Peter Garland, Aki Takahashi & Essential Music – Another Sunrise, 2002



Guest post by Peter Harkawik

For the past few years, I’ve been fascinated by a certain thread of post-minimalist music that has taken the form away from its challenging, austere roots and more toward the melodic, etherial, and uplifting. Daniel Lentz, Mary Jane Leach, Paul Dresher, Elodie Lauten, and Andrew Poppy (whose Lost Jockey LP remains criminally out of circulation) have all made contributions in this direction. Wim Mertens is as responsible as anyone, publishing American Minimal Music, a text that helped introduce Europe to minimalism, in 1983. Perhaps my favorite though is Another Sunrise, a piece composed by Peter Garland for Aki Takahashi and Essential Music in 1995.

Another Sunrise continues a long intersection between Native American and minimalist music. Harry Partch and Moondog both constructed instruments inspired largely by those of indigenous peoples; the latter spent a summer in 1948 camped outside a Navajo reservation in New Mexico in a failed attempt to interest them in his music. Garland studied composition and ethnomusicology under Harold Budd and James Tenney at CalArts in the early 1970s, making extended stays in Mexico and eventually settling in Santa Fe in 1980, where he directed a performance ensemble. Sunrise benefits greatly from his long friendship with Aki Takahashi, a gifted and prolific avant-garde pianist who has collaborated with Tōru Takemitsu, Morton Feldman, Alvin Lucier, and Carl Stone. She is joined by Judith Gordon on piano, and four percussionists, apparently the product of an arrangement previously set up for a Paul Bowles piece.

 Another Sunrise is, from its first note, a showcase for the marimbula, an instrument of the Caribbean that shares a heritage with the African thumb piano. Its opening five bars form a simple theme that is the piece’s primary generative element. The titles of its short segments offer formal clues: mariachi, ballad, rumba, bolero, coda and finally, gospel. Vibraphone and marimba declare themselves halfway through “Ballad,” joined by dueling pianos. If it were not for the supreme beauty of the melody, Takahashi’s playing here would be almost violent, an urgent reminder that the piano is, after all, a percussive instrument. “Rumba” borrows only rattles and tempo from its namesake, followed by a quiet interlude in “Bolero.” Another Sunrise makes powerful use of its silent passages, and its circular, modal nature make for many moments when the piece feels it has concluded, only to continue in a thrilling steel drum crash. This is most true in the coda and final “Gospel Medley,” a deeply moving summation that calls to mind a congregation of enthralled worshippers. Part of my love of minimalist music is its ability to reveal itself upon repeated listenings, making it the ideal soundtrack for work that requires long stretches of sustained concentration, and this is certainly true here.

Sunrise is accompanied by two other Garland works, “Dreaming of Immortality in a Thatched Cottage” (1977, recorded in 1997) and “I Have Had to Learn the Simplest Things Last” (1993, recorded in 1995). “Dreaming” is a somber polyphonic work, beginning with a naked vocal harmony and slowly introducing an Indonesian angklung, marimba, and harpsichord. This marks Garland’s return to working with orchestral instruments after a period of abstinence apparently inspired by a brief friendship with Partch. “Simplest” was composed shortly after the death of John Cage in 1993, and is the collection’s most pared-down, most direct piece. It is broken into four segments that feel like a single supposition with divergent conclusions. Its final component, titled “I Found Them Like Seashells On The Beach (J. Cage)” is a passage of startling and profound quietude, and a fitting end, both for its subject, and this collection.

Kenji Kawai – Ghost In The Shell, 1995

A few days ago, poor Steve Aoki revealed his remix of the iconic 攻殻機動隊 (Ghost in the Shell) theme for the forthcoming remake. The remix is the EDM equivalent of trying to embroider lace with a power drill, and incensed anime fans have flooded the comments with rage (as well as with links to the also-iconic theme from the Stand Alone Complex series). Rather than adding further insult to injury, I wanted to share the original soundtrack, as it’s one of the best anime soundtracks (and arguably one of the best soundtracks, period).

To make the aforementioned theme, scoring giant Kenji Kawai combined Bulgarian choral harmonies and traditional Japanese vocal techniques into a wedding song with lyrics in the ancient Japanese language Yamato Kotaba. The theme is repeated in three different variations, all of which should give you goosebumps. The rest of the soundtrack is gorgeous, murky atmospherics: submerged keyboards, sparse taiko, synthetic strings, ominous clanging, a lone (Spanish?) guitar. If you haven’t seen the movie, song titles like “Nightstalker” and “Floating Museum” should be able to paint a sufficient picture. The real curveball is the closer, sometimes listed as a bonus track, which is a bubblegum pop sung in Cantonese. Many reviewers complain about the inclusion of the jarring closer, but I think a slightly psychotic ending makes sense in the context of a movie about fragmented personhood in a cyberpunk dystopia. Bonus round: here’s a very beautiful live performance of the theme.

Harold Budd & Hector Zazou – Glyph, 1995

An underloved record from two masters. Trip hop feels like a radical genre departure for both Budd and Zazou, and yet it instantly makes sense upon first listen. Both leave their stylistic fingerprints all over Glyph–Budd’s melancholia, Zazou’s sinister sensibility–weaving haunted ambient jazz into fizzed out drum loops. Trumpet arrangements by Mark Isham, guitar by Barbara Gogan (with whom Zazou also collaborated on a very good trip hop full-length that I’ll be posting at some point), and poetry recitations by Budd. Attains startling heights of opiated beauty (“Reflected in the Eye of a Dragonfly,” featuring a wash of pedal steel guitar courtesy of BJ Cole; sinuous grooves on “Pandas in Tandem” and “As Fast As I Could Look Away She Was Still There”). Does exactly what good trip hop is supposed to do, and then some.