Brendon Randall-Myers: dynamics of vanishing bodies

Composer and guitarist Brendon Randall-Meyers has written for numerous acoustic ensembles, and played in experimental rock bands, but it was joining the Glenn Branca Ensemble in 2015, and taking over as conductor three years later, that seems to weigh most heavily on this dazzling new album. His masterful harnessing of massed electric guitars is on vivid display on this stunner composed for the New York electric guitar quartet Dither (Gyan Riley, James Moore, Taylor Levine, and Joshua Lopes).

While the five-movement work is technically daunting, with frequent real-time shifts in tuning, physically grueling finger manipulations, rigorous pedal control, and ultra-precise harmonic effects, Dynamics of Vanishing Bodies never sounds ponderous or busy—although the fourth movement shreds viciously. Clusters of notes tangle in remarkable harmonies, waves of billowing feedback, tricky post-Sonic Youth tip-toe tones, and jagged lockstep patterns, all carving out space with a meaty yet agile attack. The composer uses sound to explore a sense of loss and absence visited by the death of his grandfather and periods of long-term geographic separation from his wife. Each sonic episode is followed by what he calls a “ghost of event,” refracting and diffusing each gritty section with a kind of spectral memory where volume and intensity are reduced, melting down the preceding moments into a drifting essence.

— Peter Margasak, 10.26.2020

Brendon Randall-Myers released his video for “Auras” this past September. Off his 2020 LP Dynamics of Vanishing Bodies (New Focus Recordings), the composer/guitarist wrote the 37-minute piece specifically for the NYC-based Avant-guitar quartet Dither. Thematically, the complex and challenging work deals with the notion of “absence as a felt presence,” and Randall-Myers echoes this with a varying sonic approach that uses foot pedals and looping parts to explore the after-effects of sound as musical presence.

Discussing the track, the composer tells us:

“In ‘Auras,’ three guitarists unfurl reverb-laden cascades of harmonics while the fourth captures snippets of the reverb in a looper, assembling a ghostly echo of the live music that remains after the other players stop performing. I was thinking about how spaces retain echoes of the people that occupy them, and about technology’s ability to preserve digital remnants of our experiences after they’re over. “

The video for the track uses lighting effects and processing to create a liminal visual experience exploring the nature of sight itself. Light’s wave-particle duality makes it the perfect metaphor for his theme of “absence as felt presence.” Randall-Myers explains:

“The footage for Auras was the result of a series of light experiments conducted by director Derrick Belcham and filmmaker Tracy Maurice (studiotracymaurice.com) in her Montreal studio. They spent several days combining various lighting sources, effectors, and filming techniques, putting each initial analog capture through many iterations to achieve deeper development and meaningful connection to the music. The addition of a simple mirror in portions of the final filming provided a layer of incidental metaphor and a further distance from the grounded materiality of the footage.”

— Iggy Pot, 12.15.2020

Dynamics of Vanishing Bodies, Brendon Randall-Myers’ five-movement, album-length work for four electric guitars, sounds something like a scaled-down variation on some of Glenn Branca’s long-form symphonies for massed guitar orchestra. That shouldn’t be entirely surprising, given that Randall-Myers, himself a guitarist as well as a composer, participated in the Glenn Branca Ensemble and conducted it after Branca’s death. Randall-Myers’ background in punk and metal is also evident, particularly in the work’s distorted timbres and dissonances. Randall-Myers builds much of the collective sound as an accumulation of interlocking, short motifs and/or rhythms; rather than going for an effect of sheer sonic mass, he leaves open spaces over which the ringing ends of these brief riffs can hang. The guitars, played here by the Dither quartet of Taylor Levine, Joshua Lopes, James Moore and Gyan Riley, put out a shimmeringly rich, reverb-drenched sound augmented by sustaining pedals and loops.

