David Torn Arrogant Ambient Music from a Guitarist Who's Not That Sure He's a Guitarist
by John Diliberto
The album credits and press bios say that David Torn plays guitar. And to further the illusion, they send out photos of him with a Steinberger slung around his neck. But the alien sounds, muulti-layered textures and melodic choruses he emits couldn't be anything but the most agile array of synthesisers. Torn doesn't play guitar, he defines entire spaces. Even he is confused sometimes.
"I don't know what I am anymore," he says with gleeful resignation, flipping aside his tousled brown hair and exhaling a stream of cigarette smoke. "I don't try to play fast very often and I wonder if I still can, actually. But I had that period where I had to develop a certain amount of speed and facility. Once I had done it, I had done it.
"Playing guitar as a guitar player isn't enough," he exclaims in the living room of his Bearsville, New York ranch house on three wooded acres, where he's lived since 1983 with his wife Linda and two children. "There's too much available in the guitar with the mixture of a little electronics stuff to not explore the possibilities.
"In popular American guitar the thing is the massive amount of speed and technique one can develop doing the old thing. How much faster can you do Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix and Van Halen? So they're amplifing the old shit of the guitar, and that stuff's got to die. So let's find a new way. I'd rather go see Henry Kaiser play, definitely, and see what he's doing, or Bill Frisell. They'll go through 50 sounds in a few seconds and make some kind of sense out of it."
Working with a combination of delays, reverbs, harmonizers, assorted guitar effects and MIDI controls, Torn transforms the guitar into an orchestror of texture, layering streams of sound that can flow from ethereal gentleness to psychotic anger to lyrical ecstasy. He's played with teh likes of Don Cherry, Jan Garbarek, Mark Nauseef, David Borden and virtually anywhere and everywhere with Mark Isham. On David Sylvian's Secrets of the Beehive, Torn insinuates himself with subtle grace into the vocalist's acoustic chamber works. In concert with his Cloud About Mercury group that includes drummer Bill Bruford, bassist Mick Karn (ex-Japan) and trumpeter Michael White, he drives the band with overlapping crescendos of sustained guitar that build like acid-banshees.
He's coined his own definition for it: "arrogant ambient music." "The David Sylvian tour was the arrogant ambience at its finest," he contends. "I don't think any band ever sounded like that before. Just layers and layers of texture, and then in comes screaming guitar or a burning jazz trumpet solo with weird guitar behind it. I still want that dichotomy. I still enjoy the conflict between stuff that's very atmospheric, hypnotic and relaxing and shit that's just all over your face. You try to wipe it off like a giant mosquito from hell, just attacking," he laughs.
The 35-year-old guitarist began honing his sound during the frenzied days of '60s psychedelia. He'd already given up the piano, which he started when he was 6. With a guitar his parents bought for him with S&H green stamps, he began ingesting the music and other substances associated with the era, fronting rock bands with musicians 10 and 15 years older than him. By the time he was 17, he was fried and dropped out completely, travelling in India (an experience that lingers in his playing) and essentially realigning himself.
He came back in the early '70s, when fusion was going full-bore, and was inspired by the music of the Mahavishnu Orchestra and guitarist John McLaughlin. He went to Berklee, the monastry of mega-note guitarists, thinking he'd get his jazz chops down. "But I was a reject at Berklee," he confesses. "I didn't fit, and therefore I only stayed for two months. I couldn't put my nose to the bop grindstone and transcribe solos and that whole routine. That just wasn't for me."
He shuffled around a variety of progressive rock groups, trying to find the handle between popularity and experimentation. His guitar style was already forming, with solos that twisted in feedback glissandos. "I can remember a couple of gigs where I was playing some solo routine thing in the middle of some bizzare rock tune and thinking, 'Ornette Coleman,' thinking of someone else further into the edge, into the noise realms. I thought, 'Saxophone players are allowed to overblow. It's been something happening in jazz for years. Well, why can't I get the effect of overblowing?' No great revelation, but I saw that out-of-control, distorted, feeding-back guitar sound, in combination with something physical on the guitar that feels like overblowing was acceptable."
Torn began steadily refining his sound, experimenting with multiple distortion devices and volume pedals. In his head, he heard more sound that you could get out of a single processed guitar, and in 1975 he thought an answer was the ARP Avatar, one of the first guitar synthesisers. He was dazzled by a demonstration, plunked down a small inheritance, took it home and has regretted it ever since. "I realized it had to be tweaked because it glitched like crazy, and no one could tweak it," he woefully recalls. "I was at the height of my technical period and everything I played was so clean that it was impossible that I was doing anything wrong."
After countless phone calls and visits to the engineers, who shook their heads and said that's as good as it gets, he wrote it off. It turned him off completely to synthesisers in general, and guitar synthesisers in particular. Not that he needs them. Torn instead developed sounds from a routing system that of effetcs and MIDI triggers that looked like a New York subway map. As part of his concept of orchestral guitar, he used digital looping and delay systems in real-time applications. He'd already heard the tape-loop processes of minimalist composer Terry Riley. "I was a Terry Riley fan from In C, A Rainbow in Curved Air, Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band," admits Torn. "That's really all I knew about looping. But once you stack one chord and play over it with a long looping effect delay time, for me there was no turning back."
