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█ █ P U B L I C . S O U N D
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█ █ presenting our latest release
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r e l e a s e . i n f o
Artist.....: Birchville Cat Motel
Title......: Gunpowder Temple of Heaven
Rip Date...: Jan-31-2008 Cat.No.....: PICA004
Style......: Ambient Label......: Pica Disk
Quality....: VBRkbps Type.......: Album
Size.......: 57,9 MB Source.....: CDDA
r e l e a s e . n o t e s
Birchville Cat Motel is the project of New Zealander Campbell
Kneale, who has from his base in Lower Hutt since the mid 90-ies
established himself as the leading voice of this generation of NZ
sound artists. Gunpowder Temple of Heaven is a new highlight in
his extensive discography. A single 40 minute long-form piece that
keeps building and unfolding; heaven for drone-noise enthustiasts.
The CD comes with a booklet with a complete Birchville discography
as well as liner-notes by Bruce Russell.
"Music by Birchville Cat Motel, a.k.a. Campbell Kneale only
reaches me very occasionally, so the list of releases mentioned in
this booklet certainly impressed me. If ever I want to collect it,
I sure have a lot to catch up with, but it might be a worthwhile
thing to do. Or so my thoughts were when hearing this release.
Like I said, I don't always catch up with Kneale's output, but
this new one certainly filled me with pleasure. To make things
easy: Birchville Cat Motel plays drone music of a louder kind. One
piece here, forty minutes in length. At it's core lies organ
drones, that sound like a church organ, carefully layered to
create miniature variation. That is the firm foundation of the
piece. Somewhere a bass slab sound comes in, and somewhere later,
the organ plays a three note melody, all of this while the
fundament lies firm. Hold on, there is a cymbal played
mechanically too. Or isn't? Such is the music of Birchville Cat
Motel. Deceiving. Deceivingly simple from the surface,
but complex if you listen carefully. Things aren't what they are,
elements are picked out and evolved, altered and put back in the
mix. Not 'loud' as in the word 'noise' but forcefully present -
the music is 'there', loud and clear. A very refined work of drone
meets noise. Play loud and be immersed." (FdW, Vital Weekly)
http://www.cpsip.co.nz
http://www.lassemarhaug.no/picadisk
LINER NOTES:
IÆve been listening to the music of Campbell Kneale
for more than a decade now. Recently Iæve been listening
with a sense of increasing admiration as he
stacks up monumental sound slabs in an architecture
of audition - building a lofty tower of sound.
In the early days, like most people, he was
still on a journey to discover what his own music
was going to be. Gradually, like all true artists, his
own voice began to emerge predominantly from
the babel. For me the tipping point occurred when
I heard the tape which became the Prayers CD on
Corpus Hermeticum. It was his ability to manage
atmospheres, and to layer sounds, that enabled him
to make the breakthrough. Always a dedicated
worker at whatever he does, Campbell had mastered
the detailed work required to place many
sounds accurately across each another. Often this
kind of 'more is more' strategy backfires into murky
sludge, where the increasing layers merely obscure
each other. On the contrary, the more BCM puts
into a piece, the more you hear coming out.
This tendency has reached a new peak on
Gunpowder Temple of Heaven. The first time l put
this on I found time slowed to a narcotic crawl and
my mental processes threatened to atrophy altogether.
I was trying to write, but this became
impossible, so I stared at the blinds on the window
for a while, till I realised they were starting to ripple
alarmingly. My eyeballs seemed to be changing
shape under the pressure of the sound. Once I'd
scraped myself from the floor, I made an effort to
understand what I was listening to, and why it was
affecting me so physically. The clues are in the title.
Church music was the first heavy metal - and central
to this devotional head-banging was the majestic
power of the church organ. Essentially, these are
machines for piling massive droning tones on top of
each other within a purpose-built acoustic and aesthetic
environment. In the Baroque period mechanical
advances in air pumping enabled organs to be
built bigger and bigger, in a potlatch of competition
to offer to the Almighty the loudest praise ever
heard. This shows up very clearly in the inexorably
building tones of this piece, which mount ever
upwards as your mind retreats panic-stricken into
semi-consciousness.
In the Old Testament the walls of Jericho
succumbed to the massed trumpets of the righteous,
a form of warfare that the twentieth century
did much to perfect. More recently sound has been
used both acoustically and psychologically as a
weapon. As the major division in world politics has
reverted from political ideology to the more traditional
religious divide, the connection between
liturgical and military music has become increasingly
pertinent.
