the sound of the suburbs

Really happy to have the opportunity to write about one of my favorite albums of the 21st Century so far: Suburban Tours by Rangers. For Pitchfork's Sunday Review series. 

It was also an opportunity to get started - possibly jumping a gun a bit, since it's only 16 years since, but why not? - on feeling nostalgic about chillwave a/k/a hypnagogic pop. 

The Rangers review is also a kind of an ambivalent ode to suburbia - where I grew up, where I returned  to (but not forever?) - and this is something explored previously in this essay about Ernest Hood's Neighbourhoods for The Nation.

Here's an epic 13 minute-plus track from the follow-up to Suburban Tours, the double album Pan Am Stories. "Zeke's Dream" takes the stoned-on-sunshine sound of the previous album even further, especially in the last of its several segments: a controlled explosion of ecstatic noise, two minutes of blasting bliss I could happily listen to for ten times longer. Joe Knight, self-effacing guitar hero. 

. 

I did not know there was an Olde English Spelling Bee video for "Deerfield Village"

Another beauty from Pan Am Stories - now who is he channeling in the guitar solo? (I have my own ideas)

In the Pitchfork piece, I talk about how Suburban Tours prepared me for the move to LA in some obscure way... 

A slightly fanciful thought maybe but it is true that hypnagogic pop made so much more sense to me almost the minute we arrived in Southern California (as explored in the piece on the genre for Frieze).

In David Keenan's famous Wire piece on hypnagogic, James Ferraro describes KFCs as "dark energy temples"...  and my reaction, as someone then living in New York, was that it was stoned hippie drivel.... But then moving here, especially in the more featureless reaches of the San Gabriel Valley, through the endless strip malls, it's true that the fast food outlets and name-brand retailers and supermarkets like Bristol Farms can start to look a bit like ecclesiastical buildings, what with their out-size frontages and spire-like constructions calling out to you from a distance....  beacons for the faithful in the church of consumerism ... At the same time, actual ecclesiastical buildings - modern-look or even outright Modernist churches and synagogues and Scientology temples  - look like megastores or shopping malls. In poorer neighbourhoods, the churches look commercial in a different sense: like bodegas or repair shop shacks...   Unlike in new york or london, where fast food places are bunched together with other and much more older and characterful buildings, in LA KFCs and McDonalds and In-N-Out Burgers and Jollibees are usually separated off (realty space being cheaper) and they often have bizarre ziggurat-like or pagoda-like shapes.... at night, they really do look like peculiar plastic temples glowing with too much artificial light... 

if my life were considerably emptier, I think i might cultivate an interest in modernist churches

they used to trigger Prince Charles/carbuncle-style revulsion

now they have a certain intrigue

the same kind of pathos of the long-past vanguard stirred by looking at the record packaging of 20th Century classical music-- the typography, the graphics, the invariably modernist/abstract expressionist/minimalist/Op Art etc paintings chosen; the unsmiling formality and sternly meticulous detail of the sleevenotes...

pathos, but also honour

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

here's a good example of the kind of sleeve i'm talking about

and in a similar vein

this series (which woebot wrote about along time ago here) are major fetish items (nearly bought on the other day -- Jean Guillou, Visions Cosmiques, deranged church organ music--purely for the cover)

varese ones--those endless versions of the same set of five or six classic Works--Arcana, Ionisation, Poeme Electronique, etc--tend to be particularly evocative

see also
stockhausen
more stockhausen
and even more stockhausen

i've developed quite an interest in the second-tier avant-classical/electronic guys like this chap -- see also kenneth gaburo, charles wuorinen, etc -- partly because they're, well, more affordable -but also because the pathos is particularly intense with these guys-- they really thought electronic music was the next stage in the grand forward march of Western Civilisation (hence the loftiness of the themes behind Rudin's Tragoedia) only to have their genuine enthusiasm (as opposed to bandwagon jumping) for all these new machines wrong-footed by where classical music and the broader culture went next (i.e. backwards, pretty much)... So where are they now? Returned to tonality and the orchestral palette with their tails between their legs (Wuorinen, whose Time's Encomium on Nonesuch won some kind of massively prestigious award, a Pulitzer or something, back in the late Sixties when all this was hot). Or still beavering away doing granular synthesis and similar digital whatnot in one of the computer music labs that so many major universities in America still maintain?

