Now and then I get a musical surprise, as I learn of something that I wasn’t at all aware of before. This is the case with Walter Thompson’s CD PEXO. Just looking at the CD layout, feeling it out, I get somewhat reminded of Innova, the artist-run recording company over in Minnesota, which has surprised me too, at times, and I also come to think about CRI, Composers’ Recordings. This feeling gets even stronger as I start to listen.
This means that there is a certain originality about the whole concept, about the musical and artistic ideas, often as a result of some very dedicated person; in this case Walter Thompson, who splits his time between Sweden and the U.S.A. when it comes to habitat. I seems to experience an aura of American ingenuity around these releases too, that I sort of recognize, which sets these few recordings aside from the bulk of new sound recordings that overflow the market.

Some real live information is necessary, to understand what Thompson is involved with. This is a quote from his homepage:

As I read this and think about the more than 750 gestures that are used for conducting musicians or poets or dancers etcetera, I can’t help but associate to Karlheinz Stockhausen, who has worked a lot with the theatrical aspect of music, and who has written a work called Inori, in which numerous gestures go together with the music in an organic unity. I’ve attended fantastic performances with Alain Louafi and Kathinka Pasveer, and also with Russian artist Michael Prosnjakov. You can’t say that these gestures conduct or lead the music, because the music and the gestures of Inori constitute a unity as such, like a formidable prayer, but there are some correspondences anyway between Thompson and Stockhausen in this case, because of the way they both think about gestures.

In Thompson’s case the gestures comprise a language which Thompson talks and the artists understand, and as I understand it, Thompson has fine-tuned this language into a rich and varied, perhaps even dialectal, language with detailed and delicate performance instructions; in itself an art form; an art form with links to ballet and miming.
Naturally, Thompson cannot get out there and be a guest conductor with any orchestra, but has to cultivate his own – even though his has met with some orchestras abroad, teaching the players some of his sign language.
Even in this aspect Thompson shares something with Stockhausen, who never liked the idea of a conductor flying in, doing a few rehearsals, performing and then living. He sees this as superficial and dangerous; dangerous to the spirit and soul of art. Therefore Stockhausen has worked long periods with the same musicians, having them understand his artistic language, just like The Walter Thompson Orchestra understands Thompson’s gestures.

These are the members of The Walter Thompson Orchestra:

A word that Thompson uses when describing his methods is “spontaneous composition”. When one evaluates what the concept soundpainting means, one sees that this is true. Thompson can choose among his gestures and sets of gestures when conducting a group of artists, leading them into completely new and hitherto unknown combinations of sounds and movements. The gestures also have a number of parameters, which splice them up even further, into a fluent language. Through his gestures Thompson can indeed paint with sound and motion, improvising the whole orchestra at will, without score; letting the spur of the moment decide. It is a fascinating concept. It is a form of structured improvisation that can take you very far.

Walter Thompson has some special things to say about this recording, that further explains the goings-on:

Believe me, I learn these things when writing this, and I really enjoy the ingenuity of it all!

Track 1 is called Entrance. It begins in a minimal, repetitious manner, double bass and guitar pizzicatos playing in a thudding march that moves merrily and decidedly down the line. This soft and lustful relentlessness - hips swinging, fields passed by – is interspersed with hard-pressed violin strings, electric bass and other more crude sounds in a number of patterns that sound more like you’d expect from pure improvisation, but the repetitious little figure keeps returning, like taken from a part of Tchaikovsky’s 4th Symphony, or – softened and mellowed – from a Bartok string quartet – but only faintly and by way of my own frames of reference… because this is a music all to itself! Beautiful! A number of musical styles are present here and there, like sudden glimpses that blow by in a jiffy like passing reminiscences. I even hear Django Reinhardt and Stephan Grappeli inside this softly bouncing mild weather march!

The second part is entitled Prepare. It’s completely different, opening in a yawning and slowly stretching orchestra, as voices are also introduced, in shreds of sentences or only half complete sentences, or parts of speech hanging loose, spread like curtains or scarves, or clothes on hangers that you seep through in the cupboard.
Sound poetic passages mix with choral speech and jazzy exclamations, and for sure you cannot – as the listener – at all tell where this is going to go. I begin to understand the magnificence of soundpainting; the way it can be executed to shape these ever-changing sound patterns; these soundscapes.

