David Brooks’s Corporate-Rock iPod — Or, In Praise of Fragmentation

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

In a thought piece earlier this week titled “The Segmented Society,” New York Times columnist David Brooks decried the “fragmentation” inherent in today’s diverse music scene, wishing for a halcyon era when “mega-groups attracted gigantic followings” (nytimes.com).

I pretty much never find myself agreeing with anything that Brooks writes, but what’s interesting about this particular piece of his is how he seems to put aside his vaguely libertarian, free-market mode when it comes to culture.

He is saddened that the monolithic acts of the past have given way to what could best be described as a democratization of culture. A critic of big government, he seems nonetheless to desire a big, centralized culture: “It’s going to be necessary to set up countervailing forces — institutions that span social, class and ethnic lines.” (He also seems to have not heard of Radiohead: “There are many bands that can fill 5,000-seat theaters, but there are almost no new groups with the broad following or longevity of the Rolling Stones, Springsteen or U2.” While we’re at it, how can a “new group” have “longevity”? That’s a perfect example of the stacked-deck rhetoric that makes Brooks unreadable most of the time.)

Somehow in Brooks’s imagination, the massive acts of the past were natural cultural occurrences, whereas today’s broad market is the result of a pattern of divide and conquer by record-industry executives: “In any given industry, companies are dividing the marketplace into narrower and more segmented lifestyle niches.”

Yeah, that’s right — Bruce Springsteen (whose guitarist, Little Steven, serves as a primary source of information in Brooks’s column), the Rolling Stones and U2 were cultural entities whose popularity was a natural outcome of mass appeal (no marketing or other machinations involved), whereas the rise of a more genre-aware, globally curious, shuffle-mode audience is … is what, exactly? Part of some master plan by the record industry?

Brooks’s use of the word “lifestyle” illuminates how mistaken he is. He seems to imagine that individuals elect to follow specific lifestyles and that music is then micro-tailored for them by a convenience industry. He gives no credence to the idea that rather than give their musical imaginations over to a handful of mega-groups, today’s listeners often fill their iPods (or equivalents) with a wide array of lesser-known acts — hip-hop and classic rock, soundtrack cues and novelty songs, indie-rock nuggets and non-English pop. For that is the era we live in now, which is precisely why it’s such an exciting time for music. The flourishing of electronic music in the past decade (the primary focus of this website) hasn’t been a self-contained phenomenon; it’s part and parcel of the flourishing of folk music, jazz, heavy metal, hip-hop, contemporary classical, country, etc., etc. — and the countless subgenres thereof. (Speaking of diversity, I won’t even begin to excavate Little Steven’s myopic and self-serving sense of musical history.)

But since Brooks’s usual beat is politics, I’ll just assume that he isn’t really writing in “The Segmented Society” about music — or even about fears of a multi-cultural America — at all. What he may be doing here is channeling his frustration that his own political party, after seven years in the White House, has an overstuffed block of presidential candidates who have widely differing views and who thus appeal to different segments of the party — and that there is no single evident front-runner. That is, no crowd-pleaser.

(Brooks already has been taken to task for “The Segmented Society” by various folk, including Alex “therestisnoise.com” Ross, gawker.com, playboy.com‘s Tim Mohr, thestranger.com‘s Eric Grandy and businessweek.com‘s Jon Fine.)

MP3s of Ray Lee’s Spinning Sound Works

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The artist Ray Lee uses the Theremin as a starting-off point for his sound-rich sculptural installations and performances. His “Choir” places 16 spinning devices in a single space. The setup looks like a compact windfarm, and the resulting sound is a rapturous, churning cloud of tones (MP3).

A more recent iteration of that practice, “Siren” nearly doubles the number of tripods and adds LEDs to mark their circuitous paths; the sound is an equal mix of kinetic energy and bliss (MP3). The image to the left, borrowed from Lee’s website, shows him adjusting an installation of “Siren.”

Just yesterday, Lee presented a new piece, “Force Field,” at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ica.org.uk) in London: “By interacting with the electromagnetic ‘force field’ that surrounds the theremin (the instrument you play without touching), Lee activates and controls a series of kinetic sound machines, creating music and movement from the ether.”

There’s a lot of video at his website, invisible-forces.com.

Diana Al-Hadid’s Gramophone at Perry Rubenstein (NYC)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The Perry Rubenstein Gallery in Manhattan currently houses a sculpture by Diana Al-Hadid titled “Record of a Mortal Universe”(2007). The work is characteristic of Syrian-born, Ohio-based Al-Hadid: a freestanding set piece that serves as a fantastic vision of an impossible instrument. True to form, it is just shy of nightmarish.

The sculpture, pictured here, shows steps leading to a distant architectural crown, and beneath those steps are the spindly pedals of some strange organ. Where an organ might have pipes, this one instead houses a massive, ornate gramophone. The gallery describes the work as a “narrative object.”

The lasting impression is several-fold: of the fragile pedals beneath decaying steps; of the gramophone that allows light to pass through like a Tiffany lamp; of the way that the gramophone’s horn narrows to a point, and how at the place where the needle that results from that point might make contact with a record, the grooves of the record look more like ripples, ripples that the point effects upon the surface of a thick, dark water that is frozen in time.

