Re: [microsound] return of the son of failure, part 3 - the 24-bit years

[Joshua <thermal@xxxxxxxxx>]

>>>
i always hear the issues of idiosyncrasies involved with hardware,
software,
etc.  currently, through my progression, ive unfortunately found no
interesting fuck-ups, noises, flaws, or glitches with my setup.  i find
>>>

This is a fascinating situation, if you start to wrap your head around it.
I begin with the word "glitch"; which seems - I think rather unfortunately
- to have become the Brand-name (or at least explicit guiding principle)
of a certain subsection of digimusic.  Here in the land of Microsound, the
word has a positive valence, indicating a perhaps stochastic intrusion of
de-composition into the compositional process, yet across my Inbox on the
user group list for Logic (and probably elsewhere), the word is spoken in
the gloomiest of whispers and indicates that the ever-tweaked audio system
has again failed (that word again) to work properly.

While deceased philosphers are being trotted out, I find another useful in
this context - the current political bugbear and former fancier of painted
shoes Martin Heidegger.  [I feel as if someone is singing that Monty
Python song down the hall...]  Specifically the Heideggerian concept of
equipmentality seems involved in our little issue, which here is no longer
that of the undesirable creative failure but that of the felicitous
technical one generative of redirected creativity.  In his concept the
tool or piece of equipment when functioning properly is transparent to the
user and does not get in the way of a direct connection between a desire
and an action:  I wish to hammer a nail into a wall, I pick up a hammer,
and in goes the nail; only if the hammer is broken does it call attention
to itself as a hammer (he of course excludes the possibility that the
hammerer is a hammer geek, but that is thornier territory), whereas if it
is in working order the user simply considers the nail and its journey
into the wall.

A musical instrument, to me, is a piece of equipment in precisely this
sense, and one has become an expert player of any instrument, whether
lute or VST plug-in, at the point at which the technical being of that
instrument has become transparent to the player - at which the creative
idea can become music directly without any conscious fumbling with the
equipment itself.  A broken instrument then becomes one which calls
attention to itself, opacifying (if this is yet a word?) the transparency
of creative technique and blocking - or detouring - direct expression.

Yet here we seem faced with a strange conundrum:  in the temple of the
glitch, we enjoy the fruits of technical failure, yet simultaneously we
are faced with instruments not only difficult to master but - as Michael
mentioned earlier - also constantly metamorphosing by way of upgrades and
technical advances.  We struggle asymtotically toward mastery of our
Protean instruments yet we seek their further opacity - or as a translated
Heidegger might say their obtrusiveness - in order to enhance the
expression of our creativity.

In this way is perhaps an Interesting failure to be valued more highly
than an antiseptic predictable success?

I am reminded here of an artificial lifeform programmed some years ago as
a virus but found so harmless and fascinating that it became
recontextualized as voluntarily downloadable freeware for those who wished
to study or adopt it.  Perhaps it is the benign sonic virus we seek here,
a digital cat-across-the-keyboard, to subvert unpredictably the
transparency of the creative process, and if so I wonder how the language
of equipment and musicianship will need to be transformed in order not to
lag behind the use of its component words.

Anyone?

Joshua / Thermal / Boxman [Hako Otoko] label
mailto:thermal@xxxxxxxxx
http://www.wenet.net/~thermal/


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