Arp’s latest album The Soft Wave is released on Monday and attempting to select a representative track or even a single track that suggested an mp3 accompaniment on these pages proved…hard. The Eno (circa Another Green World) love letter of From a Balcony Overlooking The Sea is delicate and nostalgic and a glorious send off as the album winds down. The bubbling piano beds that underpin Catch Wave scream out for the long gestating La Monte Young post that will someday appear on the site (when the need arises to obliterate our bandwidth).

But it was the opening, Pastoral Symphony: I. Dominoes II. Infinity Room that proved unshakable in its grip on the fevered imagination of this 20JFG scribe. Straddling as it does two distinct movements: sliding us through the simple tones of early electronic experimentation to the warm bounce of synthetic melodies before complicating the utopianism in the grainy analogue streets of 70s Germany.

Arp – Pastoral Symphony: I. Dominoes II. Infinity Room

Arp’s nigh essential new album The Soft Wave is out on Smalltown Supersound on September 6th. Undoubtedly more info here.

David Behrman – Figure in a Clearing

A nervous cello scratches about in a decidedly non-digital manner, seemingly seeking out the impending synthetic interloper. To approach this music knowing the electronic experimentalism that is to come is to experience all of the David Gibson’s emotive cello playing in state of tension. As the primitive synthetic tones arrive, triggered not by the whims of humans but by the abstract machinations of physics, they seem to mesh with the comparatively ancient cello to form a duet full of warmth where once there was harshness and absence. The scratching cello recast as a compliant companion.

Figure in a Clearing was the first piece by David Behrman to use a computer in bot the creation and composition of music. The time intervals were modelled on a falling elliptical orbit of a hypothetical satellite as it descended towards a planet. That model controlled the time intervals between chord changes. David Gibson improvised within a set of 6 pitches laid out by Behrman whose only other instruction, to not speed up when the computer did, hints at the role Gibson was to play in the duet between planet and satellite.

Fun Behrman facts: Behrman studied composition under Stockhausen in Darmstadt in 1959 with La Monte Young; he also produced Terry Riley’s In C while working at Columbia.

Behrman was described by Haruna Miyake as creating ‘unfinished compositions’, to our videogame addled mind, that places him in the mould of a designer/programmer, a creator of rules with which the player can perform. Or in Benrman’s own words:

‘An analogy that I like for interactive music is that it’s like a piece of sports equipment – a bicycle, say, or a sailboat. The design is very important, but all the experiences of bicycling or sailing can’t be foreseen or controlled at the boatyard or factory, nor should they be.

The tradition of ‘unfinished composition’ of course is not new. Much of Jazz and other musics primarily designed for live performance have a lot to do with that kind of idea. You could say that when the composition is unfinished, authority is being questioned.’

Punk as fuck.

Figure in a Clearing can be bought as part of Lovely Records’ On the Other Ocean reissue that came out in 1996 but is still available here. Interview excerpts from Jason Gross’s 1997 interview here.

Epilogue -
This post is tagged with prog