Ninth Grade Spoiler Alert: Remember when your high school history
teacher blew your mind by deconstructing communism and fascism,
explaining how these opposed totalitarian ideologies are actually
similar? I’m experiencing a similar realization lately regarding
tradition-rooted folk music and experimental music in Portland,
watching how these two styles and subcultures have increasingly come to
resemble each other at their margins, both staking out some room under
the Tibetan prayer-flag-shaped banner of psychedelia.
There is no clearer illustration of this phenomenon than the back
cover of Prism of Eternal Now, the engaging new album of
instrumental, guitar-based third-eye-schmutz-remover by one-man-band
White Rainbow (AKA Adam Forkner), released on CD this week by Kranky,
and on vinyl in July by Portland-based Marriage Records. Any
seldom-showering Oregonian will immediately recognize Prism‘s
graphic design as a parody of perennial hippie soap-of-choice, Dr.
Bronner’s, complete with microscopic snippets of nonsense like,
“Centuries old Eastern Wisdoms prove that Sound Vibrations contain
Vast, Powerful, Positive Healing Energy!”
Not just a spot-on spoof, this nod to neo-hippie culture is also a
sincere acknowledgement that, esoteric drone and contemporary classical
references aside, Forkner’s music can perhaps best be compared to the
most out-there, textural, sense-of-self-defying moments of ’60s guitar
psychedelia sundered from their pop structures. The fact that tablas
are the dominant rhythmic element on Prism further underscores
the album’s proud indebtedness to Maharishi-mad, Summer-of-Love global
consciousness.
Experimental music like White Rainbow’s is ignored by some because
they have no frame of reference for it, making it easy to mistake
experimentalism for traditionlessness. Forkner deftly preempts this
kind of dismissal by providing a historical context for his music with
Prism‘s psychedelic packaging.
Ethan Rose, a member of electro-acoustic quartet Small Sails, and
perhaps Portland’s most widely acclaimed electronic music composer and
found-sound manipulator, performs a related contextualizing feat on his
new album Spinning Pieces, making cutting-edge ambient computer
music from antique mechanical instruments, tying the avant-garde to the
old guard. Rose’s music is no less abstract than Forkner’s, but it is
pristine and light where White Rainbow is murky and dark. Spinning
Pieces consists of three gorgeous, chiming tracks constructed from
a tightly constrained sonic palette. The album’s first two pieces,
“Singing Tower” and “…The Dot and the Line…” are each built from a
single sound source—the Stanford automated carillon in the first
instance, and player pianos at the Immortal Piano Company on Belmont in
the second. Rose’s computer-sequenced music comes off as organic
because its composer occasionally tips his hand and strips away the
processing, revealing unidentifiable electronic chirrups to be
familiar, old-fashioned music box chimes in disguise, helping the
listener to relate the brand new to the time worn.
See Ethan Rose summon experimental music from traditional tools
as he releases Spinning Pieces at 9 pm on Sunday, September 30
at Holocene; White Rainbow plays at Portland State University on
Wednesday, October 3 at noon.