Arvo, Velvets, and Drone.
This is a bit of writing I did for one of those rare charming occurrences on social-media, where you get nominated-by-a-friend, and you have to post a best-of list. In the end. Some people found it a short, fun read, so here it is:
Album Influence: day 1
Drones
To make this a little more interesting and self-reflective, instead of just posting one record, I’m going to use this album-influence trend to investigate an aspect of sound that has shaped my musical life. Giving two examples, of superficially contrasting nature, that helped illuminate and point the way towards my seeking the experience of magic in music. Cause that’s all I care about really, magic that is.
I was never going to be a hippie, I liked fistfights and eau de toilette too much. However, my admiration and wonder for psychedelic/religious mystic experience in music held firm, and a big player in the construction of that sound was the presence of a gravitational, birthing, mother-tone. A drone. As a young fellow, I hadn’t yet found anything in the Western traditions that gave up the aesthetic garments of hippie-fashion, yet retained the trip. Coltrane and modal jazz was to come later.
I had a feline sleek, cool cousin, and after a visit to my house in 1991, she left a mix-cassette which included the song ‘Heroin’ by the Velvet Underground. I was so lifted by it that I purchased ‘The Velvet Underground and Nico’ the next weekend. Imagine my musical brain melting as a young teenager when ‘Venus in Furs’ begins, and the out-of-tune-on-purpose viola of John Cale wailing in anti-drone drone. That is, a centre that was not trying to be perfect. An unpretty core. And I for sure, in no way, was prepared for Nico. Although she is singing different pitches in ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’, her voice was received as a drone. Whether it was her delivery, timbre or state of being, I was enamoured, hypnotized and totally in love. This is not even to mention the masterpiece of ‘Heroin’.
What is there to say about Arvo Part’s ‘Fur Alina’ that hasn’t been said? I found it in my dad’s collection, and I liked the colour of the cd case (baby blue), and the instrumentation (minimal, piano, violin, cello). Arvo mapped out a sound that is at once, as precisely designed and heavy as the Sagrada Familia cathedral, and at the same time as light and delicate as a petal. His iconic works were all constructed around a singular triad, and the divine-design mathematical permutation of a scale. He realized, it seems, that many things can put us into states of spiritual trance (in his case, influenced by the Russian Orthodox tradition). A drone need not be one note. It can be an idea/ideal. The sophisticated, effortless repetition of a triad, and the swirling around of it’s relatives, can lead to trance experience, possibly an even deeper one than served by a single tone.
Other observations:
-Both these albums for better or worse, fed my already-present slight suspicion of virtuosity. Imagine the conundrum when later in life at music school I tried, and crashed and burned, to play bebop.
-Guitar tone. Vox amps. Anti-Clapton.
-Representation of experience; does the music included in these albums strive to gift the listener a fasttrack to the assumed states? (Arvo, oneness with God. VU, injecting heroin), or does it simply aim to display them? I don’t know, but these albums sure began my bad-habit of asking too many questions.
-While I love the Grateful Dead, the cuddly image of teddy bear Jerry Garcia, and later on rave-culture, was the farthest thing from from psychedelic for me. I wanted ‘serious’ psych. More Gurdjieff rather than Leary*. These albums showed me at a young age that maybe, although we share similar paths, there are alternate routes. That was important.
Influ-meter: 10 out of 10 Discmans
*A friend and scholar, Randolph Jordan, pointed out that I had an incorrect reading of Timothy Leary. Leary was less tuned-in to the hippie movement than I had thought. His adoption by the movement, led me to presume that his perspective was in-line. Which I guess it wasn’t.