Alex Carpenter;
Studies In Dynamic Photography
Music of Transparent Means – Studies In Dynamic Photography
Alex Carpenter [music & photography] – Music of Transparent means [music performance]
Vanished Records DVD VAN20504. Duration: 44:50
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01. Emerging Like An Infant From the House of Truth [12:20]
02. Second Precensing [10:05]
03. Burial Music [5:54]
04. Deep Golden Flourish (excerpt) [16:30]
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Track 1: Emerging Like An Infant From the House of Truth.
This is what I wrote immediately on hearing Emerging Like An Infant From the House of Truth for the first time, from the CD Selected Live Recordings:
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Emerging Like an Infant From the House of Truth (12:20)
Alex Carpenter [keyboards, bowed guitar] – Luke Harrald [bowed guitar] – Zoë Barry [amplified cello]
Recorded at Nexus Cabaret Space, Adelaide, 11th September 2003.
A rough build-up (build-down…) of scorching soot tones, as if run through an old-time fuzz-box that has survived arson, adds timbre after gray timbre in this densifying matter-music, raw and ghastly, like a crowd of hoarse foghorns in a poem by Alvin Curran!
Yet, another vision out of these sounds is a huddling group of high-voltage transformer stations, whispering in amperes and volts about their battle strategies, like American football players before kick-off.
Emerging Like an Infant From the House of Truth is granular synthesized growls of black bears and ton after ton of gravel being unloaded from dump trucks at a Baltic harbor.
A friend of mine – sound poet and painter Hebriana Alainentalo – once recorded a dredger outside the Swedish West Coast town of Varberg. It reminds me of this too. Anything that can raise so many illustrious visions in your mind must be worth something. I love this!
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With Alex Carpenter's video flow the impressions deepen even further, as the mesmerizing film ripples down the path of time just like the music. The view is static, the direction of the camera and the area viewed remains the same throughout, i.e., there is no camera movement. However, the occurrence shown on the screen is what is happening, what is in motion; a steady, flowing motion from top to bottom – reminding me quite a bit of some of Björk’s videos. Small grains of dark matter flow in vessels of some kind. Associations move from blood vessels inside the body to alien occurrences on distant celestial bodies to time-lapse shots of glaciers from a satellite. In any case, the motion of the visuals and the might of the music fuse into one coherent artistic and – in a way – philosophical, hands-on experience of the constant flux of energy throughout space and our endlessness of lives, but, importantly, not in a basically reflective, pondering way, but, more to the point, in a direct, unaware absorption of Life, Time, Space.
Perhaps this video would be a good source for some kind of torch lighting meditation. For me it works that way, hypnotically pulling my eyes together at the nose-tip, lifting my sense of perception and conscience like a kitten is lifted by his neck, blasting these immense universal plains in front of me, inside me, rippling with plasma energy and forceful peace.
Track 2: Second Precensing
This was my view on Second Precensing on initially hearing it:
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Second Presencing (10:40)
Alex Carpenter [keyboard, digital delay]
Recorded at EMU Studio, University of Adelaide, 19th August 2003.
This does seem to have an overly meager beginning, with just a few hits at the keys, monotonous – but all the listener needs is a small measure of patience. Carpenter adds to this single, repeated chord, extending the figure a little, having it grow overtones and a richness of timbres, more in the likeness of an electrified harp or an amplified Iraqi oud, and, yes, the music takes on an Eastern fragrance, of the Middle East or the Indian Subcontinent.
The clusters of tones that sprinkle out like water over a lawn starts a mimicry of a sitar being strummed again and again, and soon you’re lost in this embellished meditation, which also carries an undertone of eroticism. It is very beautiful, very persuasive, magically losing itself in a haze of tonal colors that fall around you like fainting spells.
Again, like in Carpenter’s Deep Golden Flourish, he has this rare atmosphere in common with Norwegian guitarist and tape recorder experimentalist Askild Haugland.
