24 August 2008
Born in 1882 in Brighton, Victoria, Percy was the son of an architect. The Graingers moved around often and perhaps as a result of this Percy enjoyed the companionship of few childhood friends. He was home schooled by his mother who also began his piano tuition which would be his entry into the world of performing and composing. His father gone from the scene, Percy and his mother travelled to Germany when he was 13 and then to London when he was about 19.
It was in London that Percy met the great Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg who encouraged him in his artistic career as composer to 'classicise' and thus celebrate the folk tunes of the English speaking world, primarily, but also those of other European nations such as the Scandinavian ones. Grainger would become an influential proponent of 'world music' in general. Grainger's folk-orientated compositions were notable for their directions on how they were to be played: 'Rippingly' or 'clatteringly'. Such 'Grangerisms' have frustrated performers of his music ever since.
As a performer, Percy is said to have played according to the prevailing mood. His piano style was generally virile and attacking, stemming from performances in large halls he gave in his youth, although he could also be lyrical and gentle. The great Grieg stated that Percy's playing was "like the sun breaking through the clouds", that "it is a great human, a great soul, an aristocrat that is playing". Percy himself said that "fierceness is the keynote of my music".
The man seems to have fashioned an 'athletic philosophy' in life: he was constantly walking, cycling and would never ascend or descend a set of stairs without bounding the entire way. He was an athlete and an artist, with a somewhat ascetic, yet playful, outlook. "I do not eat meat, I do not smoke, and I do not drink" he declared. Grainger admired the supposedly free and wild life of the Vikings and other groups like the ancient Greeks of the Homeric epics.
While his artistic side yielded a stern yet playful beauty, his athletic side yielded a cruel yet playful sexuality which he would became notorious for. Percy the child was kept in check by his mother's corporal punishment and by the time he was a teenager he had developed a fetish for pain. He wrote, amusingly, "A man cannot be a full artist unless he is manly, and a man cannot be manly unless his sex-life is selfish, brutal, wilful, unbridled."
Grainger died of prostate cancer in 1961, but performed right up until 1960, leaving behind his wife, a long and fruitful life, but no children. Along with his supremely joyful and energetic music with its visions of force, movement and beauty, his unorthodox character, and bounding personality, Granger's legacy includes his experiments in the 1930's with 'free music', where music could be artificially generated by a machine, anticipating the role of the much used modern synthesiser.
Information loosely sourced from 'Facing Percy Grainger' - An exhibition at the National Library of Australia - http://www.nla.gov.au/exhibitions/percygrainger/index.html
~Recommended Works~
- 'Lincolnshire Posy'
- 'Country Gardens'
- 'Shepherd's Hey'
- 'Molly on the Shore'
- 'Green Bushes'
- 'My Robin is to Green Wood gone'
- 'The Duke of Marlborough Fanfare'
- 'Willow, Willow'
- 'Scotch Strathspey and Reel'
- 'I'm Seventeen come Sunday'
- 'Shallow Brown'
24 August 2008
Dead Can Dance ~
The Serpent's Egg (1988) 
I. The Host of Seraphim {6:19}
II. Orbis De Ignis {1:36}
III. Severance {3:22}
IV. The Writing on my Father's Hand {3:51}
V. In the Kingdom of the Blind the One-eyed are Kings {4:12}
VI. Chant of the Paladin {3:48}
VII. Song of Sophia {1:25}
VIII. Echolalia {1:17}
IX. Mother Tongue {5:17}
X. Ullyses {5:09}
Total Length ~ 36:16
Dead Can Dance released
The Serpent's Egg in 1988, the title being an allusion to ancient creation myths. The album is an epic collection of partial and full blown period pieces from various cultures, played on modern instruments. This 'timeless' musical setting is appropriate for what may possibly be described as the timeless or 'classical' symbolisms presented to varying degrees of abstraction in the lyrics: of self-discovery, perceptual refinement, the idealistic attainment of wisdom, the human will and also its antithesis in depression, Plato-esque cave allegory, and frustration but not resignation towards humanity.
Lush synthesisers, organs and strings mix with the soaring primitive vocal performances of Lisa Gerrard (known also for scoring movies such as
Gladiator) and the soulful and austere style of Brendan Perry. Both artists combine very well at various points both as vocalists and musicians, and it is no surprise that the album was produced at a time when the two were unified by much more than simply their music. Tonal organisation of instrument and voice ranges from mystery inducing polyphony (The Host of Seraphim) to the primal wale of a single melodic line (Song of Sophia), and while rhythm favours slow unravelling motion it deviates towards paces of ritualistic affirmation towards the close of the album.
