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Re: [microsound] oval armani



Øivind, philippe, Frans, et al........

interesting to see this thread go past the 'player-hater' phase and into some rich areas. the economics of the underground remains one of my interests, but this last comment touches on something even more important...

markus popp has brought the idea and sound of generative music to a wider audience than ever before, even with the armani spot excluded. to me, generative art involves two distinct things:

1) that the 'artist-as-virtuoso' (aka rockstar) has been undermined by technology which removes performance from the equation.

2) but at the same time, the artist has assumed the role of engineer or technician to create the micro-world in which this generative situation occurs.

conclusion: all reports of the 'death of the artist' have been greatly exaggerated.

by admitting 'glitches' and 'accidents' into our work, we acknowedge a small part of the first point. john cage and others in the 60's pursued a similar vein when they said that any sound that occurred in the performance space was also the music (replace 'technology' with 'circumstance' in the first statement). the second point has been explored most recently by program-it-yourself art applications such as PD and MAX/MSP, and by satirical looks at how software shapes what it creates like auto-illustrator.

popp's work, for me, is a prime example of how an art form (generative music) which originated in part to 'erase the artist', or to 'make everyone an artist', has been subsumed by this new 'artist-as-engineer' movement to create new rockstars. for convenience sake, we see 'markus popp', engineer and composer, but we might as well give credit to Phillips, Sony, Microsoft, Toshiba, etc for actually creating the tools necessary for popp's generative environment. or own own... as for his 'source sounds', his debt to christophe charles is jimi hendrix's debt to robert johnson and django reinhardt--something we don't admit fully on CD liner-notes, but that anyone with a sense of the music cannot ignore.

happy new year,
derek

some notes:
yes, i'm aware that 'systemisch', 'diskont 94' and 'dokk' are not generative pieces, that they were manually chopped and spliced just like most any other soundworks, with allowences made for accidents in the name of art. but with popp's recent attempts to to "inscribe [himself] into this more musical heritage [and contribute] to a historical musical discourse" with his "oval process" (Lecture, SFU Harbor Centere, Oct 19, 2000), i think it's fair to dissect him as a generative music technician on a theoretical level.


also, for an example of replacing 'technology' with 'circumstance', you could do much worse than to look at the work of christophe charles himself. his environmental field recordings are some of the most sublime i have ever heard.

----Original Message Follows----
From: Øivind Idsø <plateaux@xxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [microsound] oval armani