The latest release from Brighton sound artist Simon James was recorded at Cathedral Quarry in the Lake District. Its first four pieces are essentially unadorned field recordings made in a cave, full of chilly atmospherics and incessantly dripping water, evoking a sense of vast space but also a macroscopic focus on miniature events. The final piece, ‘Exquisite Friction (Binaural)’, was made with a double mid-side microphone and transforms the cave ambience to trace outlines and alien textures, blending metallic tones and watery subterranean depth. Released 20 March 2024.
Simon James recently worked with local residents to create Neolithic Cannibals, a multidisciplinary arts initiative taking place at Brighton’s Lighthouse Project Space between 4 and 19 May – visit www.lighthouse.org.uk for more details.
FOUND OBJECT – EVERY SILVER LINING
Found Object is the alias of Pete Allen, a former drummer who makes rhythmic instrumental electronic music that nods squarely in the direction of a certain legendary Düsseldorf quartet while also isolating the emotive melodic qualities of early 1980s synth pop. Not for Allen banks of vintage gear – all of the tracks here made using the iPhone Beatwave app. Tracks like the astute and moving ‘Silver Lining’ carry a rhythmic firmness and emotional turbulence of Depeche Mode’s ‘Nothing To Fear’, while ‘Mephisto’ (this writer’s personal favourite) stacks cyclical layers of icicle-sharp hooks on top of an unswerving beat that offers a sense of perpetual movement through the murky, neon-lit quarters of a thriving metropolis in the early hours.
Allen is also a frequent collaborator with powerful Kidderminster vocalist and electronic musician Jess Brett. Their ode to Berlin’s stately Unter den Linden thoroughfare is a triumphant pop moment for both artists.
Every Silver Lining was released 6 March 2024. Unter den Linden with Jess Brett was released 25 March 2024.
GVANTSA NARIM – CRUEL NATURE (Cruel Nature)
The latest album from Georgian sound artist Gvantsa Narimanidze derives its name from the label releasing it. Split into two long tracks, each lasting around twenty-five minutes, the album finds Narimanidze in deeply reflective mode. ‘Cruel’ offers a sort of sonic dualism, with drifting, ethereal, ascending tones occupying the upper registers and an unsettling, undulating drone and outline of a bass-heavy pulse operating as a foundation layer. ‘Nature’ adopts a similar pose, only its high end shapes are less uniformly soothing and its underpinning dronescape is more intensely restless. Released 29 March 2024.
THE NIGHT MONITOR – HORROR OF THE HEXHAM HEADS (Fonolith / Library Of The Occult)
Neil Scrivin has truly cornered the market in freaky electronic music inspired by unexplained phenomena and paranormal activity. His first collaboration with Library Of The Occult is inspired by two carved stone faces that appeared, inexplicably, in a Northumberland family garden in 1971, foreshadowing a bunch of strange activities that I’m far too disturbed by to search for on the internet. Scrivin has assuredly outdone himself this time, stripping his compositions back to almost skeletal forms. ‘The Witch’, one of my favourite pieces, pairs rich and resonant synth sweeps with scratchy, nails-on-glass screeching that had me glancing at the window to make sure nothing was trying to break in (and, for context, I was in a plane flying at 35,000 feet in the air at the time). The shortest interlude here, ‘How Does Your Garden Glow’, is one of the collection’s finest moments. It might last barely a minute but its edgy, metronomic pacing and unwinding, slowly-writhing melody is – no pun intended – wonderfully haunting. Released 5 April 2024.
SERMONS BY THE DEVIL – BAPTISM OF DESIRE
The latest album from New Jersey’s Sermons By The Devil arrives with a manifesto of sorts: “If free will is the last battleground of youth, then dancing is the most rebellious thing that can be done as humans.” These pieces are indeed danceable, though I found myself moving almost involuntarily to each one, leaving me wondering what free will I had in the face of these persuasive moments. Each of these tracks rely on subtle shifts and intense repetition. You will find tasting notes of Micro-phonies-era Cabaret Voltaire soundtracking a pagan muzak rave. The two opening tracks are among the best. ‘Black Magik’ carries itself on a low-slung, nagging bass-heavy rhythm with a sort of heavy, ritualistic intent. Swirling spirals of brooding synths act as an offset but this is a grubby, minimalistic and insistent track. Meanwhile, ‘Fetishes And Sacrifice’ mines a chunky electro beat overlaid with ground-out bass synths and intensely-worked, restless sweeps. At almost nine minutes it is an intense and often disorienting highlight, relentless and urgent In spite of its slow tempo. A wonderfully dark collection from the self-styled ‘official house band of the apocalypse.’ Released 11 April 2024.
I can think of no better way of describing the eclectic, diverse, inscrutable musical melting pot that was New York in the late 1970s and early 1980s than a moment recounted by Brooke Wentz in her book Transfigured New York, a collection of radio interviews made between 1980 and 1990.
Wentz, who presented a long-running, adventurous radio show called Transfigured Night on New York’s WKCR-FM, was interviewing dexterous avant garde jazz bassist Andrew Cyrille in September 1986. Cyrille was midway talking about spontaneity and improvisation. However, the interview needed to be cut short because Wentz’s next guest had arrived. That next guest was the composer John Cage. On one level you could see this event as two different generations passing each other, metaphorically perhaps, in the corridors of culture; I like to think that it actually demonstrates how many musical forms could co-exist and thrive simultaneously in New York. The Brazilian percussionist Cyro Baptista nails it when he describes the city as “a caldron of misfits from all over the planet.”
Manhattan, geographically, is an island of just 23 square miles. Small and compact when contrasted with sprawling cities like London or Los Angeles, it’s hard to think of anywhere else that’s contributed so much to music, and, within that so much so-called ‘experimental’ music. Wentz’s radio show acted as a critical portal into that unfolding cultural significance, while her interviews with key figures – selected and collated in Transfigured New York – were illuminating insights into the motivations and works of figures that operated on music’s wild and essential fringes.
Wentz began her radio show in 1980. Starting then was important, as it allowed her to catch some of the architects of contemporary music before they passed away, or before resonant personalities like La Monte Young became reticent about being routinely interviewed. Her interviews with some of electronic music’s founding fathers – the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center team of Vladimir Ussachevsky and Otto Luening in particular – are illuminating and full of details that were new to me. They each shine a light on their atypical paths to electronic music, and how the earliest electronic studios were themselves started. One especially interesting area was around how progressive pioneers like Ussachevsky were with early computers, long before their use as creative – rather than functional – tools had been identified.
Transfigured New York is divided into nine sections – ‘The Founding Theorists’, ‘The Materials Scientists’, ‘The Composers’, ‘The Iconoclasts’, ‘The Vocalists’, ‘The Dissenters’, ‘The Popular Avant-Garde’, ‘The Global Nomads’, ‘The Performance Artists’. These are convenient, but relatively arbitrary groupings given how fluid New York’s cultural diaspora was, and how welcoming a city it was for visiting performers such as Ravi Shankar. Each interview is also accompanied by smaller, Post-It Note-style excerpts. These footnotes – with everyone from Meredith Monk to Ikue Mori to Zeena Parkins – aren’t in any way indications of lesser importance, but they go a long way to reflecting how many individuals were hard at work setting up New York as the crucible of post-War creativity.
