Even Unmentionable Shades
About a year ago my friend O'Neill offered me an extra ticket to go see David Gilmour play at Madison Square Garden. I've learned that, as with most of my friends, when O'Neill offers a ticket, the correct thing to do is to say yes. Like the time when, thanks to him, I was able to see Neil Young & Crazy Horse a few years earlier. O'Neill had just got back from Toronto, where he'd seen Gilmour twice, and he already had plans to see Gilmour's second show the following night as well. So you could call him a fan.
What was interesting to me was the conversation that we had prior to the concert. He said that it was Gilmour who put him on the path to musicianship — his playing showed O'Neill that it was possible to use an instrument to express oneself in any way that one chose. This made me start thinking about my own ‘Rosebud’ moment, if I've ever had one. It took some thought, but I’d say it would have to be the first time I encountered ‘Koyaanisqatsi’, the 1982 collaboration between Philip Glass and Godfrey Reggio. I can't remember exactly when I first saw it — most likely on public television a few years after its release, but certainly by the time I was sixteen — and I'll never forget being floored by the emotional resonance of Glass's shifting planes of sound. It was one of those rare moments where you find yourself in an utterly new and distinct perceptual world. Perhaps Debussy experienced something similar when he heard the Javanese gamelan orchestra during the Paris Exhibition of 1900, compelling him to write to a friend, "Do you remember the Javanese music, able to express every shade of meaning, even unmentionable shades?"
There’s an essential distinction between O’Neill’s experience and mine, however. It’s not so much about the immediacy of the musical experience, but rather the immediacy of its authorship. Gilmour plays guitar (as does O’Neill, hence the affinity); Gilmour’s sound, characterized by sensitive lyricism and sustained plangency, is unmistakable. There is no distance between the music and the musician, in the sense that only one person can play this way, and to such an extent that anyone else emulating the style is immediately, irredeemably thought of as an imitator first, and perhaps not as anything else second. Even if your experience of Gilmour’s guitar playing is only via recording, there is no doubt that there is a unique artistic voice directly responsibly for that music.
By contrast, my experience with Glass’s score for ‘Koyaanisqatsi’ felt more like an alien visitation. Despite its overwhelming affective power, Glass’s particular minimalism (a term which he has always disliked) seemed like an inscrutable communication, a finely tuned evocation illegible by its own nature. It was a distinct epiphanic moment — the slap of the Zen master’s paddle — that showed me that music could be this way. Except that I didn’t run out the next day to buy tickets to see Philip Glass perform. In fact, I didn’t see him perform until many years later, when his ensemble subjected Avery Fisher Hall to a complete performance of ‘Music In Twelve Parts’. I have to say I was underwhelmed by the entire event. I think that it was the imperfect nature of it all — the notoriously lurchy acoustics of Avery Fisher, the difficulty of balancing electronic and acoustic instruments, and the sheer technical absurdity of playing the same damned arpeggios for minutes at a stretch. Before that, my love of Glass was cemented by listening to ‘Dance Pieces’ and other works for many hours while hiking in the Andes, outside of La Paz, Bolivia, where I lived for most of the late 90s. But on those hikes I inhabited the perfection of a studio recording. Minimalism does not lend itself well to the drama of a live performance, and the mere expectation of precision makes for a poor substitute for a visceral guitar solo.
It was around this time — 1996, to be exact — that I really dove into electronic music. But it was only recently that I realized that the things I value in electronica are not far removed from the shifting timbral geometries of ‘Koyaanisqatsi’. The minimal pace of change for extended periods of time, followed by sudden shifts, or the slow and majestic alternation from one time signature to another, or one polyrhythmic figure to another, and then return — these all have their analogs with electronic music, even — or especially — with electronic dance music. Always the return, but to a place that is slightly different from where you were. Come to think of it, perhaps this was what felt so refreshing to Debussy as he sat at the feet of the Javanese orchestra. In my perception, these shifts signal not so much a change in tonality (as in classic music theory, like a key modulation) but a shift in color and texture, introducing a new palette of sounds that nevertheless makes sense with, and of what, came before.
How does this actually sound in a mix? Here’s an example from one of my Cutouts, mixed in a fairly classic full-on psytrance style. Starting from 8'48, the two tracks featured here are Strange Planet’s ‘Launchpad’ and Vimana’s remix of Chromosome’s ‘Reality Engineer’. Both have similar timbral structure: a minor sensibility, stepped sixteenth-note basslines, and most importantly, several filter-swept ostinati in the midrange of the frequency spectrum.
Picking up at 8'48", we get the big breakdown in Strange Planet’s ‘Launchpad’ (4'25" in the original track). By 9'41" the full statement of the melody and groove is happening. But by 10'10" you can already discern a new synth figure creeping into the mix — this is the Chromosome track, which I’m sneaking in via the mid and high EQs, as well as the crossfader. I take the next minute or so to let it mingle with what is already familiar to the listener. The real shift lands at 11'27", and is created by nailing the exact moment when ‘Launchpad’ ends and ‘Chromosome’, following a mini-break of a few seconds, downshifts into a sparser groove (check this at 5'48" of the Chromosome track).
Careful EQing is also essential to making a successful transition here. I had maxed out the bass EQ in the initial track, and minimized the bass for the incoming track, all the way until the moment at 11'27". But as I mention above, I’d already been introducing elements of the incoming track for the preceding minute. Once the bass/kick for ‘Launchpad’ expired, I had all that room in the bottom of the mix to slam in the ‘Reality Engineer’ bass/kick in all its glory. Now Chromosome’s synth lines had the context that had been lacking earlier. Flipping the basses like that is a simple and common trick, but extremely effective if it’s done at the right moment. Additionally, there’s still a few seconds of swirling but beatless sound to conclude the Strange Planet track, which provides a really nice ‘contrail’ to complete the transition. One of the great sleights of hand of which DJs are capable is to make one track seem to be ‘born’ out of another. For me, this magic is almost exactly like those moments Glass first conjured in ‘Koyaanisqatsi’.
