ARTICLE FOR GRAMOPHONE EXPLORER, JULY 1999

Corn-Fed Radicals: Neglected Pioneers of the Heartland

Life beyond New York and California may seem unlikely to some, but civilization, even composers, can in indeed be found between the Hudson and San Fernando valleys-it all depends on your perspective. While the music industry moguls are firmly entrenched on either coast, and tend to see their own backyards as the predominant cultural centres, a significant proportion of American experimental artists actually chooses to live elsewhere, swapping freedom for neglect.

Drawn to the earth, composer John Luther Adams, an active environmentalist, has lived near Fairbanks, Alaska for over 25 years. He calls his Earth and the Great Weather (New World Records NW114) "sonic geography... a journey through the physical, cultural, and spiritual landscapes of the Arctic, in music, language, and sound." No Symphonia Antarctica ˆ la Vaughan Williams this. Rather an intense prayer scored for strings, Native Alaskan speakers (reciting names of places, plants, weather, and the seasons), and Dionysian drum quartets based on Eskimo rhythmic patterns. Adams's other recordings, The Far Country (New Albion NA158) and Clouds of Forgetting, Clouds of Unknowing (New World NW123), are equally windswept (with overtones of Tenney and Feldman) and by comparison make Maxwell Davies's rugged Orkney tone poems seem like basking in the Riviera.

Fellow Alaskan Matthew Burtner's Portals of Distortion: Music for Saxophones, Computers, and Stones (innova 526) also partakes of the state's infamous terrain and chilly weather. In this case, however, the ringing drones of the sax multiphonics suggest a miasmal world of ice, crags, and Northern Lights: "Deep slabs of ice, split and creaking, revealed glimpses of darkness and running water beneath...portals of distortion." Rhythmic patterns, where they occur, owe less to Eskimo culture and more to a mechanical Polyrhythmicon, but the effect of stone on stone is scarily primal.

Warmer climes-the Anzo Borrego desert-incubated Kenneth Gaburo's Antiphony IX (...A Dot) for orchestra, children and tape (Music and Arts CD832). Gaburo (1926-1993) was a seminal composer, teacher, publisher, electroacoustic pioneer, and proponent of compositional linguistics. His concern for ecological systems is parallelled in this reinvention of the symphony orchestra as a community of desert life forms: poised, fleeting, cyclic, persistent, breathing. By means of random processes and graphic notation, even an experimental microphone placement for the recording, the space comes alive like a dawn chorus. Gaburo's final major work, Winded, for organ and tape (innova 524), likewise exhausts the history and possibilities of the instrument (not to mention the indefatiguable organist Gary Verkade) and is guaranteed to disturb your average church organist.

Gaburo spent many years in Iowa City, Iowa-a region with its fair share of corn-fed radicals, and home to the Tape Beatles. This collaborative band of visual and audio artists (aka Public Works, featuring Lloyd Dunn and Ralph Johnson) is a whizz with recycled-tape and razor blades. Taking 1950's school-science filmstrips, American-dream propaganda films, nationalistic speeches, and other remnants of optimistic mass culture, they splice together deft masterpieces of information overload with so much irony their tongues must by now be firmly stuck in their cheeks. John Oswald, Negativeland, and the Atomic Cafe rolled into one, their motto is Plagiarism¨ and healthy scepticism their rallying cry. The Grand Delusion (Synthety, STCD 065), is a deliciously unamerican response to the Gulf War.

Just up the road in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the industrial taiko band Savage Aural Hotbed offers a less critical view of industrial culture, mostly by hitting it. Four guys in radiation suits, bedecked with fairy lights, pound (and did, long before Stomp) on anything. Whether tied together with amplified springs, or operating a gas-flame oscilloscope with a homemade Theremin, or sending sparks flying into the hall as the power grinder meets the oil drum, they bring a fascinating precision to their interlocking polyrhythms, no doubt developed during long winters in the tool shed. Something like Xenakis with a groove. While recording conveys little of the danger of live performance (except the risk to your speakers) much of the energy is retained on Cold is the Absence of Heat (Ultramodern, ULCD 616) in the form of disciplined whacking and a severely good time.

Not what most associate with Fargo, Henry Gwiazda is not a kooky character in a homicide movie but rather one of the more remarkable guitar-playing sample-masters. With an enviable library of sampled recordings of everyday sounds, he triggers surreal strings of them in mind/narrative-boggling sequence. In "MANEATINGCHIPSLISTENINGTOAVIOLIN" from NotNotesNotRhythms (innova 505), for example: a dog barks, crisps are crunched, a train passes, a fiddle licks, a guitar drones, bees swarm, a plane passes, quickly followed by a Theremin, gamelan and telephone. And somehow it all hangs together in a fantastical choreography of noise. In the first ever Virtual Audio on disc two of the pieces here give the impression of emanating fom your scalp. You'd swear you were at the barbers. The curious thing is that the effect lingers long after the music is over: you come away with better ears.

