CHORD's "CHORD III"
A few days before the package containing CHORD III arrived, my wife and I were watching our way through Jim Jarmusch's filmography. While we agreed that 2009's The Limits of Control is probably his weakest film (NB: we haven't seen The Dead Don't Die yet), both of us dug the way the director used the Japanese doom metal band Boris' music (including snippets from the albums Feedbacker, Rainbow, Smile, and Pink) to set the mood for his cryptic tale of an assassin, and the way the music's reverberating harmonics rubbed up against the movie's gleaming surfaces.
In recent days, I've been reading, studying, and thinking a lot about the reasons why people respond as they (we) do to music, inspired by convos with an old ally who, like CHORD co-creator Nick Didkovsky, lives in Brooklyn and programs generative music software.
One of my buddy's gurus is David Huron, who has written extensively on the neuroscience of music cognition. In his 2016 tome Voice Leading: The Science Behind A Musical Art, Huron writes about the importance of continuity in the perception of an auditory stream: "Compared with most natural sound-producing objects, musical instruments are constructed so as to maximize the period of sustain....In the case of the guitar, solid-body construction and controlled electronic feedback became popular methods of increasing the sustain of plucked strings." Huron also highlights the difference between the different types of expectations listeners hold, which are based on knowledge of the specific piece of music (veridical expectations) or knowledge of a style of music or music in general (schematic expectations). He also distinguishes between analytic (detail-oriented) and synthetic (totality-oriented) listening.
Since the first, eponymous CHORD EP appeared late in the summer of 2018, Didkovsky and his collaborator Tom Marsan have been asking the musical question, "What happens when you remove loud, distorted electric guitars from any formal context where the listener might have expectations?" One result of this extreme closeup exercise is that every detail and nuance in the two instruments' interplay is thrown into brilliant relief. If the debut was a bold, bracing "proof of concept," CHORD II, released at the beginning of 2019, displayed a more expansive dynamic and expressive range. Now, CHORD III represents Something Entahrly Other.
About a third of the way into the album's 15-minute opener "martyrs," my wife looked up from her computer and asked, "What's this?" -- a sure sign that something noteworthy is occurring. Starting slowly, the guitarists weave webs of dissonance, a flat 2nd trill like the one that opened Alice Cooper's "Halo of Flies" briefly raising its head, the metallic clangor of industrial machines blending with the blare of sirens, foghorns, alarms, and tolling bells, Godzilla shrieks like the glisses that were my favorite part of the first MC5 album, acidic midrange tones spraying partials across information-dense layers of sound, raking behind-the-nut harmonics, finally achieving a singularity of sound like every Hendrix plane crash and the Graves At Sea show circa 2004 that made my body feel like it was turning inside out, ending the only way it possibly could -- with a trailing wisp of feedback. Didkovsky confirms that "martyrs" established itself as the cornerstone early in the album's germination.
While it's whack to ascribe programmatic intent to instrumental music (tell it to poor old Dmitri Shostakovich), it's hard not to hear the album's longest track, the 17-minute "draw near," as a soundtrack for the pandemic, its slow build evocative in the same way as Boris' Jarmusch soundtrack of the "Deserted Cities of the Heart" Cream once conjured. Ten minutes or so into the piece, a pulse appears, gradually morphing into a feedback waltz of unexpected grace and brutal beauty. The gentle chiming of "it was" provides a brief respite before the anguished soul cry of "help her" that closes the album. For those with adventurous ears, CHORD III could be just the catharsis you've been seeking, at a historical moment when such is at a premium.
In recent days, I've been reading, studying, and thinking a lot about the reasons why people respond as they (we) do to music, inspired by convos with an old ally who, like CHORD co-creator Nick Didkovsky, lives in Brooklyn and programs generative music software.
One of my buddy's gurus is David Huron, who has written extensively on the neuroscience of music cognition. In his 2016 tome Voice Leading: The Science Behind A Musical Art, Huron writes about the importance of continuity in the perception of an auditory stream: "Compared with most natural sound-producing objects, musical instruments are constructed so as to maximize the period of sustain....In the case of the guitar, solid-body construction and controlled electronic feedback became popular methods of increasing the sustain of plucked strings." Huron also highlights the difference between the different types of expectations listeners hold, which are based on knowledge of the specific piece of music (veridical expectations) or knowledge of a style of music or music in general (schematic expectations). He also distinguishes between analytic (detail-oriented) and synthetic (totality-oriented) listening.
Since the first, eponymous CHORD EP appeared late in the summer of 2018, Didkovsky and his collaborator Tom Marsan have been asking the musical question, "What happens when you remove loud, distorted electric guitars from any formal context where the listener might have expectations?" One result of this extreme closeup exercise is that every detail and nuance in the two instruments' interplay is thrown into brilliant relief. If the debut was a bold, bracing "proof of concept," CHORD II, released at the beginning of 2019, displayed a more expansive dynamic and expressive range. Now, CHORD III represents Something Entahrly Other.
About a third of the way into the album's 15-minute opener "martyrs," my wife looked up from her computer and asked, "What's this?" -- a sure sign that something noteworthy is occurring. Starting slowly, the guitarists weave webs of dissonance, a flat 2nd trill like the one that opened Alice Cooper's "Halo of Flies" briefly raising its head, the metallic clangor of industrial machines blending with the blare of sirens, foghorns, alarms, and tolling bells, Godzilla shrieks like the glisses that were my favorite part of the first MC5 album, acidic midrange tones spraying partials across information-dense layers of sound, raking behind-the-nut harmonics, finally achieving a singularity of sound like every Hendrix plane crash and the Graves At Sea show circa 2004 that made my body feel like it was turning inside out, ending the only way it possibly could -- with a trailing wisp of feedback. Didkovsky confirms that "martyrs" established itself as the cornerstone early in the album's germination.
While it's whack to ascribe programmatic intent to instrumental music (tell it to poor old Dmitri Shostakovich), it's hard not to hear the album's longest track, the 17-minute "draw near," as a soundtrack for the pandemic, its slow build evocative in the same way as Boris' Jarmusch soundtrack of the "Deserted Cities of the Heart" Cream once conjured. Ten minutes or so into the piece, a pulse appears, gradually morphing into a feedback waltz of unexpected grace and brutal beauty. The gentle chiming of "it was" provides a brief respite before the anguished soul cry of "help her" that closes the album. For those with adventurous ears, CHORD III could be just the catharsis you've been seeking, at a historical moment when such is at a premium.
posted by stashdauber at 8:16 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home