The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 62

Saturday review 1 5 Saturday October 6 2001 The Guardian Is there more to music than melody and sound? Continuing our series on 'difficult' art forms, Simon Hattenstone delves into the works of Stockhausen in a bid to understand electronic music and loses his balance, his appetite and almost his mind Listei tout preiudice WJ banality of a tune that sears the soul. I consider visiting the local record shop to congratulate the owner for not stocking Stockhausen and his mates. A new compromise. No Stockhausen while my partner and the kids are about. Alex Poots, who has programmed a series of electronic music at the Barbican, has just told me the fact that I'm a gibbe ring ghoul of my former self means that I have risen to the challenge.

I've engaged with culture rather than the pacification that passes for most pop music. Apparently, what Stocky actually said was that the twin towers bombing was "Lucifer's greatest work of He's always been misunderstood. Not least by me. "Look, Alex, I'm glad I've engaged, but I still don't like it." He sighs. What a poor world it would be that only valued stuff we liked.

He lends me afamous quote: the function of art is to raise doubt, the function of entertainment is to maintain the status quo. Poots tells me that Beethoven's Fifth was dismissed in its day in much the same way as Stockhausen is today. So he thinks Stockhausen will become as popular as Beethoven? "No." He sends me a CD of electronic music composed by artists influenced by Stockhausen Orbital, William Orbit, Talvin Singh, Bjork, Aphex Twin. It sounds great, really enjoyable, doctor. Perhaps I've been listening to Stocky wrong? Or, even worse, hearing and not listening.

"Not necessarily," he says. "Think of Stockhausen as afashion designer who creates clothes in their purest form; clothes made for the catwalk rather than life. These clothes will then be diluted down by another designer and made wearable for the masses." Poots admits he wouldn't sit down to Stocky for light relief. A month has passed. My Stockhausen experiment is corning to an end.

I'm sorting out my CDs. I've put Stocky on the top shelf. If there were shelves that were impossible to reach, Mikrophonie II and Gruppen and Kontra-Punkte would be on them. Don't know why, but I've left Hymnen out, just for the hell of it I suppose. I'm watching a film by the Quay Brothers.

The soundtrack has been written by Stockhausen. Only it hasn't. The music was written first, and the film is the soundtrack to the music. It's baffling, but kind of wonderful. It's early and I feel hungry.

I go to the kitchen. Chocolate, cornflakes, cheese, bread? Don't fancy any of it. A fag? No, thanks. I wander back and it hits me that what I actually fancy is a bit of Hymnen. There was a time, maybe yesterday, when I would have listened while reading a novel.

Now I give it my all. Strange: my ears feel as if they've been syringed. I can hear so much better those terse, edgy notes hitting against each other are haunting, almost melodic. The way he's taken those anthems and mashed them up seems so optimistic a glorious United Nations of sound. But I'm not sure.

Moving, strangely melodic even, maybe. It's enjoyable. But I'm not sure. I lon' tkiow whether it is because I want it to be, or because I recognise it and anythingyou recognise becomes a kind of music, or because I know the back stories, or because I've hypnotised myself. I'm enjoying Hymnen.

What's gone wrong? The Elektronic season, including work by Stockhausen. Talvin Singh and William Orbit, runs from October 1 3-1 8 at the Barbican. Box office: 020-76385403. smiles when asked if he's got any Stockhausen. "Fraid not," says the owner of the polite classical music shop in the north London suburb.

"Not much demand for it round here." Perhaps he could recommend Stockhausen for beginners? Some easy listening. He tells me there is no such thing, and asks if I've ever heard any Stockhausen. No, of course not, but I know when I'm being patronised. I begin to feel a bond with Stockhausen. united against the smug complacencies of the bourgeois world.

I walk away that little bit taller. A couple of days later, I head for a West End megastore. It turns out that Stockhausen is German, in his 70s. and that his electronic music has paved the way for all sorts of groundbreaking genres from prog-rock to techno. I look under for Stockhausen and find only one disc.

The shop is playing boring stuff Mozart, Beethoven, Bach. You know, tunes. The sales staff say they do have more Stockhausen and whip out a stacked box from under the counter. Why do they keep them here? Two reasons, they say. First, they don't have that many requests for them.

Second, when they do put him on show, he tends to get nicked. A young man, with a soft voice, tells me that the discs are expensive because Stockhausen makes them himself, and he insists on a very high standard. He shows me an opera, which retails at 5.99- He tells me that Stockhausen is interesting because he's broken down the old order. He puts on Unsichtbare Chore reverently. This is what I've been waiting for a new beginning.

