Influences etc

[Ivodne Galatea <takas20@hotmail.com>]

You can't unravel influence really I think.

If it's not too vainglorious, I'd like to use my (improbably) most downloaded piece on both SoundCloud and BandCamp is The Ballet of Kore and Demeter* and it gets downloaded almost daily since I put it on my feature list. Given that I only recovered it off a harddrive I found in an inspection pit in my garage and was only looking on it to make sure that it had nothing sensitive on the hard drive it's an odd but jubilant feeling to have it unexpectedly appreciated 18 years on. But it's a good reason for the impossibility of unravelling of influence of the me that was me in 1996

https://soundcloud.com/ivodne-galatea/the-ballet-of-demeter-and-kore
http://ivodnegalatea.bandcamp.com/track/the-ballet-of-kor-and-demeter

Anyway, it's a 74 minute recording of a live-performance of continuous composition looping over sequencing with prepared sounds, played on a keyboard in real time from a graphic score against sequenced loops (in a lost AV programming language called RAVEL), with a cassette playing of all that was left of my own musique concrete performances owing to the great tape decay event which were brutist to begin with but now sound like something crying out in a dungeon underneath.  It's 74 minutes long because back then that's all you could get onto a CD and was a construct upper bounds.

Influence analysis: it is so completely under the spell of Oprhee and Variations for a Sigh and a Door and also the Cocteau reinventing myth vibe as well, but it's also completely egrossed in the aesthetic of Chowning's Stria - not the synthesis aspect but the musical development of the piece itself as timbre and the Golden Ratio - I always get overwhelmed listening to Stria, it's just perfect. But it's also got the aesthetic of "A love supreme" throughout (and it's pan-African idealistic influence). But also of Soft Machine 5, the free percussion aspects and it's amazing use of looping and overlaid rhythms and shifting sigs all emerging into dance. And the compositional aspect is massively influenced by my abiding love of Kecapi Suling music. But the overall idea of using loops to compose and perform in that way at all was entirely down to Riley and my ongoing love of his music and his time-lag-accumulator. I'm not sure you can see any of that in the piece though - I can but then I would be able to.

But more importantly for the purpose of the discussion, there wouldn't be a bin in your local record store with those things in it as a category - it's what people might metaphorically considered Salmagundi (oblique reference to the origin of the motto of the US - the man gathering ingredients for a salad, and out of the many, making one thing)

Perhaps other people might share how they see influence in pieces they are particularly proud of (if it's not over-sharing)


*originally called Persephone (which has been seen as being derived from "destroyer of speech" or "destroyer of sound") as a tribute to Schaeffer and Henry but I renamed it because of too many other things being called Persephone and getting fed up with people getting confused.