Some of the aspects of the Walter Thompson Orchestra remind me of an orchestra that I work with as a photographer and a writer; The Great Learning Orchestra in Stockholm, which plays just for the fun of it and for learning and developing. They work with all kinds of scores or no scores, and recently the British composer Dave Smith (who used to work with Cornelius Cardew and the Scratch Orchestra) visited the orchestra in a three-day workshop. One of the funnier works was a partly textual bit. The text, about half an A4 page long, had certain words or part of words or the end of one word and the beginning of next word underlined. The regular text was to be read out in a normal, kind of low-key voice, whilst the underlined sections were to be screamed. The Great Learning Orchestra sat in a big circle, and Dave Smith stood in the center. He pointed at one musician, who then began reading through the text, and then Smith slowly turned around in a circle, pointing at each one of the orchestra as he turned around, thereby distributing the text along the time axis, in a simple way building a very interesting vocal texture, where the shouted words rang like sudden and uneven explosions around the hall, while the subdued, normal voices provided a hum, like a backdrop full of morphemes, like a poster from the Lettrist movement! In the same piece the players were to toss coins on porcelain plates too. It was fun, and it really worked!

The same will to explore and find new things seem to flourish within the Walter Thompson Orchestra.

Track 3 is Get Ready. Without any warning or, for that matter, any hesitation, this opens in a Latino jazz poesis with trumpet and trombone, later joined by sweet gnawing strings, eventually all coming together in a donkey exclamation of stubbornness and sturdiness, time and again seasoned with that same old poetic little figure that started it off. A cello that – for an instant – could be about to paint one of Bach’s Cello Suites continues on to other ventures, the violin and the trombone rub sensually against each other, and the trumpet intervenes nervously and penetrating. This is very complex, and I can just imagine how rewarding it must be to signal all the soundpainting gestures that make all this sound the way it does. Magic! The François Dufrêne or Henri Chopin – or even Jaap Blonk - sound poetry towards the end of this piece doesn’t make things worse; I just love this mouthful och saliva spitting oralities! The creaking – yes, indeed; creaking – of a roughly treated cello or double bass, coinciding with an old health resort brass band on a romantic note, brings this wonderful piece of audio to an unforgettable conclusion!

The longest piece – by far – is a tune called Bob Barker, almost 19 minutes long. There’s so much happening here that it really is impossible to keep up on one spin, but one characteristic of this particular work, which I haven’t heard on the preceding tracks, is a peculiar vocal element in beat and time with some brass instruments and percussion. It’s amazing, tremendous; challenging! All the harsh utterances of the brass and the drums are glued onto choral speech, male and female, in a storm of staccato incisions, in unison. Behind this a tuba provides a backdrop of a repetitious pattern.
This is a description – not even complete – of just a short part of this long work, which keeps changing, bringing the listener into halls of mirrors of sound, into impossible labyrinths of auditory revelations and shredded human sentences flying up and about like leaves in a storm.

The Crowd is number five. It begins like a theatrical speech piece, the voices and words, though, treated structurally like musical notes and chords, building up in a frenzy, suddenly coming together in the united expression of one sentence, only to fall apart again into agitated cross-wordings! This is a brilliant utilization of choral speech, really like none I’ve heard before; excellent! I’m so full of praise for this part that I can’t quite find the fitting superlatives!
Some instruments appear too, sparsely used to begin with, letting the speech rule and dominate.

The concluding work is Two Talk Show Hosts, entering in obscurity, slowly emerging in carefulness and humbleness. Whistling sounds soar and roll around and along the instrumental sounds, which at times come in bits and pieces in erratic progressions, somewhat in the style of Luciano Berio’s Eindrücke – which in fact goes for a lot of this music; these erratically distributed rhythmic figures, and these bubbles and spheres of seemingly random combinations of sounds that explode and rain down on us, only to regroup and transform into other patterns, other segments of kaleidoscopic sound worlds, at times in mimicry of well-known styles and recognizable words or sentences, later to fall away and come back in yet other guises. There is no end to the variations and combinations possible Walter Thompson’s soundpainting. Elating!

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