Is pleasure a relevant lens for thinking about experimental music?

It can be an interesting exercise to try and view one’s “own” subculture with an alienated gaze… I’ve been feeling this way about experimental music the past few years, and have been wanting to articulate my shifting sense of doubt about a type of art that I once identified with strongly. Experimental music can provide an instant sense of community, and it feels odd to both participate and to feel separate.
One recurring question I’ve had is about the role of pleasure in listening to music that might be determinedly anti-comfort, anti-tradition, anti-beauty. My goal in asking is not to form an overarching theory about pleasure. There are infinite loci of pleasure, both in terms of making and listening. Pleasure as a subjective experience comes and goes – the same piece of music finds different places of interest depending on the moment, the context, the level of attention, and any number of other factors.
Experimental music is paradoxical in its formation as a genre. The term is problematic because it would best describe an activity that is constantly breaking apart under its own process of self-inspection. One thing I’ve noticed is that the rules actually seem to be multiplying. In addition to the usual concert-going conventions of classical music (audience should sit quietly, contemplating the music, and should clap after an appropriate pause), some areas of experimental improvisation have added several more layers of implicated or unacknowledged structure. For example, the set should consist of one long piece, or at most two; no leader or conductor should be hierarchically positioned; no pre-determined plan or score should guide the music, except for perhaps a few simple parameters; nothing resembling “music” should be played, even when traditional instruments are present; in many cases, timbral beauty should be resisted.
It’s a paradoxical position - the conventions of breaking the conventions. The restrictions of experimental concert practice have created a position within which any form of aesthetic conservatism mustn’t be used – regular rhythm, melody, and pitch have been removed from the palette of resources. These are deliberate choices, but they can feel diminished rather than expanded. Anything traditionally pleasurable is seen as conservative, and therefore must be withheld.
The history of 20th Century music contains many examples of withheld pleasure. The “progress” of the modernist avant-garde consists largely in the denial of familiar pleasures. Composers and musicians push audiences to accept gestures which are extreme in relation to their cultural context, and the accommodation of the new territory creates a new form of pleasure. The NPR program Radiolab had a fascinating section on Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and its passage from riot-inducing avant-garde to Disney soundtrack. On a neurological level, the brain enjoys challenges, and assimilating unfamiliar sound combinations gives pleasure.
In many cases, it seems that while some types of pleasure are denied, a replacement can be found. For example, in Cage’s iconic work of withheld sound, 4’33”, we can find new pleasure in the absurdity of the theatrical gesture, the neo-Dada humor in the stilled player(s), the social tension of an audience attempting to be quiet. (Witness an orchestral version for an amplification of such characteristics, broken by the coughing, shuffling release of “allowed” noise during the movement markers.) Perhaps, maybe, one might experience the stated goal of 4’33” - the pleasure of hearing all sounds as music and the replacement of orchestral entertainment with the joys of apperception.
It’s not that I’m a stranger to the exquisite pleasure of displeasure. One of my favorite examples is the 2-CD “TNB Est Mort” by The New Blockaders. This grinding, crushing, wailing, dragging piece of noise music is broken into four approximately 25-minute sections, each of them continuous, unbroken, unchanging and similar almost to the point of being identical. In this case, the negation of musical pleasure is replaced by the monumental decision to just continue - the sheer excess of the composition extends beyond the bounds of tolerance, forcing the listener to either submit or reject.
