"There wasn't always a war with the Centauri, but in my lifetime it's all I've ever known. By the year 2050, six years after the first attack, we'd lost so many things. We'd lost the sky to electromagnetic domes, to shield the Earth from frequent air raids increasing in intensity. We'd lost the uncovered cities that the government forgot. We'd lost democracy to global leadership. We didn't expect peace anymore with the Centauri, because we came to see that peace wasn't their goal. Their goal was Earth. The ultimate land war, with no boundaries."
Gary Fleder's (2001) Philip K. Dick adaptation, Impostor, trots out merrily and seemingly without too much self-awareness all the old dystopian science fiction cliches: the violent, uncompromising homeland security agents with their baroque torture devices; the CGI-generated post-Metropolis, post-Blade Runner hypermodern city-scape; the scarred 'Zone' inhabited only by a brutalised underclass (including amongst their number, of course, one street-tough-but-still-scared cute little girl); on the bonus 'behind the scenes' documentary on the DVD the film-makers trot out the names of Kafka, Orwell, and so on, as though reciting an ecclesiastical litany; we even have the omnipresent propaganda posters with their Churchillian slogans - "Victory at Any Cost", "The Project is Your Future". But then, amongst the phrases familiar from 1984 and its imitators, we have one propaganda slogan familiar from another source, Thatcher's old mantra, increasingly also the motto of the Conservative-Liberal coalition: "There Is No Alternative."
Despite the association of the phrase with a PM deposed two decades ago, it is probably this one slogan, more than the smouldering iMacs and the ubiquitous iPads and the whizz-bang police technology, that makes this film (whose special effects, jerky camera moves and all over orange-and-teal-ness have otherwise aged very badly) feel like it still just might have something to say.
So, Spencer Olham and his wife (Gary Sinise and Madeleine Stowe) can still take a trip to the woode for a picnic and the national parks still look green and verdant just like they always did - until, that is, you look up and notice the vast electromagnetic dome which shields the sky from attack. And Olham can get in the shower and use his voice-activated music software system to play some tunes while he washes, but he can quickly get rid of that frenetic drum and bass which comes on first and replace it with John Lee Hooker with a simple voice command.
Slavoj Zizek is fond of saying that at the end of the 1980s many of the communist leaders in Easter Europe resembled those Warner Brothers cartoon characters who had run off the edge of the cliff but not yet looked down. Today perhaps we are in the reverse position. It is not the past, down there, which has unexpectedly caught up with us, but maybe the future is here, already, up there in the sky, but we consistently refuse to look up and see it. And perhaps iTunes, iPods and all the other tools that are supposedly making music, in Gerd Leonhard's words, "like water," are not so much "the future of music" but in fact the very things that are blinding us to a future already present, and maintaining the safe cushion of the old familiar classics around our ears.
Ingvar Cronhammar has implied that his life's work has been an attempt to get over the trauma of existential angst that struck him upon sneaking into a screening of Bergman's The Silence as an adolescent. There is a kind of opaque muteness to all his work, none more so, perhaps, than Elia, the enormous creation (60 metres in diameter, 32 metres high, weighing in at 380 tons) that dominates the far end of Birk Centerpark, just outside Herning, Denmark.
Cronhammar's work seems to have been becoming more and more inhuman, more and more inorganic ever since his earliest work from the late sixties to the early eighties. Most of the early stuff tended to involve the bodies of animals, whether living - as in the live chickens with flashing lights on their backs in Concert for Member of the Home Guard (1969) - or dead - as in the taxidermied pigs heads, mounted and tagged with the logos of prominent local institutions, of Those Pigs (1976), or the stuffed swan perched at the top of Time is On Our Side (1983).
The elliptically titled Time is On Our Side was followed by the even more mysterious The Gate (1988), the work which Cronhammar admits opened the door to artistic life for him, as well as pointing the way towards the monumentalism of his more recent work. The Gate resembled a great industrial machine, like something wrenched from the bowels of a ship. Only it would seem that the only conceivable purpose of this engine is the raising and lowering of a whale skull in a tank of water.
Since The Gate, Cronhammar's art has increasingly developed a kind of forbidding sheen, as though refusing to tell tales on its own manufacture. And, whether the scale has been domestic - Torben Weirup, in his book on Cronhammar, speaks of "memories of furniture... or furniture for other beings" - or landscape, they have never lacked a certain sublime, impenetrable mightiness, and metaphysical wonder. In fact, there may be less distance between his animal bodies and industrial edifices than you might at first think. He grew up in Kristianstad, Sweden - just next to a slaughterhouse.
