Sphinx

I’ve just published a piece in Epoiesen, the fantastic online journal for creative engagements with history and archaeology, on the Melian Dilemma game and some of the thinking behind it. I’ve been meaning to get round to this for ages – and I’ve been given extra reason to regret not getting my act together sooner, as my fate now is to be completely overshadowed by Assemblage Theory, the brilliant contribution by Andrew Reinhard, published a few days earlier, on his latest musical experiments: exploring different conceptions of the idea of ‘assemblage’ by producing new songs using ‘found sounds’. Go read, go listen. If this piece doesn’t single-handedly exemplify why a journal of wacky historical creativity is an absolute necessity, you are beyond saving.

A major part of the raison d’etre of such an enterprise is of course to provoke a reaction – any reaction.Once I’d got over the ‘awe’ phase, I found that the discussion raised lots of questions in my mind that the music doesn’t really answer. Is the creator playing the role of time and/or other impersonal forces, selecting some sounds for preservation from the total array and thus creating the assemblage, or the role of the archaeologist, interpreting the assemblage and turning it into a more structured form imbued with meaning? The music itself raises questions too; if this is an archaeological assemblage, isn’t it a bit…coherent?

Maybe it’s just because I’m not such a pop traditionalist, but like a bit of dissonance, noise and unexpected silence in my music. In my mind, archaeological music should be more like the Schwarzwaldfahrt album recorded by Peter Brötzmann and Han Bennink, in which those giants of European free jazz wandered round the Black Forest with a tape machine, recording themselves duetting with birdsong and using trees, rocks and streams as percussion instruments. We need music that’s actually made using fragments of Dressel 4 amphorae, rather than just echoing the process of putting the fragments back together, or which records the soundscape of an excavation, including the work songs of the toiling students.

But one really great thing about Andrew’s article is that he’s made available the sound files he used for one of his tracks, so that anyone can muck about with them. I’ve spent a happy hour and a half today doing just that (it does help that I’m quite familiar with Audacity, the free editing software). My aim was to produce two tracks. The first, Fables of the Reconstruction, is a sort of tone poem, echoing Charles Mingus’ classic Pithecanthropus Erectus, which depicts the evolution, growing superiority complex, and resultant decline of humanity. The track is intended as a representation of an archaeological interpretation of a site, region or culture in terms of its development and destruction. It offers a rather obvious musical narrative, gradually building complexity up to a point of crisis; it is deliberately coherent, and deliberately quite predictable (at least by my rather random standards and given the time constraints).

https://www.dropbox.com/s/cwkyv0pftcuj4qz/fables.mp3?dl=0

I really need to have another go at this piece. However, it is really only a means to an end: the real goal is to partially destroy it – deleting substantial sections, distorting others, moving some bits around and out of sync; drawing inspiration from ‘glitch’ music – in order to create a track that represents the ambiguous and fragmentary record that lies behind the processed sounds of Fables… The two (so far) versions of Gaps in the (Material) Record are intended to be much more ambiguous pieces, hinting at structures and themes rather than developing them; of course you can see their relationship to Fables… – but the idea is that they could have been interpreted quite differently, to produce quite different reconstructions.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/jvi39yafdrwnzin/gaps1.mp3?dl=0

https://www.dropbox.com/s/r8jacd69d2gx4cr/gaps2.mp3?dl=0

Put another way: the ‘assemblage’ out of which both Andrew and I created our original tracks is one that has already been sorted into neatly organised compartments (musical fragments in the same key and tempo, that can be duplicated and combined). These tracks represent the earlier stage, before the different components have been excavated from their context and immediate relationship to one another…

Bottom line: this is FUN.