I well remember my own flattered astonishment when some good simple soul told me, after listening to my own Jardin parfumé, of the various rustic sounds he said he heard therein; the brook, the bees, the birds doing all the things you expect birds, bees, and brooks to do - in their publishable moments. I could not forbear to ask the good soul if he also heard the rich purée d'épinard plop of the cows emptying their bowels, those least - so admirably least - costive of creatures, whose evacuations, performed with such nonchalance and brio, and full-bowelled ease, are such a shining example to the constipated idiots who live on and by them.

Herewith I offer some observations about nothing in particular, and also some observations about a self-produced CD album titled krop3rom, the creation of which is credited to the identity "A9FF" whom we on the max listserv know as antiorp.
 

I obtained a copy of antiorp's CD, krop3rom, in mid-November (1998). I had no intentions of writing a review, until antiorp, in a transgressive breach of trust, revealed the fact that I'd purchased a copy by posting my private email on the max list. That was an act I do not take lightly. I contacted antiorp many months before, in an attempt to purchase a copy, but I refused to obtain it under the then current "plan" of buying a batch of 10 CDs at USD 3 each. When he finally extended an offer to buy a single copy, I accepted without hesitation. I am fully aware that this review is likely to be the successful outcome of some calculation by antiorp -- part of a scheme having as one component the manipulative revelation of my private choices/purchases. So, here’s one more review to post all over the internet, my good friend.
 

Some max-l members will be disappointed over my taking the effort to write this review, but there are bigger issues than my own approval rating. The issue is the health of max-l. No, that's not it. The issue is how suitable max-l is to me, to the maintenance of my own interest. Perhaps just the mere use of the great tool called MAX isn’t stimulus enough. It seems that the obvious purpose of my initial action (the private email to antiorp) eluded our iconoclastic friend. If he had understood, I probably would not be typing this now. It was not a persona (which should be simple to ignore, yes?) that placed my private matter into the public domain, however. This was the very real and desperate (at least for the moment) person behind the antiorp phenomenon, capitulating to his own self-centered needs. As he made certain to tell us, he does so in blazing outsider glory; the magnificence of a lone artist with no corporate or academic sponsorship, promulgating his work to a wide public. A few years ago I wrote a semi-autobiographical piece called "The Outsider." I know of this quest.
 

I have a major interest in this recording, and I'm not reviewing it under any feelings of pressure, or of ambivalence. Perhaps it’s 3go!zm - the editors of Fanfare don’t know yet that I exist. To assume that my review is neutral, unbiased, and not preconditioned by my own rather active feelings about the "antiorp matter" is risky, however. That I had a predisposition toward this recording is obvious. Did I expect a brilliant conception, a high level of intensity? Sure I did. Did I know the artist before hearing his work? Well enough, as well as any other max-l member. Did I expect antiorp's CD krop3rom to be rigorous and uncompromising in its musical conception? Yes I did. I sat back without a copy of this work, while others, such as Nick Rothwell, the founder of max-l, offered their observations, and in Nick's case, even humorously entering into antiorp's own language-idiom to form the codetta of his review. I was intrigued. Nick's review confirmed that krop3rom's sound palette would be laden with legions of idiosyncratic bleeps, boinks, bonks, and bzzzps. They are there, but they aren't the point.
 

It's All in How You Hex It

The composition krop3rom is consistent with one faction’s apparent mental picture of antiorp's public cyber-persona as that of a belligerent, megalomaniacal pseudo-intellectual out to rule the roost. That is to say, krop3rom is not going to change the minds of antiorp’s attackers because its surface, at least, does not refute that picture. However, it is a mistake to conclude that political motives or a kind of canny manipulation superceded the quest for substance on behalf of this composer. krop3rom is rich enough to be felt on levels other than the deep allegory many Wagner aficionados need to apply to, let’s say, the Ring. Well then, does antiorp, or "0f0003," carry his social/political message within the spiraling track of his CD, wherein interesting sound designs are presented with points of apparent sloppy editing (which are as intentional, no doubt, as Miles' cracked notes)? Perhaps. My expectations of a consistently uncompromising musical conception were initially dashed by an off-putting drumkit-based backbeat groove that struck me as a capitulation to the mass taste -- a sort of projection into the dance hall. I soon decided that this relentless rock backbeat, which does not consume all that much of the work's total running time, is an effective foil for the conceptual abstractions that indeed make up most of the piece. That groove is based on a dark secundal ostinato that is too forbidding for the delicate ears of most of pop culture’s inhabitants (from my elitist’s podium I’ll shout: That pleases me). So, my first crisis with the piece was overcome, although I still feel injured by what looks like a composer's easy way out.
 

krop3rom’s sound world is varied and rich, with a significant amount of granular synthesis and some passages sounding like the spaceship SuperCollider. Concrète techniques appear to be limited to recordings of human voices delivering text. The piece is highly oscillator and noise-based in its textures. In general, these are rough-edged sonorities -- really nice stuff indeed. There’s compression, gobs of it, way more than Oppenheimer would paternalistically advise in the happy-talk columns of his slick rag. It’s almost as though we’ve got a RealAudio-readied pre-master -- another thing that, at first, put me off. By invoking Steve O. do I imply that the pages of EM are a more fitting place than CMJ for analysis of krop3rom? I’m undecided. I have not yet come to terms with where this work is situated in the greater scheme of things.
 

