Michael Pisaro - Étant donnés / Shades of Eternal Night (Gravity Wave, 2018)

Michael Pisaro - Étant donnés (Gravity Wave, 2018)

For those who don't know, Étant donnés refers to the French-American avant-garde and conceptual artist Marcel Duchamp's final major work, a sculpture which was constructed over 20 years while the artist claimed to be retired from the art world (a brief video of the work can be seen here: youtu.be/dAlzBx24_vM). The artwork of Michael Pisaro's Étant donnés, the first of two albums released after a 4-year gap from his Gravity Wave label, closely mirrors Duchamp's work – although, the image of a naked woman has now been replaced with the edge of a distant mountain. Michael Pisaro has been involved with experimental music for over 20 years now, so an allusion to Duchamp is hardly surprising – in fact, I'd be more surprised if he wasn't a fan. To me, the surprise is that this is the album that it accompanies. I say that, because Étant donnés is probably the most accessible, and the least academic, album that Pisaro has ever made.

Album opener give me your sines features soft, repeating jazz samples as sine tones grow separately in each channel. A soft eruption occurs when the piano is introduced and the tones begin to subside. What it reminds me most of is the minimalist jazz improvisations of The Necks, but Ed Howard points out that the music is actually all coming from Curtis Mayfield's soundtrack to the 1972 blaxploitation film Super Fly, more specifically the opening moments of Give Me Your Love. If this is all sounding pretty silly right now, then the remix of John Carpenter's theme to 1981's Escape from New York, a post-apocalyptic action film set in futuristic 1997, likely will have you rolling your eyes. Well, you're right; it is silly. But that's okay. Who said that experimental music wasn't allowed to be? After all, it isn't as if Duchamp himself was without a sense of humour.

Although it may be hard to picture Pisaro as anything less than an avant-garde stoic, Étant donnés isn't actually his first flirtation with pop music. 2012's Tombstones, which featured the now-successful art pop musician Julia Holter, attempted to reconstruct pop music within the lowercase composition domain Pisaro was best known for. Étant donnés is, largely, that experiment turned onto its head – pop music manipulated into experimental composition. Although that description sounds similar, the music is miles apart, as is the emotions within it. Tombstones was slow, relaxing and contemplative. Étant donnés, though extremely varied, is primarily warm, playful and exciting. More than ever, Pisaro has shown a sense of humor – this can easily be seen in the track titles (Shostakovich and Something Riot [a punk song is sampled here, which I assume to be a riot grrrl track from the 90's, but I couldn't identify the actual song although the lyrics can clearly be heard saying "riot"] merge to create shosty riot), but also in the music (I can't help but smirk when the cheesy filtered vocals pop up in bass never smiles).

It isn't rare for experimental musicians to sample pop music, but there aren't many who do it with as little irony as Pisaro (the album lands quite close to some of the music of Jason Lescalleet in this sense). It feels like a love letter to the pop music he adores, likely the stuff that he grew up on. In creating an original piece from Escape from New York, Pisaro restores dignity to Carpenter's original piece. That isn't to say that the piece wasn't already dignified, anyone should know that John Carpenter is respectable both as a filmmaker and musician. But we see no shortage of experimental music fans and musicians ignoring this music, writing it off simply as pop, and I think that this was Pisaro's attempt at fighting back against that method of thought. In the final track we're welcomed by a sample of a symphony by Dmitri Shostakovich (who he also sampled on last year's 13 Thirteen), creating a surprising lineage: Dmitri Shostakovich – John Carpenter / Curtis Mayfield – Michael Pisaro.

An academic reading of that lineage might be that yesterday's contemporary music becomes today's popular music, or that contemporary music will always be an amalgam of all of the music that's came before them. Both of these may very well be true. However, how I choose to read it is that the distinction is unimportant – it's useless to get caught up on what's contemporary or experimental and what isn't. A Curtis Mayfield piece will never be enjoyable in the same way that a Dmitri Shostakovich piece is, and that's because the intent is completely different. It doesn't make one better than the other in any way. Today's contemporary musicians may look back in time and sees composers like John Cage or Morton Feldman as saints, while ignoring the pop music that surrounds them (this may even extend to writing off music like Shostakovich as old-hat). From what I've taken from Étant donnés, I think that Pisaro would like today's musicians to take inspiration from anywhere they can find it, and to remember that nothing can be gained from a closed mind.

