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Gordon Monahan
By Nick Storring
Since
the late '70s, Gordon Monahan has been making a career of extracting
the unheard from pretty much anything he can get his hands on. A
seasoned composer and performer, he's worked with string instruments
played by wind, Theremin-controlled water droplets (which "play"
various amplified objects) and even with fake speakers. While he is
constantly discovering alarmingly distinctive sounds in unexpected
places, he mostly eschews electronic effects, trading pedals and
plug-ins for homespun mechanical gadgetry.
His battery of esoteric approaches might suggest stiff academic music
that places concept well above content. But Monahan avoids the kind of
annotated navel-gazing one might expect, instead drawing the listener
into the core of sounds themselves, intoxicating listeners with both
sheer force and myriad details. Unafraid of fun and spectacle too, he
often delivers performances and installation pieces with an incisive
yet impish sense of humour.
While the "mad inventor" tag gets thrown around fairly liberally when
it comes to the weirder end of music, the label is quite apt when it
comes to El Gordo. While some turn to synthesizers and software to find
new sounds, Monahan is interested in "interfacing with physical
mechanical devices" and builds many of his instruments from scratch
using simple materials: motors, piano strings, tubing, magnets and
contact microphones (like an electric version of a stethoscope).
His idiosyncratic method, of course, necessitates a radically different
kind of setup than that of even your average experimental musician. "We
have a separate workshop [for] anything like drilling or metal — we've
got a metal cutter there and a drill press," he says about his home
studio, appropriately dubbed the Funny Farm, just outside Meaford, ON.
"[In] another building we store a whole bunch of electronic parts and
supplies."
While the notion that someone would need power tools in the studio
might sound a bit ridiculous, seeing one of Gordon's elaborate live
performances would definitely clarify things. Although "ridiculous"
might still be an appropriate adjective for his musical Rube
Goldberg-esque machines. His 2003 piece New and Used Furniture Music
uses a souped-up theremin, which controls (via an old beater Macintosh
computer) a system of small robotic devices. As if by magic, water
droplets fall in perfect rhythmic synchronicity on contact-miced saw
blades, twelve-inch records, CDs, and plates creating a bed of
percussive sounds. Sheet metal bends and quivers all by itself,
producing crashing torrents of white noise, while long metal piano
strings strung up above the audience hum and sizzle as they come into
contact with motorized plectrums and magnets. The whole room quakes as
though it were alive, resonating with dense slabs of noise.
The resultant music might actually almost pass for unreleased Autechre
tracks, or something else from the more adventurous end of electronic,
but the only electronic tampering involved is simple amplification.
Even the piano, in Monahan's hands, becomes an alien machine; his 1983 work, Piano Mechanics,
is what he terms a "post-electronic work for acoustic piano," where the
titular instrument is recast as a "machine to produce sound." Setting
aside the familiar building blocks of melody, harmony, rhythm, Monahan
built the piece on waves of sound produced through keying, striking and
strumming the strings, and letting them ring through the entire
instrument sympathetically.
"I don't think I would've composed that piece unless had worked with
analog electronics about the same time, which started tuning my ears to
listening to sounds from an analytic point of view. I extended my piano
technique to bring those kinds of sounds out of the piano. There's a
certain aspect of this sound I'm making now that sounds a little bit
electronic... but how can I make it sound more electronic without using
any electronics?"
And despite his deep investment in ferociously innovative
sound-textures, Monahan is almost equally committed to his own warped
brand of humour. His numerous forays into lounge music are certainly
ample indication of this. "When I played piano when I was a kid, I
actually think I subliminally wanted to learn to play the Hammond organ
and do this kind of easy listening."
Music From Nowhere, one of his many installation pieces, also
might elicit a few chuckles. Speaker cabinets are displayed in a
gallery, but while it would seem you're listening to pre-recorded
sounds, here's no actual speaker inside — you're listening to the
whirrings and scrapings of some motorized device, obviously
hand-crafted by Monahan himself. "It's a one-liner, but it's also about
deconstructing what audio is, because it draws into question the false
aspects of audio. Audio as a medium is a representation of reality.
Anytime you start deconstructing a loudspeaker, you're deconstructing
the device through which hear, listen to music."
Monahan hosts the Electric Eclectics Festival July 31 to August 2 near Meaford; more info at electric-eclectics.com.
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