The Ballad of Cant and Bias

The Ballad of Cant and Bias is a three-part "album" lasting just over seventy minutes,
and is designed to be delivered via digital playback equipment, typically either a
computer or a compact disk player, via either personal headphones (for best stereo
panning) or loudspeakers (for louder reproduction without risk of damage to the ears).
It is primarily designed for personal use but can be delivered as a piece of
performance art to an audience either as the backdrop to an exhibition, delivered on
loop (preferably with at least one minute between iterations) or as the centrepiece to a
concert performance. The latter option has been the subject of discussion throughout
the 1990s and many people believe that it is less than ideal to attend a concert given
by loudspeakers. If this is felt in the particular circumstances to be a problem, then the
piece can easily combine with the visual arts in terms of dance or live art-creation, so
long as the content of this visual dimension finds a balance in terms of how related or
unrelated it is to the apparent "content" of the piece.

The piece is in three parts. These are:

"Dreaming Shit" - a short story wherein a male protagonist muses and worries
"Cat bag" - a one-movement concertino for electronic keyboard
"Fang box" - an exploration of the conflict between man and machine in
the contex of electroacoustic music

The three pieces are related thematically in several ways. Stylistically all three pieces
are, to a greater or lesser extent, concerned with the relationship between the human
voice (mainly spoken words) and types of noise more conventionally associated with
the term "music". The over-riding principle is the idea that a heterophonic
presentation of voice and "music" sits more consonantly with the ear than such a
presentation within the scope of the part deemed "music".

Dreaming Shit

In "Dreaming Shit", my previous compositions, mainly for live instruments only, are
presented in sequence like a kind of mini concert, with the short story running over
the top as a kind of 'audiobook'. The vocal part, if you will, is delivered "clean", in
sequence and without any special effects. It is combined with echoes of itself from the
past and the future, many of which coincide with the lines being delivered. This
secondary voice is an allegory for the thoughts, plans and reminiscences of the
protagonist, drawing the piece together as a single entity and making poetic allusions
to similarities in the "backing-track" at those times that it speaks and mocking or
colluding with the protagonist at different times. A third part is added towards the end
of the piece to summarise the echo part and unify it into something approaching a line
– a kind of experience similar to that commonly supposed to happen at the moment of
death. It also serves as a marker that the end of the first part is imminent, as predicted
by the fourth extra-musical element, the absurd "horn", which occurs at something
approximately matching the golden section of the piece's duration.
The fifth extra-musical element, even more important for piece cohesion, will be
discussed after a brief aside.

The Golden Section in "The Ballad of Cant and Bias"

Each part of the piece has a gesture like the one mentioned above; at approximately
the point where delimiting two conceptual parts of the piece would produce a balance
between their proportions and their sum, the "horn" sounds. The horn does not have
any hand in the design of the piece and does not produce any genuine change in the
music over which it sounds. Its purpose, as a dry and incongruent "noise", is to stir up
the listener's "inner clock" and give a sense of signposting within the movements and
within the piece, to suggest an inevitable end, a predestination which adds to any
feeling of direction that might lurk in the piece.

I also alluded in the section on "Dreaming Shit" to a fifth element, and this too has a
relationship to the golden section of Fibonacci, though its numbers are not true
Fibonacci numbers.
In "Dreaming Shit", there is a chiming, a time-dimension that roots the piece in
external time. The word "turd" is pronounced grimly by something related to the
protagonist – it is pronounced once every sixty seconds – it chimes on the minute, as a
clock chimes on the hour.
In "Cat bag", the turd is again present, but it only chimes every ninety-seven seconds.
Here is the very essence of the turd's relation to the golden section in "The Ballad of
Cant and Bias": 60 is to 97 as 97 is to their sum, 157.
In "Fang box", unsurprisingly this is continued by the chiming of the turd happening
every 157 seconds. The purity of the golden section that defines the change of interval
between the first two parts is 99.81% "pure" and the second golden section is 99.93%
"pure". What is also interesting about the three intervals used for the turd-chime in
"The Ballad of Cant and Bias" is that sixty is a very factor-rich number, which is why
it is used to measure time: it can be divided into twos, threes, fours, fives and sixes
(among other factors). When this rich number is used to form a golden section, the
"large part" and the "first sum" are both prime. So whilst the turd lends consistency it
also lends a kind of spiritual contrast between the chimes of the first part and those of
the rest. It is as though the protagonist has given up his struggle to retain a balance,
though in a sense, relating for a moment to the content of the short story of the first
part, the protagonist's only real grip on reality is the turds in his life.