I came across Elia (2001), earlier this month, when I was in Herning for the opening of the Socle du Monde Biennale at Herning Kunstmuseum. The day after the private view, we were given a brief tour of the Birk Centerpark area, the final stop of which was here. Immediately upon seeing it I was dumbstruck, confounded. It is common to compare Elia to the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey, but to me it more resembles another Arthur C. Clarke creation from just a few years later.
In Rendezvous with Rama (1972), what is first mistaken for an asteroid turns out to be an enormous alien space craft, 20 kilometres in diameter and 54 kilometres long, that, whether by accident or design, has drifted into our solar system. When the crew of a the space ship Endeavour, go in to investigate the alien vessel, they discover it to be completely uninhabited, empty but for a few dormant machines, the size of cities.
Like Rama, Elia is built on a scale not quite human, but not so far off. You can climb the staircases that lead to its summit - but it's slightly uncomfortable, each step being just a bit too big. Similarly, Elia gives the distinct impression of being both brand spanking new (“everything looked absolutely new; there was no sign of wear and tear”), and a million years old. But what is perhaps most disturbing to the crew of the Endeavour upon exploring the insides of Rama is its silence, and much the same could be said of Elia.
“During the first 'nights' on Rama, it had not been easy to sleep. The darkness and the mysteries it concealed were oppressive, but even more unsettling was the silence. Absence of noise is not a natural condition; all human senses require some input.”
But like Rama, Elia is constantly threatening to 'wake up'. The tops of its towers contain red lights and lightning conductors, and the steel and concrete base has been designed for maximum resonance. Engineers have estimated that a clap of thunder would be returned and amplified for about forty seconds. Also, twice in every nineteen day period, providing weather conditions are favourable, the dome - which is connected to a natural gas pipeline - will shoot a nine metre high flame into the sky for half a minute.
“One might speculate endlessly, but the nature and purpose of the Ramans was still utterly unknown.”
On the day of its unveiling, on the 28th of September, 2001, a television journalist asked the artist what the monument was for. 'Nothing,' replied Cronhammer. Six months on site, 'scanning it in' to develop the idea, followed by twelve years to build the thing at a cost of twenty-three million Danish Kroner. The journalist repeated the question, what is it for? It is a place, Kronhammer replied testily, where people go to be quiet, to shut up!
Since 2002's gruesome rape-and-revenge tragedy, Irreversible, the films of Gaspar Noé have often been grouped together with what James Quandt baptised the 'New French Extremity'. This term, introduced in the February 2004 issue of Artforum magazine, uneasily aligned (then) recent works by directors as diverse as Claire Denis, Catherine Breillat, Philippe Grandrieux, Alexandre Aja and Leos Carax under a rubric “determined to break every taboo.” With the release earlier this year of Noé's latest film, Enter the Void, however, it may make more sense to examine this work by the Argentine -born director in terms of Fredric Jameson's conception of 'magic realist cinema'.
Jameson begins his theory of magic realism with Alejo Carpentier's “prologo” to El Reino de este Mundo, in which he relates the combinatorial mischief of surrealists to that of magicians. Discussing André Masson's drawings in Martinique, he describes how the marvellous truth of the subject devours the artist - a truth that comes into being only through an unexpected alteration of reality, related to miracles. “The marvellous,” he writes, “implies a faith.” The real maravilloso is an aspect of everyday life, but one still imbued with the “invocatory power” of folklore. Jameson describes Carpentier's theory in terms of “a certain poetic transfiguration of the object world itself – not so much a fantastic narrative, then, as a metamorphosis in perception and in things perceived.” (177) Later, and particularly since the work of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, as Jameson relates, magic realism has become associated with a certain movement in Latin American literature concerned with a kind of anthropology of the fantastic.
Drawing on Lacan, and Freud's conceptualisation of the “uncanny,” Jameson seeks to transfer this notion of magic realism from the realm of painting and literature to that of film, seeking in doing so an alternative to the late capitalist logic of postmodernism. The essay, 'On Magic Realism in Film', teases out its programme through an analysis of three films from Poland, Venezuela, and Columbia. With each of these films, it is through their specific relation to a certain historical referent, the way in which these films engage with history as such, that they find themselves opposed to cinematic postmodernism. Such that, in spite of the undeniable visual pleasure of the films in question, it is far from the case, as in postmodern 'nostalgia' films (such as The Godfather, The Conformist, &c.), that the viewer's engagement with history is confined to the consumption of a “surface sheen of period fashion reality” in the manner of some “visual commodity” (179).
