Snatch Tapes 2022

So it is round up time. It has been been a busy year for releases over at Snatch Tapes. 2022 started with the Passionate Particles CD released by Walter Robotka on Klanggalerie - a selection of tracks from the last twenty years. I thought this might introduce the Sanderson oeuvre to more people - It didn't but the CD had an upbeat review in Avant Weekly by Frans de Waard and got a few spins on WFMU and other fine radio stations. 
Undaunted by the slightly underwhelming response to the CD in Spring came the next Ice Yacht cassette Noisy Nylon limited to 30 copies - described by Keith Rodway as sounding more 'industrial' this turned out to be a stepping stone to doing more long form msuique concrete-is style work. The first manifestation of this was Redux a 30 minute reworking of Snatch Tapes material described by Eric Lanzillotta as being a little like Pierre Henry. Then came Lost With All Hands (the Legend of Goodwin Sands) an album of two 20 minute pieces. The title track was played by Carol Crow, Daniel Blumin and Tony Coulter at WFMU and was heard in one of the listening towers at the recent Sonic Cartogarphy conference at Chatham Dockyard. Then the Queen died and using a single bell toll as source material a 17 minute piece called The Ringing of a Bell was conjured. Lastly there was The Sunken Features of a Satellite - more long form soundscape that reworked the previous Pillbox release.
For what its worth my own favourite of the year was

Green on The Horizon at BFI Southbank NFT3

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

That old Sanderson & Ball 'classic' Green on The Horizon gets a screening this week at NFT3 as part of a programme of Peter Greenaway related shorts entitled The Unreliable Narrator: Adventures in Storytelling, Documentary and Misinformation.

To  quote from the programme notes: Veracity and doubt play off each other to uncanny, witty ends in imaginative films by Greenaway, John Smith, Patrick Keiller, Steven Ball and Philip Sanderson. The voice illuminates and obscures in equal measure, dryly satirising the authority of the documentary narrator, and interrogating film language and the relationships between sound and image. Weird tales and odd instructions seep up through the gaps.

Steven and I shall be at the screening to make a brief introduction. 

New Website

I have a new website documenting all my various art work, be it music, single screen video, installation, Chronocuts, etc. It is called Rumble of The Ruins and you can find it here.   

A ringing of a Bell

And so the Queen is dead, and the bell tolls 96 times – what can be drawn from this dull and dutiful repetition, dong, dong, dong, neither building nor climaxing, an endless anticipation, a ceremony of the senses, an everything of nothing, a shrill shell. 

 

Let us take just one single toll of the bell and see if out of that metal on metal we can conjure something befitting… 

 

I give you The Ringing of a Bell

released September 12, 2022 

 

Philip Sanderson: treatments. Unknown Bell Ringer: Bell

 

 

LOST WITH ALL HANDS (The legend of Goodwin Sands)

So in pursuance of my (further) investigations into noise-sound I have been working on a couple of new long form pieces namely ‘LOST WITH ALL HANDS (The Legend of Goodwin Sands)’, and ‘The Mourning After’.

 

Goodwin Sands is a sandbank off the coast of Deal in Kent notorious as the site of shipwrecks and the loss over centuries of thousands of seafarers’ lives. At first Goodwin Sands was nothing more than a handy working title for a piece I was making using various noise-sounds such as squeaky gates and bowed cymbals treated using granular synthesis. The shifting patterns and textures had some loose approximation or analogue with the dynamics of the sandbank and having seen a copy of a second hand book about the Goodwin Sands in a local shop I adopted the name, but the initial idea was not to represent or make a piece about the sands per se. 

 

The piece was taking form and as part of the general research one does around such things I came across a folk song by George Gilbert entitled ‘The Legend of The Goodwin Sands’ (1974) which originally appeared on the 1974 LP Medway Flows Softly - Songs of Kent by George Gilbert. The LP was one of those privately pressed LPs of folk music that were released in the 1960s and 70s. It contains a number of often humorous songs many of them based in and around places or events in the Medway Towns where I grew up. George Gilbert wrote all the songs and provides the inter track introductions. Many of the numbers on the LP feature a full band and other singers though ‘The Legend of The Goodwin Sands’ is just Gilbert himself on vocals and a wind/water background sound.  

 

With some suitable treatment the song fitted well overlaid in the centre of the piece I had already made. Fitted almost too well for no sooner was it part of the composition than the various noise-sounds which previously had maintained an abstracted relation to one another began to morph into representations of location sounds. A bubbling sound became water, the overlaid granular synthesized bowed cymbal the creaking of the vessels, other tones took on the mantle of wind and waves. In short the noise-sounds began to before my ears loose their autonomy and become illustrations of the text of the folk song. 

 

With some judicious mixing and copious editing I found a sufficient tension and distance between the song and the noise-sounds could be maintained to make the piece ‘work’, but it was close, had I started with the song and then added the noise-sound I fear all would have been lost (at sea) as it would have been difficult not to hear the noise-sounds as nautical sound effects from the off.  

 

In contrast with side A which as has probably been inferred took some time side B, ‘The Mourning After’ was a relatively quick affair employing pulse comb filters excited by a range of audio sources including location recordings in Kent, vocals and shortwave radio. I had been experimenting with the pulse comb patch for a good six months and had a number of takes none of which seemed to quite hot the mark, but having completed side one and with its theme in mind I had another go and managed to improvise the track in a couple of takes. 

 

The Sunken Features of a Satellite

Revisiting noise.

