The history of Nosferatu’s soundtrack, or lack thereof, is almost as notorious as that of the film itself. Predating sound-on-film technology in Weimar Germany by several years[1], Nosferatu appeared at a time in cinema history when a full or small chamber orchestra played live accompaniment. All the great Weimar ‘silent’ cinema classics, from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) were synchronized to commissioned scores played by such orchestras, and most of the large European and American cinemas of the day boasted full orchestra pits. Hans Erdmann’s original score to Nosferatu was lost during the well-known legal debacle following its release, which saw nearly all copies of the film itself destroyed, and all known copies of the score along with them.

Following the death of Florence Stoker, copies of the film began to reemerge from dark corners of film libraries all over the world, but any remaining copies of the score have yet to do so. Thus, many attempts at recapitulating it from remaining fragments, and reinterpreting the film musically have been made over the years, James Bernard’s being perhaps the most well known. But the mystery of a missing score, especially one which accompanies a film of such artistic purity, should perhaps remain a mystery.

There are exceptions to this, and Peter Krasinski is one. It being Halloween night, he began the evening with a rendition of Toccata and Fugue in D minor (BWV 565). The organ was positioned on stage such that Mr Krasinski could watch the film with the audience, and we could see him play from an oblique angle (or, for some people, from behind). When the film began rolling, Mr Krasinski immediately settled into that perfect flowing path that always stays two steps ahead of innocuous, without ever overtaking the film itself or calling attention to itself. His playing throughout amplified the drama of the film while remaining remarkably restrained and seamless, given the great temptation to thrash bombastically around on the Irvine’s 10,731-pipe Curtis Organ, one of the largest and most elaborate in the world.

Tocata & Fugue in D Minor, BMV 565, Johann Sebastian Bach, Klemmens Scnorr Organist

The drama of the film feeds on the blood of psychological counterpoint: Hutter’s naïvete and Count Orlock’s savagery; Knock’s duplicitous sycophantry and the untiring loyalty of Harding and Annie. These contrasts and emotional undulations became thicker and denser through Mr Krasinski’s playing, for while I never detected a repeated motif, per se, he seemed to cycle and groove within the deeper undercurrents of the film. Moreover, if I’m not mistaken, a choice of low notes to vibrate the pit of the stomach rose higher with the stink of boxes filled with Transylvanian dirt in the hold of a Black Sea cargo ship. Above all, the playing grounded to the audience in a reading of Nosferatu as tragic and triumphant, menacing and mysterious, in an age when it might be passed off as a campy curiosity. The distinctly uncreepy Mr Krasinski looked moved himself, taking no delight in the strangulation of Ellen; his final crushing chord ushering her, in her ultimate sacrifice, out of this life beneath the rising of the sun over Wisborg.

Appropriately, the influences of Bach’s keyboard were in clear evidence that night. However, the improvisation was not limited to the Teutonic or even the Baroque: hints of Bernstein and other Modern American classical touches, progressive touches a la Procol Harem and Egg; here and there some passages of non-repetitive jazz piano (if you get me). Mr Krasinski is, it turns out, one of the world’s finest—if not the leading—silent film live improvisational accompanists. His accompaniments to Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Phantom of the Opera, as well as Metropolis, in addition to a large repertoire of sacred works, are well known and keep him in high demand. A personable fellow, he smiled broadly to our ovations. And in a charmingly old fashioned touch, he stood in the lobby and shook hands with individual audience members as they left the theater.

Who knows what manner of plasmatic psychosexualis would have resulted had Janet and Catherine taken up Byron Coley’s challenge, and who knows—maybe they will get around to doing it someday. In the meantime, perhaps I can talk Mr Krasinski into lending his inspired genius to Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc, or, hey, even Zabriske Point—with or without psilocybin molecules multifoliating in his head.

In the end, whether we consider Postmodern music a calculated response to Modernist forms, or a convex re-analysis of music in general, the act of listening remains deeply mysterious. Whether we ascribe universal meaning to Mass in B Minor or The Pirates of Penzance within their authorial and historical contexts, or devise a hyperlogical system to register tones as phonemes, 4′33″ and The Well-Tuned Piano still stare back like Rorschach blotter. Perhaps the acme of Postmodern music will be an authorless text without any possible universal interpretation, only individual descriptions and resonances, such that the only possible recourse will be to listen. The act of listening is not getting any less mysterious, or vital, as technology changes. Nor are the distinctions between content and process becoming any more important. As long as resistance to poetic registers in critical description remain, so will commitments to the worst possible misapprehensions: the substance is overlooked while the procedures are hunted down and taxidermized.

Jeph Jerman doesn’t need me to tell him he’s post-anything. In fact, he prefers I would shut my mouth and listen. Yet because his sound resembles little else, his influences are diffuse and distant, and in many ways he has reinvented John Cage’s notion of automaticism for himself, from the ground up, I felt compelled to investigate. As early as 1981, Jerman was recording environmental sounds to listen to in raw form, and feed into tape loops. His interest at this time was not in making music, per se, but in sound experiments. Though he released nothing, as he says, “worth listening to” until 1987, some of his earlier material has recently been made available on CD. Jerman’s early work as Hands To, and with the noise-unit City of Worms, is rich in grays and blacks, tones of earth and metals flickering against the walls of your ears; vast ambient spaces and tight, deep underground tunnels. Sometimes the sonorous roar of hundreds warehouse district machines all blend together at night; the occasional voice rises like water from soft sand; futuristic metropolises collapsing into the mighty rivers that gave them life — or perhaps none of these things, for it is impossible to know, at present, what is actually in the text. Many of Jerman’s works in this phase are apparently idea-based and framed by the limits of his equipment; their programs are kept so hidden that you must give in and just listen. The overall structures of these early tape works is careful and contemplated, even if the vibe are dank and unfathomable, and occasionally gives the impression that it is a transmission from somewhere else, using Jerman as its shamanic medium.

Caldia, from Ashent, City of Worms, 1988

Drome, from Crumnants, City of Worms, 1987

Jerman has also participated in a downtuned rock-oriented quartet called Big Joey (a quartet who lasted one LP, released in 1988, plus a second which remains unreleased), as well as the full-blast free jazz unit Blowhole, whose numerous cassette releases have been transforming genomes since 1990. The releases to which he has contributed number over one hundred, and he was based in Colorado Springs and Seattle, before settling down in Arizona.

Around the turn of the millennium, Jerman transformed his lightly processed samples and tape loop-based sound into a practice of using only found objects as sound sources. Nevertheless demanding, the results have gone from overwhelming to minimal, so minimal at times the composer’s presence slips between our fingers. These days Jerman feels less inclined even to see his work as self-expression, and begins no longer with ideas but with pure sound. Like Ezra Pound staring into the depths of Chinese logograms and diving meaning, Jerman listens to the sounds around him and gives us certain of them, his authorship present more in the erasure of context than in the creation of the sounds. Creaking. Thunder. Crickets. Wind. Water. Listen.

The Listening Chair, 2008

I think to study Frederick Sommer’s approach to photography is to learn something further about Jerman’s sound art, inasmuch as they are both methodical explorations of place, down to the grain, and both trapsed the northern Arizona desert in search of exquisite detritus. In Sommer’s treatise on aesthetics he wrote, “The smallest modification of tonality affects structure. Some things have to be rather large, but elegance is the presentation of things in their minimum dimensions.” Similarly, Jerman considers very carefully both the sounds he records and how he reproduces them. Recording the sounds of water, for example, is not a simple matter. How do you position the mics to capture that tonal quality of water that distinguishes the tones and rhythms we recognize as water? Of all the sounds water flow can make, how is it the human ear has come to relate certain sounds with it? And so begins the philosophical-aesthetic circuit known as interpretation, made all the more drastic by Jerman’s dissolved presence as composer-author. Forget content and process, abstract and concrete, composed and aleatory, and just listen.

The following interview took place in August 2011 by email and in Cottonwood, Arizona, where Jerman makes his home and studio.

****

Aram Yardumian: How did you become involved in the world of sound art? Were you part of a movement, or did you somehow come to it on your own?

Jeph Jerman: I think like much else in my life, I sort of stumbled into it. I’ve always been interested in things beyond ’songs’: wind in the trees, radio between stations, etc., but the first time I became aware that people were deliberately doing other things with sound was when I heard a Ken Nordine record called Word Jazz that my Mom played for me and my brother and sister. There was a piece called “The Sound Museum” in which Nordine describes various ‘sound paintings’ and then lets us hear them. I was completely enthralled with these sounds, and wished that they would go on longer. I made a tape of the sound paintings only, without the narration, so that I could listen to them over and over. I wanted to hear more stuff like them, and spent lots of time looking. At around the same time I was given a tape recorder as a birthday present, and almost immediately began trying to make my own ‘sound paintings’, along with the other silly things that kids do with tape recorders. My dad had a small reel-to-reel recorder as well that I used to borrow and play around with. Wish I had that machine today. It wasn’t until much later that I found other people who knew about different musics, and then around 1980 I began working for a college radio station in Colorado Springs which had an amazing record library. That really got the ball rolling.

I hadn’t thought about it before, but that act of removing the narration from the Nordine piece is indicative of my subsequent path through sound work. Very telling. Removing the context so that the sounds stand alone.

When I, with a few friends, began making work available publicly the only movement I was aware of was the ‘cassette culture’ explosion of the early 1980’s, which was helped along by magazines like Sound Choice and Op.

Ken Nordine, The Sound Museum

AY: Speaking of removing sound from its context, you once described your transition from ‘idea based’ material to more ’sound based’ material, and commented that this was due to your own increased interest in listening and concomitant loss of interest in contextualizing sound. Could you expand on this by explaining what is meant by ‘idea based’ and ’sound based’ and how this transition has come about?

JJ: Put simply, I’d say that idea-based material has some context outside of the sounds themselves, a perfectly mundane example would be “Peter and the Wolf”, or pick any song, past or present. The main thrust is to convey some mood or tell some story. By ’sound-based’ I’m talking about material that is only a sound or collection of sounds to be paid strict attention to, sounds that have no narrative or emotional prod. A good example might be the long string drones of Tony Conrad.

I think my waning interest in the former and gathering involvement with the latter followed along with my slowly increasing understanding of what it is to really listen—to shut off the internal dialogue and pay attention to the vibrations entering one’s ears. At the same time I felt a need to distill the work down to its barest essence. At some point I started feeling like all the added ideas were just cluttering things up, and it all seemed rather silly. There had been allusions to sort of quasi-scientific research, and I thought if I was going to go in that direction, I should apply for a research grant and go whole hog.