These contrasts are united by the overall 'feel' of the music which is archaic and epic without being crass, evoking a powerful sense of transcendence from fickleness and fad.
19 October 2007
"I've never accepted the external appearance of things as the whole truth. The world is much more elaborate than the nerves of our eye can tell us... " - James Gleeson.
Gleeson was spawned in Hornsby, Sydney in 1915. He studied primary school teaching at Sydney Teachers College and art at East Sydney Technical College, becoming drawn to the works of Dali, Ernst and the European Surrealists. Around the time of joining the 'Sydney Branch of the Assertively Experimental Contemporary Art Society', Gleeson became interested in the writings of Freud and Jung.
Typical of surrealists, Gleeson's themes are commonly said to explore the human unconscious and its relationship with our rational or conscious states. Surrealism, as a movement in art and ideas belonging to the broader Modernist period of the early 20th century (modernism being proceeded by Romanticism and Enlightenment in turn) undertook to transfer over to art theories popularized by the psychologist Sigmund Freud, which were themselves in some form actually anticipated by Nietzsche's writings on the underlying human will to power, and which potentially downgrade, according to the Surrealists, the primacy of our rational faculties.
From a slightly different and philosophical-historical perspective, Surrealist art is another manifestation of our long held tendency to doubt the objectivity of what are today held to be our infallible tools for grasping what is 'real', i.e., our senses. Doubt regarding the objectivity of these most academically came to the attention of Modern Europe through the philosophical works of Immanual Kant and subsequent German Idealists, but these thinkers were by no means the first to tackle the subject. Plato and many religions preceded them.
With the German Idealists, 'Idealism' did not designate a dedication to any moral nor heroic ambition but rather to two, both metaphysical and epistemological, points. Firstly: the possibility that our minds do not grasp reality in itself but rather only representations of reality which may or may not correspond to reality objectively (i.e. may not correspond to reality as reality is, in-itself, separate from our perception of it). This idea can be demonstrated simplistically by putting forward the case that what we experience as the colour red really does not exist in the so-called 'red' objects themselves, but only in our minds as the subjective result of our optical nerve reacting in a certain way with the certain wavelength of light that 'red' objects reflect, to produce a certain (red) image in our consciousness or in that part of our mind which deals with the representation we depend on live. This scepticism has often been extended to claims, of varying degree and plausibility, that the underlying laws or invisible principles (i.e. of Newtons) with which nature or reality is organised are really, or merely, laws embedded into our understanding rather than into nature itself, and that our (now subjective) representations of reality, while organised by these principles, therefore do not necessarily correspond to the 'chaotic flux', or what have you, of nature as it really might be in-itself, possibly devoid of such ordering principles.
Secondly: German idealists, borrowing from eastern philosophy to some degree, posited the slightly different theory that reality itself is simply one big idea or interplay of mental entities or thoughts rather than of concrete material entities or objects, and that we ourselves are but mere thoughts or hypotheses of this mental reality (or 'over mind'). What is known as Hegel's dialectic method is an influential example of one instance of this idea. Another is Schopenhauer's conception of the world as 'will and idea' and to some degree Nietzsche's more personal-based notion of humans existing simply as the players in a big arena subject wholly to their will to power, this 'will' being the fundamental driving force behind all human action and also thought (including rational thought, which thus turns out being wholly determined and thus can be downgraded from being considered as a free and hegemonic faculty to being simply at the whim of our will to power or 'survival' or 'life' force).
As for Gleeson, it is the first of these stances on Idealism, in the two aforementioned philosophical senses, that his quote at the opening of this essay alludes to, and the influence of this sort of thinking can be seen in those of his works which hint at the 'otherness' of being which possibly lies 'behind' our experience of life, or in the same works which at least stand as wake-up-calls and metaphors for the sheer mystery of existence that we at all times live with but which we moderns conveniently ignore and cover up with the increasingly drone-like and mundanely standardized nature of day-to-day life or which we have become too desensitised to or accepting of, like a constant stimulus or situation which soon becomes ignored due to familiarity.
The second stance seems not to have been neglected either though: Worshipping the vague idea that the cause of all our thinking and action is some sort of underlying or unconscious driving force or will, Gleeson, seemingly along with the Surrealist movement in general, wants to let this force express itself through art "in the absence of conscious moral or aesthetic self-censorship". It is obvious that Gleeson's works do not bear witness to a lack of standards, but rather to less interest in normal depictions of form as opposed to more 'normal' styles of art, representing a Dionysian-like interest in the human being's drive to simply create and expend its energy un-hindered by too many unnecessary impositions.
