Whose performance? Jan Bang, musical tension & listener focus

I've been wanting to write about Jan Bang for a while but despite having it in the pipeline for weeks there's still more I'd like to explore before drawing strong conclusions (plus it turns out university requires work too!). In particular there's been some academic work on musical ontology recently that I think might be relevant. But for now, some thoughts on Bang's ...and poppies from Kandahar.

(Have a listen to bits of the album here)

What I find so exciting about this album is Bang's collective approach to sampling, field recording and found sounds. First off, there's a real physicality to the snatched recordings in each track, achieved largely through an emphasis on or 'sounding' of the production process of the recordings. So the layering of samples/recordings is made quite obvious to us, with different elements having quite different EQs, volumes and spatiality. The nature of their recording is also seemingly-deliberately manifest: the noise floor of each element is striking, with 'pristine' silence broken by audible hiss as samples of brass instruments or recordings of objects – apparently being dropped, shaken or shuffled – are introduced. The specific noises of these found sounds are akin to the creaks of a room, or of the furniture within it, that sometimes sound while you're trying to make an otherwise-professional music recording.

It's this latter notion of sounds being incidental that leads to the real interest for me in Bang's work. ...and poppies from Kandahar is full of occasions where the assumed 'field of vision' for music is disrupted, where the Western audio-gaze is questioned. Sounds that we'd normally assume would be most important to the piece are 'neglected'; sounds that we'd consider unimportant are shoved in front of our ears. Take the album's first track, 'The Drug Mule' (again, check the link above to listen). The track begins with a long string/woodwind trio chord. We get a sense of a specific space due to the positioning of and reverb of the instruments. Within a few seconds, this sense is distorted by found sounds of plops and twists of toy-mechanical objects. These sounds are seemingly-incoherent, unstructured, yet they overwhelm the strings as the latter fade away. These sounds also occupy their own space (the noise floor hiss I mentioned contributes to this), much further to the 'front' of the audio field (ie. recorded & mixed such that it sounds close to us and unmediated by muffling or reverb etc.). Once these sounds also run their course we're left with about twenty seconds of very quiet sounds of what could be described as a squeaky wheelbarrow! Eventually a low synth chord is introduced, with a wide stereo field but staying very much in the background as the found sounds continue to stutter in and out of existence at the front of the mix. After another twenty-odd seconds the synth disappears and the trio chord returns. As it does, that chord is again 'overridden' by loud direct found sounds.

This interplay continues throughout the rest of the track – more traditionally 'musical' elements appear but always defer to 'un-musical' elements. Now in one sense people might say 'big deal, what's new about musique concrete methods in electronic music?' But the success of Bang's work is to create a kind of dramatic tension through the juxtaposition of the musical and concrete parts. The former elements – the string/woodwind chord, the low synth, then later the use of choral-style vocals and even quieter playbacks of wailing – are performances whose characteristics would normally encourage us to pay primary attention to these parts (this is the Western audio-gaze in action). The performances are all identifiably 'musical' due to the clear presence of traditional melody and harmony. They are also – with the exception of the low synth – identifiably-human performances that, through intuition and musical convention, we as listeners assume require concentration & effort from the performers. There's an intensity to these separate passages of music, due to the timbres and harmonies used (as well as their associations with 'serious' classical music). If we heard these musical elements on their own, we'd be in no doubt that a performance was calling for our undivided attention. Unfortunately for those elements, they are constantly threatened with being drowned out by foregrounded, in-focus found sounds. These latter sounds appear slapdash, unconsidered, unstructured; they do not draw on conventions of musical performance to demand our attention. Instead, they are simply dropped at the front of our audio field.

The convention of musical performance and consequent attention is thus called into question by Bang's work. What should get our attention? Are traditional characteristics of music necessary or sufficient for defining the field of focus, or can they be overridden? I love the fact that such intense concentrated musical passages are put in the background; this only adds to the dramatic power of the piece. For not only are we listening to intense music, we can't quite make it out or give it our undivided attention because of other 'disruptive' sounds. The dread and foreboding of those musical passages are rendered into a wider musical metaphor (here perhaps there are similarities with what I said is going on Xela's early work).

The dramatic tension of ...and poppies from Kandahar also depends upon the audibility of the recording methods. The volumes, EQs, spatiality and noise floor hiss of each element of a track like 'The Drug Mule' encourages us to experience the track as constituted by the layering of different musical performances on top of eachother. But when this layering results in the kind of questioning of attention focus as described above, the track is experienced not just as a juxtaposing of performance, but of compositional / performative intent. Because they're experienced as different recordings and thus as performances of different musical passages, we're invited to see the intent of one composer / performer – that of the trio chord or of the choral vocals – as standing in tension with the intent another, namely Jan Bang, the person organising these different recordings into a track. The former wants their part front-and-centre, the latter refuses this, while the directness of the found sounds indicates that they are more fundamentally the work of Bang himself. The question then becomes: who is the composer and/or performer of this track? Is the whole track itself the playing out of a battle between composers or performers? The answer to this is constantly up for grabs throughout a track like 'The Drug Mule' – one second we think we know, the next our audio-gaze has been disrupted by the introduction or loss of different elements.

All this leads to a question that I hope to explore in a later post: what's the ontological nature of the tracks on ...and poppies from Kandahar? Do these tracks subvert the notion of musical pieces having an 'essence', or at least is the essence of any track on this album constantly in flux? I'll end with a thought from Jan Bang himself. It's interesting when considering ideas of compositional & ontological tension that Bang's musical direction began with him sampling other musicians live on stage. Bang seems very aware of the in-flux nature of his work, particularly when it comes to who should be considered the composer:

“[...and poppies from Kandahar is] a logical follow-on to [Arve Henriksen's album] Cartography, another example of the collaborative nature of this group of Norwegian artists, and their egoless approach in getting their music out to the world. "For me," Bang says, "Cartography and poppies are two albums made in the same way. The first has Arve's name on it, and the second one has my name on it. They could easily have been swapped, and that, in itself, is interesting to me. To work with different artists, and sometimes put my name on it, sometimes put their names on it, and still just feel that it's good music.”