Re: [microsound] Re:ambient books

[dbuchwald <dagmar.buchwald@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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Hi,

maybe that would be a different thread altogether, but moving a little
bit away from the notion of "ambient" and more towards the notion of
"texture" then books like Lucy Church Amiably by Gertrude Stein might be
mentioned (although she was originally rather inspired by painting) --
texts that evacuate language of sense and draw attention to the texture
of composition.  Almost impossible to read from cover to cover but
something to dive into at any point and then watch how the textures
expand and contract, new motifs drifting in, others petering out..  Or --
thinking about loops -- something like Modular Poetry by Dick Higgins
which permutates words and phrases in a looplike fashion, like a mantra.
Sometimes it is a closed system -- that is, a fixed number of words or
phrases are simply permutated according to a set of rules -- as did
Oulipo in France, sometimes it builds up and expands.  What you never get
though is the real overlapping of loops, or the overlapping of rhythms
creating a virtual third rhythm or moiré, as Gregrory Bateson descibed
it; something Steve Reich did with his "Music for eighteen musicians".
What I mean to say is: there are books -- not really ambient but rather
modular, loopy, texturous -- achieving a musical quality.  They are
certainly not linear.  But what they cannot get at is the overlapping of
different layers or strands -- at least not in silent reading.

Maybe that's the point: the books you all mentioned, the "ambient" books,
are not empty of sense; they are no longer really narrative but they
still depend on the mind of the reader to understand the words and turn
them into  .. world, ambience, something three-dimensional
(four-dimensional?).  Whereas those textural approaches I mentioned focus
on language as structure, thus losing a dimension (the imagined world in
the mind of reader); they are getting even closer to abstract music than
the ambient books but then they lack the multilayeredness of all you can
HEAR.  Although they are not linear they depend on the format of texts:
one letter after the other.

I wonder where Finnegan's Wake would fit in.

Sorry about the mess; I should have started this mail differently, viz.
what interests me in music such as microsound is when it becomes loopy,
when different textures, rhythms or whatever are layered above each other
so that something third or forth is created merely through the overlay;
and I was wondering whether books, texts could achieve something
similar.

Dagmar

Bill Jarboe wrote:

> Marcel Proust; '`A la Recherche du temps Perdu'.
>
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