ZING! WENT THE TIME-STRINGS

ZING! WENT THE TIME-STRINGS

The fifth CD release from The Four Last Things is a double-length album consisting of four massive abstract musical landscapes spreading out under recitations of old poetry ranging from Roman times to 19th Century England. If this were the 1960s or 70s, each of these four individual pieces would fill an entire side of a 33 & 1/3 record. (Here in the 21st Century we’re able to squeeze them all into one compact disc!)

That first paragraph already contains a bunch of “time” references, and that will begin to clue you in to the meaning of the album title. But we’re not stopping there. Let’s hop back to 1979 for a while. . . November 1979, to be precise. That’s where the earliest noise on this record comes from. Now, I often refer to the music I make as noise, but usually I’m just being coy, because I make plenty of normal stuff with melody and so forth. Not so here. The vast bulk of Time-Strings is rampant, loud guitar/amp feedback, occasionally interrupted by quieter sounds, and frequently punctuated with stops & starts. I am certain many, probably most, listeners would not consider this to be music at all. But I’ve been partial to the avant-garde for a long time.

Anyway, in November 1979 I was starting to record some experimental “sound-pieces,” mostly for my own amusement. I cite a few precedents as influences. One would be the 20th Century “Classical” music genre known as Electronic Music or Musique Concrete, which was created mostly on tape by composers who felt that traditional instruments did not provide all the possible sounds they wanted to make. Synthesizers and other electronic devices, as well as traditional vinyl records that could be manipulated (for example, through variations in speed), became these composers’ “instruments.” Much of what was produced by them in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, was rejected by the musical establishment, who heard only senseless noise. In fact, the phrase “The Lunatic Fringe,” which has come to be used in many other arenas, including politics, was actually coined by a writer describing the earliest electronic music composers. Of course, the movement was not stunted at all by such criticism, and soon enough, major composers like Varese and Stockhausen certified the genre with their own experiments in the field. Varese’s Poeme Electronique is the work that stands out principally in my estimation.

The example of these Classical guys was soon enough translated to the world of popular music. In 1968, John Lennon gave us the oh-so-Varesian Revolution #9 on the Beatles’ White Album (recorded only a few weeks after a more primitive attempt with Yoko Ono on their Two Virgins album). A few months later, in March 1969, John & Yoko gave a live concert performance in Cambridge, England, that consisted of a half-hour of Yoko’s abstract vocalization accompanied only by John’s guitar feedback. This was followed up by the more well-known collaborative album, Live Peace in Toronto, which was half rock standards like Blue Suede Shoes and Dizzy Miss Lizzie, and half avant-garde noise in the Cambridge 1969 mode. The Lennon-Ono recordings of 1969 were probably the most immediate influence on what I was trying to do in 1979.

There is a form in the Classical Music world known as the tone poem, where a composer will use the instrumental colors of the orchestra to paint a picture in sound, often with an underlying theme taken from a poem or other literary work. Franz Liszt, for example, wrote an orchestral tone poem on Hamlet. Tchaikovsky wrote one on Romeo & Juliet. Richard Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra, based on a novel by Nietzsche, became famous as the theme of the movie “2001.” Some tone poems took their subjects from works of visual art. When I started doing my sound experiments, I was thinking of this latter niche. Being obsessed around this same time with Renaissance Art, I began titling the pieces after paintings by Michelangelo and others, and called the whole collection “Paintings In Music.” I continued doing these guitar feedback recordings into the 1980s, also at times producing more subtle sound montages in the musique concrete/tape music style. (Several of these were anthologized in 2004 on a home-studio demo titled Climb Every Montage.)

Like so many of my musical projects, the feedback experiments sat around for years, providing me with listening entertainment, occasionally shared with friends with similarly radical tastes. Then, in the early 2000s, when the Four Last Things’ Otherwise album was being assembled, I decided to finally unveil one of my personal favorites, a 1980 effort called Ancestral Voices. Up until nearly the end of the Otherwise production timeline, Ancestral Voices was intended to serve as the sonic foundation of the piece, Oxyrhynchus. Plans eventually changed on that front, but I knew that Ancestral Voices and others would soon have their day.

Time-Strings is their day. It collects all the best of my efforts in this genre, all captured on tape between 1979 and 1984, and distilled, assembled, and edited between 2018 and 2019. Although I had, up to the Otherwise production, never thought of adding voices to these pieces, it seemed like a good idea, both to give some absolute meaning to the listening experience, and to pay homage to some great literary works.

