Fusions Of Music

FUSIONS OF MUSIC

Categorizing ‘Friends of Merlin’ without categorizing – The Post-Modern reality of today’s underground live popular music vibe

The term ‘Post-Modernism’ essentially means, to quote the post-modern philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend, that ‘anything goes’, the idea that everything can be subject to deconstruction, and that we should be ‘Against Method’ in all things, even in science, according to Feyerabend. This then is what Post-Modern art attempts to emulate, the creation of art that is not orthodox or conforming to any kind of established rules or accepted criteria. [Feyerabend’s book ‘Against Method’ was first published in 1975.]

There are of cause serious issues for art and particularly science and skill systems, if you abandon all forms of discipline and established levels of excellence and for this reason post-modernism is not a popular mode of operation for those who seek to achieve ‘quality control’ in how art is made and generated. On the plus side however, an art movement that is seeking to be totally original and unconstrained by out-dated rules and systems is the very essence of what Art is really aiming to achieve for most creative artists seeking to be ‘original’ and to stand out from the crowd. How far it is actually possible to abandon all forms of technique in the quest for ‘freedom of expression’ though is debateable because essential skills are often the real means to ‘freedom’ rather than always being the things that prevent artistic genius from fully emerging.

It is for example impossible to become a professional ballet dancer if you decide to abandon all teachings of training and technique and if as a musician you decide not to learn how to play an instrument properly, or if you want to write a symphony that can be played by an orchestra, you reject the skill of how to get your music notated. You are not necessarily going to achieve the highest standards in art forms without some vital skills needing to be applied. You may be able to be on the fringe of the avant-garde with no actual skills but are you ever going to become a truly professional artist? Are you ever going to be able to build a rocket to get to Mars if you never learn the basics of Newton’s science of the Third Law of Dynamics? In fact in all things creative, there does have to be some rational, constructive method involved if anything is going to exist at all.

And in language for example, we can play around with the meanings of words, we can say they only mean what we want them to mean, that they don’t really have an essential context, but are words really so arbitrary? The word ‘wicked’ essentially means something is evil but in popular slang its meaning has been totally inverted and it also means something is brilliant, amazing in ‘street talk’. We may be able to be sophists, and like the post-modern French philosopher Jacques Derrida alter the meaning of terms to please our own personal agendas, in effect to abandon all ‘common’ sense and meaning for words and reality, but even so, words have their essential intonations and sounds and even though we might alter their true nature, ultimately the essence of what they really mean is still perceptible to everybody intuitively, we all really know what the word ‘wicked’ truly means even if we use it occasionally in a post-modernist way. Likewise skills in all their forms also are essential attributes for certain modes of action and art forms. Things cannot always be as arbitrarily conspired as we might assume them to be.

It’s nice to believe that we do not have to put in all the hard work that is required to actually learn a skill to be a ‘free spirit’, but is that what really happens in reality? The jury is still out on whether ‘anything does really go’ absolutely in relation to post-modern schools of thought...

So between the 1960’s and 1980’s as Post-Modernism began to emerge, there was much controversy as to what could be classed as Art in all areas of the arts and if modern avant-garde music, because of its rejection of the rules of harmony, was really music at all. If it was even possible to create music if one did not have the traditional skills of knowledge of notation and composition. Even the Beatles, though not trained in actual composition, intuitively understood the essential mode of ‘classical counterpoint’ and skilled themselves to a very high standard in order to play their instruments.

If we look for answers to this dilemma in the arts of whether we can really be against all methods to achieve artistic freedoms, music is actually a very good medium to observe because some of the most ‘free’ forms of music have come out of Jazz. The whole history of Jazz really stems from the need to break the rules of orthodox rhythms and classical forms, BUT...here’s the rub...all the greatest Jazz musicians first learned the rules of orthodox forms and how to play their instruments to a very high level of skill in order to improvise new modes and forms. Then what we see emerge in Jazz by the 1960’s is a new form of expression known as ‘Fusion’ spearheaded by Miles Davis, but a form of Post-Modernism that was based in real technical skills.

Davis was a great innovator but his genius was not based on a lack of skills and technique, he did not throw the baby out with the bathwater, he simply took the most orthodox and established forms of music and mixed them with Jazz extremes to create ‘Fusions’. When he first took the song ‘Favourite Things’ from the musical ‘The Sound of Music’ and improvised with it this was considered shocking, that he had betrayed the principles of Jazz to be so ‘traditional’, but very quickly musicians began to see how ‘Fusion’ could actually enhance Jazz and expand its form rather than undermine its anti-establishment core values.

Davis did deconstruct but it was a form of deconstruction in music that was also about skilfully building something really original and new based on old traditional forms. This is a different kind of post-modernism to that of ‘against all method’, this is a form of hybridization in music that recognizes the essential forms of both harmony and discord, while bringing together different styles and genres of music into new forms. This takes immense skill and does not happen because of a total lack of rules or Method. Rather there is profound Method in the ‘madness’. Thus Post-Modernism does not always mean that one is totally against all forms of Method or that old forms are totally rejected within the ‘new mix’.

