Drone and Response: Pierre Boulez and Dassault

The above image is an artist's impression depicting the nEUROn Unmanned Combat Air Vehicle (UCAV, or drone) whose prototype, designed by French defence contractor Dassault, was first displayed at the Paris Air Show in 2005. The name, presumably, is intended to indicate its pioneer status as one of the first combat drones developed by a European company. 

I happened across the nEUROn drone when browsing through recent posts from the official Wikileaks Twitter account. After a somewhat catty blog post at the New York Times by former editor, Bill Keller, the 'Leaks are currently using their tweets to explain exactly why they decided to go home and take their ball with them, and while we're at it we dropped the NYT, Guardian, Le Monde, El Pais, etc., not the other way round, thank you very much. 

One of the reasons for their ire was apparently the amount of redactions insisted upon by their media partners - not just names of diplomats, but frequently also names of banks and major corporations. So they're publishing the unredacted versions over at Cabledrum.net. Including this one in which someone evidently insisted on redacting Italy's interest in investing in Dassault's new UCAV.

There's an interesting connection between Dassault and the world of avant-garde music. Back in 1984, Pierre Boulez's IRCAM institute needed its new 4X computer put into production - and fast! The premiere of Boulez's Répons was looming and four such machines were required to make work its delicate interplay of acoustic and digital music interacting in 3D space. So, IRCAM sold the designs to Sogitec to put them into production. Sogitec had at that time just been bought by Dassault.

In her book, Rationalising Culture, an ethnographic look at the inner workings of the famously secretive IRCAM institute, former Henry Cow / National Health bassist, Georgina Born recounts the frustration of some IRCAM workers at the sale of their baby to the notorious arms manufacturer:

"The 4X-Sogitec saga was kept quiet during 1984 and was not spoken of freely within IRCAM. A few workers mentioned confidentially that they were upset by the militarist implications of the deal, and equally b the failure of the 4X to reach a larger musical public, but most remained silent."

Since the early 80s, Sogitec has been a wholly owned subsidiary of Dassault, with a particular speciality for flight simulators and 3D imaging. IRCAM sold them the 4X on the basis that it would be able to create realistic flying noises for their flight sims. The 4X was IRCAM's flagship computer, probably the most sophisticated piece of music hardware ever built, capable of real time filtering and morphing of sounds, and the last of its kind - after Sogitec made only a small run of 4Xs, insufficient to be put into use at other music research centres around the world, the emphasis largely moved to software based systems like MAX.

Of course, Sogitec make simulators - not actual combat vehicles. Except of course that with drone warfare the line between simulation and real warfare becomes increasingly blurry. From the pilot's point of view - and perhaps even from the point of view of at least some of the hardware and software components - controlling a combat drone in an actual field of war and taking part in a flight simulation might be almost impossible to distinguish.

As one final note, it may be amusing to recall that in his April 2000 column for The New Yorker about Pierre Boulez ("a great but ungenerous artist"), Alex Ross singles out Répons for criticism precisely because of its over-reliance on drones!

Ecstacy and Her: On the potential military application of the player piano

With celebrity shoplifters in the news this last week, it behoves us to look back for a moment at the life of Hedy Lamarr. The actress once known in Hollywood as the most beautiful woman in the world was arrested several times for leaving a shop without paying for her items. Interviewed for the documentary about her life, Secrets of a Hollywood Star (2006, Barbara Obermeier, Donatello Dubini & Fosco Dubini), Kenneth Anger memorably recalls an occasion when she was caught stealing laxatives for her constipation. "It was very pathetic," sighs Anger, who befriended the actress in New York in the 1970s. 

On another occasion, when arrested again, several decades later, in Florida, Lamarr claimed that a transvestite of her acquaintance had framed her by stuffing the stolen goods in her handbag without her knowing. In 1966 Andy Warhol had made a short film, Hedy, in which Lamarr was herself played by transvestite Mario Montez and shown caught in the act of shoplifting by Exploding Plastic Inevitable dancer (later bit part actor in Knight Rider and Babylon 5), Mary Woronov, and put on trial before a jury consisting of all five of her ex-husbands. 

"And here is the best part," sings Montez vamping on Sinatra's 'Young at Heart' in a blonde wig, puffing on a cigarette holder, "You have a head start / If you are among the very - Kleptomaniac". The seventy minute film, which also stars Gerard Malanga and Ingrid Superstar, is notable for its music, provided by a then little known group called The Velvet Underground.

Born Hedwig Keisler in Vienna, 1913, she started acting in her teens and scored one of her first starring roles in Czech director Gustav Machatý's (1933) Ekstase. Viewed today, this wild and dreamlike film seems years ahead of its time, recalling Jean Renoir at his very best, even anticipating some of the surrealism of Alain Resnais, the chiaroscuro of film noir. 

Hedy herself is utterly bewitching. Years later, she would tell Kenneth Anger with a raised eyebrow that Hollywood taught her the easiest way to look sexy was to act dumb, but here she is headstrong and willful, possessed of a haunting melancholy, and fiercely independent. She would later claim she was paid nothing for the role and that she certainly wasn't told in advance about the nudity for which the picture soon gained notoriety. 

In the same year, she married the Austrian arms manufacturer, Friedrich Mandl. A prominent fascist, Mandl sold weapons to both Mussolini and Hitler, both of whom were guests at Mandl's lavish soirées. Kept a virtual prisoner in his house, Hedy escaped with the help of a British diplomat and fled, first to Paris, and ultimately to Hollywood. Practically as soon as she stepped off the boat she had a contract with Louis B. Mayer and a new name, Hedy Lamarr.

