Makedonska Narodna Ora - Pece Atanasovskoga & Ansambl Narodnih Instrumenata

We begin the vinyl ethnography series with a favorite record of mine, beloved because of the excellence of its music and the intrigue of its cultural roots.

Makedonska Narodna Ora, Jugoton Zagreb, LPY-50985, ~1972

The Acquisition
I came by this LP not in a record store, but in the very back of an upscale thrift store. NYC's Vintage Thrift mostly specializes in clothing, furniture, antiques, and other collectibles, and seems to welcome donations of the vinyl kind. Though the store contained plenty of the standard bargain-bin detritus, there was also an unusually substantial selection of great ethnic folk music - including lots of old recordings of Yugoslav song and dance. This leads me to believe that those records, "Makedonska Narodna Ora" included, came from the collection of an older Slav, who may have purchased it overseas.

Though I have a certain fondness for nature imagery, pre-Photoshop image superimpositions, and Macedonian bagpipers in traditional garb, the album cover wasn't the main thing that grabbed my attention. What grabbed me was the This is the first and only vinyl record of Macedonian music that I've ever come across. While it doesn't contain my favorite song, "Dvajspetorka," a lively romp in 25/8 time, it features many other fantastic and "undanceable" odd-meter dances.

Pece Atanasovskoga and gajda

Some Context

The venerable gajda player pictured on the album cover is Pece Atanasovskoga (or Atanasovski), a veteran leader of Yugoslav state folk song and dance ensembles by the time of this recording in the early-mid 1970s. He played a complex role as a bearer of "authentic" folk traditions in an era when these traditions were being recontextualized, standardized, and marketed by the Socialist state apparatus.

These state-sponsored folk culture ensembles are extremely interesting to study critically. They took traditions formerly transmitted from person to person and performed in intimate social, dance, and sometimes spiritual contexts and moved them to the international stage. The concert hall, with its defined dichotomy between performers and audience members, was a significant factor in the "classicalizing" of folk forms. In this new context, ensembles created a  new representation of folk culture that was often marketed to foreigners while claiming "authenticity" - a loaded claim, considering the hybridity of practices engineered by the new space, new performance standards, and new pedagogical approaches. We'll go into greater depth about these issues in the next LP I post, of the famous Moiseyev Dance Ensemble.

A Look at the Record and the Music

The vinyl record provides an interesting lens through which to view the musical changes of the socialist era, as it embodies the process of decontextualization inherent in folk musics. Jugoton, the largest record label of Yugoslavia, was responsible for recording, producing, and packaging the musics of Yugoslav state ensembles for distribution and export. Considering this, there is a distinct dearth of information supplied on this record. Atanasovski is backed by an anonymous group of musicians, only referred to as "Ansambl narodnih instrumenata," or "ensemble of folk instruments." This record gives no information at all on the dances or the music, implicitly forcing the music to stand on its own. Moreover, this sounds nothing like any dance music you've ever heard, which enforces the fact that a prime factor of context is the listener's cultural background. When confronted with music like that of this record, my reaction is to listen in enraptured amazement. Thus, a soundtrack for social dance becomes the object of a solitary, involved listening experience when its context is altered. Because of the hybridity of transmission inherent in the state ensemble and Atanasovski's own pedagogy, it is impossible for me to tell whether this is presented as "authentic" dance music or pieces geared more toward listening.

The track listing - featuring markings of the previous owner's preferences

 The majority of the world's dance music (seen from a Western analytical perspective) is in symmetrical meters like 4/4 and 3/4 or 6/8, although one of the most ubiquitous rhythms is formed by subdividing a bar of 4/4 into 8th notes, grouped 3-3-2. The majority of Macedonian dance music on this record, however, is in asymmetrical meters like 5/8, 7/8 and others of even greater complexity.

Such meters are far removed from what we consider dance music in our culture, and are more often identified with progressive art musics - hence my tongue-in-cheek reference to "undanceable" dances earlier in this post. 
The rhythms on this record are intoxicating, perhaps the music's most striking factor to my ears. They stutter, lurch, and sway, sometimes evoking the lumbering movements of a great beast. The percussionist creates this sense of rhythmic compression and expansion by anticipating or delaying the beat. No matter how affected the beat becomes, however, the rhythmic and melodic instruments are always locked in perfect time with each other.

In considering these rhythms, another issue of personal context arises. In Western classical music, meter is explained as a divisive phenomenon: 4/4 means that a 4-beat bar is divided into 4 equal units. In Eastern forms such as the Indian tala, however, meter is thought of additively: a 4 beat cycle, composed by adding a 2-beat unit to another. While divisive and additive meters can produce similar sonic results, they do have tangible effects on performance, composition, and analysis. Different ways of thinking about meter allow us to experience and create the music in different ways.
Additive melodies often follow from additive metric systems, and in this music we often hear melodic phrases built by the small groupings - everything, even the most mindbendingly complex passages on this record can be explained as additions of twos and threes. The melodic contours themselves are simple as well, with focus on a stable, percussion-anchored line.

