Emvergeoning

Max Neuhaus has been a visionary in the artistic use of sound for decades. In the 60s he worked with some of the most innovative musicians in America (Cage, Stockhausen, Feldman), and was a pioneer of “live electronic music.” But soon he sloughed off the constraints of traditional musical performance altogether. The limitations Neuhaus tore down include time-based sound composition and the separation of audience from performer. To free sound from the tyranny of time, Neuhaus developed the concept of sound installations, which work as audio sculptures to be experienced as spacial components of the environment (one of these pieces is located in Times Square, and maintained by the Dia Art Foundation).

To break down the isolation of audience, performer, and composer, Neuhaus began to work on community-based sound compositions in the 60s. To do this, he connected two widespread audio networks: the telephone and the radio (apparently this was before the days of call-in radio shows). By putting ten telephone lines into a radio studio in New York, and developing a device to answer them and mix the audio, he created a sound piece in which the audience was the primary composer and performer of the work. He later convinced NPR to let him repeat the project across the nation in the late 70s. For Radio Net, Neuhaus connected 200 NPR stations, five of which were accepting calls. Over the course of two hours, ten thousand people participated in a nationwide audio loop.

His newest project flows out of these ideas of communities collaborating with sound, but moves the work to the Internet. With his Auracle website, Neuhaus has built both an instrument and a space within which to perform. Using a microphone, visitors can use their voice to control a sophisticated sound-creation tool. Your voice is analyzed by a JavaScript program on your computer, and certain gestural cues are sent to the server, which then sends them back to your computer to generate the sound. When you enter the website, you can set up virtual spaces (like chat rooms) in which you can perform with a group of other people. The sounds generated are ghostly electronic echoes, but in them can be heard the gestures of human speech. They are simultaneously mechanical and natural, robotic and organic. As Neuhaus says, “what these works are really about is proposing to reinstate a kind of music which we have forgotten about and which is perhaps the original impulse for music in man: not making a musical product to be listened to, but forming a dialogue, a dialogue without language, a sound dialogue.”

[Image courtesy Lawrence Markey Gallery]

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Back in the salad days of VHS, perhaps the only special, visual effects you could add were on a weird, radioactive-color-scheme-slider mechanism. If you grew up in San Antonio, this song was the soundtrack to your childhood. This video of Freddy Fender seems like the equivalent of a visual menudo-panacea for all your over indulgence last night at Bar America…

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For those of you who missed the Han Bennink + Arthur Doyle show at Trinity on Thursday, or just want to relive it, here’s the beginning of the third set.

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Someone has been kind enough to upload a bunch of short, abstract Harry Smith films to YouTube (the lazy blogger’s best friend). Harry Smith is known to fans of folk music as the compiler of the Folkways anthology, an important document of early American folk. But his film work, inspired by alchemy and the occult as much as it was by modern art, is just as important. Kenneth Anger referred to him as the “greatest living magician.” But for Smith, the music he loved and the films he made went hand in hand. Many of these early films were screened during jazz concerts in San Francisco and New York. Smith said that he made the work for contemporary music, and talked about the films in terms of synaesthesia of color and sound. For this reason, his work is considered a precursor to ’60s psychedelic culture. You can read more about him and his work at the Harry Smith Archives. This particular film, Color Study, was made in 1952 (the music was added by the person who stuck it on YouTube):

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Thanks to local radio shows like the Hillbilly Hit Parade, I was reminded of Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys. The improvised, falsetto “ahas” in this video are nonpareil…

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This is the only film that should have ever been made about 9/11.

