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LOU REED BIOGRAPHY
Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Trio: MM3 Sarth Calhoun, Lou Reed, Ulrich Krieger
Live at Blender Theater: John Zorn, Ulrich Krieger, Lou Reed, Sarth Calhoun (3D microphone foreground right)
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Lou Reed is an American Master who was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996 and is a founding member of the legendary Velvet Underground. His latest creation is the 2011 play Lulu, directed by Robert Wilson and performed at the Berliner Ensemble Theater. It inspired a historic collaboration with Metallica on Lulu and the music video for the single The View, which was directed by Darren Aronofsky. In 2008, Reed released a live electronic album, Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Trio: The Creation of The Universe, which inspired two extremely well received performances by MM3 in New York in 2009. Reed released a suite of electronic meditation music, Hudson River Wind Meditations in 2007. In 2006, Lou Reed staged his masterwork Berlin at St. Ann’s Warehouse in New York, which was documented by director and artist Julian Schnabel for the feature film Berlin (2007). Mr. Reed made the documentary Red Shirley (2010), which told the story of Reed’s cousin Shirley’s distinguished life, on the eve of her 100th birthday. Mr. Reed is a photographer whose works have been exhibited worldwide. His third book of photos, Romanticism, was published in 2009. In 2010, Reed collaborated with Lorenzo Mattotti on a graphic novel of The Raven. Reed is currently working on a photographic project with author Bernard Comment. Reed just completed an introduction for the new edition of Delmore Schwartz’s In Dreams Begin Responsibilities. Lou Reed co-hosts The New York Shuffle radio show on Sirius XM with music producer Hal Willner. He is the recipient of the Commander of Arts and Letters from the French government and numerous other awards.
ULRICH KRIEGER BIOGRAPHY
Live show is engineered for reproduction over a spherical “ambisonic” loudspeaker array, recreating Reed’s onstage experience
Arup Acoustics 3D spatial recording technique captures performance on stage and in the theater
Ulrich Krieger is a composer, performer, improviser, noise and experimental rock musician living in Southern California. He studied classical/contemporary saxophone, composition and electronic music at the University of Arts Berlin, Germany and the Manhattan School of Music, NY. He has developed a new approach to the saxophone, which he calls “acoustic electronics.” His recent activities are in the various fields of new music, experimental music, electronic music, noise, improvisation, and avant-garde rock. He has worked with: Lou Reed, Lee Ranaldo, Thomas Köner, La Monte Young, Michiko Hirayama, Radu Malfatti, Ensemble Modern, California E.A.R. Unit, Soldier String Quartet, and many others. He teaches composition and Experimental Sound Practices at CalArts. www.ulrich-krieger.de
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS PRODUCTION CREDITS Produced by Lou Reed, Mike Skinner and Raj Patel. Recorded, engineered and mixed by Mike Skinner, Raj Patel, Dave Rife, and Ryan Biziorek at Arup Acoustics. Ambisonic Mix engineers, Mike Skinner, Raj Patel, Ryan Biziorek, Dave Rife and Alban Bassuet and Arup Acoustics. The ambisonic array is recreated in the UAM gallery space so listeners experience the live event as Reed did Cover images: Lou Reed ©2006 Ralph Gibson, Blender Theater ©2009 Dave Rife, Arup. Fig. 1 ©2011 Amy-Beth McNeely; Fig. 2 ©2009 Dave Rife, Arup; Fig. 3-5 ©Arup.
The UAM wishes to thank the Instructionally Related Activites Fund, the Constance W. Glenn Fund for Exhibition and Education Programs, CSULB College of the Arts, the Bess J. Hodges Foundation, the Arts Council for Long Beach, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services for their continued programming support. We are also grateful to Adaptive Technologies Group, Arup, HARMAN Professional, KCRW, Mark Moore Gallery, Rum and Humble, and the J. Paul Getty and Pacific Standard Time initiative for their generous efforts.
