Cornelius Cardew Collective
live at Panteão Nacional 29 June 2014
As a young disciple of Karlheinz Stockhausen, a member of the seminal
group AMM and founder of the Scratch Orchestra, Cornelius Cardew
(1936-1981) was one of the most restless and decisive musicians and
composers of the 20th century. Aware of the connections between art and
life, art and politics, he defined his music as «people’s liberation
music». In the 1960s, he approached the languages of musical
improvisation and the thinking of Wittgenstein, whose treatise (about
the relationship between language and reality and definition of the
limits of science) inspired his masterpiece.
With AMM he helped to create free improvisation and avant-garde popular
music in England. During the 1970s he became a Maoist militant and, with
the Scratch Orchestra, broke with the avant-garde and composed hymns
and intervention songs for the working class. It was as a result of this
break that he published the controversial pamphlet "Stockhausen Serves
Imperialism".
Considered the "Mount Everest" of the graphic scores, the "Treatise" by
Cornelius Cardew was started in 1963 and completed in 1967. It consists
of 193 pages combining an immense set of graphic elements that form a
long visual composition (numbers,
shapes and symbols, some of which are related to classical musical
nomenclature, but without any hypothesis of absolute interpretation).
Cardew did not specify or instruct on the execution of "Treatise". There
are no explanatory notes or doubts. Rather, it is configured as a
landscape open to any number of musicians, instruments (acoustic, analog
or digital). Encouraging improvisation. It is suggested that the
interpreters define themselves previously the rules of (their) game.
In all its aesthetic scope and visual impact, the “Treatise” constantly
puts (its) open performativity, sometimes even subduing it. By releasing
music, historically tied to conventional notation, it is an inspiring
landmark in the demand for new forms and sound languages.
The Garden of Perpetual Dreams is an album by fabled Dutch musician Freek Kinkelaar.
Tracing his roots to a small Dutch scene of the 1980s, Kinkelaar
embraced a tradition of surrealist eccentricity releasing home-recorded
cassettes, publishing Dadaist art magazines and experimenting with song
and sound. Inspired by chance meetings, dissecting tables, premonitions
and apparitions, it was during this time he met Frans de Waard, a now
iconoclastic figure of the Dutch avant-garde with whom he would form the
group Beequeen (1988-2015).
Recording over thirty solo and collaborative albums over a career
spanning more than thirty years, Kinkelaar attracted no shortage of
admirers along the way: Andrew Lilies invited him to contribute voice to
two solo albums in addition to one with Steven Stapleton as Nurse With
Wound, while Paul Panhuysen, The Residents, Merzbow and Edward Ka-Spel
have included his ingenious touches and thoughts in their work. In 2015,
Kinkelaar announced his last solo album under the name of Brunnen, Sometimes My Arms Bend Back.
Originally conceived in 1989 and released in a short run of cassettes
two years later, The Garden of Perpetual Dreams, Kinkelaar’s oneiric,
singular wonderland is revisited, reworked and re-visioned as a new sail
across the skies. A richly evocative, densely imagined universe of the
uncanny and sublime; a place haunted by innocence and composed of
fragments of dreams. Giant teacups, shadows in the trees... wandering
and wondering in enclaves where you were sure you had just been.
Charming yet unsettling, it's a place whose fragile beauty and fatal
savagery greets your fall down the rabbit hole.
Produced with Raymond Steeg of The Legendary Pink Dots and mastered by
Steeg and Peter Van Vliet (Mekanik Kommando, De Fabriek, The Use Of
Ashes), the 2019 recording of The Garden Of Perpetual Dreams is a story
recounted by a visionary narrator, masterful raconteur and everlasting
beacon of the Dutch underground.
. . . Tracing his roots to a small Dutch scene of the 1980s, Freek Kinkelaar
embraced a tradition of surrealist eccentricity releasing home-recorded
cassettes, publishing Dadaist art magazines and experimenting with song
and sound. Inspired by chance meetings, dissecting tables, premonitions
and apparitions, it was during this time he met Frans de Waard, a now
iconoclastic figure of the Dutch avant-garde with whom he would form the
group Beequeen (1988-2015). . . .
