In the preface to Steppenwolf, the story of a wild man alienated from society, Hermann Hesse wrote, “Let every reader do as his conscience bids him.” Filter through enough disposable, formulaic music, and you wish you could swap out “reader” for “musician” and have these words stapled to the foreheads of music makers so they might see them in the mirror every morning. Do what you want. Create strange, terrible, mystical, terrifying and wonderful sounds. Do what your conscience bids you — the opposite of what it bids you, even. Just get off the path and into the cut.
One person who has never needed encouragement when it comes to straying from the narrative is experimental musician Stephen O’Malley. A nomad in both the musical and personal sense, he’s moved around a lot over the years, starting out his life in the Pacific Northwest and eventually winding up in his current home base of Paris, France. Musically he’s migrated from doom to drone to noise to ambient to extreme metal and many esoteric points in between. Those who follow his work follow all of it — Burning Witch, Khanate, Sunn 0))). They scour the output of the labels he has been involved in running over the years, Southern Lord, The Ajna Offensive, and most recently Ideologic Organ. Intentionally or not, O’Malley has become one of the hooded gatekeepers of grand distortion born of stacks of Orange amplifiers, cyclic and droning walls of guitars, and improvisational explorations of the dark and beautiful corners of the mind.
One of O’Malley’s current focuses is the art installation known as Tempestarii, a project by filmmakers Gast Bouschet and Nadine Hilbert for which he provided the sonic backdrop. The film follows a theme of repetition and disintegration, decaying further and further with each new cycle until viewers are left with nothing but a visage of stark oblivion. In the Luxembourg-born pair O’Malley has found the perfect collaborators, their art a visual representation of his aural expression and vice versa.
Photo courtesy of Gast Bouschet and Nadine Hilbert
Says O’Malley of working with Bouschet and Hilbert, “The thing I like about collaborating with people who are working in non-musical fields, there’s something to be said about being good at what you’re doing alone and to accept an external reflection on your work as direction from the collaborator.”
Having worked together previously on another installation piece, Unground, which was performed live in a cave attached to the Casino Luxembourg last year, the trio has had time to get in tune with each other’s idiosyncrasies. Whether by process of collective evolution or by sheer force of creative karma, they have found their individual ideas falling into line with one another.
“I think some of the ideas and themes we connect on are ones such as this idea of elementalism,” O’Malley says, “these different types of time interpretation, the physicality of encountering these kind of energies, and also just pure visual aesthetic qualities.”
O’Malley’s compositions are often of such a gargantuan scale in nearly every sense one can conjure that it can be hard to fathom that there is any rhyme or reason to it whatsoever. It’s difficult to imagine that it is anything but a spontaneous eruption of pure, unchecked emotion, but that simply isn’t true, and therein lies the essence of outsider art — challenging perspectives and deriving similarities from places where most would find none. In performing Tempestarii live, O’Malley accomplishes both.
“There’s certainly structure, but I’m not working from scores and it’s not repetition,” he says before correcting himself slightly.
“Well, it’s repetition in the sense that literally cyclic repetition is a big part of the forms of music I produce but there is a lot of improvisation involved. I think that’s really true with any live music, though. Even a string quintet is improvising, somewhat, and that just may be from the interpretation of what they’re reading. Each performance is a completely different experience.”
Improvisation takes with it an inescapable feeling of running close to the edge. When the possibilities are virtually limitless, save for the physical limitations of the instrument you are working with, as O’Malley says, so too is the well of potential to send out the wrong vibrations, if there is such a thing with experimental music. But if you aren’t willing to walk along that proverbial razor’s edge, then you don’t belong in the cut, in the company of the sonic hermits weaving through the detritus to gain access to new territory. It’s daunting. It’s nerve-wracking. But it’s necessary.
“You’re in front of a crowd and you want to do something natural and individualistic, but you also have several hundred people watching and analyzing and experiencing what’s happening, so, yeah, it makes me nervous,” he admits.
“But I can’t say it’s something I’m ashamed of either. There’s something there that sort of validates it, the idea that you’re trying to do something significant. You want it to be more than you imagined, that’s why you’re nervous.”
■ Stephen O’Malley will provide live music for the film Tempestarii on Thursday at The Wall, B1, 400, Roosevelt Rd Sec 4, Taipei City (台北市羅斯福路四段200號B1). Tickets are NT$1,000 in advance, NT$1,300 at the door. Doors open at 7:30pm and the performance will begin at 8pm.
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