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Endaural Hour Episode 001
Considering the Innovative
[Mixcloud Stream] / [Direct Download]
TRACKLIST:
Paul Abbott - Gravity Variation-0 (4:38)
nnirror - 3+||=E (5:42)
Quartabê - Não tem solução (3:19)
Maria Portugal - Cheio/Vazio (4:27)
Maria Beraldo - Da Menor Importância (3:02)
Hrvatski - Paint It Black (4:46)
Ricki Wiedenof - Raptured in Formal Violence (6:05)
Nochexxx - Infected People (4:27)
BAUR - Terowongan Jadi Underpass (11:41)
SCRIPT:
Welcome to the Endaural Hour, I'm your host, Alex Tripp.
Our first music for today will be two relatively recent releases. We've got the first track from Paul Abbott's brand new album "Knees, Elbow Bag", as well as something off of nnirror's new one, "makesgons".
This music might be experimental, but if anyone tried to fight me about that, I would find a way to politely escape the conversation. I've never really cared about innovation in a precise, record keeping kind of way. If I get blown away by something that came out in September of 1979, but then I find out that someone else was already working in a similar area in *August* of 1979, or even in any of the early months and years, I don't think that diminishes the later release at all. I just need the sense that the artist is stepping forward into something unknown, for myself and for them. If they didn't know about the thing that I didn't know about, that just makes them more relatable as people. Maybe the historians will come out and say that these are *not* certified fresh, but I'd still believe they're capturing the excitement of the new.
We'll start with Abbott's piece, 'Gravity Variation 0". It might give you a little startle off the bat, it's a mass of sharp hypercolor static sounds, like listening to a magic eye poster without being able to see the magic picture. But soon, it seems as though drums start to cut thru the noise, not as an audible component of the music, but as something offscreen, leaving us to hear the reaction from the synthetic sound. At least, that's what I think is happening, I've tried to do a bit of research but I'll admit, I could have done more. But, whatever it is that is happening, there's a sense of a dimensional illusion that appears in the sound, it would make sense to call it gravity, it feels like witnessing the immaterial get struck by embodiment and sent crashing down to earth. So if you start to get a bit scared during the opening noise, just try to remember that you're hanging in there for something really, really *cool*.
The piece from nnirror that follows is significantly different, because Abbott's work is the type of thing that feels like a large portion of the substance could never be expressed in a reduced format like a score. It comes down *into* the recording, with the experience of its timbre being a vital component of what it is. But nnirror works in the field of live coding, the music starts with some lines of text, attributes getting numbers assigned to them, something equals 80, another thing equals 6, this measure gets this one event 40% of the time that it gets looped, a bunch of instructions like that. And from that, the music emerges. Now, I can't say that I know how all this stuff works, especially since nnirror built his own custom system. He put the whole thing up on GitHub but I haven't really looked at what it can do. But I think I can grasp enough of it. In this piece, titled 3 plus two vertical lines equals E, the music gives a sense of following a linear path, getting from A to B, but it's like time's light scatters differently over everything in the scene, with adjustments that all differ in scale but maintain a proportional relationship. There's something I find so engaging in the depth of interconnectedness to all of the distinct instruments, like they're all driven by something complex to begin with, but they're also seem to send out ripples of influence to all the other voices. It is outstanding. So, lets give these two a listen now!
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Even though these two pieces of music had their differences, I think both of their engagements with live performance in electronic music are offering experiences that could only be brought to us today. While they maybe aren't *categorically new*, because people have been doing this sort of stuff for a long time, I think nnirror and Paul Abbott are both bringing something fresh to the category. And not just in a technological arms race kind of way. Like, if you understand this music technology as a means of mechanically extending a human action, like those gundam robots where someone climbs inside, they move their hand, and that gesture translates into a big robot hand doing a move, it could become easy to conceptualize progress in this area as a series of increasingly larger and more complicated gundams. But I think its the specific actions that are being taken that give this new music its newness, its about the way that Abbott saw a recipe to make gravity, and how nnirror saw the new ways of convoluting a path. It's not that they're bringing us bigger gundams, it feels more like their contribution is the types of battles they wage.
Now, we will be changing gears a bit, and turn towards Brazil, home of the band Quartabê. I don't actually know them too well, but I'm a big fan of one of the members, Maria Portugal. She had this great album in 2021 that I stumbled on by chance, it does an art pop sort of thing with a very compelling mix of jazzy and electronic approaches, it's actually really weird that it is not more widely known, people should be all over this.
I'd listened to a bit of Quartabê before when I first encountered Maria Portugal, but I never went too deep. I can be very slow with this kind of branching out through artistic affiliations, especially when the next branch I hear isn't immediately engaging to me in the same sense as the previous branch. And also, the group is very deliberately engaging in a musical lineage, making their study of Moacir Santos and Dorival Caymmi an explicit component of how the music is presented. And it's like, on the one hand, awesome! I've never heard music from these people, now I have more music to check out! I get to potentially hear really good music for the *first time*, which is always the best feeling. But on the other hand, this acknowledged weight of history can make me feel like I have homework, I get too much in my head about *having* to do something rather than *getting* to do something, and it saps my energy completely. So, I have not listened to much of this band. But, just the other week, I was checking Maria Portugal's bandcamp page and sure enough, there was a new album from Quartabê up there, and I decided to give it a whirl.