The work contained on this recording represents Dave Seidel’s second foray into the realm of releasing a full-length recording. But this new milestone was not reached until he had long immersed himself in the experimental scene in NYC in the 1980s and 1990s, working closely with established experimental music pioneers Lois V Vierk and Guy Klucevsek among others. Seidel’s own composing and performing grew, blossoming into live performances in the 2000s and 2010s, allowing further exploration into programming and experimenting with sonority and algorithmic sonification. What we hear on this recording is the care and detail of his passion for these two features of composition and a steady integration of them. This leads us to the two pieces heard here: Involution and Hexany Permutations.
In thinking of sonority, Seidel has spoken of the strong influence of La Monte Young’s use of perfectly-tuned intervals and Young’s ideal of previously unheard sounds, those that may engender new sensations and emotions in the listener. But Seidel also confirms the influence of the work of Alvin Lucier, in particular the Orpheus Variations. For Seidel and his sonorities, he has found little use for the 12-note chromatic tempered system, no doubt the ubiquity of this universal tuning of Western music having too few possibilities for his ear. The question then appears: how does he apply this desire to explore new forms of sonority outside the well-tempered system and, for our purposes, in these pieces?
The first CD in this set presents Seidel’s composition Involution, heard in three sections. The music is presented as an expansion of slowly-changing sonorities that explore the harmonic spaces inherent in certain microtonal tunings and scales, or modes within those tunings. Each section employs a different tuning and a different set of scales or modes. How does this work in Seidel’s arrangement of these possibilities?
In Involution, Seidel employs both traditional and modern scales as well as one of his own devising. We hear this as follows: Involution 1 uses the Wilson-Grady Meta Slendro scale, Involution 2 the just-intonation Centaur tuning divided into the Scriabin-derived Prometheus scale and the Hindustani Marwa scale, and Involution 3 combining the use of two 6-note scales (also used in the second piece on this recording, Hexany Permutations) known as the Hexany scale.
The sonorities given have three layers. In the fundamental layer is a sustained dyad, the next layer a “choir” of sine waves deriving from that dyad based on combination tones, the final layer adding another clustering of tones further derived from the fundamental dyad. The first two layers are produced by a computer, and have a cool, orderly, continuous surface. The third layer is produced by a modular synthesizer and is itself composed of several layers, featuring constant change influenced by random processes, resulting in a warmer, noisier, and more disorderly extension and commentary on the fundamental dyad.
The piece is loosely combinatorial in structure, using two separate, concurrent sequences of slightly different lengths and registral ranges and running at different tempi, eventually working through most of the possible two-note combinations of a scale, with occasional octave displacements. We can further hear that the two sequences described run at different tempi to ensure that a high proportion of the dyads and their resulting chords share a common tone, smoothing out the harmonic transitions.
Hexany Permutations, the music that the second CD of this release contains, hints at the same concerns of sonority heard in Involution but tackles the composing slightly differently, with musical results of differing proportions. In this piece, the structure of the piece plays an equal if not more dominant role than the microtonal sonorities explored.
After hearing the American minimalist Tom Johnson’s 1986 piece The Chord Catalogue, in which all 8178 chords in a single octave are enumerated, Seidel, while enamored of the catalogue aspect conceptually, decided the music that resulted from such a purely presented collection was too dry, without the color and texture he felt could be inserted into music that explores the complete set of combinations within a gamut. Hexany Permutations is Seidel’s response.
In this piece, each of the six sections result in a different formation of the same catalog. The music throughout employs unique scales which remains consistent throughout each section as well. The scales Seidel uses in this case is identical to the Hexany mode he puts to use in Involution 3. Seidel describes this scale as “a tuning I devised consisting of two six-note 1-3-5-7 Hexany scales, 9/8 apart. The dyads may come from the first hexany, the second hexany, or both (one voice from the first, the other voice from the second)”.
