Super Luminum in conversation
Cat Hope (electric bass) and Lisa MacKinney (electric guitar/ organ) converse in the lead up to their performance of VOLUMINUM, a new notated composition by Cat Hope premiering at the Melbourne Town Hall on November 30 2023.
Cat Hope: We started playing together as Super Luminum in 2017, playing guitar and bass with pedals. I even added a wah pedal to my pedal line up so I could join in with you on that....I don't use it in any other setup. Is there anything you do differently in this duo from your solo project Mystic Eyes, or other collaborations?
Lisa MacKinney: I'm always listening, playing off what the other person is doing. So in Mystic Eyes, I'm focussed on creating a big drone carpet (!) using various sustaining methods that I can then embellish with more linear sounds, screeching feedback, and some notes that might almost be recognisable as solos! But it's just me, so I'm listening to my overtones and drones. With you, because your playing is so much more abstract and you have an amazing arsenal of techniques and textures, it's really exciting because it can truly just go anywhere. So I'm listening to you, riding the drones I find in what you're doing.
CH: Thats one of the great things about collaboration, how you influence each others sounds and processes. This is our first large scale project together, and bringing in collaborators will definitely change things - though we made a recording with Gandolfo Pagano in Sicily in 2019, and with Alan Lamb’s wire installation in Dwellingup, Western Australia in 2010 before we were a ‘band’. Live performance is quite different. I know you have played a lot with Bonnie Mercer (electric guitar), and I have done a lot with Louise Devenish (percussion, in my ensemble Decibel) - what do you expect will be the main difference? You will be playing organ - so thats one big difference.
Cat and Lisa with Alan Lamb in Dwellingup, 2010.
Super Luminum recording with Gandolfo Pagano, in Sicily 2019.
LM: Well with you in Super Luminum and with Bonnie (who I play with in Hospital Pass), there are just the two guitar players in each project and a lot of feedback, so quite a dense guitar texture. With Voluminum, although this will still be present, the addition of the organ, harp and percussion (rather than drums, as such) will make for a much more intricate arrangement of sounds. But in the spirit of Volumina (Ligeti’s organ piece on the same program), I'm sure there will be parts that are loud and overpowering! The Grand Organ is goddamn loud, and can more than hold its own, even against a two-pronged Hope-Mercer guitar attack! I think it will be wild, noisy but with lots of nuance and I'm really looking forward to hearing how the harp and percussion will work in with that. I can't wait!
CH: This is the first time I have written a notated peice for us, but not the first time I have written for organ. I love the organ sound, and I did a piece called Black Emperor with two organs and string orchestra linked telematically in 2012. But now I am super excited to play in a piece with organ - amplified guitars seem like a good match for it. You've played the Melbourne Town Hall Grand Organ before. What was your experience, and how does it relate to the way you play your own Ace Tone organ, or even guitar?
LM: Yes I played it with Taipan Tiger Girls in 2017, a performance for Melbourne Music Week that has recently been released on record. It was a truly incredible experience; it is a gigantic piece of machinery (rooms and rooms of pipes, the largest pipe organ in the southern hemisphere, I believe) that packs a truly mammoth sonic punch - without electric amplification! It can do so much and has so many settings - among hundreds of other things there are multiple tuba and trumpet stops, harp, even drum rolls! I find it fascinating that, well over a century ago, the more complex pipe organs were attempting to replicate other instruments so that you could to some extent have a little ensemble going at your fingertips. They're very much an early idea of what a synthesiser might be able to do. And although I was using I reckon about one twentieth of the organ's capabilities, I was in heaven up there in the little (literally - it's a tiny space) organ bride balcony making all that racket! Bonnie Mercer, who will be playing guitar with us in Voluminum, also played on the 2017 Taipan Tiger Girls recording. So I know for a fact how fantastic Bonnie's playing sounds in this context and it will be absolutely ripping with you and the organ.
