Album of the week

Casey Anderson
ghostses
Bent Duo
(a wave press)

There seems to be precious little information available on the World Wide Web concerning ghostses, a piece the Los Angeles composer Casey Anderson created from 2016 to 2018 for Bent Duo – keyboardist David Friend and percussionist Bill Solomon – or so it seems, until you find the page on Anderson’s website that refers to the piece. Even then, the details at first seem fairly sketchy. There’s a YouTube video of a complete performance of the piece, filmed at the University of Leeds on June 30, 2017, and a page of text rendered in different colors. The notes provided consist of a single line:

written for BENT DUO (David Friend & Bill Solomon)

Maybe it’s for the best, since part of the beauty of listening to ghostses is being confronted with its similarly elusive matter-of-factness. Both Friend and Solomon are featured as speakers, delivering alone or simultaneously fragments of text from the first chapter of W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn—this, according to the Bandcamp page for the new recording, as well as on the website of a wave press, the impressive young experimental-music label Anderson launched in 2016.

The players accompany their speech with a variety of small percussion instruments—bells, tiny cymbals, tuning forks, and so on. Friend blows a harmonica; Solomon squeezes a concertina, or maybe it’s a toy accordion—this, you can see in the aforementioned video. Both also tune in glitchy, fuzzy bits of live radio regularly; on the newly released recording you catch a bit of “Long Cool Woman (in a Black Dress)” here, a snatch from “Bohemian Rhapsody” there, indistinct voices and electronic squelch throughout.

It all blends together surprisingly well. What transpires might not sound like music in a conventional sense, more like a ritual, or a game. But there’s no question that the performance is musical—even if its rhyme and reason seem abstruse.

But look again at that page about ghostses on Anderson’s website. Right under the picture of the page of text, you’ll see this line:

The software to generate the score, as well as various drafts, can be found here.

Click on the word here, and you find yourself on Anderson’s GitHub page, where all the components of ghostses can be found lurking: the Sebald chapter (in complete and edited forms); variously styled PDF files in which the text has been atomized by Anderson’s Python program into its constituent nouns, verbs, adjectives, punctuation marks, and so on; and, tucked away in a folder labeled “rendered,” a set of rigorously detailed instructions for the performers.

To summarize succinctly, both performers are reading the entire text of the Sebald chapter silently from a page labeled “background.” At the same time, two or more additional transparencies are positioned atop that base layer, with various components of the text rendered in different colors. Colored words signal the performers to read that word and a few adjacent words aloud. Those same words also serve as cues to play one or another instrument—nouns might be assigned to radios, adverbs to harmonicas, and so on. Punctuation marks, though not read aloud, similarly serve as performance cues. The layered stacks can vary from performance to performance; likewise, nouns or adverbs needn’t always correspond to the same instrument. The system is built to provide ample opportunity for chance and variety.

Knowing about all of those details and instructions makes listening to ghostses more intelligible, its workings discernible. For instance, here’s a sample passage from Sebald specifically concerning the Rembrandt painting The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp:

If we stand today before the large canvas of Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson in the Mauritshuis we are standing precisely where those who were present at the dissection in the Waaggebouw stood, and we believe that we see what they saw then: in the foreground, the greenish, prone body of Aris Kindt, his neck broken and his chest risen terribly in rigor mortis.

Now, listen to “Page 4” of the Bent Duo performance. Around 30 seconds in, we hear Solomon deliver parts of the passage quoted above:

If we stand… before the large… are standing precisely… who were present… stood, and we believe that we see what they saw then… terribly…

Workings that seemed unknowable suddenly become more clear. And yet! As if responding to Solomon’s words, Friend’s radio exactly then and nowhere else pulls in a snatch of a familiar Beatles song:

Try to see it my way…

If, as Arthur C. Clarke posited, “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” the fact remains that calm logic still can’t explain away every serendipitous ghost in the machine.