The No-Age of Music
Even for practitioners of No-Age Music, it
is difficult to get a handle on what the genre is about. One obvious angle is
that it is what 'no wave' is to 'new wave' -- an industrial strength counterpart
to new age. This leads to another difficulty: ascertaining what 'new age' music
is. One resonant evocation of this musical genre appeared in the Doonesbury
comic strip. In one vignette the character 'Boopsie,' a woman who obviously
enjoys this music, vacuously describes a relaxing, warm bath of soothing sounds
-- a pleasant, enveloping sound-environment without too many distracting details.
In another installment of the cartoon, two characters are having a conversation.
One of the characters, asking what new age music is, receives the unexpected
response that he has been listening to it for quite some time during the course
of their conversation. The listener is not even aware that there is any music
at all -- only a sort of sonic wallpaper, or 'furniture music.'
The no-age analogy to a warm bath must
be a cold shower or even a water cannon. 'Furniture music' by now has a checkered
past, beginning with Eric Satie's original conception, continuing with John
Cage's silent composition (4'33''), and championed relatively recently by Brian
Eno in his 'ambient' works (music accepted happily by many into the new age
canon). A no-age musician views Cage's approach most sympathetically. For Cage
silences are valued not for their lack of sound, but for the sounds they reveal.
Silence does not actually exist, there is always some sound -- if nothing else
the functioning of the human body's neural and circulatory system. He stresses
acceptance of the beauty of the purposeless of our surroundings. New age environmental
recordings of nature run counter to this Cageian notion. They present a romanticization
of the environment - the sea (gulls and surf), the jungle, forest birdies and
waterfalls, all untouched by civilization. One of the great fallacies of western
culture is the belief that society is somehow set outside of nature. In reality
most soundscapes are touched by man and technology - first, by the mere presence
of a sound engineer with a microphone, but more directly through the ever-present
sounds of machines and amplification. In the privacy and solitude of the most
remote spaces the listener will usually hear traces of human machinery -- the
sound of cars on a rural road several miles away or of an airplane overhead.
Late at night in any populated area, while the decibel level is substantially
lower, the sounds of far-off cars, and air conditioners still produce a hum
to drown out the ringing in our ears.
The no-age is concerned with a rendering of
this environment -- the noises of both "nature" and technology. These
sounds are often available as sound effects (a different, but curiously direct
subterfuge of the actual environmental soundspace) -- and the ever-present beat
and babble of the 'consciousness industry.' The admittedly broad aim of no-age
music is the exploration of the sonic profile of the world's sounding objects,
both real and fantastic. In no-age music, the interrelationship of both natural
and 'unnatural' sounds is stressed with an emphasis upon the disquieting results
of this juxtaposition.
Steve Knopoff and I began collaborating in
the fall of 1986, producing at first a number of instrumental duets (for our
principal instruments, trombone and bassoon respectively). These pieces are
non-thematic and predominantly improvisational. Each stake out a single sonic
scenario. The result is a fluctuating interrelation of our individual parts;
in each duet we each play a single role that interacts with the counterpart's
role. This way of thinking begins with the realization that what is conveyed
by an instrument is the quality of its sound, style, or phrasing, irrespective
of the particular musical details that it may be playing. Our subsequent explorations
are concerned with finding ways of improvising interactively and with the creation
of a context for this activity. We have attempted, rather than be concerned
with the development of thematic, or harmonic organization, to explore the acoustic
potentialities of our instruments (through timbral variation, physical deconstruction,
multiphonics etc.)
Working in this manner, we found ourselves
only performing comparatively short, direct compositions. In developing extended
musical forms, rather than stretch out single musical ideas, we lengthened our
collaborative compositions through the creation of aural scenarios: sonic contexts
framed by prerecorded sounds of various kinds. Our first extended work,
Music
in American Life: Theory and Critique, was a multi-media presentation
utilizing video, slides, live electronics, and tapes. One frequent use of the
tape-recorded sounds was to create aural illusions. For instance, this composition
opened with a recording of a crowd milling about at a concert intermission (this
piece opened the second half of a concert). At other times, we performed alongside
recordings of ourselves in order to obscure the relation between the live and
prerecorded sound making the origin of the music unclear. In the final sequence
of the piece, the microphone levels for instruments were gradually increased
as our playing faded away amplifying the resonances of the room while the sounds
of our instruments fade away.