I’m guessing that one underlying cultural metaphor separates pleasure into two varieties – that of the body and that of the mind – intellectual or sensual. Perhaps this division drives the pursuit of an arid aesthetic within experimental music, which is supposed to be smart. I suppose it also drives the vacuity of many popular musics. We could say that a song like Pitbull’s “Hotel Room” – which I find adventurous and hugely engaging on a timbral level - displays an entirely empty and surface-oriented lyrical content. This emptiness plays into the song’s function as a dance track. It emphasizes an unthinking, body-oriented listening.
I recently attended a concert of improvised music at the sparse but beautifully resonant Gallery Homeland. Performed was a duo between Bryan Eubanks on electronics and Vic Rawlings on electronics and cello. The sonic structure was typified by whooshes of white noise, crackles of contact mics, piercing high-frequency tones and crunchy electronics bursts. I’ve enjoyed music by both of these musicians on other occasions, but on this evening I found the music dry, timbrally predictable and sometimes painful on a basic auditory level. I really wondered what there was to find pleasurable – not because I questioned the musicians themselves but because I wonder about my own quality of attention.
In some improvised music, predictable structures are replaced by instrumental virtuosity, but this is a music that purposefully distances itself from displays of virtuosity. Some composed music orients the listener around processes of memory and recognition, but this is a music that is constantly drifting - neither static enough to be forgetful nor organized enough to be memorable. Most experimental music (and, I would argue, pop music) finds pleasure in new timbres, but here I found myself over-familiar with the limited range of non-musical sounds and physically repelled by the high-frequency sine waves.
Matt Carlson suggested that the locus of pleasure in this type of music is a deep self-identification with the players and their decisions. Each new sound, each interaction is viewed through a lens of asking if each choice was a ‘good’ one - “If I were playing, would I make the same decisions?” This requires an extremely close attention and when it works, it can also produce that attention. But perhaps it also emphasizes an insider’s understanding of the means and results. Does it exclude an unfamiliar audience to utilize only this kind of listening?
I ask this question of my own work as well, out of the desire to include more people in my sonic interests - not to meet an audience at the level of predictability, but to somehow draw them in. I would suggest that it has become more unpredictable to include “musical” structures and sounds in experimental music than to exclude them. I have been sweetly surprised by the music of Giuseppe Ielasi, for example, which draws elements of rhythm, melody and pattern into a fractured, difficult and gloriously unconventional framework. (Matt Marble wrote a nice review of Aix here.) Ielasi resists any blanket statements about the direction of his work or experimental music in general. Future projects may include minimalist drones or free improvisation. At the same time, these elements are not combined in a bricollage of various styles – they feel deeply committed and personally relevant. Each project is truly an experiment.
...
I felt the need to write this essay, but now I wonder about posting it. I would like to stop defining my interests in the negative. I hope that it might start some interesting discussion.
I’m becoming more and more convinced that commitment is the key term in the exchange between artist and audience. It is commitment which opens up the possibility of pleasure – through the means of attention. The energy of commitment itself can come from any number of sources, cultural or personal. It gives force to the act of attention, and anything becomes interesting given close enough attention.
From here on, I'll be writing more about the things that have caught my attention.