You may wonder why I am making a point of defining the two different aspects of Post-Modernism and why it is relevant to the music made by ‘Friends of Merlin’, well its because if you want to categorize FoM, the best way to define where we belong in the greater themes of the music of today, is in the rising underground stream of post-modernist ‘Fusion Music’.

Unbeknown to some in the established music industry, in the Live Music scenes where real bands play real live music rather than computer-generated music, the big up and coming way to create new music is to do ‘Fusion’. In particular with the use of harmony combined with punk and gothic-style modes

Though I should also state that there is a wealth of ‘Fusion’ that also happens with computerized and electronic music that is not ‘mystical’ in the way that FoM are but is a fusion market that is more mainstream due to the use of technology in the music industry.

I first became aware of the ‘fusion method’ in the underground music scenes though while appearing with FoM in some very weird ‘fringe’ venues. And by talking to the people who come to our gigs I began to see that what is becoming very popular with the younger generation at the grass roots is music that ‘crosses boundaries’, that is classified as being a hybrid of different categories. In particular FoM recently supported the band ‘Mother of Crows’ at the launch of their new album. This is a band that is a hybrid of Jazz and ‘gothic rock’ mediums.

When I asked members of the audience what it was that drew them towards bands like ‘Mother of Crows’ and ‘Friends of Merlin’ they were very specific in their answers, they like the way that these bands are not locked into one category of music, they like that we mix mediums and styles, that we can be both traditional yet also ‘punky’ and more edgy and gothic in our musical forms.

This is the concept of ‘Fusion Music’ that the audiences are interested in, without maybe even realizing what that label is. If we look at folk, the way that Folk Music has found itself a whole new audience in recent years, this is also due to ‘Fusion’, ‘Mumford and Sons’ creating a new style of Folk Rock for example, and now there are many new folk bands, particularly in Ireland who are deeply rooted in traditional folk musical sounds and yet are hybridizing these with styles of music that years ago one would never presume could be ‘married’ to Irish Folk, even merging Folk with Punk. Though in dance ‘Fusion’ happened years back in Ireland with Michael Flatley’s ‘River Dance’. And it is also true particularly for Irish traditional arts that before ‘River Dance’ it was considered utterly heretical and totally wrong to try to fuse traditional Irish arts with other art forms, but today even Irish artists and audiences are welcoming the multitude of new ideas that are being mixed with traditional Irish music and dance forms.

In part this is the post-modern theme of deconstructing old modes to create new forms, but it is essentially a hybridization of genres that is known as ‘Fusion Music’. It happens in all forms of music; in particular Western musicians just love collaborating with non-Western musical forms. It’s not something that has been as widespread in the most commercial forms of pop music but I think FoM is one of the first bands this century to begin to be much more of a ‘Fusion’ band than most commercial pop oriented bands would usually be.

I suppose the most important Fusion Band of the 1960’s once they stopped touring and only recording was the Beatles, but most pop bands today who are not in the more avant-garde area of music are not now looking to traditional musical forms in order to hybridize them like ‘Mother of Crows’ and FoM. There’s no doubt that the ‘Mystical Rock’ of FoM is a hybrid form of music because it draws so much from Western classical musical harmonies as well as Eastern modes and themes; just like the Beatles did with ‘Sgt Pepper’s’ and their ‘White Album’ to kick-start the Progressive Rock movement of the 1970’s.

If we also look at the styles and fashions today of the audiences at big music festivals, such as the Isle of Wight and Glastonbury gigs, the style is ‘hippy chic’, all flouncy, ‘New Age’, ethnic, with Kathmandu jackets and Himalayan mysticism, but all fused with Victorian ‘Steam Punk’ hats and gothic boots, and that’s the men as well as the women! You could also say that ‘Woke Culture’ is a form of post-modernism in a social context, where the usual definitions of gender are being challenged, deconstructed and redrawn. In fact at this point in time all social and cultural forms that used to be considered unchangeable are now being reassessed and deconstructed in a post-modernist way.

As for ‘fashions’, if the audience is creating ‘fashion fusions’ in how they dress and in how they create cultural icons then it’s not surprising that they like fusion in music. In fact clothes fashions today are whatever you want, ‘vintage’ is well in and that means that you can wear any fashion from any age and mix and match, fuse, any different styles and still be ‘in fashion’...we could say that in matters of what you wear ‘anything really does go’...or as Cole Porter wrote in one of his classic songs... ‘In olden days a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking but heaven knows, now anything goes...The world’s gone mad today, and black’s white today, and day’s night today’ etc...

So for those who want to define what category of music FoM belong in, in truth we don’t really belong to one category in particular because we Fuse different Forms of music, we cross boundaries, and we belong in a number of different categories, so you can categorize us as a ‘Fusion Band’ but the reality of what we do is that we are not really categorized in the traditional meaning of that term; we are a bit ‘Zen’, with FoM, if its mystical, ‘anything goes’ but we are not totally un-defined or lacking in ‘method’. We are essentially then a particular kind of post-modern band, and there are a number of other bands on the live music network who are also ‘Fusion Bands’ that at present are not really known about in more established music channels. They are not mystical rock bands like FoM but they do have a tendency to mix their own original sounds with some of the imagery and tones of the Romantic and Gothic Arts along with other music genres.