AY: With field recordings there is an interesting blending of concrete and abstract going on all the time. Most of your early work seems highly abstract and most of your recent work is more concrete, and even comes with a description of the recording process. To elaborate on your last answer, what are the different things you find you can achieve with specifically abstract and concrete material?

JJ: I believe these are different means to the same end. By abstract I’m assuming that we’re talking about soundwork that has no referent to real-world things or events. In the case of at least some of the hands to material, there’s no indication of what the sounds are supposed to represent. I did have some ‘mental pictures’ that went along with various pieces while I was making them, but I didn’t make these pictures available to anyone, and the titles don’t help either. (As an aside I’d like to say that in the years since making the hands to tapes, I’ve forgotten many of those mental pictures, and listening to the works at this point in time I can almost listen to them as if I didn’t make them. Almost).

By concrete then, we’re talking about sound as itself, with no mental picture or framing device such as a narrative or ‘made up’ context, i.e. here is the sound of a 22-inch wind gong being played by a small battery-powered fan. There is nothing else given to think about while one is hearing the gong. The two approaches are means to the same end because they both end up directing one’s attention to the sound only. The abstract stuff gives no information to contemplate while hearing, and the concrete only gives specifics of being. This is not to say that one’s mind will not wander while hearing either of course…

AY: What, to you, is ‘listening’? What is the difference between listening and hearing? How can a listener change or improve the practice of listening? How have you done so?

JJ: I think that the difference is in one’s attention. Hearing goes on all the time and is involuntary, but we decide which things we pay attention to. I think it’s called ‘paying’ attention because to really do so one has to give up, or at least bypass one’s internal dialogue or judgment mechanism. Listening is a practice that can be improved. When attention wanders, re-focus on the sound. That’s what I strive to do.

AY: You once said, “I wonder to what extent the history of western musics is an outline of people’s deteriorating ability to listen.” I wonder also. Have you any continued discourse on this fascinating statement?

JJ: For one thing, people’s attention span seems to be deteriorating, and I think popular music reflects that. There aren’t many real melodies in popular music anymore, just short repeated sequences of notes, or even just chants. The way that popular music is produced leaves less and less to actually listen to, it’s all very airless and compact, like a series of hammer blows or something. It doesn’t allow you in, it slaps you in the face repeatedly. People don’t pay attention so they need to be forcefully reminded. To what extent one is the cause and the other the effect I cannot say. I think the general feeling about the attention deficit is that it is due to the proliferation of television and video, the way that things are edited into short little bits. I think there may be more to it though, including things like diet and general lifestyles. There is also the idea that children grow up much slower emotionally than they used to, being able to retreat into the fantasy world of the internet and video games. I’ve read that the average 20-year-old American has the emotional maturity of someone much younger, say, twelve or so. And we know how short children’s attention spans are.

It may also involve the ‘I’m great’ culture that’s evolved alongside rap music. Some people are so busy asserting their individuality that they have no time or space mentally to pay attention to and appreciate others. I see this every day at my job.

AY: What existential or purely aesthetic, or mystical, problems or questions have you approached with your work in its early and later phases?

JJ: There’s always been the question of how other people perceive the works themselves, and I think my process has been one of making the context more and more simple and transparent. The big questions for me have always been ‘what is this stuff for? Where does the impulse to create it come from, why do it at all?’ Early on, I didn’t think about it much. As the work took on a slightly more public life and I began to get feedback about it, I started to have to defend it almost, and that led me to question my motivations and then amend my methods and aesthetic.

AY: You use a great variety of found objects as sound sources, many of which I notice are some form of detritus. What is it about detritus that attracts you?

JJ: Much of it is quite beautiful, I think. There’s something about the way an abandoned house deteriorates—the shape changing, the wood weathering and disintegrating etc, or the way metal rusts and loses its structural integrity, that I find fascinating. The Japanese have a term for it, wabi sabi. For whatever reason, newer things just don’t sound as interesting much of the time.

AY: Many of your Hands To album and individual track titles seem non-externally referential, at least to me (e.g., Q’ojfa,Suake). By this I mean, I can’t always connect what I hear with the titles, unless I really let my imagination loose. Is it part of the program to engage the listener’s imagination through sign-signifier juxtaposition, or are there more specific onomastic connections known to you?

JJ: Many of the titles are neologisms composed of shortened forms of words or phrases. I would generally start with some sound or group of sounds, which would conjure some mental picture for me, and in turn a phrase might suggest itself. Shortening the phrases into odd-sounding words seemed to better represent each individual piece without giving it a concrete meaning. Some of the phrases I left intact: “carnival blades” or “fingers breath”, and some got chopped up and lost their meaning, like “scrine” (scribe whine) or “suake” (san francisco earthquake). “q’ojfa” was a word I found on a page of automatic writing done on an old typewriter. The name hands to is a shortened form of the phrase “and so I turn my hands to the task”, which for me at the time was used to signify my differing attempts to use or abuse sounds to different ends. The task would differ from tape to tape.

Lung Organ, from “Hoast”

Carnivale Blades from “Neumes”

AY: Giancarlo Toniutti and I were recently discussing the art of field recordings in relation to photography and certain forms of descriptive poetry. Inasmuch as early photographic art was seen as an aid to painters, and later as a kind of automatic painting or ‘pencil of nature’, it was criticized for representing too ‘directly’, which is also a commonplace criticism of field recording. What is your take on the relationship between field recording and photography, and the criticism they have absorbed? Is there anything field recording can achieve that no other art form can?

JJ: “Represent too directly” – that makes me laugh. It reminds me of something Berhard Günter said to me once too, that he enjoyed walking in the woods as well as anyone else, but that it wasn’t art. And I thought “’why not?’ The inference, as I understood it, was that only humans could make art.

Field recordings can be utilized in many ways: for pure listening, to study aspects of a sound field either scientifically or for general information about how sounds occur in nature—the rhythms that happen, etc. One could record the same spot at different times to try and understand the sonic changes that take place. Field recordings can also be used to present sound that isn’t representative of one’s personality, to some extent. There is still the instance of choosing what to record and where to present it. Lots of artists use field recordings as raw material to be processed…

AY: Fred Sommer’s work, especially his images of the Arizona desert, reveals, I think, his training as an architect. Do you think in terms of 2D structure or 3D architecture when composing?

JJ: Perhaps in terms of three dimensional structure. I often think of the sonic artifacts that I devise as sound-fields or sound-clouds. An encompassing presence to ‘sit in’ and experience. I used to use the phrase sound-paintings to describe my work to people who were unfamiliar with this kind of stuff, so I guess it’s gone from a two dimensional analogy to a three dimensional one.

AY: Robert Frost wrote about the conundrum of committing tones to paper, meaning things like irony, acquiescence, and doubt, which are easily discernible from speech. Mastering this was one of his chief concerns, and successes, as a poet. I see a similar kind of challenge for the sound artist who wants to capture a sense of place or concrete mood but finds that sounds on the magnetic tape are as toneless as words on paper. How do you meet this challenge?

JJ: I’m not sure that I do. At some point, after I had stopped using samplers and things and was making collages of field recordings I surmised that I may be indeed trying to conjure up feelings of place. I’m not sure that sound on its own can do that. It may evoke different moods in different listeners depending on their temperament and experience. With a work such as Cicuye the sounds are presented along with a few photos of the places where the recordings were made, so there’s a little more information to explore. These days I don’t try to evoke anything, I make sound that’ll hopefully be listened to. There are still vestiges of idea-attachment now and then. I’m human after all, and old habits die hard.

AY: I would think the American Southwest to be an especially vital source of sounds. Do you agree?

JJ: Indeed. The very name ‘Sonoran Desert’ is sonic. ‘Sonoran’ is Spanish for ‘sounding’.

I remember lying around in the living room of the house on West 3^rd Street in Lexington, Kentucky where the phonograph, the record player, commanded the space below the windows that looked out toward the holly tree. I remember the album covers stacked beside the speakers – 12×5 by the Rolling Stones, The Beatles’ Abbey Road, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan and many others that were only slightly less emblematic of that era. Set apart a little in my memories is the album cover with, on the b-side, the picture of the naked woman engulfed in flames. Dark haired and voluptuous, the woman raised her eyes toward heaven, transfixing my ten year old imagination with her beauty, her nakedness, and with the mystery of the broken chains that hung from her wrists. When I turned the album cover over I could contemplate the face of the singer, a close shot, the focus a little soft, of a man with dark hair and liquid, sensual eyes that made a strong impression, I could tell, on my older sister. The songs on the record seemed almost old-fashioned, the lush imagery salvaged from melodrama by the singer’s precise phrasing – the way his voice relaxed into its own depths and broke a little, not taking things too seriously but never ironic in its sincerity either. On the one hand there was the sense that these songs were offerings, confessions that moved as far as they could in the direction of prayers, and on the other hand they made no such extravagant claims and were content to remain ordinary ballads with catchy melodies – no big deal.

Thirty years later, in 2001, the singer’s new CD arrived, a Christmas gift I think, from my older sister probably. Ten New Songs it was called. I listened to it once or twice but it didn’t grab me. I thought the singer-songwriter – Leonard Cohen – had lost his edge, and the songs seemed over-produced and un-hip. Plus, without really knowing why, I had fallen out of the habit of listening to music. It wasn’t a choice, really, but at some point during the Bush-Cheney fiasco playing CDs disappeared from my daily routine. Listening to music had started making me feel like a consumer perhaps, at a time when I couldn’t stomach that identity. The counterculture had long since been emptied of juice and abandoned, conceding its irrelevance to the course of things in a “real” world that had been seized by ghouls and demons. Also, all the young artists making a bid for striking relevance had begun to seem inherently irrelevant to me: the packaging of persona, the pageantry of personality, the new combinations of moves emblematized by artists from Elvis to Iggy Pop seemed trite and over-worked in the corporatized era of the new century.

I don’t know why I put the CD in the player a few months back, but I was instantly struck once more by the deep ease in Cohen’s voice. The same seductive and disarming intimacy that had set that earlier album apart so many years before had been amplified so that now the voice seemed to emerge from some place the other side of a whisper, or from deep within the structure of the singer’s cells. The lush arrangements that had seemed over-the-top to me when I first heard Ten New Songs now seemed like a smart choice, a covering of ones tracks. “Can I experience this and be at ease at the same time,” the songs seemed to ask, examining love and death and other highly charged and defining experiences of humanity. Over the top but also somehow irresistible, this is music that aims to transform surreptitiously, shifting weight into ease, reconciling us to our situation.

