Quote of the Week: The Turntable as Metaphor

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

In an interview with Greg J. Smith at Serial Consign (serialconsign.com), artist/educator Jeremy Hight talked about his work in and on locative art, especially the piece “34 North 118 West,” which Hight has described as “a generative narrative that relies on outdoor wireless internet connection to tell a story specific to user location.”

Hight shared, in the following description, a part of the project that didn’t make its final cut:

“The analogy was of putting a needle on a record, but at random. The needle is a point, a place and it moves and the record is also a place and it moves, yet both can be held still. When you drop that needle and that random sound emerges it was recorded at a specific time, and of a certain moment, people playing etc, but it also defies time as long as it can be heard, or triggered really. So”¦ a place is the same, and any place has many such moments, people, places, events and they can be also be subtle, humble, quiet, and yet important.

“We used to talk to people about 34 North”¦ as also a story of the quiet moments, lost moments and their resonance and how it could even be the hidden ones, suppressed ones, or what what was not seen as ‘history’ by the media or the sexy semiotic of celebrity and big events. What about local people ? What about jobs no one remembers? What of the Latina women in the 1940s who helped build a city and no one remembers them now? A city can have a botoxed face, the past can often be obscured or lost. I walked out of the Downtown library one afternoon dazed after hours of looking at microfiche of newspaper articles from the early 20th century. It hit me finally with full force that this was not only a new kind of writing (progressing from many other forms of course”¦ not out of the blue) but more so it was to give places a voice. It was an odd feeling seeing something so big and knowing that it does not exist yet and how grandiose it would sound to call it such.”

The emphasis for Hight is the democratizing potential of locative art to store memories that, in the past, would have lost ground to more pervasive narratives. But what’s worth focusing on as well is his artful employment of the turntable as a metaphor. (The two paragraphs appear as one in the original text of the interview, but I divided them in order for the part about the turntable to have its own space for consideration, without losing sight of the larger context.)

The turntable has quickly gone from fact to metaphor, from consumer product to idea. Much of the turntable’s artistic impact these days is visual and nostalgic, usually a mix of the two. There’s nothing wrong with celebrating the turntable’s iconic form in all its variations, but its physicality contained meaning, and that meaning can persist, can inform, even if the tool itself has largely been set aside. What’s beautiful about Hight’s insight about the turntable is his sense of the symbolism built into the device’s tactile, haptic reality. He locates in the vinyl record an origin point for locative art (as he says, the art is “progressing from many other forms”), how the turntable coordinated sound and place, aural and physical.

Read the full interview at serialconsign.com. More on “34 North 118 West” at 34n118w.net. Hight’s collaborators on the project were Jeff Knowlton, Naomi Spellman, and Brandon Stow. More on Hight at airstory.blogspot.com.

Grassy Knoll MP3, Circa 1998

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Over at feedtheenemy.com, Bob Green has posted a rare demo of a track off the album III by his alternate identity, Grassy Knoll. The track dates from 1998, well into the rise of electronic music, but before the laptop had truly inserted itself into the process. I remember visiting Green in his San Francisco apartment around that time, and watching him work his magic on pre-existing samples — it was as if he’d externalized his memory, and could work it by hand. Well, in a manner, that’s exactly what he was doing, improvising with samples in a mode that is common today but was quite remarkable at the time for the freshness of the approach. And Green’s approach wasn’t just a matter of ingenuity, but of artistry and imagination. If anything signals his alternate readings of familiar sonic cues, it’s the way sound of audience applause appears as a texture in this track, which is otherwise thick with dub-like bass, and is titled “Down in the Happy Zone (Demo)” (MP3):

[audio:http://www.feedtheenemy.com/audio/DownHappyZone.mp3|titles=”Down in the Happy Zone (Demo)”|artists=Grassy Knoll]

Writes Green of the tech on which he produced this:

This is a demo track for the album “III”. There was something special about the sound of the Roland S-550 but it had some serious memory issues. It could only hold 2 floppy disk worth of samples! Good enough for creating demos and the sound of this machine transfered to 2” tape rather well”¦

Green was among the dub-influenced musicians I interviewed back in 1997 for the story “Dub, American Style (read at disquiet.com); also in the story are Dub Narcotic Sound System, President’s Breakfast, and Beastie Boys colleague Money Mark. The piece was collected in the anthology Reggae, Rastafarians, Revolution: Jamaican Music from Ska to Dub (Schirmer Books), edited by Chris Potash.

