“…but it wasn’t scary…”

 

 

…must have been the first thought I had upon exiting my first dark ride. It was a fairly typical track-based haunted house ride, under two minutes long. As a perpetually frightened child, I was a bit surprised to discover how scared I wasn’t. Despite the lack of traditional thrills, I immediately got back in line, to the mild annoyance or confusion of the adult accompanying me, as something pulled me to the dark ride experience. Upon meeting up with the older kids in my family group, one of my cousins informed be that the haunted house attraction I had described as “not scary” was indeed the “not scary” option at this theme park. The real scares were to be found in the second haunted house dark ride, on the other side of the entrance to the park. Of course, when I rode this second dark ride later in our day, I found the dark tunnels full of oddly static figures and corny sound effects to be similarly unscary to the first ride.

While I couldn’t articulate it at the time, these rides informed my artistic output and methods of creation and consumption for years to come. The teenager obsessing over the German Kosmische records of the late 60s and early 70s indeed found similarities: a push-pull between stasis and constant movement, the illusion of great depth, occasional dated or “corny” sounds whirring and whizzing passed the listener, and above all a near-obsessive focus on atmosphere. A love of video games, particularly from the mid 90s to early 00s, also helped me find more dark ride like elements in the art I enjoyed.

 

Non-Traditional Scores and Notation: Examples

In the mid-twentieth century, various composers began experimenting with music notation that didn’t involve typical staffs, scales, notes, chords, etc. The idea being explored involved musicians and performers interpreting various images and symbols and creating music based on these non-traditional scores and notations.

 

Alone 1 by Roman Haubenstock-Ramati (1965)

 

Music For Airports by Brian Eno (1979)

 

Stripsody by Cathy Berberian (1966)

 

Treatise by Cornelius Cardew (1967)

 

Marcel Duchamp’s Next Work by COUM Transmissions and Paul Woodrow (1974)

 

In this piece, 12 replicas of Duchamp’s ready made bicycle wheels were placed in a circle. These “Duchamp Harps” were played by twelve volunteers, according to colored slides and written instructions presented by a thirteenth performer.

 

Dark Rides Volume 1

Recently I’ve been looking for new methods of musical composition, and I thought “why not incorporate my love of dark rides?” After all, there are countless videos of dark rides online. I could use the rides themselves as the score for original music? This was the birth of my new instrumental EP, Dark Rides Volume 1.

The idea is this: watch dark ride POV footage and craft the music around this experience. Color, light, movement of objects and the rider: all these things can act as cues for a musician, and any given cue can be interpreted in numerous ways. A tinny keyboard preset rhythm can be ghoulish miners, a screeching synthesizer can be screams of torture, and so on. Some footage was so dark and/or grainy, as to suggest a deeply ominous and large space. I dubbed my setup “the control room” and worked the necessary knobs, keys and buttons in the dark. Looks a bit like some sort of dark ride control panel, no?

 

 

THE RULES

One thing I love is a self-imposed, internal ruleset that dictates a given work, so I set a few rules for this project. The last record I made, A Small Vision, had its own symmetry-based ruleset dictating the structure and instruments of each song, but this time I wanted an outside force helping impose the rules. The most obvious rule is that each song is strictly composed to a given ride-through video of that song’s dark ride. This creates a rigid timing and structure, and also creates a dialogue with the original video. Another rule is that every sound source must constantly move in relationship to the rider, according to the movement of the ride. However, each song has an element that stays still relative to the rider, representing the cart moving along the dark ride’s track carrying the rider. Each track must also include the audio from the video clip, however maimed and distorted it may be. These rules can be bent according to the needs of a given song, and each song has its own smaller ruleset as well.

