barry chabala, michael pisaro black, white, red, green, blue (voyelles)

I’ve spent time on and off over the last couple of weeks listening to Michael Pisaro and Barry Chabala’s remarkable recent work Black, white, red, green, blue and its companion piece Voyelles. The two pieces of music, each lasting an hour were released as opposite sides of a cassette tape on the Windsmeasure label, in a relatively short run that has now sadly sold out. I don’t own a cassette player, and haven’t for many years now. The medium sounds, to my ears, terrible when compared to digital music carriers. Tapes are still alive out there though, mainly in areas of music where tape hiss is considered an added bonus. Michael Pisaro composed this piece of music with the medium of tape very much in mind, with the idiosyncracies and uncertainties of cassettes therefore taking a part in the final listening experience.

So, no I haven’t gone out and bought a tape player just to listen to this music (though the possibility did cross my mind) Barry Chabala was kind enough to send me lossless recordings of the music to burn to a CD. As a result, I am obviously missing that last added layer of experience here by listening this way, but its the best I can do, and the experience has still been quite wonderful.

Black, white, red, green, blue is a scored work written by Pisaro that is performed by Chabala on electric guitar. The title of the piece comes from a Rimbaud verse in which he seems to liken these five colours to vowels used in language. The significance of this to the final work here is not completely clear, but the music has a simple, elemental feel that reflects these simple building blocks of other artforms. The piece appears to be divided into five parts, one for each colour one would imagine (I have not seen the score). In each of the parts quiet guitar sounds are placed at regular intervals amidst the silence. The sounds are grouped together by their musical shape rather than their pitch. The first section makes use of gentle, ringing guitar notes that chime softly before decaying very slowly into the thick, thick silence. In the next part a faint note rises gradually from the nothingness before falling away again, dissolving into the quiet before the next arrives a few moments later. Other sections see the sounds become firmer and more present, elsewhere longer, the notes extended out into a virtually continuous sound that dips below audible levels only to resurface seconds later.

The music of Black, white, red, green, blue is incredibly serene, slow and if listened to closely any sense of time becomes difficult. The music has an incredible stillness to it. Sitting down quietly to listen to the music from start to finish, as I have managed twice today feels like a deeply meditative exercise. The sounds that appear from Chabala do so at mostly regular intervals, but the way they are shrouded in silence makes the space between sounds seem longer, but full of anticipation, the shadows of the last sound colouring the silence, if only in my mind. The pacing of this music, alongside the careful placement of the scant elements that make up the work is just wonderful. There is nothing complicated here, nothing that, when described in words sounds particularly original, but somehow this music captures something truly beautiful, a sense of gentle atmosphere rather than the tension we might expect from say a Sugimoto guitar composition, but there isn’t the cloying prettiness of an Eno ambient work. The music here manages to sound completely still rather than flowing along, each silence becoming an individual feature of the music rather than being just the blank canvas in the background. Like studying a small section of a painting, as I did for a while today while listening to this music, each portion of the work, be it a guitar sound or a silence placed between events has its own character, coloured by the world around me as I listen, coloured by the tape hiss for those able to listen to the music via the medium intended. The music’s lack of momentum allows the listener to study these moments in the present, considering each against the five colours of the title, each a little window through the music on what is happening around us as we listen. Black, white, red, green, blue is just great, but it does need time and space given to it by the listener. It really does not work for me as something that can be played in the background. Chabala, who is becoming a seasoned collaborator with Pisaro is completely in tune with the composer’s music here. Pisaro is a guitarist himself and the understanding between the two seems very close, perhaps the perfect collaboration for work of this kind.

For the second piece, Voyelles (literally translated as Vowels) Chabala’s recording is left untouched, but Pisaro has added an additional layer of sounds, mostly formed from recordings he made from many hissing tapes, but with a few subtle sinetones added. If Black, white, red, green, blue is somehow about the stillness of silence, Voyelles somehow takes that thought and extends it, with the silences between the guitar sounds here shaded carefully with hisses and fuzz, ranging from the barely audible to resonating clouds. The treatments here are very subtle, often only just noticeable, never really trying to alter the guitar sounds in any way, but offsetting the moments of colour against soft grey backdrops, so that each decaying sound might dissolve into a different cloud. Everything is still so very slow, perfectly positioned, with only on a handful of occasions the tape hiss sounds appearing quite suddenly, usually emerging from behind some of the bolder guitar notes. If the original recording reflects the simple use of these five colours, then Pisaro’s rework here diffuses them slightly, allowing them to blend in in some places, stand clear in others, but undertaking a relationship with these new shades of grey rather than with the transparency of the pregnant silences.

Both recordings are really wonderful, quite different listening experiences and yet so obviously linked. Pisaro’s music (and I should mention here that I sent a Cathnor release composed by him to the pressing plant yesterday) seems to be rightly gaining a reputation for its simple yet striking use of the most uncomplicated, elemental sounds, always so beautiful through the simplicity of its structure yet leaving a real impression. Its a real shame that this cassette has gone out of print so soon, and I hope that a CD version of one or both of the pieces appears, as the music deserves a little more longevity, with or without the extra layer of tape hiss. The image above is not the sleeve image, rather it is my own visual response to the music, not endorsed in any way by the musicians.

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reviewed by Richard Pinnell the watchful ear
04-march-2010