At the conclusion of Second Presencing you’re in a fairytale of colors and innumerable golden little bells that ring.
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Now, with Carpenter’s landscaping, the piece indeed takes on further properties, seemingly arrived at in some kind of intuitive film making, if that can be conceived!
The hypnotism is ever-present here too, as in the preceding piece, and Carpenter has fused this flowing, sliding, timeless time with a drive-by film, shot out the left window of a car driving down a country road in Australia, or – I don’t know – from the window of a train thundering down the rail. The savannah-like landscape drifting by, with farms silos and trees and farm fields with bales of hay, set the inner pace for me as I watch and hear. Again I find natural references to, for example, the film Qoyaansiqatsi (Godfrey Reggio's debut as a film director and producer. The title is a Hopi Indian word meaning "life out of balance." Created between 1975 and 1982, the film is an apocalyptic vision of the collision of two different worlds -- urban life and technology versus the environment. The musical score was composed by Philip Glass).
The feeling of Alex Carpenter’s film and music focuses your being in the same way, into an urgent awareness of the vulnerability of your dreams, of your consciousness, reflected in the way you make the world, reflected in the way the world makes you, eon after eon, life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life after life
Alex Carpenter’s drive-by landscaping vision-film is very spiritual, and since the passing scenery is Australian, I recall atmospheres out of the book The Songlines by author, dreamer, thinker and traveler Bruce Chatwin (From the back cover of the book: ”Bruce Chatwin ventures into the desolate land of Outback Australia to learn the meaning of the Aboriginals’ ancient Dreaming-tracks. Along these timeless paths […] he discovers a wondrous vision of man’s place in the world.”
In fact, I was made aware of Bruce Chatwin and his books while trekking the rock deserts and glaciers of Lapland, by the young German woman Michaela Bach, a student of glaciology who also strayed across the openness of Sapmi, the northernmost territories of Lapland.
There is always something spiritual laid bare in these dry, empty landscapes, where there is very little to fragment your mind, where, free of pastimes, your elusive Self – just another aspect of the All – may come a little closer to some kind of truth of Existence. This is true for the landscapes of, for instance, New Mexico, Lapland and parts of Australia, and these places, all in their own way, open up spaces and barren landscapes that provide no place to hide, but plenty of space to realize the adventure and responsibility of Living. Thus, these predicaments, these open truth-scapes, call for shaman advice, shaman pointers – and sure enough, in New Mexico you have the respected Indian medicine men, in Lapland the Saami shamans and in Australia the wise men and women from the Aboriginal tribes. These are basic human focal points, basic human wells of spiritual riches, now temporarily blurred by the hurried, flickering imagery of a world of no causes – but the disorientation will eventually cease.
J.M.G. Le Clezio’s books – though set in completely different environments, like hot summer days in small towns in the south of France or by the Mediterranean Sea – reclaim a similar awareness for Man, in an intensive but relaxed, almost absentminded stubbornness of radical perception.
All these important summations of this flow of consecutive lives arise in my mind while playing Alex Carpenter’s DVD rendition of Second Presencing; track 2 on the DVD. There is no way I can tire of watching and hearing this!
Another aspect that makes me experience these Australian landscapes in Carpenter’s film in a stronger and more physical way is the fact that I have strong bonds with the so-called down-under these days. Last year, while hiking in Lapland, I met this amazing young woman Zoë Smith, who also hiked by herself. She originated in Bristol, England, but had worked as an arborist in Stockholm, Sweden, for almost two years. We teamed up and hiked together, and continued meeting after our mountain hike, all fall, until she – as she’d planned for long – departed for New Zealand by way of Tibet.
I got these amazing photo CDs coming in from high plateaus and temples and monasteries, and eventually Zoë arrived in Auckland, New Zealand, and took up her arborist trade in a small town of the Northern Island; Taupo.
