// tusK "10 Greatest Hits !"

STX07 | 21-09-2009 | 11 titres | 33 min | improvisation

 

musique sous licence creative commons by-nc-nd

 

 

tusK (Stuart Chalmers) fait de la musique électronique crée à partir de rebuts sonores et autres accidents de machines analogiques lo-fi. Il utilise des oscillateurs maisons et des micro contact avec des pédales d'éffets trafiquées donnant des improvisations électroacoustique noisy.

Tout est complètement improvisé, ainsi structure et direction sont composées dans l'instant présent. Chaque enregistrement est le son d'une énergie brute et imprévisible, une expérience physique où éléments controllés et chaotiques fusionnent ou se contredisent. L'artiste français Jean Dubuffet semble résumer cette approche: "L'art devrait toujours nous faire rire un peu et nous faire peur un peu...".

 

- site internet de tusK: soundcloud.com/skarabee

chronique:

- EARTRIP issue 6 by David Grundy | october 2009

 

So where is Noise at today? An initially radical gesture, focussing exclusively on the ‘non-musical’ elements of music in the creation of extended sound experiences, it has now become, as the trend always goes, a marketable genre: previous extremes having reached dead ends, new directions branch off from the latest limits, before they, too, face assimilation. By ‘assimilation’ I don’t necessarily mean incorporation into the mainstream, but rather, the maintenance of the radical gesture as a kind of controlled ‘resistance’ to that mainstream, creating a tension which, though very real, is also in some sense illusory, as it allows a modicum of conflict (which is, however, never going to mount a serious challenge) to spice things up a little and keep things ticking over nicely just as they are. When the ‘fuck you’ gestures of the experimental side of rock music seemed to have reached the limits of assimilation, noise took things further out (further, even, than the screaming choir of horns on Coltrane’s ‘Ascension’ or the dense textures of Alan Silva’s ‘Luna Surface’, masses of sound forcing their way out of the speakers like the impasto oil paint hanging off a Frank Auerbach canvas, so layered and crusty that it could be called a kind of relief sculpture). Furthermore, it could trace a heritage going back to Luigi Russolo and the Futurists’ paradoxical embrace of modernity, right through those moments in popular, classical and jazz musics in which instrumental textures had created densities of sound in which individual lines or groups could no longer be distinguished.

 

The packaging of ‘10 Greatest Hits’ suggests a parody of the pop music forms which noise music inherently resists (the slab of feedback which formed an ‘interlude’ on the original studio recording of My Bloody Valentine’s ‘You Made Me Realize’ became, in the band’s live performances, something which completely overwhelmed the cursory ‘song’ bookend , turning the feedback and noise of large-scale concert rock into a howling and total body experience). Yet one must ask: is this resistance now inherent? Bands such as Boris and Sunn O))) have tapped into another market (the avant-metal scene – and, through the work of Stephen O’ Malley, the art world), while harsh and glitchy sounds which might previously have been heard as ‘errors’ are now part and parcel of much contemporary electronic dance music. While noise itself attracts a very definite and specific crowd (it remains very much caché music), the set of gestures, both musical and extra-musical, which have developed around and within it, might have been said to have solidified so that it has lost its dangerous edge. Of course, the same criticism could be levelled at any number of genres – free jazz and (acoustic) free improvisation – with debatable levels of accuracy.

 