As many will know, Cohen is a Zen adept in the Rinzai tradition who lived for many years in the monastery on Mt Baldy under Kyozan Joshu Sasaki Roshi. Having practiced in a related tradition for some time now I found myself listening to the ten songs with the ears of practice, appreciating the way Cohen was able to convey the experience of dharma via the over-familiar forms of the popular ballad. To my ear, songs like In My Secret Life and A Thousand Kisses Deep seem written and delivered in a purely meditative mode, all the forms of a long and successful career as a commercial musician are engaged with and purified simply because that’s what this particular trajectory entailed. All the songs on the album now seemed strong to me. Love Itself, the fifth song, is perhaps the clearest expression of the kind of affective experiences that come with a daily practice.

But it’s the 8^th song on the album, Boogie Street, that had the strongest impact. “Oh Crown of Light, oh Darkened One,” the song begins, a soulful refrain, “you kiss my lips and then it’s done.” Death is being addressed here by a man old enough to be cultivating that acquaintance. I think of the Tibetan Book of the Dead and the eerie accounts it contains of what our last moments look and feel like as we sip that final breath. I think of a sequence in my own daily practice where the instruction is to examine those very last moments – how the five stages of grief tend to seize the mind then, and what steps one can take to move through denial, bargaining, anger and despair toward acceptance and a return to presence. It’s always instructive to observe which steps in a meditation sequence we skip or gloss over in distracted, auto-pilot mode. Often in my own practice it’s this step, the one involving an encounter with the moment of death, the moment Cohen has, with rueful humanity, re-christened the moment of boogie street.

Boogie Street, Ten New Songs Leonard Cohen, Sony 2001

The aim of such “impermanence” meditations is hardly morbid – these practices do not enervate so much as provide relief and release, and are actually among the most energizing and liberative meditations. We are turning to confront in its purest form one of our shaping anxieties, an anxiety that has always hovered at the edges of our conscious awareness. Under the tent of that encounter we can finally assess what we are to each other, how we should behave, even what music is worth the investment of time.

So come my friend, be not afraid

We are so lightly here

It is in love that we are made, in love we disappear…

Listening recently to Ten New Songs I was struck by the sophistication of what Cohen has accomplished, and by the way authentic understanding can permeate simple artistic forms. The rap about Cohen was always that he was a published poet first and a songwriter second. It always seemed to me Cohen used his literary credentials to inoculate himself against those aspects of pop celebrity that would have been a burden, preserving himself from the parade of shtick that got in Bob Dylan’s way, for example. But with this new work I found myself appreciating the songs on a purely poetic level. My sense was that Cohen’s celebrity was now serving to protect that essential poetic quality of repose in the grip of tension, a quality that now seems in danger of receding from our world. Who has time to read poetry anymore? Who has the mental space required for that contemplative experience in a world defined by frenzied business of the internet? Well, we still know how to tap into iTunes and Cohen’s ten songs are waiting for us there. The strength of the commodification that had drawn me away from commercial music seemed suddenly providential – a gift preserving our link to the essence of that more vulnerable literary cousin. Cohen’s voice, the  deeply embodied way it lays back into the shadow-ground of love and mortality to give form to the simple truths it finds there, now seems to make a powerful case for the relevance of poetry in general. Along with the repose comes insight and compassion, life as a song full of sadness and glory.

Oh Crown of Light, Oh Darkened One

I never thought we’d meet

You kiss my lips and then it’s done

I’m back, back on Boogie Street

Boogie Street – Leonard Cohen

]]> http://www.timesquotidian.com/2011/08/29/boogie-street-2/feed/ 7 http://www.timesquotidian.com/2011/08/01/tba/ http://www.timesquotidian.com/2011/08/01/tba/#comments Mon, 01 Aug 2011 07:01:20 +0000 Nancy Cantwell http://www.timesquotidian.com/?p=15419 Interview with Georgian composer Natalie Beridze
Introduction by Aram Yardumian

A discussion of Georgian music in polite company usually relays between two poles: Zakaria Paliashvili and polyphonic choral singing. Little else of Georgia’s folk, classical and modern forms have been granted a visa to cross the borders. And yet, the more I move about the country, the more intrigued I become by the diversity of styles. Song and dance traditions vary between regions and even between villages. There is a lively hip-hop scene in K’ut’aisi, and the whiff of a garage band catches my ears some nights in my neighborhood here in T’bilisi. The conservatory is still a lively place. For better or for worse, the Rus-pop virus has infected the disc-players of all who own a Mercedes. And of course the unique polyphonic ensembles may be heard at nighttime events. Not bad for a country which for seventy years experienced cultural freezer-burn as a Soviet member state.

Beneath the Slavic blue-beats and the ringing panduris, somewhere in an apartment with a dim chandelier, dwells Tba — Natalie Beridze — with her heaving desktop computer and microphone. Alone in her world she creates warm, cleansing electronics. Never bombastic or self-aggrandizing, her realizations reach beyond the borders of her country in much the same way Björk reached out of Iceland in her post-Sugarcubes work. That is to say, with grace but on her own terms. Tba’s body of work, taken all together, cannot be said to bend in any particular breeze. Album to album she opens another electronic advent calendar door to herself and her glitchy world. Some tracks lean heavily on lounge pillows and there is the occasional house ding-dong, but always they are structured as songs or sound-poems, not interminable heaps of techno. And always the narrative is a circuitous search for something, a longing for something, or a questioning. Tba is not an acronym for ‘to be announced’, it is in fact a pronunciation of her initials (Tusia is the diminutive form of Natalie) and a Georgian word meaning ‘lake’ — an appropriate descriptor for music which both undulates softly and plumbs to classic work of great depth. ‘Beba Plays’, the opening track of Annulé, recalls Nancarrow. Other tracks strike the same Teuto-harmonic stones as early Kraftwerk. Her wordplay belongs on a shelf with Amirkhanian and Robert Ashley. Much more visits the textured planes where Orbital and Aphex Twin have landed their innerspace ships. Forget’fulness even contains a collaboration with Ryuchi Sakamoto, which signifies another kind of step taken. All of Tba’s music, from the dancefloor to the cerebellum, is warm and ringing, and as intimate as fingertips on your skin

Beba Plays from “Annulé”, 2005

The range of styles on Tba’s eight albums to date have prompted some critics to describe them as collections of “odds and ends”, or “uneven and unsettling”, but I suspect a thinner and clearer thread runs through the works, uniting tracks which at first do not seem to add up. Indeed, sometimes they come off like post mortem collections of private recordings assembled by close friends. But just as when I listen to Ursula Bogner or Peter Laughner, I hear her albums (with the exceptions of Size and Tears — Alice in Wonderland, a concept album, and Stupid Rotation, a straight dance album) as the audio diaries of a light soul in a dark world, emotional peregrinations in a city and country where things have all her life been highly unpredictable. For all of Georgia’s indigenous sound, Tba’s albums display hardly a parochial sensibility, and yet as I prowl T’bilisi at night with Tba in my ears I can’t help but feel the city in her warm and empathetic, yet guarded, even impenetrable generosity.

Aram Yardumian: I don’t find much in the way of traditional Georgian motifs and imagery in your work, but (as I will write in the introduction), I do feel T’bilisi in the center, but I cannot articulate how. What do you think?

Natalie Beridze: I don’t know what to think, since I still don’t know what T’bilisi really is to me, or how to position it in my identity patchwork, as well as in my music. If you dig into the basic construction, then I’d say this place has provided this construction with a strong fundament, such as vivid, splendid, happy childhood, with a strong bond to family, friends and generally humans, as such. Nobody told me as a child: “It’s a stupid, dangerous, hellish world… but don’t let it frighten you!” and it wasn’t a lie. My parents and their parents truly believed in it. That’s a very Georgian approach — perfect naivety, incarnated into strong belief, which makes things really work. Reality is not so popular in Georgia. People believe in miracles, on large scale, in everyday life. That’s what makes this place non-European.
I think my music is a bearer of this fundament in a way. It carries some amount of reluctance towards existential problems. Or at least it leaves a little crack open at the end of the tunnel; the light that never goes out— it’s there without any reason, unconditionally— you can call it irresponsible and immature, you can call it humor. You can call it trust. You can call it the ‘fundament’.

However, on the other hand, the concreteness of this place is absent in my music. Any place is absent. I as a person need to have this sense of absence in order to be fully present somewhere — fully present in the thought, in given space, in relationship to another human being. I’m a classical type of introverted personality. I’m able to think, produce, experience genuine emotions only when I’m absent in relation to the outside world, hence present within. A place has limits. A thought where this place is present is boundless. So if I think about T’bilisi this way, it’s minimal on the surface, and more present at the bottom.

AY: I’ve already read a bit about who has influenced you, but this is according to other people. I have yet to hear it from you: who inspires you?

NB: Einstein says: “the secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources”.

In poetry & literature & movies: Marina Tsvetaeva, Joseph Brodsky, Max Voloshin, Boris Pasternak, T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Arthur Rimbaud, F.M. Dostoevsky, Nikolai Gogol, David Lynch, Dinara Asanova, Peter Jackson, etc.

I’m inspired by my husband.

I’m inspired by reading prose, written by poets.

Traveling. (Perhaps there’s no other thing that inspires me more). Atlas of the world/maps. Alps. staring at the surface of the sea, catching that inexplicable, deadly fear of the unknown and exploring through it. I’m inspired by National Geographic or BBC films about nature / animals. I’m inspired by cemeteries, by prayer, by experiencing genuine repentance and redemption. by magic of the movies and their separate stills, images of slow motion, face expressions, abstraction of sound, word structure, myths and generally by people who are myth-creators in their essence. (I love to listen to their stories and let them flow into me, inhabit and become part of the reality).

I’m inspired by the human ability to give oneself away unconditionally. The perpetuity of it all. And perfect precision in everything around. I’m inspired by modesty (an interview with Agnes Martin). I’m inspired by state of emptiness. Emptiness is a bliss. (Empty structures. empty in their substance, content — like techno music. There’s so much room for thought inside). Emptiness is unequivocally much more inspiring then fullness. Much more productive. While you’re perfectly happy, full of positive emotions, you don’t get a kick to produce, there’s no need to add anything. It’s like being in beautiful cities or nature, or in love, or drunk, or on drugs…. you’re complete within this given structure. Once there’s an imperfection, an error, emptiness, there’s a natural need to analyze it, embrace it and manifest it, incarnate into this or that — into music. Nobody is interested in how you love, it’s more or less the same everywhere. but show me your wounds and ill listen to you endlessly. You can only create with a critical spirit. …and so on, endlessly.

Hell Risers from “Pending’, 2009

AY: Your approach strikes me as highly personal and rather (though not staunchly) apolitical. Nevertheless, how have the various conflicts and upheavals in Georgia’s history since 1991 shaped your material or role as an artist?