As Wentz’s show – and her musical research – evolved, she began embracing African music. The latter interviews of the book bring this personal interest to life. She excitedly recounts a trip to Africa and hanging out at Baba Maal’s Senegalese home while there. Happily, for Wentz, New York’s ever-evolving music frontier was also embracing broader cultural inputs more or less simultaneously, and her radio interview with Maal is undoubtedly among Wentz’s most impassioned conversations.
Comprehensive though Transfigured New York is, I was left feeling that there were other sides to this story that need to be told. Interviews with Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo, Rhys Chatham and Glenn Branca each highlight how easily the so-called avant garde meshed with No Wave. Wentz hints at that when interviewing Peter Gordon about his Love Of Life Orchestra : “You’ve said that the group is an attempt to create a ‘democratic music’ that includes people from all sorts of backgrounds – classical music, rock, funk, poetry, rock, funk, poetry, visual art. That seems like a pretty good reflection of the city’s downtown scene.”
We get a tantalising glimpse, again, of how possible it was for different scenes to cohabit when artist Mikel Rouse talks about Philip Glass performing at Peppermint Lounge, and Glass himself talking about how his arpeggio-filled minimalist classical music was embraced by rock music fans. The apparent inconsistency between reading a wonderfully in-depth interview with John Cage where he talks about not enjoying noise, and another with Glenn Branca where he talks about Cage appreciating the volume he operated at quite honestly blowed my mind, but my mind was blown on almost every page of this engaging, near-exhaustive collection.
Ultimately, what Wentz’s book reaffirms is that New York, during the period she covers, was a small island with some of the biggest ideas and contributions. These first-hand accounts are among the most illuminating pieces I’ve ever read with players that often feel inaccessible. To have so many of them all surveyed in one book, just like the sheer number of important experimental musical figures who have been active in Manhattan, is a gift to us all.
Words: Mat Smith
Transfigured New York by Brooke Wentz was published November 16 2023. With sincere thanks to Meredith Howard at Columbia University Press, Gretchen Koss at Tandem Literary and Reed Hays.
Today we hand over the keys to Further. to Nicholas Langley, founder of Brighton’s Third Kind Records. The label celebrated their 10th birthday on 3rd September. Congratulations to Nick and all the artists who have released incredibly diverse electronic music through TK over the past decade – and here’s looking forward to the next ten years.
“Even for the purposes of one of these anniversary type articles it’s impossible for me to chose some key releases from the eighty plus we’ve made over the past ten years. Every single release came about because I loved it for one reason or another and wanted to bring it to the ears of a few more people. Sometimes it was just a handful of people and other times it was quite a fair few – there never seems to be any real rhyme or reason to that. One thing is apparent to me now, that play stats and sales figures are no indicator of the real impact on human listeners out there. So anyway, instead of making an arbitrary selection myself, I asked some regular artists on the label which were their favourites.”
“Mind Control is a captivating release from Third Kind’s catalogue. The album is boundary-pushing, emotive, and intelligently crafted. I will never be indifferent to ‘You’d Better Wake Up Girlfriend’s melody and weird straight groove. More than that, Mind Control holds a special place in my heart as it was while listening to it that I decided to send my Notebook demos to the label.”
“In a personality-defining trip to Canterbury in the early ‘90s I visited my mates in a student house they shared with Nick Langley, now the label boss of Third Kind. One afternoon in the beige-carpeted living room, cushioned in a heady mix of ganja smoke, daytime TV, tea and buttered toast and half-heard conversations about alien abduction, Nick and his friend Dave Dilliway (fellow band member of Pharagonesia) played an impromptu ‘gig’ on a Yamaha SY85, mini-Korg and effects-laden electric guitar. The incredible music, which features on the 2021 release Geocentrics, opened my mind to the idea that music wasn’t just made by people with loads of cash and expensive studio set ups – I could try to make this kind of awesome electronic music in my own bedroom! Particular highlights are ‘Metropolis’, with its rapid distorted bass stabs, and the sublime ‘Geocentrics Theme’, with its perfect bass loops and melodic chimes. During the same visit Nick played me Aphex Twin’s seminal Selected Ambient Works 1985 – 1992 album. I moved to Canterbury soon after and the rest is history.”
“I love this album, but it’s hard to explain why. I love it enough that I named all the tracks of one of my own albums after the track names of this album. I don’t really understand how it was made. It has mystery, which is what I love. It says something in the notes about ‘fractal’ and ‘computer assisted’ but obviously with a human ear for beauty.”
“I fell in love with this album exactly 17 seconds in, as soon as I heard Hattie sing ‘Seriously…’ over those watery synth chords on the opening track ‘Shut Your Mouth’. Having only become aware of Hattie’s work through The Sleepers I was completely unprepared for the intimate, confessional nature of her songwriting and her fantastic voice which reminded me of Tracey Thorn’s. The stripped-back nature of the production only serves to enhance the feeling of a friend whispering secrets into your ear whilst strumming a guitar or playing a keyboard. Masterpiece, pure and simple.”
“I was really drawn to Ffion’s Unfurling because of the artwork. Something about it promised a melancholy and otherworldly experience. And that’s exactly what you get. Arpeggios that rise and fall like waves lapping the shore, this album is a whole seascape of hope and then fear, calm and then intensity, contentedness and then longing. It’s beautiful work.”
FFION (THOMAS RAGSDALE): Andy Fosberry – When Comfort Is Stranger (2020)
“I’d definitely have to pick Andy Fosberry’s When Comfort Is Stranger album because of its incredibly wide palette of sound ranging from tender strings and piano to clicky drum tracks. I’ve loved Andy’s stuff for years, but for me this one opened a bigger door into his world and musical vision. It’s got a great uniform sound to it and clearly comes from the same sessions, but nothing ever outstays its welcome.”
ANDY FOSBERRY: Sussex Telecom – Creator Warehouse (2022)
“Sussex Telecom is a used future of organic machine music from Skynet’s time displacement portal. Layers of drum machines, late stage first wave analog synthesisers, misbehaving 16-bit samples and often non-linear arrangements weave paths that your ears just have to follow. A beautiful, essential postcard from the present past of textural electronica. Favourite track: ‘Night’.”
PORTLAND VOWS (BOB PLANT): Bary Center – Guide Me Through The Hills Of Your Home (2020)
“I’ll be honest: the first thing that drew me to Bary Center’s 2020 Guide Me Through The Hills Of Your Home was the wonderful cover art, but it was the music that kept me there. These pieces have an almost tangible weight, something dark and warm you can almost hold. ‘Aforementioned Weaknesses’ and ‘Roots Of The System’ are especially evocative for me, especially now that Autumn is approaching. But all of these tracks offer something special.”
BARY CENTER (MARK WILLIAMS): Nicholas Langley – Final Wave (2019)
“For me, Nicholas Langley’s Final Wave encapsulates the entire Third Kind vibe in one record. Probably because Nick is the founder and curator of Third Kind, haha. Everything from giddy chiptune to dark ambient synth to intricate IDM, all born of artistic independence and sonic exploration. Like the entire Third Kind catalogue, Final Wave is playful, moody, weird, and warrants a lifetime of listening.”