In the end, it is the place of visionaries like Gleeson to hint at the uncertainty that will forever stem from the facade or at least the boundaries of human perception, but also to manipulate in the surreal fashion the appearances that we do possess of our only reality, and to "stimulate the fantasy of mortals" to borrow a quote from Varg Vikernes. As with the musician, who's craft could be labelled surreal in many ways, great Surrealists like Gleeson twist and distort every-day representations (i.e. pieces of sense data) to form new organisations/structures of sense data, expressing the part of either our consciousness or unconsciousness (I'll leave that up to you) standing in awe of a universe that by the very scale of its vastness appears surreal to us, and which continues on in its ways indifferently to our relatively petty and slight individual concerns.
18 October 2007
Born a baker's son in West Melbourne, McCubbin would become a predominant figure in the 'Heidelberg School' of Australian art.
The Heidelberg school was foremost influenced by the European impressionism movement. It abandoned the laborious attention to detail, produced within the studio, emphasizing 'plein air' or open air landscape painting, the instantaneous effects of lighting, and also experimentation with visible brushstrokes. Works reflecting the style of the school were not 'finished' to the polished levels of those of Von Guerard or even Buvelot, but with all its quirks and the influences it took from Europe, the school, which was more like a club consisting of artists who took excursions to Heidelberg in the late 1880's/early 1890s, and in particular McCubbin, who maintained a slightly heightened sense of realism when compared with his colleagues, produced many works which captured the feel of the Australian landscape and general atmosphere to a degree surpassing all previous attempts.
After all, the artistic skills of those who came before and influenced McCubbin were imported, in some sense, as opposed his own which he developed at the same time as he grew around the subject matter he would come to depict.
He is remembered often for his portrayal and celebration of, what was, the Australian bush life. Perhaps his most famous work along these lines is 'The Pioneer' (above) from 1904, which expresses an affectionate portrayal of the lives those freemen who, in the time subsequent to the convict era, layed the foundations, in terms of managing to settle in isolated parts of the harsh bush and farm, for a civilization that would subsequently flourish.
18 October 2007
A Swiss-born landscape painter who emigrated to Melbourne in 1865, Buvelot studied, worked or painted, or all three variously, in the locations of Paris, Bahia in Brazil; Rio de Janeiro (attracting the attention of emperor Don Pedro II who knighted him with the 'order of the rose'), and lastly Switzerland before sailing for Australia where by 1869 his reputation was established in Port Phillip as the colony's leading landscape artist.
Several artists of the Heidelberg school, such as Frederick McCubbin, who Buvelot in fact taught at one point, considered him to be the father of Australian landscape painting with his emphasis on painting out in the open air directly in nature and in the surroundings of one's subject matter, and for his astute and realistic assessment of tone and lighting rather than emphasis on romantic themes and renderings, (a la Von Guerard), which Buvelot used to animate each of his works and which enabled him to depict the true appearance of the Australian landscape to a degree not yet witnessed.
18 October 2007
Born in Vienna, Austria, Von Guerard was educated in the visual arts in Rome and Dusseldorf, Germany. He immigrated to the gold fields of Victoria in 1852 but soon found that there were opportunities for men of his artistic talent in Australia.
His own style drew noticeable influences from German landscape painters of the European Romantic period (spanning, roughly, from 1790 to 1840) such as Caspar David Friedrich. This style of natural art was attached to the intellectual concerns of the Romantic Period such as holism and of identifying God, the 'divine', or the 'life force', inside of nature rather than outside of nature (these ideas also provided the abstract mental orientation for Darwin's observations and subsequent theories). Thus the art strove to depict nature as infinite and as 'the sublime'. Works emphasise depth, detail and 'the picturesque'. Tiny human figures are often dwarfed by the grand scale of nature, as can be seen in many of Von Guerard's works.
By 1860 Von Guerard was recognized as the leading landscape artist in the colonies. Although with the onset of greater 'spontaneity' in the works of Louis Buvelot a few years later, and then even more so with the subsequent Heidelberg school, his population began to dwindle in later years.
In all, he was considered a pioneer in Australian art, and a man of considerable strength and determination, venturing into remote areas of wilderness in search of the sublime and opening the eyes of younger Australian artists to the vast and inspiring subject matter that lay in waiting to anyone who cared to venture into more remote areas away from the cities and larger townships.