While Hedwig Keisler was growing up in Vienna and making her first steps in the movie business, the American composer George Antheil, was mostly in Paris. He lived for ten years above Sylvia Beach's bookshop, Shakespeare and Company, causing a series of minor riots in concert halls across Europe (one of which would become background action in a Marcel L'Herbier film) with his mechanical music for player pianos. "One day in the future," he once said, "we will make God in the heavens with electric lights." 

He returned to America in 1933, the same year as Lamarr, and by 1936 both were living in Hollywood. He was writing film scores for Ben Hecht and Cecil B. DeMille and reporting on soundtracks for Modern Music magazine, with a sideline posing as an expert on female endocrinology, giving advice to the "questing male" in the pages of Esquire. The story goes that Lamarr and Antheil met a cocktail party, she sought him out for advice on enhancing her "upper torso" through the use of hormones and somehow the conversation turned to munitions.

By 1941, Antheil and Lamarr were in possession of a patented method for launching submarine torpedoes without getting their radio guidance systems jammed by the enemy. The technique, which they dubbed 'channel hopping', combined the familiarity with high-tech weaponry Lamarr had gained at her former husband's side, with Antheil's intimate acquaintance with the mechanics of the pianola. 

She had the idea of sending out the tracking signal in rhythmic bursts, according to a coded sequence; he figured out you could use the mechanism from the inside of a player piano as the encoding device - the keyboard's eighty-eight keys allowing the torpedo guidance system to leap amongst eighty-eight different frequencies. 

Though the military insists Lamarr and Antheil's invention was never put into wartime service and the pair never made a penny from their patent, today Lamarr and Antheil's "channel-hopping" method is all around us. Long after the term of their patent had elapsed, the technique was recognised as an enormously efficient means of data compression. Now known by the term "spread spectrum", it forms part of working infrastructure of GPS, mobile phones, and wireless internet networks - even if few of these devices seem quite big enough to fit the insides of a player piano inside them.

So it seems that within a day of the city of Paris launching its AutoLib electric car hire scheme last month, a woman was knocked down by one because she didn't hear the thing coming. According to this, the US Senate passed a law back in 2009 requiring electric car drivers to make "a minimum level of sound to alert pedestrians" of their coming. All of which is somewhat reminiscent of a line in Robert Heinlein's The Cat Who Walks Through Walls (1985) about car owners playing the tapes of authentic 20th century car noises as they drive their vehicles with otherwise silent power sources. 

Being a frequent Paris-London traveller, I was very pleased to have an article published about the AutoLib scheme in the December issue of Eurostar's onboard magazine, Metropolitan. As is so often the way with these things, most of my favourite bits of the piece cot cut out in the to-and-fro of the editing process so, now that a new issue is to be found in the seat-back pockets of the cross-channel express, I thought I might offer you a little remix of some of the off-cuts from the essay Metropolitan called 'Electric Avenue' . . .

In the first novel by Hugo Gernsback, the man who coined the phrase "science fiction" and published the first magazine devoted to the stuff, we learn that gasoline-driven automobiles have long been obsolete in the year 2660 thanks to the "electromobile". Each of these electrically-driven vehicles is equipped with a small mast to convey power to the motor and rubberised wheels to insulate the car from metallic roads. 

Ever since the 1911 publication of this heroic fantasy, electric cars have been unable to shake off the association with science fiction. The Vanguard CitiCar turned up in George Lucas's (1971) film THX-1138; and only a couple of years ago, the swoosh-shaped, three-wheeled Aptera made an appearance in J.J. Abrams's Star Trek reboot. This December, as the new fully-electric, noise-free, emission-free AutoLib system is rolled out across Paris, science fiction becomes quotidian reality - six and a half centuries ahead of Gernsback's prediction.  

Perhaps the strangest thing about the history of the electric car, however, is that they were a fact of life long before they were the object of sci-fi speculation. There were miniature electric vehicles invented as early as 1828 (by a Hungarian priest, named Ányos Jedlik), and a full-size model drove into the International Exhibition of Electricity in Paris in 1881. By the end of the 1800s, there were nearly 34,000 electric cars on American roads, nearly double the number of petrol-driven motors. In fact, in the nineteenth century, it was the gas guzzler that was science fiction, as evinced by the "horseless carriages" of Jules Verne's (1863) fantasy of Paris in the Twentieth Century.

"A symbolic clock is as nourishing to the intellect as a photograph of oxygen to a drowning man."

The most preposterous thing about Zack Snyder's bloated, flaccid big-screen adaptation of Alan Moore's Watchmen comic is that it posits a world in which the doomsday clock is at a minute to midnight, Nixon has served five terms, and real life superheroes walk the streets and the plains, fighting crime and winning wars, and this has had no effect whatsoever on contemporary pop music.

How Music Got Game (Or Game Got Music)

" . . . Badges must be worn at all times . . . "

Read more about music apps, gamification and exploitationware in my "Wreath Lecture" for The Quietus here.

. . . have you hugged, kissed and respected your brown Venus today? Robyn Orlin reviewed. . .

". . . The challenge for Robyn Orlin then becomes how to make a piece of theatre which re-tells the story of, and pays tribute to, Baartman, without in the process exacting the same work of spectacularisation of which the latter has historically been the victim. This she achieves through the deft manoeuvre of exhibiting instead the audience to themselves. . ."

