Walking Tune

Charles Amirkhanian - Walking Tune

In the end, Charles Amirkhanian is really an anthropologist. His music is descriptive, specific, lush, and oddly exotic. Listening to his pieces, or falling into them, eventually becomes a visual experience. I'm reminded of Brian Eno's music for imaginary films, although Charles takes this idea much farther. While Eno creates a soundtrack, a mood, Charles uses things like thunderstorms, carousels, birds, and machines to create imaginary spaces filled with characters, voices, motion, and colorful magical drama.

It is the motion in these pieces that I find most fascinating. In Walking Tune, the listener's perspective is constantly shifting. This is literally a walk through a piece of music. The gravel crunches beneath your feet; you hear the sound of donkeys? pigs? chickens? squealing and braying. The point of view shifts and you realize you're not walking, you're watching things pass in front of you. You're at a parade. The camera tilts up to the sky where a violin is floating, drifting by.

The art of audio collage has been reinvented here. It's like a new kind of cinematography which can move from a wide shot to extreme closeup in one flawless tracking shot. No cuts, flowing, streaming with effortless dreamlike motion.

The lovely violin refrains and the voices are more disembodied than the landscapes and theyhover about, like a Greek chorus. The sampled aspect of the voices is acknowledged and beautifully used to make the voices live in the same half musical, half concrete realm as the clouds of birds that inhabit these places. The quickened quiver of a vocal sample played above its normal pitch, the throaty, lugubrious vibrato of a slowed-down sample remind you that this is not and never was quite a real world, a real place. The same thing happens with animal sounds. Just when you think you know what breed they are, they turn into squeaky toys that are being quickly inflated. Daffy Duck starts to quack.

Mixing the real and the imaginary is a skill that very few composers have. Charles jumps back and forth between these worlds with delightful ease, his curiosity and humor always evident. But in Walking Tune - and many of the other pieces he's done over his long career - this skill is mixed with a sensibility that is elegiac. Each time the violin returns, it has a different meaning. It becomes a remembered thing. This is achieved, amazingly enough, without nostalgia.

Other pieces on this CD express the wide range of Charles's work. Chu Lu Lu is a brilliant, dense, plaid travelog, an energetic series of jump cuts that glimpses several cultures almost at once from pygmies to American Indians. In Bajanoom, instruments and machines leave long eerie comet-like trails of sounds that spin and echo. In other pieces, a mad carousel whirls while sirens restlessly ascent and descend. A sound like flipping through a giant dictionary works as an insistent percussive track. And just when you think you've got the picture, giant mosquitoes arrive and the landscape collapses into what feels like a birdcage.

In Gold and Spirit the composer's voice shouts out words like "pandemonium," "Barcelona" and 'Philadelphia." The places? Some sort of stadium where the game keeps changing. Sometimes it's tennis, sometimes baseball. A game with no rules, that's the one that Charles is playing here. He chants and cheers ("Just not so!") using his voice as one-man band cheered on by a one-man crowd. His choruses of "oos" and "ahs" are especially raucous and funny. At other points, his voice is so severely processed that it sounds like frogs who have just begun to speak.

Humor, colorful cinematography, and a brilliant sense of imaginary space are just some of the joys of this CD. (Laurie Anderson from the liner notes)

Tracklisting:

1. Chu Lu Lu {0:57}

2. Bajanoom {3:00}

3. Vers Les Anges {6:09}

4. Gold and Spirit {10:19}

5. Walking Tune (A Room-Music for Percy Grainger) {27:49}

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