Re: [microsound] Re: [mcrosound] mnmalsm + 02 "i"

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

> It immediately implies subtraction
> from something else so that minimalism (each minimalism) is in a parasitic
> relation to its precursor.  This means that each minimalism occurs in
> reaction to particular context so that you can have minimal-techno, minimal
> rock, minimal bagpipe music, whatever.  Each is bound to its own genre. But
> subtraction also defines a telelogical direction: a tendency to subtract
> more and more towards the absolute limit case of silence.


Re-reading:

Telos happens here if one utilizes a framework to posit subtraction as the
"historical" process by which a "subtractive" movement delineates each
successive "movement" of minimalism. In this framework, moving from one to
the next, in a cause-and-effect that would be parasitic, each successor
tends toward a zero point of minimalism, at which point, in the totality of
history, at a certain moment minimalism as ultimate silence would be
reached, if this were possible (which isn't necessarily silence, as what
could be subtracted is not only sound, but recordings, performances,
notations, archives, concepts, thoughts, etc., i.e., the ways in which
subtraction is thought, performed, applied, conceptualized and so on in each
"movement"--which would also require a "history" of epochs, periods, etc.,
which would ALL have to be subtracted; in short, the end nothingness of all
nothing).

I don't think Hawtin was using subtraction in this manner. Rather, he was
creating sound and then subtracting elements from it to achieve the desired
result, "stripping it down." As opposed, for example, to playing a deep
tone, following Pauline Oliveros, whereupon a resonant sound is produced to
focus upon in the manner designated as Deep Listening. There is no
subtraction in this process, rather, the process begins and remains within
the same horizon. Or, the ways in which Reich offsets his repetitions, or
Glass constructs and deconstructs his. It seems that considering various
approaches (throughout history) to _what constitutes the limits of
minimalism_ may shed light on other logics beside silence and might avoid or
pose difficulties to approaches that categorize a certain minimalism as
"aesthetic" (and another as "not-aesthetic")  etc., in which certain
aesthetic frameworks are applied that infer an aesthetics, and remain
recursive within this tautology. This would also require opening history to
that which would be silent or reduced in this history. Or, all too noisy,
maximalized, omnipresent.

To return to an "ahistorical" analysis of the "tendency" of minimalism.
Would this not assume minimalism's tendency is reductive to silence? And how
would one consider silence? Although certain patterns may be generalizable,
is not "silence" remixed at each moment through a minimalism's questioning
of this limit? I.e., Cage. And moreover, Cage posits the limit of silence as
an impossibility, not only practically, but theoretically. Any ahistorical
analysis of minimalism as tendency would have to investigate what is meant
by "tendency" and "reduction" ahistorically, and without resorting to a
tautology. Cage renders impossible the ahistoricity of minimalism and yet
instates minimalism as a conceptual moment of impossibility by thinking
"all-sound." 


That's enough from me tonight.

best,

    tobias


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