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Re: [microsound] What a press kit should contain



Certainly deconstruction participates in the production of new meanings and
contexts. Otherwise why do it? Deconstruction isn't simply about pulling off
the covers to expose the ugly innards of our most sacred word objects and
the ideas that cling flimsily to them. And to merely expose fundamental
oppositions creates philosophical and artistic stasis. If we take the case
of Derrida, his writing is much too lively to be the product of such a
meager intellectual enterprise. Rather, I would suggest that Derrida chiefly
plays with language--specifically, with the generative qualities of
language.

To get at the generative quality of language, one goes beyond language as a
tool for merely and transparently conveying meaning; it becomes first and
foremost a sound-generating device, an abstract musical instrument. Alive in
intonation, language proliferates through puns, yes, but also in the manner
of reverberations, echoes, mishearings, interference, even aural
hallucinations! Perhaps I'm drawn to Derrida's earlier work, like "Plato's
Pharmacy," precisely because it reveals the deconstructive activity as
something very playful, almost beside the point, something along the lines
of whistling a very long and intricate improvisation.

I would suggest that the strategic practice of deconstructive
acts--particularly as characterized in works like "Plato's Pharmacy" and
GLAS, which reads almost like a product of the Oulipo--is very much relevant
to the practice and study of microsound. I think that the connection is
there in the practice, in the theory, and in the techology. And if you doubt
that, how many of you are producing your audio projects by using the QWERTY
interface at least somewhere in the process?

I very much agree with the statement below that deconstruction has been
associated with a lot of bad collage. Ultimately, I wouldn't care that much
if we never used the word "deconstruction" again--certainly, let's keep it
out of the liner notes! But I would like to see more people practicing in
the generative nature of deconstruction. What are the possibilities of
collaborative deconstruction? Isn't that what the "Parasites" remix project
is all about? Clearly in this case source materials are being used to
generate new sources, and I would hazard a guess that most of the processes
involved in transforming these pieces is deconstructive: which I take to
mean the process of cutting, looping, and/or resequencing a source (a .wav
file, a word, say, "pharmakon") while applying a variety of
difference-producing filters (linguistic echo, cognitive reverb) ... and
then seeing what you can make with that ... and then again ...

Freejazz? Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn's "remixes" of Tchaikosvky's
Nutcraker Suite is profoundly more deconstructionist ... and more enjoyable
to listen to ... than any freejazz I've ever heard!

-=Trace Reddell

>
> >The goal of deconstruction isn't to create a fresh context, but rather to
> >expose the context and the fundamental oppositions that exist within it.
Of
> >course, post-structuralism isn't the only branch of postmodernism, or the
> >only way to subvert a context, for that matter.  I'd say sure, it's
possible
> >to create a fresh context by subverting an existing one.  Collage would
be a
> >simple example.
>
> That's not a bad definition of deconstruction which, I agree, is
> essentially a textual operation, and can't be easily translated to other
> artistic practices, like music .  The term deconstruction has suffered at
> the hands of artists for many years (particularly in the New York art
> scene) where it is used in a simplistic manner, to describe any work which
> "pulls apart" the elements of another work and reassembles them. A poor
> definition in my opinion.
>
> >I don't really know free and avant-garde jazz well enough to say, though
I'm
> >slowly moving into the genre(s).  My superficial view of free/avant garde
> >jazz is that it's similar to glitch in aesthetic, but not necessarily in
> >intention.  The works I've heard (by Coltrane and Taylor) work with
> >unexpected sounds and cadences, much like glitch, but unlike glitch they
> >seem to be trying to impress the weight of the totality of the music on
the
> >listener.  Also, I've always heard "free" and "avant-garde" used
> >interchangeably with respect to jazz; is there a difference between them?
> >
> The work of John Zorn would be a good example of the collage applied to
> jazz in a truely post-modern way, ie. with irony. I've always thought of
> musique concrete as being an example of modernist audio collage, where as
> cut-up is an example of post-modern audio collage. The former uses
recorded
> sounds (pure sounds) as its source, while the later uses music,
voice/text,
> noise (in other words, chunks of culture) as the its source.
>
> Ian Andrews
> Metro Screen
> Sydney
>
>
> Email: i.andrews@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> http://www.metroscreen.com.au
>
> Metro Screen
> Sydney Film Centre
> Paddington Town Hall
> P.O. Box 299
> Paddington NSW 2021
> Ph : 612 9361 5318
> Fax: 612 9361 5320
>
>
>
>
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