Saturday, March 13, 2021

Meet The System: Orphan Sound System. Archives of Williamsburg--based band, Volume One. With a commentary by John Elmanahi.

the music of the trio. free for download, name your price.

https://orphansoundsystem.bandcamp.com/releases

 Welcome to Meet The System by Orphan Sound System aka OSS. We are making a map from where we started out. Our sonogeography is diverse and this album recorded in the garage in Williamsburg just one of many artefacts from a very dense 2 years of creative activity. We pass the microphone to John El-Manahi, who recalls our formation in 1994 (years are often contested) in Firenze, Italia.

 "It’s my recollection that OSS was formed the moment John Palumbo knocked on the door of the flat I was sharing with Jeff Gburek, Florence Italy, 1993, and said “I heard the Monk and had to see where it was coming from.” From that moment we had music as the foundation of our interaction. Gburek and I had met the year before in similar fashion when I’d heard the sounds of an acoustic guitar in some alt tuning echoing in the stairway of a temporary student lodging...I eventually found him and said something dumb about Paco Del Lucia or John McLaughlin. Eventually that awkwardness gave way to cautious, suspicious friendship that solidified over travels, sharing music, philosophical discussions, art and poetics.

By the time Palumbo had come to Italy, we’d already been flatmates binging on Scelsi, Xenakis, Bartok, Ligeti, NanCarrow, Messian, Henze, Boulez, Stockhausen, Beethoven etc....Mingus, Monk, Miles, Coltrane, Sun Ra, Albert Ayler, Throbbing Gristle, Neubauten, Can, Sun City Girls...Umm Kalthoum, Gnawa Music, Nass El Ghiwane Turkish Pop, Balinese and Javanese Gamelan, Sundanese Pop, Tibetan Monks, African Music of Pygmy, Bantu, and Tanzanian Peoples, Nigerian Beat...to name a few. The point is that we were immersing ourselves into a sonic universe that was completely interconnected. We listened with the intent of tying music to our current state of being as a means of expressing all our creative and spiritual energy. Along with all the sound were books, poetry, mythology, film, art, philosophy and world religions. Everything was included in our understanding of sound as a means of expression and transformation. Palumbo came in from a primarily Jazz, punk background...but shared the improvisational sensibility that our listening was unconsciously developing. We were aligned with the sensibilities of Sun Ra, Cage, Kurt Schwitters, and other transcendental Jazz musicians. 


After Italy we met up in Williamsburg, Brooklyn in 1995. We were a cobbled together unit that had some pretty ramshackle instruments and amps...I believe we were very lucky to have landed in such musical poverty because it forced us to be inventive with what we had. Create instruments and sounds from tuning, preparing, found objects, and invention. I did not own or use a single pedal during my entire time with OSS. I simulated echo, and pitch shifts by adjusting my playing style to mimic the sound I wanted to make. I added shortwave radio and a hand held tape recorder that I would play through the guitar pickups.
 

The whole band only had one or 2 pedals that Gburek cooped to make the “Lancelot”. It was a microphone jammed into the horn of a discarded bugle, run through a pitch shifter, that had a looping setting. In addition to it being a feedback wand it was a listening instrument that took all the sounds we made and transformed them. The feedback sounds were completely unique. At times the Lancelot would just run on auto pilot while Jeff played another instrument. It’s in these moments that OSS produced more sound than seemed possible for 3 people.
*** see Jeff's note below 

 Palumbo was always an inventor. He tried to make a “drum machine” that would allow him to play far more drums than he would be able to by hand. It was a massive wood and cable contraption that was far too big to move and kinda dangerous if you got too close to it. As it was he had saw blades, metal pipes and plates, shards of cymbals, and assorted other pieces that could be used as percussion. They were hanging all around his drum kit within reach of Jeff and I. Our extensive metallic percussion was another facet of OSS’s texture. I’d found an old metal fireplace and attached a metal comb to it. That became the “4th Orphan”...an instrument that could sound like anything from a timpani to a toy piano. We would play any of these at will so we could shift textures seamlessly.

This is all to explain how the music of OSS began to form and evolve in the moment due to the sounds we had available. Playing bass or guitar or drums was a given, but we wanted to compose pieces, or create an ecstatic event like the folkloric music of indigenous people. We didn’t care if we were virtuosic on an instrument. It was more the sound and timing of it that made any difference. Palumbo using clarinet, or trombone on the moments he was inspired to, provided far more impact than an overly cerebral academic choice. Everything was drawn out of the ether and we were just along for the ride.

 We’d made attempts to be more purposeful even as an improvisation group. There’s a certain amount of snottiness and elitist mentality in the circles of avant-garde and experimental music. We were fully confronted by this, even though we had studied music composition in college and we had all been very experienced players. It didn’t matter. In those circles your pedigree has to pass the sniff test, like dogs smelling each other’s asses. In response we created improvisation maps and notation for scoring so we could be more deliberate in the process. We developed things like “non playing” where we would frenetically mimic playing as close to our instruments and hit by chance. What resulted was heavily textured quiet moments with percussive exclamations, which would emerge with greater frequency. Also, we would create shapes that had wave like forms with markings like crescendo, decrescendo, accelerando, ritardando, staccato, legato etc. and we could map out a flow based on visual information. We all had visual art backgrounds so we used these maps and waveforms to create loose scores that allowed us to adhere to a “composition”. Ultimately we internalized all these methods and used them in a seamless non verbal communication based solely on aligned intuition. Basically we stopped seeking approval from academics and followed our creative instincts. What we were producing was like nothing we’d ever heard so we felt we were on the right path.

The gigs were a mixed bag. The climate was accepting enough for noise and improvisation bands in NY at that time. Though there was still the arms folded audiences who were too uptight to go anywhere. The exception were loft parties and squats that had a more informal vibe. These people we’re looking for freakish acts that would give their events a legit art vibe. So we had some very good performances that were well received.

 The resurfacing of these recordings are a time capsule from that pre-internet period of experimentation and free thinking. Alternative methods of production and disseminating ideas. The tapes that have survived are almost entirely live and created in the moment. If one were to play them in order they would see a clear evolution of technique and complexity of idea."

 Note on The Lancelot by Jeff Gburek

The Lancelot was named so because once the microphone was inserted into the bell of the bugle it resembled a medieval lance. The canalization of the soundwaves lead to a peculiar effect: it would create a feedback pitch entirely dependent on what area of the speaker of the amplifier it was aimed at and the physics of this made it predictable and playable. It seems to be the fore-runner of microphone/saxophone feedback arrangements I would later see used by John Butcher & others. The Lancelot was also therefore a wind instrument, a kind of electro-acoustic kazoo and with the pitch-modulator and delay pedal it was capable of becoming a cybernetic system interactive with the entire sonic environment. Once I started working with Djalma Primordial Science, I started to call it the Orphan's Ear. The Lancelot was a device that both listened/received and transmitted/generated sounds.The search for automatons as John indicated would not stop there. As we continue to re-master and upload the surprises will continue.

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