Stephen Gard:
carriers



Stephen Gard – Carriers
Gard Edition. Duration: 40:10

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01. gabble [00.05] 02. scatter [02.28] 03. newfoundlandS [02.21] 04. heterodialectic [03.54] 05. BFO [03.31] 06. NRV [06.55] 07. stammer [05.30] 08. babel [14.17] 09. babble [00.09]

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Stephen Gard on Carriers:

Now if that doesn’t raise your interest, nothing will! Gard is highly articulate about his sonic art, approaching the sounds of the ether in a receiving attitude of piety; nothing less!
The comments above about the Babel of voices rising out of this intelligent (not wise, except in the rare case) species, has me think about the book and movie On the Beach, dealing with the silence after a nuclear catharsis. I recall those submariners who were the only survivors, listening to automated broadcasts that kept transmitting messages from a humanity that was already dead en masse, gone lost and stray in a crack of time.

Yeah, and the star sonorities, making you feel both lonely and jubilant, lost in this flood of starshine; this constant surge of energy through the Cosmos.

Track 2: scatter

Gard:

Well, the description given is accurate, but it doesn’t give you any idea about the atmospheres, the worlds rolling past beneath you – or through you – as you let these sparks and specks shoot through your allotted durations of viability.

These kinds of static sounds always bring me on home to my childhood in the countryside of Sweden, where I had my own room in a house which otherwise was used just for storage. My room was on the second floor of this old wooden building, and I used to sit there listening to AM and shortwave, always so fascinated by the blurred, almost hidden and utterly mysterious messages from around this sphere, floating in unfathomable space… I’ve really tried to retain that enthusiastic and deep sense of wonder that carried me through those early years, and I think I’ve succeeded decently. This CD sure livens up the memories of the days when I began to grasp the magnitude of the mystery of world and life. Ah, those smells of valves and soldering irons! I was even DX-ing for a while, and got pen pals from all over the globe as soon as I started learning English. Talk about being motivated!!!

Stephen Gard composes these found sounds of the ether in his own manner, as the composer that he is. This can be done any old way, but I have nothing against Gard’s way. You name it; we like it!

Track 3: newfoundlandS

Gard:

A massive grainstorm takes hold of your being, or perhaps innumerable dry peas being unloaded off of a truck on a farm – or it’s simply the background hiss of the airwaves, the shortwave static brought forth, claiming it’s musicality, its sonorous identity in the world of pretty things?

More distinct, individual attempts at graystone audio appear in groups of about three, panned across the hemisphere, shooting up like Woody Woodpecker here and there, in and out of view.
Later on this gray and black sonicity takes on some modal, tonal embellishments, evolving into – or letting through – sounds with pitch and color… and then it stops. Nice!

Track 4: heterodialctic

Gard:

As this begins I feel referred to early or semi-early electronic music – even to Swedish landmark sonic investigator Rune Lindblad – signals flashing, veering off hither and thither like space probe recordings of alien magnetospheres, on a backdrop of background radiation.
On distant horizons gravel-rake audio scratch and scrape jagged forests, and I feel a temporal mix too, like decades, centuries, millennia and eons are conjured up on the outskirts of audibility and sketched right within earshot, within mindshot.

The piece is imaginative, evoking all kinds of destinies from the periphery of the possible, right from the brink of the horizon of events. Out of this massive tension bright spurs of elastic, high-pitch chirps escape, through cracks and fissures in an otherwise relentless curvature of cosmic laws – but I think the global community of theoretical physicists pours quantum mechanics and string theories into the flow of thoughtforms, so one never knows…

On a more down-to-earth (sic!) level I notice that this piece resembles recordings of the naturally occurring electromagnetic (radio) signals emanating from lightning storms, aurora (The Northern and Southern Lights), made by Stephen P. McGreevy.

Track 5: BFO

Gard:

Right off I get inter-planetary associations, since I’ve just listened to the sounds recorded by the European Space Agency’s Huygen probe descending through the atmosphere of Saturn moon Titan; a softly padded, muffled sound, as if you passed a microphone though a bale of wadding. The sound is gray as gray can be, like mist, like drizzle on your window in November (if you live in the Northern Hemisphere) – but it is also structured in a way that mist isn’t. A vibration, a wobbly rhythm, travels through the mist, at first rather slow, then faster… and then, after a while, so fast that it clicks over into pitch and rumbles along like an echo of a truck heard through an adjacent back alley with brick walls and garbage containers.
Later the pitch takes on the characteristics of a Theremin or a couple of Theremins, in an upward glissando that takes you up the frequencies until they ascend above the limits of hearing.

Track 6: NRV

Gard:

A grainy, short message – right, left and center - wrapped in thorns and spider-webs; a cocoon of sorts, turning like a forlorn Aniara spaceship, forever adrift in the void – and then a more musical gesture, often heard on the shortwave band – and suddenly I realize why it feels so familiar: I’ve made a composition myself years ago with this exact sound – so it must be going on and on, unless Stephen Gard also recorded it years ago! Strange to feel comfortably at home in these alien soundscapes…

The piece evolves into sturdy, welding type machine hall smokestacks, echoes of deep space transmissions flickering like huge shadows of welders up the walls of steelwork brick walls, disappearing in the dust and smoke up above the overhead traveling cranes, hoisting mighty loads of sheet metal in factory halls kilometers long.

