Stefan Tischler’s collaborations with Keith Keeler Walsh (aka Keeler) as Port Said seem to sound resolutely 80s—and charmingly so. Why? If you’ve been neckdeep in about every mode of electronica of the past 30 years (post-prog, krautrock, new wave, post-punk, experimentalism, the avant-arts, new age, post-techno) it’s safe to assume your sixth sense caught more than just a fleeting glimpse of many a machine’s ghost. What is most evident about Port Said’s four records from the early 80s— Through Veils, Eve of Depature, Crossings, and Traveller’s Companion—is the obvious love both Tischler and Keeler have for their equipment and what the bloody machines could just do. These are two fellas who channelled Cluster, Tangerine Dream, Tonto’s Expanding Head Band, Eno, and other obscure cosmic couriers of the time through the byzantine corridors of sound and vision. Spin Traveller’s Companion and admit you can’t help but break out in a cheshire grin absorbing the phalanx of drum machines and yearning pre-dawn synths that curdle the air of “Alpha” or “Countdown to Midnight.” Or bite your lip in childlike glee as you partake of the nursery cryme maneuvers of “Oktoberfest” and “Elf Dance” from Eve Of Departure. Or look Through Veils to catch the drunken arabesque and faux Middle Eastern polyrhythms of “Khartoum” as well as the carnival fun ride electronics and slinky bass hashmarks of “Monsoon.” Or let your mind wander amidst the silicon borogroves of Crossings, which strips the funk out of Herbie Hancock’s same-named record to leave in its wake a residue of blurts and bleeps every bit as twisted as the best Moebius (and Roedelius) strips. Though not particulary redolent of New York’s grimy 80s experimental underground (the morphing of punk into new wave was the city’s prevailing trend then), Port Said’s music, inadvertently and unbeknowest to its creators, pointed the way to as yet unknown musical futures years ahead of their conceptualization.

The direction that Tischler would take on his subsequent solo work couldn’t have been more markedly different from his former partner’s. While Keeler went on to further explore drum machine dada and Pollock-like synth collages, Tischler chose the neo-impressionist route, an interest in soundscapes for the ear he dubbed “Cinematics.” Tethered to this approach, his productions began to attain a distinct polish (neé professionalism) that wasn’t discernible in Port Said’s grooves, the mark of a musician finally comfortable with his devices and in sync with their potential. Released on LP in 1985, the still ridiculously unsung In Florette’s Room shows a voice eager to flex untried aural muscles. Mostly shorn of rhythmic anchors, the record is a series of fascinating tone-poems splashed across different-textured canvases, painted in vibrant hues of bold, primary colors. Tischler hammers home the cinematic analog by using voice samples and snatches of dialogue, a device still a number of years away from becoming well-worn cliché, something that’s most effective on “It Doesn’t Matter Who I Say I Am” and “See You in 1997,” which transmogrifies the psychotic engram of Travis Bickle onto magnetic tape. Throughout, Tischler adroitly shifts emphasis from light to dark: cymbals crash and burn, windchimes rattle in blustery winds, choruses of angels bellow amongst preening harps and synths cry out from deep in the void. The record is truly a rush for the senses, faintly sinister and buoyant with a dangerous undertow, save for the exuberant proto-techno of the title track that is a positively prescient three minutes of kickdrum gymnastics, saxy cool and sequencer strum.

Tischler’s next recordings, Invisible Cities, The Blue Pill, and City of Dark, are a vivid and schizophrenic (well, maybe bipolar) clutch of works that attempt to resolve shadow and substance, darkness and light, abstraction and formality. If there is one unifying factor to Tischler’s m.o., it’s that he gives off the air of the restless nomad, never content to settle in one place or style for long, spirited and always engaging in spite of the themes he diligently pursues album after album. Invisible Cities is no less striking now than it was when first realized in 1986. Recorded in Vancouver and done as a homage to author Italo Calvino’s phantasmic work of the same name, the record posits the shifting landscapes glimpsed by nomads, extrapolated on by nomads, and reimagined in the psyche of nomads, travelling amidst the grey zone between fiction and reality. Tischler’s sonic palette here is nothing short of enigmatic—the co-mingling of struck tablas, the mini-symphonies of cicadas, buzzing tonal clusters, the bleats of Hasselled trumpets, the bright reflective surfaces of metals glistening out of an indefinable electronic aorta—his morals writ large from far-flung tales of topographic oceans. Quite original, and, quite extraordinary. The Blue Pill shucks off the metropolitan poltergeists for more personal considerations, as titles such as “Revelation,” “Apocalyptic Threat,” and “Evolutionary Pride” make clear. In truth, the record’s like some bastard offspring of Sousa and Stockhausen Shrill blasts of brass, squashed, suffocated, mangled, and finally looped, erupt out of a miasma of tremolous synths and faux-orchestral marches. Bassdrums stop and start; whistling electrons whoop and holler. A track such as “The Anti-Drug” nearly trips over itself as it attempts to achieve equilibrium amongst martial drumbeats and synth squalls. Far less texturally enterprising than its predecessor, The Blue Pill’s calisthenics make for a more irruptive aural exercise. City of Dark brings us back to Tischler’s urban crawl, evincing nocturnal unease, full of sonics taking flight amidst the chaos of gridlock, the faceless monkeymass of the population, dead-end corridors, concrete noir. Tischler navigates us down some tense, Scorsesian avenues, from the shuddering industrial calvacades of “The Corporation” and “The Outcasts” to the oddly quiet and placid electronic trills of “TV Station.” It’s arguable that Tischler’s sonics don’t always perfectly dramatize their titular metaphors—such is the dichotomy of the neo-impressionist—which doesn’t make any of the tracks any less satisfying. Nevertheless, the signs were apparent that Tischler had reached a nadir of sorts; he appeared ready to unite his vested interests within a more provocative context.