GRAHAM DUNNING: H.L. Collins – Creating Friction (2015)
“Henry Collins’ Creating Friction is one of my favourite objects – I have the lovely big yellow box displayed on my bookshelves, and have had since I acquired a copy. Henry’s work has long been an inspiration and the tapes of the Creating Friction installations especially so. Chaotic scraping, drones and an otherworldly reverberation from various large junk metal sculptures.”
“Without meaning to sound sycophantic, Hz’s Sci-Fi Rains & Heartaches is an all-time favourite. It has that Blade Runner thing about it that’s hard to resist. And the minimal cassette sleeve has a personal feel, like receiving a handwritten letter in the post.”
TRIUM CIRCULORUM: Erm & Nickname – Erm & Nickname (2017)
“I got in touch with Third Kind Records for the first time a good few years ago. Nick did a giveaway for TK’s 333rd Twitter follower which was me. I received a massive pack of tapes soon after. The sound and physical media aesthetics resonated with me in a very deep way. From then on I bought a tape or two whenever I liked a release. The one I still love most is the Erm & Nickname album, an appealing set of cassette and CD with blissful psy-folk. The entire album has a sort of mushroom mood with songs coming over as detail rich collages. I love this release because it’s completely different from what I create.”
PETER HOGGARTH: Erm & Nickname – Erm & Nickname (2017)
“Dark psychedelic clouds gather at the fringes of a sepia tinged 70s English summer that never existed. Fave tracks ‘Wash Away’ and ‘If You Listen Very Carefully’. This record crops up on my iPod in shuffle mode quite often. I can’t quite place it, but it sounds familiar and is always a welcome pastoral delight.”
“For the full intended listening experience please use a cheap pair of headphones in the backseat of a car, bus, or in your bedroom,” advises the press release for Amy Cutler’s Sister Time. That instruction immediately transports you to a time and place before iPhones, Bluetooth earphones and all the comfortable trappings of modernity. For me, it takes me to the back of my parents’ car, listening to Kylie Minogue’s first album on a crappy Sanyo cassette player with uncomfortable orange foam stretched over the earpieces, only to find the batteries were running out and I hadn’t thought to bring spares.
Cutler’s cassette for Strategic Tape Reserve is a metaphorical duet between two of her selves, namely the person she is today and the person she was at the start of the 1990s. The source material for the 24 pieces here were mixtapes and other recordings made on a hi-fi she bought with the winnings from a drawing competition she entered as a child. This conversation between her youthful aspirations and her current sensibilities produces a collection which is both fragile, moving and also strangely unsettling.
The best example of that intended queasy feeling comes on ‘Sleeper Train To Nowhere’, featuring a looped and manipulated section of Coil’s brittle, emphatic ‘Cold Cell’ submerged under gauzy textures, unspooling sounds and heavily altered voices that sound like the ceaseless chattering of an uncertain mind. The album is interspersed with pieces like ‘It Is Only A Dream Of The Grass Blowing’ and ‘Lost Field, Empty Reins’ that have a mournful, choral dimension, full of fleeting, floating voices and untraceable field recordings, like tiny eulogies for lost and irreplaceable time. This is the domain of small loops, minor gestures, distressed fragments and obscured views.
These pieces, for me, are analogous to the concept of fading memories. There is something powerfully resonant in taking a preserved artefact, with all its attached recollections, hopes, dreams, innocence and associations, and trying to see (or hear) that world again from the vantage point of your changed self. Thought-provoking, uneasy listening from the mind(s) of Amy Cutler.
Sister Time by Amy Cutler was released 26 May 2023 by Strategic Tape Reserve
In a message to me accompanying a link to his new album, Switzerland-based electronic musician Rupert Lally cautioned that the collection was “VERY ambient.”
That sort of risk warning isn’t a problem for me. I’ve been listening to ambient music intently since the mid-1990s. I’ve always found it one of the most underrated, engaging genres of electronic music, and have always resisted the notion of it simply being sonic wallpaper. Neither is this unfamiliar territory for Lally, whose back catalogue is full of releases that offer the sort of weightless ephemerality that Multitudes floats upon.
The tools of Lally’s trade might be modular synths, but, for the most part, the tracks on Multitudes are informed by naturalistic sensibilities, with pieces named after wildernesses, rivers, beaches, woodlands and naturally-occurring phenomenon. Unlike the actual places that inspired Lally’s recent pastoral excursions through his local area (Wanderweg), these locations and events are entirely metaphorical, but they nonetheless highlight an artist completely at one with the natural world.
Lally is masterful composer of evocative melodies, and that’s evident here in spite of the tracks being constructed primarily from textural materials. One of the stand-out pieces, ‘Fjords’, might be presented under a drapery of intense reverb, but its core signifier is a sweeping, long-form melody that suggests an almost classical grandeur. The title track has a searching central refrain with a clean Fender Rhodes jazziness, held in place by the faintest trace of a rhythm. Elsewhere, the brief ‘Wasteland’ carries a sense of mournfulness and regret as it alights its attention upon an environment ravaged by the opposite of Lally’s respect for the natural world.
VERY ambient it maybe, but VERY good it also is. A beautiful, engaging, subtle and moving addition to Lally’s expansive catalogue.
Main Street Electrical Parade 7-inch (Disneyland, 1973)
Disneyland’s Main Street Electrical Parade is one of the most unusual parades presented anywhere in the world. More than a quarter of a million colorful, twinkling lights re-create scenes from many of Walt Disney’s most memorable film classics. A staff of 65 artists and craftsmen created the sparkling stages featured in the electrical pageant. Some of the brilliant units, powered by close to 75,000 watts of battery power, measure up to 14 feet in height and 75 feet in length. As for the music, the basic theme is titled ‘Baroque Hoedown’, around which a number of themes were interwoven as counter melodies.”
– Liner notes, The Main Street Electrical Parade picture disc 7-inch, 1973
First premiered in summer 1972 at Disneyland in Anaheim, California, the much-loved Main Street Electrical Parade was an innovative technological marvel, consisting of a series of slow-moving, brightly-lit parade vehicles covered in miniature electric bulbs, memorable Disney characters and a large vehicle in the shape of Pete’s Dragon. Their movement along the parade route was accompanied by a cheerful, bouncy electronic score using segments of familiar Disney themes. Those sections were laid on top of an obscure stepping stone on the journey to electronic pop: Jean-Jacques Perrey and Gershon Kingsley’s irrepressibly upbeat ‘Baroque Hoedown’, originally released on Kaleidoscopic Vibrations (Vanguard, 1967).
In its original format, the Main Street Electrical Parade ran at Disneyland for three years and then returned with an updated soundtrack in 1977. Its relaunch coincided with its parallel introduction to Walt Disney World, the vast Orlando, Florida resort that opened in 1971. Since then, the parade has had long periods of being a daily feature at many of the Disney parks worldwide, returning to Disneyland most recently for just under six months across the summer of 2022. Adding up attendance figures for Disney’s US theme parks during its various runs easily makes the soundtrack one of the most-heard pieces of electronic music ever created, with upwards of 75 million visitors having enjoyed the seamless blending of electronic pop and synthesiser versions of familiar Disney themes by 1998.
