Synthesis

Ad Stellas Per Musica

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

Jason Heller’s Strange Stars is an overview of music of the 1970s that referenced, overlapped, or otherwise advanced science fiction. As such, it gives us a unique musical history that sidesteps much of what dominated the Seventies, but which was central to what made that decade unique in contemporary, pop, youth, and/or rock music, however one registers the soundscape of the period.

His take-off point is Davie Bowie’s appearance as a kind of avatar of unapologetic science fiction concepts through music, especially his Ziggy Stardust persona. Given the chronology, I can’t argue with that, even though at the time I was only marginally aware of Bowie, and when I did notice him I was not especially impressed. But Heller touches on many of the bands and performers who did exemplify that strain of music for me.

Reading Strange Stars, I’m reminded of how much it is possible to miss, even while—or perhaps because of—living through it all. For instance, George Clinton and the whole Funk movement passed me right by. I was aware of its importance only in retrospect. Likewise with a great deal of Glam. It seemed to me at the time to miss the point, but I can’t say why exactly since I paid it little attention, intentionally or otherwise.

But Heller is right that the Seventies encapsulated the emergence of science fiction in popular culture in ways it never had before, and in popular music it came to the fore in unique and unexpected forms. There were precursors, of course—the instrumental bands like the Ventures and the Tornados, the novelty acts, and then the whole psychedelic movement that gave us bands like Pink Floyd, which, despite Heller’s dismissal of them in later albums due to a lack of overtly SFnal lyrics, remained aesthetically connected to SF compositionally—that led to a flowering and full embrace by 1969-70.

Heller searches for and finds ample connection to science fiction through lyric content, Easter eggs and unapologetic references to classic SF and thematic explorations, and certainly all that was present, especially in a lot of Bowie from that early period of his career. But for me, it was the composition and performance itself, regardless of lyric content, that spoke to my geeky SF fan backbrain. All those novelty songs from the Sixties, which Heller catalogues, never said “science fiction” to me because musically they were still products of 1950s rock’n’roll and rather cheesy and absurd, albeit amusing and catchy.

He catches this when he tags Bowie and, especially, King Crimson as the first full on manifestations of a SFnal aesthetic. What I recall listening for was, in a way, a departure point, perhaps a gateway into a future like those I found in novels by Heinlein or Clarke or Norton or Asimov. As the decade continued, I felt that many of these bands were acting as guardians at the gate of a tomorrow we might actually live in. If we were mindful. If we were careful.

So for me, it was Yes that signaled the future. Yes and Genesis (up to A Lamb Lies Down On Broadway) and Emerson Lake & Palmer. Especially ELP with Emerson’s embrace of synthesizers and compositional experiments like nothing else in Rock till then. I heard this music in the same way I read science fiction, as manifestations of different worlds.

Emotionally, I imagine that the first time I heard Tarkus I felt—reacted—the same way audiences back in 1913 heard The Rites of Spring. Something so unexpected, so divergent, so….tomorrow….that it was like a wrench.

For whatever reason, Bowie didn’t do that for me, for all that I liked Space Oddity. But Heller’s thesis is valid just the same. After Star Trek it became a popular aesthetic movement that more and more took on the surface, at least, of science fiction. The music perhaps has been an underappreciated aspect of that. I remember as an earnest adolescent searching for the next bit of music that fed that need for the next phase of civilization. (I found a great deal of it in what later became known as Electronica, especially with Tangerine Dream, whose albums were all racked in Rock along with James Taylor, Chicago, The Doors, and Joni Mitchell.) When I settled down to listen to an album or go to a concert, I was looking to be transported. Often it was just rock and I loved all that offered, but there were those acts and albums that, for me, were gateways in the same way many of the books I read were.

I very much enjoyed Heller’s book. It took me back. I learned things I never knew (like that the backing band for an obscure album by Ramases, Space Hymns, which is a curiosity more for its cover art than for its music, later became 10cc), and so many creations I never knew about. One is limited by time and, often, money. I didn’t have the budget to acquire most of the albums I would have loved had I known about them. It was a rich period of musical ferment and worth a new look. You could do worse than use Heller’s book as a guide.

