[microsound] Re: Socio/political implications of microsound music?

[tasty radish <tastyradish@xxxxxxxxx>]

>I don't think these specific questions had different meaning in the 
>'50s and '60s than they have now...
>of course, some important things changed radically, but the basic parameters are >still the same: you have "capitalism", you have "art 
>market" (relation between the two) and you have "advanced music and its 
>makers"...


yes, these elements are the same (in a certain sense...). 

But alot has happened since the 50's and 60's, which is neccesary and NOT incidental to understand and to attempt to map out.... 

How for instance, does the post-colonial period come into play?... We could think of dub music and its relationship to what we are loosely terming microsound...(i.e. dub to house, to post-club music, to IDM, to dub [again and again], post-beats, etc.) ... This is not just a matter of formalisms, at all, but rather a matter of resonances, intensities and a kind of provisional hybridizations between 'genres' and hence between imaginary spaces and times... (-- we could debate various 'results' which have arisen-- key right now is an effort to map out not debate/pick good and bad examples... )

Also, related to dub music in a certain way, is the breakdown of the Promised Land, as well as the breakdown of the Pan-African movment.. (this is all about how the Reagonomic/Chicago School/WorldBank re-mapped the post-colonial period... ) -- and hence, hip hop, jungle, grime, etc. -- the role of the sample... the role of a sense of a kind of hyper-realism in the face of Ideologies of Dominance -- as symptom, as excess, as free-play...



Other notes: 
How did the transfer of capital and the production of goods change significantly in the 70's/80's (i.e. the development of trans-national systems of production scheduling, etc.; the development of "Just In Time" production, etc. )?  How does this come at a time when the everyday politics of power have been entirely enveloped in a kind of post-political trajectory where there can be virtually no meaningful political possibilities save Globalization/SuperCapitalism, etc. (an illusion in its own right, but nonetheless my point is that this is the dominant *Ideology* of our time [despite BS claims to the post-modern being "after ideology" -- actually our post-modern times are perhaps more ideological a time-period then has been the case in a good 150 years or so ] -> there is no outside, no significant other Possibilities then Globalization-- for us, as modern, "rational", secular people that is... ) ? 

How is this a part of what microsound plays with, addresses, is symptomatic of, duplicates, parodies, problematizes, etc. ??  

I will throw out some responses- > maybe... It has to do with the degree to which microsound work is engaged in refusing a consumable Happy Multi-Culti framework (unlike current rock by and large, and to a certain extent hip hop, i.e. we all just do our thing, and that's the name of the game pretty much..)... How the sound/music is along wavelengths of noise/deconstruction/hybridization/perversity-sampling, etc. ( links up with abstract expression in perhaps an impossible way, as well as anti-aesthetic actions-- again, an impossible modernism?).  How the sound/music calls into questions pop music and its claims to gratify our needs for excitiement, identification, etc. (not too many hooks going on, in general).   How it points to something both engaged in modernity (the pure thing-itself) but also ambivalent and melancholic (quite often) on the framework of the Modern...  (somewhere between Adorno's famous 'difficulty' and a kind of spirit of DIY post-punk free-play)..

____

Microsound, technologically, in and of itself could be seen to have arisen when the sound production technology became relatively portable (this has been said many times).[ No longer were the mega-computer systems of Xenakis day needed to do relatively extensive granular synthesis, etc. etc., ] 

So, this was an opening (a recent one), and in a sense, a radical democratizing of this power/field. -- To do what Cage once described as the promise of computer music -- to give us MORE problems (!) (i paraphrase... he means to create music/sound which would go beyond emulating or working-fairly strictly-within the possibilities and experiments we have so far known...).  Portability also has other intersections, such as the role of the turntable, record player in the homes and public spaces of 50's/60's/70's and now the role of the sound file (mp3, etc)... roles that have been played with and riffed on like never before possible (going further into the everyday of the Now-- the role of trading cdrs at this point.. in how we think about influences, about inter-cutting so to speak between styles, sounds, etc.).   Not to mention the ideas of muzak, pumped-in music, sound as space particle...

Further:  the technology developments at a socio-cultural level, and their excesses, in general of these times, have been very much an 'intersection' that this 'genre' (if i may...??) has been engaged in (i.e. project working with Spam, etc.) more or less intently.  I would say that one of the 'markers' of this discourse (microsound) has been that it is NOT specifically formalistic (in the traditional modernist mandate aim), but rather engaging at certain boundary points between and within fields overlapping, intersecting (fields of the everyday, fields of transcendent formalism, fields of noise, fields of leisure-work time and the uses of the computer, etc.).  

more...


-A

 		
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