— Daniel Barbiero, 9.09.2020

From the very first moment, dynamics of vanishing bodies (2017) seems to shout the name of the spiritual godfather of its author Brendon Randall-Myers, member of the Glenn Branca Ensemble since 2016 and conductor of the same after the American master’s death in 2018. So far the name of the young guitarist and composer from Brooklyn has appeared mainly in collaborative albums and in collections of contemporary music for electric guitars: the one presented by the praiseworthy New Focus forge can therefore be considered his solo debut; and it’s hard to imagine a better way to introduce his eccentric and determined vision, a slow-burning engine that moving from an initially atmospheric trait proceeds towards an ecstatic peak of scorching intensity.

The exceptional architect of this performance is New York’s quartet Dither – formed by Taylor Levine, Joshua Lopes, James Moore and Gyan Riley – which previously performed works by Fred Frith, David Lang, Phill Niblock, Lee Ranaldo, Elliott Sharp and others, as well as being the protagonist of the first volume of “John Zorn’s Olympiad” (Tzadik, 2015). These are guitarists with a rigorous academic background who were then converted to experimental music, and that with Randall-Myers’ five-movement suite have the opportunity to commingle the various extended techniques associated with the amplified and distorted sound, dissected and absolutized by the pioneering experiences of no wave and totalism.

dynamics of vanishing bodies offers the ear a sort of cosmogony in gradual accumulation of energy: a clockwork mechanism whose strokes, in the first segment, are presented in the form of overtones and feedbacks with razor-sharp edges, subsequently enveloped by ambient trails and propagations generated by the volume pedal and e-bow. The reverb of the amplifiers prolongs the decay of the single sounds in less and less cadenced succession, with a third movement that briefly allows them to breathe in their vague and isolated trajectories, deviated through slight manual detunings.

It is actually the completion of an anticlimax that leads to the abrasive epicenter of the work, a discharge of major chords and cacophonous compounds, a jutting mass of dark matter within which proliferate anxiety-inducing ascending scales and hammering rhythmic interlocks of natural harmonics and palm muting. Here’s where the dazzling catharsis of Branca’s symphonies fully relives, a profane sublimation that extends in the form of airy loops to the last, melancholy movement: if not the reestablishment of some universal order, at least the pacified dampening of a disruptive and troubled genesis, an arbitrary rewriting of the primordial energies hurling us in and out of existence.

The powerful completeness of Randall-Myers’ work unhinges the exciting prospect of an “electrified chamber” music bringing the post-minimalist legacy to uncharted expressive waters, while maintaining its transcendental vein intact. Dither quartet’s performance undoubtedly represents a defining moment for this new course, as well as one of the emotional high points of the year.

— Michele Palozzo, 9.27.2020

The electric guitar’s capacity for crying out loud is well documented, yet I’m hard pressed to think of a lamentation quite so arresting as the one that starts dynamics of vanishing bodies, a 2017 composition by Brendon Randall-Myers. Partly that has to do with numbers: not one electric guitar, but four, in the expert hands of Dither, a New York quartet known for championing and – by necessity – expanding the repertoire available for such a configuration.

But it also has to do with the piquant tunings Randall-Myers requires from the players: this movement, and indeed the entire piece, demands guitarists capable of excessive physical exertion, but also precise retuning on the fly. The composer knows that in Dither – Taylor Levine, Joshua Lopes, James Moore, and Gyan Riley – he’s got the right players for the task, not least because he’s served on occasion as a substitute member.

Chords, clusters, and intervals jostle, merge, and shimmer like heat haze in “missing fundamentals,” the first of the work’s five movements, in a manner not wholly removed from the free stretches in a choice Sonic Youth live tape. That should come as no surprise, seeing as how Randall-Myers, like Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo, came up under the wing of Glenn Branca, a guitar-wielding composer who knew his way around volume, intonation, and massed guitars.

It’s no coincidence that missing is in the movement’s title, since deep personal loss and extended separation motivated this composition. Hefty, jagged shards of sound flash past your intellect, landing somewhere closer to the heart. But not everything here feels animated by the weight of grief and solitude. The blissful second movement, “auras,” twinkles like a night sky specked with pinprick stars and smeared with ambient illumination. It sounds like a music box crossed with a glass harmonica and plugged into a wall socket.