One could surmise that Byron divided the original 19th century ‘Romantic’ movement in Art into the Romantic Love strand and the Gothic strand, but that culturally today popular culture is beginning to recreate the ‘caduceus’ of the Hermetic tradition of ‘art as healing’; bringing those two romantic strands of the darkness and the light, the Sublime and the Ecstatic back together in music into a new kind of cultural form.

Thus personally I see the new Fusion movements in music as yet another re-emergence of the traditional ‘Romantic’ movements in Art, a desire in artists and their audiences to reach into the heart of love itself, but also a need to express the ‘Sublime’ darkness of the Self, a need to find transcendence, a fusion between the eternality of Love and the limitation that is Death. Incarnation after incarnation in the West then we see the reawakening of Lord Byron’s Sufi metaphysics alongside his Gothic themes, casting a long, glowing shadow of romanticism in Western Art concerning the Immortal Muse of Love, the Poet’s inspiration, the ‘Sacred Feminine’, the ‘Mystical Lady of the Lake’ of Arthurian legend, Woman, as both ‘Anima’ and ‘Animas’ as the bringer of transcendent light and as the harbinger of Death...

“She sleeps beneath the wandering wave –

Ah! Had she but an earthly grave,

This breaking heart and throbbing head

Should seek and share her narrow bed.

She was a form of light and life,

That seen, became a part of sight...

Yes, love indeed is light from heaven;

A spark of that immortal fire

With angels shared, by Allah given...

Devotion wafts the mind above,

But heaven itself descends in love...

And she was lost – and yet I breathed,

But not the breath of human life:

A serpent round my heart was wreathed,

And stung my every thought to strife...”

[Byron, from ‘The Gaiour’ - A fragment of a Turkish tale]

If you go into Waterstone’s bookshops today there has suddenly emerged a whole new raft of novels, tables full of Byronesque Romantic Gothic Literature. This is undoubtedly stemming today from the popularity of the ‘Twilight Saga’ by Stephenie Meyer and the success of the TV series ‘Game of Thrones’ adapted from the books by George R. R. Martin; based on a more ‘militarist’ form of the gothic genre. Maybe one could say that ‘Game of Thrones’ is actually a fusion of some of the Medieval Arthurian themes with its dragons and fortresses, but with the modern twist of Victorian Steam Punk Gothic.

I surmise philosophically then that the deeper, more subconscious reasons for why the Romantic movements in the arts are resurfacing is due to the need in ‘Millennials’ to seek out the experiences of ecstatic emotion and mysticism at an organic level of reality. There is essentially a need to find something more meaningful than technology and social media and this is why Romanticism is beginning to reignite in modern, even post-modern, culture. Technology is numbing the souls and removing the ability to experience real emotional involvement between human beings, so in order to counter this mechanization of the Spirit, the 20 year olds are beginning to turn to mysticism in the arts to rediscover something ‘organic’. This is of course also reflected in how deeply involved the younger generations are in ‘save the planet’ movements.

So the rise of extreme forms of technology, technology that is limiting the emotional lives of those who use it and which is also engendering severe forms of hatred and bullying, according to Newton’s Third Law there is then going to be a ‘backlash’, a cultural reaction, a counter-movement, that is all about seeking a Romantic reality as an alternative to a brave new techno-world of loveless computerizations. Hence the reason for why new Fusion Music and Fusion in the arts in general, is becoming ‘Romanticised’ with mystical love themes at the grass roots

To categorize FoM then, where their music fits in, in the greater schemes of the Arts, well I think we are definitely a Fusion Band that has carved out its own unique genre of ‘Mystical Rock’ in order to fill a need in Culture for something that is rooted in the Spirit of the Beloved, rather than hearts and minds being controlled by the unnatural processes of technology. FoM do belong to the cutting edge of the ‘Romantic’ genre as it is re-emerging, as well as being a band that reappraises the ancient mystical cults of the Hermetic/Occult traditions that are within all cultures, because of the human need for some form of transcendence from the ordinary, and now, as a release from technological tyranny...

FoM dare to jump into the abyss of the dark Self, into the ‘Sublime’ of the Gothic with our ‘Vampire’ and ‘Eclipse’ lyrics based on the ‘Twilight Saga’. But we are also primarily expressing the universal ‘religion’ of ‘Romanticism’, the melodic harmonies of Love and Peace in a 60’s and ‘70’s retro-style in a song such as ‘Only Love’..Essentially then, ‘Friends of Merlin’ are not afraid to ‘dabble in the dark side’ of the soul, but primarily we are ‘Love’s Messenger’...

“Let us choose one another as companions! Let us sit at each other’s feet!

Oh friends, sit a little closer, so that we may see each other’s faces!

Inwardly we have many harmonies – think not that we are only what you see.

Now that we are sitting together, our hands hold the wine and our sleeves are full of roses.

We have a way from this visible world to the Unseen, for we are the companions of religion’s messenger...

Although in form we are beggars in the lane, behold our attributes! Then you will know what sort of sultan we are!”

[From the song ‘Love’s Messenger’ by Rumi]