Re: [microsound] being 'political' in non-verbal music

[Bill Ashline <ashline@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 6/23/05, jeff gburek <tsazmaniac@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> clear, but that's not exactly what you said and the
> drift of your statements accumulated in the direction
> of what i find to be the ultimately unjustifiable and
> and unsupportable notion that sounds don't have any
> meaning. 

I am insisting that outside of an interpretive framework, sound has no
meaning whatsoever, other than the meaning you wish to place on it,
which you are certainly allowed to do.  As for being "ultimately
unjustifiable and unsupportable," I'd say that about the idea that
sound has an inherent meaning outside of culture.  Your point was that
it has a "potential for meaning."  If it has a "potential," this means
that there isn't one in advance and that you are agreeing with my
position.  Feel free to produce sound in such a way that's political
but without the rhetoric or the artist statement being available, to
see as such, no listener, unless you are exploiting the obvious codes
like the  cash register and "Come All Ye Faithful," is going to hear
an inherent politics.


>mine is a political stance that seeks to
> empower sound and those who do not feel yet that sound
> can say something outside of being recognized by a
> powerful elite, which, being driven to that
> conclusion, is the same "cultural" cul-de-sac all
> post-modernism ends up in: stale academic
> conceptualism. if you only have culture as the final
> arbiter then an individual who says something
> different has nothing else to do but to declare a
> break with culture. 

But the break with culture is always already "cultural."  It's already
part of the fabric of cultural resistance, which has a very long
history.  There is no outside.  You're not being clear in your sweep
about postmodernism and academic conceptualism.  I have no idea what
you're trying to say there.

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