No Instruments?Zeitkratzer plays Metal Machine Music by Lou Reed

Spotlights 03.10.2022

In the context of the riverrun festival of the GMEA in Albi, Kasper T. Toeplitz, gives us the keys to the creation of Metal Machine Music by Lou Reed on the occasion of the concert given by Zeitkratzer on October 3 at the Garonne Theater in Toulouse.

Trying to define what could be the greatest musical revolution of the 21st century - although it is far from over, but especially despite the fact that playing this game is always a bit futile - it is very possible that it is a change in the practice of "traditional" instruments, those that we continue to call the "real" instruments: all those that are written down in orchestration manuals, and for which pages and pages of studies are written where there are no progressive virtuosity studies for lap-top or DIY (do-it-yourself) hacking of electronic toys - although there is a kind of Bible for it, the book "Handmade Electronic Music: The art of Hardware Hacking" by Nicolas Collins.

It may seem curious to speak of a progress in music - even a revolution - carried by an instrumental practice, by the way in which the instrumentalists and composers of today draw their inspiration from sounds "as electronic" but played on acoustic instruments, whereas in the last century the composer Olivier Messiaen affirmed that the most important change for the composers of the XXth century was the electronic music, including, and even especially, he specified, for those who did not practice it - and he himself wrote very little electronic music, and this mainly for the Ondes Martenot, an instrument for which the old values or definitions of what is music (pitch, duration) are operative, whereas the current instrumental revolution we are talking about here redefines the notion of what is played, and turns the instrument into a generator of sounds largely inspired by "electronic sounds", shifts the finality of technical work from classical virtuosity to a knowledge of its less obvious possibilities, allowing the instrument to return to its place as "simply" an instrument, a tool that makes possible the materialization of music in the broadest sense, not only music thought out for this given instrument.

Actually, the approach of applying "electronic thinking" to the handling of traditional instruments is not really new; already in the 1970s there was a plethora of publications and research on "other" uses of traditional instruments, for example how to play multiphonic sounds, i.e. chord-like sounds, on wind instruments such as flute, saxophone, clarinet or bassoon, which are essentially monophonic or melodic instruments. Even before, since since the 60s, many composers wrote for instrumental ensembles sounds coming from an electronic imaginary, like the enormous sliding clusters produced by an orchestra of 52 string instruments composed by Krzysztof Penderecki in his Thrène à la mémoire des victimes d'Hiroshima in 1959, the micropolyphony developed for the orchestra by György Ligeti in 1961 for Atmospheresor the "coordination scores" of Christian Wolff like his For 1, 2, or 3 people of 1964, which already prefigured "computer music" by noting not the pitches and durations of the notes to be played but the interactions between the musicians almost in the manner of an electronic circuit diagram.

However, it is to be wagered that it is not so much these experimentations of more than half a century ago that have changed the practices and the sound research of the musicians and instrumentalists of today, but that this change comes from their opening to other musics, to all musics, one would like to say, placing them on an equal footing, contrary to the conservative attitude consisting in speaking of "learned music" and "other" practices, differentiating them by the degree of calibrated virtuosity necessary to their execution as well as to their composition. And if there will undoubtedly be for a long time to come the supporters of the old school regretting that today the mastery of counterpoint has been replaced by that of rubbing a hard bristle brush on the skin of a bass drum, the change in the thinking of music, what it is, how to conceive it and practice it, changes it radically.

And if there is an ensemble that can claim this change of thought, a circulation between supposedly "opposed" musics, that navigates between Stockhausen, James Tenney, Xenakis, John Cage and Merzbow, Whitehouse, Sonic Youth or today's "unclassifiable" composers such as Dror Feiler or Zbigniew Karkowski, it is indeed ZeitkratzerThe ensemble was formed in 1997 under the direction of Reinhold Friedl. From the start, the ensemble, made up of a dozen musicians, mostly classically trained and playing acoustic but amplified instruments (with the exception of rare additions of electric guitar), proposes a repertoire ranging from "20th century classics" to compositions, or even transcriptions of today's musicians from other, less academic spheres. And it is the saxophonist Ulrich Krieger, who is not only a classically trained musician, perfectly at ease with the contemporary repertoire, but also an actor of new music, improvised, research or electronic, who is going to propose a transcription of Lou Reed's legendary Metal Machine Music , an idea he had since he heard the record, released in 1975.

When Lou Reed, finally and after much prevarication, accepted the idea and gave the green light for the transcription of the piece, Ulrich Krieger and Luca Venitucci (who played accordion in Zeitkratzer), did the work in only a few weeks, in 2002, after which the two musicians met in Berlin to compare their work and establish the final score. The result as played by the ensemble, and recorded twice on discs (on Asphodel Records, then on Zeitkratzer Productions) is quite amazing. Astonishing by the timbral similarity with the original Metal Machine Music, while the emblematic instrument of the whole project, the electric guitar, is absent.

Because Metal Machine Music is at first a story of (electric) guitars - but also of their absence, because when listening to the original double LP, you can't distinguish the presence of guitars in the album, only electronic sound and the album cover states
METAL MACHINE MUSIC AN ELECTRONIC INSTRUMENTAL COMPOSITION *THE AMINE ß RING
before specifying
No Synthesisers
No Arp
No Instruments?

And further on:
No panning
No phasing
No
A "no" opposed to the classic rock instrumentarium, guitar-bass-drums, and especially to its primary expression: the voice, and thus the song. But also to the recurrent idea in the history of rock: the battle between instrumental virtuosity, the technical mastery of an instrument and the emptiness of this idea to which are opposed the notions of truth and urgency (and we should not forget that 1977 is the year of the birth of punk, partly in reaction to "progressive" rock and its excesses of virtuosity).
However, this idea of "machine" (and its affirmation of No Instruments - embellished with the question mark) is only fantasized - Metal Machine Music is an album of guitars, not of machines, more precisely of electric guitars. Guitar in the broadest sense, that is to say not only the stringed instrument but also all its peripherals, Marshall and Fender amps, effects and even further, in concentric circles, the studio equipment: headphones and loudspeakers, tape recorders and microphones. The essence of this music is the love of the electric guitar and its most famous corollary: feedback. Guitars, specially tuned, placed against amps, as if playing themselves: the sound emitted by the amp excites the strings whose vibrations create the sound that the amp emits. Another guitar, with its own amp, and a different tuning. And yet another. A stack of guitar feedbacks, whose resonances mix, each one parasitizing the other a little, bringing it into another territory, creating a common mass.

Metal Machine Music hides the origin of its sound paste - the No Instruments? of the liner notes - and doesn't let you hear the guitars; the subtitle of the piece, "An Electronic Instrumental Composition", suggests instruments, but it is certain that this precision of instrumental is rather a warning: there are no songs here, it is not a continuation of Walk on the wild side and its "too toodo toodo". Only guitars, but camouflaged - to perceive them clearly it is better to listen to the album at half speed. As for "composition", it seems that at the time of the release of the double LP, the question did not seem very serious: although there were rumors that the record should have been released on RCA's "classic" collection (Red Seal), they are largely unverifiable today and seem to be more of an urban legend; it is only Zeitkratzer's work and positioning that poses this sound heap as a "composition", a piece to be replayed again and again, outside of the machine (of noises, of sounds) that generated it, but that somehow allowed the reinvention of the instruments and thus justifies, half a century later, the No Instruments?

Kasper T Toeplitz

Festival riverrun, concert on October 3 at 8pm at the Garonne Theater, Toulouse

Photo © Johan Coudoux

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