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AN ECHOES SURREAL SOUND SURVEY
by John Diliberto

May 11, 2004 marks what would have been the 100th birthday of Salvador Dali, who died in 1989. Dali's art was that rare beast that crossed many disciplines, finding resonance in film, theater, and music. Dali sought to open up the mind, using archetypal images in odd combinations and forms to pilot deep into the subconscious. Titles like "Persistance of Memory," "The Great Masturbator" and "Hercules Lifts the Skin of the Sea and Stops Venus for an Instant from Waking Love."

He called his technique the Paranoid Critical Transformation Method by which he employed"irrational knowledge" based on a "delirium of interpretation." It's this technique that Dali used to create paintings with multiple images and optical illusions. He drew upon religious iconography, desert landscapes and African mysticism to find deep, archetypal relationships.

Salvador Dali was always a favorite of the hallucenogenic generation, but the artist once proclaimed: I don't take drugs. I am drugs."

Here are twelve sonic trips that wouldn't be possible without Salvador Dali and surrealism. For more surreal sound, listen to a Centenary Tribute in Sound for Salvador Dali, Echoes program 0419B.

Tangerine Dream
Phaedra/Rubycon/Richochet

Tangerine Dream is the German synthesizer ensemble that made Pink Floyd sound like a folk group. Born in a synergy of technology, hallucinogens, and the cultural upheaval of the 1960s and 70s, the Dream took an inner journey of rubbery sequencer rhythms and haunting, ethereal textures drawn from synthesizers and the mellotron. Before forming the Dream, founder Edgar Froese provided soundtracks for art exhibits by surrealist icon, Salvador Dali. That influence pervades the middle years of Tangerine Dream, from 1973-1983. Signposts of that period are the trilogy of Phaedra, Rubycon and Ricochet. Phaedra topped the British pop charts and created a gestalt locked around technology, space imagery and altered states of consciousness. From its diaphanous silver-blue cover painting to the side-long title suite, Phaedra seemed like a passage into a new world. With no words, and almost no conventional instruments, Tangerine Dream used VCS3 synthesizers and the mellotron with its tape loops of violins, choirs and flutes, to create an album that was as much soundscape as music. Rubycon and Ricochet, a live recording, refined this sound, each with a single, album length piece that throbs with pulsing sequencer patterns and swirling electronic effects.

Phaedra

Robert Rich
Bestiary

Robert Rich says he composed Bestiary in response to a challenge by surrealist artist, Andre Breton. "He wrote in a few different places that he felt that music was one art form that could never properly express a surrealistic idea." Rich met that challenge in 2001. Bestiary creates a swirling soundscape as Rich morphs rhythmic and melodic patterns through his analog synthesizer. Sounds are squeezed, shaded, imploded and exploded across a landscape that would have been familiar to Salvador Dali. Rich rarely loses the pulse and often unleashes moments of exotic melodicism. An expression Rich has for his music is "glurp" and it doesn't get much glurpier than Bestiary.

Bestiary

Laurie Anderson
Big Science

Most of us walk through the world numbly, impassively accepting what wanders before our eyes and ears. Laurie Anderson looks at that same world and sees the absurdity, and sometimes the beauty and heroism of our existence. Big Science was her first album, culled from her epic 1980s work, "United States." From the opening lines of "From the Air" - "Good Evening. This is your Captain. We are about to attempt a crash landing" - Anderson sets the tone for a world view that is at times Orwellian, often Warholian and always surreal. She played violins that emitted spoken words when bowed. She opened her mouth, and light poured out. These were the visual cues that had audio analogs on Big Science, like "You're walking. And you don't realize it, but you're always falling." The centerpiece of the album is Anderson's greatest hit, "O Superman." A song of disconnection, Anderson saw lines like "Here come the planes. They're American planes. Made in America," take on a different meaning when heard in a post 9-11 world. But her images were just as haunting in the early 1980s.

Big Science

Brian Eno and J. Peter Schwalm
Drawn From Life

Brian Eno is a musician who, like Edgar Froese, had actually hung with Salvador Dali. There's a famous picture of the two taking tea, Eno in his full glam make-up. Like many artists here, any Eno album could make this list of Surreal recordings. With German drummer and composer J. Peter Schwalm, a new, spontaneous sound entered Eno's music, adding shape and texture to ambiences that invite, entice and mystify. Eno has long been a fan of Miles Davis's Bitches Brew-era fusion and you can hear that influence in a free interplay of sonic textures, solo fragments and those haunting melodies that Eno conjures. It's a cyber-noir sound, with an atmosphere of black and white cityscapes shot through a misty haze at night and perhaps, a better sound track for the Luis Bunuel/Dali film, "Un Chien Andalou." On "Like Pictures Part Two," Laurie Anderson intones some oblique lyrics like "Some things are just pictures. They're scenes before your eyes." A perfect surreal sentiment. Drawn from Life has plenty of pictures for the mind's eye. Another choice from Eno would be the more jagged and aggressive Nervenet, a CD that just grabs you by the throat and casts you into a world of hidden whispers and shattered doors.

