A Guide to Electronic Music

Paul Griffiths A Guide to Electronic Music (1979)
Back in 1981, I won the school art prize for drawing pictures good. They asked me what I wanted and I said this book, which I'd noticed in the book shop at Warwick University. I'd discovered Throbbing Gristle through raids on Graham's older brother's record collection, and had somehow come across the suggestion of electronic music having been originated by Stockhausen and others associated with the classical tradition. Unfortunately, Griffiths' guide struck me as a bit dry back in 1981 even before factoring in the absence of pictures, and I never got around to reading it.

Forty years later, having discovered a couple of Stockhausen discs in a local record store, it seemed like time to make the effort.

Actually, it is kind of dry, if reasonably informative in terms of the history of electronic music as it stood in 1979, and the stuff about Pierre Schaeffer and the subsequent artistic division between musique concrète and pure electronic sound; but it's also a tad limited in scope, with no mention of Russolo - who should surely count at least as a precedent for non-musical sound repurposed in a musical context - and a certain classical bias revealed in the token section on rock music. While I didn't really expect entire chapters devoted to either Gristle or Cabaret Voltaire, both of whom were very much on the radar by 1979, a greater page count than would seem warranted is devoted to Switched on fucking Bach and those bands apparently legitimised by sheer technical achievement such as Yes and their ilk. Punk rock, for example, is dismissed as a reaction to technological sophistication. This seems to present a contradiction given the enthusiastic focus on avant garde classical pieces dispensing with tradition by embracing chance and improvisation as legitimate methods of composition and performance; and once we're done with the historical testimony, the remainder of the guide mostly provides descriptions of pieces I haven't heard by composers with whom I'm only vaguely familiar, the value of which is probably subjective.

Classical music isn't really my territory, and although there are pieces I appreciate, my appreciation is intuitive and emotional, so neither the mathematics nor the ingenuity of the composition make much difference to me. While I find the factors informing the composition of certain pieces by Stockhausen interesting, for example, the last word for me is whether the piece works when you listen to it. Unfortunately I get the impression that the historical and artistic value of classical music tends to be inextricably tied to technical concerns rather than whatever we may feel when we hear it, and this applies as much to avant garde classical despite it being additionally associated with modernism as the musical counterpart to painting, writing and so on. This constitutes something of a contradiction given the shift of creative emphasis introduced with Cubism, for example, in contrast to traditional nineteenth century painting. If an equivalent shift occurred in classical music, the hegemony of structural and compositional sophistication as indicative of value remained as it ever was, hence innovation within any other field, particularly rock, garnering an indulgent pat on the head for having succeeded despite the patronage of chavs, teddy boys, and other unwashed types. In other words, if one is allowed a simple emotional response to the paintings of Pollock or Rothko, appreciation of Stockhausen and his colleagues remains an exclusive club. I suspect this may have been what Cornelius Cardew was getting at, although writing condescending songs in honour of all his cloth-capped pals down t't pit probably wasn't the greatest solution.

Griffiths' book works well enough as a guide and an introduction, having furnished me with the titles of at least a few things I feel I should hear, but is otherwise hampered by its tone and general criteria being so deeply embedded within the academic tradition it discusses with all the usual biases of class, high art, and people who went to proper schools. Just this week I listened to a CD of works by Schaeffer, Stockhausen and the rest followed immediately by Smell & Quim's Nativity Colostomy, and they all sounded like different expressions of the exact same tradition with the transition from one disc to the other barely even registering as such. Admittedly, Griffiths' book was written well before pretty much all music counted as electronic music, but I feel there really should have been something in here which allows for the existence of Smell & Quim, amongst others.

