a r t i s t : Paul Dolden
t i t l e : Delires de plaisirs
d a t e : 2005
l a b e l : empreintes DIGITALes
g e n r e : Avantgarde
r l s. d a t e : May/2006
t r a c k s : 06
b i t r a t e : VBRkbps
s i z e : 130,1 MB
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Buy this at http://www.electrocd.com/
Give it a chance... it starts off sounding sort of lame, but
trust me, Dolden is a clever guy who gets some interesting
sounds brewing up in due time.
Entropic Twilights: Explicating the Plague
by John Keillor
At the beginning of the 21st century, listeners are inundated
with music that wafts through every commercial space. Shopping
malls have become tasting centers, wherein a book shop will
pipe in a muzak-ed The Beatles tune while the clothes boutique
next door is barking bass-heavy electronica. A little further
down the stroll, light classical is shouldered alongside hip
hop, creating a garbled omnipresence. There is no silence any
more, only a miasma of unrelated ideas.
Paul Dolden coheres such babble in a single, densely packed
meta-narrative. This is his voice, his style, condensing the
shopper's day, explicating the aural plague, giving it shape
and substance. Since the 1980s, Dolden's vision of the present
has made the musical community prickly. His output does not
tidily emerge from the austere modernist tradition, which has
long lost its currency, except among composition instructors
and their students. By today's techno-standards, the musical
descendants of Webern and Stravinsky sound nourishing up
close, quaintly non-electric at a distance, and not quite real
any more.
With his history of layering hundreds of recorded tracks,
aggressively recalibrating the limits of orchestration, Dolden
attacks classical music's tail-eating inwardness and the weak
fibres by which it clings to artistic relevance. 1989's Below
the Walls of Jericho, with its bristling fabric, was bent on
enlivening the audience's blood flow. It was a nasty shock in
the concert hall, where shocks have been in short supply. Now
Dolden offers a new sound in Entropic Twilights, a barrage of
now, in the form of myriad musical genres, packed smart and
tight like Bach's counterpoint or Ligeti's mircropolyphony. ET
is tonal, less dissonant and longer than any previous works
(49 minutes) and welcomes comedy back to serious music. Listen
for when the dark, pulsing orchestral tensions melt into
speedy jazz guitar at the end of the first movement and try
not to smile. Let's return to the humour aspect later.
ET begs a reappraisal of the vocabulary around Dolden's music.
Particularly, his often-touted aesthetics of excess no longer
seems to apply; the millions of notes heard on this recording,
uncharacteristically, do not overload the listener. There are
exactly enough of them.
Composer is another problematic term, because its classical
inferences do not encapsulate what Dolden does. Other
composers compose for the open air, only rarely with
electronic assistance. Dolden composes for cyberspace, and
this is best illustrated through ET. Gone are the raging
blocks of scintillating klangfarben heard in the Jericho
triptych. ET works instead with four brief melodies, stretched
and compressed, beginning and ending at different positions
around the body; you can actually feel one tune coming down
into the top of your head as another strain spirals upward
toward your jaw. This creates a unique sensation of panoramic
space: the listener's body feels like a magnet, drawing
together musical Diaspora. At other times, there is a
perception of physical movement, as if the listener was moving
through audio chambers featuring walls of only recently
imaginable timbres, among other individual melodic currents
cruising at their own distinct tempos. Dolden does this by
composing in stereo and realizing his ideas through recording
engineering of the highest order.
Composers compose for the open air, while Dolden composes for
recording technology, and this is a pertinent distinction:
mediation becomes muse. During his suburban upbringing, young
Dolden heard almost all music through radio and recordings, as
did we all. His youthful compositional approach came under
fire for its unnatural fixation on microphones and
loudspeakers over pure, unblemished instrumental sound.
Ironically, live instruments are today a rarer treat than
their electrically mediated facsimiles. Nature, it would seem,
is being overrun by reality. That irony is critical to
Dolden's approach. Responding to media mediation is, again,
his style, an enterprise distinct from traditional composing.
It is media art.
