"Ambient music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting."
In the faux-modernity of the Transport Securtity Authority - the Agency administered world - nobody could take the time and effort required to engage with
Music for Airports in its ambience. The reputation of ambient music has gradually diminished from the revolutionary nature of 1970;s Eno, through the career of
Doctor Alex Patterson whose chill-out at
Heaven led to the Spacetime Parties of Cable Street, London, and the
The Orb's Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld until the
Musique concrète degenerated into a kind of ersatz ambience. Like the faux-modernity of Transport Security.
Beginning with
The Horrors of the Night there is a building of a layer of ambient music. The first two minutes take underground train noises, steam hissing, insect muttering and the distinctive train rhythm of
clackety-clack-ing. It is a theme that underpins the whole work like the hobos of
Harry Partch's world of Benson - where Partch earned money delivering toothpaste and curlers to prostitutes. The ambience of
Ghost of Hope develops onwards from the multiple perspectives of
Bad Day on the Midway or the multiplied personae of
Gingerbread Man. Gradually, the principle of ambience becomes clearer. The ambience is not provided by the environment but the people.
Partch rode the rails. Following the fruit harvest across the country as part of a culture that was disappearing. His experience was not simply of watching culture disappear but of taking something from the ambience of the Hobo and packaging it up for others to discover. What Partch did for the subtlety of tones, the Residents are doing for the subtleties of layering. In
Shroud of Flames the
clackety-clack of the
Horrors of the Night mutate, almost, into something like the vocal rhythms of
Up the Junction by
Squeeze.
Up the Junction is the name of a collection of short stories by
Nell Dunn. The collection was first published in 1963. In 1965 a television play version of the work, directed by Ken Loach, which led to a 1968 movie version. The film had a soundtrack by
Manfred Mann singing
Up the Junction. Lyricist Chris Difford, of Squeeze, said that the title phrase was lifted from the collection but the
sound and fury of the
Up the Junction by Squeeze is different to the
Manfred Mann song. So too is
Shroud of Flames. It manages to lull, like the
clackety-clacking of the train on tracks until, suddenly, it throws out an idea
Clinging to their limbless trunks
Like the scent around a rose
Which takes the sounds - the actual building blocks - back into something more than simply enforcing a pastiche of
up the junction. The technique of quotation is not simplistic. Instead of quoting in easy to comprehend blocks of words or sounds as such:
The railroad track is miles away,
And the day is loud with voices speaking,
Yet there isn’t a train goes by all day
But I hear its whistle shrieking.
All night there isn’t a train goes by,
Though the night is still for sleep and dreaming,
But I see its cinders red on the sky,
And hear its engine steaming.
My heart is warm with the friends I make,
And better friends I’ll not be knowing;
Yet there isn’t a train I wouldn’t take,
No matter where it’s going
Which takes an entire poem and seems to suggest a particular interpretation of the sounds before the listener. This is not an ambient quotation. It is imposing a specific direction of interpretation. It is an Agency Administered world approach: meaningful quotations that present meaning even where the actual meaning is difficult to discern, as in poetry. The ambient approach to quotation could have taken merely part of the poem
All night there isn’t a train goes by, though the night is still for sleep and dreaming,
Which would be sufficient for someone familiar with MIllay to see the quotation pass by as part of the ambience of everything passing by. By analogy, those familiar with the
Residents would recognise
A train went by as I ran out the door - the number on the engine was forty-four - I rode that train to New Orleans and took my tears to a voodoo queen.
From
Our Finest Flowers but might also see an oblique reference to the project of
Sculpt. Which is where the ambient sound techniques show themselves to be incredibly powerful. Unlike the more primitive
Eskimo where the ambience was foregrounded with technological and traditionally musical sounds,
Ghost Of Hope takes the Listener outside of language in the same way ambient music can take the Listener outside of traditional music. Unlike others who reduce words to percussion, the
Residents have made language into a talking tonal drum. The vocals are not, realisticallty, singing, but layering tones and meaning. Not simplistically in the manner of three notes creating a major chord or a minor chord but of three sounds creating a harmonic of meaning.
