Honestly, it’s like that old joke about waiting for buses. You wait years for a new release from Lee Fraser, and then two come along at once. Hot on the heels of Live at Parken, Vienna, 05.08.23, released in March, comes a new album, Scii Tenaph, not so much accompanied by as ensconced within a book, Ghost Semantics, containing a collection of texts purportedly pertaining to Fraser’s music. The book takes its title from an unpublished paper of Fraser’s from 2009, Ghost Semantics: An Enquiry into the Nature of Listening, Discourse and Value in the Acousmatic Arena. That paper is evidently the origin for a new paper by Fraser that concludes the book; both texts are themselves the starting point for the three essays in the book, by Tobias Ewé, Sam Ridout and Seth Ayyaz, such that Ghost Semantics in its entirety reads akin to a theme and variations, with the theme only appearing in its truest, clearest form at the end.
A short introduction by Inigo Wilkins, The Sonicliminal, is a very useful way into the book, and especially helpful in terms of setting out the bounds of what’s to come. The overwhelming emphasis here is on listening, particularly with regard to the relationship between not just familiar and unfamiliar but, more broadly (even transcendently), between Inside – everything we can actively sense – and Outside, touching on the possibility of the unknown (unknowable?) beyond, and what Wilkins tantalisingly describes as “sounding the unsound”. It’s a fascinating opening gambit, and a plausible one too considering the way Fraser sculpts and creates his music, which, compared to the majority of contemporary electronic composers, could well be regarded as an “Outside music”.
Tobias Ewé goes much further with this in his essay Shaking the Habitual. Though interesting in its own right, the connection to Fraser’s music – not so much organically reached as shoe-horned in in just a single paragraph near the end – feels forced and unconvincing. Its theme, that entrenched listening habits require sonic stimuli that disrupt and challenge them, is surely true for Fraser’s music (Fraser himself advocates strongly for this in his concluding essay) but it’s just as true for many other, very different kinds of music too. The suggestion – and it would have been nice if Ewé had drilled down into this rather than leaving it entirely implicit – is that the Outside, beyond our senses and perceptions, is the inspirational utopia from where Fraser’s compositional imagination derives its spark, and thereby its potential. Reading between the lines, he hints (and only hints) at how Fraser’s uniquely uncanny music might be able, as Wilkins suggests, to sound the unsound, when he writes, “While listening directly to the Outside is impossible from the point of audition of the human auditory system, the presence of catastrophically unpredictable sounds can bring the Outside in.”
Ultimately, for all its philosophical interest, from a musical perspective there’s not much in Ewé’s text that feels imperative or vital (indeed, beside Fraser’s own essay it seems largely redundant). People may be resistent to a lot of new music, and perhaps that’s in part to do with entrenched listening habits, but, put simply, Fraser’s music is unlikely to draw vast quantities of new fans simply because of how radically unconventional it is. If anything, considering the average listener, the opposite seems far more likely. (Apropos: at no point does Ewé seem to have the average listener in his sights; this seems to be a rallying cry aimed at the already- or mostly-converted.) In relation to music in general, and Fraser’s music specifically, Ewé’s essay reads as a bit of a loquacious red herring.
That’s as nothing next to Seth Ayyaz‘s monster of a text, Mentalizing Sound, the Biopsychosocial Condition of Listening & Experimental Phantasmogenesis, which, to extend that metaphor, is more like a multiloquent scarlet barracuda. Ayyaz also addresses the perspective of music that’s outside expectations and conventions, yet his subject matter plays fast and loose in its (non-)relationship to Fraser’s music, getting bogged down in biological aspects of listening and interpretation, with an extensive discussion on apophenia. Furthermore, though it’s an ever-present danger in books of this kind, Ayyaz’s language is more than usually obscurantist, making even his more interesting passages irritating to wade through. i found this essay almost entirely removed from anything that might pertain to a more meaningful engagement with Fraser’s music, and as a consequence, due to its length, insufferably boring. “The reader might notice that I have not said anything to delimit, frame or otherwise discipline an act of listening to Fraser’s works”, he says toward the end. Yes, i noticed that.
