"Lost Analog" Barry Schrader "Exploring Creation in an Imaginary World"

LOST ANALOG

Barry Schrader

Exploring Creation in an 

Imaginary World

Barry Schrader: 

There’s a line from Robert Lowell that I’ve often quoted to explain part of my creative intentions: "I want to make something imagined, not recalled."

Barry Schrader's music is never a recollection. The music on "Lost Analog" is beyond what we would call "Grand." This music is the sound of events too large to have ever been witnessed, and far too elemental in nature and structure to be sentimental. When I first listened to "Death of the Red Planet" from Lost Analog, I heard the sound coming from everywhere at once and it depicted in my imagination creation itself. 

In the beginning, God created the earth, and he looked upon it in His cosmic loneliness.

—Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle

No one could witness what I heard in this music and live, or so it makes me feel. This music is so HUGE, it is necessarily indifferent to human concerns. An avalanche, an catastrophic earthquake or a devastating flood would have more capacity for sympathy than the imaginary event this music depicts. I believe few composers would venture this far into creation and come back sane enough to market the product. This music is a force grander than nature. The force this album depicts is at the very limits of what a mind can imagine.

Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme—

why are they no help to me now

I want to make

something imagined, not recalled?

—"Epilogue" by Robert Lowell (1917-1977)

What techniques and theories could be of any help to sing the creation or destruction of a world? The potential for this sound in the existence of a Buchla or Moog electronic music machine has seldom been approached with such fierce, unfettered and fearless imagination. To witness this music — because it is visual beyond any sound I have known or feared — changes a person. After the first listen to Lost Analog, my thoughts abandoned my mind completely for some time. If you can imagine witnessing the creation of a world from a safe distance with a few friends, who would speak first after that? In another earlier time, this music would have been banned, and Barry excommunicated for attempting to depict a power equal to God. 

Barry Schrader to Billy in response to the text of Mark Strand's poem:  

Mark Strand was a great poet.  I’m deeply taken by the following passage, because I always strive for what I consider “perfection” in what I compose, even though I know it’s impossible to actually achieve it, and I never have:

If only there were a perfect moment in the book; 

if only we could live in that moment, 

we could begin the book again 

as if we had not written it, 

as if we were not in it.

—From the poem "The Story Of Our Lives" by Mark Stand

That wish on Barry's part is a bit nuts! But after hearing what he has achieved, most saner composers should be sold at a discount for a week once a year. Why buy timid music, without first acknowledging that the boundaries have shifted beyond traditional instruments. The limits of imagination are barriers to our understanding of the scale and scope of what the mind can "know." Grow up! And take your place in the big cosmos! Listen here! The earth is not the center of the universe. Not anymore. Never was. That sort of knowledge can be FELT in this music, and that feeling is what may change you.

Having seen Your universal form that I had never seen before, I feel great joy. And yet, my mind trembles with fear. Please have mercy on me and again show me Your pleasing form, O God of gods, O Abode of the universe.

Baghavad Gita 11.45

I have spent a little time contemplating the nature of an electronic music creation machine, and how it might shape the form of a composition. What would you do, if presented with every possible sound of any parameter, in any timbre, and any tonal value? A banjo sounds like it is telling the truth. A piano has the ability to play in every key, but never in true harmony. An orchestra has the grand collective feeling of many musicians cooperating for a collective sound. 

But the Buchla offers everything at once and not one clue what to do with it. The Buchla is all-powerful musically and yet it is utterly indifferent to its own music, or to the listener, and feels not a whit of interest in the composer or his composition. It is as though there were a machine that would sculpt a perfect human being using myself as raw material. What changes would I make? Would I remain human after perfecting myself according to my own creation? Would I frighten the cats? Wouldn't it be better to let things be, and maybe learn to play the banjo?

Billy's words are in black and not offset from the margin.  

All of the quotes below (in brown and offset from the margin) are from Barry Schrader's text to Billy in November of 2022. 

 

I was writing feverishly on a bit of a manic episode to Barry Schrader, but he managed to feed me a few words that eclipse everything I wrote to him in two long paragraphs texting on Messenger. I have broken up his writing into smaller paragraphs and broken them up with my own commentary.

My ultimate compositional goal has always been to create new worlds in the medium of music.  While I’ve spoken and written about more technical and academic (musicological) aspects of my compositions and the works of others, I’ve rarely ventured into publicly discussing the domains of the aesthetic and the emotional.  This is because these things are difficult to describe and they’re not highly regarded in academic circles.   

I think it is a damn shame that the seemingly infinite possibilities of electronic music could be allowed to eclipse the emotional content of the music! I make it a point never to discuss technique in public. If I am "impressed" when I leave a concert, I should get my money back. This music has deep emotional roots, and deeper than that is knowledge, and when I listen as deep as I can go, I sense a profound wisdom in this album that goes to the core of what it means that matter came to exist in this particular Universe in a form that could spin in balls around other balls in a composition capable of sustaining life. 

Nevertheless,  I’ve always wanted to create music that would transport the listener to realms of the imagination beyond what they might be able to conjure for themselves.  This was something that impressed me about music from an early age (I began playing piano at 5) although, for me, not all music seemed able to generate this transportation into the fantastic.  I found that electronic music allowed me to do this in ways not possible with acoustic instruments.   

 What a compositional goal is this! I have heard it said that music could transport us into our imaginations, but never "transport the listener to realms of the imagination beyond what they might be able to conjure themselves." Holy crap! I have certainly settled for less and not felt I was limiting my listening. What courage must it take in the imagination to go that far, and hope to retain a hint of sanity? Barry Schrader's "indifferent" explosive creation depicted on this album is not benevolent, but it isn't the disturbing fever dream of Cthulu either. The effect of this "indifferent" power on my mind is to put my world in place, and bring my ego to its proper size. So the power may be indifferent, but the effect of this omnipotent sound on our collective experience takes our “imagination beyond what [we] might be able to conjure.” The result is spiritual to me and meditative.

It took me some time to gain the knowledge and expertise to be able to effectively use the technology.  At the same time, I wanted the technology to be invisible to the listener, as it’s a means to an end, not an end in itself.  In order to do this, one must have great control over both the technology and the compositional material, and I’ve spent my life trying to gain ever-increasing mastery over both of these things.  I think of what I’m doing as extending the traditions of music into new incarnations, an expansion of the past, not a break from it.   

As I expected, it takes a shit-ton of knowledge and practice to create on the "infinite possibilities" machine. I don't care about that. As LaMonte Young put it, “If listeners aren't carried away to Heaven, I'm failing.” In Barry Schrader's Lost Analog, I witnessed the creation of an imaginary world beyond my capacity to dream. Close enough. Next time I will specify heaven maybe, but it was a helluva ride!

With the exception of a few commercial projects, I’ve always composed what I wanted to with little regard for what might be considered commercially viable or academically “correct” music for the time.  I consider my music to be very personal, but I also hope that it will communicate to others.  I also realize that my work sounds arcane to many people.  

There! He said it! This music is not "correct" and the Spanish Inquisition will surely be notified to lock him up and re-educate him in the joys of orthodoxy. Or maybe that "rebel" spirit is just the thing your record collection has been lacking all these years. 

How many music lovers are saying right now that there is nothing new, and what is current isn't as good as the "old school?" Maybe this music is just what we need right now to transport our minds away from the lies and spin and clicks and likes of our current paucity of human interaction and unimaginative sound.

You be the judge! Take the blue album or stick with the red one you already own. 

BARRY SCHRADER

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