American minimalist Arnold Dreyblatt discusses his new Drag City album, opening the archives for Black Truffle and the impact of Jim O’Rourke
Arnold Dreyblatt has been experimenting with sound and music since the 1970s. Championed by Jim O’Rourke and currently collaborating with Oren Ambarchi (who has joined his Orchestra of Excited Strings), Dreyblatt remains forward-leaning and utterly relevant. Resolve is the first record from Arnold Dreyblatt & The Orchestra of Excited Strings in more than two decades and as such deserves your undivided attention. Out now on Drag City, it’s an off-kilter experience that the listener falls into like Alice or Dorothy.
Looking for answers, I fired up the old hot air balloon and sent some questions to the man behind the curtain. He was gracious enough to respond.
The Orchestra of Excited Strings dates back to the 1970s, but Resolve is the first release since 2002. Could you tell us a little of the orchestra’s history and what it means to you? Why the twenty year hiatus?
Actually, it was not a hiatus in composition and performing. I have been active all along performing solo concerts, and have collaborated further with various ensembles and musicians, such as Megafaun (2013), The Great Learning Orchestra (Stockholm, 2014), Konrad Sprenger, Jim O’Rourke and Oren Ambarchi together with local musicians in Japan (2017), and Bang on a Can and many others. In fact the current Orchestra of Excited Strings has been performing since 2009 throughout Europe. It just took us a while to get this band recorded to our satisfaction. (An earlier recording session in 2012 was not released.)
Please introduce the current orchestra lineup. I was thrilled to hear that Oren Ambarchi was a member.
This ensemble was founded with my collaborator of many years – Konrad Sprenger (aka Jörg Hiller). We have worked together since the early 2000s and he has developed into an important composer, performer and producer in his own right. He produced Resolve. In addition to performing on a reduced drum set, Jörg contributes with his multi-channel computer controlled electric guitar system. Joachim Schütz is based in Hamburg and has been a member of the Orchestra since 2009. He is a guitarist, composer, audio engineer, producer and DJ. Since moving to Berlin during the pandemic, Oren has begun performing with the Orchestra and he has released many of my archival recordings on Black Truffle (including the recent collaboration with Tony Conrad and Jim O’Rourke at Tonic) over the last years. His signature harmonic wall of sound fits in perfectly within the ensemble and he needed no introduction to fit right in! The lineup also reflects the different roles of the instruments within the orchestra: the ‘excited strings’ bass, percussion, sustained guitar in Dreyblatt tuning, and sustained harmonic content (Oren).
How would you describe the new record?
These recordings represent our current concert program. Many of the pieces have been in development for many years. The second side is unusual for me, appearing in an extended format. It’s based on a number of shorter performance pieces which seamlessly morphed into a longer format. I read a comment on Instagram from someone who said that this piece has all aspects of Dreyblatt within it. I don’t disagree!
What would you consider to be the ideal listening conditions for listeners to fully engage with Resolve?
Loud, immersive!
How do you view the current state of experimental music?
What one might call the experimental music scene today is vastly different from the world in which I began creating music. In the 60s and 70s this world was incredibly small, everyone knew each other, not just in downtown New York City, but also across the States and in Europe. In the States activity was mainly centered in New York, on the West Coast, a few college campuses such as Wesleyan and Mills College (which just closed) and some other colleges and universities where specific composers were teaching. In Europe it was much more academic – if you wanted to be experimental you had only the choice of Free Jazz or the conservatory route. Access to rare recordings was difficult, through word of mouth and those unusual personalities working in record stores and college or independent radio stations who would make suggestions. Now this world has truly exploded as recordings from the past and the present from all genres and cultures are easily accessible. The younger generation is vastly knowledgeable but there has been a bit of what I would call re-inventing the wheel in some cases. But it’s largely positive!
Drag City is a label that is open to the moment and unconcerned with genre boundaries. Could you talk about your history with Drag City and how important it is to have established indies like them in today’s challenging music industry landscape?
