COLLAPSING
IMAGE INTO MUSIC: Part 1
Musique Concrete, electronica & Sound Art
published in The Wire No.164, October, 1997,
London
A
movie. A child stands on a street corner. A milkman sorts through
his bottles. Clouds streak across the sun. What music goes with
these images? What should accompany them? What do they contain
that needs to be brought out? Every sprocketed strip of film music
is beaded with the sweat of such ponderous deliberation. Its composer
has mused over which music to fuse with which image, settling
on cues which silently insist that only this music could go with
that image. It's part illusion, part trickery, part chance, part
chaos. Many film composers know this musical existentialism intimately
- and it intimidates them. It is both the source of frustration
which hinders and constricts their art (the dictates of convention)
and the impetus for the reactionary stance they have struck throughout
film history (the spectre of invention). For there is film music
which figures there is meaning to be unravelled from image, a
desperate reason for syncing to an action. Then there is music
that embraces the essentially detached nature of the film score,
casting wild sonic gestures whilst inventing a narrative logic
to govern its audio-visual realm. Any sound or music or atmosphere
will go with those images. The question is not why: it is why
not.
Possibly
the best answers to date are provided by Pierre Henry's recomposed
scores for Walter Ruttman's BERLIN: THE SYMPHONY OF A GREAT CITY
(1927) and Dziga Vertov's THE MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA (1928).
Both scores (composed in 1991 and 1993 respectively) are designed
to accompany the projection of these silent films, with a live
multi-track mix in an environment prepared for sound diffusion
through anywhere from fifty to a hundred and fifty speakers. The
utter disparity and complete autonomy sound and image grant each
other in these 'cinesonic' environments is so unworldly, so unconventional,
and so unimaginable that one is silenced into agreeing: why not.
A wall of detuned acoustic guitar strings wail as cars streak
a wet road; a solitary cricket chirps as people cross a draw-bridge;
echoed claps rise and fall as market stalls are set up. No direct
sense; no obvious reason; no apparent motive. The stuff of exciting
film sound.
From
the sparse mechanical rhythms which grind, grate and galvanize
in THE MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA, to the dense sheets of layered
textures which flap, fringe and float throughout BERLIN: THE SYMPHONY
OF A GREAT CITY, one can hear Henry 'reading between the images'.
He is looking elsewhere - beyond the image, past the narrative,
through the scene. His choice of sounds empties them (and, to
a degree, their matched visuals) of overt content and expected
denotation. In place, the newly articulated 'sound effects' enliven
the dormant energy of both sound and image. Connections arise
which suggest not that this sound goes with that image, but that
the fullness of the image is best serviced by an openness to its
potential sound accompaniment. This may sound introverted and
self-absorbed, but watching the films while hearing Henry's sounds
dive through the cinema soundspace to Vertov and Ruttman's flickering
images, I was more moved and excited by the scintillating beauty
of pure sound and its spatial apparition than I have ever have
been in the confines of a cinema and the claustrophobic conditions
of unimaginative naturalism which regularly muffle my enjoyment
of film music and sound design.
Henry's
background in musique concrete is crucial to his approach to film
sound and to our awareness of the wide ranging techniques that
shape the audio visual event. Admittedly, musique concrete is
a somewhat rarefied form of sound art which many casually celebrate
as 'radicalized noise' without understanding the more dynamic
relationship it entertains with classical, romantic and modern
music. Too complex to debate here, musique concrete can be regarded
as the first de-interiorization of the sound of music: its experiments
are the produce of hearing the sound of sound, of touching the
skin of recording technologies which define the postmodern realm
by which all music this century is snared.
Most
importantly, musique concrete - and both its attendant and contradictory
branches in electronic music and electroacoustic music - had by
the mid-50s signposted all the transgressive traits which would
mark the following forty odd years of recorded rock music. Inverting
signal to noise ratios, privileging background hum, overloading
electro-magnetic systems, distorting parameters of reproduction,
collapsing purposeful amplification, excessively rendering the
flow between inputs and outputs - these are as much the base manoeuvres
of musique concrete's apparatus as they are the technical fissures
of rock music production. Henry has enjoyed a hedonistic divorce
from rock's excessive noise, from his aurally schizophrenic collaboration
with Spooky Tooth for their gaudy 'electric mass' (CEREMONY, 1970)
to the beautifully perplexing trowelling of Jimi Hendrix's guitar
in BERLIN: THE SYMPHONY OF A GREAT CITY. Cinema, musique concrete,
noise, rock, cinema. Despite their superficial differences, the
genealogical loop is sonically discernible: cinema bore musique
concrete which in turn bore rock which in turn rebirthed both.
Some
sound. Sonorous tones of men and women breathe words (en Francais)
close to a microphone. Footsteps echo along tiled hallways. A
body suddenly dives into water. A bird warble. An old car passes.