Cat Bag

"Cat Bag" is very much a 'cut-up'. It is based on material from a very basic electronic
keyboard, recorded and then assembled into a piece. There are separate documents for
"Dreaming Shit" and for "Cat bag" which give much more detail about them, and in
the case of "Dreaming Shit" there is also a sub-document relating to one of the pieces
used as 'backing', "New Miracle Scenes" (1995, G.Fox). That document, and the
piece's procedural background, are highly relevant to "Cat bag", as is discussed in the
separate document on "Cat bag".
In the context of "The Ballad of Cant and Bias", "Cat bag" is a moment of uncomic
relief from the inner voice of the protagonist. It is made up of largely loud
instrumental passages on the keyboard, but is framed by two poems which are closely
related thematically and concern waste and destruction. The poems are delivered by
the dual voice of the protagonist's ambivalence to their subject.
The first, "Geisha", is delivered very divergently, as the ambivalence felt by the
protagonist is more intense:
Geisha

On a silver sheet
the remnants of my heroine
she's pricking holes
to smoke the craic

I wish she'd stop taking drugs
for a few minutes

In "Geisha", words are used to reflect the ambivalence of the protagonist in his
commentary on his friend the prostitute crack/smack addict.
The silver bedsheet on which the heroine is laid in her defeated state is also a
reflection of the foil on which small fragments of diamorphine remain after the
primary smoke and are often resmoked in case anything meaningful remains therein.
She's pricking holes to smoke the craic because she's literally taking pricks into her
holes to kill off her daily opportunities; the lifestyle is viewed by the protagonist as
destructive and masochistic – taking drugs to enable work to enable drug-taking.
Obviously the other side of the coin is that she's literally making small holes in the
foil in order for the crack cocaine to burn downwards into the bottle ready to be
inhaled.
The protagonists motivation in the second stanza is disturbingly questionable, to say
the least. On the one hand he is empathising and on the other he wants her to hurry up
so he can fuck her.

At the other end of the "cat bag" (which may or may not be the disturbingly heavy
bag held by the protagonist on the bench; one wonders if he is procrastinating before
deciding whether or not to drown some kittens) is the thematically-related but less
ambivalent poem "The Fox" (which may or may not be an allusion to the defeat felt
by the protagonist, who at least during the creation of the piece must in some sense be
felt to be "The Fox", the author.)

The Fox

On the soft verge
A fox

Imagine a truck but probably a car
with people in
going somewhere

Faster than my eyes up and down this gentle body

Like the geisha, the fox is supine, but instead of taking drugs and preparing for
business, the fox is already dead from its chaotic lifestyle – or, in this ambivalent
mindset, from the intervention of the brutal outside world of "people going
somewhere". The protagonist wants life to move more slowly now instead of more
quickly, and his insight into his own stereotypes does nothing to rescue the fox or the
protagonist himself from the emotion in the final physical gesture. "Cat bag" sounds
its concerto heroism (and its horn) but nothing has changed; we may be in the larger
part of a goldenly-proportioned headspace but this headspace has three not two
sections and the ambivalence is only resolved to a temporary grieving before the true
confusion of part three!!!

Fang box

The final part of "The Ballad of Cant and Bias" opens with the protagonist depressed
and disjointed; a cut-up of words which will be presented "properly" later in the piece
when there is more interruption from the "music". The text relates to the process of
creating material for a cut-up, so the results here are presented before the method and
one equals the other. The relationship is a permutation similar to those used to create
the "music"; in this case, two old ensemble pieces: the first, "Miss the Lift", is very
fragmented to start with and created from permutations of a serial row, in a similar
way to the material in "Cat Bag", and "Dreaming Shit" ("Bloody" and "New Miracle
Scenes" use the same method). Here though, "Miss the Lift" is cut up slightly and
recombined in a stereophonic self-counterpoint. It's presented alongside some random
note-sequences performed by the ZX Spectrum "beeper", which is rather like the type
of beepers used up until quite recently by the first couple of waves of mobile phones.
Maybe instead of thinking of the humble spectrum, a 'modern' listener will think of a
mobile phone gone mad, talking to its user instead of being the prelude to a "real"
conversation.
The other backdrop to "Miss the Lift" is "Extended Horn", which is based on treble
recorder noises ("extended techniques" such as playing with the mouthpiece removed,
overblowing, etc. etc.) sampled, sequenced and mixed; a gesture of the kind of "pop"
sophistication widely associated with more 'normal' electroacoustic music. In a sense
"Extended Horn" and the keyboard music in "Cat Bag" are two sides of yet another
ambivalent coin – both use "sequencing" – in "Extended Horn" the raw noises of the
real world are sequenced by a computer; in "Cat Bag" the synthetic sounds of an
electric keyboard are sequenced (admittedly using a computer) by a real person to
entirely change their capabilities and properties. (The piece could not realistically be
notated or performed on such keyboards.)
(Another interesting fact to note is the thematic relationship between the material of
"Extended Horn" and "Overture: Electric Spring 1995" which forms part of the
"backing" to "Dreaming Shit".)
The section based on "Miss the Lift" follows a period of abuse, which I shall discuss
next, working backwards through the piece as befits it: an avoidance of calling the
end an end perhaps, and is an example of how "music" works when combined
heterophonically. There is some usage of heterophony in the original piece – things
moving out of step with the conducted "beat", for example, but ultimately the genuine
combining of unrelated things in the same listening-space is done here by mixing.
Unlike "Dreaming Shit", which involves a happy coexistance of spoken word and
"music", this section of "Fang Box" is much less than "happy" and it will depend on
the individual listener as to which strand is perceived as 'dominant' with the rest as
'accompaniment'.

