through the progression of these sections that accords to a sense of narrative, with the template of traditional rock forms as the backdrop to the performance, we are struck mostly by the audacity of the dynamic and stylistic shifts.
2. Single-cell forms
Some rock recordings avoid the quest narrative through being completely comprised of repeated iterations of a single musical idea or tonal area. This may take the form of a riff, chord progression or drone.
Pink Floyd - 'Obscured By Clouds' (1972)
This track might be described as a restrained guitar solo over a pulsed drone. Without any alternation of sections, or a strophe, and especially with the track beginning and ending with fades, we could be hearing an excerpt from a much larger, perhaps endless form. The music is presented as a process, rather than having a beginning-middle-end reinforced by formal divisions. The complete lack of harmonic movement helps to establish the sense of a prolongation of a single moment or situation, rather than a progression of episodes or a number of recurring scenes symptomatic of quest narrative structures. Just as pivotal is the lack of variation in instrumentation, timbre and the articulation of rhythm. All of these musical phenomena result in our experience of the track as sound-mass. This is in distinction to the foregrounding of melodic and rhythmic characteristics that traditionally help to articulate quest narrative form in rock music.
It might be possible to map some sort of narrative structure onto the use of register in the lead guitar part, but without the landmarks we usually find in the areas of harmony, instrumentation and timbre, this would be a relatively obscure approach. 'Obscured By Clouds' might also be considered an 'immersive' form (see below), although the mix level of the lead guitar situates it as the lead instrument, much like the vocal in the majority of pop and rock recordings. The presence oft a clear lead instrument or vocal ın a recording takes us away from immersion as we become spectators to the actions of the lead part as protagonist.
Smog - 'All Your Women Things'(1996)[1]
In what is a common approach for this artist, this recording repeats a single three-chord progression for the entirety of its seven-minute duration. While this progression quickly
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- ↑ Again, for a discussion of Smog/Bill Callahan's approach, see Encarnacao (2007)
PORTAL, vol. 8, no. 1, January
