All: Minuscula, Goethestrasse 17 - 10625. Berlin , Germany.

c/o Marcelo Aguirre

Marcus Boon

Outside of the music of Reynols and Kagel, the experimental music scene in Argentina remains largely unknown.  The economic crisis in Argentina has worsened the situation by shutting down festivals hosted by the Experimenta label that allowed some kind of dialog to occur between local musicians and the rest of the world.  At this stage, even posting CDs abroad has become prohibitively expensive.  So much for the joys of IMF funded globalization.

According to a recent statement Argentinan psychiatrist and music journalist Daniel Varela and visual artist José Marchi, joined forces in order to produce drone-based music that does not cater to a ““fear of nothingness” where everything is submitted to the order of narrative.”   It’s tempting to read these words in the light of the political situation in Argentina, where it is precisely a narrative, that of global powered economic salvation, that has fallen apart.  As capital comes and goes, cultures flicker between intense moments of crisis and abandonment in which time stretches out.  Which would be where the drones come in.     

Circular, their first CD issued in 2000 consists of 4 pieces in which the musicians are clearly testing the waters – the first a minimal percussive piano piece that brings out overtones; the second a piano and bagpipe piece; the third, most impressive, mesmerizing, slow brooding dronescape composed on Tibetan bowls and bells, crystal goblets, piano strings that sounds like one of those LP second side-filling krautrock acid-jams without the drums – a kind of happy chaos in which the joy with which the power that belongs to certain sound-producing techniques is applied makes it all alright. 

There’s a quantum leap in Marchi and Varela’s music made on the excellent 3CD set El Jardin Blanco, which consists of 3 sound environments composed to accompany an exhibition of Marchi’s paintings in Buenos Aires in late 2001.  The first volume, “El Jardin de los colores” is a gorgeous single 50 minute drone, played on bowed e-guitar, full of lattices of fluttering overtones, which you are advised to listen to at “very loud volume”.  “La Oracion del Arco Iris” mixes field recordings of water gardens and children playing, while the third volume mixes sounds from the previous two volumes with Satiesque piano figures taken from English experimental composer Hugh Shrapnel’s 1970 composition “The Lullaby”.  This is highly focused drift music, intensely nostalgic without ever descending into kitsch. 

2002’s Inner Time Markers explores gong sounds from a Jogyakarta gamelan, in a way that resonates with Philip Corner’s “new world” gamelan explorations (Varela and Marchi are planning a collaboration with Corner) and La Monte Young’s “Bowed Gong” piece from the Black Album.  By computer editing, different sets of pitches with interesting or powerful resonances in the gamelan gongs are brought out, and the percussive aspect of the gong minimized.  While the gongs are considered the ultimate markers of time in traditional gamelan, this function is inverted on Inner Time Markers so that by producing a sound without end (i.e. a drone) the gong triggers an intense and “inner” experience of timelessness. Drones present a challenge – they fascinate but what kind of relationship can we have with them?  Does the pleasure come in making them, in being immersed in the act of modulating the sound as it’s produced?  If so, can we expect the growth of thousands of drone collectives who get together for the simple pleasure of producing these tones together?  Are they to be listened to, in the passive sense of being part of an audience?  If so, does a drone CD, which gives a crude snapshot of a particular set of sounds resonating in a particular space, make any sense?  Do CDs function as angels of information that spread the idea of the drone, which then has to be experienced in a “live” space?  Or do drones render live performance itself obsolete, given the opportunity to slip through drug-like doorways of sound into eternity just by putting on a CD at home?  In the case of Marchi and Varela, the answer is all of the above.       

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