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I've been having an interesting discussion offline about the "confusing" nature of my recent music. A listener suggested that if it's German trance or house I'm going for, it should be more sophisticated and varied, with more filtering, pitch-shifting, layering of sound, use of quantizing to give more swing to the rhythm, and less use of factory presets. If it's conceptual art (as in Yoko Ono or Philip Glass minimalism--my examples), it should be a lot clearer that's the frame of reference. As it is, the listener says, the music is somewhere in the middle and needs to lean one way or another.
Maybe what set him off was a piece I just posted, called "Permanent Chase," which took a one bar "found" melody and pretty much beat it to death. Composing for me isn't about spending hours in the lab creating new synth sounds--it's more about taking what's there and using it to just to the point where you're about to scream and then tossing in one little change that brings some closure. Maybe with that piece I failed (too many bars before the goofy key change? maybe if snipped out about 8-16 bars?). I've pulled it pending further study 'cause I'm not sure myself.
Generally speaking, though, I like that middle ground he's talking about. My visual work has always occupied a realm somewhere between "failed commercial art" and "conceptualism that's too stupid to look at." I certainly started out doing music with that mindset. I've been grinding out so much of it lately that maybe it's starting to get "good," as in, one wants to hear it be "better." That may be the time to walk away from it. My hearing would probably thank me.
Steve Gilliard wrote this imagined dialogue between Bush Senior (41st president) and Junior (illegitimately elected 43rd). The substance is there, but this conversation would never occur in a patrician family like the Bushes'. 41 would communicate his concerns to Barbara or one of Bush's brothers, who would pass it along to Junior. An even more likely scenario is that Senior would weakly, passively say nothing and Barbara (possibly after a few cocktails) would instigate and deliver the lines below:
The Bush family is sitting in the White House family quarters.
41 is standing, 43, sullen and silent while Barbara looks on
41: Son, you're in real trouble now
43: Whatever
41: No, son. You're in this up to your ass and I cannot fix it. I thought Dick would look out for you, but his ass is cooked as well.
43: I'll handle it.
41: Handle what? What are you going to handle? A prosecutor?
43: I'll pardon them
41: No you won't. You wanna be impeached like Clinton? People don't like you, George. You're mean and crude and this day has been coming for years.
[etc]
Cory Arcangel did an interview with me, published today at Rhizome.org [dead link - see below]. Thanks to him for the good back-and-forth, once I got my rather long-winded biographical reminiscing out of the way, and Marisa Olson for her editing. (Update: Marisa just reposted the lead-in to the interview--newsGRIST's reblogging of Rhizome's original post.)*
It was great to talk about music with Cory, whose work I really like. The 8-Bit Construction Set LP--which he made with the BEIGE crew--still gets props, most recently in an article in Wired. Also "Rudy Tardy and the Slowes," his solo music that I posted here a while back, continues to be listened and linked to, just this month by an Italian site called neural.it. We also talked about visual art--Chris Ashley found a good excerpt that I will probably post as a teaser; see the comments for now. In fact, I'll probably end up putting up goodly chunks of the interview here as I continue to have second thoughts and/or run out of new things to say.
At the end of the interview we discussed what it means for an artist to be "all over the place," i. e., not just sitting in the studio turning out objects in that same signature style. I gave the best answer I could--it's tough. I understand the benefits of that kind of forced discipline, and go in and out of periods of Tim Hawkinson-like focus myself, but I hate that it's the only measure of commitment or worth as an artist. One hope I had in starting the blog was that the various diverse activities documented here could be seen as feeding into some kind of overall artistic sensibility. But for all the lip service paid to the idea of cross-disciplinary practice by curators, etc., it's still viewed with skepticism. In the art world's collective unconscious, the prime model is still a romantic primitive like Albert Pinkham Ryder, painting all day and sleeping on the streets at night in a rolled up carpet. And doing nothing else.
reposted with more verbiage...and ranting
Update: New Link to Cory's interview with me.
