A TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY REALITY CHECK - TAKING STOCK WITH STOCKHAUSEN

FluxEuropa regular Stewart Gott recently (October 2001) attended the four Stockhausen concerts that formed the heart of the London Barbican's 'Elektronic' event. As an uncompromising noise fiend he half expected a bit of easy listening. What happened instead made him think again about his Merzbow and his Macronympha. Life in general too, come to that. Sirius stuff indeed.

Sunday afternoon, an interval, somebody says they've seen the Aphex Twin, hanging out round the benches outside the Barbican "holding court with a bunch of groupies". Downing my lager I rush outside in the hope that he will still be there, and that I may add my own lightweight presence to the admiring throng but - too late, he's gone, and I already know there's no chance of getting a ticket for his set in the conservatory later on. I'm still reeling anyway from meeting Stockhausen the previous evening. Two heroes in less than twenty-four hours might be too much for me. My suggestion that Stockhausen's wonderful Hymnen, which I had just heard performed, produces trance like euphoria appeared to meet with the great man's approval. "You must listen with your eyes closed and concentrate on the music". I did, and I will. Back to Sunday night, another interval, another lager and I watch with interest the antics of the Aphex Twin disciples - black-clad skinny groovers, imaginatively bearded, glistening with bright-eyed, righteous expectation. Not a sound set of bowels amongst them either, judging by the queues to use the cubicles in the gents. Back in to the hall I go, and room to stretch out, seeing as my first half neighbours left and right have been scared away by the screech and clatter of Song of the Youths, the last piece before the interval and one of the most unnerving pieces of music I have ever heard. The three guys sitting in front of me seem to know a bit about it. "Can't deny he's a genius" says one. Another, who has already endeared himself to me by applauding everything so far with a dogged ferocity that has matched my own, lets rip: "That lot outside" he spits. "Stockhausen's nothing to them. It's a shame. He's not that great either, the Aphex Twin - or whatever he calls himself. It's just a dance version of this. Of Stockhausen". And with that Professor Stockhausen takes once more to the stage, his persil-white garb a fitting antidote to the dodgy dark threads of Richard D and his mates, and proceeds to lecture us on the forthcoming attraction: Kontakte. Five seats up, two visitors from the composer's home planet, bald as coots, dressed in matching outfits of a shiny, colourless material, sit statue still, staring blindly at the back of the seats in front of them. To the boys outside this may be the establishment, but inside the walls have already been torn down. Isn't that the point?

Stockhausen

Monday night, and a "quasi concert" programme of 'Friday'', the fifth part of Stockhausen's mammoth opera cycle: Light. This is in three layers - abstract, continuous electronic music, found sounds processed and unprocessed, scenes performed by live musicians. For long periods the stage stands empty, at times in darkness, at times bathed in an eerie orange glow that makes sinister the blank walls of a starkly minimalist set. Around the void sheets of electronic noise billow and sputter, mingling with the musique concrete of dogs, typewriters, racing cars, ravens and photocopying machines. These and others are split into 'couples' - man/woman, dog/cat, typewriter/photocopier - and each allocated one of the twelve loudspeakers set around the stage. In his pre-concert introduction Stockhausen again urges the audience to close their eyes while all this is going on - "there is nothing to see". All well and good, but then you have to keep opening them to make sure the stage is still empty. Nicholas Isherwood (bass), playing the Lucifer-figure Ludon, moves in from the left and Angela Tunstall (Eve) from the right, accompanied by Elu (basset-horn) and Lufa (flute). An extraordinary duet develops. Ludon, snakelike and malevolent, circles Eve, clucking, clicking and hissing at her, his voice rising and dropping through a spectacular range of sounds. Eve in response twitters, gasps and screams like a tethered bird, the power, clarity and virtuosity of Tunstall's performance fully matching that of Isherwood. This is mesmerising, exhilarating stuff. It is impossible to believe that human beings are capable of making such noises: hearing and watching them do so is more terrifying than any horror movie I've ever seen (and that includes the Quay/Stockhausen In Absentia short showing in the foyer, pencil sharpener and all). Stockhausen makes it clear that he considers one of the most important advances to occur in music during the last century was the ability not only to capture sound but to transform it. This is clearly shown a number of times in Hymnen, most memorably when a recording of children's voices is transformed into the sound of ducks, that then go on to quack the Marseillaise. The same thing is done here in Friday, but without electronic wizardry. The audience may feel they are watching the antics of gods, or aliens, or mythical figures, they may be put in mind of ancient Egypt or Aztec Mexico, but it becomes potent because it transcends all of this. Stockhausen has made human beings superhuman: the effort required to perform this is staggering, the will to conceive it in the first place even more so. Another example of the same thing was seen the day before, when Frank Gutschmidt played Stockhausen's solo piano piece Klavierstuck X. Eying the piano warily, as if he suspected it might try to sting him in retaliation, Gutschmidt launched into a frenzied assault upon it, bludgeoning, tinkering and teasing it, the silence between each renewed attack singing with resonance. Such a silence greeted the end of the first half of Friday, one of the most profound I have ever heard in a concert hall. That said, the overriding memory of the whole thing was how sexy it was, the protracted copulation between Eve and Ludon's son Caino (baritone Jurgen Kurth) matched by the brilliantly mischievous duet from Elu and Lufa: basset horn player Suzanne Stephens and flautist Kathinka Pasveer, both in a state of creative undress - the combination of this and the dexterity with which they performed complicated musical manoeuvres whilst skipping about like a pair of Spring lambs as close as you're ever likely to get to witnessing one of Caligula's orgies.