Reviews

Been getting some nice, thoughtful reviews in the blogosphere. Really encouraging.

Touching Extremes
Just Outside

new CD!

Flock & Tumble is out now from Sonoris (France)! This music was mostly the result of my scoring of Linda Austin's dance piece, Circus Me Around, which ran November 2007. For that production, the sound was dispersed on a roughly cross-shaped four-channel system, across three separate but simultaneous performance areas in a large warehouse. This album marks a major shift in my compositional style (at least to my ears), emphasizing a more song-like structure, a more obvious inclusion of the voice as material, and a finer degree of attention to micro-structures.
Confusingly, this is not the sound for my own performance piece of November 2008 titled Flock & Tumble (I'm still looking for a label for that material, which will be called Furl.)
The beautiful cover image is by Harrison Higgs.

auditory practice 2

I'm interested in the way sound connects to other things, forming temporary alliances. Rather than seeking a primacy or purity of the auditory, I like its contingency.

My fascination with the tactility and physicality of sound is what now attracts me to working with dance. Choreographers are also working with a kind of resonance between the bodies of the audience and those of the dancers. While (probably) unable to perform their actions, on some level we “feel” them, in a neurological way. The weight and density of the dancer’s body, the breath, feet, sweat and pulse of the dancers become associated with the metallic or wooden or watery sounds, complicating both their gestures and my music. Through the laws of magnetic attraction, impulses of movement become connected to sonic impulses, creating strange overlaps and correspondences. In some ways, this completes a loop - the removal of sound from action in capture and the connection to a new action in performance - but in a way that is shifted and shifting. Dancers allow themselves to find and feel the pulse, and I find ways to adjust and respond to their gestures. These elements become linked, but tangentially. The link occurs primarily in the experiencing of the moment.
I want to recognize all listening as happening within and through a body.

auditory practice 1

I am experiencing a near-total block with composing. Not too unusual in general, and as preoccupation shifts to visual work, focus on sound tends to lessen. I experience a fairly constant doubt around the creative process, but I most often find a way to become fascinated by something. I can't go on, I'll go on...
But this current feeling is more extreme and part of a larger, gradual shift. I've been listening mostly to underground pop and various dance musics lately, and more and more interested in making something which reflects my enjoyment of those forms. But filtered through my lack of musical skill and my "mis"understanding of those sonic worlds. On the other hand, I occasionally become tired of the attitudes and limits which surround all kinds of musical activity - the conventions of genre or sense which make a cultural object identifiable. Sometimes, while listening to music I'm overwhelmed by the "belongingness". I want to hear things which can't be identified, can't be named. And it's also the kind of music I want to make.

Perhaps I'm moving away from making sound work which is organized into "tracks" and gathered into an "album" (it's getting increasingly difficult to find willing labels, anyway). I'm more interested in sound work which directly relates to an event in real time. Simultaneously, I'm moving alongside "real music", wanting to act as some kind of reflection. In the next few weeks or months, I plan to write occasional posts on my past and current composing, in an attempt to find out where I am. I would also like to start writing about the music of others I enjoy, attempting to articulate my appreciation of diverse sounds. This might be a way back in.

Flock & Tumble!

... is almost here. Our first rehearsal in the space is on election night (what was I thinking?) At this point, I'm confident we'll have a reason to celebrate.
This performance feels like a celebration, a very formal one. I intend for humor to pierce the weight at all points. Kathleen and Rikki of Woolly Mammoth have given brilliant performances as hypnotized hand signalers. I can't wait to see and hear it all together.

See you there?
www.brownpapertickets.com/event/42133
November 7, 8, 9 8:00 pm
doors, drinks and hors d’oeuvres at 7:30 pm
AudioCinema, 226 SE Madison

proximation

I'm considering the space between notes (bursts, iterations, events) as a moment of charge. Utilizing an erotics of distance: the use of the call to connect across space, invigorating a shared medium (atmosphere). The space between is a charged waiting - a poised position. Balanced by an erotics of proximity: the "tuning-in" of closeness, the ways of changing and being changed by those who are near.
Within the model of compression/expansion, each individual is charged with the minor catastrophe of breaking a silence, instigating a tumbling chain of events. On an individual level, the compression occurs as a small loss of self-awareness around the burst, following by an expansion outward with the ear.
Distance and proximity interact as a self-organizing form. This is my interest in a school of fish or flock of swallows. I am con-fusing spatial distance as an analogy (map) with temporal distance (between events). Always staying near, neither too close nor too far. Keeping an always-same but always-changing form, self-maintaining but allowing for rupture at any moment. A proximation of form.

Performance questions

I’m interested in the yell - the shock as a moment of compression and expansion, a release of energy. I’m interested in making bold, clear forms, in reacting against timidity. The yell/shout/exclamation is suggestive of animal characteristics - the oddity and violence of a frog inflating its air sac and the release of that air in a compressed burst which charges the space between. The power of waiting, a group which is poised in the edge of breaking a silence... each performer can be the one to disrupt the structure, balancing on the edge of a catastrophy. The yell as rawness, untrained vocalization. Anyone could make the sound without special knowledge or practice. The yell as a basic, unformed element of music which punctures. By altering factors slightly (extension, tonality) the yell can become pitched - it exists between noise and note. I’m interested in the balance between talking, exclaiming and singing. Crossing between the communicative and the aesthetic. Finding a base physicality which joins the act and the sound.

