Love Poem

Don Paterson, ceva poet scotian, a castigat, in Anglia, The Forward Prize pentru cea mai buna poezie pe 2008 cu o oda inchinata nevestei lui Thomas Brinkmann, compozitoarea de muzica electronica Natalie ‘Tusja’ Beridze. It goes like this:

“Love Poem For Natalie ‘Tusja’ Beridze”

O Natalie, O TBA, O Tusja: I had long assumed the terrorsits balaclava that you sport on the cover of Annule
which was, for too long, the only image of you I possesed –
was there to conceal some ugliness or deformity
or perhaps merely spoke (and here, I hoped against hope) of a
young woman struggling
with a crippling shyness. How richly this latter theory has been confirmed by my Googling!

O who is this dark angel with her unruly Slavic eyebrows
ranged like two duelling pistols, lightly sweating in the pale light
of the TTF screen?
O behold her shaded, infolded concentration, her
heartbreakingly beautiful face so clearly betraying the tru focus
of one not merely content – as, no doubt, were others at the
Manover Elektronische Festival in Wien –
to hit play while making some fraudulent correction to a
volume slider
but instead deep in the manipulation of somecomplex
real-time software such as Ableton Live, MAX/MSP
or Supercollider.

O Natalie, how can I pay tribute to your infinitely versatile
blend of Nancarrow, Mille Plateaux,  Venetian Snares, Xenakis,
Boards of Canada and Nobukazu Takemura
to say nothing of those radiant pads – so strongly reminiscent
of the mid-century bitonal pastoral of Charles Koechlin in their
harmonic bravura –
or your fine vocals, which, while admittedly limited in range
and force, are nonetheless so much more affecting than the
affected Arctic whisperings of those interchangably dreary
Stinas and Hannes and Bjorks, being in fact far closer in spirit
to a kind of glitch-hop Blossom Dearie?

I have also deduced from your staggeringly ingenious
employment of some pretty basic wavetables
that unlike many of your East European counterparts, all your
VST plug-ins, while not perhaps the best available,
probably all have a legitimate upgrade path – indeed I imagine
your entire DAW as pure as the driven snow, and not in any way
buggy or virusy
which makes me love you more, demonstrating as it does an
excess of virtue given your country’s well-known talent for
software piracy.

Though I should confess that at times I find your habit of
maxxing
the frequency range with those bat-scaring ring-modulated
sine- bursts and the more distressing psychoacoustic properties
of phase-inversion in the sub-bass frequencies somewhat taxing
you are nonetheless as beautiful as the mighty Boards
themselves in your shamless organicizing of the code,
as if you had mined those saw and squares and ramps straight
from the Georgian motherlode.

O Natalie – I forgive you everything, even your catastrophic
adaptation of those lines from ‘Dylan’s’ already shite
Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night
in the otherwise magnificent ‘Sleepwalkers’, and when you
open up those low-
pass filters in what sounds like a Minimoog emulation they
seem to open in my heart also…

[…]

At least, my dear, let me wish you the specific best:
may you be blessed
with the wonderful instrument you deserve, with a 2 Ghz
dual-core Intel chip and enough double-pumped DDR2 RAM
for the most CPU-intensive processes;
then no longer will all those goreous acoustic spaces

be accessible only via an offline procedure involving a freeware
convolution reverb and an imperfectly recorded impulse
response of the Concertgebouw made illegally with a hastily-
erected stereo pair and an exploded crisp bag

for I would have all your plug-ins run in real-time, in the
blameless zero-latency heaven of the 32-bit floating-point
enviroment, with no buffer-glitch or freeze or dropout or lag;
I would also grant you a MIDI controller of such responsiveness,
such smoothness of automation, travel and increment
that you would think it a transparent intercessor, a mere
copula, and feel machine and animal suddenly blent…

Posted in academia, de-dans on November 26th, 2008 by de-dans | 58 Comments