Sam Ridout‘s response to the radicality of Fraser’s music, Reading in the Dark, seems to be rooted in worrying about how to define it and, thereby, how to go about listening to it. It’s a curious text, one that takes its starting point from “acousmatic music” being “the description” of and “the designation” for Fraser’s work. Ridout doesn’t say who made such a claim in the first place; perhaps it’s an assumption based on the fact that – well, what else are we going to call it?! Ridout recounts the history of the term “acousmatic” in the hope that it might shed light on the matter – a kind of academic retracing one’s steps, not a bad idea – and to an extent it does, insofar as his conclusion (spoiler alert) is not dissimilar from Ewé’s starting point: an assumption that, to make any sense of it, one needs to get away from conventional modes of listening. Ridout notes the most obvious aspect of Fraser’s music – its totally synthetic nature – and points out this puts the audience in a position of considerable uncertainty, and thereby places extra demands on them. Hard to argue with any of that (considering how obvious it is), or with Ridout’s ultimate acceptance that, whoever it was who claimed Fraser’s music to be “acousmatic”, was probably right. Perversely, Ridout seems to evade the fact that a great deal of Fraser’s music actively evokes real-world sounds and sources. (This is something Fraser and i discussed in our Dialogue together; and in any case, as Fraser touches on in his own text, is it even possible to create synthetic sounds that make no connection to anything real?) One could therefore make a claim that Fraser’s music isn’t so completely removed from the electroacoustic tradition as Ridout implies but, honestly, i hardly think it matters.
To an extent i can’t help feeling that this text says more about Ridout, and his need to get analytical and define things in order to be able to listen to them, than it does about Fraser. That being said, where Fraser’s music sits in the broader history of electronic music is an interesting question, a question that i’ve never been able satisfactorily to answer (not that i’ve tried very hard). i appreciate the distinctions Ridout makes in distancing Fraser’s work from other musics, such as Noise music, but i find it impossible to agree with this sentence, “Fraser’s noise is not to be equated with the visceral, the immediate or the exceptional.” Not in a superficial way – in other words, not to attain simplistic ends or conventional ‘effects’ – certainly, but i’ve never failed to find Fraser’s music all three of those epithets. In abundance.
Not surprisingly, the most immediate, tangible and pertinent of all the voices in the book is Fraser himself, particularly in a short interview with Rahma Khazam, conducted in January 2019. It becomes clear here how the preceding texts take their starting point from Fraser’s comments (citing Lachenmann) about a new kind of listening and composer-listener relationship, and more specifically Fraser’s interest in Deleuzean transcendental empiricism, with the implication, for both composers and listeners, that we should all shift mentally and seek to cultivate a new openness to things from beyond our sphere of recognition and understanding. Considering the ways in which Fraser’s work plays with liminality – being entirely synthetic yet frequently alluding to real-world sounds – makes the discussion about absolute music especially interesting. It makes a lot of sense therefore that Fraser neatly sidesteps being too fixed about the non-referentiality of his music, instead acknowledging a “tension […] between this desire to transcend or escape the human experience and an acknowledgement of our absolute bondage to it”. He goes on to cite Aristotle’s discussion of mimesis, stating that “all art, no matter how abstract in its ambition, remains bound to a certain interiority from which it can only picture, illuminate or, at most, extend the shaping forces or nature, but it can never hope to escape them.”
Concomitant to this is a discussion about the usefulness and importance of metaphor in making sense of, and personalising, the listening experience. i like the way Fraser describes “the search for a powerful metaphor” as “a creative process in its own right”, which definitely reflects my own experiences trying to discuss his music. And i also really appreciate, and fully agree with (and feel deeply challenged by) his subsequent comment on how provisional the metaphor process is, and that it “ultimately acts as a diversion: despite its qualities, its necessarily reductive outcome captures none of the fugitive awe that the manifold of unvoiced perceptions can inspire during the flow of audition. So […] we should take care not to be completely taken in by it.” Ultimately, the conversation with Khazam clarifies how grounded Fraser is, taking a pragmatic approach to composition while being open to the ways it can fire the imagination to contemplate the Outside.
Fraser’s own essay, Somatic Abstraction, brings the best of the wildly diverse preceding thoughts into sharp focus. The extent of influence of his former teacher, Denis Smalley, becomes abundantly clear, particularly in his discussion of the liminality of music in relation to Smalley’s notion of ‘spectral space’. Fraser talks about the “capricious form of attentive listening” encouraged by this space, in which “cues are processed as novel coordinates in the subjectivised reproduction of space, giving ghostly form to an as-yet unbranded entity. Through the combinatorial psychophysics of source bonding, the entity receives its tenor.” Fraser could here almost be describing his own music. He also makes it clear that inculcating a new mode of listening isn’t simply a challenge but, potentially, “a conflict”, though one that is “a complex psychophysical process working miracles to assemble spectres of semblance from out of thin air” (Fraser’s turns of phrase are often marvellously poetic). His discussion of overcoming barriers to the new is nicely playful; regarding the “synthetic abstraction” of his musical language, he describes how, due to being “[s]tripped of associative specificity (but dressed the part), these almost-objects operate an illicit trade in The Faculty of Perception, outfoxing security at reception to get psychotropic goods to the executive branch on the top floor.” He ends, bringing the focus to a critical point, summarising the role of the composer as being “in short, to evolve listening”.
