if a mys

Tim Berne's Hell System No.2

2006-10-18T16:15:00.000+02:00

Big Satan Speaks

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Early in 2000, Tim Berne's Big Satan - a trio featuring guitarist Marc Ducret, drummer Tom Rainey and Berne himself on alto - played a one-off London gig. motion caught up with the trio and chatted to them about New York in the 80s, running your own record label and the terror inherent in performing improvised music live.

Motion Introduce yourselves, please...
Ducret I'm a guitar player, self taught; I don't play any style in particular - I have a tendency to like them all. I play with my own trio, I play solo gigs, I play a lot with Tim Berne's different circuses..
Rainey I'm Tom. I play the drums. I took drum lessons. I play with Tim Berne. I've played with a lot of other people: Mark Helias, Tony Malaby... and I'm happy to be here!
Berne I'm Tim Berne; I play mostly with the circus now - my own circus. I've been playing with Tom for 18 years or so. And, despite several attempts, I'm still self-taught. I've played with a million people. Mark Helias comes to mind; Drew Gress... And I'm also happy to be here, drinking coffee. I met Marc in Germany at the Baden-Baden New Music Meeting in 1988; it was a collection of Europeans and Americans brought together to make music. Unbeknownst to him, I hired him for a tour! I've been playing with him ever since. Tom and I met in New York - in an opium den! - in the early 80s and we've been playing together at least since 1982.
Rainey Now seems to be a more fecund time in New York. At the time there weren't so may venues to play. It was hard for a lot of musicians, especially drummers because a lot of clubs couldn't have drums due to an old law called the Cabaret Law. Now's a richer period because there are more places to play. The Cabaret Law dated back to before the turn of the century. In order to have more than two musicians to play at a time you had to have special licence which was very expensive to have. So in the early 80s there were a lot of places in New York where you could go and hear piano and bass duos - famous clubs like Bradleys - but there were very few places except for the major jazz clubs where you could actually hear drummers play. Now you can have any combination of musicians play at a venue. So it's opened up quite a bit. That law's been gone for quite a while now, but in the early 80-s there really weren't that many places to play.
Motion How would you describe the music you play as a trio?
Berne I don't thank I ever think about it, except when I'm asked. We don't sit around and decide whether we're going to play a jazz tune or play some rock or discuss what it is we're going to do at all, because it's difficult for us to classify it as one thing... it's pretty impossible. Titles are very limiting. At the same time they can be very provocative. So just calling it jazz or rock ot thrash or improvisation doesn't really tell you anything. What it boils down to is that in most cases we play a lot of written music that's meant to provoke and stimulate improvisation which is really the heart of what we do. An improvisation means having a conversation in front of people - having a musical conversation. We're sharing ideas, we're relating to each other, we're listening to each other. It's all that stuff at the same time. I don't know what to call it, though...
Rainey ...creative music.
Motion Is this group substantially different from others in which you all play?
Ducret Whenever you really get into the music and try to honest with it every group is single. People are really unique; they have their own way to speak to each other which cannot be related or compared to another way. Yes, according to the line-up there are some things you can or can't do. Part of th game is ignoring the rules. Just because there's no instrument playing the bass [in Big Satan] I'm not going tohave to play the bass. or to not play it... but the situation is about questions as much as about answers.
Rainey Music changes between groups as much as relationships change. When the three of us play together it's a certain relationship we share. Tim can go off and play a duo with somebody else or play with a larger group and those groups will be as different as the relationships. It's about chemistry which gets stimulated by bringing different individuals together. Sometime, like in this case, it's a successful chemistry. Other times, even though you might be able to put four amazing musicians on stage together, it won't necessarily result in any special chemistry that makes everyone want to continue. But in this case, at least for a few years now, we've stayed interested.
Berne The basic thing we all share... the thing we're all really interested in a certain growth. Over the next three years we don't want it to stay the same. It's not a 'show'; we're as surprised as anyone else when we play. An that element of surprise is what makes it interesting or not. You can't try to remember what you did the night before. Often you have a great night and it's almost depressing because the next night it's so much harder, 'cus you can't duplicate it. There's no road map of how to get to that point again. What I enjoy about these guys is that they never do anything for their own gratification. It's always to make the whole thing sound better. And that could mean stopping. That sounds like it shouldn't be such a big deal but it is; it's rare. Yes, we all have moments where we get off, but 99.9% of the time - even when I'm screwing up - I trust they'll have the goal in mind and will make it work.
Motion Tim, can you tell us a little about running your own label, Screwgun...
Berne I've always been a control freak. With all the labels I worked with I don't think there was ever a time when I didn't have some input into the cover design, or some interest in the whole presentation. I'm just one of those people who likes to be involved in all those aspects, and I have strong ideas about them. So it was inevitable. I had a good relationship with one label for quite a long time, in every area up until the records came out. Part of the problem was that there was a big company - I think it was called Poly... - that ultimately owned it and so there was always going to a problem with how to 'market' this kind of music. We all tour all the time. We do all the things you're supposed to do to sell a record. No rock band has anything on us in terms of how we promote ourselves by playing. So I never felt like that was being taken advantage of and I just decided to do it myself. Even if it takes twenty years, at least I know where the records are going. If I do a gig, at least I know the records will be there. I can guarantee that and it makes me feel better. I don't really enjoy doing all the busy work but it just seemed like that was the only way I was going to document what I was doing, keep it preserved.
Motion Are you as hard on yourself as you would be on a large label?
Berne It's a different thing. I don't have the kind of money those guys have, so I don't get hard on myself, but I do get frustrated. I'm a perfectionist, but there are things I just can't do. Sometimes it's about money, a lot of the time it's just about time. So I've accepted the limitations of doing it myself. But I really like doing it. I really like recording other people as much as I like doing my own records. It's very gratifying to make a good record that someone else might not have made. That's the best feeling - putting out Marc's record or Michael Formanek's, Django [Bates'] - even though I didn't produce them. Just being able to present those records in a way they're happy with and not getting in the way...
Motion Could you talk a little about your influences.
Rainey As much as anything it's about my friends, and not just the work they do, but maybe the things that they turn me on to musically. When I was learning to play the drums I was ravenous for everything. So I could list a hundred drummers' names that were an influence. But really, over the last ten years, it's been the things my friends are doing. We all go out and hear music together... so, yes, I'm really influenced by my community. Outside of music, I like to watch sports on television!
Ducret I was a professional musician by the age of 17, playing in dance bands, singers and stuff ;like that. I was very greedy; I really wanted to play everything I could and with everyone I could. And still I'm interested in all kinds of musics. This most;y made me aware that I was not interested in doing certain things. Of course, you're influenced by all these incredible creative people who have achieved so much beautiful music. But I was much more influenced by what I didn't want to hear from myself. And I still am - as much as a composer as a musician or guitar player. There are certain things I don't want to hear from myself, so I try to stay away from them. that's all, basically.
Berne Mine would be similar to Tom's. There was a certain period in my life when I was a fanatical record collector. I was always looking for new things. I was particularly stimulated at one point by these guys from Chicago: Roscoe Mitchell, Braxton, Julius Hemphill, Lester Bowie... this whole school of musicians. At the same time I was into Sonny Rollins, Joe Henderson, Sam rivers, but not as a musician, as a fan. Then I got to a point where I like it so much I had to play, I had to participate. So I got into playing. Almost synonymous with that I stopped listening to records. After that, every experience I had playing with someone, working with someone, reading an interview with them or listening to them play... this was the education. I was always picking up information. I have a real hard time learning these things on my own, in isolation. there has to be a context. Like, for me to sit at home and learn to read music I had to know how it felt not to be able to read and get clubbed over the head... and I was like 'Oh, I gotta do this'. But if someone tells me 'You've gotta do this', it doesn't register. So everything I've learned I've learned through some massive failure or humiliation. I always tell people, you have to fail, it has to be a regular thing. You have to have a bad gig once in while to get better. It's not interesting to me to work out what works and stick to that formula. That's a show. I've had to face that this wasn't always going to be fun or successful. That's OK. Sometimes people will hate it; sometimes you're going to play bad. The trauma of that is intense. Especially on tour; every day, two hours before you go on stage you worry about how you'll play. At the same time, we're our own worst enemies because we're not going to do the same thing twice. That fear and anxiety feeds what we do.
Motion What's coming up on Screwgun?
Berne I don't really know; I was very disappointed not to get the Julius Hemphill record Dogone AD. I'm reeling from that, and also trying to sort out distribution. There's a general fear that the internet is going to take over; record companies and record stores and some distributors are backing off from anything they deem risky. This label requires fanatics, people who really love music and believe things can better, that music can transcend its business side. I'm just waiting to see who's real and who's not, because some of the distributors I have were into it for a while, and now they've burned out on doing anything that's not easy to sell or that they have to talk somebody into. I believe in this; I'm going to do it for the rest of my life, somehow, some way... Maybe it won't be as frequent as I'd like, but I do believe that at some point it will get easy. Or easier. So... what I want to do and what I'm gonna do are two different things. I'd like to record Marc forever, I'd like to get Tom to record for me, Herb Roberts... these are all people I'd record like that [clicks fingers] if time and money weren't a problem, if I didn't have to worry about selling a certain amount.
We're doing great compared to most people, but it would be nice if people who control the business, which is like two companies now, learned how to do their jobs as well as we do. Then things would probably work better.

motion's reviewed Marc Ducret's "l'ombra di verdi" and Michael Formanek's "Am I Bothering You", both out on Screwgun.

Never Before Some Ruins Had That Speed

2006-10-03T12:48:00.000+02:00

Ruins are the brainchild of drummer Tatsuya Yoshida, one of Japan's most original and fiercely independent musicians. He formed the band in the summer of 1985, originally intending to be a power trio, but when the guitarist didn't show for their first rehearsal, he bumped Ruins down to a rhythm-section-only duo. At the time, he was also performing with YBO2, along with avant guitarist K.K. Null. The seeds of the present-day communal atmosphere of Japanese underground musicians were sprouting with this early moonlighting affair, as Null would go on to play with Zeni Geva and Yona-Kit (see their separate pages), among others, and of course Yoshida has played with darn near everyone, even The Flying Luttenbachers in a live version of "De Ventura". Ruins produce a unique fusion of punk and progressive rock. Yoshida has stated that while he admires punk's energy, he has no desire to play pure punk, and in fact grew up on a steady diet of prog bands such as Genesis, ELP, and Gentle Giant. However, his true inspiration came from France's Magma. Magma's trademark odd-metered motives, faux operatic signing, and especially Christian Vander's extroverted drumming have certainly made their way into Yoshida's consciousness, although the jazzy undertones and relatively atmospheric group sound did not. From an early point, Ruins appealed to the avant-garde and punk listener more than the more traditional 'progger'. On their first recordings, they teamed up with NYC experimental sax-icon John Zorn, and would later put out albums on his Tzadik label. The Ruins sound is dense mix of hardcore punk, prog theatrics, and free-improv. Some critics have used the term 'jazzcore', but that seems inadequate. There really is no describing the duo's sound. Yoshida performs with a vast number of other projects. Akaten, who appear on the Camp Skin Graft cd, are also a duo. Formed in 1995 with Tsuyama Atsushi (of Omoide Hatoba) in 1995, they're a humorous unit, who bring their interests to life, by using cameras, scissors, zippers,etc as percussion or simulating a wide range of bird calls in their bombastic style. Yoshida's Koenjihyakkei is more of a traditional prog band, with added guitar, keys, and a female singer. Yoshida calls the band a 'Japanese Magma.' High Rise and Mainliner not only share the hard psyche-prog style, but the same members! Korekyojin is a collaboration with Bondage Fruit guitarist Kido Natsuki and Ground Zero/Altered States bassist Nansuno Mitsuro. Other projects include Tairikuotoko Vs Sanmyakuonna, Seikazoku, Musica Transonic, Sunkich, and Zubi Zuva. And then there are his solo performances - true one-man shows, wherein he drums, sings, plays keyboard, and guitar simultaneously. A non-digital, purely-physical performance, full of improvisational spirit that defies common sense. Ruins have toured around the world numerous times, most noteably as part of the Japanese New Music Festival, a tour of Tatsuya's own invention, where he has managed to create a spell binding lineup of five bands out of just three performers! As for Ruins, Yoshida has stuck with his bass-n-drums formula throughout the group's history, exceptions include the one-off Symphonica (with Kenso's keyboardist and two singers), collaborations with Ron Anderson and the bonus live tracks on SkiN GRAFT's "Refusal Fossil" - which feature a variety of guests. The only a two man unit, Yoshida has switched bassists when needed. The bass in Ruins performs double duty, covering every end of the sonic spectrum, melody, bottom, white noise and athletics. "Refusal Fossil" is the first release to feature six-string bassist Hisashi Sisaki. For this release, the band has recorded some of the rawest, most extreme Ruins songs ever written, all unreleased and some dating as far back as 1988. The live tracks on the CD feature Ruins' previous bassist, Ryuichi Masuda. As if all of this weren't enough, Yoshida also manages his own label, Magaibutsu Limited, the definitive outlet for his many projects. See the links page for more info.
For the "1986-1992" release, RUINS poured over all of the bands early material (much of which had been unavailable for years) and extensively remastered the material for re-release. The album includes their first 7", their cut from the NG II compilation, tracks from the first 12" EP, their debut LP, plus remastered best of tracks from the Stonhenge and Burning Stone LP's.Early 2005 finds the band unveiling "Gwodhunqa" for a split 7" and comic set with the band HIGH ON FIRE and issuing a radically re-worked edition of the CD "Vrresto" (which had previously only been released overseas). Details on these can be found at the catalog page.

http://www.skingraftrecords.com/bandhtmlpages/ruinspg.html

because when we drink we are vulnerable

2006-09-27T22:40:00.000+02:00

Heart And Soul

Instincts that can still betray us,A journey that leads to the sun,Soulless and bent on destruction,A struggle between right and wrong.You take my place in the showdown,I'll observe witha pitiful eye,I'll humbly ask for forgiveness,A request well beyond you and I.Heart and soul, one will burn.Heart and soul, one will burn.An abyss that laughs at creation,A circus complete with all fools,Foundations that lasted the ages,Then ripped apart at their roots.Beyond all this good is the terror,The grip of a mercenary hand,When savagery turns all good reason,There's no turning back, no last stand.Heart and soul, one will burn.Heart and soul, one will burn.Existence well what does it matter?I exist on the best terms I can.The past is now part of my future,The present is well out of hand.The present is well out of hand.Heart and soul, one will burn.Heart and soul, one will burn.One will burn, one will burn.Heart and soul, one will burn.

may you be well.may we drink with you in an uncertain future.may we love women together.

we have done all of these.it is time for the stars.

mr. Fred Frith

2006-09-26T19:39:00.000+02:00

Fred Frith
Interview by Dan Warburton, March 19th, 1998

British-born guitarist Fred Frith, founder-member of mythic 70s progressive rock group Henry Cow, erstwhile collaborator of Brian Eno and Robert Wyatt, and major figure on the New York scene since the 1980s (Material, Massacre, Skeleton Crew, Naked City) paid two visits recently to the Laboratoires d'Aubervilliers, a recently-opened venue for new music and art in the bleak suburbs of northern Paris.
On the menu for those who braved the trip into what the French like to refer to as "the zone" were four fine concerts (three duo and one trio) of improvised music, Frith inviting old friends such as cellist Tom Cora [who sadly passed away of cancer at the time of this printing - Editor, April 9, 1998] and percussionist Chris Cutler but also new acquaintances, Czech violinist/vocalist Iva Bittova (whom readers may know of from her appearance in the "cult" Frith documentary-movie "Step Across the Border") and British guitar pioneer Keith Rowe, founder member of pioneering improvising group AMM (with Cornelius Cardew and Eddie Prevost), now resident in France.
The concerts were all recorded, but Frith wouldn't be drawn on whether he was planning to release them (though a similar duo last year with Jean-Pierre Drouet did come out). Curious readers may like to check out Fred's website (see below) for further information. Our conversation took place in the dressing rooms at the Laboratoires, and was accompanied by twitters from baby pigeons nesting in the roof, as well as bangs and crashes from Chris Cutler's sound check next door.

