Folke Rabe - 2012 - What??

 

Important Records – IMPREC368

What?? begins by asking a question so elementary that most music never needs to ask it. What is a sound before it becomes a note, a melody, a chord, an emotion or a recognizable instrument? Folke Rabe removes nearly every ordinary answer and leaves the listener inside vibration itself. There is no performer to watch, no beat by which elapsed time can be measured, no sequence of themes promising eventual resolution. A sustained electronic field appears, changes almost imperceptibly and invites the ear to travel inward rather than follow it forward.

The title has moved among Swedish, German and English as Va??, Was?? and What??, but the uncertainty remains intact. The punctuation does not feel like confusion about what to call an unfamiliar composition. It is the composition. Rabe places a question mark beside the entire category of music, then adds another because one question may not be sufficient. What is sounding? What are we actually hearing when we believe we hear one tone? What becomes audible after contrast, rhythm and melodic movement have been reduced almost to zero?

Rabe created the work in 1967 at the electronic studio of Swedish Radio, during an era when electronic composition was frequently associated with complicated serial structures, bursts of laboratory activity, spatial effects and futuristic novelty. What?? moves in nearly the opposite direction. Its technology does not demonstrate an expanding catalog of remarkable sounds. It commits to a restricted family of harmonic materials and remains there long enough for that apparent restriction to become immense.

The piece grew from Rabe’s attempt to “hear into” sounds. He had noticed that a piano tone does not merely become quieter after the key is struck. Its internal balance changes as it decays. Certain overtones remain audible longer than others, causing the note’s color to transform even when its fundamental identity appears stable. He also listened closely to vowels, hearing brittle little stairways of formants emerge when the mouth slowly changes shape while pitch remains constant. These were not merely acoustic facts to be understood intellectually. Rabe wanted the ear to experience them directly.

A harmonic sound contains a fundamental frequency accompanied by partials related to it through whole-number ratios. We ordinarily perceive this complex structure as one unified tone, much as we see a face rather than separately inventorying every line and shadow. What?? weakens that automatic unity. Rabe isolates, emphasizes and blends partials until the supposedly single sound begins revealing its internal population. One tone becomes many rooms.

This makes the music resemble magnification without representing anything visual. A microscope does not necessarily add information to the object being examined; it changes the scale at which available information can be perceived. Rabe performs a similar operation upon hearing. The piece enlarges relationships normally crossed in fractions of a second and gives them enough duration to become environments.

Approximately eighty-five percent of the material was electronically generated, but Rabe emphasized that the tones are never presented in their original static condition. Each partial receives separate treatment. Harmonic fields move into one another through what he called enharmonic melding, with compatible partials reinforcing, disguising or transforming their neighbors. The result can create the illusion that a new tone has entered when the existing material has merely redistributed its energy.

This is why the word “drone,” while useful, remains incomplete. A drone suggests one continuous pitch or tonal center held beneath changing activity. What?? contains sustained sound, but the sustaining is itself the activity. Its internal proportions continually reorganize. A high whistle rises from a dense middle register, remains visible for a while and disappears. A low vibration begins behaving like machinery. Clusters form around frequencies that may have been present all along but only recently became perceptually dominant.

Nothing here is motionless. The movement simply occurs below the speed at which Western composition ordinarily announces change. Rabe was fascinated by monotony because repetition and extension could reveal details that stronger contrasts concealed. Place a delicate variation beside a dramatic chord change and it may disappear. Remove the dramatic change, and the variation acquires the force of an event.

Monotony therefore becomes an instrument of disclosure. The listener’s first few minutes may be spent identifying the broad object: a dense, hovering band of electronic sound. Once that identification no longer requires attention, the ear begins searching within it. Small pulses become audible. Frequencies appear to beat against one another. Phantom rhythms develop where adjacent tones repeatedly reinforce and cancel each other. The piece has not necessarily added a percussion part; hearing has learned to recognize motion inside interference.

These beating patterns are partly physical rather than compositional in the ordinary sense. Two nearby frequencies combine in the air and create fluctuations according to the difference between them. Speakers, room dimensions and listening position can alter which relationships become most prominent. Move through the room and the composition changes. Turn the head and a thin frequency may appear or vanish. What?? is fixed on the recording, but it is never completely fixed in space.