More on Grassy Knoll and Bob Green at feedtheenemy.com.

Death Metal at Quarter Speed (MP3s)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Astrum‘s recent release on the Rain netlabel takes a quote from the Haruki Murakami novel Kafka on the Shore as its epigraph: “The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.” That could be the mantra of a sample-based musician, in that it so explodes — as in expand, not destroy — the idea of memory that it gives lie to the whole concept of past and present, sample and sampler. If there is source material to the eight tracks on Astrum’s record, which is titled Earth Mechanics, it isn’t identified, but the molasses pace is applied to sounds ethereal (the woozy, attenuated “Tenebra”: Ogg), orchestral (the synth strings of “Artery”: Ogg), and earth-bound (the heavy, dark tones of “Metal-Hydrid Core”: Ogg). The latter track, at nearly 30 minutes, is the by far the album’s most extended, though all of them have a single-mindedness that’s compelling. In general, they have the intensity of a doom metal band, albeit at quarter speed.

Get the full release of Earth Mechanics at rainnetlabel.blogspot.com. Note that the files are only available in the Ogg (not MP3) format, hence the lack of streaming on this page (or at the archive.org page where it is housed).

Astrum is Kaluga, Russia-based Vadim Mosin.

Matmos + So Percussion = Exotica Sextet (MP3)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Teaming up So Percussion and Matmos is a match made in contrapuntal heaven. The percussion quartet has made a career of recording and performing demanding contemporary music, including a highly regarded album of work by Steve Reich, and the duo Matmos has been eliciting unusual sounds from the familiar yet peculiar (famously including rodents and plastic surgery) since the late 1990s. On a forthcoming album, due out July 13, titled Treasure State, they’ve become a formidable exotica sextet, judging by the advance taste provided by the track “Treasure” (MP3).

[audio:http://www.cantaloupemusic.com/sound/somatmos-treasure.mp3|titles=”Treasure”|artists=So Percussion & Matmos]

Midway through, it breaks into a solo that sounds like Adrian Belew — or, looking back a little further, Frank Zappa — at his most squelchy. But before and after the warped squall it’s a delicate, almost frivolous mix of chattering acoustic beats, mumbled drumming, and slow throbs.

When bands like Tortoise ushered the word “post-rock” and the concept of rhythmically complex, melodically sublimated, compositionally astute chamber music into our consciousness, the idea seemed to be that rock bands would slowly move in this direction. But So Percussion’s experiments with Matmos here are firm evidence that — at the risk of my extending a dualism while celebrating its disappearance — classical ensembles are challenging themselves as well, to the great reward of listeners.

The recording of Treasure State also featured editing by Wobbly and overdubbing by Lawson White. More information at cantaloupemusic.com.

More on Matmos at myspace.com/matmos1 and brainwashed.com/matmos, though both are a little out of date. More on So Percussion at sopercussion.com.

Despite the Downturn: Now with Flavor(wire)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Three new and substantial articles covering Despite the Downturn: An Answer Album have been published this week. Despite the Downturn is the various-artists collection (housed at archive.org) that I put together in response to an article written by Megan McArdle in the May 2010 issue of The Atlantic (“The Freeloaders,” at theatlantic.com) about the current challenges facing the music industry. Each of the album’s tracks interprets the illustration that accompanied McArdle’s article as if it were a musical score. (A detail of the image, by the talented artist Jeremy Traum, appears at left as the “cover” of the album.)

Over at flavorwire.com, Max Willens wrote a well-crafted overview of the project. His story carries the splendid title “What ‘The Death of the Music Industry’ Really Sounds Like.” It includes this careful listen to, and appraisal of, how the album functions:

Despite the Downturn’s composers used a fascinating range of materials to create their pieces: public domain recordings of Beethoven’s “Adieu au piano,”field recordings of children playing outside in the summer, sampled bits of NES games, Risset tones, and more. They were scrambled, reconfigured, and manipulated in ways most people have never heard before. Depending on one’s mood, they can sound either stranded or intrepid, defiant or lonely, incomprehensible or exciting.

They are also pieces of music that would have been impossible to produce just a few years ago. They may be part of McArdle’s vision, labors of love produced in spare moments. But they also embody the new creative possibilities that enable musical dialog as well as collaboration, and Weidenbaum relishes the opportunity to spur those conversations forward.

