Advance of the Canadian Regressionists // Tommy LaCroix
An interpretive essay on Puppets Forsaken’s The Noisebau, written by Tommy LaCroix
“dissonant chords are "active"; traditionally they have been considered harsh and have expressed pain, grief, and conflict.”
MUSIC: An Appreciation - Roger Kamien
Dissonance in music is nothing new. No one cares. It's not a question of “right or wrong”. It's just a single aspect of a greater whole. Like silence. When exploited properly it serves to enhance the other components of the composition. If it works, it's valid.
In Western music, historians tend to point at Stravinsky as the progenitor of dissonant 20th-century music. It’s a sad state of affairs if it’s really come to that. Look anywhere else, Africa, North Africa and the Middle East. Morrocco. Interzone. Into the eternal souls of The Master Musicians of Jajouka, Check ceremonial music; “Tibetan Folk and Minstrel Music” (1967 Lyrichord LLST 7196) is a stone-cold wicked album of the highest order, some of the most dissonant group chants and off-kilter drumming ever, but you really need to acquire a record player that has the 16 RPM option. It’s way better played at 16 RPM.
These are just a scant few examples. There are simply too many forms and sources to mention.
“One need only to look back some distance in history, at most places on the planet, to see that dissonance in music has been exploited to powerful and transcendent effect in most cultures…”
One need only to look back some distance in history, at most places on the planet, to see that dissonance in music has been exploited to powerful and transcendent effect in most cultures, neither Avant-Garde nor “difficult”. It’s just business as usual for them. They enjoy it that way. As they should because it sounds nice.
The Noisebau in the Main Gallery, January 19 - March 2, 2024.
Dissonance has been understood and heard differently in different musical traditions, cultures, styles, and time periods. The terms dissonance and consonance are often considered equivalent to tension and relaxation. Aristotle spoke of it in those terms; however, he was applying it to politics, namely his model for the “virtuous mean”.
The reason I am speaking of these things here is that David Gifford began commiserating with me about dissonant music over a year ago. I was not sure why, and I’m not sure if he chose the right guy to talk to about it, I know mostly modern noise music, a little Mid Century Avant-Garde stuff, and a bit of world culture folk and nature field recordings, but recreationally, I mostly listen to old punk records, and stuff I remember from the radio like Bobbi Gentry.
Still, I suppose he didn’t know who else to ask because he doesn’t really listen to much music at all, especially not genres such as Power Electronics or pre-1974 French Instrumental Prog like I do. He likes Leo Kottke(!?) But that’s OK, I like Bubblegum Music and most people find that intolerable.
He eventually let me know that he was building an Intonarumori, the musical instruments created and used in concerts and compositions by the Italian Futurists. He has formed a band with collaborator, Natali Leduc, performing together since 2019.
The Noisebau in the Main Gallery, January 19 - March 2, 2024.
Anyway, I know who the Italian Futurist were. I even have some idea of seeing pictures of their orchestra in some book or TV show on PBS. Despite these drawbacks, I remain impressed. David and Natali have reached directly back to the very beginning source of what is known today as “Noise-Music”. This is interesting to me because while David (I’ve never actually met Natali) does find the more contemporary noise that I enjoy to be odious (he’s right, it generally is just that, and intentionally so too) he, with his collaborator have managed to take some pre-existing Luddite leanings and intentionally anachronistic aesthetic and found a way to make it work in a most au courant way.
Most, if not all, contemporary noise music (up to the mid-90s) is produced with electronics. It is often played at volumes approaching the threshold of pain, and usually is obsessed with themes of self-loathing, extreme misanthropy, abnormal psychology, and sexual sadism.
“David and Natali have reached directly back to the very beginning source of what is known today as “Noise-Music”.”