Mr. Warburton: Do you "rehearse" for concerts such as these?

Mr. Frith: No. With improvising, a rehearsal is all you've done in your life up to date. The only things you need to do are make sure the technical side is working, make sure you can hear each other right, that the sound is nice, and then just.... go for it.
Had you played with Keith Rowe before?
Once, in about 1986, I think, though I've known him longer than that. The first time I saw him play, he was playing revolutionary songs, during that period of composer Cornelius Cardew's life when he'd abandoned all improvising as not being "politically correct". They were playing left-wing songs, and I was very disappointed because I was expecting to see this guitarist everyone had been telling me about, and he was playing C, F and G. It was a bit strange, but not in the way I was expecting! I heard AMM's first record when it came out, because, at the time, Elektra was a new label, and the first record they put out that I heard was the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, and I loved that record. In those days, you didn't know what was coming next, so I figured anything on Elektra was going to be interesting. The next thing they put out was The Doors.... I thought that was pretty far out, and then suddenly out came AMM! (Laughs)

What else were you listening to back then?

About everything, as you can tell! Anything that was coming out....

I read in a recent interview that you were trying at that time to be a "normal" blues-based guitarist... Do you think in that sense you actually succeeded?

As I look at it now I probably should have answered the question a bit straighter, but it is true that Henry Cow started as a blues band. That's what we were doing. I met Tim Hodgkinson in a blues club. We evolved into other things simply because, at that time and in that place, so much was going on that we discovered new things almost hourly. I can remember a day when I heard "Big Pink" by The Band, and the first Beefheart record, and Frank Zappa all on one afternoon. You know, that's a lot of input. And in all three cases those were things that became profoundly important for me. So all that happened one afternoon, but there were many afternoons like that...

Did you have a traditional musical education as such?

Semi-traditional. I come from a relatively musical family; my father was a pianist-not professional, but he played a lot-and we all liked music, so I started violin lessons at the age of five, kind of abandoned it at the age of thirteen when I changed schools and didn't like the new teacher... I'd become more interested in the guitar at that point. My eldest brother was very much into jazz, so at home I could hear Django Reinhardt, people like that. My next brother was a total pop fanatic-and still is-and so I could hear Johnny Ray, and whatever was going on in the Fifties pop world, and my father was listening to Bartok, Delius and Debussy. He was very much into early twentieth century classical music, but also very curious about whatever was going on in the classical world. I was taken to see Yehudi Menuhin when I was very young, and I also saw Britten's "War Requiem" in York Minster, which made a deep impression on me. Being somewhere between those three polarities, I took a little bit of everything.

How did your family react to your own subsequent musical development?

They were always totally supportive. I think they probably thought I was a bit reckless-my father worried about my career-but they came to concerts, and still do. I think I've been very lucky with my family; they've really been behind me without ever letting me get big-headed. My sister's very good with the dry humour; she uses my records as ashtrays!

You played viola on the last track of Robert Wyatt's "Rock Bottom". How did that come about?

It came about because we were signed to Virgin records. I'd known Robert before; when I was a student I used to call him-I was a student with somebody who happened to be his next-door neighbour, so I had Robert's telephone number-I used to call him and say: "Why don't I come down and join The Soft Machine?" (Laughs) He was always very friendly, if a little cautious-!-and so we knew of each other. He got very interested in Henry Cow, because he came to see a couple of gigs, and we were both signed to Virgin records, and, well, that viola session led to all kinds of stuff actually, because as a result of my working with Robert, Ivor Cutler asked me to play on his record, and then after that, after the "Guitar Solos" record, Brian Eno asked me to play his stuff. It was a period when doors were opening for me.

Any particular memories of those Eno sessions?

I just think it's incredibly funny that I was banging a guitar with drumsticks in a rhythm section with Phil Collins! (Laughs) I wonder if he remembers it at all! I thought it was wild.

Was Eno already controlling the small details back then?

No, I had total freedom of input. I mean, the whole thing about Eno's studio approach was not that he was controlling people at all; he was creating a situation in which we could do what we did, as far as he could see to our best advantage, and afterwards manipulating it. I had no control whatsoever of what he used of mine, how he used it, or what he did with it. But in the studio session I could really literally do whatever I wanted. I recently came across an interview Bill Laswell gave back in 1981 to Downbeat magazine, and one of the questions was: "Who are your favourite employers?" and he replied: "Fred Frith and Brian Eno because of the freedom they give me." From my point of view, with Eno that was certainly the case. It was the first time somebody had trusted me to do what I do, which is a little leftfield, in the context of what was ostensibly some kind of pop music.

But you had the same kind of freedom in Henry Cow...

But it was a very different kind of orientation, and also it was a collective and everything was discussed, and so for me-and I think we all feel the same way-the weakness inherent in a lot of Henry Cow's material (and there are strengths of course, and I'm not trying to negate those), the frustration was that everything that came into the group ended up being watered down as a result of the collective process, rather than strengthened. It was as if no idea was allowed to be tried without discussion first. I'm probably exaggerating this with hindsight, but I think this it was a big mistake, and a lot of our best ideas may not have been fully realised as a result of it.

Now that even the Sex Pistols have reformed, may we look forward to a Henry Cow reunion concert?

(Laughs) Forget it! We're all much too busy.

You still keep in touch with them all, though.

Yes, we've all actually played together over the years. I was in a quartet with Lindsay Cooper, Gianni Gebbia and Lars Hollmer a couple of years ago, I've done tours with Tim, and I do a lot of work with Chris in one form or another. It's very sad that Lindsay has multiple sclerosis; this has been a big preoccupation for all of us lately, since she decided to come clean about it; it puts things in perspective, to say the least... I admire the way she's handling it tremendously.

Is there anybody you still haven't collaborated with that you'd like to? I shouldn't say "still", should I? It sounds like you're at the end of your career!

Yeah, it's all over now! (Laughs) Yes, lots of people. I've worked with some great musicians, I've been very lucky. I would love to work with Robert again at some point in my life. I would like to do something with somebody like Henry Threadgill, for example, or Oliver Lake, people who for me are more what jazz is about now-as opposed to Marsalis and so on-people who are on a quietly radical front. I think it'd be interesting to work with people like that, speaking as a non-jazz musician.

Do you think you would have developed differently musically if you hadn't gone to New York when you did? What would you have done?

God knows. I have no idea. All I know is that going to New York was a profoundly liberating experience for me; for the first time I felt that I could be myself and not try to live up to what I imagined people were thinking about me. This was definitely my problem-getting out of Britain helped me work this problem out; I no longer felt there was a weight pressing down on me. (Pause) I felt a lot of weight all the time in Britain. I still feel that a lot of musicians in Britain are stuck, partly because culturally Britain is incredibly stingy. Of course there's a very important music scene-in terms of commercial music it's fantastically vibrant, and because of that people tend not to notice that there are a whole lot of areas where it's not. As a vibrant pop music centre, Britain has obviously exported pop music all over the world, it's very successful-PRS is a very big organisation-and so if you say: "Music is not successfully promoted in Britain," it sounds a bit perverse. But in all other European countries, Canada, Australia, I see there's a level of support for other kinds of music that simply isn't there in Britain.
Is there any particular reason why you've settled in Stuttgart?
That's where my wife's family comes from, so it's practical. There's no cultural reason to be there whatsoever. Actually, I think of myself more as an American than a European.

Really? In what sense?

I emigrated to the States, I lived there for 14 years, I go back there every year, a lot of my friends are there, I feel that I'm a part of that community... I think of myself as a kind of ex-patriot American. I can see myself moving back there, sure. Absolutely.
What do you think of the New York scene nowadays? We seem to have a new release on Tzadik every week... (Laughing) Is it the same vibrant scene that there was in the early Eighties, or have things... matured?

Matured meaning what? Got better or got older? (Laughs)

Probably the latter...!
I think it's still in a state of flux, and for sure, it's not going to be my generation that decides whether it's vibrant or not... In a way, a lot of the people who, at the beginning of the Eighties, were considered to be in a big and energetic and innovative scene have all moved on, consolidated and are doing important and interesting work, but the younger generation are finally out from under that shadow, so we'll see what happens.

No pangs of nostalgia for playing in draughty lofts with John Zorn?

I still play in draughty lofts! (Indicates the surroundings of the Laboratoires d'Aubervilliers) I mean, what is this? (Laughs) No, I think it's funny to look back and think of playing with John in his apartment in front of five people, while at the time it was ironic that the English musicians were complaining that I'd gone to the States and was making lots of money, being really successful, while I was just doing exactly what they were doing except I was in New York and not Britain.

Why did your group Massacre with Bill Laswell and Fred Maher split up so soon?

There was a whole load of politics going on. I don't even remember the details, to tell you the truth.
Any regrets? "Killing Time" has since become a sort of mythic album...
Yeah. We've tried occasionally to do stuff, and I was never really happy with it. Actually, about a month ago, Bill and I and Charlie Hayward recorded a trio record, which we're now in the middle of editing and selecting material for. That'll come out eventually, and that's probably the closest to Massacre that I've felt since then, though there are twenty years and several lives in between, so it's nonetheless a different feeling.

Why did John Zorn choose you as bassist in Naked City, and not as guitarist?

Well, first of all Bill's a much better guitar player than I am! (Laughs) No question about that!

So why you on bass and not another bassist?

Because I was the only one of his circle that was actually coming from a rock background, which is kind of interesting. Kramer could probably have done most of it... Basically John wanted to explore music which had a very broad cultural range, from film music, and jazz, as well as pop and rock, and the musicians he knew and was playing with tended to come from jazz. There was nobody there who had a kind of rock capability, as a result of which I was thrust into this position where I had to play walking bass, which I'd never done in my life, and playing Mingus covers and stuff, it was really intimidating...!

Mingus covers with Naked City?

Well, we did a Mingus tribute, which is not quite the same thing... But at the same time I was giving them a sort of rock heaviness that they probably wouldn't have had... It was a lot of fun.
I have to ask you about the night that will live in infamy for Parisians, Zorn's "Houdini/de Sade" in 1992.... [Zorn's "opera" featured not only an all-star cast of New York Downtowners, but also two video monitors showing uncut hardcore porn that would have been much appreciated by the late Marquis-Ed.]

No comment! (Bursts into laughter)

Did you know in advance what was going to be on those video screens?

No comment! (Chortles uncontrollably) Talk to John!

What do you mean? You know he doesn't give interviews!

Well, there you go...!

I believe Bill Frisell was overheard saying: "Zorn's gone too far this time..." (Frith Continues chuckling) He certainly didn't set foot in Paris for some time after that!
I don't know what happened after that. There was probably a "period of reflection", as the Italians say. (Laughs) That was the beginning of a Naked City tour, and we did another couple of tours after that. Basically John had an idea of the project, and "Houdini/de Sade" wasn't really part of the Naked City tour, it's just that we happened to be in the right place at the right time. It was a one-off.
I remember going to see it with a would-be girlfriend...

How long did that relationship last?
Anyway, on to other things... tell us about the new band.

Tense Serenity? It's actually the name of a piece I wrote for string trio and trombone that was performed by members of the Arditti Quartet with Uwe Dierksen from the Ensemble Modern, and it represents for me a certain aesthetic which I like, and I decided to call the band after it. I'm interested in putting together an improvising group which is fundamentally quiet. Basically quiet playing. (Pause) And also to see if I can make the same kinds of structures that I do with the Ensemble Modern, which is to try to use written cells and conduct a piece in which the musicians don't know if or when the cells will occur... it kind of gives a certain edge to the performance. Nobody really knows until the moment it happens what's going to happen. I wanted to see if I could do that with a small ensemble instead of with twenty people. We've done one concert so far, and it was promising, so we've decided to make a tour.

What's the position with the Ensemble Modern? Are you still working with them?

We've got a big project coming up in June; we're playing in four cities doing a piece called "Traffic Continues" which is a continuation of what we've already done, precisely in this direction of mixing four different worlds, one of which is completely improvised, one of which is completely scored, and the other two of which combine kinds of cued material which is both fixed and contains other elements which are not fixed. So it involves quite a lot of rehearsal just to learn the signs. What's important in an improvising situation is that you react fast, but on the other hand reacting fast and playing something precise is not always easy.

Learning the signs... is this is a kind of Butch Morris hand language?

