(Esplanade Recital Studio, 11 February 2007, 7:30pm)

Mark Wong

I. Enabling Art

Conceived in response to the M1 Singapore Fringe Festival 2007’s theme of “art and disability”, Singaporean Ang Song Ming and Malaysian Yeoh Yin Pin’s Unwound¹ was based on a simple premise: the sound artists would hold a guitar concert with self-imposed limits on their playing. In the process, alternative approaches to “guitar-playing” would be uncovered and explored.

The choice of the guitar for this experiment is apt. It is one of the most popular of musical instruments today, ubiquitous in most rock, pop, country and blues music. That we tend to worship the most skilled (or flamboyant) guitar players as gods (rather than bassists or drummers), says something about the anthropomorphic instrument’s place in our cultural psyche. Thus, when Yeoh removes the instrument from its intimate position strapped to the guitarist’s body and instead lays it flat on a table, immobilised like an injured comrade (or corpse), or when Ang completely dispenses with the physical body of the guitar by playing pre-recorded guitar samples off his laptop, both are seeking no less than a remapping of relationships with their instruments.

The performance was split into two halves, with local spacebar boy Song Ming opening proceedings on solo laptop. He began by filling up the recital studio with a sea of digital fuzz — a method akin to the establishing shot in film — in preparation for the (dis)appearance of his guitar or what, for our purposes, we might call the “cyberguitar”. Liberated from physical constraints, the cyberguitar breathed its second life, stitched together from the disembodied guitar samples residing in Ang’s sample bank: straightforward riffs augmented with lavish resonances and alien timbres flowed into loops of expansive backward strums. Snatches of what sounded like film dialogue or Chinese Wayang were also weaved in to reinforce the cinematic quality of the music.

Now by “cinematic”, I mean more “evocative” than “immersive”. Rather than bathe the audience in a dense rain of sound (something he does only for a few minutes towards the end of the set), Ang’s performance was fairly restrained from the way the layerings of sounds were generally kept few and simple to even the medium volume levels. The effect was that the audience was allowed a margin of detachment to consider the transformations that had taken place to the source sounds and how the laptop was not only a physical screen between performer and audience, but also a layer of mediation between inputs and outputs.

In his final masterstroke, Ang took the wailing guitar riff from Bon Jovi’s “You Give Love a Bad Name” and in his own cock rock gesture, milked it for all it was worth by layering on the distortion and setting it in an incessant slow motion loop. I’m reminded of the final scene in Bonnie and Clyde where the protagonists go out (also in slow-mo) in a hail of bullets, but here it is Ang who has shot through the heart of pop and left it in its erotic death throes — a “Blaze of Glory”, if you will. The humour in this loving parody cannot be overstated in a genre often ridiculed for its po-faced seriousness and flooded with tired jokes about performers checking their e-mails. Ang’s twenty-minute solo performance was a fine balance of abstract shades and populist gestures to appeal to even the uninitiated.

The second half began when Yeoh emerged on stage-right to take his place behind his tabled guitar, which had been lying in the darkness during the first twenty minutes. Yeoh, probably an unfamiliar name to most Singaporeans, is a sound artist who works mostly with the guitar and field-recordings and is a key founder-member of the Experimental Musicians and Artists Co-operative Malaysia, a vibrant group championing the cause of some of the most vital experimental music in the region.

As the lights came up over the Klangite² chameleon, a miked up folk guitar lying horizontal on its back was revealed, along with a handful of objects, most noticeably a Tibetan singing bowl and a string of Indian hand cymbals (Manjiras). His very first moments of contact with the guitar were tentative, gauging the range of possible sounds that were arrayed in front of him, but in no time at all, he was teasing out a whole range of responses from his instruments.

One particularly arresting image-sound was that of Yeoh taking an extra set of steel guitar strings in one hand, winding and weaving them in and out of the guitar fretboard in circular motions, and scraping against the existing strings to produce an industrial saw sound, while using his other hand to tap, pluck and meddle with the other parts of the guitar, or with his objects, or using the objects against the guitar. With his large stature and rhythmic motions, Yeoh appeared as some dark magus mixing up some sonic spell in a textural thaumaturgy; if the tabletop guitar was laid like a corpse, Yeoh’s ritualistic performance was nothing less than a dramatic resurrection of his folk guitar into an entirely new sound world unto itself.