In the process of archiving and digitizing analog tape loops from work I had done in 1982, I discovered some wonderful sweeping pastoral pieces I had forgotten about. Beautiful, lush cinematic truly American pastoral landscapes swept before my ears and eyes. With excitement I began recording the first one to cd, mixing a new piece with a subtle random arpeggiated countermelody from the Voyetra. To my shock and surprise, I soon realized that the tape loop itself was disintegrating: as it played round and round, the iron oxide particles were gradually turning to dust and dropping into the tape machine, leaving bare plastic spots on the tape, and silence in these corresponding sections of the new recording. I had heard about this happening, and frankly was very afraid of this happening to me since so much of my early work was precariously near the end of its shelf life. Still, I had never actually seen it happen, yet here it was happening. The music was dying. I was recording the death of this sweeping melody. It was very emotional for me, and mystical as well. Tied up in these melodies were my youth, my paradise lost, the American pastoral landscape, all dying gently, gracefully, beautifully. Life and death were being recorded here as a whole: death as simply a part of life: a cosmic change, a transformation. When the disintegration was complete, the body was simply a little strip of clear plastic with a few clinging chords, the music had turned to dust and was scattered along the tape path in little piles and clumps. Yet the essence and memory of the life and death of this music had been saved: recorded to a new media, remembered.

As far as Sept. 11th goes, perhaps you had to be here and see it with your own eyes and experience the horror and the ghastly smell, and smoke, sirens, no television or telephone, F-16s strafing the city at ear splitting volume, the fear, agony and deep sadness, see peoples faces in the subway, the deep longing bonded look people gave each other, the lip compression signifying compassion, to understand the magnitude of what we felt here. This was the end of the world…and we were literally sitting up on the roof all day and into night watching without believing as NYC burned, and listening to the heartbreaking Disintegration Loops…I thought…it’s the soundtrack to the end of the world…I had been assigned the job without knowing the details, it was done, and here we are…The Greatest Show on Earth, Armageddon. We were all literally losing our minds in terror, each person looping onto what holds him or her together..clinging to that which could provide some kind of release or explanation..just as each of the individual melodies in the Disintegration Loops did…at their own pace, seeming to hold onto that which made the melody unique, while letting go of the unimportant sustains or gently adding rests incrementally before the downbeat…it really blew my mind.

I hadn’t really though t of trying to “achieve” anything. But perhaps, if the music enabled listeners to contemplate the temporal nature of life in this world and come to some small inkling or understanding as I did of a redemptive spirituality that animates us and continues on, then that would be an achievement.

— William Basinski

As far as I can tell, Otonson is the only place where you can still buy the DVD.

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Interesting festival excerpt from the brilliant sound culling machines known as Sublime Frequencies. Also watch the trailer for their film “Sumatran Folk Cinema.” I miss Thailand!!

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Just thought I’d link y’all up to probably the most sublime review of a rock album ever written; in fact, one of the best pieces of art criticism I have ever read. The author, Lester Bangs, is among the most celebrated American rock critics, and although he has written some crap, this review shows why he deserves that reputation.

Astral Weeks, insofar as it can be pinned down, is a record about people stunned by life, completely overwhelmed, stalled in their skins, their ages and selves, paralyzed by the enormity of what in one moment of vision they can comprehend. It is a precious and terrible gift, born of a terrible truth, because what they see is both infinitely beautiful and terminally horrifying: the unlimited human ability to create or destroy, according to whim. It’s no Eastern mystic or psychedelic vision of the emerald beyond, nor is it some Baudelairean perception of the beauty of sleaze and grotesquerie. Maybe what it boiled down to is one moment’s knowledge of the miracle of life, with its inevitable concomitant, a vertiginous glimpse of the capacity to be hurt, and the capacity to inflict that hurt.

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In the course of doing some research for a Han Bennink / Arthur Doyle gig I’m organizing, I came across an amazing blog which focuses on music, but occasionally throws in some film-related content. What makes this blog such a valuable resource is the fact that the author makes entire albums and live sets available for download. These are out of print or unreleased recordings, and many of them are very rare. The author’s focus is free jazz, but there are quite a few posts on artists outside this arena, such as Captain Beefheart and Tom Waits. If you’re into this stuff, I highly recommend you check in with Church Number 9.

