On Drunk Walks and What Goes Away

Omair Hussain (OH): The  first thing I was struck by listening to “Drunk Walks,” both because of the work itself, but also because of my own preoccupations, was structure. My own work repeats the structure of Verse-Chorus-Verse-Chorus, both because of the conventions of pop music, but also because the repetitive structure allows me to play with polyphony and polyrhythm and complex layering, related in my mind to Terry Riley’s conception of “vertical music.” 

What struck me about Drunk Walks was that it seemed like it was structured both vertically and horizontally. Layered repetition happens, but through a slight variation in the repeated notes, suddenly a new phrase is introduced. In other words, at first it seems like a theme is going to be repeated endlessly until suddenly a slight variation becomes the site of the source of a change. It reminds me of Steve Reich’s phasing technique, not literally, but in spirit. How did you think about structure in this work?

Bret Schneider (BS): A lot is implied in the title “Drunk Walks,” which is of course a great Dionysian ground — the mythic image of an Eleusinian procession drunkenly chanting “Euoi!” to invoke Dionysus — but more concretely a “drunk walk” is a math term that describes a specific kind of iterative movement. It creates a fractal-esque rising and falling movement, somewhat predictable but with variation… like a drunk… walking… stumbling along a path. The “drunk walk” spans long durations and visually looks like a complexly modulating sine wave, which mirrors the spectrum of the individual notes, but on a broader time frame. So there's a micro-macro formal relationship. It is a great — albeit strange — vehicle for tonality, too. The technique isn't central really, it's just that it works for creating the kind of self-similar, self-resonating musical structures that I think are poetic in general and evoke emotive impressions. When my process is well-lubricated, multiple melodic lines are dispersed in this somewhat wild undulation — when layered vertically they converge and diverge to create diverse harmonies, all live-composed in real time, moving between church modes and whatever chromatic idea I'm exploring at the time. I think of these vertical melodic buildups like a Jackson Pollock lyricism, like a thrall of meandering, drunken lines that seem to self-organize or evoke various interval relationships. Iannis Xenakis theorized this — stochastic synthesis — but had no interest in writing tonal music with it, nor do a lot of contemporary electronic musicians. But I do, because I love light, dreamy, beautiful French piano music. So yeah, these are polyphonic harmonies that build up vertical structures iteratively over time, deconstruct themselves, reassemble, transform, etc., based on whatever spontaneous aesthetic decisions I want to make while I'm doing it. I don't really design it too much structurally, but more play it as a continuous, sinuous movement with a lot of vertical tonal shading. Form is created on the go, so to speak. 

However, the timing is really the main articulator of these structures because rhythm is directly linked to pitch: the rhythmic pacing is tuned at a subharmonic of a selected tone in the currently playing phrase in each voice… roughly eight octaves lower, in the 3-10 hz “theta” range… and these selections are also “drunk” improvised. So in a very concrete sense the rhythms (with stacked voices polyrhythms, likely why it reminds you of Reich) create their own chord structures… but expressed over a more expansive time frame… and as rhythm and not as tone! I guess you could say the rhythm is like the bass… but too deep to register as such. You'll notice that when I change a melodic phrase, the timing will change too, and when the pitch rises, so does the speed, and so on. But with structure I'm not really designing it in advance. I might think, "I'll try an Ogives style Satie thing tonight", but things change rapidly as I live-compose and listen — I have a lot of time to listen, shape the melody, etc., intuitively and swiftly — continual transformation of a few voices or elements is more how I think of structure. And then I stop the river’s flow when I get tired of it.

Are you always structuring V-C-V-C, or do you like to play with different forms? I definitely hear a similar vertical arrangement with your work… and then your voice comes in and seems to challenge that; its rawness is kind of like a counter to the elegantly stacked harmonies and rhythms. I’m curious how you see the relationship between these more immaculately designed vertical structures and your voice/lyrics. It strikes me as a unique synthesis of IDM and Grunge.

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OH: I’ve used the V-C-V-C structure for the two albums I’ve done so far. I understand myself to be working within the art-pop tradition, and popular music is defined by repetition. I’m interested in emphasizing this repetition to an almost exaggerated degree. 

I was influenced conceptually in the making of this album by Brian Eno’s “Oblique Strategies,” a deck of cards he made in 1975 with multimedia artist Peter Schmidt, with each card having a very Eno-esque suggestion to help induce creativity in a musician by encouraging lateral thinking. I found a $2 app in the App Store with each card in digital form. I would scroll through the digital cards in my spare time in preparation for making this album. Two of the cards I was heavily influenced by were: “Emphasize repetitions” and “Repetition is a form of change.” 

