style calling itself ‘industrial’ that emerged later that decade and continues to be flogged
like a dead horse.

  But the short-lived movement has had a phenomenal impact on the electronic music we take for granted twenty years later. Its impact on young British musicians, artists, designers and music journalists at the time was integral in the development of a better understanding and appreciation of experimental music and underground culture in general; its use of sampling techniques and an untraditional approach to composition, along with the integration of new technology to do so, is a practice that has continued.

  You can hear its legacy in the soundscapes of artists like Coldcut, Jeff Mills, DJ Krush, Optical, Little Nobody, Steve Law, Aphex Twin, Black Lung, Atari Teenage Riot and Voiteck.

  Many of industrial’s principle protagonists also helped to develop techno in its formative stages, and some still continue to make vital contributions.

  Although Throbbing Gristle split in 1981, founding member Genesis P-Orridge went on to form Psychic TV just as his cohorts Cosey Fanni Tutti and Peter Christopherson formed Chris & Cosey. Cabaret Voltaire, while still ostensibly together 25 years after they were formed, has seen Richard Kirk join up with Sheffield’s Warp label to create some poignant electronic muzak albums and Stephen Mallinder — who now lives in Perth — moonlighting as a member of Sassi & Loco as well as the Ku-ling Brothers.

  Ollie Olsen, who was a member of pioneering local synthesizer outfit Whirlywirld in the late ‘70s then worked with experimental band Orchestra Of Skin & Bone in the first few years of the 1980s, went on to push the perimeters with No, found pop success with Max Q, and set himself up as one of Melbourne’s first purist techno musicians as Third Eye; these days he still produces electronic sounds, he DJs around the traps, and he runs Psy-Harmonics.

  So, what exactly is this music we call techno as the new millennium kicks into gear?

  It’s a hybrid creature, a fusion of influences and interests, ideas and ideals, that has no specific original source; in its time it’s drawn upon previous movements such as industrial, hip hop, house, funk, disco, soul, blues, punk, rock, salsa and Dada. It’s been influenced not just by the cerebral experimental studio work crafted from the 1940s through to the 1960s, but also by B-grade ‘50s sci-fi film soundtracks.

  Meaningful monologues from The Twilight Zone sit comfortably beside news broadcasts appropriated from CNN; inane vocal samples are shaped to become just as pivotal a part of the music as the TB-303 bassline beneath.

  Contemporary electronic music is a realm in which culture, politics, history, entertainment, humour and technology can all sit alongside literally hundreds of diverse musical influences jammed together to create the whole; it takes stock from the world we live in and flashbacks to the past in order to create a new and ever-changing futurist entity. It’s electronic music that derives its sounds from machines and its ideas from the environment, and it has the potential to restrict itself less than any other musical style in history.

  Amen to that.

  Occasionally I do get these bees in my wee bonnet (shhh!). At one stage, since I was an electronic muso and music journalist (at the same time) I trumpeted the joys of local indie electronica in Melbourne, along with the vitality of sampling and a sense of humour in music.

  I think anyone who’s read my writing will have noticed that I sample from myself (and pop culture) just as much there as I do in the music I make under silly aliases like Little Nobody and Funk Gadget. I remember reading that Raymond Chandler did a similar thing, so — while I’m hardly comparing myself to the great man — I can hang onto the coattails of his habits.

  Anyway, living in Tokyo over the past 12 years has allowed me to watch the rapidly developing skyline, which is a joy to see — but I do pine for the history that is lost, for the little old weatherboard numbers with the sliding doors that you’ll see in post-war domestic flicks by Kurosawa and Ozu.

  So I had another soapbox-moment in Geek magazine in 2009.

  I pinched some of this for one of Floyd’s rants in Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat.

  Tokyo’s Post-Modern Purge

  One of my preferred sci-fi flicks from the early ‘50s is The Thing from Another World, with James Arness menacing a crew of American military trapped on an Arctic base.

  The direction, while credited to Christian Nyby, smacked more of Howard Hawks’s style — and while Hawks is listed in the credits just as a producer, people do have their doubts.

  Anyway, my lasting memory of the movie is the final paranoid riposte, “Watch the skies, everywhere! Keep looking. Keep watching the skies!”, and the truth is that in Tokyo, you really do always have to look heavenward.

