John Michael Greer recently wrote a post on Music as a Magical Language. Towards the end of the essay he writes that “it wouldn’t be too hard to work out classic rock numbers for every planet and element.”

There is classic rock that I enjoy very much, but it’s not really my main musical interest, so in the spirit of dissensus I am going to make an eclectic list of songs for each of the elements. A later list will contain music for the planets, and still another will go further out into the empyrean to share music about the zodiac.

For the element of Air, Brian Eno’s Music for Airport’s comes to mind. At this point there are many different versions based on his original. I am rather partial to the Bang on a Can version, but there is also one from Psychic Temple the project of Chris Schlarb, a Long Beach jazz guitarist. Air is an element we associate with thoughts, thinking. Sometimes we call someone who gets lost inside their head flighty. What is great about Music for Airports is the way it allows thoughts to land and take off to many different destinations while listening in an orderly fashion. This jazz version of the ambient classic does it up right. I’ve always found jazz to be great music for thinking and writing, and this rendition really does allows the higher qualities of the element of air to circulate within the mind. The Psychic Temple version is also nice in that the album also features a track called Music for Bus Stops.

enry Flynt’s mixture of hillbilly-cum-rockabilly fiddle music overlaid on topic of electronic tanpura drones takes the listener deep into the burning flames of creativity on this revelatory album long cut, Purified by the Fire. This is an exultant combination of the high lonesome sound heard in the hills and hollers of Appalachia, that gets a hard edged rock kick when the electrified strings are distorted. Henry Flynt was one of many students of the classical Indian singer, Pandit Pran Nath, and this work shows that element, not just from the drone, but also from the tones that leap like flames out of the fiddle.

For the element of Water, I suggest Watermusic by William Basinski. It’s a quintessential liquid ambient album designed to be listened to at low volumes. As it moves through the space it will seep into every available crack and pore. The title appears to be a homage to George Friederic Handel’s Water Music, from 1717. Beyond that, and their evocation of the element of water, the two pieces appear to have little in common. This Watermusic is on the tranquil rippling side, and a perfect way to quell the more turbulent manifestations of water. It cools the emotions keeping them in calm equanimity. Basinski did a reworked version called Watermusic II and it is just as elementally essential.

Some people like to make music with the very stones of the Earth. Among them are Scott Gibbons and he did just that on the album Stone for his Lillith project in 1992. Scott got his start in performance with a group called The New Elementals. The sounds on this album are all made just with stones that have been struck, stones that have been smashed, grated even, and includes both granite and clay. The recordings were taken and remixed as raw materials in the studio. This is probably the most experimental of pieces in this list, but the experience of listening is still grounded. Listening is a way to do just that, ground oneself in physical presence.

If we look at the Chinese elements, than the topic of Wood might come up. Many instruments are made from wood of course, but Timber, a cycle of percussion works by Bang on a Can founding member Michael Gordon takes the cake. It is mesmerizing music and I would love to be able to see it performed live someday because he figured out a way of tuning blocks of wood in such a way that when the musicians play them it creates a sense of movement of sound around the room.

Percussion in particular seems to correspond strongly with the element of Earth. The late industrial musician and legendary percussionist Z’ev explored the properties of metal with his homemade and scavenged drum kits. As a Qabalist and mage, he was also very in tune with the elementals and worked with them deliberately in his music. His piece Elemental Music which exists as an early recording from the 80’s and as various performances, captures his connection to the elements. This short filmed performance from a show in Milan, Italy gives a visual example of just how connected he was with his instruments and the elemental metals they came from.

Songs for the element of Aether are a bit harder to pin down. “Structures from Silence” by Steve Roach comes close. Perhaps its just because this album is one of my all-time ambient favorites, or the fact that I use it for meditation and other practices, or the way the title suggests structures emerge out of something beyond, something silent, something still that gives birth to what we might call spirit. The whole album is like that, with “Reflections in Suspension” being my favorite track.