Another “Oblique Strategies” card that ingrained itself in my mind was one that read “(Organic) Machinery.” This speaks (perhaps obliquely) to your second question about the relationship between the tightly designed vertical structures and the raw, often imperfect vocals. The vocals are recorded in a couple live takes and the only adjustments made to them are a chorus effect that seems to accentuate the natural waver of my voice. Another Eno card reads: “Emphasize the flaws.” I like how such an otherwise precise recording has the feeling of the vocals being done live. I’m interested in having what is human and flawed integrated with what seems machine-constructed and precise. I’m interested in humanizing the mechanical, and mechanizing the human. Two other Eno cards read: “Mechanicalize something idiosyncratic” and “Humanize something free of error.”

In terms of the lyrics (to put aside thematic concerns because I wouldn’t know yet how to conceptualize them as the lyrics are written so quickly and in a stream-of-consciousness fashion), I use them formally to establish a rhyming pattern and rhythm of the vocal melodies that are so simple and repetitive, sometimes simply keeping the quarter-note beat, in contrast to the drum tracks which are often much more complicated rhythmically, as if the vocal melody is keeping the beat for the track and accompanying the track, rather than the other way around. I think this is an interesting inversion. An “Oblique Strategies” card reads: “Turn it upside down.” 

It seems to me like “(Organic) Machinery” seems applicable to “Drunk Walks” as well, both as a function of my response to the work aesthetically, but also because of how you responded to my first question. How do you balance or navigate the relationship between “the human” and “the machine” in your own work, if you think about this at all? Without fetishizing the technology used to make the work, how do you think the technology used transforms how you think about composing? For example, in transitioning from writing music for live rock instruments to writing music for digital instruments on the computer, I realized that it wasn’t just the sound of the instruments that changed, but the entire way I conceived of composing the music. And while the comparison to Satie is to me accurate and interesting, does the use of technology in composing your work express a different musical apperception than Satie’s? In what ways does the technology express a transformation in musical apperception, and in what ways is the task of composing still the same?

BS: The technology question is so overemphasized that it makes me want to avoid it altogether. Because of course it’s not about technology, though the technology can expedite and expose the compositional process. Not to say it actually does. Often the technology is an obstacle to the process instead of its liberation. I’m always working against the technology to make it do what I want. I committed to writing music with a laptop around 2000, mainly so I didn’t have to deal with a band, scheduling, etc., basically jettisoning all the nonmusical parts of music making so I could focus on what’s important: the music itself. I guess efficiency is one of many present values lurking behind the music. I do consider myself a “silicon composer” and try to do something medium specific with the laptop, “third ear” music and so on. But I’ve settled into considering it “computer assisted composition” — after many frustrating years, the computer now assists me with composing really expressively, to help me decide on the fly which flaws to emphasize or not. It's an amusing contradiction that it requires so much mediation to do something immediate! It's an annoying contradiction that I have to develop convoluted systems to achieve simplicity. Also contradictory: the removal of the hand makes the music sound more natural. And there's nothing more forbidden in music right now than writing it on a laptop — both the most out-there experimental noise musicians as well as the most traditional instrumentalists have placed a taboo on the laptop bard, which is why I sometimes comically consider myself an "outlaw computer musician." But again, it’s not the “technology,” it’s all my own idiosyncratic approach to music writing that I’ve painstakingly conceptualized, and that could hypothetically be done without the computer at all. Though, my composition system has become almost like a self-psychoanalysis environment, where I’m really attuned to my own aesthetic values and emphasize them while jettisoning what I find inessential. 

Regarding the effect this has on my conception of music, it is really abstract and “meta” compared to writing music on an instrument. I consider these piano pieces more like meta-piano. It’s extremely distantiated. By analogy, it’s the difference between trying to understand a forest by way of a single tree, versus trying to compose an entire forest from scratch. It’s a really high-level approach where my mentality is likened to viewing all of music and music history from on high, far above, as an overseer. For better? For worse?