I’m interested in boldness, clarity, force, perceptual derangement, intentionality, spatial dispersion, emergent form, shifts, demanding durations, engagement, physicality, patterns, darkness, repetition, off-balance structures, tension, care, precision and wildness.

compositional terms

Each new batch of sound pieces tends to concentrate around a group of terms, ideas or concepts, without necessarily abandoning previous ideas. Since December, I have been making new recordings, pieces, sketches and sounds for various functions (dance score, installation, CD). While still working with ideas of "flocking", tumbling" and "awkwardness" which were the main focus of Flock & Tumble (see below for elaboration), I have been identifying some new concerns:

Velocity - The concept of "sound-objects" (Shaeffer's term for discrete sonic occurences) never made sense to me when I was involved primarily in creating "strata" of sound. Recently I've been collecting separate (rather than continuous) strikes, scrapes, thuds, bangs, pings, whips, gongs, drops, clatters, clinks, cries, rumbles... These occurrences form themselves into chains (sometimes with some help). The attack and decay of each event can be manipulated. The speed, power and physicality of attack and decay build velocity. While the composition moves at an overall pace, velocity works through individual sound objects. Velocity indicates force, aggression and physicality - occurring as an object which has weight and implied materiality.

Material Index - the term derives from Michael Chion's analysis of film sound, and refers to the way in which material density and substance is inscribed into recorded audio, and the way that sound might either correspond with or contradict visual information. Tati's footsteps are an example, in the way different, often very unrealistic foley effects determine a character's presence. The use of ping-pong balls for footsteps creates a hollow, springy character, often without our conscious awareness. This indexical and sensual aspect of sonic material has always interested me, and in the use of simple materials for sound production (metal, wood, glass, etc.) I have realized the degree to which we are able to decode and imagine the tactility of those materials through their resulting sonic character. The "woodness" of sound from wooden objects (for example) is intrinsic and almost impossible to obliterate.

The character of sound matter is imbedded deeply in my work despite modifications and alterations (pitch manipulation, reversing, layering, editing, etc.). In my opinion, this creates a primary complication to the idea of "reduced listening" through using acoustic sources. However obscured or hybrid, something of the initial material is retained. The ear is finely attuned to the qualities of weight, density, rough and smooth - sensations to which sound experiences are connected in daily experience. My own interests include the full range of mutation, hybridity, obscurity, confusion and recognition, while avoiding illustration or description.

Sounds are always (as has often been stated) sounds within a space - which carries its own material index. Mediation (the imprint of media on the spectral or textural character of a sound) provides another aspect of material index which can be manipulated. The particular and unique combination of matter, media and space for every recorded sound is what makes Shaeffer's goal of a complete solfege of sound impossible (though it shouldn't preclude attempts at precise description).

White noise and artifacts - I previously identified this as a component of "awkwardness" and I've been lately listening to clicks, pops, distortions, traffic sounds, far-away voices, tape-hiss, etc with increasing pleasure, as an integrated component of the sounds. I don't want the process to be invisible.

Depth - As I construct flocks of sounds, I work with them at a specific distance in representational space, imprinted by the material index of real acoustic spaces. I work with the ear's movement between different depths, and the dynamic of sounds which move or interact among and between different depths. Thinking of these flocks as points of activity at various distances, producing a complicated mobile - never static.

Tangentiality - A compositional strategy of decentered elaboration. Mutating and disturbing individual sonic elements, allowing a piece to follow multiple possibilities with a limited range of sources, shifting them in space, density, depth, interaction, etc. Shifting views of sonic clusters to reveal a variety of perspectives.