Yeah, sure, there's an aspect of that in it, a kind of "conduction"-we can't use that word of course-but in fact I've been working with this kind of cued language for quite a long time, using graphic scores in rehearsal and also as a workshop tool, and actually it's something that I first saw used by Frank Zappa in the Sixties when he used hand signals with the Mothers. It's something which has been around in various contexts-it's interesting to me to think that it began in a rock context, although this is now totally forgotten. When I went to New York it was to work on Zorn's game pieces, which is a whole other version of sign language. Miya Masaoka told me she was so confused working with different composers whose signs are the same but meanings different that she'd like to propose a standardised system! I hope she doesn't succeed!
Your last album was a set of homages (as it were) to contemporary "classical"-for want of a better word-composers, including Cage and Feldman... Do you spend much time listening to that kind of music?

I spend less time listening to it now, but I listened to it a lot in the Sixties and Seventies. It's very much part of my blood, and since Feldman died there's been a lot more of his music available on record, so I've been able to hear things which I hadn't heard before, which are very interesting.

In writing these pieces did you go as far as embracing the open indeterminacy of Cage, or did you still choose to have an elemental of compositional control, structural backbone?

Well, these three pieces are all very much geared towards the kinds of soundworlds that these composers create, although they're written by me so they have my own preoccupations in them as well, but structure of the Cage piece on "The Previous Evening" was largely generated by chance methods, for example, and a lot of the material within the structure is also aleatoric.

Did you yourself play experimental music back in the early days?

I played some of Cardew's magnificent "Treatise", so I've always been attracted to the graphic score world. As a student I was also very much interested in Terry Riley, Steve Reich, that kind of nexus, back in the Sixties. Cage I found much more arresting as a writer than as a composer, but that's also because there weren't many opportunities to hear his music; at the time when I was reading him, there weren't many Cage concerts about. I wasn't a Londoner, so I wasn't living where everything was happening, you know-I was out in the sticks... It wasn't so easy to get to hear stuff.

How much time do you have now to sit down and listen to music?

These days not much, but I produce a radio programme which gives me the chance to hear new stuff, and I have a CD player in my car, so I can try to catch up like that. But it's true that if you spend a large amount of time listening to your own music, as one does simply for reasons of composing or editing or whatever, the last thing you want to do when you've finished is sit down and listen to somebody else's music. You want to listen to nothing.

Not even your old records?

Rarely.

Do you have any favourites?

I think "Winter Songs" is very interesting; compositionally I like it very much. "Gravity", still... I like "The Technology of Tears". They all have their qualities. I've done remarkably little that I've regretted, which is usually a good sign. There are things I wish I hadn't done, but we don't talk about those! (Laughs)

Do you have a large record collection?

I've given away several large collections. I guess I have about five hundred CDs or something, but when I moved to the States I probably gave away three or four hundred LPs, and when I moved back I gave away at least as many again. I'd rather people were listening to them than they sit in my room doing nothing.

OK, I warned you before, but we're serious at PNMR about this: your apartment's on fire, the wife and kids are safe, and there's just enough room in your suitcase to bring along your ten all-time favourite records.

Ten records, off the top of my head? Tomorrow it'll be ten a different ones. (Pause) I'd say... "For All We Know", Billie Holiday. (Pause) "Kind of Blue", I guess. Miles. Can't really avoid that, can you? (Pause) Glenn Gould playing Bach. Just about any of it. (Pause) "Rothko Chapel", Morton Feldman. (Pause) That piece of Messiaen, "Des Canyons aux Etoiles", is it?
An interesting choice... I don't normally associate you with Messiaen, harmonically speaking.
I'm a big Messiaen fan, structurally also, very much. Probably ten years ago I'd have chosen the "Turangalîla Symphony"; now I like the later things. (Pause) That's five, isn't it? Five to go... (Laughs) The second record by The Band, the one with "The Night They Burned Old Dixie Down" on it. (Pause) Erm... this is when it gets hard... I'd say Asha Bhosle singing Ghazals from Indian film music. (Pause) Julian Bream playing the music of John Dowland.

English roots?

I guess. It connects me to something folkloric as well as anything else. (Pause) Charles Mingus "Live at Town Hall" 1964. (Pause) And probably Kostadin Varimezov, a gaida (bagpipe) player from Bulgaria. I used to have a pen pal in Bulgaria, who used to send me lots of old LPs of Bulgarian bagpipe playing. If you really want to understand some of the things I do as a guitarist, you should go listen to the gaida, because there's a lot of it in it.
There's also a website, www.fredfrith.com Do you run that yourself?
I don't run it but I provide them with the material. It became necessary because if you look up my name in a search, you only get to the website after about thirty entries. Everything else is other people putting out information without my authorisation, without necessarily checking their facts. It's very nice, they mean well, but a lot of the time there's stuff out there which is incorrect. So I thought it was a good idea to have a website to make sure that somewhere at least there was a reference to information that was at least correct.

What about the use of technology in your playing? Are you not tempted to use live sampling now?

Before they were called samplers I was using that kind of effect; with Skeleton Crew we used to do a lot of that kind of thing, at the beginning of the Eighties. Sampling has become so much a part of the current vocabulary that I'm very cautious about it. I use it in the studio when I need it for specific reasons, but on stage I find that it's just too easy to do the same things everybody else does, so I'd rather do something else. It all depends of course on what you sample in the end, and what you do with it. I hear so much really boring sampled stuff that it hasn't really drawn me into it. "Technology of Tears" was a sampling record, and that was in 86. I did things that interested me to do with sampling back then, and sampling hasn't changed substantially since that time. There are people who are doing fantastic things with samplers, like Bob Ostertag, but they're basically not really acknowledged and not well known outside of a very small group of people.

And yet that group seems to be getting larger all the time, especially over here, where kids of 23 are running round buying Derek Bailey records!

Yeah, it's great. (Laughs)

I put this point to your friend Heiner Goebbels, but he thought the situation was just as depressing and miserable as it always was.

So speaks somebody who's signed to a major label, wins countless prestigious prizes and is touring all over the world with the Ensemble Modern! (Laughs) He should come and join the rest of us in our little ghettoes! No, I think it's great what's going on. France, these past two or three years, has been really exploding with interest, and I now I get a lot of frustration expressed by people because the music isn't as available as they'd like it to be. Finally there's a distribution network that's making things more possible, and there's an interest on the part of journalists. Yesterday there was a guy from France Culture who decided he wanted to do a feature on this kind of music, while it was only two months ago that a certain person from Radio France wrote a very nasty insulting letter saying that I was a totally unsuitable person to be broadcast on French radio! (Laughs) So I guess there's a little movement somewhere.

When will we be seeing you again in Paris?
I
'll be back later in the year for six more concerts.

Who with?

A-ha! Wait and see...! Jimi Hendrix, maybe...