The listener’s body participates as well. Low frequencies can be felt through the chest, floor or furniture, while high partials may seem to occupy a point inside or immediately behind the skull. Rabe’s electronics possess no visible source corresponding to a violin string or saxophone bell, so the brain cannot easily place them within an imagined performance. Sound becomes detached from the image of somebody producing it and attaches instead to the surfaces through which it is currently passing.

This physical uncertainty is one reason What?? can feel both enormous and intensely private. At sufficient volume, it seems to fill the building with one continuous substance. At the same time, some of its finer interactions may exist only at the listener’s precise location. Another person a few feet away is technically hearing the same recording but inhabiting a slightly different arrangement of resonances.

Rabe had begun his musical life as a jazz trombonist, and his later catalog remained deeply connected to brass instruments. Although What?? rejects the breathing phrasing of an instrumental performance, his background offers a useful route into its sound. Brass players live inside the harmonic series. Embouchure, air pressure and tubing determine which partial becomes dominant, while the player learns to feel several possible notes existing inside one resonating column of air. What?? takes that internal ladder of possibilities and removes the lungs that ordinarily climb it.

Rabe described electronic devices as having no muscles. Their natural characteristic is tireless endurance rather than expressive breathing. Instead of forcing machines to imitate a performer inhaling, swelling and relaxing, he allowed their inhuman persistence to determine the form. This was an unusually respectful relationship with technology. The machine was not asked to disguise itself as an orchestra. It was allowed to do what the human body cannot: maintain and manipulate tones without fatigue for a seemingly endless duration.

The first version lasts a little over twenty-five minutes. Its opening has an immediate density, as though the recording begins after an unseen engine has already been operating for years. There is no fade from silence explaining how the structure was assembled. We arrive inside it. The sound appears ancient and technological at once, less like a futuristic device being switched on than a permanent electrical climate that human beings have only recently learned how to detect.

High frequencies hover above a rougher middle body while low material produces the impression of motors heard through walls. The layers do not form a clean chord. Their alignment is close enough to suggest order but unstable enough to prevent rest. At moments the field seems to be tuning itself. At others it seems that tuning is the very condition from which it will never escape.

This instability gives the original-speed version an emotional intensity sometimes softened by the word “minimalism.” Minimalism can imply clean surfaces, rational repetition and an elegant reduction of means. What?? is reduced, but it is not particularly clean. Its frequencies rub, accumulate and produce a queasy pressure. The work may be systematic, yet the result feels biological, meteorological or even geological.

The sound occasionally resembles an enormous ventilation system whose mechanical hum has developed consciousness. It can suggest fluorescent electricity, distant aircraft, bowed metal, industrial refrigeration or voices held beneath a surface. None of these sources is literally present. The mind manufactures them because it dislikes an effect without an identifiable cause. Rabe gives the imagination enough acoustic evidence to create images, then refuses to confirm any of them.

That refusal distinguishes What?? from electronic music built as sonic illustration. There is no official spaceship, factory, cosmic birth or nuclear landscape hidden in the composition. Such images may appear, but they belong to the listener. Rabe is concerned with sound’s internal facts rather than the external objects it might convincingly imitate.

Paradoxically, this makes the piece unusually fertile for imagination. Conventional program music supplies a narrative and asks the sound to support it. What?? supplies the sound and allows narratives to arise as temporary side effects. One passage may feel cosmic during one listening and claustrophobic during another. The electronic material has not changed, but the listener brings different fears, memories and environments into its sustained question.

Rabe’s resistance to conventional Western structure was not a rejection of the European tradition’s achievements. He recognized that notation enabled elaborate construction, coordination and preservation. His criticism concerned what notation had pushed toward the background. Subtle relations of tuning, tone color and temporal inflection are difficult to capture on a page. As systems of written music became increasingly powerful, qualities resistant to writing could be treated as secondary decoration.

What?? reverses that hierarchy. Tone color is not applied to a composition; tone color is the composition. Tuning is not a preparatory stage completed before the music begins; tuning becomes the drama. Duration is not a container divided into measures; duration supplies the conditions under which the material becomes intelligible.