Contents

 

1 The Industrial Revolution 

2 Revisiting Russolo – The Art of Noises

3 From Russolo to Schaeffer

4 Composing Noise-Sound

 

 

1 The Industrial Revolution 

 

It is over a hundred years since the idea of noise as something to be desired rather than kept to a minimum was first advocated. We can point to Marinetti’s 1912 Zang Tumb Tumb celebrating the rat-a-tat-tat of gunfire, which in part inspired Russolo’s Art of Noises. Across Europe be it Futurists or Russian filmmakers such as Vertov and Avraamov noise and in particular the sounds of the industrial revolution were embraced as not only offering new possibilities beyond the then canon of Western classical music, but in some way signalling the modern and a confrontational cleansing of all that went before. 

 

Great - lets bow an old hubcap, scrape that oil drum across the floor, make some noise and welcome the future. But wait pitfalls a plenty are to be found in making noise. The first lies in the original act of inversion, the reversal of the term noise from unwanted to desirable. We might categorise this change as an example of linguistic amelioration. 

 

Linguistic amelioration of adjectives such as ‘bad’ and ‘sick’, become quasi-ironic positive endorsements enhanced by the negative shell they inhabit. Such ameliorations are not permanent transitions of meaning but require a degree of hip insider knowledge and are thus tied to small generational shifts in language use. 

 

More culturally charged linguistic ameliorations of nouns such as say ‘queer’ signal a reclamation of the word from its original negative and pejorative usage into an emphatically empowered positive. Here the ameliorations is usually initiated by those who were the subject of the intended abuse and the power of the relocation and repurposing of such terms lies in both their inbuilt historical memory of having been negative and in an ongoing recognition that many in society still view them as such and so they contain a continued act of defiance. 

 

Aside from occasionally being booed off stage noise makers and musicians are hardly a persecuted segment of society indeed it could be demeaning to those who are to make such a comparison and yet the investment in ongoing linguistic amelioration of ‘noise’ follows the process found in nouns far more closely than that of adjectives. 

 

Despite noise’s over a hundred year pedigree many noise artists who operate in what might loosely be called the popular music field (i.e. outside of academia and state funded studios) exhibit a strong desire to maintain the memory of noise as undesirable tied to an ongoing belief and indeed celebration of its perceived inherent provocative nature. We are noisy and proud of it. As such the sounds of the industrial revolution can all too easily become not so much empowered or a new vocabulary of sonic possibilities as imprisoned pawns in a parody of more culturally charged linguistic ameliorations. 

 

Nowhere can this be seen more clearly than in the development in the late 1970s and early 1980s of noise and industrial music in Britain. It was Throbbing Gristle (TG) who coined the phrase industrial music, and though nearly all TG concerts would end with a vibrating wall of distorted sound TG were arguably a proto noise group rather than not a noise band per se. Outside of the full-on live finale regular rhythms, beats, vocals, lyrics, etc can all be easily distinguished in TG’s output, which for all the confrontational pose of the band was readily distinguishable as music/songs within the parameters of the day. The creation of TG relocated the activities of their front man Genesis P-Orridge from the (fine) art world that he and his then partner’s Cosey Fanni Tutti’s, COUM Transmissions project had inhabited into the stream of popular music. For though TG were never to trouble the charts their releases and gigs were reviewed in the mainstream music press (Sounds and NME) and their records were largely bought by listeners who also purchased the likes of PIL or Joy Division. 

 

If TG were a pro-noise band then it was to be a younger generation inspired by TG such as Whitehouse and Merzbow who would strip out the more conventional musical elements and focus on the remaining shell of noise. Following on from TG’s siting of their project within popular music the noise bands that followed were framed within the same context. Noise bands would often play at the same venues where rock bands played. This was significant in so much as it created an (oppositional) frame of reference with regard to popular music as opposed to say locating practice closer to Cage, Musique Concrète, Jazz, etc. Such framing helped encourage the repeated restatement of the original linguistic amelioration of noise as if it were a constant shock trooped antidote to popular music and culture. 

 

A thriving underground scene developed in the early 1980s of noise bands with matching graphics/artwork which taking their cue from the collages of leading TG member Genesis P-Orridge variously depicted death and destruction, mutilation, factories and urban architecture, bondage and fetishism, etc all photocopied in a reduced tonal range. If many involved with Futurism and in particular Marinetti had prior to World War 1 embraced the machine age and the cleansing effects of war and destruction DaDa responded to the horrors of World War 1 by a rejection of capitalism and the rational. 

 

Whilst Genesis P-Orridge’s collages were heavily influenced by DaDa TG’s overall image often tended towards the militaristic proto-fascist tendencies of Futurism. This mixed cocktail part Futurist, part DaDa with some added Burroughs and Lou Reed added in for good measure seeped into the very veins of noise music. The imprisonment of noise in a continual restatement and reinforcement of the original linguistic amelioration was now also inexorably linked with a visual and metaphorical depiction of destruction, death and decay hovering somewhere between celebration and condemnation. At times the emphasis would be more playful and DaDa whilst others would openly flirt with the more fascist overtones such as with Boyd Rice/NON. 

 

These tensions and tendencies are embodied in the sonic and visual output of almost every noise artist that emerged post 1980, and remarkably perhaps persist to the present day in the work of contemporary artists such as Wolf Eyes. Different artists of course respond in their own way to this approach and there are many subtle different sonic variations to be had, nonetheless the original linguistic amelioration and conceptual wedding to noise as noise frames so much of the output and restricts the creative possibilities and potential.    

 

The critical and audience framework in which noise music is received has tended to further reinforce the straightjacket that noise found itself in. Reviews of work containing noise will inevitably fall back on a range of nouns and adjectives the sounds is: spiky, deranged, glitchy, lo-fi, damaged, fucked-up, distorted, the beat: grinding, queasy, broken, disjointed, disfigured, the atmosphere created is woozy, bleak, dystopian, and so on. Similarly many audiences demand their noise gigs to be loud, confrontational, dark and dirty with stomach churning volume. Noise artists are expected to be at the very least self-declared bohemians edgy and excessive both in their habits and output, with many releasing literally hundreds of records and fans’ shelves groaning under the weight of vinyl box sets. What has noise done to deserve such a fate, and is there another way or other ways…?