The dynamically off-kilter rhythms of many of these dances highlight a difference in instrumental role between Macedonian dance music and most other musics. We're used to hearing percussion play the role of timekeeper, anchoring the ensemble. Here, the percussion's role seems to be rhythmic play and propulsion, feeding off the invisible dance. The tambura, a long-necked lute with four doubled courses, similar to a bouzouki or mandolin in the guitar range, keeps time throughout by playing a constant stream of notes.
Atanasovski's gajda leads the ensemble on most tunes, providing the tonic drone and nimble melody over the perceived "chaos" of the percussion. This is the album and instrument that will help you fall in love with the bagpipes, purging your mind of that one unskilled Scottish piper you heard that one time who instilled an indiscriminate hatred of the instruments in you. The gajda's sound is more substantial, less bleating and shrill than the more familiar Scottish highland pipes. Its rich, reedy drone and soaring melodies have a more pleasant, balanced and rounded tone.
The other regional instruments of the Ansambl are the kaval, an end-blown flute played across the Balkans and Asia Minor, the tapan drum, the shrill double-reed zurla. There is also a more conventional Balkan ensemble on some tunes, featuring violin and clarinet as the main melody instruments. Interestingly enough, there are also moments that remind me of Indian and Tibetan temple music, the zurla and tapan resembling the sounds of the nagaswaram and thavil.

But I implore you - listen and draw your own conclusions about this wonderful music. Don't forget my favorite activity - attempting to count the beat cycles and understand the meters. With music this challenging and rewarding, it stays fun and doesn't get easy too quickly. 

Hope this post hasn't been prohibitively long! ENJOY!

Some almost-intelligible writing on the cover -
perhaps an autograph from Pece Atanasovski himself!

The Vinyl Record Ethnography Project

I spend a lot of time in record stores. Many would say that I spend too much time rummaging through those dusty bins, that what once began as an innocent consumerist hobby has become closer to an obsession or addiction. 
I think it's more than that.

I see the vinyl record as one of the most material manifestations of the musical immaterial, not just any other consumer object. Music lives in the grooves, canyons and valleys of those black discs, and it changes and ages with each play. When we put a record on, we hear its playing history in pops and scratches, the occasional scrape, skip, or repeat. While these effects sometimes become intrusive, I see them as a part of what makes each individual record unique - regardless of whether it is part of a mass-produced global release or a private pressing.
Each user of a vinyl record leaves their indelible marks on it, on the packaging in the form of writing, bends, wears, tears, sometimes even original artwork, and on the music itself simply by playing the record. In contrast with the now-ubiquitous digital formats of mp3, FLAC, WAV, the vinyl record's identity is forged through the act of playing and listening, while digital files only gain individual "identity" as they degrade in quality through conversion, compression, and other methods of transfer.

I almost exclusively buy old records, because a beaten copy with history is worth more in memories, time, and cultural background than any pristine reissue copy. Plus, the old one with its previous owner's stoned musings written on it probably costs less as well.
A project-exhibit by the artist Rutherford Chang that took place earlier this year elucidates how mass-produced vinyl becomes something deeply personal and strongly individual with time. We Buy White Albums focuses on the blank canvas  of the Beatles' much loved White Album as it becomes colored with age, drawn on with love, scratched, beaten, warped, and worn from excessive play, neglect, or some combination of the two. The project does a fantastic job of demonstrating that each vinyl record has a unique history, tempered and formed by its owner(s) as well as by the artists, labels, distributors, and all others involved in its production.

A beautifully personalized White Album from Chang's collection

And the dusty bin ceases to be just a dusty bin. It is a treasure trove of lost and found loves, musical objects with cultural histories of their own. I never know when I might find what I'm looking for, and I never know exactly what I'm looking for. In the digital age, this cultural materiality and uncertainty can feel like a blessing. I'm always content to while the hours away in crate-digging meditations, in blissful pursuit of those lost and found loves, those pleasures old and new.

This post inaugurates Oblique Acoustemologies' Vinyl Ethnography series, in which I post rips of rare, out of print, or little known records and attempt to recreate their background - the stores they came from, where they've been, the significance of the cultural attitudes expressed in the music and packaging - in as much as much depth as I can. Stay tuned for this series, beginning very soon.

Improvisation - Why We're Listening

In my first post on this blog, investigating the process of creative listening, I finally gave form to ideas that have been stewing in my brain for quite some time. This new shaping of old ideas got me thinking more about my development as a listener, and the scope and content of Oblique Acoustemologies.

To find the roots of my relationship with listening, I must go deep into my own sonic history. Before my relatively recent encounters with ethnomusicology and the academia of the avant-garde taught me showed me the pathways to expressing and understanding my ideas about experimental listening and music in an accepted grammar, I always felt the music and sounds in me. They were there, but I understood them more viscerally, just outside my zone of intellectual comprehension but imbedded in my sonic consciousness.

The zone of disconnect between the visceral and intellectual zones of consciousness is a place toward which I continually gravitate. In it lies the metaphysics of the music making experience, where a synthesis of listening and soundmaking combine to create singular happenings - ephemeral moments in which the music seems to inherit a will of its own.
This brings me back to the core of this blog - why we're listening, and why we're listening in the way we do.

