Re: [microsound] microsound vs. DJ culture

[Christos Carras <ear@xxxxxxxxx>]

evening all!

a) Adorno the racist: there are certainly many examples of musics that 
Adorno did not listen to enough - jazz (post big band especially) and 
many forms of electronic music of the 50's and 60's especially. however 
his critique of jazz is related to colour only insofar as he felt that 
black musicians were perpetuating their own oppression by playing to 
white audiences in forms that reinforced their servitude. personally i 
think that for certain styles there is more than a grain of truth in 
that, though there are many many examples of jazz and later improvised 
music breaking absolutely from anything that resembles this model, that 
Adorno never took the time to deal with. generally he had a rough time 
with anything that stayed too close to traditional forms and i don't 
think he was much of a dancer either. to indulge in a hypothesis : 
Adorno probably wouldn't have been a klezmer fan either.

b) dj culture: what does the practice of 'recombining' existing musics 
tell us about our culture, especially when we elevate it to the level 
that dj-ing purports to achieve. using other musics in compositions is 
certainly nothing new. a european approach can be found in Mahler and 
later Berio of course (to mention just them) and an american approach is 
Ives. but the way that composers use "found sounds" including "found 
music" has a tension, either through montage that explicitly reveals the 
facticity of the process or through the shock value (for example 
Stockhausen's Telemusic or Hymnen) because of the way it corodes 
established sound-icons. from the [very] little i know about 
"mainstream" dj practice, it seems to me that the re-use of tracks is 
dangerously close to manifesting a cultural problem, viz the inability 
of the contemporary subject (consumer and artist) to break through the 
mirror and establish an individual and / or open relation to the world 
of sound.

christos

Peter Price wrote:

> What is the relationship between "microsound" and "DJ culture?" Is the 
> first a subset of the second...a stylistic genre? Are they completely 
> separate, culturally autonomous realms? Or somewhere in between?
>
> If DJ culture is about popular music, is microsound about unpopular 
> music?
>
> What role does race legitimately play in musical discourse. Is DJ 
> culture really related more to "people of color" than what? non-DJ 
> culture? Is microsound a music of people of non-color?
>
> Does the terminology "DJ Culture" itself prevent critique by 
> presenting itself as more than just music. In what way is this really 
> the case?
>
> I am trying to answer these questions for myself with little 
> definitive luck so far. Can anyone help me out?
>
>
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