chef d'oeuvre / canavarro

[gg <gg2g4ink@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

From: Ian Guthrie Yeager <iyeager@xxxxxxxxxxx>
> By the way, has anyone heard that compilation called "Only in America"?
> It features a track of musique concrete assembled by some guy entirely out
> of Chef Boyardee jingles.

that "guy" is Jon Appleton, a founding member of the SEAMUS (Society for
Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States) and the CIME (International
Confederation for Electroacoustic Music). "Chef d'Oeuvre" can also be found
on empreintes DIGITALes' fine Appleton retrospective, "Contes de la
Mémoire." the voices are those of the Andrews Sisters, as featured in a Chef
Boyardee ad spot.

Appleton's an academic, but he has a great sense of humor and timing. For
1969's "Newark Airport Rock," the composer querried passers-by at the NJ
terminal for their opinions of "the new electronic music" and wove the piece
together with a little Moog and MIDI doodling, Robert Ashley-style. Appleton
revisited the concept in 1996, this time at San Francisco International
Airport, to see if/how public opinion about electronic music had changed. a
very smart set of bookends.

re: Canavarro

let's refrain from measuring the music produced in the post-Oval glitch
frenzy against "Plux Quba."  Canavarro's album is a curiosity piece, crafted
through decidedly lo-tech and organic means. it may be no more than an
estranged heir to Ashley's "Automatic Writing." surface similarities aside,
"Plux Quba" is sonic sire, not sibling, to more recent micro-melodic
electronica. you can't expect the warmth of Canavarro's tape-and-polymoog
dexterity from the DSP set. at best, you get the cold cathode radiance of
Kim Cascone's residualism or the diffused energy of Tom Steinle's teeming
soundsprite ecosystems.

there's no question that musicians active within certain sectors of Aachen
and Köln had their creative instincts stimulated and rewired by chance
encounters with the "Plux Quba" LP. but ever since Markus Popp instigated
Oval's "politics of digital audio" rhetoric, the unpretentious sound of
Canavarro's crackles and crinkles has been saddled with unfair implications.
Popp's CD sabotage and process-oriented aesthetic expose every "glitch" to
the issues of ownership and audio propriety that preocupy public conscience.
what sounds so naive and natural in "Plux Quba" has been corrupted, co-opted
as the rallying cry of the android-paranoid, flagged as ominous evidence
that the world is being digitally remapped and restructured. have we adopted
glitchmusic as the "now" soundtrack for the Millennium's
'netcentric/data-dependent fear-of-a-digital-planet millieu?

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"silence is a rhythm too" - the slits