C-SIDE - Experimental Music Magazine

C-SIDE Photo Story from

Chengdu Music Scene Interview with

Charmaine Lee Feature on

Ana Roxanne Interview Highlights

John Zorn

COVER

July 2019 Issue 207 Rs. 75

John Cage On his life and career and the undeniable impacts he has on music.

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Editor’s Note The world of experimental music is largely undiscovered, and nevertheless underrated.

Some even express strong dislikes to this genre of music— if considered so. But from my experiences with this kind of music since the last couple of years, I realized how it has opened to a wide range of possibilities in the soundmaking industry.

With this magazine, we wish to bring these experimental artists and their works to the forefront, and help the reader connect with the artists. With columns on featured artists on every issue of the magazine, exclusive interviews and notes on contemporary music revolutions across the globe, I hope you have the best time reading this issue of Untitled.

Sakthi Mathav

Chief Editor

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Contents

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Featured Artist Ana Roxane

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Conversations with Charmaine Lee

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Cover Story On John Cage

Interview Highlights John Zorn

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A Story in Images The Chengdu Music Scene

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Featured Product Dubreq Stylophone Gen X-1

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AD

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Subtleties The Los Angeles-based ambient musician’s EP is restful and restorative, using lo-fi tones and textures to create a work that subtly transcends.

by Anna Gaca Associate Editor Photos by Getty Images

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hen Ana Roxanne recorded an EP in 2015, she wasn’t making a debut. ~~~ originated as a private project, the culmination of formal and informal musical training from church and school choirs to college to studying with a teacher of traditional Hindustani vocal music.

Freshly re-released by Leaving Records, the EP’s warm meditations feel unconnected to a particular time or place. Its title is utilitarian, the kind of placeholder symbols tapped out to keep a digital file at the top of an alphabetized folder. Its low, wavering hums and glassy plinks have a restful, restorative quality; it fades into the background or rewards close listening with equal ease. ~~~ sets a mood through pacing as much as through sound. The quiet recordings of ocean waves that open “It’s a Rainy Day on the Cosmic Shore” and “In a Small Valley” serve as long pauses, building the illusion of space into a short album like mirrors in a small room. The fuzzy, analog aquatics recall the Environments series of field recordings, originally released in the

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1960s and 1970s and recently reissued by Numero Group as an app—a modern edition of an earlier generation’s serene, anonymous background sound. Such sound can aid in introspection or distract from it, depending on your priorities; by shifting field recordings towards melody and spirituality, Ana Roxanne invites contemplation.

When ~~~ incorporates vocals, they fall between a murmur and a soft melody, intimate without getting personal. “In existential mathematics, the degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory,” instructs a man’s gentle voice on “Slowness,” before pausing to ask, “Why has the pleasure of slowness disappeared?”

Synthesizers cycle and burble, a kind of ambient music that’s more USS Enterprise sound effects than seashores. Ana Roxanne’s intermittent use of her own voice helps unify the collection, an individual stamp on a humanistic style. On “Nocturne,” her ethereal croon is an overheard echo of the cathedrals where, as a young person, she came to understand music as a sacrament.

FEATURED In its final third, ~~~ shifts outward, taking a turn toward pop’s past. “I’m Every Sparkly Woman” is a cover of a cover, draining the funk from the Whitney Houston version of Chaka Khan’s “I’m Every Woman” and recasting it as a whispy strand of melody over bubbling Moog arpeggios. Misty and distant, the song’s karaoke influence shines through in sound and ambiance: virtualized pop with the forlorn glow of an empty bar.

Why has the pleasure of slowness disappeared?

