ON JEFFREY ALLPORT: QUIET NOISE
Anju Singh and Alexander Muir
DEMOCRATIC MUSIC
As is the case for many from his generation, Jeffrey Allport has arrived at his current music making process through considerable contact and involvement in the fields of noise and free improvised music. Time spent living in Osaka, Japan in the mid-90s afforded him the opportunity to experience firsthand a very dynamic and innovative ‘scene’ helmed by groups like the Boredoms and the Incapacitants: groups whose work he admires a great deal. Perhaps a little less obvious would be his fascination with and influences from more traditional ritualistic music from all over the world. In interview, Allport claimed to have been particularly taken with the space and rhythms of Korean ritualistic music and Japanese Gagaku. These influences stirred an interest in his current music-making endeavours; however, there was also a degree of pragmatism guiding his approach. In Japan, living in relatively close and small quarters with frequent collaborator Tim Olive, he was forced toward a creative approach regarding the size and volume of his instrument. One of these creative solutions was child sized drum kit, fit for travel and for use in his attic space, which he used and experimented with extensively while in Japan. At this time, partly due to domestic volume constraints, but also very much due to the lack of listening maligning many louder musics, Allport and Olive concentrated on exploring the quieter possibilities of noise music. What resulted was a discretion in volume that must have seemed as good a method as any to resolve a hazier music-making field into something clearer, featuring more discrete voices. This process could be understood as one that reassesses the nature of the listening/expressing/responding dialogue being staged. Over the course of our interview, Jeffrey toyed with the notion of democracy as it might pertain to music—and this question of distinct voices and their interrelation is certainly one point of entry for this notion.
FREEDOM AND IMPOSITION
With a minimal kit, Jeffrey’s sound palate zeroes in on quiet sounds that are not typically given credence in drum kit playing. At times, it seems almost as though he accents the exact negative image of the range of many players; seizing on many of the unwanted, or ‘accidental’ byproducts of a more conventional playing mode. To follow the democratic conceit , we might go so far as to suggest that Allport is ‘voicing minorities’, which, to a certain extent, necessitates the extraction of the louder sounds a drum kit often makes. Here, one can begin to feel the weight of the politics at play in making certain quieter entities audible. The process of giving space to (sound) minorities is a sign of Allport’s generosity as a player (both with the sounds of his drum as well as with his collaborators and listeners). His listening-based playing approach can be viewed as a sort of liberating act: by giving the sounds space, he is freeing them. Yet, this seems to be a problematic way to conceive of this, as the equivocation of “giving space to minorities” with “freedom” seems flawed. Although it is true that Allport provides space for some of the ‘innate’ albeit less acknowledged qualities of the drum kit to freely resonate, in turn, he also forces and prods sounds from the kit itself, inducing a mutation of the kit through many external preparations and interventions. If it cannot be said that Allport (and other players of his generation like Burkhard Beins, Gunter Müller, Tim Barnes and Sean Meehan) wholly quit the virtuosity arms race of free-improv, it certainly takes a sidestep as exploration of preparations becomes more important. Allport describes how gathering tools for his performances in Japan consisted of regular trips to the 100 yen store. There, he would find standard household items such as combs and wire for use in experimentation with his instrument. These “tools” allowed Allport to push the boundaries of the instrument itself, warping the identity of the drumkit. Even its functionality begins to shift from a rhythm or pulse-driving object to one that can provide texture, or, at times, melody. What we are describing here is a twofold approach that Allport’s performances and practice embody: while Allport is listening carefully to the drum and providing freedom for its innate sounds to be heard, he is also imposing upon it new sounds by manipulating its physical makeup and changing its original proposed function.
LEVELING THE PLAYING FIELD
While Allport seems particular about his collaborators, they nonetheless come from various backgrounds and possess various degrees of formal training-or lack thereof. Allport has collaborated with players who have arrived at this music from the fields of jazz, electronics, noise, punk, and even classical music. With this diversity, it is clear that the sole unifiers in these performance contexts are one’s ears and one’s sense of placement. Here, listening becomes momentous as the players may very well be unfamiliar with one another’s typical playing fields, and even with their own role within this new context, despite their level of musical training. We believe that this unfamiliarity may enforce a certain leveling of expertise, which results in an even “playing” field. However, this is not to say that what results is some kind of post-historical music making practice, but rather a whole array of musical understandings, and their attendant temporalities, reconciling in an area where vocabulary and method have not yet been established. One can take the act of sight-reading away from a classically trained musician in this context, but this restriction does not preclude a response imbued with a classical sensibility.What results is a piece that has elements inspired by a number of things influencing the player, which could include past musical training, but just as importantly includes personal experience, emotion, mental thoughts, or even visual stimuli. Players, due to the discarding of the need for some kind of musical influence, are in a position to react more intuitively during a performance of this type. The piece that is performed by these players is a consequence of what the participating players’ ears have interpreted and placed together based on the qualities of their sounds and the potential influences mentioned above. Although this approach at first glance may seem vague, the results are beginning to present themselves in such a way that this approach to music making could be considered to have sprout into its own genre.
