Lawrence Ball – Method Music (Navona Records)

0

Lawrence Ball’ Method Music takes its impetus from, and is co-produced by, the Who’ Pete Townsend. Townsend, it seemed, had long been looking for a way to realise his Lifehouse project, an almost sci-fi concept of taking data about individual listeners and converting it into music tailor made to suit their personalities, a sonic portrait of sorts. In 2007 and 2008, Townsend and Ball hosted a website called The Lifehouse Method which enacted this idea, creating thousands of individualised pieces of music. Method Music is a double album of tracks formed from these initial experiments.

It’s an engaging concept, but what interests me most about the album is the strange junctions it finds between seemingly opposing genre ideologies. For example, Method Music scored high praise recently in Pitchfork, of all places, where it was lauded as a prime example of the so-called “emergence of indie-classical”. This is an odd position to occupy, between the often aloof traditionalism (or sometimes equally aloof avant-gardism) of classical and the self-conscious “nowness” of indie, but there is something to it. Certainly the John Adams-esque sheen of the music places the album within (admittedly the more populist end) of classical but the concept that underpins the music is the kind of neat, almost gimmicky, idea that seems to better fit blogging, re-linking and other methods of the indie hype machine.

At another level, Method Music finds a similarly strange juxtaposition between algorithmic composition and minimalism. For big-name, early algorithmic composers, such as Stockhausen and Xenakis, the use of algorithmic systems was a way to boycott their own taste and create music that was logical but sounded unlike anything before it. The results, though frequently interesting, tend towards the rhythmically unpredictable and the harmonically dense. Lawrence Ball’ algorithms, however, seem to churn data into locked, tonal grooves that sound more like minimalist works by Terry Riley and John Adams, full of tiny melodic nuances that overlap to create pleasant, large scale textures.

There is a propulsive energy to the way the tracks move. Ostensibly static, they are filled with organic development and atomic shifts in rhythm. The ingenuity of concept and form is let down a little, however, by the sounds themselves. The album uses software emulators to mimic a wide variety of orchestral and rock instruments. For the majority of the album, the sounds are so densely overlaid that one doesn’ think too much about what they are emulating but every now and then, a almost-real-but-unreal violin or piano will crop up, creating a sudden feeling of uncomfortable artificiality – a musical equivalent to animation’ “uncanny valley’. Often, concept driven music such as this suffers from a case form over function (method over music, if you like) but Method Music seems to manage both – an interesting concept that’s realisation creates a sound world which is interesting in its own right.

Henry Andersen

Share.

About Author

Leave A Reply