Next is “phantom rhythms (with singing),” where the whisper of electricity, coursing through plugs and wires, maintains a constant presence. The fourth movement, “trem chorale/harmonic melody,” taps into the obsessive riffing and confrontational snarl of punk rock, pushed right up against the border of black metal’s nihilistic buzz. (There’s also, at 4:50, a high-pitched tremor that reminds me of Steve Stevens slicing into the opening bars of “White Wedding”—but probably that’s just me.)

This music is physically punishing, but also detailed with fanatical precision; again, it’s hard to think of anything I’ve heard previously that behaves or resounds quite this way. And there’s one last coup in store, when “vanishing bodies (lines and loops)” arises from the dying embers of the previous movement, its eerie spiritual viscosity achieved with pedals and loops.

What results is saturated with an unearthly glow. Still, Randall-Myers doesn’t attempt to hide the subtle mechanical clicks and clacks of pedals being engaged and disengaged—a gesture that grounds the raw electricity of this uncanny music with the physicality of lived experience.

— Steve Smith, 9.25.2020

Brendon Randall-Myers is a composer and electric guitarist with a multifaceted musical history—from conducting the Glenn Branca Ensemble to performing Bach. His new album, dynamics of vanishing bodies (New Focus Recordings), written for the electric guitar quartet Dither, focuses on the use of psychoacoustic effects to explore the sensations of place and memory. We sat down for a video chat to discuss his new record and his long relationship with the guitar.

Vanessa Ague (Rail): When did you start playing guitar?

Brendon Randall-Myers: I started when I was 11 or 12. I had my dad’s acoustic guitar, and I tried to start learning on it, but it was painful and too big for me. Shortly thereafter, my parents bought me an electric guitar plus an amp that together cost about $80.

Rail: Did you do classical training when you started playing?

Randall-Myers: I was self-taught for a year or two, and then my cousins gave me a few pointers. The year before high school, I started taking rock and jazz lessons. I grew up in rural West Virginia, so there weren’t a ton of teachers around. There are a lot of really amazing folk musicians in West Virginia and a lot of good rock players, too, but they're all far apart. Even this teacher was a 25-minute drive each way to get there.

I was homeschooled until high school, when I went to Phillips Exeter. I did everything I could there. I did rock, classical, and jazz guitar. I played in five rock bands. I was taking jazz piano. I finished the entire music theory curriculum by the end of my second year.

I kept doing classical guitar all through undergrad. I finished undergrad and I did another year of playing classical guitar somewhat consistently, and then I just stopped. I went back to electric and realized that I like practicing electric in a way that I don't like practicing classical guitar. Classical always felt like a lot of work, and electric guitar feels like a thing I can just do.

Rail: How did you get into the downtown-New York scene?

Randall-Myers: Early in high school, I got into math metal, like The Dillinger Escape Plan and Converge, and from there it was a short path to Mr. Bungle, which was a short path to John Zorn. Zorn was the first experimental composer that I really knew when I was 15 or 16, and it was totally through those Bungle records.

In undergrad, I got to know minimalist composers, but I feel like I only internalized Glass when I played Two Pages in my immediately post-undergrad math rock band. Glenn Branca was someone else that I knew relatively early through Sonic Youth. Once I was down the Bungle/Zorn, Sonic Youth/Branca rabbit holes, I was hopelessly a nerd.

Rail: When you were discovering all this music, were you also playing it, or were you just getting it in your ear?

Randall-Myers: I wasn’t playing the really experimental stuff. I played in a hardcore band my first year of undergrad, but then all those other people graduated and I didn't play loud music again the rest of the time. I was just playing in classical guitar ensembles. I lived in San Francisco for three years after undergrad and studied composition privately. I played in a math rock band and didn't really start performing contemporary music.