NB: I doubt that they have any role in me as an artist at all. It definitely has played a role on a personal level, in terms of experience — a completely different experience from the lives of teen girls living in Europe or America, in the 20th century. For example, I don’t panic and feel more prepared if and when I hear machine-gun fire or a bomb explosion; or during electric black outs and water shortages (we’ve spent several splendid winters in candle light and kerosene stove heaters in the middle of the living room. Because there were so many times when we lived on the verge, in repellent readiness to lose everything we had, I know that there are things which are important, without doubt and there are things that can be replaced. But my music bears no reflection of that period. I was a small kid back then. I remember those weird and dark times through the expressions of the faces of my grandparents and parents. I felt their pain, not mine. However I do feel heartache towards events that take place in Georgia today. I try to keep away from them (there is no other way to be dedicated to what you do), and yet I know exactly that everything that I loved and cared for in this country is being taken away from me. Bit-by-bit, with a laconic reasoning, by those who I never understood and vice versa. Their lucid dream is to make this country a Christian Dubai — a tasteless, hideous, glittering oil bunker. A place you can not become part of. A place which can only exist in a state of recollection, rather than reality.

AY: How did you get your start as a musician? How or why did you come to choose electronics as a mode of expression over traditional instruments?

NB: Probably because I don’t play any instrument. My friends, Gogi Dzozoashvili and Nika Machaidze had these big, ugly PC Windows 32 desktops and made fantastic tunes with them. I just did the same later. Back then the idea that one can communicate and actually make something on this yet unexplored device, like a computer, enchanted me. It certainly was a worthwhile decision, since I could muffle the fact that I don’t have a musical education. All i needed was some basic knowledge of Pentium and full consumption of my ears. I must say it took me very little time to understand that this was it. I had found it! I felt so rewarded and so lucky to have found what I was looking for. Even now, after almost ten years later, I have never regretted it. I think the possibility to make music is a gift, regardless if you’re successful or not.

AY: What is GosLab and what are its aims? Who belongs?

NB: It was a group of friends, who wanted to play creative games and hang out the best they could given the circumstances… it was not long after the civil war in Georgia, which was followed by another war in Abkhazia (ex part of Georgia), which left the country crumbling. It was time of fear and confusion, of electric black-outs, felony, isolation. A time of anguish and despair but nevertheless there was huge wave of commitment and eagerness to pull through. so in a sense the only way to break through was to stick together and surf on a wave different then reality. We named it GosLab for a better sense of integrity and togetherness and we had fun…nowadays there is no more need for collective effort, since there’s no more hindrance as such. So we all work separately. GosLab is now a recollection.

AY: When I walk around T’bilisi I hear the usual stuff coming out of cars and shops: pop, hip-hop, R&B, club beats, ad nauseam. But who in Georgia, besides yourself and George Dzodzuashvili are making inspired electronic music with character? Who is making musique concrète, drone, field recordings, and this kind of thing?

NB: Nika Machaidze aka Nikakoi. Actually it’s thanks to him that I do music myself. He was a pioneer of computer generated Georgian music, starting from the 90s. Now there are few more people, like Jorjik, Thoma; young collectives like Kungfu Junkies, Me and My Monkey, Okinawa Lifestyle, Stia, Misho Urushadze, Luka Nakashidze. There’s this new wave which might go somewhere. Right now it sounds like most of the Western music, but this is not so important because everything is always taken from the existing, and all is stolen. Ultimately, what’s most important is from where you take it. So i feel there’s a chance something valuable emerging here, soon. At least I see eagerness, interest, and a certain readiness.

AY: You spent nine months in the United States as a teenager. What are some of the memories that stick with you from that time?

NB: Yes, I was living with a host family in Buffalo, NY. They were from the South, had an obvious strong southern accent and a persistent racist slant, which in retrospect, they never tried to hide. I was 15 and hadn’t yet taken American History, so I had very little understanding of racism in America.

It was a very cold day, with 1.5 meter high snow. The day before we were told in the school that we were going to have a day off for Martin Luther King’s birthday, so I intended to sleep longer that morning. But my host parents woke me up, shouting that I am going to be late for the school bus. I tried to tell them that it’s Martin Luther King’s birthday, it’s a day off and that the bus is not coming to pick me up, but they refused to listen and went on shouting in denial. They were indignant and outraged. They said something like,”that guy is totally overstated, definitely not worth it and that the country should not and is not having a day off due to some fraud, etc..”

They convinced me to pack my school bag and wait for the school bus in the street, where I stood for about 30 minutes, freezing. Eventually I went back inside and told them that if they still don’t believe that the bus is not coming, then they should call the school priinciple. they never called. Instead they maintained tha bad temper throughout the day, looking at me as if I was an enemy of the state.

AY: TBC Geo Doc is an especially intriguing track. Though I needn’t understand it to appreciate its phonetic-aesthetic properties, I do understand it’s about tuberculosis. How did this track come about?

NB: Through personal experience with countless doctors and blood tests. I was 22-23, diagnosed with tuberculosis, and was under heavy antibiotics treatment. I still don’t believe I was really infected, because I felt healed once I stopped taking the medication, went to the sea and drank and smoked like hell. It’s very typical of Georgian doctors to scare shit out of you. I imagined this doctor in the track as a monster, the hybrid of an animal and an old lady, with huge glasses and huge hair — very serious, pretentious, trying to swallow me. this archetype is mostly present in my “size and tears”, or at least it was meant to be. There’s much humor and a flair of mysticism to it.

TB Geo Doc from “Annulé”, 2005

AY: What was your reaction to Don Paterson’s paean to you? How did you learn of it? She doesn’t address this part. I might get rid of the whole question and response as well as it seems really insider? your thoughts?

NB: I laughed like hell. I laughed that I have “slavic eyebrows” and how he hated my former husband – Thomas Brinkmann, and so much more. It’s a great work, I think. And I was definitely pleasantly surprised and flattered.

AY: Have you any particular habits, rituals, and technique while composing? What is typically the process of getting a song from your imagination to the master tape/disc?

NB: I don’t really have any rituals. the ritual is probably the everyday routine of turning the computer on and starting to do something, no matter if I’m inspired to make music or not. This discipline I have gained with years of experience. It’s a fragile moment of the very beginning, with no expectation at all — you fail, you are rewarded. Most important is to get into the process, into the state of contemplation, state of complete withdrawal from reality. Once you’re there, you’re up to something. The process is something to die for, not the outcome, not the aftermath. I try but I can never fully possess it, control it. There are no tools that help you get hold of it. It’s always obscure, concealed. That’s why it’s always hard to talk about music, unless it’s been released and out there for a long time. If I understand what it is I’m doing from the very beginning, it turns out to be an invincible, boring scam. Very lonely, and never-to-be-loved. I sit by the computer and keep trying things up until the moment I catch a perfect wave. There’s always this one tune in the beginning. it’s the half of the whole. Everything else is less important. The rest flows like in a panic attack — rampantly. Usually arrangement has to be done in one flow, in couple of hours. Next step is the lyrics, which is nevertheless an important process. I grab the books, or internet with favorite poets and writers and create a patchwork. take bits and pieces from every one of them and mix those with mine. Done. Record…

Silently from “Forget’fulness”, 2011

AY: Do you anticipate any radical changes in direction, or have any plans for the next project you can discuss?

NB: I do actually. I’d like to switch to having my music be performed by live instruments, by the orchestra. I’m going to be working on two major projects this and next year, on the soundtracks for two feature films.

AY: What, if anything, is holding you back from doing exactly what you would like to do, artistically?

NB: Probably it’s the fear of confronting the limits and being incapable to overcome and go beyond them. Other than this, I think I am lucky to be doing what I’m doing. I am genuinely thankful for that.

Introduction and Serial Four-Part Interview
Introduction Part One: Prolegomenon Part Two: Universal Structures Part Three: Authorship

Aram Yardumian - Although your music is tightly composed and a cerebral experience—almost without limits—for the listener, I don’t find myself thinking it is bereft of emotion. Is emotional content a byproduct or part of the articulative structure, or something else?

Giancarlo Toniutti - I think we should better define what we mean with the word “emotion”. My idea of it is not a sentimental one. As you noticed I have spent words “against” a sentimental nature, but this is just to discriminate and separate my work from a commonplace attitude over these concepts. I understand sentiments are part of our world view and life, but they have rather limited access when you properly work with sound. The sentiment you might inscribe in a music is a literary one, a quote, we could say. And this rational literary approach to music is not something I am interested in. My music has to do with fundamental (at least this is my effort) dynamics of the psyche, the body and us anthropologically seen. So emotions if taken as a sentimental part of life is something I never use to make music. I never decide or observe my emotions (even less other’s) to generate music. I consider them to be outside the realm of rationality and language control and by remitting them to that realm would mean transforming them into a rational and narrative part of the ego, something I am not interested in as a method of work or as a purpose. Emotions are simply one of the fundamental functions of our psychic complexity, meant in its broader sense. But to work as a function they cannot be translated into or represented as something else, be it music, art, language or whatever. This representation is not the emotion itself, concretely taken, but the narrative idea the author has or wants to communicate of it. And too many times this is the only mode authors seem to have to deal with emotions, using them to convey this (limited) typification form. To me the emotional content, as you call it, is “naturally” inscribed into anyone’s action, and the more complex the action is, the more the emotional content is deep and impossible to be superficially treated. In this sense all my works have this deep level, which is something I don’t work with, as it comes by itself (you say a byproduct, we could call it an epiphenomenon), and it is a field where the dynamic side of reality is dealt with in non-rational terms. But when I speak of emotions (in this case) I am not talking of love and hate, rage, fear, pleasure etc. which are the representational verbal side of affective conventions (typifications). What I mean as interesting is the limbic perturbations of the organism connected to human behaviour and cognition. The moment I speak of them or treat them in a “figurative” way, I am already cutting them off the phenomenon and transforming them into objects of thought.

AY - Do you ever find yourself in the music, or learn anything about yourself in the process?

