The Hippodrome

In both Heaven and Hell, there is only one album that has always played and will always play until the end of time: heaven has Brian Eno’s Ambient 1: Music for Airports, hell has Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music. If you like both of these albums and don’t believe in heaven or hell, but rather that nothing happens when you die and the only thing beyond this world is the endless stretch of cosmos in which each individual life is unfathomably small, then Helicon, the official debut by computer musician Rod O’Connor (a.k.a. Sixty Cycles or 60Hz), is for you.

Although this is O’Connor’s first official release, he’s recorded some 10-12 albums worth of material since high school, covering almost every imaginable style of electronic music, from drum and bass to ambient minimalism to psy-trance, and he’s done more than his fair share of genre-bending and experimentation along the way. His collected body of (mostly unreleased) work is approximately six days long in total.

“[This is my attempt] to make ‘noisy’ music which still harkens a little bit to this Romantic Music idea of evocation of emotions,” says O’Connor of Helicon. “But I’m not using traditional harmonies or tonal material so much, so what are those emotions that get called up? I don’t necessarily know, I just know that it’s not comfortable.”

O’Connor works primarily using a technique called granular synthesis, which is the process of cutting a sound up into lots of tiny pieces and rearranging them. While this would have meant countless hours spent cutting and re-arranging tape (see, for instance, the work of Greek composer Iannis Xenakis), the introduction of digital media completely re-formed the playing field for granular synthesis (as it did, of course, for pretty much every other medium); O’Connor uses, according to his SoundClick, only three pieces of equipment: computer, brain, coffee.

Helicon features a wide variety of source material, most of which is warped and manipulated beyond recognition into a wash of ambient textures. The title track opens the album with subtly manipulated electric guitars; “Noisey Planet” features a broken AM radio being played like scratching a turntable. Several of the tracks feature manipulated recordings of a fifteen-piece ensemble led by avant-garde jazz legend Anthony Braxton, with whom O’Connor has played live electronics at Wesleyan University.

“I included the live recordings to pay homage to his work without ripping it off per se, because I can extract the tamboral characteristics of what makes the sound a certain sound, but totally obscure any musical content that he was putting out.” He points out that Braxton’s voice is audible at the beginning of “Lacus Somniorum - Lake of Dreams.” “There’s no words, but the sound is there.”

Helicon was released for free download on Unwashed Records, a small label made up almost exclusively of psy-trance DJs. O’Connor has found a receptive audience in the dark-psy community (although some posts on the Unwashed message board complained that Helicon sounds “too harsh”).

“I was aiming for the things that I like about electronic dance music, but on my own terms,” O’Connor explains. “It has that [aggressive] sentiment, like ‘I’m a fucking sound! Listen to me!’ But it’s also got a little bit of subtlety in there. It’s not just to make you dance; it’s more about the intensity of sonic experience that I feel like a lot of the more underground dark-psy tries to have.”

O’Connor is (somewhat predictably) dismissive of any genre classifications you could apply to his music. “All these terms that you use to talk about music, they’re helpful, because you hear the term ‘bluegrass’ and you know it means something; you don’t know what it means, but it means ‘not dubstep’… the music business gives us terms like that. It’s like, how do we label this thing, this sound, this identity, that you construct by associating with this performer/group/image/whatever? How do we shape that to something that is common to all of these elements? But I guess I don’t really care about the music business. I just want people to hear it and take it at face value.”

There isn’t really much of a way to take Helicon other than at face value. When you listen to this album, it’s not hard to forget that you’re even listening to music. Like all truly great ambient music, it fills the room like a gas leak, registering subconsciously as changes in air pressure that affect you the same way a change in temperature or humidity might. The tones range from soothing and ethereal to gritty and claustrophobic, and they often change so gradually it’s nearly imperceptible until you find yourself submerged in a sea of noise that would give Lightning Bolt’s Brian Chippendale nightmares.

To be sure, Helicon is not for everybody; there is nothing to grab you and pull you in. You have to just let it happen to you. Put it on as “background music” while you do your homework or cook dinner. Don’t wait for anything to happen, just let it unfold and see where it takes you. It may not be comfortable, but it is powerful, moving, and - somehow, despite all the cold, hard zeroes and ones that went into making it - utterly, undeniably human. And besides, if all you want from music is a feeling of comfort, listen to Music for Airports.

Audio: Helicon
Audio: Noisey Planet

This entry was posted by Max Horwich on Thursday, April 24th, 2008 at 6:40 pm and is filed under Features, Written By Max Horwich. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.