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| Sin Waves Beyond Good & Evil |
| band: Dorobisz, Patrick |
| Album: Fine Arts et Dix Ans Apres |
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"Whatever is done for love always occurs beyond good and evil."
Friedrich Nietzsche
"I write two kinds of music: clocks and clouds."
~ Gyorgy Ligeti
When Patrick Dorobisz calls an album "Fine Arts et Dix Ans Après," he may just possibly be making reference to Alvin Lee's band and their classic song "Going Home." Dorobisz's influences range from Ashra Temple to Schoenberg, Cage and Terry Riley. Patrick sees sound and paints it literally. His album covers are diagrams used in the production of the sin waves that make up the sound. If this album has a touch of "Going Home," it is at home with pure constructed sin waves and the recorded incidental sounds once called musique concrete. In other words, there are bird sounds, machines, spoken words and crowd noises, but all the rest of it is created from scratch with a keyboard and lots of dials and slide controls. This is an album about choices and contrasts. Each note has a cluster of dials, switches, and nobs responsible for it's birthing. Every timbre and tone is chosen from the ether to fit into a construction as complex as string theory. What makes one choice better than another? If you have to ask, you can't afford it.
There is one great big literary reference in song 8 on this album: "Par delà le bien et le mal" (beyond good and evil). I take this to mean this album was done for love. The writer of "Beyond Good and Evil" thought that "[w]hatever is done for love is beyond good and evil." Faced with a chaos of choices at the modern electronic keyboard, there is no other reason to exercise freedom of choice. Question is: What do these choices create inside of me? These sounds don't make me want to dance, fight, eat or make love, so they aren't good pop music. At first, I feel a little afraid. There aren't any places to lounge in this music. These are electronic sounds, with no beat to tap my foot to. Ah, but that's the beauty of it. I think too much. This music is strange. It's been quite a while since I've had a little strange. How's about you?
Without the usual 7th chords and 4/4 time to make me feel comfy, a part of me rejects this sound as "not music." There is another part of me, thank heck. A lumbering, sleepy listener inside of me opens one eye and flutters its lash at this unfamiliar chaotic landscape and begins to stretch to quit the throes of sleep. This deep listener has been in a deep sleep, drowsy from countless meals of comfort food, and satiated with "that same new thing." I proudly discover that there are "clocks and clouds" in these sounds, and there are repetitions, and phases of tempos askew. Good. I can almost stop listening. I almost have a handle on it. Then something goes wrong. My description loses footing. It's like a chess game with a better opponent. At first I'm pissed, but at some point it's like learning from Bobby Fisher. Sure, I'd like to win, but I'll settle for making him sweat. This is recorded music, so I get to play again and again. I'll win next time, or the next. I'll understand it and I can pigeonhole this stuff as something or other, forget it, and call it familiar. What baffles me so far is it keeps sounding new. And when I can't figure something out, I feel it. Hey that's it, I think. This guy is making really cool choices in a restless kind of way. I could do that in my own stuff. A feeling of freedom comes over me. Yikes, but it's hard work. "Habit is a great deadener," says Samuel Beckett. A little freedom and I'm ready for a nap. But I will try to use this technique, this caring about every little aspect kind of choosing once in a while. It's hard work. I have to care a whole bunch to work that hard. It's only worth it when I care deeply. That kind of awareness is too much work unless I'm in love with what I'm doing, or who I'm with. This awareness of every aspect stuff is beyond difficult. It's beyond doing things the right way. It's beyond doing things right or getting it wrong. Feels like being in love.
THE SONGS:
1. ELECTRO 1 begins with the sonar heartbeat like that of a submarine increasing in tempo to become the excited pulse. The complex rhythm of phase music develops as though the same tempo were played on different machines slightly out of sync. The tick tock of sin waves in search of synchronicity forms a chaotic web of possibilities. An anxious, throbbing electromagnetic field might make this sound. The timbre of the waves suggests a ney played over the tics of a clock shop buried beneath the waves.
2. ELECTRO 3 is a cloud to follow the Electro 1 clock. A complex drone underpainting supports a melody like a small bouncing ball on a Casio keyboard with companion orbs attempting some sort of convergence. The pace quickens as though the keyboard were juggling multiple spheres. The quickening timbre of a darker, larger basketball of a percussion key with its tone changing rapidly on impact like the arc of a timpani's distinctive attack and Doppler-like decay pesters the smaller sounds into anarchy.