Another piece, and one greatly contested over the decades since it was first performed that I think epitomizes the element of Aether is 4’33” by John Cage. Cage taught us to really listen to the sounds going on around us, the sounds within us. Cage is also responsible for popularizing a saying he got from Indian musician Gita Sarabhai, that the purpose of music is "to sober and quiet the mind making it susceptible to divine influences." When we turn off the music and embrace the silence, we might just began to hear our own thoughts and get in touch with the parts of ourselves that are beyond the physical.

​Have you ever tried to open up a door no one else even knows is there? That’s what I’ve been doing on and off for the past twenty odd years. I tried all kinds of things to get the door to open, but none of them ever worked until I gave up. I spent a lot of time and money trying to get through that door, but in the end the price I paid was just a penny compared to what I gained.
Working downtown at the main library for as long as I have you start to notice certain things. It’s a big building and if you are into exploring at all, you start finding yourself in forgotten corners. The place has seen a lot of construction and remodeling over the years. There are some places up in the stacks where work projects have been started but never finished.

One morning not long after I started the job I managed to come in early. With some time to kill before my shift began I went up to the browse the stacks. I’ve never gotten tired of picking through the old books there is always a new discovery. Just when I happened to stumble across an ornate volume of Giordano Bruno’s Art of Memory I saw someone move out of the corner of my eye in the row next to me. I peeked through the shelf and saw the back of what looked like a middle aged homeless man. He slipped off around the corner along the wall.

The public aren’t allowed up in the stacks yet at the same time I didn’t want to narc on the guy. Street people had been known to sneak into them before closing time to sleep somewhere warm and dry. To me that’s blameless. I did want to see where he was going, so I followed him down the hall until he turned a corner. When I turned the corner he was gone.

I walked along the edge of the wall looking for him until I came to a place where a heavy canvas drop cloth splattered with gray, white and beige paint was hung. It flapped in the wind as I arrived and the air seemed warmer. I could smell hot dust. With it came the memory of the desert, of the time my Mom and I had flown out to visit family in California.  My aunt and cousins took us back home after a few weeks and we drove through the Mojave. I still remember seeing the cattle skull on the side of the road. Then the wind and smell disappeared. As I stood   another memory welled up inside me, a half grazed recollection which lingered on the edge of an impossible threshold. When I reached out to touch it the memory faded.

I pulled back the canvas drop cloth to reveal the door. My jaw dropped at the sight. It was a solid piece of oak so polished I could make out my own reflection inside the mesmerizing grain. The hinges were solid cast iron with bronze bolts. Carved into the door itself were words written in an ancient alphabet reminiscent of both Hebrew and Greek but belonging to neither. It was no script I recognized. The handle and the keyhole were made of silver. Embossed on the knob was an octagon star. When I turned the handle and pushed and pulled the door stayed firm, stolid, in its place. I crouched down and tried to peer through the keyhole. Squinting and looking inside all I could see was a field of black, but then a star glittered and then a field of stars exploded into view, a milky splash glowing against the night until these too faded back to black. Perhaps I had just strained my eyes.

I looked at my watch and was stunned to see I was fifteen minutes late. Where had the time gone? I scrambled down the nearest stairwell to Book Distribution and punched the clock.

“You’re gonna have to stay after a bit Justin, to make that up.”
My manager Rich had a haircut straight out of the ‘70s. He kept it dyed too, the same dark reddish brown as the tie clipped to his neck.

“No problem,” I said. For a boss Rich was cool. He collected Arkham House first editions and had a vast knowledge of Weird fiction. We’d chat about the adventures of Conan, and the intricacies of Lovecraft’s mythos.

I grabbed a cup of coffee from the percolator and started scanning a box of material perplexed and disoriented by what I had seen. 

“So Rich, I was up on D stack this morning and I saw this homeless looking guy up there in the religion section, and I followed him and then I saw this door. It looked like something straight out of a fantasy novel, all gilded and carved and stuff, except it was under this hanging piece of canvas. Have you ever seen that?”

