Philip Sherburne on the new formlessness and its relationship to a queering of electronic sound - Arca, Elysia Crampton, Lotic, Amnesia Scanner et al -- a messthetic (de)based around "muffled explosions, glassy digital synthesizers, the over-compressed bandwidth of FM radio; the metallic detritus of Southern rap and industrial music; the reduction of human voices to grunts and yelps..... tension, disjunction, pliability—things being stretched to the breaking point."
This is the real-deal brain(y)dance:
"At Krakow's Unsound festival this year, [Elysia Crampton] delivered a performance that was part concert and part graduate seminar in object-oriented philosophy: five minutes of music, then five minutes of lecture, and so on, for nearly an hour. Before she began playing, Crampton invited the audience to consider the "clowniness" of her music, but when she spoke, she ranged from the creation of atomic elements in the Big Bang, to her Aymara heritage, to the issue of "trans-visibility" in popular culture and the question of whether trans-being is not an end in itself, rather than a journey between two poles; the thread uniting it all was the idea of emancipation and survival."
I think this might be my stumbling block with all this stuff - the "graduate seminar" aspect.
I don't know if I really want to be edified by music, exactly.... I want to be unloosed, opened, slammed... uplifted or flattened... the brain disabled by a flood of emotion..... or sensation....
I do seem to have fallen back on a somewhat moronic metric with music - that if it gives me a strong feeling, an emotional kick... or it has a basic function that it pulls off successfully (groove, chill, slam, brock out, etc)... then great
Personally feeling a bit exhausted with Conceptronica - all these complexly collated arrangements of weird and disparate electronic sounds, which are accompanied by equally dense spiels of theory and hyper-rationalisation.... music where the listening and the reading really have to be in parallel, meshed together inextricably...
It's the next step beyond IDM,....
IDM flattered itself that it was really cerebral and required a more discerning brain to understand it as sound ... but you didn't actually have to be au fait with theory or read the artist's spiels to listen to and enjoy and understand Aphex or Autechre or FSOL (if that floated your boat) ....
"Understanding" wasn't really the point... even with Oval, you could ignore Markus Popp's theory
But this next wave of form-bending electronic music is a new stage in IDM where the music is complex and the thinking around and intertwined with music is complex...
There is a kind of obsessive self-curation, a dotting of every 'i' and crossing of every 't', every last reference point mapped out
It's all a bit tidy-minded, for all the sonic imagery of abjection and splurging leakage and unravelled forms
For sure, the Conceptronica thing, it definitely was really refreshing, really stimulating, when it first started stirring (Ferraro, the first handful of OPN, etc) because things were a bit slack intellectually on the music scene...
Ultimately it's not really what I'm looking for in music I don't think
I'm looking for release.... not further knotting and cramping
Whatever the "it" is that I'm seeking it's not to do with verbalisation - music does what words can't do, that's what it's there for.
The words should follow later and be somewhat desperate, flailing attempts to catch up with the music
For textual intent to be so imbricated in the very heart of the sound....
Then again perhaps these artists are today's equivalent to early Scrittis.... hopped up on different texts, responding to different (yet not that different) conditions.... a new "Bibbly-O-Tek" fighting a different "Hegemony"
hmmm....
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Sherburne's take makes for an interesting compare + contrast companion piece to this one on NeoFuturism in (un)dance in the Tiny Mix Tapes end-of-year overview
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Rockets and Rayguns's Bruce came up with a good term for the new genre - MDM - Mutant Dance
2 comments:
Fernando Ramírez Ruiz says...
"It looks as music going to the gallery, where would listen to the music equivalent of a shoebox and have to read texts (including the artists CV) to "get it"."
current electronic music seems to be more and more exposed to contemporary art discourse, while using the artworld's infrastructure (PAN events at MoMA and Kunsthalle Basel, Mark Fell at the Whitechappel gallery, Helm at the South London Gallery, Russell Haswell at the Serpentine, James Hoff at Frieze, Evian Christ's installation at the ICA, Factory Floor's durational performance at the Tate Bunkers, and so on). Current music producers having increased awareness of contemporary discourse in a number of fields (queer studies, postcolonial studies, Anthropocene theory, new materialsms, new realisms etc) it's something fascinating rather than problematic I guess... Apparently most people involved in discussions of Accelarationism and Speculative Realism are themselves fans of electronic music (see Lee Gamble producing a podcast for Urbanomic press, Kode9's installation at Speculative Tate). Any relation between text and sonics (or/and visuals) doesn't reduce the one to the other, the conceptual element in the best of those cases does not try to explain or analyse the affective element, which in turn is not trying to illustrate theory by other means... Those different regions are relatively independent of each other, at best trying to complicate rather than rationalize things... As more musicians try to incorporate textual layers in their work there are plenty of conceptual artists (or even just academics) who try to complicate their 'performative' lectures by using sound and visuals in order to interfere and distort their essays...
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