The Ruined City leads off the album. The music was recorded in July 1984, in the basement of a house on Hall Street in Dunstable, during my first period of residence in the town. More than any of the other feedback-fests, this piece contained substantial chunks of what we would call “lead guitar,” i.e., rock-style soloing with a heavily bluesy flavor. This feature led me to the idea of bringing in bass and drums parts to create passages resembling typical rock & roll jamming. It just so happened that I had a few minutes of “free” drums from another project that seemed to fit perfectly. During the 2018 work on reissuing First Things on CD, I had trimmed several minutes of instrumental soloing out of the track L’Homme Arme. This included a few minutes of Ken Chartrand’s drum solo. Voila: my first drum addition. Ken’s long-lost drum work from 1992 came back to life as the percussion foundation of the “lead guitar” sections of The Ruined City. The bass guitar that shows up in the same sections is of more recent vintage; it is a heavily-edited loop of excerpts from a discarded jam section in the yet-to-be-released 4LT song, NGC 7331. The player is Brent Godin, who is well-known to 4LT and LOE fans as our engineer of choice in the studio, who also whips up a mean bassline when called upon. For the title and lyrics of this piece, we go back to Old English, the language of Beowulf, around 800 AD. The anonymous poem is a haunting look at a ghost town of ancient days, describing what once stood there as well as what is left. I managed, with a somewhat limited grasp of the antique grammar, to “translate” the Old English into Modern English. And then I went ahead and did the vocal part myself.

Next up is The Temple of Mars. The words here come from The Canterbury Tales by Geoffry Chaucer. So we’ve moved up now from Old to Middle English, to the 14th Century AD. The passage from Chaucer is a detailed description of the art and sculpture that his imaginary narrator sees within this temple dedicated to the god of war and destruction. As we see (hear), Mars’ dark influence extends far beyond the military battlefield, to every nook of bloody violence and even common mishap. There is a long litany of hurt: murder, suicide, death from plague, a hunter killed by bears, a man who falls under the wheels of his own cart, a cook being scalded in the kitchen. It’s all part of Mars’ domain. The music comes from two separate feedback recordings of November and December 1979. More of Brent’s homeless bass track is present in the “trio” passages. The drums this time are by Gary Gagnon and are taken from a series of overdubs he did for the 4LT album, Yearn, but which were left aside in favor of his original tracks. The vocal is by David Landman, my great English professor back at the University of Lowell, who opened my eyes to the excellence of Chaucer and much other old literature. Now in his late 80s, he gladly agreed to do the reading, although he felt modestly about his ability to do it justice. For me, however, there could be no more appropriate choice!

Our time machine now takes us even farther back, as we approach the banks of the Mosella. The Moselle is a European river flowing through both France and Germany, long notable for the hilltop vineyards along its course. Around 370 AD, the Roman poet Ausonius wrote a nearly 500-line poem in Latin titled Mosella, and excerpts from a modern translation by the British WWI-era poet, Frank S. Flint, are used for the recitation in this piece. The music is an amalgamation of a July 1982 feedback recording and some other stray fragments from the late 70s/early 80s. Bass & drums were again flown in from unrelated fragments, performed by Godin & Gagnon. As in The Ruined City and Temple of Mars, remember that none of the separate musical parts were meant to go together - all were recorded at different times, with no reference to the other parts. So if there are moments when “the band” seems to be in the groove with one of their jams, it is as much a coincidence as those parts where they might seem to be going off-kilter. (This is called making apologies in advance.) The vocal rendering, which includes a snatch of Latin at the beginning, is by my friend Stephen McMillen, a fellow Classicist and big fan of Roman literature, who seemed a perfect mouthpiece for dear old Ausonius.

Finally, we come to the longest and, lyrics-wise, the latest, of our tone poems, Ancestral Voices. A brief summary of how it came about can stand as a blueprint for the creation of all the guitar stuff on Time-Strings. One day in July 1980, I plugged my Fender Stratocaster and a fuzz pedal into whatever cheap & crappy amp I was using at the time, threw a blank orange-label Certron cassette into my portable mono tape recorder, pushed the Record button, and made noise for the length of a 30-minute tape side. I titled the resulting improvisation Ancestral Voices, from a line in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem, Kubla Khan. At some point not long after, the tape was partially eaten and a couple of minutes were lost, but I repaired it, dubbed the music onto another tape and kept it stashed in a drawer, occasionally pulling it out for a listen to remind myself how wonderful noise can be. As mentioned above, it almost, but not quite, appeared on the second 4LT album, Otherwise. Whereas, on that album, I was going to pair it with some ancient Greek poetry, I finally decided to go back to the very source, and to use the Coleridge poem that was in my mind at the outset, a poem that speaks as much about the power and process of artistic creation as it does about old voices. Our new voice on this recording is another friend and League of Existence comrade, Brian Farrell. This is the only one of the four pieces to not include bass and drums.

For those who incline to the out-of-the-ordinary, Time-Strings may be appealing, although it may be, even to them, too rough around the edges to be more than a one-time entertainment. For the middle-of-the-roaders, the easy listeners, and probably even most “heavy” music fans, there will be no coming to terms with this. Although I did not count it as an influence, since I was not familiar with it when I recorded my stuff, Lou Reed’s 1975 Metal Machine Music album might be considered a distant cousin to this. But I do believe I’ve tried to soften the metallic blows, where Mr. Reed was content to let them fall how & where they may. For me, this noise is like the rollicking sloshing of waves in the womb, and I feel a warm and enveloping ease listening to it.

I would be remiss in concluding without thanking again all the participants: Ken Chartrand, Brian Farrell, Gary Gagnon, David Landman, and Stephen McMillen. And double thanks to Brent Godin, who not only contributed electric bass but also performed his usual miracles in mixing & mastering the whole mess at Night Train Studio.

(and P.S. - note the Judy Garland reference in the title of this post!)