Aphex Twin

About three years ago I started listening to extreme music, noise music. The kick start for this was a little known compilation of avant stuff called Amduscias on the west coast Zenflesh label, which contained a track by Luke Oram, trading as Noise/Girl. This was the first pure noise recording I'd ever heard. Five minutes long, I spent a week playing it over and over and over, nothing else, just noise. At the end of that I penned an ecstatic review, my very first for FluxEuropa. What impressed me was not just the blistering power of the recording, which was unlike anything else I'd ever heard, but also the capacity it had to conjure visions, to transport and to actually physically affect. It was like a white canvas, a blank page that you choose your own words, your own colours for. Electronic music of this sort seemed to me something very new, but of course it's really just one step further down a long road with no destination. The whiteout of Merzbow is there in Stockhausen's Kontakte. Aube's recordings of the human body are present at the end of Hymnen. Found sounds reverberate through Stockhausen's works, so do processed sounds, the mangling of musical instruments, the use of everyday objects, distortion, samples. The Canadian artist Alan Bloor - known variously as Knurl, Pholde or Pyrox - has a habit of including the bald message "No musical instruments were used in this recording" on the sleeves of his albums. The concept is dead, basically. There are no musical instruments anymore - or at least no need for them. I have in this month's review pile a CD made from the sound of barcodes being read - "All electronic sounds are 100% barcode controlled". As I write this article I am playing Michael Prime's Interglacial, a PowerMac manipulation of the sounds made by a domestic fridge/freezer. Even more extreme individuals have in the past sent me recordings of themselves and their families using the toilet, the sounds of a dead squirrel decomposing, a double CD consisting of the noise made by a window opening and closing. Koji Asano, the prolific Japanese composer, has produced in his album Monsoon an hour or so of exquisite, intricate piano music - played with a cartload of pencils and ping pong balls thrust in to the piano, resulting in a horrible cracked edge to the recording. Even more unnerving still: John Hudak's manipulated extended playback of his mother's voice on an answerphone machine, Alexandre St-Onge's Un machoire et deux trous LP ("an audio documentation of having a microphone in my mouth while sleeping in front of my apartment building"), surgical operations documented in graphic detail by Matmos, Eric La Casa's astonishing recording of himself accidentally falling in to a waterfall while audio taping Jerome Noetinger and Lionel Marchetti taking a swim. I could go on at (even more) length, but one more will suffice. Kyoshi Mizutani's field recordings of various birds in various locations, made for the excellent Ground Fault label. Bird Songs is relevant in this context because of the shocking clarity of the recording, and the way that Mizutani has subtly manipulated the sounds recorded. As a result Mizutani's birds sound clearer, louder, 'better' than the real thing - eerie stuff indeed, particularly when you also consider that they are different from the real thing too. Watching Stephens and Pasveer blow across the mouthpieces of their instruments to make unearthly whistling noises, or Gutschmidt pummel his piano into dissonant, crashing waves of sound, or Isherwood and Tunstall snarling and spitting like demonic creatures conjured from some mythical bestiary the same uneasy feeling prevails. Stockhausen has re-invented reality. Emerging from the last of the four absorbing, exhausting concerts I was inclined to question reality myself. If Stockhausen is right, that music will become the new language, that our own little world is peripheral to something larger, then what I witnessed was not the past but the future. The Aphex Twin's new album Drukqs is pretty good too, by the way.

STEWART GOTT - 29 October 2001

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