He's as excited as I am. I give him the thumbs up. He gives me a Masonic nod. It's ghastly. Truly bloody awful.

Rats scurrying across a blackboard, a washing machine turning somersaults, a car horn hooting in temper. And when it's not quite so ghastly, it turns into a Monty Python sketch a choir of cheeks being pulled at speed. The blow-job sonata perhaps? He laughs. His colleague says the people who buy Stockhausen arc geeks out to impress other geeks. Invariably men.

"You would have to question the sanity of anyone who claims to like this." she says. He looks hurt. "No he says in that soft voice. "The music is asking us complex questions. Why do we find it discomfiting? So threatening? Why should music give pleasure? What is music?" He nods, as il'he's just tasted a fine wine.

"Yes. this is good, very good. And. of course, utterly unique." "There's a good reason it's unique." she says. "Who else would write such shite? Mind you, it's good to clear the shop with." She points towards a man in a suit on his way out.

"Are you trying to drive the customers away?" he snarls. "Told you so," she says. "This music contravenes nature. No bird sings discordantly, even water has overtones." "This music is driving me round the bend," says another middle-aged suit on his way out. My new friend, the Stockhausen fan, apologises and explains that I had requested it.

"Well, why doesn't he go home and listen to it?" A tiny, elderly, middle-European woman likes it. "It reminds me of cubism, all the dissonance." She licks her lips with approval. I go home, with i'100 worth of Stockhausen. 1 like the title Hvmnen. one of PHOTOGRAPH: AKG PHOTO cars, chaos, the frazzle of a million machjnes and jconyejggtjons.

making music in I960 'This is a soundtrack to modern life his better known pieces. It's a good omen. Hymnen sounds like a requiem for the internal combustion engine. One track starts in the middle of another track. Another is pure silence.

Then halfway through, he starts sampling Europe's national anthems and we're in 1966! For a second, 1 think I'm enjoying it before realising that my only pleasure lies in recognising, through the distortion and loops, anthems I'd always taken forgranted. Anyway, Stockhausen must be taking the piss. Isn't he saying that the only decent anthem is a beaten-up anthem? It finally comes to an end. Eerily, it starts up again a minute later. Ah, this is rather good, I think to myself.

Then I realise I'm listening to the burps and groans of our heating system. I go to bed achy, anxious, defeated. Next day, I am walking through the city, listening to Hymnen. It makes perfect sense. This is a soundtrack to modern life cars, chaos, the frazzle of a million machines and conversations.

It's all here. I've lost my balance. I keep bumping into things. Cars. I wait for the track of silence, and never has it life.

I agree with Jeremy Till that good buildings are critically shaped by the human and temporal dimensions: how people use them and how they can be adapted over their lifetime. I just hope that his cry for "weird shit" does not receive its welcome in literal terms, so that people design simply to shock. Most buildings arc meant to last, so it is important that they remain useful: adaptable according to the needs of the beings who use them. GIf Galal, London "Perhaps you really do like it!" The accusation stings. We compromise.

No Stockhausen while she's in the house. When she goes to the gym, I rush for Mikrophonie II and play it to my daughter. There are pigs grunting, birds tweeting, chickens having their throats cut, dustbin lids banging. 1 think. "It's like ghosts singing religious songs in a graveyard," she says.

That's great, I say. "No, it's not. It's horrible," she says. "What about this?" I say. Kontakte is thought to be perhaps his greatest piece.

"Tcletubbies," she says. She's right. With a few underwater farts thrown i for good measure. I'm drowning in elcctroniea. sending me more and more music.

Friends! It's getting desperate. I try out John Cage's Williams Mix. it sounds like someone throwing up into the loo then stirring it round with a plunger. At the end, there is huge applause. I smile for the first time in weeks.

Next conies Steve Reich's Pendulum Music: two recorder notes against a police siren. And the very nadir. La Monte Youngs seven minutes of single-note tinnitus. I listen to Bobby Womack's Harry Hippie for a treat. Ah, the Architecture is an art, and an older one than the other visual arts, but it needs to reinvent itself continually.

Most of the rubbish bought and sold as private housing in this country (the majority of which has never seen an architect anyway) is proof of our inability as a society to comprehend architecture. The failure to recreate the house in Britain is probably the greatest failure of the last 20O years, but we largely seem so blissfully unaware of it, despite the fact that we have to put up with its failure daily. I originally intended to train as an architect, but chose theatre design, partly because of the length of architectural training and the uncertainty whether one would ever get to build anything of real interest, David Cockayne, Nottinghamshire four different helicopters. You'll never guess what he's gone and done now. Only told the world that the bombing of the World i Trade Centre was our greatest piece of art.