 

 

2 Revisiting Russolo – The Art of Noises

 

So can noise be liberated from the straight jacket of linguistic amelioration and linked visual and metaphorical depictions of destruction and dystopia? Lets go back to the beginning and Russolo and his Art of Noises.

 

Whilst Russolo has become part of the historical telling of the birth of noise aided by that photo of the enigmatic boxes the Intonarumori which with their sound horns look for all the world like an early Reggae sound system Russolo’s contribution is nonetheless somewhat marginalised. Often depicted as a Futurist agent provocateur whose performances were accompanied by riotous response superficially it would seem that Russolo and The Art of Noises fits into the straightjacket of noise for noise sake. A closer examination reveals a lot more depth to the Russolo project than he is given credit for.

    

Though audio recordings (onto wax cylinder and then disc) were regularly being made during Russolo’s lifetime only a few muffled minutes exist of a performance from 1921. Similarly no original Intonarumori/noise machine survives and a couple of bars from a score. For a proper assessment of Russolo’s importance we must turn then to Russolo’s writings his Art of Noises (the Art of Noises Futurist Manifesto published in 1913, and subsequent publications in 1916 all translated from the Italian by Barclay Brown 1983). 

 

Russolo’s writing is in keeping with the Futurist manifesto style polemic nonetheless it is also analytical, unfortunately the power of the former often obscure the clarity of the latter. Many times when reading Russolo we have to go beyond the eye-catching Futurist rhetoric to read the finer implications of what is being said regarding noise-sound. 

 

Russolo starts The Art of Noises by heralding the new world of sound that the industrial age had ushered in “Ancient life was all silence. In the 19th Century, with the invention of machines, Noise was born. Today, Noise is triumphant and reigns sovereign over the sensibility of men”. Russolo then proceeds to a very short description of the evolution of music tracing its development over the centuries from the first single tones obtained from a plucked string up to an ever greater complexity of chords and finally “musical art seeks out combinations more dissonant, stranger, and harsher for the car. Thus, it comes ever closer to the noise-sound”.  

 

From the start then Russolo is not positioning noise in opposition to music per se so much as locating aspects of the “noise-sound” as embodiments of the trajectory in music’s development. “In order to excite and stir our sensibility, music has been developing toward the most complicated polyphony and toward the greatest variety of instrumental timbres and colours. It has searched out the most complex successions of dissonant chords, which have prepared in a vague way for the creation of MUSICAL NOISE”.

 

Following this analysis it is not surprising that Russolo then makes the call for the traditional orchestra instruments and the orchestral music played to be replaced by a new range of noise-sounds (produced by his own Intonarumori.) There is a degree of Futurist declamation regarding the demise of Beethoven and Wagner and of the need to shake up the Buddha-like audience but, in keeping with Russolo’s belief in noise-sound having the potential for much greater tonal and pitch variation than traditional instruments he then goes on to describe the sheer range and diversity of noise-sound. 

 

Somewhat paradoxically before listing as one might expect the soundscape of the city “the throbbing of valves, the bustle of pistons, the shrieks of mechanical saws, the starting of trams on the tracks, the cracking of whips…” he firstly turns to the naturally occurring sounds of thunder, wind, gurgling brooks and waterfalls. Putting aside the slight contradiction here with Russolo’s previous assertion of the world being all but silent before the industrial revolution. Though the headline is all about the more abrasive auditory pulse of the city and of war (reported via a letter from Marinetti as at the point of writing Russolo had yet to experience the horrors of war himself) the detail is that all noise-sounds be they man made or naturally occurring are worth exploring.  

 

Russolo without the aid of contemporary audio analytical tools identifies what it is that makes noise-sounds of musical interest and different from the tones produced by traditional instruments is “that the vibrations that produce it are confused and irregular”. This complexity and changing nature of the components of noise-sounds be they timbre, microtonal pitch, harmonics and off beat rhythms are what set them apart and are what the designers of and players of traditional instruments had over the years of refinement often sought to minimise.

 

Though Russolo is inspired by the complex tonalities in a range of noise-sounds that he hears a key aspect of his project is that he is not seeking to directly imitate or replicate them. Unlike many contemporary noise artists who bring on stage large sheets of metal, hammers, chainsaws, road drills and all the rest Russolo’s intention was to create a series of instruments that could extract what is of interest in a noise-sound and enable it to be played with the operator having control of a range of parameters. By harnessing the essence of what makes a particular class of noise-sound of interest be it made by man, machinery, or nature an instrument could be created that would then allow for the musical permutations and variations to be explored in a concert setting. 

 

Having indentified 6 families of noise-sounds Russolo then set about building a series of Intonarumori to generate them including the howler, the roarer, the crackler, the rubber, the hummer, the gurgler, and the hisser. The mechanical workings of the instruments were shrouded in secrecy concealed inside large wooden boxes from out of which only protruded the sound horn and the handle and levers used to operate them. The reasoning behind this enclosure was arguably twofold, firstly Russolo was approaching the project not only as a musical one but hoped to be able to make and sell the Intonarumori as a business and indeed at various points financial backers were close to supporting the project. As such patents were taken out and thus Russolo was keen for commercial reasons to keep the precise workings of the Intonarumori secret. The second reason for boxing in of the Intonarumori is more speculative but in keeping with Russolo’s desire not to imitate the sounds that had inspired him the concealment of the components was intended to focus attention onto the abstract audio quality of the noise themselves rather than the visual operation of the mechanism. 