The music of Puppets Forsaken is quiet, gentle, and kind. I like this contrast. No one else is doing it. Well, maybe Pharmakon, or Vatican Shadow, but still. None of them are acoustic. There are some common threads linking the Puppets Forsaken to that of first-wave electronic noise practitioners. While most of the first-wave industrial/noise acts from the late 70s through the 90s are only distinguishable by the names they choose and their album art, bands with names like Sutcliffe Jugend, Roman Discipline, Hair Police or Ramleh. They decorate their album (usually cassette tape) covers with images of serial killers, totalitarian propaganda posters or actual photo-documented war crimes. It became so “inside the genre” that the various (and identical sounding) bands trying to one-up every outrage over each other that the whole thing just injured its audience and left them with little else of interest except the increasingly difficult task of trying to parse whether the band are really for real fascists or just trying to mess with your head. I think in most cases it’s probably a bit of both. The Puppets don’t participate in this economy and it’s a welcome relief.
The Noisebau in the Main Gallery, January 19 - March 2, 2024.
A proper futurist orchestra had many different types of instruments, they employed fog horns and sirens, things that operated by small steam-powered engines, they banged on pieces of sheet metal a la Einstürzende Neubauten. Unfortunately, none of the other instruments from the original futurist orchestras survived and neither do any detailed schematics or description, only those for the Intonarumori exist. That is why there are about a dozen futurist re-enactor orchestras in operation today and they all consist of multiples of one single instrument only. You guessed it …
Intonarumori does make cool droning effects that behave a little like human voices though. The third voice emerges when two voices modulate pitch at slightly differing semi and half tones. Subharmonics, like duelling didgeridoos. Or that Red Cross water safety PSA they used to broadcast on TV. Or droning monks. Only it’s an automaton. “Different but the same.”
The Puppets place the Intonarumori knock-offs they built, facing each other and turn the cranks but I don’t think it’s totally about drone and phantom voices entirely. There are the “Six Families of Noise for the Futurist Orchestra” to consider, which are explicitly laid out in the “Art of Noises” … the manifesto of Futurist Music:
Roars, Thunderings, Explosions, Hissing roars, Bangs, Booms
Whistling, Hissing, Puffing
Whispers, Murmurs, Mumbling, Muttering, Gurgling
Screeching, Creaking, Rustling, Buzzing, Crackling, Scraping
Noises obtained by beating on metals, woods, skins, stones, pottery, etc.
Voices of animals and people, Shouts, Screams, Shrieks, Wails, Hoots, Howls, Death rattles, Sobs
Puppets Forsaken seems to inhabit the area of #2, #3, and #4 for the greater part. With emphasis on the #4.
The Noisebau in the Main Gallery, January 19 - March 2, 2024.
Mostly the clicks and pop part. But there’s some rusty door hinges. A ghost ship lost at sea. Or maybe the squeaky floorboards I would try to avoid stepping on when I was sneaking downstairs after 11 o’clock to watch Italian sex comedy movies, dubbed into French, on CBLFT Channel 25 when I was 12.
Well, hey, that’s noise music for you, right? You can dress it up in all sorts of fancy theoretics but at the end of the day it’s just rudimentary. You get two or three modes, an overall unified sound that modulates a little. Some of it (most of it) can be pretty one dimensional. This is why I declare Puppets Forsaken an unmitigated success; they are doing “Noise” exactly right.
“Mostly the clicks and pop part. But there’s some rusty door hinges. A ghost ship lost at sea. Or maybe the squeaky floorboards I would try to avoid stepping on when I was sneaking downstairs after 11 o’clock to watch Italian sex comedy movies…”
And do not overlook the fact that these people are creating fully operational works of art that were historically inspired to promote the destruction of the past, and the dismantling of history to make way for the future. The musical element of Futurism was just one facet of an intended cultural whole whose each component; painting, poetry, theater, even cuisine, was meant to, when all facets are working in concert, and facilitate some maniacal ideology of nationalism, even if by violent revolution. A hallucination of blood purity, made tangible and real. All six senses work in concert. Plastic form, aural vibration, visual stimulus, physical movement, the sense of taste in your mouth, and overall fanatical zeal.
Finally, and above all, the Futurists idealized technology. They vaunted the most modern of technologies. And yet here they are, Puppets Forsaken, painstakingly recreating hand-cranked gimcracks from over a hundred years past.
“In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.”
W.H.Auden excerpt from Musée des Beaux Arts
The Noisebau in the Main Gallery, January 19 - March 2, 2024.