University Art Museum
College of the Arts California State University Long Beach 1250 Bellflower Blvd. Long Beach, CA 90840 562.985.5761 • www.csulb.edu/uam
’s ou Reed L METAL MACHINE TRIO
THE CREATION OF THE UNIVERSE
LOU REED’S METAL MACHINE TRIO: The Creation of the Universe SOUND IS AN ENTITY by Ulrich Krieger
Sub-low dangerous drones flow out of the speakers like lava intercepted by punctuated noise attacks soon to be accompanied by beautiful melodic lines of feedback created by no-one-knows-whom. Orientation is blurred. Sounds by this three-headed beast melt into organic oneness. The soundscape morphs into a dark ambient of natural beauty like water in a stream with a jetfighter flying by low above. Moments of rock guitar and saxophone shine through like sunrays on a desolate but unsettling beautiful wasteland. Suddenly a voice rises from the abyss to shout out to the lost souls only to disappear again in the ocean of sound with squeals roaring high. Sound is an entity and it has been freed from its constraints. This force of nature called Metal Machine Trio (MM3) is made up of three limbs: Lou Reed—guitar, pedals, and Continuum Fingerboard (a touch sensitive keyboard); Ulrich Krieger—saxophone and live-electronics; and Sarth Calhoun—Continuum Fingerboard, electronics, and live-processing. The group premiered in Los Angeles in 2008 and performs regularly worldwide. Its music cannot be categorized, but touches on a wide variety of genres from dark ambient to free rock to noise and further. MM3 is a contemporary continuation of Lou Reed’s 1975 album Metal Machine Music, but does not attempt to reproduce it. Rather, its members perform in the same spirit, pushing the boundaries of beauty and physicality of sound into unknown realms. When the legendary double album Metal Machine Music (MMM) was released in 1975, it created an explosion and an uproar in the rock scene. Fans and critics of Lou Reed alike were hit over the head by the sheer sonic force and walls of noise that he unleashed. MMM contained no songs, no voice, no drums, no chords, no melodies. (Actually there are melodies, but hidden inside the sound, in “drag,” as Reed puts it.) It seems nobody was prepared for or understood this “cacophony” called MMM, even though the album was unmistakably subtitled An Electronic Instrumental Composition. This description should have said it all. MMM is a single electronic and instrumental piece that extends across 4 album sides. It was purportedly taken off the market within three weeks of its release. Why was it such a shock? Should not his fans and music critics have known what to expect from Reed and been more adventurous, more alive themselves?
MMM did not appear out of nothing. No work of art is created out of thin air. A piece of art has its influences, history, and predecessors. But on the other hand, artists often spookily pick up the zeitgeist before the average Joe does. Sometimes this is a conscious effort, while other times it is subconscious—but mostly, it is a mix of both. Great artists have an antenna picking up the “signs-of-the-time-to-come.” This is part of their job description, so to say. Think of Ornette Coleman’s album titles, from Tomorrow is the Question (1958) to The Shape of Jazz to Come
(1959) to Free Jazz (1960). Their ability to tune in does not diminish their achievements, but rather defines them as avant-garde. The romantic genius, who nervously awakens in the middle of the night, gets up, writes a new symphony, and then goes back to bed is a 19th century romantic fairy tale. Creating art requires much more than just a muse. It needs discipline, time, practice, research, experience, and (sometimes manic) involvement. So what was the music that prepared MMM to come into being? The answer is, a multitude. The oldest influence is the so-called new music of the modernist avantgarde of the first half of the 20th century. By 1913, the Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo gave concerts on custom built instruments he called Intonarumori, which were tunable, acoustic noisemakers. In his pamphlet, The Art of Noise (1913), Russolo addressed the need for a new music made from noise in order to reflect 20th century industrialized society. He had an urge to represent these new daily soundscapes of factories, automobiles, trains, and streetcars. Other early 20th century musicians joined Russolo in the choir of noise. In the 1910s, the American pianist and composer Henry Cowell introduced thick, dissonant aggregates he named “tone clusters,” which were built from major and minor seconds rather than thirds as in traditional music. Further he would reach inside the piano to play on its strings, creating unheard sounds and an extremely influential new playing technique called “inside piano.” Cowell gave his new music a theoretical foundation in his book, New Musical Resources, published in 1930. In 1931, Edgard Varèse premiered his composition, Ionisation, which was the first Western art music piece for unpitched percussion ensemble. Although much later, music would be made of indiscriminate sounds, including all noises. In the early 20th century, many composers, like their contemporary H. G. Wells with his 1933 novel, were researching “The Shape of Things to Come.” This development in new music really took off after World War II with the creative