 

Far from being just a Futurist agent provocateur seeking a linguistic amelioration that continually restates the abrasive nature of noise. Russolo set himself the almost impossible task of not only identifying a new sphere of noise-sounds but then also building the instruments to play them, composing and scoring music for the Intonarumori and, lastly staging concerts of the new music. All attempted needless to say with minimal funds and support. That the project was only partially successful in its execution is not surprising - Russolo’s descent in later life into poverty making a living from palmistry whilst living in a small attic all reinforce the legend but do little to enhance the intellectual contribution which was nothing short of a manifesto for a whole new way of approaching music through the exploration of noise-sounds. Lets just recap the key points.

 

1.            Noise and specifically noise-sounds are not defined by their anti-music or non-musical status, but rather can be viewed ”as embodiments of the trajectory in music’s development”.

2.            That though Russolo was inspired by the new vibrant sounds of the industrial revolution, the categorisation of noise-sounds also includes naturally occurring sounds such as “wind, gurgling brooks and waterfalls”. 

3.            For Russolo what differentiates noise-sounds from the tones of traditional instruments (played in a conventional fashion) is “that the vibrations that produce it are confused and irregular”.

4.            The purpose of creating a range of new instruments (the Intonarumori) was not to imitate specific sounds (say a car engine) but rather to offer a way of generating and playing noise-sounds giving the creator/musician control over a range of expressive parameters such as microtonal pitch and timbre.

 

 

3 From Russolo to Schaeffer

 

Russolo’s ideas are echoed (if not always acknowledged) throughout the 20th century in the work of John Cage, the Musique Concrète of Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry, and the electroacoustic practice of Trevor Wishart (to name just a few pivotal players). Many popular noise artists have also name-checked Russolo whilst not pursuing any of the ideas in the manifesto. A good example is Einstürzende Neubauten who for the accompanying video to their 1993 song Blume executed a nice recreation of the Russolo photograph of the room filled with (imitation) Intonarumori. In the background suitably suited gentlemen slowly turning the handles whilst in the foreground a woman rotates on a small dais whilst the lead singer sings to and around her. It is all very entertaining in a cabaret mecanique way, but has vey little to do with Russolo or his ideas. The music with its slow chord progression has a dusty romantic world-weary fin de siècle whimsy but there is no noise-sound to be heard anywhere. This is noise as style not to far removed from mainstream bands such as Depeche Mode who would flirt with adding a little noise to their percussion on tracks such as Master And Servant.

 

Going back to those who most clearly owe a debt to Russolo a key paradigm shift is away from music being something solely played by traditional instruments to it being created from noise-sounds. In 1976 Schaeffer wrote (distilling ideas he had been refining for 20 years) ‘The sound object, which may be any possible audible sound, is that which ranges from natural sounds to the noises of civilisation, from animal cries to human words”, meanwhile Trevor Wishart begins his 1994 book Audible Design by stating “Any sound whatsoever may be the starting material for a musical composition”. 

 

An obvious difference between Russolo and those that followed is in the means of producing noise-sounds with the former creating sounds from scratch in a perfomative setting with his hand cranked Intonarumori whilst in much Musique Concrète and Electroacoustic music pre-recorded sounds are manipulated. The manipulation of the Concrète would seem to be fundamental to the very identity of Musique Concrète, but as with Russolo the aim was never to imitate the sound by for example simple playback (with all the caveats about recorded sound being a representation of a sound and not the sound itself) but rather to create source material with which to experiment. As the practices of Musique Concrète morphed into those of Electroacoustic music computers rather than tape machines began to have an ever greater role and effectively became sophisticated instrument to ‘play’ noise-sounds. So if Russolo can be credited with the ‘invention’ of the noise-sound what of composition. 

 

 

4 Composing Noise-Sound

 

How might we organise noise-sounds. Though the origin and inspiration for noise-sounds be it in the roaring city or the babbling countryside may be chaotic or even random Russolo is clear that in terms of composition noise-sounds are to be tightly organised writing of “combing noises” and “selecting, coordinating and controlling all the noises” which “through a fantastic association of the different timbres and rhythms…will obtain the most complex and novel emotions of sound.” On timing in particular Russolo argues that “musicians, being freed from traditional and facile rhythms, must find in noise the means of expanding and renewing itself, given that every noise offers a union of the most diverse rhythms”. 

 

Russolo’s writing conjures an image of layered, controlled and composed noise-sound, alive with rhythmical excitations inspired by noise. Such is the exuberance of Russolo’s polemic one can almost hear this new music just out of earshot – almost. We shouldn’t however underestimate the task that Russolo was setting himself for though he positions noise-sound in a trajectory of the then developments in classical music the new vocabulary of noise-sounds would presumably require whole new forms of assembly. Russolo was keen to identify a dominant pitch in the noise-sounds produced by his various Intonarumori, but countering this was an encouragement of the exploration of microtones and glissandi with the instruments having two controls a simple crank handle to activate the mechanism, and a lever to vary the sound. If the Intonarumori would be unsuited to playing Beethoven’s 5th then equally all the musical apparatus of harmony, counterpoint, indeed the very language of music (up to that point) would need rethinking for noise-sounds. 

 

In most (conventional) music(s) several sounds/notes/instruments will occur simultaneously, but this is made possible in the context of a tightly controlled musical structure that defines the relationship between the sounds both vertically as in say the notes of a chord, and horizontally as in a chord progression. This is the beauty and the tragedy of much conventional music as once we know the formula and even internalise the logic it can quickly excite and fizz pulling us along in its train, but it can then also just as quickly tire as we find ourselves musically and emotionally dragged from one chord to the next in an increasingly predictable progression. Whilst nuances of execution and production can provide even the simplest of structures as those found in pop music with seemingly endless variations in the end it all becomes rather like drinking fizzy cheap lager in the hot sun - you just end up more thirsty.         

 

If noise-sound offers the promise of a quick escape from such strictures and structures we are left with the question of how exactly do we compose both horizontally and vertically. What are the parameters, why should any noise-sound go on top or under another, or indeed precede or follow it?  