As a performer, I love playing really stressful, physically exhausting music for reasons that I can't fully explain. The same things that I get out of distance running I get out of playing Two Pages. If you screw up, you're just done.

Rail: I would assume that your experiences with the Glenn Branca Ensemble, conducting and playing, would surround that physicality of performance as well.

Randall-Myers: It's hard to find music that asks more of you. When I was one of the guitarists, I found it less insane. It drew on skills I've spent a long time cultivating. As a conductor, it is the most physically demanding and emotionally demanding performance experience I think I've ever had, especially the first one at MIT, which was the first ensemble performance that we did after [Glenn] died. You can play the notes, but you have to bring the energy, or it’s not Glenn. So that first performance was about finding that energy.

Rail: You wrote dynamics of vanishing bodies for Dither, a group that you also play with. Did you have a lot of collaboration and communication with them?

Randall-Myers: I don't do a whole lot of work where I'm just writing a one-off piece for someone—it's usually the culmination of a much longer relationship, and that's super true here. In the first performance, it was a little more prescriptive than I like to be with performers. Since then, I revised it a little bit—the whole last section of the piece used to be completely written out, and now they improvise the last four or five minutes.

I wrote dynamics of vanishing bodies after a period where Fay, my partner, was waiting to get her green card. It was five months, and I was not sure when we would be in the same place. I was thinking about the weirdness of spaces that people inhabit and then no longer inhabit, and also about technology and how technology can preserve these parts of people. Those are the two things I was trying to get at in the piece with its psychoacoustic effects.

Rail: The title is a double entendre, right? Because dynamics of vanishing bodies is a physics textbook, but it's also about a vanishing presence.

Randall-Myers: Yes, and I will admit that it's a riff on a John Luther Adams piece, The Mathematics of Resonant Bodies (2006).

Rail: Do you have an interest in physics?

Randall-Myers: Not especially an interest. I got back into the math aspects of acoustics because I was listening to this Maryanne Amacher record, which led me down a rabbit hole. Right when Trump got elected, I started trying to write a metal record with Doug Moore, who is the singer of Pyrrhon and a band called Weeping Sores. This summer, I finally finished that piece and what that turned into is kind of like the dynamics of vanishing bodies sequel. I've been forced to systematize some of the math things again to make it repeatable and a little more harmonically robust.

Rail: Did that dynamics of vanishing bodies sequel have any correlation to the election, or was that coincidental?

Randall-Myers: It's definitely not coincidental. There's all of this white male anger that's everywhere, and I was very aware of the aggression in my own music. Harshness is still there in this piece, but it's much more about tools to exist with pain and exist with uncertainty and discomfort and anxiety, and to hopefully find some beauty in that process.

There's also something for me about changing my relationship with catharsis and what I want out of heavy music. Heavy music has always been kind of a safety valve for me. I'm trying to learn other tools to manage my own feelings other than just raging in a pit. That's what a lot of the music that I've written in the past four years is: it's trying to sit with something long enough to see what's really in there.

Rail: Is that why you took up long distance running?

Randall-Myers: Long distance running preceded this; that was something I got into in high school, actually. The last couple of months, I took a class on nonviolent communication with my mom, and so much of that is about paying attention to what your body is doing. It connects so directly to the running practice because that's all you have to sit with on a 20-mile run. Bringing that awareness first to the body allows me to make better decisions with the rest of me. I've started connecting the running practice to the music practice more overtly in the last couple of years. This is also part of why I like metal. In the process of trying to do these ridiculous runs, you end up having to develop a pretty deep connection with your body. I've tried to abstract some of those ideas around endurance and physical presence and do it in music that isn't always as abrasive.

— Vanessa Ague, 10.15.2020

Has hauntology also penetrated contemporary music? The term was coined in 2005 when critics Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds began to describe a sort of network of artists, mainly English, among which the musicians of the Ghost Box label and others spiritually related played an important role.

