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The elephant in the room
There is an elephant in the concert hall. We should talk about it. The elephant is volume. The elephant is the fact that most people I know take earplugs to every concert they go to, inserting them furtively when volumes creep up to 100dB or so. The elephant is the fact that artists turn the sound up and up with the mixing desks they now tend to have on stage with them, determined to make an impact. The elephant is the irony that the more they turn up, the less we listen. This elephant-sized sound is big and grey and rather boring. In the end, all we hear is the house sound system and its capacity to fill and to shake the room. Listening to the house sound system cranked up to 11 has a benefit: vibro-massage. But it also has a downside: deafness.
The elephant in the concert hall is why composer Bernhard Gal, who came with me to Transmediale to hear Noriko Tujiko and Lionel Fernandez, left after ten minutes. A musician as talented as Gal is going to need good hearing later in life. I'd brought my trusty wax earplugs, but gumming them deep into my ears didn't stop a case of low-level tinnitus later in the evening, the squealing sound of an absent television set filling my silent apartment. Even Noriko, up on stage, was grimacing at Lionel, singing with her fingers in her ears. Something is deeply wrong here. Why have we scaled our sounds to the elephant's gigantic ears rather than our own small, delicate ones?
Last night at Transmediale, Felix Kubin played a sort of arty 'DJ Battle' with a Polish musician, Woj3k Kurcharczyk. The set was full of clever conceptual touches, like a series of tones which were supposed to command the audience to cross the Polish border. And of course, since it was an ironic and iconic battle between Poland and Germany, they both turned up the sound. Beside me Eric was explaining the jokes to Mario, hollering into his ear. Meanwhile I was trying to hear what Francoise Cactus was telling me about Stereo Total's new album. It might be called 'Do The Cow', but I couldn't really hear properly. I grinned and nodded a lot, loosening my earplugs. In the end I have to say I found Kubin's set (the first I'd seen by this interesting artist) disappointing. Because, despite the flow of rather interesting ideas, this was finally just another loud gig in a room with huge speakers and coloured spotlights. I slipped away to the Dense stall and bought a CD: Meeting At Off-Site Volume 2.
I've played it twice now. The first time, I heard almost nothing. The volumes were so low on the record, the sounds so enigmatic, that my battered ears could hardly distinguish them. Bulemia had been replaced by what seemed like a sort of aural anorexia. But soon I re-adjusted the threshold of my attention, turned up my tiny speakers. And it not only scuffled, buzzed and plinked, it clicked. This is music which knows all about the elephant in the room. These are artists who have done 'loud' and come out the other side into 'quiet'. This is music which comes out of small rooms, spaces in the Aoyama and Yoyogi districts of Tokyo without rock lighting rigs or sound systems. It's improvised on 'instruments' like no-input sampler, broken synthesizer, crumbs of rosin, broken pieces of bamboo stick jumping on a snare drum, the sound of a loose tape recorder spool flopping around. It's music which restores sound to a human scale, recognizing that we have the ears of human beings and not elephants. It knows that listening pleasure is about freshness, and about scale, and about colour, and about contrast, and about space. Precisely because this music comes out of small rooms, it knows the importance of space. A single guitar note makes a 'plink' in the middle of minutes of semi-silence, and we hear the sound. It doesn't repeat. It doesn't need to. Repetition would diminish the impact. John Cage said that musicians are trained not to hear a single note, only the relations between a sequence of notes. Well, here (as in Webern's exquisite 'Five Pieces For Orchestra') the single note strikes back. And it's gorgeous.
When Wire magazine covered what it called the 'Japanese Reductionists' (Toshimaru Nakamura, Tetuzi Akiyama, Otomo Yoshihide, Ami Yoshida, Sachiko M, Sawako, Yoshiyuki Suzuki, Aki Onda, Atsuhiro, Yukari Ito, Midori) in its July 2003 issue, it titled the story Site For Sore Ears and gave it the strapline 'How a Tokyo Cafe with noise-sensitive neighbours came to host some of the quietest music on earth.' Wire writer Clive Bell visited an Off-Site concert and was struck by 'the superhuman quality of the listening, both by musicians and audience.... Sitting on small stools on a concrete floor, they listen like they mean it. This is listening that you can almost see, suspended in the room like coloured light.'
This week I was contacted by UbuWeb, a site containing the world's best archive of 'listening music'. They asked to host my Summerisle Horspiel. The piece -- a collection of whispers, mumbling, scuffling and chopped up folksinging -- will join their archives soon. I'm delighted. It feels like a small victory against the boring big elephant.
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I'm reminded, though, of a gig by our man
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1. Introverted ramblings. (Should be 'too quiet'.)
2. Disturbing PoMo pyschodrama. (Getting louder.)
3. Major folktronic hoedown. (Deafening fiddle-synths.)
Of course it's hard to explain this to the sound engineer without appearing to be a plonker. So I normally just say 'No reverb on the voice, please!' and leave him to do whatever he wants. It's my laissez faire 'deafen as desired' policy. But I can always pull the level down on the iBook.
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