But it’s still of a piece with the music that surrounds it: textured but uncomplicated, soothing without feeling narcotic, flashing glints of personality without leaving the chill zone. Ambient music has perhaps never been so readily available as it is right now; Ana Roxanne’s quiet soundscapes offer the promise of artisanship in an automated age.

~~~ (2019)

1. I’m Every Sparkly Woman 2. Slowness 3. In a Small Valley 4. It’s a Rainy Day on the Cosmic Shore 5. Nocturne 6. Immortality

Explore more of Ana Roxanne on

Ana Roxanne recording a piece

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That the Voice is a Shared Thing The vocal improviser discusses the visceral tactility of the voice as a medium for organic and synthetic sound.

A C O N V E R SAT I O N W I T H

Charmaine Lee

by Conrad Tao

Conrad Tao

Improviser, vocal improviser, vocalist. The first thing that comes to mind is the order of words. What here is the operative thing?

Charmaine Lee

Coming out of an institutionalized jazz education, the term vocalist had very mixed connotations for me. I spent years being treated like I didn’t know anything about music, expected to stand there, look good, talk between sets, and do the banter. These days, I think of myself first and foremost as an improviser, channeled through the voice.

CT

Right, another entry into your music comes from most people’s familiarity with this instrument … that the voice is a shared thing.

CL

When I first started improvising, I was very conscious of the fact that I was using the voice in ways that challenged my own vocal technique.

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INTERVIEW CT

I’m curious if there is or was ever, at any point, some relationship to a more conventionally representative way of sound-making—this sound is rain, this sound is thunder, this sound is birds, etc.—if that’s something you were ever thinking in terms of.

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At the end of the day, what I really care about is making great music, so all of this only matters in the context of being in the service of that.

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CL

Sonically, I’m very much inspired by sound that’s made by people— specific musicians, communities, and time periods in music. This includes free jazz, European improvised music, noise, ASMR, and onkyo. I’m especially drawn to the timbres of saxophonists, cellists, double bassists, trumpeters, and electronics.

CT

You mentioned the institutional education you received earlier.

I come from a concert music background, which I think can be perceived from the outside as having an obsessive focus on technical skill. I’m curious to hear about your relationship with technique.

CL

My two years at the New England Conservatory were extremely formative—I developed a set of tools that lets me constantly reevaluate my music and my practice through a fresh perspective. It helps me wake up every morning and feel like I’m grappling with something

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that I must work toward. It also exposed me to highly conceptual, challenging music, and through the process demystified certain concepts that I felt were way above my head. At the end of the day, what I really care about is making great music, so all of this only matters in the context of being in the service of that.

CT

That gets at something that I like about your music—it’s not fetishistic. There is expertise there. Instead of just displaying your expertise, you’re using it to get at something more … intuitive, at the core. But I hear that core in your work, without it ever falling into the obvious and latently racist approach of, like, “And now we’re going to expose the raw primitive heart of humanity with these sounds,” you know?

CL

It’s all too tempting when you’re using the voice.

CT

Do you find that?

CL

That’s an issue I have with some experimental vocal music: it feels kind of masturbatory. It feels like it’s exploiting the universal human connection that I mentioned earlier, fetishized by extended vocal technique. I’m not really interested in pursuing that.

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INTERVIEW

CT

It’s funny to hear you say that because I would argue that performing with a contact mic that’s taped to your throat with a bandage all the way around your neck already has a theatrical dimension to it, regardless of whether or not it’s intentional.

And you do have a physicality in your practice. As a performer myself I understand it might not be something you’re thinking about consciously, but it’s unavoidably there.

CL

I recently re-watched a video of my very first improvised solo set from three years ago, and it’s wild how physically different I am. I find myself becoming more and more minimal in how I move. I think it’s largely for economical reasons—a reflection of the techniques I’ve cultivated that require a certain level of intense concentration and physical stillness in order to execute.

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Great Records

You May Have Missed It’s impossible to hear all the music that comes out every day, but with this list we hope to direct your attention to generally overlooked albums our writers and editors have been returning to over the last few months.

Harmistice by 9T Antiope & Slavish Amini Iran’s experimental music scene is thriving right now, and Harmistice brings together two of the community’s leading lights: Tehran’s Siavash Amini and the Paris-based duo 9T Antiope.

Shea Butter Baby by Ari Lennox Shea Butter Baby is a tender, hilarious, honest document of Ari Lennox’s young adulthood, in which the Washington, D.C. singer charts the mundane and the grandiose with equal care.

Flawless by Baby Smoove On his latest mixtape, Detroit rapper Baby Smoove sounds like he set foot in the booth directly after waking up from a nap that failed to cure his hangover.