use of electricity and advances in media technology. In the 1940s, the French composers Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry developed musique concrète made entirely of recordings from daily life that were then manipulated and edited on tape—a train whistle or squeaking door, for example, would be transformed into a musical composition. In the 1950s, Greek composer Iannis Xenakis and, in a different way, the Hungarian György Ligeti wrote dense orchestral pieces in which the individual instrument were of lesser importance, giving way to thick, atonal, dissonant, moving “sound clouds” within which the listener could immerse himself. The Italian composer Giacinto Scelsi wrote pieces on one tone and microtonal variations thereof, creating complex orchestral textures that were still somewhat tonal and/or modal. Although music of this era is always moving, it often has a strangely static atmosphere to it. In the 1950s, the American composer and Fluxus artist La Monte Young would lay the foundation for what later would be called drone music. Based on very long, sustained tones, it was a new form of modal music and a less busy, more contemplative sibling of the European music. Young invited the audience deeper into the fabric of sound. His alleged influence would be acknowledged on the album cover of MMM, although Reed would remain unclear if it was a real influence or just a joke to play with people’s expectations. Another American, John Cage, used chance operations for his music. After mapping the initial questions for a composition, Cage gave up certain compositional decisions by submitting to indeterminacy and
January 27 – April 15, 2012 randomizing procedures that were not unlike Xenakis’ mathematical stochastic operations. Cage also accepted silence and arbitrary noise as components of his music. In pieces such as Cartridge Music (1960), he welcomed the hum of contact microphones, hissing and feedback from the speaker system, and other sounds just happening at the moment. In the latter half of the 20th century, many composers had a strong urge to use further non-traditional systems to generate musical material. In the 1970s, David Tudor pioneered “circuit bending,” which is the creative customization of the circuits within consumer electronic devices in order to obtain unheard new sounds. He performed with an array of homemade electronic instruments and pedals, live-manipulating the sometimes more or less random sounds these systems produced. Since the earliest examples, there have been many forms of systemic composition and today, in the age of the laptop more than ever, there is a growing interest in such system derived and controlled music. On a different front in the 1960s, free jazz broke loose. Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Albert Ayler and many others were exploring freely improvised music. Freely improvised does not mean arbitrary. Rather, its aesthetics were explored and researched by small collaborative groups in rehearsals, concerts, and discussions. Free jazz groups performed with a never before seen physicality and created dense, noisy, dissonant sound fields, still reminiscent of melody and tonality, but existing outside of any traditional system. Enter rock. Although originally rock ‘n roll was mainly a blues-based commercial genre, it soon took an unexpected side-turn. By the mid1960s, bands began to play more sophisticated, adult-oriented styles. Musical elements similar to those explored by avant-garde composers could be found in the rock music of the era. There were thick, heavy, noisy fields of sounds, this time created by distorted guitars, basses, organs, and feedback. While composers like John Cage accepted feedback, rock musicians actively invited feedback into their sound. Lou Reed’s own group, The Velvet Underground, was at the very forefront of this development. Other bands, such as The Who, MC5, or Jimi Hendrix used feedback and noise orgies as the grand finale of a concert. But for The Velvet Underground, feedback, noise, drones, and improvisation were an integral part of their songs. Listen to European Son, Venus in Furs, Heroin (all 1967), and Sister Ray (1968). In these songs, you can hear early sound studies of what would later manifest itself as MMM. Undeniably, noise is native to the 20th century and in the 1960s finally gained prominence in many types of music. It was then the first noisy collaborations of rock and classical art composers began. The blues band Spooky Tooth collaborated with Pierre Henry on their album Ceremony (1969). In 1973, the German rock group Faust recorded a drone album with early Minimalist Tony Conrad. Other krautrock bands such as CAN, inspired by Velvet Underground and German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, worked in the no-man’s land between avant-garde art music, free improvisation, and rock. So why then was MMM such a big deal? First of all, its two subtitles pointed deliberately, and confusingly for many, in two different directions. An Electronic Instrumental Composition attributed it as art music, while The Amine β Ring showed its deep roots in rock. MMM was the first piece to take the abstract, academic and sometime esoteric exploration of sound and noise and infuse it with a big portion of real-life realism. It was