Torn uses the delays for shifting washes of sound, through which he glides solos that are in turn transmuted into new loops and atmospheres. With the Yamaha MIDI Control Station, he taps six delay lines of his Lexicon PCM 42 and the effects of the Lexicon PCM 70. The PCM 42 has been modified to give him up to 20 seconds of delay. "I use delays in a longer sense," he explains, "just creating a space or atmosphere with the echos. When you get into 15- and 20-second delays, there's not a whole lot you're going to do rhythmically unless you're running a click track constantly. It's quite hard."
So with his sound fully developed, a distinctive set-up of electronic processing and a residue of ARP Avatar bitterness informing all conversations about synthesizers, why is a Stepp DGX MIDI Guitar sitting in the corner of Torn's studio, next to a Mac, an E-max sampler and a Casio CZ-101? "From my perspective it says a lot about the Stepp that I wanted to jump for it," he says. "I'd tried the Roland guitar synthesizers and felt the compromises I had to make in my playing weren't worthwhile. So when I saw the Stepp, and Steve Randall and Glyn Thomas playing it, it was happening.
"Of course, as soon as I got mine they went out of business and mine broke down and they couldn't fix it because there was no company anymore," he relates with ironic resignation. Uh-oh, ARP deja-vu.
The Stepp overcame his prejudice against canned synthesizer sounds becuase he'd already spent the better part of a yearcreating his own sound samples with an E-max. "I've built up a library of sounds that I feel are fairly unique," he claims. "Not only samples of non-guitar things, but my own library of guitar samples which are quite strange, and wouldn't really sound like anyone else since I did little performances with tape loops and then sampled them. It's an outgrowth of stuff I did with David Sylvian and stuff that's all over Mark Isham's record, Castalia. Both records have loops all over them, because I did the stuff on Sony F-1 digital tape, and I thought, 'Why don't I do that with my sampler, and when I get a controller that's working properly I'll mount it on the stand so I don't have to hold it all the time, and I'll be able to play a library of my samples. So I'll have two ways to play something that's really very personal."
In fact, his sounds are so personal that Torn had no compunction against simply leaving them with Isham, to place as he wished on Castalia. And they are all over it, providing a floating carpet of sound on which Isham drifts his delicate synthesizer melodies and trumpet improvisations. "He sampled and chopped it up the way he liked it and used it all over Castalia and particularly over this Windham Hill video he did, Tibet," says Torn. "Boring video but the music is really good."
I suggest that he might not be exercising the proper proprietry interest in his sounds. After all, some people are suing over just this kind of piracy. "I personally approved of it because of our friendship and working relationship," says Torn. "Same thing with David [Sylvian]. I even suggested that there might be times when he might want to use my stuff, and if it's credited I don't have any problem with that. With people that I trust, why not do that?"
For Torn, the sampler is part of the same sonic exploration he's been engaged with on the guitar. In fact, finding sounds is almost the best part. "You know what I do," he confesses, "if I have no inspiration to write anything or do anything creative, like structurally, I'll just get a sound to sample and spend hours perfecting a sound until it becomes something I can use."
Before he had the sampler he would fabricate instruments like The Thing, inspired by Don Cherry's dou'ssngouni. Torn took a defenseless acoustic guitar, smashed a hole in the back, mounted it with koto bridges and stuck a pickup on it. It can be heard on "Snapping the Hollow Reed" from Cloud About Mercury, but has since been given to David Sylvian. "I had to," laughs Torn. "Never has anyone wanted a thing so badly."
Sonic exotica continue to inspire Torn. "Look at these things that Sylv gave me," he cries. Like a kid with new toys he grabs a jamisen and shamisen, wto Chinese stringed instruments. "I haven't figured out what to do with this at all," he says, pointing to the shamisen, "but look at this 200-year-old snakeskin cover." He knocks the body of the jamisen, a Chinese banjo, and plucks out a pentatonic blues.
David Torn is on the edge of contemporary music. His records have been on the jazz ECM label, but they're not jazz. He's playing with art-pop musicians like David Sylvian, but he's improvising almost non-stop. We discuss his forthcoming project with ex-Santana drummer Michael Shrieve and synthesisist Steve Roach, which Shrieve is calling a jazz record. But with people like Mark Isham and Andy Summers, Torn thinks it could take another direction. "There's no point in putting a boundary on anything anymore."
"I'm really trying to make it clear to myself what I am as a guitarist. It's getting clearer, and as it does, it's clear to me that it's pretty different. Whatever it is that I'm doing, I can look at it and say, yeah, this is real different from Holdsworth, and really different from Frisell and Hendrix, and it's not at all like Henry Kaiser and it's not like a guitar player at all. What is it? What the fuck is it? I can pull all these things away from what I'm doing and it becomes pretty clear that I'm an odd bird, and I do have to find a way to fit in with other musics, you know. And I can. Everything feels like a challenge to me."
Printed in Musician, September 1988.
Sourced and supplied by Scott Hansen, May 2003.
Transcribed by John McCullagh, November 2003.