Full With Noise: Theory and Japanese Noise Music

2006-09-10T18:07:00.000+02:00

Full With Noise: Theory and Japanese Noise Music
Paul Hegarty

1. Scratching the Surface -------------------------

"Full with Noise,..." is about noise music, specifically the version that has come to be called Japanese Noise -- itself composed of many different strands. The first half deals with the question of noise. What is it, whose is it, and how can we think about it. Also, how does noise inflect our thinking, rather than being an object; at what point does noise lose its noiseness and become meaning, music, signification? Or -- is there even a point where noise can subsist? Mostly, the text below takes the view that noise is a function of not-noise, itself a function of not being noise. Noise is no more original than music or meaning, and yet its position is to indicate the banished, overcome primordiality, and cannot lose this 'meaning'. Noise, then, is neither the outside of language nor music, nor is it simply categorisable, at some point or other, as belonging exclusively to the world of meaning, understanding, truth and knowledge. Instead, noise operates as a function of differance. If this term is what indicates and is subsequently elided, in/as the play of inside and outside (of meaning, truth, language, culture....), then we can form another binary with identity on one side and differance on the other, but with this difference - that differance is both one term in the binary, and that which is the operation of the binary. This is what noise is/does/is not. For Douglas Kahn, noise drifts across the binary empirical/abstract, such that "when noise itself is being communicated, [...] it no longer remains inextricably locked into empiricism but it transformed into an abstraction of another noise" [1 ]. In other words, noise is (taken to be) empirical, belonging to the world that is there in itself, a world of sounds without conscious sources. When such a view is mobilised, by the dadas, the futurists and so on, then noise becomes second order: a demonstration of the noise that subsists beyond.
As Kahn rightly notes, there is no noise without the thought of noise, and ideas about sound can therefore "make an audible event called noise louder than it might already be" [2 ] - noises come from specific places and specific conceptualisations. At some level, the use of noise is a bid (however unwitting) to master it (at least in Western modernism), and reduce its quality as noise: "avant-garde noise, in other words, both marshals and mutes the noise of the other: power is attacked at the expense of the less powerful, and society itself is both attacked and reinforced" [3 ]. This of course includes the "actual" others of the Western male - woman and the foreign other particularly significant here. For the purposes of this essay, it is the use of the exotic other that might be at stake. Kahn observes that the early modernists" love of "the primitive" led them to (in)appropriate so-called primitive musics, and "thus, the grinding sound of power relations are heard here in the way noises contain the other, in both senses of the word" [4 ].
Perhaps this is what is going on in trying to theorise Japanese noise music, even when rendering this a theoretical agent. Maybe crucial cultural elements are missing, leading to presumptions about what is being produced, based on underinformed hearing. This may be so. But what needs to be added is that if noise is to be noise, then an authentic reading (of true meaning) cannot be, cannot take place. More importantly, Japanese noise has its roots as much in free jazz, experimental rock music and contemporary classical music, as in traditional or classical Japanese musics. Part of the "noise" that unites highly disparate musics under the banner of noise music is precisely a disruption of Western music and its genres.
Japanese Noise music has existed since the early 1970s, and since the late 1980s has been increasingly influential. This essay concentrates on the figure seen to epitomise Japanese noise: Merzbow, essentially the work of Masami Akita, and even then, only a tiny fraction of his output. The second half of the essay, including the conclusion, is an attempt to create a Merzbow/theory object -- failing.
II. Scraped Subjectivity ------------------------
A recent exploratory political document states that "noise is sound which has a negative effect on people (unwanted sound)."[5 ] According to C.S. Kerse, noise is "sound which is undesired by the recipient", "a sound without musical quality or an unwanted or undesired sound" (The Law Relating to Noise, 8)[6]. Noise, then is subjective, and this is what vexes the Law, which exists, according to Jacques Attali, as result of the transformation of noise into music, into a regulated system, which heralds all regulated systems, all that comes from the buried sacrifice at the origin of society.
Attali: "Primordially the production of music has as its function the creation, legitimation and maintenance of order. Its primary function is not to be sought in aesthetics, which is a modern invention, but in the effectiveness of its participation in social regulation. Music - pleasure in the spectacle of murder, organizer of the simulacrum masked beneath festival and transgression - creates order"[7 ].
Is noise subjective? Could we not instead say that noise has to do with the subject: that which occurs as/at the limit of the subject; that which signals an immanence outside of the subject/object divide, however reclothed in phenomenology? It would not then be enough to say "one person's noise is another's music" in some liberalist fantasy - rather we would have to acknowledge the constructedness of the "subjectivity of noise".
Technical books on acoustics often assert that noise is in some way biologically coded - 'we' perceive certain sounds as noise because the vibrations are too close to the frequencies, rhythms, wavelengths of bodily functions. Others are noise because they are too alien. This is not totally false, but what is really at stake here are discourses which presume that there is an absolute, shared biology, layered with personal freedoms of judgement, feeling and so on. Such a stratification is also not false, but that does not make it natural, nor the specific layering a given: it makes an apparent end-result (or beginning-result), where there could simply be process [8 ].
If we are to listen to noise as music, noise designed as music, noise perhaps designed to stay noise, but to be heard in the conditions music is listened to, then something must give. Two possible models: firstly, learn to live with it - adopt an Adorno pattern (didactic) over a Hegel pattern (post-Hegelian, (un)phenomological), unwittingly championed by John Cage, and argue that we can, as result of listening to noise, rather than hearing it involuntarily, relearn how to approach the world and its cultural 'world' (of course, world and 'world' can be quickly reversed); second model - create a situation which exposes the 'noise-afflicted subject' to remain so - through an act of sovereignty (something in Bataille that seems to be mastery, but undoes itself) consign the subject and its supposedly subordinate vessel to chora-ness.
How to be a body without organs without being a fusion-loving hippie: after the schizo, paranoid, hysteric bodies, comes the masochist body: retrained and subjected as the last choice of the subject, the masochist body is "further" than the schizo body, leaking its internal organs, becoming pathway, becoming solid, becoming-becoming. The masochist body has the option of losing itself as organism through restraint, enclosure, containment (whilst also becoming someone else's body without organs, becoming body of the other): "it has its sadist or whore sew it up; the eyes, anus, urethra, breasts and nose are sewn shut. It has itself strung up to stop the organs from working; flayed, as if the organs clung to the skin; sodomized, smothered, to make sure everything is sealed tight" [9 ]. As a result we have a version of 'the' body without organs: it "is what remains when everything is taken away. What you take away is, very specifically, is the [masochist] phantasy, the whole made up of significations and subjectifications" [10 ]. Except that not everything has been taken away - the ears remain open.[11 ] Is this so the masochist body can hear instructions? Is this because the body without organs is really about listening?[12 ] It is perhaps that the ears constitute 'an' organ that we cannot control, so to leave 'it' open is to close the possibility of control through closing - if the ears were closed, the masochist would again be in charge of the soundworld. The ears become wound.
A suspicion remains that the unclosed ears maintain a link to the world of sense - whilst the ears themselves might constitute a wound, it is an enabling wound, one that (like the pain now disallowed as warning signal) allows the possibility of processing the world into meaning. To block the ears would also instigate a possibility of self-awareness as organism, although a sense of panic, if it occurred, would be the undoing of this. Even so, the end-result, once we consider the ears as hearing device, whether open, closed, blocked, unblocked, the body without organs but with ears is a naturalised one, one that returns us to a primordial condition (even if a primordiality that was not primordial, but becomes that which is returned to as if it were primordial).
The body without organs whose ears are filled with noise, however, is more (or, more accurately, less) of a body without organs: the noise-filled ear is no longer capable of hearing the voice of reason, the warnings of danger, the patterning of sound we somehow have always come to believe constitute not-noise. The body without organs does not hear or listen to noise, but is (in) the hearing of noise that exceeds the body that first lost in the sound of its muffled breath, the movement of liquids and gases, the slight panic pulse.[13 ]
Deleuze and Guattari are right to note that the body without organs is about the failure to become: "There is no attaining the Body without Organs -- you cannot attain it, you never finish getting to it -- it's a limit."[14 ] The body without organs cannot become itself, or anything else, and the way in which this specifically cannot happen is through the multiple failure of hearing/ears: its mysterious amnesty in _A Thousand Plateaus_, its failure through noise to process sense, the failure to stop processing, the failure to return to the 'true' body, and the failure that is the return to the "true" body (in, for example heightened awareness of the body's function -- although even if this were possible, it would constitute a forcible intervention in the functioning of the body). The body without organs is the failure of completion, the failure of this failure (organ resistance). The failure is the process of becoming, and becoming-failed is the noise of the attempt to get to the body without organs - the supplemental 'place' where it cannot be, where only it 'is'.
Another story of the ear related by Kroker is one in which "the ear finally comes into its own. But not the old ear attached to a living head".[15 ] The ear moves into (non)being as a post-masochistic organ without a body. But as we have seen, also an organ without a body without organs.
Noise can be seen as structural: in the realm of law, of good citizenship, it is "undesired", or "excessive" sound.[16 ] In the realm of Law as that which operates rationality, noise is that which has always to be excluded -- the exclusion having always already been and (not) gone, in order that the Law exists. This seems to indicate noise as a category, like the sublime, of domesticated exclusion. But noise can be conceived of as process. For Russolo, "[the timbre of noise] is no longer an effect bound to the causes that produce it (motive energy, striking, friction through speed, bumping, and so on) owing to and inherent in the purpose of the machine or thing that makes the noise",[17 ] and if noise is process, is always a becoming-noise -- or, alternatively, (not) coming into (not) being as noise, this exclusion (what we take to be in the exclusion) is undone when noise 'is', as noise is the coming-undone of noise/organised sound. Most particularly when noise 'is' where it cannot be -- music.[18 ]
Noise also has to contain judgement: it is 'unwanted'. Can noise be wanted - clearly that would then define the noise in question as not-noise. If we are happy with tautology, we can stay there. Or - let us presume that noise is always unwanted as a function of wanting (desire, if you must) - it might even be "what you did not know you wanted" -- as suggested by Attali, when he writes that new music always emerges as noise in what is to become "the old order": "despite the death it contains, noise carries order within itself; it carries new information";[19 ] as of course suggested by that prime mover of de- and re- territorialisation, the 'capitalist machine'. The unwanted is not a function of some lack-oriented mysticism about desire, but the actuality of wanting, once removed from subject/object control. More simply, though, what if you actually do want to hear something that is noise - in the shape of unorganised, unpredictable, violent (sometimes in terms of volume) sound? Attali makes the case that 'music' is heading toward noise, in the form of unavoidable background music[20 ] and in its increased standardisation, where "it is trapped in identity and will dissolve into noise".[21 ] The judgement 'I want to listen to noise' is a deterritorialised one - it is occurring without the subject intervening. Nonetheless, it might be the sign of the dying Subject grasping for some form of Authentic Existence before disappearing (accompanying the world of "performance art" into a world of hyper-simulated sacrifice).[22 ]
Music, according to Attali, is "the organization of noise".[23 ] Noise has an existence outside of our conscious control, which is partly natural, partly social environmental: "life is full of noise and [...] death alone is silent: work noise, noise of man, noise of beast".[24 ] Life, then, is rationalised, brought into line, and rigorously limited. A general economy of sacrifice, murder, waste is lost, in music, "originating in ritual murder of which it is the simulacrum".[25 ] Attali, however, cannot go so far as to see that noise cannot be natural -- that it is the equivalent of the Nature left behind at the signing of the social contract -- only coming into (not) being as retrospective, excluded and forbidden. He clearly states that noise is that which is to be excluded, but not that the endless and impossible exclusion is where noise 'is' -- crossing and not crossing the line that is (not) there, as with Foucault's transgression line. Why is death silent? At a literal level it is noisy -- organs becoming extinct, collapsing, expanding, rotting -- an endless carnival even before the arrival of other creatures. Death is silent in the sense of the subject not being there to hear it. Is this what occurs in Cage's silences? Is the hearing subject absented, rather than, as Cage wished, brought forcibly into the presence of sounds usually unheard?[26 ] Silence, however, is structurally speaking, death - the death of the system of organised sound, priority of voice, meaning, music.[27 ] The death that is fully recognised by the system that excludes it. Silence, unlike noise, does structure, or let come into structure, systems of meaning. Noise is too much, is excess as the working of excess (not just the excessive product).
Noise is excluded for being too natural, but also for being unnatural. Rupert Taylor, in a burst of retrospective utopianism, asserts that "at the same time man was learning to create pleasurable stimuli to his sense of hearing, in other words to create music, he was beginning to pollute his surroundings and blunt his hearing by making more and more loud and unpleasant crashes and bangs, grindings and rumbles" (The Law Relating to Noise, 16). Much, maybe all considerations in terms of noise as a social issue presume noise is that which is to be reduced (not wrongly, but...) -- so that we can return to what is best for us ("like water and air pollution, most noise is the result of the decision for technological progress at the expense of the human environment".[28 , 29 ] The "human environment", endlessly stabilised, is not nature, however, and is not to contain silence. In fact, contain silence is precisely what it does, offering endless background noise (sometimes in the form of music) in order to actively silence, argues Attali.[30 ]
III. Endless Oscillation of the Material----------------------------------------
Merzbow (aka Masami Akita) plays the double game of ambience Attali identifies: omnipresent sound, becoming noise; noise becoming background. Merzbow music consists of the debris of music, of sound: pulses, feedback, hisses, whirs, blasts, distortions, pure tones, shrieks, machine noise -- all played extremely loud.[31 ] But this music is noise "all the way down" -- there is no space for recognisably musical sounds to be overlaid with distortions (as in 1980s music in the wake of punk), just combinations of noises, that do not settle into a mantric pulse, or continual explosion ("not music at all, but rather the intensive expenditure of sound and silence").[32 ] The listener struggles to find a way through, in or above the noise music but gives up at a certain point: rhythms are to be found, frequencies to be followed -- it is not just random, but - eventually "the listener" is pulverised into believing there is a link. Noise music becomes ambience not as you learn how to listen, or when you accept its refusal to settle, but when you are no longer in a position to accept or deny. Perhaps the "experienced listener" can manage whole albums, concerts -- Merzbow has the answer in the shape of the 50CD Merzbox. The possibility of mastery, of "learning to hear anew" etc. -- held out as if possible -- endlessly broken (to keep the possibility open as indefinite promise) by alteration, by blurring of the strata of sound, is what feeds the continual excess of noise music. Noise music is the endless sacrifice of art music didacticism and of restricted economy "noise" (metal, hardcore of all types).[33 ]
It seems like a claim could be made for Merzbow to be the avant-garde, perpetually renewing the art, moving the boundaries etc., but actually noise music inhabits the failure of the avant-garde to be, to come to be. Schwitters wanted his Merz to redefine our relation to the material, to value, to what art could be. This then is brought to the interior, and shores up the monument of art. Merzbow does not want to live in a house full of crap, or outside it, neither does it want to live in a new crappy house: it wants to knock down the house it lives in, to live in it. Even this is too much, though: Merzbow actually wants to find a rundown house made up of broken stuff, and break it. Over and over.
The reason Merzbow cannot be avant-garde (or is the avant-garde that cannot be: i.e., the avant-garde) is that the breaking is static: like Paul Virilio's speed, Merzbow's destruction of music attains a point of stillness, one composed of total movement (and like Nietzsche's "moment" of eternal return). The world of 'the now', this now, always now, comes together as interface, as the non-place of speed as non-movement.[34 ] This in turn signals the possibility of "crash music",[35 ] emerging at a new stage of hearing (generally neglected with the presumption that the digital world is one of images alone), such that we can now take noise/"crash music" to be "so seductive because of its fascinating logic of an always promised imminent reversibility: pure ecstasy/pure catastrophe".[36 ] This imminent reversibility, occurs as solid, as immanence.
Merzbow eludes Adorno's critique of aleatory music (whilst wilfully staying within its purview): "today's artists would rather do away with unity altogether, producing open, unfinished works, or so they think. The problem is that in planning openness they necessarily impart another kind of unity unbeknown to themselves".[37 ] The apparent aleatorics of noise signal an endless closing, a ceasing filling, but always, at any one time, ceaseless. Noise music (which is admittedly not the same as Adorno's actual target -- the music of Cage or those who followed in the 1960s and 1970s, but bearing in mind his even stronger 'critique' of jazz, I think we might be able to infer a line of tech flight to noise music), seems to fall into Adorno's trap: in terms of the title which takes on an increased significance, as we search to impose some form of sense, even if we do not necessarily seek to do this. Not having any titles would be just as caught within the loop: the subject now the ineffable abstraction of sound, noise, music etc., or as with some abstract painting, the subject becomes the Subject, working itself through on the canvas. The title (in Merzbow's music) sets up a process wherein it cannot become the subject of the music: there is no metonymy, mimesis, metaphor to be had - and yet, the title makes it ~as if~ such things were possible - as with the structure of the 'pieces' (Akita: "When I use words, say album titles, they are not chosen to convey any meanings. They are merely selected to mean nothing".[38 ]
With this in mind, Merzbow's Antimonument (1991) can be seen as a mission statement -- both for and against Schwitters, Merzbow attacks the solidity of Hegelianised Western culture, through five tracks of seemingly arbitrary lengths, made up of arbitrarily selected sounds, moving along but not. In fact, Antimonument is quite 'readable' - centred on arrhythmic, treated percussion: the monument has yet to be left behind -- but this is still music with the music taken out - hardly any attack in the percussive sounds, distortion, and unpredictable 'interruptions' by hisses, static and so on constituting the material proper. Akita specifies that the reference to the Merzbau is one of decreasing relevance: "the name is only important to my early work, which I thought related to the concept of Merzbau".[39 , 40 ] Antimonument is Akita leaving the building. The building, the monument that is progressively deserted in Antimonument, as the tracks grow sparser, is a double one: it is the leaving of a traditional Japanese music (that Merzbow never completes -- "Japanese sounds and instruments are used but their character is often purposely extinguished in the mix",[41 ]), and also the leaving of the Western monument. Why should he even be near this, except in a Western-centred model? Because philosophically, musically, politically and economically, Japan has not stayed outside the Western monument. This despite a certain exoticist attribution of lack of meaning, of, therefore, an atheoretical purity -- "Japanese artists use Noise simply as cathartic release without the philosophical underpinnings" [42 ] -- emptying the space to fill it, if not with Western meaning, then with Western emptiness. Masami Akita is interested in philosophy: in Eastern: "Japanese Noise relishes the ecstasy of sound itself and the concepts come from the sound. It is a tradition of eastern philosophy to base theory on real experience" [43 ], and in Western: in the form of explicit references to contemporary theory (Derrida, Foucault, and Bataille, whose use is contemporary), and implicit ones: "noise is the nomadic producer of difference" [44 ].
In today's restricted (but generalised) music economy, we have had the ludicrous 'world music', and also the real world music Attali hints at: ambient pap. Alongside these particular versions, is another (anti)global music: Japanese noise music: a refusal through over-acceptance of Western genre, such that genre does not work: hence Japanese noise music's different take on violence and sound, away from heroic (tragic) mastery of or submission to "the horror, pain etc., of the world" (this despite the importance of bondage as a reference for Masami Akita). Against generic noise, but with the noise of genre.
There is a sense of progression in Merzbow's oeuvre, as the materials alter, and the recording capacities of CD technology allow a greater range of frequencies to seep in. David Keenan argues that Noisembryo (1994) "is the quintessential Merzbow release"[45 ] due to its power, volume, and force - this, then is what had been aimed at all along, in the teleological version. Noise, however, does not necessarily have anything to do with these factors, and their having an apotheosis. The "sheer noise" of the mid 1990s releases could be described as a different sort of zenith in terms of the fact that there just is 'more'. Instead of a Hegelian progress, a Sadean, additive process. This 'more' has to be more than more; otherwise we are just in the realm of groups such as Whitehouse, whose purpose often seems to be to attain a position of mastery over noise.[46 ] This more than more is, perhaps inevitably, a less: Merzbow can never get to the zenith, because Merzbow's music is doomed to fall: it is always open to assimilation as music -- or, it is not assimilable, and therefore it claims transcendence. Or, in some notional noise/music dialectic, in being on the limit, it fails to resolve, and fails to fail - because it is noise music, it cannot belong, dwell. Instead it is dwelling, part of a plateau, rhizome etc., with 'the listener', noise as becoming-noise, as well as becoming-music.
Noisembryo opens with a blast of noise that endlessly mutates across the album, interrupted by (the noise of?) silence three times. Always differentiated, this is noise that does not settle, where even the volume -- or mass of sound -- cannot be perceived as consistent as the pitches of the specific strata are continually shifting, whilst not at any one time covering the whole range. This album is noise as the immanence beyond, beneath, above the noise/music divide: noise as the emptying immanence.
It might seem that some form of communing, however perverse, might be possible. If so, it is that community which is not realisable, the one 'present' in Bataillean sacrifice -- Thacker notes that in Music for Bondage Performance (1991) we see "the body of music filled with excess and volume, presented as the tension-filled inability of excess to fulfil itself",[47 ] and this "body of music "is" the body of listener, the music as material, the hearing as solid, and the un-communion of these, all at once. Thacker further claims that noise is the accursed share of the sound worlds, and therefore itself in the position of that which is to be sacrificed.[48 ]
But it is Bataille's conception of immanence that is of interest here, as its dividing off of animal from human stands in parallel to that of noise and music, with the former term the always (to be) excluded that can return, but which 'we' cannot be. Bataille suggests that the animal is like "water in water",[49 ] which seems to be what is happening if immersed in noise, if liable to suggest some kind of sacrificial wholeness, a form of rescue.[50 ] Japanese noise will not get us there, any more than sacrifice. Immanence is not only what is beyond (performative negativities like object, nature, the other) but what is (not) beyond: that which is the beyond of the beyond, only insofar as there is no such place to be.
Bataille: "I am able to say that the animal world is that of immanence and immediacy, for that world, which is closed to us, is so to the extent that we cannot discern in it an ability to transcend itself. [...] It is only within the limits of the human that the transcendence of things in relation to consciousness (or of consciousness in relation to things) is manifested."[51 ]
There is no place for the object or the subject's transcendence, coming to be, getting beyond that coming to be in knowing about it, or being known, when immanence is the field. The 'consciously' constructed sound of Noisembryo moves into the smooth space of immanence as it eludes the knowable world of other noise (of noise 'in the world'), which is held at a distance. This set of sounds brings the distance near, and this just as much when blasts of 'different coloured' noises slide across each other, a third of the way into "Part Two" as when 'the' noise falls away into a distorted drone halfway into "Part Three". Noise as event, as excess of eventness, because unlike late serialism, it does not leave gaps peppered with inane atonalities. It is gap, non-tonality.
For Deleuze and Guattari, the non-place of the body without organs is (in) immanence, and is itself (as immanence) the non-place of desire.[52 ] However, they do not see any totally free music being the way, as "a material that is too rich remains too 'territorialized'"[53 ] -- too diffuse, too noisy. Such emphasis on getting outside music has held us back/in, as "people often have too much of a tendency to reterritorialize on the child, the mad, noise".[54 ] We are back once more with Deleuze and Guattari's still open ears: open but not too open (not open enough?). These are ears that can learn, that can discern patterns, and the undoing of patterns, not ears that might be held forcibly open.[55 ]
What happens when you hit something like ultimate noise (it cannot be described as pure)? Where is there to go? In order for it to always (fail to) be ultimate, it must go nowhere, but go it must, dromological. Before the sovereignty of Merzbox (which is largely older materials in any case), comes Pulse Demon (1995). The title obliges an attribution of purpose: we know what Merzbow is up to, maybe he is becoming increasingly Hegelian, and attempting to map all noise, with this being his exploration of 'the pulse'. I suspect there are no more or less pulse actions in this album than any other mid 1990s Merzbow albums.[56 ] What is indicated is the arbitrariness of signification, an arbitrariness which serves to highlight another difference between Merzbow and Western 'avant-garde' music: randomness, as Deleuze suspects, is not really very interesting, but arbitrariness - chance as destiny, read as if there were variation (or indeed as if there were not) - carries noise as process, as that which intervenes 'between' noise and organised sound. Pulse Demon is undeniably 'organised sound' - it has differentiated tracks, titles for these, and seemingly significant times: we might get the impression that if all this noise has been split into 6.42 ("Woodpecker no.1"), or 24.53 ("Worms Plastic Earthbound"), that the duration might be significant. But many (possibly all) Merzbow 'pieces' of this period are cut, not ended. Their beginning is often cut, so there will never be a sense of attack -- we are immediately in the realm of distortion, hiss, pulse, squawks etc., -- of the effects of actions, not the direct products -- noise all the way down. The organisational frame of the album undoes the possibility of this being 'pure noise' or even an exploration of duration (very few Merzbow albums consist only of one track). Instead we are in the curious position of listening as if it were noise (i.e. because framed as if it were music). Any settling into listening to this 'stuff' as if it really were either noise or music is very much the 'consolation' Nietzsche hints at in The Birth of Tragedy as being our way of minimising the otherness of sounds presented in a musical frame.[57 ] Such a 'consolation' is not an individual failing, but a systemic success of failure to fail.
IV. Is Nothing not Enough?--------------------------
Once again, and still: what if we do not want the consolation (consolation of noise being music really; of noise being natural; of noise being an escape, a line of flight that might go somewhere; of noise being a ruse of power)? Noise can perhaps never escape (it might be the 'as if' escape were possible), as it comes in with voice, language and meaning.[58 ] Derrida asks of philosophy (here, as often, standing for sense, rationality, discourse, (search for) truth, etc.) whether it can exceed itself: "can one violently penetrate philosophy's field of listening without its immediately -- even pretending in advance, by hearing what is said of it, by decoding the statement -- making the penetration resonate within itself [...]?" ("Tympan", xii). Derrida's answer is, as always, that the outside of philosophy (or of organised sound as philosophy) is to be found at work in/on/as the inside of philosophy - with the inside being the outside of the outside, and the process that (never fully) establishes the divide. Zarathustra's hammer instead is the condition of its other, and the othering between Same and Other (xii-xiii), such that we should be interested in the limit itself, and not what is beyond it, the marginality of the margin itself, and so on. Japanese noise might be such a negotiation of the limit, but one that only works as such because it declares itself outside, is the declaration, the announcing of outside. The 'real' noise in noise music is this (not) crossing of the line that is (not) there: noise is not the other of the other that equals the same, but the other of the other as non-line, as what cannot be the same and cannot inhabit otherness. Where Derrida is outflanked by Merzbow is that Derrida says you cannot get outside, you cannot consciously undo philosophy with a hammer, therefore you should not do it -- instead you should not attack directly (xv); should take an interest in "timbre, style, and signature [as they] are the same obliterating division of the proper" (xix). Why not do it? Why not do it, knowing it cannot be done, that your noise is fatally compromised, part of failure?[59 ] Merzbow is the getting outside that is not the completion of a new "inside", but an endless outside, fated to be inside only to fail to ~ever be~ because of this arbitrary and perverse relation to the inside (of organised sound). Where Derrida says "no", Merzbow is an immanent "yes".

