Judith's 20 Things site is now live.

"[I]t came together as I lay in bed in the dark . . . I'd invite 19 other people to each make 20 things in 20 days, and send them to me with a SASE and that I'd swap the art and mail everyone back one of each thing."

Judith is the first to position this project within the larger tradition of collaborative mail art projects. I'm also reminded of the related amateur press associations. Members of an APA produce pages for a publication, and send in a certain number of copies of these pages to a "central mailer," who collates the copies and redistributes them back to the contributors. (This history of APAs is interesting, dating them back to the mid-1800s.)

I can't help but feel like these systems are somehow relevant to Scrytch, the loose grouping of textual documents intended to be freely "appropriated, edited, revised, mangled, and perverted."

As I've written about a lot lately, the tools to appropriate, edit, and mangle sounds are becoming more and more readily available. It may now be possible and desirable to create a kind of sonic Scrytch project, similar in spirit to Otomo Yoshihide's Sampling Virus project, where he released a CD of sampled material into the public domain, for purposes of further sampling. (Here's a brief article with more information on the Yoshihide project, which also heads into a "technology and the future of music" direction, discussing microlabels and genre profusion.)

So: APA-style compiling and distribution + scrytch + music production technology = a project, in which individuals contribute sonic material to a central compiler who burns it all to a CD and distributes it to the participants for further reworking.

I may need to do this.

Labels: projects

Saturday, March 30, 2002
11:08 PM
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Glenn McDonald's The War on Silence currently has up a review of Bob Mould's new album Modulate.

The further Mould gets away from his Husker Du days, the less interested I get, but the review is interesting because it presents the dark flipside of Kevin Kelly's vision of new technological tools engendering a flowering of amateur music.

"Samples, drum loops, sequences, factory presets, combs, performance controllers -- on the best of the new equipment you can punch a few more buttons and twist knobs and change the noises without ever having to learn a grammar at all. Spend ten minutes with a Karma and you can have two club anthems and a car commercial. Give the Media Lab a couple more years and it won't even be that hard. Gesture, and you perform. Think, and you compose. You have music inside you, the promise goes; machines will remove the barriers that keep it from getting out. And as entertainment, this may be extremely engaging. But it isn't art. Or, more precisely, it isn't your art."

I don't know if I agree with all of McDonald's points, although he picks on them better than I can here, spending a formidable amount of time thoughtfully listing "clauses and clarifications and exceptions" to his own arguments.

Douglas Wolk, over at Lacunae, responds to McDonald's essay, by writing: "as much fun as [shortcuts] are to take ... having some kind of understanding of how musical theory actually works is what really lets you do worthwhile things." I might argue that theory (with the possible exception of Michael Nyman's text Experimental Music) doesn't always account well for conceptual music, a category which includes a great deal of the music generated by technological shortcuts. But, that said, I see Wolk's point, and my only qualification might be that the technology that makes it easier for amateurs to make something musical may be a gateway to the theory, not simply a replacement for it. I would never have linked to that page on polyrhythms if I hadn't spent a few months playing around with the drum machine in AudioMulch.

At the end of McDonald's review, he forgives Mould's digitalia experiments by writing "Some aspect of the new technology will let Bob Mould do something that nobody else could have, and how is he going to figure out what it is without trying all the buttons?" I would simply suggest that that statement has the potential to be true, not just for Mould, but for everyone.

Labels: amateurism, creative_process, music_commentary, technology

Wednesday, March 27, 2002
3:15 PM
0 comments

Tuesday, March 26, 2002
9:49 PM
0 comments

I'm currently reading Sven Lindqvist's History of Bombing.

The subject matter is obviously relevant, but it is the book's form that fascinates me the most. The book is organized into 399 fragments, organized roughly chronologically, but within that chronology, several different narrative threads exist: you are not intended to read the book in a straight-through linear fashion, but rather to jump from fragment to fragment, depending on which narrative chain you are following. (The book opens with twenty-two starting points, which you can choose from freely.)

The book functions like a more structured version of Cortazar's Hopscotch. Or, more generally, it works as another good example of "ergodic literature," where "nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text," a category which also applies to a great deal of electronic writing. It not entirely unlikely that part of the reason I respond so favorably to the idea of separate narratives within a chronological superstructure is because it is similar to my own project, Imaginary Year.

Lindqvist describes his book as "a labyrinth with twenty-two entrances and no exit."

Labels: book_commentary, electronic_literature, writing

Monday, March 25, 2002
12:40 PM
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This Kevin Kelly article, "Where Music Will Be Coming From," is interesting and mostly well-reasoned. (It's a New York Times article, so if you don't have an account with them, use member ID invisible-city, password reader.)

