A Year of Music

One of the many fruits of my recent orgy of downloading and purchasing is that it’s put me back in touch with a lot of my favorite industrial and drone music, and among the groups who combine both those tendencies most effectively, Organum has to stand as one of the most impressive and uncompromising. They’ve built up a small pile of releases over the years, many of which are only available as part of compilations, and are not a well-known group even among fans of strange music. It’s not hard to understand why they’re marginal, as their work is fairly inaccessible even by industrial music’s esoteric standards, but every time I listen to an Organum record I find it riveting, a collection of mysterious yet concrete sounds that never overstay their welcome.

To refer to Organum by a plural pronoun is a little misleading; in every meaningful sense the name is just a handle David Jackman has attached to many of his musical activities. Organum’s music has appeared on many collaborative releases (Jackman especially appears to favor split albums), but these days, the best way to find his music is on a couple of CDs, prosaically entitled Volume One and Volume Two, on Robot Records. By “best” I mean “easiest to find”; the downside of listening to Organum on omnibus collections is that many of the original pieces originally stood alone, and stringing them together robs them of some of their power. The perfect amount of time to spend listening to Organum is about 20 minutes. Unlike some of his followers (most notably Jonathan Coleclough, whose music I absolutely adore no matter how long the works are), Jackman has recognized the power inherent in keeping compositions concise.

Jackman’s method is easy to describe, but the net effect is close to indescribable. Typically he combines some kind of mechanical drone (compression fans, electrical motors) with bowed metal (cymbals, saws). It can range from the quietly ominous (“Crux”) to the overpowering (“In Extremis”), but always with the unpredictable shrieks and whines caused by friction against sheet metal. Often there are abstract elements (wordless vocals, feedback) layered over the top. It’s a strict program, and would seem to make for predictable / boring / irritating results, but each recording has its own distinct personality. Despite the mundane origins of the sounds and the plain recording, Organum’s work feels like ritual music, and it is weird in the truest, oldest sense of the word (“suggesting something supernatural; uncanny… connected with fate”).

Much of Organum’s early output was released on Nurse With Wound’s United Dairies imprint, and careful listeners can derive insight into Organum’s methodical approach by comparing and contrasting Organum’s work with Nurse With Wound’s. Steven Stapleton is a curator, a consummate technician and a near-involuntary surrealist; each Nurse With Wound record is a product of laborious tape engineering, even if the original source material is the product of random studio improvisation. By contrast, Organum’s work is relatively static, and it seems as if Jackman sets up the initial conditions for a recording, records a take, and calls it done. You can hear the room in which the music was recorded, as opposed to NWW’s dematerialized (and often chaotic) soundstage.

Most of the Robot Records material is still in print, or at least available, so if you’re curious about Organum, I recommend picking up a copy of Volume One and listening to it as two separate halves (it compiles Tower of Silence and the Organum half of the NWW / Organum A Missing Sense / Rasa split single). From there, Ikon and Sphyx are both fine releases, if you can find them. All of Organum’s material is best when treated as abstract sound sculpture, and rewards a meditative frame of mind; it’s neither ambient wallpaper nor music in any traditional sense of the word.

There’s a small circle of musicians making a very specific kind of drone music that sits somewhere between processed field recordings and pure electronic ambient. It’s never quite clear what made the sounds you’re hearing, and this mystery, as well as the way that elements shift, emerge and disappear keeps it from being sonic wallpaper. Most of this artists in this circle (Andrew Chalk, Jonathan Coleclough, Colin Potter, the modern-day Hafler Trio, Andrew Liles, Christopher Heemann) know each other, and they all cultivate their indifference when it comes to finding an audience: Mirror, one of the most talented of these groups, spent a long time putting out 2-500 records at a time (and I do mean records). There’s something weird about buying a record with sides that are more silent than not. It’s somewhat disquieting and anonymous.

Andrew Chalk was in Mirror (along with Christopher Heemann of HNAS), and right now I’m listening to his Shadows from the Album Skies, which has a peculiar name but is a beautiful record. It’s more static and mysterious than most of these lowercase drones, with the only recognizable sound on the whole release being some microphone feedback subtly woven into the first track. It’s subtle and unchanging enough that it draws you in, forces you to listen closely to hear the variations and textures. Moreso than most ambient music, it creates a numinous aura of sound. It is quietly sacramental.

Chalk’s stuff can be hard to find, but it’s worth digging up. Without really meaning to, I’ve collected 7 of his releases and find them all beautiful, soothing and deeply strange.

Part of the appeal of listening to surreal music is that it often brings along with it surreal art:

cover to Hirsche Nicht auf Sofa’s Melchior snarfed from Brainwashed’s HNAS discography.

You can get the 2002 reissue of Melchior from Mutant Sounds, or from a record store with a really good selection of used CDs in its experimental music section, like Amoeba.

Also, here. Read that article and this one to get more of an idea what HNAS were all about.