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Walt Disney World’s Electrical Water Pageant represents one of the most unusual concepts in entertainment pageantry seen anywhere in the world today. With the nighttime beauty of the ‘Vacation Kingdom’ as a backdrop, thousands of brilliant lights are utilized to create a spectacular water parade of imaginative creatures which include a sea serpent, dancing dolphins, flying fish, a spouting whale, an octopus, a giant squid, a turtle, and King Neptune in a chariot pulled by four frolicsome sea horses. As the ‘Creatures of the deep’ wind their way across the waters of Bay Lake and the Seven Seas Lagoon, the visual elements of the parade change as if by magic into a patriotic ribbon of giant American flags linked together by brilliant units of stars. The music accompanying the Pageant is a combination of various Disney and American patriotic melodies produced by an electronic Moog Synthesizer.
– Liner notes, The Electrical Water Pageant picture disc 7-inch, 1973
It’s often reported that the predecessor to the Main Street Electrical Parade at Disneyland was the Electrical Water Pageant at Walt Disney World in Florida. One of a small number of attractions still in operation today that premiered with the park’s opening in 1971, the pageant consists of a series of large connected barges, each containing 25-foot-tall screens filled with patterns of electrical lights arranged as sea creatures. These connected displays float across the manmade Seven Seas Lagoon, accompanied by a cheerful electronic accompaniment.
In reality, the Electrical Water Pageantdid premiere in 1971, but only for a private event. Its original music wasn’t specially arranged or composed for that event, and likely featured some pre-recorded music edited for that singular occasion. When the Electrical Water Pageant did become a nightly feature of the Seven Seas Lagoon, its signature electronic soundtrack was borrowed completely from the Main Street Electrical Parade, which debuted at Disneyland the year after Disneyworld opened.
Reading first-hand stories of the development of Walt Disney World by key Imagineers like Marty Sklar (Dream It! Do It!, 2013), it becomes clear that all of the Disney theme park energy in the late 1960s and early 1970s was being expended on the Florida park, largely at the expense of Disneyland. The Californian park was, by 1971, badly in need of attention and new reasons for guests to visit again. Disney president Card Walker, impressed by the Electrical Water Pageant concept after its one-off showing in Orlando, requested that a nighttime attraction be brought to Disneyland in an effort to encourage more guests to the park.
Electrical Water Pageant 7-inch (1973)
Responding to Walker’s instruction, Vice President of Entertainment for Disneyland and Walt Disney World Robert Jani (1934 – 1989) and project manager Ron Miziker set about creating what became the Main Street Electrical Parade. It would consist of one hundred vehicles and scores of performers, each wearing costumes covered with lights. In total, the Main Street Electrical Parade required almost half a million battery-operated, hand-painted miniature Italian lightbulbs, inspired by Christmas decorations that Disney executives had seen on Michigan Avenue in Chicago.
Another member of the Main Street Electrical Parade project team was Jack Wagner (1925 – 1995). Prior to arriving at Disney, Wagner had a storied career as an actor, radio presenter and DJ. He provided many of the original announcements that could be heard across both Disney resorts, including the fabled warning on the Monorail trains: “Please stand clear of the doors. Por favor manténgase alejado de las puertas,” – still more or less the same today, though Wagner’s original recording has long been replaced.
His role with Disneyland Entertainment was more extensive than just providing memorable voiceovers for attractions and transportation systems, however – he was directly responsible for overseeing music production in the park, including parade attractions like the Main Street Electrical Parade. For the new attraction, Wagner would work with Jim Christensen (1935 – 2020), Music Director for Disneyland Entertainment and an accomplished conductor, composer, arranger and trombonist.
There are differing accounts of what was proposed for the parade’s music. Wagner and Christensen both recalled that the original music proposal for the parade was to use an orchestral piece like ‘Night On Bald Mountain’ by Leopold Stokowski, which appeared in Walt Disney’s 1940 ambitious, experimental animated endeavour Fantasia, or something similarly dramatic. Other accounts suggest that Jani always intended to use an electronic score. Unfortunately, we’ll never now know for sure.
Perrey – Kingsley Kaleidoscopic Vibrations (1967)
One version of events can be found in the liner notes to Disney’s Electrical Parade, released to commemorate the introduction of a version of the parade at Disneyland’s California Adventure in 2001. According to those notes, the notion of an orchestral proposal jarred with Wagner. He thought that the use of orchestral music was out of character with the vibrant, modernist spectacle of the new parade, and, apocryphally, was given 48 hours to come up with a better idea. After scouring his personal record collection he alighted upon Kaleidoscopic Vibrations, the 1967 album of early electronic instrumentals by Jean-Jacques Perrey and Gershon Kingsley. Among arrangements of pieces like ‘Umbrellas Of Cherbourg’ and ‘Moon River’ was an irrepressible, upbeat Perrey – Kingsley original called ‘Baroque Hoedown’. That piece was proposed by Wagner for the fledgling Main Street Parade, and Christensen was tasked with creating a new version of ‘Baroque Hoedown’ to accompany the parade.
He enlisted Paul Beaver, best known as one half of the duo Beaver & Krause, to program Christensen’s new arrangement on a large modular Moog system at his Los Angeles studio. Beaver was an artist able to occupy many fields, often simultaneously. As a California Moog sales rep with his musical partner Bernie Krause, he had sold Moog synthesisers to George Harrison, The Byrds, The Monkees and countless other musicians and studios, while with Krause he had crafted one of the most seminal early electronic music records, The Nonesuch Guide To Electronic Music (Nonesuch, 1968). The double album wasn’t a conventional music record, and instead provided a beginner’s guide to electronic sound, demonstrating the various noises and effects that a synthesiser could offer the composer, as well as an informative accompanying sixteen-page text bound into the gatefold sleeve. In a sense, through its decomposition of electronic sounds, The Nonesuch Guide… was trying to position synthesisers as unique creative tools, not just something that could be used to make new versions of standards, which is what a lot of Kaleidoscopic Vibrations offered.
Beaver & Krause The Nonesuch Guide To Electronic Music (1968)
Work on a new version of ‘Baroque Hoedown’ commenced in May 1972 but the demo was ultimately abandoned because it was felt to be unsatisfactory. With the planned premiere of the parade approaching, Wagner arranged to licence the original Perrey – Kingsley version on Kaleidoscopic Vibrations for use in the parade as a base layer. Beaver and Christensen then added additional melodies and effects, including sections of Disney themes from Dumbo, Cinderella and It’s A Small World as well as patriotic American anthems, and this arrangement provided the accompaniment for the Main Street Electrical Parade’s debut at Disneyland that summer.
Somewhat strangely, the same piece of music was used for the Electrical Water Pageant at Walt Disney World, despite the fact that the arrangement didn’t fit the nautical imagery of the pageant at all. Only one section of the music that Christensen and Beaver had created – the stirring finale – had any real connection to the water spectacle at all. The music for both the Main Street Electrical Parade and the Electrical Water Pageant were released as commemorative picture disc 7-inch records in 1973. The music on the records was identical but the packaging was different.
