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

[Aaron Ximm <ghede@xxxxxxxx>]

> > On 6/21/05, Damian Stewart <damian@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >> How do you get across political messages in music which has no lyrics
> >> and which has no voice samples?
> >
> > You can't.
>
> Not sure about that Bill. I've just heard a simple piece called Cacerolada
> at the Sonic Arts Network Conference in Scarborough, UK that made a very
> powerful political statement on several levels without lyrics or voice
> samples. The piece, by Justin Bennett, was a recording of the people of
> Barcelona banging kitchen utensils and the like in protest against the Iraq
> war for which they eventually suffered a bombing, then overthrew their

Of course, in cases like this it's the context that makes the recording
meaningful -- not the sounds themselves... my first reaction is that the
contextualizing information here serves the same roll as the lyrics in a
protest song. I expect the melody of the latter case and the rhythmic
thumping sounds in the former case are themselves asemantic and apolitical
to a truly naive listener.

Btw I'm quite interested in such recordings -- which are interesting not
because of what they are as sound waves, but for the significance of their
making, existinence, subject -- but do consider them a fundamentally
different category of field recording -- a nontraditional one; maybe
"conceptual field recording" is a good category label.

My default example from my own work: a recording I made of the banal
silence at the "killing tree" at the Choeung Ek killing fields in
Cambodia.

 best
 aaron

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

  |  quod omne animal post   |
  |  cogitum est triste...   |


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