Five years ago last week, Basil Kirchin left us. On the recently re-launched Bearded website, we ran an article written by Jonny Trunk – the man behind one of my favourite record labels Trunk – who was responsible for giving Basil a second breath of life just as he was losing his battle with cancer.
The article is a poignant piece about Jonny’s experiences with Basil. It speaks poetically about how, after much searching, Jonny received a letter from Basil saying how he’d, “been waiting for anyone to pay attention all his life,” and how the positive reaction to Trunk’s release of lost Kirchin recordings Quantum and Abstractions of the Industrial North had encouraged Basil to record one last album before he left us. The record – Particles – is, put simply, a masterpiece. It mixes the avant-garde with the lounge jazz Basil grew up playing as a member of his father’s The Ivor Kirchin Band, and from the first track ‘Bye Bye 1941’ you can tell you’re listening to something special, original and timeless (if you must listen to the record – and you must – it’s available to stream on Spotify).
But listening to Basil’s music again and reading about the man made me think about the art of music and, in particular, the mathematical art behind music. One of Basil’s aims was to find music within music. It was his belief that if you stretched out a note long enough, music from within that note would emerge. As Jonny puts it in the Bearded article:
“Ever keen to explore the development of his own musical development, Basil began to record wildlife sounds, organic noise and environmental dins. He then spend years stretching and manipulating the recordings into new noise, “the worlds within worlds” as he called it. His theory was simple, if you stretch a noise far enough it reveals further boulders of music – the sound within the sound if you like. These finished recordings were then improvised over and the subsequent release on Columbia records sewed the seeds of ambient music. The follow up recording in 1973 included sleeve noted by Brian Eno, paying homage to Basil as the man who has discovered a whole new area of sound.”
And this sort of researching the actual sound is something largely absent from modern music. You have bands and artists who have put together music using alternative instrumentation – Hanne Hukkelberg arguably being the most prominent in recent years – but few who really experiment with sound itself. It was a pleasure, therefore, to listen to the Black Carrot record Milking Scarabs for Dough, which is probably the most obtuse record of the year thus far. It ranges from the genius to the questionable, but it’s possibly the most interesting new record of this century. Somewhere between Henry Cow and Scott Walker, it swings from avant-garde jazz to classic rock in a heartbeat. At one point it sounds like a Lloyd-Webber musical. All in all, it keeps you listening – which only a handful of bands seem to manage nowadays.
But mathematics is where fascinating music comes from. Robert Schneider wrote the entire Apples in Stereo record New Magnetic Wonder using the non-Pythagorean scale – invented by Schneider and based on natural logarithms, which I’m not going to pretend I know anything about, but needless to say it’s very intellectual.
It was also the basis for the celebrated BBC Radiophonic Workshop, which invented electronic music before Robert Moog brought the synthesiser to market. The most popular member of the workshop, Delia Derbyshire, had a degree in mathematics, along with a large number of her compatriots. The painstaking process that fellow workshop member John Baker went through in composing his music (listen to ‘Woman’s Hour’ on The John Baker Tapes for a great analysis) emphasises the actual craft that went into the music.
Which is where I come in with my question. In a time when it’s easier than ever to create bad music, are true innovators harder to discover and are potential great innovators in sound and music being discouraged by the ease of which a record can now be cut? When you consider that The Beatles released their greatest music when experimenting, and no bands (with the possible exception of Radiohead) have come close to that mixture of experimentation and popular success in the proceeding forty years, it makes it hard to guess when the next truly great, inspiration and original artist will emerge. Will we ever have an artist like that again, or do we live in an age where this sort of experimenting is discouraged, and is harder for the popular audience to discover? I’ll leave you to hypothesise.
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one “modern world” example of your hypothesis is in my opinion Radiohead, who manically pursued to completely change and innovate their sound on Kid A, haunted by their immense popularity, and in the end they got even more popular. Now being accomodated with their popularity, they actually still don't stop to expand and experiment (I'm not a Radiohead fanboy by the way, but it's just fact in my opinion, heh)
Great piece Gareth. As much as things seem to go in cycles I suspect it will be many years before experimentation and commercial success walk hand in hand again.
True innovators are harder to find because of the huge amounts of noise out there – now everyone can not only make music, but they can get exposure for it on line with very little effort. Just because everyone can, and does, make music and get it up on line doesn't mean that there are more great musicians than there ever were. It just means that they're having to shout much louder to be heard.
It's unfortunate that most of you tend to agree with my insinuations, because I was hoping I wasn't right! The anonymous guest is absolutely right that Radiohead are a once in a generation (or multiple generations) band. I'm no fanboy (in fact, I regularly kick against the Radiohead bandwagon just to give it some balance), but it can't be denied that they are the most innovative and interesting band to have had serious commercial success.
Kerry, I'm sad to agree entirely with you, and as more and more people are shouting about their (99% of the time) tediously plagiarised (or simply not very good) music, it's really hard for true innovators to be heard. Does this discourage innovation though? I'm inclined to suggest it does, because the lack of appreciation (even without financial recompense) means people can get disheartened and settle for the 9-5 job, mortgage and 2.5 children.
Adrian, hopefully it won't be too long to wait until another truly interesting release, that Black Carrot album is weird and wonderful, and we've already had great records by people like Thee Oh Sees, Ty Segall, Factory Floor, Connan Mockasins, Meursault, Faust and Konono No.1 (to name a few) this year, as well as labels like Finders Keepers releasing some amazing untapped gems from the archives and Planet Mu who continue to release the best electronica in this country.
Of course, none of those are truly innovative or creating new sound like Basil Kirchin or the Radiophonic Workshop did (although arguably Thee Oh Sees mixed psychedelia with garage rock in a way nobody else has done before), but I suspect it's a matter of time before something genuinely new comes out of the woodwork – although I doubt it it'll even come close to commercial or popular success!