I listen because I'm an improviser. 
Music has always been a phenomenon of spontaneity for me, a nexus of actions and reactions interfacing sound and the mind, unfolding in a malleable but somehow intangible process. I see improvisation as investigation, bound up closely with listening. However, it is difficult for me to reflect on my improvisatory process - I am hardly conscious of what exactly I'm doing, bound up as it is in a lifetime of music listened to, learned and assimilated, familiar patterns and frameworks, and quick harmolodic reasoning. Yet I improvise to make sense of sounds, to contextualize them, to reflect upon their old and new meanings. The greatest feelings I get while improvising come from spontaneous connections to the soundworld or to other improvisers, where something just "clicks" and the result is life-affirming, meditative, and transformative.
I listen because the inspiration for the connection is always there, always changing, always fleeting.
I listen because inspiration occurs in unexpected places, from unknowable sources.
I listen because the meaningfulness of a sound experience is inextricable from its impermanence.
I improvise to experience these elusive moments of meaning.

Moreover, the process of improvisation is so central to my life that it informs the way I understand human existence.
The improvisational process, with its focused listening and quick, almost unconscious reactions and adaptations, is vital to the survival of the human species. The great improvisers have an evolutionary advantage - sharp senses and quick reactions allow them to pick up cues from their environments and turn signals into meaningful information. Just like the musical improviser, the life improviser draws upon a lifetime of experience with every (re)action. As a life improviser, you have a library of responses to environmental and interpersonal stimuli that you access without conscious thought. You know from experience that fire is hot, to use a common example, and that excessive heat is damaging to the body - so when you move too close to a fire, you are repelled by your body's time-honed reflexes. 
Improvising musicians operate by channeling the consciousness of their idiom (or lack thereof), the fundamentals of their instruments and physicality, and their musical pasts and presents to create the sonic future.
Improvisation and being-in-the-world are process, journey, destination, (re)action, working within and without infinite subtlety, microstructure and macrostructure.
In Improvisation I find the meaning and joy of life, as one phrase within the joyous collective improvisation of civilization.

Introduction: We Are Listening

¹ oblique

 adjective \ō-ˈblēk, ə-, -ˈblīk

2. a : not straightforward : indirect; also : obscure

2 acoustemology

 noun 

  1. a : a portmanteau of the words "acoustic" and "epistemology" - the study of acoustic  

         knowledge. Coined by ethnomusicologist, anthropologist, and linguist Steven Feld.

Sound is one of the fundamental building blocks of all human experience. As we go about our lives, we hear - but when we focus, we listen. When we listen deeply enough, something beautiful happens. We compose the sonic events around us into an aural landscape, and thereby situate our internal and external selves in relation to the environment.

By exploring "...ways in which sound is central to making sense, to knowing, to experiential truth..." (Feld 1996:17), we can arrive at a deeper knowledge of our place in the world.

Listening is simultaneously an investigative and a creative act. Though the ideal of the aural sense is to process the totality of sound, it is impossible for us to register the subtleties of all the sonic events occurring around us simultaneously. Listening therefore necessitates focus, a shaping of the soundworld by each mind within it. We all compose the soundtracks of our experience, but we will go deeper: we strive for virtuosity in listening.

To become virtuosic listeners, we immerse ourselves in the worlds of experimental music and the avant-garde - the obscure, the difficult, the chaotic, the oblique- and this trains our brains to perceive and create strands of order within dense cultures of sound. Experimental music thrives on contextualization: putting unfamiliar sounds in familiar contexts, and familiar sounds in unfamiliar contexts. Drawing from the processes of experimental music, we can contextualize and compose our soundworlds as musical pieces through musical listening and field recording, and place ourselves within the soundscape by sounding our bodies or our surroundings in dialogue with the environment.

This is the Oblique Acoustemology, in which we use virtuosic listening to expand our knowledge and awareness of our sonic environments, of sound itself, and of the duality between the sonic self and its surroundings. 

We seek the obscured sounds within the known and familiar, as well as the familiar sounds within the obscure. 

We seek the truths within sound by listening for harmonic and enharmonic overtones and partials.

We seek outstanding and astonishing acoustic phenomena in unlikely places, and delight in the the sounds that lie outside the scope of our understanding. 

We make sounds of our own - shaping the sonic worlds of our experience and the experiences of others. We use our voices, sonorous objects, and musical instruments to blur the lines between indivi-duality and the sonic totality.

These goals inform the essence of this blog, centered on the music and musings of our (extra)ordinary lives. You can expect to see many different kinds of posts by me and other contributors over the coming days, weeks, and months, varying in scope and subject but always with reference to the concepts stated above. Types of posts will include: field recordings and field improvisations, unconventional instrumental discoveries, musical explorations of resonant spaces, concert reviews and bootleg recordings, rips of rare and out of print vinyl, musical object ethnographies, and other ongoing projects.

Thanks for taking the time to stop by, to read and listen.

Wherever you go, keep your mind and ears open.

Matt Chilton