Meanwhile, those primal gestures were well complemented by Ang’s techno tinkerings, usually filling out the low end but also raising its head in comforting digital beeps. The only regrettable moment of the night was when Ang rounded out the second collaborative set with the buoyant bassline from the Spice Girls’ “Wannabe” (“the Karaoke version,” he later informed me), which was too much a case of pulling the same trick twice and without half as much conceptual spunk as in the earlier instance. It was also an unnecessary curveball that broke the flow of what had been theretofore an involving interplay between performers.

An occasionally quirky but mostly compelling experience, Unwound was a love song (in two movements) for the guitar in all its manifestations. While sound art in general still carries the impression of insularity and inaccessibility, Ang and Yeoh succeeded in creating a conceptual performance that was open, accessible and engaging to a curious if cautious audience.

II. Techno Art

Mark: You play the guitar and piano as well. Why have you chosen the laptop as your primary musical instrument at least as a solo musical artist?

Song Ming: My interest in computers started when I first discovered electronic music, excited by how aesthetic grounds were being broken with technology. Computers have been instrumental in causing some paradigm shifts in various aspects of music. With the appropriate software and hardware, the computer can be used for many purposes, including synthesis, recording, composing, sequencing, and improvisation. Being interested in musique concrète and electronic music, it was just quite natural for me to delve into computer-based music, which is in a way a digital extension of tape music.

The laptop is really a comprehensive technology to work with because it functions as an instrument, a virtual studio, and even a source of dissemination since I can burn my CDs from my computer and also publicise my work through the Internet. I used to hijack Web streams and record samples of videos played on my computer …. The computer is just incredibly flexible and productive.

MW: Why laptop “performances”? Why don’t we just listen to a CD? What is the meaning of a laptop performance?

SM: If I may be allowed to generalise: CDs focus on the art of composing and recording, whereas laptop performances focus on improvisation and communicating the music in real-time. Both are challenging and interesting in their own ways.

I think the “meaning” of a laptop performance is contextual. It depends on the music, performer, audience, time, and place, amongst other possible variables.

MW: How much of your performance is “improvised”? How much is “composed”? What does improvisation even mean in laptop music for an audience, when the actions and processes of improvisation are hidden from them?

SM: For my solo set at Unwound, I took the approach of live remixing, where I take apart and recombine previously sequenced/composed music from my studio albums into something new. For this, I use the software Ableton Live, which allows me to play my sequenced recordings in a non-linear, improvised manner, while digitally processing the samples “live”. It’s like playing an improvised “cover” version of my own “original” recording, and can sound discernibly faithful to the originals or radically different.

The duo set with Yin Pin is even more spontaneous – akin to free improvisation. There is nothing composed beforehand, just a bunch of pre-selected samples which I feel will gel together when I improvise. I do it using this freeware Lauki, which its software designers call “an instrument whose visual qualities define the musical outcome”. It’s incredibly good for collaborative improvisations because I can react quickly on it. I like how freeware can be inventive while being simple.

Kim Cascone wrote a related article to laptop performance, which may be helpful to your question about what laptop improvisation means for an audience “when the actions and processes of improvisation are hidden from them”. It explains how audiences may deal with the apparent lack of event, authenticity, and presence in laptop performance.

MW: When laptops play together with other “conventional” electric/acoustic/voice instruments, they tend to be conceived of and set as “background” music³ — an observation which can also be said of your set with Yin Pin. This strikes me as a tad odd: that despite the enormous storehouse of possibilities contained within the processing power of the laptop, its usage has been so focused on the backdrop. Alternatively, it hasn’t been able to compete with a listener’s proclivity towards “human” instruments. What do you think?

SM: The “computer vs. human instrument” divide is an interesting opposition that has yielded plenty of good works, but there are more similarities between these two seemingly polar opposites than we care to remember: the computer is a human instrument too – you need a human to play it. Conversely, a guitar or piano is a machine, a form of technology, just like the computer — a standardised tool built to serve a function in an efficient way.

It’s interesting that you mention “the enormous storehouse of possibilities contained within the processing power of the laptop”. It reminds me of the notes by pianist John Tilbury, on his improvised collaborative performance with electroacoustic group MIMEO:

“As I enter the arena to take my place at an instrument, a much-vaunted example of nineteenth century technology, literally surrounded, incongruously and vulnerably, by electronic gadgetry of awesome creative and destructive power, Marcuse’s thesis comes to my mind — ‘the traditional notion of ‘neutrality’ of technology can no longer be maintained’. I venture a quip: ‘In one second you guys can eliminate me once and for all’. Jérôme Noetinger corrects me: ‘less than a second’. So the past (like the present) is constantly under threat; lives in a constant state of exposure and insecurity (instant obsolescence) …. [But] the newest and most sophisticated technology can malfunction, hitting the wrong target: the wrong people, the wrong building, or, less catastrophically, the wrong sound.”