When that happened, and this woman whom I’d been so very, very close to, mentally and physically, resided in New Zealand, the antipode of Sweden where I live - when she couldn’t get any farther away from me without leaving the planet - I started sensing the whole globe, the entire planet, as a giant ball of matter beneath me. Zoë was there on the exact opposite of where I was, and I could sort of feel her there, by embracing the whole Earth. I hadn’t had this feeling of PLANET in that direct, physical, relentless way before, even though I have a big poster of the Earth with a picture taken of the planet coming back from the moon by one of the Apollo crews in the early 1970s.
It was a shocking, but then gradually very pleasant feeling, which I have always now. It’s integrated with me now, because of Zoë, and so I have this strong sense also when I play and replay Second Presencing, over and over, and watch that landscape drift by, as a memory or a dream.
Zoë
Track 3: Burial Music
This is yet another of Alex Carpenter’s artistic/philosophical/musical ideas which works brilliantly. What you hear is an ensemble of sounds emerging in bands of different density and pitch, on top of each other or beneath each other, for different durations, occurring and recurring, like ice floes pushed under and over each other in spring as the ice cover breaks, in a kaleidoscopic motion of sound.
What you see is some kind of garden plant growing by a white wall, and through time-lapse photography the film of this plant with several flowers evolve from bud phase to magnificent open petal phase, over a few minutes, as bud after bud opens, in a ceremony of beauty and fragrances.
The method is so simple, and yet these plain methods are so effective, as is proven here in Burial Music. This is yet more true mystery conveyed through an act of art.
Track 4: Deep Golden Flourish (excerpt)
As I listened to the full-length Deep Golden Flourish on the Vanished Records CD with the same title, I wrote:
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Music of Transparent Means – Deep Golden Flourish
Alex Carpenter [guitar, delay, pedals, multiple amps]
Vanished Records VAN20402. Duration: 31:31 [on the DVD the duration is 16:30]
Of course I was aware of the performer when sliding this CD into the player, but I wasn’t aware of what kind of sound world would embrace me. I was surprised to find a sonic milieu that I could immediately associate to one – and one only - earlier singular experience, that of Norwegian sound artists and guitarist Askild Haugland, whom I’ve accounted for elsewhere at Sonoloco. He is an obscure and single-minded artist who uses extremely meager means to produce deeply touching and musically profound works, which he issues on vinyls!
Alex Carpenter of Music of Transparent Means in Adelaide produces similar art, but on CD, and he also has a broader spectrum of possibilities through the loose-knit Music of Transparent Means Ensemble, of which he is the Director, and with which he has issued another CD; Selected Live Recordings.
When I read about the Music of Transparent Means Ensemble I can’t help but make comparisons with an orchestra that I am closely associated with in Stockholm, Sweden; The Great Learning Orchestra, which functions in a similar way to The Music of Transparent Means Ensemble, in that it consists of a number of musicians – mostly in Stockholm, but also elsewhere – who come from different walks of life concerning musical habitat, from rock groups to string quartets to symphony orchestras to electronic music studios, who get together in the realm of The Great Learning Orchestra to do workshops with composers (Gavin Bryars, Terry Riley, Dave Smith), and who are called to the different projects through email lists. As with The Music of Transparent Means Ensemble, The Great Learning Orchestra may look very different from time to time, from project to project, from rehearsal to rehearsal, concerning the number of attendees and the mix of instruments. You can read about the GLO elsewhere at Sonoloco.
This said, I am well prepared for the experience of The Music of Transparent Means Ensemble, and I’m also very happy to find out about it! It also makes me wonder to what extent – if any – forerunners like Cornelius Cardew’s Scratch Orchestra has had any significance for the formation of Music of Transparent Means. I know The Scratch Orchestra meant a lot for the occurrence of The Great Learning Orchestra, who even took its name from a work by Cornelius Cardew.