Dolden the media artist has also been called a maximalist,
though that term means little more than containing more. There
certainly is a lot of music in ET, but that is also true of
every Mahler symphony. The term is misleading: æmaximalistÆ
implies a school of composition that does not exist in any
meaningful way. As for the use of different musical genres
concurrently, Dolden is using genres the way Bach, Haydn,
Schoenberg, and Bartok used folk tunes. Dolden uses unorthodox
instrumentation to capture those genres accurately: heavy
metal through electric guitar, and gamelan through those
gorgeous gongs.
Dolden is a staunch post-modernist, eager to play with
signifiers and, luckily, he is witty enough to make genre
splices splat or glisten. The jazzy guitar part that concludes
ET's opening movement, Twilight's Nomadic Desire, almost
goofily caps the more brooding, percussive choral stuff
beforehand. It is a sudden shift, deliberately snuffing out a
darker kind of tension in favour of something more exuberant.
It is a pratfall, and also a serious demonstration of how to
refresh the listener's experience. The icy trance beforehand
had been well prepared; the dreadful atmospheric integrity
explodes while the music's integrity holds fast. (Remember, we
are dealing with very finite musical materials constantly
reappearing in new garb: a four-melody Idee fixe.) The
anticipation of the listener is mangled but the music's logic
remains intact, which seemingly goads the audience to listen
less as academics and hear more as adventurers and joy riders.
Serious music has been skimpy on visceral thrills for a long
time now, perhaps because popular music often is so good at
evoking them. But 18th and 19th century listeners attended
piano concertos in part for the wild ride of a virtuosic
performance, a lively accompaniment, a yee-hah! This recent
absence has cost the classical tradition dearly. Dolden's ET
livens up the situation, for all music. ET is a rejection of
music's pervasive tameness, via velocity and scale. Just as
the healthiest artistic genres of todayùfilm and the
novelùappeal to the guts of the audience as much as they
provide cerebral edification, ET evocates the breadth of our
actual living experience, supercharged and relentlessly
entertaining.
ET is a challenge to the classical scene and to those polite,
piped in tunes, those vague prompters of commercial well
being. It is ill to reduce music to a mere sickness imposed
upon our sensibilities, to allow musicÆs value to be whittled
away by flabby ubiquity and frippery. DoldenÆs rebuttal is an
action-packed tonic of fortifying, electric irony and
multifarious, heads-up reality. Enjoy.
Production Methods for Entropic Twilights
by Paul Dolden
First the work was composed on 140 pages. I remember it took
me 137 days to compose the work. While composing I created the
click tracks since many of the sections involve complex
rhythmic phasing and I needed to see how the bars lined up to
control the harmonic rhythm.
Next the individual parts were written out and musicians and
singers were hired to perform the individual parts one at a
time. I performed all the bowed and plectrum string parts. All
the parts with sustained note values (i.e. melodic work) were
performed four times each. All the parts were recorded in
stereo using two AKG 414 UBL-S microphones. The microphone
pre-amp was a tube amp made by Peavey (VMP 2). The signal was
then placed through a Klark-Teknic Parametric Equalizer with
different EQ curves for each instrument (These curves I have
developed over many years of recording). The signal was then
placed through a phase angle correction unit, the Barcus Berry
BBE. Finally the signal was digitized using a Digidesign 882
I/O. All the performances were edited for greater accuracy.
Next all parts involving the inharmonic samples (i.e. pitch
shifted saucepans, bowls, wheel rims, various poles, bass
drums, various gongs and tams and many types of bells) were
created. In the case where samples doubled a performed part,
the samples were edited following the rhythm of the live part.
The piece was originally premiered in September 2000. However
I was still unhappy with the sound of the piece. For the next
two years I re-mastered my three previous solos CDs: L'ivresse
de la vitesse #1 and #2 and Seuil de silences (originally
called The Threshold of Deafening Silence). During this
remastering period I learned a lot about the new digital tools
available to me. Secondly I began to realize that for Entropic
Twilights I needed new types of production styles. I spend a
great deal of time listening and studying other people's
productions and mixing techniques. However I may be alone in
the inherent problems of dense multitracking. Moreover I may
be really alone in my orchestration ideas. For example, in
this work, I have 6 cymbal parts, 3 guiros, 3 shakers,
castanets, maracas, 2 snares and I still want the flute part
played softly in its first octave to cut through. Obviously a
few sonic comprises have to be made. Here are a few
engineering tricks I developed for this work.
