RR #6 – Give me Maths, I’ll give you Music

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Five years ago last week, Basil Kirchin left us. On the recently re-launched Bearded website, we ran an article written by Jonny Trunk – the man behind one of my favourite record labels Trunk – who was responsible for giving Basil a second breath of life just as he was losing his battle with cancer.

The article is a poignant piece about Jonny’s experiences with Basil. It speaks poetically about how, after much searching, Jonny received a letter from Basil saying how he’d, “been waiting for anyone to pay attention all his life,” and how the positive reaction to Trunk’s release of lost Kirchin recordings Quantum and Abstractions of the Industrial North had encouraged Basil to record one last album before he left us. The record – Particles – is, put simply, a masterpiece. It mixes the avant-garde with the lounge jazz Basil grew up playing as a member of his father’s The Ivor Kirchin Band, and from the first track ‘Bye Bye 1941’ you can tell you’re listening to something special, original and timeless (if you must listen to the record – and you must – it’s available to stream on Spotify).

But listening to Basil’s music again and reading about the man made me think about the art of music and, in particular, the mathematical art behind music. One of Basil’s aims was to find music within music. It was his belief that if you stretched out a note long enough, music from within that note would emerge. As Jonny puts it in the Bearded article:

“Ever keen to explore the development of his own musical development, Basil began to record wildlife sounds, organic noise and environmental dins. He then spend years stretching and manipulating the recordings into new noise, “the worlds within worlds” as he called it. His theory was simple, if you stretch a noise far enough it reveals further boulders of music – the sound within the sound if you like. These finished recordings were then improvised over and the subsequent release on Columbia records sewed the seeds of ambient music. The follow up recording in 1973 included sleeve noted by Brian Eno, paying homage to Basil as the man who has discovered a whole new area of sound.”

And this sort of researching the actual sound is something largely absent from modern music. You have bands and artists who have put together music using alternative instrumentation – Hanne Hukkelberg arguably being the most prominent in recent years – but few who really experiment with sound itself. It was a pleasure, therefore, to listen to the Black Carrot record Milking Scarabs for Dough, which is probably the most obtuse record of the year thus far. It ranges from the genius to the questionable, but it’s possibly the most interesting new record of this century. Somewhere between Henry Cow and Scott Walker, it swings from avant-garde jazz to classic rock in a heartbeat. At one point it sounds like a Lloyd-Webber musical. All in all, it keeps you listening – which only a handful of bands seem to manage nowadays.

But mathematics is where fascinating music comes from. Robert Schneider wrote the entire Apples in Stereo record New Magnetic Wonder using the non-Pythagorean scale – invented by Schneider and based on natural logarithms, which I’m not going to pretend I know anything about, but needless to say it’s very intellectual.

It was also the basis for the celebrated BBC Radiophonic Workshop, which invented electronic music before Robert Moog brought the synthesiser to market. The most popular member of the workshop, Delia Derbyshire, had a degree in mathematics, along with a large number of her compatriots. The painstaking process that fellow workshop member John Baker went through in composing his music (listen to ‘Woman’s Hour’ on The John Baker Tapes for a great analysis) emphasises the actual craft that went into the music.

Which is where I come in with my question. In a time when it’s easier than ever to create bad music, are true innovators harder to discover and are potential great innovators in sound and music being discouraged by the ease of which a record can now be cut? When you consider that The Beatles released their greatest music when experimenting, and no bands (with the possible exception of Radiohead) have come close to that mixture of experimentation and popular success in the proceeding forty years, it makes it hard to guess when the next truly great, inspiration and original artist will emerge. Will we ever have an artist like that again, or do we live in an age where this sort of experimenting is discouraged, and is harder for the popular audience to discover? I’ll leave you to hypothesise.