whole bunch more here mixed up with more kitschy electronic stuff (who's listening superfically then eh? "kewl burbling alien noises!" well, me too to be honest)

i also dig the packaging of the non-electronic/non-concrete end of 20th Century classical, your Messaiens and Pendereckis and Ligetis and Berios; all those neglected Eastern European composers and British serialists and such like, e.g. the CRI label where the composers have names like Birtwhistle etc (this stuff goes real real cheap--nobody wants it!)

the sobriety, the severity, the solemnity ... it's quite affecting ... so much of this stuff was spiritually driven

hence the affinity with modernist churches

mouth music (not-so-slight return)

late breaking flurry of suggestions:

A. Parker with another goodie - weeping ceremonies on this ethnomusicological field recording Music of Oceania: the Kaluli of Papua Niugini 
which you can get here

while we're on the ethno-exotico-voyeur tip, in the tradition of Missa Luba, and also My Life In the Bush of Ghosts, here's Gilles Aubry "performing" the glossolalia of charismatic churches in the Congolese capital Kinshasa. As suggested by E. Anderson. 






another good one, from B. Cole  - Filipe Pires



"Homo Sapiens - 1972
At the heart of this work is the human voice, used as the symbol of earth and creation. It is phonetically framed towards movement, elaboration, and the fusion of disparate sound elements. Homo Sapiens is a revision of the first part of the Nam Ban ballet, composed in 1970. The present version was composed while Filipe Pires was studying at the GRM in Paris."

see also "Canto Ecuménico", also using voices of ethnological provenance, on this recent Creel Pone reissue

S. Spiers-Conte materialises from the ghostly mists of memory to point out the startling omission of Bo Anders Persson 





R. Rosengarde proffers



A. Thompson, with just a tinge of asperity, draws attention to the non-inclusion of the sound poems of Gil. J. Wolman, such as this, one of his mégapneumes



Two Swedes for the price of one (suggested by H. Blumner)   



Another Swede - Ilmar Laaban - brought to my attention by J. Lyons





Did I not do Francois Dufrene already? M. Brewer thinks not. No harm in duplicating, I suppose







J. Maynard seems genuinely shocked by the omission of Karl Stockhausen's theatre of voices





Eerie-lovely choral music with serious hauntological pedigree - the theme tune to Children of The Stones, suggested by A-J. Kirby.  You can hear the main theme right at the start but other outbursts of vocal strangeness crop up throughout the series, which is well worth watching in its entirety.






But who made the music? Revelation courtesy of A Sound Awareness: 

"The music was composed by Sidney Sager who used a combination of a cappella vocalizations of a single, repeated Icelandic word ("Hadave") to create a terrifying and dissonant score. The vocals were provided by the Ambrosian Singers who during their long career have provided choral work for both Ennio Morricone and Nino Rota. he score for this series has never been commercially issued, which is a shame as both the "Start Title" and the "Ritual And End Title" are some of the scariest music I've heard on television."
And finally (?) - J. R. Press, points out an absolutely heinous absence - Yoko Ono

hauntology in The Guardian, albeit rebranded as "psychogeographic rock"


this bit is almost too perfect to be true!

"By day... Harding is a town planner in Solihull; by night and weekend he makes music that is inspired... by "municipal parks at dusk", "concrete precincts" and "old ordnance survey maps."



Along with July Skies (top songtitle: "The Ruined And Disused Churches Of Norfolk") and Avrocar, Harding is also semi-member of Epic45, whose Hood-like May Your Heart Be the Map is a kind of ex-concept album: it started out inspired by the post-plague depopulated Britain reclaimed by wilderness of Seventies TV series The Survivors but then evolved in a different direction, with only ghostly residues of the original concept still clinging...