"The Society of the Spectrum" by Guillaume Ollendorff. Translated into English by Tim Hodgkinson

Guillaume Ollendorff

THE SOCIETY OF THE SPECTRUM

Date of publication: 12/12/2011

The sixth edition of Spectrum XXI Festival, organized by the Romanian composer-couple Ana-Maria Avram and Iancu Dumitrescu, was held from 10th to 30th November 2011 in London, Paris, Berlin and Bucharest. This article concerns the Berlin performances.

The Spectrum XXI festival gravitates around a 'Spectral Music' nucleus most dynamically represented by the Romanian composers Iancu Dumitrescu and Ana-Maria Avram. The idea for this touring festival was theirs - London, Paris, Berlin and Bucharest being the four host cities of the sixth edition. On the 23rd and 24th November 2011, the spectral convoy paused in Berlin for two days of intense celebration at the NK, a small venue tucked away in a remote corner of the district of Treptow, and devoted to sound experimentation of every kind.

In addition to the Romanian duo, Berlin audiences were able to hear, among others, composer Maya Dunietz, free improviser Tim Hodgkinson, and noise activist Stephen O'Malley, known for his participation in Sunn o))) and for his collaborations with choreographer Gisèle Vienne. Among the spectators I noted a few familiar faces (Mika Vainio, and, I believe, Ricardo Villalobos) in a mix of youthful industrial music fans, more weathered improvised music aficionados, and an out-crowd of the more orthodoxly dressed. I also met the representative, fresh from London for the concert, of the improbable and seething Association of Musical Marxists, for whom "any radical new music fulfils the program of a Marxist revolutionary music." It had been a long time since I had met any revolutionary artists; in fact I had NEVER actually met any. Hadn't the idea of changing everything long given way to a weary and hedonistic resignation? ... To think the radically new, the eruption, the destruction of the old order, would be like sighing nostalgically for a glorious past...

But what is new in this militant music is neither the dissonance nor the feeling of the unknown, nor even the incredible research into the timbres of 'conventional' instruments. (Forty years of Brötzmann-style free jazz had, we thought, completely expunged these possibilities, even if you can still feel an uncanny strangeness listening to a Ligeti or a Stockhausen.)

What is new here, and something to be, if not understood by the brain, at least felt by the body, is that musicians coming from a classical heritage are overturning the organizational principle that has always defined it. This 'society of the spectral' relegates the idea of organization to the background, requiring it to adapt to a pre-existing sonic reality and to the immanence of sound as both first and final cause. And this is not idle theoretics, this is concrete method: using a laptop, the composers play a pre-recorded track - a molecular soundscape that unfolds in real time - and direct the musicians to react to its varied contingencies, and inhabit as best they can the accumulating and multiple flows of sound material. The waveshape itself becomes the shaping force in this modular kind of writing (though I doubt the validity here of the word "writing", to which they seem nevertheless very attached). From the swarm-like oscillation of free-floating sound, they manage to extract a sense of both temporal progression and a residual tonality, contriving to read in its erratic motion something like the narrative of a possible story.

This kind of "antistructural" praxis, although present in popular music ever since rock music broke with the idea of mass appeal, has never before been adequately thought through by schooled musicians - more often than not unable to exorcise the demons of analysis and rationality.

There is, in Avram and Dumitrescu, the ambition of addressing the condition of European music as such, and perhaps redeeming it. To cleanse it of the contaminations of the productivist society, technicized and mathematicized, in which it is hopelessly embroiled. To rescue the great cadaver, and reverse the classical music tradition. Set fire to the house to save the furniture!

This is why they mix everything up. Free improvisation, noise rock, electronics and musique concrète all in amongst the orchestral instruments. This is why they electrify their classical instruments, because technological contemporaneity is as much part of life experience as ancient heritage. They neither love nor hate technology, they simply grasp it as a medium in which we live, one which we can, and perhaps must, confront.

The presence, as a spectral (excuse me, special) guest, of Stephen O'Malley ( as both musician and composer / director) is a nice surprise, but not an incongruity. For ten years he has also made live music where structure counts for little and the sound comes first, conceived as a force against which the player fights, in which the listener swims, a force that seems pagan because it is as inarticulate and unpredictable as an avalanche. Sunn o)))'s 20-minute plateaux of menacing drones reference neither melodic or rhythmic know-how, nor a stance of ironic Satanism, but the act of invention from myriad sonic interstices, the nurture of unfathomable forces tracked down in their own environment (which is here the fact of technology).

Avram and Dumitrescu talk a lot about phenomenology, stream of consciousness, Gestalt, and the relationship between a perceptual inside and outside. For my part, I see in them the return to a nature re-imagined as dangerous, a site of hand-to-hand combat. To be at home in a sound, to inhabit sound the way sea-life swims in the sea or clings to a rock. Structure, since it still exists, has to find its place in the interstices of actual things, in the lengths and continuities of organic waves. We try to inhabit the world anew rather than dominating it. This is absolutely not sustainable development! There is here a whole dimension of defiance, violence and brutality. Running with the quanta is no picnic. But, if the cost of this music is high in terms of comfort, the rewards in terms of pleasure are doubled.

Sink your teeth into the pulsating heart of the world and devour it on the floor, wrestle the cosmic serpent bare-handed. This is what it is about. And there's no way that walking out on the old classical drama - the search for a pristine and absolute spirit - means giving yourself up to chaos or suicidal surrender of the will. Far from it. You lose yourself in the world of matter only to rediscover yourself. There is some Herzog in here, a wide-thrown romanticism of a new type in which we are going back not to nature, but to the taste of the struggle with it, rediscovering our old adversary, our Other - intangible strengths, violent objects, understood by no-one and impossible to name.

You might even find here the possibility of new 'grand narratives'. I had never heard the Fate that knocked at Beethoven's door as intensely as in the music of Avram and Dumitrescu.

Guillaume Ollendorff

English translation, Tim Hodgkinson

2)

Translated from Facebook, I think, from article entitled: Que la lumière sonne. Le festival Lux Aeterna à Berlin : récit d’un parcours. By Guillaume Ollendorff

It was then that the sky finally crashed in on our heads. Avram and Dumitrescu, the lynchpin (of the performances) and the key (to the vault) of the complex edifice of this festival's programming.

Honestly speaking, this was one of the most exciting musical experiences of my last few years. A classical instrumentarium (ensemble of brass, strings and limited percussion), used here for every conceivable marginal and purely timbral possibility (rubbings, cracklings, rattlings, rumblings and miscellaneous creakings), used also for its cultural heritage dimension, as much as for its potential as a sounding mechanism de luxe, delivered - along with a well placed laptop - a veritable apocalypse of friction in which rattling sickly silences gave way to climactic tearings apart of the weft of the world. Flat out, bottomless, abyssal and explosive: something has collapsed, but what?

Their spectral inferno comes to seem as if a pleasure in matter itself is letting rip. Avram and Dumitrescu conduct their musicians with authority and passion; a highly agitated quantum world bounds into to life under their amorous fingers. A music, partly written, partly improvised, in which complex compositional technique dissolves humbly into texture. In which composing runs up against the immeasurable. In their own way the two Romanians are realising the ancient dream of a music based entirely on timbre, but stripped of any impulse towards hyper-rationalism, or nature-conquering engineering. Each thing is unique and nothing is transposable into anything else. A music which departs from knowledge to arrive at consciousness, which departs from the known so as to destroy it and flirt with the unknowable, turn its back on what merely IS so as to invent a possible.

Above all, this is a scouring physical experience. Marvellous.