AEM032 Dandelion Fiction

The world of sound is a strange one, indeed. Think about it. We pay money to watch peo­ple make sounds. If peo­ple make really cool sounds, we pay more money. I’ve heard peo­ple make some pretty cool sounds in my day. But it’s all a hoax. I sin­cerely regret to inform you that the cur­rent sound world you inhabit is lim­ited, a sham. After all, there’s a poten­tially infi­nite com­bi­na­tion of sonic tex­tures to be tapped. If it’s in the range of human hear­ing, we should be able to hear it. The prob­lem, how­ever, is that there’s a finite num­ber of instru­ments in the world. The objects we have for real­iz­ing sound poten­tial are inher­ently limited.

This is one of the many rea­sons why exper­i­men­tal instru­ment design is such a vital field in music. Instru­ment design­ers are like musi­cal sci­en­tists, forg­ing new vehi­cles for the man­i­fes­ta­tion of pre­vi­ously unimag­in­able tim­bres. If the poten­tial sound world is lim­ited, then there must be a whole range of tex­tures wait­ing to be uncov­ered. Jon Scov­ille, in his intro­duc­tion to Bart Hopkin’s use­ful Musi­cal Instru­ment Design, waxes philo­sophic on the mat­ter: “There is an ancient imper­a­tive lodged in our DNA which asks us to make music. Our intu­itive under­stand­ing of being alive on this blue planet is most poet­i­cally expressed in our songs and dances. In our instinct to orga­nize sound and move­ment we fully express both the ambi­gu­i­ties and cer­tain­ties of life. Mak­ing the instru­ments that make the music that makes the sound­tracks to our lives is one of the ways that we recon­nect our­selves with the world and with our ancient her­itage. Thus we join that long tra­di­tion of (mostly) unknown instru­ment mak­ers who gave birth to drums, vio­lins, lutes, bam­boo zithers, steel drums, game­lan, and the count­less other instru­ments that pro­duce our planet’s songs and sym­phonies” (iii).

We can now add to that list the dax­o­phone, a fric­tion idio­phone invented by Ger­man musi­cian and typog­ra­pher Hans Reichel. Pic­tured with Dan­de­lion Fic­tion above, it’s essen­tially com­posed of a vari­ety of thin wooden blades (or “tongues”) inserted into a wooden block, which is in turn ampli­fied by small con­tact micro­phones. The tongues are then bowed with a horse­hair bow and bent to alter pitch. Daniel Fishkin, the brains behind Dan­de­lion Fic­tion, is one of the few dax­o­phone play­ers you will ever meet. He learned how to play and design this unique instru­ment under Mark Stew­art, an instru­ment designer, found­ing mem­ber of the Bang on a Can All-Stars, and ensem­ble musi­cian for Steve Reich and Arnold Drey­blatt. The sound of the dax­o­phone can be accu­rately described as mam­mals mat­ing (this could be why one of the songs on the 2008 Dan­de­lion Fic­tion LP You’re A Strong One is called “Bad­ger Thumpin’.”)

Check out A-side “Leg Shimmy” for a glimpse into the world of the dax­o­phone. The instrument’s vocal qual­ity is imme­di­ately appar­ent here, par­tic­u­larly in the song’s first few sec­onds where the pitches jump around so much as to sound like a muf­fled repro­duc­tion of a con­ver­sa­tion. The track quickly set­tles into a fun lit­tle groove, prov­ing that you can be on the cut­ting edge of 21^st cen­tury music and still have a sense of humor. Towards the end of the song, a mys­te­ri­ous drone is intro­duced. Is it feed­back? A tape? Frankly Mr. Shankly, it mat­ters not. Some­times the mys­tery of sound can be as impor­tant as the exact doc­u­men­ta­tion of its pro­duc­tion. This couldn’t be more true for the epic nightmare-techno of B-side “Unravel With Ease.” I could spend all week try­ing to fig­ure out how all the sounds here were pro­duced, but I’d rather let it pum­mel me with its Stravinksy-like syn­co­pa­tion and relent­less pound­ing. There’s def­i­nitely some­thing to let­ting the sounds occur with­out fur­ther inves­ti­ga­tion. The song’s direc­tions are pretty clear.

Although the sim­i­lar­i­ties between Dan­de­lion Fic­tion and Ani­mal Col­lec­tive are scant, they have some inter­est­ing things to say on the topic of divulging sound infor­ma­tion. Quoth Avey Tare: “Part of the mys­tery of a lot of the bands we like was their abil­ity to cre­ate really spe­cial sonic envi­ron­ments. It was some­thing that made us think and inspired us to make music of our own. If you just spend a lot of time telling, espe­cially younger peo­ple, what you’re doing and how every­thing is done, you feel like you’re not going to push peo­ple to exper­i­ment on their own and try to fig­ure things out on their own. And I think that’s another good thing about not say­ing what we’re doing all the time.” Indeed, if music and exper­i­men­tal instru­ment design are about dis­cov­ery, then an ele­ment of mys­tery is the per­fect cat­a­lyst for explo­ration. Keep us in the loop, I say, but not too close.

Jake Brun­ner

Side A — Leg Shimmy Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Down­load the lat­est ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Side B — Unravel With Ease Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Down­load the lat­est ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

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