 

Russolo looked to adapt the traditional methods of music scoring to suit the new music he wished to create and provides a couple of pages of examples along with a supporting commentary that suggests not only the limitations of conventional scoring without the addition of complex extra notation, but that Russolo favoured an overlaid form in which one set of sounds slide into another. Russolo’s compositional techniques, was underpinned by a classification of noise-sounds into "six families of noise": 

 

1: Roars, Thunderings, Explosions, Hissing roars, Bangs, Booms

2: Whistling, Hissing, Puffing

3: Whispers, Murmurs, Mumbling, Muttering, Gurgling

4: Screeching, Creaking, Rustling, Buzzing, Crackling, Scraping

5: Noises obtained by beating on metals, woods, skins, stones, pottery, etc.

6: Voices of animals and people, Shouts, Screams, Shrieks, Wails, Hoots, Howls, Death rattles, Sobs

 

Russolo felt these groupings represented sets of fundamental noises or building blocks from which all or any noise-sounds could be constructed through combination. Each Intonarumori was designed so as to be able to play or create sounds inspired by but not imitative of those in each family.

 

This model provides for a basic logic to noise-sound production though still offers little to answer the hows and whys of composition. We should of course be careful in suggesting that there might be a single answer or method to noise-sound composition, but a methodology or methodologies is needed if we are to achieve more than washes or walls of sound.

 

In industrial and post-industrial music the restatement of noise as noise often as not provides its own structure with sounds simply overlaid and/or overdriven to create walls of self-consciously abrasive texture. There is usually movement in the blocks that comprise the wall of sound indeed there needs to be sufficient to maintain an ongoing sense of edge throughout the 20 minutes or so of an LP side, but whilst continually refreshing the cacophonous energy is more difficult than it might seem nonetheless composition per se is often eschewed. 

 

The vacuum created by this lack of compositional engagement is in part filled by the continual restatement of noise as noise epithet and the previously mentioned accompanying dystopian visual and aesthetic contextualisation. Audiences often declare that such recordings and live performances offer a cathartic cleansing and there may be something to be said for this form of alternative ambient assault on the senses. A live noise performance on a large high quality sound system can be something like a fairground ride as one’s insides are literally shaken and jiggled by the audio with the performers intently twiddling knobs or screaming into microphones and/or labouring over metal sheets. It can be a grand coup de theatre that foregrounds the physiological effects of sound above and beyond other more musical properties. 

 

So what of other approaches to the composition of noise-sound? The inheritors of the Russolo approach would logically be the Musique Concrète  of Schaeffer and Henry. Schaeffer writing in his journals in 1948 as he begins to explore the possibilities of sound echoes Russolo in his quest for a “symphony of noises”. Exploring a range of sound making possibilities from traditional instruments to bicycle bells, and trains as with Russolo and his six families of noise Schaeffer moves towards a categorisation of sound in a bid to establish a new vocabulary. Through a period of extended experimentation with recordings of various sounds Schaeffer gradually formulates a definition of a unit of sound he calls the ‘sound object’.  

 

The theorisation of the sound object was refined and developed over the rest of Schaeffer’s life and required a number of intellectual somersaults The root cause for this somersaulting is that unlike Russolo who was inspired by the noises he heard around him but sought not to imitate them but to extract what was of interest and create noise-sounds (using new instruments) Schaeffer was working with actual recorded sounds – originally on locked groove discs and then magnetic tape. 

 

A recorded sound is a representation of a sound rather than the original sound itself, mediated on a technological level by the apparatus of recording and playback, and on a phenomenological level by the context of playback. Nonetheless the recorded sound speaks to and seeks to be imitative of the original sound. Not only that but it repeatedly calls to a causal relationship between the original vibratory source of the sound and what we are hearing – be it somebody striking with a hammer, playing a guitar, the creaking of a door, the puff of the engine as a train leaving the station and so on. 

 

Far from being made available as a potential flexible contributor to a symphony of noises the recorded sound is by definition captured and constrained. Like a specimen awaiting dissection Schaeffer found that through a range of processes such as editing fragments of the sound and then repeating them, or removing the attack portion of a bell sound he could to an extent liberate sounds from their imitative causal relationship. The manipulated sounds could then be put to the service of composition as  Concrète elements. The process was far from straightforward though and Schaeffer was continually seized with doubts and caught in a double bind whereby he firstly found interest in a particular set of sounds such as those of a train (for his Etude au Chemin de Fer), and then was frustrated by not being able to easily free the sounds from their causal origins with the results in danger of becoming either “anecdotal” an/or “dramatic”.  It is perhaps a little uncharitable to suggests that if you use railways sound as yours source material and then call your piece Etude au Chemin de Fer that then one shouldn’t be surprised if it impels the listener towards recognition of the original sound and potentially a dramatic reading of it. 

 

In practice Etude au Chemin de Fer which is credited as being the first ever piece of Musique Concrète is delightful but compositionally relatively straightforward in first isolating and then looping the off-beat rhythms (steam) trains make as they rattle over the tracks, puff and stamp as they tackle gradients, heave and pull out of stations and so on. The rhythmical sections are cut together with assorted whistles and steam exhalations, which provide short pauses between. The source material is instantly recognisable as being railway sounds, and indeed this would continue to be the case in a significant proportion of Schaeffer’s output. The theoretical abstracted sound object freed from its causal source recording would seem to have been more an aspiration than an actuality, what is of interest is how the off-beat rhythms would influence and one might go so far as to say unintentionally provide a template for how the samples in subsequent Musique Concrète pieces would be structured.