Across Boundaries

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

Ray Nayler’s novel, The Mountain In The Sea, is a superb example of asking a simple question and then exploring the ramifications at length. The question? What is intelligence and how would we recognize it in other species?

The novel concerns the discovery of an octopus species that exhibits the kind of behavior till now deemed impossible—unlikely at best—given the nature of octopus biology. Dr. Ha Nguyen accepts an invitation from the head of a global corporation to come to an isolated island in the Ho Chi Minh Autonomous Trade Zone, Con Dao, to study an anomaly. Con Dao is a protected area, cordoned off by advanced defensive systems to keep predators—human—from coming in and wiping out the ocean life in aggressive sea farming.

On Con Dao she meets two people with extraordinary capacities, one an android, the other barely human after a life of harsh conflict.

The android, Kamran, is the only one of its kind, a remarkable construct built by the woman who owns DIANIMA, Dr. Minervudottir-Chan, the corporation that has brought Dr. Nguyen to Con Dao. Humaniform, erudite, somehow not intimidating, they are set to research the octopuses together. Also on the island, Altansetseg, the security officer, a woman of long experience with the scars and the cynicism as proof, who operates an extensive remote drone net that proves startlingly powerful. Nguyen, Kamran, and Altansetseg develop an alliance centering on the creatures who have found a home in the bowels of an old shipwreck just off-shore.

Other characters in various locations come into play as berserkers, radical actors, fey factors in relation to DIANIMA, which impinge on the whole question of artificial intelligence and emergent sentience. Rustem, the outlaw hacker, who is hired by enigmatic people wanting to hack a code that has to do with (perhaps) autonomous AI; Eiko, a kidnapped worker enslaved to an illicit fishing trawler run by an AI system. But the main subjects in this are Kamran, Nguyen, Altansetseg, and, later, Minervudottir-Chan.

And the octopuses. Against all theory, they seem to have created a community, and developed the ability to communicate symbolically. The details of this are one of the chief pleasures of the novel.

One of.

These people all come together from isolated lives constrained by shells of self-defense and a frustrating inability to get past themselves in order to join community. Any community. They get by, they associate, the have colleagues. But Dr. Nguyen herself makes use of an advanced AI in order to indulge the forms of a relationship without there being an actual person involved. Kamran is alone by virtue of being the only one of its kind. Minnervudotir-Chan is perhaps the most isolated, having as excuse exactingly high standards for any kind of relationship, and finally resorting to build her own creature to meet them…which, of course, Kamran doesn’t. Altansetseg is buried inside a shell created by her entire life as a warrior. Vulnerability for her would be a form of self-destruction.

And yet they are all brought together to make contact with a creature that was supposed to be by nature all alone and has now, apparently, learned to make community.

The layers of revelation and interpenetration in this novel engage the desperate need to Be latent in all of us. And while Nayler does a remarkable job examining that, he is also giving us a material to consider the question of self-awareness at the heart of any discussion of AI. Before we can answer the core questions about AI, we have to answer it for ourselves. We have to recognize also that we need to extend that question to nonhuman life in all its forms. How, basically, can we expect to recognize self-aware intelligence in a machine if we can’t recognize it in biological forms other than our own?

Humans are rather chauvinistic about that. Perhaps understandably so. The question is meaningful only if we want connection, and we of course want it in terms we can understand. The only example we’ve studied in any depth till recently is…ourselves. So the template, the criteria, already presumes the markers of recognition.

“When we try to compare one animal’s brainpower with another’s, we also run into the fact that there is no single scale on which intelligence can be sensibly measured.” Peter Godfrey-Smith, Other Minds

Given that, communication runs aground on the same problem. No one scale on which to measure. And that has to do with expression, never mind meaning.

The Mountain In The Sea is an alien contact novel, make no mistake, only the aliens turn out to our preconceptions and limitations, as defined by the encounter. Every single character in this novel is an alien and they are all trying to connect, whether they realize it or not.

The Color of Sound

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

Ages ago, it seems, I stumbled onto a band that opened up for me the possibilities of what music could be.

