Tag: instrumental

Paul Horn – Inside The Great Pyramid, 1976

I’ve been hesitant to share this record because I can’t tell if everyone already knows it—it seems a bit dadcore, and I think it sold a bajillion copies—but it’s something I keep reaching for when fall turns to winter, so maybe y’all will enjoy it. I mentioned Paul Horn in my post about Pauline Oliveros the other week, and have been appreciating it even more in light of her recent passing.

Paul Horn was a legendary jazz flautist, saxophonist, and composer, and considered to be a new age pioneer. Inside The Great Pyramid was part of his “inside” series, in which he recorded site-specific music in places of spiritual significance, oftentimes making him the first person to record music in those locations. In addition to sneaking a tape recorder into the Taj Mahal, he was the first westerner to be granted permission to perform in the Potala Palace in Lhasa, Tibet, considered to be the spiritual nexus of Tibetan Buddhism. This was the first recording made in the Great Pyramid of Giza, and I think that most or all of it was recorded in the King’s Chamber right at the heart of the pyramid. The story goes that Paul began by hitting the large granite sarcophagus in the center of the room with the flat of his hand, which emits a resonant tone of 438Hz, slightly lower than an A. (You can hear this in the opening track previewed below.) Horn tuned his flute to that and improvised from there.

As you might expect, the natural reverb and room tone is arguably the most interesting part of the record. Horn is an incredible flautist, and he vocalizes a bit too, but the weight and air of the pyramid steal though show, especially given that the pyramid’s strong resonance was a deliberate feature of its architecture.

Raul Lovisoni & Francesco Messina – Prati Bagnati Del Monte Analogo, 1979

Such a special record. Split between Raul Lovisoni, whose work I don’t know too much about, and Francesco Messina (there’s a track from his very strange and very good Medio Occidentale on this mix). The A-side is a 24 minute long synthesizer bath, with swaths of meandering piano on top (there’s definitely something harp-like happening too, though it’s not listed in the credits). It sounds like a hot spring in the wintertime, with synth pads acting as clouds of rising steam. The B side is two ~10 minute tracks by Lovisoni, both very different from the A-side and from each other. “Hula Om” feels markedly more “indoors” than Messina’s cosmic title track. It’s just a repeating harp motif, though at a few points you can hear bird sounds filtering through a window, something being dropped in the next room, clothing shifting around, and the creak of somebody’s knees, all of which feel fitting given the raw and warm spatial textures that bring three seemingly disparate tracks together. The closer, “Amon Ra,” also a Lovisoni composition, is mostly clear, ringing overtones courtesy of a crystallophone, with some sparse patches of vocal chanting. The embrace of truthful, unedited sound, both across the synthetic landscape of the A-side and the acoustic sparsity of the B-side, makes Prati Bagnati del Monte Analogo feel like a diary or a photo album: these are bare bones, beautiful songs as they happened, where they happened, and that’s more than enough.

Pandit Ram Narayan – L’Inde Du Nord: L’art Du Sarangi, 1971

Another favorite from the Ocora catalogue. Pandit Ram Narayan was the first internationally successful sarangi player, credited as responsible for the introduction of the sarangi as a solo concert instrument in Hindustani classical music. He’s also responsible for developing simplified sarangi fingering techniques, and elements of his tone and inflection have been widely mimicked and adapted by subsequent generations of sarangi players. There’s lengthier information about the ways in which he pushed the boundaries of both the instrument and the genre here.

The short version of the story is that this record is incredibly beautiful, and serves as a plain reminder of why the sarangi was traditionally treated as a filler instrument during solo vocal performances, meant to imitate the vocals. Ram Narayan’s sarangi is so expressive that it feels human: crying, lilting, taking melismatic nosedives and acrobatic leaps. It’s piercing but never shrill. It’s something you should hear before you die.

Note: I spent awhile wavering between sharing the original recording, which has some room tone, vinyl pops, and a sound that is both richer and muddier; and the remastered version, which is cleaned up and has a sound that is clearer but thinner. I settled on the original, but if anyone feels strongly about hearing the remastered version (which includes an additional râga), let me know and I’ll post it.