I have come to believe in heavy compression of most
instruments and voices because otherwise when all the tracks
are together, you only hear the strong or penetrating parts of
each instrument. (i.e. high notes on brass and flutes/piccolo,
the low notes in saxophones, clarinets, vocal vowels which
have high pitched formants, etc.). The problem with extensive
compression of all tracks is that you start getting that
static wall of sound. Secondly, percussive sounds with
exponential envelopes cannot be clearly perceived through this
wall of sound. (One tends to only hear the tick of their
attacks). Therefore I developed dynamic settings for
compression with optical-style compressors. One example:
Attack: 100 (milliseconds) Release: 12 Ratio: 20:1 Threshold:
-30 dB. These types of settings produce an articulation
similar to a musical articulation of sfp (Fast loud attack and
quick decay to soft). This is emphasized by the fact that
optical compressors emphasize lower numbered harmonics as they
go into deep compression. (In this case the soft or last part
of the sound). Partially to offset this darkness, a dynamic
treble enhancer was used after compression that kicked in as
the signal became too dark. The quick reduction in level after
the attack of each note or phrase allowed the short envelopes
of the percussion instruments to be perceived in the final
mix. In short I made the orchestral instruments more
percussive.
Likewise I realized the pitched percussion instruments (metal,
bowls, poles, gamelan instruments, plucked strings, gongs,
tams, vibes, marimbas etc.) needed to become more sustained
and less percussive. I designed extreme low level compressors
for each instrument type. These compressors left the peak of
each sound where it was and severely brought up the decay
portion of the sound. To this decay portion I often added
dynamic noise reduction and/or treble enhancers. I also added
many short delays, in the 5 to 50 milliseconds range to these
instruments in order to imitate the timbral density of the
orchestral and voice parts. This timbral density for the
orchestra instruments was created by recording each part four
times. In addition for these pitched percussion instruments I
often used multiband compressors and expanders designed to
pull down the upper register during the bright attack portion.
Lows and mids were brought up or down in conjunction with the
previous low-level compressor.
Another sound quality problem I had in previous mixes was the
build up of resonant peaks resulting in a muddy sound when
many tracks were playing fast. In particular the resonant
peaks of particular instruments become an almost steady hum or
drone killing the rhythmic drive. For example both the piano
and cello have strong resonant peaks between 85 and 110 Hz.
When you have many tracks of the same sound source you get
this sonic sludge in these resonant regions. In previous works
I had worked with finding numerous resonant peaks and using
notch filters to remove them. However acoustic instruments
often have many closely spaced resonant peaks and by the time
you are up to 10 or 20 notches you are starting to get a very
thin sounding cello, piano, toms, etc. I realized I needed
more of a gap or space between each note than was possible
with human performance. In other words an extreme short
staccato. This was done through fancy applications of gates in
order not to cut off the initial attack transients of each
note. First an extremely fast optical compressor was used to
darken the sound after the initial attack. The next unit, the
gate, was triggered by seeing only the bright attack
transients. Next, another fast attack VCA high ratio
compressor was used to even out the levels. Often a dynamic
treble enhancer was added and/or a de-clicker to remove the
clicks that did occur by gating. Often somewhere in the chain
of plug-ins a multi-band compressor/expander was needed. For
each part I also produced a very fat or full sounding
compressed version which did not use gating. In the final mix
I would have the staccato or gated version and the legato
compressed version at the same time. I would achieve a balance
between the two and sometimes vary their mixture levels. In
some passages only the gated versions appears in the final
mix. When only using the gated version identification of the
instrument is often impossible. However following the pitch
pattern is possible because the gated short notes ended up
being around 20-40 milliseconds long.
A similar approach was used on cymbals, shakers, guiros,
hi-hats, toms, timpani, bass drum, low gamelan tams, electric
bass, acoustic bass, contra bassoon, tuba. A short gated
version and a fat compressed version were produced for each
performance. In the final mix the gated version produced the
rhythmic articulation and compressed version produced a
resonant big sound. In the final mix there was a tendency to
use more of the gated version when the two rhythmic sections
had pulled apart either through the use of phasing or two
different tempos. The most time consuming part of all this
work was when I had sounds for which I could not gate
electronically. For example, all the electric bass parts I
went through and edited in a silence between each note.
