Feedback as primary means of making live music seems to date from 1964. That was the year that Max Neuhaus debuted his Fontana Mix - Feed (see Brain v06i19) and when Robert Ashley brought fourth his tape, voice and feedback creation The Wolfman.Room feedback occurs when the sound from the loudspeakers in aperformance space reflect off walls and ceiling back to the microphone,as opposed to following more direct paths. In essence, the room itselfis set up to work as a cavity oscillator. The fun part is that whenthis happens the sound has the appearance of coming from differentpoints all over the room depending on exactly which reflections orwhich modes of oscillation dominate. Ashley's design for The Wolfmanuses a vocalist in front of the microphone singing gently into themicrophone and using his mouth to modulate the room feedback. There isalso a tape track, a full spectrum deluge of tape manipulated foundsounds, fed into the mix to provoke more variation in the feedback.Just how this works in a performance we will have to imagine since theperceptual effects of being inside the cavity oscillator are completelylost in a mere stereo recording. But what we get on the CD isnonetheless a full scale onslaught of highly dynamic noise that fullyholds the attention for its entire 18 minutes. It has a gritty rawenergy that any 90s noise artist would be very proud of but the humanvoice component takes it beyond the realm of mere electronics. The CDhas three other early Ashley tape compositions from 1957 to 1964 and ofthese The Bottleman from 1960 has captivated me. It wasoriginally the soundtrack to a film by George Manupelli featuring a mancollecting bottles in various desolate and dilapidated scenes of urbandecay. The music is quiet, very slow and has the same kind of insanedark ambience found in the soundtrack to Eraserhead. It is a tapemanipulation piece based on contact microphone feedback, found soundsand voice and, as with The Wolfman, it is the vocal componentthat adds the deepest tensions. Despite never having seen the film, theimage of a deranged person wandering around landscapes of discardedlife collecting bottles is easily imaged with the music being thesoundtrack in the near insane bottleman's mind. Fully deserving its 43plus minutes on the CD it is really very effective.Read More
