Bäck to the Future (det här var imorgon)

 

Released 1978, recorded at the start of the 1970s. Give it a listen, it's immense

What blows my mind is that by the time this came out, Sven had turned his Bäck to the Future and gone back to the traditional composerly palette of orchestra, choir, etc

So many avant-gardists of the post-WW2 surge into the electronic and tape-music unknown did this coming-home drift back to the acoustic.  Nono, Ann Southam, Pauline Oliveros, Paul Lansky, Stockhausen to a large extent...

It's like a film maker deciding to go back to black-and-white. Or to forego sound, revert from talkies to silents.  

But perhaps they felt that electronics had been taken as far as they could.... or that something of the human touch had been lost. 

Well, some who dabbled, gave up very quickly - Ligeti, Penderecki, Takemitsu - feeling that it was tonally impoverished or unwieldy. 

Perhaps most mystifying of all to me is the gentleman who did it just the once, superbly, creating what might be on some days my favorite piece of tape-music: Henri Sauguet.

"Aspect Sentimental" appeared on this landmark compilation

But once was enough for Henri

Back to Bäck...

Confusing matters, Fylkingen, the Swedish label that put out Sven-Erik Bäck's Electronic Music, put out another album called Electronic Music eight years later, by Pär Lindgren. Also worth your ear time. 

In the gap - which could be as much as 14 years, given that the Sven-Eriktronica was recorded in the early 70s -  "this kind of thing" has got a lot more crisp and spatialized. I'm not sure if it's made digitally but it certainly feels like it.

I'm impressed but I don't like it nearly as much as the Bäck or the Sauguet era work which is much  blurrier and ethereal. 

I wonder if the difference between  Bäck and Lindgren ere loosely corresponds to the Mark Fisher distinction between eerie and weird. 

The Sventronica edges into formlessness, recedes from our touch, is gaseously ghostly - it's eerie

The Lindgren is fully formed in its strangeness, an alien object, starkly contoured, at once obtrusive and opaque, dropped into our reality from "outside" - it's weird.  

Lindgren's repertoire of shredding, contorting, torsioned and toroid-al, rubbery-squeaky sounds remind me a bit of SOPHIE - which complicates the claims of futurism, given the at least 30 year gap between "Houdinism" and "Faceshopping". 

I guess the future is unevenly distributed, or it is lagged... so many things the IDM-ers in the 90's, or the conceptronica-ists, in the '10s, did, were actually preempted by the post-WW2 vanguardists or the early digital composers of the 1980s. 

But then Lindgren too went back to using the orchestra, on Fragments of a Circle, 1992

"the Song of the Atom"

 Sean Albiez on the etymology and earliest uses of the term "electronic music"

The Substack post is a preview or advance-excerpt from a book length work-in-progress on electronic music in the 20th Century.

Amongst many other early examples, Sean points to Leopold Stokowsky, Director of the Philadelphia Philharmonic Orchestra, who in 1931 declared: 

"MUSICAL instruments up to the present have been developed on the cut-and-try basis. Electrical instruments offer us the really scientific method, with much greater possibilities.

When I return from Europe, I am planning to organize an orchestra made up entirely of artists playing electrical instruments. For the time being it may well be advisable to seek musicians who can play the old instruments well, and are willing to work up ability with the new."

I wonder if he followed through?  Seems unlikely, otherwise he'd been considered a real pioneer.

Something was in the air, though. Take Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley, which was published in 1932, and must have been written around the start of the 1930s. It contains descriptions of music involving instruments that are at very least electronically augmented versions of existing ones.  There's also reference to Synthetic Music. As I write in the Futuromania essay on science fiction writers and their imaginings of future music: 

"Huxley anticipates Muzak with his Synthetic Music Machines: the first one we encounter is "warbling out a super-cornet solo" in a female dressing room; later, a Super-Vox-Wurlitzeriana fills the air "with gay synthetic melodies" at a hospice for the terminally ill.... Mmusic production is centralized, streaming out of a gigantic building in London that contains various Bureaux of Propaganda, floor upon floor of which house the "laboratories and padded rooms in which Sound-Track Writers and Synthetic Composers did the delicate work".

In Brave New World, there are also concert halls and nightclubs like the Westminster Abbey Cabaret, whose hoarding promises "ALL THE LATEST SYNTHETIC MUSIC."   Two of the characters, Lenina and Henry, go there on a date, joining the crowd of couples "five-stepping around the polished floor" to the complex rhythms of Calvin Stopes and his Sixteen Sexophonists.  The band play standards like "There Ain't No Bottle in All the World like that Dear Little Bottle of Mine": not a paean to booze but Huxley's twist on Al Jolson's maudlin "Mammy", for in Brave New World fetuses are hatched in glass wombs, to spare women the hassle of pregnancy and the agony of birth but also to avoid emotional attachment and all the neuroses created by the Freudian "family romance".   Hence lyrics like "Bottle of mine, why was I ever decanted?/ Skies are blue inside of you/ The weather's always fine". As the "tremulous chorus" of sexophonists "mounted towards a climax" the conductor "let loose the final shattering note of ether-music and blew the sixteen merely human blowers clean out of existence." After the band finish, a "Synthetic Music apparatus" pipes out "the very latest in slow Malthusian Blues" leaving Henry and Lenina feeling like "twin embryos gently rocking together on the waves of a bottled ocean of blood-surrogate." 

Elsewhere there's ecclesiastical music (or in Brave New World terms, hymns and choral music for a Solidarity Service at the Community Singery), including fanfares from ersatz trumpets and haunting harmonies from "near-wind and super-string" instruments. Music is also a crucial component of the "feelies": an omni-sensory update of cinema in which smell and touch are stimulated as well as sight and sound.