I’ve known Alex Temple since before we both lived in Chicago, so it’s truly exciting for me to be playing the world premiere of Behind the Wallpaper next Saturday, June 29 at The Hideout, along with our badass guest vocalist Constance Volk. There are already more words here than maybe need to be said of a work that makes such an immediate impact, so I’ll leave you in the capable hands of Alex for some excellent listening and thoughts about the music.
Image may be NSFW.
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JAW: As a performer, looking at your music for the first time, the page is not overwhelming. The information I see in front of me is well-written and concise, but it doesn’t contain the whole. Nor does it try to. Your music necessitates a sensitivity to style and a flexibility to get away from the cliches of instrumental performance. What part of your musical background and interests have inspired the sound world that you have in mind, and the style of performance that you are looking for in this new piece? Is it a matter of artists you like who have inspired you, or more a matter of simply trying to find new directions away from “classical” or “new music” performances you’ve found tiresome?
AT: Well, part of what’s going on with Behind the Wallpaper is that I’m writing for people who already know what I’m up to musically, so I don’t feel the need to be as specific with my notation as I normally would. But even when I do put in more information about style, it’s usually in the form of text markings (some of my favorites included “schmaltzy, Hollywood” and “big, loud and dumb”), rather than going in and writing out every little pitch bend, every little rhythmic nuance, and so on. That’s partially because I want to give performers the freedom to exercise their own musicianship, and partially because, purely in terms of aesthetics, I don’t like the way visually crowded scores look.
As for the sound world of Behind the Wallpaper, there are a lot of different ways I could talk about that. One thing is that I’m interested in creating a music of emotional repression, as opposed to emotional expression. The songs are all about unsettling experiences, but the music keeps the anxiety associated with those experiences very muted. As a listener, I’m much more moved by music that hints at something painful than by music that screams its rage and grief at the top of its lungs. That’s one of the many reasons I don’t like traditional operatic singing, and don’t want my music to be delivered in that style.
There are specific artists lurking in the background of the piece too. In fact, each of the songs is a tribute to a different composer or songwriter who I feel is particularly good at creating strange, subtle and suggestive atmospheres: the first to Julia Holter, the second to Gabriel Fauré, the third to Imogen Heap, and the fourth to Matt Marks, who was the first person to make me aware of the potential eerieness of Auto-Tune. So the (hopefully) deceptive simplicity of the songs is to an extent a reflection of the (definitely) deceptive simplicity of those artists’ songs. But at the same time, I’ve been feeling the need to strip things down for a while now. A lot of the time my first reaction to a piece of music, especially contemporary classical music, is “do all those notes really need to be there?”
JAW: Could you recommend a song by each of the artists you list for our readers? Perhaps saying a word about what’s interesting in each song, if there’s something specific to listen for.
Sure. Check out Julia Holter’s “Marienbad” — a song whose mixture of early-music and indie-pop elements partly inspired the first song in Behind the Wallpaper, “Midnight Bus.” The title and lyrics allude to the experimental French film Last Year at Marienbad, which has been important to me for years. It’s also about a sort of unsettling experience: a man meets a woman in a vast, impossible hotel full of mysterious strangers, and tries to convince her that the two of them had an affair, even though she doesn’t remember it.
One of my favorite Fauré songs is “Clair de lune.” It seems to take place in a fantastical 16th-century mansion, which might be the ancestor of Last Year at Marienbad‘s fantastical 20th-century hotel. My own song “Unnatural” is yet another update: now the crowd of mysterious strangers is walking through an urban office plaza.
Imogen Heap is great at creating the sense of something deeply wrong hiding under the surface of a catchy pop song. Take a listen to “Let Go” by her band Frou Frou. Like “Claire de lune,” it can’t make up its mind whether it’s in major or minor — I do something similar in my song “Tiny Holes.” In “Let Go,” that ambiguity is made especially haunting by the lush electronic production and the careful use of a vulnerable, breathy singing style, only on certain notes.
Unfortunately, the Matt Marks piece that got me interested in using Auto-Tune, This Will Hurt Someone, doesn’t seem to be available either online or on a commercially available recording (I saw it in a live performance). But for a good sample of his uncanny ability to blend the disturbing and the garish, check out “OMG I’m Shot” from The Little Death, an opera / album / song cycle about sexual repression in the evangelical Christian community.