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NEW RELEASES

What Life by Club Night As the frontman of the Oakland emo band Club Night, Josh Bertram finds his power in ambiguity. On the band’s debut album, What Life, he layers his androgynous yowl over math-rock guitar licks until he creates his own gang vocals.

2nd by Grace Ives Grace Ives’ lo-fi electronic pop songs are short, repetitive, and nervy—they sound like someone trying to recreate Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” in a shitty apartment with just an old Roland Groovebox at their disposal.

Sulphur English by Inter Arma With each new album, Inter Arma raise the bar a little higher. Few metal bands are so wary of repeating themselves, and fewer are so immediately capable in each new avenue they explore.

Womanhood by Klein Zage Klein Zage is a producer with a sense of humor. It shines through on her debut EP, Womanhood, a collection of left-field UK garage and house tracks that poke fun at patriarchal expectations of women.

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Jo hn Ca g e’s C e nt ur y

John Milton Cage Jr. was an American composer, music theorist, artist, and philosopher. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde.

On John Cage

Cage was born September 5, 1912, at Good Samaritan Hospital in downtown Los Angeles. His father, John Milton Cage Sr. (1886–1964), was an inventor, and his mother, Lucretia (“Crete”) Harvey (1885–1969), worked intermittently as a journalist for the Los Angeles Times.

Cage was a pioneer of the prepared piano (a piano with its sound altered by objects placed between or on its strings or hammers), for which he wrote numerous dance-related works and a few concert pieces. The best known of these is Sonatas and Interludes (1946–48).

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4’3

Cage is perhaps best known for his 1952 composition 4’33”, which is performed in the absence of deliberate sound; musicians who present the work do nothing aside from being present for the duration specified by the title.

The content of the composition is not “four minutes and 33 seconds of silence,” as is often assumed, but rather the sounds of the environment heard by the audience during performance.

The work’s challenge to assumed definitions about musicianship and musical experience made it a popular and controversial topic both in musicology and the broader aesthetics of art and performance.

0’0

COVER STORY

33”

Cage’s legacy and influence remain a point of contention.

As The New Yorker’s Alex Ross pointed out two years ago, “4’33”” very often stands as an artistic punchline. In a provocative and sometimes vindictive 1993 essay for The New Republic called “No ear for music: The scary purity of John Cage”, writer Richard Taruskin explored the unease Cage created within musical establishments, sometimes without warrant. His career has been analyzed into a great mass of confusion and conjecture, meaning Cage sometimes stands as the butt of endless jokes about art without a point or purpose, as though it requires one. One day, Taruskin prophesied, Cage’s works for the piano will be his only lasting contribution to the greater musical vocabulary.

The often-missed corollary to “4’33””, though, is “0’00””, a 1962 piece in which Cage shattered one of his earlier work’s remaining musical rules: time. “In a situation provided with maximum amplification, perform a disciplined action,” the original score read.

In the liner notes for a new set of Cage-centric reissues on Japan’s EM label, Gen Igarashi wrote, “Perhaps for Cage this was the natural outcome of the musical emancipation process which had begun with “4’33””. For Cage, revolution was an infinite concept.

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The Portrait of John Cage

by Grayson Currin

Several weeks ago, I began sending out inquiries about John Cage to an intentionally broad range of musicians, essentially asking: Do you like his work, and, if so, would you talk to me about it? Obscure noise artists received the questions, as did rock musicians who have appeared on “Saturday Night Live”, metal dudes, warped pop chanteuses, singer-songwriter types, and bleedingedge hip-hop acts.

Of the three dozen or so people who responded, not one said they didn’t care for Cage, his music, or his ideas. In fact, most said they either felt unprepared to say something salient or sufficient about such a luminary, or that they couldn’t condense their thoughts in a mere matter of days and weeks. After all, the late composer, thinker, and artist posed fundamental questions about the essence of sound, music, chance, arrangement, and instrumentation

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Below, I’ve gathered the best dozen or so anecdotes about Cage from all the musicians I contacted. Together, they weave a portrait of a legacy that-- in 2012, 100 years after Cage’s birth-- largely still compels by way of ideas, if not necessarily sonics.

II first heard his name when I was in high school.

At the time, I didn’t investigate his music at all and had the impression from what I heard that it was something dry and unpleasant to listen to.

Something I heard about him made me assume that it was something very high up and distant, in the same way that a lot of “avant-garde” music is.

Julia Holter

Photo by Rick Bahto

I have a crystal-clear memory. I was under 10 years old, and my dad was watching a very extensive, intimate documentary on TV. My dad never kept up with music as a traditional fan, but he really had a lot to say about how important this guy John Cage was.

In the documentary, Cage is walking around in a forest picking up different leaves and twigs and things to be used as instruments in a new piece.

Andrew W K. Photo by Danny Pardoe

I didn’t hear his music or read his ideas until I took a music class my freshman year of college.

