Backbone > Ear Whacks

Musical Labyrinth
By Sharon Nichols . Photos by Dion Ogust

His Majesty: Well, Herr Mozart, an excellent effort. You have shown us something quite new tonight. Of course, now and then it seemed to have—how shall one say?—too many notes.

Mozart: I don’t understand. There are just as many notes, your Majesty, as I require, neither more nor less.

His Majesty: My dear, young man, don’t take it too hard. Your work is ingenious. There are simply too many notes, that’s all. Just cut a few and it will be perfect.

Mozart: Which few did you have in mind, your Majesty?

—from the film Amadeus

Plainly, His Majesty was an artistic imbecile to complain that Mozart’s symphonies were too lengthy or complex. Yet one might wonder what Mozart would have accomplished with today’s technology. Probably what’s being done by Hudson Valley composer Kevin Bartlett, a man whose intricate, high-tech, orchestral compositions lay the stones in a spiraling path toward a true center of musical brilliance.

Bartlett’s journey through the industry maze has crowned him with every imaginable hat. Before his beginnings with electronic instrumentation in the early ‘70s, Bartlett spent the psychedelic era working special effects lighting for Janis Joplin, Led Zepplin, Jeff Beck, The Who, B.B. King, John Cage, and the Moody Blues. He worked in music retail and stage management; composed for dance and theater, including Toni Morrison’s "Dreaming Emmett"; produced two rock operas; marketed other artists’ work on his Aural Gratification label; composed for HBO, MTV, VH1, Comedy Channel, and "Sesame Street"; wrote 20 years worth of commercial music; and performed techno-dream excursions for live audiences. The culmination of all his efforts is the recently released Near Life Experience.

Composed, performed, produced, and engineered by Bartlett, NLE is a 10-track journey through a panoramic, electronic soundscape in which myriad samples of live instruments and voices paint a vivid 73-minute canvas, most tracks pushing 10 minutes. Too lengthy or complex? Hardly. Guitar is the only nonsynthetic instrument on NLE, though it would take a trained ear to distinguish Bartlett’s woodwinds or strings from the real thing. He jokes that there are 7,000 instruments on this recording, but that’s precisely how it sounds.

"If I do an 8- or 10-minute piece, it’s a drop in the bucket compared to a symphony," says Bartlett from his gizmo-packed Glenford studio. "These pieces are movements to me, with a beginning, transitional point, and resolution. I take as much time as necessary to go through whatever particular life movement I’m trying to render."

With a background in lighting, Bartlett’s able to visualize passages in 3-D, with layer after layer creating a palette of sound. "Every sound is a color," he explains. "With electronic music, you go way beyond the traditional orchestral colors available. The colors are infinite; I’m attracted to electronic music for that reason." Bartlett can define the color of an oboe, but some tones are beyond description. "There’s some instrument there and I have no idea what it is. It’s shortwave radio, a banshee screaming, a 50-foot blue razor blade. I don’t know what it is; it’s a color, a texture. That’s my bag—doing imagistic, romantic, classically, and rock-based music, but not with traditional sounds."
There’s a consciousness to NLE that transcends conventional sensibilities. These emote-a-tones are Bartlett’s children and they’re laughing, sprinting, weeping, contemplating, having temper tantrums, and lying in the sun watching the clouds. Bartlett’s labyrinthine, well-structured tone poems will appeal to fans of ambient and symphonic music, but his prime audience is the film industry, the cinematic nature of his compositions being perfectly suited for Kodak moments and rolling credits. Take notice: this one requires headphones to truly savor its tender and bombastic nuances.

What is a near-life experience? While discussing alien abductions and out-of-body and near-death experiences with a friend, Bartlett quipped that he was having a near-life experience. "I’m using so many samples, synthetic instruments, and effects that it’s not live, it’s near live. On a deeper level, all of us have defenses and personas that we’ve developed to survive, and while that’s a kind of truth, it’s the truth of fear, not the truth of love." NLE’s cover image reiterates this concept. "It’s the universal symbol of man, but he’s distorted because he’s depicting our out-of-focus nature. Our initial life experience is predicated on personality and ego that isn’t fully awake or aware."

NLE opens with the 10+ minute "Gayatri," morphing from an elegant dreamtime ambience into an inexplicably joyous illumination, a passionate heart bursting with Celtic leanings. Mid-track, a female vocal speaks a line from Ralph Blum’s Book of Runes: "You, who are the source of all power, whose rays illuminate the whole world, illuminate also my heart so that it, too, can do your work."