This term was very lucky. The concept, borrowed from Jacques Derrida’s book “Specters of Marx” (1994), is based on a play on words around the terms “ontology” and “haunted” which allowed the author to exploit the philosophically problematic entity of the ghost (the to be/not to be, presence/absence) to reflect on the mysterious resistance of Marxist ideas after the death of communism.

The concept of hauntology was hugely successful in academia, where it was used as a theoretical framework for lectures and essays on memory and ruins. But it has also been transformed into a watchword in the art world: in the first decade of 2000, works based on archives, historical memory, lost and fallen futures were in vogue.

“This strand of “ghostified” music doesn’t quite constitute a genre, a scene, or even a network. But it is an entity, nebulous and as yet nameless. “Hauntology”, my early nomination for genre handle, is tad clunky and carries a heap of post-structuralist baggage (it’s Derrida’s pun on ontology, part of his attempt to track the undercurrent of “spectrality” in Western thought, especially Marxism). “Spectral music” is already taken, referring to a very particular form of avant-classical composition. “Memoradelia”, as proposed by critic Patrick McNally, is just a little too neutral, lacking the spook factor. And “eldritchronica” (another of mine), while cute and accurate (most of these operators have roots in Nineties electronic dance: early UK techno, IDM, trip hop) is just a bit of a mouthful. So perhaps it’s better that this remains a genre-without-name: more of a flavour or atmosphere than a style with boundaries. Perhaps this whatever-it-is ought to elude our grasp, like mist or mirage. ”

And even certain musical niches, particularly dub step, have drawn ideas and mental panoramas from these ideas. In particular, the glacial near future evoked by the atmospheres created by Burial, well documented and analyzed by Mark Fischer in his book “Ghosts of My Life”.

Extraordinary mythographer, Burial proved to be a sound poet capable of articulating the existential malaise, the melancholy and the afflictions and of a place, the wounded London, populated by the victims of ecstasy, by the nihilism emerging after the happy hangover of the rave years and the economic crisis caused by the collapse of sub prime mortgages. And contemporary music? The great absent. For years I have been looking for traces of hauntology in the works created by academic composers, but nothing.

Now, finally, a sign of life. The emergence of a connection between the subculture of contemporary guitar music, which I like to call the “conceptual guitar” and the subcultures deriving from popular music. It took time, but a message was picked up. On September 25, 2020 the cd by composer Brendon Randall-Myers was released for the independent label New Focus Recordings, the title is already a manifesto: “Dynamics of Vanishing Bodies”. Created thanks to a residence sponsored by the Jerome Foundation at Roulette Intermedium in Brooklyn, the composition, which is divided into five parts, was presented for the first time at Roulette Intermedium in 2017, and was subsequently performed by the Dither electric guitar quartet at Bang on a Can’s LOUD Weekend and The Stone NYC in 2019.

The album was recorded at Brooklyn’s Greenpoint Recording Collective and mixed by two-time Grammy nominee Mike Mike Tierney. On the New Focus Recordings website you will find this presentation text “At the root of Randall-Myers’ piece lies a palpable sense of ‘absence as a felt presence’; of the pain felt facing a void when a loved one has gone. The loss of his grandfather ignited this haunting sense of absence, as did lengthy periods apart from his wife (then based in Beijing while on a winding path to a Green Card). Randall-Myers describes the space around him as having been both empty and ‘full of memories’. “I was in our apartment surrounded by our stuff and communicating digitally with her, but with no idea when I’d be able to be with her in that space again.” This separation directly informed the emotional intensity of dynamics of vanishing bodies, formulating as it does delayed reflections of itself; organised within its five-movement structure as “event” followed by “ghost of event”. Does it remind you of anything?

If Burial is a sampling magician, managing to generate strong and livid sensations using only sampled voices, broken break-beats and sound effects from musique concrete, then Brendon Randall-Myers is a genius in using the possibilities offered by the virtuosity of the Dither quartet. The guitars become sampling and micro-beats. The hum of the amplifiers, the feedbacks that pay homage to Glenn Branca’s volumes and the manipulations of the pedalboards replace the dub spaces, the diaphanous voices and the electrostatic crackle of Burial’s albums and if the strength of Derrida’s concept lies in the idea of ​​being obsessed from events that never really happened, from futures that never happened and that float in the subconscious of our societies like unsatisfied ghosts, then “Dynamics of Vanishing Bodies” is the “conceptual guitar” version of the connections created by Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds. This sense of temporal disjunction can be appreciated even more through videos.