Gail Laughton – Harps of the Ancient Temples, 1969

You might already know Gail Laughton from the inclusion of “Pompeii 76 A.D.” in the canonical I Am The Center compilation, or from the same track’s inclusion in the Blade Runner score. Alternately, if you’re big on 1940’s rom-com, you may have heard Laughton’s harp recording pantomimed by Cary Grant in The Bishop’s Wife—Laughton also instructed Grant in harp-syncing and apparently served as a body double for some close-up shots. Though Laughton worked in Hollywood and played on many cartoon and film soundtracks—John Wayne, Looney Tunes, etc.—Harps of the Ancient Temple was his only solo release, and a radical conceptual departure from his typical work.

Harps uses ancient sacred rituals, each catalogued by year and location, as jumping-off points for his neo-classical and heavily impressionist-influenced interpretations. “Japan 375 A.D.,” for example, seems to mimic a koto played in a Japanese pentatonic scale. Much of the record is exactly as pillowy and perfumey as you might hope for from a harp record that’s regularly slung around by new age devotees. Still, many tracks lean into dissonance and spin out ominously, building to what feels like like an unobstructed fall down a very long spiral staircase in the closing track, “Atlantis 21,000 B.C.” Lots going on here, but happily this works well for both active and passive listening. Fans of Joel Andrews will appreciate this, and similarly it’s cloaked in a dense hiss of room tone.

Osamu Shoji – Night Flight, 1979

Album artwork says it all. Exotica-tinged, phaser-heavy Japanese library music, with a whole lot of new age-inspired arpeggiation and sci-fi synth pads. All credits go to the very prolific Shoji, with a note that the Synthesizer “Space-Sizer 360” was invented and supplied by Noriyasu Fukuda. I can’t find anything about the synth or its inventor anywhere. Shoji put out a cool 39 records between 1971 and 1987, including what appears to be an entire album of Bee Gees covers–does anyone have this? I need it. Shoji also makes an appearance on our OMG Japan mix. For fans of Hiroshi Sato, Tomita, Joël Fajerman.

Pauline Oliveros, Stuart Dempster & Panaiotis – Deep Listening, 1989

Iconic improvisational collaboration by a trio also known as the Deep Listening Band–a play on words, as this album was recorded 14 feet underground in the disused Dan Harpole Cistern in Port Townsend, Washington. The cistern, originally built to hold water for fire-fighting, was drained in the 50s, leaving a space more than 200 feet in diameter with a reverberation time of 45 seconds. The trio brought a trombone, didgeridoo, accordion, garden hose, pipe, conch shell, and their voices, and allowed their sounds to stretch out slowly, like sonar, as if nodding to the chamber’s original two million gallon contents. The resulting sounds lose touch with their origins, becoming barely recognizable, what the shifting of tectonic plates or the millenia-long carving of water channels might sound like if they were rendered into music and hit with some heavy reverb. That otherworldly (or perhaps subworldly) quality brings to mind artists for whom space is integral to the sound–David Hykes, Yasuaki Shimizu, Paul Horn (reminder to self to post Paul Horn), and yet Deep Listening is spacious enough to expand into something cosmic.

Thanks to John Schaefer’s New Sounds, which brought me to Stuart Dempster’s (also excellent) In The Great Abbey of Clement VI a few years ago, and is also indirectly what brought me to the work of Pauline Oliveros, who’s become a personal hero.

Muslimgauze – Zul’m, 1992

Hard to know where to start. Muslimgauze was the moniker of UK musician Bryn Jones, who released over 90 albums in his short life (he died suddenly at 37 from a rare blood infection). As more of his recordings are still being unearthed posthumously, his discography is currently approaching 200 releases. The project originated with Jones’s support for Palestine in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as its nexus, but eventually expanded to encompass his sympathy for other conflict-ridden Muslim countries, and his belief that Western interests in natural resources and political gain were at the root of many of these conflicts.

