Sergio Merce - en lugar de pensar / Sergio Cote Barco - pink noise(s) in prime numbers (Edition Wandelweiser Records, 2020)
Sergio Merce - en lugar de pensar (Edition Wandelweiser Records, 2020)
When I first heard saxophonist Sergio Merce's first album for Edition Wandelweiser Records, be nothing, I felt that I had found the most inspiring artist who still uses an instrument. The album nonchalantly blended microtonal saxophone tones with analogue electronics to create simple, beautiful, tonal sound masses where the sources of these sounds felt unclear and insignificant. I felt a performer placing performance aside in favour of sustaining a soft aesthetic that feels alien and surreal yet genuine and natural – it's like the sounds that leak from electric outlets, from distant fans, from a large vehicle outside your window whose reverberations have begun producing a surprisingly clear, deep tone.
What I did not realize about the album until years later was the strict, repetitive compositional structure of it. The hour-long composition only included three recordings, varying from two to seven minutes, and are repeated in their entirety in this structure: A-A-B-A-A-C-A-A-A-B-A-A-C-A. What one likely could have assumed to be improvisation was actually built more like a slow-motion, fractured pop song. That earlier mentioned alien, natural quality allowed for these repetitions to seamlessly blend into their environment. But even more than the spaced-out loops are unnoticeable, they're reassuring and true to their aesthetic – why shouldn't the electric outlets continue to leak the same sounds, why shouldn't that large vehicle begin producing that same tone, and do you not still like it? Perhaps it's even grown on you with an element of nostalgia.
Sergio Merce's new album, his third for the label, isn't so
different, but it feels more fulfilling. It still sounds to be leaking from the
walls and not a performer, but this one has me more convinced that there's
something living within those walls. Merce's toolbox has slightly grown to
incorporate the exact middle-ground of his current aesthetic: an EWI – a small
synthesizer played like a saxophone. It's an instrument that can easily feel
tacky, but here it makes sense. Not just does it fit right in, even further
obscuring the question of sound source, but it points towards Merce's growth as
a performer by suggesting a way to make electronic music where the body is more
viscerally connected to the sound – a concept which previously only felt
incidental to the fact that a saxophone was used.
The album is titled en lugar de pensar, which has
been translated to instead of thinking. A brief paragraph by the artist printed
on the CD booklet provides a brief, eloquent explanation of his aesthetic:
"The name of the album is about this feeling that I
have. I believe that playing music is a non-cerebral thought form; thought in
the sense of being a channel to see, to reveal, a channel that opens through
intuition, observation and attention but not through thinking."
The album's half-hour opening track, forma circular, is
built in brief sound blocks like be nothing was, but one of those blocks
happens to be nearly 10 minutes long and seems to be the artist's greatest
achievement as a performer. It's an absolutely gorgeous mass of drone music, elegantly
shifting and swaying to warp its reverberations and overtones while staying
mostly the same. How many layers of sound are we hearing? Surely several, but
they come together very singularly, as if it truly is a single captured sound
mass that has been leaked through the open, thoughtless channel in the artist's
truest intuition, as he put it. The illusion is immediately shattered when the section
is followed-up by a repetition of its final minute-long tone, detached from the
rest of the sound mass which has now been proven to have been assembled. That brief
tone also opens and closes the composition.
The piece's structure is as follows: A-B-B-C-C-D-A-A-B-B-C-C-D-A.
Not just are their small repetitions, but the entire second half mirrors the
first. It's a 16-minute piece played twice, but just like when I first heard be
nothing, I did not notice. And just like be nothing, on an aesthetic
level it totally works. On repeated listens the piece encourages my brain to
slip into a warm state of nostalgia – craving sounds that I heard minutes
before and I will hear soon again, sounds that are only a little different from
what I'm already hearing. However, it leaves me wondering how a structure like
this could ever be intuitive – does this non-thinking thought form genuinely
repeat itself in this way? Well, maybe. Nobody knows the artist's thoughts except
himself, but it would be a lie to say that my most genuine and most intuitive
thoughts are without repetitions – in fact, it's that repetition which make
their genuineness clear. Humans are creatures of habit, after all. Another way
to put that phrase would be as the track's title implies: thought forms are
circular.
The album's second track is titled forma continua,
and it does indeed continue the thought forms that the listener has spent their
past half hour with. At first it feels refreshing to hear new content. The composition
first appears as soft, tonal pulses – nothing alarmingly new, but smaller, less
immediately grasping than the previous palette. The repeated pulses leave the
listener wondering if they have been re-recorded or copy/pasted, but as layers
are added to the growing sound mass the question loses its relevancy. The piece
comes together as a single assembled drone, no moments of silence like before,
and that grants it a feeling of sustained bliss which isn't found in his other
music. Tones come and go from within, and pulses, frequencies and textures
mutate, but at its core forma continua merely continues. It adds little
more than what's necessary, what’s intuitive, sounds that should be heard, and
sounds that the listener, if they're in tune with the thought form, expect.
I hope it's not dismissive to say that forma continua
feels like a footnote to forma circular. The first track lays down the
musical ideology and makes the aesthetic landscape clear and concrete, but
refuses to deliver a simple, tangible piece of music: it diverts itself with
cold repetitions and stabs of digital silence, instead it focuses on building an
intuitive narrative quality in its structure. If we're willing to consider forma
circular a narrative, then I'd look at forma continua as music for the
closing credits: a piece of music that borrows its tools and ideas from that
earlier piece, continuing its thoughtform, but finally delivering upon its
promise to create a concrete piece of music, something non-narrative and raw
that lives up to the performer's intuitive potential while presenting a
consistent, comprehensible atmosphere for the listener.
