Multiple sonic pleasures: Multiplicitas by Magic Bullet

 

Multiplicitas, the extra special double debut album by Magic Bullet, another artistic incarnation of the underground and independent music guru that is Mick Magic. This blog, too had the pleasure over the recent years of savouring and writing about Mick's long-standing travails in the underground music scene - and this is yet another epic creative venture unleashed on the rather surreal world of 2020...

The double album consists of Solidarietas and Curiositas - and they take us from something firmly rooted in experimental sound galaxies to head-bobbing high-octane progressive rock.

Solidarietas was reportedly born out of a creative wave that initially provided a shorter work for a musique concrète compilation. This hour-long experimental composition is demanding attention - which is quite different from what often-seen misconceptions about the genre state. 

It may well start with elements of ambient noise, radio broadcast fragments in Russian language, natural sounds - but, like all imaginative musique concrete, it is not background ambiental music. It is clearly a product of the digital era, this is not Varèse experimenting with rudimentary tapes... Thus, there is much more precise control in sculpting sounds - and considerably more processing possibilities that propel the listener into another world. 

In a many ways, the mindset that is required for an introspective work like Klaus Schulze's Sebastian im Traum is needed here. The overall effect, not the individual elements matter here as we are taken on a sonic journey. The processed 'raw materials' certainly seem to fuse time and space, evoking imagery from the Soviet era, moving through the cogs of some immense Pink Floydian machinery, then floating off to some alien corners of outer space...

The second disc, Curiositas brings a mighty energy injection with the opening track, M.M.A.T.T. 33 - which is a mash-up of earlier Magic Moments At Twilight Time works, mainly from Creavolution (latter having been reviewed on this blog, too). It feels remarkably fluid for a mash-up, and with a driving rhythm that will certainly recharge battery cells after the previous meditative journey.

The A.F.C. Song continues on an energetic note, and rightly so - as it is a tribute, firmly rooted in space punk, to A.F.C Wimbledon. Dance, Freak gives us an ambiental, mysterious-sounding repose with sampled and processed voices, with a return to high-octane and tight riffs that have serious head-bobbing potential. 

Stille Nacht follows as a re-interpretation of the traditional song, which will definitely surprise many. It starts as an ambiental journey, with a sonic imagery evoking winter scenes, with a dreamy, but playful, piano arriving on the scene... until a firm and eminently electronic section cranks up the energy levels. 

As Christmas, its natural setting, and the whole sacred/secular juxtaposition of things around that time of the year got a thorough(ly) prog-rock treatment, why not look at (and dive into) Easter, too?

Thankfully, the following two tracks do just that - the first of those, Jesus Is Dead (Let's Eat Chocolate!) has a charming family connection, too with the mastermind behind this double album - as it features a very young family member (undoubtedly also a great fan of, uhm, secular aspects of Easter, namely the aforementioned chocolate).

We keep the energising and forward-driving, even propelling, rhythms and riffs, with a tempo that stays with us for the Jesus Has Risen (Let's Mow The Lawn) track, too - where we have more electronics joining the arrangements, with (no pun intended, or maybe a little bit...) spirited modulations of  synthesised sounds.

The bonus track, which ends our sonic journey from experimental to high-octane prog rock realms, is Live In Session (On Tudno FM) - an edit in three parts of a recent radio appearance, with special live versions of tracks from Curiositas.

Thus, definitely not shortage in creativity and inspiration, which means that hopefully other concept albums from Magic Bullet await us in the future. In the current rather unusual, often well-and-truly mad, times it is certainly a very welcome escape from everyday surrealism.

Fifty switched-on years: Wendy Carlos, a modular Moog... and Bach

The 1968 original cover

In October 1968, the seminal album Switched-On Bach was released. Wendy Carlos, using an era-defining Moog synthesizer, has surprised audiences with pioneering electronic renditions of selected Bach compositions.

In 2018, this may sound absolutely banale - even if in 1968 none other than the legendary pianist Glenn Gould held the ground-breaking performances in the highest regard. We are  nowadays taking electronic instruments for granted, and synthesizer reworkings of classical pieces have been ubiquitous...

One really needs to put Wendy Carlos's unprecedented achievement in technical, musical, and also cultural context.

