What's in a Name? clipping. and Rhythm

Review and discussion on CLPPNG, the 2014 release from experimental hip hop group clipping.

Modular and the Power of Suggestion

I stumbled across Modular in the artist recommendation area of Bandcamp one evening while doing the menial but necessary tasks associated with being a band director. Although it was my intention to employ it was background music in my office, it immediately resonated beyond this function. Rather than take note to further vet the album at a later time (as I ususally would), I ended up streaming it in its entirety several times throughout the evening.  It seemed to capture all the epic post-rock grandeur of Tortoise’s best work while paradoxically remaining as intimate as a jazz trio recording. The room seemed to feel empty without it and nothing else really came to mind that could effectively follow it up. 



By the time I was ready to head home, I was sold. I was eager to get Modular in regular rotation, but I was disappointed to find, as is increasingly the case these days, that the album was not available in a CD pressing. Not to be dissuaded by lack of access to my preferred format, I purchased the MP3 album as soon as I got home and in the weeks to follow Modular came to be standard evening music in the household.

I heard a curious balance between improvisation and composition throughout the album that urged me to look deeper into the album’s inner workings. Normally, this would mean combing through the CD liner notes, looking for recording and performance clues. Most MP3 albums are sadly lacking in this regard, but Modular came with a 36 page interactive PDF that implied the album’s scope was much broader than I had suspected.

These “soft” liner notes suggested that Modular was informed by a meticulous data gathering system that used movements of clouds, tectonic activity, water currents, and other natural phenomena. This data was gathered by six analog sound components, each specifically designed to process information from aspects of a given environment. Each track on Modular was somehow based on the data gathered from nature. Beautiful pictures of these components in their respective settings and graphic renderings of acoustic data drove this point home.

I was spellbound by this idea. The components presented in the liner notes seemed functional, and the way in which the data was used added a third dimension to the spectrum of improvisation and composition. There was only one problem:

I could not for the life of me understand how it was done.

I strained my mind's ear with every playing, trying to figure out how the data was being used, but I could account for most of Modular’s sounds within the synergistic musicianship of guitarist Dan Phelps, drummer Matt Chamberlain, and bassist Viktor Krauss.  Were sounds generated from the data and used as backgrounds? Was it used as an organizing principle for the compositions and improvisations? Were there subtle envelope filters draped over the performances informed by the data? Was it in the guitar effects? Was it in the melodic material? The possibilities were endless, and my inability to suss out the truth was maddening.

Finally, after several months, my curiosity got the better of me. I actually contacted Phelps through e-mail and asked him directly how he used the data that he had gathered. He replied in a timely manner and apologetically admitted the “scandalous truth:” the entire data collection aspect of Modular was a fabrication of the graphics team of Nate Manny and Gabe Kerbrat. Although that made more sense than any of the outlandish methods that I had imagined, I was still quietly crushed. I really wanted to believe in the potentials in the proposed Modular method, and I truly felt like the pieces painted a compelling picture of the environments to which they referred.

I was not the only one that felt this. While I was still questioning how much my impressions were informed by the liner notes, my wife picked the track Constellation for her performance art installation. In its earliest iteration, this performance was to take place outside under the stars, and she picked the song out from a lineup of contenders because of a connection she heard with this setting.  Weather restrictions ultimately forced it into our garage, but the change of venue did not constrain the track’s suggestion of the night sky’s vast openness.



Despite having a more conventional creative process than I envisioned, Modular still succeeds at capturing something essential about the natural environments that inspired its concept.  I am left to wonder, however, if this perception is irrevocably influenced by my struggles to decode its "mythos."  As of this writing, I am unsure if the concept drove the music or the music allowed the concept to emerge.  Only Phelps, Chamberlain, and Krauss can really answer this conundrum with any authority.  In either case, the album has survived intense scrutiny and still never fails to engage my attention in terms of both musicianship and concept.  My investigation of and experience with the album caused Modular to emerge as an absolute favorite listen this year.

"A Scarcity of Miracles," Waterfalls, and Sirens

During the recent negotiations of a house sale, a potential buyer wanted whack off a couple thousand to install a water fountain in the back yard that would “drown out” the noise from the road.  As I stood in 104 degree temperatures and watered the yard with a scalding hot garden hose, I pondered this proposal, along with the fact that it is, quite frankly, impossible to keep a lawn green in Texas right now. 

Its a well-traveled corner that the house sits on, but it is hardly a major thoroughfare.  There were cars driving by, but to my ears, it mostly seemed like delicate whooshing, and certainly nothing that would keep me up at night.  I was about to dismiss his proposal as utter nonsense when an EMS truck defiantly revved up its siren full-blast directly outside, rattling my naked eardrums.  No way any two thousand dollar waterfall could combat that.

In Mozart’s day, Vienna was quiet enough that fire signals could be given by the shouts of a scout mounted atop St. Stefan’s Cathedral.  Now, our moments of “silence” are actually times when we "just" hear the air conditioner, or the cars whizzing by outside, or the stomping around of our upstairs neighbor’s children.  You can hardly stand in front of a burning house and yell “fire” in a way that anyone will pay attention to.  It's no wonder that music has generally become noisier.

