Orogenesis refers to the cataclysmic geologic processes which form mountains. In Stockholm, new structures often must be built with the assistance of dynamite and great tunnel-boring machines, as the city lies on a landscape of solid granite. A kind of human orogenesis. This piece is built from two sorts of instruments- pipe organs and modular synthesizers. I have been drawn to contemplate the relationships between these two kinds of instruments during the last years. This piece is one of an ongoing series contemplating both their acoustic properties and how they might express, dwell in and reflect the life and ongoing transformation of the city where I live. The organ material is drawn from a handful of recordings I made on the three pipe organs at MHM (Lund univerity's Academy of Music in Malmö). The synthesis material has been realised in Stockholm, on the Buchla 252 and 252e and Serge systems at EMS (the Electronic Music Studio in Stockholm) and KMH (the Royal College of Music in Stockholm).
This piece was commissioned for the Intonal festival in 2016, and was built for the 49 speaker acousmonium that was built for the festival that year. The acousmonium concerts were curated by Jakob Riis and Alessandro Perini.
As I wrote the piece, many deep changes were occurring in the on-going transformation of Stockholm. Huge apartment houses were going up in Råcksta, parts of the iconic structures at Slussen began to be dismantled. Massive Gallerias were opening all over the place, and the old industrial areas of Liljeholmen were giving way to luxury accommodations with architecture reminiscent of California's or Florida's seaside resort apartments, masking the area's former history. The organ as Klarakvarteren, the Buchla as Sergels torg. The Serge as Industrial area, the Organ as the masses of miljonprogram (“million program”) apartment buildings, like so many pipes. The Buchla as 90s rave scene, the Organ as broken down Rhodes in an old ölkafe (“Beer Cafe” or neighborhood pub) somewhere long ago.
But perhaps the most prominent metamorphosis in my environs was at KMH. The great pit of dynamite-rendered stone from which I had taken the recordings for my violin piece two years before gave way to a magnificent new complex of buildings. The home-y old high school which had housed the school for so long in the interim period between the original design for a dedicated music school in the 60s and the newer one which has now been realized, was being readied for demolition. As the old building closed and the new one readied to open, I was writing this piece in the transition.The Buchla as the old brick building, formed like a g-clef; the Organ the new golden-windowed Choir salon, overlooking Östermalm. Indeed, I was the last person to complete a work in the studios of the old school, leaving right at midnight the day it closed,
I worked with the four organs in the basement of the Music Academy in Malmö. There is one very large instrument and three smaller choir organs, each with its own quirks. I recorded both improvised material and close-up recordings of individual pipes, and then took the recordings back to Stockholm to work with the Buchla and Serge systems there, going back and forth over some months. Thus they were layered and combined, like their architectural allegories, transforming, like their counterparts in Stockholm. A tectonic shift in the ephemeral city.
At the 2016 Intonal festival, where Orogenesis was premiered, Morton Subotnick gave a live performance of his seminal work Silver Apples on the Moon.x He remarked, before commencing, that he never believed a live performance of the piece would be possible in his lifetime. This rendition combined instruments, controllers and software from every time period that had passed from its inception to the present. Looking at this decades-spanning set-up, I was taken back to Subotnick's remarks a few years earlier, at the opening at Stockholm's then-new venue for multi-channel music, Audiorama. He described online listening, where one could go online and listen to music spanning from the 1400s to the present, and then concluded "There is no context in our time".x
Tableaus
The piece is structured in seven parts plus an epilogue. Different sections highlight different methods of using and processing the organ, the synthesizer, or combinations of both, as well as different evocations of Stockholm. In making this piece, I found myself using the term ”building” rather than ”composing”, and true to this monumental thought, the piece maintains a very slow pulse, punctuated at point by silences, throughout.
