Antivariation

"The inclusiveness of rock", writes Berio, "is connected with the absence of a predetermined structure." This is not strictly true. An enormous proportion of conventional pop records retain the predetermined structures popular songs have always had. Even otherwise extreme groups like the Who never diverge from the music-hall norm in their simple verse-refrain songs. More experimental groups such as Cream, the Grateful Dead, the Jimi Hendrix Experience and the Nice arc still dependent on blues form insofar as they show a tendency, even after long improvisatory flights, to pay lip-service to a peroratory restatement of the theme. In this kind of pop one often feels a tension, an inner contradiction between the music's electric momentum and the restraining formal influence of its historical antecedents. This is particularly to be regretted in a number like Spoonful from Cream's LP Wheels of Fire, whose form corresponds closely to the progression found in most Indian classical music, from a relatively loose, slow beginning to a fast, tense close. Unfortunately the blues rules are obeyed and a chorus in the opening slow tempo is tacked on to the piece's wild and constant accellerando. The return is anticlimactic rather than culminatory.

In Sister Ray from the Velvet Undergrounds's LP White Light White Heat the process of expansion is not frustrated, but allowed to play itself out. This group is connected with Andy Warhol, the pop artist notorious for his endless, antivariational films. They collaborate in particularly extreme forms of son et lumiere manifestations. In their systematic and relentless assaults on the senses they invite comparison with the unvarying single sounds favoured by the most provocative member of the American 'straight' avant-garde, Lamonte Young. One of Young's latest 'pieces' consists of unleashing a constant, amplified sound reminiscent of an iron-foundry in full cry, and leaving it to its own devices for a number of hours. In the Velvet Underground's Sister Ray an extraordinary process of metamorphosis is unleashed whereby the players, seemingly guided by the sound itself, gradually pare down the music to its basic essentials, reducing it to a single chord and then to a single note while the beat becomes divided into absolutely regular pounding quavers until something very like Lamonte Young's foundry sound is reached. No recapitulation is attempted. The dictates of the acoustic situation are obeyed absolutely.

A mindless experience? Of course—and one from which one returns greatly exhilerated. Is it coincidental that the same could be said of the last four minutes of Hey Jude?