What happens in the structure of this piece? In Hexany Permutations, the seven-note Hexany scales are, in pre-composition, used to articulate all of the combinations of two-note, three-note, four-note, five-note, six-note chords and the one seven-note chord. How does this work? We can visualize this combinatorial process numerically in this way: (0, 1), (0, 2), (0, 3), (0, 4), (0, 5), (0, 6), (1, 2), (1, 3) … (0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)
In completing the list, we find this totals 120 combinations. After these combinations are defined pre-compositionally, the scale can be mapped to each note, permitting the harmonies to proceed without disturbance. Here we find the harmonies unfolding in six different but related manners, each a discrete section of the piece. Seidel calls these different manners of presentation the “permutations” he refers to in the title.
To further understand the piece structurally, before looking into the sonorous result, a good question to ask at this point might be: how does the overall form of each section work? We find that the full catalogue of combinations of the scale is varied by inversion, retrograde, and other strict yet rudimentary manipulations (“permutations”) without alteration or interference, each variation becoming the discrete section. This objectively neutral presentation allows the listener to take in the orderliness without Seidel inserting more emotional or personal musical decisions, like changing the order of a specific progression to more suit his musical taste or tweaking chord tones or entrances to create specific areas that are specifically pleasing to his ear. In this sense, the acceptance of the inevitability of the presentation allows for the process to be heard as a statement of neutrality; after this decision was made, we focus instead on the combinations and the sonorities of them, again returning to Seidel’s insistence that we take in the color and diversity of the sound as well as the tapestry of order.
Interestingly, it turns out that the permutations of the presentation of the catalogue are, as Seidel describes them, are not in fact composed intuitively for their musical properties. After programming visual analogues to the combinatorial sound structures, he reveals that, “the order I chose for the sections, was just about entirely by the way the "score" diagrams looked when regarded as a series. Thus, in this sense, the overall structure of the piece was not about sound per se, but was more a conceptual choice based on intuitive visual aesthetics.”
Taken together, these two pieces are composed to enter aural spaces both mathematical and sensual, each combining these elements in disparate and multifold ways. I find I am attracted to each in different ways, admiring the detail and consideration given with a fine attention to the sounding result. As we can hear, it is to Seidel’s advantage to explore this area of composing with the ideals of forms and tunings together. But, of course, the music must be the final arbiter for us and here Dave Seidel offers the welcome opportunity to both observe the detail of the construction if we choose or to immerse ourselves in the sonorous design. The balance is one that is best considered at once.
Warren Burt is a composer, performer, video artist, sound poet, writer,
instrument maker (both in hardware and software, electronic and
acoustic) and above all a pioneer who started to study modular synthesis
back in 1969 at the State University of New York at Albany, with Joel
Chadabe, and recorded these 2 compositions on a Buchla 100 in 1972.
Thanks to whoever it was that mentioned the Storyville sale. Only problem being I forgot to use the code for all but one item
Bought far too much while forgetting items I'd emailed myself about and had the usual fun of my bank blocking my card payment. I mean you'd have thought that they would have got used to it by now!
Comments
live at Panteão Nacional 29 June 2014
2016 Super Petite
2016 Branches nyp
2009 Brokebox Juke
2011 Kammerspiel nyp 2011 Kammerspiel Remixed nyp
-Oops, I meant these.
2013 Palaeochannels 2013 Two Crests
Tracing his roots to a small Dutch scene of the 1980s, Kinkelaar embraced a tradition of surrealist eccentricity releasing home-recorded cassettes, publishing Dadaist art magazines and experimenting with song and sound. Inspired by chance meetings, dissecting tables, premonitions and apparitions, it was during this time he met Frans de Waard, a now iconoclastic figure of the Dutch avant-garde with whom he would form the group Beequeen (1988-2015).
Recording over thirty solo and collaborative albums over a career spanning more than thirty years, Kinkelaar attracted no shortage of admirers along the way: Andrew Lilies invited him to contribute voice to two solo albums in addition to one with Steven Stapleton as Nurse With Wound, while Paul Panhuysen, The Residents, Merzbow and Edward Ka-Spel have included his ingenious touches and thoughts in their work. In 2015, Kinkelaar announced his last solo album under the name of Brunnen, Sometimes My Arms Bend Back.
