Sean Derrick Cooper Marquardt by Mildred Klaus.
 
Sean Derrick Cooper Marquardt makes music that is right for our time. Challenging. Difficult. Powerful. Brilliant. That kinda thing.

Plague covers the planet. Cities shut down. Rioters loot and burn. Welcome to the New Normal. Put on your mask and shop this way.

There’s gotta be a way out. Maybe Marquardt’s music offers one?

I was supposed to talk with Marquardt sometime in June. Or was it July? The days merge. One day is much the same as the next—under a lockdown that gave me one hour-a-day outside (for exercise) and one trip (only if really, really, really necessary) to the store for essentials. Sean Derrick Cooper Marquardt could be one of those essentials. He’s not to everyone’s taste I know but his music is important and relevant. Especially today.

We should have spoken together in June or July but then his nephew was shot dead on the streets. An horrific tragedy. What can you say? I sent condolences. Waited. Waited. Didn’t know what else to do. Looked back on what I’d once written:

Sean Derrick Cooper Marquardt is an American musician who lives in Germany. He has been making music since he was six-years-old. He started by writing songs or “texts” and “melodies” as he describes it before taking an interest in House Music in his teens. Sean began DJing, before moving from Chicago to Berlin, where he started singing and playing guitar with metal bands. It was in Europe that he began his interest in electronic music.

With a desire to balance both his love of electronic with metal, Sean produced drone, ambient and noise recordings, developing his own distinct form of “Accidental Guitar Music.”

“Accidental Guitar” is a holistic and grounded concept that includes three main aspects. The first of these is the creation of sounds and sound worlds by combining the guitar with distortion effects – a type of “routing” or “mapping” technique where the musician does not lose himself, however, but instead works in a deliberate manner with the tools available to him. The second dimension of “Accidental Guitar” is improvisation—an approach that Cooper Marquardt has chosen, systematically rejecting predetermined choreographies and all forms of rehearsal or planning. This applies not only to live performances, but also when making recordings in his studio. Finally, the third dimension to this concept is the specific situation that the musician encounters when playing: the atmosphere and setting, the persons, conditions and moods present in the space in question lead to a contextualisation of his music.

Sean has released over 500 recordings as solo artist, collaborative artist, or just playing on someone else’s tracks. He has performed across the world. Gigged. Toured. Played the festivals. When I approached him before to ask some Q&A he preferred to “create [an] article without using the question and answers normal modus of operation.”

Yeah, I know.

He wrote and said he wanted to do the same again and I should contact a guy called Nicholus. It’s a bit like speaking through an agent, or maybe a medium, or just selling myself to do PR—which ain’t what my job entails. If you push to be interviewed then you should be available to be interviewed—it’s a business—otherwise you’re just playing games and after all this was the second time Marquardt had opted out.

Who knows? Maybe it’s me? I wouldn’t be surprised. I don’t even talk to me…and I promised to write myself every week too…
 

Photograph by Bert Loewenherz.
 
More after the jump…

 
If you’re one of those people who wouldn’t be caught dead listening to new age music, I may have some bad news for you. It just so happens that, in 1989, a scientist working in the psychology department at Plymouth State College in New Hampshire conducted research on people who had undergone near-death experiences. The research seemed to conclude that the musical stylings of the pioneering new age musician Iasos (pronounced “ya’ sos”) scored the highest ratings in a survey of various types of music reported being heard by those who have undergone a near-death experience—most notably Iasos’ piece entitled “The Angels of Comfort.”

So, it might just be that new age music is the ONLY kind of music you’ll be caught dead listening to. Death metal can’t really hold a candle to actual death music, can it?

But then again, if you’ve heard “The Angels of Comfort,” you might conclude that you could very easily duplicate the same results in a survey of people who huff paint on a regular basis. I’m not necessarily suggesting that the heavenly music corporation producing these angelic choirs on high are the result of a lack of oxygen to the brain as vital organs shut down during the near-death experience, but it’s certainly a distinct possibility. For all I know, Iasos’ electronic noodlings sound the closest to an EKG machine or a ventilator. In any event, Iasos may or may not be on to something otherworldly.

Although many would credit Mike Oldfield’s 1973 masterpiece Tubular Bells as the seed that started the popularization of ambient sound, it lacked a genre in which it could be placed. Most just labeled that album as “progressive rock,” for want of a better term. The ambient music that would come to be known as “new age” certainly owed a debt to Oldfield as well as the experimental works of Edgar Froese, Tangerine Dream, Can, Klaus Schulze, and various other musical visionaries. But the phrase “new age” had yet to be coined in 1973. That would take another two years.

