Ryuichi Sakamoto 1952-2023

The year was 2010, the setting a restored movie theatre converted for live performance. The event was a solo concert by composer Ryuichi Sakamoto.

Against a backdrop of pre-recorded material (including an under-the-ice stream of water recorded from a glacier in Greenland), Sakamoto assumed his position on one of two grand pianos and played what can only be called “a duet with silence.”

At one particularly quiet point during the concert, the wail of a siren could be heard from the fire house across the street from the theater.

It was not unlike how Alan Licht once described a 1952 piano piece by John Cage protégé Christian Wolff, in which the sounds of traffic noise outside Wolff’s open window were louder than the notes he played.

A thin red line was projected on the screen above the stage, slowly moving from left to right as the sound of the fire trucks faded into the distance.

For a brief moment, everyone in the room occupied the same acousmatic field, a happenstance encounter encompassing both creator and audience.

A faint smile on Sakamoto’s face seemed to indicate that the siren was not a distraction, but rather a delightful accident analogous to the shattered glass visible in Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even.

The result was a beautifully unintended yet compelling coincidence, shared by all who participated in its magical serendipity.

It made for the most entrancing moment in the evening teeming with entrancing moments: a collectively satisfying experience encompassing light, sound, space and time.

Junto Project 0550: Abrupt Probability [repost]

Someone suggested that Suss Müsik repost our contributions to the weekly Disquiet Junto projects, because they enjoy reading the explanations of the tracks. While you’re reading the original post, make sure you check out the other contributors’ works as well.

There was an incident at Suss Müsik headquarters this past week. During the overnight hours, a bird appeared to have met its abrupt demise as the result of an encounter with another animal—a cat or raccoon, perhaps. Nature is cruel and often mysterious. “[It is] in the womb of nature,” wrote the artist Paul Klee, “at the source of creation, where the secret key to all lies guarded.”

Dunno about that … but whatever took place, Suss Müsik’s porch was the stage for an ornithological unvermittelt featuring a random arrangement of blood, feathers, and at least one disembodied talon. Darwin might have described the scene as one species demonstrating “injurious variations” over another; in other words, natural selection at work. For Suss Müsik, it was an unexpected opportunity to test the garden hose’s pressure-jet feature.

(Apologies to squeamish readers. There’s no way to describe this creative process without a few gory details).

For this week’s project, Suss Müsik began with a photograph of the debris described above. The image was rendered for high-contrast in order to isolate the lines of the porch floor and placement of organic matter. The blood splatters comprised a basic three-part chord structure. Ten feather clumps were divided into two sets of five; one was used to design an arpeggio for piano, the other as a motif for grain synth and second piano using particle refactoring.

The piece is titled Tatort, which translates to “crime scene” in German. It was recorded quickly to 8-track in July 2022. The bird deserved a better epitaph.

porch with feathers and blood

highlight of feathers and blood

feathers and blood with numbers

Ex Post Facto

Suss Müsik is readying a new release, a 34-minute album of reworked (and some previously released) material entitled Ex Post Facto. Here’s the cover:

Most of the tracks are decidedly kept short, between two and four minutes each. One track approaches the eight-minute mark, but for the most part the intention was to make the point and evacuate. The pieces are performed on fake strings, piano, mallet percussion, some fake woodwinds, and (on one track) a table saw.

The album is in the mixing/mastering stage and should see formal release in May 2021.

Update: Ex Post Facto has been released. Give it a listen and read the liner notes.

Junto Project 0326: Wave Turntable

Someone suggested that Suss Müsik repost our contributions to the weekly Disquiet Junto projects, because they enjoy reading the explanations of the tracks. While you’re reading the original post, make sure you check out the other contributors’ works as well.

As mentioned in Disquiet Junto 0325, Suss Müsik loves the sound of surface dust on a vinyl record. We are also fans of composer Danny Clay, whose work explores territory between the guardrails of chance and curiosity, often finding musical significance in random pairings.

Perhaps Clay’s most inspiring works are his collaborations with elementary school students. In his piece 27 Overtures [after Ludwig van Beethoven], a group of 3rd graders were asked to draw graphic scores in response to hearing Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge. The “scores” were then arranged and performed by a string quartet. Suss Müsik was particularly struck by one student’s interpretation: a boxed sequence of arrows on the scoresheet pointing edge-to-center.