 

Turning to Schaeffer’s diary detailing his research as he starts to assemble the sections of Etude au Chemin de Fer he is at first dissatisfied with the rhythms of the engines “We are momentarily filled with enthusiasm. In reality, when we listen again, impartially, to what we have composed, obtained after long hours of patience, all we find is a crude concentration of rhythmic groups resistant to any regular rhythm”.  Schaeffer is seeking to impose traditional musical value on the material “I imagined I had extracted a three-four, a six-eight from the moving coach”. Specifically it is the irregularity of the train rhythm that is seen as a disadvantage “The train beats its own time, perfectly clear but perfectly irrational. The most monotonous of trains has constant variations of rhythm. It never plays in time. It changes into a series of isotopes”. But then there is a moment of revelation “what subtle musical pleasure a practiced ear could find learning to listen to, to play this new-style Czerny! Then, without the help of any melody, any harmony, you would only need to be able to discern and savour, in the most mechanistic monotony, the interplay of a few atoms of freedom, the imperceptible improvisations of chance . . . “. 

 

It is a good few chapters on in the diary before Schaeffer fully acknowledges “that my mistake had been in going back to musical instruments, musical notattion, musical thought patterns. Going back to noise would in fact have been the surest way to find solid, and at least unexplored, ground.“

 

If we attempt to represent the train rhythms in Etude au Chemin de Fer as text we might get – ratata tat ratata tat ratata tat tat, thwump, chop, huff, hump, thwump, chop, huff, hump, titoo, titoo, titoo, titoo, and so on. Two quick observatrions can be made the first would be the similarity such text has with Marinetti’s  Zang Tumb Tuuum, which of course inspired Russolo the second would be that these machine rhythms are precisely what  Russolo had in mind when he spoke of  “every noise offers a union of the most diverse rhythms”.

 

Somewhere between the irregular train rhythms and the vinyl locked grooves and tape loops of Schaeffer’s repeated phrases we get the origins of the rhythmic patterning one finds in so much electroacoustic music. It has a start-stop feel often punctuated by sudden rapid accelerations and then descending crescendos. Variations on this style of rhythmic patterning can also be found in improvised, algorithmic, generative, and electronic music. It is so prevalent that hardly anybody ever mentions it. 

 

Contemporary software such as Max/MSP and Pure Data offer a host of tools and patches to help produce sequences with varying degrees of randomness in terms of pitch, rhythm, tone and texture. Similarly what Schaeffer was striving for in terms of breaking sounds up into fragments or atoms that could then be re-arranged to create new sounds separated if not divorced from their sources is the principle behind a host of granular synthesis apps. 

 

So making music that embodies aspects of Russolo’s quest for an exploration of noise-sound and indeed his and Schaeffer’s imagined orchestra of noises has become from a technological perspective much easier. The would-be noise-sound composer may have been technologically enabled, possibly even too much so, but still faces the key compositional challenge of how to assemble noise-sounds vertically and horizontally.

Recent Reviews

 A couple of recent reviews to keep the spirits topped up. Firstly Ed Pinsent's take on Not Even My Closes Friends. 

Songs of Friendship

Latest gem from Philip Sanderson is Not Even My Closest Friends (SNATCH TAPES tch 221), this time released as a limited edition cassette tape. In some ways following on previous outing Rumble Of The Ruins, it’s another set of electro-pop songs, carefully composed and layered, all performed and sung by Sanderson.

Once again assured melodic tunes and a user-friendly surface hook the listener in, and at one level the closest comparison might be Sparks (as already identified by another online reviewer), and not just because of the keyboards and multi-tracked vocal parts but also the shrewd knowing tone in the semi-ironic lyrics, which just happen to be littered with enough pop culture references to fill Greil Marcus’ Dustbin Of History. It so happens that our man has blogged about the creation of this album and those inclined to learn more can view a series of posts he wrote in June-July 2021, printing the lyrics to each song and detailing the circumstances of its creation. Even a cursory skim here will yield a rich harvest of unexpected influences and ideas, including Genesis, Throbbing Gristle, sea shanties, British Cinema of the 1950s, Kraftwerk, Aleister Crowley, Marc Bolan…and that’s not counting the “shopping list” styled song ‘Idol Ferry’ which drops so many ultra-charged names into the magic hat that previous contenders Bill Joel, REM, Paul Simon, and Bob Dylan just wither into tiny raisins…and all this is without taking into account the song-craft, studio technique and technical ability with synths, software, drum machines and sequencers that Sanderson weaves together with an almost invisible skill.

There’s a certain modesty and charm that conceals this skill; there’s no keyboard solos or other musical flourishes, and all the effort is poured into the song’s construction, each layer adding the precise degree of desired inflection or musical mood to the overall piece. When faced with the familiar producer’s dilemma of having too many good tracks to work with, the composer stoically sighs “you have to choose which child to sacrifice” as he shelves an immaculately recorded instrumental part simply because it doesn’t fit the overall scheme. (Perhaps Brian Wilson should have applied this line of thought in 1966, instead of allowing those multiple takes of ‘Good Vibrations’ or ‘Heroes and Villains’ to grow out of control). Elsewhere, our self-effacing singer comments on how he keeps his own vocal mannerisms in check with a simple “you can have too much chocolate in your box”. The net result of all this work is a number of imaginative and distinctive pop songs (and one instrumental) which will bear repeated listening for many years, and even on early plays one can discern the slightly dark and discordant elements lurking in the background of these otherwise brightly-coloured pop tones, elements which have evidently been layered in with consummate care.

Conceptually rich, NEMCF deserves to be regarded as an intelligent, informed recasting of selected moments from pop/rock music history into new and exciting forms, in a process which has to my mind been matched only by such luminaries as David Thomas and Kraftwerk. 09/03/2022 Ed Pinsent

...and Frans De Waard from Vital Weekly 1322 on the Passionate Particles CD.

