Organs are everywhere these days. In the last two months we've seen the release of Áine O'Dwyer's Music for Church Cleaners Vol. I and II, a set of improvisations recorded on a church organ in London, and M. Dwinell's Golden Ratio, a series of just-intonation experiments for the electric organ. Last fall, the Entr'acte label put out Alfredo Costa Monteiro's Insula, a wild, forbidding recording based on a multi-channel installation for electric organ. And, just last week, Oneohtrix Point Never, Nico Muhly, and James McVinnie appeared at London's Barbican in a performance called "Twitchy Organs", after one of Muhly's compositions.
Then there's Cameron Carpenter, the Skrillex of the classical circuit, whose "Birth of the International Touring Organ" video has become something of a viral hit. The first time I saw the video, I assumed it was a spoof, like Spinal Tap for the tubular set, but Carpenter turns up in Alex Ross' recent New Yorker piece on the Walt Disney Concert Hall's earthshaking pipe organ, pulling out all the stops, figuratively and literally, on Scriabin's Fourth Sonata; he seems to be legit. (That Disney organ, by the way, is dubbed "Hurricane Mama"; that it was the raga-loving minimalist Terry Riley who gave the organ its name somehow makes it even funnier.) "A pipe organ can approximate the voice of God, but it also happily evokes a fairground calliope," writes Ross. "It is one of humanity's grander creations, and also one of its more durable technologies." Here are 10 releases charting the organ's revival in semi-popular music.
Various, Spire: Organ Music Past, Present & Future (Touch)
This 2003 compilation from the Touch label kicked off a resurgence of interest in the organ. Spire showcased a vast array of work utilizing (or inspired by) the instrument, often using electronic processing to all but obliterate the music's source. Leif Elggren's "Royal Organ" opens the album with slowly cycling foghorn blasts—a warning, perhaps, that we find ourselves in unfamiliar waters. Philip Jeck's "Stops" might be a slowed-down snippet of Metal Machine Music, or an amplified bagpipe ensemble. Toshiya Tsunoda's "Layered" sounds like a dozen film projectors rattling away in an apiary. Chris Watson's "Askam Wind Cluster" captures organ-like tones found in nature, while BJ Nilsen's 27-minute-long "Breathe" lays out slowly evolving tone clusters with the patient pacing of Sunn O)) or Folke Rabe. The best thing on the double-disc set might be Oren Ambarchi and Tom Recchion's lyrical "Remake", with its ghostly chromatic riffs; it sounds a little like a slimmed-down version of Gastr del Sol's "Our Exquisite Version of 'Eternity'".
Marhaug / Asheim, Grand Mutation (Touch)
When asked what it's like to work with trained classical musicians like Nils Henrik Asheim, Lasse Marhaug told Dusted, "Abstract electronics and noise are like potatoes; they fit with a large number of dishes." At the outset of Grand Mutation, the 2007 pairing between Marhaug, a noise musician, and Asheim, an organist, the comfort-food metaphor seems apt: It's all cozily reassuring drones, familiar as the sound of a plane overhead, intimate as your own idle thoughts. But it grows, almost imperceptibly, into a massive tangle of long held organ tones interlaced with Marhaug's quicksilver oscillations. At it peaks, it's as mammoth as the heaviest heavy metal; the closing "Clavaeolina", on the other hand, has the spectral, shimmering qualities of Messiaen or Ligeti. As far as meat and potatoes go, it's pretty damned luxe.
Ethan Rose, Oaks (Baskaru)
The organ doesn't have to be as forbidding as Marhaug and Asheim make it. Ethan Rose's 2009 album Oaks radiates an almost childlike innocence. There's good reason for that: It was recorded utilizing the Wurlitzer Theater Organ installed at the Oaks Park Roller Rink in Portland, Oregon, sampling and rearranging the organ's tones into shimmering ambient textures. I grew up skating at Oaks Park, and my enduring memory of the place remains a series of small, rolling bumps along one stretch of its burnished hardwood floor; with its brightly colored tones and rippling shapes reminiscent of Nobukazu Takemura's work, Oaks perfectly encapsulates the rink's anachronistic enchantments.
Tim Hecker, Ravedeath, 1972 (Kranky)
Tim Hecker recorded the source material for his 2011 album on a pipe organ in a Reykjavik church. He completed the initial recordings in a day, but the subsequent treatments to the raw material sounds the opposite of spontaneous; it sounds eternal, not ephemeral. Stacking up layers until their overtones ignite into dazzling, Milky Way-like clusters, and dialing up the distortion until it seems to pulse, Hecker conjures a full-on music-of-the-spheres effect: cosmic background radiation as imagined by a high romantic.
hamaYôko, Triptyque de L'Oeil (Entr'acte)
This 2011 release from the excellent Entr'acte label is a total acousmatic mindfuck. At the core of the music, there's a fat, humming mass of pipe organ, recorded at St. Augustine's Church in Croix Rousse, Lyon. It throbs like a vein; it is as radiant as a chamber whose walls, floor, and ceiling are covered with fluorescent tubes. In places, it's piercing; it hurts a little bit to listen to. But that's not the half of it: Woven in with the buzz and whine are spectral voices, cooing babies, and abstract rumbles, and something about the way the album is mixed makes it feel like those sounds come not from the speakers but from a point elsewhere in the room, or somewhere high overhead. Multiple times, I've reached for the volume knob, convinced that an unidentified buzz came from the street outside, only to discover that it was a part of the mix. Every time that happens, I laugh out loud, which feels like a strange reaction for such brutal, breathtakingly beautiful music.
