Cory Allen: “HIF 1” (Hearing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Hears, Quiet Design, 2009)
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It’s rare to think of tranquil music as “unlistenable,” but Austin, Texas ambient musician Cory Allen’s latest album, Hearing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Hears, arguably challenges the listener’s concentration because it is so easy to listen to. If you were to try mapping out this music, it would require intense concentration — way more, perhaps, than the hypnotic, brain-twisting work of minimalist icons like Steve Reich and Philip Glass — but it would most likely subdue you first!
“Probably,” laughs Allen, who also is co-owner/curator of Austin-based independent label Quiet Design (along with founder and fellow ambient artist Mike Vernusky). Most easily described as a sequence of softly rippling, algorithm-based tones that sound a lot like a computer rendition of wind chimes, Hearing is Forgetting… was in fact inspired by the wind chimes outside of Allen’s bedroom window.
Unsurprisingly, the album lends itself to quiet reflection and inner calm, but it differs in some fundamental ways from music that we might typically identify as “meditative.” Whereas other ambient artists — and even Allen’s previous work — tend toward inducing heightened awareness in the listener, Hearing is Forgetting… instills a distinct sense of non-awareness, non-being even, and was in a sense designed to evaporate when we turn our attention to it.
“If you can get your ears and mind somewhere between listening to this music and ignoring it,” he offers, “it really will reveal itself.” At least, he admits with a chuckle, he hopes so.
“By removing the identity and removing any attempt to impact, your brain doesn’t get in its own way. And whenever you stop trying, things just grow out of you.”
Heavily influenced by the writings of Zen philosopher Alan Watts, Allen often applies Zen and Taoist principles to his music and uses his music as a vehicle to explore a longstanding preoccupation with the nature of perception itself.
“The area between the objective and subjective universe is really what interests me,” he explains. “What’s happening outside of our skin, what’s happening inside of our skin and in our minds, and then the dissonance and lost-in-translation kind of thing that happens in the act of perception — all of my work deals with that. All of it’s about manipulating perception.”
Nonetheless, Hearing represents a dramatic step forward from its predecessors and arguably marks the first time that Allen has succeeded in penetrating the realm of meta-perception with sound. For the most part, despite sharp distinctions between them, his other albums — Gesemi Tropisms (2005), Observing a Warmth (2006), Satori in Atlantis (2007), and The Fourth Way (2008) — all strike an impressive, almost paradoxical balance between sedate and gripping.
But in all of these cases, the listener is able to “follow” the music from beginning to end. You might get carried away, but you never fully lose yourself, or your sense that the music exists as something solid and tangible. “All of my previous work had been pretty linear,” Allen says, “in the sense that it definitely goes somewhere from beginning to end. There are trajectories and different compositional gestures and sections that take you different places. I wanted to get away from that.”
Enter the work of installation artist and light sculptor Robert Irwin, whose use of shadow and light to remove the boundary between sculpture and the space surrounding it inspired the conceptual framework for the music on Hearing. (The album title is a take-off on author Lawrence Weschler’s 1982 biography on Irwin, Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees.)
When Allen happened upon one of Irwin’s “light disc” pieces at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC, he saw an opportunity to take his music a step further by translating some of Irwin’s ideas into sound.
“The discs are about three or four feet in diameter,” Allen explains. “Looking at one of them, it casts this three-dimensional effect where you can’t tell where the piece ends and the room begins. They’re actually hard to identify. Irwin was so interested in the way that light and color affected each other, and affected everything around them, that he would go into the installation space and paint away shadows and paint all the walls and ceiling and floor an identical color. So that way, there was no possible intrusion on the work.”
Irwin eventually took this approach to its logical conclusion, which appealed to Allen. “At a certain point,” Allen says, “he abandoned the notion of there being an actual focus on a piece. He stopped working on canvas because it dictated such a harsh edge for where a piece stops. So I started thinking, ‘Okay, I need to make something that has no boundaries.’ I thought, ‘It doesn’t need to be defined; it doesn’t need to have an edge.’”
Newly inspired, Allen still had to figure how this all was going to work. “What’s funny,” he recalls, “is that I thought about this for months, but right outside my bedroom, my neighbor has a wind chime. It’s just so beautiful, particularly if there’s rain or something like that going on at the same time. A wind chime is infinite; it’s a set pattern of notes, but somehow, it’s always different. It’s got an essence, more than a composition does, that’s just happening. And it’s delightful to listen to.”
Not to mention, it’s easy to listen to. Part of the reason that Allen didn’t initially look to the wind chime was that he often listened to it passively, barely noticing that it was there — much, he says, like being in a state somewhere between listening and ignoring.
“I thought, ‘Man, there it is!’” he says. “I wanted to remove the template of sound and creation and space and time, remove all of that from the music and just have this pure sensation. As soon as that clicked, I started doing the work immediately.”
Like all of Allen’s albums, Hearing is, sonically speaking, quite distinct from the rest. “Everything on there,” he explains, “is made from complex sine tones that I created with my computer that all have overtones drawn out in a very specific way. Whenever they interact with each other, the overtones of each frequency collide and create these meta-frequencies.”
Hence the harmonic “rippling” effect that mimics a wind chime. “It was important,” Allen says, “for me to make something that was musical but was also static, just kind of suspended there.”
If that sounds like a conceptual conceit, the way the tones hang in space — “just kind of suspended there” — actually mirrors Allen’s way of life. “As I grow older,” he says, “I want to dissolve myself as much as possible. I do my best to keep myself in a state of non-existence. I’ve removed my self from the situation, where living becomes ‘such-ness.’ By removing the identity and removing any attempt to impact, your brain doesn’t get in its own way. And whenever you stop trying, things just grow out of you.”
Certainly, full-length albums seem to “just grow out of” Allen, at a rate of one per year. In listening to any one of them, one gets a clear sense that the music resolves, that it reaches a kind of natural conclusion. But Allen compares his work to the way a school of fish moves. As far as he is concerned, there is nothing driving those movements other than movement for its own sake. There’s no way to gauge, then, what Allen might put out next.
Just this year, he took an unexpected detour when he released Dimensions of Tomorrow, an album of sample-based hip-hop instrumentals under the name Datalove. Datalove manifests a beat-bumping (if still somewhat esoteric) side of Allen that has yet to emerge in the music he puts out under his own name. As a musical alter-ego, Datalove provides not only a refreshing, 180-degree change of pace but also some possible clues as to what Allen might accomplish when his muse inevitably swings back in the direction of formlessness.
Even then, though, Hearing is Forgetting… will likely still stand as the challenging, rewardingly impenetrable work that it is.