18 October 2007
Disembowelment ~ 
Transcendence into the Peripheral (1992)
I. The Tree of Life and Death {10:25}
II. Your Prophetic Throne of Ivory {7:40}
III. Excoriate {4:45}
IV. Nightside of Eden {2:39}
V. A Burial at Ornans {14:38}
VI. The Spirits of the Tall Hills {9:23}
VII. Cerulean Transience of All My Imaged Shores {10:06}
Total Length ~ 59:36
Oppressively heavy, at times hauntingly and majestically introspective, this album from extinct Melbourne beast Disembowelment is a diamond in the rough. Whereas a tendency might exist to classify this band along side those of the Doom Metal sub-genre, this release from the band transcends that genre qualitatively and idealistically. Indeed the music has more in common with grindcore and also ambient music than some overly sentimental and melancholic doom/heavy metal.
A high level of musical variation is displayed as furiously fast and liquid 'melodic' phrases flow and progress linearly, subsequently changing down to slow but vast and crushing passages of, yes, ambient riffing.
Tone is delivered through a huge and hideous method of production partly paralleled in much grindcore music but here given much more bass and also some reverb. This production technique allows such slow and weighty riff fragments to hang in an infinite space, vibrating with an intensity comparable only to the energy levels immediately furnished by an exothermic reaction in the sun.
Clean but deconstructed 'lead' guitar lines are used to stunning effect when placed over these fragmented and weighty undercurrents of thunder, as are occasional clean vocals, creating an ambient and 'doomy' variation of melodic grindcore. These aspects of the music are given boundaries by shifting percussion which sometimes hits repetitively, slow and hard, in rhythm with the laborious riffs and at other times changes to blast furiously around the riff pattern.
Progression in each composition is thus often slow, but it is by no means non-existent. Tacks do flow, often remarkably so, but... slowly - due to the ambient nature of much of the music which injects much more space into metal than is the norm, especially in grindcore-influenced metal. This is reflected in the long length of time expended by most of the tracks.
This is vast music and it dwarfs the listener, but in this way it is far from being self-obsessive. I imagine that, due to its impact, it is as much an exercise in ego death as can be achieved by music. However, one's time meditating with this monster will nevertheless furnish questions and highlight the ever groping nature of the human being.
18 October 2007
Portal ~
Seepia (2003) 
I. Glumurphonel {5:05}
II. Vessel of Balon {2:42}
III. Tempus Fugit {4:20}
IV. Sunken {3:10}
V. Atmosblisters {4:11}
VI. Transcending A Mere Multiverse {3:03}
VII. Antique {2:41}
VIII. The End Mills {6:41}
Total Length ~ 31:53
Appealing to our subconscious sense of or desire for the infinite, or for ego death, experienced in the face of near chaos, or perhaps to a desire for what lies 'behind' currently accepted human designs, Portal emerges with its first full length work which proves to be an exercise in sustained discordance par excellence. The relatively thin and grainy production used for the album adds to the rhythmically fragmented and musically atonal nature of the material, where nothing is as it seems it should be.
This is a truly challenging work, for Seepia combines the employment of rhythmic unpredictability when the structure of notes being used is more agreeable/perceivable, with tonal unpredictability when the rhythmic/timing structure is instead somewhat more perceivable. 'Ecto surreal abysmill horror', as the band describes it, indeed.
Portal would seem to be spot on in labelling their art as surreal, in the sense that its aims are, in light of its discordance, to appeal to our subconscious feelings rather than our conscious rational powers (...used to perceive structure etc, for in this release structure is, even relative to some other extreme metal, minimal). The last two tracks possibly provide the greatest amount of relief, though minute, from the cacophony, with an electronic/soundcape piece and then a metal track with sustained use of barely melodic themes, and the question begs itself as the album closes and the piece loses what ever consonance it had, as to whether music should forsake our need for structre as us much as this release does.
To this writer, Seepia proves to be an interesting exercise in art, although it seems too ready to disregard as 'unreal', like much Surrealist/Dadaist/Absurdist art, what Julius Evola would call the 'conscious and sovereign principle of the person' in favour of the 'irrational, unconscious and nocturnal dimension of the human being', and as a result it often lacks the power to do much other than disturb and coldly agitate the listener. Here structure, and particullary the principle of tonal structure, is violated, leaving the listener with little to work with.