“…‘real’ rock about ‘real’ things.” (MMM liner notes) Like Russolo, Reed was looking for new sounds to fathom the reality he experienced around him. And in its sculpted sounds, you not only hear the music, but also feel it, which is another essential property of rock music. With MMM, Reed radically reduced music to its absolute essential parameters: sound and structure, but “…respectfully, intelligently, sympathetically and graciously, always with concentration on the first and foremost goal.” (MMM liner notes). New for the rock genre was also MMM’s non-linearity, as one can start and stop any place on this album. The mainstream rock audience was unaccustomed to such experimentation, as formulaic commercial songs dominated the airwaves. Most of the 1970s audience was unaware of new music, did not understand free jazz, and only liked noise and feedback in small portions to spice up its rock. When they ventured too deep and too far ahead, free jazz musicians and new music composers lost their audience and got bad reviews from critics. With MMM it happened again, only this time in the rock scene. Reed knew it when he wrote, “Most of you won’t like this.[…] It’s not meant for you.” (MMM liner notes) Another challenging aspect of MMM was that Reed summoned all those 20th century musical movements and brought them to a new level. MMM has the complexity and depth of contemporary orchestral music, the directness and freedom of free jazz improvisation, and the energy and aggressiveness of rock. Reed’s compositional process can be described as systemic rather than purely intuitive. Amps, pedals and tape machines became his musical instruments, which is reflected in the title of the piece: Metal MACHINE Music. Reed set up a finely tuned system of interactions between precisely tuned guitars, pedals, amplifiers and controlled feedback. The guitars were in a special custom tuning and flatly listed in the equipment specifications for the MMM album as “Avoidance of any type of atonality.” Reed leaned those guitars against the amplifiers, but never actually played them. Turning the amplifiers up would initialize the strings of the guitars to vibrate, creating a resonant feedback between guitars and amplifiers, which would make up the modal basis of the piece. Pedals served as an electronic processing system. Further controlled amplifier feedback introduced chance interferences and a recursive feedback loop. With such parameters set, certain sounds were to be expected, but the specifics of how they would manifest were unknown even to the composer. Additionally, Reed played melodic fragments that were often hidden by and within the sonic texture (in “drag”). Later he manipulated the recordings in the studio by changing tape speeds and using two tapes simultaneously—all standard techniques of electroacoustic music. In its final form, MMM is like a composition for two orchestras. So a binaural record release, having a different “guitar orchestra” in each ear, seemed to be just the right thing. As discussed above, if sound, rhythm (that is, structure), and intensity are the essence of rock music, MMM is the quintessential rock album. Soon after MMM, the rock music world changed drastically and forever. In the late 1970s, a subsequent generation of musicians created new musical styles in which they embraced noise. Punk was the most visible form, but not the most radical one. The first album released by Throbbing Gristle in 1977 presented “Industrial Music for Industrial People” with dissonant, thick walls of sounds and a radical philosophy behind it. New York no wave bands and musicians, like Rhys Chatham with his composition Guitar Trio (1977) or Glenn Branca with his guitar symphonies, as well as harsh noise guitar bands like DNA and Mars redefined rock music. Somewhat more rock audience compatible, but no less radical, the group Sonic Youth was
influenced by punk, no wave and MMM, spreading the gospel of noise to the world of rock. In the 1980s, many post-punk bands played music that did not follow traditional song structures and used noise as an integral element. The Japanese musician Merzbow (Masami Akita) spearheaded a new style at the time that later would simply be called “noise.” His first release in 1981 was titled Metal Acoustic Music. In 2006, the Norwegian noise band Jazkamer released Metal Music Machine. The linkages between the contemporary noise scene and MMM are clear. MMM is referred to as the initial “big bang” for noise, alongside Iannis Xenakis’ hour-long electronic epic Persepolis (1971). My personal involvement with MMM started the moment I bought the double vinyl in 1979 or 1980. I had read about MMM, but could not find the album. One day it showed up at my favorite record store. Listening all the way through, I felt I had come home. It combined my favorite aspects of classical, free jazz, and rock—especially rock! To me, MMM epitomizes rock’s sheer sensual power of sound. It is the ultimate rock album, the essence of rock music. But I also heard it as an orchestral piece for guitars and amplifiers. Immediately I had the idea to transform it into an orchestral arrangement. But that was just a wishful impulse. It would take relocating to Berlin, studying classical music at the university, and spending my nights in punk and new wave clubs, before my vision was ready for the light of day. In 2002, I finally