Notes -----
[1 ] Douglas Kahn , Noise Water Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1999), p. 25.
[2 ] Ibid., p. 20.
[3 ] Ibid., p. 48.
[4 ] Ibid., p. 45.
[5 ] European Commission Report: Position Paper on European Union Noise Indicators (Luxembourg: European Communities, 2000), p. 71.
[6 ] C.S. Kerse, The Law Relating to Noise (London: Oyez, 1975), p. 8. Rupert Taylor also describes noise as "unwanted sound" (Noise (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), 22).
[7 ] Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1985), p. 30. Originally written in 1977, this text remains vital in assessments of freedom, control, subversion, radicality, recuperation etc. in terms of human-produced sound. The argument here that "Japanese noise" is that which specifically exceeds his argument should in no way be taken as criticism of Attali. One criticism that could be made of Attali is that he presumes that music has a single origin/reason/purpose. Music could be said to be always already plural. Such would be the argument of Philip V. Bohlman's "Ontologies of Music", in Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist (eds.), Rethinking Music (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 17-34 -- even if this article provides nothing in the way of ontology, as understood since phenomenology.
[8 ] Arthur Kroker: "Hearing has always been alchemical, a violent zone where sound waves mutate into a sedimentary layer of cultural meanings, where historical referents secrete into contemporary states of subjectivity, and where there is no stability, only an aural logic of imminent reversibility" (Spasm: Virtual Reality, Android Music, Electric Flesh (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993). The alchemy is one the body, the ears, the sound, noise, codings, listening practices etc. and cannot be definitively described or known, except as a statement about how a particular society, at a particular time, seeks to encode, to end transformations.
[9 ] Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 150.
[10 ] Ibid., p. 151 (translation modified).
[11 ] The body of organs, of identity (not forgetting that organs without a body might be more dangerous still) has privileged the eye, and in contemporary culture, makes this privileging a site of control: "the eye is a masochistic orifice in the age of panoptic power, capable of endless discipline and of being seduced beyond bodily subjectivity into a floating free fall within the society of the spectacle", leaving the ear repressed, except in terms of receiving "spectacular" sound (muzak, MTV) (Kroker, Spasm, 49). The body without organs, though, would not free us from this, but drive us further in, playing masochism beyond jouissance. "Freeing" the ear would not liberate us, either. Rather, the ear has to become masochistic, in the Deleuzian sense (see "Coldness and Cruelty" in Masochism (New York: Zone, 1994), 9-138) instead of being forced to submit. It must then renounce both control and contract. There is, of course, another story of the eye -- Bataille's, followed up by Foucault, in which the upturned eye, removed, trans(un)figured, is the site of the loss of meaning. Eugene Thacker assimilates this story with noise music: "the visuality of Bataille transgressing itself is analogous to the music of noise" ("Bataille/Body/ Noise: Notes Toward a Techno-Erotics", (63), in Brett Woodward (ed.), Merzbook: The Pleasuredome of Noise (Melbourne, Cologne: Extreme, 1999), 57-65). The comparison is perhaps too easy as the ear does not have the status of the eye, nor is music of noise in itself capable of the reversibility of the eye, which seeks to be both medium and control of media.
[12 ] Derrida seems to "prefigure" this in writing that "to forget it [the role of the ear, and of listening] - and in so doing to take shelter in the most familial of dwellings - is to cry out for end of organs, of others" "Tympan", (Margins of Philosophy (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982), ix-xxix), xvii. This occurs because the ear allows hearing of one's own self and voice, leading to the non-conception (as unproblematised) of self-presence or "absolute properness" (ibid.). Derrida, however, in turn, has not questioned whether an ear can be less than open or closed, and could in fact be filled. See also Hegel, making essentially the same point: "hearing [...], like sight, is one of the theoretical and not practical senses, and it is still more ideal than sight", as it gets the subject to "the first and more ideal breath of the soul" (Aesthetics, Vol. 2 (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), 890).
[13 ] C.S. Kerse, citing Samuel Rosen, notes that "at an unexpected or unwanted noise, the pupils dilate, the skin pales, mucous membranes dry; there are intestinal spasms and the adrenals explode secretions. The biological organism, in a word, is disturbed" (The Law Relating to Noise, 7)
[14 ] Deleuze and Guattari, op. cit., p. 150.
[15 ] Kroker, op. cit., p. 47.
[16 ] Kerse, op. cit., p. 3.
[17 ] Luigi Russolo, The Art of Noises (New York: Pendragon, 1986), p. 87.
[18 ] Noise is not differance - it is an emptier of links, relations, processes, not that which holds them mysteriously together. It is Bataille's "NOTHING", not the nothing that is the opposite of something, or the reason why there might be something instead of nothing. It is the thing which stops there having been a reason for something over nothing.
[19 ] Attali, op. cit., p. 33.
[20 ] Op. cit., pp. 111-12.
[21 ] Op. cit., p. 45.
[22 ] The dying subject is not one reaching out for the answer, but reaching into its disappearance in noise. For Nietzsche, "the Dionysiac, with its primal pleasure experienced in pain, is the common womb of music and the tragic myth" (The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music (London: Penguin, 1993), 115). In looking at tragedy, he writes, we seek to go beyond its pain, and, similarly "with reference to artistically applied dissonance [...] we want to hear and long to go beyond hearing" (ibid.). Rather than take this as the suggestion we might learn from what is difficult, painful, etc., we could take this as stating the case for not going beyond noise: the act of listening to noise is one of supplementarity: the beyond of noise (initially music)is the precondition for listening to noise, so as to get to "the beyond of noise" (which now is that there is only noise, and that the beyond of noise is what can never have been attained). In listening to noise, though, the loss is played over again always for the first time, as opposed to being the excluded loss of foundation (the "birth of sense"...).
[23 ] Attali, op. cit., p. 4.
[24 ] Op. cit., p. 3.
[25 ] Op. cit., p. 4.
[26 ] Michael Nyman notes that Cage discovers the impossibility of silence on a visit to Harvard's anechoic chamber, where he still hears his own body (Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 25-6. Cage's famous 4'33" "is a demonstration of the non-existence of silence" p. 26.
[27 ] This has led many others, as well as Attali, to assert that noise is life, or nearer to life's "real processes". Russolo states that "noise [...] has the power of immediately recalling life itself" (The Art of Noises, 27). This, coming as it does from the "pioneer" of noise in/as music, could be taken not as a simple naturalism, but as a parallel with "bare" or "mere" life (Benjamin, Agamben). Noise for Russolo also signals the life that had already moved on from nature, that is the excluding of nature - i.e. the city. Masami Akita (Merzbow) concurs: "noise is one of the most primitive music forms in the modern city" (in Woodward (ed.), Merzbook, 11). Is this to naturalise noise? Only before we think about music: for noise to be some sort of fundamental music demonstrates Akita's awareness that the noise of the city comes as a result of organisation, of power systems, of restricted economies of signification.
[28 ] Kearse, op. cit., p. 1.
[29 ] Adorno claims aeroplane noise ruins walks in the forest (Aesthetic Theory (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), 311) -- noise is wrong because not part of true nature, but what Adorno is also claiming ("despite himself") is that noise is also ruinous of nature as acculturated Nature - as it is an uncontrolled incursion into a humanised sphere, immanence in the subject/object field. Hegel argues that to overcome this "problem", music must moderate "the natural": "the notes [are] not to be a purely natural shriek of feeling but the developed and artistic expression of it" (Aesthetics, vol II, 910) - so music is neither too natural nor unnatural (it is to express what is now left behind as natural).
[30 ] Attali, op. cit., p. 20 and passim.
[31 ] Amplification - the technological means for producing noise as volume of sound, as well as feedback systems (if not the only means) is an essential part of the development of noise music, which at the risk of being slightly determinist, arises (in the Japan of the early 1970s) out of the combination of improvised music in the form of free jazz, and the improvised rock of a similar period, which relies for its effect, on the power of amplification, the distortions of feedback. Douglas Kahn , dealing with experiments with noise and sound, signals the importance of technological developments in the alterations in ways of thinking sound, noise, music (see Noise Water Meat, 2-13 and passim).
[32 ] Thacker, op. cit., p. 63.
[33 ] Noise music is also the sacrifice of the "music business", the rendering of it as general, rather than restricted economy, through its disruptive methods of releasing recordings on many labels, in limited and peculiar editions, direct sales. Woodward notes "the creation and production of such items intentionally subverts late capitalism's notions of the marketplace, the performer/audience relationship and entertainment commodity production and distribution" ("A Machinic Scream" (33), in Merzbook, 33-6). Before we get carried away with some postmodernistic praise for the artisanal symbiosis between musician and listener, it is worth noting that concerts are infrequent, and a literal distance maintained, a distance allowed by the very processes of subverting "late capitalism". This is a deterritorialisation that stays one -- i.e. carries no autonomous radicality.
[34 ] See Virilio, The Lost Dimension (New York: Semiotext(e), 1991).
[35 ] Kroker, op. cit., p. 54.
[36 ] Ibid.
[37 ] Adorno, op. cit., p. 204.
[38 ] Akita in _Merzbook_, p. 40.
[39 ] Akita cf. Edwin Pouncy, "Consumed by Noise", The Wire, vol. 198 (2000), p. 29.
[40 ] Op. cit., pp. 26-32. This interview and overview is a solid introduction to Merzbow, whilst being caught up with the "musicality of the noise". Pouncey stresses the learning experience, with statements such as "when the listener has attuned his or her hearing perspective" (26), "the fact is that to understand, enjoy and eventually reach noise nirvana through Masami Akita's work, you have to listen to a hell of a lot of it" (27). These sentiments are echoed by David Keenan's top ten Merzbow albums (The Wire, vol 198, 32-3).
[41 ] Akita, in Woodward, op. cit., p. 11.
[42 ] Woodward, op. cit., pp. 14, 12-15.
[43 ] Akita, in Merzbook, op. cit., p. 23.
[44 ] Op. cit., p. 9 and elsewhere, as the contributors love repeating it.
[45 ] The Wire, Vol. 198, p. 33.
[46 ] See for example Never Forget Death (1992), which warns that "Torture Chamber" (a track of mounting "white noise") should not be played excessively loud -- i.e. because it is inherently loud.
[47 ] "Bataille/Body/ Noise: Notes Toward a Techno-Erotics", op. cit., p. 58.
[48 ] Op. cit., p. 59.
[49 ] Theory of Religion, (New York: Zone, 1989), p. 23.
[50 ] Op. cit.
[51 ] Op. cit., pp. 23-24.
[52 ] Deleuze and Guattari, op. cit., p. 154.
[53 ] Op. cit., p. 344.
[54 ] Ibid.
[55 ] To be fair to Deleuze and Guattari, Japanese noise was far from a breakthrough in 1980, although nearly all of today's "recognised practitioners" were active then. Their unfortunate espousal of the "influential" Varese is just one example of why caution should be taken with imagining Deleuze and Guattari as signposts for the future. In one sense this lack of awareness of the contemporary is itself contemporary -- not in terms of some sort of "dumbing down", but just in terms of the retro-future we seem to inhabit in terms of future music (for example in The Matrix, whose future remains 1985).
[56 ] If this seems a very specific dating, it nonetheless applies to perhaps 20 albums. Merzbow's output is immense: in addition to the 50 contained in Merzbox, there are another 150+ recordings.
[57 ] Nietzsche suggests that if music can rediscover its links to the emptiness that is "true reality, through an appreciation of every "phenomenon", then we will experience some kind of catharsis (see 94, in particular). In the light of the later preface, however, where "perhaps as laughers you will consign all metaphysical consolations to the devil -- and metaphysics in front of the rest!" (12), much of the main text suggests a proto-Bataillean recognition of a fearful, sacrificial, dangerous general economy of "ugly" sound, brought inevitably into a restricted economy where we "get something from it". See for example 83-4, where "consolation" with regard to the ineffability of things is one of "three levels of illusion" (84), not the hidden truth, or goal. The inevitability of the restricted economy can be seen in the inevitable influence of Apollo (rationality, wisdom, accumulation of knowledge): "the Apolline lifts man out of his orgiastic self-destruction, and deceives him about the universality of the Dionysiac event, deluding him into the idea that he can see only a single image of the world" (102).
[58 ] This despite the ineffability claimed for noise (and claimed throughout history for "that which goes beyond language" - music, the image, the world, gods, etc). Woodward's version of this: "It's almost the inability to definitively describe Merzbow's music with the limitations of the written word that is the testament to its thrill and power, intricacy and convolution" ("The Nomadic Producer of Difference", in Merzbook, 9).
[59 ] We can compare Derrida's deconstructing binaries with those Attali establishes through noise and music, as in the following: "Music responds to the terror of noise, recreating differences between sounds and repressing the tragic dimension of dissonance - just as sacrifice responds to the terror of violence. Music has been, from its origin, a simulacrum of the monopolization of the power to kill, a simulacrum of ritual murder" (Noise, 28). Noise and music blur when sacrifice is at issue, when music is excessive and essentially ritual, such that "music functions like sacrifice; listening to noise is a little like being killed" (ibid.).