Portal ~
The Sweyy (2004)
I. The Sweyy {5:05}
II. Werships {6:11}
III. Doors {2:57}
Total Length ~ 14:13
The Surrealists from Queensland returned, quite soon after their 2003 cacophony, Seepia, with an additional guitarist to deliver a new but short length release possibly hinting at what is in store from this band for the future in the form of increasing use of structure and adherence to boundaries.
The first track on this EP most closely resembles the heavily discordant Seepia album, although it is a little more focused in that many phrases take the listener in a sustained direction for longer before unravelling into the fragmented atonality and also sometimes rhythmic irregularity this band is known for. But then boundaries to the randomizing combination of elements are again erected around the phrases and the piece explodes forward with this traction once more enabling a sense of defined spacial direction. Similarly, but in certain of the not so completely discordant section of the piece, tones float above the sustained and rigid stream of percussion below in an ambient but slightly detached manner, akin to debris floating to and fro in a gentle river eddy as the current spills on right next to it, before being pulled back into a main flow and pummelling onward down the musical stream.
The second and last 'metal' track on this release displays an even greater awareness from this band of what the human brain perceives as structure in music. Long and sustained phrases stretch in and out, almost as if reality is breathing, to create a majestic sway against the rigid and grounding use of percussion before again briefly exploding forward and then finally unravelling into disarray. A soundscape wraps up the EP.
In all, this release is poignant for its ability to so vividly portray the human consciousness as it moves between the contemplation of all that it cannot achieve without an adherence to structure or design on the one hand, and a realisation of the sharp unfolding clarity and direction which suddenly emerges when those conditions are met on the other.
Portal ~
Outre (2007)
I. Moil {1:35}
II. Abysmill {4:46}
III. Heirships {6:06}
IV. Omnipotent Crawling Chaos {5:17}
V. Black Houses {5:00}
VI. Outre {2:32}
VII. 13 Globes {4:08}
VIII. Sourlows {7:18}
Total Length ~ 36:36
Moving further into uncharted territory with this release, Portal manage to fully incorporate ambient composition into their increasingly blackened brand of death metal. Their use of extreme dissonance resembles bands such as Averse Sefira and Immolation, but here it is taken one step further, allowing it free reign to guide the music through seemingly random yet subtly ingenious structures.
After a brief, disturbed intro which builds tension the music moves seamlessly into blasting dissonance; this build up without resolution in characteristic of this album, which utilises constant churning chaos without immediately recognisable structure to penetrate the darkest recesses of the listener’s subconscious. Drawn out tremolo picked melodies are repeated for long periods accompanied by the more usual highly dissonant technical riffs. The repetition is complemented by the increasingly ambient style of drumming, which now often resembles a black metal pulsing blast more than regular death metal drumming. These elements create a chaotic and atmospheric style, directly assaulting the listener’s perception.
The structures may alienate the average hessian at first because of their complete rejection of standard metal forms. They more closely resemble the droning dark ambient style of Raison D'Etre and Lustmord in their constant development and lack of cycles. Each riff is used and then discarded in the constant unrelenting chaos of this album, and multiple variations on themes ensure that these songs are not linear but more closely resemble the growth of a tree, with parts shooting off in every direction. This is brutally penetrating; its surrealistic tendencies serve only to reflect the dynamic nature of reality, communicating the seeming omnipotence of both continuation and change.
Internally these songs are held together by melodic and rhythmic devices, which may allow some degree of familiarity for the listener. As a melody shifts a rhythmic idea remains constant, or melodic ideas are transposed to another riff with a different tempo. This gives each song a vague sense of continuity which was less developed on their previous album. As each song begins the chaos is gradually decoded to reveal a continuous narrative. These gradual rises and descents between chaos and order have no definite beginning and end as might be found in other metal, rather it seems they are in constant motion, this allows a great deal of freedom or the listener to find their own meaning within this maelstrom of dissonant harmony and ambient style song structure.
While this is without doubt a challenging listen, this album is relentlessly inventive and at times, beautiful. Beyond the immediate chaos there is a sense of order established that puts this release above much death metal and Portal are beginning to realise their potential and clearly display an ability to transcend the metal genre. This reviewer recommends that listeners become familiar with ambient music in order to gain a better understanding of this release.
hink of it all - of the life that is! Study your friends and foes!
Study the past! And answer this: "Are these times better than those?" The life-long quarrel, the paltry spite, the sting of your poisoned pride! No matter who fell it were better to fight as they did when the world was wide.