GT - I have not a self-indulgent ontogenetic relation with music, or sound. At least not in the role of the author. As a listener and sometime performer, which can be a special case of listener, I can be inside sounds, not necessarily finding myself. Well, I would have to define who I am, first, and since each one of us is, at the same time, many “personae”, I could anyway only find a portion of them. In this sense what I could learn is only a particle of that complexity, if I learn anything. In my opinion it’s not so much about learning as it is about cognitive functions, and in this sense I am sure music has a lot to “induce”. But when I am composing, the act of organizing and articulating sounds into a sound morphology, my self is a part of the whole process. Of course, as I said I don’t intend to remove myself from the compositional act, only my ego perhaps. In any case, I am sure that what I do has a significance if I am doing it, even the least of the actions I could do, being part of my own mental and practical processes is giving something to “humanity”. It is inevitably me, the one behind those musics. But this “me” has not to do with the realization or improvement of my self (even less my ego of course), but with a kind of cultural-cognitive function to a collective gnoseology and/or ethos, we could say, given the chances I might have to reach people. What I learn from this whole general process, of course, comes first from my research activities, which can be sonic as well as non sonic ones, even when musically oriented. I can learn about myself, as I learn about each human persona for everything and anything I do can teach me something. But this depends more on my attitude in learning and the tools I have developed to learn, then the chances given to me from occasional and fortuitous circumstances. Learning is a process depending on the questions we pose to reality. Answers depend on questions.

Tienalauami, Tahta Tarla, by Andrew Chalk and Giancarlo Toniutti

AY - What projects have you in mind for the near and distant future? A magnum opus?

GT - As you know I have published some new work in the recent years. It’s been a renewed relation with forms. I have been investigating sounds more and more and I have plenty of ideas for new projects, cd publication, texts, live activities etc. There already are a couple of improving projects I have put my hands onto in the recent years, that will come to a conclusion hopefully within the next year or so. I cannot foretell deadlines as I have no deadlines and time for me is relative. As in the past my pace tends to be “geological”, in a way. I need to give time to each project to see if it really has a necessity behind or if it’s just a selfish compromise of my mind. I have in mind also some magnum opus as you call it, or as I represent it to myself. One should be a large documentation, in the form of a box with “cd-specific” versions, of my 4 sound-sites, the live multichannel “installation-like” sound forms I developed over the years. Then there are several investigated fields to be discovered while working and a lot of work and research to do. Anyway as for the “near” future, the two projects I should be working onto, one of which already has many recordings done, involve two main fields of interest. First one is about what I could call “marginal” sonic structures, usually meant as “ornaments” even in sound-works, which I want instead to investigate in their central functions, so to say. The idea is to work with sonic structures which are usually considered “accessory” to a main work, to investigate this accessory quality and see how it can, on the other hand, be formed as central, core function to a morphology, and then cognition. This of course tends to imply the use of both quite “inertial” sonic phenomena and environments. The other project, still to be developed, seems to rotate around the idea of critical bands in frequency perceptions. But I think it is useless to go into details at this point of the development. More has to come. One day they will certainly appear. I am never really scheduling my activities, if not as a response to commissions, or offers of projects etc. I keep my working method as open as possible and responding mainly to its quality and research time. I am fascinated by so many subjects, and only when I can pour enough material into a growing project I can think that this is something I will work onto for the next times. It’s a “double-walk” and polygenetic process.

Introduction and Serial Four-Part Interview
Introduction Part One: Prolegomenon Part Two: Universal Structures Part Four: il sé interiore

Aram Yardumian - What is the relationship between your album “Epigènesi” and epigenetics, if anything? Epigenetics is of course a most fascinating subject, but I failed to see how it was part of the concept of the album, if in fact it was.

Giancarlo Toniutti - Epigènesi (Italian for epigenesis) has strong connections with the notions of epigenetics. It has a relationship more with the concept of course than the concrete epigenetic conditions, at this stage. Epigenetics has to do with the interactions occurring between the genetic and environmental conditions of an organism’s development and how these interactions help the morphogenetic (the creation of form) and cognition fields of that organism. How genotypes develop into phenotypes within an environment. This is a very basic approach for my work with sounds. Seen under different (more musical) terms, it is the relation and interaction between the conceptual macrostructural approach (the general shape idea) and the concrete “environmental” conditions of each single sonic phenomenon (the single sound and their single generation) I involve in a project. “Epigènesi” is the first time I properly worked with these concepts in an operative sense. La Mutazione was based more on the contrasting encounters of different surfaces of sounds, which layered through a contrastive and/or cooperative work. Each layer in La Mutazione starts as a separate layer entering the same (sound)-space and interacting with the others (trying to find a niche etc.). In “Epigènesi”, differently, layers are formed with the contribution of many diverse sub-layers, so that their interaction with the other layers is more of a densifying type, creating specific niches etc. The final form, thus, is originated through the “conflicts” between the continuity points within layers and such “conflicts” mainly depend on the sonic “environment” generated by these process trajectories. Epigenetics in this sense also gives a “philosophic” background to the approach to the various levels of the composition. From then on it has become something like a general “rule” to my working methods, and it still is.

AY - There is something uniquely decadent about electronic music from Italy (I don’t use the term “Industrial” because I think that term was born and died with Throbbing Gristle). You and Maurizo Bianchi especially, as well as Vivenza, who is in fact French. Part of it was born there with Busoni, Russolo, and the Futurists. There is, it seems to me, a praxis in Italian electronic music the same way, for example, the 70s German underground, diverse as it was formally, shared an aesthetic. I’m not talking about nationalen Bewußtseins here (or in your case coscienza nazionale), but perhaps some kind of shared memories or shared language within an interaction sphere. What do you think?

GT - Actually from my point of view, there is not such a homogeneous “language” in what you call the “Italian” electronic music. Maybe this might be due to the fact that my personal relationship with what was happening during the early ’80s in Italy was not so big (though of course I had my contacts). I think the whole Italian underground scene was much more heterogeneous than the way you maybe perceived it, at least in my view. Certainly there has been, especially at the beginning, some shared territory, but this was mainly due, in my opinion, to the cultural currents of the time and the strong influence an author like Maurizio Bianchi had on his contemporaries (mostly younger than him). Italy has had different avantgarde waves during the twentieth century, from the Futurists to the ’50s electronic (academic: Berio, Maderna, Nono) music, to the late ’60s improvisation avantgarde like Nuova Consonanza and their innovative language and techniques within an instrumental repertoire. In the early ’80s a new avantgarde exploded much like it exploded in other European countries, but of course with certain characteristics, I cannot identify from within probably. As for me, and my activity, if I have been receiving some influence from MB’s more abstract works, I also took my own path trying to avoid any (apart from historical and unavoidable connections) direct relationship with anything like a genre or a mode of specifically making music. So even though some unconscious legacy could be somewhere in my work (though I wouldn’t see any connection between the adjective “decadent” and my music), I never worked in favour of it or in favour of any possible conclusion (or seclusion) within a shared praxis (not to speak of a shared aesthetics). All in all, I also abandoned electronics as a means to generate sound since “La Mutazione” (in “epigènesi” and somewhere else electronics has been scarcely used and basically as another “acoustic” source). I tend to think that any “common” ground of a movement is more a question of critic point, seen from elsewhere, than a real convergent function.

AY - You and your brother Massimo Toniutti both work in the field of electronic music, albeit with remarkably different results. Perhaps you might share any memories of Paroksi-Eksta (25 years ago), and comment on whether you continue to collaborate.

GT - My brother is younger than me, so probably he grew with the musics I was listening to at home, in a way. He started doing electroacoustic works around 1984 I think, with some occasional contribution to some of my recordings earlier than that. Nowadays he is more into musics for videos of different natures (from art to documentary) and maybe moved a bit away from the early electroacoustic experiments. As for Paroksi-eksta, this was a specific project we did with two friends of us (with which we ran a mail-order catalogue too at the time: Daniele Pantaleoni and Giuliana Stefani). We only realized two contributions to two compilations and the project was quickly over. It was a time of experiments under many directions and of course as any collaboration, this has been a way to see how different approaches could coalesce and give way to new possibilities. I must admit that all in all they remained just two closed experiments. As for future collaborations with my brother, I don’t think we will (though I can’t predict future!!) because there are differences in our views, mainly, and when these differences are “shared” between brothers (and people who are so close to each other) it’s always more difficult and maybe less reasonable to try to force the conditions. We certainly have quite a sharing of our differentiated experiences, so we are always in contact and keep having a fruitful mutual dialogue on the topics related to musics…

Warkswood, Tahta Tarla, by Andrew Chalk and Giancarlo Toniutti

AY - Field recording is not yet very well understood as an art form. I think it is fair to say that it is no more a matter of pressing the button at random places and times than is photography. Do you make field recordings as a discipline wherever you go?

GT - I think Field-recording has been overestimated and at the same time underestimated. The debate over what field-recording is or could be and its limits, gains etc. has been quite restricted to a technical debate (over the equipments) or to an aesthetical one (over its “sentimental” side). But much of what should have been fundamental to it, seems to remain at the borders of the enquiries. The problem regarding the notion of nature and natural, the role of the “observer” in the observation (the recordist/recorder in the recording), the function of the field-recording and the debatable concept of soundscape, and so on, all this is still quite neglected in the artistic debate on the field. At least this is my impression and much is, on the contrary, concentrated on field-recording as a discipline as you say, or even as a label (with a dogmatic view of it). I think field-recording as a name is quite devoid of meaning if taken as it is, i.e. something done (recorded) outside of the studio. The practice of using rooms, spaces and places different from a recording studio has a long history and as for me, has been practiced since my early days. My studio has more or less been quite an occasional place to record sounds. It is a place where I work with them (still analogically, reel-to-reel tapes etc., at least in terms of its modulation, elaboration, abstraction). While to record sounds I do this wherever I find a suitable (fitting) place to go and generate sound (be it anthropically made or captured). The problem with field-recording nowadays seems to me to be the representational attitude still over-existing in its praxis. You should be followed when you write “it is no more a matter of pressing the button at random places and times than is photography”, but I think to many people it’s still that. Or its sentimental complement, the idea of representing a “natural” subject through the field-recording approach as something “more natural” and thus more true, as opposed to something cultural and thus artificial. This, that I see as a Romantic investment (with a scientific legitimacy), is something I am not following at all. My field-recording activity (intending this only as the activity of capturing sounds from the reality as compared to generating sounds myself) is “only” another possibility to continue and develop my idea of a separation of the productive gesture from the generation of sound (cf. my text “Epigenetic Hyperphonesis: maltreatment of the sound source” in “epigènesi” as a first source of this notion), this “distance” helping to avoid the intellectual, sentimental and behavioural influences one has over the involved sounds. This has nothing to do with the Cagean idea of the removal of the author (simplifying of course), but much to do with an idea of emphasizing the role of sound sources themselves (and their inherent dynamics etc.) over their productive use and utility. In this sense I only record when I have a project. I have no archive (or mostly) of “useful” field-recordings or any other recording. My activity is always functional to the specific projects, or almost so. Only when I have a project, or mostly, I start investigating, studying and collecting the sounds I intend to involve in the project. Though of course there is a constant and daily attention and investigation of sonic phenomena and their possible preliminary attraction.