"It’s a prayer embodying the life force and the sun’s energy," Bartlett explains. "It’s about letting right action flow through you, passing on the light and empowerment of the sun." Expressed in four movements, the piece embraces the sense of spiritual awakening, the doubt of one’s path, conviction, and finally acceptance. "It’s the path illumination takes and you have to start living it. But there’s still a subtle layer of questioning which will keep you seeking and growing."

"Tripping Over Torn," an homage to composer David Torn and his album Tripping Over God, engages slinky xylophonic keys, guitar looping, and Torn’s sampled voice. It came about as the result of a joke between the two musicians. Torn had left a message on Bartlett’s answering machine, saying "I’m not going to leave you a message because I’m afraid you’re going to sample it and use it in something," followed by a diabolical laugh. So, naturally, Bartlett sampled it. "I thought, god, that’s so artistically perfect!" laughs Bartlett. "I think David’s a beacon of creativity; his guitar looping and sense of timbre and tonality have been a liberating force in my musicality. He should be proclaimed some sort of national monument."

"Miserere Mei" is an unspeakably beautiful symphony, its title being Latin for "have mercy on me." Heart-wrenching strings wed haunting Gregorian chant, bass guitar, and percussion in a lush opera conveying the exquisite agony of supreme loneliness. Bartlett expounds, "The whole world for centuries has been looking heavenward and crying ‘have mercy on me.’ The pendulum is always swinging between light and dark. This orchestration is a resolve to that universal cry, moving the dark into a regal majesty of light and affirmation."

The prog-rock of "Sockdolager" is an angst-and-release confessional employing heavy, chromatic guitar; keys cascading like raindrops; and a disturbing assemblage of indecipherable female chatter. A light surfaces at song’s end with Bartlett singing a sweetly falsetto "And I love you." Sockdolager, a word made popular in the 1800s, means the defining, decisive event. "This is anxiety, fear run amok, sorting through all the conflicting data that flies at us as human beings and wrestling with finding clarity," he says. "It eventually resolves into a long breath of release. When you get to the love, anxiety disappears." Yet another cloud immediately passes with the steady rain and sparse piano of the deeply personal "Across My Heart."

Energetic "The Best Laid Mice..." melds influences of Hans Zimmer, Steve Hackett, and Mike Oldfield with those of minor chord maestro Bartlett. The track continually unfolds, unleashing eastern influences, Turkish vocals, and soaring Ebow in a piece that Bartlett had to set free, letting it take on its own life. "The title is a word play on ‘The Best Laid Plans of Mice and Men.’ This piece showed me that our ends never know our beginnings, how things go awry and come out differently."

"Outer Marker" has an enigmatic, sultry, dance-of-the-Dark-Lord feel. Based on an aviation term meaning the farthest location point for an aircraft, it’s really about extraterrestrials, filled with samples of police chiefs, farmers, and skeptics discussing sightings that Bartlett sampled from shortwave radio. The track includes a joyous, celebratory Scandinavian vocal, gospel choir, soaring lead guitar, pipe organ, bass pedals, and other crazy elements. "It’s saying isn’t it just cool to be alive? It’s the joy of discovery, the aliens in our hidden psyche, as well as on other planets. So, what’s the outer marker to an interstellar spacecraft?"

Bartlett’s journey doesn’t end there, as there’s more fear, rapture, and confusion to explore on NLE. "I’m just some guy trying to sort this stuff out," he says. "I put truth into every track and that’s my criteria. Yes, there’s some clever musical things going on, but emotionally I hit my target. That’s the artistic success to me."

Bartlett plans to replicate this material live using an orchestral/electro ensemble, and is currently auditioning players; he’d like to include a theatrical multimedia component with lighting and video footage. His next musical project, which he’s already written eight tracks for, will be more vocal oriented. "As I commit more to a true life experience, my music probably won’t be as couched in production. I’ll come out and say this is the way I feel, I’m naked, and it’s okay. And it’s okay if you are too."

Wanna spin this disc? Visit cdbaby.com, cdnow.com, amazon.com, auralgratification.com, or e-mail auralg@ earthlink.net. A portion of proceeds benefits Tribe of Heart (tribeofheart.org), an animal advocacy organization.