3. FRÉQUENCE rides the wave of a humming machine in a tone that resonates from every surface in the room. There is "noise" in the saw tooth of the sound forming the tiny rattle like that of an insect beating it's wings into a secondary tone. Dorobisz explores timbre in the drone of a sculpted sound. A single timbre explores pure glissando up slowly and back below the range of the ear. Along this sliding tone there are notes that resonate with the organs in the body. I find my brain becoming hyper aware and just a little paranoid. This sound is pervasive. Such tones are used to signal danger.
4. IL ETAIT UNE FOIS sounds like the French equivalent of "Once upon a time." "It was one time" or "it was once" is a bad literal translation. The music is playful and fancy, with some of the repetitive sound, and distinctive tone of a Merry Go Round. There is something magical in this tinkle tinkle repetitive calliope. This may be the dance of chromosomes or the fermentation of scant fact into fantasy.
5. PULVERISATIONS begins with bird song in a musique concrète landscape as the ghost track of electronic effects creates an other worldly aspect to these familiar chirping creatures. A radio can chirp in a magnetic field, and this piece is a kind of duet between feathered creatures and feathered tones. My fantasy of this song involves a flock of birds greeting the mechanical beasts from H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds for a sing along. Clever birds carry the avian flu, for which no Martian has immunity. It's has a happy ending.
6. ELECTRO 2 might be a fitting replacement for the tones of the Emergency Broadcast System. The emergence of a lumbering melody is found in a collection of gamelan bells half submerged in water. The machine is trying to tell us something.
7. VIOLON BLANC means "white violin." There are voices muffled and distorted floating in stereo with trucks driving from speaker to speaker. A man is speaking French. Sounds like the tape is being fiddled with by some malicious man in the mixing room. Rain sticks spill there hermetically sealed seeds inside the tube. The noise is a light blonde color, almost white. A monotonous deep keyboard does it do re do ti do re thing and there's a scary hum like the refrigerator is about to quit working. Whew! At least this isn't a dream. Or is it?
8. PAR DELÁ LE BIEN ET LE MAL uses the keyboard to play the sound of a gong slower than any bell could manage. My speakers are hooked up right, so I can hear the swell of deep sound spinning around the room. There are electronic crickets out the windows of my tweeters. This is a cloudy place. Sure, I'm a little scared, but I'm going to ride this one out. It exists in time, as do I, so in the end I'll be free to get a PBJ and a glass a milk and say that I was up to the challenge. There's a crane flying overhead, squawking it's endangered song. Sure, I know the world is this deep, but not on TV. I remember when everything was this interesting and the sounds turned out to mean something. I learnt that certain sounds brought me milk and cookies. I had to sweat that one out, but it was worth knowing. This is a dangerous place. What are the rules here? I don't think there are any rules. I'll have to feel my way through this one, and keep smiling. Don't let them know you are afraid! This would be a flashback, but most of my recreational trips were pretty ordinary. Maybe this is a flash forward. If this feeling sticks with me, I can use my vinyl copy of "Frampton Comes Alive" to bring me back down. Hey, I'm starting to like it here.
9. MOX is a swirling churning urn of burning Bach. There is something on the Internet called the Mox Pearl. It was a big one. And MOX is a mixture of plutonium used in nuclear power plants. This one seems like a live one. There are no spent rods. It sounds like pipe organ music on acid. It keeps moving somewhere and doubling back like it's going in expanding circles. As it gets faster and faster, it seems like a shock wave to me. I think there's going to be some 'splaning to do. This MOX sounds benevolent, but a little too powerful. It's always the little things. Like balls of energy. Teeny tiny balls of energy. They don't like being messed with. I like my mushrooms on chicken. This one is a cloud.
10. TRAIN drips into existence like that faucet near the echoplex in the combination kitchen and recording studio. More drips and drops summon a tiny train going to white noise land. I think it is blowing its horn. I want to dance along to this water music, but it's not symmetric. I stumble after a few attempted steps and fall into a train with lots of conversations. I'm on a French train, and the water is still dripping. The voices are just like water flowing through the train. We don't arrive. The train gets quiet. Hey, where did everybody go?
Post Script:
Subsequent to the review, I learned that Dorobisz wrote some of this electronic music when he was at "Fine Arts" in 1973. Hence the name Fine Arts & Ten Years After. The production was done on analog tape with old style synth machines. Some of the sound was achieved by physically manipulating the tape as it traveled through the reel to reel magnetic recorder. Patrick has moved from France to Belgium, where he is setting up a new recording studio.
An email from Patrick Dorobisz in response to this review included the following quote:
"I use sounds...what is the difference between a painted surface and a painted time?"
Every picture has a source of light. Every song illuminates a part of the world. Even the silence shimmers.
"In the midst of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer." ~ Albert Camus
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