Rich laughed, “You making stuff up again Justin? This would be good in one of your stories.”

“No, I’m not making anything up. When I saw it I became transfixed and lost track of time. That’s why I was late.”

“I’ve never seen that,” he said. “But hey, it’s a big building. Maybe it’s one of those unfinished renovations.”

“Okay,” I said. It was hard for me to believe he hadn’t ever seen the door. Rich was in his sixties and had started working at the library when he was eighteen. He knew the building back and forth.

Yet his dismissal only served to make me more curious. Anytime I had to go fetch a book that was shelved near the door I’d make a pit stop and try to turn the handle, see if it would open. Getting to the other side of it became a slow burning obsession.

Years passed. Life happened. I met a girl named Audrey and she became my girlfriend and a year later we shacked up. My curiosity about the door remained. A few years after we moved in together death happened. My mother’s passing was sudden and unexpected. Yet even after death life kept happening and Audrey and I got married the year I turned thirty. All through this time I still wondered about the door and stopped up to take a look at it every now and again, to see if I’d ever be able to crack it ajar. 

On the weekends the lady and I would go antiquing trips to northern Ohio, or down into Kentucky, or Indiana. I’d buy skeleton keys on these jaunts and try them on the door. We had lots of fun and my collection of keys had become quite impressive but none of them ever worked.

I was beginning to lose hope when I saw an ad in the back of Citybeat for a lock-picking class at the local hacker-space Hive 13.  It was real nifty. You get these little pieces of thin metal to put into the mechanism so you can trip the bolt. Not to toot my own horn but with practice I became skilled at picking locks. One time I got my cousin Chris out of a tough bind. His ex-girlfriend called me up in a panic to help unchain him from the bed. It was kind of awkward for everyone. But on the door this skill didn’t do diddley-squat.

 I started spending loads of time in the lock-picking forum on reddit because someone in the world must know how to trip the mechanism. I chatted with folks who were as bedeviled as I was about doors, locks, bolts, keys. Still nothing worked.  

Then I saw the homeless man wondering in the stacks again. I was fetching a copy of The Jerusalem Bible for a patron and there he was. When I yelled “Hey,” he turned to look at me and I saw him. Marvin. The crazy hobo squatter punk. He ran down the aisle ahead of me and turned the same corner he had all those years before. The canvas drape flapped in the desert scented wind as he shut the door in my face.

I pounded on the door with my fists, but he didn’t come back. No one answered. He might be able to tell me what was behind the door, but maybe he didn’t want me to know. My mind despaired. In all likelihood it was probably just a storage closet for the janitors or an access point to the HVAC system and Marvin slept there when he could. Yet if that were the case why was the door made of fine oak and carved with ancient letters in detailed filigree? Maybe it all was just my fevered imagination.

Shaking my head I tried to let the whole thing go. I grabbed the book I’d come up for and took it down to the customer, full of seething resentment and defeat.

I couldn’t believe it was Marvin. I’d seen him around town and knew him by reputation. I’d run in to him at noise music shows over the years. My wife and I saw him milling about at the annual Northside Rock and Roll carnival on the Fourth of July. All the cities hot freaks came out for that. But mostly I’d seen him at the library, looking at books on mysticism, magic, and meditation. My co-workers thought he was weird. I was intrigued by him, but now I was just peeved that he could go in the door, and I was stuck out. He didn’t even work at the library for Christ’s sakes.

My good friend Syd knew him a bit; he even lived with him in a punker’s squat for a few months and relayed Marvin’s crazy stories to me, stuff about being a time traveler. No one believed a word.

