‘Clouds of Glory’: Suicide’s Mark Rev captures the chaos of nature
Music might be one of the most connective art forms in the world. You can argue a lot about why this might be, but realistically, it’s because it’s so easy for people to connect and relate to, and it follows us around everywhere we go. This doesn’t just mean listening to The Beatles on your way to work, but it’s present in the sound of birdsong, in the rhythm of footsteps and the whistle of the wind.
Even in the modern age, as machines and technology dominate our lives, when we don’t intend to listen to music, we still manage to listen to music. There is the bang of construction work, the screech of tyres and the chatter of busy commuters. All of it is music, equal parts chaotic and beautiful.
Luigi Russolo, who is often dubbed the founder of noise music, once commented on our relationship with music in nature and how that changed with the Industrial Revolution. “Music originally sought purity, limpidity and sweetness of sound,” he said. “Musical evolution is paralleled by the multiplication of machines… the machine today has created such a variety and rivalry of noises that pure sound, in its exiguity and monotony, no longer arouses any feeling.”
Essentially, because we drown out naturally occurring sounds in the world with artificial ones, the music we digest will change from something sweet-sounding to something more harsh. This is a fair argument and has formed the foundation for a lot of harsh noise acts; however, it isn’t wholly applicable, given a lot of the music that we listen to now, one hundred years after that prediction was made, could still be described as having “Purity, limpidity and sweetness of sound.”
There are two ways to look at that quote in the modern world. The first is that the prediction wasn’t made long enough ago for us to accurately decide whether it was right. One hundred years isn’t that long a time in music, so to say Russolo made an accurate prediction of the future of sound is tough.
Alternatively, you could argue he was wrong and that both sweetness of sound and harsh sounds can co-exist, they certainly do in the real world, so why not in music? We walk by roadworks, people and traffic daily, yet we also go into nature to hear birds, running water and wind. Those sounds exist simultaneously in our lives, so why wouldn’t we let them exist within the music we listen to and make as well?
This is essentially what Suicide’s Mark Rev did with his album Clouds of Glory. It’s a blend of pretty synth sounds and harsh noise, something as unpredictable as it is fun. When asked about the inspiration behind the album and what he was trying to do, Rev admitted that he got most of his inspiration from nature, meaning modern cities and the serene outback.
“I started out viewing American landscapes as something almost mythological, their having a certain metaphysical, semi-religious feeling to them. I was travelling a lot in America, and I felt something, a developmental stage happening in American history,” he said when discussing the inspiration for Clouds of Glory. “Its landscapes were signalling: telling a certain story at a certain stage in history that was very contemporary. It was sort of second and third-generation Americana being told through its land.”
The record feels like the closest you could come to a long walk being condensed into sound. Both machinery and birdsong played a part in its conception, and it’s almost as if the natural sounds that impact us every day are conveyed in some way on each track of the album.
“You can have three or four major events happening at one time between an airplane going by, smoke coming from a factory, lights coming off a watchtower and a train coming from another direction,” he concluded. “That, with the whole lighting of the entire atmosphere and a lot of sky and desert, tracks or forest, all of this suddenly takes on a kind of active story.”
