Tall Poppies Rec. Tristram Cary : Soundings -2CD-(UK,rec.1955-1996,pub.2000)****°
-electroacoustic works 1955-1996-
Tristram Cary only recently was being rediscovered with various releases of his works (Trunk/Tall Poppies). As having been involved as a composer with radar during the war he started to show an interest in electronic and electro-acoustic music, and as a pioneer began to discover and explore the possibilities of using tape as an instrument (not aware of similar explorations in Paris, in combination with recorded sounds, and Cologne, in combination with sinus waves). One of the things that gave him renewed attention was his work for the BBC Radiophonic Workshop (where he designed the sounds for the daleks on the Dr.Who series), but then I still didn’t expect something more serious to have happened in the UK outside the BBC RW related ideas commercialising the use of occasional effects and tuned music. When hearing this double album that was recommended to me by Ian Helliwell (of Tone Generation), after my question about which non-keyboard music and tape music I should not miss, this finally showed me the existence of something far more serious in compositions and with truly creative ideas within the field of electronic music. Tristram had one of the first private studios of electronic music in 1967 (with its first location at the Royal College of Music). He had also formed, along with Peter Zinovieff and David Cockerell, the Electronic Music Studios (EMS) in 1969, and he also co-designed the VCS3 (Putney) synthesiser, one of the earliest synthesizers with a precise choice of frequencies, something which later had a keyboard added despite the preference to keep away from tone-based and chromatic standards. In 1974 he moved to Australia taking his studio with him. CD 1 contains his tape compositions including a few radio plays, which are absolute worth discovering. The second CD shows some of his computer music recorded since 1979.
CD1:
“Continuum” (1969) is a stereo piece of pure electronic sounds stretched in multi-layered movements. The higher tones are partly melodic. There are colourful tone melody accents, wobbling sounds, and a few waves of noise. All of this is in a constant, natural evolving, pulsating, and transforming into space, natural and consistent as a pulsating melody.
The Suite from 1972 is an imaginative radio play, a sort of Moby dick of the future where the composer “aimed to create an electronic score more akin to the orchestral textures of Melville’s period than to the spiky tensions of the mid 20th century.” This is a mostly electronic piece (except some drum sound), a musical play with a beautiful evolution in stereo and with two or three layers moving like separate instruments with oscillating evolutions, changing pitches, tone or vibration.
“3 4 5” is a stereo tape study based upon mathematical variations of frequencies and their multiples, which shows rhythmical supersonic tone combinations with some combined reverberation. Although it has a rather scientific idea as a starting point the evolution and inner growth, sounds natural with interesting interactions, evolutions and harmonic combinations. This is both technically interesting as well as sonically considering the dry nature of its core. Tthis is a real achievement. It shows a real experience and world on its own.
Another interesting piece is the BBC radio drama “Suite: The Children of Lir” with a poetic script by Harry Craig. An interesting piece too for its totally different use and approach to electro-acoustic music, more in the sense of how I expect it to be, with much more happening that now-actions and passing-by soundscapes of sound compilers, so something more concentrated and with more different compositional movements. This is thought over and with spatial dimensions, even when this is only recorded in mono. There are beautifully changing and evolving tape effects, use of tape noise or distortions, and melodic themes. We hear the tapping sound on what sounds like a plastiing type machine keys for the melodic-rhythmic theme of an Irish jig, some whining voice and singing an Irish melody. The piece has been slightly reworked in 1996.
“Birth is life..” (1967) is a partly more fragmentary collage piece of acoustic and electronic sounds part of a soundtrack for Don Levy’s “sources of power”, and was used for the British pavilion at Expo '67 in Montreal. For this we miss the visual accompaniment to make it complete.
The Suite “The Japanese Fishermen” (1955) based upon stereo manipulations with percussive elements and reverberations (worked out by using two tape machines instead of a reverberation tool) was dedicated to the Japanese fishermen who were not warned to stay out of the H-bomb test zone and who died of an overexposure to radiation.
The next track is an interesting contemporary flute piece played by Douglas Whittaker with some direct live reflection (the title is “Narcissus”) of tape play-back with some deliberate feedback errors or pauses, and speed and direction changes influencing the live performance.
“Steam Music” (1978) is also worth checking out. It very much is a next, more advanced chapter to Pierre Shaeffer’s early train sounds loop recording (called “Chemins de Fer”, 1948). This new music concrete composition used 4 different pre-recorded train sounds of different origins, combining them in 4-track stereo to cross-communicative conversations giving stereo-dialogue effects, finding a sonic compositional place where similarities come together in this one piece.
CD2:
From all the early computer music I have heard, Tristram Cary showed also a couple of brilliant ideas. Most computer music I have heard either has too much of the human interference or of the randomness of the programmed results or suffers from its two dimensional programming. Tristram clearly tries to overcome all that, which especially on “Trellises” comes to a natural effect in the self-organisational programming.
“Nonet (1979) was written for a unique 256-voice synthesizer called Samson-Box which he had a to its proposal (at the Stanford University). The natural compositional structure here combines itself with the element of mechanical strangeness.
“Soft Walls” (1980) is composed with the Synclavier I computer synthesizer, partly written in Pascal. Also this shows with its harmonic qualities a certain randomness and self-organisatory elements as well in the composition. Also “Three Clockpieces” (1983) shows comparable qualities.
The sine wave composition on “Sine City II”, computer music in stereo (1979) sounds remarkably warm.
“Black, White & Rose” sounds like an improvisation of acoustic instruments with the extensional use of digital tape.
On “Trellises” Car wrote a program that allowed him graphic control over certain parameters so that he was able to change the general sounds of a fundamental composition, in that way that the ears have something of an extra quality to feed upon, hearing the changing shapes and colours over time. Such filters seems to have made the composition more warm as well.
The last piece of which only 7 excerpts were added, “The Impossible Piano” is another extension of an acoustic instrument, in this case a piano with a computer sequencer. Especially the bouncing notes on the piano immediately attract attention for being such a good and rewarding idea of an extension.
An album worth discovering !