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Main Street Electrical Parade poster (permission requested)
Allen Cohen: Some composers are relying more and more on electronically generated music, causing many musicians to be concerned over the possibility of being supplanted by synthesizers. Do you foresee a day when muscians will become obsolete?
Don Dorsey: Don’t be silly. If musicians become obsolete, then who will play the synthesizers?
‘A Conversation With Don Dorsey’ in the liner notes to Beethoven Or Bust (1988)
Standing on the sidewalks of Main Street with some friends, not long after the Main Street Electrical parade opened in 1972, was a young Orange County music student by the name of Don Dorsey. Watching the parade had an immediate impact on Dorsey. “I knew instantly that electronic music and live entertainment would be my new career focus,” he says.
Music had been a major focus for Dorsey from a very early age. “My first notes on the piano were played while I was in kindergarten,” he remembers. “I came home from school and found notes on our home piano that matched the ones my teacher used. Based on this, my mom urged me into piano lessons during Grade One. I had a good ear and consequently didn’t learn to actually read music notation until high school when I wanted to start composing. My formal classical keyboard training started in high school with private studies at California State University at Fullerton (CSUF), across the street from my high school. I would check out orchestral scores from the college library and dissect them at home. After high school, I became a music major at CSUF and studied music theory and composition.”
Don Dorsey by Adam J Bezark (c. 1985)
Dorsey’s first music sensibilities were, then, broadly classical, something he would return to in the 1980s with two albums of electronic reinterpretations of pieces by Bach and Beethoven – Bachbusters (Telarc, 1986) and Beethoven Or Bust (Telarc, 1988). Dorsey’s early interest in electronic music started as he graduated from high school, when Bob Moog’s eponymous company unveiled the Minimoog in 1970. Compact and portable compared to Moog’s earlier modular system, the Minimoog was the first synthesiser available in retail stores and sold for around $1,500 (around $11,000 in 2023 terms).
“I immediately purchased one after talking my mother into making me a loan,” remembers Dorsey. “I also had a 4-track tape recorder and was doing multi-track layering of electronic music at home. I forget when, exactly, but I remember I was in touch with the Southern California Moog sales representative and because of that, I started demonstrating my Minimoog around Orange County schools.”
Dorsey’s Minimoog performances gained him a sufficient reputation to attract the attention of Jack Wagner, who contacted Dorsey through the sales representative that had originally sold the synthesiser. “He wanted to use my MiniMoog on a project,” recalls Dorsey. That project was the 1974 Orange Bowl halftime show production Fifty Happy Years, celebrating the passing of half a century since Walt Disney and his brother Roy had founded their animation studios. Rather than needing Dorsey’s Minimoog to create electronic music, as might have been expected, Wagner and Christensen simply needed it to generate a click track.
Still from Fifty Happy Years (1974)
“He was interested in what I was doing with it and asked to be kept informed, however,” says Dorsey. “Shortly after that I landed a live performance gig with the Fullerton Jr. College Concert Band. They paid me to do an arrangement for the band and then perform solos on the Moog. Jack came to the concert and suggested there could be a job for me with Disney in the near future.”
It would take over a year before Wagner got in touch again to ask Dorsey to work on the music for America On Parade, which replaced the Main Street Electrical Parade in 1975 as part of a two-year celebration of the Bicentennial. Paul Beaver had been ill for a while, and ultimately passed away in January 1975. With their original synthesiser programmer too unwell to work on America On Parade, Wagner turned to Dorsey to work on the music. That decision proved to be the start of Dorsey’s long association with Disney’s theme parks, particularly with the lagoon shows at Walt Disney World’s Epcot.
After working on America On Parade, Dorsey was asked to update the music for the Electrical Water Pageant at Walt Disney World in early 1977. It was, he recognises in hindsight, a precursor to potentially working on the updated Main Street Electrical Parade, scheduled to return later in 1977. “I felt like it was sort of an audition before they granted me the keys to the larger project,” he says. His music radically updated the original, ditching ‘Baroque Hoedown’ completely in favour of more nautical tunes like ‘Hornpipe’.
Dorsey passed the audition and began working on updating Main Street Electrical Parade and giving the parade its own unique soundtrack at Wagner’s studio with Jim Christensen that year. Initially, the emphasis was on updating the original music, along with adding new sections from the Disney theme music catalogue, including music from Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs and Song Of The South. The music that soundtracked the parade’s return was all made using Dorsey’s trusty Minimoog, but the synthesiser ensemble was expanded in 1978 to include an enviable array of analogue equipment, including a Moog Model III modular system and a Sequential Circuits Prophet 5.
“It took a total of one week to record the music in 1977,” remembers Dorsey. “Subsequent units would take a day or two to arrange, followed by another day to record. Each unit uses less than 16 tracks, including the ‘Baroque Hoedown’ bed mix, and most were fewer than eight.” As had been the case in 1973, a 7-inch picture disc of the 1977 theme music was issued by Disneyland Records. A similar disc of Dorsey’s new music for the Electrical Water Pageant wasn’t pressed by Disneyland Records.
Bode 7702 Vocoder
Like Disney’s theme parks, the music for the Main Street Electrical Parade was constantly evolving. In addition to new theme songs, in 1977 Dorsey added a stirring fanfare to herald the arrival of the parade into the various zones on the route, which then ushered in the rendition of ‘Baroque Hoedown’. Even ‘Baroque Hoedown’ was open to change, initially being performed as a short 1:03 segment before being fully looped a second time in later modifications to the parade music. A spoken word segment, featuring Wagner’s voice run through a Bode 7702 Vocoder, was added in 1978. That replaced an original announcement sequence written by Robert Jani and delivered by Wagner, where he described the synthesiser music as ‘electro-synthe-magnetic’. The description was retained for the vocodered version of the opening speech.
Like Wagner, with his seemingly incompatible role as both theme park voice over artist and music producer, Dorsey’s role was soon to expand from composing and arranging the musical accompaniment to involving himself in the technical presentation of the parade’s music. Anyone watching a Disney parade will more than likely be blissfully unaware of the multiple complexities involved with synchronising music to a long-form performance that’s continually moving forward, and rightly so: Disney’s whole theme park aesthetic was about leaving reality at the gates and entering a world of magical fantasy.
Disney’s parade experience was directly informed by some of their earliest semi-commercial attraction experiments. These began with the Pepsi-sponsored It’s A Small World, originally designed as a tribute to the work of UNICEF, and presented at the 1964 World’s Fair at Flushing Meadow in Queens, New York City. It’s A Small World was a boat ride through various different international scenes filled with cute characters wearing local costumes, with each scene containing a unique local language version of the joyous song that gave the attraction its title, penned by Richard and Robert Sherman. The movement of the music from one scene to another was seamless and fluid, with no discernible gap in its presentation, giving the soundtrack a feeling of a continuous piece of music when it was in fact constructed from short loops in different scenes of the ride that were perfectly synchronised with one another – the music stayed were it was, continually repeating itself, while the listener that moved forward through the ride and its depiction of an interconnected world of different cultures.