 

Collaboration

The most fascinating collaboration is with the strangers who filmed the original POV videos. I am working, in a sense, potentially across years/decades, with the decisions of whoever rode and filmed these dark rides in the first place. Shaky pans, bad low-light cameras, choosing to film the outside of a ride before boarding: all these elements are cues for the composition of the music. Of course, there were more traditional collaborations as well. My friend Daniel (This Man and The Dream Surfers) added some samples to the track “Black Diamond”, and my friend Ian (Jetski) played black metal guitars on the track “Dracula’s Castle”. In both cases they watched the POV dark ride footage while they played their parts.

 

The Project Itself

It’s worth noting that this music is not intended as a “soundtrack” for these rides per se, but a standalone EP of experimental music. I have however included the original POV clips with the corresponding tracks as a window into the process of this new project. I hope to continue this series each year with a new set of Dark Rides… See you then?

 

TerrorRide

 

Black Diamond

 

Lumalusion

 

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

 

Dracula’s Castle

 

“In the end the attempt proves too difficult, but this doesn’t matter since the primary aim was to capture a voice.”
-Robert Pinget, preface to That Voice

 

So there’s a lot of rules here, many things at play shaped the form and mood of each song. Does this whole process matter at all? For one, I hope that the audience of this blog will get a kick out of the process-oriented approach, and maybe consider methods of kickstarting creativity. At the end of the day, I hope that the music on this EP conjures compelling atmospheres for any listener. Smoke a bowl and listen in the dark, take a walk in the woods at night and bring the music along, or check out the songs with the original dark ride… I hope there is something here for you. If you like, stream or purchase the EP at the link below.

 

 

https://pelagoramrecordings.bandcamp.com/album/dark-rides-volume-i

Pelagoram Recordings is the home for my solo work and various duos and one-offs made with dear friends and collaborators. Feel free to poke around and see what you find, if you are so inclined…

 

 