To consider Enter the Void as a magic realist text now appears doubly strange: a French film set in contemporary Japan, it seems pretty far from either a work of Latin American literary anthropology, or of cinematic historiography. Its concern is neither with any historical referent, nor, for that matter, with magic (at least, in the strict sense). And yet, in spite of these apparently insuperable differences, there appear certain aspects of both Jameson's conceptualisation, and those of older writers, that seem to describe precisely the contours of such a film. In a French context, the appellation may not seem to strange, of course; when I interviewed Gaspar Noé earlier this year for The Quietus, he immediately related the notion of magic realism to that older term, poetic realism, usually applied to French cinema from the 1930s, such as the films of Jean Vigo, Marcel Carné and Jean Renoir (but for Noé, just as much a reference to Fellini). He described his film as “kind of a fairy tale” and yet at the same time insisted that it was “more realistic” than its brutal predecessor, Irreversible.
Of course, Noé himself can be understood in more than just a French context. He was born in Buenos Aires, the son of Argentine artist and writer, Luis Felipe Noé. Coming to prominence in the early 1960s, Noé Sr. can be seen as Marquez's contemporary in South America, and the aesthetics of the Otra Figuracion group, of which he was a key member, share with the latter a sense of reality transformed and surrealistically distorted. In the films Jameson considers, he describes a particular approach to the use of colour in terms of “a unique supplement, and the source of a peculiar source of pleasure, or fascination” (178) and the same could clearly be said of the bright, vivid hues of Luis Felipe Noé's paintings. It is in terms of colour that Noé Jr draws a link between his own work and that of his father, suggesting that the colourfulness of his latest film may be an attempt “to top [his father's] fluorescent colours.” A first-person perspective film about hallucinogenic drugs, seen through the eyes of its protagonist, Oscar, and set in the neon city of Tokyo, Enter the Void is characterised by a lysergic visual palette, and some of the more fantastic 'trip' sequences are comparable to the experimental films of Jordan Belson.
For what Jameson calls 'magic realist' cinema, it is not just a question of bright colours, of course. He speaks of an “awakening of fresh sight” (195) and here one thinks almost inescapably of the drug experience described in Noé's film, and of Aldous Huxley's reference to Blake's “doors of perception.” In a now famous anecdote, Noé has claimed the original idea for Enter the Void came to him whilst watching Robert Montgomery's (1947) first-person perspective Chandler adaptation, The Lady in the Lake, after consuming magic mushrooms. We hear of the disappointment of Noé's teenage self that the hallucinogenic drug experience had never been accurately rendered on film before. Enter the Void thus seeks in some way to redress this perceived imbalance. That a heightened, transfigured perception of colour forms a major part of this psychedelic experience - the “magic mirror” referred to by the character, Alex - should be self-evident, not least from the numerous aforementioned trip sequences in which colour quite literally detaches itself from being the property of some object to become a kind of free-floating – and “mesmerising” as Jameson (ibid.) puts it - quality in itself.
“I like showing the flesh of people,” Gaspar Noé told me. “Even the genitals or whatever. And when you shoot a car crash, of course you have to show that humans are made of flesh and that's how they come to this world and that's how they leave the world too.” Not just through colour then, but just as much in its relation to the body, Enter the Void enters itself within the orbit of Jameson's theory of magic realist cinema. Jameson speaks of a “reduction to the body” mobilising the “resources and potentialities of pornography and violence” (203) not just as constituent of this magic realism but part of a greater “de-narrativisation” of film (a term inspired by Stanley Cavell's “de-theatricalisation”). In Enter the Void, this focus on the body, and the body in its fleshiness, is taken to almost absurd heights, in for instance the long 'Love Hotel' sequence, denounced by so many critics as boring and pointless. It's very excess becomes its own rationale, its superfluity abstracting the flow of the narrative into something else – less like the telling of a story, more like the drug experience itself: lingering unnecessarily, gazing in rapture.
