globe & mail article

[Kerry Uchida <kerry@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>From globeandmail.com, Saturday, June  8, 2002

>From high art to the music of liposuction

RUSSELL SMITH



 A California group called Matmos makes pieces of music entirely out of
the
recorded sounds of plastic surgery being performed. A British technician

called Matthew Herbert makes dance music entirely out of the sound of a
McDonald's meal being unwrapped and consumed. They are both part of a
trend
sometimes known as "glitch," which is music made without any
instruments,
entirely of found sounds, which are then arranged into musical patterns.

Glitch is primarily about what fun can be had with samplers and
computer-editing programs, but it is also about bridging the gap between
pop
music and conceptual art.

Matmos, a nerdy white male duo from San Francisco, has released a number
of
albums of jangling, moody tunes, made from sounds like those of a
balloon
being stroked and twisted, or of a needle hitting the run-out groove of
a
vinyl record (clever, that one, eh?). Their last album, A Chance to Cut
Is a
Chance to Cure, is, variously, the music of real liposuction, laser eye
surgery, a rat's cage being plucked and bowed. One track is "composed
entirely from sounds generated while measuring the galvanic response of
Martin's skin to a constant flow of electricity."

Matthew Herbert, who has gone by the names Radioboy and Doctor Rockit,
has
released an album called The Mechanics of Destruction, which has more
conventional rhythms, but is even more conceptual: His is a
Marxist-antiglobalist music that recycles the sounds of corporate
products.
Each track (which can be heard at
http://www.themechanicsofdestruction.org)
comes with a little essay explaining the wrongdoings of its originators:
the
music made of Kraft cheese slices is about GM Food's assault on the
developing world; the piece made of an Air Max shoebox is about Nike
sweatshops; the pieces sampled entirely from Henry Kissinger's speeches
need
little explanation. Herbert adds, in one of his many polemics: "I also
derived great pleasure from consuming these omnipotent products in ways
that
they weren't designed for. I didn't drink the Coke, watch the TV or eat
the
Big Mac. In part then, it's a chance to reclaim these products that have

filled the world's landfill sites with non-biodegradable plastics and
people's stomachs with less than healthy food. It's also a journey of
rubbish, turning shit into music, the temporary into permanence, and the

identical into the unique."

It's important, in the work of Matmos and Herbert, and in that of all
the
similar practitioners (there are lots out there right now: Find links to

several on Herbert's sites), that the original sounds have been made
unrecognizable. You have to read the notes to tell what they are. In
this,
the work resembles gallery conceptual art, which is utterly
uninteresting in
itself: It is only interesting when its process or its genesis is
explained.
This is what most people find so problematic about conceptual art, and
yet
it's precisely the point: All you need to appreciate it is to read the
artist's statement tacked to the gallery wall.

Hence the manifestoes and essays behind every one of Herbert's Web
sites. He
explains the use of unrecognizable "real" sounds with this problematic
but
interesting assertion: "Music has usually been about representation but
in
the age of the sampler we can capture the actuality of that which
indicates
existence: noise."

Both of these bands come out of dance-club culture; both groups have
worked
as DJs making conventional dance music. And there have been several
pop-culture precursors to current glitch music, industrial bands like
Einsturzende Neubauten who turned the noise of pre-electronic machinery
into
tunes. This band, which was popular in the 1980s, once famously attached

microphones to one band member's body and then beat him; the resulting
recording provided the percussion track on one song.

But I think, interestingly, the most important root of this trend comes
from
high art. Herbert admits his debt to the grandfather of all such
found-music
experiments, John Cage, who was trying to record the noise around him as

early as the 1930s. (In 1939, Cage wrote, "Percussion music is
revolution.
Sound and rhythm have too long been submissive to 19th-century music.
Today
we are fighting for emancipation. Tomorrow, with electronic music in our

ears, we will hear freedom.")

Herbert's manifestoes also refer to the Cage-influenced musique concrcte

practitioners of the 1950s, the intellectual orchestral school that
included
Varese and Stockhausen. They were the first to include the taped sounds
of
factory noise in orchestral concerts. Herbert also refers to the Marxian

French intellectual Jacques Attali, whose seminal 1976 tract Noise: The
Political Economy of Music first linked the use of random noise (in
experimental "free jazz") to an ideological stance.

Matmos's obsession with plastic surgery also echoes the work of the
French
artist Orlan, who has had her face reconstructed several times as live
art,
and who was in turn influenced by the self-mutilating performance
artists of
the 1970s such as Chris Burden.

These were once arcane avant-gardisms; they are still used by
conservatives
as examples of how loony and out of touch modern art is. Now pop music
has
exactly the same intellectual preoccupations, and they make sense to a
dancing crowd.

That highbrow influence on youthful dance-club culture -- 25 or even 50
years later -- is evidence that the fringe of art always eventually
becomes
commonplace. Which is more evidence that we should take it seriously.



--

Kerry Uchida
Vancouver,Canada

"Sounds don't belong to human beings,
in the same way as nature itself does
not belong to them.  Sound Ambience is
part of nature, and the composer only
needs to make listening to it possible." -John Cage


Now Playing:

DJ Aural---- http://www.mp3.com/DJAural

Coming Soon:

Technomorph-- http://www.technomorph.com
Morpheus Project- http://www.morpheusproject.tv