Skeleton Of An Audio Photographer

After Derek Bailey’s recent passing, I pulled out some of his albums, found some live bootlegs, and managed to come across "On the Edge: Improvisation In Music," a four-episode television program created and inspired by Bailey’s simply titled book, Improvisation. BBC Channel 4 aired the films in early 1992 and was likely the only televised documentary on the subject (European Free Improvisation site). "On the Edge," like the book, examined improvisation in all its forms, across cultural and political boundaries, and with an insightful accessibility from a guitarist whom still no one can aptly describe.

            The very first episode shocked me upon first viewing, as it explored the nature of improvisation in Mozart, whom I attributed as a Classical composer steeped in stiff Baroque figures. We certainly have the stereotype of the tux and gown orchestral performance, but as harpsichordist Lionel Salter remarks in Improvisation, “The music as written down was only a kind of memory jogger. It represented a skeleton of what was played.” It’s that skeleton that I'm interested in most, as a representation of temporary order. The stability of said skeleton is, however, not fixed. Wasn’t it Ty Burton (S.S. Bountyhunter) who growled, “Three sternums / Three spines / Twenty-seven ribs where there used to be nine”?

            It’s really only a phenomenon in the last fifteen years that an artist records an orchestra or a choir only to completely disassemble the source material into its own beautiful Braque-ian beast. Mark Hollis of Talk Talk exposed Laughing Stock to what public was left over from Spirit of Eden—the 1991 record released on the specialty jazz label Verve Records to avoid as much backlash as possible (Polydor committed the Mothers of Invention to the same fate). Eighteen musicians were given the task to improvise around a basic theme—the skeleton, if you will—and Mark Hollis spent the next seven months moving and removing samples to create his own masterwork.

            Ricci Rucker’s recently issued Fuga (Alpha Pup Records) is, in many ways, the album I’ve been waiting for since I heard Soul Junk’s 1958 and Matthew Shipp's Equilibrium. Little did I know that in 2003 when those albums were released, Rucker would have begun and completed Fuga in four months. It would also be the year I started digging through the jazz archives at WUOG (Athens, GA college radio station) and delving into deconstruction as a literary and artistic theory. I’d dream of Cooper-Moore’s angular piano pillagings and otherworldly handmade instruments cut-up arhythmically by Slo-Ro (this, by the way, needs to happen) and hoped to find my answer in DJ Spooky’s Blue Series (Thirsty Ear) contributions, but was ultimately let down by the lack of true integration. Jazz and sampling were two separate entities, like a house beat slapped onto a poorly re-mixed Madonna hit. No, I wanted an entirely different sound, an honest synthesis that becomes an identity in itself.

            Fuga's process reads similarly to Laughing Stock by first sampling records to make “the skeleton to the whole album,” presenting the material to live musicians to lay out chords, melodies, and percussion tracks, to then improvise on top of themselves. The material was pressed to vinyl "so they could be scratched, programmed, and arranged from the vinyl." The last step sounds particularly Portishead-ian, but it’s really a different means to an end.

            "Sampling isn't just an idea of taking pre-recorded material, then re-manipulating it," Rucker told me. "Sampling is the idea of taking an idea and re-manipulating it. It's the foundation of life. Guitarists sample guitars, pianists sample pianos. No one owns sound—if anything, people own a unique combination of sounds."

            Fuga is an album that consciously builds itself on the accidents Rucker's recorded, a thick foliage of legal plunderphonics reaching into scattered and reconvened aural assemblies. Its colors are muted browns and golds folding into late 60s (pre-fusion) Miles Davis, Don Cherry’s gamelan-filled “world fusion” records (Eternal Rhythm, Brown Rice), and the funky post-modal drones on Herbie Hancock’s Sextant.

            The album deliberately starts with a silence soon accented by the rumbling of disparate sound: a scratched vinyl, a frantically bowed cello, electronic gurglings, brass blats, and a thumb piano attempting to make sense of the cacophony. Tribal drums pound through like a Microphones album left at sea, instead of conquering a mountain, as ambient synths also look for composure.