It is here, through the neutralisation of narrative into what Jameson calls “a seeing or a looking in the filmic present” (205) that we enter, finally, the film's relation to history. For though, Enter the Void is not set in any distinct temporal past – rather, in fact, following William Gibson's provocative remark in which “the future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed,” we might call modern Tokyo a kind of spatial future – it nonetheless offers a kind of history of the individual subject, as seen through particular moments of bodily trauma (for example, the death of his parents in a car crash). And that history, experienced as it is fragmentarily, drifting through visions and memories in a psychedelic haze, is precisely Jameson's “history with holes, perforated history, which includes gaps not immediately visible to us, so close is our gaze to its objects of perception.” (179) Going further – think here of the cinematic fillip of using first-person perspective throughout: “a kind of bas-relief history in which only bodily manifestations are retained, such that we are ourselves inserted into it without even minimal distance.” (205)
It is here, through this manifestation of a scattered temporal history in the midst of a spatial future, that Enter the Void employs these tropes of magic realism in the service of a critique of a certain kind of ideology. For if the idea of magic realism implies a disjunction or overlap, between different historical temporalities, “precapitalist and nascent capitalist or technological” (190) this is precisely the dream of Tokyo as dreamt by Western tourists, which is what the central characters of the film, despite their somewhat dubious resident status, most clearly are. Towers of neon - but just around the corner, traditional wooden machiya; serene, ancient temples AND MacDonalds AND Starbucks AND nightclubs playing up to date techno music. Isn't this precisely the tourist fantasy of Japan? And right in the middle of this, the dubious presence of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, proffered approvingly by the stoned 'hippy' Alex, totem of the gaze of the Western “traveller” upon Eastern religious culture since, at least, the 1960s.
If the story seems at first to follow the spiritual passage of Oscar after his death at the hands of the Japanese police, leading up to his eventual reincarnation (and therefore confirming the narrative of the Tibetan Book of the Dead), this initial interpretation needs to be interrogated, if not rejected outright, on a second glance. In fact, everything in the mise-en-scène points towards, on the contrary, an extended hallucinatory fantasy from which Oscar may well wake up. “I'm an atheist,” insists Noé “So even if the movie portrays the dream of a guy who dreams that his soul can come out of his body, in reality you never know what happened. He gets shot. And at the end of the movie you don't know if he's dead, or if he's gonna wake up in a hospital, or if he's going to wake up in prison.” Enter the Void, then, uses these tropes of the magic realist cinema, to expose and deconstruct the Western imagination of Japan, and of Tokyo in particular.
The film thus seeks less to replicate the actual experience of taking drugs but rather to “reconquer that terrain by other, internally constructed means” (206). Hypnotic visuals, psychedelic music (Coil, Denis Smalley, Delia Derbyshire, Zbigiev Karkovsky, Toshiya Tsunoda, Alvin Lucier), are all marshalled to the service of generating a fantasy that can be perceived directly as such. The film alienates its audience even as it draws them deeper inside itself, through a kind of attraction/repulsion that is at the heart of Freud's theory of desire, and the Lacanian concept of the objet petit a. The peculiar orientalist fascination of Japan for the Western traveller is structurally equivalent to this Freudian 'Thing', offering itself as a “magic mirror” to the Western gaze, just like the DMT that Oscar takes at the start of the film. As Gaspar Noé says of film-making itself, “At the end, you are playing with a spectator who wants to play with you.” The very pellicular of the movie, its skin/surface, acts as a libidinal intensification of this unspoken content, and of the desiring gaze of the viewer – offering it back as disavowed fetishism, or “magic mirror.”
(all page references in brackets are to: Jameson, F. 'On Magic Realism in Film' in Signatures of the Visible, New York and London: Routledge Classics, 2007)
If dance is the pre-eminent art of the body, the body unalloyed in its beauty, and unadorned by technology; in the choreography of Merce Cunningham, we find the body transfigured and transcended, to the point where, as in the philosophy of Donna Haraway, the line between the human and its android doppelganger becomes blurry to the point of indistinguishability. Not just Olympia, the mechanical doll from Offenbach's The Tales of Hoffman (as filmed, perhaps, by Powell and Pressburger), but a whole stage full of dancing automatons have been released from their box. But never have these clockwork figures appeared so tender, so pliable. Choreographed by Danceforms software to programme bodies imaginable only through wetware, we find the human at its most subjective in its transcendence, its communion with objects.
Elements of classical ballet, the modern dance of Cunningham's mentor Martha Graham, and -this being a "circus" on Finnegan's Wake - Irish dancing of the Riverdance variety, converge in occult combinations; finding impossible correspondences and convergences, spinning gold from base metal. From this seeming unrelatedness, elements adrift on an even plain, the eye picks out details and attractions at its own pace. Accepting the inevitable partiality of its position in space (as the ear must equally, in listening to Cage's accompanying music), one regards the whole more as one views a vast canvas, and with scant reference to the standard narrative expectations of classical ballet.
