The Transforms

Blue Gene Tyranny – The Transforms (1972 – 1992)

Within the environmental sounds were small events – rhythms, quasi-melodic inflections, ringing harmonics – a fine, sub-rosa level brought out by electronic scans called transforms’. Heard through small-band “windows”, the two channels cross-modulate each other, creating a simple field in which everything affects everything, like the body’s perceptors transducting an outside sound. The sensation of a transform is like the feeling left after a sound has ended, or a concert is over.

The transforms heard here are

A Dream Without Images
The feeling behind the action. A telegraphic ringing relaxes into cascades of harmonics, acetylcholine neurons flash in the brain, calcium deposits from exploding stars leave traces in the synapses, and we dream of being helpful for no reason at all, while sferics sweep the atmosphere.
X Marks The Spot (Daydream)
This music occurs simultaneously in both forward, historical time and backward, daydream time. This is analogous to interior imagination and visual perception physically sharing the same pathways only moving in opposite directions (in the occipital parietal temporal lobes). Background and foreground positions gradually cross from one world to the next, and curious illusions occur at the exact midpoint of this crossing (‘X’). “X Marks The Spot” at which the inside and the outside meet.

The peculiarity of these pieces lies in the fact that they derive from recordings of environmental sounds derived from common daily activities. The sounds of everyday life are isolated, treated, sometimes used as control sources for other sounds. It is this way of finding music in everyday sounds that I find noteworthy.

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