Therefore the gate had a chance to identify each note
separately and then shorten each that note accordingly.
There were other processes involved to get the sound of
Entropic Twilights which are too numerous to mention. However
I would like to mention one recording innovation I used for
drums. I first used this idea during the remastering of older
works phase (2000-2002) (in Beyond the Walls of Jericho and
Physics of Seduction. Invocation #3). My problem with drum
recordings previously is that I had been using standard
industry procedures. When I got to the final mix I found I did
not have enough level control over individual drum pieces,
because of the bleed of sound. (i.e. sound of the hi-hat in
almost every microphone etc). I realized I needed to record
the drums in the same manner as I did every other sound: one
piece at a time. This allowed for individual level control in
the final mix and individual settings of compression and
equalization for each drum piece. Moreover having the player
free from playing the entire kit at the same time allowed for
certain articulations that are not otherwise possible. For
example the six cymbals parts play a continuous ride in the
feel of the musical section. In addition I had the player
(Phillipe Keyser) play two bars normal and then two bars where
he choked or stopped the sound of the cymbal after each stick
stroke, with his free hand. This prevented the buildup of the
cymbals in the mix that you often hear in a typical rock mix
in which once the drummer starts bashing on the ride cymbal
everything else is masked because of the 300 Hz to 20 kHz
broadband noise of the cymbal. Likewise having 6 cymbals, like
the 3 guiros and 3 shakers, is to create a timbral density
equal to the instrumental parts.
My intention in Entropic Twilights was to produce a beautiful
recording that constantly varied its sound and therefore the
production procedures (for example sections that are very
ôorchestralö, sections that seem to swing like the best big
bands, sections that rocked you into the ground). Unlike most
composers or producers who create one type of sound world this
is still my biggest challenge which means developing an
extremely flexible audio production technique. In addition I
am doing sound constellations that cannot occur with acoustic
ensembles.
As a final comment I realize my music, particularly since
LÆivresse de la vitesse, has become about the same musical
materials being performed by a constantly changing
instrumentation. In this piece, the four melodies are only
developed in a limited manner, and no other melodic materials
are introduced. Contrasts are created by each section having a
unique orchestration that is never repeated again in the work.
By contrast, the instrumental composer normally deals with a
fixed instrumentation for the duration of the composition,
whether it is a string quartet, orchestra, or solo flute. In
most styles of writing the compositional decisions and
tensions are based on the introduction of new material and/or
more extended variation/development of existing material.
Clearly my working method elevates the art of orchestration
coupled with audio engineering to a dominant compositional
concern. At the point of this writing, the obvious question is
whether I want to change this balance.
Musicians featured in Entropic Twilights
Paul Dolden: electric and acoustic guitar, electric and
acoustic bass, violin, viola, cello, dulcimer, sitar, banjo,
tams, gongs, bowls, wheel rims, metal poles, metal plates,
various bells, gamelan orchestra instruments
Phillipe Keyser: drum kits
John Korsrud: trumpet
Derrick Christian: bass voice
Hamish Gordon: oboe, english horn
Johanna Hauser: clarinet, bass clarinet
Liz Hamel: alto voice, tenor and bass recorder
Brock Campbell: tuba
Nick Apivor: marimba, vibes, congas, shakers, guiros,
castenets, maracas, timpani
Elliot Polsky: bata drums, timbales
Lorraine Reinhardt: soprano voice
Bill Runge: soprano, alto, tenor and baritone saxes
Jason Cook: boy soprano
Ingrid Chiang: bassoon, contra bassoon.
Rod Murray: trombone
Jonathan Quick: tenor voice
Chenoa Anderson: flute, piccolo
Jeff Nelson: french horn
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01-entropic twilights--twilight's nomadic desire pt1 [12:16]
02-entropic twilights--twilight's nomadic desire pt2 [09:46]
03-entropic twilights--twilight's sleep [08:11]
04-entropic twilights--twilight's ritual incantations [18:59]
05-the gravity of silence, resonance #5 [13:53]
06-the heart tears itself apart with the power of its [14:44]
own muscle, resonance #3
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77:49 min