For another Clay piece, elementary school students from Zion Lutheran School each drew and recorded their own graphical “note.” One student wrote the words “low long soft” to accompany her/his drawing, perhaps as a reminder on how the “note” should be performed. Wonderful stuff.

Jon Fischer’s work resides in a similar intersection: the relationship between ambiguity and rigidity, permanence and decay. Tricky Triangle is a series of printed works that portray the passage of time as “one of the least understood aspects of human existence.” Turn Table Drawings does this concept one better, constricting pen-to-paper actions to the rotations of a record player. Lines become loops, loops become forms, forms become evidence.

For this weird piece by Suss Müsik, surface noise on a turntable was broken into four fragments and looped through a Moog low-pass filter. Six sine waves in various tones were then played edge-to-center on a theremin emulator using a self-imposed “low long soft” rule: keep it low, keep it long, keep it soft. These swim lanes converge with a deepening sine wave before being released into random artifacts.

The title is Fischerclay. The image is an imprint of one student’s “score” overlaid onto an excerpt from Turn Table Drawings.

Suss Müsik thanks Mr. Clay, Mr. Fischer and the McEvoy Foundation for the Arts for allowing their creative work to be interpreted for collaboration.

Junto Project 0323: Music for Meditation

Someone suggested that Suss Müsik repost our contributions to the weekly Disquiet Junto projects, because they enjoy reading the explanations of the tracks. While you’re reading the original post, make sure you check out the other contributors’ works as well.

“Write a poem imagining your conception,” recommends Andrei Codrescu in an essay titled Exercises for Poets. “Use the breath measures that might have been those of your conceivers … [then] write a poem about your birth. The poem itself should be concerned mainly with the journey from the moist darkness of the womb through the birth canal into the light of the world.”

Suss Müsik declines to envision such grotesque imagery, thank you very much. That being said, effective meditation is understood to be something like returning to a womblike state. One concentrates solely on breathing in order to achieve a deep form of relaxation, helping to clear the mind from the cognitive detritus that collects day-to-day.

For this lengthy piece, Suss Müsik began with a simple organ riff that was played through a Moog MF-102 ring modulator. The sound of breathing was sampled and distressed to match the timbre of metallic percussion. You might hear voices and flutes in there as well. A chime enters at the 1-minute mark and repeats just before the final ascension back to consciousness.

The piece is titled Lůno, named after the Czech word for “womb” and dedicated to little Zachary Isaac (who was born this week to good friends of Suss Müsik). The image is magnified cotton.

Junto Project 0291: Make Music That Sounds Like a Lantern [repost]

Someone suggested that Suss Müsik repost our contributions to the weekly Disquiet Junto projects, because they enjoy reading the explanations of the tracks. While you’re reading the original post, make sure you check out the other contributors’ works as well.

Synesthesia is a condition where one’s senses are simultaneously rewired in the brain, mingling how a person experiences colors, shapes, sounds and flavors. Although it sounds pretty weird, it’s not altogether uncommon; about 1 in 2000 are estimated to have synesthesia. Among those affected are such well-known individuals as Vasily Kandinsky, Franz Liszt, Richard Phillips Feynman and Mary J. Blige.

No two people experience synesthesia the same way. One person may see the color blue whenever the number three is mentioned; another imagines a city skyline when they taste blackberries, or they feel a tickle on their ankle at the sound of a harpsichord.

(Suss Müsik envisions the mischief one could have at the expense of a friend with synesthesia. Would they be forced to hear “Me and You and a Dog Named Boo” every time we hold up a yellow card? Would they taste cod oil whenever we yell the word “tablecloth!” You probably do not want to be Suss Müsik’s friend).

For this short piece, we took an approach somewhere between those used by GL Smyth and the bell mechanical. We considered the filtering of sound the way a paper lantern diffuses light: thinly veiled yet repetitious, fragile yet warmly inviting. We sampled the subtle “zzzt” of an electrical switch and ran it through a Scream tape emulator at two simultaneous frequencies.

This fuzzy, breathy loop became the bed for a percussive rhythm we tapped on paper with chopsticks. The final touches were added using heavily diffused piano, plucked/bowed electric guitar, real/fake violins, and an EWI device playing various notes of the E-flat triad from three sampled tones.

In related news: Disquiet Junto participants may be interested in reading about a synesthetic installation that took place in Krakow three years ago, where pieces of music were transformed into fragrance and visuals.

The image is a magnesium flash bulb used by photographers in the 1940’s, which would emit a pungent, metallic odor when activated.