The first experiments in psycho-acoustics
were carried out in churches. As cathedrals
acquired more and more ranks of pipes, and as
more came to be known about the psycho-acoustic
inter-relationship between organ design and
acoustic space, the impact of organ recitals
became more intense, and these impacts became
more explicitly the point of the exercise. This tradition
of 'shock and awe' was what Le Courbusier
and Xenakis were building on with their electroacoustic
architecture for the Phillips pavilion at
Brussels in 1958. In this Xenakis, of course, was
responding to his studies with Messiaen, the giant
of twentieth century organ players, as well as to his
own architectural theories. A whole tradition of
artists has followed in their wake, predominantly
concerned with psycho-acoustic effects, Maryanne
Amacher is an obvious example. And while this is
not the prime concern of BCM, it certainly feeds
into his project, which is concerned with the
impact of sound and amplitude on the list-ener.
It is not really crucial to know what actual
instrumentation was used in the making of
Gunpowder. The effect of these continuous tones,
underlaid field recordings of acoustic environments,
and overlaid modulating notes is to create
an atmosphere which invokes the overwhelming
power of the wind organ in all its pomp. It is no
accident that one of Messiaen's preoccupations
was the relationship between music and time, and
the way that tempos and structures can be manipulated
to affect the listeners' perception of the passage
of time. This kind of thinking is inherent in the
electro-acoustic music of BCM. On first listening I
had no idea if the piece ran for 15 minutes or 50, all
I was sure of was that the sun had not set while it
was playing.
Temples are a recurring motif in Campbell
Kneale's work. They seem to stand not only as symbols
of worship for the creator, but also as visual
metaphors for the overpowering weight of divine
omnipotence, and perhaps secular powers as well.
Certainly I can't look at a cathedral without thinking
of Julian Jaynes' theory of the origin of consciousness
in our evolution from the primordial bi-cameral
mind of schizophrenia. For Jaynes, temples formed visual
mnemonics in bi-cameral societies, substituting for the yet to
evolve individual consciousness
in the creation of social structures. This,
he argues, is why the characteristic temple form in
these early polities was the ziggurat, or pyramid.
On a flat irrigated flood plain, these structures
could be seen from greater distances, thus extending
their zone of psycho-social control, since constant
visibility was needed to reinforce the voices
of the Gods which controlled the unself-conscious
bi-cameral people. In effect the temple was the
ruler in these theocratic societies. If he is correct,
echoes of this still infect our subconscious today.
Previous works of BCM have drawn attention
to this secular/sacred duality, by contrasting
the silence and purity of the Zen ideal with the
'impure' torrent of noise produced by the electronic
arsenal at his disposal. in another instructive
episode from the incessant wars of the Old
Testament, Samson destroyed the temple of the
Philistines by pushing down its main columns. He
did this because they had blinded him, but also to
wreak revenge on their god. He could do this
because he was a culture hero of more than mortal
strength, and he did not need to use acoustic techniques
to achieve it. Neither did Guy Fawkes, in his
attempt to bring down parliament by means of gunpowder
in 1605. The House of Lords at that point in
English history, was not far from a church, still
being the site of the exercise of the divinely-sanctioned
secular power. Fawkes, it should be remembered,
was a religious rebel before he was a secular
one. His objection was not to the institution of
monarchy, but to the church that those monarchs
worshipped in on Sunday.
Thus for me, Gunpowder Temple of Heaven
is a complex cluster of metaphors: linguistic, historical
and musical. The proof, however, is in the pudding.
It is the psychotropic effects of listening to
this carefully laminated composition which makes
it clear that there is in fact a more than accidental
confluence of image and sound. What you see and
hear is, remarkably, exactly what you get - a consciousness-
capturing dose of sound that grips your
skull like an abductor's taped-on mask. I personally
recommend it.
Bruce Russell
Lyttelton
June 2007
p l a y l i s t
01 Gunpowder Temple of Heaven 40:49
40:49 min
g r e e t i n g s
agw - amok - bass - bcc - bex - boss - cmg - cmc - cms - d2h
def - dh - disc0 - drum - emp - ftd - fwyh - gem - i8 - ipc
jce - jfk - jrp - just - khz - kinky - kw - lame - maem - mbs
mgc - psycz - r2r - rac - radial - rapid - rks - rtb - sb
sever - sfe - soup - sour - sq - tr - trt - ube - uc - upe
uki - xtc - yard - zi
respect to music lovers worldwide
never forget : go to the show. buy the t-shirt. order the vinyl