Drawn From Life

Future Sound of London
The Isness

Syd Barrett era Pinky Floyd and Revolver era Beatles have never been far beneath the surface of Future Sound of London, but their spirits inhabit The Isness like mischievous ghosts. Beatlesque harmonies, sitars, mellotron flutes and phase-shifted vocals permeate the album in a flow from surreal sound collages to "The Galaxial Pharmaceutical," a pop song hymn to "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn." A "Tomorrow Never Knows" drum groove here, a Terry Riley sample there connects the lines from the latest FSOL album to their spiritual ancestors, 1960s psychedelia. After the roaring aggression of "Dead Cities", their previous CD from six years ago, The Isness is a pastoral idyll. Gone are the aggressive beats and distorted vocals declaring "We have explosive." It sounds like the sampling saboteurs had, in the spirit of their 60's sources, gone to the English countryside, dropped some lysergic substances and grooved on nature. Although their modus operandi remains the same as when they established ambient house with The Orb in the early 1990s, the mood is more playful, with wry lines like "Solo on the dildo." The Isness is a fan-splitter for FSOL. You either love it or think it's the most indulgent trash possible. FSOL is just enjoying the Isness of it all.

The Isness

Loop Guru
Bathtime with Loop Guru

I'm not sure this is my favorite Loop Guru, but it's the one that makes me laugh the most. When the instrumental credits include "quantum physics, insect manipulation and luminous wetlook," you know you're not about to have a normal listening experience. But the abnormal is de rigeur for the British ethno-techno group called Loop Guru. Bathtime with Loop Guru follows with the sample happy grooves and stolen themes of previous Guru outings. The band, now reduced to a duo of Jamuud a.k.a. Dave Muddyman and Saam a.k.a. Sam Dodson, freely samples sitars and mellotrons, Kraftwerk rhythms and gamelan cycles, all collaged onto delirious, dub-trippy grooves. The title track places a dialog clip from an obscure French film against an operatic soprano in a re-contextualized slice of surreal eroticism that ultimately is only in your mind. Loop Guru really would've been happy as a 60's psychedelic band, hanging out between Frank Zappa and Pink Floyd, but forged a few years too late, they've adapted to the technology and tone of the day, mixing sly humor into their most chilled and sensual album to date.

Bathtime with Loop Guru

Steve Roach
World's Edge

There are any number of Steve Roach's albums that could be described as surreal. Salvador Dali was a major influence in his earlier work, and he participated on the collection, Dali: The Endless Engima. World's Edge is a recording that often gets over-looked. Released after Dreamtime Return, it shares that CD's mix of primitive sounds and modern technology. Roach was still in the sway of aboriginal mysticism, and what could be more surreal than a culture which believes their dreams are another reality. Roach has spend most of his career mapping that alternative reality and World's Edge is a CD that lives up to its title. Trancey percussion grooves underlay drifting synthesizer pads that swirl like wind swept clouds. Didgeridoo haunts the edges while, Native flutes call out ancient echoes. A side note: The title track from World's Edge was taken from an Echoes Living Room Concert performance.

World's Edge

Holger Czukay and David Sylvian
Flux + Mutability

Every generation kicks up its music eccentrics, artists like John Cage, Ornette Coleman, Harry Partch and Captain Beefheart, who hear music differently from most of us, and who ultimately change the way we listen. Holger Czukay could easily move to the top of that list. He was a member of the seminal German rock group called Can and he's gone on to a quirky solo career that has drawn people such as David Sylvian and Jah Wobble into his elliptical orbit for collaborations. Czukay predated hip-hop and techno in the use of found sound and sampled snippets. His masterpieces remain Movies and On the Way to the Peak of Normal from the very early 1980s. From the Echoes Era, I've selected Flux +Mutability, an ambient collaboration with David Sylvian. Together these artists create a surreal sound world of disembodied radio voices, eastern inspired grooves, wafting volume pedaled guitar textures and Holger's distinctive, muted guitar plucks.