But I don’t much separate what is human and what is machine, because humans are always doing techne, it is a part of our species-being and doesn’t need to be emphasized or de-emphasized. I address it by keeping it on the periphery, where it belongs. Technology should take a backseat to music, which is by comparison a much newer, stranger, more compelling form of experience we don’t entirely understand yet. Usually when technology is emphasized in music, I assume it’s because there’s no other musical idea. I also think part of the power of the “Drunk Walks” is that it sounds so human because it’s so disinterestedly mechanized. A friend remarked that she was always calmed and more attuned as a listener knowing that the music was “performed” by a machine — in my opinion it removes the sport of physical performance so that the music experience is emphasized instead of the player’s dexterity as entertainment, etc., which is of course just as mechanical as a machine, perhaps even more so. Removing the proverbial hand foregrounds my aesthetic decisions, structure, acoustics, etc. It’s funny, there are moments when it sounds like I messed up playing a piece, like practicing and hitting a wrong note… but of course I’m not “playing” notes. So there are already human flaws in the machine, or inherent in the process. My point is really that the expressiveness, the evocativeness comes out of the harmonic structures, and not the player. I don’t feel the need to introduce flaws, because I'm inherently flawed and so is my machine mirror. Perhaps the whole of contemporary music is one big historical flaw, an interesting one to work through.

Regarding Satie… Satie embraced the “mechanical” in his own time. His compositions have a quality that sounds like they could be coming from a player piano, and he explicitly de-emphasized the player’s hand. It’s why he ultimately was a lodestar for Surrealism and Dada, which found in industrial society an analogy for dreamlike processes. And Fauré made piano rolls for player pianos as well, perhaps because he, too, didn't care for performativity. Philip Corner, one of Satie’s best interpreters, even says that his work is incapable of lending itself to interpretive embellishments — it sounds wrong when it’s over-expressive or something. It’s hard to hear this now because Satie sounds so twee the way it’s typically used in, e.g., Hollywood, but when it’s done right, his music has this really surreal gamelan beating going on. And of course listeners in his moment thought it was barbaric, and not so sweet. But his compositional values stressed lucidity in a way that I try to stress also, even though there are a lot of differences. I'd say the compositional problems are still similar, but register less as a problem and more as a free-floating curiosity. I also have had to develop extensively roundabout constructions to solve problems of affect and style that are themselves not totally clear, but still deeply felt, and are indirectly appealing to new, inchoate feelings about what is simultaneously possible and forbidden. Likewise, Satie relates to a lot of musicians today in the attempt, maybe even necessity of synthesizing classical sensibilities with pop music idiom. Negotiating new paradoxes like these is still very relevant.

And Satie was influential on Eno of course! Satie is rightly considered the first ambient musician due to his concept of “furniture music.” What Satie and Eno also have in common is that they aren’t reducible to current ambient music tropes, they are more imaginative than that — the “Oblique Strategies” or Satie’s abstract notes for his musicians induce what you called lateral thinking. Repetition is also what they have in common. What is it about repetition that attracts your interest? What was it to Eno, you think, that made him think it was ripe for interesting music? For me it seems to be a remnant from Minimalism — but I think Minimalism accidentally exposed that repetition is really conducive to the music experience because it slows the current of music down to a pace that resonates with listening reflection. Classical or romantic music moves almost too fast for the listener.

OH: I want to get at my interest in repetition by introducing this quote from Adorno’s essay “Form of the Phonograph” (1934) which also relates to things you’ve just brought up:

Through the phonograph record, time gains a new approach to music. It is not the time in which music happens, nor is it the time which music monumentalizes by means of its “style.” It is time as evanescence, enduring in mute music. If the “modernity” of all mechanical instruments gives music an age-old appearance — as if, in the rigidity of its repetitions, it had existed forever, having been submitted to the pitiless eternity of the clockwork — then the evanescence and recollection that is associated with the barrel organ as a mere sound in a compelling yet indeterminate way has become tangible and manifest through the gramophone records.

I think of that quote because in it, Adorno identifies the repetitive nature of mechanical music that seems so fit for being consumed as a record of expressing a sense of time as evanescence, transience. In contrast, classical or romantic high-bourgeois music is time which is monumentalized by the music’s style. Adorno, somewhere else, calls the sonata form the aesthetic expression of bourgeois time, because it is time which is shaped according to an (aesthetic) logic. Through time being shaped in the sonata form, we experience the passage of time itself as meaningful, as shaped by us in our freedom. It is bourgeois in this way.

Adorno is saying that the nature of time expressed in repetitive mechanical music made for the gramophone is time that seems both eternal and profoundly fleeting, rather than time that is monumentalized and structured according to a logic in which we recognize our freedom in shaping it.

I raise all this just to say that I’m interested in repetition because I think it expresses this sense of time as evanescence. I think the repetition in my music makes one feel like one is running on a treadmill, in which what is being presented is constantly escaping under one’s feet only to be reasserted and then made fleeting again. The title of the album, “What Goes Away,” is intended to reference what is fleeting. There are lyrics that are repeatedly about time slipping away. 