Rabe contrasted this with musical cultures where qualitative aspects of immediate sound remain central, and recalled Indian musicians saying that Western music continually breaks off before it has begun. The remark reaches the heart of What??. A chord in European concert music may last only long enough to establish its function before moving toward the next chord. Rabe holds the door open. The sound is permitted to begin completely.

That does not mean he imitates Indian classical music. There is no borrowed raga, tabla pattern or picturesque Eastern surface. The influence is more fundamental: patience with a tonal field, attention to internal tuning and the understanding that duration can deepen rather than delay the musical event. Rabe learned from another way of organizing listening rather than decorating European electronics with imported symbols.

The original work premiered in 1967 during a collective evening called Signery at Stockholm Radio Hall, presented with Jan Bark and Bo Anders Persson. Persson would soon become a crucial figure in Pärson Sound, International Harvester and the communal Swedish psychedelic tradition. The connection is more than an entertaining genealogical detail. Rabe and Persson shared an interest in repetition as a means of changing perception, although one worked through electronic partials and the other increasingly through amplified group performance.

In 1970, Wergo placed Rabe’s piece, then titled Was??, beside Persson’s “Proteinimperialism” on one LP. The pairing joined two radically different answers to the problem of sustained sound. Rabe constructed a meticulously treated electronic continuum; Persson used instruments, improvisation and psychedelic electricity. Academic electronic music and the Swedish underground occupied opposite sides of the same object without needing to become the same style.

That original context complicates the later classification of What?? as an isolated drone masterpiece. Rabe was not sealed inside a laboratory unaware of the wider musical upheaval surrounding him. His work touched experimental theatre, choral writing, jazz, brass composition, radio and musicians who would help form Sweden’s countercultural rock language. The piece’s austerity was one part of an unusually social and curious musical life.

Its apparent impersonality may therefore be misleading. What?? contains no conventional performer, but it emerged from somebody listening intensely to piano decay, vowels, instrumental harmonics, other musical cultures and the capabilities of a particular public broadcasting studio. Every electronic decision originated in curiosity. The work sounds inhuman only because human curiosity has asked the machine to reveal a scale the body cannot sustain unaided.

The first version gradually increases in apparent brightness and pressure. This development is difficult to divide into sections because the transitions occur through redistribution rather than replacement. One frequency does not stop so that another may begin. Their relative prominence changes until the ear realizes it is standing in another part of the same building.

Near the final stretch, the partials begin aligning with an almost luminous force. What had seemed abrasive reveals a strange consonance inside itself. The effect can feel like resolution, but it is not the ordinary satisfaction of a harmonic journey reaching its home chord. The home has been present throughout. The listener has finally become able to perceive its architecture.

This arrival is emotionally powerful precisely because Rabe avoids conventional emotional signals. No melody rises to announce transcendence. No cymbal confirms the climax. The sound simply becomes more completely itself. After twenty minutes of microscopic instability, reinforcement among the partials creates the sensation of an enormous object turning toward the light.

The ending can resemble a major chord emerging from inside a machine, but its beauty retains friction. The consonance has not defeated dissonance. Both have been revealed as different relationships among the same material. Frequencies that once seemed hostile may become components of a larger unity when the listening scale changes.

The second track begins the entire process again at half speed. This is not another composition and not a modern remix designed to add value to a reissue. Playing the tape at half its original speed doubles every duration and lowers every frequency by an octave. The internal proportions remain related, but the listener encounters a substantially different physical object.

The transformation demonstrates how dependent musical identity can be upon scale. A rapid pulse in the original becomes a slow undulation. A piercing frequency moves into a warmer register. A brief transition becomes a prolonged environmental shift. The same information seems less anxious, more spacious and more obviously connected to later drone music, despite having been generated by no new compositional action.

At original speed, the sound often feels as though it is pressing outward against its container. At half speed, the container appears to expand around it. Harsh upper partials descend into regions where their interaction becomes bodily rather than piercing. The machinery grows larger and slower, as though the first version documented a device and the second allows us to enter its interior.

Rabe occasionally used the slowed version in performance, suggesting that he did not regard playback speed as a sacred property permanently fixed during composition. The recording was material whose scale could be altered according to context. This is another quiet challenge to Western ideas of the definitive work. Which is the true What??: the original realization, the half-speed journey, the room in which either is played or the field created between speakers and one particular nervous system?

