Penultimatum
AutoCad/Pantheist Audio
Independent
2000
8 tracks
As a rule, I don't review recordings that are not meant in some way to be a retail release. As a rule, I don't review recordings that come to me on CDR media. As a rule, I don't review music that some might call New Age, that electronic stuff that's become the vogue in some circles. When Thomas Park contacted me, I told him that he could send the CD along anyway but that, as a rule, I don't review the music it seems he has to offer. So Thomas Park sent me a CDR of electronic music never intended for retail sale. And, you know what? I decided some rules are just meant to be broken.
So here's my challenge: to justify why I broke not one but several of my own rules and to explain why I think the music of Thomas Park is actually a fit with the folk and roots-related music usually reviewed here. I think I can do both.
When I was younger, I listened to music from a variety of composers who made what we sometimes called electronic and sometimes computer music. There were artists round the world making this music: in Europe, the Americas, Asia. I found some of this music very intriguing, especially in that it could be very melodic even though in those days it was more often than not pieced together a note at a time. A long time favourite of mine is the Japanese composer Isao Tomita, whom I first heard in 1974, when I bought "Snowflakes are Dancing," his debut North American album.
Much earlier than I became consciously interested in electronic musical instruments and performance, I and most of my generation were unconciously introduced to this music by way of the sound tracks of science fiction movies, which used electronic instruments such as the theremin for effect.
Now, back to those rules. This music was sent to me on CDR because it is rarely, if ever, released in CD form. It's heard in such monumental public settings as planetariums [would that really be planetaria?] and such intimate settings as private homes, played back off the internet. Thomas Park appears to be an electronic hippy, giving his music to the world without commercial goals. Beyond that, upon listening one might ask, is Park's music really that "New Age" after all? But more on that later.
Through his band [no other names mentioned, so the "band" may consist of several aspects of Park's own personality], Park has been involved with music for more than two decades. This ASCAP artist has written more than 200 songs and has more recently signed a deal with Pivotal Records of Hillsborough, North Carolina, a label founded in 1998 with the expressed intention "to spread quality electronic art and culture." So it can be argued that Park is a serious artist, a professional in his field.
Right, you say. And just how is this electronic stuff roots-related? Well, in several ways, but I can narrow it down to two.
Firstly, the music is roots related in the types of sounds Park chooses to incorporate. Many of the rhythms used are primitive. Here are the simple beats we hear in the earliest, simplest music, including variations on the human heartbeat. Here are other biological rhythms replicated through mathematical recombination. Here are rhythms based on AAVSO variable star data, the very rhythms of the universe.
Secondly, in a very quirky way, in the 21st Century, this electronic music actually could be described as "roots" music. Often, when we talk of roots music, we really mean the blues of the early twentieth century, the folk music recorded by field archivists like Alan Lomax, and other music that, while its antecedents may be very old indeed, truly dates in forms we recognize from the past two centuries or so. Electronic music and the instruments with which it is created actually predate much of that.
As early as 1870, there were instruments designed to create musical sounds electronically. Rather than paraphrase, I'll quote one source that tells the story much more completely and concisely than I could.
"The origins of electronic music can be traced back to the audio analytical work of Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz (1821-1894) the German physicist, mathematician and author of the seminal work "SENSATIONS OF TONE: Psychological Basis for Theory of Music" (c1860). Helmholtz built an electronically controlled instrument to analyse combinations of tones the "Helmholtz Resonator", using electromagnetically vibrating metal tines and glass or metal resonating spheres the machine could be used for analysing the constituent tones that create complex natural sounds. Helmholtz was concerned solely with the scientific analysis of sound and had no interest in direct musical applications, the theoretical musical ideas were provided by Ferruccio Busoni, the Italian composer and pianists who's influential essay "Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music" was inspired by accounts of Thaddeus Cahill's 'Telharmonium'
"The first electronic instruments built from 1870 to 1915 used a variety of techniques to generate sound: the tone wheel (used in the Telharmonium and the Chorelcello)- a rotating metal disk in a magnetic field causing variations in an electrical signal, an electronic spark causing direct fluctuations in the air (used uniquely in William Duddell's "Singing Arc' in 1899) and Elisha Grey's self vibrating electromagnetic circuit in the 'Electronic Telegraph', a spin-off from telephone technology. The tone wheel was to survive until the 1950's in the Hammond Organ but the experiments with self oscillating circuits and electric arcs were discontinued with the development of vacuum tube technology.
"The engineer and prolific US inventor Lee De Forest patented the first Vacuum tube or triode in 1906, a refinement of John A. Fleming's electronic valve. The Vacuum tube's main use was in radio technology but De Forest discovered that it was possible to produce audible sounds from the tubes by a process known as heterodyning. twentieth century by radio engineers experimenting with radio vacuum tubes. Heterodyning effect is created by two high radio frequency sound waves of similar but varying frequency combining and creating a lower audible frequency, equal to the difference between the two radio frequencies (approximately 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz). De Forest was one amongst several engineers to realise the musical potential of the heterodyning effect and in 1915 created a musical instrument, the "Audion Piano" . Other instruments to first exploit the vacuum tube were the 'Theremin' (1917) 'Ondes Martenot' (1928), the 'Sphäraphon' (1921) the 'Pianorad' (1926). The Vacuum tube was to remain the primary type of audio synthesis until the invention of the integrated circuit in the 1960's."
You can find this and lots more information on the history of electronic music at obsolete.com.Thomas Park's music has no lyrics to review. The music is created almost entirely outside the analogue realm we normally associate with traditional music, whether we call that folk or roots or something else. The process of composition is partially directed but at least as much random. And yet, this music is drawn from the roots of our nearer, modern world experience, and the sounds it carries carry the rhythms and emotions of the millennia.
Much of Park's music is based on the same sort of mathematical science that creates those pretty recombinent and moving geometric drawings on your home computer screen, those fractal images. Says Park, this music "Focuses on Fractal Ambience (often danceable) of the Jackson/Strohbeen school. Generally, natural or mathematical data are used to create logarithmic music. For example, biosequence data was used to generate songs [so that] listeners will be able to listen ... and appreciate the world around them by doing so."
Okay, so it's not much of a review. But it is interesting stuff.
To read an interview of Thomas Park about his music and his philosophy, visit Legends Magazine. If you want to check out his music for yourself, you can visit his mp3.com site.
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