ISOLATED QUIETLY
As a co-curator of “Your Hit Parade”, Allport was instrumental in the staging of a 3-day festival that provided Vancouver with an opportunity for a concentrated glance at the kind of music making processes described herein. The festival brought together a host of musicians drawn both from the local/regional community and an international base, playing in different combinations over the duration. This format is becoming more and more familiar in cities that might be construed as ‘hubs’ for this sort of music, but here, in Vancouver, it is still relatively rare. Allport himself occupies a somewhat obscure position within the Vancouver music scene, even if he seems to have gained the admiration and attention of many. This respect is mutual, as Allport expresses affiliation with and an admiration for some of the more established local experimental communities, such as Fake Jazz Wednesdays, and the sound art/experimental scene at large. He nonetheless concedes that his work sometimes feels a bit isolated, in part simply due to its volume dynamics demanding in directions opposed to those of a venue like the Cobalt, which plays host to most Fake Jazz proceedings. The extent to which this situation is problematic is debatable. Allport expresses an appreciation for the opportunity to interact with a host of different listening/performing communities as a result of his marginal standing. Allport seems to shy from a language fixated on innovation (something which plagues the discourse surrounding some of his international collaborators), but perhaps he stands a better chance of keeping things fresh when he is forced to perform in a wholly heterogeneous arts community; finding contemporaries in sculptors or installation artists as often as musicians. Whether or not this situation might change in the wake of a relatively successful festival remains to be seen.
AUDIENCE PARTICIPATION
The qualities of diversity and unfamiliarity are equally as pertinent with respect to the audience as they are to the players involved. As has already been emphasized, listening is of arch importance for Allport’s music-making process. Players collaborating with Allport, as participants in the creation of a piece, listen carefully to the sounds other players create and respond appropriately while drawing on their own musical experiences and backgrounds. Audience members, in the context of performances like Allport’s, are expected to participate in a similar way and their contributions are indeed significant. Due to the relatively quiet nature of the performance, the role of the audience as “active listeners” is important to Allport. During a performance, Allport will wait to start playing until the audience has agreed to play their role in the piece. If this role is executed in a way that the performance demands, the audience members will refrain from creating sounds in the space so that other sounds, those created by Allport and collaborators, have space and are audible despite their relatively low dynamic volumes. It is within the context of a collective listening agreement that the audience and players implicitly distribute the duties of the addition and subtraction of sounds during the performance. This form of listening is distinct from that espoused in John Cage’s 4:33. Although Allport’s performances share much in common with this piece specifically, such as the value of silence (Allport uses silence often in his work) and listening, there is a clear difference in the concepts that Cage and Allport are exploring. In 4:33, Cage composed a piece with a set length of time during which there would be no sound created by the player(s) of the piece. As in Allport’s work, the “players” (audience) in 4:33 play an important role; although a very different one. In Allport’s performances, the role of audience members is that they refrain from adding sounds during the performance and this is the agreement. In 4:33, however, the audience members are unexpectedly placed into a scenario during which their own sounds are highlighted. Rather than having audience members agree to be silent for the purposes of active listening to sounds created by the players, Cage has audience members actively listen to the sounds created by the room and one another. It is not surprising that Allport mentions Cage as an influence on his work. There are very clear points of reconciliation between their works. The interesting thing about this comparison is not just the differences between Allport’s and Cage’s treatment of silence and expectations of their audience, but rather their point of departure on the act of listening: Allport seems to want audience members to listen carefully to the less audible sounds of objects they may believe they are already familiar with, whereas Cage just wants audience members to listen.
ALLPORT AS A SOLO ARTIST
As Jeffrey himself noted, he does not perform solo on a regular basis. The concepts of listening and communication between players are key features of Allports’ approaches to music making. In improvised music, there is an awareness of the dangers of simply shuttling through a repertory of techniques and sounds discovered by the artist in a performance. In a solo setting, the danger of employing seemingly arbitrary techniques could be greater than in a collaborative piece. It is obvious that with other players present, the artist can be swayed in and out of the act of simply displaying her ability to perform a specific technique, to using the technique to contribute to a larger piece. It is easy to imagine examples of this: it is an especially troublesome area for some virtuosic guitar players known for having performances that are not musically interesting compositions, but that instead just show what the player can do on the guitar. This is an interesting problem, especially when we start to consider the difference between improvisational “music” versus extended techniques/virtuosity on a particular instrument. It may be the case that Allport is attempting to draw on both of these areas, but we believe, based on Allport’s appreciation of musical continuity and listening as an act of playing, that he is looking to create music more than to showcase his techniques. Further, Allport seems to shy away from the role of composer, but understands that in a solo setting, his role begins to slide toward that end of the composer/improvisor continuum. At the best of times, the music generated through group improvisation in this field seems fundamentally different from composition, for better and for worse. The diversity of players and approaches can guide the music into unfamiliar territories that the premeditation of a single-minded composition cannot access. Placing a musician of Allport’s constitution into a solo context amounts to dropping him into a fascinating liminal territory. Being the only player and only sound-producer, the amount of space that exists in solo improvisational performance leads to the chance for the piece to either be musical, with well-considered techniques used to achieve a compelling sound with texture, voice, space, and tone all considered; or to simply seem like a mishmash of sounds thrown together to represent a repetoire of techniques. Therein, lies much of the vitality of Jeffrey’s work.
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A response to: Jeffrey Allport