The half-speed version also reveals that time and pitch are physically connected in analog recording. Lowering the tape speed does not separately transpose the notes and stretch the timeline. Both changes are consequences of one mechanical action. Duration and frequency prove to be two readings of vibration. The album turns that technical fact into philosophical experience.

The listener now receives more than seventy-six minutes generated from one approximately twenty-six-minute electronic construction. This could be understood as repetition, but the two tracks do not feel interchangeable. The first trains the ear for the second. After learning the original field’s internal behavior, one enters its enlarged version with a more sensitive vocabulary. Details that might have remained anonymous during an initial encounter begin announcing relationships.

The reverse can also occur. Hearing the slower version first may make the original seem compressed, agitated and unexpectedly rhythmic. The tracks form a perceptual instrument for examining one another. Each is the control experiment and the altered condition at the same time.

Jim O’Rourke and David Grubbs restored the work to circulation through their Dexter’s Cigar imprint in 1997, pairing the original with the half-speed version. That reissue placed Rabe within another historical network. Listeners shaped by experimental rock, post-rock, noise, improvised music and the rediscovery of neglected minimalism could now hear What?? less as an academic artifact than as an ancestor whose future had finally caught up with it.

Important Records returned to that expanded configuration in 2012, adding archival material supplied by Rabe. The label’s catalog, with its sustained investment in drone, minimalism, acoustic phenomena and artists including Eleh, Pauline Oliveros and Éliane Radigue, provided another fitting habitat. What had once appeared almost without category could now sit among decades of work exploring closely related questions.

This later context should not be allowed to make What?? seem inevitable. Drone is now an established listening language, extending through minimal composition, ambient music, doom, noise, installation, electroacoustic work and countless home recordings. In 1967, Rabe was creating this sustained harmonic environment before listeners possessed that accumulated history. The work did not merely enter a genre. It helped demonstrate that such a genre could exist.

At the same time, historical priority is not the principal reason to hear it. A recording can be first and still be uninteresting. What?? remains alive because its material continues producing perceptual events. Modern speakers, headphones and rooms may expose relationships that older playback systems rendered differently. The piece has aged, but it has not finished developing.

Its technological limitations may even contribute to that durability. Early electronic studios did not offer infinite presets or instantly recallable software environments. Sounds had to be generated, filtered, recorded, spliced and layered through laborious physical processes. Restriction encouraged commitment. Rabe could not browse ten thousand textures and replace one whenever attention weakened. He had to examine a limited body of sound deeply enough to find its hidden multiplicity.

The work therefore contains an ethic of attention that feels increasingly unusual. Contemporary life is organized around contrast. Images change before the previous image has been understood. Songs compete for recognition within seconds. Interfaces interpret stillness as failure and immediately offer another object. What?? provides almost none of the signals by which attention is normally rewarded.

It does not hurry to prove that the next moment will differ from the present one. It asks whether the present moment has actually been heard.

This can produce resistance. A listener may initially believe that nothing is happening, then become irritated, restless or sleepy. Those responses are not necessarily failures. They expose the habits through which the nervous system expects time to be divided. The piece gives those habits nowhere to hide. Without verses, beats or scene changes, impatience becomes one of the most audible events in the room.

Remain longer and impatience may itself begin changing. The mind stops demanding a destination and starts noticing local weather. An upper frequency grows more brittle. A pulse forms, loses definition and returns. The low field seems to inhale despite Rabe’s insistence that machines have no muscles. One eventually realizes that the music was not withholding activity. The listener had been searching at the wrong scale.

What?? can therefore function almost as ear training, but its purpose is larger than technical education. Greater sensitivity to partials changes the ordinary world. Refrigerators, electrical transformers, ventilation systems, engines, fluorescent fixtures and distant traffic contain interacting bands of sound that daily attention edits into convenient single objects. After Rabe, those objects may briefly open.

A refrigerator stops being “the refrigerator hum” and becomes several pitches beating, drifting and modulating according to the compressor’s operation and the room’s resonance. The city reveals sustained tones beneath its dramatic noises. Silence becomes less empty because the ear has learned that apparent continuity contains movement.

