Carl Stone turned 70 back in February this year. As well as retiring from his academic post in Japan, Stone has marked this birthday year with a schedule that just taken him and his music around the globe. In parallel, his new album Electronic Music from 1972-2022 released by New York based label, Unseen Worlds, is perhaps the single most all-encompassing overview yet, of his exhilarating 50 years of electronic music making so far.
Being lucky to have an advance copy, and the fact Stone was playing Edinburgh in early July gave us the perfect opportunity to be treated to a feast of Mr Stolen Car on record, and on stage.
Stone’s work has been a constant at OBLADADA for several years, a handful of his tracks would effortlessly fit in our best tracks ever playlist. An ongoing fascination in his work, is always that they focus on sonic samples that either unravel or realign themselves into odd new horizons full of dizzying, and sometimes chaotic beauty. Generally speaking, his earlier work draws on more classical sources and textures, whilst more recent works creates new wormholes through shiny forms of pop music, from around the world.
The first two tracks from Electronic Music from 1972-2022 are the earliest pieces yet released, and they combine into a 23-minute introduction to his world. Despite coming from a teenage Stone, they’re nothing short of staggering.
Three Confusongs (1972) feels like the day Stone finally switched the power on this fledgling set up and started pushing sounds through it… The material sampled here is a human voice. Stefan Weiser aka Z’EV reading his own poetry, chopped and warped into banks of aural silt, disembodied words, and phrases placed on top, within and behind other sounds. Something every day, splintered and presented in infinite new forms. Eventually the fog clears as Weiser queries ‘Am I recording?’, and this feels like the very moment of Stone’s conceptual birth, as the loops spectacularly divide into a lysergic mandala of heaving voices and textures. It swells into a jazz band jamming with a car alarm and whilst nothing makes any sense at all, this is music that knocks you sideways from the pure dazzling creativity. The whole thing is stroboscopic, like the sound you’d hear whilst flying through a Bridget Riley painting.
Next up, Ryouund Thygizunz (1972) centres in on metallic percussive sounds. Everything is dry and coated in gonging vibrations and almost proggy reverb laden shadows. At the point the piece seems to organise some five minutes in, the whole wildly fades into a shimmering midground, you feel your ears being drawn into the droning throb at the very heart of the music. It’s easy to completely loose grip of your surroundings as the music seems to pull you somewhere beyond where you might reasonably have expected it to take you…
Countless times, this monumental opening side of vinyl has stunned us. We’ve looped these earliest tracks obsessively, and whilst a full half a century old, are both razor sharp, mind fizzing and completely essential.
Very much under the spell of these tracks, jumping to a gathering of 3 new tracks at the other end of this 3 LP set from 2022, the sonic jump feels vast – into another planet, light decades away. The twisted abstract psychedelics giving way to the day glo, computer game chase sequence of Walt’s (2022). The music could be from an advert for a shopping mall, or from a pop radio station, seasoned with vocal debris, but somehow it all slowly starts to reveal weird incremental improvements of itself.
Kustaa (2022) is even more impressive, a wobbly off-centre plucked groove. Vocals of something that feels like they are dusted in liquid Italian or Turkish, whatever the origins… they are carved out into a deeply affecting joyful folky procession. Merkato (2022) pinballs in a labyrinth of tiny afrobeat splinters, where seconds of music germinate into huge, detailed arcs.
The rest of the album maps out the waters Stone has navigated between these two contrasting beginnings and ending eras covered by the album remit.
We have tracks like Vim (1987) and Morangak (2005) that zone in on The Beach Boys’ Fun Fun Fun and Queens’ Bicycle Race respectively. Somehow here both feel ever so slightly more like demonstrations of the process, perhaps due to the source material feeling so ingrained and familiar already, that somehow makes them less substantial, simple as they seem to offer some sort of safety line.
The converse approach is apparent in perhaps one of Stones most discussed pieces, Flint’s (1999) that somehow converts Aqua’s plastic pop cheese and ultra-relevant, Barbie Girl, into a thumping electronic banger. Next, all-timer track, one we already know and love deeply – L’Os à Moelle, is another huge event here. Built around The Byrds Stranger in a Strange Land, (a track often regarded as one of the very first psychedelic rock songs) is woven into a vast lysergic blanket. The zoned out, trippiness of the original exploded into 24 minutes of a looping slowly mutating third eye groove. The heady sun dappled 60’s fractalized into an even more potent version of itself – psychedelia squared, as it heads towards a bizarrely melted Pepperland fanfare…
The sharp rhythmic almost Celtic tinged Noor Mahal (1987) and the infinite stream of loose ends gathered and reshuffled in Ngoc Suong (2003) complete this blistering 2-hour set.
(Photo OBLADADA)
In the midst of all these gems, then having seen Stone play live with his latest’s iPad set up only makes our appreciation of what he does somehow even more impressive. Whilst it would seem easy to assume much of this music happens via airless computer software, you always get the impression that all his music exists as approximate bundles. There is a human wobble in the way the elements come together, a very good grasp of precision but dusted with flecks of delicious inaccuracy. Clearly, he is performing on stage and in the studio, the music is animated and alive, not some hard edged and aloof process.
It feels like Stone has always used technology in a fairly simplistic way, in the same way a camera can be pointed anywhere and capture an image, it feels that mind blowing results are always possible, whatever you care to feed into his portable set up.
During his live set, there was times it was clear the gyroscope in his iPad was converting motion, and effecting parts of the sound. He even at one point, sang a phrase and looped it back into the backdrop of mayhem. It seems the immediacy and fluidity of his system will only continue to find new places and sounds to digest.
Overall, we end up with music that’s sometimes beautiful, sometimes abstract, sometimes from music that you have a pre-existing relationship with, and sometimes completely new. The results though are always more impactful and revelatory than somehow it would be reasonable to expect. A recycling process that yields more than what you originally recycled.
The worlds that Stone births might all be initially anchored in taking little chunks of pre-existing material. But the lasting memory here, and elsewhere in his stunning discography, depicts whole new realms just next to ours, that makes everything more porous, humorous, engrossing, and frankly awe inspiring.
A joyful love affair with the inherent marvellousness of sound itself…
Electronic Music from 1972-2022 is out on 4th August on Unseen Worlds.
Available as a 3LP set or digitally. Preorder it here or here
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