I think this is accurate:

"Digital copies are not only perfect and free, they are also fluid. Once music is digitized it becomes a liquid that can be morphed and migrated and flexed and linked. You can filter it, bend it, archive it, rearrange it, remix it, mess with it. And you can do this to music that you write, or music that you listen to, or music that you borrow.

At first glance it seems audiences were drawn to online music because of the power of the free, but in reality the rush to online music came from digitized sound's ever-expanding power of liquidity. Once music could swirl around one's life unencumbered, the millions of people who downloaded peer-to-peer file-sharing software suddenly and simultaneously imagined a thousand ways to conjure with music's liquidity. It wasn't only that it was free; it was all the things you could do with it.

Once music is digitized, new behaviors emerge. With liquid music you have the power to reorder the sequence of tunes on an album, or among albums. To surgically morph a sound until it is suitable for a new use. To precisely extract from someone else's music a sample of notes to use oneself. To X-ray the guts of music and outline its structure, and then alter it. To substitute new lyrics. To rearrange a piece so that its parts yield a different voice. To re-engineer a piece so that it sounds better on a car woofer. To meld and marry music together into hybrid breeds. ... With digitization, music went from being a noun, to a verb, once again."

And I think his conclusion is accurate:

"Music could experience a similarly exuberant, irrational flowering of the amateur spirit.

Part of the reason people have been inspired to create text, graphics and action in the digital realm has been the arrival of new tools. Fans of music are already ... making music in the way that a camera makes an image -- by starting with what is there and adding a unique view to it. Just as the introduction of the Brownie camera changed photography from an expert's art to a ubiquitous public expression, with the right tools in hand it is not a very long hop from now to a time when everyone makes music in a small, amateur way."

But I disagree with his thoughts about how people will sift through the ensuing mountian of music. These thoughts (which appear at least three separate times on this bullet-pointed list) don't go beyond "people will pay others to sift for them," an unsubtle hint to people looking to make money off the future. (Unsurprising, given Kelly's long-running tendency to operate as a corporate-friendly visionary.) But there has always been more music than people can possibly listen to; this is not new. And, yes, people have made money by providing accessible guides to that music, and, yes, this will continue to be true into the future. But I think that the real trend here, which Kelly misses, is the increase in noncommercial fan networks.

Mailing lists, suggested discography pages, weblogs, Amazon collaborative filtering systems and Listmania lists, submonitions pages: these things are proliferating wildly right now, and they all serve to amplify basic word-of-mouth. As a result, it is easier than ever to find music you will like, not harder than ever, and this makes it less likely that recommending music will be lucrative in the future.

Think of MP3 swap networks, which have all the benefits of the old underground cassette networks, only without the expense of postage. And, like the cassette swap networks, MP3 swap networks are participated in by both fans of obscure music and obscure musicians seeking kindred souls. And it's easier than ever to find kindred souls right now. I see the amateur musicians out there finding other musicians, who are pursuing similar experiments, and then swapping tracks with them, eventually perhaps bonding together as an identifiable unit. Anticon and Elephant 6 are perhaps recent successful examples of this phenomenon...

I am indebted to Dirk Hine for the original link to the Kelly article.

Labels: music_commentary, networks, technology

Thursday, March 21, 2002
11:23 AM
0 comments

I've always liked this Walter Benjamin quote about books and notes:

"The card index marks the conquest of three-dimensional writing, and so presents an astonishing counterpoint to the three-dimensionality of script in its original form as rune or knot notation. (And today the book is already, as the present mode of scholarly production demonstrates, an outdated mediation between two different filing systems. For everything that matters is to be found in the card box of the researcher who wrote it, and the scholar studying it assimilates it into his own card index.)"

I'm not sure if he's being ironic or not—Benjamin loves the book as much as anyone, as his essays like "Unpacking My Library" suggest, and by the point in this fragment on "Three Dimensional Writing" where he suggests that poets need to master technical diagrams, I'm almost certain his tongue is firmly in his cheek. But on the other hand, he did spend many years working on The Arcades Project, a huge unfinished volume of notes on all sorts of topics, and the original notion of the Passagenwerk was that it would be a work entirely composed of quotations from the works of others...

Labels: indexing, writing

Monday, March 18, 2002
11:41 PM
0 comments

Instructions from Otomo Yoshihide:

"Play loudly and create new sounds before the previous sounds disappear." (governing the musicians on tracks 1 and 4 on this record)

"Do not respond to the sound of others." (governing the musicians playing tracks 2 and 3 on the same record)

This reviewer writes: "[This music] becomes difficult on a whole other level than normally difficult music."

Labels: instructions

Saturday, March 16, 2002
10:26 PM
0 comments

John Zorn: "My concern is not so much with how things sound, as with how things work."