In my analysis so far, I've failed to mention the album's two longest pieces – the 10-minute rounds most pinched, most arched and the 11-minute sympathy for 11. I do think that it's safe to assume that these pieces are still made from song samples, but stylistically they are miles apart from the rest of the album. The music is exhaustingly slow and simple, which is nothing that should alarm a fan of Pisaro's work. rounds most pinched, my favorite piece on either of the new releases, features a slow, distant, low-end drone, and three evenly-placed repetitions of a 40-second slowed-down string sample. I'm unsure, but I suspect that the 11-mintue drone is actually just this 40-second sample slowed down even more, with reverberation added. To me, the piece is nothing short of wonderful. The string sample is equal parts gorgeous and melancholic, but it's the pseudo-silence that follows it which really hits me. I'm left waiting, in this state of nostalgic curiosity, wondering when I will be able to hear those strings that left me in such a state again (the answer is 3 minutes and 20 seconds by the way, one third of the track's total length). The droning sound itself would be written off as boring in another context, it sounds like little more than distant wind with an odd tonal tinge. But in this context, where it works as both a prefix and a postfix to the same sample, it becomes enamoring – it's the only source of sound you have to hold onto while you wait, and the piece's emotional effect stays in a state of patient limbo as you do. Eventually, the drone begins to fade out. After over a minute of dissolving, the drone is nearly gone, and then the sample plays for its third and final time. When it finishes, the drone has completely vanished and there's 20 seconds of pure silence. It feels like the emotional atmosphere has drifted away, and we're left with a brief moment to reminisce before the next piece, a quirky remix of a dance track, begins.

sympathy for 11 seems to follow similar time-based experiments, although far less obviously. This is actually the only track on the album which sounds like it could be a proper composition (you know, the type with a score and an ensemble). We hear a slow-paced guitar melody, intermittent percussion sounds, and what sound to be more bowed strings. The music is all slowed to the point where it's little more than sound, and then soaked in thick reverberation so the sound becomes a dense fog. The music lands in an odd area between beautiful and ugly, calm and alarming, warm and cold. Although I do find it interesting and affecting, I don't think it quite lives up to rounds most pinched.

Comparing the album's art to the original Duchamp piece, we see a naked woman become a mountain. I think this makes a strong allusion for the album's concept – the original samples being the woman (beautiful, simple, natural) and Pisaro's compositions being the mountain (ambiguous, distant, but still natural, human and relatable in a very different sense than the originals). Étant donnés may not go down as one of Pisaro's greatest releases, I personally think that it has some issues regarding consistency and that it isn't very cohesive. However, I applaud this step into a new domain, and I certainly think that it was a successful one. I wait in patient excitement to hear what's next from the ever-diversifying Michael Pisaro.

Michael Pisaro - Shades of Eternal Night (Gravity Wave, 2018)

The second of the new Gravity Wave releases is a single three-movement composition titled Shades of Eternal Night. Shades of Eternal Night is a collaboration with Dutch pianist Reinier van Houdt, who fans will remember from 2016's spectacular triple-disc the earth and the sky. Going into this, I was expecting something that might actually resemble a traditional piano composition, which this is very much not. In fact, we don't actually clearly hear a piano until a couple minutes into the second movement. Instead, what we get is a sort of electroacoustic / field recordings / electronically processed…thing. Well, whether it can easily be thrown under contemporary composition or not, Shades of Eternal Night is gorgeous, mysterious and moving. To explain what this is all about, allow me to dissect the three movements (which are all surprisingly distinct).

The first movement is titled Ghosts of the Site, and it's the shortest of the three at just 7 minutes (all three of the pieces run for an exact number of movements, so I think it's fair to assume that time-based scores were used). In addition to being the shortest, it is also the simplest and the quietest of the three. We open on the sounds of filtered field recordings, creating elegant high-pitched drones. They come and go cautiously, creating what could almost be called a slow-motion melody. It isn't until the three-minute mark when we begin to hear prominent sounds below 2kHz (which is certainly still considered a high pitch, by the way). When the low-end sounds emerge, they dominate the sound for the rest of the piece. It sounds like the lowest register of a church organ, infinitely ringing and reverberating in a massive space. The music is so slow and methodical that it would likely be considered a bore on its own – but as a primer for the marvelous second movement, it works wonderfully.

