For three weeks I have attempted to finger the thematic underpinning of Ethan Rose's Spinning Pieces. A collection of three pieces recorded between 2003 and 2007, each track sources a different mechanical device: music boxes on "Miniature & Sea", player pianos on "...The Dot and the Line...", and an automated carillon-- a 100+ ton tower containing dozens of large bells-- on "Singing Tower". Each source is digitally kneaded into extended, wordless compositions.
So then, a theme. "Reclaiming the music from the machines" seems incongruous amid Rose's substantial computer-aided manipulation. "The juxtaposition of old and new technologies in music" fails because Rose is bent on blending sounds, not comparing them. "Transferring the mechanical into the digital" seems equally unpalatable, as Rose mostly borrows from the sources' tones, not their programmed pieces. Forget it: Spinning Pieces is plainly ambient mood music, however it was conceived. Keith Fullerton Whitman-- another sound philosopher-- often provides neat, ordered photos of the guitars, keyboards, and widgets he distills; if nothing else, Rose's fascination with noisemakers offers a similar measure of discovery. It's not that Spinning Pieces had to be recorded using these anachronistic devices, but their incorporation does provide a sense of rustic unity.
Anachronistic is the right term -- nostalgic is not. Player pianos have disappeared from everywhere but the atriums of medium-upscale department stores, and music boxes, well, iPod etc. And apologies to anyone bemoaning our nation's dearth of carillons, but Spinning Pieces isn't really about fondly remembering. Rather, Rose explores both the sounds these machines made and the methods with which they made them. "Singing Tower" opens with a series of ringing bells, but its quivering middle passage suggests the vibrations that push the air around the carillon's cables and hammers. "The Dot and the Line" reproduces not just the precise, rolling notes of the player piano but the hum of the music roll's turn. The crank of the windup key inhabits the blank space of "Miniature & Sea". Rose's additions are wooden and damp, at their best they recall the handcrafted boxes and constructs that held his machines.
These are the same ideas Rose mined on his 2006 debut Ceiling Songs, though likely because of Spinning Pieces' separate recording dates, the process here is more discrete. Any added distinction, however, does little to clear up how sounds from a tiny Portland piano shop end up as largely formless avant-garde compositions. Indeed, for all of its clever, quaint sourcing, Spinning Pieces skews toward the heavily abstract. There is nary a melody or rhythm to be found, unless you care to imagine the machines' natural hums into the tracks. "The Dot and the Line" turns a music roll's tune into hazy notes that wash ashore and before sliding backwards. The closing minutes of "Miniature & Sea" depict what a music box might sound like if its lullaby were smeared and played as a long, gently shifting tone.
Rose enjoys this sort of blurring: taking familiar, melodious tones and shaping them into still-recognizable but mostly dissimilar ideas. That these tones come primarily from mechanical gadgets gives form to the flotsam he injects between them; not merely pretty noises separated by digital wicker, Spinning Pieces is pretty noise strewn about the wires, gears, and scrolls there were once constrained by.
