brettworks

“The tune is space. The blue guitar

Becomes the place of things as they are,
A composing of senses of the guitar.”

Wallace Stevens, “The Man with the Blue Guitar” (1937)

Same Walk, Different Music: Arovane, “Deauville.” In the quest of searching for ever new music, always listening for something unusual, a useful reset is returning to something you once listened to often but never thought about why. I first heard the music of Uwe Zahn, aka Arovane, in the early 2000s, a time when one could preview CDs at record stores, iTunes had just launched, and music streaming was still a few years away. Zahn’s album Tides was appealing because its tracks had the arrangement clarity and feel of a real band, while the sound palette was from the producer’s world. (Zahn made the album using samples arranged with a hardware sequencer.) The best track, “Deauville,” was structured around lead chords played on a vibraphone-like sound, floating through a 12-bar sequence. The chords are of uneven lengths, sometimes hitting on the beat, sometimes off it, and they’re unhurried, taking 48 languid seconds to move through their 12 bars.

In a way, this slow vibes sequence contains the entirety of “Deauville” in a loop that’s slow and long enough to leave room for imagination to fill in the details. The track develops with each repetition, as a few other sounds enter the mix. The drums, whose components Zahn sampled from jazz records, are distilled to just four: kick, snare, and hi-hats (open and closed). The beat is essentially a breakbeat–if a breakbeat playing at 59 bpm can still be called a breakbeat. There’s little complexity here, but enough ghost notes and small syncopations in the beat’s patterns to remind us of the power of restraint and the link between going slow and feeling meditative. Next, a faint pad enters as a kind of monophonic harmony, then a high whistling lead, then field recordings of ocean and seagulls. Notice that there’s no bass part, which the music doesn’t miss. There’s also a very audible high-frequency tape hiss (perhaps attached to the vibes?) that continues throughout the track, like a white noise drone. With each repetition of the 48-second sequence, small changes within the track’s parts take place.

Re-listening to “Deauville” a bunch of times after having not heard the music in many years, I find that it holds up to my memory. I heard/hear its chord sequence not as sad but as pensive, its sensibility like a narrator in a W.G. Sebald novel who is observing a scene and recalling, a bit dispassionately, trains of thought. And since we always listen to music contextually, against every other music we’ve encountered, the minimalist downtempo aesthetic of “Deauville” brings to mind the sonic density and intensity of contemporary electronic music production. Much has changed in 25 years, for reasons both technological and procedural. Software is now the studio, and as techniques of DAW-based sound design proliferate and are shared through YouTube tutorials, musicians have learned how to do ever more adventurous things with their sounds, from intricate modulating to resampling to micro editing. Consequently, the leading edge of production often sounds timbrally amorphous, structurally fluid, bass-heavy, and rhythmically hyper. This is all well and good, but listening to an older piece of music can reveal continuities and enduring principles, thus helping us understand our present through our past. “Deauville” continues resonating because it’s an elegant solution to musical questions of what to leave out, how to take one’s time, and why a music’s techniques of construction are perhaps best left in plain sight.