In recent days a small amount of vaguely heated discussion has sprung up online regarding Matthew Mullane’s recent release on the free to download Homophoni label. The recording is called Double Negative and is credited to Non Group, a name chosen specifically because of the nature of the piece’s construction. The music is described as a work of appropriation, because it is actually a collage put together from samples of the work of forty two different improvising musicians. With the exception of a tiny bit of processing in the opening seconds, Mullane has not treated or altered the samples, merely edited them acutely and arranged them carefully so as to create a new piece of music from the sounds. I should start by saying that although Matthew contacted me about this piece some weeks ago, encouraging me to listen to it to try and work out how it was made, I only listened to it for the first time a few days back, after I had read about its method of construction. It certainly would have been more interesting to have approached the work without any prior knowledge, but such is life.

A bit of history first. Few people know this, but about thirteen years ago, when I bought my first computer and discovered simple sound sequencing software I used to mess about in a similar way to how the Non group piece was made, taking samples from my CD collection (Mullane might as well have used my collection given the list of musicians he sampled) and essentially trying to recreate the work of John Wall, who composed stunning collage works using tiny snippets from CDs. Like Wall though I worked hard to try and disguise the origin of the samples, processing them through basic tools, or simply sampling just tiny moments of sound so as to remove any sign of the original musician. Mullane has attempted something different here, taking sections of the musicians’ playing that are often easily recogniseable and putting them together without any processing. I should add at this stage that the amateur music I used to make was complete rubbish, but I learned an interesting thing from the exercise- often the parts that sounded better when I put the pieces together were the sections that fell together by accident, where two samples might have crossed by mistake but sounded good together so they were left in. Sometimes just combining random samples together produced results that would sound good, as if they were meant to have been placed together that way.  from this I realised that there are certain common musical traits in improvised music that form when two sounds are placed together, even by accident.

Although the original release of Double Negative came without much explanation, Mullane has since stated that the work is designed to “question the relationship between the performer and trusting listener in recorded improvised music” Mullane is interested to hear if people can tell the difference between this piece and a “real” improvised work, playing with notions of listener uncertainty. Perhaps a listener might hear glimpses of musicians he recognised, and so the notion of authorship in improvised music might be challenged,

The first thing I must say is that I don’t think I would ever have confused this recording with a “proper” piece of recorded improvisation. Of course it is easy to say this in retrospect, but there are I believe, far too many factors that give the construction away. While the sections do work together very well in places the music has an overall sense of musique concrete composition rather than organic improvisation. The music’s joins and changes are too abrupt, too well timed, too perfect. More obviously though, most of the sounds are easily attributable (to me at least) to the musicians that they originate from. I can spot Axel Dorner’s trumpet, John Butcher’s sax or Thomas Lehn’s synth squiggles a mile off. In the case of some samples I think I can even trace them back to the albums they were lifted from. Technically also, this album just couldn’t be possible. The forty two musicians are all recorded too well and mastered together with an accuracy that just couldn’t have happened in one room. The piece also has a structure that sees musicians come and go in little sections, all the saxophones playing together at one point, the pianos at another, something unlikely to have happened in a free for all improv situation. So it is obvious to me, and I suspect always would have been obvious that this is music built from samples of other CDs. Perhaps my over-exposure to this music makes this more obvious to me than it might be for others less familiar with this area of things, I don’t know, but certainly Double Negative does not sound like any kind of live improvisation.

The thing is though, it does sound pretty good as a composed collage work. Mullane’s sense of composition has always impressed me, and here his ear has lead him to layer these sounds into often quite interesting structures.  The last six or seven minutes of the twenty-three minute piece are particularly good, dense layers of quite busy activity of various types coming and going. If you are able to stop pulling apart the music into its constituent elements as you listen then the whole mass of material does combine nicely, like layers of semi-transparent strata seen together. I find myself wondering how this music might sound if each of the samples was replaced by a sample from a field recording rather than a musician, does my interest in the work stem from the way the parts are constructed or from the actual sounds themselves? How much of my enjoyment of this piece is down to Mullane’s ear for constructing music from collaged parts, and how much comes from the choices of sounds made by the musicians? Do we forget the origin of the sounds when they are placed in a new context? How many of the moments that work well here are the result of pure accidents, like I used to create for myself in my own amateur efforts? I found myself listening in two different ways to this piece, once trying to dissect it back into its individual parts, and then again, like perhaps with musique concrete once the novelty of which sounds have been used to make the piece has worn off, I listened with more open ears just to how it all came out in the wash. Does the whole equal more than the sum of the parts?

Certainly improvised music is about far more than the combination of certain angular sounds in certain manners. Its power is often beyond the ear of the listener, a social thing, a force for a communitarian meeting of personalities. Musicians will change their sound, their approach, even their instrumentation in certain situations, in certain rooms, alongside certain other musicians. These elements will often result in a different set of sounds produced, but even when there is little audible change in  a musician’s approach to a collaboration (s)he will gain so much more through the improvisational experience. Of course all of that is missing on the Non Group release, and if Mullane’s intention was to try and recreate any of the magic that sparks between improvisers playing well then he was always on to a loser. If however though his approach was to create a collaged work that happens to use the sound of other musicians as the raw material for a carefully constructed composition that works in a different way, purely as a composition, nothing else, then Double Negative does its job nicely.

This recording seems to have got a few people’s backs up, but for me it is an interesting experiment that investigates the way we each hear improvised musical sounds. For me the samples in Double Negative are obviously samples, and their origin are mostly familiar to me. Is this the same for everyone though? Are only those very familiar with improvised music able to identify that this is not a live recording? If sounds taken completely out of their originally intended context can still sound quite good when appropriated for a completely different work just how directly connected were they to the original recording in the first place? We might all have very different answers to these questions dependent on our individual viewpoints, which is why I think Double Negative is a valuable exercise. Fortunately we can all go and sample it for free here.