He lived with his parents until his death, but was effectively living in his studio most of the time, often churning out an album a week for months on end. He was so obsessive about his music-making (and showed no regard for how little interest it generated during his lifetime) that he often said he didn’t have time to listen to anyone else’s music–yet he pulled from so many genres in such a prescient way that he must have been some kind of lightning rod for musical synthesis. His work incorporates elements of dub, techno, drum and bass, industrial, ambient, and traditional percussion borrowed from dozens of ethnicities. Most (and I say most lightly, as I’ve barely scratched the surface) of his music is built around that percussion–drum kits, drum machines, breakbeats, ethnic hand percussion, pots and pans–and tape loops, which he preferred over computers and samplers despite their much more laborious process.

Zul’m is on the more accessible side of what I’ve heard of Muslimgauze, and it neatly encapsulates much of Jones’s aesthetic. It moves slowly and decisively, building up to frothy climaxes that occasionally feel joyful in spite of the oppressive, clanking weight of the whole thing. Hypnotic stretches of percussion, looping, and vocal samples (in both Hindi and Arabic on this release). I think this was around the time that Jones was beginning to use more spaced out, expansive production, and you can hear that dubby quality working to terrific effect. Zul’m is dedicated to “the unknown Palestinians buried in mass graves in Al-Riqqa cemetary, Kuwait city.” Today we might also dedicate it today to the civilians of Aleppo, both the living and the dead.

Roedelius – Wenn Der Südwind Weht, 1981

Hard to pick a favorite release from Hans-Joachim Roedelius, who’s contributed to 92 different releases, according to Discogs. Though most famous for co-founding Cluster and Harmonia, he’s been even more prolific as a solo artist. Wenn der Südwind Weht (“When the South Wind Blows”) was his seventh solo release, though he followed it up with a casual 35 more full-lengths, most of which I still haven’t heard. Of his earlier releases, this is both my favorite and the most exemplary of signature Roedelius. The most remarkable moments are when synthesizer acts as a vessel for his pastoral sensibility, with unabashedly sentimental lines of synthetic oboe, clarinet, organ, and something theremin-like sitting on top of rolling piano chord pulses muffled in golden-warm reverb. The title track, “Veilchenwurzeln,” and “Mein Freund Farouk” are the best instances of this kind of classical miniaturism–they’re what make this record feel like a favorite sweater–but in very German tradition, a handful of the other tracks meander into more shivery, drawn-out synth meditations (and that’s certainly a good thing). Ideal rainy day music.

Yutaka Hirose – Soundscape 2: Nova, 1986

One of three records funded and released by Misawa Home Corporation for use in their prefabricated houses between 1986 and 1988. (The other two releases are both by Hiroshi Yoshimura; I’ve posted my favorite of the two here.) As with some of the other Japanese minimal records I’ve shared, Nova is an unabashed embrace of, as Spencer of Rootblog phrased it, “the illusion of nature in a hyper-urban environment.” Judicious use of water, insect, and bird field recordings, sparse bells, piano, and synth. Somehow just as evocative of an idealized, imagined natural world as it is of the synthetic, heavily manicured interiors that seek, roundaboutly, to reference nature. Regardless of where this puts you, it’s very good.

Michael Shrieve with Kevin Shrieve & Klaus Schulze – Transfer Station Blue, 1984

Classic. Michael Shrieve is a drummer who was one of the founding members of the original Santana band and is featured on their first eight records. I haven’t spent enough time with his other work to have a sense for it, but Klaus Schulze feels like the dominant force behind Transfer Station Blue–it sounds squarely like guitary Berlin school, using Shrieve’s insistent percussion as a vessel with which to drive Schulze’s pulsing, icy synth work (as well as guitar from Kevin Shrieve, who may or may not be Michael’s brother). The two long tracks (“Communique – ‘Approach Spiral'” and the title track) are the centerpieces, both using long, tense build-ups and ominous arpeggiations to propel to a particularly anthemic release on the title track. The two shorter tracks, “Nucleotide” and “View From the Window,” explore more kosmische and new age territory, though they’re still plenty sinister. Good for fans of Double Fantasy (guys, that record is so good, go listen to it), or of anything slick and shivery and German.