The professor played the class “Williams Mix” and “4’33”” and I was more intrigued by the ideas than the applications. Discovering him led me to people like Brion Gysin, Alvin Lucier, Iannis Xenakis, and Robert Ashley. He’s a great experimental-music gateway drug, like Charles Ives or Christian Fennesz.

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James Jackson

COVER STORY

I’m just finishing up the book of [fellow composer] Morton Feldman’s writings, [Give My Regards to Eighth Street], and he talks a lot about Cage and that New York scene. It sounds like a really rad time. Speaking of Cage and Feldman, they aired conversations between them on the radio in ‘67-- I can’t recommend them enough, just for pure inspiration even as far as just how to get going on a project on a pragmatic level. It’s fascinating to hear how Cage’s mind works and analyses things on the spot-- always with a question, “Hmmm?” It gives a good insight into his brain, especially his humor.

Ben Chasny

Photo by Cam Archer

When I first heard Cage, I was in my late teens and just starting to get into electro-acoustic and concrete music. I was also experimenting with hallucinogens and starting to realize that there was unorganized sound and music everywhere around us. While I wasn’t very interested in his recorded output, his philosophy and theories on sound and music definitely struck a chord with me.

James Plotkin When asked how he found the sounds on the prepared piano, Cage said that he found them as one finds shells on the beach. Making patches on a modular synthesizer often has this quality; you feel as if you’re searching to discover a sound that you’ll fall in love with and want to keep and put in a piece. This working method toward generating musical material comes partly from Cage’s influence.

Matt Carlson

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‘Challenges Are Opportunities’ At 60, New York City-based composer John Zorn is wiser, sure, but no less prolific, thoughtful and antagonistic than before.

by Christoph Schnipp

Interview Highlights On turning 60 “There are no more doubts. It means that little guy that sits on my shoulder, the guy in the red suit with the pitchfork and the pointed ears and the tail, that little guy that’s on your shoulder that once in a while used to whisper in your ear, you know, ‘You could be really wrong about this.’

That guy isn’t around anymore.

I brushed him off. Everything is very clear: what I need to do, why I’m on the planet, the best way to accomplish it, what is a distraction, what helps me focus.

Everything is really there.”

On his ‘gift’ of music “I feel like there are messages, I feel like there are angels, I feel that there is a legacy and an energy. I feel that it’s possible to tap into that. I just don’t believe in ego that much. I don’t think it’s

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just me. I think you can even just talk about community. I could not do this music without these musicians. It’s about people. Music is about people for me. It’s not about sounds. It’s about people; it’s about putting people into challenging situations. And for me, challenges are opportunities.”

On being exposed to different cultures in New York “I was never hit with any kind of value judgments about different kinds of music. Another thing I should say, growing up in New York, and in particular going to the UN school... I went to the United Nations school from kindergarten all the way through high school. I had the same 25 friends in the same class the whole time.

And these are kids that came from Nigeria, from Japan, from France, from Germany, from Holland, from India, from Pakistan. I had

friends from all over the world.

That’s how I grew up.

On his home environment “I make music in my home, and I’ll tell you what my home is. My home is not just an apartment. I’ve been living in the same place for 38 years. My home is a device — a device for enabling creativity. A device for cutting out the chaos outside that people think is reality; that’s chaos. My home is a way of insulating myself and stripping that away so I can get into what reality is for me, which is creativity.”

INTERVIEW

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John Zorn Photograph: Henry Bell

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PHOTO STORY

The ancients who proclaimed “the young never come to Sichuan, the old never leave” clearly predated an era of all-night raves and high-rise buildings. The proud, open-minded capital Chengdu is both spicy and sincere, and now, in an era of immense mobility and connectivity, the city has become a bubbling hotbed of creative music culture.

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While dance crowds are drawn to acts from foreign labels such as Giegling and Ostgut Ton, locally-produced nights are also flourishing.

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PRODUCT FEATURE

Stylophone GEN X-1 The Stylophone GEN X-1 is the latest portable analogue synthesizer by Dubreq.

Kane Michael

To create sound, the Stylophone requires the provided stylus to touch the metal keyboard, with each note being connected to a voltage-controlled oscillator via a different-value resistor At first, I wasn’t really sure what to make of the synth.

Although it’s similar in size and basic function to a Korg Volca, I’ve honestly never played something like this. It’s a quirky little bit of kit that certainly has its own signature sound. Where I had the most fun with it, was running it through various effects like the Strymon Timeline, Big Sky, and death by audio Absolute Destruction. When running it through all these, and modulating the LFO, all I can say is WOW.

Available only on

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PROS Small, portable, fun to play with.

CONS None really considering it’s intended to be simple. Maybe less plastic would be ideal.

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