Engineer
Pat Downs, of
The Horrors of the Night is a pun on being
patted down by Security Guards. Which makes the nakedness of
Mrs McCurdy more sinister. The only way she could escape the crash was, it seems, to be naked. Which, again, makes the ambient nature of the
Residents work far more vivid. It is not an insipid ambience - like the faux-ambience of chill-out rooms. This is an industrial and social ambience of industrial society.
The Ghost of Hope exits the first train crash in
The Horrors of The Night and meanders through a story which is increasingly claustrophobic. From the misguided idea that train crashes could be entertainment in
The Crash at Crush to the prescience of
Killed at the Crossroads where an automated train - the "Woggle-bug" killed Wilson Page and Mrs. Robert L. Folwell. In a world where technology giants are building cars that have passengers and no drivers, this is not simply some kind of historical oddity.
The Ghost of Hope documents a world where the accident is an integral part. Not simply something that happens but something that fills the world with meaning.
It is not simply that the
Ghost of Hope continues the story telling and musical experimentation of, say
The Voice of Midnight but that the narrative technique moves onwards from the radio-show style presentation of
River of Crime and the
horspiel of
The Voice of Midnight into a more information saturated
media style. The layering of almost singing that drifts in and out of spoken word - sometimes by several people, all layered together - gives a sense of pervasive presence. There is some kind of unspoken
thing about the story. The
Ghost of Hope is not, like the story of
Tweedles simply placed out in a simplistic narrative.
Train vs. Elephant suggests the metaphor of the
elephant in the room: there is something out here and we are not noticing it.
The overall work is layered together. There is a sort of
Eskimo-
esque ambient layer. Without the faux-inuit narratives. The narratives are taken from our world - the industrial world - and layered onto the top. Another layer is the complex assembly of vocals which are sometimes spoken sometimes lilted and sometimes sung and, many times, double or triple tracked. As though the entire work is being given voice by a crowd all seeking to be a single person. Which gives the sense of how anonymous living really is and how anonymous the stories' subjects are.
There are a whole crowd of names scattered throughout the
Ghost of Hope from the suspiciously punning
Pat Downs to the multiple identities of
Mrs Folwell. If there is a secret identity within the
Ghost of Hope it is not one that is being made easy to understand or access. It is one that needs continued, repeated listening to the noises. As Eno claims it is as ignorable as it is interesting. The sense that there are trains - all sorts of trains - pervade the soundtrack. The sense that every train is a disaster for people pervades the spoken words and the lilted words lead away from the disasters to something else. Almost as though the
elephant in the room is the unasked question: do all clouds have a silver lining? Are all disasters capable of releasing some good.
Which returns to the identity of the
Ghost of Hope. Pandora, the first human woman created by Hephaestus and Athena on the instructions of Zeus. Zeus ordered Hephaestus to mold Pandora out of earth as part of the punishment of humanity for Prometheus' theft of the secret of fire. Pandora was endowed with a huge number of gifts from the gods including a box. Within the box were imprisoned the
Horrors of the Night which Pandora opened and allowed into the world. Only Hope was kept in the box. The idea that Pandora had a box was due to the translation by Erasmus of Rotterdam - the great humanist - where he translated the Greek work
pithos for storage jar into the Latin word
pyxis. In the modern, industrial word nobody has translated
pyxis into anything. Which doubly traps the
Ghost of Hope in an ever more bleak prison.
It makes sense to remark upon the guitars and the percussion and the vocals, but they simply serve to conceal the
Ghost of Hope in ever deeper layers of ambience. The kind of world where music is consumed instead of internalised is the kind of world where people seek an explicit gratification from every song. Which
Ghost of Hope does not give. Instead there is the sound of the
bean sìth the keening woman who heralds death. In Irish mythology she is called
Aibell and her song is a screech and her harp, once heard, is the portent of approaching death. Which makes a strangely serene kind of narrative bubble up out of the ambience mixed with music.
It is a first listen. Less than a dozen times.
Ghost of Hope is not simply recycling previous ideas but building something sinister and new which appears less benign the more you listen. The stripping away of the layers increasingly suggests that there is an invisible character in the story and it is a character that we are all straining to ignore.
I suspect that I have missed a huge amount of detail. I suspect I should need to return to thinking about what I have heard in, perhaps, a year or so. Let the noises begin to inhabit my bones.