ASIA
MINOR & OTHER EASTERN MODES: Part 1
The Skin of the Human Drum
published in The Wire No. 161, July, 1997,
London
Tokyo.
Downtown. Peak hour. Three sonic booms are sounded: Godzilla is
about to perform some radical urban redevelopment. From 1959 to
1972 - the first cycle of Godzilla movies produced by Toho studios
- those sonic booms functioned as phonemes, signalling the arrival
of Godzilla's mighty power. Yet despite their iconic clarity,
their means of production was and remains indistinct: somewhere
between fist bangs on a metal door and mallet strikes on a timpani,
recorded with slight distortion and heavy compression. Those booms
can serve as our aural porthole into the sound of the East. We
arrive somewhere between sound, music and noise. Somewhere outside
of European concert halls; somewhere on an Asian soundtrack.
You
hear nothing when Sumo wrestlers thump, pound and careen precariously
within a minuscule space too small for their size and movement.
The similarity in scale between a Sumo wrestler in his ring and
Godzilla in Tokyo (a man inside a rubber suit destroying a miniature
diorama) suggests that the Godzilla movies are essentially Sumo
bouts with post-dubbed sound. In the West, the sprung mat of wrestling
already acts as a live sound board - a gross, square drum which
amplifies the fall of the vanquished body, giving us a sound uncannily
like Godzilla's own thunderous foot-steps. The Eastern silence
of Sumo, the Western explosiveness of the WWF, and their monstrous
fusion in the Godzilla soundtracks each convey the feeling of
being physically struck and racked internally by sub-sonic shock
waves. In Sumo, these waves are imagined as if your ear is on
the ground; in the WWF, they are amplified by separate mic placement;
in the Toho monster movies, they are reconstructed through tape
manipulation. The earth, the mat, the body - all become terrorized
timpani, psycho-acoustic human skin stretched to grant us as listeners
a hyper-tactile sonic experience. On the Eastern soundtrack, sound
is physical, tangible, affective; we become the human drum that
resonates to its din.
Just
as Godzilla sounded his last pedestrian thumps in 1972 (prior
to his revival in 1984), kung fu movies from Hong Kong extended
this idea of the human drum. To the Western ear, kung fu movies
are rendered farcical due to the 'exaggerated' sound of their
hand slaps and fist cracks. It is well nigh we acknowledge that
kung fu soundtracks push bodily sounds in the mix partly due to
the genre's fixation on physical action, and partly because their
score and design are a transformation of the highly percussive
music which accompanies the acrobatics of traditional Chinese
opera.
In
Lo Wei's seminal FISTS OF FURY (1972), the score by Ku Chai Hui
exemplifies the Eastern dissolution between sound, music and noise.
As with many Hong Kong kung-fu action movies from the 70s, the
soundtrack deploys a parallel split between post-dubbed effects
(metal stings, wood cracks, flesh snaps, etc.) and scored percussive
music (drums, wood blocks, cymbals, etc.). A sonic symbiosis is
continually struck: the sound effects appear musical while the
score has the texture of actual sounds. Key dramatic fight sequences
in FISTS OF FURY become richly interpolated lines of sound and
music, recalling Edgar Varese's Hyperprism, Peking opera and a
furniture factory all at once. Rarely in the West do you get soundtracks
so heavily compacted and so defiantly opposed to clear distinctions
between the musical and the sonic.
The
end fight of FISTS OF FURY is a symphony of bodily effects played
by and upon the body of Bruce Lee - a tightly tuned and tautly
toned human drum. As Godzilla becomes a magnificent mallet that
strikes the skin of Tokyo with each step he takes, Bruce Lee orchestrates
every move with an aural spike, inflicting pain, deflecting harm
and directing energy from within his physical being. When Bruce
finally kills the Western kung-fu expert employed by the Japanese
in FISTS OF FURY, he thrusts the guy's head back and snaps his
neck with a chop on the Adam's apple. The music score's hissing
cymbals and atonal flute wails build in intensity as Bruce internally
conducts his chi in order to deliver the death blow. The score,
however is extended beyond the event, indicating that Bruce's
body still quakes with the excess chi he willed to execute his
opponent. Unlike Western film cues where sound is synced to visible
on screen action, sound in kung-fu movies closely follows the
psycho-physical energies a character masters.
