Other formats

    Adobe Portable Document Format file (facsimile images)   TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

Salient. Victoria University Student Newspaper. Volume 33 No. 4. 7 April 1970

Electricity

Electricity

There are two aspects to the use of electricity in pop music and they correspond roughly to the two main types of electronic composition today—live' and 'studio'. On the former Berio writes: "Voices and instruments are heavily amplified; a certain continuity of sound is obtained with a sufficiently controlled use of feed-back which also serves to level out the differences in intensity between the various sound-sources. Microphones, amplifiers, loud-speakers become therefore not just an extension of the voices and instruments but become instruments themselves, sometimes superseding the original acoustic qualities of the sound sources."

The phenomenon of levelling-out and of the total blending of sound (the acoustic aura) has been noted by Cardew when improvising in a restricted area. The players lose their individuality in a room-filling sound, unaware of who is producing which part of it. In this situation instruments seem to become autonomous, a tendency strikingly illustrated in a pop context by the lead-guitarist of the extremely loud American group Blue Cheer. An extended solo improvisation culminates in disjointed phrases during which the player gradually allows the instrument to pass from him into the world of feed-back, until on his knees he lays the still resonating instrument on the ground. The sound can, seemingly, only be halted by the switching off of the amplifiers. It should be remembered that any note played at this kind of intensity (400 watts) will feed-back to infinity unless halted by damping or by the stopping of another note. Moreover, the feed-back, in establishing itself, causes an isolated note to grow in intensity after the attack, like a tam-tam stroke. The formal counterpart of this acoustic growth is what might be called 'electric momentum', the temporal consequence of the guitar's electronically produced head of steam. Allowing this momentum full rein produces long forms which seem to balance the music's high intensity.

Comparable to the 'studio' branch of electronic music is the recorded pop created during the recording session, and not reproducible in live performance. A landmark here was the Beatles' Sergeant Pepper LP, in the preparation of which hundreds of hours of studio time were spent in the application of electronic techniques. In addition to the normal recording technique of the artificial balancing of disparate elements, there became incorporated the multiple superimposition of tracks, extreme filtering, backwards tapes and the exploitation of the spatial effects made available by stereophony. Continuing the development of these innovations, Jimi Hendrix in his LP Electric Ladyland has produced some of the most sophisticated, travaille and, indeed, resourceful pop on record. His virtuoso deployment of guitar sonorities has led him to master tape-manipulation. His musicality has empowered him to achieve an amazingly successful blend of his distinctively passionate vocal and instrumental style with radical instrumental and electronic noise-improvisation passages very reminiscent of the AMM improvisation group.