On “Lament”, Clark accompanies his own voice with the Buchla digital studio at NSEM. One might think that we would all be bored of the synthesiser by now but thanks to the recent resurgence of interest in in the possibilities afforded by these machines (Daniel Lopatin, Jason Kahn, Keith Fullerton Whitman) we also have access to a global reissue trend of electronic composers and can rediscover pioneers and renegades (as Ian Helliwell would have it in his pieces for The Wire last year). Track three, “Lament”, is a literal reading of its title that I found quite hard to listen to all the way through the first time. If I had been played this recording “blindfold” with no previous sight of the cd sleeve, I would have assumed it was a recent recording. Then out of nowhere something like a precursor of Ambient Techno. Tuned toms and plenty of electronic drone. Little does the Finnerrud Trio realise they truly are part of the vanguard of experimental jazz – something that continues to challenge and obsess the more receptive musicians now, forty years later. Although perhaps with less wild abandon than the modern clique of groups enjoy.
#Hal 9000 sound plus
This piece is the kind of thing the modern proponents of the free-playing plus electronics styles such as Temperatures or Bolide aspire to. In fact they had been refining their integration of modern with traditional instrumentation for the five previous years since 1969. These were musicians who certainly did not baulk at the idea of improvising jazz with a man wielding an analogue synth one of these strange new machines, some the size of a wardrobe, which is surprising even in the groovy post- Bitches Brew jazz world of 1974.
On “The Breath, Nerve And The Pulse Of Life”, with piano, drums and bass almost like a futuristic jazz quartet, Clark’s work falls somewhere between The BBC Radiophonic Workshop and Bud Powell, perhaps? The Finnerud Trio were Hal Clark plus Svein Finnerud on piano, Bjonar Andresen on bass and Espen Ruud on drums. Then there is discordant melodic information as the notes gradually pitch-slip to a quieter passage, leading on to “random” note clusters which reminded me of the more sinister electronic backdrops in the film Logan’s Run.
“Rouge Permanent” has some nice chiming cadences after the recitation of the poem. Interesting side note: Buchla built the mixer for Ken Kesey’s Merry Prankster bus which now resides (the mixer, not the bus) at Calgary’s keyboard museum Cantos.
#Hal 9000 sound series
The results were the 500 series and the 300 series, both of which paired the new technology with existing 200 series modules to create hybrid analog/digital systems”, according to Wikipedia. The first track, “Rouge Permanent” combines a poem written by Hal Clark and read (possibly compiled from multiple takes) by his Norwegian friend’s five year-old with material generated on a Buchla 502 specifically – “In the mid 1970s, Don Buchla began experimenting with digital designs and computer controlled systems. NORWAY PRISMA RECORDS PRISMACD716 CD (2013)Ī compact history lesson with regard to the potential of analogue synthesisers, primarily the Buchla Series 500 but also the EMS VCS3 “Putney” synthesiser (the keyboard-less synth Brian Eno famously used with Roxy Music), here and there combined with vocals or acoustic instruments.
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