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Steve Flato, "Mara's Daughters"
Steve Flato's inaugural cassette release from Lengua de Lava bears two illuminating dedications: one to Richard Maxfield, the innovative American composer, Fluxus member, and electronic music pioneer, and one to Eliane Radigue, the French-born Buddhist convert, equally innovative, whose experiments with feedback, tape loops, and synthesizers gave birth to some of the subtlest and most hypnotic music of the 20th century. The influence of both can be heard on Mara's Daughters, but for the first 41 minutes—the entirety of side A—Radigue's ultra-precise, slowly-unfolding sound is upended. Flato plots his course over harsher terrain. His sound is confrontational and messy, a constantly churning chaos of grinding noise and digital squeals rendered with impressive clarity. It is the kind of bedlam that would ordinarily repel meditation or introspection, but Flato's stratified attack is so massive it implodes and, by unexpected means, pulls the listener into the reflective stillness at its center.
In some Buddhist scriptures, Mara is a demon who sends his three daughters to visit Siddhartha Gautama. Their aim is to seduce him and thereby tempt him away from enlightenment. Despite their beauty Siddhartha rebuffs them and, without celebration or any sign of self-satisfaction, continues down his path to egolessness. Whether or not he intended it, Flato's music reads as an abstracted mirror image of this story. Beside the obvious reference to Buddhism, so integral to Eliane Radigue's private and artistic development, "Mara's Daughters" offers up heavy, frequently strident sounds that harry the mind. They are forceful, emphatic, and distracting, the kind of noises that frustrate concentration on anything else. They are also physical and call to mind mechanical processes. Like Richard Maxfield, who recorded the sound of a tape machine's erase head and used it in his music, Flato documents the clamor of machines cannibalizing themselves. He generates spools of tumultuous racket from data files and alters their qualities by physically handling the tapes on which they are stored. Beneath and within these elements Flato has buried haggard tones that radiate a kind of wan melodiousness. As "Mara's Daughters" progresses those tones emerge more and more and the surrounding noises become just that. Patterns, imagined or otherwise, develop, sound sources become more distinct, and intense focus replaces reckless intensity.
On side B, "Mara's Veils" and "Salton Sea" paint a very different picture of Flato's music. "Veils" begins as a conflagration of rhythmic refuse and piercing sine waves, then slowly transforms into a resounding mass that rises and falls in long metallic breaths. It concludes with a series of harmonic shivers that glimmer in the silence the way mirages waver in the summer heat. This leads naturally to "Salton Sea," named for the accidental lake created in 1905 by engineers employed at the California Development Company. Like its namesake, the music is littered with debris. A constantly fluctuating drone fills the entire piece and above it, or perhaps beside it, bells, voices, and silvery harmonies resonate like ghostly voices echoing off the hardpan. They join the sound of bats and wild dogs barking in the distance, then lose their form. It all concludes with a stretch of manipulated tape. Flato pinches and presses the fabric of the recording, which warps, then bends, then loses its center. A short beep and an abrupt burst of static signals the end. It is an epiphany to realize that the same stillness is at the heart of both Flato's noise and the silence that circumscribes it.
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