Re: [microsound] the great depression of experimental music?

[Aaron Ximm <ghede@xxxxxxxx>]

A few parts of this discussion have caught my eye...

Might as well sprinkle a few comments about my own relationship to these
issues.

Re: artists making music for other artists, with no other audience...

Those of you subjected to my spam about my series Field Effects know it's
been going on a few years.

All else aside, it's been succesful I think in attracting and maintaining
an audience that does not consider itself (on the whole) to be fans of
esoteric music. Though the balance ebbs and flows, there are usually as
many people in the audience I don't know as those I do. One side effect is
that artists who I consider it an exciting honor to present only loosely
get more of a turnout than 'unknowns' -- for at least a good chunk of the
audience, they're ALL unknown (hard as that is to believe).

This was an intentional goal and I am happy to see it progressing. The
recipe is simple: make the environment INVITING. Comfort and vibe go a
long way. Keep people constrained; constrain (time and in other domains,
eg amplitude) IMHO concentrate attention and can result in better quality
work.

Recently I've gotten a lot more forceful about asking artists to TALK
about their work, which (a) contextualizes work for people who don't have
a framework to analyze it in already; and (b) humanizes work (or at least
performance) that can be abstracted.

Pretense and insularity have attended experimental/underground art as
groupie-handmaidens for as long as I've been around it. While they do help
the community maintain a sense of common cause and offer a nice us/them
boundary to feel smug about, they also of course keep the audience-pool
(and hence potential revenue stream for 'working' artists) minimized.

Let's share the riches, folk. Seduce those open-minded but ignorant
peers, don't condescend to them...  celebrate the work you like, and be
willing to patiently explain what you find in it.

Something to muse ~ what can you put out there that acts as a "gateway
drug" to our little worlds...?  (For me, it's my 'one minute vacations'
project which gets 20x the interest of anything else I do...)

Re: CDRS vs CDs, and the argument that the money it takes to produce a run
acts a worthwhile filter...

While it's true that plenty of unbaked goods are passed around on CDR, so
is a lot of top notch material. It's ridiculous IMO to equate the
willingness to throw $1000 or more behind your work with a belief that
it's "worth" it. For as many good small-run or self-pressed CDs I've
heard, I've gotten just as many that only got pressed out of vanity,
nepotism, or a well-timed grant. It's not who you know, it's who you blow.

Getting a name-brand label to put you out is great if there's an audience
for that label who will take a chance on it (I was that way about Kranky
for a long time), but who among us could sell 500 or 1000 CDs, resident
"stars" aside?  Can we get a show of hands?  Especially with tried and
true distribution channels drying up (RIP Anomolous)...!  Unless truely
short run high-production-value options become a reality, I'll keep
burning my own. I have six years of work in the catalog, I'm not going to
drop 20 grand to "legitimize" it; it should speak for itself.

Also I trade MY cdrs for other peoples all the time and as a result have a
much deeper and wider pool of contemporary class work to listen to. God
bless the CD burner. And streaming stations!

Anyway...

 aaron

  ghede@xxxxxxxx
  http://www.quietamerican.org

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