It's really good! It's still a bit new to me, so I'm not ready to speak on it with much depth, and it really challenges my ability to read it as a coherent object so I'm a little bit uncertain about how to talk about it. There's these tracks where it's just four people on guitar and voice, sometimes going really loose and flexible on the timings, and they all feature an interpolation of this one song by Caymmi. But then there's two poppy tracks with guest vocalists and tight rhythms, a samba jazz track, and an instrumental that sounds like it could easily fit in alongside some Anna Meredith, or maybe even some Battles. It would be easier to understand the album if it was a full-on variety pack, but the ways that some individual tracks are contributing to something bigger than themselves has me puzzling, I want to find a way to make them all make sense together. And I haven't! I'll probably have to do my homework.
While I'm trying to figure out this album, I've also got to answer the question I've been postponing, who is this band? What is their deal? One of the traps that I tend to fall into when trying to come to an understanding is that I'll try looking at the band as a showcase for one individual's brilliance. So, there are some truly incredible things happening with the drums on the Maria Portugal album. Like on the first track, it starts out with this skeletal two hit drum loop, as bare bones as it gets, and that's all you get from that instrument for a while. But then, just shy of the 2 minute mark, the whole thing *explodes* and you get this skittering glitchy beat with a large vocabulary. So that got me thinking, "since Maria Portugal is the drummer in Quartabê, and since she is *literally* on the record in her own work, being cool with the drums, it stands to reason that she is the driving force behind the cool rhythm stuff happening in this group." That sounds reasonable, right?
OK, so fast forward a couple of days, and I saw someone online offering to take you on a musical discovery adventure through Brazil, you just have to say a genre that you're interested. I decided to say that I'm already into Brazillian music, and I mention some older artists as well as Maria Portugal. He comes back at me with a recommendation to check out Maria Beraldo. She's got this album from 2018, Cavala, and I was blown away when I heard it! I'm not quite sure how to describe it, she plays clarinet, and there's lots of electronics, so I probably could use the same language I used for the Maria Portugal album. But the two experiences are really distinct, Beraldo's feels more song oriented, and she uses that orientation to bring a wider range of styles into a shorter span of time.
So I start to look up a bit more about Beraldo, and I see she's in a group. The group is called Quartabê. The band has two Marias! So, this changes everything. I can't confidently say that Maria Portugal is the driving force behind the rhythm stuff happening in the group, because now I have clear evidence that there is another member who also does cool rhythm stuff! I have been humbled.
OK, that's enough yakking. Lets take a listen to all this music now. First, we'll start with the Quartabê track that reminded me of Anna Meredith, and then we'll go to that first track off the Maria Portugal album, and then we'll have a listen to something from Maria Beraldo, a track titled Da Menor Importância.
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Welcome back! Next up, we'll be looking at some pieces of music that makes me want to draw connections, but I'm not sure if they're entirely justified. First up: the Paint it Black cover that Keith Fullerton Whitman made under his Hrvatski alias, and the second track off of Ricki Weidenhof's new album "Church".
The differences between these two tracks are quite significant. Weidenhof is more willing to have the drums cleanly divide time, and also has more cleanly divided segments. They both have a bit of a twisting structure, but the Hrvatski track keeps a more solid continuity, there will an element carrying over between segments, an uninterrupted connective tissue, while Weidenhof seems much more willing to drop everything. But I'd still say these two songs belong together. You won't even notice the transition between them! There's something about the temperatures, the atmospheres, the uses of that technique where drums turn into glitchy sounding overlap tones... I don't know, maybe these are just superficial connections. Or *maybe* my intuitive brain is a lot faster and smarter than my conscious brain, and I just haven't fully realized the actual connections. They both have lots of great twists and turns... maybe they're prog? Maybe that's it? Maybe both of these two songs are prog? Well, that's up to you to decide.
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Our final music for the show will be another connection that I don't fully understand, but it's one I believe in Something off of the Nochexxx album from 2015, "Plot Defender", and then something from earlier this year on this really cool label DIVISI62. They're based in Indonesia, they put out that gamelan techno album from Uwalmassa back in 2022. The track is called Terowongan Jadi Underpass, and it's by BAUR, spelled B A U R, different from that other artist with the similar name. Both of these tracks are on some kind of odd techno styles, a bit rough around the edges. And they seem like they're carrying genuine heat, as well as the physical toll that comes along with that temperature. They don't ever feel sleepy at all, but it feels like there's a bit of drag on their efforts, like we come in and the sweating is already in progress. But once again, there are some significant differences in this pairing. The BAUR track has this maniacal devotion to horizontal progress, like it's all pure drive the whole way thru, with flashes of odd sounds that pass by like the scenery outside a car window. The Nochexx track is much more directly playful, with a lot of building up to big moments that pare down into smaller ones. So again, I'm not quite sure if they totally make sense together. But I kind of think they do!
It looks like we'll be pushing over one hour here, so these tracks will take us to the end of the show. Since this is called the Endaural Hour, it seems like I should probably get this thing to last for exactly one hour. But this is the first episode, I'm sure I'll get the timing right for future episodes. I hope you've enjoyed, and I'll see you next time!
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