Structure emerges as if by accident, with the beauty of DNA, ant farms, or fractals. From moments of the strictest discipline spills the most casual intimacy; machinic rigour thus become inseparable from the simplest, most human of gestures. Even the stools, their cushions in the same colours as the dancers' clothes, are arranged, as if to emphasise the very objectness of the human figures, in the same holds and wild combinations as the coryphées themselves. The world of Roaratorio - and a whole world it most certainly is - is one in which tension and release, the animate and inanimate, form four points of a highly unstable Greimasian semiotic square which are constantly changing places with each other. This is why the dance does not 'mean' anything. It is not a work whose 'deeper' hidden truth can be divined or interpreted. Everything is on the surface, teeming with life. This is the sense in which, with Cage and Cunningham, artworks move from the romantic position of imitating natural phenomenon to operating themselves according to nature's own way of working. Without purpose, unpredictable, yet strangely fascinating.
Is there any more disgusting spectacle from last week's news than the sight of former Bullingdon vandals queuing up to denounce the looting of their London club house?
"Thuggish" cried Boris Johnson. "Unacceptable... violence and destruction" bellowed David Cameron. Both of whom spent their student days vandalising restaurants and scarpering before the arrival of the police.
While Zizek speaks of a "speculative identity" between those perpetrators of the "objective violence" - structural damage enacted upon on the people and state infrastructure through budget cuts to welfare and education - and the "subjective violence" of physical destruction directly enacted against persons and property; here there is no need for speculation. They really are the very same people. The same people who would hire out restaurants in order to smash them up, throwing money at the owners as they leave; the same people who now ransack higher education and benefits provisions in order to line the pockets of their friends in high finance.
What is so "unacceptable" to Cameron is clearly not the so-called "violence" and property damage - how can it be when he has as good as admitted to the thuggish behaviour of his own student days, all the while dismissing it lightly as mere drunken japery? No, what they object to is that this vandalism is not a mere jape, a prelude to flaunting one's wealth, all the while cravenly keeping one eye on any possible damage done to one's own future career; but direct action targeted towards a cause that transcends the people who fight for it, a cause for which those people are willing to sacrifice their own interests to defend.
There is perhaps only one more dismal voice in the week's news. The shrill voice of National Union of Students President Aaron Porter, leaping to denounce his own members before even the Bullingdon Boys had a chance to stick their oar in. Porter's denunciation shows unequivocally the same pusillanimity as Cameron and Johnson's hurried escape from the scene of the crime, the same craven eye towards a future career in politics (the list of former NUS presidents to have ended up in cabinet, screwing over the very constituent they once represented, is an extensive disgrace).
Those who, like Porter, praise the "good protestors" who obediently marched along the agreed route, sitting down when they were told to and standing back up again when they told to do that, but leap to condemn those "bad protestors" for whom such empty play-acting is not enough, want, in Robespierre's phrase, "revolution without the revolution."
In 2003, over a million marched obediently against the Iraq War and changed nothing. In France, this year, several times that figure marched and many also went on strike, achieving just as little. When the political parties show their contempt for the standard democratic procedure of making manifesto pledges, winning votes based on those pledges, and then sticking to those pledges when those votes bring them to power - it is time the public too accepted that normal democratic procedure has been suspended. Now, only direct action - and, yes, potentially violent struggle - has any chance of bringing about change.
There are other voices making themselves heard, less shrill, less contemptible, but equally curious. Those who say, 'What a pity! That the good intentions of 50,000 peaceful protestors were put to shame by the violent actions of a few!' And, 'Why must the media always focus on this hardcore minority instead of the overwhelming majority who did what they were told peacefully and dutifully?' - which latter is rather like saying, there are a million honest peace-loving citizens of Gotham City who feel no need to wear a mask or garish make-up - why must those mean old comics focus on the few who choose to spoil it for everyone else?
What emerges from these complaints, outwardly sympathetic to the aims of the protest, is the image of a subject supposed to vandalise. This subject is, inevitably, not a student, some sort of interloper, probably a member of the increasingly spectral 'black mask faction' of anarchists (the problem with the notion of anarchists protesting against the dismantling of the state clearly somewhat under-thought here). No matter that every report from anyone actually within spitting distance of millbank tower has found that at least the vast majority of the occupiers were, indeed, just 'ordinary students', swept up in the fervour of the moment. No matter that there is no evidence for the existence of this much phantasised 'black mask' faction (beyond the rather more prosaic reality of a few people spontaneously covering their faces in order to avoid identification by police photographers and cctv cameras). There is evidently a felt need for those protestors who occupied the building to be othered, for the speaking subject to distance him or herself from this supposedly dangerous and violent minority.
