#tiaraforcomputer

[jefferyryanlong]

Fresh Listen - Ray Barbee, Tiara for Computer (Um Yeah Arts, 2018)

(Some pieces of recorded music operate more like organisms than records. They live, they breathe, they reproduce. Fresh Listen is a periodic review of recently and not so recently released albums that crawl among us like radioactive spiders, gifting us with superpowers from their stingers.)

Around Christmas-time 2018, my good friend Nathan invited us to a shindig at the Hawai'i Bowl, a post-season exhibition game at the Aloha Stadium, UH vs. LA Tech. Pregame was an all-you-can-eat/drink “tailgate.” Over-salted and overheated meatballs and short ribs, prepared frozen food from institutional distributors, served alongside twelve-ounce Coors Light or Heineken. The kind of party more fun in the abstract--in real time, you inevitably get sucked under a sluggish and dehydrated day drunk, and no quantity of soggy tater tots can pull you out.

As soon as we took our seats under a canopy set up just beyond the parking lot and in front of the entrance to the stadium, we realized conversation would be impossible. The band, a nameless cover group that interspersed Christmas tunes with their catalog of oldies, was too loud, and we had no choice but to drink silently and listen resentfully. The lead guitarist, hamming it up in an a Santa hat, was for the most part terrible and tried to compensate with a series of funny faces to the audience. (Granted, there were a few lines and riffs he had somehow motivated himself to practice to an almost polish). My girlfriend Rachel, who hears music with a far more sophisticated ear than I ever will, thought the drummer was “dragging” in most of the songs, but I just attributed his playing as part of the overall mess. Eventually the band gave over to the bass player, a thin white dude in an Aloha shirt, and he shocked all of us by manifesting not only the note-perfect bottom end but also the soulful vocal stylings of Motown’s greatest hits. But the true revelation of this performance was the keyboard player.

Nathan described her voice as Dionne Warwick at the Apollo, the sound of a class act singing her way back to the roughest definitions of her soul. While the keyboardist did have the coffee and cream smoothness of Dionne, she also carried in that voice a swallow of grit on the back end. It was a voice with some miles on it, a voice that had sung the story of heartbreak so often it could open up that valve to the universal pain in the speaking of a vowel, a syllable. This wasn't just the voice of God--it was undeniably human, the voice of desire and desperation and exultation.

But not just her voice that surprised and moved us--it was her mastery of her keyboard, a general issue piece of equipment, a preset memory bank of synthesized sounds. She could power her way through piano chords on covers of Adele, she could color the bass player’s R’n’B aspirations with bursts of faux horns. And when she needed to emotional immediacy of a note bend, a twang, that offset cry that simulates the human voice coming to grips with great feeling, the fingers of her left hand caressed the synth’s pitch shifter, modulating the artificial tones toward something that came close to natural. As fake and insufferable as they are in other cover groups, this specific keyboard transformed the liabilities of this imperfect band into strengths.

Because of the perceived dangers of displacing otherwise capable musicians, electronic synthesizers were surprisingly slow to be incorporated into popular music. The earliest recordings of synth music were put to tape by avant grade composers and theorists. For the most part failing to re-conceptualize the parameters as a whole new different conglomeration of sounds, these musicians took it upon themselves to recreate classic pieces of music through programming and note translation. (Their radioactive experiments, which pulsate and glow with the impossibility of ever striking a listener to the emotional core, are nonetheless compelling, unlistenable gems, evolving later into the computer program that stiltedly regurgitated an idealized, dehumanized melody, the theory of which was data-entried into its memory banks).

Kraftwerk pushed toward pop music as a synthesizer ensemble, but a true human face was not added to the cold, detached robotic visage until artists like David Bowie or Donna Summer coopted the German aesthetic for their Berlin and disco records. Stevie Wonder, perhaps because of his universal acclaim as a songwriter, vocalist, and instrumentalist, doesn’t receive enough credit as an electronic music pioneer, though he was utilizing synthesizer technology as early as 1972′s Music of My Mind. Over layers of weirdly chorded synths (all of them played himself), Wonder inserted a soul into the music, with his pure, flawed voice. With his inimitable, low-key drum style, he imparted a living heartbeat.