The Lost Girl

D.H. Lawrence The Lost Girl (1920)
The Lost Girl was written around the same time as The Rainbow, then rewritten for publication in 1920, presumably incorporating semiautobiographical details of much which had occurred within Lawrence's world since the first draft. It's difficult to gauge the extent of the revisions, but there are points at which the tone switches so dramatically as to leave the whole feeling a little like two different books, albeit both telling the same story. The first chapter, focusing upon the father of Alvina, our Lost Girl - herself loosely based on Frieda, Lawrence's wife - makes numerous references to nineteenth century novelists - George McDonald, Dickens, Wilkie Collins and others - whilst betraying an influence of the same, strongly suggesting the possibility of having survived the 1920 rewrite more or less unchanged.

By contrast, the second chapter introduces Alvina in an unusually light, jocular tone very much contradicting the received wisdom of Lawrence lacking a sense of humour, particularly once we meet the theatrical sideshow performers who catalyse the action of the novel, specifically Alvina's escape from both a stifling home environment and then England itself. The performers, clownish and exaggerated, are described with sardonic indulgence rather than sentiment or anything so dismissive as the frowning misanthropy we are supposed to expect of Lawrence. He didn't much like the vulgarity of the modern world, but clearly shared the working class love of spectacle and garish folk tradition. The flamboyant Natcha-Kee-Tawara theatre troupe, for example, perform dubious Red Indian scenes at the newly opened cinema - James Houghton's latest doomed venture; and if Lawrence regards them as brash, describing their performance in anthropological terms as he would later describe actual Taos Indian rituals, he is sympathetic, seemingly regarding the noise as more honest than the moving pictures of Houghton's cinema and so more in tune with his class.

The introduction of the Natcha-Kee-Tawara additionally seems to suspend reality in some vaguely Shakespearean sense, allowing for the derailment of narrative conventions and for occurrences of the chance and unexpected, notably Alvina encountering Cicio with whom she eventually flees to Italy, as did Lawrence and Frieda.

Unfortunately, the general tone changes once again from this point on, reverting to Lawrence's more familiar landscape of emotional tumult and psychological undercurrents which, given the contrast with the first half, suggests either indecision, a lack of direction, or simply that The Lost Girl needed a little more work prior to publication. As it stands, the transition from relative whimsy to the cloying Dickensian sentiment describing the death of James Houghton and the subsequent fate of his daughter is jarring, giving an impression of certain passages having been subject to much greater revision than others. We almost have two books here, at least in terms of tone, and while one is certainly respectable and consistent with the author's reputation, the other one could have been great.

The Sex Shops of Sherman Oaks

SJXSJC The Sex Shops of Sherman Oaks (2021)
To kick off at something of a tangent, back when I was a self-involved teenager and my mother was doing a literature degree of some description at Warwick University, she often dropped me off at the university's expansive library so as to keep me occupied for an hour or so. I expect she hoped I'd discover Dickens but I usually ended up browsing the William Burroughs shelf. I'd just discovered his writing and the university kept original hardbacks of all the obscure out of print books, a few of which I hadn't seen before and have never encountered since. A couple of these were illustrated with collages by Burroughs himself, or Brion Gysin, or somebody else - stark black and white things, often jarring cut-up images very much belonging to the same lineage of juxtaposition and dissent as Steven Purtill's illustrations for The Sex Shops of Sherman Oaks, which similarly reminds me of that initial thrill of discovering Burroughs for the first time. This one comes from Amphetamine Sulphate's science-fiction imprint. As may be obvious, it's more Burroughs than Asimov and as such falls under the heading of things which approximately continue the experimental thrust of Moorcock's New Worlds.

That being said, while I presume the influence of Burroughs may figure in there somewhere, and the occasional passage suggests something of his voice, this is nevertheless something new, or at least new to me. The narrative is delivered in short, functional sentences, sometimes without verbs, and with an overpowering tendency towards what may initially seem like the sort of random digression which results from cut-up texts. There's a fairly high degree of repetition, and while some of it may indeed be derived from the cut-up technique, the whole seems quite carefully directed towards specific effects and is therefore a long way from comprising random phrases plucked out of a top hat.

