a new primitivism?

[w_a_s_t_e_@xxxxxxxx]

During the last year I have been 
thinking a lot about the status of 
sound in digital music. If one 
considers the efforts of labels like 
12k and raster-noton, or artists like 
Ryoji Ikeda for example, what seems 
to be at stake is to put across the 
thought, or message, that music as 
sound is something essentially 
physical. For example Carsten 
Nicolai exhibited a work at this years 
venice-biennal which, according to 
Nicolai was an attempt to "show the 
physical in music, mwhich has 
always been there" (if I remember 
the catalogue correctly), by low end 
sinuses which had the water in 
some tubes make patterns. 

My point, or rather question, here is: 
Isn´t the thought of music as 
something physical something 
which has guided the making, and 
experiencing of music since 
pythagoras? Why are we all then 
acting as if this is something 
completely alien to the history of 
music? As if the purity of tones (to 
speak with Immanuel Kant) were 
something neglected or forgotten. 
One may only think of rock music, 
which also builds itself on a similar 
notion notion of physicality. 

At least for myself, I have decided to 
consider this as a new primitivism. 
Though, it should be noted that 
primitive need not be bad. But are we 
really aware of this? What happened 
to the physico-social meshwork? Are 
we all just joining the post-adornian 
thought of Jaques Attali: that noise is 
no longer arranged according to our 
experience of music, but instead our 
experience of music arranged 
according to noise. I believe Adorno 
himself has a much better, and more 
complex, grasp of contemporary 
digital, post-digital or whatever 
music, than that. 

With these unfinished thoughts 
behind me I end with some 
encouraging words from Edgar 
Varese: "Contrary to general notion, 
the artist is never ahead of his own 
time, but is simply the only one who 
is not way behind" 

/tomas

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