Several Species of Furry Autechres Deconstructing Digital Culture in a Cave with a Laptop

[Joshua Maremont <thermal@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Permit me to have a series of random difficulties with the digital culture 
toolkit, nee the eternal recurrence of Autechre baiting.  Specifically, these.

Talk of impressiveness of patch programming and choice of gear recalls all 
too vividly the days of childhood in which I would engage with my friends 
in passionate discourse concerning speed of guitar solos, tube amplifier 
sound against solid state sound, and the great Gibson/Fender dilemma.  But 
I also recall an interview with - I want to say - the bass player Stanley 
Clarke (Return to Forever) concerning the guitarist Andy Summers (The 
Police), in which the latter was described as playing furiously in an 
audition with the former; Clarke responded that he already knew Summers 
could play his guitar and was interested instead in what he could play on 
it.  Similarly, if I buy a record or attend a performance by a digital 
musician, I have made the assumption that he or she is able to use the 
equipment properly and hope to experience new music rather than simply a 
hardware or software demo; I must admit I have absorbed far too many 
recordings and performances falling into the latter category, as if 
sponsored by the VST Plugin Of The Month Club.

Unlike some theoretically propped (or crutched) groups, Autechre seems 
content to be making music, and given that this duo originates in the world 
of dance music and refrains from esoteric footnoting (but perhaps not 
nosepicking) on its records, it seems unfair to burden its music with the 
leaden mantles of digital cultural helmsmanship or of technical 
innovation.  Rather than trying Autechre for some betrayal of experimental 
purity, why not instead enjoy the subversion of the mainstream of the 
electronic musical consciousness by way of this group's MAX/MSP programming?

What is finished?  In recorded music, the finishing is inserted into the 
production process; a trip to the mastering room generally indicates that a 
piece is finished.  But is it really?  What does it mean to release an 
"unfinished" piece?  That one is lazy?  Or slow?  Or making a statement 
about the production process of music as retail product?  Or do we mean not 
unfinished but rather carelessly fabricated - brought to a finish prematurely?

Digital culture bugbear:  does culture evolve around practice, community, 
ritual, belief, ethics, or rather is it distributed by media conglomerates 
and presented for instant assimilation.  When we speak of MD, CD-R, DAT, 
LP, Powerbooks, etc, can we really speak meaningfully of culture, or are we 
instead calling culture the ooze seeping into the cultural vaccuum created 
by mass consumption?

Oval might have contextualized the music of skipping CDs within a program 
of retail music deconstruction, in which the transparent tool of 
commodified musical disemination is presented as such in its unwelcome 
opacity, yet the artifacts of this program have themselves been 
commodified, to the extent that groups use the sound of skipping CDs not as 
a reference to the underlying theoretical discourse but merely as an 
imitation of a successfully marketed and now easily categorized 
"sound."  Here there is neither tool analysis nor digital cultural critique 
(and to extrude the latter from Oval records is already a stretch), but a 
gestural SDK emptied of all but aesthetic contents.  But perhaps not 
subsequently debugged.

Tool-content relationship = signifier-signified relationship?  The tool 
signifies the content?  How can this be accurate?  My collection of 
instruments does not signify content of my music; rather the tool is the 
device that allows that music - and any signification made within it - to 
occur.  Certainly, the choice of tool can alter the palette of semiological 
possibilities within music (some of which may feed back toward the tool 
itself), but the tool may just as easily be left out of the layer of 
signification entirely; not all music is self-referential.  Must all 
writers, similarly, bring the publisher of their word processing software 
into their stories?  Do we care what sort of typewriter Thomas Pynchon 
used?  Another tired Selectric novel, yawn!

Musicians know how music is made and are able to pick apart the production 
process of a record; indeed sometimes their listening experience is 
crippled by an inability to restrain their picking apart.  But it does not 
follow from our ability to analyse the workings of this music that the 
music is "about" these workings.  When I listen to Peter Gabriel's third 
album or the early ECM releases I hear Steve Lillywhite's gated drum 
reverbs or Erik von Kongshaug's ride cymbal microphone techniques, but it 
would be a bit extreme for me to say these records are "about" these 
techniques.  For listeners - and for us if we are willing to humbly submit 
ourselves to the music - music is about sound, and in electronic music it 
seems especially unfortunate to manacle the abstract and 
nonrepresentational possibilities of this sound to an interpretive matrix 
of production accidents.

The ourobouros is pictured as a snake swallowing its tail.  Why in the case 
of humans is hall-of-mirrors self-referentiality depicted so often as the 
tail swallowing the head?

And more, but typing must stop for the moment.  Respect to all.

np - Radiohead "Amnesiac"

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