Robert Traxler – Memphis Flyer

The experimental music scene in Memphis is an elusive thing. It’s certainly out there, as evidenced by the Memphis Concrète music festivals, but a newcomer may find it hard to discover. That was certainly the case 12 years ago, when an electronic artist and co-manager of an experimental music label in Lisbon, Portugal, found himself in the Bluff City. Luís Seixas recalls those days, after his wife’s new position at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital brought them both here, living in America for the first time.

“It was tough to find the people here,” he recalls now. “It took me a while to understand how things move in Memphis. I didn’t find the scene I was expecting to find in a city of this size. Then I came across Mike Honeycutt.” Honeycutt, an electronic musician who releases his work primarily on cassettes, had collected tapes that Seixas’ label partner, Fernando Cerqueira, had released decades before. “I was like, ‘He has tapes going back to the late 1980s! A Memphian with a radio show on WEVL!’” Seixas continues. “But he told me, ‘No, there’s not a scene. We’re struggling, it’s hard.’ And it was. Not finding a scene here was the strangest thing. I expected Memphis to be an epicenter, that would attract people, but regarding electronic music, I saw the opposite: People who were born and raised in Memphis then left for other parts of the United States.”

Seixas in turn may have become one of the scene’s best-kept secrets. Ever since he arrived here, he’s been helping to make that scene bigger, plugging Memphis artists directly into a network, centered in Lisbon, that reaches across Europe. Thanks to Seixas, Thisco (pronounced “disco”), the label that he and Cerqueira founded in 2000, has become a presence in the Mid-South. “We were about to leave Lisbon,” Seixas recalls of his pre-Memphis days, “and Fernando suggested I operate Thisco only in Memphis. But I said, ‘No, we’re going to have two headquarters, one in Lisbon and one in Memphis.’ Why not?”

By now, many local knob-twiddlers (including myself) have collaborated with Seixas, who creates his own music under the name Sci Fi Industries. And still more have benefited from the breath of fresh air he brought to that elusive experimental music scene. In 2012, when he was working for the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art (in the capacity of his trade as an art conservator), Seixas curated The Paik Sessions I – Music for the Vide-O-belisk, a collection of ambient pieces that paired well with Nam June Paik’s sculpture Vide-O-belisk (2002), then located in the rotunda of the museum. The following year, he compiled The Paik Sessions 2.

Since then, he’s become increasingly more active in local electronic music. “We released the compilation for Memphis Concrète, On Triangles, and that was totally supported and paid for by Thisco,” Seixas notes. “We gave carte blanche to [Memphis Concrète founder] Robert Traxler to pick the lineup, and of course we sent copies to Europe. We’ve also released albums by Robert, The Pop Ritual, Ihcilon (Paul Randall), and we’re still waiting on a few more to join us. The label just turned 20, and we’re still getting new artists.”

Alas, Seixas’ Memphis chapter is now coming to a close, as his art conservation work will soon take him to Florida. Yet it doesn’t appear that his labors in music will cease anytime soon. “I started Thisco partly because I’m kind of a librarian,” Seixas muses. “I want to preserve these things. I want to see what people are doing and put it out there. If I can document what was happening at this moment in time, I’ll do that. I guess that’s why I became an art conservator. I’m preserving something, and Thisco comes directly on the same path. It’s a way to capture what was going on in a moment. I know anyone can put their music on the web now, but sometimes they need that push. Someone saying, ‘This is good!’ There’s always this self-criticism. ‘I’m not good enough! Should I put this out?’ Or the opposite: They just put everything out without a filter. Sometimes you need a friend to tell you, ‘Well, maybe work a bit more on that one.’ So I think there’s still a role for people like me. Someone to say, ‘Do it this way, do it that way. But do it.’”
For more information, visit thisco.bandcamp.com.

Just up the river from Memphis, in 1944, one of the first compositions known as musique concrète was presented, The Expression of Zaar, using manipulations of wire recordings to create an audio collage independent of the sources it was based on. The composer was Halim El-Dabh, and while he was closer to Memphis, Egypt, than the Bluff City, it’s somehow fitting that by the 21st century, his approach has gained a foothold in Tennessee. Nowadays, of course, synthesized sound permeates nearly every genre, but it generally owes more to the tradition of disco or synth pop. Yet the tradition of musique concrète lives on as well, and Memphians will get a heavy dose of it in this weekend’s Memphis Concrète Festival.

It may come as a surprise that most of the festival’s acts are local or regional. While Tav Falco combined synthetic noise with rock-and-roll as early as 1979, a torch now carried forward by the NOTS, the textural (as opposed to melodic) use of synthesizers among locals has otherwise remained under the radar for most labels and media. But Robert Traxler, who organized the festival, found that once he began looking, an entire world of such artists emerged. “You start talking to people, and it kinda snowballs,” he said. “I’m hearing so much stuff that was completely new to me. And some of it just right here in town. You may not see them a lot, but you know there are more people out there than what you see firsthand. So a lot of my drive was to find people that are in fragmented scenes and bring them together.”

Traxler notes that, out of more than two-dozen acts, “the majority are from Memphis.” Even among these local acts, “the variety is pretty exciting. You have some ambient, drone, experimental dance music, noisier stuff, and some that’s more abstract. A lot of different artists representing different subgenres.” Among the Memphis acts, >manualcontrol< is arguably the best known and the most original, with a reputation for completely extemporaneous performances that solicit much audience participation. This is partly due to their unique human/machine interface, relying on light-activated audio processing rather than keyboards, which responds to both the performers and audience movement. Other locals range from Nonconnah, who purvey ambient textures using effects-laden guitars, to the beat-driven approach of Qemist. The latter act is associated with Rare Nnudes, a homegrown label whose growing profile is another indicator of a more robust Memphis scene.

What surprised Traxler most was the variety of artists emerging from Mississippi, including the noise textures of Pas Moi and the edgy dance sound of Argiflex from Cleveland, Hattiesburg’s NEPTR and Division of Labor, Jackson’s Blanket Swimming, and Oxford’s Ben Ricketts, who is also known as a more traditional singer/songwriter. Beyond our neighbor to the south, look for artists from as close as Nashville and as far afield as Virginia. Pittsburgh’s snwv (pronounced “sine wave”) is notable for his generative, systems-based approach, which sets up sonic layers that interact according to loose parameters that evolve independently.

This “generative music” can also be experienced in one of the free exhibits that open each day of the festival. Saturday’s exhibit, called “You Are Standing in a Room,” involves a feedback system based on noises from the surrounding space, which processes and re-processes them into new sounds that gradually amplify the room’s particular overtones. Traxler himself developed this for the festival, inspired by the work of experimental composer Alvin Lucier. Sunday’s free exhibit, “Hand–>Ear,” while not premised on any particular conceptual approach, will feature a theremin (the world’s first electronic instrument, invented in the 1920s) and various materials connected to microphones that patrons themselves can play and process with effects.

Finally, Saturday’s grand opening will include a screening of Forbidden Planet in its entirety, with the original score replaced with compositions by Traxler and other collaborators. While the original dialogue will remain in the mix, scenes without dialogue will be re-imagined with the new music performed in real time. All in all, it promises to be a unique event for Memphis: an ambitious weekend of experiments for the aurally adventurous.