Giovanni Antognozzi’s label ants (a new timeless sound) in Italy continues its fine line of releases, this CD with works by Hugh Davies (1943 – 2005) – together with David Monacchi’s Paesaggi di Libero Ascolto – being one of the finest electroacoustic in a while, arriving late December 2005, as the snow blows hard around my Scandinavian house in the northern mid-winter.

The liner notes for this CD were written by Hugh Davies and David Toop, each providing extensive texts, Toop’s finished after the untimely demise of Davies on day 1 of January 2005.

Hugh Davies has been around a long time in the realm of new music, beginning in the mid-60s. For the most part, as time went by, Hugh Davies concentrated his efforts in the fields of instrument invention and performances with these new instruments. His prime interest to begin with lay with live electronics, so his subsequent instrumental inventions were amplified, for the most part.

Since Davies mostly involved himself in live performances, he didn’t compose much tape music. This ants CD in fact contains most of Davies’ more substantial electroacoustic compositions, all but one of them never recorded commercially before this release.
This is all the more amazing – and rather sad – since the quality and ingenuity of these recordings are so sublime. It is also a bit surprising to me that all of these pieces are fairly recent, composed between 1976 and 2000, most of the them in the 1980s.

Davies has, by virtue of his instruments and his participation in various projects – like Gentle Fire and collaborations with Derek Bailey and Evan Parker as well as solo albums on FMP and Grob – had a great influence on contemporary music. After Cornelius Cardew’s jailbreak from the fortified Stockhausen castle, Davies took on the feat of being Karlheinz’s assistant for a couple of years in the 1960s, and he partook in Stockhausen recordings, such as Mikrophonie I and Sternklang. He also performed in Stockhausen’s Mixtur, and he was entrusted with writing new performance material for Momente. All in all, his collaboration with the Old Child from Kuerten lasted two years.

He returned to England in 1966, equipped with an array of makeshift electronic devices and many ideas that had sprung from his collaboration with the incredibly ingenious and relentlessly stubborn and indefatigable Karlheinz Stockhausen.
Stockhausen is in himself a great school for anyone seeking his trade in the arts, because he demonstrates with his example how far plain good old target orientation and persistency can carry. Just take a hard look at Stockhausen’s first electronic works from the early 1950s, when he spliced tape for months, without tiring! This Ardennes draft-horse strength of his continues till this day, which compositions like Engel-Prozessionen and Lichter-Wasser show.

Sometimes I believe that Stockhausen has more of stubbornness than talent. He simply keeps on much longer with his ideas than anyone else. Look at the Helicopter String Quartet, for example. Everyone else would just have left the dream as it was; a dream. Stockhausen, on waking up from this dream, began scoring it!
It is easy to be swayed into thinking that nothing is impossible, after a sojourn with Stockhausen, and I think this feeling followed Hugh Davies back to England, as he began his own work.

Four of the five works on this Davies CD were perceived in a theatrical context, bur Davies says that he always had in mind concert versions as well. Referring to Stockhausen’s Kontakte, Davies also says that he, of late, has scored some of his electronic compositions to be performed with a solo instrument, but that he is content with the pure electronic versions, as they appear on the Tapestries CD.

Hugh Davies is also known for his environmental concerns, reflected in his writings and sonic activities.

Another aspect of Hugh Davies, which is very important, is his independence. In late Sixties and in the Seventies, you were supposed to take sides, to join groups with causes – and if you didn’t you were looked upon with suspicion and disdain. Hugh Davies seems to be a Bob Dylan of art music, in the sense that he managed to stay out of all kinds of reducing commitments and sectarianism, while all the while retaining his personal independence and artistic integrity. This is not an easy feat. If you watch Bob Dylan on the No Direction Home dvd, you can see that he toured the world in the mid-60s, being booed at each and every appearance, because he went his own way, into the use of electric instruments, leaving his folk oriented writing for surrealist poetry. Yet he kept it up, simply expecting to be booed, and accepting that. Hugh Davies seems to have succeeded, in his way, to maintain his own course, despite the strong pull from all kinds of causes around him. Maybe this too was a quality that had been magnified and consolidated through Davies’ acquaintance with Stockhausen.

The fact is, anyway, that Davies crossed the superficial dumb-ass borders between art music, improvisation, composing etcetera, with ease and grace! This was not easy during those early years. In addition, Davies went into research, working two years at the GRM, Groupe de Recherches Musicales, in Paris, researching electronic music, publishing his results in the MIT Press. He founded the Electronic Music Studio at Goldsmiths College in London in 1967, at the invitation of the Head of Music there. This was the first studio of this kind in Great Britain.
He joined the group Gentle Fire in late 1968. This was one of the first musical groups devoted to the performance of electronic compositions. They played places like the first Glastonbury Festival and Shiraz, Iran.

Track 1 on Tapestries is Celeritas from 1987. To give you an idea of Davies’ musical methods I quote him from the booklet:

As I start the piece, fast, glary, gleaming beads of tones unfold, like a controlled firework of shrills and shreds. The impression is extremely pluralistic, as I listen along the immensely speedy figures, like letting my fingers lightly touch an uneven surface of turning brushes.

It’s like a mix of Chowning FM synthesis, Smalley Wind Chimes and Subotnick Silver Apples. It’s bubbling and bouncing and rippling, always with this shine about it, like solar reflections on the surface of a glacier brook in Lapland.