Read more at Exeunt Magazine.

Rock and Roll Vs. The American Federation of Musicians

 ". . . Listening to rock & roll, then, is to cross a kind of sonic picket line. . . "

Read more at The Quietus.

The Atari Video Music and the Music Video

"... There is a kind of whig history of the music video in which early performance based clips, such as Jan & Dean’s ‘Surf City’ on the Pacific Coast Highway and the minimalist cool of The Animals’ sound-studio set for ‘The House of the Rising Sun’, give way to a burst of creativity which starts with The Beatles and explodes with MTV and Michael Jackson. It is a seductive narrative, and not uncoincidentally one that neatly dovetails with the rock heritage mag lists of the great classic albums . . ."

Read more at the ÉCU - European Independent Film Festival music blog here.

Black Rain - Music for the End of Time

"Some three minutes of Shôhei Imamura’s Black Rain (1989) have elapsed before the first entrance of Toru Takemitsu’s original score. The credits have rolled, the principal characters and the setting of the first act – Hiroshima, August 1945 – have been introduced. Within only 30 seconds of the creeping entrance of the violins, the blinding flash of white heat has burst upon the frame. So it is perhaps appropriate that one of the chief influences on Takemitsu’s music here is Olivier Messiaen, the composer of the Quartet for the End of Time."

Read more at Electric Sheep Magazine.

Three sketches of Metropolis; from the current exhibition at the Cinémathèque Française

In 1924, Fritz Lang and his producer, Erich Pommer, traveled to America by boat. Whilst they were there they picked up two Mitchell cameras, both of which would later be used to film Metropolis. But on their way to the States, they shared passage with the architect, Erich Mendelsohn (later to be the designer of Bexhill-on-Sea's De-La-Warr Pavilion), in the same year that he would form the group known as Der Ring with Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius.

It may be interesting to speculate upon what Lang and Mendelsohn might have talked about on that long sea voyage. Certainly there are family resemblances between Mendelsohn's vision of America - not to mention his own expressionist buildings - and Erich Kettelhut's designs for the city in Metropolis; likewise in his idea of the city as a kind of "organism," of "the city of the future" as "a system of focal points that is, in panorama, the very fabric of space." But also, in a letter to his wife from just a few months before setting sail for the US, Mendelsohn wrote of architecture task of "reconciliation" between "function" and the "sensual" in a manner which finds it echo in the Maria's line of dialogue that, "There can be no understanding between the hand and the brain unless the heart acts as mediator."

That they did talk seems practically assured given that, upon his return to Europe, Mendelsohn published a book of photography, Amerika, Bilderbuch eines Architekten which attributes one of its images, entitled 'Broadway by Night', to Lang himself. Lang's image of Broadway is woozy, delirious, somehow both glamourous and seedy, anticipating something of the Yoshiwara district of his Metropolis. The staggered pseudo-double exposure of the neon lights implies the moving camera of the cinema.

In a photograph towards the end of the Cinémathèque's exhibition we catch a glimpse of Lang relaxing during a break in shooting, alongside his wife (and the film's writer) Thea von Harbou, and the actress Brigitte Helm (who played Maria). They appear to have formed a little musical combo with Lang on drums, von Harbou on piano and Helm on saxophone. Harbou would later note that one of the "choicest materials" used to build the pyre upon which Maria was to be burnt in the film's climax was a piano. 

We see many of Gottfried Huppertz's sketches and short scores for the film's music juxtaposed with von Harbou's original script pages. Glancing at these yellowed pages, it is immediately clear that the music for the machine room was immediately conceived as a forest of repeat marks. For Rotwang's laboratory we see crowds of hurried semi-quavers arpeggiating up and down through masses of sharps and flats.

Unusually, both for the time and for films in general, Huppertz was employed early on in the production process. He would bring his piano on set, writing his scores there and then during filming. So when it came to the recent work of reconstruction, the original musical score was an invaluable resource as a guide to editing scenes to the correct length and to the right rhythm, for which the conductor Frank Strobel was employed as an essential consultant.

One day during filming, after shooting the early scene in the "eternal garden," the production received a number of visitors from the Soviet Union. Sergei Eisenstein, along with his cinematographer Eduard Tisse, and assistant director, Grigori Alexandrov, were visiting Germany after the completion of Battleship Potemkin. 

Lang eagerly showed his visitors some of his rushes, declaring, "Now you go and do the same. But different!"

Tisse, impressed by the film's technical achievement but not by the "personal ends" to which it was put, would later write, "Our Battleship Potemkin had not yet appeared in Germany. But we had already decided that we would certainly not do the same."

Cage, Stravinsky, the Long Now

"The sooner the world forgets Stravinsky the better," wrote the young John Cage to a friend, in 1935, "If he gave us the primordial, as you say, I swear it was a cheap imitation." Igor Stravinsky, for his part, was scarcely any kinder about Cage. Though the composer of the Sacre du Printemps would admit, in one of his many conversations with his friend, the conductor Robert Craft, to finding some of Cage's work "enjoyable" he admitted, finally, that "his performances are often, to me, the frustration of time itself." 

Looking back over the music of the twentieth century, it seems in hindsight that, more than Schoenberg and Stravinsky or Cage and Boulez, the two magnetic poles in terms of style and temperament were indeed Cage and Stravinsky, two composers who could never see eye to eye and for whom there seems scarcely any point of engagement or rapprochement. And it may be, as Stravinsky hints, precisely over this question of time, and of one's mode of being with regard to time, that this fundamental incompatibility is most keenly felt. 

