Peter Gordon

Peter Gordon, born in 1951 in New York but raised in Munich, was part of that “post-Cagean” avant-garde close to the new wave.

In Europe he studied saxophone and clarinet and played in small jazz ensembles. At seventeen he returned to the U.S. to study composition in Los Angeles, completing his studies at Mills College in 1973. From 1975, back in New York, he began performing as a saxophonist in Manhattan clubs, and in 1977 he founded the Love Of Life Orchestra (LOLO), gathering around him eccentric musicians such as percussionist David VanTieghem, trumpeter Rik Albani, and singer Rebecca Armstrong, with whom he presented an intellectual form of disco music.

Gordon had already shown himself a master at assembling consumer music stereotypes in his first solo work, Star Jaws (Lovely Music, 1977), where he aligned a series of surreal ensembles—one per track—each marked by the prominence of winds and keyboards. By applying avant-garde procedures to mass music, Gordon achieved a hallucinatory and sophisticated commentary on the idiocy of post-industrial civilization: just as it is possible to compose a daily life using only clichés and waste, it is possible to compose the soundtrack to that life by methodically accumulating only kitsch stereotypes. In the vertiginous minuet of Star Jaws, there are the rises and falls of the clarinet, the supersonic hiss of the synthesizer, the flute’s march; in the boogie of Machomusic, an insistent progression of layered tenor saxes and guitar distortions; in Intervallic Expansion, reggae guitar and a saxophone fanfare. These are pieces born under the banner of the minimalism of In C, yet nourished by vulgar, lowbrow, commercialized rhythms, corrosive melodic phrases, and obvious arrangements.

Even with the open ensemble of LOLO, occasionally joined by rock musicians like David Byrne and Arto Lindsay, Gordon enjoyed laying down an innocuous sonic foundation and sadistically disturbing it with his “terrorist” arsenal: dissonances, abrupt tempo changes, atonality, cacophonies. Neurotic and anxious, the music depicts modern individual solitude and alienation in a grotesque register.

Gordon toys with all kinds of keyboards (even the most outdated timbres) and his favored saxophone (vigorous, full of life and love for life) and conscientiously distills music reduced to its bare essentials: rhythmic, dynamic, driving, and melodic. By fusing fragments of everyday music and trained in all sorts of harmonic acrobatics, Gordon can elaborate ingenious manipulations, sabotage, and falsifications of banality, such as the effervescent “disco” of Extended Niceties (Lust, 1979), perhaps the absolute masterpiece of disco music, and the grotesque sketch of Beginning Of The Heartbreak, its B-side.

In the latter, the saxophone intones a poignant melody over a panzer-like rhythm and Lindsay’s screeching guitar. The former is built on a crescendo of crescendos—a process of recursive music: it begins with obsessive metronomic beats progressively joined by guitar, drums, bass, and keyboards; after a vaguely dissonant fanfare of keyboards and winds, Gordon launches the first violent sax break, propelled by a series of percussive bass syncopations, initiating a hammering cadence on which the winds intermittently scream; the guitar ignites in a demonic solo, the organ cavorts in a mechanical ballet, and again the sax soars in an epic crescendo, with the entire orchestra pushing it and the synth bubbling cacophonies; and, after a grotesque solo punctuated by screeching dissonances and violent distortions, the organ resumes the dizzying crescendo, dragging the orchestra along, while the sax makes a final, galactic flight before the sarabande closes in an epileptic choral triumph.

It is music certainly closer to instrumental rock for the underground scene, but meticulously composed according to techniques that are both minimalist and concrete. The result is surprisingly exuberant, even though the artificiality and mechanical nature of the piece always produce a disorienting effect.

