Re: [microsound] ENOvsMICROSOUND

[Joshua Maremont <thermal@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 11:06 AM 6/22/01 +0100, Marc Day wrote:
> Here's Eno dribbling on and on like he usually does in his own slipstream of
> monotony.  But you'ld better watchout Laptoppers - Eno's got a new target -
> YOU!
> http://www.launch.com/music/content/1,5850,198216,00.html?vo=nwsi

Having read the article just now, I think the interpretation above somewhat 
mischaracterizes Eno's sense of the computer and its users.  While he rants 
against the cult of the popstar, his gripe with computers seems to have 
little to do with its users or with its powers (he is one of the former and 
is happy to take advantage of the latter, as exemplified in his Koan 
release years before the massmarketing of digital culture, or in a 
different sense in his Windows 95 start-up music) but with what I would 
call the nontransparency of its interface:  the physically unnatural means 
by which it must be approached as an instrument.  That is, the computer for 
him is undeniably powerful as a compositional and production tool but is 
lacking as an instrument in that - for him at least - it is hard, literally 
and figuratively, to come to grips with it, to make it an extension of the 
musician's body in the act of playing.  And I have to agree with him here, 
having felt the same way not only about computers but also about 
keypad/dataslider-based interfaces to any number of digital instruments.  I 
began to make music with guitars, knobby effects boxes, and menuless 
button-based drumboxes, and found that musicmaking was a visceral activity 
in which my body and the instruments were at one with each other.  As gear 
became more powerful, the menu, the keypad, and the dataslider entered the 
picture, and musicmaking would occasionally be diverted into logical 
puzzles of interfaces and menu organization, all of which reached its 
height with my hardware sampler, which stopped the visceral act of music 
making entirely and detoured interminably into testing and tweaking.  I am 
not stating this as a factual taxonomy of instruments but rather as a 
personal opinion based upon my physical and emotional reactions over the 
years, but generally I have found that computers and chip-based hardware 
have directed my music making away from intuitive physical playing and 
toward a more detached and logical compositional consciousness.  With the 
computer I cannot simply pick the thing up (especially with a G4 tower) and 
play (unless I am using dancefloor-oriented software or premade soft 
instruments, neither of which hold much interest) but must first consider 
my musical goal and ponder a technical strategy for reaching it.  The 
results too are different in my own case:  more refined but less 
direct.  Nowhere am I saying that computers suck or that computer music 
sucks, but only that for me the process of working with a computer is 
inescapably different than the process of working with a guitar or the 
like, and that for me the happiest musicmaking involves both the physical 
and the virtual.  And Eno is really saying the same thing in an edited 
article reflecting his own Post-Bono Aesthetic.  The irony of the reaction 
to Eno here is that Eno himself took a great deal of abuse from old fans 
for his Koan release as it was for computer rather than CD player, as well 
as from Mac-heads for releasing it for Windows software and for consorting 
with the Microsoft monster in his Windows 95 theme music; he is anything 
but a luddite, but neither has he anything to do with othodoxy, analog OR 
digital.

np - The Danse Society "Seduction"

Joshua Maremont / Thermal - mailto:thermal@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Boxman Studies Label - http://www.boxmanstudies.com/