Tim Hecker
Axolotl
In most cases, though, musicians don’t attempt any sort of representation, and the only specific image that comes to mind when you listen to a recording is that of the performers and instruments used to create it. With representation off the table, abstraction can only be a meaningful category with respect to those performers and instruments–that is, with respect to the source of the sound, not its meaning. If you’ve never heard or seen a bassoon before, you won’t have a mental picture to go along with its tone, even if you’re listening to an unadorned live recording of one.
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While it’s usually easy to tell that an abstract painting or photograph was created with paint or a camera, in abstract music, sounds are deliberately detached from their sources, not just from referents–it’s impossible to say what generated the sound in the first place. This approach began in intellectual circles in the early 50s, reached a popular audience in the early 70s, and today exists as a folk form. Three records released in 2004–Tim Hecker’s Mirages, Washer, Zimmer & the Guitar People’s Eat Your Friends, and a self-titled disc by the San Francisco duo Axolotl–demonstrate the vitality and variety of the genre. It’s a lot like punk rock, in that anyone can do it; the necessary technology gets cheaper and easier to use every year.
American composer John Cage championed the freedom that abstraction gave a listener with a clarity few have matched. He offered a corrective to the notion of abstract music as the product of an ivory-tower clique by pointing out its timeless spiritual qualities, but unsurprisingly he didn’t reach a mass audience either. In his 1959 article “History of Experimental Music in the United States,” Cage writes, “Why is this so necessary that sounds should be just sounds? There are many ways of saying why. One is this: In order that each sound may become the Buddha. If that is too Oriental an expression, take the Christian Gnostic statement: ‘Split the stick and there is Jesus.’” The listener could create an independent world out of the sound, because it wasn’t attached to or subsumed into any meaning or image in this world. Rather than turning its back on reality, abstract music created a reality of its own, superimposed on the first, that deepened the listener’s appreciation of ordinary experience.
Fortunately digital technology has made it relatively easy to create a broad range of sounds that have few referents even for an educated listener: these days it’s almost impossible to be sure whether you’re listening to an analog keyboard, for instance, or a digitally reprocessed tap on the bottom of an aluminum bowl. Perfectly sustained sounds and fine-grained textures, extremes at both ends of the frequency spectrum, and sharp transient spikes–all of which were difficult or impossible to produce with Fripp and Eno’s tape-based processing–are now at a composer’s fingertips. Whether the future pace of innovation will be enough to prevent audiences from growing acclimated to these new noises remains to be seen. But between 1995 and 2000, German electronic composer Wolfgang Voigt released four discs under the name Gas that suggest innovation may win the race.
Washer, Zimmer & the Guitar People also draw from ambient styles old and new, but as the name suggests, this German group tilts toward a rock idiom. The “guitar people” on Eat Your Friends (released late last spring on the band’s own Keplar label) are Florian Doelzer and Matthias Neuefeind, who contribute unprocessed electric guitar and bass lines. (“Washer, Zimmer” is Andreas Kurz and Henry Ok.) It’s almost a shock to hear immediately recognizable instruments on a record like this, but it’s not unprecedented: in press releases Washer, Zimmer have openly acknowledged the influence of 90s ambient innovators Labradford, who also used relatively clean guitar and bass sounds.