On the album Geneve (Lust, 1980), Gordon’s meta-musical technique is enriched with a ferocious danceable rhythm and a whole series of kitsch excesses. The Orchestra performs only instrumental pieces, with an abundance of keyboard, percussion, and wind instruments: the martial, spirited reggae of Cry Like A Baby Sing Like a Dog, the effervescent psychedelic surf of Bugsy, the obsessive ska of Tight Ropes, the beachy shake of Diamond Lane (driven by organ and guitar in a sparkling boogie), the romantic ballad of Young Girls (launched into a wild gallop and then a classical interlude), and the frantic tribalism of Revolution Is Personal. A more complex arrangement governs Lament, propelled by an epic fanfare of keyboards and a long electronic percussion solo, transformed into hyper-kinetic, uncontrollable funk.
These are small musical vignettes with disco tracks invaded by hordes of drunken barbarians. They are ballroom rhythms thrown into turbulent, destabilizing muzak orbits. They are anemic melodies attacked by swarms of voracious mini-tunes. Overall, it is a modern music hall in which comic and tragic, parody and elegy, perfectly interpenetrate under the banner of high technology. Low art, in the spirit of a dilapidated basement band, a hydra of a thousand overdubs, a jungle of timbres and noises, a powerful pop fresco of disco civilization: these tracks are gigantic mass graves to be filled with the carcasses of generation after generation of kitsch. Yet they are also mini rock symphonies, thanks to the formal perfection of the studio arrangements. In rock history, they are learned appendices to the “wall-of-sound” of Phil Spector and the noble subculture of instrumental rock.

The effervescent drive that characterizes the Orchestra’s pieces is certainly a tribute to the carefree Sixties, but it resembles the false confidence of an ugly woman heavily made-up. The more the tracks draw on “fun” stereotypes, the more they seem to convey a paranoia of boredom, a devastating existential agony.

In June 1979, Gordon recorded Dinosaur L (1981) with about twenty musicians from Harlem; it was released two years later and includes You're Gonna Be Clean On Your Bean, another small masterpiece of intellectual disco music.

He then returned to LOLO for Casino (Expanded, 1982). With Rebecca Armstrong’s clear, sweet whistles and vocalizations, Bill Laswell’s bass, Fred Maher’s guitar, and Gene Tyranny’s piano, Gordon and Van Tieghem wrote Casino in 1982, another seductive, band-like, and dissonant disco music piece, featuring repetitive sax solos full of life and metallic and electronic percussion. Rhythmic pastiches (an industrial pulse here, a tribal epilepsy there), melodic progressions, repertoire riffs, and crossed metronomes season the occult tribal dance of Siberia, the gentle soprano elegy of Condo, the sinister swamp cadence of Casino (with alluring sax themes, chic cacophonies, surreal whistling), and the hypnotic fantasy of Roses On Bond Street (with arcane soprano solfeggi, minimalist iterations, and western Morricone-like suggestions). Though less dynamic and aggressive, these tracks retain the inherent, harmonious elegance of previous works. They tend to develop ideas, whereas before Gordon was swept up in the collage-like rush of immediately fixing them in sequence.

Innocent (1986), with Van Tieghem, Tyranny, Albani, Landry, Ned Sublette, Peter Zummo, and a dozen others, indulges in that ephemeral, intellectual danceable style, but between almost Zappa-like orchestral overtures (Romance, Announcement) and almost Morricone-like poignant themes (Afternoon Drive), it also hits on some fragments of more sunny, less serious fusion/ambient music than that of Byrne and Eno (Double). Many tracks seem mostly opportunities to showcase the eccentric virtuosity of the guests. Likewise, Brooklyn (1987), with ethnic fantasy Kora Music and little else.

Gordon also composed various music for theater and dance, such as Secret Pastures (1984), and even an electronic and parodic revision of Verdi’s Otello (1987).

Leningrad Express (new Tone, 1990) is music for large ensemble, mainly inspired by slavic folk. Quartet (Robi Droli, 1995) is a collection of impressionistic instrumentals.

Still Life & The Deadman (New Tone, 1993) is music composed for several string ensembles.

Nostalgic, romantic, and humorous, Gordon’s sound sits on the border between disco-rock, postmodernism, and exotica. The formal perfection of his mini-symphonies built from consumerist stereotypes represents the mature outcome of a decade of sonic pop art, of socio-musical analysis and vivisection of sound. The ineffable semiotic quality of his meta-musical program makes him the first conscious exponent of postmodernism in rock. Medium: the decadent elegance of playful practice. Objective: the erosion of the imaginary of leisure.

The Yellow Box (1996) collects chamber experiments with David Cunningham (Flying Lizards) recorded in 1981-83.

Symphony 5 (Foom, 2015) in five movements was recorded by a chamber ensemble with electric guitars and synthesizer.

Same Language, Different Worlds (2016) is a collaboration with vocalist Tim Burgess (of the Charlatans).

Eighteen (Foom, 2018) was a collaboration among Peter Gordon (on synth and found sounds), Gabe Gurnsey (drums), Larry Saltzman (guitar) and Paul Nowinski (bass).