PHILIP SANDERSON - PASSIONATE PARTICLES (CD by Klanggalerie)

I like Austria's Klanggalerie label because they are not strictly a re-issue label, even when a considerable part of their catalogue is about giving old releases a new life. They also like their old artists to release new music, which is great. Please don't stick to your old guns, but also care about new music, as we will see today and in the next few weeks; I got a few of their recent releases. Today I'd like to start with Philip Sanderson. As you may know, Sanderson began his musical career in the late 70s with the Storm Bugs and his Snatch Tapes label. For many years he worked his own name (next to a more ambient oriented side project as Ice Yacht), and 'Passionate Particles' can be seen as a re-issue but not of one particular old release. Rather, it is a collection of pieces from the last twenty years that found their way to a plethora of formats (LP, cassettes, downloads, CDR). I enjoyed Storm Bugs in the past, but Sanderson's work is totally my thing. It is a no-brainer that I picked his album first from the bundle of Klanggalerie. Since the release of 'On One Of Those Bends' (Vital Weekly 1177), I have paid particular attention to his work. There is something lovely pop music about his work. I recently (Vital Weekly 1290; two of the pieces from that cassette are also on this CD) connected to Sparks, especially in his vocal delivery. That is not yet as strong on the sixteen pieces on 'Passionate Particles', except for the two pieces from Not Even My Closest Friends', but poppy it certainly is. Not the naff kind that is popular with the kids these days, but lovely music for adults. All electronic and sometimes instrumental bring a fine balance to the album. I would think that if you love Sparks or The Residents (who have a strong presence in the Klanggalerie as well), Sanderson's music will go down well, even without the guitar parts that these days seem to play a more significant role with The Residents (so I am told, not being the biggest fan there; odd, come to think of it). Sanderson's music isn't per se uptempo and upbeat, but moody and introspective, next to being quirky and pleasant; another excellent act of balancing there. Obviously, you'd find none of these tunes in any top ten, which is a great pity. This is precisely the sort of music that deserves a bigger audience; if only the world would listen! Today it rained a lot, but this release put a big smile on my face. It went straight to repeat, just as yesterday. Next up is some more of his music, as I call it a day and I want to enjoy some more wacky tunes! (FdW)

Passionate Particles CD

As part of a bunch of new-year CD releases from Klanggalerie which includes archive recordings by Robert Rental, and Frith’s Skeleton Crew comes Passionate Particles an hour-long compilation of instrumentals and songs by yours truly from the last 21 years. 

 

The16 tracks, which are drawn from LP, CD, cassette, and download releases made between 2000 and 2021 reflect the various strands of my output, so as well as Sanderson tracks one also gets four Ice Yacht numbers, and two pieces that originally appeared on Storm Bugs releases.

Throughout the 21 years various pieces of hardware and software have come and gone, but the overall methodology has remained largely unchanged. Whatever the set-up almost every track began life as a quick ‘live’ (live in the studio that is) take.  In a couple of cases namely "Lay-by Lullaby" and "Feeding Time" the original single take is what you hear, but in most cases there followed many hours of editing. This is especially true of the songs. 

 

Given that editing and selection is a key element in the process I have favoured computer programmes that facilitate cutting over multitrack recording.  Back in 2000 I was using Sound Edit 16 whose real world paradigm was a film magnetic sound stripe. It is what is known as a ‘destructive’ editor. Once you change something that is pretty much it. I liked the way this forces you to make decision (even if you regret some later) and when Sound Edit 16 disappeared along with OS9 I embraced Sound Studio which is very similar, but has endless undos, the ability to use Audio Unit plug-ins and so on. 

 

So lets run through the tracks.

 

1. Lay-by Lullaby 

My ‘return’ to music making (after 7 or so years concentrating on installations) was made on a Mac bought in late 1997. I had no other hardware to speak of and anyway liked the idea of doing everything in/on the computer. The Mac didn’t come with any music making software but the programmer at Apple David Van Brink who had overseen the implementation of QuickTime music had independently made available a small app called wbl4014. The wbl4014 allows you to access all the QuickTime Musical Instrument parameters and sequence them. A quirky programme without instruction one can do a surprising amount with the wbl4014 albeit the app doesn’t record so one had to organise one’s sequences and then play them back live recording the output to another machine or in my case a mini disk player. The wbl4014 is well suited to short repetitive phrases and is mildly addictive I recorded numerous tracks with it but found myself distilling many of the ideas down into one piece that reminded me both of some of the soundtrack music I had recorded in the 1980s as well as aspects of Ralf and Florian era Kraftwerk when they still combined acoustic with electronic instruments. I decided to make the Dusseldorf suggestion overt and go with the parody motorik title "Lay-by Lullaby". The somewhat thin sounding QuickTime Musical Instruments are supplemented by Moog bass and Melotron string samples. Watch out for the banjo part. Original released as a CD-R in 2000 and mostly sent to friends.

   

2. Omeletto 

Following the release of the Storm Bugs archive recordings on the CD Lets Go Outside And Get it Over, Steven (Ball) and I felt the inevitable urge to make some new Storm Bugs music. We didn’t collaborate on the recordings in the conventional sense, but both of us recorded our own tracks with Storm Bugs’s hats on with the 'idea' of Storm Bugs as a loose frame of reference.  An album’s worth of material was recorded from which Walter at Klanggalerie selected 4 tracks for a vinyl EP released in 2002. "Omeletto" is one of the numbers from the EP and is made up from loops assembled in Soundedit 16. The vocals sounds are all manipulations of the word egg.