In the first tableau, the listener is placed in an abstract city of organ pipes. It is constructed of recordings of individual pipes from all four of the organs in Malmö, placed near and far, like many different structures. This section also simulates standing inside of an organ which has exploded into a vast landscape, and so employs a kind of ”speaker choir” technique, where each individual speaker becomes an individual organ pipe or two. The depicted scenario is also impossible, since the recordings are from four different instruments.
The second tableau draws organ recordings, synthesized sounds, and processed organ recordings into a montage, to evoke music one might hear at various locations in the evening in Stockholm during the last half of the past century. These sounds are then placed in speakers which were placed outside the symmetry as “solo/voice” speakers, inside the innermost ring, like a soloist playing in the corner of a forgotten bar. Here I have briefly quoted local musicians I heard perform at jazz establishments in Stockholm.
The third tableau is constructed entirely out of synthesized sounds. It is also the first point in the spatialization where there is unified, repeated motion in large gestures. A slow phrase moves across the room in a diagonal gesture, punctuated by harsh synthesis sounds whose interpretation I leave to the listener. For me, they represent the on-going dynamite blasts that permeated the old music school, as the solid rock outside was blown away to make way for the new building, as well as similar blasts at other sites around the city used in building. Dynamite is a common construction tool in Stockholm, where much of the ground is solid granite.
The fourth tableau is constructed almost entirely of composite sounds (organ recordings processed through modular synthesis). I passed thick chords through the Serge Variable Bandwidth VCF at EMS, which I used to play melodies in glissando on the distorted frequencies which emerged. Thus it is invisibly contrapuntal.
Here I was also trying to additively cross-emulate the way organs build pitch upon pitch based on the overtone series in order to create a whole tone color- something I was inspired to do when a friend showed me software he was using in his own work with spectral manipulation. For this I used FM to meld organ tones to choirs of oscillators (using two Buchla 258 Dual Oscillators and one clone of a 259 Complex Programmable Waveform Generator), or send them through cross- patched ring modulators (using two Buchla 285 Frequency
Shifters at EMS). This section, for me, is a portrait of a place where I have many memories in the city, and they move about the space like choirs of ghosts, closer or further, late in the evening.
The fifth tableau begins a long build-up in the form of an irregular rhythm built from synthesized sounds and punctuated with composite sounds. Here the new 252e Polyphonic Rhythm Generator at KMH was used to generate a line of irregular rhythms from frequency-modulated (using the two Buchla 258s and the clone of the Buchla 259 again) and ring-modulated (using the Buchla 285s) organ source material, played against itself in four loops. It culminates in a massive drone, with a descant made of organ chords passed through a rapidly and randomly cycling 281 Quad Function Generator, landing about a third of the way through the piece. The music is drawn in from the cornucopia of IDM shows that punctuate the Stockholm electronic dance and underground club worlds, which hold a colorful place in both the history and present of the city.
In the sixth tableau, pure organ sounds return in clusters and chords, with synthesized materials falling more into the background. The first Foley-like manipulation of the organ material as field recordings transforms close recordings of low bass pipes into a repeated, spatialized rhythmic figure, depicting a great machine, like the dynamo in August Strindberg’s poem of that title, beneath Stockholm.1 Here, then, the organ is used as a sounding object to imitate these other objects, as with radio or film sound-effects work.
The seventh and final tableau returns to the impossibility of playing four organs in the same room at once, all in motion, this time arranging them into a classic, gigantic cadence, leaving the melancholic drone continuing after its zenith. For me, this is the moment of completion of any number of massive new building projects across the city, wondrous and disastrous in the same breath.
Finally, there is an epilogue, fading out, into another field recording manipulation, transforming the organ again into something resembling a departing train.
Orogenesis. Headphone Version, made in part using a model of the Klangkupolen at KMH, as built by Gerhard Eckel in 2017.
IMPORTANT: This version is made for HEADPHONES, not for a pair of speakers. If you happen to have a multichannel listening set-up in your home or studio and would like to hear the work that way, feel free to contact me for appropriate stems.