Introduction and Serial Four-Part Interview
Introduction Part One: Prolegomenon Part Three: Authorship Part Four: il sé interiore

Aram Yardumian - Throughout your entire career, there seems to be a search for common or fundamental dynamics in the human psyche. More recently you come to this as pre-cultural habitus. But to trace this to the source, surely there must be some recourse to symbols as C.G. Jung describes them.

Giancarlo Toniutti -Well, it’s not about Jung. Even though we can consider the recourse to some idea of archetype as (relatively) viable, actually what I am working with, my idea of what’s behind our surface has to do with the notion, though not absolutist, of something like the so-called universals. You are absolutely right when you say that my search is about fundamental dynamics behind human psyche and behaviour. My idea of search is exactly outside, but not against, the acquired (habitual) codes, at least favouring a re-examination of these common codes, and the same idea of common codes. Actually what any avantgarde has done, even though it’s been done in the footsteps of history (nothing can be done outside history), has been to break with the previous codes. This break, which can be more or less programmatic, is at the same time the gain and the problem of all “discoveries”. It is a gain because it can open new or different points of view on a reality or a view on an unseen reality, but it can also create “background” troubles because the previous shared codes are no longer active and there is always a period of unshared codes where things and their value (their signification) is less clear and less perceivable under common terms. But it’s something you cannot avoid, just by relying on tradition or conservatism. History works and what you always get is knowledge, which is the foundation of reality. I am not necessarily speaking of a rational knowledge. In fact, this problem of irrationality in the arts is a false problem and a relic of Romanticism. The fundamental question is that reality mechanisms are perceived through our perception systems and how (and how much) we are our perception systems. Symbols are not the point at this level. I mean of course we all rely on symbols, as part of our abstract thinking and relating. But falling back onto symbols only as a way to discover a deeper reality is just a way to escape it. Its “material side” is much more complex than we can think of and I believe there still is plenty of space to be investigated that any need to escape from it is just a way to cut it short and be somehow comforted by some assured (short-circuited) “truth”. No truth with the big T is out there. A large part of what we do is to work with doubts (unstable systems), and any doubt is necessarily the reality we live by.

AY - Space, or lack thereof, seems to have played an important role in your work from the beginning. Even prior to reading Thom the directions of individual pieces were minutely topographical. More recently, there seems to be a center-periphery perspective—the view from South India, the Caucasus, and elsewhere—using sounds from the periphery to reference an ostensible core. It reminds me of something V.S. Naipaul wrote about in his essay “Our Universal Civilization.”

GT - Well it’s very correct to say that space is central to my work. I treat sounds only as phenomena in a space. There is no sound if there is no space to it. I recently discovered a statement by Giacinto Scelsi (even though his view might be different from mine on certain topics) which fits well the question. He says (from his autobiographical book “the dream 101″, my translation): «the sound needs a vital space in proportion to itself to be able to resonate, vibrate and carry out its creative power». In this sense, be it dense or rare, space is never detached from sound. Or vice versa. That’s why it is important for me not to work with any electronic or artificial reverberation system, and this is why I am always recording my sounds each time in a specific space, I regard as relevant to the sonic needs I have. But then you touch a different point when you speak of the centre-periphery question. I must say that I totally disagree with Naipaul’s idea about his concept of “universal civilization”. He seems to point at one civilization as being the universal one, while I never believed that there can be one civilization which is better representing the relationship between man and nature (to say) or which is more apt to convey evolution, than others. On the contrary, my interest in marginal cultures is exactly to investigate and try to demonstrate that all cultures in the world do have tried to systematize their relationship with nature (with reality), and each one of these systems being one of the equally possible valuable ways of relationship. Naipaul’s view involves a hierarchy between centre and periphery, where my idea is not hierarchical at all. There is a relation or more than one between centre and edge, one that has been explained by Thom with his notion of catastrophe sets (at the border of systems the activity is greater due to a minor density and greater discontinuities) on one hand, or by Milford Wolpoff with his concept of centre and edge (the variation being greater at the centre due to major quantity of gene flow and greater interrelations). So my interest in marginal cultures has nothing to do with a hierarchy or with any notion of a superior civilization, but on the contrary with an abundance of qualitative “specimens” in variety. Variety is the question we have to deal with, or as it is so often called, biodiversity. One of my goals is to give notice of this also through my activities.

Qwalsamtimtukw?italuc’ik (And Now He Almost Did Make Himself Into Hemlock Needles, It Is Said)

AY – Émile Benveniste remarked that speech acts constitute discourse space, creating a speaker, a location, and a moment of utterance that are utterly unique and always changing. What are your opinions on this?

GT - I think that in Benveniste’s view there is a failure in that he seems to underestimate the role of the listener. Without a listener no speech act has any function and probably would disappear (from evolution) as too much energy consuming for the organism. So if there is to be a speech act, a discourse space etc. there must be both a speaker and a listener. In this sense, relating to music or any other sonic activity, sound is there if and only if there is a space to it, both meant as its resonating space and its listening space. So it looks like the old chicken and egg question: who comes first. The problem is how we define a chicken and an egg. If chicken is what we see and define as chicken today, and the same for eggs, which one comes first is then irrelevant (even though to me chicken comes first…). The real point is the categories with which we arrange reality. And through which we systematize it. The uniqueness idea in Benveniste’s view, anyway, is reasonably considered as a cognition space, as it always is unique and it is a (as C.H. Waddington would say) homeorhetic system. As such it’s always changing. The important point we have to consider is the relation. Meanings exist in relation, not in their absolute state. In a relation something can be taken as blue or white or loud or weak, because in relation we compare and in comparison we categorize. These categories shape (in some form) our reality. Of course also in this case we might come back to the chicken and egg question. Is our conceptualization of reality shaping our perception or our perception systems (their audible, visible etc. physiological frequency ranges) shaping our conceptualization of reality? In my view, this is an epigenetic problem, a question of interrelated systems growing up and developing into a constant process.Maybe the rudimentary chicken comes first, but provided with rudimentary eggs…

AY - Has the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis had any influence on your techniques or overall outlook?

GT - As stated above I do not think that language strictly shapes our perception of reality (Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis) or reality shapes our language systems. Both views are partly acceptable and both are limited. Of course the debate is not only linked to this question but also to a possible “pyramid” view of reality (societies, cultures etc.). In any case I am basically not in full agreement with the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, as I regard it a limited view of the problem, even though their contribution to the debate was great at the time. If we certainly understand reality with the aid of words (and linguistic concepts), we must say that our understanding is not exactly the same as the narration of it. So we certainly narrate reality through words, languages and thus a certain amount of differences do arise from each language’s specificity. But what we understand is comprehended through many levels includinglanguage. It is interesting perhaps to notice and analyze this problem viewing how deaf-born people do understand reality (starting from an absence of language, as we mean it). And it is interesting to notice that they elaborate a “language” (several kinds of sign languages) which has the same diversity from spoken languages as it has from non-verbal ones. In this sense, so, language is certainly a tool and such a profound one that influences a lot of what we do, but language is not the only tool we have and as such we come in contact with reality through the many possible tools available to us. This general question certainly had an influence on my own work. We cut reality through our categories, and that’s certainly part of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, but these categories are not strictly dependent only on language structures. On one hand Sapir and Whorf opened a way to look at language diversity in a non-hierarchical way, which is an important issue concerning all cultures. No culture is underdeveloped or backward. Each culture has developed one way to relate to reality and each one is valid. We must not compare cultures, because it is not a competition to find which one is best. The point is which question do we pose to a culture to see if it’s able “enough” to respond adequately to that question. But the usual questions (technology, economy, education etc.) are very stupid ones and quite useless because they respond to our western needs and parameters. And even if we think we are in a globalized world today, this was the same (on other levels) also in the past, the very distant one. Usually we are quite short-sighted and ego-centred about differences between present and past, between here and there, between us and them and above all about dualism in general.

AY – Your use of micro-, macro-, and meso-structures again has a certain appeal to Jung, as well as to Swedenborg, Novalis, and others who traversed the depths of their own unconscious. Do you think your layered compositional methods have any spiritual significance?

GT – Starting from the question: apart from the fact that we should define this concept of “spiritual significance”, if I take it in its traditional sense, my work has no spiritual significance. There is no spiritual research or spiritual whatsoever. I say this in relation to your mention of people like Novalis and Swedenborg which are really very distant from my way of thinking. I have no romantic background, theoretically and practically. I think it is not necessary here to go into details over a debate for or against Romanticism. But what is sure for me is that reality, I mean the material reality has so many layers and possibilities that any “spiritual” level (provided there might be one, which as you guess I strongly doubt) is absolutely unnecessary to try to understand it. And what I am interested into is this: understanding, comprehending, investigating etc. reality, of which I am part of. The inner travel, inside me for example, has a limited interest for me, if it is intended as a way to elevate myself over reality (in favour of any golden age, or paradise or whatsoever) and detach myself from it. I see this form of escapism as a problem more than a solution. I am not religious in any sense. I wouldn’t call myself materialist because I do not share the whole of those views (it’s a historical label). And because it would be difficult to label ‘materialist’, for example, someone distant from western culture like a Nganasan, or a Ket people from Siberia. I don’t mean to compare myself to them. I just say that the question is (as ever) to try and see and define the basic concepts we are working with. Labels can be useful to help (heuristically) a discussion, but they are not reality. So what is important to me is not to look into my unconscious and discover from it anything about me. What is important for me is to work through myself and see and investigate what can be more fundamental to the human kind. Not forgetting we are part of the cultures we are raised into, but certainly understanding that this culture is not the whole world. And while it is only one way to look at it, and it gives only a portion of it, the answers we get from our reality (as well as from ourselves) can only be a portion of the questions. Finding knots, relations and structural sharing between cultures (as well as individuals) is the most important fact for me. Art is a collective activity, not a single personal travel to anywhere. So my micro-, meso- and macro-structural articulations are ways, tools and categories, I employ to segment the continuity of the real, to be able to work with it. And as a consequence to understand it and conceptualize. And in the end to apply all this to reality itself as a generation process (and a function both of this generation and its imprinting articulation).

Introduction and Serial Four-Part Interview
Introduction Part Two: Universal Structures Part Three: Authorship Part Four: il sé interiore

The following interview with Giancarlo Toniutti was conducted in June 2011 in hopes of providing some context through which his sound art may be introduced and appreciated. As with all permanent works of art, continued engagement yields continued reward.

Aram Yardumian – First, regardless of how I may have characterized your work historically in the introduction, how would you sum up your mission as an artist/musician at the present time?

