“Early and Foundational” Music by Thom Blum

from the Bandcamp Web page for the album being discussed

About a week after I wrote an article about Passages: audio postcards, journals, and travelogues, the third album in Thom Blum’s Collections series released on the sfSound label, he released his final Collections album, entitled Foundations. Once again, the album has been released on Bandcamp; and, while it is only available in digital form (streaming and download), the Bandcamp Web page (as hyperlinked to the album title) includes program notes not only on that Web page but also through “info” hyperlinks for each of the individual tracks. Blum introduces the album on its Web page as follows:

These are early and foundational pieces. From the earliest piece (1972) to the latest (2000) my focus, purpose, and taste formed the musical course that I then pursued over the next two decades. 

My own “first contact” with Blum took place during this interval of time; but it had nothing to do with his activities as a composer. While I was working in Singapore, Blum visited representing Muscle Fish, which had been founded in 1992 by four engineers who had worked together on electronic musical instrument research and development for Yamaha Music Technologies USA, Inc. Muscle Fish had learned of Singapore’s proactive approach to promoting innovative research, and Blum made the visit to make the case for supporting his organization. (Muscle Fish was subsequently acquired by Audible Magic in October of 2000.)

The first two tracks on the album predate the launch of Muscle Fish. Both of them, “Rotochrosite” and “Phthong,” are premiere recordings. They are Blum’s oldest pieces and his only instrumental compositions. “Rotochrosite” was composed for twelve instruments and was inspired by Formalized Music, a collection of essays by Iannis Xenakis. The performance was recorded at the California Institute of the Arts in May of 1973. “Phthong,” on the other hand, was composed in 1978 for ten vocalists and percussion, organized around the sonic properties of phonemes. It was recorded at the Jetwave Gallery in San Francisco in May of 1980.

The remaining three compositions postdate Blum’s visit to Singapore. In spite of its title, the three Studies for Pedal Steel are not, strictly speaking, “instrumental music.” Rather, they are based on recordings of pedal steel performances that are treated as sources for musique concrète. As Blum puts it, his source recordings “were micro-edited and then digitally processed using Digidesign's Turbosynth and Sound Designer II (Digidesign), Hyperprism (by Arboretum), Alchemy (by Passport), and Max (by Opcode).” Those familiar with the more traditional pedal steel work, primarily in the Country & Western genre, may still be able to detect the sources behind Blum’s richly synthesized fabrics.

“To My Son Parker, Asleep in the Next Room” takes its title from a poem by Bob Kaufman, whose son was named after Charlie Parker. Blum’s tape music is structured around a reading of that poem by Roscoe Lee Brown. One of the more interesting aspects is that Kaufman seems to have worked with a fixed syntactic structure in which, over the course of iterations, the selections of nouns, verbs, and modifiers are replaced by other nouns, verbs, and modifiers. Brown’s reading thus emerges rather like an incantation for which Blum then provided natural field recordings as source material for what amounts to a background landscape. (This is the one composition on the album I had previously encountered, since Blum had presented it at the San Francisco Tape Music Festival in January of 2020.)

The final and most recent composition is “Four Poems Somewhat.” (All the compositions on the album are in chronological order.) Each of the poems consists of three short lines, very much in the spirit of haiku without conforming to the syllable counts for each of the lines. The poems themselves are not recited as part of the synthesized music that Blum created. Fortunately, the description Web page for this track provides the time codes for each of the poems, allowing the listener to establish his/her own impressions of how the music reflects the text.

The entire album is a little more than 50 minutes in duration. Thus, it would be fair to say that none of the compositions overstays its welcome. The listener is free to decide whether (s)he wishes to “parse” the pedal steel studies or the “Poems Somewhat” into their component elements. Personally, I tend to take a “landscape” approach to listening to Blum’s compositions, even the instrumental-vocal ones. However, as is often the case with abstraction, interpretation can be a highly variable affair, meaning that any individual listening experience has at least the potential to establish itself as a unique event.