Flux + Mutability

Various: *Dali: The Endless Enigma*

Salvador Dali was one of the most musical of painters, using the imagery of instruments to populate his canvases and painting with a euphonious flow of line and form. It's little wonder that the late surrealist was a favorite of composers and musicians, most recently Edgar Froese, the founding member of Tangerine Dream, who played music at Dali exhibits, and Brian Eno. Fourteen years ago a group of Southern Californian synthesists and a few of their European idols continue the tradition with Dali: The Endless Enigma, a series of tone poems based on individual Dali paintings. These synthesists are inspired by the floating, surreal and fantastic images of Dali, but also his sense of eroticism. The cover image is Dali's "Atmospheric Skull Sodomizing A Piano," and it looks just like it reads.

Michel Huygen, from the Spanish group Neuronium, choose "The Great Masturbator," and his piece speeds up to an orgasmic crescendo, emerging into sheets of high, synth-string cascades. German synthesist Klaus Schulze's vision of "Face of Mae West" rambles through out-of-tune voice samples that eventually emerge into one of his own patented, hypnotic grooves. Bo Tomlyn also favors distended voice samples that bend and slur over metallic, often arhythmic cycles. There's a sense of twisted sexuality here, but they're not as enticing to hear as Dali's images are to view.

Taking a more serene approach is Michael Stearns, whose "Tuna Fishing" creates a fog-enshrouded harbor of lapping waves and seagulls, with muted French horns and snatches of bullfighting trumpet. Beneath these ethereal sounds he sends out sub-sonic booms with the "beam", an unusual stringed instrument Stearns plays. Both Walter Holland and the progressive ensemble Djam Karet create romantic, Pink Floyd inspired spacescapes on their works. On "Shades of Night Descending," Holland's sustained chords and sparse guitar gradually give way to a drum dirge with synthesizer filter sweeps through massive chords that seem to leave trails behind them. Djam Karet creates an otherworldly wash of intertwined feedback guitars, running water, rushing wind and a slow piano ostinato. They claim that their work actually follows Dali's "Inventions of the Monsters" from left to right, and they certainly create a sense of movement and transition.

Only Loren Nerrell keys into the primitive, African side of Dali's work, with a percussive piece called "Impressions of Africa." The CD concludes with a trio of works by Steve Roach and Robert Rich that tunnel through the darker eroticism of Dali. Their "Birth of Liquid Desires" swirls with synth drones and cyclical voices intoning a distant chant. Recorded during their sessions for Strata, it explores many of the same dark interior moods, as does Roach's solo "The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory." On "Rhinocerotic Figue of Phidias' "Illisos"" they actually sample Dali's voice. These composers have created powerful soundtracks to view the work of Dali, or to create your own surrealist landscapes.

THE ORB
Orblivion (Island Records)

It's ironic that the techniques and philosophies of avant-garde pioneers like Pierre Schaeffer, Edgar Varese and Karlheinz Stockhausen have affected popular music more than classical. The children of these composers aren't born in conservatories. Instead, they're bastard sons like The Orb, whose wild experiments are linked to kinetic grooves and implied melodies spawned in clubs. Orblivion is an extended riff on technology, a seamless 72 minute trip that evolves and transmutes. Ambient darlings since "Little Fluffy Clouds," their 1991 breakthrough, Dr. Alex Patterson & company are intent on re-arranging your psyche like a John Coltrane solo, casting you against a wall of sound. Using modified drum n' bass, re-calibrated dub and more mixological gene splicing than a British cloning lab, The Orb take the global village concept into cyberspace. With excerpts from the 1950s's House UnAmerican Activities Committee hearings and oblique rants of a modern prophet on "S.A.L.T.," The Orb thrust us into the Golden Age of Wired, where hidden connections are made and short-circuited. They take the world, splay it across hypnotic rhythms and swirling sounds and Orbliterate it.

Orblivion

Art of Noise
(Who's Afraid Of?) The Art of Noise!

Salvador Dali would've loved the Art of Noise. Spawned at the birth of digital sampling, the Art of Noise established the template for cut & paste composition. Comprised of Anne Dudley, Trevor Horn, J. J. Jeczalik, Gary Langan and Paul Morley, the Art of Noise created kinetic digital sound sculptures. Sampling horns strings, car engines, voices and anything else they could toss into their Fairlight synthesizer, they created an exhilarating and riotous brew, that included the horrific "Time for Fear (Who's Afraid)," the demented "Close (to the Edit)" and one of their many instances of sublime ambience, "Moments in Love." Their first album (Who's Afraid Of?) The Art of Noise! May be out of print, but you'll do equally well with their second CD, In Visible Silence, which includes a deranged version of "Peter Gun" or the collection Daft, which includes most of the first album.

(Who's Afraid Of?) The Art of Noise!