So amongst the several concerts of late works by the late John Cage programmed in this year's Festival d'Automne in Paris, it is this pairing of Cage's Seventy-Four (for Orchestra) with Stravinsky's Requiem Canticles at the Cité de la Musique that proves the most fertile. How better, after all, to look back upon a century like the twentieth, by which we are all still so haunted, than to place side by side the means by which two of its musical titans chose to say goodbye to music? 

Cage kept on composing until his final year, completing a number of significant works in the last few months before the second stroke that killed him while preparing tea on August 11th, 1992. Of these late 'number works' from his final months, Seventy-Four is on the largest scale and is perhaps the most obviously mournful, even while treading cautiously before applying such a direct psychobiographical correspondence with a composer like Cage. Stravinsky, on the other hand, wrote his setting of the Latin requiem mass some five years before his death in New York in 1971, and already, as his widow would later claim, he "knew he was writing it for himself." 

It feels strange still to imagine the motorik sawing of the strings which open the first movement drifting up from the canals of Venice as Stravinsky's body was ferried to the cemetery island of San Michele to be buried near his old collaborator, Sergei Diaghilev. So brittle and crisply locomotive as played tonight by the Symphony Orchestra of the Südwestrundfunk of Baden-Baden and Freiburg, one can scarcely imagine it played in a city without cars. 

Only with the sudden violence of the third movement's Dies Irae can we imagine ourselves in Venice - and even then it is the macabre and foreboding Venice of Don't Look Now and Aldo Lado's Chi l'ha vista morire? A Venice of uncanny shocks around mysterious dark alleyways. As we drift into the final three movements with the Lacrimosa, we could be amongst the damp fog of the sirocco, until the postlude brings on the eerie tolling of bells, to the final chords of, in the words of Robert Craft, "death alone". 

Cage's Seventy-Four may kick off in an equally misty atmosphere, but it is a mist of a fundamentally different texture. The name of the work comes from the number of musicians: an orchestra of two pianos, two percussionists, one harp, plus strings divided into fourteen first violins, ten second violins, eight a piece of cellos and violas, and six double basses. These seventy-four musicians are further split in two - high and low - with each group being given, less a score, than a series of notes, to be played within a set of vague time-brackets, off the clock and without conductor. A performance note encourages players to exaggerate the "usual imperfection of tuning" between orchestral instruments to give the music imprecise degrees of microtonality. 

The grand orchestras of major institutions often have a bit of a problem with Cage; tending either to treat his works with an excessive solemnity that veers on parody, or a kind of jocose levity that could seem like a flip dismissal of something, as Stravinsky hinted, best regarded as not really music. Tonight's musicians from the Sudwestrundfunk are not exempt - indeed, managing somehow to commit both sins at once. Nevertheless, almost despite themselves, they manage to conjure up some wonderfully languid textures, forming a heady oneiric concoction. 

With age, Cage's opinion of Stravinsky evidently softened, for a concert of the latter's works conducted by the great man himself forms the backdrop to one of Cage's favourite stories. As Igor lays down his conductor's baton and nods his assent to the crowd's applause, a small boy turns to his mother: "That's not how it goes." This is Cage's "proof", as offered in Peter Greenaway's film, Four American Composers, that listening to recordings can only be a bad thing. The boy was wrong, Cage implies, because, almost by definition, that was precisely how it was supposed to go - because Stravinsky himself was conducting it. 

A curious sentiment to hear from Cage, perhaps; the composer of indeterminacy, of the composer's diminished authority. By contrast, at least according to this anecdote, Stravinsky is the composer who knows how his works go; perhaps the last major composer for whom there is never any ambiguity in the score. 

This is how we tend to imagine Cage and Stravinsky, it is their image in the popular imagination (think of Mads Mikkelsen's unsmiling mien in Coco & Igor), it is, if you like, Cage's Stravinsky and Stravinsky's Cage, and it is basically what the musicians from the Südwestrundfunk gave us tonight at Cité de la Musique: clipped, terse, precision engineering Stravinsky; and lax, care-free, anything goes Cage. But is this the whole story? 

Think for a moment of the relaxed lightness, the moments of doubt and ambiguity revealed here and there in Stravinsky's Conversations with Robert Craft, or those passages - there is at least one in practically every piece he wrote - where the music just seems to get carried away with itself, the levee breaks and everything suddenly bursts free of its shackles for a moment. Think of the meticulous planning and measurement David Tudor - Cage's preferred interpreter - put into his performances of Cage's works, or the millimetre-precise measurements Cage himself left by way of prepared piano instructions. 

I'd like to suggest another way of seeing this gap between Cage and Stravinsky, that returns to this question of time with which we opened in the light of another Cage composition: ORGAN2/ASLSP. This work from 1985, the second half of whose title stands for As SLow aS Possible, originally written for piano but soon changed for organ, contains a series of notes to be played, as the name suggests, "as slow as possible". The first organ performance lasted 29 minutes. Since September 5th, 2000 (which would have been Cage's 88th birthday had he not died in 1992), a performance has been ongoing at St. Burchardt's church in Halberstadt, which is due to last, in total, 639 years. 

Stravinsky once said that "Music's exclusive function is to structure the flow of time and keep order in it." Herein lies a tacit acceptance - even a celebration - of art's power to impose an artificial before-and-after narrativity on the intangibility of duration. Even as the development of Stravinsky's career betrays a most un-Orphic tendency to look back over his own (and other people's) shoulder(s) from time to time, his is basically a music which goes from A to B, from the past to the future. With Cage we have something different. 