The primary ‘gesture’ I am thinking of is the role of rhythm. Given that noise is devoid of so much of the material that makes up ‘normal’ music – melody, harmony, and even the particular kinds of texture and textural interaction which free improvisation can utilise – there tends to be a strong, compensating focus on rhythm, often blatant and loudly industrial in nature. Compared to the polyrhythms and free time of a Rashied Ali or Sunny Murray, in fact, noise’s rhythmic assault is relentlessly crude, a reduction to its mechanised essence of the kind of popular music beat-making which Theodor Adorno famously compared to the sound of (fascist) marching. (1) In this sense, the rhythms of noise music function more as reflection than as resistance. They do not cover up the dark heart of modern society with verneers of manufactured joy and the illusory impression that individuals have the freedom to emotionally interpret and ‘make their own’ the pre-fabricated products of the culture industry’s pawns, but neither do they posit an independent alternative. Instead, they constitute a kind of truth-telling about how things are, about how existence and experience exist at this time – though they do not do this through explicit political content (Merzbow’s embrace of vegetarianism and ‘save the whales’ is not really a part of his music, even if the stickers which he plasters on his laptop are in such physical proximity to his sound-making device). Still, even if there is no explicit ‘message’, such an interpretation does come close to assigning Noise a zeitgeisty, mimetic function; and, admittedly, this kind of mimesis also does come through in comments of Adorno’s such as “modern art is as abstract as the relations between people have in truth become,” though elsewhere he argues for a concentration on form, from which an art-work’s historical ‘truth-content’ can then emerge, semi-independently of the artist themselves (“the content of a work of art begins precisely where the author’s intention stops; the intention is extinguished in the content”).

 

Whether consciously or not, then, any Noise artist’s use of rhythm comes already bound up with a complex and paradoxical series of questions about the role of music and sound within the structures of contemporary society – not as add-ons which impart the music with a pseudo-intellectual weight, but as questions fundamentally entangled with Noise, at the most level of the most basic practices and gestures which any Noise artist makes as soon as they begin to make Noise. And tusK (Stuart Chalmers) seems to be concerned with this rhythmic aspect of Noise more than most, whether as part of a conscious intellectual engagement with the issues outlined above, or as part of an engagement with the mechanics of Noise-making, as part of his improvisational discovery of means and methods, the very different process of creating rather than merely listening. As he puts it on his website (http://www.myspace.com/tuskk): “material is allowed to move in which ever way the sounds or instrumentation determines.”

 

That instrumentation consists of a couple of oscillators with various pedals and effects, and the format seems to be broadly within that of the three-minute pop song (this could have been a conscious initial decision, made at the conceptual stage for the album, or it could simply have been what happened when performing). In any case it’s a good example of the way instrumentation completely changes identity – in contrast to Chalmer’s other solo project, Skarabee, where the various pedals and effects are applied to gentler sounding instruments such as the kalimba, here, the harshness and crudity of the oscillators’ machine squelches, zaps and trilling, seemingly uncontrolled extreme pitch oscillations means that textures must be much simpler. That said, the penultimate track, ‘Drone’, indicates that it is possible to create music more similar in mood to the ambient-oriented free improvisations of Skarabee: a repeating loop is underlain by wavering low drones and sprinkled with various quiet beeps, so that, most of the time, the texture consists of at least three layers. This puts in sharp contrast the starkness of the other tracks: often only one idea is followed at a time, perhaps a basic rhythm, to be joined by one other sound element before that section is discarded and a new one starts: a non-linear, non-developmental, blocky approach in which sound creation comes in discrete units. The format of short tracks is undoubtedly an important part of this, although it’s by no means certain whether track length dictates track construction, or construction dictates track length; in any case, one might usefully contrast this approach to the long-form explorations of, say, Merzbow (or of the noise sections of My Bloody Valentine’s live performances). What we have here is not so much a morass of sound in which one can become lost, disoriented, physically affected (though the persistent harshness of tones and the repetitive rhythmic grind of the stripped-back approach constitute their own kind of challenge). In that sense the potential for exhilaration and for a sense of liberation offered by the extreme experience of going to a Noise gig or of just listening to a Noise album is diminished; which may be a way of negotiating the problems of Noise’s diminishing radicalism. One-word titles, three-minute tracks, brutally basic rhythms, deliberately restricted palettes of sound and texture: this is music that is simply there, not bludgeoning one into an experience of tortured ecstasy, making no real bones about itself, just existing as sound from the speakers. And that makes brutal lack of pretension makes quite an impact.

 

(1) “As the standardized meter of dance music and of marching suggests the coordinated battalions of a mechanical collectivity, obedience to this rhythm by overcoming the responding individuals leads them to conceive of themselves as agglutinized with the untold millions of the meek who must be similarly overcome. Thus do the obedient inherit the earth.” (Adorno, On Popular Music)