Industrial hums are not inherently dramatic or musical. There are numerous ways engender a sense of drama, most of them suggestive of intent or austere to the point of making the presence of "art" unmistakable. Musicians can lean on what's signified in their names (Labradford, Iannis Xenakis) or the imagery on their album covers (graphs, power lines, nothing), or they can set industrial hums within surroundings that amplify their abstract nature (atmospheres, beats, more industrial hums).
Another way to engender drama is to simply be Scott Walker. Since reestablishing himself with his 1995 comeback album Tilt, Walker has maintained a formidable presence in art-music circles. If singing about Ingmar Bergman in the 1960s wasn't enough, everything Walker has done in his fertile later years has skewed as work that aspires to the heights of High Modernism. He's assayed atonal sounds. He's bedded down with formalism. He's invested his process with gestures, such as making a rhythm track for last year's The Drift by punching a big slab of meat found hung on a hook in a butcher shop.
Walker has banked lots of reasons to be taken seriously no matter the context, and that figures highly into hearing And Who Shall Go to the Ball? And What Shall Go to the Ball?, a score written to accompany a dance piece in England. It all starts with an industrial hum: an ominous, throbbing pulse that pushes the air out of a room when played loud. The fact that it was recorded by Walker ups the sense of foreboding already there, but the drama ticks up with sparse flickers of static and then a mad clash of what sounds like demonic klezmer-- a rush of reeds and expressive strings that fall apart as soon as they've struck a melody.
The score develops from there in a fashion similar to The Drift, with a focus on classical music delivered and denuded in an avant-garde vein. Intricate strings drive the action throughout the course of four movements, but sections give way to the dramatic rumble of drums (the kind played with mallets by guys in tuxedoes) and surprising bursts of brightness in which Walker sounds attuned to old Alfred Hitchcock scores composed by Bernard Herrmann.
The most dramatic aspect of the piece, however, involves reconciling the fact that Walker doesn't sing a single note from start to finish. If the absence of a voice when you're expecting it can play games with the mind, then the absence of Scott Walker's-- a tremendous, trembling voice that sounds deep, eerie, gorgeous, and terrifying all at once-- arouses a special kind of dramatic tension. For its voicelessness alone (as well as its short 25-minute running time), And Who Shall… can't be classed as a Walker album proper. But it goes a long way toward revealing the strengths of an artist who has established himself as a serious composer as well as a monumental presence-- even when he's not there to be heard.
