Re: Re: [microsound] 1D

[Elisha <guitarristo@xxxxxxxxxx>]

> 
> I live outside of western culture, but it's never very far away anywhere 
> you want to go in the world, even in East Timor, where I spent my last 
> summer.  But if you want to go into the topic of non-Western musics, I'm 
> game.

Well how 'bout the balinese.  They have 2 scales and gamelons which they tune 
to create dissonance.  They like dissonance.  They've been playing dissonance 
for centuries.  I love it.  They inspired me to make my own scale which I used 
to make a dance track.  They also have a calendar that works, actually more 
than one calendar that works.

> Progress is as someone else suggested the great Hegelian chain of being 
> that drives western civilization.  If you're not part of that game, 
> fine, but the game still goes on even if we've exhausted most of 
> possible channels of progress.

Games don't play themselves.  The reason it continues is that people continue 
to play it.  I'm not really saying that things don't change it's just that the 
changes in form are completely irrelevant.  The human comedy (or tragedy 
depending on how you look at it) continues as it has been for all of history.  
As a musician, I relate to that tragedy largely through music.  I talk about it 
through music and I listen to others talk about it through music.  The 
experience of actually hearing and understanding what another person is 
communicating about life is what is important to me.  What is less important is 
what their using to communicate.  Ask yourself this: when was the last time 
that music gave you shivers.  Be really honest with yourself.  You want to talk 
about progress; I have a great idea.  It's not original but it's been almost 
forgotten.  What if music made people feel?  That would be progress to me.  I 
personally do not give a shit whether someone knows what I'm doing when they 
hear it.  I played a show once and noone knew that I was even playing music 
until the show was over.  They thought it was the bar music.  Afterwards, 
someone came up to me and said they enjoyed my set.  They said they didn't 
really register the music consciously because it was so minimal and 
inconspicuous but that it affected their mood and altered the course of their 
conversation.  I don't know how much of that is true but I do know that the 
music did something even though noone knew where it was coming from.
I think this whole question of "progress" in this context of 
performance/audience relationships has more to do with the ego of performers 
than the progress of music.  Laptops give us the ability to perform semi-
anonymously.  I've seen this taken advantage of.  At the Detroit Electronic 
Music Festival 2 years ago, Kit Clayton performed from behind the audience.  
Everyone was loking at the stage.  It was a killer set.  The audience cheered 
and danced and saw not a soul on the stage.  No one was thinking about Csound 
or how Kit was filtering some bass.

I am no longer apologizing for long rants
elisha

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