Early Transmissions from the Bureau of Sensory Intelligence

The first 3 solo records by Paul Schütze

catalogue essay for the LP re-releases on Kontakt Audio, Vienna, 2025

Paul’s music to my mind’s eye has always been about inhabitable spaces, shaped by his sensory memory of being somewhere at a point in time, which his music does not freeze but liquefies into a malleable present. How might I write about his first 3 solo records? Why not try and live in the spatio-temporal realm of their aural occurrence, and write some impressions while the music plays. What follows is just that, each written in entirety while each record plays through once.

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All the signature elements of Paul’s palette and assemblage are at work on his first solo record, Deus Ex Machine (1989). Firstly, there’s the webbed network of soluble synth pads, smearing and aerating their chordal presence. Their sequenced melodic content moves less through progression and more through a detached sense of location, as if describing a harmonic space without orienting a listening perspective through rational, diatonic logic. Secondly, the extended reverberation of single percussive strikes, sometimes as an event highlighted from a syncopated bubbling or acoustic and digital skins, rims and blocks, but more often as solitary eruptions. They puncture the atmospheric chordal terrain like extra-terrestrial lightning bolts, their strike being the electrical charge; the elongated texture of reverb amounting to a psychic rumble of distant thunder, hovering with the potential of eternity. Thirdly, something more stylistically defined than the first two markers: simulated double-bass lines and runs, evoking a jazz fusion sensibility, but half-decoded and half-liquefied, as if the ‘bottom end’ of the sonic spectrum is not a solid, vibrating ground, but an expanse in constant transition.

Sound effects present themselves as apparitions in the music’s pastoral mirage. Paul’s short essay that accompanies the original release of Deus Ex Machina outlines how the soundtrack is not a musical score, but a complete soundtrack—ontologically, formally and psycho-acoustically. It plays like one is inhabiting a movie with a supplied soundtrack. We hear music, as detailed above. We encounter voices, in French and Italian, close to the ear or reduced to a nasal phone transmission, describing something we can neither see nor hear, comprehend nor know. And occasional sound effects erupt and subside at various moments: engine rumblings and chattering; supersonic jets passing overhead and dissolving into a haze of phased noise; urban cityscapes familiar in their ubiquity, density and engulfment; an indoor bathing house; screaming children having fun; singing men getting drunk; ship horns; fireworks; thunder cracks. Tellingly, Deus Ex Machina is mixed by Paul and two notable sound designer/mixes working in Australia: Steve Burgess and Gareth Vanderhope. Technically and industrially, this demonstrates Paul’s unique take on ‘sonofying’ musicality so as to render it atmospheric. The musical elements are only occasionally to be theatrically spotlit; the preference is to accept their phenomenal ambience. Across the music’s 56 minutes (decisively programmed as a single track with no index points on the CD), a handful of themes recur. Like memories of listening, they are differentiated by their meld with new sounds and atmospheres. The space is always evolving. The scene is always changing. The music exists like the air of these locations.

Deus Ex-Machina also marks Paul’s first dual-pronged experiment in what will become his distinctively atmospheric approach to musical composition, performance and production. The first involves his making a site-specific soundtrack that immerses the listener into the museum space of the titular exhibition (at Monash University Gallery, Melbourne, in 1989). The second covers how he creates an aural document which allows one to imagine being in the museum’s curatorial space, shaped by the images, objects, designs and didactics which enlivened the show’s stated thesis of curating a type of archeo-bibliotheque to vivify “the emotional, cultural and aesthetic manifestations of man’s uneasy relationship with technology.”

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If Deus Ex Machina is, as invoked by its title, the stage management of an imaginary space, The Annihilating Angel; Or, The Surface Of The World (1990) is a dramatic stage entrance. More musically crafted, it is dressed in the modalities of performance and gesture. Each instrument is ‘played’ by sono-musical actors. Sandra Donnadi contributes pointillistic sprays and genteel murmurs of trumpet, while Tom Fryer slashes the sound field with searing guitars. Their solo moments constitute multi-tracked, studio-directed encoding under Paul’s direction, massaged into Paul’s keyboards and percussive arrays. The result is an ensemble corporealized into a singular being: the author of this musical text.

