Music Without Orders
It is not difficult to take experimental music seriously. The difficult thing may be to refrain from doing so. You can always make music more difficult, more complex, more uncompromising. You can fill it with systems, ruptures and ideas, so that it constantly demonstrates that there is a thought behind it. But what happens if you relinquish some of that control?
On three new releases by Sofie Birch, Tyondai Braxton, and Gustaf Dicksson & co., the music seems to explore precisely that question. Here, electronics chirp, and melodies are allowed to take strange detours, without the usual sense that everything has to prove how carefully thought through it is.
Here, electronics chirp, and melodies are allowed to take strange detours
The album Stilla Dagar, Stilla Nätter/Stille Dage, Stille Nætter is a collaboration between Swedish musician and composer Gustaf Dicksson, the project Post-Tragic, and Sonja LaBianca and Frida Johanne. Together, they offer five loosely interwoven compositions that have not quite decided what to do with one another.
It feels like an album about the unrestrained. Not in the sense that chance is elevated into a principle, but in a more humble way: elongated saxophone harmonies meet bright, angular piano strikes that almost become percussive. At times, the instruments merge softly; elsewhere, the music seems chopped up and spliced together, with gentle repetitions giving way to fluttering, imaginative passages. Field recordings occasionally break through – including gusts of wind hitting the microphone so hard that the sound overloads. The music is less interested in depicting a world than in taking care of one that already exists.
That is also a quality running through two albums that look set to become among the year's most striking releases, even though they initially seem worlds apart: Tyondai Braxton's Splayed Werks and Sofie Birch's Bivabippabualukka. Both possess a lightness: the feeling of having escaped the urge to control one's own expression, which can otherwise weigh like an invisible straitjacket even on the most exploratory music.
Dissolving Plastic Nature
Tyondai Braxton, composer and former frontman of the experimental rock band Battles, has become more pop-oriented on Splayed Werks – in several places, the tracks possess an almost club-like physical momentum. In »UnFS«, an angular bass figure awkwardly pushes the body forward while small electronic sounds flicker and stutter across the rhythm. Tracks such as »Dia« and »Phonolydian« likewise have the exuberant quality of a hyperactive machine being pulled apart while the current is still running through it.
Smooth, chemical, sterile. A nature that can no longer decay
What is striking is how often a form of nature appears. Not nature as the opposite of technology, but as something technology has produced an artificial version of. Braxton's sonic world is a plastic nature: a world in which the synthetic does not stand outside the organic but takes over its functions. Smooth, chemical, sterile. A nature that can no longer decay. The two Multiplay tracks in particular are filled with bird-like sounds chirping over the electronics. In »4 Zones«, the sonic universe becomes even more zoological: populated by animalistic, almost jungle-like sounds. The titles, too, suggest such an artificial nature: »Salt Point«, »Clouds of«, »Realistic Water«. The latter moves through undulating, detuned synth textures that feel both grainy and tactile, while a simple, almost pop-like chord progression emerges. And there is a surprising harmonic gentleness to the music, especially apparent in »Piiano«.
But what is simply pleasant often carries a whiff of airport lounges and massage oil
The Machines Begin to Grow
On Danish composer and sound artist Sofie Birch's Bivabippabualukka, there is a particular gentleness to the sonic landscape as well: warm chords, soft drum machines and acoustic guitar. »Sefirot Surfa«, with its gentle jazz harmonies and bells, sounds like an enigmatic cartoon soundtrack from a bygone era – Cirkeline, Alfons Åberg – before the melody suddenly lodges itself in your head like an earworm. And in »Husiana«, the gentleness becomes groovy, driven by an extremely catchy guitar riff that does not need to show off in order to be interesting.
Gentleness is one of the most artistically courageous things one can surrender to. You can defend ugliness. You can explain difficulty. You can meet abstraction with intellectual steadfastness. But what is simply pleasant often carries a whiff of airport lounges and massage oil. Birch nevertheless insists on music that does not stand with its arms folded across its chest, without therefore becoming banal. There is something patient and sun-warmed about her harmonies, but also something strange in the melodies and timbres that prevents them from slipping into pure comfort.
In mood, Bivabippabualukka feels related to Canadian composer Mort Garson's 1976 album Mother Earth's Plantasia: the same idea of electronics as a medium for a strange, lush and almost psychedelic nature. The machines are covered in moss. Electronic circuits become mycelia spreading beneath the surface. Cables have grown roots; knobs and switches are small organic protuberances, as if they had grown there rather than been installed.
Where Braxton's music can sound like nature forced through an industrial mould, Birch sounds like a machine that has slowly been allowed to grow moss. In »Kyakalia«, birdsong floats over undulating synths and a guitar figure; in »Fluorit«, it emerges between double bass and granular synthesis.
A New Lightness
There is something in both Tyondai Braxton's and Sofie Birch's music that feels like an abandonment of the urge to have everything under control – an urge that is otherwise so difficult to let go of, particularly in a culture where almost every form of expression seems subject to the demand for mastery. Braxton and Birch relinquish the need to dominate. But their music refuses to equate effortlessness with a lack of care. There is room for the slightly silly on both albums. A synthesizer can chirp without the chirping having to lead anywhere. Individual sounds are not constantly pulled into some larger machine of meaning.
There is room for the slightly silly on both albums
Both can be extraordinarily precise composers, but precision is not used to seal the work shut. Instead, it establishes conditions in which something unforeseen can emerge. A small electronic pulse can suddenly feel like an organism. A loop can become a zone of growth. A distortion can begin to behave like a fungus.
That is where the particular lightness lies. And it has nothing to do with the strained lightness of pop music, where every element is so carefully controlled that the music eventually seems weightless. This is the lightness that emerges when you relinquish some of your authority. Music that no longer feels like an order.
Gustaf Dicksson/Post-Tragic/Sonja LaBianca/Frida Johanne: »Stilla Dagar, Stilla Nätter/Stille Dage, Stille Nætter«, Discreet Music, 10.07
Sofie Birch: »Bivabippabualukka«, STROOM.tv, 21.07
Tyondai Braxton: »Splayed Werks«, Erased Tapes, 21.08