Various Artists - An Anthology of Noise & Electronic Music—Second A-Chronology 1936-2003
(Sub Rosa)
Pin it down, label it, then rearrange it. Genres really should only exist to be slain, and that's something which this particular series has been trying to do... if somewhat imperfectly. Though that's less to do with the actual excellence of the compilations so far and more to do with perceptions of what 'noise and electronic music' are.
In some respects, though, this presupposes what the Sub Rosa series is actually about. Series curator Guy Marc Hinant expressly states in his liner notes that it 'would be better to see this as a series of rereadings of History leading to other explorations.' In ways this is a Nuggets of a certain time and place, that of an electrified century, its products and its ability to be captured and preserved on tape or other media. Heady stuff and not a surprising, nor an inherently wrong approach.
In that light, this two and a half hour collection of music contains many abstract and involving joys. If the idea is to partially rehabilitate and clarify the various perceptions of what electronic music was from origin to the modern day, then the execution is often striking. Hinant's capsule essays and biographies delve into thorough detail to provide excellent and in many cases absolutely necessary context to the selections here. Nearly everything is either unreleased or nearly impossible to find in the first place, and there's a series of pleasant shocks to be found in how composers in the 1950s and 1960s created sounds and pieces that sound thoroughly familiar now. The difference in what was available to work with and how it could be worked with is such a wide gulf now—even early efforts with samplers and PC work in the eighties are astonishingly primitive compared to 2003—that to hear the cut-up and sampled chaos of Luc Ferrari's end of the fifties "Visage V" is to marvel quietly not only at the quality of the work but the painstaking effort that must have been used.
There is a reasonable enough range demonstrated as well beyond the image of a European existentialist lab geek wired on coffee and Sartre. Sun Ra, Yoshihiro Hanno, Graeme Revell, Captain Beefheart and Autechre all get nods, as do obscurer predecessors such as Daphne Oram and Percy Grainger. The decades-covering scope of the compilation allows for the idea that the twin precepts of noise and electronic music can and do take root in a variety of different atmospheres and settings, and draw on many inspirations that need not be plugged-in ones at all. With the melancholy drones of Tod Dockstader's "Aerial > Song" is also Robin Rimbaud's trademark out-of-context cell-phone conversations on "Emily," the clipped hardcore techno rush of Lasse Steen's "Purzuit Ov Noise,"Beefheart's merry insanity on a medley of "She's Too Much For My Mirror/My Human Gets Me Blues."
But rightly or wrongly, the idea of noise and electronic music in the sphere that most will hear it—the pop world, however defined or categorized—is left untouched, in keeping with the previous compilation and doubtless to followed by what is to come. There is no false advertising here—the title, after all, is An Anthology, not The Anthology—and the argument can readily be made that the whole point is to explore and consider that which has never gotten its due. Yet at the same time, if the appearance of reasonably well known modern figures like Rimbaud, Revell, Beefheart and Autechre here (not to mention Sonic Youth on the first compilation) makes a certain contextual sense, then there's no less reason to include someone like Timbaland, to name only one of the slew of producers and performers whose work with specifically electronic forms of composing and arranging—not to mention using 'noise' as a compositional element—is known worldwide by millions upon millions. A band like Radiohead may have its many electronic influences and tributes on its albums that would slot into the brief outlined here but unless there's a strictly unspoken part to the title—one that would make it read An Anthology of Noise Used in Generally Non-Melodic Electronic Music, perhaps—then the picture is unfortunately a false one now.
But this is a question perhaps unfairly asked, and in a world where of all the composers and performers only the smallest few will ever get truly well known, the need to redress the balance even slightly is always perfectly understandable. Still, though, in the end it is important to think that enveloping and intriguing as this collection is—and make no mistake, it is—it can only ever be part of a picture.
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