Alistair Riddell: Dave Reviews by Carlos Palombini and Alistair Riddell Abstract Carlos Palombini and Alistair Riddell narrate their respective experiences as listener and author of Dave Reviews, an electronic piece created in Australia from materials collected in the United States. Musical communication, the authors seem to argue, is largely circumstantial and musicality is a function of the openness for hearing. A year of debauchery through London dives and I was ready for Shincliffe Hall, the eighteenth century manor by the woods in old Durham town, where Captain Prince retired from adventure in the Caribbean Sea. From my attic window, the Wear flew not always calmly by. Broken by Norman chimes, the duskly owl, and the rattle of coppery leaves regurgitated by Northern gales in the guts of a long disused Victorian fireplace, silence was golden. I wrote “Pierre Schaeffer’s Typo-morphology of Sonic Objects” and practised the art of being politely horrible, in which English gentlemen excel. An Irishman with a Glaswegian accent arrived from Paisley in an old green Jaguar and we drove to the raves of uncouth Newcastle youth. The mid nineties would see me in a Brazilian campus in the company of youngsters from all walks of life, inhaling substances by various means and having intercourse in unpredictable ways. My Puerto Rican friend drove a 1978 yellow Passat—it was about his age—and we headed for pleasure from the shantytowns. I encountered “Ecstasy Solfège”: “although Schaeffer’s efforts resulted in a great many words, some music and lingering epigones, the only people who, I think, have come close to practising what he was getting at are today’s DJs”. Encoded in my dissertation, the message had been decoded by Riddell, who read it aloud to myself. I wrote to him; he sent me a tape. Rio de Janeiro spreads sand, tarmac, and concrete strands along the shore, between the mountains and the sea. My room overlooks the marina in the Guanabara bay. I open the window wide to let Rio in and I let the music play. Covering and uncovering the nightly scape at a regular pace, it waxes and wanes and lulls me to sleep. On the other side of the marina, the Urca rock plunges headlong into the sea. With lashes of waves, the ocean is shaping that rock into sound. Waxing and waning was Dave Reviews to me. *** I never quite seem to get away from the influence of place. To an Australian, it is an obsession with an undercurrent of panic. We seem to be not quite in the right place culturally and reluctant to accept that we are also privileged to be where we are at all. In late 1993, I returned to Australia after spending four years in the US and I didn’t really know what I was going to do. My wife and I were in a mild state of shock. The transition was smooth but a bit rushed and disorganized. I didn’t really want to leave but felt in the end that it was important to return. In some ways that was a mistake. Nothing really much happened. Instead of settling into the city or suburbs, we took an opportunity to live by the sea for about three months. It was at Point Roadknight, a short walk away from the holiday resort of Anglesea, that I produced Dave Reviews. Whose Dave? Well, Dave is David Sanford, a black American composer who now teaches at Mount Holyoak in Massachusetts(?). Dave and I were grad students at Princeton. Dave always struck me as intensely American. He is a gifted composer of art music but could stand around and recite lyrics to rap songs like he had written them himself. He talked a lot about sport, which I found hard to follow and often inscrutable. I regret I didn’t get to know Dave file:///Users/carlospalombini/drive externo/Word Files/aaa/dav... 1 de 3 better. In June of 1993, I sat down with him outside the student centre (which was the old Library then) on the Princeton campus and interviewed him. Actually, we sat around an outside table and I recorded Dave reading from a copy of the Village Voice. Later we moved to a bar in Princeton and had a few drinks. The recording continued. I recorded nearly an hour of Dave talking. In Dave Reviews, I used just over two minutes of recorded speech from an hour’s worth interview. The text reads: I’m just gonna go on with this Jungle Brothers review by Colson Whitehead here. A paragraph here caught my eye where he says, the cuts that make you came back for more here, such as 40 Below Trooper and Book of Rhyme Pages are the ones that yoke the JB’s cheeva soaked excesses so that it can complement rather than compete with conventional Hip Hop strategy. In my dream pop world where Pylon plays Shea Stadium and teeny boppers wop to Ice Cube on American Bandstand, Simple As That is a monster hit. Playing