The Saskatchewan Party There’s a Ghost in Our HomeEasy Listening StarClassical Music Magic / Classical Music PoisoningBlack MIDIChristmas Poisoning 1973-1987Relaxation Tapes BookburnersBackmaskingUnnatural Transcription Sasktronica UntitledThe Golden Age of TelevisionUrbex & RurexSchematica / Circuit Bent ScoresThe 4th Wall, The 5th WallThe Filthy FifteenDavid Lynch ÉtudesThe Mall

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Saskbient (sometimes used synonymously with Sasktronica) is a genre of music and visual art originating in the mid 1970s. It is a term used to describe the experimental scene emerging in southern Saskatchewan that contained influences of threshers, cults, locusts, power pylons, crop circles, board games, the CO-OP, and Roy Romanow. The term first appeared in print in Montreal in 2016.

The SaSkaTchewan ParTy

There’s a ghost

Listening to Kate Bush is like looking at those stylized cut away drawings of the earth’s interior, revealing skeletons, creatures, demons, ghosts, ruins, treasure, millipedes, and lost cities below the surface.

in our home

Easy Listening StarEasy Listening (a.k.a. Mood Music, Lounge Music, Chill Out, Beautiful Music) from ca. the 1950s through to the early 1980s: a major influence. And underrated in terms of orchestration, craft of melody and harmony, blending genres, inventiveness in the use of recording techniques, and pure trippy-ness. The album art was often beautifully designed - and surreal.

Moments:Nancy Sinatra & Lee Hazlewood ~ Some Velvet MorningPercy Faith ~ Theme from A Summer PlacePaul Mauriat ~ Love is BlueBurt Bacharach/Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass ~ Casino RoyaleJack Jones ~ Lollipops and RosesMason Williams ~ Classical GasHenry Mancini & his Orchestra ~ Love Theme from Romeo & JulietThe Sandpipers ~ Come Saturday MorningFrank Mills ~ Peter PiperDoris Day ~ Secret LoveAcker Bilk ~ Stranger On the ShoreAndy Williams ~ Can't Get Used to Losing YouHerb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass ~ Spanish Flea

claSSical MuSic MagicThere’s a beauty in long form genres. This is not limited to classical or concert music - but is a distinguishing characteristic. It shares this with film. Both require an investment of time and cognition to experience and absorb a work longer than 5 minutes live in real time. Long play albums (and conceptual albums, drone albums, space/psychedelia) can also be described this way if the listener experiences the work without starting and stopping, ultimately embracing the artists’ building the work with large scale narrative in mind.Live concert music and film in a cinema remain singular art forms, in part for this reason. The concert hall and the cinema, although not without their problems, have one function, and that is to present sound and images in the highest resolution possible. Unless you choose to leave - which means having to go through the trouble of step over everyone as you make your way down the row to the aisle - you are there to experience art. Together.

claSSical MuSic PoiSoningSome* of those who champion classical music continue to worship the dead at the expense of the living. It’s different in other art forms. The creation and promotion of new films, books, theatre, and visual art are front and centre, while continuing to preserve and acknowledge those of the past.

*Not all

Black MIDI

Season 1 (2017)

Selected Scripts

Episode 2: Pictionary

Setting: Living Room

Four situated around a table, playing Pictionary. One person draws the Black

MIDI card, expresses disbelief, instructs fellow game player to turn over the

hourglass timer, and starts to draw musical notes on a sketchpad - frantically

writing faster and faster (as though in a trance) until it is blackened with

notes. The guessing partner touches arm, gasps and says quietly, maybe

whispering: “Is it….Black MIDI?”

No one is sure of how, when or why it began, but Black MIDI started to appear

everywhere: in people’s homes, in the streets, in schools, in songbooks, in music

theory textbooks, as cavities in teeth, stuck on the soles of shoes, at dinner

parties, in knitting, and even in baking.

Episode 1: The Tuning Fork

Documentary excerpt - one subject speaking to off camera interviewer:

“One evening I heard a knock at the door, no one was there, but this was left

in the mailbox” (shows envelope with Black MIDI written on front) “inside was

a piece of paper with instructions, a tuning fork, this ear (points to ear) and

some instructions that say to ‘place the ear on clean, even surface, and strike

the tuning fork once and place next to ear. And when I do it, this happens….”

Strikes tuning fork once and places it next to the ear on table - Black MIDI

explodes - subject looks at interviewer incredulously, slowly shaking head.