During the parade, each unit features its own musical theme. The fully synchronized melodies and rhythms, produced on an electric Moog synthesizer are ‘on the air.’ They are transmitted from the Castle via seven individual FM radio channels to each electrical unit’s powerful amplifier / receivers. These delightful musical themes are broadcast to the guests viewing this dazzling musical procession of fantasy in lights – the ‘Main Street Electrical Parade.’
– Liner notes, The Main Street Electrical Parade picture disc 7-inch, 1977
“Technically, parades work the same way as rides like It’s A Small World, but the opposite way around: scenes pass by you instead of the other way around,” explains Dorsey. With the exception of a basic version of ‘Baroque Hoedown’ playing continuously from speakers on the buildings to glue the whole experience together, all of the music being played in the initial versions of the Main Street Electrical Parade was coming from the ride vehicles themselves. Each scene contained its own looped section that played continuously but which was synchronised to the basic ‘Baroque Hoedown’ track so precisely that when a subsequent scene followed, it seemed to blend together without any audible join. The entire parade route at Disneyland was 2,000 feet in length. It started, appropriately enough, at It’s A Small World, worked its way through Fantasyland and concluded on Main Street U.S.A.
“There was a misconception that the music on the buildings along the parade route tracked along with the individual floats,” remembers Dorsey. “That was actually not done until 1980 when I helped develop the first parade control system. In that first system, we could only change a whole zone of 75-150 feet at a time, and the original parade route consisted of 21 zones. All the control systems and features were envisioned and guided by me, but I did not do any of the actual coding. Now in a third generation, the control system addresses each speaker individually and there are more than 100 speakers along any given Disney parade route.”
Versions of the Main Street Electrical Parade have, over the years, been nighttime features at Disney theme parks in Tokyo and Paris, and Disneyland’s sister park, California Adventure. As well as being one of the most memorable and longstanding features in Disney park history, its innovative parade control system forms the basis of all the parades that have followed. Dorsey’s music would feature at all of the international versions of the Main Street Electrical Parade until 2008. The only exception was the Tokyo DisneylandDreamlights version, which replaced the original Japanese copy of the parade in 2001. For that parade, a whole new musical approach was taken. It was still built on ‘Baroque Hoedown’, still started electronic, but evolved over the length of the parade, adding more and more orchestral parts until the finale unit comprised all orchestral music. It reverentially concluded with a brief return to electronic sound.
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Just as Disney’s attention had shifted from Disneyland to Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom ahead of its opening, something similar would happen when ground broke on what became Epcot, the second theme park to open at Disney’s Florida resort.
Originally inspired by Walt Disney’s idea for an Experimental Prototype Community Of Tomorrow, by the time it opened in 1982, Epcot was radically altered from Walt’s early designs for a fully integrated residential community into two distinct ‘lands’ focused on education and entertainment: a futuristic, science-led area called Future World and a series of pavilions clustered around a large lake called World Showcase, where you could stroll between depictions of England, Canada, Norway, Mexico, China, USA, Japan, Morocco and France without ever leaving Orlando. It was, in essence, modelled as a permanent World’s Fair, a nod in the direction of where Walt and his team of adaptable Imagineers began developing and innovating attraction concepts.
With some irony, the actual 1982 World’s Fair, held in Knoxville, TN struggled to attract larger corporations because Epcot was successfully attracting more big-ticket sponsorship names. Don Dorsey found himself with a musical foot in both camps that year, making music for use at both Epcot and Knoxville (as well as applying his distinctive synthesiser nous to three songs on Donna Summer’s eponymous album from the same year). His arrangement of the theme tune for the World’s Fair Energy Express Train, composed by former Love Generation member Tom Bahler, is a celebratory, effervescent burst of instrumental electronic pop perfectly suited to the kind of scientific innovations that the World’s Fair offered that year and which are now part of our everyday lives, including touch-screen technology, the cordless telephone and pay-at-the-pump fuel. Oh, and Cherry Coke.
Don Dorsey Energy Express (1982)
When I first walked around Future World in 2001, my ears were filled with electronic sounds – oscillator sweeps, pulses, the sounds of pure and thrilling electricity. Years later, when I learned about Dorsey’s involvement with Disney, I wrongly assumed that they were his designs. Instead, apart from a piece of music written for an exhibit the Seas Pavilion at Future World, his role with Disney was already rapidly moving from something musical to producing the elaborate, technical, firework-filled spectacles that have become an established, crowd-pleasing nightly feature of Epcot’s World Showcase.
“My involvement with Epcot started with trying to get them to build the correct parade control system,” Dorsey explains. “Alas, they were too far down the wrong path before I could get involved. Then I was commissioned to do the music for the first lagoon show for the opening of Epcot in 1982, Le Carnival de Lumière. The show content for Epcot was ‘pictures of big events’ with barges, projections, lights and fireworks. It turned out to be a flop, but they liked my synthesiser music. I offered a rehab concept which became A New World Fantasy in 1983. It was from that point that I became a lagoon show director.”
Dorsey’s music for the show included pieces by Beethoven, Strauss, Handel, Bach, Bizet, Schubert, Prokofiev and others, and was realised using a Synclavier II, Prophet 5, Rhodes Chroma and his trusty Minimoog. His soundtrack was used again in A New World Fantasy’s replacement, Laserphonic Fantasy, which ran from 1984 to 1988. The majority of his music for the show (titled ‘The Festival Of Festivals’) can be found on Busted (Telarc, 1997), a CD compilation of tracks taken from his Bachbusters and Beethoven Or Bust albums, as well as pieces that he conceived originally for a third volume of electronic versions of classics. “I started a third CD project of Mozart pieces but decided it wasn’t a good idea after a couple of tunes,” he says. “Most of the Mozart work that people know is orchestral. As a keyboard player and programmer, I decided to stay with works better suited to my style.”
Don Dorsey Busted (1997)
The electronic presentation of ‘The Festival Of Festivals’ was was dropped in favour of an orchestral arrangement for IllumiNations, which ran from 1988 to 1996 and after that, Dorsey’s role was more focused on developing and driving the overall show design and direction rather than also contributing the music, and he hasn’t used a synthesiser since 1997. His singular understanding of large-scale events that are moving and breathtaking at once have undoubtedly contributed to millions and millions of enduring memories, alongside those created while watching the Main Street Electrical Parade.
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Electrical Water Pageant from Disney’s Polynesian Resort, April 12 2012
April 12, 2012, Disney’s Polynesian Resort, Walt Disney World: I am stood on the outside deck with my two young daughters and wife watching the Electrical Water Pageant floating past.
My daughters were transfixed by the colourful show of lights, pointing across the water at displays like the sea serpent with the unbridled joy that only comes with being five and four-years-old respectively gazing at what must have felt like pure magic. Their young minds had already been overwhelmed by everything Walt Disney World had to offer – the characters, the scale, the rides, everything.
I was so caught up in the atmosphere that it took me a while to realise that I was listening to what sounded liked analogue electronic music being played across the lagoon. For some reason, it seemed vaguely out of place compared to the music heard elsewhere at Walt Disney World, yet completely natural. I’d seen the Main Street Electrical Parade when my wife had visited Florida in 2001, but I hadn’t retained any knowledge of the music for some reason, probably because I was again totally absorbed in the moment.