it on the box, Simple hearkens back to Our House U (?) coupling trad rap vocals with dense dance beat but this time around the chorus is sung by some rent-a-diva back up singers who add yet another propulsive touch. Ah, I dunno. Have you heard of the Jungle Brothers? There’s an end to the Gangsta rap scene lately. It was this thing that came out, er boy. It is supposedly is an LA school thing, where sort of the idea of the east coast rappers; these guys who came out of Long Island, Queens and Brooklyn and generally weren’t nearly as down with the boys in the hood as they would like to think they were. Were as out west in LA, you got, like I think Ice-T was the original one there, as he calls himself, OG, original gangster. He was the first person who actually sort of came and made his career having been, having made his money from drug money and actually going out actually and saying I used to be a gangster and sort of get the street credibility. Him saying he actually was there. Then you get NWA following in his footsteps and you know was sort of an interesting idea back in about 87 or 88 when it was fresh and different and rappers sort of saw themselves as “Hey, we’re offensive and damn it this is what you are going to get and fuck you” and now it just sort of... it’s been done to death sort of in the same way that, I dunno... I wont say Punk is dead but, I mean, it’s all been thrown in your face a little too much and I don’t think anybody’s really... you can’t shock anyone anymore. The text comes from the very beginning of the tape and is, in a way, fresh and uninhibited. So, some months after I recorded Dave, I sat down in front of my NeXT station and started to experiment with techniques and concepts. Point Roadknight out of season is a lonely place. The empty beach houses and deserted roads can be quite sinister on a windswept overcast day. Point Roadknight is a spit of land that comes to a rocky point with a beautiful calm family beach on one side and a thunderous ocean beach on the other. You can walk from one to the other in about two minutes. In high summer one is crowded with people and the other is empty except for a few file:///Users/carlospalombini/drive externo/Word Files/aaa/dav... 2 de 3 beachcombers. The beach houses aren’t on the point but skirt it on the sea side of the Great Ocean Road. Point Roadknight was an unusual place to go after New Jersey. I was also in New York quite a bit in the last month we were in the US and sitting on the back beach (the wild beach) it was hard to imagine that after the intensity of the US east coast I was experiencing the stunning isolation of an Australian beach in late Winter. I imagine Dave has heard the piece. I sent him a copy. He hasn’t said anything to me about it but I did hear from a mutual friend that he wasn’t that impressed. I can understand that. It’s not that unlikely. Dave isn’t into technology. He is, in one sense, a traditional composer and yet when you hear some of his works that is not the impression you immediately get. One need only hear Russo/Argo/Russo on the DRCD from the Princeton music department, to realize that he has a profound sense of the moment. *** Children who lived by the sea loved the seagulls. Every morning they would go playing with them and more seagulls would come, by the hundreds and more. Their father told them: “I have heard that the seagulls play with you. Go and catch me some so that I can amuse myself with them.” The following day, when they went to the beach, the seagulls developed their pantomime in the air but did not descend. This is why it is said: the perfect discourse is wordless, the perfect act is not to act. What all sages know has little depth. (Lieh-Tzu) We therefore present these notes to the reader as an illustration of what may happen to music commentary when Molino’s “neutral level”, which, somewhere in the Contemporary Music Review, David Osmond-Smith calls “a last resting-place for Kant’s ‘thing in itself’”, absents itself. References Lie-tseu, 1980, “Les mouettes”, Le Vrai Classique du vide parfait, in Philosophes taoïstes, Paris, Gallimard (Pléiade), p. 402. Osmond-Smith, David, 1989, “Between Music and Language: a View from the Bridge”, Music and Cognitive Sciences: Contemporary Music Review 4: 89–95. Palombini, Carlos, 1993, “Pierre Schaeffer’s Typo-Morphology of Sonic Objects”, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Durham, Department of Music <http://www.sun.rhbnc.ac.uk/Music /Archive/Disserts/palombin.html>. Riddell, Alistair, 1996, “Ecstasy Solfège”, Sounds Australian v. 14, n. 47 <http://www.alphalink.com.au/~amr/ES.html>. file:///Users/carlospalombini/drive externo/Word Files/aaa/dav... 3 de 3