James McVinnie, Cycles (Bedroom Community)
Formerly the Assistant Organist at Westminster Abbey, James McVinnie straddles two very different worlds. On the one hand, performances with Oneohtrix Point Never; on the other, a gig accompanying the 2011 Royal Wedding. As a member of the Bedroom Community label collective, he works closely with the likes of Valgeir Sigurðsson, Nico Muhly, Sam Amidon, and Ben Frost; on the 2013 album Cycles, he performs a set of organ pieces composed by Muhly. Of all the albums in this list, Cycles is the most traditionalist; there are no effects and no post-processing—just organ, both solo and accompanied by voice, viola, and percussion—and Muhly's compositions draw from various liturgical traditions as well as American minimalism. Still, in places McVinnie makes his instrument sound unusually synthetic; on "Seven O Antiphon Preludes: O Radix Jesse", the stripped-down counterpoints and natural reverb give the momentary illusion of a sickly Roland synthesizer, while "Slow Twitchy Organs" is as lush as a Vangelis production.
Anna von Hausswolff, Ceremony (City Slang / Other Music)
The organ plays a scene-setting role on Anna von Hausswolff's dramatic 2013 album Ceremony; its quivering presence suggests a vastness that would otherwise be invisible. On "Deathbed", for instance, it provides the shimmering velvet backdrop for sparse flourishes of electric guitar and drums and, in the climax, von Hausswolff's operatic rock'n'roll presence. It operates like air—a vibrating sea of molecules without which all would be barren and lifeless.
Alfredo Costa Monteiro, Insula (Entr'acte)
This 40-minute composition opens with ear-piercing frequencies and a tremolo effect modeled, it would seem, on the movements of quarters as they spin down on a flat surface. The layers pile up; before long we're struck up inside a dial tone, zip-lining down threads of pure data. (If the Wachowski brothers were smart, they would've used something like this for the soundtrack to The Matrix, instead of all those low-grade breakbeats.) For a long, long time, it is not at all obvious that the organ plays any part in this whatsoever, and to be honest, I'm not entirely sure how it figures in. According to the label's notes, it's "a multi-channel composition for electric organ, commissioned by L'ull Cec for The Game of Life Foundation's spatialisation sound system (consisting of 192 speakers and 12 subwoofers, using the Wave Field Synthesis technique)." The sound rises and falls in pitch. Sometimes it sounds like icicles growing; elsewhere it's a car crash in slow motion. Frequently, it feels like you're being pulled apart at the seams. Someday, once we've all gotten used to the idea of zapping ourselves around via matter-transportation beams, this kind of thing will become old hat—just the ho-hum reality of dissolving to bits and being reconstituted again out of thin air, haloed with a whiff of ozone.
Áine O'Dwyer, Music for Church Organs (Northern Spy)
The backstory on this one is almost too perfect: Áine O'Dwyer, normally a harpist, was granted access to the pipe organ in St. Mark's Church, Islington, London—but only while the church cleaners were at work. As a result, her improvisations on the instrument are accompanied by random background clatter: the rustle of feet, muffled voices, furniture being moved, and even the telltale whine of the vacuum cleaner. O'Dwyer describes the process in Cagean terms, whereby every sound is equally deserving of attention, equally integral to the overall composition. (Cage, at least, has the privilege of performing for an audience already receptive of his ideas. O'Dwyer, in contrast, had to satisfy the cleaners' request that she not linger on any given note "for a long time.") The results, as she puts the instrument through its paces and tests out different timbral settings, are nothing short of hypnotic: freeform meditations on tone and space that bump up against the world in unexpected ways, and intermingling the worlds of the sacred and the profane.
M. Dwinell, Golden Ratio (Amish)
As a member of FORMA, a group with releases on Spectrum Spools and The Bunker New York, M. Dwinell's work shuttles between cosmic music and acid house; it's heavy on pinwheeling arpeggios and fleshed out with crisp Roland drum programming. Golden Ratio, recorded between 2007 and 2008, covers somewhat similar territory; it's full of interlocking sequences that spin like clockworks in graceful contrapuntal motion. But its instrumentation and arrangements are a lot simpler than FORMA's tend to be, and as a result, the music feels that much more potent. Dwinell limited himself to a Farfisa Compact organ and, in a few places, an Ensoniq TS-10 and clarinet. The organ has been tuned according to just intonation, and the Ensoniq is apparently tuned to Harry Partch's 43-tone octave scale (though I'll have to take his word for it). Does the tuning matter? Even to the untrained ear, I think it does; there's a richness here that sounds quite unlike what we're used to hearing. The closest analogy that comes to mind is Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Vol. II, in which odd, microtonal harmonies seem to shiver in midair. In the case of Golden Ratio, those micro-movements are combined with the kinetic energy of his tumbling arpeggiated sequences. The results are like a water wheel viewed through prismatic goggles, as though every atom were bursting with vibrant color and kinetic energy.