What images accompany these sounds? A quiet landmark is sited
by the 1997 ECM release of the soundtrack to Jean Luc Godard's
1990 film NOUVELLE VAGUE. Not the music from the film - nor music
'inspired by' the film - but the actual and complete soundtrack
of every sonic moment from the film's 100 plus minutes. Obviously,
fixed images do accompany these sounds - but listening to the
CD throws one into a disembodied state of listening. It sounds
like the soundtrack means something, but searching for that meaning
will only frustrate and irritate. This isn't 'film-style music'
and all the post-BLADERUNNER ambient stylings which have a certain
erotic allure yet are generally bereft of any cinematic substance.
This is a functional film soundtrack - one forged by the timings
of narrative, the spacing of mise-en-scene, the shifting of focal
planes, the lingering and denouement of dramatic configuration.
Directed
by Godard (cinema's most sonically-aware modernist director) with
sounds designed and mixed by one of French cinema's true artists
in the field, Francois Musy, the NOUVELLE VAGUE CD is produced
by ECM's Manfred Eicher, who has acted as a close music supervisor
on many of Godard's films since the mid-80s. In contrast to the
synthetic-cubism of Henry's frenetic scores, NOUVELLE VAGUE typifies
the neo-plasticism of Godard's mature recent work. Sounds, atmospheres,
voices and traces of music (including Patti Smith, Meredith Monk,
Paul Hindemith and Arnold Schoenberg, plus instrumental moments
performed by David Darling & Dino Saluzzi) no longer collide
with each other as they did in, for example, PIERROT LE FOU (1965)
and BRITISH SOUNDS (1969). Of late, Godard's soundtracks dance
in a series of splayed and webbed curves which envelope each other,
stringing aural merges of opposing details. The end result is
surprisingly reserved, contained, natural. In fact, after 20 minutes,
one notices that sound/voice/music are versions of each other,
in that their sum total across a passage of time is what defines
that passage's aural gesture. Somewhere between how Luigi Russolo
heard machines, how Bela Bartok heard insects, how Glen Gould
heard voices, and how Miles Davis heard traffic is how Godard
hears the world. It is busy and obtrusive, but it belies a calm
and unproblematized logic of presence, timbre and shape. It is
all musical; it is all cinematic.
Unfortunately,
the chances of catching Henry's live mixes to the Ruttman and
Vertov movies are rare. Equally rare will be most people's capacity
to listen to 100 minutes of a film soundtrack with no images.
However, if one is genuinely interested in investigating the dark,
moist centre of the audio visual experience and its fruity alchemical
processing, these are the places to which one must journey.
The
long standing dialogue which has ensued between film, music and
sound along the experimental peripheries of the arts this century
provides a rich context for Jerome Noetinger's series of Metakine
mini-CDs, COLLECTION CINEMA POUR L'ORIELLE (Cinema For The Eyes).
The title has been used often, and here as elsewhere there is
little to warrant the use of the term 'cinema'. But many of the
works released in this series - resulting from a diverse range
of predominantly European electroacoustic composers - have grasped
the key dynamic interface between filmic structure and musical
narrative and have orchestrated their sounds accordingly. Included
in the series are two works - CREDO MAMBO (1992) and GLORIA (1994)
- by Michel Chion, one of the world's leading theorists on the
nature of contemporary film sound post-production (see his AUDIO
VISION translated and published by Columbia University Press).
His layering of voice, sounds and atmospheres embodies cinematic
devices as much as musique concrete effects, allowing him to freely
shift from naturalistic passages to violently stylized moments.
Broadening the historical perspective on 'film noise' is Walter
Ruttman's own brash sonic montage for his film WEEKEND (1930)
- an amazingly succinct treatise on the role that interruption
was already playing in information technologies (radios, telephones,
etc.) by the 30s.
From
the disquieting proto-pornographic murmurs of Luc Ferrari's UN
HEIMLICH SCHON (1971) to the hyperkinetic organ babbling of Michele
Bokanowski's TABOU (1983/4) to the overpowering majestic sheets
of noise in Christine Groult's L'HEURE ALORS S'INCLINE ... (1991)
to the chaos of everyday banality in Jim O'Rourke's RULES OF REDUCTION
(1993) - there is much here to experience, contemplate, savour.
The Metakine CDs do not simply 'evoke moods' and 'paint landscapes'
as per the heroic romantic tradition which guides the specious
and dubious beauty of many 'cine-ambient' works. Rather, they
project architectural domains through which precise events occur
and resonate, enlivening the music's depth and flow beyond the
erotics of ornamentation. Just as one is sensuously confronted
by Henry's scores and headily perplexed by the Godard CD, one's
imagination is activated by the impression that somehow, somewhere
in the proto-cinescape of the Metakine pieces, action is taking
place.