performed an orchestral version of MMM with my Berlin-based ensemble, zeitkratzer. For this, I needed a special kind of virtuosic musician who was able to read music, improvise, play aggressively and physically, “rock out,” and could enjoy (or at least tolerate) really loud music. To transcribe and orchestrate MMM demanded classical training and experience with complex modern scores—however, to understand it requires a love of rock. After my MMM rendition, Lou and I continued to converse about MMM, music, and life in general. In 2007, after a move to California, the idea to play to together, which has been floating around, got more realistic. We debuted Metal Machine Trio (MM3) in October 2008 at the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater (REDCAT) in Los Angeles. MM3 uses MMM as a philosophical point of departure, but 30 years later expands on it through group improvisation. MM3 is not about individual egos, but a group sound. It is anti-hierarchical, three minds working as one. Anything said about MMM is true for MM3. But while MMM was focused on a single type of monolithic, monochromatic sound, MM3 makes all kinds of sounds and noises part of our sonic palette: dark ambient, harsh noise, electronica, free rock, melodies, heavy riffs, drones, feedback, and more. MM3 is not simply improvisational—ideas are tried, discussed, rehearsed, and sometimes abandoned before we go on stage to play freely without a premeditated concept. The MM3 sound melts guitar, saxophone, electronics, and computers into one soundscape. We often play our instruments in unconventional ways, creating new, unheard sounds. MM3 is the ultimate, wild, exciting fusion of the classical avantgarde with free improvisation in a rock context. People who come to MM3 concerts with preconceptions about the music to be heard are sometimes puzzled. But MM3 is not about satisfying expectations. It is about obsessive (yes, manic), sensual exploration of sound and deep intensity within the context of rock. To me, MM3 is what rock should be: controlled ecstasy, planned hedonism, and consciously designed rituals in sound. It is meant as a shared experience with our audience. The path is the goal.
For the installation of MM3 at the University Art Museum, we use as source material the second concert of two nights at the Blender Theater in New York in 2009, with John Zorn on alto saxophone as our special guest. But is it possible for a concert to be translated into an installation, which is more abstract than seeing musicians perform live on stage? Thanks to the spatial recording technique of Arup Acoustics and the Arup Soundlab™, it is. With their 14-channel surround speaker system, the listener sits within the sound of this installation. The Arup system enables the audience to have the same physical experience as in concert—only better. The museum gallery has been optimized for listening, so visitors are immersed in the sound rather than confronted by it. Sound waves are not simply a property of time—they take up actual space. So listeners are encouraged to move around the space, to stand where Lou, Sarth, or I would be, even to walk between those, in order to perceive and experience the changes in the music depending on the physical location. And it is not just the listening focus that shifts. With the change of location the music itself changes. Music creates acoustic sensations in our ears and brain, which are not being created by the performers. We know of visual sensations and irritations. Like in Op Art, for example, where a two dimensional painting turns three dimensional in the eye of the observer. In music something similar is created by so-called psychoacoustic phenomena. This includes so-called combination tones, which are low bass tones and clouds of high harmonies. These can be heard, but actually are never being played by the musicians. They are a product of our ears and brain alone. These psychoacoustic sensations change depending on your position in space. Additionally, to further the confusion, in the music of MM3 tones, harmonics, and sounds melt into one large soundscape, which is created by all three performers, but often can’t be traced back to the individual sources. This creates a constant creative irritation about who is producing which sounds—but is it important? Leave your preconceptions outside, open your mind and ears, and let yourself be taken away by the sound. Don’t look for melodies or other traditional musical elements and enjoy them when they appear out of noise and sounds. Intervals and chords, which were considered dissonant by people only a hundred years ago, are now normal for even the most commercial music and its audience. Our hearing evolves, it gets accustomed to more and more dissonances, meaning to more and more complex combinations of frequencies.
Noise is just the next step in the development of music. Noise is pure sound. It has no semantics. It has to be experienced. Sit back, walk around, forget your expectations, listen, relax, let yourself get immersed, let your ears and mind drift deeper and deeper into the soundscapes. Experience the focus, concentration and energy the performers put in, the quasi-static moments and the sudden shifts, like listening to nature. Enjoy the fun, the hedonism, and the ecstasy of frequencies. Enjoy the sound of rock to come…
