Ron Geesin

Among veteran followers of rock music, Ron Geesin’s name usually registers for a single connection. Close inspection of the sleeve for Pink Floyd’s Atom Heart Mother reveals that the extended title track is credited to Gilmour-Waters-Wright-Mason and Geesin, marking the sole occasion on which a Floyd composition was even partly written by anyone outside the group, at least before David Gilmour began enlisting external lyricists following Roger Waters’ exit. Geesin supplied the suite’s elegiac cello line, oddly headed “Breast Milky.” Listeners drawn from there to his own recordings might nevertheless have been startled, since measured, classically inflected laments do not represent his usual territory.

During the 1970s his albums, issued on the self-run Headscope imprint, carried the advisory notice for retailers: “File under Ron Geesin.” Such guidance would have been redundant in any shop maintaining a category for Madcap electronic composers-cum-performance artists who also write and declaim absurdist poetry and make far-ranging radio programs for the BBC. Even that rubric, however, would have understated the breadth of his activities, which additionally encompass painting, short stories, the design of interactive sound-and-video installations, off-the-wall comedy, lecturing, and record production. His range of pursuits approaches the boundless.

The label “electronic composer” likewise fails to capture the improbable tangle of musical sources that shaped him. As a youngster in the 1950s his first instrument was the banjo, which by age sixteen had steered him toward jug-band music and trad jazz. An early interest in the blues followed; he worked the pieces out on the household piano, employing three fingers per hand whenever his two sisters were not using the instrument. In 1962 he joined the Downtown Syncopators, outfitted in stripy blazers and bow ties. Arguably the most consequential discovery of his musical life, though, was the tape recorder and its unexplored possibilities for sound manipulation. For the ensuing twenty years, until acquiring his first Fairlight computer, Geesin delighted in warping, reversing, fragmenting, looping, and electronically processing every sonic event, musical or otherwise, that crossed his path.

His first album, A Raise of Eyebrows, appeared in 1967 and constituted Transatlantic’s initial stereo release. From the opening piece, which evokes a cluster of jabbering eccentrics trapped inside a bottle bank, it was apparent that his records would prove difficult to market. The Atom Heart Mother assignment arose from a prior partnership with Roger Waters on the soundtrack to the feature film The Body. The two men largely worked separately, Waters’ introspective acoustic songs often submerged beneath Geesin’s intricate string writing and boundary-crossing collages. Anyone puzzled by Waters’ uncharacteristic Ummagumma track “Several Species of Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving with a Pict” would find its origins clarified by Music from The Body. One of Geesin’s most visible commissions of the era was the score for the well-received film Sunday Bloody Sunday, although his subsequent film work never quite matched that early visibility.

Throughout the early 1970s he appeared frequently on John Peel’s BBC Radio 1 program and contributed in various capacities to the more formal Radio 3 and Radio 4. He was especially dismayed, on several levels, when Peel ceased broadcasting his music after punk arrived. Geesin also gave live performances, sometimes wearing a physician’s white coat and compensating for the absence of other musicians by trading phrases with a “silent banjo” resting against a stool. His principal livelihood, however, came from composing distinctive, slightly eccentric scores for feature films, television programs, advertisements, and short promotional films, a domain in which he collected several awards. In the 1980s and 1990s his work continued to surface, albeit less regularly on air, now employing an assortment of computers and synthesizers. Even so, his earlier influences remained audible, as on Bluefuse, where he cheerfully dismantles and reconstructs a twelve-bar blues until it ceases to be recognizable as such.

Viewed strictly as a musical career, Geesin’s output invites both genuine regard and the persistent sense that his potential remained only partly realized. Returning to the core albums that established his reputation demands constant resolve to resist pressing the skip button. Many of the sonic experiments now register as self-indulgent or deliberately zany. Yet whenever his instinctive and wholly personal melodic gift surfaces, whether on banjo, treated piano, or rudimentary synthesizer, the listener encounters the uncommon sound of an unmistakably original voice. A piece such as “The Middle of Whose Night,” from the 1973 album As He Stands, offers a restless yet haunting blend of cellos and counter-tenor that lasts less than three minutes yet would flatter any contemporary classical composer.

In later decades Geesin grew somewhat conscious of suggestions that he produced only miniatures, and for a considerable period he labored on a composition titled “Journey of a Melody,” which he referred to as “the big work.” Regardless of whether that piece ever appears, Ron Geesin will continue to be remembered as a true original who maintained a robust indifference toward both the classical establishment and its rock counterpart.