Chas Smith has contributed to many film
scores and rock albums, playing pedal steel guitar and organ;
since the 1970s he has been designing and creating his own
instruments - he has also worked as a professional welder
and machinist. His metal constructions – many of which bear
colourful names, as listed above – can be struck, bowed or
otherwise manipulated in a variety of ways. In a sense he
can be seen, I suppose, as a descendant of Harry Partch, part
inventor, part composer with an individual vision.
Among his instruments
are the ‘Copper Box’, which uses a number of aircraft parts,
can be struck or bowed and has a ring time of 45 seconds;
the ‘Pez Eater’ which “has 36 steel rods, captured at one
end and tunable, mounted in front of guitar pickups that are
adjustable up and down to look for ‘sweet spots’. It’s played
with pencil erasers, rubber grommets, thin wires, bowed with
Velcro and ribbons” and ‘Guitarzilla’ “a tripleneck guitar
with a short scale 10 string, a long scale 10-string and 5
string bass neck. Each neck has pickups on both ends and all
of the strings are coplanar so things like drill rods and
such can extend across multiple necks and be woven in the
strings (see ‘Simple
Music for Complex Sounds’). In truth, it has to be said
that individual instrumental sounds can scarcely be distinguished
in the music on Descent.
The fascination
with sonority is the dominant force in Smith’s music here;
‘Descent’ is made up of thick, multi-layered textures of sound,
vaguely mechanical in implication, with the sounds of jet
engines clearly heard at times; the music moves very slowly,
the effect is a kind of industrial/technological sublime.
Slowly the pitch of the labs of sound moves downwards (which
is presumably part of what the title refers too). This is
slow music which demands a good deal of patience and attention
if one is to listen to it properly; there is a strange sense
of sounds which are simultaneously delicate and weighty. For
me the experience was initially relaxing and then rather unsettling.
‘Endless Mardi Gras’ opens with distant sounds of conversation
and then – again – jet engines, which become dominant; this
particular sequence I found rather tedious and overlong, though
the spatial effects as the sounds recede and approach are
often interesting. ‘False Clarity’ has some more obviously
‘beautiful’ textures, quiet and crystalline, the metal sources
of some of the sounds more obvious, the shifts of pitch and
tone again very slow. There is a voice to be heard too; it
is probably the most immediately approachable of the three
tracks (if only because it has affinities with certain kinds
of ambient music). But ‘Descent’ seems to me the most interesting
and individual work here and will, I suspect, be the most
likely reason for my returning to the album later.
This is not music
which will appeal to everyone, and, in truth, it isn’t music
I expect to listen to with great frequency myself. But Smith
deserves to be taken seriously, and his work articulates a
particular experience of the world in interesting and idiosyncratic
fashion. Personally I would like the opportunity to hear some
of Smith’s instruments in isolation, as it were, not just
as voices (mostly impossible to distinguish with any certainty)
in these dense textures of sound. Perhaps Cold Blue will consider
creating the kind of opportunity to hear and ‘play’ Smith’s
instruments which exists, where Partch’s instruments are concerned
- click here.
Glyn Pursglove
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Oja Fin (voice);
Chas Smith (stainless steel sheet, jet plane/notch filters, Copper Box,
steel guitar, Que Lastas, Jr. Blue, flutes, zither, Guitarzilla, Pez Eater)