May 22, 2007

Flock & Tumble - a definition of terms. The composition of Flock & Tumble combined the intensely detailed and the haphazard. This methodology meant being open to chance while paying attention to the "purpose" or necessity of every sound at every moment. Recording and manipulation of sounds involved strategies for random behavior, including: - recording in noisy environments which contain traffic, rain, wind, people, dogs, radios, etc., - a lack of monitoring between overlapping layers, - improvisatory recording sessions, - providing participants with only schematic scores (such as indicating pitches as "high, medium low"), - and the blind layering of individual sources. In response to this randomness I chose to where and how to emphasize and elaborate, moving into microsecond editing. For example, I created many "hybrid" events by precisely matching/masking multiple envelopes into unified new sounds. As I worked over the last 6 months, I developed terminology which refers to various structural techniques or methods. Two of these terms became the title, in which I take the ideas as a compositional spur. By "flocks" I refer to sound-events which occur at irregular intervals in varying densities, forming clusters. This is a behavior which occurs on the level of individual layers, each distinct source or element within a composition. It is a form of continuity which links sound objects (discrete sonic events) into strands of intermittent occurences . Whereas "flocking" is horizontal, "tumbling" is vertical, a relationship between two or more strands in which a sound triggers one or more further sound-events. "Tumble" is the perceptual grouping of sequential sounds into a causal relationship. It could be seen as a "meta-flocking" across layers of the music. These structures come about both intentionally and unintentionally, often arising through accidental correspondences which are then emphasized purposefully. While the concepts of "flock" and "tumble" are largely specific to this series of pieces, another idea has enveloped my approach to composition in general for the past few years. "Awkwardness", used positively, is a vague and difficult term, more a quality than a thing. It comes in part from pushing against my own comfort levels in the creation of music. It relates to the degree to which I can remain surprised at my own work. It is a sense of unfamiliarity shading into rejections of "the rules". It is also an undefinable "feeling" in the music, a subjective pleasure which may be brought about, in part, from things such as: - sounds that are too brief or loud in relation to their context, - recordings that are distorted, warped or noisy, - backgrounds or environments for recordings which are filled with low-level noise, - long pauses, - and sounds which are too "human"/"animal"/"organic"/"artificial" in relation to their context, at times creating a contrast between natural and artificial. Awkwardness may also linger atmospherically from the use of real acoustic spaces, echoes and reverberations, and especially the confused layering of multiple reverberant signatures. Awkwardness could be opposed to a cool, refined or machine-like texture, though it should ultimately be elegantly awkward and intentionally accidental. Awkwardness leans toward an incorporation of humor, oddness and drama, but without specific referent. It is a floating term, attaching itself on various levels of the work.

found

this strangely complete discography on the Spiritual Achives blog.

Flock & Tumble - Screens and bodies

A large performance event, Flock & Tumble is scheduled for the first weekend in November at AudioCinema (226 Se Madison St in Portland). A large, empty warehouse, 12 sound-makers (performers), 4 channels of pre-recorded sound, 4 video projections of the dancers Linda Austin, Wooly Mammoth and others, with clothes by Diana Lang. At this point, I am working with 5 sections - an opening "tumble", three "flock" sections ("Flock", "Swarm" and "Torus") and a closing "tumble". Loosely speaking, (that is, as far as I know) a tumble consists of actions which are passed sequentially from one performer to another, while the flocks use rules of behavior taken from animals (birds, insects and fish) to create clusters of activity. The dancers perform only in screenal space - projected onto the walls.

What does it mean to dance on a screen? Why are the dancers in this piece separated from the activities in “real time”? Perhaps simply to create this space for “unreal time”. I have been interested in the possibility of simultaneous frames which “open up” the edges of actual space into alternate ones. With the emphasis on the plural. These are not spaces to lose the sense of the body (as in the typical cinematic experience of "suspension of disbelief” - though these videos will clearly draw on filmic inspirations. I have been noticing the movement of bodies in films which exist on (or across) the edges of “realism” - the carefully choreographed actions in Bresson’s prime output. The way sitting down, turning the head, placing a hand on a bench can be both completely normal and totally stylized. He achieved this hyper-awareness by filming many, many takes of the same seemingly unimportant movement. On the 40th take, the actor finally reaches an appropriate level of automatism. “Don’t we complete most of our actions in a kind of automatism?” he asks.