This is the social generosity concealed inside an apparently austere composition. Rabe does not merely provide one remarkable electronic artifact. He demonstrates a method of listening applicable outside the record. The composition ends, but its question migrates into every later sound: what is actually in there?

The cover of the Important edition matches this refusal of spectacle. Folke Rabe’s name dominates the top in severe black lettering separated by a thin red line. Almost the entire remaining field is blank white. The two tracks are listed modestly near the lower left, followed by the description “two productions from the electronic studio of the Swedish Radio, Stockholm.” There is no cosmic illustration, no photograph of vintage machinery and no attempt to tell the listener what the sound should resemble.

The white area is not empty decoration. It creates visual duration. The eye crosses a large unoccupied field before reaching the small informational text, just as the ear crosses long expanses before recognizing a change inside the music. The design trusts negative space to remain active.

Calling the tracks “two productions” is technically correct but conceptually strange, since the second is the first transformed through speed. The wording turns one work into two listening conditions. The CD becomes less a collection than an apparatus: original scale and expanded scale, question and the same question asked more slowly.

The album also makes an excellent argument for the compact disc. Vinyl gave the original work a side-length home, but seventy-six minutes of continuous harmonic information suit a medium capable of preserving both versions without interruption or surface noise. This is not because crackle necessarily damages drone; it simply adds another changing layer Rabe did not compose. The CD allows the sustained tones to emerge from a relatively quiet physical background and gives the half-speed version enough uninterrupted room to complete its enormous arc.

Digital files create another condition. They can be repeated indefinitely, moved among devices and played through systems with radically different frequency responses. A small laptop speaker may eliminate much of the lower structure and turn the work into a thinner, harsher composition. Headphones internalize the field. Large speakers let room acoustics become collaborators. Each playback system answers “What??” differently.

Volume matters, but louder is not automatically better. At low level, the work may hover like distant electrical weather and reveal its finer relationships gradually. At high level, beating patterns become physical and the electronic field can seem architectural. The useful volume is the one at which the listener becomes aware of depth without turning that awareness into pain. Rabe’s exploration of sound should enlarge hearing, not punish the equipment carrying it.

What?? belongs beside the sustained works of La Monte Young, Phill Niblock, Éliane Radigue, Pauline Oliveros, Tony Conrad and later spectral or drone composers, but its identity remains peculiar. Young often makes tuning a living social practice. Niblock builds dense instrumental masses from recorded performances. Radigue’s electronic works change with almost devotional patience. Oliveros transforms listening into an explicitly communal discipline. Rabe’s piece feels like an acoustic investigation that has unexpectedly grown emotional organs.

Its emotion does not arrive through confession or story. It emerges from relationships among frequencies. This should not be surprising. Human emotion is also physical information: vibration reaching the ear, electrical activity moving through nerves, memory attaching itself to patterns. A harmony does not need to represent grief or wonder in order to produce them. The body is capable of finding significance inside proportion.

Rabe’s title preserves humility before that process. He does not call the work Infinity, Cosmos, Revelation or Harmonic Structure No. 1. He asks What?? The doubled punctuation prevents theory from closing around the experience. However much one learns about partials, tape speed, enharmonic melding and electronic production, the sound retains something that explanation cannot replace.

This is not anti-intellectual mysticism. Rabe provides unusually precise reasoning about how and why the work was made. Knowledge improves listening. Yet after every technical description, the final event still occurs between vibration and consciousness, where objective physics becomes subjective experience without anybody completely understanding the conversion.

What?? spends twenty-five minutes constructing that threshold, then fifty minutes enlarging it. The original version reveals sound as a restless population concealed inside apparent unity. The half-speed version allows the same population to move with the patience of weather or planetary rotation. Together they show that a composition can remain materially identical while becoming emotionally and physically new through one change of scale.

Anyone who heard Rabe present the work in a hall, encountered the original Wergo split with Bo Anders Persson, or remembers the Dexter’s Cigar reissue entering the 1990s experimental underground may possess another history of how this sound traveled. Different rooms and playback systems will also produce different maps of its frequencies. Those experiences would be valuable because What?? has never been only the information stored on tape.

It includes the air, architecture, speaker, body and duration through which that information becomes audible.

The question marks remain because the answer changes every time the sound finds another room.