[no subject]

Why is he an idiot? Because he didnt like the CD?

PP
>
>
>Apparently, this album emerged from the Frequencies [Hz] Audio-Visual 
>Spaces exhibit in Frankfurt from February to April, 2002. According to the 
>Raster-Noton web site, this collection of 28 two-minute tracks "documents 
>the exhibited artists work with sound in space as a performative 
>enunciation of their practice." Now, I was a graduate student for about 
>seven years (amazingly, I survived with my sense of humor intact), and I 
>know bullshit buzzwords when I read them. There's no greater bullshit 
>academic word than "performative." It's a word that's supposed to explain 
>the concept whereby the person performing an action is aware of his/her 
>performance as performance. In other words, the artists on Frenquencies 
>[Hz] are fully aware of being musicians performing in an artificial 
>environment (be it a concert stage or a CD), and are thus consciously 
>acting like musicians performing in an artificial environment while 
>creating the two-minute songs you, the performative audience, listen to. 
>Yep, that's academia for you.
>
>
>It's a stupid word, but I think understanding it helps to explain why this 
>album sucks. Here you have 28 tracks from 28 of the finest electronic 
>artists around today-including Pan Sonic, Frank Bretschneider, Merzbow, 
>Monolake, snd, Coh, Alva Noto, Ryoji Ikeda, Random Industries, and 19 more. 
>So far, it sounds pretty good, right? Then add the wrinkle about the time 
>limit for these tracks: two minutes. There are a number of very good albums 
>that have employed the time limit motif-Faalt's Invisible Cities and 
>Raster-Noton's 20' to 2000 come to mind-so the concept of limiting artists 
>to a certain time frame is fine in principle. However, those other two 
>works add another motif to the time one. In the case of Invisible Cities, 
>it was to present five minutes of sound from different places all over the 
>world. In the case of 20' to 2000, it was to record twenty minutes of music 
>that represent the state of electronic music (as defined by the individual 
>artist) at the beginning of the third millennium.
>
>
>What's the extra motif in Frequencies [Hz] ? Well, as far as I can tell, 
>the motif is that bullshit word, performative. In other words, the artists 
>were all asked to create two minutes of performative music, or music that 
>is self-consciously "music," created by artists who are self-consciously 
>being "artists." Now, I think certain concepts related to this idea of 
>performative serve a useful purpose. I'm a teacher. Sometimes I'll tell a 
>joke and none of my students will laugh, so I'll stop what I'm doing and 
>explain to them that they are students and they need to act like students, 
>and part of being a student consists of pretending to be nice to your 
>teacher-like laughing at his lame jokes. In other words, I was openly 
>discussing the roles of student and teacher while I was teaching. That's 
>the performative concept in action. But how exactly does this work in 
>music? Musicians, by definition, already know they are making music, and 
>people who are listening to music already know they are listening to 
>musicians who are creating music. It's not like musicians need to stand up 
>on stage and proclaim, "I am a musician and I am creating music. You are an 
>audience and you are listening to my music."
>
>
>So what did the artists on this compilation actually come up with as a 
>performative piece of music? Well, they came up with music that sounds like 
>all the other stuff that these artists are already known for. Pan Sonic's 
>two minutes sound like, well, Pan Sonic: a slow, propulsive beat and some 
>weird noise. Merzbow's track sounds like Merzbow: noise. Snd's sounds like 
>snd: clicks and smooth hooks. The whole album is a sampler of electronic 
>music. That's fine in theory, but two minutes is just too brief for any of 
>these artists to do anything interesting. Instead, we simply get a 
>"highlights" package featuring the most stereotypical elements of each 
>artist's repertoire.
>
>
>Come to think of it, I guess that's exactly the point behind performative 
>music: music that is self-consciously trying to imitate itself. What better 
>way for an artist to self-consciously create music than to parody his or 
>her own clichés. I suppose, then, that this work does succeed on the 
>performative level as far as the musicians are concerned. But what about 
>the listeners? Are we supposed to also jump for joy and be excited by 
>excised clichés? Give me a break.
>

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