Another very different film has informed my thoughts - a Japanese yakuza flick called “Branded to Kill” which takes the stylized choreography of genre-specific conventions - the gunfight, the chase scene, the violent death - and twists them into dance. Falling back into a spinning office chair, the wounded man spins around not once but three times, calling attention to the falseness of the entire construct. Calling attention to the beauty of pure movement which fights against the story while furthering it. There’s something about this fighting and flowing which can exist together. Maybe we can call it “Suspension of belief”...

Bodies will be multiplied by four, though not mirrored. Staggered flashes. Where does the individual movement exist in this multiplicity? How does the body contribute to the larger pattern? How does the repetition of movement create sequential pattern? These are questions I leave to the dancers, as authorities on the subject. Perhaps it can spark a conversation. I would like that.

Music has been underway since December, though I have to imagine much of the final result. In combining live activity with recorded sound, I want these elements to coexist, sharing space. I imagine voice to be a primary tool of the performers, while the recorded compositions are "instrumental" for now (concrete and electronic sounds).

scatter logic

Brushing through a book of Barry Le Va in the library, his work resonated (not for the first time) as an idea of investigating drawing. I'm looking for a way of drawing across, on and with objects, materials. Becoming slightly more clear about how objects have presence. A few weeks ago I dreamed of tall flags or banners hanging from poles and touching the floor, a dark, ominous and somewhat awkward presence. I have been at the sewing machine trying to reconstruct that image in some way. Painting fabric with a mixture of graphite powder, water and acrylic medium results in a dense black surface which turns silver with rubbing or distress. It also results in black hands and fine graphite dust everywhere. Which is not terribly good for keeping all those other mostly white drawings clean.
I keep cutting across the flags and then re-sewing, shifting their angles. I want an unstable feeling, similar to the balanced plywood pieces. The idea of shifting like fractured sedimentary layers. All of these objects suggest a ground plane.
Lately in the studio I move between sanding and priming plywood, cutting and sewing fabric, and hectic clusters of graphite marks on paper. My creative attention is split about equally between drawing and composing, as I've been recording new sounds (springs, trombone, plucked strings, metal) and starting the first stages of new sound clusters. I've also been in a process of mourning the closing of the Portland Art Center's old town exhibition space, helping to write the history of that space and think about potential futures which could include flexible, project-based collaborations and activities. It's a tremendous loss of invested energy from everyone involved, and it seemed on the edge of real fruition. At the same time, not being weighed down by high rent opens up room for different and exciting modes...

Re-orient

This blog grows out of a general re-orientation in the way I'm thinking about my work, one based on an erasure (or rather, a letting go) of divisions between various modes of making (and therefore thinking) - sound, drawing, sculpture, video, performance, collaborations. In equalizing my work in all of these practices, I begin to think of them them as parallel. They may exist separately or in various reconfigured groups. I'm still wondering what an exhibition might require - what might it include or exclude? How much is enough, how much is too much? I am interested in adaptiveness and overlap... Adapting to a particular space (without being entirely site specific, at least in a strict use of the term) through overlapping various modes. In thought, this leads to a place where meaning can drift across media - forming complexes of distinct but complementing bodies of work. Quite practically, this approach grows from the fact that I have been drifting in the studio, moving from drawing to sound to video editing to writing to sitting and staring...

A large part of this recent re-orientation is a (perhaps gratuitous) matter of self-definition. After ten years, I have a growing feeling that I am no longer interested in calling myself an "experimental musician". For one thing, I am no longer interested in making "music". It's more that I want to make sounds about music - which means paradoxically that the work has become more "musical" - in order to comment on music. A subtle but important distinction, at least in terms of the self-perception of why I do what I do.

Also fading in my mind is the term "sound artist". As I have been equalizing practices, I come to all of them as containing or embodying a kind of "listening in". I will try to return to this idea, which grows from thoughts about the mirroring empathy of physiological body sensation. Sound is often said to be the most physical of materials because it operates in close union with touch, moving through and around the body. Recently I have been moving towards a consideration of all forms of apperception as forms of "listening" - which then leads me towards various prepositions: "listening into", "listening with", "listening under", "listening through", etc. etc. This is the engine which drives my current work...