            At the four-minute mark, “Tension and Release (The Journey to Fuga)” has realized its humanity with melody, which Rucker confirmed, “I tried to create the sound of the human growth process.” Strings document the first creation with delicate sorrow over an intense Hamid Drake-like conga-kick-hi-hat combination that also reprises in the last seconds of the album (the Beaver Harris-style extended drum solo on “Harder Than Hard, Softer Than Soft [The Line Between Yin and Yang]” ain't nothing to sneeze at either—see the closing cut off Beautiful Africa).

            Laughing Stock, The Getty Address by the Dirty Projectors, and Fuga are three albums that not only share an aesthetic but also a concept. The idea of the journey grounds these reconstructed works as narratives. Mark Hollis reaches out to the spiritual, David Longstreth examines the post-9/11 world as Don Henley guided by Sacagawea, and Ricci Rucker instrumentally photographs human growth. These artists seem to find comfort in their re-arranged compositions, as if the only way for their audience and themselves to understand their vision is through what Hollis called "arranged spontaneity” (Melody Maker, September 7, 1991).

             Rucker explained:

The re-arrangement process is exactly what it was, which is why it was really not of concern for the musicians to nail any type of specific performance. The main reason for this process was to create a situation where my compositions would not sound like anything else. One of the easiest ways I’ve found to do this is to work in a reverse manner. Taking pre-recorded sounds, and arranging them without too much thought, and working more as an audio photographer. My job was to create variables by moving parts, chopping parts, doin’ any type of manipulation within the sounds recorded, and let all the variables played at once, create some type of movement.

The idea was to capture the moments that came together by themselves, then build off of them. In this way, it's almost impossible to not come up with something that my mind would never think of. The way the universe moves is the most advanced type of composition, so I use the variables of life to dictate the movement. My job is to provide the variables and then listen.

             The “variables of life” remark sounds a bit like a philosophy student trying to get laid, but the intention’s well taken. Fuga provides a new realm for sampling to conquer: free-music. Rucker thinks “sampling is the next logical step in the music process in general,” and while I can’t argue with that statement, sampling (viewed as a collage format) is still growing as an accepted art form—despite its long-ignored existence in musical quotation (most often in jazz), literary allusion, and human evolution.

              DJ Olive has tackled free-jazz turntablism for some exciting results, like on William Hooker’s often forgotten Mindfulness (pun not intended). He treats the turntable as an instrument by running his vinyl collection through processors and responding intuitively to the other improvisers, though some of his effects did grow a little tiresome.

            Rucker took the concept further when he created The Controller One, a turntable with D-style now produced by Vestax. He explained it in great detail via e-mail, but the most innovative aspect of The Controller One is its ability to sample within established musical scales by a series of buttons around the table. Like a scratchable moog, it expands turntablism’s vocabulary and allows the "traditionalist to function as they understand, and they can go deeper into the art, and can give the traditional scratchers the ability to do what they’ve been doing for years, but now begin to incorporate it with how the rest of the music population understands music.” Rucker is quick to add, “Both are valid, and both have plenty to offer, this turntable fuses both together.”

             The album’s process puts Fuga in an interesting position: a composition rooted in free-music arranged meticulously by one person. By that account, Fuga is a contradiction as it removes the very aspect of free-music that makes it unique: free-improvisation.

The compositions started taking shape after the ‘accident’ was created, and I began taking a more understandable approach after a foundation of accidents were created. If I took these sounds and tried to compose them by the influences of other past compositions, it would’ve been too direct and predictable, like a lot of music today.

             Perhaps Fuga is a variation on Butch Morris’ conduction technique, which is a form of conducted improvisation guided by the musician’s interpretation of the conductor’s hand gestures, but instead of hands conducting bodies we have hands re-mixing vinyl. It’s all very metaphysical, but regardless of the procedure or inspiration from it, Ricci Rucker has realized a fifty-minute composition in league with other epic sampling artists that confidently advance and elevate plunderphonic exploration.