Giancarlo Toniutti – It is difficult to question one’s own “mission” because of various reasons. The point is that evolution, which of course still has to do with the notion of improving the fitness of the species, but also the singular “abilities” of each individual is always going on and is part of the goal. If this seems to be quite a bit ambitious or haughty, maybe, I understand the problem. But if we have to speak about a goal, we should also better specify the field, before specifying the “mission”. Limiting the idea of “mission” to “making music”, if there is any mission, or goal, this has to be included in a general idea of what an “artist/musician” is within a culture or a society. Given somehow for granted some of the definitions like culture, artist, purpose and so on, I can only mention that my idea of what I do (and maybe why) is functional to the idea of evolution of “culture”, and in a way a very general anthropologic idea of culture, which has to do with humankind and phylogenesis as well, This function is related to a certain idea of purpose, as I cannot see my sound working as devoted to just entertain anyone or even supply any sentimental journey, as much as I cannot see the second law of thermodynamics as entertaining, for example, or the Yenisey river as entertaining…. Of course the question is more complex than that, but maybe I gave you a hint…

AY – What are the most important basic thematic lines a listener should follow?

GT – Do you mean in musical terms? Or not only. In musical terms my issue with working with a sonic reality is anyhow to work with its morphology. I could mention from René Thom’s book, Structural Stability and Morphogenesis, a quote which, as general as it is, well applies to my idea of what making music is (for me): «One of the central problems studied by mankind is the problem of the succession of forms». So my “program” and my problem has always to do with forms, morphologies and how they interact, relate, generate, collapse, change, modulate, oscillate etc. From this basic program many levels should follow the fact that sounds are the core to the generation of music forms, the respect of their generative “natures” is fundamental to my working with them. That’s something I could call the “rights of sounds”, which has not to do with a “naturalistic” idea (representational or figurative) of the sonic phenomena, neither an impressionistic one, but with their rights to be treated according to their own morphological and morphogenetic dynamic features and fields. And in this sense one of my main ideas is what I can call “the accident as a necessity” (to paraphrase a lecture by Luigi Nono “the error as a necessity”), given the fact that the instability of micro-structural patterns has such a relevance in my construction of music. It is for this that the study of anthropology, morphology, acoustics (and more) are inevitably the rudiments for me. Then each work tries to investigate a specific question, from a certain quality of sounds, a certain quality of forms and their relations, a certain structural activity and so on (from macro- to microstructural questions). We could go into details for each work, if you like. But then we should also walk outside the musical field and into “sciences” -anthropology for example…

AY – You began reading René Thom in 1983. It seems apparent to me that his Singularity Theory provided a structural basis for “Metánárkosis” and “La Mutazione”, et al; as well his work as a topologist may have informed some of your more recent work. But I suspect his influence is more pervasive than I have detected. How would you characterize it?

GT - It is correct to say that René Thom’s theoretical approach to reality, his program of studies, as explained from his book “Structural Stability and Morphogenesis” on, has been very important for me to develop the fundamental tools to observe reality, which music is part of. His influence has been much more important from “epigènesi” on, in a way, as the previous works had more to do with a more elementary treatment of the sonic structures, from simple linear interactions, to surface modulations etc. Of course this doesn’t mean that I have closed my research within his system only, or that his system and theoretical approach is the only possible one. I find it a great investigative and generative system, but it is one of the many possibilities we have to investigate reality and as time goes on I have developed and improved my knowledges of other systems as well, which have become beneficially complementary to my work. Certainly he’s been and still is very important to the way I look into the complexity of things. It is a fact that complexity too often is taken as a problem more than a resource. But as long as we are aware of how reality works, we cannot help but recognize that what we deal with is only a limited part of the whole mechanics implied in a system, and that systems are porous, elastic and in constant mutation. Theoretical questions in general seem to me to be fundamental to our praxis, despite an always increasing anti-intellectual mood. To ask why and how things are the way they seem to be, and if they can be different, is as important as the practical choices we employ.

The Tree, La Mutazione (1985)

AY - Apart from your early interests in Schnitzler, Schulze, Brian Eno, et al, are you consciously aware of any specifically musical interests on the material you are creating now? Regardless of influence, what if anything do you listen to these days?

GT - Certainly I am still influenced, on some level, by what I listen to. And what I read as well. Positively or negatively said. And by attraction as well as reaction to what’s going on in the field or fields of music nowadays. Of course the great formative influences usually appear at the beginning of a “career”, when we are closer to an open system. But I have been constantly trying to inform my sound-working through what I can listen to, on certain levels. There always is a chance given to my ears, and mind, to learn a bit more about things. It is about forms, as said above, and as such it is about finding forms in things we perceive. All form dynamics help understanding forms. Certainly now I tend to somehow filter more than before what I listen to. It doesn’t mean I listen less than before or that before I was less radical than I am now. It’s not to do with that. I keep being interested in things because of their values and structural qualities, more than what I can simply judge as “what I like” which is a pervasive yet vagrant and arbitrary quality of things. But there is somehow a kind of professional by-product, which influences the way I listen … Anyway I listen to a certain “limited range” perhaps, in the eyes of many, if we think music as divided in genres,which I do not. I mainly listen to electroacoustic or avantgarde or experimental, or whatever the name, musics, with my ideas of them. I can listen to other things of course, but that’s mainly done as a research work. I am not omnivorous at all. That said, I also listen with great interest to non-western musics, especially from areas I am interested in (like Siberia or the Caucasus e.g., to name a few). I have learned a lot from these cultures, how they can structure music and sounds, how they relate to them etc., which can be very different from our ideas of it all, and this is always quite relevant to me, both in theoretical and operative terms.

AY - Barring some buried found vocal snips on “The Tree”, the human voice plays no role whatsoever in your music. Have you no aesthetic interest in it, or do you find its semantic values too specific to find a place in your work?

GT - Yes, basically the human voice has no part in my sound materials. I have used it a bit in the past – early days, before becoming progressively aware of the fact that our (acoustic and neural) physiology treats human voice differently from the other sounds. It is somehow impossible, or very rarely possible, to use voice along with other sonic phenomena, and not being mainly attracted by it, or not treating it separately. This has to do exactly with the fact that our perception system has developed to select voice out of the general sonic environment of reality, as we need semantically listening to it, more than we do for other sonic events. Its place in human evolution, language, vocal signals and so on, has taken such a large amount of space (also neural), that it is impossible to avoid being influenced or affected by it. It is impossible, or nearly so, to really abstract and move it on another level of perception. What music does is to abstract the sonic quality of a phenomenon and create complex relations between such sonic qualities. But this abstraction means we have to forget the representational levels of its original source, or at least put it in a lesser degree of perceptual cognition. This could be clear, I think, when we speak of sounds from a natural source e.g. When, as a composer, I am recording the sound of a creaking tree bent by wind, I am interested in that specific creaking sound, and not in its representational image (the iconic idea of the sound of the tree, bent by wind).  But this is true and maybe even stronger, as an example with sounds from any musical instrument, like a viola, e.g. When listening to a viola playing a certain tune, we don’t have to concentrate our attention on the fact that we listen to strings attached to a wooden body and struck by a bow made of hair etc. But actually that is exactly what we are listening to. Should we stop at the “concrete” realm we would remain attached to that “idea” of sound and are unable to make the “music” experience. With voice this abstraction is much more difficult if not almost impossible to me. And that’s why it doesn’t work into my idea of music. Of course voice used to convey a narrative code is another question and I can enjoy this in other approaches to musics.

Serial Four-Part Interview
Part One: Prolegomenon Part Two: Universal Structures Part Three: Authorship Part Four: il sé interiore

Introduction Essay by Aram Yardumian

Giancarlo Toniutti began conducting sonic experiments in late 1977 with his friend Tiziano Dominighini in a glassworks owned by Dominighini’s father. With the various tools, machines, surfaces, and sheets of glass, as well as a few traditional instruments, they began making “not exactly free music”. By this time Toniutti had discovered Conrad Schnitzler, Tangerine Dream, Pink Floyd, et al, but found these things too easy and took little inspiration from anything but his own ideas, and a desire to create his own listening world. He soon began taking his own practice of composition more seriously. In 1980 he obtained a synthesizer and in 1982 began studies of electronic music at the Conservatory in Venice. There he was introduced to the music of Ligeti, Nono, and Xenakis. At the same time he began corresponding with Maurizio Bianchi, who helped him attain a presence in cassette culture, and with the labels who would eventually release his records. On a superficial level it is not unreasonable to characterize Toniutti’s music as a bridge between the dynamic formalism of the modern Conservatory and the claustrophobic parallel universe of early Bianchi, but this would be to pass over the living world to which his sound structures are a gateway. That Toniutti began thinking and composing as a teenager unguided by any musical lantern but his own interests is essential to an understanding of the directions his musical output have taken.

The evolution of Toniutti’s oeuvre is as fluid as the work itself. I divide its course into three phases, early, middle and late. The early work (1981-84), consisting of three cassettes[1] of treated acoustic source material and synth sounds serve as a kind of foundation for the mid-period works for which he is best known. Each of these early tapes is a kind of phenomenological assault on lived experience—time, space, structure, poetics, being, and perception—an ascent to Seinsverständnis. On a superficial level it is not unreasonable to characterize this early phase of Toniutti’s music as a bridge between the dynamic formalism of the modern Conservatory and the claustrophobic parallel universe of Bianchi, but this would be to pass over the deep living world of his sound structures. You will find the pieces on these cassettes are remarkably structured and nuanced, and if you are prepared to listen to them again their complex evolutionary patterns will continue to unfold. The first of them, entitled Wechselwirkung (1982) is a series of mechanistic exercises whose complexity is derived from aleatory encounters of dual cyclic sonic lines which in time evolve from linear to granular motion. Metánárkosis (1983), in spite of its title, feels warmer, more organic and more spacious than its predecessor. Here, for the first time, we see Toniutti using specific asymmetric syncopations to dispense with linearity in favor of three-dimensional motion. It is as if you are listening to the secret interior sounds of complex cell growth. On each side of Das Todesantlitz (1983) there is one long synth-based piece of a more confrontation nature, both in terms of inter-structural elements with each other, and the overall structure. Increasingly complex, Toniutti with this cassette, as with Metánárkosis, seems to be settling into a multi-level approach to composition, one which he retains even as his intellectual and timbral modes expand and change with each subsequent release.