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p.s. Hey. Today the blog takes great pleasure in being the physical situation for this guest-post by the multi-talented artist known locally as Thom. As you surely don’t even need to imagine, the project on display plays into one of my personal great fascinations, and he has done an extraordinary job at finessing and extending/personalising the dark ride’s pull and joy. Please explore the things up there thoroughly, and the pleasure will be yours. Thank you so much for storing this here, Thom. ** lotuseatermachine, Oh, wow, how nice and surprising that those books are so gettable. Me too on the lists and noted plans. I’m kind of a list fetishist myself. I even look at the weekend movie box office figures even though I don’t really care what wins and loses that battle. So interesting about GA. So I’ve seen him at least. Good, I’ll head to Internet Archive. Adam Briggs, good, thanks. Maybe I can coerce Yellow Veil into sharing a screener with me. Hm, seems possible. Or see it elsewhere although I don’t Yellow Veil’s reach includes France? Thanks a lot! ** _Black_Acrylic, Yep, yep. Looks pretty clear up above sky-wise here today so far. I predict that jacket, once adorned, will conquer all of its naysayers at a glance. ** Jonathan Lees, Hi, Jonathan! Great to see you. Mekas was your boss? Wow. And Mekas + Godspeed … holy moly. If I look for it, can I find the video, I hope? Take very good care, sir. ** Carsten, I love Paris, but I do miss and treasure the LA days and folks and scene, for sure. I actually like being interviewed. I’m preternaturally kind of reluctant and shy to talk about myself and my work, and being formalised into a situation to do that is welcoming. Plus it’s valuable to get to know what someone thinks of what you do one on one. Zac and I were interviewed about ‘RT’ the other day, like I said, and it’s true that it has gotten very hard to talk about the film without just reiterating what we’re said many times before. Kind of ready to put that project to bed, vociferously at least. Virtual hang … you mean like a Zoom? Sure, we just have to sort out a mutually good time. ** laura w, I’m not in a depressive spiral as far as I can tell, but I also need ‘Ocarina’ to pull me out of something or other. My living situation makes it difficult to play games because my place is small and my roommate works in the living room where the screen/Switch is. Grr. Four pages is plenty. I’ve written fiction things even shorter than that. That’s no problem. And now it’s Friday for us both. The pressure to make the week count before the weekend signals its demise. ** HaRpEr //, Hi. Hm, yeah, I don’t believe there is a Mekas-like figure now. Experimental filmmaking has become so scattered. Maybe I’m missing something/someone though. I think Smith had major issues with how his films were shown generally, no? ‘The Magnificent Ambersons’, greatness incarnate. Except for the horrible tacked-on studio shot ending, of course. It’s true, maybe my all-time favorite film scene is the one where the old, dying patriarch Amberson looks into the fire and talks about the birth of the world until Welles brutally fades him out. I get chills just thinking about it. The scene where Agnes Moorhead ends up sitting against the cold heater is also one of the greatest scenes ever to me. ** Bill, I tried! Two months, wow. Back to the Far East, I’m guessing? Thanks for the Christopherson link. I’ve never seen his Thai-era videos. I’ll hit it up shortly. Good luck with your preparations. ** hitchmk, Hey. Yeah, agreed. Have you read Georges Perec? He wrote quite a number of books that are seemingly just him listing and noting things around him, and they’re kind of inexplicably fascinating. I hope the student papers seem to fill in magically. And I hope your impending weekend is some mind of balm. ** worm, Hi. If that’s true about us wide-eyed older types, I wonder why? I think I was always like this, but the world seems considerably less fucked back then, I guess. The trippy dated CGI stuff in ‘Altered States’ is so charming. Oh, you’re in spring, duh. We’re in the fall here, and I think we’re always opposites? Yes, Mr. Salerno is yet another Melbourne produced little genius. Well, maybe you’ll end up downing expressos while French people dart to and fro before your very eyes one of these days or years. ** Uday, Hi. Luck with the library, I would be very surprised. Rivalry is just stupid. Everybody is a star. Oh, sleep, a thematic I don’t think I’ve tackled yet. Might work. Hm. I’m suspicious of assigning human emotions to dogs or animals in general. How do we know? A cynical friend of mine thinks dogs lick us only because they like the salty taste. Who’s to say he’s wrong. ** Fred, Hi! Is that ‘A rebours’ structure that you think might not work alterable? I’m a big believer in the magical powers of editing and restructuring. Or most of the time. I have seen ‘As I Was Moving Ahead …’. It’s really nice, but I think it might be impossible to live up to promise of that great title. Patti Smith: I really like the first single ‘Piss Factory’ and the ‘Horses’ album, but I’m not so interested in her stuff after that. I think it kind of gentrified or something? But I actually made a Rimbaud t-shirt for her and gave it to her when she came to LA on her first tour. She liked it enough to take me backstage to hang out with her and band, and that was very cool. And she gave me a poem for one of the issues of my lit magazine Little Caesar. So, she’s cool. I’m just mostly into her early, really daring period, I guess. I can’t say too much about the new film yet. It’s kind of about a 12 year-old puppeteer named Joey and his handmade hand puppet named Crumb. And some other characters. I did for a long time want to make porn film that would be the ‘Citizen Kane’ of porn, but after making Zac’s and my first film, which is kind of sort of a porn film that isn’t very sexy, I realised that I, at least, am not capable of making a masterpiece porn. Sadly. What’s new with you or what does your weekend promise? It’s great talking with you too. ** Thom, There you are, the maestro of the 24 hours. Well, more than 24 since the posts are eternal. What foolish, deluded people out there haven’t bitten? That’s outrageous! No, seriously, your name is from Tom Rapp and the ISB? That makes your name kind of holy, at least in my realm. I’m going to go listen to ‘Translucent Carriages’ to mark the occasion. ‘En Rade’ … maybe I haven’t read that. How strange. I’m on it. Thank you again in person for this great project and post. I’m so seriously chuffed. ** Okay. Y’all know what’s in store for you today, so I’ll leave you to it and then see you again tomorrow.