In 1996 I received a fax from someone named Jim O’Rourke asking me about re-releasing my first record Nodal Excitation on his Dexter’s Cigar reprint sub-label for Drag City. That record had originally been released in 1982 on the India Navigation label in a series curated by Phill Niblock, but had quickly been disappeared from view. To make a long story short, I travelled to Chicago a number of times and quickly understood that there were revolutionary shifts afloat that would fundamentally change musical culture. Jim and Drag City were at the forefront of these changes – erasing genre borders and introducing experimental music to a larger public. To put it another way, young people no longer needed to have song-form and were suddenly open to listening to sound itself.
Do you have any music-making rituals?
Taking a deep breath before performing. Otherwise, no.
What motivates you to make music? Who inspires you?
These questions are mutually entangled but hard to unpack. Of course, in the 70s, as I began to make music, there were many figures who were important to me, and I was lucky to have close personal contact with many of them. There are always multiple influences. In my case: working with electronic signals in early video art, going to the Fillmore East in high school, early listening to ethnographic recordings of non-western music, immersion in the downtown New York scene in the 70s – just to name a few. I think that back then there was a music in my imagination that I wanted to hear that didn’t seem to exist. I was coming from a visual art background and was therefore an autodidact – I learned on my own, and took what I needed in creating my music and instrumentation. But I have found that that motivation and inspiration continually changes over time!
Oren Ambarchi released Tonic 19-01-2001 on his Black Truffle label earlier this year. It’s an archival recording of a trio Tony Conrad, Jim O’Rourke and yourself played as only once. Could you talk about that performance and what it was like working with the two of them?
In late 2000 I was invited by my old friend, musician and music archivist David Weinstein to participate in this cross-generational concert program at the legendary Tonic in New York. The event was special as a statement of what one might call a sort of lineage, in that the initial spark from Tony in the early 60s passes through me (as both a student at the University of Buffalo and also a student of La Monte Young) and then through Jim who was partially responsible for the re-emergence of both of our musics.
In the liner notes to this recording I wrote: “When the three of us climbed onto that little stage at Tonic on January 19, 2001 to join Tony as he reached the conclusion of his solo set, we both understood that we were entrusted with seamlessly fitting into Tony’s sonic universe. Jim had performed with Tony many times in earlier years, and one might say that my entire musical output is in response to Tony’s legacy.”
There were two nights in which first my orchestra performed, then Jim and Tony performed solo, and then we played all together. The first recording was unusable and I had thought that the second recording was lost. Oren prodded me to look more deeply into my archives, and we were all surprised at the recording quality of this performance when the tape was discovered. I am very thankful that Tony’s son Ted allowed us to release this performance.
I understand that Jim O’Rourke is an important figure for you, in that he helped introduce your music to a wider audience. Jim has opened many doors to a lot of ears and remains an inspiring figure. Tell us about your relationship with Jim and how you view his music? Are there any plans for further collaborations?
As I said earlier, Jim’s role has been unprecedented. He had already been instrumental in helping to re-introduce Tony to a new audience and then to followed that up with igniting a sustained interest in my own music for a younger generation. It would be a generation which could appreciate minimalism while ignoring the traditional categorie of composer, performer, producer and song-form as well. I was privileged to share a tour with Oren Ambarchi, Konrad Sprenger and Jim in Japan in 2017 which included a collaboration with Jim’s community of musicians in Tokyo. His musical output continues to amaze me! We keep in touch and I would love to visit him and Eiko [Ishibashi] again in the near future.
Are you taking the orchestra on the road and can we expect some UK stops?
The orchestra would love to perform in the UK – please spread the word!
What’s next for you?
I am collaborating in Berlin with the legendary engineer and musician Sukander Kartadinata on an electronics project for my recently developed new version of the ‘excited strings’ bass. I’ve also begun a recording project with a reconstruction of a historical pipe organ with 31 tones per octave at the Music Academy in Basel after a live concert interacting with this instrument late last fall in Berlin. I am working with Sarah Hennies on reviving an ensemble composition of mine from 2007 that she performed with an ensemble in Austin back then. At the same time I have also been busy with various art projects in my other career as a visual artist. An LP entitled Music from the Resting State is being prepared for release by the label One Fine Legacy later this year with tracks from an immersive audio/video installation of mine from 2019. This is just an example of some music and projects on the grapevine!
Main photo credit: Moritz Haase
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