I think ASLSP has more than a passing resemblance to Stewart Brand's 'Long Now' project, to build a clock and bury it, that would count ten thousand years. It is often argued that Brand's clock is a call to think seriously about the future. I would argue otherwise. Brand's clock is a bulwark against the future. Taken at absolute face value, the clock of the long now is designed to preserve just that - the long now, the neverending present.

In case anyone were in any doubt of the regressive nature of current British policy, one of the more arresting images from today's protests in London. What better image of the desperate striving for an idealised past than the spectacle of some twenty policemen, riot shields strapped to their belts, all stationed to protect a clock which runs backwards? The backwards march of post-history must be protected from the dreams of rioting futurists!

(image via @DrStu2012 thanks to Oliver Basciano for bringing it to my attention)

Music, Sound and Time in Bruno Dumont's Hors Satan

Early on in the new film by former philosophy teacher, Bruno Dumont, Alexandra Lematre's character (identified only as "elle") takes an in-ear headphone from the pocket of her hoodie and slips it in her ear. We, the audience are never made privvy to the music she listens to, but the gesture draws attention to the absence of music in the film. As traditionally defined, there is no music in Hors Satan - no silken Hollywood strings, no pop songs, no diegetic performance, no non-diegetic score. Even the kind of sonic re-structuring usually handled by a sound editor is missing, for Dumont did not hire one.

No music, nor very much dialogue either - and most of that which there is is largely inconsequential. But Hors Satan is not a silent film. Far from it. We hear birds tweeting, cocks crowing, leaves rustling, as well as several more revealing sounds - a camera dolly rolling over its track, the wind blowing against a microphone.

In an interview with Jean-Michel Frodon, the director explains, "We recorded only live and "mono" sounds. What you hear in the film are the actual sounds recorded during shooting. I didn't alter or re-record them. I wish some noises weren't there, but I kept them anyway, stoically. . . The sound material is very rich and untamed. Therefore, when there is a moment of silence, you can feel it loud and clear."

At one moment, after it has been raining, we hear water running over a corrugated iron roof and falling to the ground. The two main characters pause in their journey to watch and listen, and we listen with them. These characters frequently take time out to simply stand still and pay attention to some ambient sound. And even in their absence, the camera will likewise pursue such sounds to their sources, becoming, in the process, a character like them. Sound - and a certain quasi-musical attentiveness to sound - thus subjectivizes, and in so doing constructs an audience that will be willing, like the film's characters to offer a certain attentiveness toward sounds, to give them time, without preconceptions.

How can we describe the sense of time experienced in the films of Bruno Dumont? It is certainly very far from the clock-time of Hitchcock, the almost Taylorist efficiency with which narrative details are revealed and slotted into the perpetual motion machine of the diegesis in North by North West or The Man Who Knew Too Much, for example. We find with Dumont a concern with rhythm and tempo that goes beyond brute functionalism, and there is evidently something musical in this. But neither are we dealing with the languorous time of Apichatpong Weerasthakul, nor the deep time of Bela Tarr, which would be something like the Erfahrung of Walter Benjamin.

Karlheinz Stockhausen once remarked that "Wagner, more than any other western composer, expanded the timing of western music: he would have been the best gagaku composer." While the first half of this statement is undoubtedly true, I'm not so sure about the second half. Think of the constantly held back, teetering sense of anticipation, of desperate yearning for an impossible fulfillment, found in Tristan und Isolde. Perhaps I am wrong, but I suspect this is something foreign to the Japanese gagaku tradition. But maybe not so much to the cinema of Bruno Dumont - even if only to an earlier film such as Twenty-Nine Palms, in which the palpable sense of dread, of waiting for some seemingly inevitable horror hangs suspended in each crawling take, like the infinitely delayed resolution of some dissonance in the middle voices.

Hors Satan is different in this respect. The shot lengths are generally shorter than in his earlier films (though still considerably longer than most mainstream films), the forward motion of the narrative less precipitous. Perhaps this film is closer to the sense of time alluded to in Stockhausen's reference to gagaku.

In his book, Haunted Weather, David Toop, in the midst of a discussion about contemporary Japanese electronica, describes this 7th and 8th century court music which, he says, survives largely unchanged to this day, "So measured in the progress of its percussive markers that it draws the image of a footstep raised to move forward yet caught in a universal power cut, gagaku's timbral consistency is a gaseous astringency of reeds, flutes and free reeds."

Toop quotes William P. Malm's book on Japanese Music and Musical Instruments, which claims that the chords of the sho bamboo reed pipe do not serve the functions of tension and release allotted to western functional harmony, "Rather, they 'freeze' the melody. They are like a vein of amber in which a butterfly has been prepared. We see the beauty of the creature within but at the same time are unaware of a transparent solid between us and the object, a solid of such a texture that it shows that object off in a very special way."

Stockhausen discovered gagaku music when he travelled to Japan in 1966 to complete his Telemusik at the NHK electronic music studios, where composers like Toshiro Mayuzumi and Makoto Maroi had been creating electronic music for over a decade. Mayuzumi would score over a hundred films, including several by Imamura and Mizoguchi, both of whom are renowned for their long takes and slow, refined pacing.

