The Totem that Listens Back

Charles E. Burchfield, Fantasy of Heat 1952-1958

Paul Turner

Four Walks in Three Parks

(2025)

It is the year 2025. I live in Canberra, Australia, having come to this part of the country over twenty years ago to take up a job as a high school mathematics teacher. I studied music in Melbourne a long time ago, which is where I first encountered musique concrete, its tools and concepts. Later, in Adelaide, I learned about mathematics and being a teacher, and where the breadth of what could be counted as music began to become clear to me.

—Paul Turner

Four Walks in Three Parks, to some who are following this series, might be considered one of the stranger pieces thus far. Strange is a relative word though—my strange will be different than your strange, and since I have a high threshold to which I consider to be strange, I’ll just say that this piece falls into the not just “strange” category but makes it into the “high strangeness” realm.

The phrase “high strangeness” was coined by ufologist J. Allen Hynek to describe eerie and uncanny events, both physical and psychic, surrounding UFO sightings. I’m using the phrase in a different way, in terms of how recorded music and sound act upon a listener’s imagination. I’ll keep the physical and psychic component—the imagination can work on many levels. Eerie and uncanny… certainly!

I’ve often talked about how Acousmatic music (and its many close musical siblings like electro-acoustic, ambient, drone, and numerous others) is often built from many strata of sound objects stacked on top of each other—like a Totem Pole composed of sonic waveforms. Imagination will dictate the nature of this polyphonic Totem Pole. Will it be solid—a banded rock formation in the high desert? So strong, so dense, where the aural material becomes heavy and thick? Or, on the other extreme, a fragile thing, made up of micro thin filigrees of wispy, spectral sounds, susceptible to even the slightest air disturbance caused by the powdered wings of a butterfly on the other side of the world?

Paul Turner’s piece is strange to me. I guess that might be saying something. I’ve listened to it in numerous ways. The Totem Pole structure of the piece is variable.

With each listen, a question arises in my mind concerning layers. Just how is this Totem Pole constructed? The layers are distinct but, as layers go, it’s hard to distinguish where the foundation of this sonic structure is and what is built on top of it. It changes, not only with each listen but within each listen. Strange.

Foot falls on a stoney path are heard that seem to be accompanied by the steady cadence of the sharp crack of a drum. This seems foundational. Maybe this is the safe harbor, the anchor that holds fast against the other. The other that is there, you can sense it, you can clearly hear it too, but it’s blocked out. Staved off behind a thin veil separating worlds.

Ghosts of recognizable Western music. Short bursts of a late-night Saxophone motif recalling rain-soaked streets in an empty city. Symphonic snippets that sound familiar but just can’t break through to the other side of certainty. Other chordal passages, lived in the past but pulled into the present, the now. Oddly, some sound alien, electronic. Are these the foundational “known” in a sea of unknowns?

The occasional penetration of the veil. A chopper overhead, a spell breaker. The presence of humankind, an intruder to a world which was built with materials foreign to it, except to the artist or the poet. Strange, tragic even, that such technologies are foundational. Such is the world as it is today.

Signs of other kinds of life. The life that is indigenous to this world. Its real owners, the baseline of everything. Camouflaging themselves out of necessity. Mimicking the intruders to blend in because survival is the only thing they know. Are they the foundational substrate that marks the journey that Four Walks in Three Parks promises while at the same time confounds the sonic pilgrim?

Sometimes confusion is a necessary building block of something beautiful. If you are looking for an endgame, a solution that might put this confusion to rest, look again. Or better yet, stop looking and just listen. That in itself is the beauty.

Strange, isn’t it?

—Michael Eisenberg

In a walk on the traditional lands of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri peoples in a now urban setting, one hears birds and frogs and the movement of air, but also the apparatus of European civilization. Signal and noise become entangled.

I cannot know that the piece will be meaningful for many listeners, but only that it now seems right to me, having labored on it for some time. The raw sounds are mostly recognizable and mundane, but I hope that in their combinations and juxtapositions there lies a potential stimulus for the imagination.

—Paul Turner

Paul Turner has a bandcamp page. Strangeness beckons.