The album's liner notes include a "Cast of Characters", with the following names: heavens, earth, winds 1, piano, water, winds 2, thunder, winds 3, canvas, and anvil. It also includes pictures of wave forms where the actors' pictures might be expected. Although I do think that this image is more-or-less a joke, it does shine some light onto the album's second movement, Event Storm, and the role of the piano and recordings within it. Much like thunder or any of the three winds, the piano is just one of the many players in this piece. Event Storm opens with layered field recordings (no longer obviously manipulated), which the liner notes place in Syros, Greece, and Southern California. It's a beautiful natural landscape, full of birds, insects, streams, and wind – and then at the 2-minute mark a thick wall of piano notes absorbs the listener. Layers of heavily reverberated notes grow and envelope the listener while being juxtaposed by the sounds of water flowing and crashing over rocks, giving the listener the idea that the piano layer itself could sound a lot less like a stream.

Event Storm is long, complex and dynamic, so I shouldn't explain every moment of it. In a variety of ways throughout the movement, Pisaro thoroughly investigates the combination of piano and field recordings and how they can work under digital manipulation. Layers come and go, sometimes in gradual fades and sometimes in fairly immediate cuts, often occurring on exact minute marks. Never has a Pisaro piece felt more like a voyage than Event Storm, and for that I think it's some of his best material. There's a complex conceptuality to it, regarding the use of acoustic instruments and found sounds in contemporary music, on how independent layers and styles are able to harmonize and juxtapose, and on how recordings from different locations are able to create imaginary landscapes. But when I listen to Event Storm, none of that feels important. I am so easily sunk into the soundworld that Pisaro has provided, and it can be so exciting to just follow it. It covers a wide non-specific emotional palette, full of nuance and climaxes, twists and turns. Towards the end of the piece there's a layer of melodic piano playing, and in the context of this densely collaged piece it can feel like the most moving piece of music in the world.

Finally, we have the third and final movement The Poem of No Names. Although I'd call it the piece (on either of the new discs) most closely resembling traditionally composed music, it still starts with three and a half minutes of, what I assume to be, contact microphones being rubbed on cardboard. Within the piece we get placed (occasionally filtered and manipulated) recordings, intermittent strikes of a prepared piano, and awkward gaps of pure silence. The piano has been rigged with a bell (I believe), giving each strike an enormous weight, which makes them feel near-devastating. When the piano strikes, a spatter of recordings, which all fade before the next strike, accompany it. They give the sounds an odd emotional atmosphere – it's unsettling, as if you're hoping that another strike from the piano won't occur, even though you know it will. The recordings feel too random to make any conceptual or thematic sense out of, which I'd think is intentional.

In the third quarter of The Poem of No Names, we hear gentle drones which sound remarkably similar to the filtered recordings we hear in the first movement. The difference between the two parts is that they have now been greatly simplified, inviting the listener to pay close attention to the subtleties of each specific drone. Following this, we have another gorgeous piano climax, which itself sounds a lot like the piano melody I commented on at the end of Event Storm, also simplified. I find this finale to be incredible. It calls reference to some of the most memorable parts of the earlier movements but allows us to hear them in a new context and be moved by them all over again (and I assure you, this new piano climax is just as moving, if not more moving, than it was before). Although an argument could be made that this ending is a bit obvious, I'd rather call it natural, cohesive, and simply beautiful.

Just like Étant donnés, Shades of Eternal Night is another reference to a piece of contemporary art. Shades of Eternal Night is a painting by American artist Cy Twombly, taken from his ten-part work Fifty Days at Iliam. The paintings themselves are a reference to Homer's epic poem The Iliad. Although Shades of Eternal Night makes extensive use of Greek recordings, I'm not sure if the contents of the album itself makes any reference to the poem. However, I do understand how it could tie in to this specific painting. The painting is beautiful and simple, a cloud is painted on a large canvas, leaving most of it empty, which forces the viewer to compare the man-made cloud with the absent color of the canvas. Both the painting and the album want to ask a fairly complex question about the purpose of performance, environment, and nothingness in art, and how the three of them can intersect. But, perhaps more importantly, while creating something so interest or conceptual, neither Twombly nor Pisaro have forgotten what the most important aspect of art might be – creating something aesthetically unique, affecting, and beautiful.

Both albums are for sale in both digital and CD copies from Michael Pisaro's bandcamp:
https://michaelpisaro.bandcamp.com/album/tant-donn-s
https://michaelpisaro.bandcamp.com/album/shades-of-eternal-night

As well as as CDs from ErstDist:
http://www.erstwhilerecords.com/distro.html