A record which arranges a new piece of music with each play sounds like sci-fi fantasy. With well over a century in the business, the world's biggest music companies have never come up with such a thing. Genuinely new ideas are rare and this one is not a major label marketing gimmick. It is, instead, an attempt to bring the recorded music experience closer to live performance.
The aptly titled Infinity is a new piece by K-Space, the latest line-up to feature Dundee born percussionist Ken Hyder. It's carried on a cd-rom, which includes software previously used in gaming programmes and has been designed to trigger an entirely new mix of the musical elements with every successive listen. The most remarkable thing, to my ears, is that each time I've heard it – even knowing that I'm listening to the result of a computer triggered sequence – Infinity sounds like a cohesive musical work, as though it was meant to be that way.
Ken Hyder and his long-term collaborator Tim Hodgkinson formed K-Space with a Tuvan shaman, often playing live in places where there is no electricity. The dichotomy of a band like this using cutting edge computer technology sits well with Hyder's long history of musical innovation and collaboration.
Moving to London in the early '70s, Ken was drawn to the Little Theatre Club, run by drummer John Stevens, where the nexus of improvisers seeking to extend the language of jazz included Keith Tippett, Larry Stabbins and Nick Evans. At the same time he was discovering Scottish music whilst taking drum lessons from the very open-minded Stevens. "He blind-dated me with a School of Scottish Studies record", says Hyder, "He says "where's that from?" and I'm listening to the rhythms and a bunch of women singing, "sounds like North Africa to me John". They were the waulking songs for the teasing out of the tweed sung by women in the Hebrides".
Ken Hyder became the drummer in the improv collective The Amazing Band following Robert Wyatt's crippling fall. Their free improvisations included a session for John Peel's Top Gear which, much to Peel's amusement, generated a record number of complaints and a show at Ronnie Scott's club where they performed with psychiatrist R.D. Laing. Meanwhile Hyder was drawing parallels between the modes and drones of Scottish music and the soul and spirit of Albert Ayler and John Coltrane.
Ken Hyder's Talisker started out as a jazz band with some tentative nods towards Scottish forms, but the leader's interest in pibroch and the psalm singing tradition of the Western Isles suffused through their music and would ultimately spread wider: to work with Brazilian musicians, a South African band and even an album of music recorded with Tibetan monks.
In a world where facile Celt-fusion acts are ten a penny and even the better attempts at combining styles are quite common, it's worth noting Robert Wyatt's remark: "Ken's amazing – he was doing that stuff years before anybody else". The first Talisker album Dreaming of Glenisla came out in 1975 and has just made its debut on cd. The reaction to it seems stronger now than the first time round, which suggests that Hyder's visions are often ahead of their time.
Talisker's second release was perhaps their most ambitious. Land of Stone was born from Ken Hyder's interest in researching the improvisational elements in traditional forms of Scottish music. An arts council grant, which would ultimately take him to the home of the doyen of Gaelic waulking songs Miss Mary Morrison of Barra, led to a meeting with Hamish Henderson in the wood panelled home of The School of Scottish Studies at Edinburgh University.
For the Land of Stone album, Talisker was augmented by the impressive vocal talents of Frankie Armstrong, Phil Minton and Maggie Nicols, who still collaborates with Hyder in a duo they call Hoots'n'Roots. The connection with Hamish Henderson continued too. In 1979 Talisker played a show with the poet at Glasgow's Third Eye Centre (now the CCA), which is now archived in The School of Scottish Studies thanks to the recording I captured there when I was fourteen years old.
Along the way Ken Hyder recorded an album of freely improvised instrumental music with Dick Gaughan. Although this is not so well known as Gaughan's deeply politicized songs, the singer cites Fanfare for Tomorrow as a strong influence on much of what he's done since.
Hyder's longest lasting collaboration, with multi-instrumentalist Tim Hodgkinson, reaches its 30th anniversary this year. A new direction for their work came about after a chance meeting at one of Tim's gigs in Moscow in 1989 when he was asked "How would you like to play all of Russias?" Hyder and Hodgkinson became the first British musicians to play in Vladivostock since the revolution and, as this was still within the Soviet era, a separate KGB clearance was required for every city where the duo planned a show.
A discussion on how to find the right energy level for each performance saw Hyder introduced to the concepts of shamanism by Hodgkinson. Shamanic culture had been practised in secret since the oppressive Stalin era, so Ken and Tim's tour as The Friendly British Invasion in Search of the Soviet Shamans initially met with little response until they were given some tapes in Novosibirsk and, eventually, started to meet shamans in Tuva.
The experience of shamanic ritual music - kamlanie - had a profound effect on Ken and Tim. Meeting and playing with the shaman Gendos Chamzyryn in the Tuvan capital Kyzyl in the '90s resulted in the formation of K-Space. Ken Hyder says of their album Going Up that it "puts sounds and performances together in a way which doesn't conform to musical rules, but fits into the reality of nature which allows birds to sing in different keys and in different tempi all at the same time".
Going Up is an exciting and radical record, but rather than follow on with more of the same, K-Space wanted something new. "Before recording technology emerged", says Hyder, "anyone listening to music, perhaps unfamiliar music, would have to listen to it very carefully. With Infinity, the music is remixed differently each time. We hope that the listener will listen to it as if it were a one off live performance". By deciding that they wanted Infinity to appear on a cd, Ken Hyder and Tim Hodgkinson had already set limits on the number of files they could include to be remixed. However, changes in dynamics add to the vast number of permutations of the sound sources.
The complex dream of Infinty has been made possible in collaboration with software expert Andy Wilson, whose authoring and testing of the programme worked in tandem with Tim Hodgkinson's writing of scores for the work into computer code. One thing it is not: a random shuffle. Hyder compares the choices made by the software to asking a route planner for different choices on the road from London to Inverness. "You can ask it to give you a route avoiding motorways, or the scenic route. Similarly, a particular play on Infinity could concentrate on acoustic samples, or more electronically treated soundfiles".
Repeated plays of Infinity have rewarded me with radically differing versions of the piece, each one possessed of a compelling energy. The sound sources include atmospheric field recordings, an exotic spectrum of percussion, harmonic vocals, aka throat singing, string and reed instruments. Once it ended with bells, the next time with chanting and drums.
The piece runs to around 20 minutes and although it can become quite intense, the textures within remain very clear. Hyder and Hodgkinson found their researches on multiple layers of sound chimed with the work of neurologists who believe the human brain's short term memory is best equipped to juggle no more than seven completely different strands at any one time. All these experiences and insights informed the way Infinity was structured.
Ken Hyder is something of an unsung hero in his own land. Dreaming of Glenisla and Infinity represent innovations from different eras and, together, bookend a body of work from a musician on a continuing path of invention. A guiding light in Ken's life is the memory of his Dundonian granny who, when told something wasn't possible, would enquire "How no'?" Can you have an infinitely variable record? How no'?!
Infinity is released on the Ad-Hoc label.