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the anti-rhythmic imperative of the 21st Century neo-Brutists



dear list ;

duncan van halluciphile said...

"Beatmaching is for wanker DJs fueling dancing
alchoholics, and sound collage is for a more mind
stimlulating sensory exploration."

I know you're just tossing this off, but nevertheless, it is symptomatic.

This is the kind of Euro-centric, high-art stance that so mirrors the early
days of the Cabaret Voltaire and the foundations of "brutism" (let's mime
"African language" and call it a "poetry of the savages!") that it makes me
wonder if, indeed, any of the major developments in acknowledging that 1.
there are no hierarchies of sound; 2. sound has no content nor meaning (see
Achim Szepanski's excellent reiteration of this in the Parachute
"Electrosounds" issue 107), and 3. rhythm, as a movement of sound in a
certain temporality, likewise _expresses_ no lesser nor greater element of
_value_, has been at all digested in today's world of listeners and
producers among the so-called "avant-garde" of experimental electronic
music. All that can be measured--for rhythm is a temporality of measure that
affects not only sound, but of temporality itself--is a slippery cultural
affect, and when I see comments such as these, my immediate response is that
the speaker must be a very unsexy chap indeed.

As I mention in the Wire review of Mutek,

"The DJ, as a purveyor and selector of musical memories and a distinct link
to electronic music's Afro-American histories, is a distinct component that
could well combat experimental electronic music's current sense of
stagnantation, as well as tactically undermine popular music's appropriation
of the DJ from an aesthetic weaver of narratives to a glorified, sexy
jukebox. "

I've a paper coming out which will deal with a little more explicitly what I
see as an incredible Euro-centric / North American-white non-rhythmic
underpinning of much of the general discussion and theorising surrounding
much of microsound and other such "experimental" genres. When it is
published, I will make it available to the list.

However, in the meantime, may I leave you with this paragraph, which I think
will do here:

Both the interior and exterior [I am summarising here two previous passages
that note the birth of glitch music from both within the electronic music
traditions of techno, IDM, and so forth and without, such as the post-rock
scenes]?insofar as they can be actually separated?undoubtedly owe a debt to
the avant-garde roots of electronic experimentation, including John Cage,
Morton Feldman, the Futurists, Musique Concrete, Karlheinz Stockhausen,
Iannis Xenaxis, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, etc. However, that they also owe a
debt to Wendy Carlos, Vangelis, Keith Emerson, Kraftwerk, Can, Pink Floyd,
Laurie Anderson, David Bowie?this cannot be excluded from the picture. And
overall, these sounds have echoed within a general electronic framework
developed in the last quarter of the Twentieth Century, stemming from sounds
made in Afro-American music that have drawn from funk, soul, and jazz:
hip-hop, disco, house, Detroit techno and the entire interpretation of
technological instruments, such as drum machines, to create a music of those
instruments. Likewise, a radical popular experimentation with turntables to
create the art of DJing, and a sustaining environment and range of artistic
practices?including but not limited to the Sci-Fi Futurism of Detroit techno
on the one hand and the 4 Elements of hip-hop on the other?stems directly
from Jamaican Dub Soundsystem traditions popularised in North America
through an Afro-American fringe experimentation that always works with
rhythm?rhythm in a much broader sense than simply that of timed music.
Rhythm here becomes a modality of living, a virtual construction of future
desire and past history as seen in the Jamaican "Soundsystem" and the DJ as
a "Memory Selector," or, as we can see in Detroit's Underground Resistance,
a political re-encoding of the Sci-Fi Futurism of Sun Ra and Model 500 into
a mythology of Saturn, Mars, and the battles between the Underground and the
Programmers. Rhythm echoes in the sense that Derrick May pronounces "Rhythim
Is Rhythim" and that Deleuze and Guattari say that "Rhythm is the milieus'
answer to chaos," and that "what chaos and rhythm have in common is the
in-between?between two milieus, rhythm-chaos or the chaosmos" (Mille
Plateaux 313). This is in stark contrast to the common themeatic that
resonates with the "avant-garde," and which still, from time to time,
pronounces non-rhythmic sound as superior, and rhythmic sound as a simple
music structure that is only present to seduce the listener from a "higher
appreciation" of non-rhythmic sound to the dark and questionable world of
dance-infused listening events, and which amounts to a moral imperative to
avoid becoming the "demonic dancer" of a "brutist" cultural sound that is
only  useful insofar as it can be appropriated, even as Russolo's
noise-percussion. We have much to owe to rhythm: the '80s genres of electro,
New Wave, New Age, industrial, and acid house are in debt to what is a
pragmatic and joyful--yet "political"--deconstruction of paradigms of the
"listening, sitting, audience," which, when taken in a larger sphere of
cultural interaction, foregrounds the much more serious cultural judgements
and reductions at work in such declarations. As much as luminaries such as
John Cage still influence the academic world, the most we can perhaps
ascribe to Cage in the scene of experimental electronic music?rhythmic or
not?is his realisation, as early as 1937, that rhythm and percussion, in the
deconstruction of tones and scripts, are to provide the potential for the
future, and that, already?as of 1937?an Afro-American tradition of "hot
jazz," if not one of "Oriental cultures" in general, is far, far ahead of
the supposed avant-gard (Future 5).



tobias c. van Veen -----------
http://www.quadrantcrossing.org
http://www.thisistheonlyart.com
------------- tobias@xxxxxxxxx

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