Despite the sometimes austere titles, Mayuzumi's electronic music, such as 1953's X,Y,Z for musique concrète, (contemporary with Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry's concrète opera, Orphée 53), exhibits a kind of delirious playfulness, equal parts hallucinogenic Looney Tunes pandemonium and delirious melodrama, as pitch-shifted horns and bird tweets give way to echoplexed weeping.

Moroi and Mayuzumi's collaborative work, Variations on 7, is, however, more restrained, with a much greater economy of means, while still remaining very different from either the French concrète of Schaeffer and Henry or the sine tone based electronic music of Stockhausen and Eimert in Cologne. "One probably reason why this work seems to compelling and relevant now," says David Toop, "is the directness, the clarity, the sense of pure intent."

And this last seems to me a good description of the attraction of Dumont's film-making. He is one of the few directors working today willing to impose restrictions upon himself, to act with a strict economy of tools and means. Utilising a restricted repertoire of shot lengths, camera heights, and angles. Even if his short lengths were to be reduced much further, there would still be a certain sense of slowness to his film because there is none of the usual digital busyness of superimposed sonic and visual detail (/clutter). He does this without nostalgia: there is nothing old-fashioned looking - or sounding - about his films. But there is this sense of "propriety" as he says of Alexendra Lematre's performance. And the drama comes from the disproportion between this propriety, this certain holding back, a resistance to express even, and the sometimes quite startling events which unfold; events which in another context, filmed in another way, might seem, as Dumont says in the above cited interview, quite normal. This is the source of Dumont's "slap in the face"; a slap which is in many ways very musical. Like a snare drum erupting in the midst of a performance of John Cage's 4'33''.

Flying Sorcery

Manned flight somehow never quite lost its sense of magic. Ever since Louis-Sebastian Mercier altered his second edition of L'An 2440 to accommodate the recent balloon flight of the Montgolfiers, in 1786; flying machines have provided a persistent trope for science fiction writers. Nearly a century later, Jules Verne would still find wonder in balloon journeys. And a half century after that H.G. Wells was still writing scientific romances about aeroplanes, decades after the Wright brothers had taken to the skies. When the futurists, Italian and Russian alike, wrote their operas, they chose aviators for their heroes.

This sense of wonder is reflected in our daily experience of commercial aviation. I have known confirmed atheists to cross themselves before take-off. The sigh of relief - even applause - frequently to be heard upon landing is a reaction to what is still perceived as a kind of modern miracle.

If we take the Eurostar, or any other kind of international train journey, and we experience extensive delays or cancellations, we expect - and generally receive - some form of apology and material compensation. Somehow we neither expect nor receive the same treatment from an airline. We stolidly accept hours of waiting at the flimsiest of excuses, gushing our gratitude when the winged beast finally deigns to take the air. This is related to the lingering sense of magic that hangs about planes. One does not ask for money back guarantees from the village shamen.

In his exhaustive history of the utopian impulse, The Principle of Hope, Ernst Bloch finds in fairy tales of magic carpets some of the most primitive gestures toward the kind of technological utopian wish fulfillment pioneered by Francis Bacon's New Atlantis. Today, a recent paper in the journal Applied Physics Letters (reported by the BBC) unites several centuries of utopian dreaming with a description of a prototype "flying carpet", employing cybernetic feedback principles, which its designers hope could be suitable for the exploration of Mars.

The above image cribbed from Unsanctioned Speculation.

Beyond the Black Rainbow at L'Etrange Festival, Paris

"[S]et in a health-resort-cum-religious community 'in a beautiful place in the country'. . . it could be said that with its coloristic compositions and repetitive scenic plan, the film’s structure is more musical than novelistic. . . What is perhaps most intriguing about the film is its apt demonstration that, today, in order to present a future that is genuinely ‘other’ one must set one’s narrative not in the world ‘of tomorrow’, but in the recent past."

Read the full report at Electric Sheep Magazine.

I've Got a Secret and Avant-Garde Music

"It's September 16th, 1963 and John Cale is walking onto the stage of a television studio in New York City. "That was one repressed individual," recalls the older, less repressed John Cale over the phone from his studio in Los Angeles, nearly half a century later, "Very uptight." Back in 1963, Cale in a dark velour suit jacket and tie takes a seat next to the show's host, Garry Moore and whispers into his ear, "I performed in a concert that lasted eighteen hours." The point of the show was that the four panellists had to work out the guest's 'secret' from a series of yes and no questions.

"Does it have anything to do with endurance?" asks former Miss America, Bess Myerson."

The above is an extract from my recent interview with John Cale, for The Quietus. But three years later, on the 12th of December 1966, another episode of the same show featured Victor Borge, one time "clown prince of Denmark" withholding the secret, "I'm going to play a song by touching ten pretty girls". The electronic device utilised by Borge for this most extraordinary rendition of 'Dark Eyes' is called a Peopleodeon and was invented by none other than Bruce Haack, along with his friend Ted Pandel, both of whom make a brief appearance at the end of the episode.

Former pianist with The Swing Tones, Haack met Pandel at the Julliard school in the fifties. This episode from I've Got A Secret was broadcast somewhere between Haack's various electronic records for children, made in collaboration with dance teacher, Esther Nelson - Dance Sing & Listen and The Way Out Record for Children - and later (even) more psychedelic stuff like Electric Lucifer and Haackula.

Without any real training in electronics (his degree from the University of Alberta was in psychology), and showing disdain for such ncieties as circuit diagrams, Haack gamely hacked together his own electronic instruments out of guitar effects pedals, battery-powered radios and any other bits and bobs he could lay hands on. These oddments were then put to the service of instructional dance records for children.

