Re: [microsound] the anti-rhythmic imperative of the 21st Century neo-Brutists

[Ian Andrews <i.andrews@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I thoroughly agree.

Unfortuately there will always be those can only think in terms of this
Eurocentric binary opposition:

European, intelligent, high art, mind,  / NonEuropean, utilitarian,
popular, body

looking forward to reading your paper Tobias.




>
>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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