John Cage is most famous in the mainstream for his composition 4’33” (1952). A piece that caused outrage – all for being composed of silence.
This fury which still rumbles along even now, however misses the entire point. That the piece was intended as a live performance, the score detailing it’s for any instrument or combination of instruments and contains three movements. At the beginning of each of these, the performer would gesture they are about to play their instrument. Your eyes then tell your ears to prepare for a sound… which then doesn’t happen.
But your brain doesn’t fill with silence, rather a slow epiphany is triggered, that the listening space is a full panorama of ambient sounds. The piece guides you through a threshold – a space you always assumed to be empty. But, as Cage stated – silence is pregnant with sound – rather than devoid of it…
This latest release by Bernhard Living The Future is Not the End of History, immediately made me ponder all these thoughts around Cage all over again.
Whilst the London based composer Living’s work feels like its anchored in silence, his compositions seem unconcerned with ambient sounds. In his practise, he cites mathematical structures such as the Fibonacci Sequence or Pascal’s Triangle, and what he calls ‘technological lessness’ – and what architect and philosopher Buckminster Fuller called ‘post-industrial ephemeralisation’ – of doing more with less – of doing everything with nothing.
The magic here in The Future is Not the End of History feels more like some engrossing way of plotting sounds as they transform into an inescapable silence. A subtle but important difference from Cage.
3 tracks, all of which are around half an hour long, where each is a timeline centred around a chord. The first is a trichord, the second a tetrachord, and the third a pentachord. Whilst the technical details quickly confuse our non-musical brain, in each case the sounds have a structure and distinct surface that’s easy to sense. Each track presents a series of these events, shapes or patterns, that due to the ultra minimal atmosphere, become almost visually apparent.
Living was previously a member of Manfred Mann Chapter Three, playing alto flute and sax for them back in 1969/70. Whilst the grooves of tracks like One Way Glass remain undeniable, Living has immersed himself in this seemingly more austere space for decades. His numerous studies and albums, all resplendently lower case, in tonal grey sleeves (his Bandcamp page currently lists almost 200 albums) that might feel like a sobering science lab more than a juicy creative one, but quickly a weird magic takes hold.
The Future is Not the End of History is an album that surprisingly works well in numerous settings. A meditation on the lifespan of sound, a composition, an arrhythmic placing of events that feels like some microscopic attempt at storytelling within this binary space. Forming like throbbing islands of sound, sometimes overlapping, sometimes looming out of the air. Sounds appear like focal points in space, not breathing or beating, no elaborate form or shape, just an engrossing accumulation and release of energy.
We’ve looped this music for whole chunks of our day, and it quickly becomes oddly magnetic and irresistible.
The Future is Not the End of History is a 90-minute listen that fundamentally marks the passing of time. It’s not even clear what the sounds are, just amorphous and exactly controlled events that somehow draw you into their weirdly exposed and vital internal workings.
Despite its almost spectacular nothingness, this is, in a strange way, amongst the most alive, sound has sounded.
The Future is Not the End of History is out now on Donemus Records, and available to stream/purchase here
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