Reasonably thorough notes on John Zorn's "game pieces" can be found on this John Zorn FAQ, if you scroll down.

"A game piece ... is a method of group improvisation where the structure of the piece (the rules of the game) is set by a prompter at performance time, and the players have complete freedom within the structure. ... Just as people playing games or sports must follow certain rules which determine how they interact, but not exactly what they do (in baseball, for instance, the infield fly rule says what to do when one occurs, but there is no rule governing when a player must hit an infield fly), in his game pieces, Zorn creates structures and situations for improvisors to perform in, while providing little, if any, actual notated music."

Feel free to splurge on this 7-CD set of Zorn's game music, or just click on this link to hear a minute or so of Hockey.

Further reading: this article goes into greater detail about the inner workings of the game piece Cobra (the title is taken, I believe, from an old TSR wargame).

Labels: creative_process, instructions, music_commentary

Friday, March 15, 2002
2:32 PM
0 comments

In considering how a band could operate "from a formal manifesto," Douglas suggests some basic rules that have been of some benefit to other bands, including "Not everybody has to be playing all the time. If it makes sense to sit out part or all of a song, do," which reminds me of this piece of acting advice from Christopher Walken, quoted secondhand over at Consumptive: "When you're in a scene and you don't know what you're gonna do, don't do anything."

As for myself, I've always found Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies to be a pretty good set of rules for any creative endeavor, and music-making is no exception. In addition, I like some of the mottos that come from the Zen Guitar Dojo, especially their "Simplicity and Repetition," and the more mystical "Fill yourself with the sky, then play."

As you draw closer to the world of conceptual music, of course, you begin to find works that are generated by nothing more than musicians following a particular set of rules, perhaps most notably Terry Riley's minimalist compostion In C. The score of this piece is available here (as a PDF) and it consists of one page of 53 short musical clusters and two pages of rules for how the musicians (on "any number of any kind of instrument") should use them.

Labels: creative_process, instructions, music_commentary

Wednesday, March 13, 2002
6:46 PM
0 comments

My friend Hannah is coming to town today. She will be here through Thursday, and I want to be a good host, so updates may be few and far between during that time. Until then, I leave you with this neat, minimal Flash animation by Yugo Nakamura (and collaborators).

Labels: meta, personal

Sunday, March 10, 2002
12:24 PM
0 comments

I like this quote from Kobena Mercer:

"[A] profusion of rhizomatic connections ... implies another way of conceiving 'the role of the intellectual,' not as a heroic leader or patriarchal master, but as a connector located at the hyphenated intersection of disparate discourses and carrying out the task of translation."

I plan, sometime soon, on reading his Welcome to the Jungle : New Positions In Black Cultural Studies. Expect more notes in this space.

In other news: it is so windy today that my house is shaking back and forth.

Labels: networks

Saturday, March 09, 2002
1:32 PM
0 comments

Nanoloop is "a synthesizer / sequencer for the Nintendo Game Boy (TM) . As it is a pure software product and stored on a normal game cartridge, it can be used on any Game Boy and as it provides all necessary functions to produce nice electronic music, no further hardware is needed."

• Nanoloop users discussion forum
  
• pile of Nanoloop-assisted MP3s
  
• Nanoloop compilation album on Denmark's Disco Bruit label. Includes a Merzbow track (which you can hear in RealAudio).
  

Thanks, Neil.

Labels: music_commentary, technology

Thursday, March 07, 2002
11:31 PM
0 comments

Some preliminary sources on videogame music:

Chicago Reader article on 8-Bit Construction Set, a group that released an album of locked grooves, samples, and songs created on an Atari800 and a Commodore 64.

Information (including MP3s) on Output 64, a compilation (on the German label Enduro) of remixes of the music from Commodore 64 computer games. (Enduro also released Input 64, a compilation of unreworked C64 game music from 1985-89.)

"[T]he aim was clear: the selection of artists should reflect and bolster the original versions’ incredibly broad spectrum of approaches (despite the technical limitations of the Commodore 64’s SID sound chip), disregarding all musical boundaries and preconceptions."

Information on Matt Wand's 1½ Volt Music.

"The piece uses a dozen pocket game machines (Gameboys) programmed to generate permutations of the composer's score which was structured using the rules of the game TETRIS ( ie: as gaps appeared in the music the score is adapted to fill them).... the project continues the artist's long standing interest in totally portable and cheap noise/music making apparatus."

More on this later, perhaps.

Labels: music_commentary, technology

Wednesday, March 06, 2002
9:53 AM
0 comments

The newest Imaginary Year entry is up.