Now King Crimson, there’s a noisy band, or at least a band with a long history of an incredible potential for noise.  For a brief period in the 90s, its ever-shifting lineup evolved into a six-member paint-peeling beast that whose group improvisations threatened to crumble under their own weight.  In response, band master and philosophically aloof guitarist Robert Fripp encouraged the various members of the groups to create ProjeKCts, smaller satellite ensembles whose purpose it was to “research and develop” the potentials hidden within the larger group.  There is a good compilation of the work of these groups called Deception of the Thrush. Put it on at your next Thanksgiving dinner and see what happens.
 

Many of these ProjeKCts were pretty noisy and improvisational in nature, but King Crimson, as a larger unit, was not just about incendiary group improvisations.  Fripp also regularly explored atmospheres and ambience as readily as dissonance and angularity.  A recent collaboration with Fripp and several King Crimson alumni has received the “ProjeKCt” label, A Scarcity of Miracles, by Jakszyk, Fripp, and Collins, and it represents a much different aspect of King Crimson's multiple personalities.

This group, ostensibly “ProjeKCt 7,” is composed almost entirely of players that have played with King Crimson from different eras of the band’s career, not the least of which is the “dream team” of drummer Gavin Harrison and bass guy Tony Levin.  I am also happy to see the role of 70s King Crimson saxophonist Mel Collins acknowledged, and, as always, Fripp's guitar tone is nothing short of inspirational.

Guitarist and vocalist Jakko Jakszyk stands out a little in this line up due to the simple fact that he has never actually played in King Crimson proper.  Still, he has a stocking at the King Crimson family Christmas, although by way of the back door.  Jakszyk played guitar and sang in the 21^st Century Schizoid Band, a group made of up King Crimson alumni who, with Fripp’s blessing, covered selections from the band's 60s and 70s back catalog: songs that have been effectively retired.  His inclusion into this ProjeKCt allows that recent reincarnation of the band’s past to be folded into the complex King Crimson lineage.

Its classification as a “ProjeKCt” allows A Scarcity of Miracles to somewhat sidestep the issue of being considered a “true” King Crimson album.  Although they are generally remembered for their angular proto-metal and polyrhythmic excursions, King Crimson has always counterbalanced their aggressive side with dreamy, soothing ballads, even as far back as their first album.



A Scarcity of Miracles is an outlet for Fripp's melodic and atmospheric side.  It’s more like a flowing waterfall than an explosive siren, but it still harbors a satisfying depth.    

Making Space for Scott Walker's "Tilt"

I became interested in Scott Walker a few months ago after streaming the documentary “Scott Walker: 30 Century Man” on Netflix.   Scott Walker is a fascinating artist, and for those interested, this documentary will certainly pique your interest further.  To make a real long story short, Walker was a 60s teen idol who decided that fame was not really his bag of chips.  At the peak of his popularity, he retired from the public eye and became a bit of a hermit.  Since the late 70s, he has released a solo album once a decade, each one increasingly avant-garde.  You are probably already familiar with him, however, by way of The Walker Brothers, who were giving the Beatles a run for their money with this little ditty (which became virally popular again through the recent zombie miniseries “The Walking Dead”).

The orchestral palate and reverbed vocals of “The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore” and many of the other Walker Brothers songs has a darkly stereotypical 60s studio ambience.  This acoustic background became the kernel for Walker’s unapologetic individualism and patient perfectionism, although it took significantly different forms in the following decades.

“Tilt” is his entry from the 90s, and, admittedly, it has been a particularly resistant listen, so much so that I was toying with the idea that I liked Scott Walker’s artistic ideology more than I liked his musical output.  As I stated previously, however, the majority of my listening takes place during solitary time in the car.  Driving is an activity that is pretty well-suited for listening, but the car is a flawed listening environment.  In many cases, the sound of surrounding traffic and the car itself can be tuned out as white noise, but recordings whose strongest attributes lie in subtle ambience and atmospherics are difficult to fully appreciate.  To be fair to "Tilt," I thought I should devote a small portion of my Spring Break listening to it in a more controlled and hi-fi (more signal than noise) acoustic environment.

Sitting down and listening to “Tilt” in my living room with libretto in hand was a much different experience.  Although superficially it seems a minimalistic and bare-bones affair, a close, focused listen is mesmerizing.  Throughout “Tilt,” industrialist clicks and tinkles combine with slow, ominously pulsating drums and bass that swirl in fractalized eddies of echoes within echoes, as if the entire album was recorded in an abandoned underground subway station.  In this setting, Walker juxtaposes impressionistic images with his lyrics, resulting in an unsettling soundscape that sometimes borders on the nightmarish.  This song was my favorite from the car, and it took on new dimensions in the relative silence of my house.

There were moments when I related to “Tilt” in unique, inexplicable ways during that listen, and I can’t deny a newfound respect for the album that I hope will carry over into future listening.  My personal favorite from “Tilt” is still the sublime “Farmer in the City,” but because of Walker’s reclusive nature, footage of him playing this song live seems pretty rare.  In fact, there is very little footage of him publicly performing his solo work at all.  I did, however, find this little gem of him performing the Buckleyesque “Rosary.”

“Tilt” is hard listening - I have had to work to hear it.  I think that it is Walker’s intention, however, to reward the listener who is willing to invest this sort of attention to his work.  To rise to this task, I had to break away my usual listening habits and create a space that allowed Walker’s mastery of recorded ambience to come through.  This changed my perspective in other ways, as well: after listening to “Tilt,” I got in the car to go to aikido class and the track “BTTLS” from Battles’ “B EP” came up on the player.  The soundscape on that track seemed oddly reminiscent of what “Tilt” is all about, and now I find myself wondering what else I am missing in the hum of traffic.