The question is, what on earth was a man like this doing on I've Got a Secret, a mainstream American panel show, hosted by Steve Allen and created by comedy writers Allan Sherman and Howard Merrill as a sort of cheap knock-off sister show to What's My Line? How much of another world does the sixties seem when we discover that such a workaday network product, otherwise notable for its brief appearance in the 1959 Doris Day vehicle It Happened to Jane, would feature incursions from John Cale playing Erik Satie's Vexations and Bruce Haack's homemade electronic instruments? Can you imagine comparable guests being introduced in the midst of Ant & Dec's Push the Button?

Britain's Best Baritone: Roderick Williams on Castor and Pollux

"It's 1977, the year punk broke into the mainstream and Maria Callas died of a heart attack in her home in Paris, and Roderick Williams is taking the stage in North London for perhaps the first time. It’s the junior school play, the text is forgotten, but Williams has taken the unusual role of an "exotic fortune teller" garbed in black wig and skirts. "I had to perform a belly dance – with my parents in the front row of the audience." Little did he know at that time how this performance would prepare him for his latest role, as one of two eponymous brothers, in the ENO's new production of the mid-18th century tragédie en musique by Jean-Philippe Rameau, Castor and Pollux. . . "

Read more at What's on Stage.

Slavoj Zizek at Occupy Wall Street, 9th October 2011

"In April 2011, the Chinese government prohibited on TV and films and in novels all stories that contain alternate reality or time travel. This is a good sign for China. It means that people still dream about alternatives, so you have to prohibit this dream. Here we don’t think of prohibition. Because the ruling system has even suppressed our capacity to dream."

Bagrec - London

Lovely remix from Mr Richard Sanderson, from this album by Lamb & Tyger, which describes itself as "William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience set for Hammond Organ and voice then re-versioned by a commonwealth of audio-artists." Also features Jude Cowan, Cult of Wedge, The Big I Am, and the delightfully named Tinks and Fugal, amongst many others. The whole damn thing is available for free download via that link above, so, you know, you might as well.

KOSMOS

Slag that I am, I currently have three different articles doing the rounds, each exploring a different facet of the BFI's current season of Soviet SF. There's this at The Quietus, about Aelita, Bogdanov and the 'first wave' post-revolutionary science fiction of the 1920s; there's this in Glass Magazine about Yefremov, Lem and the thaw-era second wave; and finally this, for Sound and Music, about Eduard Artemiev's soundtracks for Solaris, Stalker and Mechte Navstrechu (clip above). Enjoy!

"Structured formally as a kind of duplication of sexual intercourse"

In amongst the mounds of stuff at the - actually quite disappointing, all things considered - Kubrick exhibition at the Cinématheque Francaise, a letter from a fan. Shortly after the release of Dr Strangelove, Kubrick received an admiring letter from a Cornell art historian called LeGrace G. Benson, otherwise notable, it would seem, largely for an essay entitled 'The Washington Scene' about the evolution of the arts in D.C., for a 1969 issue of Art International.

Benson's letter, dated March 20th, 1964 compared Kubrick's film favourably to the then still fairly new Pop Art movement, "In both paintings and movie there is the competent use of a developed artistic vocabulary, and knowledge and undisguised use of commercial techniques and processes, the deliberate manipulation of those cliched images near and dear to the hearts of our countrymen, the apparent use of the ostensible subject matter concealing the actual meaning. It is interesting to see that the paintings and the movie have both been received by some critics as "attacks" on various aspects of "Columbia, Happy Land." Some of us see not an attack but a deliberately detached and sensitive description."

Benson goes on to quote Wittgenstein's, "What is done cannot be said" which he claims the film illustrates, and goes on to compliment the film for "having been structured formally as a kind of duplication of sexual intercourse, which is entirely appropriate to the iconological content."

Kubrick, evidently flattered, replied on April 6th, thanking his correspondent for such an astute and well-thought out analysis, "Seriously, you are the first one who seems to have noticed the sexual framework from intromission to the last splash." And he promptly invites Benson out for a drink, during his forthcoming trip to New York.

It is not, apparently, known - or at least not made clear in the exhibition - whether messers Kubrick and Benson did in fact meet that spring in New York. But we do know why Kubrick was going. Not for that year's World's Fair, at which Raymond Scott's 'Futurama' and 'Space Mystery' will provide the soundtrack for a General Motors-sponsored vision of the future of urbanism. It was in New York that summer, just across town from the World's Fair, that Kubrick met up with Arthur C. Clarke for the first discussions towards what would eventually become 2001: A Space Odyssey, but at that time was still being called "How The Solar System Was Won".

". . . never exactly the same and never really different. . . " : Eliane Radigue's Naldjorlak

[image: from Displaced Sounds blog]

It is difficult to imagine how one could experience Eliane Radigue's Naldjorlak except as some sort of consensual hallucination. In its first movement in particular, for solo cello, you find yourself staring at the body of the instrument, transfixed: you can see exactly what the instrument is doing, exactly how the sound is being produced - and yet, you are bamboozled. Sounds seem to be drifting, floating around the room, moving through space, coming at you from behind. Tones that are familiarly acoustic are behaving in ways one would expect only from electronics - with glacial, infinite sustain and purity of tone; then, tones distinctly electronic behave in ways unmistakably organic - ever shifting, fluctuating, ululating. All just from a cello, and one seemingly just playing one note. Tuned, as cellist Charles Curtis claims, to the instrument's 'wolf tone' - "the essential frequency of the cellos' resonating cavity." This is not, as the Deleuzians would say, a becoming-animal, a becoming-machine - but something bodily is happening. An exobiology. First contact. Music for creatures who exist on different time spans from us. Like a swallow hypnotised by the song of a whale.