Iasos was a major pioneer in the creation of the musical genre of new age. He was born in Greece but moved to America at an early age, migrating to the West Coast in the late ‘60s for the sole purpose of pursuing his musical vision. In 1975 he released his first album, Inter-Dimensional Music. It’s the kind of music to play while riding astrally projected elevators through the space-time continuum.
 

 
1975 was a heady year for “new age” culture; it is often cited as the year that the genre was created and the phrase was coined. That was also the year that Steven Halpern released his seminal and highly influential album Spectrum Suite. Even more important to some is the fact that 1975 was the year that Brian Eno released his first fully ambient record Discreet Music, setting in motion decades of ambient recordings from the famed musician, producer, and all-around genius.

That’s right, kids. Eno’s Discreet Music is 40 years old now. And that’s how long Iasos—who should, by rights, be counted alongside those previously mentioned visionaries—has been churning out his own brand of new age and ambient sound. By my calculations, Iasos is approximately 68 years old. So, he’s still producing new age well into his old age. And he shows no signs of slowing down. His multilayered ambient droning drones as hard today as it did in 1975. 
 

Ambient Bandstand audiences rate Iasos: “Its got no discernible beat, and it’s easy to trance to.”
 
Iasos claims that he composes in collaboration with an inter-dimensional being that he calls “Vista.” According to Iasos, Vista is the true visionary and architect behind these complex soundscapes and compositions. Iasos merely serves as the conduit through which Vista operates and opens new windows on the musical world.

Thank Vista, Iasos has recently posted an incredibly trippy, short documentary to YouTube that was filmed in 1979 (four years after releasing his first album), and it shows him at the height of his creative genius. The documentary, which you can watch below, oscillates between Iasos talking about his musical approach and general philosophy and various musical performances. The documentary appears to show a truly bliss-filled musician talking about receiving the radio signals in his head from his “collaborator.”  He also speaks of a feminine counterpart to Vista that he calls “Crystal.”

According to Iasos, higher beings are interacting with humans to create a greater harmony, a paradise of music on earth. However, these higher beings practice a policy of non-interference and must be invited in. The more people who interact with these higher beings, the faster a paradise on earth will be formed. Convinced?

Pay attention to the fact that in this documentary, Iasos seems to laugh at less-than-appropriate times, like Dr. Julius Hibbert on The Simpsons. It’s also fascinating to see his home studio comprised of state-of-the-art analog equipment… for 1979. Marvel at his incredibly spiritual framing of electronic sounds: “Electrons are pure God beings and are very sensitive to God control.” He’s clearly operating on a much higher plane than the rest of us.
 

 
h/t Iasos’ website

 
Before the advent of recording media, a piece of music could be quite long without its duration meriting much notice, but when the mechanical limitations of the 7” 45rpm single codified the length of a song at about 3 1/2 minutes, the pop-listening western world really adapted its musical mindset to that standard, to the point where even a massive hit like “Hey Jude” drew anxious notice from radio for being 7 minutes long. And now there’s QuickHitz (“Twice the music, all the time”), a radio format that cuts off every song at the two-minute mark, which, if it catches on in a big way—and face it, have stranger things not caught on?—will surely result in loads of pop singles being produced at under two-minute lengths.

The Residents are prophetic yet again.

But in avant-garde classical and artrock circles, songs that seem crazy long by pop radio standards are a perfectly normal part of the listening experience. After all, what impact would Oneida’s infamous 14-minute, one note song “Sheets of Easter” have had if it were three minutes long? How about Television’s “Marquee Moon?” King Crimson’s “Starless?” Flaming Lips’ 24-hour song “7 Skies H3?” And those examples are all well within the rock idiom—I haven’t even broached the New Age, noise, and ambient genres. So many of us have been acculturated to think of long pieces of music as “pretentious” or “indulgent,” products of anti-populist ivory tower navel gazers who are hostile to average listeners. Well you know what? Fuck your shitty attention span.

The Fayetteville, AR composer Cheesy Nirvosa has been making glitchy, drony compositions since the mid-oughts, and under the name “crysknife007,” he’s established a YouTube channel to disseminate conceptual pieces of lengths that could fairly be seen as downright punitive to many listeners. These are often the sorts of things that, in a LaMonte Youngish kinda way, can be more interesting to talk about than actually listen to, especially since many of these works are 12 hours in duration. “12 Hours of Pi Being Dialed on a Rotary Phone.” “Yoda Laughs for 12 Hours.” “PSY Says HANGOVER for 12 Hours.” “6 Tone Car Alarm for 12 Hours.” (I recommend city dwellers skip that last one, it’s waaaaaaaay too much like ordinary life.)