To make an abstract theoretical point, I think the interest in repetition that was such a force in minimalism comes from a disenchantment with the shaping and structuring of time. In other words, I think it expresses an experience of time radically different from what the sonata form expressed to Adorno about bourgeois time. Musical repetition expresses time not as structured by our freedom, but time as eternal transience, as evanescence. I don’t think one can simply reappropriate the sonata form for example in the present, because I think we experience time differently than Beethoven did. I think, for better or for worse, repetition in music expresses a historically specific relationship to time that is different than in high bourgeois music. This is how I would explain its interest to Eno and others, including myself. 

In terms of thinking about form as expressing history, how do you think the formal decisions you made in “Drunk Walks” express the present? In what ways do the formal decisions and compositional approach you’ve used relate to the history of music and the present itself as historical? 

BS: Someone recently described the recent piano music as “neoclassical,” which made me depressed for a night. I mean, it’s not like Kubrick was “neoclassical” for making a movie exploring 18th century experience and illuminating it all with candlelight, so why is music considered trad if it reconstructs the piano? I thought … maybe neo-romantic, because I do kind of think of the form more in a bourgeois sense, where time is structured according to the lyricism of my own subjective decisions. Though, I like repetition (iteration, really) and think it “resonates,” so maybe I can’t help but express our moment through that specific taste for the treadmill you describe. The music could hypothetically go on forever, it’s only my aesthetic judgment that isolates specific segments of the current that I find more acute than others. It’s maybe like Mondrian, whose lines suggest an eternal extension going beyond the picture plane, but they also simply don’t go beyond the picture plane materially. Since any song is like a fragment of eternity, it leads one to wonder what’s so special about this particular fragment. 

Also it’s virtual piano music; it’s not really piano music per se, since it’s all synthesized, which makes it very abstract and evanescent in a different sense, e.g. the psychoacoustic purity. It’s virtually music, so to speak, which I think is characteristic of all music in our era. Eno once said that all music is electronic music, but I think the abstract character of contemporary music goes far beyond even that now. It's all virtual, and not just in the trendy “virtual reality” sense, but in the sense that music seems to inevitably force the question of whether it's truly music at all. It's propositional. The “Drunk Walks” are deconstructed piano, which has been around since at least Satie, but I’m not sure there’s yet been much interest in reconstructing piano. Like, when a building is razed, it forces the imagination to wonder what that foundation pit can be new grounds for, dunnit? For a while now I’ve considered my music as a kind of prosthetic on the phantom limb of music history.

But I think it reflects our time more affectively by way of turning my back on the ethos of the cultural zeitgeist, deserting what Nietzsche called “demolatry” of the masses, and playing with history’s disjected symbols in our present (see Baudelaire on Wagner), adopting incomplete forms available to us today: historically introspective forms like nocturnes that are considered dead… yet also feel nascent. I mean, the Gymnopédie form was invented just over a century ago! You’d think musicians would be inspired by these new forms instead of rejecting them due to some herd-like devotion to a half-baked end-of-times ideology. Occasionally some relevant contemporary artist will say to me, “You can't do that!” And I always respond, “I am literally doing it right now… there, it’s done!” On a basic level I hope to expose what is forbidden, the nonmusical taboos currently imposed on what can be done musically. The “Drunk Walks” are an example of me saying, “Yes, you can write introspective piano music on a forbidden laptop, here’s proof.” Or to quote Trotsky, “The plough of the new art is not limited to numbered strips. On the contrary, it must plough the entire field in all directions. Personal lyrics of the very smallest scope have an absolute right to exist within the new art.” I've turned my back — in the Nietzschean sense — on the mass’s “large” — what Baudelaire pejoratively labeled coarse — contemporary tropes. I don’t think I’m the only artist who’s come out the other side of experimentation exhausted by a myopic obsession with technique, timbre, texture, etc. A lot of what is considered avant-garde in our time is even more calculated and reified than pop music, which is at least transparently calculated. It’s truly shameless!

I simply want to write the most beautiful music possible, which relates to a more general and profound sensibility in our time, however subconscious and marginal it may be, that wants to jettison all the inessential, ugly, water-muddying, obscurantist pseudo-aesthetic fluff. Are you familiar with the LaMonte Young composition Draw A Straight Line And Follow It? I’ve adopted this ethos… even though I may drunkenly follow that line which points towards beauty! I’d also say historically I’ve tried to process the meaning of the last half-century of experimental music and apply what we’ve learned from it to music experience beyond its genrefication. For example, the way I modulate key is more akin to the way an electronic musician modulates a waveform, not the way a bourgeois composer would. Beethoven would be quite confounded to see how I modulate! It’s not neo-anything for these reasons. 