Paul Hegarty teaches at University College, Cork. He also Dj's Japanese Noise Music.

The Importance of mister Julius Hemphill

2006-09-10T17:31:00.000+02:00

Hemphill was best known for his work with the World Saxophone Quartet — he was arguably the band's most distinctive writer — but his work as an improvising saxophonist and composer encompassed a variety of other contexts over the course of his career. Hemphill worked with everything from big bands to duos; he especially excelled at composing for unusual instrumental combinations. Hemphill's primary instrument was the alto; he had a huge, somewhat harsh tone, almost as if he were playing a horn made out of a steel pipe with a sax mouthpiece attached. He possessed a formidable technique and a fertile imagination. The latter probably best manifested itself in his compositions, in which he merged his jazz roots with European classical and African influences. Hemphill's first instrument was the clarinet. He played bari saxophone in high school; purportedly, he fostered a musical infatuation with Gerry Mulligan. In Fort Worth, he studied with the renowned jazz clarinetist John Carter and played with local rhythm & blues bands. Hemphill joined the army in 1964. Upon his discharge, he played for a time with Ike Turner, then moved to St. Louis in 1968. There he became involved with the Black Artists Group, a new music collective that also included Oliver Lake, Hamiet Bluiett, Joseph Bowie, and Baikida Carroll, among others. Hemphill formed his own record company, Mbari, to document his music. His '70s Mbari releases, Dogon A.D. and Blue Boyé, proved to be quite influential, affecting the later work of such disparate artists as Dave Sanborn and Tim Berne. Hemphill moved to New York in the mid-'70s. There he became active in loft sessions and recorded as a sideman with Anthony Braxton and Lester Bowie. Around this time, he also recorded for the Arista/Freedom label. In 1976, he formed the World Saxophone Quartet with Lake, Bluiett, and David Murray, which would prove to be the most commercially successful and long-lasting of his performing units. In the '70s and '80s, Hemphill played and recorded fairly often for several labels, almost always under his own leadership. His 1980 album, Flat Out Jump Suite (Black Saint), with cellist Abdul Wadud, cornetist Olu Dara, and percussionist Warren Smith, was critically praised, as was his concurrent work with the WSQ. In the late '80s, Hemphill and the WSQ began an association with the Elektra label, which led to a number of well-distributed and aesthetically rewarding albums. In 1988, Hemphill got his one and only chance to record his big band compositions, on the album Julius Hemphill Big Band (Elektra/Musician). Hemphill left the WSQ in the early '90s, thus weakening the ensemble from a conceptual standpoint. He went on to form his own all-sax group — a sextet — which included such players as Marty Ehrlich, Andrew White, and a young James Carter. The band made a pair of albums: Fat Man and the Hard Blues, recorded in 1991, and Five Chord Stud, recorded in 1993. Hemphill's presence on the latter was as a composer only; a worsening medical condition had by this time forced him to stop playing. Hemphill also had a strong interest in theatre. He incorporated theatrical elements into his 1977 album Roi Boyé and the Gotham Minstrels and in the '80s he composed an extended work entitled Long Tongues, which he called "a saxophone opera." Hemphill's death in 1995 prematurely curtailed the career of one of free jazz's most visionary composers.

Tim Berne's hell system (Part 1)

2006-09-10T14:24:00.000+02:00

“I just don't want to turn it into a show ...it's just my nature--I'll get bored. There’s something exciting about not knowing whether it’s going to work or whether they’re going to like it. It's almost like cheating when you find something that works and then just keep doing it and it's successful.”

Tim Berne Answers 20 Questions about Life on the Road

Bill Shoemaker: What is the most difficult airline to deal with in terms of instruments and equipment?
Tim Berne: All of the above.
Which airline has the worst economy seating and food?
Lufthansa
Which airport is craziest for making connecting flights?
Paris. What is the most important thing you ever forgot to pack?
My wife.
What is your worst lost baggage story?
Coming home from Paris with a gig in New York that night and then starting a States tour the next day, early AM … No way to wait for bags the night of arrival in New York and airline incompetence the likes of which hasn’t been seen since the Stone Age … My lovely wife was forced to wait for our bags.
What country hassles musicians the most at customs and passport checks?
Canada.
Which city has the worst cab drivers?
Naples.
What is the best hotel that a presenter has provided for you?
Any hotel on a beach.
Do you travel with a laptop or a PDA? If so, how many times a day do you check your e-mail?
No.
Do you listen to music on the road?
No.
If so, what device do you use?
My imagination.
Do you do your own laundry on the road?
This information is not available to the public.
What is your most nightmarish sound check to date?
The next one.
What is the scariest food that has been laid out for you backstage?
Any food outside Italy and India.
What are your three favorite venues?
My rehearsal room, Vortex in London and 55 Bar in NYC
Which cities have the best restaurants for late after-gig meals?
London, Florence, New York.
Which cities have the best after-hours sessions?
Never did one.
What is the best city that closes down too early?
San Francisco.
What is the best locale to have a day off?
Rome.
What is your cure for jet lag?
No sleep and spicy food.
What is your best tip for the novice?
Learn to sleep standing up.

Ground Zero

2006-09-09T12:57:00.000+02:00

Dissolving Ground Zero: From "Performance" to "Sound"

by Atsushi Sasaki

(Liner notes for the CD Last Concert)
For musicologists of the future, this album will have a place of great importance. Not only is it the final recording of Ground Zero, Otomo Yoshihide's major project of the '90s; it also marks a critical turning point in Otomo's musical career. More precisely, a clear division can be drawn between Otomo's music before and after the last Ground Zero concert--the "Dissolving Gig"--which took place at On Air West in Shibuya, Tokyo on March 8, 1998.
This album, which contains almost all of that concert, provides a complex and ambiguous blending of the "before" and "after" elements that characterise the distinct phases of Otomo's work, and it is likely that listeners accustomed to hearing either the "before" or "after" Otomo will to some degree be puzzled by the combination of the performance and sound elements it contains. I don't want to imply that this ambiguity is the result of any vacillation emerging in this transitional period: the music here no doubt arises from intentional choices and actions on Otomo's part. Rather, I think the essence of the musician Otomo Yoshihide is very apparent in this concert recording. Moreover, this album not only illustrates the division between the "before" and "after" music; it also transcends that division, to reveal the motifs which run through all of Otomo's work.
If the basic elements of what we call music are performance by human beings on musical instruments and objects, and the sound that emerges from these activities, then one could say that the change in focus on Otomo's part was emphatically from the former to the latter. When Otomo (a remarkable guitarist and Japan's first turntable artist) began to develop and deepen his musical style, he initially placed much importance on playing skills and physical expressivity in performance. This was natural for a player who emerged from the world of free jazz and improvisation and, through a unique process, then moved towards composition. In order to realise certain types of new music, Otomo demanded a high level of technical mastery and physical dynamism from the various musicians who made up Ground Zero (each of whom was a technically outstanding player active outside the group as well). From the time of the band's first incarnation to its final dissolution, it's membership changed several times, the shifts in personnel relfecting the process of trial and error by which Otomo pursued his musical vision. Ground Zero's music was never a specific end in itself, but rather a series of steps towards ever higher goals; and as it changed from a basic band format to a "double band" with two guitars, two basses and two drum sets, and then to a format extended further by a sampler, a koto, and a futozao-shamisen, Ground Zero rapidly headed towards the farthest limits of music-as-performance.
There is no telling what sorts of internal struggles Otomo went through, or what sorts of exchanges occurred between him and the various group members, in regard to Ground Zero's disbanding. However, since the "dissolving" of the band, Otomo's solo work and his new group projects, I.S.O. and Filament, have shown an orientation which is clearly different from that of Ground Zero. To put it bluntly, it suggests an abandonment of "performance"--or at least an attempt at release from performance. In I.S.O. and Filament, Otomo does not play the guitar; nor are the familiar mechanical devices--turntable, sampler, CD/MD players--"performed" on with the unique style and technique with which he has always been associated; they are used instead merely as tools for the production of apparently quite simple sounds. In contrast to the phantasmagoric ensemble work of Ground Zero, the core of the new sound is an electric and based on sine waves; the sound of direct contact--even poor contact--with circuits; fragments of various recordings of today's frequency-synthesized and frequency-generated music; and the faint noises produced by the turntable and needle themselves.
Otomo has said that Sachiko M (of I.S.O. and Filament), the only Ground Zero member who had never played a traditional musical instrument, had a strong influence on this change in style. Sampler artist Sachiko--who for some time after joining Ground Zero handled the elements of sound collage and sound effects--eventually quit altogether what we call sampling to move off in a unique direction, using the sine waves preset in the sampler as her only source of sound. This is precisely the same direction that Otomo is currently pursuing, both in Filament (a duo with Sachiko) and in the trio I.S.O. (where they are joined by Ichiraku Yoshimitsu, a percussionist who has likewise changed his orientation and now uses only electronics)--moving from "performance" to "sound." At this point, questions about how to play and what style to play in are barely considered. Sound itself lies outside manipulation and expression. The issues to be addressed now are, first, whether or not to produce sound; secondly, the choice of sound; next, at what volume to set the sound; and finally, duration of the sound, how long to keep it going. And here music moves away from physical action and becomes a more speculative form of work. As this activity (which can rightly be called radical) continues; it will be interesting to see how Otomo progresses.
But back to this album. The "Dissolving Gig" was an event which took place at the midpoint of this (perhaps irreversible) change on Otomo's part. The one-off group consisted of 13 people, some selected from among the musicians who had played with Ground Zero in the past, and some entirely new faces. By March 1998, quite a while had passed since Otomo had announced the disbanding of Ground Zero, and he was then moving into a new phase. We can reasonably assume therefore that in the "Dissolving Gig" Otomo was attempting to simulate the aforementioned change from "performance" to "sound." In effect, this album is a high-speed race through the history of Ground Zero. Rock, jazz, improvisation, ethnic music, noise, musique concrète, minimal music--all of the various elements appear, disappear and reappear, overlapping and separating, tracing a complex, unstable path. This is not, however, an attempt at an aesthetic mixture; rather, it gives the impression of a rough, carefree spinning. The kind of obviously cathartic and ecstatic elements heard previously in Ground Zero's performances are almost entirely absent--and even some self-avowed Otomo disciples experienced a sense of incongruity during the concert and felt dissatisfied on hearing the constant flow of sound.
Surely, though, that was what Otomo intended. This was the performance in which he literally let us hear the process of Ground Zero's "dissolving." This album records the transformation of the aggregate called Ground Zero from an orchestra to an oscillator. Towards the end of the gig, the sine waves surge like the waves of the sea, washing over the entire performance. Finally, only sound remains.
However, the transformation crystallized in this album is actually no more than a superficial aspect of this work. Although I might seem to be contradicting everything I have said so far, looking back from the perspective of the present one sees that Otomo has always addressed the same fundamental question (one addressed also by the late Takayanagi "Jojo" Masayuki in his final album, Inanimate Nature): How does one hear, or make heard, the world's stirring and chattering? Or, how is one to reconcile the presentation of the anarchy (chaos) created with sound, and the organization (cosmos) of that anarchy?
First, by pursuing the expansion of the idioms of noise and improvisation which sabotage existing "music," Otomo tried to organise chaos, while at the same time secretly injecting chaos into order. Next, by adopting the idea of sampling, he entered his period of postmodern citation and collage (and to be frank, Otomo's efforts at that time were more successful than anyone else's). However, the structure whereby chaos and cosmos are fundamentally linked, or conceptually appear continually to be interchanging, is based on the assumption that chaos and cosmos are strictly and clearly distinct from each other. The trap which avant-garde and postmodern aesthetics has fallen into is to remain unaware that anarchy and organization, as the basis of one another, continually reinforce and maintain each other. But on the contrary, can't sound itself demonstrate that chaos and cosmos are originally exactly the same, that there is no clear distinction between them--and that that is what the "world" is? This is the starting point of Otomo's new phase of activity.