You know, 1 tell Worby, last night I definitely heard a bit of Radiohead and Pink Floyd in Hymnen, and 1 think 1 even heard Ah, this is rather I good, I think. I Then I realise I I'm listening to I the burps and I groans of our i heating system the Beatles. He tells me my listening is improving, and that the Beatles I were so influenced by him they 1 included him on the cover of Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. My partner asks me why I'm listening to the same awful piece again and again. "If you like I a piece of music, you like it.

You 1 can't force yourself." She pauses. So the RFH and the NT are great 1 buildings not because of how they empowerment they afford their unseeing users. Jeremy Till has famously put down the British Museum Great Court as an airport check-in. Is this because it doesn't have enough beggars to please him, or because he's nearly blind? Maybe Canary Wharf underground station is more to his taste, or is its spatial empowerment too straightforward, too like the BM reading room, perhaps? The pictures of the slraw-bale house suggests it's a fun piece of narcissistic expressionism. Maybe it's too much fun for Foster, hut Rogers, bless him, can still do Wasn't the plastic dome and its rainbow chill-out space evidence of his ofiicc's sentimental attachment 1 lohippydom and archigram? Gordon MaeLaren, London 1 but why can't he just knock out a decent tune? "Ah, he does know all about tunes," Wbrby says.

As a kid, Stocky could listen to any song on the radio and play it instantly. Perhaps he became bored with normal music. It was too easy for him. When he heard Schoenberg and Webern complicating things, he wanted to complicate them further. And when tape recorders and computers came of age, he was made he could take sounds and squish them about as never before.

Ach, the banality of melody, says Wbrby, such a piddling aspect of music. Stockhausen realised that music can be about the way sound moves around space, the way different sounds collide and clatter. Worby says he enjoys Stocky in the same way he enjoys Percy Faith and his orchestra. So he can hum along to Hymnen? "It's very difficult because it's not about tunes. But, yes, I do often hear it in my head." Yeah, right.

It turns out that not only is there more to music than melody, there is more to music than sound. Stockhausen is about performance, so he wrote a string quartet to be played from dictated here basically, go to work, have no friends round, don't have any clutter, don't grow your own food, and stare at the telly, not the fire, in the evening. Buildings need to he designed to look good and feel good for the people using them. They need to generate harmony and inspire people to relate to space, light and ambience. And definitely lots more weird shit please.

More sensuous curves, more unusual materials, more humour, and more risk-taking. Stefan Baton js, Devon sounded so beautiful. Is that Stockhausen's cryptic message? Later that day, I play tennis, i upture muscles, and am on crutches. The day after that the US is bombed, and I'm heading for Armageddon with Stocky on my headset. Gruppen, three orchestras playing against each other, is even nastier than Hymnen.

Mikrophonie II is even nastier than Gruppen. It hurts, but so does the world. Friends say I look miserable. The composer and Stockhausen enthusiast Robert Wbrby hears that I've been listening to the composer's music while walking. He's worried for me.

"Never put him on as background," he says. "Listening is very different from hearing. Hearing is a physiological phenomenon; listening is hearing connected to the intellect, the emotions, all the cultural baggage that you carry. Stockhausen's music is disruptive, it demands that you take part in the musical process." I tell him I feel sick, and think that Stockhausen may be responsible for the bad things that have been happening. "If you're asking questions, then it's changed your life in some way," he says.

Fine, Modern architecture largely sucks, whether it's the toytown clock-tower of out-of-town stores, the cold clinical emptiness of modernism, or the brand new house that I live in. My house is like most new developments: probably looked pretty on architects' plans, hut a nightmare to live in. Why not orientate the house towards the sun? Why is there no entrance lobby? One cannot greet or say goodbye to visitors at the door. There are no storage spaces or fireplace. My lifestyle is licing 'Modern architecture, including the brand new house I live in, largely sucks' Your reactions to last week's article Have your say Is electronic music sublime sound or unholy racket? Send your views on Simon Hattenstone's article to: What's the Arts Desk, The Guardian, 119 Farringdon Road, London EC1R3ER, or email artsguardian.co.uk.

Letters should arrive by Wednesday and include your address and daytime telephone number We have to turn architecture upside down: architecture is primarily an intensely intellectual and technical discipline, art comes only later. The danger with the concept of buildings that look good, as pieces of art, is that they usually do so only when new, when they are most able to shock and excite but for how long? Part of the visual excitement with a building is its novelty value, and how it appears in photographs. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and it has a strict shelf.