Originally conceived in 1989 and released in a short run of cassettes two years later, The Garden of Perpetual Dreams, Kinkelaar’s oneiric, singular wonderland is revisited, reworked and re-visioned as a new sail across the skies. A richly evocative, densely imagined universe of the uncanny and sublime; a place haunted by innocence and composed of fragments of dreams. Giant teacups, shadows in the trees... wandering and wondering in enclaves where you were sure you had just been. Charming yet unsettling, it's a place whose fragile beauty and fatal savagery greets your fall down the rabbit hole.
Produced with Raymond Steeg of The Legendary Pink Dots and mastered by Steeg and Peter Van Vliet (Mekanik Kommando, De Fabriek, The Use Of Ashes), the 2019 recording of The Garden Of Perpetual Dreams is a story recounted by a visionary narrator, masterful raconteur and everlasting beacon of the Dutch underground.
Welcome to the world of Freek Kinkelaar.
1984 Dogs Blood Rising 1997 Current 93 With Thomas Ligotti
- In A Foreign Town, In A Foreign Land
1998 Soft Black Stars 2000 Faust
Emusic, Bandcamp
2015 Mortalscapes nyp 2016 Codek Valtu nyp
The work contained on this recording represents Dave Seidel’s second foray into the realm of releasing a full-length recording. But this new milestone was not reached until he had long immersed himself in the experimental scene in NYC in the 1980s and 1990s, working closely with established experimental music pioneers Lois V Vierk and Guy Klucevsek among others. Seidel’s own composing and performing grew, blossoming into live performances in the 2000s and 2010s, allowing further exploration into programming and experimenting with sonority and algorithmic sonification. What we hear on this recording is the care and detail of his passion for these two features of composition and a steady integration of them. This leads us to the two pieces heard here: Involution and Hexany Permutations.
In thinking of sonority, Seidel has spoken of the strong influence of La Monte Young’s use of perfectly-tuned intervals and Young’s ideal of previously unheard sounds, those that may engender new sensations and emotions in the listener. But Seidel also confirms the influence of the work of Alvin Lucier, in particular the Orpheus Variations. For Seidel and his sonorities, he has found little use for the 12-note chromatic tempered system, no doubt the ubiquity of this universal tuning of Western music having too few possibilities for his ear. The question then appears: how does he apply this desire to explore new forms of sonority outside the well-tempered system and, for our purposes, in these pieces?
The first CD in this set presents Seidel’s composition Involution, heard in three sections. The music is presented as an expansion of slowly-changing sonorities that explore the harmonic spaces inherent in certain microtonal tunings and scales, or modes within those tunings. Each section employs a different tuning and a different set of scales or modes. How does this work in Seidel’s arrangement of these possibilities?
In Involution, Seidel employs both traditional and modern scales as well as one of his own devising. We hear this as follows: Involution 1 uses the Wilson-Grady Meta Slendro scale, Involution 2 the just-intonation Centaur tuning divided into the Scriabin-derived Prometheus scale and the Hindustani Marwa scale, and Involution 3 combining the use of two 6-note scales (also used in the second piece on this recording, Hexany Permutations) known as the Hexany scale.
The sonorities given have three layers. In the fundamental layer is a sustained dyad, the next layer a “choir” of sine waves deriving from that dyad based on combination tones, the final layer adding another clustering of tones further derived from the fundamental dyad. The first two layers are produced by a computer, and have a cool, orderly, continuous surface. The third layer is produced by a modular synthesizer and is itself composed of several layers, featuring constant change influenced by random processes, resulting in a warmer, noisier, and more disorderly extension and commentary on the fundamental dyad.
The piece is loosely combinatorial in structure, using two separate, concurrent sequences of slightly different lengths and registral ranges and running at different tempi, eventually working through most of the possible two-note combinations of a scale, with occasional octave displacements. We can further hear that the two sequences described run at different tempi to ensure that a high proportion of the dyads and their resulting chords share a common tone, smoothing out the harmonic transitions.