 

3. Feeding Time

I continued to use the wbl4014 for a number of years When talking about equipment it is easy to slip into technological determinism, but it is more a case of finding software (even if limited) whose underpinning paradigm in some way resonates with one’s musical thinking. I tried umpteen apps at this time, but found myself coming back to the wbl4014. "Feeding Time" is the second track on the CD recorded in one take using the wbl4014. One reviewer compared aspects of the track to chip tune music used in early video games, but having never played video games I was thinking perhaps more of the little runs and riffs that fruit machines make between payouts, or to entice you to put in more money. The jaunty tune designed for feeding fish to seals at the zoo nods to Delia Derbyshire and the BBC Radiophonic Music Workshop. Originally released on The Seal Pool Sounds CD on Seal Pool records with thanks to John Podeszwa.

 

4. Body Snatcher & 5. Crystal Set 

Crystal Set was recorded around the same time as the Seal Pool material (2005/6) but was not included on the CD as there was a touch of noticeable distortion at the beginning of many of the lead line notes. Six years later I still liked the track and its Kraftwerk as played by Joe Meek feel and tried editing out the distorted sections. This was harder than it should have been as the tracks was recorded in one take and mixed down so it meant losing part of the rhythms as well. A slight jump then occurs here and there rather like an old film slipping in the gate, but this seemed in keeping with the overall period feel. Originally released on the Hollow Gravity vinyl LP in 2012 on the Puer Gravy label (a short lived enterprise by Eric Lumbleau and Matt Castill the people behind the Mutant Sounds blog). 
 

 6. Down A Denny Lane & 7. Kite

The first songs on the compilation. I had written songs (of sorts) for the original incarnation of Storm Bugs as well as the Naomi, Swoon Baboon and subsequent projects, but from 2000 to 2014 my solo output was exclusively instrumental (if one discounts sampled voices). I was initially a little cautious about singing worried my voice was too reedy, out of tune, etc. There was also the concern that the small audience might be alienated by the more ‘poppy’ aspect of the songs. 

 

Writing the songs was relatively straightforward for rather than working with a chord sequence I found that by simply singing over a sequence some kind of tune would quickly emerge that could then be honed down. The lyrics were often shaped by then repeatedly singing the tune back to myself as I walked to work (or wherever), quickly scribbling the words down in a notebook before I forgot them. "Down A Denny Lane", and "Kite" are also the first tracks on the CD to use analogue hardware rather than software, though sonically you would be hard pressed to notice the difference from the tracks on which software synthesizers are used. Originally released by Snatch Tapes on the Back Projection album. This was my first download only release, which as I soon learnt was something of a guarantee or reaching as small an audience as possible.  

 

8. Racing The Arctic Shadow & 9. Summer With The Snow Bees 

Having now developed a song based output I still was recording numerous sometimes lengthy instrumentals. I revived a pseudonym from the old Snatch Tapes days namely Ice Yacht (who appeared on Snatch 3) as a vehicle for releasing the material. A fanciful narrative was constructed about the master tapes having been discovered in some permafrost after Ice Yacht had gone on a trip sometime in the early '80s to retrace the journey of Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen to the North Pole. The story was implausible and I doubt one person believed it to be true unlike the Claire Thomas & Susan Vezey saga. Appropriately enough cassettes were once more back in fashion and Fragment Factory in Germany released Pole of Cold on a snow white tape.  

 

10. Pity The Small 

A late addition to The Storm Bugs Certified Original and Vintage Fakes album. The track began as an instrumental nod towards Laurie Spiegel and uses the Metasynth slicer to rearrange a short synth sequence into numerous different patterns which were then overlaid. It is that continuously evolving whilst standing still paradigm. The lyrics are reworked and developed from an early (and rather different) version of the song recorded in the early 2000s.  

 

11 View From A Hill  & 12. Rumble Of The Ruins 

I contributed an early version of View From A Hill to a Linear Obsessional Christmas 2017 compilation, which had as inspiration the MR James ghost stories. The idea of the landscape as palimpsest infuses and informs many of the lyrics I’ve recorded. The whole idea of the hauntological has been very much into vogue in recent years. I view the enthusiasm for all things Weird Britain with a little bemusement as of course Steven and I were exploring such themes albeit on Super 8 film back in the 1980s before such things were fashionable.  Both tracks are from the Rumble of The Ruins cassette released in 2020.

 

13. Slow Water 

Somebody somewhere is no doubt already working on a thesis whose subject is the moody and reflective albums made during lockdown. In my case I was taking longish walks including across Rye harbour, which obliquely fed into the making of the instrumental Ice Yacht Pillbox cassette in 2020. Comparisons will possibly be made with the work of Mr. Brian Eno, but the loose inspiration for the track was not the big E but Walt Rockman’s library record Underwater Vol 1. Indeed there is a whole sub genre of underwater library records presumably to compliment the increasing amount of Jaques Cousteau type underwater footage that was shot from the 1950s onwards..  

 

14. Morphover & Curl, and 15. Swing 

Two songs from the 2021 album Not Even my Closest Friends. Both are good examples of how songs were conjured from the smallest of fragments. In the case of "Swing" the stating point was the ¾ electronic sequence you hear right at the end of the track and for "Morphover & Curl" it was a 4 note bass line that was overlaid on itself multiple times, each time at a higher frequency until a sequencer type patter emerged. A few weeks and countless overdubs later and the tracks took shape.     

 

16. Colour Buffer.

The early Storm Bugs tracks made extensive use of the VCS3. It is many years since I have fondled the knobs of the ‘real thing’ but the paradigm of the matrix patch bay and joystick translates well into software and "Colour Buffer" (taken from the 2021 album of the same name) uses a software VCS3, a sequencer and a previously made recording of some interference. The VCS3 envelope was set to self-trigger (or loop), this then interacted with the trigger from the external sequencer creating a more fluid rhythm than the simple repeated pattern one gets with just a sequencer alone. The recorded interference was fed to various parts of the VCS3 so it is filtered and shaped dynamically with the signal. The whole thing was recorded in one 17-minute take, which was then edited down to the length you hear here.