Music of Transparent Means - Selected Live Recordings

From Iggy on the cover of Raw Power to Black Sabbath, circa 1980, in Milwaukee, from the ’52 Cleveland riot through to Suicide in Brussels, a healthy dose of chaos and danger is at the heart of all great rock music. So, it comes as no surprise to hear Alex Carpenter, the musician behind Music Of Transparent Means (MOTM), talk about chaos as core to the development of his music: “Even though there was this purity and mathematical elegance throughout some of the thinking and theory, what I remember almost more than that was the chaos and the mess, the forcefulness, the saturation and obliteration. The clear ideal gave way to this kind of loud, intense chaos, which in turn opened a path back to the clear.”

Music Of Transparent Means has always struck me as a particularly rock-reverent kind of minimalism, as though Alex has removed all the excess baggage that rock has picked up over the decades and focused on its most important aspects: noise and intensity, energy and mayhem. There is, of course, a great tradition of rock minimalism, from the Velvet Underground through AC/DC to Rhys Chatham and Glenn Branca, on into Band Of Susans, Spacemen 3 and Loop, but Alex’s music is curious for the way it flips the script on those examples and gives us an altogether different take on the intersection of these two forces.

You can hear the ‘elegant chaos’ of Alex’s compositions throughout this second archival release by the ensemble, which is filled with music that’s both seriously beautiful and deliriously serious. If the first MOTM release on De la Catessen gave an extended view into Alex’s work, with one long piece per side, here we have excerpts from performances throughout the years, allowing a more expansive take on both process and outcome. What strikes me, listening to this music, is the way that Alex indeed allows chaos to take its own non-form, to coalesce and congeal into huge, abraded blocks of sound, to allow the meeting of musicians, many from different walks of life, to morph into one throbbing brain at the centre of the sonorous universe.

Hearing “Rose Street Womb” for the first time in over a decade, I am also momentarily surprised by how much it echoes another favourite composition of mine, Arthur Russell’s early ‘80s piece, Tower Of Meaning. In “Rose Street Womb”, musicians are each given one short phrase, or a series of them, “which were continually repeated (either fully or partially) and continually elongated,” Alex recalls. “Performers were encouraged to listen less to their own part and more to the overall ensemble.” Here, you can hear that collective mind flame into being, where a ticker-taping tessellation of tones builds abstract architectures. It’s a collectivity that’s echoed in the brief excerpt from “Mountain Piece 2”, for massed drums, though this concerns itself more with the dynamic of rise and fall, and the collapsing of our distinct sense of rhythm and texture; it’s an exhilarating rush of projected energy.

By contrast, the woozy, sea-sick strands of melody in “Burial Music” obliterate themselves via the delay feedback system that Alex has constructed (shades of Fripp and Eno in the (No Pussyfooting) mirror-verse here), eventually leading to simple phrases collapsing in on each other, “resulting in a sort of ‘burial of melody’,” Alex confides. This focus on delay as a structuring force is also evident in the following “Second Presencing”, where Alex draws out what he terms an “audio canvas” by “increasing the delay time to over five seconds, thus opening a space in which I could react musically and build upon burgeoning patterns and gestures,” with a “slow change of harmonic centre”. If the delay pedal is so often the curse of lazy experimental and post-rock music, an easy route to padding out the tonal spectrum, Alex, on the other hand, uses it with indeed a painterly caress, using the parameters and extremities of this phenomenon to offer different ways of composing and responding to sound as it unfolds in real time, in front of our ears.

The closing excerpt from a 2002 performance of “Disappearance #1”, for wine glasses and bowed guitars, has particular personal resonance for me – attending this show at SEAS Gallery was the first time I’d encountered Music Of Transparent Means, on the recommendation of Alex’s and my mutual friend (and general all-round mensch of Adelaide music) Nigel Koop. I recall being struck by the eloquence of the sound and tested by its duration. For Alex, “Disappearance #1” was a significant piece – “the result of a painful re-entry back into performance after a long period of getting hung up on theory,” he remembers, “in particular the history of Western tuning and the idea of returning to some rarefied (and impossible) ‘perfect sound.’ Writing in just intonation definitely helped with the re-entry, but ultimately I realised I wanted more energy and chaos, even if it was in the service of striving towards some type of perfection.”

When I interviewed Australian musician Oren Ambarchi many years ago, I asked him why he was so moved by minimalist composers like Phill Niblock. His answer was simple: “I like it because it rocks.” Listening, with some intensity, to Alex’s music after some time away from it, I’m struck by the way it also collapses dualities – elegance and chaos; body and mind; heart and head; rock and minimalism. In here, we can experience something that’s fundamental, I think, to what we’re all looking for, perhaps moreso on the level of the unconscious, whether we’re lost in the zone at a heady recital or caught up in the tidal waves of noise rolling off the stage at a gig; deep, identity-dissolving sensory obliteration.

Like being caught in the middle of the holocaust of sound that my bloody valentine erupt into at the end of their gigs, during “You Made Me Realise”, you’re blissfully lost, and not a little concussed and confused. “The goal was to exhaust people first,” Alex concludes. “To get them to a point where these perceptual habits stopped serving them. Like meditating on a word until it loses its referential significance or magnifying an image until its normally recognisable shape becomes unstable. It’s only after these surface layers start breaking away that we can start clearing a path towards a more direct engagement with the material.”

© Jon Dale, 2021