Skiks – Compulse (Split Notes)

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Skiks is one musical face of percussionist/producer/composer/improviser Bruce Hamilton. Compulse, his most recent album under the Skiks moniker, admirably manages to sound completely unlike any music I have heard before with its oddball fusions of Hip-Hop and Techno derived grooves, computer emulations of acoustic instruments and squalls of electronic noise. Much of the album’ unusual sound is tied up with its use of xenharmonic music’ alien textures.

Xenharmonic music is best defined by what it is not. It is not equi-tempred music. The pitches it uses are not those of the standard, Western, twelve-tone scale. Instead it uses quarter tones, sixths of tones and even smaller gradations of pitch. Such tunings have existed for centuries in Balinese Gamelan. In more recent years microtones crop up in works by Penderecki, Cage, Ligeti, Stockhausen, Grisey, Ives and many more of the last century’ most influential composers. Microtones can even be found popular music (Radiohead’ All I Need for example). In recent years, unconventional tunings seem to be emerging ever more readily – due in part to the newfound of ease of achieving such pitches on computers. (There are even several “Xenharmonic Alliances’ collecting in the many folds of the internet)

Despite its gradual infiltration into the musical consciousness, xenharmonic music still sounds bizarre. Where it is used effectively it can create sonic effects quite unlike those achievable with conventional tuning. When Penderecki uses microtones they provide him a means of blanketing the frequency spectrum, creating blocks of tone that cannot be unpicked in any harmonic sense. Where Grisey uses unusual tunings they mirror the natural mathematics of spectral analysis. Where such tunings are used ineffectively however, they can sound annoying, naff, or just like mistakes.

The biggest flaw in Compulse is that it too often falls into the pitfall of treating xenharmonic scales as if they were conventional scales which, of course, they are not. Take, for example, “Bomper’ a glitchy Jazz workout in which the VST piano is tuned microtonally. Whilst a few of the chords are interesting, by-and-large, the grating effect is of listening to a piano that badly needs tuning. The notes of “Tubbies’, similarly, sound completely disconnected, the track’ odd tuning more a source of irritation than intrigue.

And yet, despite the failed experiments, the album has its successes too.  “Waiter, there’ a rage in’ creates an impossibly dense sonority of microtones and noise. “Birovy’ turns out a ghostly flittering of tones. The result is an incredibly mixed album, some tracks impressively original, others basically unlistenable. Where the pieces work, they find new and occasionally beautiful places in the space between conventional tunings, where they are unsuccessful they sound like a primary school string orchestra.

Henry Andersen

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