Owen Pallett: the complexity of pop

http://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2015/feb/04/owen-pallett-the-complexity-of-pop

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At the Music Hall of Williamsburg on Thursday in New York, Canadian multi-instrumentalist Owen Pallett approached a microphone alone, his head floating in and out of the shadows formed by two cones of blue light. He described the order of his set – he’d play some songs on his own, layering violin and piano lines until they became muscular structures. Then he’d invite drummer Robbie Gordon and guitarist Matt Smith onstage. “Things [with the band] will get proggier than I’d like,” he said. “But probably not as proggy as you’d like.”

Beyond his orchestration work for artists such as Arcade Fire, Robbie Williams and Taylor Swift and his scoring for such films as Spike Jonze’s Her, Pallett’s own records, which contain a kind of dense chamber pop, occupy suggestive spaces – between proggy and economical, accessible and complex. His catchiest songs also harbour clusters of strings which gather and swell like clouds about to burst.

In the opening seconds of the first song from last year’s album In Conflict, Pallett layers piano chords and strings in trembling columns. It deliberately recalls the dense and microtonal choral parts of György Ligeti compositions, where members of a choir would sing at half steps from each other, forming nervous, wavering textures.

Pallet is an inflexible singer, but “inflexible” is in many ways another word for “precise”. He is often compared to John Cale, yet the crisp, silvery quality of his phrasing also brings to mind Green Gartside of Scritti Politti; Pallett sings notes in similarly modest, syllabic shapes, which seem inverse to the varieties of meaning they contain. (I have attended karaoke with Pallett; he tears completely into Alanis Morissette’s You Oughta Know.) In I am Not Afraid, Pallett sings: “My salvation is found / In discipline,” referring both to the foaming intensity of the Throbbing Gristle song Discipline and to the ways in which discipline takes shape in the routines of life.

“Ultimately I am at my happiest when I am living life and doing work ‘to order’, fulfilling programs and completing recipes,” Pallett says. “It’s a good way of living for somebody who works [in a creative field], which is basically an occupation of telling cool lies.”

I am Not Afraid inhabits a queer perspective, itself a kind of liminal stage of identity that for many people never resolves . For Pallett, presenting as a gay musician is a kind of convenience that also feels fraudulent. “I see people like Antony and Arca and feel that there is a way that a queer person can be in the public eye, and I am not working hard enough,” Pallett says. “I have spent my career answering the most banal questions about ‘How does your sexuality inform your music-making?’ Increasingly I am wanting my music to answer that question.”

In Song for Five and Six, also from In Conflict, Pallett sings of “a gap between / What a man want and what a man will receive.” “Did you see that scene in [Michael Haneke’s] Code Unknown?” he asks me, referring to the opening, in which a deaf girl performs charades in front of a group of hearing-impaired children who guess at her meaning in sign language. She turns sideways and crouches against a white wall, telegraphing fear. The children guess: “Alone?” “Hiding place?” “Sad?” “Imprisoned?” She shakes her head at every answer, her eyes growing watery. “There’s a deliciousness in being an Anglophone,” Pallett says, “and seeing this French-language movie made by an Austrian begin with a subtitled scene where a group of kids are using ‘universal sign language’ and failing to communicate with each other.”

In the same song, he asks: “Do you agree or disagree?” So much of of Pallett’s music is an active dialogue – between him and his audience, between self and context, between the differing frequencies of the musical instruments he employs. He provides his phone number in the lyrics of The Secret Seven as a kind of antidote to the violence and disconnection the rest of the song describes: it’s about Tyler Clementi, an 18-year-old gay violinist who killed himself in 2010 after his roommate streamed webcam footage of him having sex with a man.

Throughout the record it feels as if Pallett is trying to reconcile or inhabit the gaps that take up the space between things and people. Gaps also form literally on In Conflict’s cover art, obscuring lyrics. “The blob covers up different parts of the text, depending on which region you’re in,” Pallett told Wondering Sound last year. “There’s no version that has the complete story. No matter what version you get, there’s going to be some aspect that’s obscured.”

At the end of Song for Five and Six, oscillating synths repeat themselves and wrap around Pallett’s voice and the structure of the song like a silver thread. This is characteristic of Pallett’s music: musical figures that, as they repeat themselves, deepen harmonically until they resemble a fractal. Strings scramble like the legs of a spider. Arrangements grow as intricate and determined as birds’ nests and then fall apart with the precision of physics. “I’m not sure if this is symptomatic of a depressive mind, or a creative mind, or both,” he says. “But whether you’re talking about sunny Brian Eno or stormy Lars von Trier, things are at their most interesting when they’re going wrong.”