In my never-ending exploration of music, I’m often probing the edges of what can be considered “music.” For many, music has to have melody, harmony and rhythm. My own definition goes much broader: music is any art rendered as sound. I get ringing in my ears; that same noise is used to fashion music. So is the air conditioning sound my iPhone app makes every night to make me not hear that ringing in my ears. Certainly, the soothing sound of the a/c noise serves as my own form of lullaby.
If you’ve read this space long enough, you know that we love to pivot to artists who challenge that very notion of what constitutes music. Some are of the extreme free jazz variety, others are the noise music kind and others are the more ambient electronic experimental style that falls under the broad, ‘minimalist’ category.
The electronically-generated music of Dave Seidel — who sometimes goes under the stage name Mystery Bear — belongs in that last category, and naturally, we’ve delved into his recordings a time or two. But unlike the other, highly improvised forms of ‘fringe’ music, there’s a lot of structure and contemplation in Seidel’s art, and his crafting of pieces around long, sustained tones show the inescapable influence of the granddaddy of minimalism himself, LaMonte Young, but also the earlier, tone cluster pioneer Henry Cowell and later figures like psycho-acoustic innovator Alvin Lucier.
Taking in these inspirations as well as incorporating the music principles of disparate, non-Western cultures, Seidel has carved out his niche in the minimalist space, and he’s done that despite having issued only one long-player record (along with a couple dozen shorter ones).
Involution is the name of his new, second LP, running the length of two full CD’s. It’s really two fully-realized pieces, each divided into several segments of virtually identical lengths. The three parts of “Involutions” are distinguished by use of different unconventional scales (or combinations of scales). But all pieces were built using three layers of synthesizer-generated sonorities.
To my un-technically inclined ear, “Involutions” is successive blasts of generator-like drones that are actually not too far off sonically from a medieval church organ. These ambient drones never stay in place; they constantly mutate, the aural equivalent of peering into a kaleidoscope and slowly twisting it. It actually sounds way more straightforward and organic than all the technology and music theory that went into making it suggests it would be, and I would call that a success.
“Hexany Permutations” is Seidel breathing some liveliness into the idea behind Tom Johnson’s conceptual album The Chord Catalogue, a very clinical album where Johnson simply played in succession all 8,178 chords in the middle C octave without any inflection or sustain. Seidel does some pretty sophisticated architecting to achieve his objective, a discussion that’s far beyond the comprehension of non-musical scholarly types. But essentially, it had to start with Seidel inventing his own scales to make it work.
And it does work, in that I would not be aware that he’s running through the whole spectrum of chords if not having read about it beforehand. Seidel took an idea that’s fascinating only in thought and with rich, string-like sonorities removed the arduousness out the actual execution of that idea.
Involution is now available from Dave Seidel’s Bandcamp page.
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