“The last instruction says to not speak a word of this to anyone and destroy

the letter. But I didn’t….I didn’t…and things haven’t been the same.”

Episode 3: Tooth

Darkened living room. One person watches TV.

A game show or sitcom is on, the subject is

eating pie, laughing periodically at the

TV. Suddenly the subject expresses a look

of horror as a tooth unexpectedly falls

out, spits out the tooth into palm of hand,

looks at it closely, tooth has a cavity, which

looks to be Black MIDI, (gasps) “Black MIDI”

(breathes out, shivering audibly).

Episode 4: Ten O’Clock News

Panel speaker 1:

"What's really interesting to me is

the almost insidious way that the

Black MIDI phenomenon crept into the

culture. Seemingly overnight this

saturated musical lexicon had seeped

into everyday life.”

Panel speaker 2:

“But what is really going on here?

Perhaps everything is not as it seems?

Is this simply a battle between good

and evil? Mass hysteria? A collective

dream unfurling on the astral plane

between the surreal and the literal,

the tactile and the ephemeral…”

Host:

“Any discussion of Black MIDI and the

implications of its bizarre arrival is

not for the faint of heart. That much

is clear.”

Episode 5: Scarf

Closeup footage of one person knitting - gradually

revealing notes on a staff being knitted into the scarf.

Voiceover:

“I’m….not…sure how it happened really. I was knitting

a scarf - just a - a regular scarf. And then I heard this

melody - repeated over and over. I have no idea where it was

coming from. Suddenly it felt as though….something….was

taking hold of me. I felt compelled to knit this melody. But

then the music began to get twisted - and I had to knit this

too…..Until the scarf was completely black with notes….

I found out later that this is called Black MIDI....And this

sometimes happens.”

Jennifer Thiessen in Black MIDI - Episode 1: The Tuning Fork ©2017

Christmas Poisoning1973-1987

• Artificial trees - plastic - branches burned and melted here and there - lead contamination

• Fake snow - layer upon layer until a buildup of 20 Christmases worth - eventually determined to be hazardous

• CBC’s A Cosmic Christmas• Bubble Lights - beautiful - carcinogenic• Baby Jesus’ eye has peeled off• Mary is missing - Joseph has an exposed

wire for one leg• Broken bulbs - still work every year - there’s

blood on the cotton used under the nativity scene from every Christmas

Relaxation

Tapes

Thrash Metal ca.1982-1986: while they all acknowledged their respective influences, the link was obscured - a completely new genre was created, removed from the mainstream. It created its own audience.

Thrash music from this era has a timbre that is difficult to describe. Not all of the albums have it. It’s relatable to drones and ambient music - some ‘relaxation tapes’ of wind, the ocean or the rainforest remind me of thrash metal.

Extreme tempos, relentless double kick drumming (with the low end rolled off to sound like clacking bones of dancing skeletons), blast beats, downstroke picking, the vocal treatments (which sounded like voices buried within the walls), the overt melodicism, and the heady subject matter. Maybe it was the pooling of all these incongruous sounds that resulted in a recording studio artifact - a phantom hovering overtop.

Moments:Exodus † Bonded By BloodMetallica † Kill ‘Em AllMetallica † Ride the LightningMetallica † Master of PuppetsSlayer † Hell AwaitsSlayer † Reign in BloodKreator † Pleasure to KillMercyful Fate † Don’t Break the OathNuclear Assault † Game OverBathory † Under the Sign of the Black MarkVenom † Welcome to Hell

*RIP Frank Zappa

There was a time when books and music could incite such fear and fervour that people would feel compelled to organize meeting places where hundreds were invited to gather to burn and destroy said books and recordings.

BookBurnersCensorship still very much exists - but in different (less obvious, less ‘interesting’) ways - in many ways more pernicious*, because it’s become so inconspicuous.

BACKMASKING

There was a time when people would spend hours listening to their LPs in reverse, searching for - usually Satanic - messages. Church leaders and politicians were convinced that the devil was responsible for those messages, communicating through the artists, and could deftly record messages in reverse while craftily maintaining cohesion when played back normally. Televangelists would devote programs to playing back and discerning satanic messages for their viewers. Absurd - but also exciting. Music was still steeped in mysticism and fantasy. It was rebellious and dangerous. But music was the scapegoat for deeper societal problems and people became self-appointed experts in lyric interpretation - leading to censorship.