 A week later I was still in a stew about it all when I left work. Waiting for the bus, my mind spun in a billion different directions. I paid my fare and noticed the 17 was extra crowded. There was only one seat left and it was next to Marvin who looked at me wild eyed as if he was about to reel in the biggest catch of his life.
 “Don’t worry, I don’t bite,” he said, as I sat down next to him. He had an earthy smell. It wasn’t the kind of bathroom funk you get with a wino though he did have a brown paper bag sitting on his lap. His smell was of strong tobacco, soil, and a dry cracked aroma reminiscent of the desert.

 “Seen any good bands lately?” he asked as I tried to get comfortable.

            “No, I haven’t,” I said.

 He looked to his side with a nervous twitch then whispered, “Will you hear me out? I’ve got something to tell you. I know you’ve seen me up in the stacks and I know you know about the door.”
I nodded my head.  

 He grinned, revealing his nicotine stained teeth. In the sparkle of his eyes I could see hints of far off places. This man had been stretched thin. Despite his rugged muscularity from a life in the elements a burning mystical gulf existed within him, a void filled with silence and stillness.

 “My friend Syd told me you hop trains?”

            “It’s not common knowledge but if you hop a freighter under the glow of a blue moon while shaking a bag of old possum bones and singing Cannonball Blues you can ride the line to another time. If you sing the words backwards you go into the past and if you sing them side-a-ways you step into the future.”
I had just learned my first piece of hobo magic.

            “It works with a harmonica too,” he said.

Marvin pulled a scratched up harmonica from the front pocket of his beat up overalls. To the surprise of everyone on the bus he honked off several bars from Cannonball. It was so captivating everyone shut up. Even the bus driver stopped until a horn blared from a car behind us. Marvin slipped the harmonica back in his pocket and we were on our way.  Conversations continued like nothing had happened.

“I’ve been all across this country,” he said “riding the rails. I’ve walked the streets of San Francisco, Chicago and New York. I’ve done odd jobs in the small towns too, in Springfield, in Ypsilante, in places you never heard of. And on all those trips I wasn’t just travelling across the country. I was travelling across time, out on collecting trips.”

It sounded crazy, but so was the door, so maybe it was true. “Collecting what?”

              “Books. For the secret wing of the library.”

            Something clicked. “Did you ever get caught smuggling books into the building?” I asked.  Steve in security had told me a story about a man they caught sneaking antiquarian books the library didn’t own up into the stacks.

            “That was me,” he said. “For a half-Irish, half-Lebanese madman I’ve wised up a bit since then. Now I use an invisibility orb when I make deliveries.”

             “Then how come I’ve seen you?”

            “People gifted with the sight can see past the glamour of the orb.”

            I was able to see things other people didn’t. “Is that how I saw the door in the first place?” Marvin nodded.

            “But how come you ran...and how come you’re talking to me now?”

            “I ran because I was on a mission. I’m talking now because you’re persistent,” he said. “And because you knocked. Knocking is the first step.”

“I’ve been trying to open the door since I started at the library. I’ve tried everything and it won’t budge!”

            “Next time you’re there it will” he said, “because something in you changed.”

            “I don’t even remember knocking.”

            “Well, you kind of pounded on it a week ago.” I had. I’d been desperate.

             “So what are you doing now?” I asked.

            “I’m gonna hitch a train up to the Cleveland. I gotta pick up a book from another member of the League, maybe check out this band Terpsichore while I’m there.”

            The League. The name was vague, familiar, a half grazed memory.

            I looked outside the bus window and couldn’t see a thing. A heavy fog had settled in. Had I missed my stop? It felt like I’d been sitting there forever. Then I looked around the bus itself and saw that Marvin and I were the only passengers left. The driver got up and said, “Layover boys.”

            “I’m gonna have a smoke, man” Marvin said, so I got up with him and stood outside the bus as he rolled a cigarette from his pouch of bugler. He offered me one and I accepted.

We were parked next to an old gas station. It was the only thing I could see. Everything else was covered in a swirling haze of mist and fog. Gas stations like this only existed in the movies or in the small towns you pass through on a country drive. It had two antique pumps, solid metal, bright red and green. An attendant was pumping gas in a white ’59 Ford Galaxy with the top rolled down. The driver took a swig from a bottle of Coke, and had his arm around a brunette sporting a flipped bob. 

