Bringing the Noise

It's got no beat, and you definitely can't dance to it.

Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music -- a punishing 50 minutes of guitar feedback looped together and sped up to twice its normal speed -- was hated by both critics and fans when it was originally released in the mid-70s.

Some drew comparisons with a dentist's drill boring away at an infected tooth, while others dismissed the double album as a bid by Reed to get out of his record contract.

But the Berlin-based avant-garde ensemble Zeitkratzer has given the composition a new lease on life, scoring it for classical instruments and recasting it as a piece of minimalist New Music.

The CD-DVD was recorded live with Reed in 2002 but only released this autumn due to copyright issues -- an ironic twist since RCA recalled the original Metal Machine Music from record stores after three weeks and told Reed he'd never make another album.

Zeitkratzer's version has drawn praise from both the high-brow New York Times and hip indie-music websites like Pitchfork. Group members say listening habits have caught up with Reed's ideas.

“Noise has long established itself as a standard element in rock music,” Ulrich Krieger, the former Zeitkratzer saxophonist who transcribed Reed's original record, told DW-WORLD. “People are accustomed to pop bands who make the charts like Jesus and the Mary Chain or Nirvana building up dissonant walls of feedback.”

Come on, feel the noise

In an interview before the performance, which took place as part of Berlin's annual “March Music” festival, Reed stressed the corporeal nature of his work.

“It's everything I like about rock music,” Reed said, thumping his chest and his thigh. “I like to feel music physically, here and down here. And I'm a guitarist. I like electric guitars.”

The Zeitkratzer performance is also physically strenuous. The brass players go red in the face sustaining what were originally minute-long hums of feedback, and the string section often looks in danger of cardiac arrest as it frenetically saws its way through oscillating patterns of sound.

And the ten-person ensemble faced other challenges performing a piece with no fixed tempo or time signature.

“We use three exactly synchronized clocks,” Zeitkratzer pianist and leader Reinhold Friedl told DW-WORLD. “Everyone can see them. We know, for instance, that we have to come together for a transition at 7 minutes, 16 seconds. We exchange glances and then Wham!”

Don't expect Sweet Jane

There's no shortage of whams and blams, screeches and scratches, hums and hoots on the Zeitkratzer CD. The 4 sides of the original record were in fact shortened into 3 movements because Reed felt it would be asking too much of the audience to listen to the whole thing.

And Friedl cautioned that anyone purchasing the disc expecting anything like usual Lou Reed would soon be selling it on Ebay.

At the same time, the ensemble version takes away some of the incredible harshness of the original and makes it much easier to hear the individual figures within the music. Occasionally, it even sounds sort of melodic.

“The instrumental sound is much richer,” Friedl said. “And of course, it's something different when you have ten people playing, instead of just two hard-edged guitar feedbacks that have also been pitched up on octave.”

But is it classical or rock music?

“Metal Machine Music is the translation of both the freedom of Free Improvisation and the sound structures of New Music into a rock aesthetic,” said Krieger. “For me it combines two different worlds, which were both important twentieth-century cultural movements, but which ran parallel to one another without ever really overlapping. It's a kind of a best-of-all-worlds situation.”

In other words, it's a very different way for the musically adventurous to take a walk on the wild side.

The CD/DVD of Zeitkratzer performing Metal Machine Music is on Asphodel Records.