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Duane Pitre seemed to rocket to recognition last year, thanks largely to the release of a single LP of drone compositions: Organized Pitches Occuring in Time, which came across as the bastard child of the Theater of Eternal Music and the guitar orchestrations of Glenn Branca or Rhys Chatham. The music thereon was played by a medium sized ensemble running the full range of acoustic, electric and electronic instrumentation. I was interested therefore to hear what Pitre would do on this ‘solo’ tape, without the big band effect of his composed works.
The A-side: Motorized Music for Electric Guitar No.1 is fairly self explanatory. The ‘motorised guitar’ now has a fairly daunting and distinguished, albeit somewhat esoteric, history. It’s proponents have notably included Keith Rowe, Remko Scha, Paul Panhuysen and Kevin Drumm. Commited fans of either the former or latter would be well advised to steer clear of this tape however, the guitar(s) here remain entirely unprocessed – the harsh electronic edge which snakes between Rowe and Drumm’s strings is not to be seen here. Of Pitre’s precursors he comes in closest to the Maciunas Ensemble’s A Wide White World. Thanks to the joys of multi-tracking Pitre here achieves the full big band impact, after beginning with a faint trail of high pitched whine, a large ensemble of strings are gradually brought, one by one, into the fray. Although the careful choices exhibited on the LP are not as evident here there remains a deft composer’s hand at work: repetitive motifs are distinguishable among the swarm of vibrating strings, and the combination of pitches give rise to an amazing flock of chiming harmonics swooping about over the sustained notes. A shock and disappointment then that it was deemed ok to simply cut the piece of at the end of the side.
Everyone, it seems these days, has their little outlet for field recordings. 29 Hours (sound collage) contains a bit of Pitre’s. It opens with the chirp of some crickets, interrupted by the occasional passing car, accompanied by some light auto-harp strummings. We are then faded into a birdsong-heavy woodland where the strummings grow deeper. Crickets return, now joined by a piano, which plonks out a slightly melancholy tune before becoming subsumed beneath an organ chord, which drones us out to the close. In a post-Jewelled Antler world this sort of tepid, whimsical attempt at pairing acoustic instruments with pastoral soundscapes just comes across as naïve.
NNA Tapes
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