Re: [microsound] the landscape/z of microsound: SPACE is the place

["tobias c. van Veen" <tobias@xxxxxxxxx>]

G & list,


Most of the time this Q is posed to the 'artist' the 'artist' dismisses with
some viciousness this claim. I find as a writer/interviewer that the
practitioner is more or less attempting to originalise his or her own work
via a discourse of amazing authenticity divorced from place, space, time,
body, gender, colour, politics, the political -- just about everything. 'I'm
just an artist, none of that matters for me' is some kind of mantra of the
experimental electronic jetset. It's also a poor excuse that renders much
audio & music lost in the moment.

The sound-artists who arrive from the previous generation (Phill Niblock,
for example, La Monte Young, for example) or any practitioner who works with
field recordings (GAL, for example, Derek Holzer, for example) encounter
space directly in ways both via sound / field recordings but also
conceptually through thought [which could manifest as writing, theory,
manifesto, process, software, programming]. Lustmord and Biosphere also come
to mind as musicians considering the conceptual arrival of space in their
work. So does Carsten Nicolai in many of his installations (standing water
in bass canons). There are many others.

Today space is much more difficult yet enrapturing space as what
sound-artists and electronic musicians are now encountering is the virtual
distribution of transactive space -- the Net -- in both dissemination and
production of their material (filesharing, MP3s, live realtime broadcast,
interactive performance, promotion, website archiving, and so on). The
relation between the Net and the physical landscape is something that is
resurging through geolocative practices, such as .walk [
http://www.socialfiction.org -- something I am peripherally involved in]. A
resurgence in psychogeography then that is also being reflected in some
sonic practices. Microsonic patterns of the city or landscape.

What has always fascinated me beyond field recordings is the ability of
electronic sounds to conjure vast hallucinations of space, be it desert,
ice, ocean, wind, mountain or outer space in the innerspace of the mind and
the tingling of the body affected by powerful, lound sound, be it sinewaves,
processed, feedback, ambient, drones, noise, beatless or beat-driven, etc.
There is a relation to affect in electronic sound that occurs when language
is broken down, like poetry, like mantras, like theory.

(Perhaps Trace has something to say here on the psychoactive relation of
sound to the city and the writer .. Thomas de Quincey?
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/quincey.htm )


> (As an example, one of microsound's predecessors, Detroit Techno, has been
> interpreted as reflecting in some ways the stark and industrial landscape from
> which it emerged.  Does this carry through to its evolutionary/devolutionary
> strains?  Tobias?)
> 
Debated on all fronts, and mythologised by those who produced the music
themselves. The question is less the reality of the landscape and
socioeconomic conditions than the myth generated by the imaginative force of
the music, art, events, record labels, djs, mixes. The cult of Richie
Hawtin, the cult of Jeff Mills. The drawings of Alan Oldham. UR. It's not a
case of justifying reflection from landscape-->sound than it is learning how
to refract the energy that exist/s in Detroit techno into other musical
moments. 'What happened here--how?' -- blow it up everywhere. Whatever
angle, I believe the relation of Detroit to techno is a GOOD analysis, a
catalytic perspective, for it aids us in understanding the link between
music and space--space is the place--when that space is outerspace, ie,
AfroFuturist, beyond language or alien, yet claiming revolutionary potential
and in-grooved messages (np. Underground Resistance
http://www.undergroundresistance.com). As Kodwo Eshun argues, it's not 'from
the streets', 'reprazentin' like hip-hop: the relation to space is not a
relation to 'realness', a reflection from or of the ghetto that is
territorial in its message and thus, often its violence. Techno is the
'spatialisation' of sound, its unfolding in imaginary space, sci-fi space.
Steven Shaviro brushes on this in his new book _Connected: Or what it means
to live in the networked society_ on U of Minnesota P 2003 (highly
recommended). http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/

[Sidenote: I'm not sure D.T. is a 'predecessor' of microsound given if we
trace microsound back to Curtis Roads, Xenakis, Schaeffer, Truax, etc -- I'd
say the two paths are simply concurrent, and now the wires have
crossed--like in Ghostbusters: we crossed the streams!--one predominantly
'interior' to an institution of the academic arts, the other linked to
Afro-American cultures of the North American continent but also linked to
global resurgences and resistances through dance, soundsystems, wax,
turntables, post-counter-cultural experiences, traveller culture,
subcultures, anarchism, squatting, AfroFuturism, funk, disco, Sun Ra & jazz,
ragtime, dancehall, etc].

Anyone who picked up the last issue of e|I [#2 -- http://www.ei-mag.com] &
read 'CITIES OF GLASS', the article on Cdn electronic music (part 1), has
encountered a long lead-in which considers the distance of Canada integral
to the digital music produced there. Canada is connected virtually--like the
very production of Cdn identity across distance (often through a negative
dialectic via the USA: 'we are what the US is not'). Many artists
interviewed would beg to differ, but their perspective is of the
practitioner in a particular space & time and not the thinker who has
gathered, sifted, read, interviewed, written, thought. Part 2 delves deeper
into considering the unique metrospace relation that is Vancouver and the
music from the Cdn Pacific NW in this respect (issue arriving in Feb by all
accounts.. as soon as I finish this last remaining article *cough*).

Spacing in thought -- always comes to mind of the writer, or at least by
necessity encountered -- word spacing -- page spacing -- space spacing --
spacing in music -- avoided by many a musician to understandably avoid being
'penned down' by poor music journalism -- but the writer & the musician
could afford some leeway in both directions to let flow that thinking space
is not limiting but deeply opening. A genre is not a limitation but a path
of thinking. A waste is the fight against genre (music/space). A fence
perhaps but also a way to acknowledge a limit. A good entry here: the
Infernal Noise Brigade [http://www.postworldindustries.com ].

- tV




> I have a question for the group.  How many of you practitioners are influenced
> or inspired by a sense of place in making your work?  By place I mean a
> specific geographical location (the city or town in which you live or were
> born, or visited), a dialogue between general and specific space (desert
> ecology vs. Joshua Tree, CA), or a sense of the vernacular landscape
> (apartment buildings, public plazas, billboards, freeway overpasses,
> storefront signage, etc.)?
> 
> The timbre and structure of microsound and its related tributaries generally
> suggest an abstract non-place (no there, there) or interstitial subatomic
> realm, as opposed to, say, phonography and field recordings, which are sonic
> snapshots of specific analog locales and which can also stand for a "type" of
> landscape (barking dogs recorded in rural Kansas, for instance, may also
> suggest a similar sound experience in a suburb in New Jersey).  (Apologies for
> the U.S.-specific references!)
> 
> (As an example, one of microsound's predecessors, Detroit Techno, has been
> interpreted as reflecting in some ways the stark and industrial landscape from
> which it emerged.  Does this carry through to its evolutionary/devolutionary
> strains?  Tobias?)
> 
> Is this something that you think about--your work being grounded in the place
> it was made?  Or is the "utopia" of the internet and its absence of material
> geography (although signals are filtered through servers and routers that sit
> in air-conditioned rooms that exist SOMEWHERE) a model for a disembodied
> aesthetic?  A combination of the two?  Neither?  Other?
> 
> G.
> 
> 
> Kim Cascone wrote: have all the microsound philosophers been driven off the
> list due to the noise?
> 
> 
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tobias c. van Veen ----------- http://www.quadrantcrossing.org
http://www.thisistheonlyart.com --- tobias@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---McGill
Communications------ ICQ: 18766209 | AIM: thesaibot


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