ROOTS
IN OUTER SPACE BY KYLE GANN
Dec 22 1999 / village voice
The
conceptualist avant-garde from the 1960s was the outer space of music,
a music as far removed from inhabited regions of sonic thought as its
creators could manage. It's hard to imagine that music as anybody's "roots,"
as though John Cage and his cohorts were involved in some quaint ethnic
tradition. And yet Sonic Youth seems to be returning to their roots in
their newest two-CD set, Goodbye 20th Century (YR 4), and those roots
happen to be the anything-goes conceptualism of Cage, Christian Wolff,
Pauline Oliveros, James Tenney, and assorted Fluxus figures including
Yoko Ono, Takehisa Kosugi, and George Maciunas. Anything goes in this
music except a rock beat, that is, whose absence SY's fans will undoubtedly
notice. Instead of Thurston Moore's and Lee Ranaldo's virtuoso noise breaks
that my son Bernard spends hours a day trying to duplicate, here are 105
minutes of the grunts, grinds, bleeps, booms, and bumps that were the
'60s avant-garde.
Yet avant-garde aficionados will find their own surprises, mainly a gritty
electronic sheen that this repertoire never had before in the classic
recordings, plus the inevitable introduction of sampling technology. Those
expecting the usual guitar songs will be thrown for a loop by Edges of
1969, one of the works in which Christian Wolff pioneered the game piece,
a genre in which the relations between sounds were somewhat determined
while the sounds themselves were left to the performers. Safe to say that
Edges has never sounded like this before: whirling electronic noises,
sampled ostinatos, a story breathily told by Kim Gordon. Likewise, we've
never before been treated to a Cage performance like this half-hour rendition
of Four6, full of driving guitar riffs and looped voice samples.
Is this a betrayal of Wolff's austere aesthetic? If so, blame the composer,
because Wolff himself is one of the performers. More likely it's the beginning
of a revisionist interpretive style for '60s music, freed from the abstract
musical atomism that made it seem like a spin-off from serialism in the
first place. Aside from Wolff, West Coast percussionist William Winant,
Fluxus violinist Takehisa Kosugi, and Chicago improvising omnimusician
Jim O'Rourke are among the other avant-garde cats who join SY for the
ensemble pieces. Of the 13 works, seven range from 1961 to 1971, and one
(the tuneful Piéce Enfantine by conductor-musicologist Nicolas
Slonimsky) goes back to 1951. The other five, more recent, include two
of Cage's so-called "number pieces" and a brand-new work written
for SY by Pauline Oliveros.
Minimalism (which was conceptualism's kid brother, after all) makes several
appearances, though never in a pretty way. Steve Reich's seminal Pendulum
Music is here (an otherwise almost impossible piece to find on disc),
in which microphones suspended above loudspeakers swing back and forth
to create out-of-phase feedback; also Tenney's equally rare Having Never
Written a Note for Percussion of 1971, whose delicate note-repetitions
morph into a deafening white-noise continuum. Ono's Voice Piece for Soprano
comprises merely two of her trademark screams, creditably squealed by
one Coco Haley Gordon Moorepresumably a close relative of SY's Kim
Gordon and Thurston Moore. Piano Piece #13 (Carpenter's Piece) for Nam
June Paik by Fluxus's guiding spirit Maciunas is allegedly "enhanced"
by a video clip, though my computer couldn't play it and gave me an ominous
warning about a "bad movie atom" instead. The piece sounds like
four people hammering nails into a piano, and I'm afraid to ask.
Is this disc, which is giving Tower Records employees headaches about
whether to stock it in classical or rock (just kidding, they really didn't
give a damn), a legitimate addition to the discography of post-Cage conceptualism?
I'll go further than that: This is the most imaginatively performed compendium
of that repertoire since the Ensemble Musica Negativa's great old Music
Before Revolution set (EMI) of 1972. It's easy for these open-ended game
pieces to end up all sounding alike, but SY has meticulously sculpted
and contrasted each performance so that no two embody the same atmosphere
or sound world. For a century that has overstayed its welcome, this is
a touchingly affectionate good-bye, and SY honors the good guys. I don't
imagine there will be a Volume II: Sonic Youth Plays the Elliott Carter
Double Concerto. But at this point, who knows?
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