Human as alien as animal as transformative substance. My gills again. My lungs left behind. The anti-intro that discusses mutations only. New genes discovered in the side streets of North Inglewood. My personal mental fitness … a direct agency to despair. Psychedelic mathematics … the double helix … organisms occur as new species … desirous selection.

It's all like this, nearly two-hundred pages, and the cumulative effect is akin to a wall of noise with little variation in tone. Nevertheless the reader will begin to notice patterns emerging from the static, not unlike images seen flickering within flames, and after a short time it feels as though you're reading something with a conventional, if not exactly traditional, narrative hidden within the information overload. Much of the content contradicts and even skewers attempts to make sense of what may or may not be happening, not least occasional half-glimpses of cyborgs and flying saucers intruding on whatever reality our narrator occupies, and yet the suggestion that we're reading something more structured persists.

I'm not sure what to make of this, but I suppose it could be viewed as narrative which gives equal emphasis to experienced reality, stray thoughts and memories, and even alternatives occurring somewhere within the many realms of possibility. Our narrator is involved with someone named Madhab, or maybe he's Madhab, but the perspectives remain fluid to the point of even gender drifting back and forth. They or he or she or whoever move around from place to place, brains fried by chemicals, engaging in auto-erotic asphyxiation amongst other pastimes. It might almost be a road movie with the first few Chrome albums on heavy rotation, but one where that which is described represents a mere fraction of the greater reality as though we experience only the sharp peaks of something otherwise too vast to operate as text in a meaningful way.

As will hopefully be clear from the above - keeping in mind that this is just my interpretation - The Sex Shops of Sherman Oaks really isn't much like Burroughs aside from the short-circuiting of consensus reality which it effects; and surprisingly, it's not even a difficult novel once the reader has dispensed with any of the usual expectations. I remain confused but am nevertheless violently impressed.

Fantastic Stories of Imagination March 1963

Norman M. Lobsenz (editor)
Fantastic Stories of Imagination March 1963 (1963)
Here's another one of these, costing peanuts and picked up from the second hand place mainly because Simak is mentioned on the cover. It also seemed like I should have another go at enjoying J.G. Ballard, but A Question of Re-Entry isn't quite the lost astronaut tale I might have hoped for, instead concentrating on those sailing up and down the Amazon in hope of locating his capsule. As with most Ballard that I've read, it's well written with a reasonably literary flourish but the narrative just sort of floats along without doing much of anything and I couldn't get on with it, and the missing astronaut element may even have been tagged on so as to justify publication in one of these digests for all the difference it makes. That said, at least I finished the thing, in contrast to Roger Zelazny's Nine Starships Waiting which I gave up after about five mystifying pages.

In addition to the usual short stories, Fantastic was in the habit of reprinting forgotten or otherwise mislaid works from before the dawn of the science-fiction and fantasy digests, of which three turn up in this issue. Guy de Maupassant's An Apparition is distinctly underwhelming, the plot being that it's a ghost, which most of us will have guessed from the title. I've encountered the name of Maupassant as significant in the history of literature, but this example contains few clues as to why. Marginally more whelming is Jean Richepin's The Wet Dungeon Straw which is essentially a slightly depressing shaggy dog story but is peculiar enough to be enjoyable. Finally Austyn Granville's His Natal Star features a person who finds himself subject to the gravity of a distant star, and enough so as to cancel out the pull of the Earth. The story, such as it is, is mostly our man walking around on the ceiling marveling at all those tables and chairs up there, but it worked for me.

