All dead. All immortal.

Remko Scha

Remko Scha and The Machines (1990) As Is
audio CD, production: Van Lagestein [Helmholtz Theater HT 03]

'As Is' is performed by six electric sabre saws on Guitar Mural # 14, a spatial construction with nine electric guitars and three electric bass guitars. Ropes, strung between the sabre saws, run across the guitar strings. The sabre saws, moving at different speeds, create different patterns of standing waves in the ropes; the impact of the ropes on the guitar strings makes them Flare, Ooze, Lick, Stride, Reel and Rasp.

Remko Scha's Sawtoothed Tremors

'On 'As Is' the 47-year-old Dutch sound artist/computer scientist rattles up a hailstorm of overtones with the aid of saber saws – portable electric jigsaws whose thin, vertically mounted blades are usually used to cut curves and other troublesome shapes. In this case, however, they're rigged to vibrate strings or springy metal rods, jouncing them against the low strings of nine electric guitars and three electric basses. The instruments – all makes and models, tuned by ear "to a chord that makes some sense to me" – are suspended, by means of securely anchored ropes, in a "spatial construction" Scha calls "Guitar Mural #14.'
When the machines are switched on, their blades stab the air, joggling the rods or lines resting against the guitar strings to produce bumblings, shimmerings, ting-a-lings, and clickety-clacks. By adjusting the speeds of the saws or changing the proximity of the moving objects to the guitars, Scha is able to effect subtle changes in the overall sound. Beyond such minor meddling, no human interference is permitted.
"You get the drone, but that becomes the background," said Scha in a recent interview. "You also get these completely spontaneous melodies on top of the drone, and you get a rhythmic variable because the motor does not run regularly." In "Flare," the first cut on As Is, a metallic jangling is tossed about in the choppy backwash of an outboard motorish pulse. "Ooze" uses harmonic clusters, chunked out at quarter-note intervals, to generate a fog bank of fleecy, billowing sound. In "Lick" and "Stride" arrhythmic clangs glance off each other while a metronomic chugging churns up the lower register.
Squint your ears, and you'll hear Alvin Lucier or La Monte Young, minimalists whose music exploits the resonant frequencies of rooms and "beating" effects, the interference patterns produced when closely-tuned tones are sounded simultaneously.
Scha sits most comfortably in the modernist tradition of scientist-musicians. A professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Amsterdam, he prefers to discuss his music in terms of mathematical randomness and information theory. Strange, then, that what begins, in one underground magazine interview, as a rather dispassionate description of musical processes ends with an orgasm. "The music is about physics and resonance phenomena," says Scha, "but it has this high energy level that you can feel in your body and to which people respond very directly. It's closer to sex than to anything else.'
Mark Dery (review of 'As Is' in Guitar Player, August 1992).

Video: 'The Machines' at the Palais des Congrès, Liège, November 1980. (Video by Paul Paquay, RTB)