Main Street Electrical Parade, Walt Disney World (Michelle Smith, 2001)
Something about the music for the Electrical Water Pageant and the magic of that evening with my family really caught my attention. I googled the music on my wife’s phone, came up Don Dorsey’s name and think I shot an email to Don Dorsey’s assistant that same evening, primarily to see if a recording of the music was ever released. I was promptly disappointed when a message came back to say that no, to the best of their knowledge no recording of Don’s version had ever been released. (I’d also wrongly assumed that the version of the music I had heard was his; it isn’t any longer and I don’t know who it’s actually by these days.)
Little did I realise that I’d opened the door to an obsession with trying to tell a story of not one, but two, pieces of electronic music heard by phenomenal numbers of people that didn’t seem to have been acknowledged adequately as part of electronic music history. The obsession came back with considerable force in February 2020 with a visit to Walt Disney World, and maybe the idle time afforded by the pandemic lockdowns that arrived not long after drove me to actually write it.
Why it’s taken over three years and two post-pandemic vacations in Florida to complete the piece is beyond me. To get it over the line took an interview with Veryan for her Insights & Sounds magazine where I mentioned the unwritten piece; some sagely advice from Walt himself (‘Everyone needs deadlines’); countless plays of Perrey – Kingsley’s original ‘Baroque Hoedown; spending a small fortune tracking down the various released (and unreleased) versions of the music to both the Main Street Electrical Parade and the Electrical Water Pageant; and, finally, sending lots of annoying emails with yet more questions to Don, for whose patient correcting of my accumulated misinformation and the wealth of insights he offered I’m eternally grateful for.
Resources:
Perrey – Kingsley Kaleidoscopic Vibrations – Electronic Music From Way Out (Vanguard LP, 1967) Paul Beaver & Bernard L. Krause – The Nonesuch Guide To Electronic Music (Nonesuch LP, 1968) Paul Beaver – Walt Disney World’s Electrical Water Pageant (Disneyland picture disc 7-inch, 1973) / The Main Street Electrical Parade (Disneyland picture disc 7-inch, 1973) Don Dorsey – Electrical Water Pageant (unreleased recording, 1977) Don Dorsey – The Main Street Electrical Parade (label picture disc 7-inch, 1977) Don Dorsey – Bachbusters (Telarc LP / CD, 1985) Various – The Music Of Disneyland, Walt Disney World & Epcot Center (Disneyland CD, 1988) Don Dorsey – Beethoven Or Bust (Telarc CD, 1988) Don Dorsey – Busted (Telarc CD, 1997) Don Dorsey – Disney’s Electrical Parade (Buena Vista Records, CD, 2001)
With thanks to Bryan Michael for technical insights.
Music for the dead of night. Nocturnes brings together Veryan and Everyday Dust, two Scottish-based electronic musicians, both of whom offer up a twenty-minute piece that evokes the stillness of night and its quiet and often unseen dramas.
Both of these pieces are shrouded in mystery, full of secret pathways and shadowy interventions. On ‘Moonlight Lullabies’, Veryan creates a slowly-advancing piece that progressively evolves toward a dawn-like resolution. Subtle field recordings give this a naturalistic edge, but it’s Veryan’s electro-symphonic arrangement here that gives ‘Moonlight Lullabies’ its sense of calm, ethereal grace – stirring string layers, shimmering synth sounds that flit across your vision, a stunning arpeggio that captures the notion of a slumbering landscape coming back to life. Its denouement is a beautiful, and hopeful, chorus of morning birdsong.
Everyday Dust’s ‘As Bats Fly’ is, in contrast, almost impenetrably dark. For me, this piece evokes that strange and liminal place that only appears in the depths of night, where a sudden wakefulness into an alien silence yields a clamouring of a thousand anxieties, each one jumping up and down and shouting ‘Me, me, me!’ The sounds here have the density and bleakness of Rothko’s paintings for The Four Seasons in New York. Like the seemingly unwavering blocks of colour that Rothko used, closer examination of ‘As Bats Fly’ reveals myriad textures and nuance, layered with enveloping detail.
Nocturnes by Veryan / Everyday Dust was released 9 December 2022 by Dustopian Frequencies.
Ten years ago, Espen J. Jörgensen and Rupert Lally released Stillium Partita, heralding the start of a vital distance collaboration which produced a rich seam of albums and projects together while never once managing to go over old ground or repeat themselves.
According to Lally, I was one of the first to pick up on the album, reviewing the release for my Documentary Evidence blog. To commemorate its anniversary, the duo recorded a video about the release, its creation and how they feel about it now. The video also features my thoughts on the album, a decade on. An edited version of my original review appears below the video.
Espen J. Jörgensen, a Norwegian documentary film-maker, fan of circuit-bent instruments and one-time collaborator with Simon Fisher Turner on the Soundescapes album that Mute released in 2011, has launched his own label – No Studio – and crafted an album with Swiss-based ex pat Rupert Lally entitled Stillium Partita. Consisting of seventeen electronic tracks that manage to blend together chilled-out Global Communication-style synthetic ambience with some more harsh, gritty sound sources, Stillium Partita arrived quietly and with little notice via Bandcamp in July 2012.
Like Soundescapes, which arose from a chance encounter, what would become Stillium Partita started with a simple question. “Rupert asked Simon and I if he could do a remix of the track ‘Soundescaped’,” explains Jörgensen by email. “I didn’t know Rupert then, but he had done a remix of something which was included in Simon’s score for The Great White Silence. I thought the ‘Soundescaped’ remix was okay, but I thought Rupert’s personal stuff was way better, and I thought, though I was burnt out and all, that his stuff could be interesting with my stuff.”
At this point, Jörgensen wasn’t sure whether to make any more music. “I was tired and I wanted to quit,” he continues. “But I thought, ‘What the heck. Let’s ask him if he wants to do something,’ and Rupert said yes. It was as simple as that.” As with Soundescapes, tracks for Stillium Partita would start with Jörgensen compiling sounds which would then be sent to Lally to add his own ideas.
Tracks like opener ‘Åpen Sår’, ‘Cobalt Night’ or the majestic ‘Gefangen’ have a sort of glitchy, electronic soundtrack quality to them, full of complex layers, burbling synth patterns, delicate melodies and a rich array of almost industrial noise effects; ‘Skallax’ goes further into the noise oeuvre with a central ‘riff’ that could have come from either a transmitting modem or a ZX Spectrum computer game tape loading up. Despite such ear-challenging interludes, Jörgensen confirms that, unlike on Soundscapes where his sounds were processed to the point of unrecognisability by Simon Fisher Turner, the intention on his collaboration with Lally was to allow for more straightforward electronic sources to be incorporated.
“It doesn’t feel like a bad follow up to Soundescapes, as it’s a very different thing,” explains Jörgensen on the different approach taken through working with Lally. “When I record stuff, I’m kind of finished with it. I send it out, and insist that my collaborator only use the best bits, or the bits they connect with. From there I think it’s best that they do whatever they want to do in that moment; it’s best that they give a 100% on their front, and if it means that they only use a fragment from my recordings, then fine, that’s the best decision. So Rupert’s used my stuff as either background ‘noise’, things which he looped, or things that played the main theme. And I’m glad he did, I’m glad he put so much of himself into this. Simon added a few recordings to Soundescapes, but it was 98% my recordings. I’m sure if Rupert just edited my stuff it would sound different, but I´m glad he added synths, beats and guitars himself. He took my recordings to a different level.”