            “I don’t remember there ever being a layover on the 17 between Downtown and Northside,” I said after taking a drag.

            Marvin exhaled and I exhaled. His gray smoke mingled with my gray smoke and both mixed into the penetrating fog. The man in the Galaxy paid the attendant and the car chugged into life exhaling thick smog from the tailpipe before driving off into the misty haze.

“This whole world is a layover. Your trip here on this planet is just a stop at a way station. You come down here and the threads of your life interweave with the threads of other folks who’ve made the same stop. Some get back on the same bus or train as you, and others walk off down the road, go a different way. Some folks you get to know real well, others just intersect your path. A few you may have met during your last stop at the way station. Some you keep on meeting again and again. You and me are like that because I swear we’ve met before, and not just up in the parlor at the Southgate House.  Anyhow, after a time you open your eyes and start seeing how you’re just another passerby. You don’t become wrapped up in the world so much. You start wearing it like a loose robe knowing it’s all just part of the weave. The painful things that go on here, and the joyful things that go on here only end up touching you in a few places, and there lightly. With your eyes opened to what lies beyond this brief layover, you’ll be able to open the door."

            As he spoke a kernel of light passed from him and into me. It was a floating golden book with tiny wings no larger than a firefly. It crawled out the crumpled paper bag he held and flew into the shirt pocket over my heart.  

            I looked inside my shirt pocket and the book bug was gone. The faint neon residue it had left behind glowed in the shape of an archaic letter. The fog started to dissipate. The gas station sign flickered on and off, and it seemed like a pink United Dairy Farmer sign emerged from beneath it. A sharp whistle from the bus driver came for us to get back on and snapped me out of my reverie.

Marvin said, “If you want to live a life of service as a member of the League take this.” He offered me the paper bag. With trembling hands I received the gift. It wasn’t a bottle of cheap dime store wine. I could feel a book inside, but it had the heft and weight of a stone tablet.  

            In the distance I heard another whistle blowing, and saw huge tufts of hot white steam in the shape of a stallion billowing into what was left of the fog. The sound of iron wheels against iron tracks rifled through the air making a sonorous drone. As the train came into view I saw it was the magnificent Mercury streamliner that used to serve the Midwest. There had been a display about the Art Deco commuter in the rare book room last month.

            “Come on,” I said. “The bus is about to leave.”

            “No. I’ve got to catch the Mercury,” he said. He tipped his hat to me, turned, and sprinted into the copse of honeysuckle and weeds in the junked out green space behind the gas station to the train tracks beyond.

​            I climbed on the bus and sat down. As we drove the fog cleared. When I reached my stop I walked home in a daze. The book was heavy in my hands, a burden and a weight, but one I accepted. Audrey was at her tap dancing class when I got home so after I fed the dog I opened up the bag to look at the book. I found a note written in exquisite cursive on a scrap of yellow notebook paper.

Justin,

 Stamped below this was the octagon symbol from the doorknob embossed with the letter L in the center.

            My first job for the League.

            The next day I managed to get to work early. I got off the bus, went inside and ran up the steps to the stacks.  As I walked to the door I heard the faint echo of a harmonica playing Cannonball Blues.
 Standing at the threshold I pulled back the canvas and knocked on the door with a tenderness I had not known before. A dry desert wind emerged and combed through my tangled hair. I turned the handle and pushed it open. The smell of old books, dry with the dust of ages, greeted me.

            My heart skipped as I stepped into the secret library. I ran my hand along a row of books, but their spines did not feel like leather or cloth or paper but like the rock wall of an ancient cave. The cave walls were painted with images of antelope and lions.