  It’s a lesson I thought I’d learned after I first arrived in this city and cottoned on that some of the coolest cafes and record shops are tucked away on the sixth or seventh floors of inconsequential skyscrapers.

  But I think a recurrent crick in the neck negated Ned Scott’s warning in recent years, and my gaze had fallen back to ground-floor level — that is, until I stumbled across an article, in the oft indispensable, Tokyo-based English-language lifestyle magazine, Metropolis (metropolis.co.jp), that reported on buildings slated to be condemned in this self-reinventing city of flux.

  As it was, I already knew about Minoru Takeyama.

  He’s one of Japan’s more famous architects, a Waseda and Harvard graduate, as well as a professor, author, and innovatory thinker; the man even worked at one stage in the early ‘60s with Arne Jacobsen, deviser of the seriously pricey Series 7 chair.

  Takeyama is best known here for the landmark Ichi-maru-kyu (109) building in Shibuya, erected in the late ‘70s — but a decade before, in his mid-30s, he’d conjured up a couple of far more iconic towers in Kabukicho, a few minutes’ walk from Shinjuku Station, and thereby created some of the earliest examples of Japanese architectural postmodernism.

  It’s these, rather than the 109, that give Takeyama kudos in architectural circles in the West, and what I didn’t know was that I’d passed these buildings by on several occasions, without ever noticing. It wasn’t until the Metropolis piece that I got the heads-up, realized my error, and started watching the skies again.

  Once you do raise your eyes from the garish thrall of the surrounding men’s host clubs, you get to see the pop-art colours of ‘Nibankan’ (Number Two Building, 1970), which looks like Roy Lichtenstein had a hand in the palette, and the monochrome, superbly Gigantor-styled ‘Ichibankan’ (Number One Building, 1969).

  Both buildings have, however, seen far better days.

  They’re now bereft of tenants (Ichibankan completely so) and in disrepair, while the owners — love hotel and business accommodation operators, Sankei Hotel — act suitably indifferent.

  One senses Sankei are biding their time, and the buildings themselves are just waiting to be demolished — as is the Nakagin Capsule Tower in Ginza, right near Shinbashi.

  A mesmerizing structure that deigns to juggle some 140 boxes (modified containers that vary in size, depending on the source material you check, but around 4 x 2.5 meters), stacked at angles on 14 tottering floors, this was the first “capsule hotel” per se — designed by architect Kisho Kurokawa, and constructed between 1970-72.

  Kurokawa had previously helped to found the Japanese Metabolism Movement in 1959, an architectural group equally philosophical in tone, with an eye on technological advances; they envisaged a futurist city whose principle structures would be flexible and encourage an organic growth potential.

  10 years later, Kurokawa apparently conceived of the Nakagin Capsule Tower while abiding by the maxim of “metab-olism, exchangeability, and recyclability”. Truth is, though, that I’m not quite sure what two of these ideas entail, nor how they relate to this rather cool building that’s slowly crumbling away due to overt lack of maintenance.

  Apparently the designer was into the idea of replacing the capsules where necessary (hence the ‘exchangeability’, which is the bit I’m blessedly able to nut out), but nobody’s ever bothered to follow through, and the structure is now quite visibl
y on its last legs.

  Ironically, while the Nakagin Capsule Tower was originally under construction, Minoru Takeyama was busy setting up the group ArchiteXt (long before the founders of Excite started using the same moniker — sans the big ‘X’ — for their new-fangled Internet portal in 1994) — to counter the Metabolist ideals that Kurokawa espoused; they instead they cited equally dizzying concepts like contradiction, discontinuity, individualism, and pluralism.

  Funnily enough, the fate of both divergent schools of thought seems to have been pretty much the same.

  Like Ichibankan and Nibankan, the Nakagin Capsule Tower is overdue for demolition — in this case due to reported fears of use of asbestos in the construction, as well as concerns that it’s not an earthquake-proof building.

  Coupled with the costs of making structures seismically-sound and attractive to an ageing clientele forever interested in things new, developers in Tokyo place precedence on the wrecking ball rather than on landmark properties that’re getting a wee bit long in the tooth.

  You get the impression that all three buildings are blocking the path of funkier, newfangled residential crystal palaces — while the government certainly hasn’t wasted a lot of time considering notions like artistic architectural heritage and its preservation for future generations.

  So, when that mindset takes its natural course, I might as well ditch the sage advice from The Thing from Another World, and stop watching those skies after all.