That context bore fruit on 1991’s Excess of Free Speech, Tischler’s sole official CD issue (released on the Extreme label in 1992), and his most notorious work by any definition (and perhaps the ultimate actualization of the full Cinematics precept). Not so much eschewing the fractured soundscapes he’d been honing over ten years time as much as situating them in confrontational milieus, Tischler’s bold new move echoed the Fluxus artists and early Cabaret Voltaire in its layering of stream-of-consciousness polemics, documentary/newsreel commentary, presidential diatribes, television commercial idiocies, and film dialogue in a McLuhanesque tableaux of mixed media and vibrating air. Branded with sobriquets such as “Desperate Despots,” “Americans Are Sleepwalking,” and “C.I.AIDS,” Tischler makes no effort to soft-pedal his disdain for the multitudinous faults in our society’s labyrinthine bureaucracies. The music itself—sparse, minimalistic, often comprised of ominous, humming drone, pensive atmospherica or carved into insistent factory-rhythms—assumes a largely backing role, but thanks to the artist’s nimble handling, both elements fuse into a galvanizing whole.

Post Excess, as he proceeded apace into the 90s and over the horizon of the new century, Tischler’s command of texture, and his feel for rendering the ephemeral corporeal, seemed to become further refined and steadfastedly imagistic. His next record, Project For A Revolution in New York (1994), title notwithstanding, truly epitomized what he so studiously maintains as “cinematic.” Through twenty-five vignettes (or, more appropriately, “cues”) variously coined “The scene…,” “The masks…,” “The cameras…,” etc., this new work heralded in a literalness of purpose that, if not his grandest statement musically, specifically generated the most stylistically profound and cohesive of his filmic ideals. Sampling found sounds (alarm clocks, winds, bells, mysterious electrical surges, defective plumbing fixtures) and integrating them into a baroque patchwork of steely, crumbling electronics, Project…’s soundtrack without a film, regardless of an episodic structure that doesn’t entirely gel, is Tischler’s boldest experiment, and deserves more than a cursory listen. That record’s follow-up (and his most recent recording) is 2004’s The Black Book, in which Tischler’s synth arsenal is augmented by two other players also contributing electronics and percussives. Here, Tischler & co. work across ten tracks of contemplative, regal beauty, in which trickling and shimmering soundfields vy with harp-like resonances and meditative rhythmic patterns suggestive of yearning expanses of rugged lands. Whether the presence of other band members egged Tischler on to greener pastures is unclear, but whatever their influence, The Black Book, taken as a whole, is successful enough to solidify Tischler’s compositional mien either solo or in tandem with like-minded operators.

In fact, of his existing collaborations, it’s curious to note the numerous differences between each; as in his work with Keeler, it seems Tischler is a passionate, empathic partner who reacts intuitively to the proposals of others in his orbit. Not radically dissimilar from the Port Said material, his 1984 collab with Tara Cross, Searchlight and Torch, works beatbox motifs and primitive synths to neatly robotic effect. Part Cluster-struck, part guileless toybox jams, it’s an especially joyous recording, whose tactile innocence and experimental profundity belies the commoner notion of two people just messing about in a room. On Gorgons & Gargoyles (1986), Tischler teams up with Blair Petrie to concoct a veritable symphony for the devil. Brash, trumpeting synths collide with muted tribal breast-beating, strange creature noises go gaga in the night, and the whole enterprise seems to get subsumed in a John Carpenterish diorama of poisonous entrails and existential dread, the kind of sounds you might have called “supercool” as a kid and can’t get enough of. Doing something of a 180-degree turn, Sultan in Oman finds Tischler and oud/dumbek player Joe Zeytoonian journeying on fourth-world safaris into a nether region where Tangiers and Mars might intersect. Zeytoonian’s strings and handstruck ragas ululate amongst the lilt of Tischler’s electronic magic-carpet rides in such gregarious employ that if anyone had been paying attention in 1984, theirs might very well have ushered in the Future Sound of India. Or at least the East Village.
DARREN BERGSTEIN www.stefantischler.com