If Stillium Partita has a major reference point, it would be the electronic soundtracks that emerged most prominently in the Eighties, the interest in which has been rekindled and updated through the likes of Cliff Martinez and his pulsing score for Drive. Icy synth melodies converge with slowly-evolving rhythms and layers of more challenging, Rephlex-esque beats, sounds and textures. Whilst not conceived as a soundtrack at all, while listening to pieces like the expansive and ethereal ‘What’s The Film In Your Head?’ or the menacing, deep ‘Structure & Analysis’, you do find yourself wondering how these sounds might interact with scenes in some imaginary movie.
Jörgensen is emphatic that there wasn’t a plan at all for how these tracks ended up. “I approached Rupert because his take on music is very different from Simon’s. Lally’s stuff was more synth-driven. I’m not going to say that Rupert belongs to a category, but he’s this guy who knows a lot about programs and so on, plus is good at playing and arranging. He uses a lot of soft synths and I wanted to have a contrast to my stuff, which can be very harsh or organic, sound-wise. Rupert felt that the music was genre-less, though I think the album hat tips to certain sounds and ideas. That´s Lally´s fault since he actually knows how to play. But I like it. It has a great contrast sound-wise.”
As was the case when recording Soundescapes with Simon Fisher Turner, Jörgensen and Lally have never actually met. “Ironically, Simon and I finally met at the Great White Silence live performance here in Norway, which was after Soundescapes was made,” says Jörgensen. “We said that we could only work together because there was a distance, and now that we’ve met there can’t be another collaboration. Luckily, I haven’t met Rupert which means that there might be another release or two to come.”
Stillium Partita by Espen J. Jörgensen and Rupert Lally was released 15 July 2012.
Words: Mat Smith
(c) 2022 Further. An earlier version of this reviewed appeared on Documentary Evidence in 2012
Response: Oli Richards Concept: Mat Smith Mastering: John@SEODAH Design: Neil Coe
A Mortality Tables Product MTP10
CONCEPT NOTES BY MAT SMITH
‘Two Meditations For Freya’ is a sound response to anxiety.
On 10 January 2022, my youngest daughter found herself too scared to sleep. She was never a great sleeper as a baby and toddler, and now, as a teenager, often struggles to relax enough for bed.
This night was different, however. She seemed to be gripped by an intense and unrelenting panic which she could not explain. In context, she had been receiving weekly cognitive behavioural therapy treatment for anxiety and depression through CHUMS, a Bedfordshire charity focused on helping young people cope with mental health issues. She’d had one of her weekly sessions earlier that day and it seemed to have triggered something inside her, but she could not – or perhaps would not – articulate it.
In an effort to help her, I offered to stay in her room so that she could feel safe and reassured enough to drift off. As she tossed and turned, I decided to practice some guided meditation in the midnight darkness of her room. She eventually fell asleep while listening to the rhythm of my breath. For the next week, we practiced short meditations together every night just before bed, and she slept better every night that week.
Around that time I was working with Oli Richards as he prepared his album Meditations Vol. 1 for release by Wormhole World. The album collected five improvised guitar ‘meditations’, each one recorded in the first few minutes after he woke up in the morning. Oli had begun releasing these pieces in November 2021, and I had been struck by their beauty and simplicity. I began seeing them as brief moments of acute stillness in which to detach from the world, and support my own meditation practice.
I approached Oli with the story of how Freya couldn’t sleep and asked if he’d consider recording an improvisation for her, to support the meditations she and I were doing together. His recordings were made on 10 February 2022 at his home in Cardiff. They were originally released through Oli’s Bandcamp page later the same day.
All proceeds from this release will go to CHUMS. CHUMS provides mental health and emotional wellbeing support for children, young people and their families. chums.uk.com
ABOUT GOODPARLEY
Goodparley (Oli Richards) is a Cardiff-based musician and sound artist. His sounds are largely based around improvised ambient guitar loops and textures, manipulated in real-time using various modulating effects to create inherently experimental soundscapes. goodparley.bandcamp.com
ABOUT MORTALITY TABLES
“In an effort to circumvent our unalterable mortality, we create. We make SOUNDS, ART, WORDS. These things are our INSURANCE against death.” – Mortality Tables, On Mortality, Immortality & Charles Ives (2022)
E Peritia Ratio: reason from experience.
Nothing happens without context. Every event has a catalyst. There is no such thing as a blank page.
So it goes that each Mortality Tables Product must begin with an outline of an initial creative concept – a thought; a notion; a moment of serious whimsy; a considered reflection on life, memory, love, loss, trauma, death.
We document those ideas, then invite collaborators to respond freely to them.
They may ignore us. They may say no. They may say yes. Whoever we invite to participate shall be unencumbered by restriction, constraint, expectation, convention, limit or judgement.
There are never any right or wrong answers, because there are no questions. There is nothing more than the idea and the response.
New label Titrate took over South London’s IKLECTIK for a night of modular electronic adventures interspersed with a drones ‘n’ tones DJ set from Sybil.
Pagan Red
Pagan Red’s set, featuring material that will form an upcoming release on Titrate, was all about that bass. After beginning with ghostly voices that are possibly about physics, a pulse emerges like a heartbeat rendered like a dub riddim, eventually replaced by quickening pattern that approximates rave or techno. The unbroken composition features undulating bass tones that fuck with your sense of perception, being focused and resolute yet open-minded enough to permit gentle, almost imperceptible changes to appear.
Merkaba Macabre
The last time I came upon Steven McInerney was with his film ‘A Creak In Time’, featuring a soundtrack from Howlround. ‘Trilateral Descent’, his performance as Merkaba Macabre, combines 16mm projections and modular synth patterns, in part triggered by three light sensors affixed to the wall of the performance space. The result is a suite of rapid fluctuations and intense, bass-heavy pulses gathering pace, while the imagery alternates between shots of woodland and twisting, mind-melting geometric lines. Imagine Disney’s Fantasia hacked by Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable set to a vibrant modular score and you’ll be somewhere close.
Hems
The headline from Hems set begins with a conversation, about what or who I can’t tell, before evolving into a shadowy, indeterminate soundfield. White noise and gradually intensifying sound waves give way to a soft whooshing, a singular crash providing a precursor to a rhythm that only arrives much later. From where I stand at the sound desk someone bites into a crisp; someone’s wristwatch advises that it’s 2300; a person orders a drink at the bar outside. These sounds are somehow integral, though accidental. An intensifying crackle, like a transmission from elsewhere, is sparse and spooky. A nascent kick drum reaches rave-y intensity before falling back into nothingness, replaced by a snarling, intense pattern that seems to appear out of nowhere, set to a recurrence of that solitary kick drum. In contrast to his debut release for Titrate, Chaotic Affair, Henrique Matias’ set is unnervingly brutal yet intensely subtle.
Based on the performances tonight, Titrate is definitely a label to watch.
Further. 
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