What appears to be lacking amidst all the hysteria, is any real question of why last week's protest erupted into this kind of conflagration. As with the riots in the Parisian banlieues in 2005, the answer seems to be a simple demand for visibility and recognition on the part of a constituent that has been shown by successive governments that its needs are simply not important to them. Even within the students own union, street protest has been largely suppressed for over twelve years now, twelve years in which first tuition fees, then top-up fees were introduced despite promises to the contrary, and student debt has escalated beyond all recognition. Both Labour and the Liberal Democrats have now broken their promises to students - and in what appears to be a kind of retrospective incitement after the fact, it emerged only days after the protests that, far from Nick Clegg's official line stating that he simply didn't realise how bad the economic situation was before the election, the Lib Dems had plans in place to abandon their promises on fees even before the election took place.
It should now be clear that if last week's protests achieved anything, then they achieved precisely this longed for visibility. At least one Lib Dem MP (in a stroke of typical Liberal opportunism) has now pledged to vote against education cuts, claiming inspiration from the "nostalgic" sight of student protestors. Trade union leaders have extended a welcoming hand to the students to form a coalition against cuts, with Nigel Stanley of the TUC claiming the protests have "given heart" to angry unionists. Manchester University has since been occupied in protest against the cuts. And the protest has been the focus of discussion across the media. To claim this would have been achieved without the occupation of millbank tower involves an extraordinary disavowal, a kind of willful blindness to the logic of spectacle.
There are those who will say that violence of any sort of unacceptable, those who will say that the Conservative Party Headquarters is the "wrong target". But a distinction must be drawn between violence against people and violence against property. The building's staff had long ben evacuated. These were acts of violence perpetrated against the building itself, and what it stood for. Like the Suffragettes, these protestors know how strong an argument is a broken pane of glass. As a symbolic target, what could be better than the new club house of the former Bullingdon boys and their running dogs? The only failure of the protest is that they did not stay longer, preventing in perpetuity the return of the usual occupants. And that they did not destroy more - computers, hard disks, filing systems, the very walls themselves. But this, of course, is only the beginning.
The latest work from HK Gruber, the Austrian composer from whom the word "enthusiastic" is never far away, received its French premiere under the composer's baton at the Cité de la Musique, in Paris last night.
Wedged awkwardly between Kurt Weill's majestic Berliner Requiem, and Vom Tod im Wald (itself, formerly part of The Berliner Requiem), like a bicycle caught between two steam locomotives; the trumpet concerto, entitled 'Busking', got off to a rather rickety start. It's first section careening about a jaunty little melody, trying to squeeze as many blunt changes of tone colour as possible into as short a time as possible by the simple expedient of multiple mute swapping. But then, after this hectic and even rather daft beginning, which seemed at times like little more than a raspberry blown truculently in the face; a moment of repose.
It came so suddenly that it was more of a shock than any loud blast could have been. Like a sudden gust of cool air, a moment of near silence. A few plaintive notes plucked from a banjo over a deep low string drone, finally joined by very high harmonics from the first violin. After a while, the trumpet re-enters but without its former bluster, now bruised and crepuscular. The effect is cinema - recalling Angelo Badalamenti's music for Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, or Ennio Morricone's soundtrack for Marco Ferreri's Harem.
Gruber is probably the most prominent member of what became known, in the 1960s, as the Third Viennese School, a kind of playful, postmodern riposte to the rigour of Schoenberg and his students. Dubbed 'clowns' by the people he in turn derides as the "dictators of Darmstadt," Gruber has never been afraid to live up to the insult, whether scoring for children's toys and swannee whistle, quoting Johannes Strauss, or appending multiple exclamation marks (how very modern) to the title of his most famous music theatre work, Frankenstein!!!
'Busking' delivers all the seductive pleasures of tonal music without its queasy predictability, and still finds time to be just as caustic as Gruber's early twentieth century countrymen. More so, in a way, as those fleeting moments of strychnine are surrounded by sweet spots. But nothing in the piece is quite as beautiful as that deep breath it takes after the opening section. And though Gruber may have inherited Weill's taste for the cabaret and the carnival-esque, he ultimately lacks his hero's bite and his commitment. So the potency of cheap music is here used less to incite than to amuse.
We may be grateful that an intrepid team of Oxford musicologists have established once and for all that the above depicted sonata for flute - as played by the derrière - is, indeed, impossible. In fact, of all the instruments depicted in Heironymus Bosch's legendary tryptich, The Garden of Earthly Delights, only the flute and the drum were in any way playable (and neither of them, in quite the way they were intended). Of the painting's hurdy gurdy, Andy Lamb, manager of the Bate Collection, the museum behind the project, attests in The Guardian, "The design seems to be fundamentally flawed. When you turn the handle, you get a half-hearted buzzing noise, but you can't get any melodies out of it. It would be difficult to hold because its strings are in the wrong position – and there is even a superfluous string."
