Eric Lyon - Red Velvet
I’m
very curious, and interested to know, ah, your ideas…
In a 1971 lecture on Moment-Forming and Integration, (later
published in Stockhausen on Music) Karlheinz Stockhausen summarized his
musical system, moment form, by reading from a poem by William Blake:
“He who kisses the Joy as it flies / Lives in Eternity’s Sunrise.”
Stockhausen’s moment form is a psychological sum of “beauty and shit” as
AGF might put it. He was interested in a textural, compositional, and
contextual soup of Joycian abrupt changes, where the disparate elements
in the work don’t move progressively; they jump, skitter, and blend in
multiplicity and aesthetic diversity.
Eric Lyon’s Red Velvet takes this Zen-like mode of
listening – “the Joy as it flies” – and stretches it by stitching humor
and calculated abandon into works that leap happily across stylistic
divides, while still managing a surprising and compelling capacity for
narrative. This music, however synthetic, marks its discourse with
realism. This is music for our times, really: self-aware postmodern
commentary, scatterbrain tangents of haunting millennial choirs bleeding
into 80s dance-pop, beauty, silence, computer chip dissonance, and the
acute cynicism of a terrified but enamored, global, and modern people –
a people who are culturally connected for better or worse in a continuum
somewhere between McDonalds homogeneity and Zen detachment.
But I just said to myself, ‘why not?’
Butter, from Red Velvet, begins like some grand dive off a 28th
century Tokyo skyscraper with a whirl of twisted synthesis and
hyperactive textural modulations, jumping and sliding from hectic to
serene and back again before offering the simple rationale: “why not?”
So what’s the overall effect? Simply put, Red Velvet compels many modes
of listening. Lyon’s music all but requires an active and studied
listen, not unlike the concentration involved in soaking in all layers
of a four voice Bach fugue for example. Although Red Velvet sometimes
engages the sort of polyphonic vertical listening Bach’s music is best
suited for, the music overall is a lateral experience. One moment may
stimulate a mode of listening usually associated with the extreme
gestural minimalism of Bernhard Günter. After a short time in that sound
world – usually just enough to establish the musical setting – a
typically graceful transition will then, for example, spring the music
into something requiring a mode of listening usually associated with the
noise-metal band Black Dice.
The real magic of Lyon’s compositions lies in these
transitions: the juxtapositions inform and quite radically transform
what might otherwise be a comfortable or traditional listening
experience. And over time an overall aesthetic impression of the piece
emerges, as in Stockhausen’s moment form. That overall impression has,
for me, continually proved to be restless, unfixed, and hard to qualify.
In American Pioneers: Ives to Cage and Beyond Alan Rich
describes the experience of listening to La Monte Young’s The Well
Tuned Piano as “a continuous meditation across a flood of images.
Hearing the work properly,” he continues, “is possible only by
disconnecting oneself with the expectations of classical harmonies such
as Imperial Bösendorfers [the piano Young’s piece was conceived on] are
wont to produce. Freely associating, one hears instead virtually the
entire range of worldwide musical experience.” Red Velvet clearly
encourages this sort of free association, and the spectrum of musical
experience Lyon pans across during the tenure of his recording is
dramatically far-reaching and rewarding in its many facets.
Red
Velvet
Eric
Lyon