I’ve also adopted an “anything goes” mentality, where I’m not really committed to a specific genre or technique or style, but look upon all bourgeois and contemporary music as ripe for appropriating, synthesizing, and perhaps transforming. The path is through and not around! For example, in the “Foremodal Gloria,” there is a moment that flows from a very pretty, ornamental circle-of-fifths pattern into something that sounds right out of an austere Arvo Pärt symphony … and then it evanesces into something else entirely. It is beautiful I think, but mainly because of the evanescence of the sections, where nothing is fixed for very long. It’s very ephemeral, but feels eternal(ly musical).

I sense a similar attitude with your turning towards pop music? I’ve seen other “avant-garde” artists recently do this, and I wonder what it means, writ large, for the legacy of the avant-garde. How about your music in relation to music history? Do you find the history question vexing, as pop music isn’t typically acutely historical? Would you say that the power of pop music is more about its ability to forget history, than to remember it?

OH: The decision to like or to make pop music (meaning popular music) was never an intellectual one. I’ve done both since I was very young. But the decision to take serious interest in it aesthetically took some time and thinking. The art critic Clement Greenberg wrote somewhere that the hardest part most people have with aesthetic judgment is to be honest with themselves about their aesthetic response, rather than fabricate it according to what one thinks one should like. I came to realize that I took for granted my aesthetic response to pop music, and that I wasn’t listening hard enough to my intuition by not recognizing that I thought some pop music was as convincing intuitively and aesthetically to me as any “high” art I was moved by. 

I do think, like you said above, that “avant-garde” formal innovation becomes reified as an end in itself. For example, people reduce Schoenberg’s significance to the formal innovation of the “12-tone-system” rather than recognizing that for Schoenberg expanding tonality was done in his eyes for the sake of expression of feeling, and not as an end in itself. Schoenberg himself said, “There is still plenty of good music to be written in C Major.”

I’ve come to realize that in terms of intuitive feeling, I aesthetically express and respond especially acutely within and to the conventions of popular music. I think it does have to do with the fact that as you said above, pop music is “transparently calculated.” I’m interested in exaggerating this transparent calculation, so as to make it more available for aesthetic and critical recognition (an Eno card reads “Give the game away”). I’m interested in exaggerating the conventions of pop music to critically objectify those conventions. One example I think would be how I construct the drum tracks. I often fill almost every beat with a percussive sound (“Fill every beat” is another “Oblique Strategies” card). By repeating this hyper-percussive loop, the track simultaneously affirms its 4/4 time signature almost monotonously and yet also seems to constantly threaten to break out of it due to the complicated and meticulous combination of percussive sounds. My rhythm decisions are heavily influenced by IDM like Autechre and Aphex Twin, who I think achieve a similar effect with their rhythms. In this way, the convention of 4/4 time is exaggerated to such an extent that it seems to demand breaking out of the convention itself. 

As a function of the recognition of my investment in pop music, I actually have begun a systematic study of its history. I’ve been collecting records lately, for example. But I think you’re right to say that pop music seems to insist on being ahistorical, always seeming to express an eternal present. It relates to the way time is flattened out in repetitive music as I talked about above. I think pop music’s sense of flattened, repetitive time expresses the flattening out of historical time in our own moment. I think the fact that pop music always appears as belonging to an eternal present without past or future speaks to our historical condition in the very appearance of being beyond or outside of history. In this way, I think pop music is an acute symptom of our present. 

BS: Your drum programming is getting really good! When I first started listening to AE et al, I assumed their rhythms were in really odd time signatures, or total chaos, but upon further inspection the lush complexity usually comes right out of 4/4, and is due to other factors. But of course, of all Aphex Twin's music, people like his piano pieces the best!

Right, Schoenberg conceived the 12-tone system as a means to expressive ends. Adorno said that the tendency to treat the technique as subject matter or an end in itself is an absurdity, analogous to painting a color palette. And Adorno observed that even though Webern was the most systematic with 12-tone, it was Webern’s lyricism that was really critical to his music, not so much the serialism. I love that quote about there still being a lot of great music to be written in C! It’s very true. Schoenberg thought that tonality was endless and inexhaustible. In his book on harmony, he compared music to an evanescent gas that is infinitely expansive, that anything one could do with e.g. microtonality could be accomplished within the chromatic scale. Instead of reinventing the wheel, why not use already functioning wheels to take you somewhere beyond the wheel-making factory?