As far as the way I play, I tend to keep it simple, like I do with my Ace Tone Model Top-5 organ. It dates from 1965 and is tonally pretty one-dimensional, but it's a great dimension! Ace Tone organs have featured on records by Rocket From the Tombs, Pere Ubu, Yo La Tengo and Sonic Youth, among others, and are prized for their classic mid-60s nasal sound. One thing I love to do is use various methods (gaffer, weights) to keep a few keys down and create a richly-textured drone undertow; there will definitely be some of that happening in Voluminum!
One of the bellows in action out the back of the Melbourne Town Hall Grand Organ during a recent workshop for Voluminum.
A screenshot excerpt from the developing score to ‘Voluminum’, showing the organ notes ‘piling up’ in pink.
CH: Yes - when you showed me this in our first workshop at the organ, it opened up many more ideas for me, and we talked about Charlemaine Palestine and how he uses them. I am writing lots of piles of long held notes in this piece, and the weights free up your hands to do things like change stops to affect tone colour as the piece unfolds. The animated notation I use is perfect for this kind of music, actually - it enables description of very long sound with any reference to pulse or subdivision.
Voluminum is a homage to Gyorgy Ligeti, who has been a major influence on me as a composer, and his textural design has influenced my improvisations too. Pieces like Lontano (1967) - which opens with a slow, ethereal unfolding of notes over long, intertwined tonalities, atmosphères (1961) - a piece he himself called “a study in motionlessness” explores very dense textures that sounds like an organ in many moments, with amazing shimmering effects. And of course, one of my favourite works of his, Volumina (1962-66), that preceeds my piece in this upcoming concert. It was one of the first graphic scores I ever saw, and it set me on a path to the kind of notation I use now. We are projecting all the scores for the audience to see in this concert. We saw Volumina together in Hamburg, Germany earlier this year during the Ligeti Festival. What were your impressions? I think of it as some kind of organ noise music!
LM: Oh I loved it, and it was particularly great to experience it in the new St Nikolai, an awesome modernist church where the spire of the original cathedral, almost totally destroyed in the war, was ‘reset’ out in the suburbs of Hamburg. It is totally a noise work for organ, yes, really working with the instrument's textural possibilities (as Voluminum does too) in a massively exciting way! I found it absolutely thrilling.
CH: Have you ever made a homage in some creative way? I composed one for Giacinto Scelsi, another one of my compositional heroes, called Sogno 102 (2013) - it is one of my favourite pieces, and one of my most performed. There is something about a homage that opens a lot of new creative possibilities for me.
LM: It’s not really comparable, I don't think, as my homages weren't compositions in the same way yours were...but about 6 months after Lou Reed died, my friend Kurt Gottschalk asked me if I could record something for his tribute called Lou Redux on WFMU, a great public radio station in New Jersey on which Kurt had a show called Miniature Minotaurs. For Lou Redux, he got people from all round the world to send in their Reed tributes. One of the many Velvet Underground recordings I'm obsessed with is an approximately hour-long Andy Warhol film from 1966 of the group improvising, known more or less officially as A Symphony of Sound. The group, including Nico (and her young son Ari), are sitting around at The Factory mucking round with a big fuzzy drone, it's shot in black and white and has this great distorted bootleggy tape sound. I remember seeing it at what was then the State Film Centre (in Macarthur St, East Melbourne) some time in the early 1990s when it was absolutely impossible to see this sort of thing - I went to see it two nights running! Now of course, it's on YouTube. But anyway, aurally and visually it's quite incredible - it just draws you into its vortex and is utterly hypnotic. Looking back, it encapsulated so much of what would come to be extremely important to my sonic aesthetic. So for Kurt's show I recorded (I use the term loosely) something I called A Meditation on A Symphony of Sound, which was exactly that really - my fuzzed-out idea of that particular moment in time. And interestingly, although I never really thought about it in this way (as a homage) until now, about 15 years ago I did a number of performances of an improvised alternate soundtrack to La Ciciatrice Interieure (The Inner Scar), a 1972 film by French director Philippe Garrel, starring Nico, Ari, and Garrel himself. I realise now that it absolutely was a homage, as I've become completely obsessed with Nico, a slow burn that's developed over decades. You and I have discussed her a lot, particularly how extraordinary and misunderstood (although that seems to be improving) her singular musical vision was.