Text is often heard -- English, German, and French, and half the times it seems to be one or another kind of protest. Much of the German is processed and inflected in such a way as to evoke impassioned wax-recorded speeches of the early 20th Century. The piece is dripping with angst from start to finish (putting it, straight away, into my camp), and it even contains the "staging" of a political execution. One of the few English lines, delivered by a woman whose saccharine smile can be seen ever so clearly in the mind's eye, is spoken in a style reminiscent of a dehumanizing industrial training video. Thus, she interjects de-contextually: "Fuck freely, orgasmic therapy, bioelectric charge and discharge -- a genital embrace. Fuck freely, communist movement...[chop]" A decontextualization, a non sequitur? Potent symbolism or sensationalism? I must leave that open, but I’ll suggest that the composer of krop3rom was committed to producing a work of artistic value and expressiveness. I do not question his integrity in carrying out that goal. My basis? What can I say -- the basis is no more than lots of careful listening over many years. In spite of the aforementioned musical compromise -- a calculated use of non-related genre-specific material (I can be bashed for that), I take the position that nothing in this piece is gratuitous.
 

The CD's 61 minutes are laid out over 98 individual tracks, with the 98th one's first four minutes (its total in duration is 4:38, 5 seconds past the magic number) housing a diabolical dead-silence. If we persist (or inadvertently let the CD run on through the first four silent minutes of this final track), we get a classic 'orpism -- the sudden eruption of hostile sounds: the stereo system is self-destructing (some listeners will never realize it’s even there). This is close to a sonic analogue of antiorp's final cluster of ascii-art featured in many of his postings. The penultimate track ends with a strikingly haunting figure rendered by a woman's voice chopped by both a slow-grained and a very fine-grained process. This is a gorgeous moment that is setup, in less than masterful, almost utilitarian manner, by the work's one really significant (near-)"developmental" passage -- a long section of sustained material led by a microtonally tuned church-organ. This part of the score, which strongly suggests time-travel, functions as a release and contrast from the tension-filled beginning and middle sections. Antiorp's chopped, semi-valedictory woman is a stroke of genius and makes a superb moment. But is it enough? When delving ten seconds or two minutes or 4:06 into the abyss of #98, it is enough. It is more than enough. Its haunting beauty still rings in fulfilling echoes. How generous of the great cyber-manipulator to offer four minutes within which to decide whether or not that perfect ending will be one's own ending -- this time. But one isn't aware that the choice exists unless one has suffered the disorientation of 98's final 31 seconds of hair-raising sound, an enactment of frantic scrubbing of the radio dial in search of... Kundry's kiss.
 

krop3rom is more interesting than most of the "serious" work coming from inside or outside of academe, yet the work's episodic nature was a problem for me at first. Its frequent shifting will cause seekers of formal refinement to leave in frustration. The formal structure may owe to a stochastic base, through which krop3rom would exhibit a local chaos (...my "episodic" sections, more than half of the piece), but a global determinism. It does have shape, and even recapitulation, but it really boils down to a drama in sound -- a melodrama, and a gripping one indeed, one which ends in full flowering ambiguity. There is no resolution, no release, and no answer. And like the antiorp cyber-persona, this piece is infused with musical evocation of the cyclical word games we see on max-l, a rhetorical statement/rejoinder syndrome, and it is so at the level of its compositional syntax. Interestingly enough, this is a consideration unlikely to enter the consciousness of non-list members who aren't conditioned by luxurious message-postings, and the fact that such rhetorical cycles are at the syntax-level will not be a problem for many listeners who can approach this work non-programmatically. However, this technique, one which diminishes the sense of organic interrelationships in the piece, is a problem for me. This is not a fatal flaw, and once I accepted this work's alliance with the popular culture, or dare I suggest, to the cyber-culture, even the gaming sub-culture, rather than to the "concert-music" or "classical" world, I came to be on better terms with it. But none of my proposed "alliances" is adequately specific -- krop3rom belongs to an emerging genre of art-music or "sound-art" that is a new synthesis (I know one person who will, of course, claim it is aligned with no known genre, and never will be).
 

I am not familiar with the work of most on the max-l, but through happenstance, there are two, Hans Tutschku and Karlheinz Essl, whose works I've examined closely. Here is different world. Here is work that, to exist at all, must throw open for the listener the doors to an exalted state. Here is work that invites the listener to inhabit a most rarified plane of existence. I place krop3rom in the context of such work of purity and majesty as that of Tutschku and Essl because it is the max list that got us here and this little essay is as much about my relationship to that cyber-entity as it is about antiorp's CD. Listen to Essl's "Entsagung" or to Tutschku's "Les invisibles" or "erinnerung" for work that is not built of the temporal concerns of politics or of corporate or academic alliances. Not a single stone of their foundations is made of rhetorical argument. Listen to work that will become a permanent part of the world's music literature, and which will inspire composers and listeners throughout the new millennium.
 

Listen also to krop3rom. It will reward that effort. A view of its surface yields the sonic equivalent of antiorp's web persona. This is utterly uncanny, and more than entertaining enough. Then dig below the surface. There lies a compelling work -- one that transcends the single life form of its creator. I like it immensely.