A little while back, I told you about some of the projects I’ve been working on. Since then, yet another project — a humorous Christmas song — has gotten added onto the list. And the project that I told you was nearest completion has, in fact, gotten across the finish line.
It’s a musical project: an album I’m calling Abstract Textures. It contains eight abstract musical pieces. I hesitate to call them “songs” because part of being “abstract” is that they don’t follow a traditional song structure — verse, chorus, etc. They don’t particularly have a rhythm or a melody. They are free-flowing and, well, abstract.
These pieces are even more abstract in the sense that they don’t have suggestive or evocative titles. You can write an abstract piece of music, but then give it a title like “Peaceful Flowing Waters,” and that immediately puts an idea into the listener’s mind: this piece should evoke a feeling or experience of peaceful, flowing waters. But to me, inserting (imposing?) that idea takes away from the “abstractness” of the piece.
So these titles evoke no such imagery. They are called “Abstract Texture No. 1,” “Abstract Texture No. 2,” and so on. The closest you get to “evocative” in the title is the idea of a “texture.” But they all actually are textures, with layers of sound interacting with one another. And “texture” here is more of a generic term anyway, applying to all of the pieces equally, and without any additional “real-world” implications.
This leaves the listener free to interpret the music in whatever way they want to, with no preconceived notions or ideas imposed by me, the composer. This, I think, is really the ultimate way to express “abstract” music.
Pre-Save “Abstract Textures” here
Going Back In Time
(Credit: Krash, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)
It occurred to me as I was working on these pieces that they brought me back to some of my earliest dabblings in music. It was the early 1970s, I was still in high school, and my buddy Ed grabbed me one day and said, “We need to go over to The Drum Shop. They have those new Moog and ARP synthesizers over there, and they let you play around with them.”
The Drum Shop was our local music store in Wilmington, Delaware. And the Moog and ARP synthesizers were new, very high-tech and very cutting-edge pieces of musical equipment. They were part of the arsenals of rock’s innovators, perhaps most notably Rick Wakeman of Yes and Keith Emerson of Emerson Lake & Palmer. And here we could actually put our hands on them and play them ourselves.
So one day after school Ed and I went over to The Drum Shop. We asked the guy if we could try out the synthesizers. He gave us each a set of headphones and basically said, “Have at it.” We each picked a synth, plugged in the headphones, and began turning knobs (on the Moog), moving sliders (on the ARP), and playing keys.
(Credit: Slugworth via Wikimedia Commons)
I had never heard such glorious sounds! They were not “music” per se, but they were definitely musical. You could play notes, or you could play swells, or you could fade one sound into another, or you could mix sounds together so they resonated against each other and created a beat…. It was amazing! And with the headphones blocking out the rest of the world, it was quite hypnotic and mesmerizing. We sat there for a couple of hours, each in our own world, dissolving away into the ever-evolving electronic soundscape.
This project, Abstract Textures, brings me back to that naive teenage time when this technology was brand new, experimental, and over-the-top exciting. Back to the time in The Drum Shop when I sat there twisting knobs on a Mini-Moog, not having a clue what “LFO” even meant, but still reveling in the wondrous sounds appearing in my headphones. It is using sound in really its purest form: without the imposition of human-created melody, harmony, or rhythm. It simply allows the sound to “be” on its own, and then we see where it goes. Sometimes we lead the sound, sometimes the sound leads us. But we never know what’s actually going to happen.
Chaos Within Structure (or Vice-Versa)
This kind of music is actually one of my sweet spots and has been ever since those earliest days. I enjoy listening to it, and I enjoy creating it. It can be moving, or enlightening, or hypnotic, or lots of other things (some people would probably say “annoying”). It’s one of those types of music that you just turn up the volume a bit, sit back, close your eyes, and then let it take you away. Headphones certainly don’t hurt.
These pieces are a little more structured and organized than what I created back there at The Drum Shop around 1971. They use 21st-century software synth sounds, for one thing. My synths today are polyphonic, rather than monophonic like the old ARPs and Moogs. And I have a great deal more experience at putting together music now than I had then.
Plus, recording material for a studio album is obviously a more structured and organized process than live jamming into headphones by yourself when you don’t even actually know what the heck you’re doing in the first place.
At the same time, there’s also a great deal of “I have no clue what’s coming next” in these pieces. They’re kind of a tightrope act that hovers between unpredictable spontaneity and somewhat structured musicality. They’re fun to play, and (for me, at least) they’re also fun to listen to.
Here’s the recipe I came up with:
- a bit of composition
- a bit of improvisation
- a bit of algorithm
- a bit of randomness
Mix all those together in various proportions, and you might come up with something.
Here’s a sneak peek at one of the new tracks, “Abstract Texture No. 7.” The full album drops on August 21st on all of your favorite streaming platforms.