Re: [microsound] off-icmc discourse

[Øivind Idsø <ezueled@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

anechoic wrote:

> - how do you avoid creating new "star systems" (paraphrase: "fashionable
> carriers of a genre") or is this a natural progression in self organizing
> systems? is the formation of a star system helped along by concert
> organizers and media?

The "star system" seems unavoidable as long as certain names are mentioned a
certain number of times in various media. There´s something about accumulation
and repetition that inevitably (more or less) turns what´s being repeated into
something elevated (whether it´s negative or positive elevation, if you know what
I mean), and the concert may have the function of crowning the growing stardom of
artist X -- seeing the person you´ve been hearing so much about probably has the
effect of sealing the deal. "Wow, it´s really him/her/them." When you hear this
sentence mumbled in the back of your consciousness you know you are witnessing a
"star" of a certain stature.

If one wants to fight this...what to do? If you change your project name for
every release, it becomes more difficult to pinpoint the Person behind the music,
thereby delaying the stardom effect. But the media eventually finds out who´s
behind all these projects, and then start building the Persona that will slowly
be projected to the public. Or the record company will use the previous
(successful?) releases as a marketing device, thereby creating the chain of
events that stardom needs to live.

Complete anonymity? It isn´t possible, is it? You have those moments when you go
to a club or a cafe and you hear some good music playing in the background. No
artist on stage, no DJ, just music playing. It´s as close as you get, and
sometimes it feels nice.

> - is it possible to keep a emergent genre from succumbing to entropy by
> maintaining an open system? how would this work?

By making sure that you spend as much time (or effort) as possible on all of your
work, instead of flooding the market with half-baked releases that really
could´ve needed some more work. There are about one hundred thousand microsound
releases coming out each week, and at that pace things easily get killed. But
that´s no problem. Things just evovle into something else. The problem is people
throwing stuff into the market that doesn´t feel "necessary" in any shape or
form. Or work that´s got a lof of potential, but the potential was never
realized. Mediocrity, in other words.

> - is it benefical to either camp to cross-pollinate academic and
> non-academic electronic music? if the answer is yes then which one should
> become the context? ie: should electronica/glitch/microsound host academic
> computer music or should academic computer music host
> electronica/glitch/microsound?

Both. Cross-pollination is good.

> - in that light, is maintaining a historical lineage important?

Yes and no. Accidents might happen, and a person with little or knowledge of
either Varese, Xenakis, Parmegiani or Stockhausen might produce something
different.

> - what sort of venue would have been more appropriate? are clubs and
> galleries the only choice of possible venues to present this new music?

I´d really like to, some day, play at a subway station or at an airport, though
this seems very difficult to achieve.

/Øivind/
--
"Silence is so accurate."
            -Mark Rothko