It’s not entirely clear if that those ripples (pictured below) are, indeed, concentric circles or the single, inwardly spiraling groove of a proper acetate or vinyl recording, but the suggested conflation is classically surreal.

Documentation provided by the gallery describes some of Al-Hadid’s intended narrative:

Rather than playing a record, the gramophone simulates the playing of fictive sounds of water ripples (sound waves) made by the fall of the hero from the top of the stairs. The illustrious gramophone is left to capture and echo the conjured sounds of the protagonist’s demise.

That reference to a “hero” seems at odds with how silent, how devoid of life aside from the allowance made by the piece’s title, the sculpture “Record of a Mortal Universe”appears to be — much like “Portal to a Black Hole,” the piece the artist had in the “Agitation and Repose” group show at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery earlier this year (see disquiet.com, August 25, 2007).

“Mortal Universe”is on view from October 19 through November 24, and when I stopped by Perry Rubenstein earlier this week and inquired of the gallery representative if Al-Hadid ever makes pieces that actually emit sounds, pieces that make music, she said not that she’s aware of. And then she added, “You know, nearly everyone asks that.” (More information at perryrubenstein.com.)

No Music Day — Preserving the Old Ways from Being Abused?

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Today, November 21, has been No Music Day — the third of five annual No Music Days as envisioned by Bill Drummond. Drummond was one of the two founding members of the early techno-rock act KLF, and his No Music Day (nomusicday.com) pretty much speaks for itself. It’s an attempt in our age of ubiquitous music to relieve ourselves of the onslaught and to not put music in its place so much as to return it to a less utilitarian, less ignorable state.

This means not just the music that suffocates us in the form of commercial jingles, but also the musical shell in which we insulate ourselves courtesy of iPod headphones — the immediate descendant of Walkman headphones, for which there had been no such precedent.

The Walkman debuted in 1979, which may be why Drummond’s five-year plan ends on the machine’s 30th anniversary. While many of us have passed today entirely unaware of Drummond’s growing army of headphone-snatchers, appliance un-pluggers, and other sonic martyrs, some institutions have been playing along; BBC Radio Scotland (bbc.co.uk/scotland) went so far as to play no music at all for the full 24 hours — no songs, no intros or outros to news segments.

The event has been covered widely (guardian.co.uk, nytimes.com, scotsman.com), and is seen as both a genuine preservationist gesture on Drummond’s part, and as an art-prank, simply the latest among his many — and not as if the two options are mutually exclusive.

I worry that such attention to a proposed idyllic absence of composed sound might diminish the public’s potential to appreciate the musical properties of the natural and industrial sounds that are all around us. I worry that such nuance, of the sort championed by composers John Cage and R. Murray Schafer, will be lost in the one-note noise of Drummond’s propaganda.

Drummond has certainly succeeded in keeping his message succinct, no doubt fully aware that public statements can be misconstrued easily. Why, a little over a month ago, art by his fellow KLF co-founder, Jimmy Cauty, was removed from the outside of a gallery by municipal workers in Brighton, England. It had been mistaken for graffiti (disquiet.com).

Christina Kubisch Sound Art MP3s

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

There is underselling, the art of lowering expectations so as to assure an audience’s satisfaction. Then there is the qualifying text that the record label Important has placed alongside two MP3s it posted for Christina Kubisch‘s album Night Flights, which is being brought back into print 20 years after its initial release and for the first time on CD. This text reads: “These mp3’s are incapable of giving you any real understanding of the perfect assemblies of sound Kubisch is able to achieve.”

Kubisch is one of the first of what one might call “fine artists” to use sound as her primary medium. Night Flights, as documented by these two segments, includes sound rich with field recordings of animal life sewn into a studio-created environment (“The Cats Dream,” MP3) and an electro-acoustic expanse of familiar instrumentation played to meditative, droney effect (“Circles III,” MP3).

The album’s rerelease has provided Kubisch an opportunity to reflect:

We tried to make multichannel recordings and mixes by ourselves, we invented long tape loops going through the whole room, echo effects and reverb. We became specialists in cutting and manipulating tapes.

Her first-hand recollections of that pre-digital era of experimentation are just as welcome as the music that resulted.

Night Flights‘s reappearance coincides with the release of a new album by Kubisch, Invisible/Inaubible: 5 Electrical Walks, which Important is promoting with a freely downloadable 36-minute excerpt. The piece is an extended series of swaths of lowercase quietude, followed by a maudlin drone that sounds like a morose robot (“Homage With Minimal Disinformation,” MP3). As with much sound art (and in no way to its detriment), the sound comes into focus when its construction, its conceptual birth, is explained by the artist:

Electrical Walks is a public walk with custom-made sensitive wireless headphones by which aboveground and underground electromagnetic fields are detected, amplified and made audible. The transmission of sound is accomplished by a built-in set of induction coils which respond to the electromagnetic waves in our environment. The palette of these noises, their timbre and volume vary from site to site and from country to country. They have one thing in common: they are ubiquitous, even where one would not expect them. Light systems, wireless communication systems, radar systems, anti-theft security devices, surveillance cameras, cell phones, computers, streetcar cables, antennae, navigation systems, automated teller machines, wireless internet, neon advertising, public transportation networks, etc. create electrical fields that are as if hidden under cloaks of invisibility, but of incredible presence. … The sounds have not been altered electronically or by other means

Additional information at importantrecords.com.