The second work is Natural Images from 1976; the earliest piece on the CD.
From the outset this was choreographic music, wherein Davies used sounds of acoustic and amplified natural materials. A later development of this work, for tape, includes transformations of concrete sounds. An example of source materials used is given by Davies: the squeaking of plastic breadbin slowed down in a whale song mimicry, doll squeaks made to sound like wolves, a train whistle sped up, and so forth, all to present a likeness but no an imitation of wildlife.

There is no question about the concreteness of this piece. It’s much rougher and more auditory abusive than the former piece. The initial heartbeat sounds in a winding gray zone of backdrop audio sets the pace, while small, churning, chewing bits and pieces pass by in grainy states.
Sudden, sparse, pointillist percussive events get somewhat denser along the way, but not dense. For a while there are no pitches; just points and dots of gray and black.
A circling motion is introduced, as from a bicycle wheel, the spokes being touched by some metallic object, but all very silently done.
I can see Davies in front of his microphones with all sorts of household paraphernalia.

Whistling, wheezing sounds are panned quickly across the soundspace, and suddenly things tighten up considerably. Sounds of friction are utilized to the utmost, but also kept at a withheld level, never exploding, but remaining as a low-level activity round the corners of reality, so to speak. Initially all sounds are close and very dry. . Some reverberation later on places the sounds in the distance, in a sudden space that wasn’t there before. For most of the duration of the piece, however, all sounds remain small, whether heard close-up or at a distance. The piece is more like a forlorn memory, or rather forlorn shreds of memories; a torn and weathered crowd of bent-away recollections, buzzing about the farthest corners of consciousness.
With a couple of minutes to go, though, the activity gets close and frantic, as the sounds of toy speedway bikes or something like that are panned madly between your ears at a loud volume!

Tapestries from 1982 and 1983 is next.
It is also as choreographic piece, but this tape is slightly reworked for this issue.
At the time, Davies had acquired new equipment, which he was trying out. At this time he had configured several of the pieces of equipment in such a way that he could basically play them like one instrument. The sounds were recorded in real time using the whole chain of studio machinery, like synthesizer, sequencer, digital delay, third-octave filter and so forth.

He says that “the final mixture resulted in a tapestry-like panorama whose elements unfold at different speeds like patterns of growth and decay that occur in nature”.

At first you seem to hear random bits of audio that shine through a dead silence at certain intervals, but soon the silences between the squeaky sounds dissolve, and you have several layers of different pitches ands speeds of the same base material. It becomes quite hysterical quite fast, and as the layers mix, the quality of the sounds and the listener’s way of perceiving them change. Davies builds and molds the sound fabric like a baker bread. Sounds that appeared as individual dots merge to form a pitch layer, and the opposite is also true. Many events grow and dissolve and dissolve and grow back, or reappear in a slightly or severely different shape. At times I get the sense of thick and cluttered shortwave static; other times of interstellar radiation or other forms of flushing energy through the ether.
The music goes from soothing qualities to piercing and back.
Many things happen. Everything changes. The sounds take on an enchanted aura. I feel the properties of voices deep inside the fabric of sounds, but there aren’t really any voices, just shapes of voices.
Thick clouds of sonic spheres approach like thin porcelain bubbles, bouncing into each other, emitting crackling and tinkling audio in the process.

Darn, the sounds at times get sharp as saw-blades at a sawmill… and then a carpet of the most beautiful modal clusters is laid out, leading straight into a garden of sonorous bliss! Mighty! Powerful! Persuading!

The fourth piece is From Trees And Rocks, from 2000 – the newest piece in this collection.
I think it’s suitable to quote Hugh Davies’ whole comment on this bit:

Indeed the sounds at the beginning are very identifiable as sawing sounds and chiseling sounds, close, crude, dry – without any treatment what so ever, except for the choice of soundspace placement. It’s little more than a sonic report from a work place at the outset.

Fending off the obvious temptation of electronic manipulations, Davies keeps presenting these sounds in the form of a report, only letting the sounds interact a little more than what you would experience real live. About half way through, though, I sense a slightly bent and phased atmosphere, with a little reverberation and some lightly applied aural or ambient tendencies.
As birds and other environmental issues are kept in the recording, the chiseling picks up on some more metallic, resounding, percussive events rising out of the handling of the rocks. It doesn’t come to more than that, though, and perhaps this recording might be put well to use at an installation, like it may have been used at the Cologne museum. I admire Davies’ discipline of keeping his manipulations off the recording. I don’t think I would have been able to refrain…

We’ve arrived at the final piece, the longest on the CD with its 17 minutes. It’s Vision from 1984 - 85, revised in 1987. I’ll let Davies speak about his piece:

The shiny, rippling and bubbling body of the music moves, shrugs twirls – rises like the hidden force of a tsunami, stopped in its torrential tracks by a halt of time itself – as starlight reflects from its bulging surface, bent like the back of an angry cat.
Murmuring unintelligibles resound deep inside the threatening force, like vicious intention born and nurtured.
The Fairlight is easily recognizable as you travel this electronic music. The sounds are unusually palpable, organic, for an early electronic instrument.
The rippling beauty on the surface of this meandering force cannot hide the dark, relentless powers within – but at a certain stage the beauty and the fright dissolves into a dream of alien shores on alien planets, at distances from Earth which are so immense that they become totally meaningless.

This music – truly and purely electronic – comes across in over-powering beauty of a venomous kind, addicting you to its soundworld.

David Toop writes in his comprehensive booklet essay the following, which I think is very important concerning the composer, musician and man Hugh Davies: