That intersection between organic and inorganic has been something I’ve been chewing on lately. What makes something one or the other? I’d argue that something as simple as the introduction of sampler instruments revolutionized the way we can make that argument immaterial.
For my latest mix for LYL Radio, I took inspiration from those early musicians who had to interface with huge, largely unexplored/unexplained contraptions like the Fairlight CMI, Synclavier, Ensoniq Mirage, E-Mu Emulator II, and other, first-generation keyboard samplers, that allowed them to take sounds out of life and prime them as musical sources to use to create something that was genuinely real and affecting.
In those early years, such instruments were deeply expensive and took reams of paper to guide users through. However, for those that took the time to figure them out, the ability to manipulate organic audio in its digital form proved that there was something special to this new creative workflow.
I’m just reminded of Skipper Wise and Tim Timmermans admission to having one American label completely omit a track from their album ‘Poems Of The Five Mountains‘ because it was “too weird.” This quasi-title track “Five Mountains” — the one that kicks off this whole mix — was the product of this new, mental workflow. Beginning with tuned percussion that gives way to a call and response of sampled voices, it careens off your ears as this unlikely, but quite affecting tone poem, based on very simple things — just a voice and a piano.
As a musician, you can imagine how they arranged it: Hard-pan a voice here. Have this specific sample, set at a specific start and end point, play at a certain pitch. Have that, other sample, play through, in a set, quarter note. Fade in this other treated, polyphonic derivative sample, through a long envelope. Lay it out. Make sure it inspires you.
This is all background noise/magic that most won’t care about. What stays with you, is how you do recognize the sutures, no matter how inhuman they are, but you still get the affectations. What the label recognized as “too weird”, merely meant some weren’t ready for it. German label, Innovative Communications, one already used to the intersection of electronics and humanity, left it on and (to their great credit) saw something forward-thinking about it, something that would make sense. They got it. There was a bigger picture. Now, these ideas don’t sound alien to us…
Rather than fear technology, what ways can we make it more of us, for others? This mix is just a rumination about that.
Poems Of The Five Mountains
1. Skipper Wise & Tim Timmermans: Five Mountains
2. Ryuichi Sakamoto: Dolphins
3. Piero Milesi & Daniel Bacalov: Camera 1 Parte
4. Jean-Michel Jarre: Ethnicolor II
5. Roberto Musci & Giovanni Venosta: Water Music
6. Haruomi Hosono: Birthday Party
7. Kate Bush: Watching You Without Me
8. René Aubry: Walk The Reeds
9. Laurie Anderson: Kokoku
10. Real Fish: タイプでABC
11. Francesco Messina (with Franco Battiato): Fine Novecento
12. Carlos Maria Trindade & Nuno Canavarro: NC: Antica/Burun
13. Sanford Ponder: Frontier
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