The composer who, on a trip to the States in the early 70s, bought an ARP 2500 and left the keyboard part behind, uninterested, deals in stretches, distortions of perspective; a delicate yet highly disciplined exploration of the possible timbres to be teased out of very limited material, developed in very close collaboration with her instrument(alist)s, and with great sensitivity, infinite nuance. Music which is, like the quote from Paul Verlaine in the concert programme goes, "never exactly the same and never really different. . . "

Beethoven's Ninth Symphony - and Zombies!

A scene in George Romero's (1985) Day of the Dead in which we see the zombie affectionately nicknamed 'Bub' grasp his own reflection in a mirrored surface and mime the act of shaving offers both a symbol of Bub's dawning subjectivity and a hint that this third in the sextet is the most Lacanian entry in Romero's career-long attempt to rewrite Sigmund Freud's essay on 'Infantile Sexuality' (from the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality) for zombies.

A later moment in his awakening sees Bub listening, on headphones, to a tape of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. He is clearly caught up short by the music, suddenly rapt, becoming visibly less hunched, less slavering - could we say more refined? Even more human?

Genre cinema, loosely defined, has had a curious relationship to the symphony that Wagner saw as the gateway to the future. The "glorious ninth" is an oft-repeated refrain in A Clockwork Orange (1971), Walter Carlos's day-glo rendition accompanying, and in some ways, in its different articulations, summing up, each stage of Alex's progress. In Dusan Makavayev's (1974) Sweet Movie, we see the Vienna Actionists delightedly singing the 'An Die Freude' as they engage in an orgy of coprophagia. It crops up also in the final scene of Tarkovsky's (1979) Stalker, masked by the noise of a running train, in which, according to Tobias Pontara, it functions simultaneously as the master signifier of rational scientific progress, and a satiric swipe at the very same.

The Ninth is used fairly rarely in cinema compared to the Fifth, or even the Sixth and Seventh - especially if you exclude documentaries and TV movies. And it may be because this quality is never quite absent - of a strident pomposity that can't quite help deflating itself. The Ninth has baggage which, like Alex after his treatment, inevitably makes us a little queasy. But does this self-parodic reflex mean the end of the era - and not just in music - inaugurated by it; or might it still be possible, like Bub, to hear the piece once more with fresh ears?

"Sounds like a woman. . . Or a monster!" : Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet

Midway through watching the Roger Corman produced space adventure, Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet (1965, dir. Curtis Harrington), one develops an increasingly odd sensation: the effects seem strangely dated for the year (even for a low budget film), the plot weirdly disconnected, like a series of events strung together with little sense of development - strands are built up, as though they are about to lead somewhere, and then just peter out. And why is the voice-dubbing so off? And is that Russian writing on the side of the spaceship?

Indeed, almost the only thing holding it all together is Ronald Stein's equally uncanny music. Stein was assistant musical director St. Louis Municipal Opera in the early fifties, and married the opera singer Harlene Hiken (who provided the singing voice of Audrey Dalton in a western of the same year, called The Bounty Killer). For several years, Stein served alongside Les Baxter as staff composer at American International Pictures, but though they share credits on numerous films, Baxter claims they never met. With its silken exotica and fleeting electronics, Stein's music for Prehistoric Planet could almost be mistaken for Baxter's at times.

It turns out, Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet was almost entirely composed of footage from an earlier soviet film, Planeta Bur ('Planet of Storms') from 1962, with the story recomposed and scenes re-arranged with the help of a couple of extra scenes starring Basil Rathbone (who would star alongside Dennis Hopper in Harrington's vampires in space flick, Queen of Blood, released the following year). Planeta Bur was directed by Pavel Klushantsev, who shot to fame in Russia when his (1958) Doroga K zvezdam ('Road to the Stars') happened to coincide with the launch of Sputnik.

It doesn't end there though, for the same footage was used one further time, in 1968's debut feature from Peter Bogdanovich (under the alias Derek Thomas), Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women, with Rathbone now replaced with Howard Hughes's former squeeze, Mamie van Doren. Prehistoric Planet now reveals itself as the incoherent, "primordially repressed" middle part of a three-stage fantasy, as in Freud's 'A Child is Being Beaten' - caught between the hard SF of the original Soviet film, and the explicit sexual fantasy of the Bogdanovich version.

In this context, we can now begin to make sense of one of the most troubling aspects of Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet: the suggestive, disembodied voice the astronauts keep hearing as they explore Venus, a tremulous electronic portamento which, as one of the men remarks, "Sounds like a woman. . . or a monster!" Throughout the story, this voice teases the astronauts and audience alike, one constantly expects it to lead somewhere - but it never does. We never really discover its source as the story just sort of peters out. Absent entirely from the original Russian film, and only finally embodied in the third version - here it remains a perfect example of one of Melanie Klein's disembodied partial objects, haunting the spectral soundtrack of the film, and somehow all the more alluring for it. Like a leitmotif from Tristan and Isolde, it constantly resists resolution - to the point of a sado-masochistic impulse that cannot fully annunciate itself, precisely as in the repressed middle term, "Father is beating me."