But if the infernal music of the painting's right hand side - the music of hell, of dystopia - is impossible; the imagined utopian music of the right hand side is unrepresentable. Bosch's contemporary, Thomas More, who claimed to have been told about Utopia by a man from Antwerp, where Bosch lived and worked for many years, offers the following in supplement to The Garden's silent left hand:
"Yet in one thing they very much exceed us: both vocal and instrumental, is adapted to imitate and express the passions, and is so happily suited to every occasion, that, whether the subject of the hymn be cheerful, or formed to soothe or trouble the mind, or to express grief or remorse, the music takes the impression of whatever is represented, affects and kindles the passions, and works the sentiments deep into the hearts of the hearers."
When we stumbled across it, quite by accident, it could hardly have looked more different than than the merrily populated exhibition concourse captured in the above postcard. The whole area, on the south-east edge of Stromovka Park, seemed haunted in a way that completely escaped our own photos as much as the official portraits from over a century ago. Everything suffused with the greyness of the sky, everything slightly overgrown. The fact that, dotted amongst the trees and the domes, and the weird futurist pods, were still-functioning amusements, dodgems and shooting galleries, their lonely operators hopelessly desperate for the scattered trade of the lost, made it all the more eerie, evoking Herk Harvey's (1962) uncanny chiller, Carnival of Souls. What is perhaps most extraordinary is that, unlike its architectural cousin the Crystal Palace, and so many of the other great iron and glass exhibition halls of the nineteenth century (see this great post by Douglas Murphy), the palace of industry, leftover from the 1891 Prague Jubilee Exhibition, still stands, weather-beaten, decaying somewhat, but erect and in one piece.
The ghosts of Expos past are scattered all over Prague. From 1891, stands the Hanavský Pavillion in Letna Park. A stones throw from Vratislav Novak's great metronome, a monument to the passing of time, that replaced a fifty metre high marble of statue of Stalin that once towered over the city. The Petrin Tower, also built in 1891, a younger sister to Eiffel's tower which it mimics, since an expedition of Czechs were inspired by a visit to the Exposition Universelle in 1889.
Boycotted at the time by Prague's then-significant German population, the 1891 Expo was a proud declaration of nationhood on the part of a state-to-come, haunted by its own consumption within the Austro-Hungarian Empire and a messianic desire for independence. As such, the event should be seen in the context of two other almost-simultaneous expressions of Czech nationhood: the building of the National Theatre, funded by collections from the mass of the people who apparently wanted a decent venue in which to watch the operas of Smetana; and the formation of the Mánes Union of Fine Arts, a secessionist avant-garde art group, that would later include Josef Čapek, who coined the word 'Robot'.
In the enormous, functionalist Trade Fair Palace, home to the national modern and contemporary art collection, there is a room dedicated to the galvanising effect on art and design of Czechoslovakian success at the Brussels Expo in '58. The restaurant which once adjoined the Czech Pavilion at Brussels has been preserved, also in Letna Park, albeit sold off as office space to an advertising agency, like so many other ghosts from the great exhibitions.
"I only have a favourite colour when it's next to another colour that I like - I'm contrapuntal."
"You have in the past been called a 'visionary' composer," I began, not without a certain pluck, "So how do you imagine the musicof the future?"
Laughter, both from the stage and from the audience.
"You're trying to put me on the spot!" chuckles Riley. "All I can say, is that I hope that there is a future."
Terry Riley was in London earlier this week rounding of his 75th birthday tour of Europe, in celebration of Pandit Pran Nath's Californian legacy. The legendary composer and improviser, who, with his plaited rat's tail emerging from a fluffy white beard, resembles a cross between an off-duty Santa Claus and a Native American shaman, dropped into Cafe Oto's monthly Wire Salon to discuss his life and work - anything, that is, bar 'In C'.
If Riley was uncomfortable mulling over the piece for which he is most renowned (Tony Herrington, Riley's interviewer, claimed he had been informed in advance that "the last thing [Riley] wanted to talk about was 'In C'."), he was much happier discussing his history of collaborations. "I'm very relational," he claims. Indeed, LaMonte Young, claims Riley, called him, "the best harmonic musician - because he can't get along with anybody else!"
