There is very little of his years spent with the Pogues
remaining in Jem Finer’s current work. Gone are
the rock-infused traditional Irish melodies, replaced
with processed guitars, found sounds and abstract constructions.
GTR and the collaboration with artist and filmmaker
Andrew Kötting on Visionary Landscapes
evolve in slightly different spheres, yet the musical
context is equally as radical and experimental, pushing
the boundaries of possible interactions between acoustic
instrumentation and electronic distortion to the limit.
Jem studied computing and sociology at college before
moving to France for a while. After a year spent travelling
in Europe, he returned to London in the early eighties
and became the bass player with a band called The Petals.
It is at that time that he met Spider Tracey and Shane
McGowan, and eventually became one of the founding members
of The Pogues, and one of its key members until his
departure in 1996. Shortly after, while The Pogues dismantled,
Finer started working on one of the most ambitious musical
projects ever thought of. The piece of work, entitled
Longplayer, was developed by Finer to play
continuously from 1 January 2000, for a thousand years,
without repetition, until the piece eventually returns
to its starting point on 31 December 2999. Totally pointless
at human scale, this project, which can be heard in
a handful of locations around the world, is nevertheless,
somehow, the starting point of GTR. Following
years working with computers, Finer found himself in
need of rediscovering the purpose of his body and play
the guitar again. He developed a way in which he could
not only interact between his instrument and the computer,
but also collaborate with it, through a complex process
of pitch recognition and real time processing of data.
Taking into account program bugs, unpredictable behaviours
and computer crashes, interpreted by Finer as a deliberate
need for his machine to ‘take a break’,
signalling therefore the end of a ‘jam session’,
Finer achieves a level of communication with his machine
only truly imaginable in science fiction movies. The
tracks composing GTR are edited versions of
these improvisations, processed live on a SuperCollider,
a real time music generation computer program.
From this, it would be very easy to imagine a highly
dehumanised collection of random music, but there is
something strangely organic running through these improvisations.
Key here is the unpredictable evolution of each track,
which gives this album startling substance and density
and compensate for the lack of melodies as understood
by most. GTR presents an interesting patchwork
of sounds and atmospheres as Finer and his computer
respond to each other through distortions and effects.
If the tracks are generally kept to short structures
of two to four minutes, some longer improvisations allow
for more spatial experimentations, culminating with
the stunning twenty-minute epic 4K161. The
variety of sonic territories crossed on this album in
turn evokes arid or luxurious landscapes in which sounds
collide and swirls around each other, developing into
beautiful formations rich on emotions and moods.
Finer’s collaboration with Andrew Kötting
was originally performed as a live soundtrack to a three
screen projection of outtakes from Kötting’s
offbeat debut documentary road movie Gallivant. Six
of the seven tracks of Visionary Landscapes
are studio versions of this installation, while the
last track was recorded live with film producer Ben
Woolford, who produced Kötting’s 2001 This
Filthy Earth. The album features a vast array of
sonic collages, bringing together disjointed excerpts
of conversations and found sounds over a patchwork of
musical elements. In just over thirty-five minutes,
the pair weave delicate folk atmospheres and poetic
landscapes which appear to evolve almost as randomly
as Finer’s solo work. Drawing perspectives on
English folk culture, this album also has a more contemporary
resonance in the way the music lingers in the background.
Very much withdrawn behind the constant vocal outbursts,
Finer’s constructions underline the constant confrontation
of traditionalism and modernism, yet nothing here clashes
as much as reflect on the relevance of each one against
the other. The Woolford collaboration, How Long
Is A Piece Of String, which closes this album,
is rooted in similar grounds, yet it develops in a more
upfront and liberated way as the music becomes more
predominant. Featuring one of Woolford’s late
father’s home made electronic organs as well as
two grand pianos, this track as a much more crystalline
and fragile feel to it, drawing this album to a slightly
unpredictable, if perfectly relevant end.
Both albums reveal a superbly diverse approach to sound
and music processing. Of the two, Visionary Landscapes
is definitely the most approachable, yet GTR
proves to be the most rewarding in the long run. Jem
Finer’s intricately woven acoustic and electronic
textures are immensely poetic and actually provide space
for the human soul to wonder in between the circuits
and processors, transforming a rational and rigorous
mathematical universe into a much more vibrant and lively
world.
GTR 4.7/5 / Visionary Landscapes 4.3/5 |