i can’t help wishing the texts in Ghost Semantics were more proximal to Fraser’s actual work. It’s fine to want to bore deep into the firmament of listening as a practice, or a state of mind, or even a biological process (or, in Ayyaz’s case, a “biopsychosocial” process), but it would have been nice if someone had wanted to probe more specifically into the nuts and bolts of what makes Fraser’s music the complex and radical sonic experience that it is. In other words, to say something about the music, and not just take it for granted. The only voice to speak actively about the music is Fraser himself, and while it’s always extremely interesting to read (or listen to) Fraser elaborating on the processes and perceptions regarding his work, it would be valuable to read something equally in-depth from an external point of view. Overall, there’s a great deal of food for thought in Ghost Semantics; some of it is highly nutritious and satisfying, some has a modicum of taste, while some portions are frankly indigestible. But the interview and Fraser’s own essay are essential reading for anyone wanting to engage with, and seek to understand, Lee Fraser’s music.
The enclosed CD features Fraser’s latest composition, Scii Tenaph. It’s a work in three movements, and it’s interesting to note, considering the liminal nature of his music, caught between synthetic and allusive, that their titles also reflect this liminality. The first movement is named for something concrete, Stheno (referencing one of the three mythological gorgons), while the latter two are simply titled Scii Tenaph II and Scii Tenaph III, abstract words that don’t suggest anything specific.
Within this tripartite structure, Stheno speaks as something akin to a warm-up exercise. A minute’s worth of lowish noise yields to edgy, tactile, somewhat aggressive actions, tapping directly into the kind of heightened physicality typical of Fraser’s music. Garnished with buzzy squelch at the sides, this apparent intensity is then completely overwhelmed by a huge central surge of razor sharpness, which also extends to the sides, feeling like a three-pronged attack. Even when it seems to ease off, it’s still very upfront and in our face, maintaining distinct left-right-centre focal points in what now is akin to an angry purring. This is answered by dull but punchy movements like something flexing: again the physicality, again the impression that what we’re hearing is a recording of something bizarre and exotic. Its denouement allows for calmer material, forming around a quickly pulsing central pitch, becoming a huge panoply of chirring, ticking and rippling elements, a tension broken by more muscular movement, coming out the other side in a beautiful hovering shimmer.
Stheno establishes paradigms of behaviour that are extended in Scii Tenaph II. Another gentle start (a bass throb cross-fading into noise) leads to more textural ripples and tickles. Yet what follows is almost like a literal embodiment of liminality, Fraser bringing together obviously electronic sounds in the form of blips and bleeps, overlaid on ostensible familiars of insect calls or bird songs. It’s a nice demonstration of the timbral tension at the heart of Fraser’s work, pulling us between being drawn to the pseudo-real for footholds or signposts while revelling (or, perhaps, flailing) in the alien. This tension becomes the centre of the episode that follows, in which bouncing and clattering sounds become the basis for, first, angular melodic phrases and then, improbably, a rudimentary computer voice, trying to emerge from quasi-vocal fry to enunciate its first words. The latter half of the piece is less demonstrative, receding to gentler textures and even a recap of sorts, until the impacts return, now confined to bouncing on and around a dronal centre.
As a short conclusion, Scii Tenaph III limits itself to pitch-based materials. At each end end there’s a sense that things have fallen apart at the seams, opening with random, metallic-like clatter (as if the conclusion of the Scii Tenaph II had become disorganised) and closing with a network of bangs and twangs like a myriad objects falling from the skies. In between, there’s a powerful tension as vague pitch elements try to project, conveying an implicit energy such that everything might explode. As in Scii Tenaph II, it again seems that these mere impacts (pitched or otherwise) could form the basis for something more than the sum of its parts. Nothing as tangible as a voice materialises this time, instead forming a rich, vibrant but edgy chorus of tones, embellished with hard bass slaps, displaying the same razor edge as in Stheno. It’s an intimidating level of ferocity that suggests it’s the root cause of the disintegration that brings the work to its vivid close.
Ghost Semantics is published by, and only available from, the Italian non-profit contemporary arts organisation Cripta747, and contains both English and Italian translations of the texts, along with the Scii Tenaph CD. No digital options at this time, though Scii Tenaph III is available separately, included on Distractfold’s 2021 compilation album The New Unusual.