Coming at last to the main feature, Simak's Physician to the Universe - which it turns out I haven't read before - is odd even by Cliff's standards, sustaining the atmosphere of a de Chirico painting, albeit one depicting a swamp, for the full forty or so pages. Here Simak does that van Vogt thing of having each paragraph bring more questions than it answers and when the end delivers resolution, it actually sort of doesn't and leaves us more bewildered than ever. This is something I enjoy about Simak's writing, namely that his explanations often serve to emphasise the sheer scale of the mystery more than they illuminate. Here his protagonists are exiled to a swamp serving as a form of limbo - locales which Simak has used more than once to place his characters outside of space, time, and  conventional reality. Somebody will one day write a thorough examination of Simak's oeuvre, it patently being of a depth and complexity sufficient to warrant such an undertaking, and light will hopefully be shed on the significance of the swamp to which he returns time and again. Until then I don't have much idea, but it's fun to ponder.

Despised: Why the Modern Left Loathes the Working Class

Paul Embery
Despised: Why the Modern Left Loathes the Working Class (2021)
Brexit has been explained to me over and over since 2016, but only twice in terms I understood or with which I could sympathise, even though I remain convinced of it being a terrible idea; and now, this is the third time, and the most comprehensive version of the argument I've yet come across. Embery argues that Britain needed to extricate itself from the European Union in order to free itself from the neoliberal hydra which has been busily asset stripping the economy for the last couple of decades. I've seen the same argument phrased as, once we leave Europe we can get rid of the Tories and vote in a proper Labour government, the sort of thing of which Tony Benn would have been proud. While I have no strong desire to have this particular argument all over again, I can certainly see the desirability of such a proposal, hopelessly optimistic though it may be. Embery suggests that working class support for Brexit has principally been moved by the above sentiment, or that it has been a protest vote amounting to the same.

Having lived in Texas for the last decade with every intention of staying here, I no longer feel deeply invested in either the Brexit circus or its monkeys, but as someone who has grown increasingly exhausted with the modern left, Despised seemed worth a look. The parallels between Brexit and what has been going on over here have been difficult to miss. I have friends who voted for Trump, for example, simply because the alternative really didn't seem like any sort of alternative. They're not racists or Nazis or even the deplorables described by Hillary Clinton, despite that I live in Texas, and despite what people who've never been here but who went to better schools may tell you. Had I been able to vote, I wouldn't have voted for Trump, but I don't know how great I would have felt about voting Clinton either; and the suggestion that persons such as myself might have been somehow scared of her because she's brilliant and she's a woman is just plain fucking silly.

Anyway, the point of Embery's book - to which the merits of Brexit or otherwise are arguably secondary - is the tendency of many representatives of the modern left to shut down debate by branding anything with which they disagree as hate speech. In this respect, the book is pretty much on point from start to finish. I recognise the sort of reductive dialogue by which those failing to toe the party line are habitually branded racist, homophobic, transphobic, or just too fucking thick to be allowed a vote. I've even been on the receiving end, because it doesn't matter so much what you may actually believe once you've expressed misgivings, or simply failed to wave a particular flag with due enthusiasm. Embery is a former firefighter and trade unionist from Dagenham and is therefore qualified to talk about the actual working class, as distinct from what persons subject to regular childhood piano lessons may believe the working class to be; so he understands the accusations and refutes them with authority, even to shed insight on the psychology of all those online versions of Rik from the Young Ones, forever pointing a finger and calling the rest of us Nazis; and as more and more of us get shuffled off to the sidelines and told to shut up because we're too old, too white, too square, or just not one of the cool kids, this book represents the sort of conversation we need to have.

That said, Despised is best taken as the opening of a conversation rather than a scientific treatise for although much of what Embery claims seems solid, I would argue that there's room for interpretation here and there - as one should probably expect of something which treads such a fine line and is, in certain respects, a discussion of nuance. While his summary of the British working class as essentially decent squares well with those two decades I spent working for Royal Mail, the notion that neither steaming xenophobia nor tabloid scare tactics influenced the Brexit result is a little disingenuous, given almost all of the relevant conversations I've had with members of my own immediate family back in the UK; and I personally suspect he's way off in believing that neoliberalism can be sent packing simply by getting it on its own and voting it out of existence.

Nevertheless, I'm very glad that we've had this conversation.