This process of pure intuition via electroacoustic meshes
may not be new to the artist, but I do think this is his most expressive work
of it yet, even if that's not something easily put into words. More than ever
is the connection from performer to sound made clear in Merce's music, and that
connection easily carries from sound to listener, and listener to performer. To
listen to en lugar de pensar is to submerge oneself in the abstract intricacies
of Sergio Merce's non-thinking brain, directly into his spirit, and that's
where we've found these intimate, beautiful sounds.
Sergio Cote Barco - pink noise(s) in prime numbers (Edition Wandelweiser Records, 2020)
Although I haven't confirmed this, it seems entirely
possible that no label has released more silence than Edition Wandewleiser
Records. en lugar de pensar only included three minutes of it, but other
albums have been much more daring, such as Manfred Werder's 2003,
released in 2016, a triple album that featured mere seconds of sound – that's
99.999% silence. With that being said, it seems difficult for this type of
megaminimalism to stay radical. That's why it's impressive that Sergio Cote
Barco makes it look so easy.
pink noise(s) in prime numbers only sports a humble half
hour of silence, slightly under half its running time, but it's what fills the
other moments that feels most radical: as one likely guessed, it's exclusively
pink noise. For those who don't know, pink noise refers to electronically
generated walls of static noise that cover the entire frequency spectrum. It differs
from white noise by having intensity tied to octave intervals rather than
frequency intervals – creating a more musical, and more comforting type of
static. Rather than sounding like an old television left on or a radio out of
channel, it sounds like distant winds and soft nothings.
The artist does filter the pink noise to make slightly
different textures. The half-hour album opener features a soft sea of noise
which gradually increases in pitch, slow enough to avoid being noticed, operating
in just a few long pulses. Instead, the emphasis is to process the already
existing atmosphere. It can't be said for the other tracks, but this one almost
feels like an affected field recording – there's something very natural in the
way that the sound changes, it's like the sounds observed while outside when
day turns to night. It could be considered a drone piece if an instrument were
used, but with pink noise these tonal pulses never become more than sound,
never become something musical.
Instead of a tonal, musical connection, the pink noise
grants a more visceral connection to the sound. As it adjusts, ebbing and
flowing in intensity and frequency, it feels like a therapeutic process
designed to make the ear canals open and close – affecting them directly while
passing through no information whatsoever. And it does feel a bit therapeutic,
it's comforting to supply the brain with such a soft bed of nothing. I could
imagine it being something nice to hear while recovering from a hangover or a
rock concert, but I'm unsure how actively this music should be observed – it seems
vehemently opposed to holding the listener's attention, banishing itself to the
back of their mind and pushing their thoughts towards whatever they might think
about, but likely not the music.
The second track is even more challenging: 43 minutes with
just six spaced-out pulses of sound, none longer than a few minutes. The listener
spends most of their time waiting. Waiting is a common trait in this minimalist
type of composition, but it's a bit different here. Rather than waiting for the
sound of a piano or a guitar, a performer off to the side who surely will bring
us music once they feel comfortable, we just wait for more pink noise, more
nothing really. It's not something to anticipate, it's just something that
happens and then stops happening. When a pulse comes it doesn't feel at all
like a celebration of their return, it just blends into the world around it,
continuing that silent atmosphere.
The CD booklet says this:
"pink noise(s) in prime numbers is an invitation
into our perceptual periphery, where noise(s) – and perhaps we – can be somewhat
disobedient."
Similar to how Sergio Merce's music seemed to come from the
walls, Sergio Cote Barco's exists as an inevitable wall-of-sound which exists
in the air of every room. It doesn't set out to exist independently from the
noise of my refrigerator, the hum of outside wind and cars or any other source
of noise, it becomes one with them. It's not coincidental that the artist
advises the album to be heard on speakers – this noise should be poured into a
room, not into a listener's ears. The listener should only hear these sounds as
an element of the room, rather than as something that exists without context or
footing.
Perhaps most difficult is the third and final track, at just
five minutes. It is a single, slow pulse of quiet, low-end noise. It's barely
audible, in fact, almost as if it were designed to go unnoticed entirely. As I type
that it does seem to make perfect sense though. Although each of the last track's
six pulses were only enough to enter the peripheral, they were certainly audible.
In other words, they made it to the listener and had an effect like they were
likely aware of – they've gone beyond the peripheral by being knowable. As this
last track slips right by, it seems to better live up to its peripheral
potential – the sound does objectively enter the listener's sound-world, but it
may go unobserved – the entire composition passed by unnoticed while the
listener awaits a more obvious pulse, have they even noticed that the second
track is over? Perhaps not, but now the album is over.
In experimental music, the question is often "what am I
listening to?" Here it's very clear – it's pink noise. In other
experimental music, the question will be "when will the next event happen?",
but here it seems inconsequential – more noise will be coming eventually. Here,
the question is not what or when, but how and why. Should
I pay attention, should I be occupied? Should I follow what is happening or just
let it sit in my peripheral? Regardless of the artist's intentions, the
listener has ultimate control of what is and isn't their peripheral, they can
pay as much attention as they like. So, if a listener really leans in and
listens to pink noise(s) in prime numbers, what do they find? As far as I
can tell, nothing: just an artist who has used a computer to place some pink
noise(s) in prime numbers. When these sounds are left to bleed into an atmosphere,
they don't become more significant, but their insignificance is comprehensible –
it's just some pink noise in the room.
Both CDs are available directly from the label:
https://www.wandelweiser.de/_e-w-records/_ewr-catalogue/ewr2011.html
https://www.wandelweiser.de/_e-w-records/_ewr-catalogue/ewr2010.html
Sergio Merce's album is also available digitally on his Bandcamp:
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