Ray Barbee’s Tiara for Computer references the trading away of old wealth for new knowledge. Specifically, an ornate but inherent useless crown-petite for the technological advantage of digital processing. As we as peoples evolve, we are learning how important it is to be plugged into the resources available via great swathes of digitized information, and progress itself is now dependent on effectively utilizing this digitized information. To evolve nowadays, to simply grow, is to synthesize the mind with the databases we move between daily. At least, that’s what we’ve convinced ourselves of.

With the help of Tortoise percussionist John Herndon, Barbee carries forward Stevie Wonder’s aesthetic, though without vocals: synth layers with a live backbeat. If there is one drawback to this approach, it’s that Tiara for Computer comes close to sounding like a Tortoise record, minus the off-kilter timing and overly cerebral melodies. Like his skater-musician colleague Tommy Guerrero, who appears on Tiara for Computer through his handclaps, Barbee’s musical drive is based on setting minimal and insanely catching melodies--through riffs and repeated lines--in stone. There are, for the most part, beginnings, middles, and ends to his songs, and on this record, aside from a few exceptions, Barbee doesn’t waste his time with free-floating beeps and tones, those textures that rise to the surface on the periphery of Radiohead records.

A fluctuating drone kicks off “Pink Noise,” an electro-alarm that announces the sonic equivalent of of a video game race over translucent tracks refracting pixels of light into rainbow prisms under the air wheels of futuristic machines. A bass synth figure keeps the track moving briskly along, subtly propelled by a tightly strummed electric guitar creating the impression of velocity. First buried low in the track, the guitar bursts into a shower of sparks as the song makes its last sprint around the length of space circling our heads.

There will come a time when the guitars and pianos and violins and saxophones of our present will exist as mere artifacts, like reproductions of lutes from Ancient Greece. The expression of the infinite well of human feeling will be predicated on the communication through a digitized language, absorbed through synapses that have evolved adequately for these missives to hit their mark. “Future Blues” is is Barbee’s rough sketch at what this music will sound like, discovering in the programmed notes of electronic keyboards a means to delicately portray he desolation of the human condition. The song could almost be a sketch from the outtakes of Kid A, grappling with it does the undead cry of technology in a struggle to capture a living sentiment.

“What’s His Neck” continues the exuberance of “Pink Noise,” a more melodically sophisticated piece accented by Barbee’s guitar and a chorus of handclaps. The fullest “band” song on he record, the song accelerates to a rave-like intensity. In contrast, “Ocra vs. Jaba” comes across as almost sanctimonious. Despite the complicated drum figure and Barbee’s groove-based riff, the overwhelming synths drag the song into a kind of slow motion, a ponderous moment that creates in the imagination a starship docking on the interior of a space station.

Herndon has several shining moments on Tiara for Computer, but his impact is never so apparent as on “Tina Cut.” As a drummer, his role in the song is minimal, tasked to ground Barbee’s sequenced movements with a steady beat that could never be replicated by a computer. The slight accents that vary between the snare, hi-hat, bass drum, and cymbals--plus the breathless manner in which Herndon pushes the sonic monolith of synths through a kind of weightless space--comes as close to a credible synthesis between electronic and live instruments. The sequel to “Tina Cut,” Ornithology,” replaces that living rhythm with a more mechanized beat, capturing Barbee’s thinking out loud through his synths.

“Holding Company,” with its processed acoustic guitar arpeggios and slacker groove, calls back to Tommy Guerrero’s laid back aesthetic, with a little of Oliver Nelson’s “Skull Session” thrown in. Barbee forsakes his firmly established melodies on the album’s title track, a tightly orchestrated freakout that, if stripped of its electricity and played by horns, could be the outro of a jazz record, notes arising and from the noise and latching onto one another briefly before traveling astray. 

With its hybridization of live and electronic instruments, Tiara for Computer might have been produced ten, fifteen years ago. It is not a groundbreaking record in the sense of reshaping the potentialities of this music. What is important about Tiara for Computer is Barbee’s excitement in engaging new modes of expression beyond his already formidable guitar work, while composing music that is, in its complex simplicity, quintessentially his own. Barbee is growing into the 21st Century, hypothesizing new ways of playing and hearing as he develops his aesthetic palette.