But while a few of these ideas come off as overly winking and even mildly irritating noise-artist stunts, some of them are absolutely lovely—specifically, pieces made from looped ambient sounds culled from science fiction movies. The general thrum of Ridley Scott’s dystopian future Los Angeles filtered through Rick Deckard’s apartment windows in Blade Runner? That absolutely holds up as drone music, as does the TARDIS sound effect from Doctor Who and various spaceship engine sounds from the Alien and Star Wars franchises. I endorse playing more than one of these at once, remixing them yourselves in your browser with the pause and volume controls, whatever. Knock yourself out. Maybe even, I dunno, listen to one of ‘em for 12 hours.
 

 
More after the jump…

 
Neither of these acts need an introduction, so let’s just let the music speak for itself (a Burial remix of a track from Massive Attack’s forthcoming album):

Massive Attack vs Burial ‘Four Walls’
 

“Come To Daddy” sleeve painted on “SAW2” cassettes by Sami Havia
 
This is a treat for fans of IDM and ambient music - a 70 minute, 1996 Aphex Twin special from MTV UK’s Party Zone dance program. There’s an interview with Richard James, numerous videos, some live footage from the Big Love festival, and an extended extract from the Warp Records’ film Westworld, a collaboration between Aphex Twin and visual artists Stakker.

There’s always been something about James that has struck me as bratty - from the tales of driving tanks through central London to numerous reports from friends of spending relatively large sums on tickets only for James not to play, or not to play properly. This interview doesn’t really do much to dispel that, but it does give a bit of insight into his working methods at the time, and goddamit his tunes are good. So sit back, relax, and zone out:
 

 
With the Daft Punk soundtrack for Tron Legacy giving off some serious Vangelis and Jean Michel Jarre vibes, it seems like it is finally acceptable to be influenced by 80s-style electronic ambience. The album Does It Look Like I’m Here? by the band Emeralds (no “the” - that’s a Japanese surf-rock band) is one of the best examples of a modern take on this sound, and how to do it well.

Released on the Austrian label Editions Mego last year, it’s been a bit of a sleeper hit with the electronica and techno community, ending 2010 in many best-of lists. Full of washy synths, cliff-edge guitar dynamics, slowly building arpeggios and practically no drums, it brings to mind the aforementioned artists in their darkest and most introspective moments. It’s psychedelic, it’s moody, and for the want of a better term it’s progressive. I would imagine it’s a good soundtrack for certain kinds of herbal refreshment.
 

 
Emeralds - Genetic (part 1)
 

 
Emeralds - Double Helix
 

 
Emeralds - Does It Look Like I’m Here?
 

Emeralds have been gigging and recording for the last 4 or 5 years - Does It Look Like I’m Here? is their fourth album, and their most accessible so far. But they’re not from Greece, Scandinavia or Germany - the band actually hail from Ohio. Along with similar ballpark acts from the States like Zombi (from Pittsburgh), it makes me wonder if this kind of epic progressive-synth music doesn’t have the same negative cultural references there that it has in the UK? I know Tangerine Dream were pretty big in the US in their day. However, the cultural legacy of punk in Britain meant that they were seen as being super uncool. Thankfully the times have changed and we can now accept this as being simply great music. You can buy Does It Look Like I’m Here?, um, here.

 
If you enjoyed those slowed down versions of the Jurassic Park theme and Justin Beiber, and I know some of you did, I think you will like this mix by UK ‘s Optimo (Espacio). It’s a lovely, if slightly unsettling collection of beatless and atmospheric tracks, old and new. JD Twitch, one half of the influential Scottish DJ/production duo says:

I’d say this mix is beatless rather than ambient as a definition of ambient is ‘a background music without rhythmic elements’. That applies to some of the selections here but several of the tracks are definitely rhythmic in that they pulse or move forward without the need of a kick drum to propel them.

FACT mix 214 - Optimo (Jan ‘11) by factmag

Odd Machine – Phase In (edit)
Cindytalk – Our Shadow, Remembered
Alvo Noto & Ryuichi Sakamoto – Morning
This Mortal Coil – Song To The Siren (JD Twitch Reversion)
Zoviet France – The Decriminalisation Of Country Music
Sun City Girls – Come Maddalena
Forest Swords – The Light
Oneohtrix Point Never – Young Beidnahga
No Man – Days In The Trees
Tomita – Clair De Lune
Conrad Schnitzler – Ballet Statique
Peter Baumann – This Day
Reichmann – Wunderbar
Duet Emmo – The First Person
Carol – So Low
Zoviet France – Vienna (extract)

This mix is available to download for another two weeks only. The full interview is here.