April 15, 1999
(Translated by Yoshiyuki Suzuki)

http://www.japanimprov.com/yotomo/groundzero/lastnotes-e.html

We Can Learn To Scream Again

2006-09-07T13:02:00.000+02:00

(dedicated to all these that are still doing it)

what is it

2006-09-07T12:22:00.000+02:00

about experimental, avant garde expression...
it is an unexpected elegance in a cursed capitalistic function of brain of order and sense and premassacred knowledge.
why can't we be taught about margueritte duras, jean luc godard, hal hartley and william seward burroughs at school?
where is maya deren and cecil taylor hidden under tones of cheap filmic and music garbage, when at the same time hypocritical, pseudo-open-minded 'artists' copy and produce in the pursuit of Vanity?
where is the Ancient Balletic Movement of Human Creativity that can curve the lines of the way we Perceive and Attach to the World's Skin??
AN UNEXPECTED ELEGANCE!

(we need time to perceive, analyse and produce raw,responsible and personal material. but why not devote some time instead of rejecting it as lunatic and irrational, at the same time that we spend time to understand 'structured' popular shit, under the flag of popularistic experimentation that can not even be played or explained LIVE with instruments and feelings and words and emotions and huge,gigantic gestures of Truth...and in the end of the day, why can't we use some of an irrational approach to a world that prohibits and provokes...what is lunatic for a modern sensibility? except if 'modern' or 'sensibility' is actually a LIE in order to self verify our selves and die under the confort of vain existence. instead of selling, we can Create!
we can create again and again, instead of pretending to listen.
the balance has changed.we need to learn to create in order to learn to listen.
put your hands in the Fire and burn our Soul and Expand in an endless universe of the Mind.
we need fires in all possible corners.)

to Savvas Metaxas and others

if music is dying, musicians are killing it.

2006-09-06T22:09:00.000+02:00

HOW WE EAT OUR YOUNG

By Mike Patton

If music is dying, musicians are killing it. Composers are the ones decomposing it. We are as responsible as anyone--although we'd love not to admit it. We lash out at "The Industry", blaming things like corporate structure for our shitty music--but we are the ones making it. We open the box they've given us and jump in, wrap ourselves up, and even lick the stamp. Why? Insecurity--the need for acceptance--maybe even money. We're not thinking about our music, just how it looks. One would rather have the warm tongue of a critic licking his asshole than the tongue of his spouse. It gives him a sense of validity and power. He seems to defy gravity. Maybe it is because he doesn't know what the hell else to do. He sees it coming--but freezes with panic like a deer in the headlights. Don't laugh--I've done it and you probably have too. And it has undoubtedly effected out music. (But have we learned anything form it?) We know that we are mostly a lot of slobbering babies who need constant stroking. We realize also in the moral order of society, we occupy positions similar to the thief, pimp, or peeping tom. We know that even if one has the pride of a bull, it is hard enough just to remain focused in this world. It gives us milliona upon millions of images--distractions--all saying the same thing at the same time: DO NOT THINK. If your fantasy and desire give you migraines, how easy it is to forget them when there is so much to look at. Our creations die quickly when abandoned like this. Do we realize that we are eating our young? It seems the passion that moves us is accompanied by an incredible urge to squash it. It is as quick as a fucking reflex--a conditioned response. It it a sexual problem? A puritanical one? The most intense and convincing music achieves a sexual level of expression, but what we normally feel is frigidity and limpness. It is just too easy for an artist to 'socialize' his desires when life tells him cardboard is OK. You should be ashamed of yourself! What is your fucking problem? If you don't come out, sooner or later you will die in there. Use chunks of yourself. Bodily fluids. Look left and right. Sift through others' belongings. Borrow. Steal. And try to achieve some sort of pleasure while doing it. This excitement should increase and intensify when you visualize it being shared by a number of people. Think about it. If it comes from inside you, it is automatically valid--it just may or may not be good. Because if it is not communicating in some way, its pleasure is as short-lived as a quick fuck in the back room. It doesn't mean shit. The labor of many composers is to construct elaborate walls of sound--but we often forget to leave a window or door to crawl out of. ow can we survive in these clever little rooms? We must eat our creation or we will starve. At this point, we have heard what we wanted to hear--our ears have shut down. We've resigned as slaves to our own gluttony. But if we have boarded up our learning environment, our only way out is to teach what we know. Will they listen? Why should they? Because they need you as much as you need them. You can save them from being swallowed up by the world--they can save you from being swallowed up by the world. Young and old players should be seeking each other out and using each other. They should develope a healthy exchange of smut--and learn to wear each other's masks. In this kind of environment, incredible things can happen. Music can emerge that is athletic and personal. Music that is riddled with contradictions--impossibilities. And that is the shit that can defy gravity.

(The End)
- Taken from the book Arcana: Musicians on Music, edited by John Zorn -

The Experimental Years

2006-09-06T13:01:00.000+02:00

The Experimental Years: A View from the Left

John Tilbury

Originally published in Contact no. 22 (Summer 1981), pp. 16-21. Reprinted with the kind permission of the author. Jems upload date: 17 March 2004.

Introduction

[1] Late in 1960 Cornelius Cardew and I gave a concert of music for two pianos at the Conway Hall in London. The programme consisted of American music - by John Cage, Morton Feldman and Christian Wolff - and music by Cardew himself. It was my first involvement in experimental music and the first in a series of concerts which Cardew and I took around to various parts of the country. The predominance of American music in our programmes was of significance; in particular it reflected an attitude to the past which, like that of the Americans, was pure and simple: we rejected it. But at the same time we were ignorant of it: we did not understand how the music of the past had come about. We knew nothing of the changing social role that music had played across the centuries. We had no grasp of the concept of class values in relation to art.

[2] The music of Cage and his followers embodied this anti-historical stance and naturally we took to it like fish to water. Personally, I had never been enamoured of the European avant-garde; I resented its musical dogma, its melodic and harmonic conventions alienated me, it seemed to me to be at once academic and aggressive, and it had neither wit nor soul. On the other hand, and paradoxically perhaps, in Feldman's music I was strongly aware of a human agency at work, of an imaginative musical mind, and the fact that the Americans had not banned certain chords and progressions from their work impressed me. True, in the last analysis they too had created artificial systems, but these did not seem to 'police' the music in the way that European serialism did.

[3] For the experimentalists John Cage is the key personality whose influence cannot be overestimated, but in the 60s a new figure emerged in America, La Monte Young, who made an immediate and dramatic impact on the scene. Nowadays we hear only the residue and rarely the real thing: Young aestheticised or commercialised by a host of composers such as the Americans Philip Glass, Steve Reich and Terry Riley and, in England, Gavin Bryars, Christopher Hobbs, Michael Nyman and Michael Parsons. These are talented musicians, but the excitement and daring of Young's music in the 60s, to which they owe so much, was never recaptured during the 70s. Naturally there were other influences, but Young's radical single-sound aesthetic became the springboard for musical experimentation: in works such as X for Henry Flynt (1960),a loud, heavy sound-usually performed as a large piano cluster - repeated X times, Studies in the Bowed Disc for a four-foot steel gong (1963) and The Well- Tuned Piano (1964), each piece (or rather each process) consists of a characteristic sound in which the listener immerses himself. Young's influence has also, in my opinion, extended to the pop world, with devastating effects. 'Pioneer' groups like The Who became identified by their 'sound', not by the songs they performed, because the musical components - melody, harmony, rhythm - were obliterated for the listener by sheer amplitude. Pop was a physical but hardly an auditory experience. Young's music contrived to be both: the listener participated, he was not bludgeoned and rendered totally passive. The sounds were not only rich, complex and interesting; his music appealed aesthetically. People found beauty in it.

[4] It was on the crest of the 'beautiful sound wave' that Terry Riley emerged and achieved during the second half of the decade considerable notoriety and popularity. Strictly speaking, Riley's music was not single-sound music, though like the blues it created that illusion. It was not radical and lacked the purity of Young's; the components were musically and aesthetically more conventional. It thus managed to bridge the gap between the experimentalists and the pop world: the repetitive nature and harmonious quality of the music appealed to the experimentalists, but its language was modal (A Rainbow in Curved Air, 1966) and tonal (In C, 1964), it used electric organs and saxophones and it had a beat. Riley's music became an important part of the new 'underground pop' movement in the 60s.

[5] The Scratch Orchestra, which emerged a little later (in 1969, out of Cardew's composition class at Morley College in London), was an enterprising body of performers, playing all sorts of experimental music (Cage, Wolff, Riley, Young, Rzewski and their own works) in all kinds of situations for all classes of people: for Cornish farm-workers in village squares, for the young industrial workers of north-west England and for both urban and rural communities on the continent, as well as for the music lovers who frequented the Royal Festival Hall. The SO consisted of an assortment of people from various walks of life (some of them with considerable artistic talent) and there was no more enthusiastic, more committed and more serious collection of individuals working in the field of contemporary art at that time. During the first two years of its existence the SO's performance and compositional output was prolific. At the same time the nature and intensity of these activities engendered contradictions that eventually gave rise to a crisis. Feelings of discontent and frustration had accumulated and finally, at two long and harrowing meetings in September 1971, souls were bared, reasons sought and excuses offered. The guitarist Keith Rowe and I put forward an analysis of the situation, a conscious attempt to understand and explain our predicament. Rowe and I pinpointed a fundamental disunity of theory and practice in the SO as the primary source of discontent among its members. In theory we believed in integration and being gregarious, in practice we were isolationists and parochialists; in theory we rejected the musical establishment, in practice we asked for its support (Arts Council grants, BBC television and Festival Hall appearances); in theory we wished to be 'an instrument of inspiration', in practice we appeared to many as 'a pessimistic symptom of a system in decay';[1] in theory we wished to build an open society, in practice we had created a closed fraternity; in theory we regarded people as a source of inspiration and in practice we were suspicious of our audiences. And so on. We willed one thing and caused its opposite: the anarchist's dilemma! The members of the SO reacted strongly to our analysis. In particular, a passage we quoted from Christopher Caudwell generated considerable discussion and it therefore seems worth quoting it in full.

In bourgeois society social relations are denied in the form of relations between men, and take the form of a relation between man and a thing, a property relation, which, because it is a dominating relation, is believed to make men free. But this is an illusion. The property relation is only a disguise for relations which now become unconscious and therefore anarchic but are still between man and man, and in particular between exploiter and exploited.

The artist in bourgeois culture is asked to do the same thing. He is asked to regard the art work as a finished commodity and the process of art as a relation between himself and the work, which then disappears into the market. There is a further relation between the art work and the buyer, but with this he can hardly be concerned. The whole pressure of bourgeois society is to make him regard the art work as hypostatised and his relation to it as primarily that of a producer for the market.

This will have two results.

The mere fact that he has to earn his living by the sale of the concrete hypostatised entity as' a property right copyright, picture, statue - may drive him to estimate his work as an artist by the market chances which produce a high total return for these property rights. This leads to the commercialisation or vulgarisation of art.

But art is not in any case a relation to a thing, it is a relation between men, between artist and audience, and the art work is only like a machine which they must both grasp as part of the process. The commercialisation of art may revolt the sincere artist, but the tragedy is that he revolts against it still within the limitations of bourgeois culture. He attempts to forget the market completely and concentrate on his relation to the art work, which now becomes still further hypostatised as an entity-in-itself. Because the art work is now completely an end- in-itself, and even the market is forgotten, the art process becomes an extremely individualistic relation. The social values inherent in the art form, such as syntax, tradition, rules, technique, form, accepted tonal scale, now seem to have little value, for the art work more and more exists for the individual alone. The art work is necessarily always the product of a tension between old conscious social formulations the art 'form' - and new individual experience made conscious - the art 'content' or the artist's 'message'. This is the synthesis, the specifically hard task of creation. But the hypostatisation of the art work as the goal makes old conscious social formulations less and less important, and individual experience more and more dominating. As a result art becomes more and more formless, personal and individualistic, culminating in Dadaism, surrealism and 'Steinism'.[2]
[6] The SO responded to this text because it summed up not only their own position but that of their contemporaries too. Many members agreed that if a solution to the problem was to be found, it would have to be within the political sphere. In finally recognising that the ideological factor in art was of fundamental importance, the SO delivered a crushing blow to the theory of 'art for art's sake', an idea with which the orchestra had hitherto managed to coexist. Political links were sought and the SO no longer existed as an autonomous artistic organisation. Study groups were set up to read the Marxist classics and those who supported the politicisation of the SO embarked on a course of self-education. The others (and it was about 50/50) drifted away to pursue their own artistic interests on an individual basis. Speaking for myself, I decided to read and study, and to think more and play less. This was not a hard decision because I no longer felt a strong commitment to a large part of the contemporary repertoire, for the reasons stated or implied in the passage quoted from Caudwell.