Period of abuse

In "Fang Box", I am not aiming to be 'controversial'; the period of insulting profanity
from the maniacal voice of the Currah Microspeech Unit (Sinclair ZX Spectrum) is a
representation of a relationship between man and machine that is rarely verbalised:
that of competent teacher versus unskilled labourer, where the teacher is the machine
and the labourer the human. Old class differentiations are inherent in the relationship
whenever anyone consults "online help" or is presented with an 'error message'. The
computer really is calling the user a "sheep-shagging, cock-sucking cunt". Well, it is
in this piece anyway. (Interestingly, the computer also calls us "you turd".)

The part before the period of abuse

The above subtitle is an ironic one, because if you listen very carefully, the computer
is already hurling abuse at the listener towards the end of "Cat Bag", and its own
threatening iterations of the title of "Cat Bag" aren't exactly intoned in a friendly
way!

The initial section of "Fang Box", between the opening and the period of abuse, is
devoted partly to the music of the Spectrum and partly to two movements of an old
ensemble piece, "Meritocracy", presented together with their endings coordinated and
the "kissing" gesture at the end of the 'first part' (now a meaningless idea) amplified
to precipitate the abuse, as though humanity wants to court the machine but it is the
machine that faces us in dumb arrogance and calls us twat and wank-stain.

Fang Box overview

A juxtaposition then of two ways of turning one piece into two, into one again; with
"Meritocracy" the piece is split into two halves and these halves are presented
together. With "Miss the Lift" the piece is cloned and then each is cut up in different
ways, with some "crossing over" (a nod and a wink to reproduction and James
Dillon!) of material from what will eventually be the left channel into the right
channel and vice versa. These clones are then combined in the stereo mix to produce a
reunified version, albeit damaged in the process.
At the same time, the words of "Deep's Low" are presented in cut-up at the beginning
and in purity towards the end – in a sense the opposite/balancer of the above structure
for the "music". The ZX Spectrum material runs throughout and dominates in stunned
silence when it becomes heavily abusive near the middle. Right near the end,
humanity attempts to imitate and ape the machine's aggression, but is speechless and
instead of swearing and cursing, the human protagonist (our hero, La Voix Fidel)
recites the hexadecimal machine codes for a routine to sample sound. (The same one
used as software by the machine to create the odd yells and screeches such as the one
in the background of the words "Cat" "Bag" at the end of "Cat Bag" just before "The
Fox".)
The gist then for "Fang Box" is the new relationship of computer and human – the
relationship that enabled the mixing together of disparate musics and recitation for
"Dreaming Shit", the same relationship that enabled the creation of complex
polyphony from a keyboard incapable of playing real music for "Cat Bag" : this
relationship taken to the extreme and the resultant confrontation presented as the
anger of strangeness and simultaneously affecting everything in both domains.

The Ballad of Cant and Bias Overview

A symphonic poem with a hero and a villain, both within the same person but in
genuine conflict over nothing but who owns the self; a journey from one form of
coexistance on a musical level to another form altogether, with links in time creating
an artificial cohesion as do memories of the same person who is now a different
person, remembering a time when nothing was the same.

Acknowledgements

Ensemble Firebird conducted by Barrie Webb
Alison Wells, Soprano in "Meritocracy" ("Dreaming Shit")
Tim Brady, Electric Guitar in "Dark Blow" ("Dreaming Shit")
The Malcolm Layfield Quartet in "String Quartet" ("Dreaming Shit")
The Mike Barlow Wind Quintet in "Bloody" ("Dreaming Shit")
Melloney Robinson for the beautiful gift of the keyboard used in "Cat Bag"
Marie Dodds for the literary inspiration for the short story "Dreaming Shit"
Christopher Fox for years of patience and understanding over "serial permutations"

"The Ballad of Cant and Bias" is dedicated to Mell Robinson and was completed in
February 2005. Words music mixing programming and implementation by Greg Fox,
© Copyright 2005.