Electronic instruments, even with the arrival of Robert Moog's classic synthesizer, have been laboratory curiosities until then. Even if some electronic works so-to-speak escaped into the popular realm well before 1968, synthesized sound has not truly exploded into popular consciousness until then.

The technical challenges were numerous, and one can get an insight into this by consulting countless notes and interviews done with Carlos and others. The list is quasi-endless, from notoriously unstable tuning to the often overlooked fact that the synth on which Carlos performed the Bach pieces was essentially monophonic - i.e. it could produce sound for one note at a time. Custom "chord generators" had to be made, with chained-together oscillators, such that Bach's chord structures could also take shape.

We must not forget, this was Bach actually played on the Moog - no automation or programming of any sort has taken place. A revolutionary touch-sensitive keyboard allowed very articulated performances. Still, it necessitated an almost superhuman way of playing when faced with a monophonic keyboard - something that Carlos modestly called "detached" playing, as each key had to be activated on its own. Try and keep an eminently fluid and spirited performance going, playing on such an instrument...

These technical difficulties, heroically overcome by Carlos, lead us to the musical achievement.

This may well be a switched-on and fully electronic Bach, but it is very switched-on from musical performance perspective, too. As much as some voices denigrated the results, even "serious" musicians, like the aforementioned Glenn Gould, and the unexpectedly numerous public embraced it.

Even now, half a century later, Carlos's performances (including the particularly superb choices made in terms of the arrangements, i.e. synthesized timbres) range from eminently subtle to joyously bouncy.

The cultural impact and its effect on the public's perception of the new electronic instruments have been immense.

The first cohesive and large work, with truly world-wide popular success, recorded entirely with synthesizers was not a stereotypical pop or rock tune (like Telstar in 1962). It was an entire album of popular works by J. S. Bach... as a result of a stunningly audacious adventure centred around a synthesizer monster that was just about emerging from its laboratory environment...

Wendy Carlos in 1968

Have all negative preconceptions, by now simply anachronistic prejudices, related to electronic instruments been put to rest during the fifty years that followed?

Yes and no.

Both utterly high-brow and utterly popular music widely employs synthesizers, and so does pretty much everything in-between... Very often, the artificial delimitation line between non-electronic and electronic instruments is entirely blurred or non-existent, as audiences may not even be able to tell the difference between some samplers and the instruments they sampled. Also, often complex processing of traditional instruments' sounds makes those sound eminently electronic when they are not...

However, some still see electronic instruments as tools for creating "sterile", "not human", "machine" etc. music. Some sub-genres of electronic music, which heavily rely on robotic rhythms or entirely intentional robotic aesthetics, certainly do not help in shifting these out-dated misperceptions.

Even within the Berlin School of electronic music, e.g. Kraftwerk represents a diametrically opposite aesthetic and artistic intent compared to e.g. Tangerine Dream. Former had a specific message centred on technology, whilst latter explicitly used technology as merely a creative tool and never let it take over. See Kraftwerk standing immobile with their laptops, and see Tangerine Dream still, 50+ years on, jamming in lengthy live improvised sets... The concept and the intent behind their respective art is vastly different - and the resulting music also shows the radically different, even opposite, approaches to synthesizers.

The great Romantic passion in works by Vangelis are quite different from the energies unleashed by any of the trance or techno acts, and comparisons are unfair to make - as there are no valid comparisons between eminently different musical intentions and aesthetics.

However, one could say that views that consider electronic music to be "sterile" have been conceptually wrong from the very beginning.

Even in 1968, people looking at (as some never listened or wanted to listen to) Wendy Carlos's monster Moog synth as a tool for "machine" music were committing a fundamental error.

Not because of subjective pros and cons and tastes... but because it is an (intentional or not) confusion of three different things: instrument, medium, and content.

Synthesizers, as obvious it may seem when rationally thinking about them, are merely instruments... One can make, and has made ,sterile or cerebral music with a flute, too...

As the late, unparalleled Isao Tomita said once, synth-made electronic sound is as natural as the sound of thunder made by nature's electric discharges... After all, what creates the sound doesn't matter - the boundaries and preconceptions are in our minds only...