The result is a type of atomized Jazz. One could conventionally ascribe it to the peripheries of textural exploration in Jazz, exemplified by Jon Hassell and Brian Eno’s concept of ‘Fourth World Music’, which was preceded by a bounty of jazz fusionists pushing beyond U.S. and European legacies. But it honestly feels more transfigured than would be allowed by Jazz history’s formalist chronology. Paul is not interested in advancing jazz. He seems to be more attracted to sailing the eddied waters and riding the temperate updrafts circulating the world of Jazz. The stultifyingly humanist rhetoric of Jazz’s aspirations seems alien to Paul’s conjured worlds. Jazz is to be softly annihilated into a humoral spread of stylistic flotsam. This is not a violent act. In fact, it is erotic, granting Paul’s music a veil of sensuality which would rise further to the surface over forthcoming releases.

Paul’s grounded relationship with sound designers and recordists continues on The Annihilating Angel: it was engineered by sound mixer Steve Burgess at Paul’s home studio and at a film sound mixing facility (Soundfirm in Melbourne) rather than a professional music recording studio. And again, space and place is accorded prominence, via the sound recordings and atmospheres of Sylvie Patiot, recorded on location in Tunisia for the shooting of Ian Pringle’s Isabelle Eberhardt (1991), for which Paul provided the score. The layering of her contributions are deftly positioned to suggest Cartesian depth and metaphysical width to the sound field in the mix. In simpler terms, they salaciously dance in front of the listener’s headphonic space, granting one glimpses of unseen depths ‘past’ or ‘beyond’ the audited music, just as they articulate a panoramic mise en scène that dresses the stages constructed by and for each track. The floating adhan call-to-prayers, the occasional chants and chorales by Sufi ensembles, the softly cooing pigeons and the calming night crickets, all infuse the tracks’ mix with a sense of temperature.

This leads me to regard The Annihilating Angel as a dark mirror held up to David Fenshawe’s African Sanctus (1973). By saying this, I’m addressing the colonial-exoticist elephant in the room (which itself is surely an exoticist metaphor) not to condemn but position The Annihilating Angel as partly an ‘exploration’ (another loaded term) into pan-global sensuality, and partly a technological outcome of how pan-global ‘folk musics’ themselves become atomized under such climatic conditions. One can listen to African Sanctus through the narrow funnel of corrective contemporaneity and damn the missionary zeal with which it uncomfortably ‘humanizes’ the ‘animal’ of Other cultures’ musics, but the original work’s structure, composition, assemblage and mix remains a strangely affecting experience. Though it might be an embarrassment for many (when in fact Fenshawe is Eno avant le lettre) African Sanctus sits in close relation to collagist/fusionist works like Freddie Hubbard and Ilhan Mimaroglu’s Sing Me A Song of Songmy (A Fantasy for Electronic Tape) and Weather Report’s I Sing The Body Electric (both 1971), Miles Davis’s Agharta (1975), Jon Hassell’s Vernal Equinox and Haruomi Hosono’s Pacific (both 1978). Like all these works, Paul’s record bears the legacy of the ‘fusion’ musical project, which sought ways to alter the hegemonic ‘First World’ hold on musical identity and geo-racial assignation. This is all to more accurately position The Annihilating Angel as a decidedly apocalyptic sonorum of stylistic mutation. In contrast to subsequent excursions into ‘tribalist’ musical genres, it tattoos itself as alien to any extant or embodied world. At moments, the poetic evocation of an ‘off world’ psycho-geography is likely enlivened by a an influence on Paul’s aesthetics: Vangelis’ polyglottic score for Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner (1982). As Paul’s subtitle Or, The Surface Of The World indicates, his musical experiment here is determined by the surface nature of things, and the ‘off world’ constructed by them.

