Difficult Listening Week, part 2: Stockhausen at Billingsgate
Before I rediscovered pop music circa 1984, I really dug Karlheinz Stockhausen. Ralf & Florian were always banging on about his music & theories, and Holger Can was a student of his, so as I was a fan of both it followed that I'd be a fan of Stockhausen. And while I found it a little tricky getting my head around some of his more fruity pieces, there was enough going on in there to make me realise there's more to music than what is actually heard.
Until I heard The Smiths, of course. At which point the tune & the lyric became king once more. Even so, hearing Gesang Der Junglinge for the first time is something I'll never forget.
So it was off to Billingsgate Market on saturday for a "performance" (read "playback") of another of his early pieces of pure electronic music, "Kontakte", plus a more recent work, "Oktophonie". I was a little disappointed that the market had been renovated as a generic conference-centre-style space, but hey, with the lights out, who's to know? Making our way to the front of the auditorium, we realised that...ah.. there's no stage. Joni looked around & mentioned that perhaps we might prefer to sit near the mixing board, where yr man was preparing...



Oh. I get it. It was like seeing Paul McCartney sitting there. Unbelievable.
The lights were dimmed a little, and after a brief intro spiel from Karlheinz, we were plunged into almost total darkness. And Stockhausen pressed "play" on his tape recorder. Hmm. He had encouraged us to close our eyes, to lose contact with our surroundings, to get enveloped in the sound. Which it was very easy to do. The pieces were presented in surround sound: Kontakte in quadrophonic, and Oktophonie in mind-blowing eight-channel sound. It was akin to sitting in a -ahem- "sound cube", sound coming from every corner: top to bottom, back & forward, left to right, and diagonally. Phew.
As for the music itself, Kontakte is a work I'm vaguely familiar with, and am rather fond of its Radiophonic/Joe-Meek-esque bleeps & bloops. In terms of sheer work, the sound generation & editing must have taken months (checks sleeve notes: yep...), which is all well & good but that's like admiring Eddie van Halen for being able to play 20 notes a second. What's most impressive is the way it makes you *feel*. Which is... out there. Man.
The second piece, while technically even more impressive, was a little anti-climactic. It's odd: I've always felt that avant-garde musicians are at their best when they're striving to create music with tools that are incapable of realising their vision. Thus they have to use their creativity to manipulate the instruments they *do* have to get the desired results. As soon as anyone could sound weird just by hitting a preset, all the fun went out of it (see also The Residents, Laurie Anderson...). This was also the case with Oktophonie, from 1991, which basically sounded like a horror soundtrack. After 15 minutes I was bored. After 45 minutes I was hoping it would end really soon. I got back into it after an hour or so by entering total sensory deprivation mode, covering my eyes and curling up in a ball (such activity was encouraged), but I was glad when it was over. If "Kontakte" was a Miro painting or a Man Ray film, Oktophonie was a Roger-Dean album cover come to life. Urgh. Still, again, it took me somewhere. Not sure I'd want to live there, mind you...

tekno_alice Did you go in the end? Any thoughts?