Bruce
Lee directs this chi flow as performer and director in WAY OF
THE DRAGON (1973) by rigorously timing camera, editing and Joseph
Koo's musical score to the real-time mobilization of chi for the
major fight sequences. The set piece in the film is the gladiatorial
conflict staged in the Roman Colosseum between him and a young
Chuck Norris. This symphony of violence is developed across five
stages, each of which portrays a variation on how sound and music
collide in the act of physical conflict. Silence is first used
to allow us to hear the sounds their bodies make as they warm
up (cracking bones, slicing air, exhaling breath). Then timpani
booms symbolize the weight, mass and power of their bodies as
they stomp the ground (a la Godzilla and the Sumo) in preparation
for the attack. As their bodies become ravaged and stressed, a
low, swirling bed of atonal orchestral humming creates an aural
swamp within which their fatigued beings sink, their actions slower,
their perception blurred. Pain takes hold, and extreme dissonance
builds (almost like multiple cues in different keys have been
deliberately mixed together), high lighted by incongruous dub-style
echoes. And finally, a fender Rhodes put through a wah-wah sounds
their vocal anguish while fuzzed and echoed flutes engulf the
sound spectrum, leaving us with an image of Bruce digesting the
dead spirit of Chuck while cracking his back bone. It truly is
a wildly sonic scene that has no comparison in Western cinema.
Equally
devoid of Western sensibilities is the late Toru Takemitsu's radical
score for Masaki Kobayashi's KWAIDAN (1964). The film is far too
complex to be analytically serviced here, but note must be made
of Takemitsu's ruthless asynchronism and his flagrant disavowal
of musical signification. In the first story of this horror anthology
- THE RECONCILLIATION (AKA THE BLACK HAIR) - a man returns home
having left his wife years ago, sleeps with her ghost (she passed
away unbeknown to him), then wakes to find the house in a state
of total decay. He charges through the house, crashing through
the torn paper walls and rotting wood frames, and gradually withers
to a skeletal corpse. Initially framed by harsh shakuhachi screams,
the raspy breathiness devolves into a score primarily comprised
of, well, 'improvized wood creaks'. As his body dries up to a
skeleton, so does the score texturally contract to a fractal network
of wood splinters, bone fractures and gravel sprinklings. In a
bizarrely concocted imagining of Japanese 16th Century futurism,
the 'music' sounds like an instrument being destroyed before our
very ears. (Interestingly, Takemitsu derived some of his dissonant
textures by recording these type of sounds on the surface of a
tuned timpani.) Furthermore - and this is to the credit of the
close working relationships Takemitsu has enjoyed with Japan's
most famous directors - the main movement of this improvization
occurs with absolutely no synchronous sound. It takes a while
to realize that what one thought was out-of-synch sound is actually
the music. The effect is haunting, memorable and exact.
While
the minimalist shakuhachi tones evoke an identifiable 'Easterness',
their material presence on the soundtrack is really where their
'Easterness' resides. Just as Godzilla's Tokyo stomps are indistinct
- part clanging noise, part musical moment - the shakuhachi that
recurs throughout KWAIDAN sonically falls between the cracks of
sound, music and noise. Firstly, the shakuhachi is one of a number
of Japanese instruments that intentionally embraces noise: ie.
part of its performance mode is to bring an excess of breath pressure
on the reed to traumatize its otherwise pure tone. (Centuries
later, it took the modernist/industrial trappings of electrification
and effects boxes to allow noise in Western instrument design.)
Secondly, the reverberant recording of Takemitsu's score intensifies
the noise effect by inducing what at times sounds remarkably like
ring modulation distortion. At any one moment, the shakuhachi
shifts wildly from a conservative lilt to an alien spasm; from
an ancient wooden instrument to a post-industrial electronic weapon.
In KWAIDAN, this poetically synchs to a highly modernist film
reworking traditional folk tales.
The
bendable continuum between old world logic and new world chaos
is of course a trait strongly associated with many Asian cultures.
Nowhere is this more noticeable than in Katsuhiro Otomo's AKIRA
(1987). Otomo employed Shoji Yamashiro and his neo-traditionalist
'world music' ensemble Geino Yamashirogumi to provide a futuristic
fusion based on collapsing cultures and ethnicities into one another.
Obviously, the Eastern sensibility of history folding into itself
and echoing its past in the present facilitated such a concept
more readily then one could engineer in Western cinema. While
many parts of the score are distinctively multicultural and pan-Asian,
the opening sequence makes the strongest sonic statement. Massive
sonar quakes (yet again, Godzilla-Sumo nexus come to mind) appear
in the form of gigantic taiko drum explosions matched to the gargantuan
black crater at the heart of Neo-Tokyo. This time, the landscape
itself is the drum; its skin the very fabric of a technological
society; the impact no less than a nuclear explosion, downtown
at peak hour. Once again, sound effect (a past explosion) and
musical moment (the ancient taiko drum) fuse as a subsonic event,
recorded as a black, concave hole that chillingly forecasts an
apocalyptic future without resorting to cloying musical devices.
There
is much to be uncovered, experienced and realized in the beautiful
chaos of the Asian soundtrack. As with the genuine weirdness one
experiences in the urban aura of metropolitan centres like Tokyo
and Hong Kong, the aural tailoring of their kung-fu, samurai,
ghost and animation movies deliberately confuses the sound of
music with the noise of the soundtrack. It is if the Eastern soundtrack
is in fact the Western soundtrack turned inside out.