I could listen to Auras millions of times, getting lost in the broken rhythm, in the electric short circuit, in the metallic dripping generated by the haunted guitars and tuned in twenty different ways. Thank you so much! What an incredible record.

— Andrea Aguzzi, 3.22.2021

Brendon Randall-Myers’ first composition for electric guitar quartet is performed by Dither, which includes Terry Riley’s son, Gyan Riley. The five movements are both intimate and distant, sharp and soothing. The striking “Missing Fundamentals” mainly consists of crests of controlled feedback, and will likely crush your speakers if you play it too loud. “Auras” is less startling, more a dreamlike ring of several close-miked guitars plucking away in intricate circles. After the brief waking winkling of “Phantom Rhythms (With Singing)”, “Trem Chorale/Harmonic Melody” is more forceful, barreling straight into the heart of the unknown with with a tough but adventurous spirit, and easily the most exciting section of the piece. Randall-Myers has been conducting the Glenn Branca Ensemble since the composer’s 2018 passing, and this track is where the album matches the force of Branca’s best work. The concluding “Vanishing Bodies (Lines and Loops)” is mostly calm levitation and floating, although there’s a few flashes where tones jump out a bit more, and it plays off of patterns like this for the final minutes.

— n/a, 10.17.2020

Although it is central to rock music, the electric guitar plays only a small role in classical music, even among contemporary composers. Of course there are exceptions. Some readers might remember the late Glenn Branca—he died in 2018—who composed several symphonies for phalanxes of electric guitars and percussion. As loud as a heavy metal concert, sometimes, they nevertheless were less about headbanging and more about the implications of alternative tunings and microtonality.

Brendon Randall-Myers’s Dynamics of Vanishing Bodies was premiered in 2017 in a performance by the electric guitar quartet Dither, of whom Randall-Myers himself was a member at that concert. The blurb for that concert called the work “brutally ethereal,” and continued, “At play are psychoacoustic effects (timbral fusion and phantom rhythms) created by overtone interaction, interlaced with gradual decay in cycles at a nearly-imperceptible scale.” Indeed, the first several minutes and the fourth section (“Trem Chorale,” “Harmonic Melody”) of this five-section work do violence to one’s ears—I wonder how loud this was in concert?—while other sections (for example, “Aura,” which is the second) are almost delicate and perhaps even pretty. I would like to know more about “phantom rhythms,” etc., but the description I have just quoted is at least more than New Focus Recordings has provided us with. The label supplies no information whatsoever about the composer and his work. According to his own website, “Brendon Randall-Myers is a Brooklyn-based composer and guitarist with an affinity for complex, cathartic, endurance-based music at various intersections of rock, experimental, theater, and classical.” Also, “his music aims to induce trance/flow states via repetition and amplification, inspired by experiences on 20-mile runs and performing in punk and metal bands.” So now you know.

If you have read this far, perhaps this music interests you. I am not sure if I like it or dislike it, but it does make me say “Gee whiz” and “Golly gee,” and it is difficult to ignore. It becomes more digestible the more than you hear it. I think it would have been fun to be at the first performance, although earplugs probably would have been a good idea. (At home, you can simply turn the volume down, although that is cheating.) I have no reason to believe that the four guitarists who participate here (Taylor Levine, Joshua Lopes, James Moore, and Gyan Riley) fall short of the composer’s expectations, as he co-produced this release.

I mean no disrespect when I write that some tolerance for what many people would call noise is required to appreciate this recording. I find the sound of this fascinating, although I do not think that I had an emotional response to it.

— Raymond Tuttle, 1.28.2021