Re: [microsound] -oval and mainstream ears

[Øivind Idsø <ezueled@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Mike Taylor wrote:

> The production was something new, but it was not that far out of an
> idea. You can do just about anything(if it is in key) and people will
> like it. The more I know about theory the more I realize everything has
> already been said, and it is just about tweaking the same thing out and
> calling it your own. Diskont could have been done on pianos, in fact it
> was done decades ago by people with pianos.

I don´t everything´s been done (if it had, why would I bother with my music or,
for that matter, this list?), but I think the idea of absolute Newness might not
apply anymore. These days it seems to be more about subtle reconfiguration than
blatant radicalism. It´s difficult to create the kind of in your face newness
that the ol´ folks of Varese, Schönberg, Stravinsky or Stockhausen represented,
simply because the Shock value has been devaluated. People aren´t as easily
revolted/repulsed as they used to be (and how could they be with the intensified
shock protection demanded by The City and the mediascape (I´ve seen murder,
autopsies, major car crashes, explosions and violent robberies on the telly --
why should, or how could, music shock me?)?), and about the only thing that will
get the masses moving, even amongst students, are when questions of taxes/money
threaten their alleged well-being in some way or another.

With regards to Oval: I still remember the first time I heard them, on
Modulations & Transformations vol. 2 (my discovery of both Oval and Mille
Plateaux -- what a day that was!  :-) . It was something completely different to
me, but this was many years ago, before I had discovered Pierre Henry, Varese,
Stockhausen, Xenakis et al. The impact of Oval still remains, though, perhaps
because they (it was "they" back then, I think) used sound material that still
sounded unfamiliar in that particular musical context. I´m still not sure if the
train sounds of Schaeffer would´ve made the same impact, simply because the sound
of trains wouldn´t have been radical enough -- we´re so used to trains these days
(there´s also the formal element, of course; Oval´s a more popularized version of
the musique concrete endeavor, and I think pop culture should be discussed in
this context, too, but I´ll leave that to someone else). I agree that as such and
in terms of musical history it wasn´t such a far out idea, but I´m not so sure it
needs to be (anymore).

I´m not so sure about the questions of harmony, though. People might accept it on
a superficial level (as in "I don´t take offence to it"), but that doesn´t mean
it´ll mean anything to them beyond this initial reaction. They might even object
to it  (but in a silent kind of year 2000 way). Why? Because there´s probably
something there that they´re not used to. Stina Nordenstam´s "People Are Strange"
comes to mind. In terms of harmony there´s nothing new in there, but on the first
track she´s playing "Sailing" alone on the piano, with lots of room ambience and
distant mic´ing and all sorts of audible debris being/becoming an integral part
of the picture. Most people don´t like this.

With Oval it was the rawness, coldness and digital glitching that I found oddly
fascinating; Popp basically reconfigured CD-skipping, a noise that I thought I´d
never listen to favourably. Pierre Schaeffer reconfigured "everyday" life, like
in the rhythmic sound of train noise. As I said, Oval doesn´t do anything
radically new in that respect, because the parameters of change basically
complies with Schaeffer and the other concretists. But he did something new in
terms of content, and the Unheard Of is probably just as much located in the
sound material/content as in the configuration of said content (form).

Something like that, though flawed.

> mike

/Øivind/