Breaking the Pattern
Making the Pattern
I remember the first time when I heard an electronic music composition that changed my mind about what music can be. I was in a car with my father driving on the highway to see the University of Toronto campus that I would be attending in the Autumn. It was a pristine blue sky day with only a few extremely high clouds. So it happened that at the same time the radio was broadcasting a program on the history of electronic music. Suddenly I heard the sounds I have never heard before. It was a German group called “Kraftwerk”. Yes, I have heard electronic music before, but this was the first time that electronic music seemed to come from its own vast and brilliant independent world. It felt like a discovery of a new world, and with it, a new way of thinking.
Hardware of electronic music instruments generate sound waves beginning with simple waveform shapes, like a triangle, a square, sawtooth, or a sine curve for example. The sound waves that are made by vibrations inside wooden, metallic, or animal skin instruments- instruments with centuries of history- are more complex and rough in character because of individual characteristics of these materials. Therefore the tone of an electronic instrument, like a synthesizer, sounds more pristine and “pure”, as if coming from a world of abstract and simplified forms. Creating musical compositions and customizing sounds from such pristine tones feels to me like constructing another world from basic building blocks, and that is the excitement that I heard in music of Kraftwerk for the first time.
“Kraftwerk” was one of many groups in the new genre of music that was being formed in West Germany around the 1970’s. Outside of Germany this genre was labelled “Krautrock”, while in Germany it was called “Cosmic Music” or “Electronic Music”. After the Second World War, music in West Germany was dominated by imported Rock’n’Roll and pop songs called “Schlager” (literally, “hit”). General discourse on that era of music is that the new generations of musicians who wanted to experiment in sound found themselves in a challenging situation. They did not want to adopt the American and British Rock’n’Roll. They also did not want to associate with German tradition of orchestral music or folk heritage because of the misuse of these cultural identities in the arts during the reign of National-Socialist party. Desire to be freed from overt associations with the past or traps of a singular culture found a great outlet in the sounds and musical structures that were offered by new and more available electronic music technology. Some of these electronic experiments stayed in the niche or underground scene. Some of the new music made a resonance in the pop/rock crowds and broke to bigger audience.
This brings me to the great and mighty David Bowie. Another big shock from hearing electronic music came to me when I walked into a familiar record store and saw a cover of a used CD by the front desk, which had a strong gravity pull on me. I took this album on a streetcar ride in the headphones to my old office building. Half way into the album I found myself totally lost in its music. I was walking at a snail’s pace through the building, along empty glass hallways and meeting rooms, industrial staircases and elevators. The evening sun was hitting the dusty glass, metal and concrete surfaces around me at the low angle, and every glimmer and reflection became a portal to another reality. That album was David Bowie’s “Low” from 1977. I have learned later on that this album was recorded in a West Berlin studio overlooking the guard towers of the Berlin wall. David Bowie got to a breaking point of physical and mental state during his soul and funk period in the USA, decided to leave behind his old performance persona, and move to Berlin inspired by German art and the “Krautrock” sound. He was in a period where he wanted to get away from the addictions and structures that have burdened him in the past and have a fresh start, to deconstruct his creative world and then rebuild it again. On the whole second side of the “Low” album made of four compositions David Bowie with the help of Brian Eno on synthesizer set out to create a new world of an alternate history where the European civilization has collapsed and people were driven to live underground. The synthesizer sound painted the landscape of vast abandoned or demolished spaces, and the choir voices sang seeming laments and hymns in new pan-European language.
It is exactly this possibility renewal of the spirit, playfulness and reinvention, and creation of new worlds that attracts me to making electronic music right now. Maybe it is only so because I have been playing guitar for 20 years in folk and rock genres that have hundreds of years of world music histories and conventions influencing me that i can find electronic sound liberating. When I play any stringed instrument I am also thankful- I am in communication with that rich tradition what I play guitar like a guitar. But ever since hearing that Kraftwerk song on the radio and further electronic music artists, I started trying to make my electric guitar sound like a synthesizer. More than a decade later I found myself quitting all bands and orchestras I was part of and starting from ground zero. I got a synthesizer and just recently a sampler drum machine. What is different now? While I play electronic music instruments I have no preconceptions or burden of knowledge how to play these instruments. I do not know what is technically or theoretically right or wrong when I play a synthesizer or drum machine, and therefore everything just is what it is and everything is possible. I make a sound and if it does not communicate together with my bandmate’s sounds or does not express what I want to express, I change it until it communicates.
Disco Oracle is a band formed a year ago. My friends and I have been playing electronic music instruments for just over one year, and every time we get together to record or create, it is like going sailing into unknown seas or landing a spaceship on another planet, it is a new experience and new beginning. Will Charbonneau is playing drum machines, bass guitar, and synthesizers as well maintaining our recording and practice space and rough mixes. My old friend with whom I have been in countless bands, he is also just over one year new into the electronic music instrument learning and perhaps it is our musical chemistry built over the many years that encourages us together through the new journeys. Cai Zhaoyi plays a synthesizer and a keyboard and has never been in a band or music project before. Yet from her first day playing she was intuitively and now systematically making the sounds that just fit and open up new horizons. I myself, Alexandr Nabokov, am playing a synthesizer, a guitar, a sampler drum machine and do processed vocals. This is Disco Oracle.
In the music stories above, new sounds came from new hardware by means of which musicians could liberate themselves and get out of fixed old patterns: Break a pattern and create a new pattern. Do I think it is necessary to be in a certain genre, or move to a new city, or get new gear to reinvent and refresh your approach to making music? No at all. It is all in the mind set. But if it feels right, do what you must and be what may be.