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If the world is but a surface, New Maps of Hell (1992) charts the geo-diabolical melt of its inevitable continental drift. The record opens with a disconcerting cinesonic amalgam that recalls the early scenes in northern Iraq of William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1971) as Father Merrin (Max von Sydow) confronts a vision of the Mesopotamian demon Pazuzu. We hear swells of subterranean rumbles; another adhan, here impossibly reverberated; and sneering, excited whispers of unnameable homunculi. A sudden audio edit introduces the sound of a male voice, but one gutturally generated from a techno-being cosmologically displaced from the mortal plane: “I did not say this. I am not here.” This is the listener’s entry into a hell sonically imagineered by Paul.

But here, a caveat. Paul’s ‘hell’ is not the same demonic zone alluded to in the music of carnivalesque Metal, maudlin Goth, or spooky Industrial. Irrespective of their pros and cons, they are cabaret: modes of performing emoted states and dramatized affect, equally celebrated and damned for their theatrics. Paul’s ‘hell’ is febrile not fetid; orgasmic not orgiastic. The opening track—a long 16’13” for Paul at this stage of his releases—is a Salome-like dance, unfurling spirals of Eros and Thanatos. If The Annihilating Angel is a theatre stage replete with aural scrims, sonic lighting and musical ambience, New Maps of Hell is comparatively claustrophobic. Indeed, a tight ensemble is conjured, in close proximity to the listener, cajoling one into dark reveries. It’s not an accident born of the recording’s circumstance. A stellar cast of musicians has been convened for the session to colour the project with bold aural strokes: Simon De Haan’s impressionist pattering of trombone; Mark Stafford’s sheets, slivers and arcs unleashed by his multi-fuzzed guitars; Bill McDonald’s slithering ostinatos and obsidian pulsation of bass; François Tetaz and Peter Knight’s collaborative battery of globally-sourced percussion instruments, augmented by Paul’s own collection and performance, alongside his myriad of keyboards.

On New Maps Of Hell, the late Craig Carter supplies field recordings (avant le lettre) and Gareth Vanderhope returns to deliver atmospheres. In accordance with Paul’s lean into an atmospheric materialization of his music, the final mix of the record was conducted at ABC Studios. The layering of Craig and Gareth’s contributions are deftly positioned. The musical interludes (a strange but apt taxonomy for a music release focussed on sonics) are braced, buffeted or collided with deep sonograms of an imagined inferno and its descending rings: distant thunder, a tensely waiting helicopter, a massive vault opening, foreboding temple gongs. Each signals a portal into which the listener is ushered, pushing them further into its cartography.

The line “I did not say this. I am not here.” is from a film Paul rightfully holds in high regard: David Lynch’s Dune (1984). It is spoken by the Guild Navigator: a tiny-eyed, ectoplasmic haunch of decaying brain-meat floating in an Italo-Futurist water tank. Lynch’s film being sci-fi not horror, this scene is not a demonic occurrence; it is outrightly post-human. Textually, such a declaration of denied authorship is Barthesian in its jouissance of annunciation. Indeed, New Maps of Hell is possibly Paul’s first declaration of the erotic dimension of language, description and narration. Definitely his aesthetic world—and it is a world, one which he eventually commenced theorising through a cross-indexed library of descriptors as part of his ongoing online project, Dressing the Air—has long been contextualized by the sensory. But his take on this does not synch with conventional Victorian aestheticism and its fawning over poetic utterance. Rather, Paul’s embrace of the sensual is appropriately pornographic: as much overcome with its sexual and paraphiliac connotations as it is with the means by which those sensations are encoded and represented.

New Maps of Hell thus might be less a Faustian or Virgilian journey, and more a welcoming of unworldly, multi-specist and contra-humanist ways of sensing the world. The sound of its instrumentation is readily identified as de rigeur post-Jazz sonics (extended techniques, improvisational gestures, digital extension and effects integration), yet it also beckons the listener to a less charted realm. Its slapped skins, hissing cymbals, and gulping tablas are transmissions from this ether, where the physical is spectrally projected. Paul’s music is a matter of touch—not of touching the listener’s heart or soul (for there is a glut of music in the world committed to such virtue-signalling) but of pressing into one’s aural crotch like a stranger on a humid night in a place you accidentally found yourself. It’s slightly dangerous, definitely thrilling, and aurally apotropaic.

Thursday afternoon, 29th February, 2024.


Text © Philip Brophy. Images © respective copyright holders.