JOHN LENNON & YOKO ONO - UNFINISHED MUSIC No 2; LIFE WITH THE LIONS. Zapple 01.
GEORGE HARRISON - ELECTRONIC SOUND. Zapple 02.
ZAPPLE'S first releases are idiomatic examples of contrasting types of modern European music. It's good to see the Beatles doing something uncommercial. And I hope Zapple will eventually use committed musical innovators, as well as people from other fields profiting by their work.
The Lennon-Ono album is a fine introduction to the movement inspired by John Cage. It's not that the East Ham apprentices and Hampstead undergraduates I've played it for enjoyed it more than they would say, Cardew, it's simply that names so firmly linked with admass publicity and selling seem somehow more real to them. But where admass musics deal in abstractions - respecting only those aspects of sound on which the mind can erect its own ideas of 'rhythm' (clockwork), 'melody' (church and nursery tunes), 'form' (repetition) and 'meaning' - Yoko Ono and John Lennon show they understand Cage's ideal of focusing attention on the reality of sounds. By making forms which resist intellectualising, the musicians leave the listener nothing to do but to listen, to experience the content in all its meaningless and inexhaustible fascination.
The meat of the album is Side 1, 'Cambridge 1969'. Notes on the live performance:
'Wolfwoman (Robert Ashley's classic 'Wolfman' uses long vocal cries distorted by amplification) and feedback (through knobs on guitar and loudspeaker, varying position of guitar in space relative to speaker, no instrumental sounds). Voice v. metallic, later shorter notes, phrases, vibrato, letters (vowels, y, w). Later guitar front propped against speaker and back prodded with foot, voice more Aylerish. Lennon esp. good - pure calm exploration of tone-colour and intensity phenomena, no rhetoric or 'ideas', just attending to the sounds. They should think hard about giving up everything and getting serious about new music, perhaps move to Rome and join Musica Electronica Viva. They could survive.'
And John Stevens and John Tchicai intervene very nicely near the end.
Side 2 has 'Baby's Heartbeat', a marvellous rich churning I never knew we made; 'Two Minutes Silence'; 'Radio Play', with perhaps too much attention to petrified structures instead of the (teeming) sounds they're made of; a shamelessly self-advertising jingle called 'No Bed For Beatle John', a kind of verbal 'Two Virgins'.
Harrison's album is establishment music in the idiom of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Centre, the models being Babbitt and others too numerous to warn against. The materials of this school are electronically generated (as if natural and electronically-modified sounds, being richer, were too interesting) and then composed out of existence (as if music was only to glorify the composer's cleverness, not for listening, and deviations from stilted regularity were forbidden). Sheep who think electronics equals trendiness (it's only another instrument) and lifeless academicism equals significance, will respect the hell out of this record. I find it very smoothly professional, and absolutely empty.