Towards the end, though, circumstances get gentle, soothingly venomous, as tinkling spheres of dreamscape audio sail weightlessly in benign motions on the spur of the moment, steered by the shifting thought-pressures of mind… along the graphs amply described by obliging mindologists…

Track 7: stammer

Gard:

Yes, here I get a feeling, first, of machine gun fire or Stalin organs, coughing away in the 1940s, but soon other aspects are included, like descending and rippling trajectories of embellished audio; diamond-shaped, tight-knit structures falling through the endlessness of endlessness, reflecting light and mind in innumerable degrees of clarity or obscurity, from the likeness of crumpling paper to the harsh influx of solar flare emissions and the resulting aurora borealis, and then back to the World War One trenches, machine guns and choirs of alien birds rising like a dark cloud out over the sea… until, after a while, you only hear some isolated, automated On The Beach transmissions from a post-war wasteland of death and radiation…

The intensity of these sounds and the structural aspect of them, make me think, again, of pioneer Rune Lindblad, but also of sound and poetry guru Åke Hodell – both Swedes, now reborn and probably oblivious of their former agendas.

This is radio static rock n’ roll; short wave funk, at times sitting back in an anesthesia of candy bar colored bands of gluey, sweet piece of mind.

Track 8: babel

Gard:

This is by far the longest piece on the CD, and it begins with station calls from all over the globe, in an almost brutal sense of humanity layering the surface, arguing their causes madly, in all their tongues – and I vividly recall - which I touched upon earlier - how I used to sit at my radio set at the age of 10 turning the short wave lever, enjoying this sense of the WORLD, of LIFE, of HISTORY and GEOGRAPHY and SCIENCE, at a farm in the countryside of Sweden.

Stephen Gard has mixed these worldwide transmissions in a splendid manner, at times applying a tiny bit of manipulation, but mostly just working with placement of sound and the sequence of the sounds.

At times he achieves tremendous effect by very simple means. At one instance he cuts up the sentence “one true living god” from a religious transmission, just separating the words a tiny bit, so that the words are hammered with rhythmic expressiveness: “ONE! --- TRUE! --- LIVING! --- GOD!”, and he repeats this mantra wise, reaching an astonishing effect indeed!

This is probably, for me, the most intriguing place on this CD, majestically precipitated through the bewildering bamboo grove of human intentions. The fastidious and discriminating edge of Gard’s method of working these sounds elevates the experience considerably. It’s simply wonderful; an almost religious experience; certainly philosophical and very, very emotional!

A strange coincidence is that I happen to be downloading a number of mpeg files about a piece by Terry Riley and the Kronos Quartet using space sounds (whistlers, dawn choruses etcetera) recorded by space probes, for example Voyager I and II from the University of Iowa as I’m writing this text on the Stephen Gard CD!

Terry Riley appears in these mpeg movies explaining about the piece – Sun Rings – and how he got involved in the process of composing it, and he also talks about visiting Kennedy Space Center during a launch of one of the space shuttles, and this too is coincidental, since when I’m writing, the space shuttle Discovery is up there, docked with the ISS (the International Space Station), estimating the eventual damage caused to the shuttle on lift-off a few days ago.

Also, this piece with its almost minimalist approach; these repetitious and slightly altered layers of the persuasive, radio-call-like sentence “ONE! --- TRUE! --- LIVING! --- GOD!”, of course, to the knowledgeable music lover, points back to Terry Riley, his early minimalist works and also his spiritual awareness. It seems so many things come together in this my moment of listening to Stephen Gard and writing this, and I'm also, these days, profusely occupied with writings about the poetry and sound art of Professor Jesse Glass in Tokyo! I span the globe in the writings and dealings of these days; Riley and Kronos in Iowa and California, Stephen Gard in Australia and Jesse Glass in Japan – myself in Sweden… so it all comes magically together in a world-spanning event! I suddenly also recall that Terry Riley talked about this new work with space sounds when I last met him in Stockholm.

None of this today would have happened, either, had I not had a serious quarrel with Stockhausen about copyright (I would have been at his courses in Germany hade he not decided he wanted to rob me of my rights to my photographs!), so sometimes you wonder how things really happen. Leaning, as I am, towards Tibetan Buddhism, I’m grateful for what comes my way, though, because karma-wise, it all evens out, it all has it’s causes, and it’s impossible in this moment to tell whether what happens to you is good or bad for you, i.e. if it's reflecting the maturation of good or bad karma, so I’m very, very optimistic either way!

I’m really enthusiastic! This piece ought to be widely spread!

And I tell you, when sudden fragments of Swedish appear, I almost jump! Even this tiny, Swedish-speaking population belongs in the Family of Man!