Black Poodle (in a heavy oval frame)

An archive story / First-person account

Black Poodle — Finding Our Way Through the Music

This was another piece from the period when I was exploring Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita through music.

The title comes from the preparations for Satan's ball. Margarita is bathed in blood and eventually receives a heavy necklace bearing the image of a black poodle in an oval frame.

I particularly liked that part of the book.

The recording begins with me saying to Henry, in Swedish, "Nu blir det lite annat stuk" — roughly, "Now this is going to be a little different."

I had just made a bass sequence on the Neutron.

Then we started playing, with absolutely no plan. I played something almost like half-time, perhaps vaguely approaching a shuffle, although not quite. Henry came in with a wonderfully rough guitar sound and something that might resemble reggae if you had a bag over your head and your feet buried in snow.

It certainly didn't sound Caribbean.

Unlike some of our other recordings, Black Poodle isn't one continuous performance. I had different musical sections and needed to find a way of moving between them without losing the atmosphere.

I turned to the preparations for Margarita's ball.

I couldn't record someone reading the text, so I created a synthetic voice instead.

I had experimented with something similar earlier, working with our uncle Anders Frank on a piece called Omicron Lament. We made a cut-up using Nyårsklockan, the Swedish version of Alfred Tennyson's Ring Out, Wild Bells.

That was also my first serious experiment with using AI to make music.

One thing I learned was that synthetic speech doesn't naturally follow musical rhythm. A voice can sound perfectly convincing when heard alone, yet be almost impossible to fit into a piece of music.

I had to cut the speech into smaller fragments and reposition them until the words and music worked together. The sound quality of the service wasn't particularly good either, so I added effects.

In Black Poodle, the music gradually dissolves into something resembling a thick soup before the spoken passage begins, around 1:51. The voice becomes the bridge between musical sections.

But the really interesting thing happens when the speech ends.

Henry has stopped playing, and I'm left trying to follow the Neutron's rather irrational bass pattern.

I don't even know what time signature it's in.

I keep lengthening and shortening my playing to avoid falling out of the loop. It feels as though it goes on forever.

Then Henry suddenly returns with a fantastic guitar lick in 4/4.

It is an enormous relief.

Suddenly, we have both landed somewhere. The music becomes extraordinarily beautiful, almost as if the ground has appeared beneath us.

But we don't manage to stay there.

After a few sections, we partially lose track of what we were playing. Perhaps I was hearing something Henry couldn't hear, while he was still searching for the next place to go. I don't know.

Then we find each other again.

Eventually, the music fades away.

That is one of the things I love about Happü.

Sometimes something seems completely obvious only at the moment it happens. A few seconds later, it can be gone again.

And that doesn't necessarily mean something went wrong.