My first experience with ‘messages from the devil’ was on cassette tape. I was 12 years old. The album was Mötley Crüe’s Shout At the Devil, which displayed a warning in its liner notes: “Record may contain backward messages”. Brilliant marketing. I didn’t have the album on vinyl at the time so I made do with the cassette. The sound of Satan for me was the sound of pressing rewind and play at the same time. Terrifying. Later I realized this ‘sound of Satan’ could be found on all cassettes played back this way.

unnatural transcription

Vinyl and particularly tape were prone to degradation but would usually continue to play until that point of certain death. Even when tapes were ‘eaten’ by boom boxes - if careful - you could weave them out, re-spool the tape, and continue listening with the added colours of stuttering, hiss and warping.

This, combined with the later years of scrubbing audio and video, have completely informed my notion of sound, structure, narrative, and orchestration. The process of transcription is a direct portal to the minutiae of sound. It is the epitome of active listening. It uncovers what is lurking underneath (whether real or imagined). Transcription and notation of sounds that weren’t intended to be expressed in musical notation - corruption, malfunction, and foley sounds - leads one down another portal. Listening repeatedly to a scream at half speed - noting changes in inflection and over/undertones in order to express these on a staff and meld them with live instrumentation - requires a different kind of listening and different type of expression on the staff. Each scream delivered by Hitchcock characters have their own colour when slowed down and analysed. Note: Dissecting Regan’s voice in The Exorcist = terrifying. This wasn’t meant to happen.

Sasktronica

Season 1 (2017)

-----

Episode 1: Pictionary

Setting: Living Room

Four situated around a table, playing

Pictionary. One person draws the Sasktronica

card, expresses disbelief, instructs fellow

game player to turn over the hourglass timer,

and starts to draw the outline of Saskatchewan

on a sketchpad - repeating this, frantically

writing faster and faster (as though in a

trance) until the pencil almost goes through

the page. The guessing partner touches arm,

gasps and says quietly, maybe whispering: “Is

it….Sasktronica?”

I spent a lot of time looking at televisions throughout the 1970s and 80s - from both the ‘consumer’ vantage point and from behind the scenes: a.k.a. the innards. As the daughter of a television salesman and repairman I was privy to all frames of reference. Three different things were happening: television design was quickly progressing, television content and viewership were quickly expanding, and the schematics and inner components of televisions were becoming more elaborate and, thus, captivating. A great time for television.

The Golden Age of Television

In urbex and rurex we find the exploration and excavation of hidden, lost, abandoned, forgotten, and decayed ruins of cities, towns, grain elevators, etc. In my Urbexploitation series urbex and rurex are absorbed and recast for chamber music, melding visual and sonic footage with live ensemble, depicting the ‘sound of’ secret passageways and reverberant man-made caves, hidden trapdoors, wrong turns, labyrinthine pathways, musty wallpaper, precipitous stairwells to nowhere, and creeping spectres.

I apply these notions of urbex and rurex to physical scores: ruins of themes, decayed melodies, notation written to resemble wallpaper, missing notes, holes in scores, ripped pages, burned staves, cut outs of scores used to ‘patch up’ other scores.

urbex & rurex

What I perceive as offshoots of the phenomenon: primitive GPS systems, corrupt google maps, and 8-bit simulations are also integrated as musical and visual building blocks over which the human players climb and explore.

Ben Reimer in Urbexploitation: Leave Nothing But Footprints, Break Nothing But Silence ©2017

Schematica circuit Bent ScoreS

Books and binders of schematics were as common as musical scores in my house during my childhood. The two have become interchangeable to me - rewiring, erasing, bending, melting, short circuiting the components of a score to find another way.

The 4th Wall, The 5th Wall

The film and screen in my multimedia works are treated as ensemble members. The music and images are written simultaneously and are interrelated - and the film components are notated in the score to allow for complete melding with the live performer. The live performer does not play on top of this or through this but is intertwined within this.

Live performers are the catalysts for all elements. They are the living humans engaging with the icons on screen and in the soundtrack. Some of the characters on screen are no longer living, or possibly have been forgotten (arguably considered no longer relevant in the eyes of Hollywood). But none of these are expected to appear in a concert hall as part of classical or concert music piece. The score and performers form the ‘recontextualizer’, solidifying this musical context. The film and soundtrack are orchestrated in the same way I write for ensemble, but it’s the third member (pianist) that confirms it place in the musical (and, furthermore, notated, concert music) world. The three (visuals, prerecorded sound and live performance) must meld completely to reach that transformative state.