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In my earlier Creation and Production post, I noted that “ceramics, more than almost any other art form, is forced to confront this tension between the creative act and the means of production.” At the time, that “almost” was meant to leave room for other functional art forms, such as furniture design or graphic design. I am now realizing that contemporary music faces this paradox in a different, but just as important way. Music, by its very nature, trades in feeling and spontaneity, and it when it becomes functional (e.g. Muzak) it betrays that nature. However, the tension between mass production and the creative act is very much a part of what musicians have to deal with, both in the sense that they are asked to churn out music in specific styles and in the sense that the work they create will (ideally) be duplicated millions of times over. Perhaps more importantly, if they ever do become successful, that success often hinges on a few recognizable songs, which are played ad nauseum. I recall seeing a Willie Nelson concert in which he introduced “On the Road Again” with the advice never to write a song unless you want to play it at every concert you do for the next twenty years.

But there is a musical movement which takes aim at these demands for repetition and mass production by sticking strictly to improvisation. Purely improvised music destroys many of the control structures that exist in the music industry by conflating creation and production. Through this conflation, improvised music refuses to let audiences demand specific songs, refuses to let a single songwriter or lead musician dominate the performance, and refuses to allow anyone to know what to expect. Ultimately, improvisation allows musicians to demonstrate a method for communities to organize themselves around awareness, feeling, spontaneity — and the personal integrity that comes with these things. Thus, many improvisers see their music as a political act, in the sense that it presents a kind of non-hierarchical politics.

However, improvisation may very well be impossible. As Derrida said in an unpublished interview:

“One can’t say what ever one wants, one is obliged more or less to reproduce the stereotypical discourse. And so I believe in improvisation and I fight for improvisation. But always with the belief that it’s impossible. And there where there is improvisation I am not able to see myself. I am blind to myself. And it’s what I will see, no, I won’t see it. It’s for others to see. The one who is improvised here, no I won’t ever see him.”

And so the improviser fights on in her quixotic task, unable to reach her goal or even to see her own progress towards it. But regardless of Don Quixote’s inability to slay a single giant or hold his beloved Dulcinea in his arms for a single minute, the world was expanded for his having fought the battle.

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Well, if you must listen to Christmas music, here are a couple of mash-ups that should do the trick: Body Sleighin’ by ccc and Rudolph the Paranoid Reindeer by ToToM. (Hat tip: Hit n Run)

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Spaztek, caught on video for the first time at the closing for Cruz Ortiz’ exhibit at FL!GHT.

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This lovely video will warm you up!

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The second monthly artist rodeo put on by Ken Little went down without a hitch this past Tuesday.  Performers included ; Hills Snyder, Ken Little, Cruz Ortiz, The Maybe Laters, Jimmy Kuehnle, Lloyd Walsh, Potter-Belmar Labs, and some other rightfully deserving folks whose names i cant quite always remember.  It was quite a ruckus.  hover over photos for more info.  

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This is an interesting video Bruce Conner made to go with a Brian Eno / David Byrne song called Mea Culpa. The song comes off a 1981 album called My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, which is an interesting album, both artistically and historically. It’s a fairly early example of a record which stitches together samples and field recordings from such disparate sources as American talk-radio shows, Lebanese mountain singers and Muslim chanting (to name a few). But naturally, it wasn’t the first, and some feel that Eno and Byrne get too much credit. I’ve heard rumors that Holger Czukay from Can always felt that Eno had ripped him off. (He apparently played a pre-release version of his conceptually similar album Movies for Eno, who then rushed off to record My Life in the Bush of Ghosts with Byrne). While trying (unsuccessfully) to confirm this rumor, I discovered that Jon Hassell thinks he is the conceptual father of this album too. I guess it is a bit ironic to argue over who came up with the idea of musical appropriation first — but maybe I wouldn’t be saying that if Brian Eno stole my big idea…

UPDATE: Looks like YouTube took down the video. And that was by far the most interesting part of the post… You can watch a QuickTime version of it here.

UPDATE 2: The video is back. Sorry for the confusion

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