This weekend 51 years ago, according to the Billboard Hot 100, the Beatles’ We Can Work it Out had just edged out Simon and Garfunkle, whose Sounds of Silence (15 years after John Cage debuted 4’33”) had dominated the charts all month. Tom Jones was number 35 with the theme song to the 007 movie Thunderball, a respectable follow-up to the greatest Bond performance ever, Shirley Bassey singing Goldfinger the year before.
It is this particular month, January 1966, that forms the musical epicentre of my new composition Refuse.
Edgard Varèse had just died the previous November, age 82. It had been 13 years since a 13 year-old Frank Zappa first read about Varèse. That was 1953 and i was in the midst of being born. Thirteen years later, in 1966, i was listening to everything i could find on the radio, and had just begun buying LPs of the music i was reading about; strange stuff that never got played on the radio. I bought Zappa’s first album, Freak Out! when it was released that summer.
Back then i had never experienced live music. Everything was filtered through the media of broadcast and recording — and much of it sounded indecipherable and intoxicating.
Half a century later, for this concert, i’m emulating Varèse’s ascending octaves and fifths, and incorporating Zappa’s rapid-fire collage of disparate genres. There’s xenochrony in the juxtaposition of Zappa the electric guitar maestro, and Varèse le chef des batteries. The specified 15-minute duration of the commission is equal to the average length of a 1966 LP album side.
Refuse is a reverie revisiting how i listened to and what i listened to in the swinging sixties. It refers to and directly quotes two musical giants whose shoulders i attempt to straddle.
— john oswald • programme note from early 2017 for a series of concerts by the Turning Point Ensemble, directed by Owen Underhill, for a weekend of concerts of the music of Varèse, Zappa & Oswald.
Oswald has a nomenclature system indicating the state of completion of tracks and albums; it’s based on the computer software versioning lingo, which was common by the 1980’s when he began to apply a numeral system to indicate revisions in the Mystery Tapes https://x-tapes.bandcamp.com/album/x-mystery-tape-sampler. Here’s the greek letter code with his caveats:
alpha — in this state i would only play something for someone if i’m in their presence to make comments about omissions, adjustments, inevitable changes to be made, et cetera.
beta — these tracks are sometimes accessible to selected individuals, and are usually indicated as rough mixes, rough edits, or general roughhewn roughage.
gamma — programmers refer to this as a “release candidate”. which means this might be a final version, but i might change my mind.
delta — this indicates that the track is more certainly suitable to inflict upon the world; which does not mean that i won’t make little tweeks; hence the accompanying version numbers. the delta symbol is ∆ which i’ve also used to begin the titles of a group of compositions particularly focused on sound as some would distinguish the term from music.
epsilon — this would indicate that i would be crazy to make any more changes.
zeta — i no longer wish anyone to hear the item indicated
credits
from i'd Love to Turn …,
released December 1, 2022
see & hear also in HD this video mix version, featuring the New Music Concerts Distance Ensemble of Tkaronto: youtu.be/59TR5QVyh_U
FONY is a 21st centuy record label focused on audiocentric creations by John Oswald and his associates—
works including
Plunderphonics, the Rascali Klepitoire, Mystery Tapes, plus miscellaneous soundtracks, sonic inventions, site-conditioned performances or installations, et cetera.
Video and audio production and mastering passes through mLAB, where Oswald is Director of Research....more
Producer Joshua Boon and his compatriots, as The Forces, create a unique fusion of Beatlesque psychedelia with hip-hop-inspired beats. Bandcamp New & Notable Sep 6, 2022