So yeah, with great processing power comes great responsibility. For me, improvisation and collaboration is more about restraint than assertion, since I get all the freedom to do what I want for my solo works. Or maybe most laptop musicians are being courteous — it’s not too nice to overwhelm your collaborator with the 10001110001011101001 tricks up your laptop sleeve.

III. Transforming Art

MW: How do you prepare a guitar? What considerations (sonic? material? symbolic? ideological?) do you go through? (Prominent tabletop/prepared guitarist Keith Rowe, for example, only prepares his guitar with common household objects, ostensibly to evoke the sublime in the everyday.)

Yin Pin: It depends on the context and the mood. For this particular show, since I was using a semi-acoustic guitar as a “foundation” for the preparations, I felt the best objects to use had to be more “organic” in nature—as complementary to the “organic” make-up of the guitar (for instance, the wood of the instrument).

Another major consideration is how much tactility can be achieved with the preparations. I like the connection that one’s hands have with the instrument and the preparations as an extended quality of the instrument. In effect, one’s hands become an extension as much as the preparations are. The touch and the movement are important qualities and considerations. So for instance, one of the chief preparations for this show was steel guitar strings tied in an almost disorderly manner onto the existing guitar strings. Moving the prepared strings along the existing strings achieves a type of sound that I find tactile and crudely beautiful.

The other consideration, I have to admit, is the aesthetic appearance of the preparations with the guitar. In other words, how the whole setup looks. As much as this sounds “superficial”, if it looks great, like a piece of, say, Duchampian objet trouvé or readymade, chances are it will most likely sound great too.

MW: When one plays tabletop guitar, how important is the table as compared to the guitar?

YP: That is a good question, if not amusing somewhat. I guess it’s more of a practical consideration that the table is used. One could always place the guitar on the floor and squat or sit on the floor to play the instrument. But that strikes me as physically constricting since you want as much mobility as possible in order to not just play the instrument but reach out for necessary objects to perform.

An elevated surface helps substantially, not just to place the guitar and the various objects but also to achieve as much mobility as possible. A standing posture is a preferred stance during a performance of the kind. So I guess a table is the most “practical” since it allows and achieves all the necessities of a performance.

MW: Do you tune your strings? Why or why not?

YP: That would depend. For this particular show, I had the strings tuned to an Open D (or was it a Modal D?) in the hopes of including “drones” as part of the repertoire for the performance but since there wasn’t any droning performed during the show, the tuning didn’t exactly serve its purpose. But then again, it did serve a purpose since the strings were tightly tuned or tightly bound to the guitar. If they were loosely bound, say, for instance, if I had detuned them significantly, then you would have a very vibratory effect with the strings. I love the latter effect too, but didn’t consider it for this show.

MW: What considerations run through your mind in a prepared guitar performance?

YP: Obviously for this particular event: how I could maximally achieve or facilitate a relation or work with Song Ming’s output. The other being, more personally, the sheer tactility of the setup and of the sound I could achieve.

MW: Cage-interpreter Margaret Leng Tan performed the prepared piano in Singapore some years ago, stressing how her preparations do not damage the body of the piano in any way. Any comments?

YP: I’m not familiar with this particular comment she made, so I’m not entirely sure how to address it appropriately. But as far as I’m concerned, when preparations are made onto an existing instrument or body, that instrument or body ceases to be what it is or as how we know it to be. Is it still a guitar or a piano? Why should it be? So if any damage is inflicted (consciously or otherwise) upon the instrument, then isn’t that “damage” part of what it has become—beyond what we presumably know or recognise of it? Or better, maybe it wasn’t a “guitar” to begin with?

1. Unwound was in fact one half of a double bill performance that night, the other being Panic Membranes by mellow American instrumental duo Charles Atlas. [↩]
2. Describing a person from Klang, Malaysia. [↩]
3. This seems to be the case whether in pop/rock/dance (The Observatory, Björk) or in the world of experimental/electroacoustic improvised music. An example of the latter is Michael Goodstein’s Other Music review of Erstwhile Records’ Schnee album, where he describes how “Stangl’s post-Derek Bailey fragile guitar introversion and alternating droning crescendos are placed over Kurzmann’s G3’s slowly changing textures” (emphasis mine). [↩]