            I crept to the end of the passage and came to find an alabaster jar. The perfume of the desert emerged from it in a spiral of dust that glittered like the stars. I reached down into the mouth of the jar and my fingers touched a scroll. The paper crumbled as I grabbed it, yet even in the dim light I saw the ancient hieroglyphic text. Afraid the knowledge would be lost forever I licked the little bits of paper from off of my hands and the words dissolved in my mouth. Thousands of little tiny golden books with wings flowed into my bloodstream and a hot red flame, bright as the fire of a welder’s torch ignited in my heart.

            Past the jar I saw the passage curve around a tight corner I had mistaken for a wall. Faint flickering lamplight beckoned to me. I followed the light further until I was standing before a spiraling staircase that climbed up into the stars and down into deep caverns below. I stood in the secret wing of the library where there were many more doors, rooms and mansions to explore.

             Now I have the key.

​​             All I have to do is knock.  

This story was originally written for a reading at a mixed media group show at the Contemporary Dance Theatre in March of 2019 and first appeared in print for Issue # 12 of Mythic Magazine in 2020.

A Sense of Brain Stimulation

Keith Fullerton Whitman was one of those electronic musicians I often heard about, but never listened to much of, except for the tracks of his I’d had from various compilations. I always enjoyed those tracks immensely, but for whatever reason, hadn’t followed up on them to find more of his work. Every devoted music fan will have gaps in their listening like this, artists or albums they have liked, but need to fill in with closer listening and attention. The quest for new music is eternal, and to amend the gap, I’ve sought out and listened to some more of Whitman’s work these past six months.

Presque Là is my favorite of his albums that I’ve listened to so far and it is relatively fresh off the plate, released this past February though the recording itself dates back to November 15, 2017. Devoted musicians, like devoted listeners, will often have a backlog of material recorded that has never seen the light of day. These pieces were intended to be issued on three hour long​ cassettes, but it never happened. Luckily, with sites like Bandcamp, artists can now make their​ works available directly to their fans when a label deal falls through, and I am glad he put this​ up. He has broken down the works into a Red, Yellow and Blue tape, with two fifteen minute pieces for each side. The only thing I miss about streaming this instead of listening on tape, is the​ joy of popping them in out and of the cassette deck.

The album is made up of three hours of music recorded at the INA-GRM studios in Paris,​ France​ a place with a storied past in the history of electronic music. The work was recorded in a single​ eight-hour session and was originally intended to be released on three tapes, with thirty minutes​ for each side, two fifteen minute compositions per side. The title Presque Là recalls to me the​ work Presque Rien from the late French composer Luc Ferrari. Presque Rien translates to​ “Almost nothing” in English, while Presque Là can translate to “Almost There.” The word Là​ can also mean a musical note. “Almost There” is thus a perfect title for this collection of pieces.
​
The music almost always gets to a point of standard musical completion, but the hope for notes almost always disappears, leaving the listener hanging, and when least expected. Whitman explains the compositions like this, “Adhering to the time-honored bassline / chord-melody / drum triumvirate, I rendered three hours of music during a single day-long session that breaks free from traditional, logical progressions. The individual pieces gradually build in intensity, only to evaporate at perhaps the least likely moments; or in any case a point in which the forward momentum implanted into the listener would be best left to accrue. Most would interpret this as a series of frustrations; the sensation of having to sneeze but being unable to.” This structure does not in fact frustrate me. It is what makes this music more interesting and novel. I pay attention to it, because it has broken free of the formulas and I don’t know what it is​ going to do next. As such it captures the imagination. In a way, it can be thought of as a kind of electronic jazz or prog rock playing in extremely odd time signatures, but ones that don’t necessarily finish a particular phrase, or pick the same strand back up when the music does continue.

Part of what first grabbed me with the four pieces from the Red Tape was the preponderance of harpsichord-like sounds Whitman used in his electronic palette. Coupled with off-kilter and fractured beats, these combined timbres make me feel like I am attending a chamber concert in a different branch of time, in a parallel universe where baroque musicians are accompanied by little drum machines that stutter in their frenetic and complex staccatos.

