Being the child of a genius must be a tough gig. In 1994, composer Anthony Braxton was awarded the MacArthur Fellowship for "exceptional merit and promise", sometimes referred to as a "genius grant". Many "greats" have received the Fellowship: novelist Cormac McCarthy, drummer Max Roach, and critic Susan Sontag are among the more than 750 MacArthur Fellows. Braxton's recognition by the MacArthur Foundation came in the middle of an extraordinarily productive phase for the musician, who spent much of the 1990s and early 2000s making what he referred to as "Ghost Trance Music", drawing on Native Americans' spiritual Ghost Dance meetings.
Advertisement
Anthony Braxton is a giant, a man that the Encyclopaedia of Jazz Musicians describes as having "extended the vocabulary of jazz" over the course of his prodigious catalogue. It is perhaps no surprise, then, that his son has assumed his mantle of experimentation and continued to broaden the vocabulary of contemporary music across a range of genres - and, between 2006 and 2009, on Warp, that most relentlessly experimental of labels.Warp are hardly best known for their work with guitars, but then Tyondai Braxton was never a traditional guitarist. With Battles, Anthony's son managed, against the odds, to rehabilitate the guitar as a potential instrument of popular experimentation. Picking up where inscrutable Pittsburgh math rockers Don Caballero left off (and, indeed, featuring one ex-Don Cab member), the four-piece wrenched guitar music back into the popular avant-garde, proposing an alternate reality not only in which six strings could produce new forms, but in which those forms could be embraced even by bastions of arch-conservatism such as the NME.Mirrored, the band's debut LP and their second release for Warp, was an unremitting set that could have been a recording of industrial machines suddenly clutching at their own, terrible agency. Guitar lines gushed away in complex polyrhythm, offset against automaton drumming that flexed with a piston-powered inevitability. Braxton's voice appeared, but it was no longer his. The inflections and quirks of human expression were processed away. The cover art seemed to say it all: the instruments and amps sat alone, in a room clad with mirrors, cascading into infinity. The band did not appear: they were secondary, almost irrelevant to the plastic and metal that seemed to have produced the record of their own volition.
Advertisement
Live, though, Battles' human dimensions were thrown into starker relief. The internal limitations to which the band adhered became more obvious. Battles' drummer John Stanier was the clearest illustration of this, placing his ride cymbal as high as its stand would extend, almost beyond the reach of his right arm, in order to avoid hitting it unless absolutely necessary. As little revolting machismo as four men could manage. It seemed perfectly emblematic of the band's rubric - revivify the rock band form by destroying rockism - but by 2009, it was clear that Braxton's patience with that form was running out.In September of that year he released Central Market, his first solo album since 2002's pedal-heavy History That Has No Effect, and his first for Warp. Central Market was a revelation, and marked a major shift in perspective. Made with the Wordless Music Orchestra, a New York group who work to draw out connections between "the sound worlds of classical and contemporary instrumental music", the record revelled in its freedom from the constraints of the guitar-electronics-drums format, even as it incorporated some of the same elements.Wordless Music had long taken the same approach to orchestral performance that Battles had to the band – an attempt to unshackle an established form from its historical limitations. Not for them the big ticket re-enactment of the canon, though. Instead, Braxton and Wordless Music's attitude was one of radical agnosticism, an outlook that saw them draw on influences and signifiers as disparate as Disney, drone, and the Great American Songbook, and one that can just as easily be applied to the perennially diverse Warp.
Advertisement
Most of all, though, Central Market took its cues from Stravinsky. In the winter of 1911, the Russian composer began work on 'The Rite of Spring', a 35-minute piece that represents a year zero for classical composition. In its startling use of bitonality, its rhythmic experimentation, and its violent deforming of the orchestra's established sound, 'The Rite of Spring' produced a new musical vocabulary to reflect a savage new modernity. Central Market made productive use of that vocabulary, taking the language with which Stravinsky addressed the heaving changes of the early 20th Century and applying it to the era of unbridled postmodernism.As critic Paul Rosenfeld wrote in 1920, 'The Rite of Spring' "pounds with the rhythm of engines, whirls and spirals like screws and fly-wheels, grinds and shrieks of laboring metal" – the sounds of apocalyptic industrialism. Central Market, meanwhile, ricochets with cartoon timbres, playing cataclysmic percussion off against Looney Tunes whistles and blood-drenched string figures taken straight from the second part of 'The Rite of Spring'. It is at once absurd and unsettling, like following Daffy Duck on a bombing spree around Don DeLillo's New York. This is the sound of a nervous system with too many inputs - the sound of the gaudy hyper-stimulation of Baudrillardian late capitalism.Formally, though, Central Market can also be seen as an admission of failure. There was a clear sense that Braxton felt the limits of the rock band form had been reached and that, for all their heroic efforts, Battles had not managed to breach them. By embracing the orchestra Braxton appeared to admit that rock music, even in an iteration as imaginative as Battles', could no longer be a site of real experimentation. To interrogate the present day, he seemed to say, we need new forms rooted not in the reactionary conservatism of the rock band, but in the malleable freedom of the ensemble.
Advertisement
Indeed, by the following year, Braxton and Battles' trajectories no longer matched. In August 2010 the band announced, via Warp, that their lynchpin had left. Battles had self-consciously avoided the frontman cliché, but in reality Braxton was the band's de facto leader, and his exit appeared to signal an inevitable sea change for Battles. And so it was, the band's next album rowing back on the group's experimentalism in favour of, as bassist Dan Konopka told the NME, the "sexiness" of tracks like Matias Aguayo collaboration 'Ice Cream'. Warp has long been home to artists of a restless disposition.In his article on Autechre, Louis Pattison identified Anti as a watershed moment in the duo's career; a record on which they shifted from Artificial Intelligence ambience towards "arid, alien computer music" via a very public warning about a contemporary assault on civil liberties. Tyondai Braxton's years with Warp might not have as explicit a political dimension, but there are parallels nonetheless. With Battles, Braxton attempted to "Warpify" the rock band, but it is with Central Market that he really maps his career. This startling, sprawling record reminds us that the roots of today's experimental music can be located in part in the wrenching reaction to the 20th century classical canon.'The Rite of Spring' famously (or allegedly, at least) sparked riots. Today it is difficult to imagine any work so outrageously alien that it could cause a similar reaction but, while Braxton is yet to cause a public order situation, in Central Market we can see some of the same aggression towards and exhaustion with contemporary formal limitation. Central Market, like all such vital records and, indeed, like Anti, is as much about the thing it is reacting to as it is about the music itself. As 'The Rite of Spring' has been dubbed a "gateway to modernism", so too can Central Market act as a cypher for the anxious, late capitalist malaise. Braxton is not Stravinsky – but on Central Market, he proved himself a vital commentator on the idiosyncratic horrors of life in postmodernity.
ONE EMAIL. ONE STORY. EVERY WEEK. SIGN UP FOR THE VICE NEWSLETTER.
By signing up, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy & to receive electronic communications from Vice Media Group, which may include marketing promotions, advertisements and sponsored content.