Hexany Permutations, the music that the second CD of this release contains, hints at the same concerns of sonority heard in Involution but tackles the composing slightly differently, with musical results of differing proportions. In this piece, the structure of the piece plays an equal if not more dominant role than the microtonal sonorities explored.
After hearing the American minimalist Tom Johnson’s 1986 piece The Chord Catalogue, in which all 8178 chords in a single octave are enumerated, Seidel, while enamored of the catalogue aspect conceptually, decided the music that resulted from such a purely presented collection was too dry, without the color and texture he felt could be inserted into music that explores the complete set of combinations within a gamut. Hexany Permutations is Seidel’s response.
In this piece, each of the six sections result in a different formation of the same catalog. The music throughout employs unique scales which remains consistent throughout each section as well. The scales Seidel uses in this case is identical to the Hexany mode he puts to use in Involution 3. Seidel describes this scale as “a tuning I devised consisting of two six-note 1-3-5-7 Hexany scales, 9/8 apart. The dyads may come from the first hexany, the second hexany, or both (one voice from the first, the other voice from the second)”.
What happens in the structure of this piece? In Hexany Permutations, the seven-note Hexany scales are, in pre-composition, used to articulate all of the combinations of two-note, three-note, four-note, five-note, six-note chords and the one seven-note chord. How does this work? We can visualize this combinatorial process numerically in this way:
(0, 1), (0, 2), (0, 3), (0, 4), (0, 5), (0, 6), (1, 2), (1, 3) … (0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)
In completing the list, we find this totals 120 combinations. After these combinations are defined pre-compositionally, the scale can be mapped to each note, permitting the harmonies to proceed without disturbance. Here we find the harmonies unfolding in six different but related manners, each a discrete section of the piece. Seidel calls these different manners of presentation the “permutations” he refers to in the title.
To further understand the piece structurally, before looking into the sonorous result, a good question to ask at this point might be: how does the overall form of each section work? We find that the full catalogue of combinations of the scale is varied by inversion, retrograde, and other strict yet rudimentary manipulations (“permutations”) without alteration or interference, each variation becoming the discrete section. This objectively neutral presentation allows the listener to take in the orderliness without Seidel inserting more emotional or personal musical decisions, like changing the order of a specific progression to more suit his musical taste or tweaking chord tones or entrances to create specific areas that are specifically pleasing to his ear. In this sense, the acceptance of the inevitability of the presentation allows for the process to be heard as a statement of neutrality; after this decision was made, we focus instead on the combinations and the sonorities of them, again returning to Seidel’s insistence that we take in the color and diversity of the sound as well as the tapestry of order.
Interestingly, it turns out that the permutations of the presentation of the catalogue are, as Seidel describes them, are not in fact composed intuitively for their musical properties. After programming visual analogues to the combinatorial sound structures, he reveals that, “the order I chose for the sections, was just about entirely by the way the "score" diagrams looked when regarded as a series. Thus, in this sense, the overall structure of the piece was not about sound per se, but was more a conceptual choice based on intuitive visual aesthetics.”
Taken together, these two pieces are composed to enter aural spaces both mathematical and sensual, each combining these elements in disparate and multifold ways. I find I am attracted to each in different ways, admiring the detail and consideration given with a fine attention to the sounding result. As we can hear, it is to Seidel’s advantage to explore this area of composing with the ideals of forms and tunings together. But, of course, the music must be the final arbiter for us and here Dave Seidel offers the welcome opportunity to both observe the detail of the construction if we choose or to immerse ourselves in the sonorous design. The balance is one that is best considered at once.
2015 Gloom Fortress nyp 2016 Uriel Wavv
Druid Cloak
2014,15&16 Lore: The Trilogy 2015 Lore Translations: Book One
2016 Lore Translations: Book Two 2016 The Grove Tetralogy
2015 Lost Scrolls I 2015 Lost Scrolls II
2015 Lost Scrolls IV 2017 DETHERRORS
2017 O.R.C.S.
Bandcamp Friday purchase
2017 Atrium
2012 Book Of Mæ'bul (Another Kind Of Sunrise) 2014 The Oversoul Manual
2015 Le Bébé De Brigitte (Lost In Translation)