*Update 2: Marisa Olson's lead-in is now at http://rhizome.org/editorial/2005/oct/31/tom-moody-chats-w-cory-arcangel/
Digital Media Tree blogger Jim Louis returned to his house in New Orleans, in one of the neighborhoods not smiled upon by the gods in the recent weather disaster, and has this report. Jim has been living in another state but still owns property in the city; he went back to assess the damage and is there now with his laptop. In a related post he said the water level on his block came to four feet, which is just slightly higher than his floor. My thoughts are with Jim as he surveys the damage in a city he has been reporting to us on for years.
Shoutback Dept., No. 1. Thanks to Marius Watz for his nice post on the Generator.x blog, published in connection with a conference and exhibition in Oslo examining the current role of software and generative strategies in art and design. Check out some of Marius' interactive abstractions here; they are seductive to look at, fun, and actually use the computer's image-making capabilities in way that lets the machine do some of the thinking, as opposed to my low-tech simulacra.
Shoutback Dept., No 2. Thanks to Ran Prieur for seconding my complaint about the Carter "energy sweater" urban myth, which holds that "Nerdy Jimmy Carter Wore a Sweater When Talking About Energy." This is wrong. To reiterate: Carter wore the sweater on many occasions after the '76 election, it was part of his laid-back "man of the people" persona, post-Nixon and his foppish uniforms for White House guards. Yet for some reason, media mavens of the left and right and even bloggers continue to enliven their prose with the image of the "nerdy energy sweater."
I've been enjoying Ran's site, which has many interesting things to say about dropping out and living off the grid that I hope to respond to in the coming weeks. Here's a pearl from his blog:
Notice that every article about energy systems contains the word "needs." How much energy do we need? Our ancestors did fine for two million years, or two hundred million if you count our pre-human ancestors, with energy gathered by plants through photosynthesis, taken into our bodies through eating, and channeled through our muscles. Do industrial energy systems make us happy? Do they give our lives meaning? Then why are suicide and depression rates higher in countries with greater per-capita energy consumption?
The only thing we need, beyond basic survival, is participation in a system that builds itself bottom-up from autonomous action. "Energy" makes us miserable and stupid when and only when it is gathered and parceled out by control systems. The nice thing about oil and coal is that they run out, and that they pollute the air to cause eco-catastrophes, which are far preferable to having our lives managed by the institutions that own the energy. Sustainable, clean energy that you can't cheaply gather in your back yard is the worst technology possible, because it will enable the systems that enslave us to continue forever.
I think behind human history is an evil collective consciousness that wants to crush the spirit of life, and techies are unwittingly resonating with it. After they take care of energy, they'll invent a way to make us immortal, so we can't even get out by suicide. We will become eternal torture victims of the megamachine, just like in Harlan Ellison's classic sci-fi story "I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream."
Jerry Saltz reviews Ludwig Schwarz's New York debut, sort of, in this week's Village Voice. Readers of this blog may have some passing familiarity with Schwarz from posts about him over the last couple of years (here, here and here), and from the "art is for the people" link that used to be on the left hand column (the site is gone and much missed; all that remains is the "brief history of texas blues"). Saltz misspells Schwarz's name and makes a dig that the work is "a little familiar in its funkiness" without explaining who else is similarly funky, but a review is a review. In fact, there's not much substance to the piece--the reader doesn't know what "jobbed-out paintings and tricked-out videos" means unless you google and end up, say, here (hard with the artist's name misspelled) and even then you won't learn what Saltz means by "tricked out." Did Schwarz cover TVs with sequins and feathers? (Obviously I missed the show's one day run.)
I'm burning up the mp3 charts at 397. Let's see, Bon Jovi, Coldplay, Scorpions, Kanye West, Christina Aguilera, House Classics for Solo Organ... D'oh, think maybe I better start putting my name on my .mp3 files, now that I'm getting traffic from download sites I didn't know about.