Band. That word connotes things which seem oddly inadequate for this.

Back in 1973 I bought two records from a local store I favored (Play It Again Records, now long gone). I may have been advised to get them or it may simply have been the covers and the length of the tracks. I used a number of questionable metrics back then to find music, because not all of it was being played on the radio, and frankly almost none of my peers were into some of things I was into.

What I was into  I later learned was called Progressive Rock. In 1973, my favorite bands were, in no particular order, Yes, Emerson Lake & Palmer, Jethro Tull, Santana, and Chicago.  But I also owned Switched-On Bach and someone had told me about Beaver & Krause.  As my record collection expanded, odd records started showing up.

One of the things about most of these bands that appealed to me (not Santana or Chicago, no) was the use of synthesizers.  I played keyboard then, and bands that featured prominent keyboards caught my attention.  As time passed,  the aural landscapes created by synthesizers became more and more central to my musical æsthetic.  Curiously, much of this led me back into classical music (even as the better keyboard players reintroduced me to jazz, which it turned out I liked from a period before my adolescent record-collecting phase).

I loved synthesizer music.

Those two records I bought that day were by Tangerine Dream—Phaedra and Rubycon.

I was drawn into them completely.  There was structure, certainly, but little traditional formatting. Soundscapes. When I think of the term “tone poem” this is what comes to mind. Waves and currents of sound, overlapping, blending. I listened to those two albums constantly. This, to my ear, was Pure Music.  It was a separate reality.  I could drop the needle, lay in bed, and experience…

I have never done drugs. (Yes, this comes as a bit of a shock to people; even my father didn’t believe this.)  Chemical escape never appealed to me.  But this, I imagined, was pretty close to an hallucinogenic experience. Immersive, escapist, expansive.

Over the next few years I acquired a few more Tangerine Dream albums, but none of them captured me quite the way those two did.

Tangerine Dream became a band I would check up on from time to time. They went through periods of radical transformations, even as they remained true to their basic mode. Synthesizers were always primary, but eventually they began to sound more like a “band”—drums, guitar, the occasional saxophone, and compositionally shorter pieces that mimicked “songs.”  While I liked much of it, there were only echoes of what they had accomplished on those first two albums I’d bought.

Once the internet opened up and such things were searchable, I looked for what else they had done, and discovered a long history.  And, yes, distinct periods, often the result of changes in personnel.

Tangerine Dream alumni have gone on to do other things (Christopher Franke notably did the soundtrack for Babylon 5) but the single constant had been Edgar Froese.

Froese died in 2015. He, with the then current line-up, had been working on a new album.

When work had begun on this album in 2014, Tangerine Dream was a four-piece—Froese, Thorsten Quaeschning, Hoshiko Yamane, and Ulrich Schnauss.  Another new period, another re-imagining.

The longest surviving bands, unless they adopt a condition of perpetual stasis as a review act, constantly re-presenting their heyday, undergo continual change, both in personnel and in approach. Sometimes this just happens, an emergent property of natural evolution. Sometimes it is intentional.

Froese died before the project this new Tangerine Dream was completed. His wife, also Tangerine Dream’s manager, saw it through.

So here I have been listening to the result—Quantum Gate.  I’ve been playing it a lot.

It is possibly the most successful mix of what I found in those two albums from long ago and the various changes they embraced over more than 50 years. I hear the lushness, the abandon to “pure” music, but packaged in structures that allow the tracks to be heard as coherent pieces—not quite songs, as such, but perhaps sonatas.

The quality of the compositions and their execution are perfectly matched.  The range of sounds does not overwhelm.  Nor is this wallpaper, bland ‘scapes designed to be heard but not listened to. Close attention is rewarded, and surrender to the directions offered accomplishes the immersion that makes this kind of music so satisfying. The brain is massaged.  Coming out the other end…

I haven’t found a recording I’ve enjoyed on constant replay as much in years.

Tangerine Dream is a fascinating workshop, a pocket of unique music that fits no preconceived niche, not easily. There have been imitators, certainly, but few as successful or as continually interesting.