228

Comments

1. 

   Christopher McFall

   January 28, 2013

   So, look…just make, record, break, and process sound, people. That’s the only thing that will quench your aching minds; it guides you though the endless banality of otherwise empty hours. Make your work and put it out there because you love it and because it’s the best lover that’s ever laid lips upon you. Let everyone around you drink it up, critics, sound designers, composers, asses, kings, queens, drunks, and beggars alike. Put it on a label, give it to a reviewer, or hide it in your closet and save it for yourself. The designations are irrelevant. Sound is what we do and it’s simply amazing, rendering all of us as beautiful, magnificent animals of the auditory persuasion.

   Reply
2. 

   Akos Garai

   January 29, 2013

   Well said, Chris! Music, be it of any kind, naturally stimulates responses which is a good thing. Which is not, or better said unnecessary to my mind is to put too much philosophy behind sounds – again – be it of any kind. Let everyone to think what he/she want to think or feel rather than tell them by others.

   Reply
3. 

   john grzinich

   January 29, 2013

   well said Christopher… this reminded me of a philosophical question I had for a long while; could a person create something that could never be perceived by another human being? For the sake of argument I defined ‘create something’ as any form of personal expression, be it a text, song, or so much as an actual concrete material artwork however small. So you sing alone in the forest, write a poem or make a sketch and hide it in a book in a closet, make a recording and it sits on your hard drive and nobody ever hears it… will these expressions ever have an audience? I mostly struggled with trying to find the most limited, hidden forms of expression, which even went into immaterial forms of creative thought or daydreaming. My answer was always yes and your audience was basically anyone (or anything) you will ever come in contact with. Whatever you create no matter how hidden will still be perceived by others. Why, because what you create changes you, your way of thinking, your behavior and ultimately how you interact with the world. The more you do something, the more you learn about what it is you’re doing and the effect it has on you and the people around you, even if you realize you don’t like it in the end, its still a learning process. Christopher emphasizes this by reminding us to really think about why we do what we do and that if we’re not passionate about it then either do something else or keep experimenting and find different ways of doing it.

   I see a lot of self doubt with people who record and compose with sound (myself included), because of the difficulty of getting exposure, good feedback, financial support etc… and I think this actually has a lot to do with the solitary nature of the practice, that is, its not inherently social in form like music of the visual arts. In many ways it is counter-social. How many of you go out recording with a big group of friends, bring some beer and look for a good time? I know thats exactly the thing I try to avoid. And when you go out into the field with one or two people, the most important thing is to keep as quiet as possible not to interfere with each others recordings. Then there’s the editing process where you want to sit in quiet studio or work at your computer with a pair of headphones, undisturbed for as long as possible. Maybe you come up with something you want to present to the world, so you release it as a download or a CD or whatever and silently send it out into the big wide world hoping someone will listen to it. And if they listen, they will do it quietly in their own home, car or on the way to work with an ipod and headphones. Then you get an invitation to do a “concert” or public listening and the audience should sit absolutely still and not talk for however long you “play”. What is the ethic there, well god help the person who has a cough or brings a child to the performance and “ruins the experience for everyone else”, right?

   So where is the opportunity for social experience in all this process? I think you get the idea about the amount of isolation that one has to face and a question I’ve had for a long time has been, how to deal with paradox of taking the highly fluid and social medium of sound and using it as the foundation for a culture of fairly hermetic anti-social behavior? My response has been varied and I’ll save that for another post or what could probably be a book of sorts. I’ve also highlighted some alternatives in the current post on TFR and I’ve tried to share possible models and methods elsewhere online. But it would be nice to hear what others have to say because this is one of those things that again rarely, if ever, gets discussed and I’m glad that TFR is a space where I feel we can do this.

   Reply
4. 

   Juan Jose Calarco

   February 2, 2013

   Well said guys, it’s not strange all this discussion also reminded me of something from a long while. It was an interview to a local composer, I think around 1994 or 1995, he was pointing how happy he was about not having to explain anymore to anyone why he choose any note or any sound on his work, if I can remember correctly he was basically saying ‘maybe the only good thing about postmodernism is that it wiped out not only those absurd distinctions between academic and popular art but also freed us from having to make up constant and forced justifications on everything we make, so now if you want to write a whole book about you latest work you can do it and if you want to let music explain itself now you can do it without anyone being able to dismiss your work, it’s all up to your likes’. I was a teen by then and making my first steps of tape stuff I really haded no idea what he was really talking about and I was just surprised me how people working in the academic field were having to deal with things as such. Almost two decades later and despite I never got into any school for learning music, I faced this same situation countless times. It feels like everything stepped back into what could be called as a neorational restoration, replacing uncompromising work by rhetorical restrictions of any kind.

   I agree with David Vélez about the need of new discourses but why fall into the formal and pseudoscientific or (much worse in my opinion) appeal art critics and institutions? Instead of put ourselves out from the small bubble we’re into should we get into an smaller one? I really don’t agree, plus, where this would lead us to, meetings and congress at universities as the main goal, think our music as social research? I’d put more energy on working with musicians and artists from other fields of music, both working together as also sharing concerts to reach different audiences. I’ve tried (and will keep trying) these experiences with all kind of results, also, playing in public open spaces can be interesting, why keep as closed? John Cage played with Roland Kirk for giving a very well-known example, whilst most (if not all) nowadays pretended cage-ians would agree to play only with the variety of extended technique musicians who thinks you can only make your instrument sound like an hippopotamus being vivisected or left it alone unplayed to peel an orange or stare at the roof instead. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong about it but there’s a clear choice to make things only for a ‘trained’ audience and even scare the curious or occasional listener resulting in the ‘safe’ concert for two, five, luckily twenty connoisseurs. As a counterpart, most people in the ‘sound art’ scene don’t feel uneasy to be truly ‘pleasers’, they try to please record label people by creating works by the trends of the specific label, please reviewers, please organizers, please curators. please anyone who has something they are interested in. As an unyielding example, many of my colleagues and friends regularly cheer a bigot guy who openly said that muslim people are a plague (!) because he has a nice russian label and they want to be featured on it or exchange releases with him, they just play the fool when he says something like that and they wait his next facebook comment to add a ‘like’. So here we are, we can be pleasers with almost no one caring about what we do or we can try new approaches, I think.

   Reply
5. 

   bruno duplant

   February 3, 2013

   It should not be enclosed edifices/structure.
   Nothing is fixed, everything is to created.
   Decompartmentalize, mix.
   Open gaps, paths, even if they lead to nothing.
   Dare!
   Open us to others.
   Believe in a sound alchemy, a grail.
   What does not exist is to invent, to shape.
   Respect, destroy, invent.
   Marvel us, indigant us perpetually!

   (sorry for the bad english)

   Reply