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Features Disc of the day
Oliveros * Dempster * Panaiotis
Deep Listening
(New Albion, 1989)
Spectral meditation drones from trombone, garden hose, and accordion - in giant military cistern.
In 1989, when this CD was first released, Pauline Oliveros was already a thirty-year veteran of the musical avant-garde. Schooled in composition at the University of Houston and San Francisco State College between 1949 and 1957, she'd worked with and influenced such luminaries as Terry Riley, Morton Subotnick and Loren Rush, helped form the San Francisco Tape Music Center, and taught at University of California, San Diego where her unconventional methods of notation ("Allow your vocal cords to vibrate in any mode which occurs naturally") and meditative theories of 'deep listening' showed fellow musicians how to listen closely and respond to the ambient sounds of their environment. Although a skilled tape manipulator and technophile, for her first recording with the Deep Listening Band, Oliveros relied solely on her skills as accordionist and improviser, taking trombonist Stuart Dempster and avant-garde vocalist/percussionist Panaiotis (aka Peter Ward) into a massive 14-foot deep disused water cistern at Fort Worden State Park in Pt. Townsend, Washington and asking them to "listen intensely to one another and the transformative spatial modulations... to make a collective music". Using accordion, sea shells, trombone and didgeridoo, and utilising the cistern's incredible 45-second smooth-reverb delay, the trio slowly, carefully crafted deep, measured acoustic reverberations that, astonishingly, give the auditory illusion of being vast electronic drones, eerily similar to the VCS3 meditation mantras of early Tangerine Dream or Popol Vuh, but generated entirely from homely acoustic instruments. "[The sound] slowly moved along the walls until it enveloped the listener," writes Oliveros in the album's liner notes, "a most remarkable and beautiful phenomenon." The more you listen, the more peculiar the effect is. Dismiss the sounds as mere electronic ambience and they possess an immense, astral calm. Try to locate the source of these strange, expanding harmonics and the effect is ghostly, unnerving, maddening. "The actual act of listening influenced the result," wrote the session's recording engineer, Al Swanson. "My eight year old son, Stephen, who was assisting me, [said], during a break, "Dad, what would this stuff sound like if we weren't listening?" Given the album's acoustic uncertainty (are you hearing an instrument, its reverberation, or its effect on your own stereo or listening space) Deep Listening is an album experience that's significantly affected by the circumstances of you, the listener, when you're listening, where, at what time of the day or year. It's like having a living thing there in the room with you. On an autumn afternoon, against the crackle of distant fireworks and the smell of wood smoke on the air, the effect is intensely, darkly magical.
Andrew Male
Posted by Ross_Bennett at 6:00 AM GMT 10/11/2010
Further Listening
Pauline Oliveros – The Roots Of The Moment (hatArt, 1988)
Tangerine Dream – Rubycon (Virgin, 1975)
Popol Vuh – Hosianna Mantra (Pilz, 1972)
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