CH I’m glad you bought up Nico, we have talked a lot about her over the years, in particular her harmonium playing and compositional approach. We were listening to her 1974 album recently, “The End..” and talking about how there is nothing else - before or since - that sounds like her. She didn’t shy away from drones - but seemed to pay a price for it. I agree her music is incredibly misunderstood.
LM: And speaking of singular musical visions...in the history of Western composition, Scelsi is really up there! I have really only listened to Ligeti in a very piecemeal way, I have to admit, and I'm not overly familiar with his oeuvre. What is it about his compositional technique(s), and Scelsi's, for that matter, that gets you excited and how has that influenced you?
CH: Ligeti’s focus on texture and its relationship to time was very influential in my own conceptualisation of sound. He developed new compositional approaches to really explore that aspect of music, that I have found very helpful. Scelsi explored the nexus of improvisation and composition, as he improvised his musical ideas to tape, then sent these off to be notated by someone else. I related to that as I had came to notated composition via improvisation and songwriting where i never wrote anything down. In both these composers I saw a kind battleground in their notation - something I have experienced as well. Trying to make the sounds in your head make sense on the page for performers to realise. This led me to animated graphic scores for my music. Ligeti used coloured pencils to sketch intertwining lines when planning his work. I was especially happy when I found these sketches some years ago - I think they look a lot like ‘analogue versions’ of my scores! And Scelsi, handing over the notating work to someone else to resolve, left space to finesse works with performers individually - these composers were trying to achieve music that traditional music notation doesn’t really serve very well, and I feel that has been a struggle for me too. This struggle mostly related to notating drones, glassandi and drawn out structures. You and I talk a lot about drone and long form musics, we listen to alot of music like that - and it forms a key element of Super Luminum performances. Your work with American composer Rhys Chatham, and mine with French composer Eliané Radigue are very much part of that. What is it about this music that appeals to you as a guitarist?
A sketch by Ligeti for atmosphères, from the Paul Sacher Stiftung.
LM: Playing with Chatham for the first time, in 1993, really rewired my head. I was quite young, hadn't been playing guitar that long (four years at the most), and I had just stumbled my way through a couple of bands that barely got to the gig stage. Then I played in his 100 electric guitar orchestra, and there was absolutely NOTHING that prepared me for what that would sound like. It has to be experienced live, and standing on stage playing with 99 other guitar players for the first time is something I will never forget. I couldn't believe the way that, after a while, the overtones would layer on each other and start banging around - I was hearing bells, sirens, all manner of sounds! I felt absolutely ecstatic, partially hypnotised or something, which of course would be no news to anyone who has ever meditated, or listened to ragas and La Monte Young or Tony Conrad, for that matter! There are so many different musical and cultural expressions of this; some of Radigue's work certainly is too. It was definitely a bodily response to sound, something I know you've had a long interest in with your work on low frequencies.
CH: I agree - something particular happens in the sound with this music. I have played three works by Radigue on the flute now, and that effect can only be experienced live, as you say. They defy the design of the instruments or something. And that experience, as it has for you, really shaped my ideas about music and composition. I think people will recognise all these composers in this work - Radigue, Scelsi, Nico and of course Ligeti - plus a few others. It’s a shame there has been so little activity to recognise the impact Ligeti has had on music in Australia this year. The last performance of Volumina I could find in Melbourne was in the 1970’s! I guess that just makes this project even more important.
VOLUMINUM is a program celebrating the centenary of the birth of Hungarian composer György Ligeti. Starting with a performance of Ligeti's legendary organ piece "Volumina" performed by Perth organist Stewart Smith, the concert concludes with the world premiere of a new large scale homage work entitled "Volumium" (2023) performed by Super Luminum (Cat Hope, bass guitar, Lisa MacKinney, organ) with special guests Bonnie Mercer (electric guitar), Louise Devenish (large percussion) and Mary Doumany (harp).
INFORMATION
30th November, 2023.
Melbourne Town Hall, 90/130 Swanston St, Melbourne CBD.
7.30pm. Free Entry. No bookings required.
Tel: (03) 9658 9658