On this CD the Director of Music of Transparent Means appears with his guitar alone, reinforced by delay pedals and multiple amps. The result is as dreamy and hypnotic as all those Norwegian vinyls from Askild Haugland, and this time I didn’t have to transfer from vinyl to CD!
Deep Golden Flourish may hint at the experience of listening. At least it shows you a certain direction. Carpenter’s Norwegian Doppelgänger Haugland simply titles his works with the date of recording, like La Monte Young sometimes does.
There is a slight buzz from Carpenter’s amplifiers – or one of them – throughout this recording, but after a while this extraneous sound becomes a wheezing drone that achieves domiciliary rights with the guitar sounds, and it does not disturb. It’s just like a streak of mist across the meadow on your early morning walk, or like some barbed wire through that mist, to keep the cows in order.
Basically, this recording, about 31 minutes long, consists of a short phrase being repeated, but with a variation in the layering, or the sprouting, or how ever one wants to characterize the tiny wave motions in the music, which perhaps are better described as Impressionist reflections off of the water of a shallow river, or even like the glittering light through spring birch trees in the winds of Scandinavia; that thin, fresh smell of light and grass and Anemone Hepaticas and a temperature that calls for Craft underwear and a wind tight outer garment, plus a warm Thinsulate cap!
Depending on where you live, Deep Golden Flourish will bring home delicate nature notions, corresponding to your own frames of reference. This is part of the magic of this seemingly simple music, or, should I say, simplistic music. It is no simpler than your mind, than the life you’ve lead, than the thoughts you allow yourself to think. The sky isn’t the limit. You are.
In this context, this music is endless, timeless, without a decided set of perceptual instructions. It brings you where you are, i.e., it more clearly opens your mind to your situation, in an existential context – thus constituting a means for meditation, contemplation, introspection. Deep Golden Flourish is one of the best meditation triggers that I’ve experienced, and beautifully so.
Alex Carpenter slowly builds a denser tanglewood, in a submerged scenario; seaweed and submarine growth swaying in salty waters, stupid-looking fish with silvery coats and round mouths staring at you under the swell of an ocean.
The contemplative force of Deep Golden Flourish makes me want to use it at night, as I sometimes do with Brian Eno’s works Discreet Music, Music for Airports or Thursday Afternoon – to drift into dreams on. Carpenter’s piece is a bit too short for this, but there is a repeat button on the player!
You are set into seamless motion by this music, on journeys into yourself; unto the rendezvous with yourself that you usually put off, but which, eventually, is inevitable. Deep Golden Flourish is one of the more beautiful vehicles to that rendezvous!
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With Carpenter’s video, the impression is enhanced, confirmed and deepened. Never in these videos have any cause for concern emerged. I’m usually put off by efforts of visualizing a piece of music with video, because most of the time the film takes away from the audio, or trivializes it. On this Carpenter DVD the opposite magically occurs. The music is strengthened, confirmed and delicately accompanied into a functioning fusion of hearing and sight, into one complete artistic expression which takes us far, inside, outside.
The video for Deep Golden Flourish is an exemplary example of this fusion when at its peak. A large number of triangles swarm the screen in a haze of sorts, in a bewildering transformation back and forth from tilted squares back to triangle back to squares, even though the main perception is that of triangles, flying in like birds from the ocean, thought static. The shapes appear in some kind of visual obscurity where light is at play, illuminating random triangle shapes before moving on to other triangles. This play of light (like flickering sunlight through leaves moving in the wind) continues and corresponds perfectly with Carpenter’s gentle and soaring, tintinnabulation guitar chords.
This dancing play of light is what you can achieve with a pair of binoculars, by, for example, looking at sun-flickering leaves or the reflections of sunlight on rippling waves in a river, and turning the binoculars out of focus. Then these crystalline or geometrical shapes will appear, shining with a radiant, illuminating light through the haze. If you’re nearsighted you can achieve the same effect by just taking off your glasses.
It’s very meditative, very lofty, weightless – and deeply beautiful.
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