It references the book Zen Guitar. The author of this book, Philip Toshio Sudo, maintains a Zen Guitar Dojo, which has lots of interesting information, including an overview of the Zen Guitar philosophy and a series of lessons.

The phrase "six-stringed object" was adapted/stolen from the name of an interesting-looking digital guitar festival, which set out to "recontextualize the guitar as an instrument and sound source," among other things. (There are some MP3s available from that site, and check out the thoughtful writeup by Needle Drops columnist Philip Sherburne.)

The entry touches on musical amatuerism, which readers of the site will know I am interested in (it's been a theme around here since the very third entry). The most recent relevant reading on this topic is this great Lester Bangs article on nonmusician Brian Eno. Amateurism, musical technology, generative systems: practically every paragraph of this article touches on some topic of great interest to me. Thanks to Dirk Hine from Subterranean Notes for the link.

Labels: creative_process, music_commentary

Monday, March 04, 2002
11:54 AM
0 comments

The Library of the University of Pennsylvania is currently hosting an exhibit on the "assemblings" created by mail artists and other networking artists and poets.

The catalog is online as a series of PDFs. The part that caught my interest particularly is this section on "intimate bureaucracies." (901 K)

"Assemblings often use advertising images, mass-media images, and bureaucratic norms and procedures. Instead of a dismissal of modernity for some transcendent escape from the society of spectacles and red-tape tangles, the artists involved pushed those quintessential forms of our bureacratized lives to new interpretations of contemporary and future cultures. ... The tone is indicative of what I call 'intimate bureaucracy': a mobilization of modern forms for other ends."

This particularly struck me because for the past ten years or so I have periodically released work under the imprint of "Central Services," a fictional bureaucracy which some readers of this site may dimly recall...

Labels: art, capitalism

Saturday, March 02, 2002
10:49 AM
0 comments

For the past two days I've had the song "S.P.Q.R." by the experimental rock band This Heat stuck in my head.

It is kind of a chant, and the part that's been looped in my head goes like this:

We are all Romans and we know all about straight roads

Every straight road leads home

Home to Rome

Two plus two equals four, four plus four equals eight

We organize via property as power

Slaveload and freedom, imperial purple

Pax Romana.

As I've been thinking these words over and over again, the song came more and more to seem like an anthem about 2,000 years of imperialism. So I dug out an old issue of the zine Sound Collector, featuring an interview with This Heat's Charles Hayward. In this interview, Hayward says the following about "S.P.Q.R.":

"When the Roman army went out to war, the standard-bearer would hold an image of two children suckling at the breast of a wolf ... and underneath it would be the letters S.P.Q.R., which means the senate and the people of Rome. Because it was at the front of the military, it was on behalf of the people of Rome, and then this carnage would take place. It was the most efficient form of organized carnage, and to facilitate this organized carnage, they made straight roads ... There was this fantastic piece of photography of an autobahn in 1942 being used by the invading German army, then the same piece of autobahn in 1965, chockablock with holiday-makers going in the opposite direction to the way the army was marching. There's a luxury system, a leisure industry, using a system which was basically there for the military in the first place. Teflon and all that kitchenware was initially used for military purposes. Everything we have, all these advances, they got their resonance, their source material, in military ideas, and then later on they become our CD players."

Then, later on today, reading Eccentric Spaces, by architecture critic / polymath Richard Harbison, I stumbled upon another, similar take on those straight roads:

"Roman geometry begins in the single points of obelisks or milestones and extends itself in roads and aqueducts. ... The roads which ran from Rome in various directions until they hit the coast were not prevented from carrying real traffic by the fact that they were ideal rays, radiations of Roman power. 'All roads lead to Rome' coerces more than we think, means that the center has absolutely been ordained by human will, that all journeys have been plotted at the start, that the quality of clockwork has been imparted to human affairs. Roman roads were laid perfectly straight in an outlying place like Britain not because it was easy to do it that way but to show that even this wild did not defeat the Roman mind, which could treat it as if it were a plane. These roads stated clearly that the power came from man, who did not mean to respect the land. An Amazonian capital or an Alaskan pipeline would have its point as long as the airplanes flew over even if the oil never flowed."

Further reading: a review of Harbison's more recent book, Thirteen Ways.

Other news: This week student conferences kept me busy and job worries kept me rattled. I'd been looking forward to going to see Japanese multimedia collective Dumb Type (featuring a soundtrack of "hyperdense pure noise" by Ryoji Ikeda), but I'd had enough stimulus for one week, and decided I'd rather relax at home than "test the threshold of [my] perceptions with a relentless flow of ultra-rapid video data." Maybe some other time.

Labels: empire, music_commentary

Friday, March 01, 2002
6:33 PM
0 comments