It would have been the third in a trilogy of pieces we co-wrote for the Guardian, including a moderately infamous critique of world music and a defense of hyper-masculine music like rap, metal and Electronic Body Music (for the deconstruction of male identity it afforded).
We were really pushing it with this one though and I'm not surprised it was not given the green light. Shame, though.
Big up to David Stubbs (whose copy of Jan Garbarek's Paths, Prints I taped back in the day and thereby got turned onto the ECM thing in the first place) and to ECM-head Jonathan Bowen (who turned me on some more in that odd lacuna-like year of 1989).
^^^^^^^^^^^^
This year Germany's ECM record label
celebrates its
twentieth
anniversary. Because it doesn't promote itself, ECM
has always had a
low profile: this despite its commercial
success in the
Seventies with artists like Pat Metheny, Keith
Jarrett and Chick
Corea, and a current roster that ranges
from acclaimed
improviser Jan Garbarek to the Estonian
composer Arvo
Part. This relative obscurity stems from the
label's founder,
Manfred Eicher, who has zealously preserved
his vision of ECM
as an island apart from the modishness and
market-consciousness
of the music industry, whose output he
characterises as
"environmental pollution".
But it's this very "apartness"
that has proved so
attractive to the
increasing number of pop musicians who have
fallen under
ECM's spell during the Eighties. David
Sylvian
left behind his
glam icon past as lead singer of Japan in
order to pursue a
solo career in 'ambient pop', and has
recorded several
albums with musicians from the ECM stable.
'Dreampop'
experimentalists A.R. Kane have explicitly cited
ECM as an
influence, and other groups (Cocteau Twins, Talk
Talk, Durutti
Column, Hugo Largo) have much in common with
ECM's quest for
"the most beautiful sound next to silence".
As well as it's influence on the pop
avant-garde, ECM is
important because
of the way it illustrates what both "New
Age" music
and "world music" (those buzz concepts of the
Eighties) could
and should have been like. New Age music
tends to be the
aural equivalent of a Radox bath: it's
therapeutic, a
palliative that helps sustain the listener
against, but also
within the demands of modern, capitalist
life. Like
vitamin supplements or homeopathic remedies, New
Age records are
little capsules of pastoralism that enable
the stressed-out
executive to cope with urban life. New Age's
soothing
emulsions of sound, like Transcendental Meditation
for businessmen,
are a tranquiliser rather than a path to
enlightenment.
But ECM's "tranquility" is debilitating rather
than restorative:
it's about fixing your consciousness on
something until
you lose all sense of yourself and your
separateness. The crystalline, open structures of John
Abercrombie's or
Ralph Towner's music suggest not so much
withdrawal as a
hyper-alert state of suspension, heightened
receptivity.
This "meditational" aspect of ECM
music is close to
the Eastern idea
of nirvana: the serenity that comes with the
cessation of
desire. In his later years, Freud came to
believe in the
existence of a "nirvana principle" or "death
instinct"
inherent in all organic life: a drive that seeks to
return to the
lowest possible point of tension. Freud
believed that
human anxiety was caused by the repression of
this natural
'death instinct', resulting in a futile pursuit
of immortality
through wordly achievement. 'Nirvana' is the
state-of-grace
that comes with the recovery of contact with
the 'death
instinct': a sublime inertia where you're wide
open to the world
rather than restlessly engaged in leaving
your mark upon
it.
'Nirvana' is, in fact, a kind of living
death or 'life-
in-death'. So
it's interesting that Manfred Eicher describes
ECM music in
terms of entombment, of sound that is "burying
itself in a crypt
of its own making". It's a metaphor that
connects with the
very funereal/Egyptian images of 'cool
jazz' found in
Miles Davis or Sun Ra. Other sources of this
meditational/monastical
condition are the pervasive
Mediaevalism of
ECM (its interest in liturgical, devotional
music) and also
its attraction to the Romantics, with their
awe before the
"sublime" and "terrible". (ECM's Russian
pianist Valery
Afannasiev talks about music that should be
fatal in its
beauty, such as Gesualdo's madrigals).
ECM suggest this blurring of boundaries,
this blissful
oneness with the
world, by their recurrent use of LP cover
images and titles
that suggest immense, undifferentiated
spaces - polar
landscapes, tundra, deserts, barren cliffs -
expanses that are
unchanging over the millenia. ECM's
artists never
seem to have any referents, no locus in time or
space. This nomadism, exemplifed by titles like
"Wayfarer"
and "Paths,
Prints", is based in the intuition that true
bliss is to be
nowhere, bewildered in the wilderness.
(It's
revealing that
the root meaning of "utopia" is nowhere).
This placelessness distinguishes ECM from
the "world
music" that
it has supposed to have prefigured by a decade or
more. ECM do draw on ethnic music, but this is
world music
without any of
the Western, liberal ideologies attached to
it: there's
nothing rootsy, convivial or feistily "authentic"
about it. Different cultures are crossed at will. An
artist
like Stephen
Micus uses instruments from every conceivable
time and place,
and even invents his own. These ethnic or
ancient musics
are often "inauthentic" too: where music
hasn't been
written down (e.g. for the albums of Mediaeval
songs) new music
is composed, or music from completely
different times
and places borrowed for the accompaniment.
Nor is there
world music's dogged adherence to Third World
or folk sources.
ECM musicians also borrow from elitist,
court cultures,
as in Paul Hillier's troubador courtly-love
songs from 12th
Century Provence, or Micus' use of
instruments from
early European orchestras. Or there's Arvo
Part, who gave up
writing serial music, and turned to a
minimalist,
neo-Mediaeval partsong. Or the improviser Keith
Jarrett playing a
Bach stripped of baroque mannerism or
modern musicianly
interpretation and "feeling".
Unlike world
music, ECM
doesn't try to rediscover pop's Dionysiac values
elsewhere; unlike
"authentic" classical performers, it
doesn't try to
recreate music as it was.
ECM music, then, is a quest for nirvana
through the
transcending of
time and place. ECM music offers the listener
a gentle
apocalypse (an "end of history" and an "end of
geography"):
a tiny foretaste of eternity. Perhaps this
timelessness is
actually the most timely phenomenon today:
perfect rest at
the heart of the pop world's hyper-active
clatter, an
"endless end" to pop's relentless turnover of
the new. ^^^^^^^^^^
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