Incandescence, and: Defiant (review)

What if one could have the whole world as an orchestra? What if every sound-producing object could be potentially used as a musical instrument?

(Electric Music Collective Web site)

The Electric Music Collective (EMC) is a group of young, New York-based artists who compose live and computer music in the musique concrète, or "cinema for the ear," style. The group consists of Chris Bailey, Doug Geers, Tim Polashek, Marcus Bittencourt, and Fernando Gomez Evelson—all graduates of Columbia University's program in computer music.Incandescence (2003) and Defiant (2004) are EMC's first two albums, and both are dedicated to tape music.

The first release, Incandescence, is a youthful, energetic, and eclectic collection of pieces that showcases the variety of different styles and compositional outlooks of the EMC composers. This CD is engaging and even endearing in places because it allows the young personalities of the composers to show. Chris Bailey appears to be the joker of the group, as his two pieces, Ow, My Head and Duude, are both hilariously, laughout loud funny. Ow, My Head, dedicated to the composer's parents' "pleasantly cookie-cutter suburban home," contains enough creaks and konks, rattles and zips and zonks, flapping papers and na-na-na-poo-poo vocal stylings to put a smile on the face of even the stodgiest academic listener. To quote the words of another well-known critic, "This work is a lot of fun and there isn't much fun in computer music" (Jon Appleton, in a Computer Music Journal review of Paul Lansky's Ride, Vol. 26/1). The pace of the piece is fast, frenetic, and frustrated, and can leave the listener a little breathless by the end. But all in all, it is fun music to listen to, as the piece has an "everything but the kitchen sink, okay, what the heck, throw in the kitchen sink and record it too, it's all hilarious" style.

Duude, dedicated to Mr. Bailey's "ratty apartment [he] first inhabited in Manhattan," is just as fast and funny as Ow, My Head. The wit of the two pieces is very similar, and after listening to both more closely, it's obvious that Mr. Bailey is doing some hard work to convince his audience that these pieces appear funny all the time. He is careful not to use his irreverent vocal sounds, random pitches, and sound bites from old radio and TV programs too carefully as loaded motivic or overly programmatic devices. Instead, he cooks up these bonbons of sound, quickly devours them, and explodes the debris into other high-octane sonic morcels (listen for the tasty Rice Krispie treat in the middle of the piece). Timing this interchange and maintaining a tempo which consistently railroads a listener into thinking everything everywhere in the piece is funny all the time is not easy, and Mr. Bailey does it well.

The only seam I hear in these two works is the use of pitch as a pacifying, closing device at the end of both pieces. An ear which is slightly tired from the pace and musique concrete– style "wall-of-sound" which these pieces create might welcome the extended references to a tonal V-I cadence at the end of Ow or the soothing string-like pads which descend by whole steps at the end of Duude. This application of pitch in a genre that often rebels against pitch is an effective contrast, although it is a well-known compositional tool. Mr. Bailey does add his own signature to this device, as he introduces and weaves the timbres of the pitched material in throughout the piece in order to soften its full entry at the end of the piece. A more wry, tongue- [End Page 106...