John Bischoff is not a name you are likely to have come across
a great deal in the U.K. or indeed in general. This is the only
currently available solo commercial release of his music that
I can find. He is perhaps best known as a founding member in
1978 of the League of Automatic Music Composers, which is considered
the first ever ‘Computer Network Band’. He is active
in the San Francisco Bay area new music scene, has toured in
Europe and is a keen educator at Mills College and elsewhere.
The informative text for this release has a good deal of background
build-up, of which the composer’s own quote is perhaps
the best summary, describing his work as “a music built
from the intrinsic features of the electronic medium at hand:
high definition noise components, tonal edges, digital shading,
and non-linear motion, all evolving in the variable context
of live performance.” There is certainly plenty to say
about associations and related art forms, and the Audio Combine
title track is as good an example as any. Combine harvesters
no doubt have quite specific musical associations for UK readers
of a certain generation but the booklet gives us a different
key, approaching the relationship of music to machinery “as
a reduction, in this case of the three actions that the machine
completes: reaping, threshing and winnowing. [They] share a
technique of collapsing input, activity and result into a single
operation, one that displays precision, concision, and natural
flow in equal measure.”
A first impression gives a sense of utmost refinement, transparency,
even of fragility in the kinds of sounds Bischoff favours in
his palette. Amplified or manipulated sounds, computer generated
signals and electronic sources are used, creating pieces which,
depending on your attitude, will give you either the ultimate
in ‘squeaky gate’ nonsense, or fascinating sonic
environments through which one can roam like a walk through
an abstract sound-park. There is plenty of fresh air in the
park, by which I mean silence around the notes and noises -
indeed, the canvas from which Bischoff’s shapes often
emerge is a kind of ever-present stillness. He works with rhythm
to a certain extent, but offers no real sense of beat or tempo
to pin us to any conventional sense of speed. Each track has
its own sonic palette and sense of atmosphere, but each give
a sense of being related by means of technique in terms of construction
and performance. Extended bell-like sounds are always a favourite
of mine, so Local Color is one of the pieces which communicated
most -forming a kind of garden of sounds in which movement both
slowly undulating and brightly sparkling is allowed to develop.
Perhaps it is also the sense of tonality in the held notes of
this piece which attract.
These pieces are all recorded in a concert hall ambience, and
give the impression of live performance. In that sense they
are not as ‘dry’ as some direct-to-disc transfers
of electronic music. Decay Trace has some interesting
nuances, with pre-recorded cluster samples and other effects
popping out of the silence to provide strange visual clues and
shifts of perspective. Surface Effect and Sidewalk
Chatter both generate their sounds “from interactions
between an analogue oscillator circuit and a computer running
sound generators.” These do the least for me, with an
acute abstraction of musical material being generated by even
more abstract and often merely annoying sources of noise. I’ve
sat in darkened rooms and heard this kind of thing plenty of
times, and never in my entire life has anyone from the audience
come away saying ‘wow’ with a sense of life-enhanced
awe.
If you like your art as abstract as it comes, and your electronic
music to be ‘hands-on’ and untouchable in equal
measure, then this may well be the CD for you. If you have the
chance, give it a listen - the New
World Records site provides samples. You’ll know within
about 20 seconds if it’s your bag.
Dominy Clements
rec. 5 January 2010 and 2 May 2011, Littlefield Concert Hall, Mills
College, Oakland, California. 