Passing Strange: Directions in Electronic Music
Various artists
Broadvista Music, 2001
http://www.broadvista.com
In the twenty-five or thirty years that ambient music has existed as a
genre, there are a few people who have been so influential in that genre
that they practially re-invented it. Steve Roach is one of these. Along with
his many collaborators, Roach gave us “desert spacemusic,” with its
windswept atmosphere, its floating chords, and its evocation of the classic
Southwestern landscape of emptiness, dust, mountains and sunbleached cow
skulls. Roach also enriched this genre with a reverent homage to Native
American (or Aboriginal) chants and percussion rhythms.
Now that the restless Roach has moved on to a more abstract cyber-sound and
textural guitar playing, the “desert” genre continues with what I have often
called the “School of Steve Roach,” a collection of ambient artists which
numbers members in not only the USA but in Germany (Matthias Grassow, Amir
Baghiri, and “Temps Perdu”) and Spain (Maximo Corbacho).
Perhaps Roach’s best inheritor is Biff Johnson, from Sacramento, who in his
earliest albums stayed quite close to the Roach style, while adding another
atmosphere of mining and industrial sound as well as his own bass playing.
Over the years he has developed his own sound while remaining in the
desert-ambient genre, and now presides over the label he founded, Broadvista
Music, which features his own work as well as distributing that of other
artists. Passing Strange is a compilation of favorite pieces by
Johnson’s friends and collaborators.
Each one of these selections is top-flight ambient. Track 1, “Unanswered
Questions” by John Pemble, is very much in the Roach/Johnson mode, with
microtonal synthesizer note-clouds slowly spreading out and crossing each
other in a vast sky of reverberation. Track 2, “The Coveted Mirror,” is by
Jeff Karsin, who published his own challenging dronefest Pandataria
in 2000. It is less Roachlike and more strictly drone-oriented than the rest
of the album, and has a darker, more spooky sound than some of the other
pieces. Track 3, “Blackbird,” by Mike Gustafson under the name of “The
Autumn Project,” returns to the Roach repertoire of floating synthesizer
chords, just on the verge of tonality, accompanied by rattles, “tribal”
percussion, didgeridoo, and what sounds like heavy breathing.
Track 4, “Used and Left to Rust,” is by Brian Parnham, whose album The
Broken Silence (2000) showed heavy Roach influence. So does this track,
which is very much in the style of Roach’s 1993 and 1994 collaborations with
Jorge Reyes and Suso Saiz under the name “Earth Island.” A slow, soaring
melody is carried on an electric guitar, while synthesizer chords, mystical
girl-voice, and didgeridoo accompany it. Rhythm is provided on clay pot
percussion. Track 5, “Forward Steps” by Kirk Watson, is actually indebted
more to Biff Johnson than to Roach it’s a kind of third-generation desert
ambient. It has Johnson’s lighter, more delicate synthesizer sound, while
electronic rhythms tick along, punctuated by eerie electro-modified voices.
Biff Johnson’s own entry to the compilation, “Lupine,” (track 6) features
his characteristic ethereal electronics, enriched with Roach’s rattles and
“singing stones,” and moves into a steady rhythm sequence, around which
electronic whizzes and zings flutter, suggesting insects and bats in an
archetypal desert cave. The seventh and last track, David Hastings’ “Brush
with the Lions,” is quite different from the others in the set, the only one
which isn’t “desert space” at all. This piece combines driving techno-disco
rhythms with digitally mangled urban pop a la “Pet Shop Boys,” as well as
industrial noise and scattered bits of jungle sounds. It is hardly from
Roach’s desert hermitage it sounds more like an urban fantasy by those wry
British technoids “The Orb.” Its dizzy mishmosh of assorted sounds is a
perfect evocation not of the nostalgic world of the Old West, but the
globalized chaos which we face every day, no matter where we are.
Hannah M.G. Shapero
4/13/02
Pandataria
by Jeff Karsin
Private release, 2000
c/o Jeff Karsin
P.O. Box 2537
Taos, NM 87571
Pandataria, which has the distinction of being “mastered” by Robert
Rich, is a journey into the drone zone. This is definitely in the department
of “drone ambient,” an extreme form of ambient in which there is no rhythm
and all notes are long and sustained. “Drone” is an acquired taste, but once
you have acquired it, there is actually an aesthetic to it, which allows the
listener to both appreciate and evaluate it.
How, then, do you tell whether your drone is “good stuff” or “bad?” First,
you must stay awake, unless you are listening to one of Robert Rich’s
“sleep” concerts. It is no accident that Rich produced this album Karsin
takes a lot of influence from that master of cataleptic ambient atmospheres.
Second, if you are awake, then you listen for whether he picks interesting
sounds to hold onto, or whether he chooses ugly noise. Third, even drone
ambient has harmony. Does your drone man choose interesting chords and
tone-clusters for his layered synthesizer tones, or does he use incoherent,
dull, or banal harmonies. Fourth, do things change as the sound goes along?
Does it get louder or softer, does he introduce new harmonies, does he
(yikes!) change key? Fifth, if you’ve managed to listen to more than 10
minutes of it, are you bored out of your skull, or have you moved into a
nicer mood, more meditative, more relaxed? Or, on the other side, are you
suitably disturbed or scared?
I’m pleased to say that Jeff Karsin, most of the time, manages to produce
material that satisfies at least 3 or 4 of those criteria, in places even
all 5. In many of the pieces, like track 2, “Creatures that May,” or the
bizarrely titled “Apple from a Dead Pig’s Mouth,” (track 6) he expands his
drones into the realm of spooky and dissonant “dark ambient.” But there are
also long passages of atonal crushed electronics which aren’t exactly
dinnertime music. This album, like most “drone ambient,” is for the
specialized listener. From the connoisseur’s point of view, this is a good
album of its kind. Anyone else is advised to listen at their own discretion.
HMGS rating: 6 out of 10
5/21/01
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