That flavorwire.com article draws on a two-part interview Willens conducted with me over the weekend on the the album’s development, as well as on the music-culture issues that lend the project context. Here is a key section from the first part of the interview (published yesterday, at weallmakemusic.com), about whether the musicians involved in the project “confront the massive uncertainties facing both their art and, possibly, their livelihoods,” as Willens put it. I responded, in part:

[W]hile the decline of the record industry has made a lot of people who aren’t musicians think about the livelihoods of musicians, I think musicians are, generally speaking, all too familiar with the fragile relationship between producing art and eating a full meal, and have been for a long time, long before the arrival of MP3 players and Rapidshare. All the musicians I contacted initially for Despite the Downturn were ones who are already very much at home with music being something that one might give away for free — that is, give away the opportunity to listen to it, and to have it in a form, a DRM-free audio file, that allows the audience to listen to it when and where they choose.

Here’s a key section from the second part of the interview (published today, at weallmakemusic.com), in which I respond to a question about the false divide between creator and consumer that is inherent in the perspective represented in McArdle article:

Music territorializes our minds. All art, all communication, territorializes our minds. That’s what riffs and hooks and melodies and lyrics do. I am going to see the musical based on Matthew Sweet’s Girlfriend, and I re-listened to the album for the first time in, easily, five years, maybe 10, and I still knew every single word by heart. And I could sing or hum along with every little lick that Robert Quine and Richard Lloyd played on their guitars, even these tiny filigrees that are little more than minor flashes of feedback. The current legislation of copyright in regard to fixed recordings simply doesn’t allow people to access their own memories, literal and figurative. Rob Zombie tells a great story, a sad one really, about not being able to use Super 8 footage of himself and his brother as kids at McDonald’s in a music video because, well, it’s McDonald’s — and well, you know, it may be McDonald’s, but it’s also a kid’s memories, an adult’s memories of when he was a kid, and the laws as they’re currently enforced protect the interests of companies who actively territorialize our memories and then charge us to access them. Lawrence Lessig has done tremendous work in pushing to revise these laws, but we have a long way to go. Can you imagine how a John Coltrane or Charlie Parker would feel hemmed in today? “Oh, man, I felt myself wanting to drop in a little bit of ‘Tea for Two’ when I was soloing, but I was too worried some ASCAP or RIAA spy in the audience was gonna tap my wages. Glad I caught myself.”

Over at twitter.com/flavorpill, the announcement of the flavorwire.com article read:

flavorpill: Our “sounds of the death of the music biz” article features “despite the downturn”, composed by @disquiet http://su.pr/5nfgBg

To be clear, I didn’t compose the Despite the Downturn album — though allowing for a meta-definition, the word “compose” works well, and intentionally or not the use gets to the heart of the copyright and collaborative-creativity issues ignored by McArdle’s article.

Speaking of copyright, I woke to find an email from Richard Stallman in my inbox this morning, and it led me to alter one particular thing at the archive.org page where Despite the Downturn compilation is housed. I swapped in “copyright” in one place where I had initially written “intellectual property,” which I had employed as a loose synonym for copyright, entirely in error. They are two related but different terms.

PS: Update (as of May 12): Stallman said later via correspondence that it’s fine to reprint his email:

I found your article TheDownturnAnAnswerAlbum a clever response to The Atlantic. However, in one point it undermines itself by incorporating the adversary’s propaganda term: the pseudo-concept “intellectual property”.

That term lumps together a dozen different laws which have nothing important in common. Those laws work differently and have different practical results. Thus, generalizing about them can only mislead.

Your article’s real topic is clear and coherent: one law, copyright. It doesn’t include patents, trade secrets, trademarks, publicity rights, controlled geographical designations, or any of the other dozen laws that some call “intellectual property”. With this clear and coherent topic, the article can be clear too, and mosty it is. However, where it uses the term “intellectual property” instead of “copyright”, it trades the clear topic for a confused one.

When I noted how this term tends to confuse every discussion it appears in, I decided to avoid it. In the several years since then, I have never had an occasion to use the term. I mention whichever law is really the issue. These laws are so different that it is never useful to generalize about them. When others do so, the best thing for me to do is to respond by explaining how that is confused.

So I’d like to suggest that you change the article, replacing “intellectual property” with “copyright”, which will make it sharp and clear all through.

Thanks for listening.

See gnu.org for a full explanation of the bias and confusion in “intellectual property” and why, we should firmly refuse to use it.

In closing, original Atlantic article is at theatlantic.com, the “answer album” (downloaded almost 1400 times in just over a week) at archive.org.