Toniutti’s mid-period works demonstrate a refined grasp on complex forms and their interactions, much as Xenakis did with “Orient-Occident III”. With La Mutazione (1985), his sole LP release for Gary Mundy’s formidable Broken Flag label, he reached what I would consider the apex of his density, velocity and saturation. This, along with the Bianchi-esque Epigènesi (1986) represent the middle phase of Toniutti’s discography, and a partial return to linearity. Dark underground streams weave for miles through the remains of buried ancient villages whose abandoned technologies speak in proto-languages to us as we pass, but soon we find we have moved only a few inches through a vast microcosmos of hypothalamic symbols. La Mutazione’s B-side track, “Nekrose”, continues this morphing abstract discourse on psychic fundamentals while also paying occasional tribute to the cosmic synth sounds of the 70s German underground. A more dedicated search for universals than in the first three cassettes, these mid-period works look to new emotional territory, especially with the mournful sounding “Ethmòs-Crivèllo”, the B-side of Epigènesi.

Nekrose, La Mutazione (1985)

These works stand in stark contrast to later works such as Tahta Tarla (1993), an LP of collaborations with English sound-artist Andrew Chalk. Here, Toniutti’s interest in anthropology and human-landscape dynamics becomes overt, even as his grammatical categories become covert. Taking geographic totems as a principle, the album’s sounds are treated field recordings relating to Warkswood, Northumberland, and Tienalauami, on the Slovenian border. The places themselves are circumscribed in the sound-work as a parallax of space/perception/memory: topology and internal morphology, reminiscent of the Psychophysics of Boas and Peirce. As with his *KO/USK- (1997), a collaboration with Siegmar Fricke, the limitations of the sound sources themselves provide a framework for the compositions, and thus the modes of transmission.

Toniutti releases and distributes his own music according to his own timetable. As a result, all his works feel fully considered and perfected. Following *KO/USK- he released very little for nearly a decade. Since 2007 there have appeared three CDs (two 3” and one full length) continuing in his mode of treated field recording explorations of complex forms, each with its own theoretical and geographic orientation. He has also contributed increasingly to print media, as well as branching into radio works and multi-media events.

Personal explorations into the sciences are the foundations of Toniutti’s music—ideas built into discourses in the halls of the Ivory Tower here receive adroit articulation in the layered soundscapes of a lone electronic musician working from his second story home studio in Udine. What is more, the attractors, knots, canalization, balances, equilibrium, Heraclitian imponderables, macro and micro structure shifts—all his hard work—may remain a technical backstage mystery without diminishing his chops. His compositions, increasingly organic as they are, give off the stench of life. Even thirty years after their creation, their stench is vital. To listen to Giancarlo Toniutti is to witness a complex metastasis of form, something evolving and growing, but like all natural life, without teleological imperatives.

______________________________________________________

[1] Each made in editions of less than 100, and now very difficult to obtain, these have been rereleased in their entirely as part of the 3xLP + 10” boxset entitled The Early Tapes Period, on Frank Maier’s Vinyl-on-Demand label.

I have not always been a big Country-Western fan, but someone posted a clip of Steve Earle and Emmylou Harris performing Earle’s Goodbye on Facebook a few months back, and it’s been haunting me ever since. Goodbye is hill people music, a Scots-Irish ballad that aims for an ideal economy of expression in which hard-won truths and lessons learned are delivered without adornment. Earle is singing about the ravages of heroin addiction, how a woman left him and he didn’t even notice. “I can’t remember/if we said goodbye,” is the simple refrain. It’s a line that reverberates endlessly against itself in ways that convey us to the heart of our own vulnerability. The reason Earle didn’t notice is that he was too high at the time; he was too high because of the intensity of his vulnerability, which is exactly what made the woman’s departure inevitable. Regret leading to self-medication leading to more regret – it’s the self-entailing nature of addiction that is being lamented here, a cycle we can all relate to because of how, in an amplified, technicolored way, it mirrors the neurotic knots we are all bound by, to one degree or another.

The visual aspect of the YouTube clip is as gripping as the musical content. The performance is from sometime in the mid-1990s, and Earle looks terrible at the mic, his face puffy and moist from poor health and too much comfort food. For most of the song he seems only provisionally present in his own body, as if at any moment an eviction notice might arrive. Emmylou, singing backup nearby, seems, by contrast, luminous and angelic, the sharp contours of her porcelain beauty achieving a kind of Scots-Irish perfection that helps pin Earle in place under the lights. We sense she’s here exorcising ghosts of her own – the loss of her cherished Graham Parsons, who “forgot” to say goodbye when he died of an overdose in ’73, for example.

Elsewhere on the web, Earle describes how he wrote Goodbye coming off a four year long heroin-cocaine binge he refers to as his “vacation in the ghetto.” He hadn’t written anything for years when, as part of a court-mandated treatment program, he was briefly given access to a guitar and Goodbye quickly emerged. The song belongs to the category of work created entirely outside the boundaries of any professional, or even artistic, ambition. It’s the kind of nothing-to-lose gesture artists learn to trust and value most, devoid of self-image agendas. In Earle’s case there’s the sense that Goodbye was a kind of Hail Mary pass that somehow enlisted the energies of grace, pulling him up out of the abyss. Standing there under the lights we see a man confronting the ultimate trigger of psychic collapse – the loss of connection to love – and singing about it.

The rhetoric of recovery is familiar to most of us today, either because we have embraced that process directly, or have read the fiction of Raymond Carver, or watched our share of Oprah and Doctor Phil. The enemy here is toxic shame, a distilled 12-step version of the amorphous sense of lack that is referred to in various wisdom traditions by words like original sin, dukkha and alienation. Here the violent energies of the psyche are turned inward. The bewildering loss of the “responsive Other” is a crisis explained by the idea that the self is somehow fundamentally deficient. A pervasive regime of self-punishment ensues, the discomfort of self-persecution being preferable to the challenges of groundlessness and ambiguity. The heart begins to collapse in on itself, forming an armored ball locked in place. Jets of inky black emotion get woven into the fabric of self images that accumulate a perverse credibility. Among the many seductions of heroin to a creative person is how effectively the drug cuts through all that, anaesthetizing the anxiety and neutralizing the self-punitive campaign. For a time, at least, the heart-mind opens again toward knowing…and then, of course, the merciless mechanisms of dependency begin to kick in.

If the Country-Western ballad is a perfect vehicle for the “discourse of recovery,” the clip of Earle and Emmylou performing Goodbye also sheds light on broader social correlates of the kind of collapse described above. Raised in West Texas, Earle has always seemed both authentically Southern and also a man resisting the knee-jerk nativist attitudes and corrosive sentimentality common to many Country-Western singers. One wonders how central a role heroin abuse played in his ability to walk that line in a region growing increasingly intolerant of dissent, and increasingly mesmerized by the vapid moral primitivism of homespun proto-fascists like Sarah Palin. In the YouTube clip, Earle radiates sorrow and regret, and his vulnerability illuminates some of the deeper and more alarming tendencies in our collective history, tendencies that can be traced back to colonial times, when Scots-Irish immigrants brought this kind of music from the British Isles.

The Scots-Irish were the last of the four waves of immigration from Britain during the Colonial era, arriving in the early 18^th century to Pennsylvania primarily, moving inland toward the cheaper land and spreading South along the spine of the Appalachians. They were from Northern England mostly, the borderland between England and Scotland, a blood-soaked battlefield for hundreds of years until King James the 1^st unified the two realms in 1603. Keeping the peace involved shipping huge numbers of people from these highly volatile border clans to Ulster County in Northern Ireland, where their warlike proclivities were used to control the local population. Within a few generations, tens of thousands began to move again, this time to the wild American colonies, where they quickly made life difficult for the indigenous people. The election of Andrew Jackson in 1829 marked the emergence of the Scots-Irish onto the national stage. Jackson promptly launched the infamous “trail of tears” in which tens of thousands of Cherokee, Creek and Choctaw died on forced marches West in violation of treaties signed and agreements made long before with the US Government. The Southern aristocracy, Royalists who had arrived in America decades before the Scots-Irish, supported this rejection of Federal prerogatives. A few decades later the Scots-Irish returned the favor by shedding blood to defend the “peculiar institution” of slavery they had little to do with in any direct way. Their fighting prowess is part of what made the Confederate Army a force to be reckoned with, and to this day they populate the US Armed Forces, an informal warrior caste with a taste for ballads about hard times, true love and a refusal to capitulate.

Earle has always been vocal in his opposition to the ways Country-Western has been co-opted by a political system embracing militarism and hegemony for ends that have nothing to do with the egalitarian clannishness of hill people. The faux-populism of wealthy elites like George W. Bush and Rush Limbaugh culminates a long seduction that began in the 1930s after Roosevelt ran over the American aristocracy like a locomotive. Over the course of the intervening decades Southern man has been slowly seduced by the corporate right, indulged by dog whistle rhetoric aimed at directing the Scots-Irish hostility towards outsiders. Violent rhetoric is remarkably effective at polarizing a discourse, and it is currently being used with abandon by the right to buttress a repressive social hierarchy that betrays the interests of poor whites as thoroughly as anyone else. When we act with violence, even rhetorically, we create a feedback loop that alters the world we encounter in ways that are easy to overlook. Our violence infuses the world with a sense of menace and threat, making it likely that further violence will soon be called for. In subtle ways, violence removes us from the shifting ground of experience, sealing us within paranoic forms of the ego, armored by self-justifying narratives of resentment that cement coercive social hierarchies. Progressives are blind to the ways those brassy put downs from Sarah Palin represent a bid for social control.

Steve Earle, Goodbye, Big Bad Love Soundtrack, Released Dec. 28, 2004

The spectacle of the violent, self-excoriating soul encountering grace involves strong and visceral emotive contrasts. One way to view Steve Earle’s “vacation in the ghetto” is that it was a dogged exertion of integrity, a long campaign to counteract the ways a tradition of music-making was being distorted, and then redeem that tradition via the 12 Steps. Watching Earle you see a suffering, clammy, worm-like human with stringy hair and zero pride. You see the wound, the basic anxiety of insecure human form, and this allow Goodbye to bring us to the edge of transformative recognitions of our own. We all want relief from this kind of imprisoning anxiety, and Earle offers us a balancing action that cuts against oppressive current that dominates human affairs. He reminds us that it’s actually crazy how we are, shifting continually between sovereign states that are irreconcilable to each other, and suppressing all knowledge of our discontinuities. The trajectory of Earle’s career, hinging around Goodbye, suggests ways a toxic cultural pattern can be dissolved via expression. One of the pleasures of the age is that one can, in a matter of seconds via Google, turn from this clip of Earle in the mid-1990s to a more recent clip where, trim and on his game, he sings the same song ten years later. Change arrives, is the message here, in ways we might be wise to replicate on a collective level, exorcising the demonic cultural forces that darken our horizon.