The harpsichord-like sounds continue to flow into the first part of the Yellow Tape where the beats have become even more alien feeling and unpredictable. I find these rhythms hypnotic, and abstract at the same. There is a sense of brain stimulation going on when I listen to this music. Steady tempos do have the capacity to induce entrainment within the human body, and while I may not be getting up to dance to these rhythms, I do find them to have an effect that can entrance, even when they are interrupted and end up careening off down other avenues of activity.

As the Yellow Tape progresses, I start to wonder about the behavior of the electronic system he has created for this music. How does it know when to stop, speed up, slow down, or shift into overdrive? “Yellow Tape A2” is made up of many little beginnings and endings, of quick pulses and tones that erupt out of the silence before fading back down to quietude. Constant shifts, starts and pauses give this work its own unique cadence. The pulse is not steady, but erratic, but its erratic nature is itself steady, forming its own kind of atemporal uniformity.

Every once in awhile throughout these pieces there is a pause and what sounds like a test tone from a television set or someone pressing the zero button on an old land-line telephone. These are like very brief reset noises that make it sound as if a new program or sequence is about to start. They bring me out of the spell I was under for a time, but just for a moment, because as soon as the music gets moving again I am caught up in Whitman’s manic mesmerization.

The use of the standard music trifecta of bass, drums, and melody does ground these pieces in the familiar, yet the way he has broken these out of their mold means what he is doing is still risky and groundbreaking research.

Whitman also says in the notes that he had the intention to “remove the composer completely” from the work itself. In fact he walked around the nearby streets and had lunch while the electronic system he had set up was making its music. This has clear precedents with the work of John Cage who wanted to remove himself from the process of creation. Before John Cage, the composer Joseph Matthias Hauer had wanted to erase his personality from the music he was making. To do so Hauer developed systems of chance operation using the I Ching, well before Cage had hit upon the idea. Hauer was also a rival originator of twelve-tone music coming up with his theory of “dodecaphonics” shortly before Arnold Schoenberg. Hauer was a probable model for the character Joculator Basiliensis in Herman Hesse’s novel The Glass Bead Game, which involves the creation of games that connect different intellectual ideas together, often relating them to music. Hauer wanted to be a conduit for what he called the “continuum” and what spiritually and religiously inclined people might think of as higher powers within the universe.

I don’t happen to know what Keith Fullerton Whitman’s philosophical predilections might be, but one way to make music where the composer distances him or herself from the creation, is by setting up an electronic musical systems who once they are running do the rest of the work themselves.
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This is not to say they lack artistry. The artistry is in setting up the system, designing the game as it were, and all the rules the game or system operates on. For this system Whitman writes, “These pieces are the result of an experiment in automating virtually every facet of the ‘form’ of a piece of Electronic Music by way of 12 randomly generated control voltages multiplied & applied to 38 discrete parameters. The idea at work here is the implementation of a complete system which allows, via a simple algorithmic approach utilizing core Analogue Computer concepts, the piece to police itself, eschewing the predictive, emotionally manipulative aspects of traditional build-release dynamics in Electronic, popular, and in fact the majority of Western music.”
I like that he mentions the “emotionally manipulative aspects” here. So much music is written to brow beat the emotions the composer wants you to feel right into the listener. There isn’t much choice in how to feel about that kind of manipulative music, because it has been predetermined for you to give precise reactions.
I find the music of Presque Là to be refreshing precisely because of this lack of manipulation. It stimulates the mind and expanding our notions of what is possible for music to do other than massage you into feeling sad, angry, mellow or exalted. Using chance to create systems that take out the familiar have results that are no less beautiful. Listening is like taking a new path through the circuitous labyrinth of space and time. The beauty here continues all the way to the final notes of the Blue Tape pieces. After many twists, turns, dead ends and reroutes the music leads to a clearing that can only be found in the mind.