He recalls his first meeting with Young, back at Berkeley College in the late fifties, as "like, woah! Somebody left their spaceship behind." The two formed an "immediate bond," with Riley playing the "straight guy." At Berkeley, the pair would sit at a piano play "very primitive blues for hours on end." It was at this time that they developed between them the foundations for what would become known around the world as 'minimalist' music.
Though they would work together off and on into the seventies, Riley claims it wasn't long before they each started to develop their "own idea of what we wanted to do with stasis." For Riley, it was the experience of working with tape loops in France, while preparing the music for Ken Dewey's play, The Gift, that made him "aware of the value of stasis," the sense of motion even an (almost) unchanging loop.
"What fascinated me with tape was the degeneration of the sound... The grainy noise quality."
Herrington plays a sample of Riley's 'Bird of Paradise' over Oto's PA system ...
Created in 1965, 'Bird of Paradise' transforms a sample from 'Shotgun', Junior Walker and the All Stars' number one hit from the same year, into a pulsing, pummeling sonic weapon worthy of the Daleks, and equally terrifying.
At the end of the sixties (a time Riley refers to as "a kind of renaissance"), after 'In C' and 'A Rainbow in Curved Air' had rendered the boundary between classical composer and rock musician distinctly blurry, Riley felt he had "completed a cycle" and was looking for his next mode of music-making. Curiously, before meeting Pandit Pran Nath, he already had in his mind this image of a figure, both a mystic and a great singer, "living in a cave somewhere" in India. It wasn't long before Pran Nath appeared in his life, fitting just perfectly the preconcieved idea he had already formed.
Riley was immediately drawn to the power of the man's voice, "I'd never experienced such a powerful sound coming out of someone's body - not only powerful in volume, but also in effect." And soon set off to India to study under the Master, and become his apprentice. His first trip to New Delhi lasted six months, during which time, spent singing and training his body, he felt "like being psychoanalysed twenty-four hours a day."
Riley is keen to emphasise Pran Nath's eclecticism and openness, the way he always "encouraged you to do your own thing but use this tradition [of Indian classical music] for your musical growth." When LaMonte Young played a record of John Coltrane to Pran Nath, he replied, "This is like me." And Riley compares listening to Coltrane to "going to church." Riley quotes Pran Nath,"'What you worship that's you will become' - and he worshipped music." Pran Nath's intention was to literally become pure vibration.
In the middle of his first sojourn in India, Riley still contracted to CBS Masterworks, received a telegram instructing him to report to their studios forthwith. "I was ten or twelve years late with that record." He claims the principle effect of his studies in Indian music was to make his music more melodic. Throughout the seventies, Riley toured extensively, trying, as he says, "to develop through the keyboard a singing style."
The loud volumes of some of his concerts, along with the nature of some of his collaborations, only furthering to enhance this idea of Riley as a rock star composer. "The appeal of the loud frequencies used by rock groups," he says, "is that it approximates the sound of just intonation." But at the end of the decade, he found himself looking for ways to translate this language into something more "intimate."
It was at this time that Riley bought himself a piano and started playing piano again for the first time in as much as two decades, leading him to explore the similarities between piano strings and the strings of a tambour. The end of the seventies also marked the beginning of a series of collaborations with David Harrington's Kronos Quartet. Harrington apparently told Riley that he could already hear strings in his works for keyboard, so the first couple of string quartets he wrote for them were fairly straight transpositions of prior works.
Though Riley claims it took him a while to get used to putting notes on paper again "and making them feel alive," it wasn't long before his youthful obsession with Bartok's string quartets came back to him, and the collaboration began to flow more freely.
Despite his reluctance in the face of my (only slightly facetious) question about the future, Riley did respond to a member of the audience who asked if had an MP3 player by admitting to using iTunes ("Is that an MP3 player?" he asked nervously) on his laptop. "I don't think I'd be writing any orchestral music today if it wasn't for computers," he claims, comparing the use of notation software to sculpture, and the magnetic tape he used half a century ago.
One of the last questions from the floor asks about our changing sense of time, both between generations, and as one gets older, eliciting a noise form the crowd that implied shock at the suggestion that the septuagenarian before us could possibly associated with anything like age. "When you exist in the world of sound and music, I think that's a kind of equalizer for what you're talking about," he replies, "as the passage of time becomes irrelevant."
There's a curious mix of the avuncular and the innocent, even childlike in Riley, in everything from his distinctly Californian, soft-spoken voice to his wide-eyed enthusiasm and gentle requests, every time a piece of his music was played, to turn down the volume just a little bit. It's as though five decades in the "world of sound" had truly allowed him to "escape time bondage." Let's hope, for good.