The idea of breaking the 4th wall, usually defined as characters on screen who address the audience, begins to shift. When characters on stage engage with those on screen, or appear on screen while performing live - effectively interacting with difference versions of themselves - expands the perception of the 4th wall or the 5th wall*. The presence of a singer will alter this further - as they face and engage with the audience, but also turn and interact with the on screen characters. In addition, the placement of miniature televisions within the footage, displaying stills from the footage or the performer on stage - further plays with that notion. Each screen introduced into the performance whether on stage or within the footage presents an additional dimension.

*It’s been suggested that the 5th wall could be social media related where the people who usually correspond online are now physically in the same room. But this is not the 5th wall I’m looking at.

FILTHY FIFTEENTHE

Aspects of news footage (i.e. the pitch and inflection in PMRC members' voices, the rhythmic gestures that emerge during Zappa's animated display of disdain for the PMRC, etc.) are extracted, manipulated and shaped into musical material, becoming a type of instrument, which is coloured and transformed live by musicians. The orchestration includes a percussion set-up labelled ‘The Censorship Kit’ as it integrates a typewriter, duct tape, chains, ripped paper, saw blades, etc.

Taking its title from the notorious list of ‘offensive songs’ compiled by the Parents’ Music Resource Center in the mid-1980s, The Filthy Fifteen is my interpretive, stylized documentary on censorship, referencing specifically the PMRC and its impact on music in the 1980s.

There’s an obsessive quality to Lynch’s aesthetic that I share. He sees the world differently than other film makers and is very connected to his subconscious and dreams.

He is like a conduit for surreal visions that come to him and he wants to document these images and feelings, which is what I feel art is about. There’s always something subversive - things that are hidden that don’t reveal themselves until after several viewings. Even then you’re not sure what it means but you’re always thinking about it.

His films are in one way very grounded in reality (the characters and scenarios could very well exist) but they steadily become twisted until you’re not sure what you’re seeing or experiencing. This is something I find I naturally do as a composer and perhaps this is the reason for my affinity with his work.

In writing the études I wanted to convey the wide spectrum of emotion that I experience when watching his films. The études are my interpretation of both the moments within the films and the techniques of the director. It’s the Foley sounds and the dialogue that I work with, more often than the soundtrack itself.

These moments are idiosyncratic - they only happen in one place and sometimes only for a split second - i.e. Diane Ladd’s pitch inflection, the rich overtones in Nicholas Cage’s scream synchronizing with the heavy metal scream on the radio, the fabricated non-sequitur language in Cooper’s Dream from Twin Peaks. I want these sounds and moments to extend and develop into a journey of twists and turns - kind of like a fever dream where elements from your experiences of the day become more vivid and unpredictable. And this is just the beginning. The characters on screen now need to interact with the live performer.

DaViD LYnch ÉtuDeS

When I was a young teen - this would have been in the mid-to-late 80s - I would visit my friends in Regina, Saskatchewan, and somehow got caught up in the fractious mall wars that were erupting at the time.

My friends had pledged allegiance to the Northgate Mall. If anyone from the Southland Mall showed their faces at Northgate, tempers flared. It was pretty intense.

I hadn’t thought about it too much until recently when I received two envelopes in the mail. One from the Southland Mall, and one from the Northgate Mall. Each contained a cassette and sheet music of songs and chants encouraging me to return to the malls.

Created for Music on Main’s The Composer Essay ProjectText by Nicole Lizée, Composer In Residence (2016-2019)

Design and silkscreen by Todd Stewart

Called a “brilliant musical scientist” (CBC), award winning composer and video artist Nicole Lizée creates new work from an eclectic mix of influences including the earliest MTV videos, turntablism, Hitchcock, and glitch. Her commission list of over 50 works includes the Kronos Quartet, Carnegie Hall, BBC Proms, the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, and the San Francisco Symphony.Originally from Gravelbourg, Saskatchewan, she has been based in Montreal for 22 years.

Todd Stewart is an illustrator and artist. Formerly from Saskatchewan, he now resides in Montreal and runs a small-scale silkscreen studio. He has worked with Nicole on visuals and posters for several of her live performances.

www.nicolelizee.comwww.todd-stewart.tumblr.com

www.musiconmain.ca