Our next extended work Music in American
Life: Music in the Workplace was more allegorical, taking as its point
of departure a variety of connections between 'music' and 'work', i.e., the
musical work, music as work, and music for work, or even music for working out
-- peppy arrangements of contemporary pop fare juxtaposed with the sounds of
exercise equipment. The most developed program of background music for the workplace
is muzak, a commercial enterprise based upon the presumed ability of
music to effect the listener's emotional level, thus increasing the productivity
or consumption of the worker or shopper, respectively. The music should be cheerful,
not interesting enough to demand attention, and usually uses instrumental tracks
since words are too distracting. In the workplace, these selections are arranged
across the work day in varying levels of intensity according to the 'stimulus
response curve' that counteracts worker fatigue or restlessness and helps increase
production and profits.
Throughout Music in the Workplace,
there are muzak selections (sometimes several at once) organized according to
a simulated stimulus response curve. We achieve our intensity by manipulating
our aural wallpaper. The high point on the curve we referred to as the 'industrial'
section (another expression of the workplace) where we tangled together distorted
muzak and factory sounds. The concept of music as work was illustrated through
sounds of Steve and I playing etudes and scales -- the work of concert musicians
-- and through the use of the sounds of musical instruction (through a tedious
sound effect recording of piano lessons) and of repetitive musical figures to
connote the repetitiveness of a work routine (a musical assembly line). Throughout
this performance we projected images, on slides, of work and of workers as well
as of imagery of nature and leisure depicting the lurking potential for escape
from the quotidian that background music offers but cannot accomplish. Other
prerecorded work imagery includes dentist office sounds (muzak is a frequent
inhabitant of the dentist office) and of sounds of a number of work settings
(ranging from factories to computers).
The most recent Gibbs / Knopoff production
was a radio performance entitled
Culture in the Airwaves. This
presentation was a radio piece about radio - the thread of the composition consisted
of backing tapes of sounds plucked from the airwaves - from three minute songs
and glib talk show hosts to extended montages from all across the radio dial.
Radio is an ideal no-age device. Interspersed
throughout the static of the radio band are broadcast signals arriving at the
receiver in varying states of fidelity -- Glen Campbell's voice will also sound
differently depending on whether he is broadcast across FM or AM or on shortwave.
Additionally, in urban areas with their greater airwave saturation, there are
numerous possibilities for cross-frequencies - two or more stations coming in on
the same frequency, creating a higher overall level of distortion. While it
is easy (and even justified) to rail against the lameness or sameness of much
of the programming that your radio emits, it is nonetheless possible to haul
in a wide variety of music, talk, and noise. Radio consists of many simultaneously
broadcast signals; radio time is no-age time with constant and variable interacting
cycles of information. There are sounds on the radio that happen all the time,
for instance, the Canadian time channel on the shortwave band that continuously
and eternally beeps the seconds away. There are also sounds that happen some
of the time, with greater or lesser frequency or regularity. Some of these sound
are periodic: for instance, network news on the hour or half hour on the radio
have signature themes that last perhaps three seconds. Other sounds occur sporadically
with greater or lesser frequency. It is easy to imagine that some dinosaur rock
track like "Stairway to Heaven" is being broadcast from some point
on the globe at every moment of every day. Additional examples of sounds that
recur irregularly are commercials. While recorded songs can be broadcast forever,
commercials have a limited shelf-life. The other temporal possibility in radio
is to hear a sound event that only happens once and is never repeated. Since
nearly all music heard across the airwaves is prerecorded, such events occur
most often on talk or news formats, or else during "spontaneous" ad-libs
made by D.J.'s. Free-form college or community radio stations are probably the
greatest hope for these unique moments.
An important technique employed in Culture
in the Airwaves is pause-button editing. This low budget (and low-tech)
method of audio editing utilizes the pause button on a cassette recorder to
control the length of audio signal being recorded. Since the cassette recorder
operates at a very slow tape speed, this method of editing is imprecise and
produces fragmented rhythms. When the radio is used as a sound source the signal
is continuous, and often organized into programmed durations (song length, show
length, jingle length, commercial length). This editing technique permits the
acceleration of these events, by removing sections of them, creating new juxtapositions
within the event. This technique also permits cross between simultaneous programming
on a variety of radio stations. In Culture in the Airwaves, programming
from a variety of times and frequencies comes together in this manner as well
as through the use multi-track recording. Pause-button technique allows varying
amounts and rates of the sound source to emerge on the final cassette ranging
from extended segments left intact to the dreaded technique of hyper-pause,
where, on a well-adjusted cassette recorder the rapidity of pausing allows the
sound's texture or timbre to remain while it becomes accelerated and otherwise
mangled. Distortion is part of the game of any no-age project and the irregularities
arising from this technique complement the distortions of the radio signals
coming through distant airwaves.
Ultimately all of this preparation and hypothesization
leaves us with a starting point for our improvisation. These pre-recordings
provide a sonic environment within which to perform. This article probably hasn't
answer the burning question of what is no-age music, but has only thrown out ideas
about how it could be happening right now.