The self-effacing traits of midwesterners come to the fore in Steve Tibbetts, whose composerly role is as sensitive accompanist to existing recordings. Like Gavin Bryars or Jan Garbarek, who have taken found musics and framed them anew, Tibbetts travels the world with a tape recorder and guitar to bring home jewels of traditional repertoires (such as gamelan, Tibetan chant, and traditional fiddling) and play along with them. Walking the fine line between homage and plunder, musical chameleon and magpie, he has a knack for making any musical guest feel welcome (albeit after the fact). In Chš (Hannibal HNCD 1404), the contemplative chanting of Tibetan nun Choying Drolma finds a new accompaniment of gorgeously-produced guitar and percussion, making it difficult to imagine they ever existed apart, so fused they seem to be. A similar treatment in � (Hannibal HNCD 1438), features Knut Hamre on Hardangar fiddle (a kind of string bagpipe) and weaves a cyclical spell.

Cross-culturalism has long been a feature of American music and there is a not-always-proud history of Indianist composers who incorporated Native melodies into their works. Three current-day composers who succeed in integrating elements of Native American traditions are echt-Mohican Brent Michael Davids, Manhattanite Jerome Kitzke, and former New Mexican Peter Garland. Davids plays his own crystal flutes and spins elegant, evocative rituals such as Elixir, which conjures up the vapours floating from the bottles of early medicinal tonics (Blue Butterfly-01). Kitzke's muscular work represents a prayer, a "stomp on the earth," for the injustices caused to the Indian nations. In The Character of American Sunlight (Koch 3-7456-2 H1) the performers whistle, shout "hey" and "shh," and recite Alan Ginsberg poetry at the tops of their lungs. The committed players, such as the manic accordionist Guy Klucevsek, bring a sincere power to this haunted Americana.

Peter Garland, spent many years in Santa Fe, at the junction of Anglo, Hispanic, and Native cultures. No wonder, then, that his Border Music (O.O. Discs WN0008) shows traces of all these. Equally au fait with Harrison, Var�se, folk harp, sirens, and bull-roarers, there is a stark beauty to his work that is of, rather than about, the Southwest. It has a forthrightness common to indigenous styles and a depth foreign to most urban music.

The phenomenal works of Colorado Springs composer, Stephen Scott, inventor of the bowed piano, call for an ensemble of performers surrounding the open piano lid manipulating rosined fishing line. From the cauldron of the piano, "they weave," according to Ovid's metaphor, "in pliant threads of gold, and trace in the weft some ancient tale." Minerva's Web (New Albion NA026) throws up clouds of sound that shift timbre from hurdy-gurdy to glass harmonica, mandolin, trumpet, harp, and cymbalom.

Also into developing a personal relationship with lengths of string is Texan Ellen Fullman. Only hers are hundreds of feet long and are rubbed by the hands while walking along. Why aren't they inaudibly low as acoustics teaches us? Because the strings vibrate longitudinally, of course. The rich sound-world of Body Music (Experimental Intermedia XI109) is searing, spacious and tactile with cascades of combination tones.

Both Jerry Hunt (1943-1993) and Branch Davidian cult leader David Koresh, called Waco, Texas, their home: both dabbled in the occult-Hunt started his own mail-order church at the age of 13-and both ended their lives on a note of suicide. There, however, the similarities end. Hunt, a pianist by trade, was one of the most charmingly inscrutable, idiosyncratic, Satiesque, ritual-artist-cum-charlatans the world has yet seen: "All you need," he once said, "is a map of Texas and a couple of books from the 18th-century magicians, and you could figure the whole thing out." If only. As a pioneering electronic gadgeteer he built motion detectors to use as alternative sound controllers long before they became fashionable, and, lab coat clad, would enact pseudo-alchemical recipes by stamping his feet and brandishing bells at the audience. Several recordings preserve some of this delightful jiggery pokery (such as Haramand Plane: Three Translation Links and Ground: Five Mechanic Convention Streams, O.O. Discs #38 and #9) though it is hard to separate the sounds from the myth that made them.

Washingtonian Stuart Dempster also goes to great lengths for his music. As tromboning sound-masseur he has recorded his own playing in various resonant spaces. The classic In the Great Abbey of Clement VI (New Albion NA013) pits him against his own echo and makes the building an equal partner in the proceedings. Underground Overlays from the Cistern Chapel (New Albion NA076) finds him with his students in a two million gallon water tank with a 45-second reverb. Down there he outgabrielis Gabrieli, and this is one underground music that will never make it to Carnegie Hall.

Home CV Compositions Articles Instruments Shoji Gallery Contact