[7] What follows below is a conglomeration of doubts and dogma which inform my present attitude not only to experimental music but to all music. The general nature of these considerations also reflects my stance against the idea of the autonomy of music.

The Ideological Factor

[8] A study of music presupposes a study of man. Art is an active socio-historical process produced by the tension between changing social relations and outmoded consciousness. Works of art do not drop out of the heavens into the minds of geniuses. Nor can any individual work of art claim eternal life. A study of the re-creation of works of art is as necessary and illuminating as a study of their creation. True, Greek art survives, but nothing survives in the same form. Greek art as the Greeks understood it is dead because Greek society is dead.

[9] Means and relations of production determine men's ways of life and condition, which in turn determine their psychology, their modes of thought and emotional make-up. These factors determine their works of art; social psychology is expressed in works of art as the cultural tastes of a given period.

Every poetical work is an integral unity, in which sounds, ideas, imagery, etc. are component parts synthetically united. On the other hand, it is also a unity from the sociological viewpoint, since all the component parts and their synthesis taken together are ideological reflexes of a definite period and a definite class.[3]
Class

[10] Much remains incomprehensible if we ignore class relations and class struggle. The artist will necessarily integrate the experience and voice the consciousness of that group whose experience in general resembles his own. Moreover, it is through social experience that our class attitudes can be changed: the individual psychology is a social creation. Beethoven was an ardent republican whose music served as a kind of rallying point, a sense of common experience and kinship, for all anti-feudal minds, for all who welcomed the conflicts of the time and found progress in them. Still in the context of class antagonisms, art can be used by one class as a weapon to help subjugate another. Writing in the 30s, Caudwell described '"Bad" art, "affective massage" which is offered to the masses, arouses and satisfies the instincts without expanding consciousness, perhaps even deadening consciousness, thus helping to keep people adjusted to an unpleasant economic situation.'[4] It thus thrives on the immaturity of its audience, hence the youthful appeal of much bad pop music. There are also examples of elaborate, 'high-falutin'' contemporary art music which fall into the same category and to which I shall refer later.

[11] In terms of the appreciation and even the definition of music, members of a social group are taught what is considered good or bad music, beautiful or ugly music and proper behaviour towards music; for example, some groups listen to music in silence, others engage in all kinds of noisy activity while listening. In this sense, aesthetic emotion is deeply influenced by social and cultural factors, insofar as some people have learned from other people what to listen for in musical sounds and patterns: they are taught the language. It follows that conceptions of music as a 'universal language' are wholly idealistic. What is regarded as 'music' and what qualities are ascribed to it are matters of social convention which vary in time, in geographical location and according to class. At a school in the East End of London, children bracketed together most of the Western art music of the last 400 years and described it as 'bleedin' opera'. A piece like Debussy's La Mer they did not regard as being music at all. This phenomenon cannot be understood simply in terms of the children's 'ignorance'; ideas about music are intertwined with and underpinned by more general ideas and beliefs with regard to other spheres of life, such as religion, work and leisure. They are also related to concepts of morality, human dignity and utility.

Music and Ideas

[12] I cannot agree with Hans Keller - whose messianic belief in the autonomy of music has led, quite logically, to his 'wordless analysis' - that the 'laws of musical thought are definably different from the laws of conceptual thought'.[5] In fact I doubt that any such line of demarcation can be drawn up: the boundaries between musical and conceptual thought are fluid and music therefore enjoys a relative, not an absolute autonomy. To be sure, the ideas which music embodies are not

the ideas which may be found in a scientific tract, but commentaries on a society showing what it means to live in it. They embrace developments in sensitivity, in the human's awareness of his own powers, and in the situation of internal freedom, as conditions change in the external world. In this way music joins the other arts in creating social consciousness, or the individual's awareness of the internal life he shares with society, and in revealing the internal history of society.[6]
[13] Non-musical ideas, ways of thinking, even whole philosophies, inform musical composition. A definite relationship can be shown to exist between mechanical materialism and post-Second World War serialism. Mechanical materialism regards nature as a passive object, not as something subject to man's activity or the antagonist of his striving, but as something self-contained, shut in by its own necessities. On the one hand there is man, the subject, desirous, active, spontaneous and free; on the other there is the object, nature as known by man, a machine contemplated in splendid isolation. Thus subject and object are mechanically separated; their dialectical (that is, mutually determining) relationship is ignored. Mechanical materialism acknowledges the existence of the objective world but sees man's relationship with it as a one-way affair.

[14] The parallel with serial composition is striking. According to the post-war serialist composer, his composition is a piece of nature obeying determinate laws (the series) so designed as to satisfy his wants (his artistic conscience) and to create use-value (for the art market). This self-contained work of nature fulfils a 'plan'; the plan is the composer's desire. The serialist composer cannot imagine himself free if the spontaneity of human desire on the one hand and the independent mechanism of nature on the other are in any way infringed. This preoccupation with the perfection of the object led to total serialism, where the performer was supposed to reproduce mathematically precise notations faithfully. But what happened was that the increasing demands of the notation engendered a proportionally increasing inaccuracy in performance. The contradiction was insoluble; the 'solution' which was eventually found merely intensified the composer's dilemma. By an iron logic, preoccupation with the object was transformed into preoccupation with the self, as in the cases of Stockhausen and, in a more subtle way. Cage: from Stockhausen's first four Klavierstücke (1953-54) to Aus den sieben Tagen (1968); from Cage's Music of Changes (1951-52) to his highly subjective dictum - 'Listen - you will hear music. Perform - you will make music.'[7] So the contemporary composer (and here we are talking about probably the two most influential living composers) abandons the object and seeks refuge and resolution in the subject (idealism, subjectivism, 'doing your own thing' and so on).

[15] In both Stockhausen and Cage there is a remarkable consistency between their writings and their music. The writings render verbally explicit the ideas expressed in the music. For example, Cage's atomistic world outlook clearly relates to his compositional method for the Music for Piano series composed between 1951 and 1964 (random, individual notes and random relationships). That these two composers have an ideological standpoint cannot be denied, though its interpretation is naturally a matter for debate.

[16] To some, my interpretation of Stockhausen's music and the metaphysical jargon in which he presents his ideas verbally may seem hardboiled and ungracious, but when the late Mao Tse-Tung described idealism and metaphysics as 'the easiest things in the world, because people can talk as much nonsense as they like without basing it on objectivity or having it tested against reality',[8] he hit the nail on the head. The banality of, say, Hymnen (1966-67) or Klavierstück IX (1954-61) (which Cardew rightly described as a 'weak, aesthetic version' of Young's X for Henry Flynt)[9] corroborates one's worst suspicions.

[17] I therefore cannot take the idea of 'communion with the supernatural' at its face value; Stockhausen invokes it, I suggest, precisely because communion with the real world is impossible for him.[10] Similarly 'a vehicle to discover their inner selves' is, on the contrary, a vehicle to intensify the audience's feelings of separation, isolation and alienation from their fellow human beings. 'Discover what they have forgotten about themselves' exemplifies the old romantic yearning for a paradise lost, and the reference to going 'through the eye of a needle' is similarly a regression, the dream of returning to the primitive state. And when Stockhausen refers to the 'spirit of the cosmos' as a source of knowledge and enlightenment, I suggest that we would be more likely to be able to determine the origin and context of many of his ideas if we were to investigate the spirit of the art market and in particular the characteristic 'star' system that forms an integral part of it.

[18] Cage's world outlook is quite explicit and there is no need to spell it out here. My point is that far from being an autonomous art, music expresses ideas about the world, and it is just those composers whose music embodies particular ideas in a convincing fashion who are taken up by society. Marx and Engels make clear the wider context in which this takes place:

Insofar, therefore, as [the ruling class] rule as a class and determine the extent and compass of an epoch, it is self-evident that they do this in its whole range, hence among other things rule also as thinkers, as producers of ideas, and regulate the production and distribution of the ideas of their age: thus their ideas are the ruling ideas of the epoch.[11]
[19] To discover other reasons for the propagation of the music of these composers, a note-by-note analysis may provide part of the answer but certainly not the whole truth; greater insights will be gained if we examine the effect of the music, its social role and its consequences. I do not believe in the neutrality of music. Neither did Beethoven, who expressed the wish that if social conditions were improved, his art should be used for the good of the poor. Nor did Schoenberg, who said 'I think [composers] are in the first instance fighters for their own musical ideas. The ideas of other composers are their enemies.'[12]

Individualism and the Political Factor

[20] The previous quote is a militantly individualistic statement. First of all, let us not confuse 'individualism' with 'individuality'. They are not interchangeable. There is a world of difference between 'individuality' (strongly marked individual character) and 'individualism' (self- centred conduct, feeling; egoism), and we can therefore distinguish between the 'individuality' of the Eroica Symphony, the inoffensive 'individualism' of Schubert's Winterreise and the extreme 'individualism', the solipsism of Stockhausen's Aus den sieben Tagen.

[21] On the Left the critique of 'individualism' is this: that one man's individualism is another man's de-individualisation. For example, an extremely individualistic score can lead to frustration and despair on the part of the would-be performer. And if audiences are bored or alienated it is often the individualism of much contemporary music that renders it unintelligible. But there is a political issue at stake here of fundamental performance. Ideologues of the Right (Christopher Booker, Paul Johnson, Hans Keller, Bernard Levin) have introduced a simplistic, individualistic/collectivist dualism. On this basis these gentlemen and their allies and masters in the media are laying siege to the collective ethos as part of an overall political strategy. The aim is to undermine and weaken the unity of purpose and the collective action which have been of necessity the modus vivendi of the majority. Keller, the musician, seems overwhelmed by a kind of panic or hysteria, with the inevitable Freudian overtones: he writes of '...the new left's commitment to violent collectivism, its regression to infantile depersonalisation and dehumanisation unnoticed by the victim . . . multiple regressions to group and gang behaviour under quasi-parental protection'.[13] What this outburst typifies is a class reflex to Left politics and in particular to Marxism, which E. P. Thompson described in The Observer last year in reply to an article by Conor Cruise O'Brien:

I find Dr. O'Brien's lampoons against undefined Marxists, his tabloid style, his roads to ruin and his abyss, the tell-tale signs of an on-coming grande peur. Historians have not invented the grande peur, this is a real event, a psycho-social class spasm of irrationality analogous to the displaced sense of 'threat' in the neurotic personality. When it comes it can claim many victims, but the first victim of its formless passions is always the reason.[14]
We can see clearly, too, how Keller's politics inform his judgements on music, and his book 1975 (1984 minus 9) provides many examples of the following variety: 'The metaphysical and/or psychological/operatic composer's utterances are of individual discoveries, whereas the Marxist, and quite especially the neo-Marxist, makes a collectivist statement for the purpose of propaganda.'[15] Perhaps, on reflection, the sheer intellectual crudity of this 'thought' embarrassed Keller, for in another passage he tries to free Nono and Shostakovich from the 'professed truth', the 'transpersonal dogma' of Marxism, and from the stupid masses: 'It follows ruthlessly that all Marxist music that does not go beyond its intentions (as Nono's or Henze's or, of course, Shostakovich's does) is music by the stupid for the collectively stupefied.'[16] Add Hanns Eisler to the group and Keller would probably spirit his Marxism away too: no easy task! After a recent performance of Eisler's chamber cantata On the death of a Comrade (1935), I reflected on its attitude towards the individual. Brecht's text is concerned with the individual and others not opposed or separated, but as a unity: 'To be together without fear, that's the start. We must stay together and must not allow ourselves to be separated...Truth and brotherhood shall replace the rule of lies.'[17] Brecht describes the death of an individual whose last thoughts embraced others. By contrast, Keller and other ideologues of the Right isolate and idealise the 'individual', who is separated from and opposed to 'others'. This dualism is precisely what characterises the relation of the contemporary composer and his audience.

The Relation of Music and Society

[22] In his paper on 'Music Historiography in Eastern Europe', Georg Knepler, an East German musicologist, made the following observation:

Neither the common chord nor the prohibition of parallel fifths can be directly deduced from the social conditions of the society in which they originated; nor can they be separated from that society and reduced, say, to the workings of eternal laws of nature.[18]
The relation of art to society is a formidable subject, but part of a letter Engels wrote in 1894 might serve as a useful starting point.

The further the particular sphere which we are investigating is removed from the economic sphere and approaches that of pure abstract ideology, the more we shall find it exhibiting accidents in its development, the more its curve will run in a zig-zag. But if you plot the average axis of the curve, you will find that this axis will run more and more nearly parallel to the axis of economic development the longer the period considered and the wider the field dealt with.[19]
What these two statements imply is that a highly complex network of psychological, cultural, ideological and economic phenomena has to be taken into account in dealing not only with the art in general of a particular period but also with the individual art work. For example, the notion of 'objective and subjective culture' is particularly relevant to present-day society where there is an apparent abundance of musics to enjoy. 'Objective and subjective culture' denotes what is objectively available at any given historical moment and to what extent social classes, groups and individuals make use of this availability.

Analysing Music

[23] The fact that music enjoys only a relative autonomy, that an anthropological category underpins all form and content, is anathema to the positivism of contemporary analysts who treat music as a self-contained, closed entity. The work is 'analysed' simply by showing the various harmonic, motivic and textural relationships within it. All the motivic material is derived from within the piece and the source is somewhere at the beginning. As befits a positivist analysis the source or 'basic theme' is regarded as 'given'; that is to say, it is left out of the analysis. There is rarely any attempt at a genetic investigation of the source material; the point of commencement, the 'zero situation' of a composition is ignored by the positivist analysts. But if, as Schoenberg claimed, the genius learns only from himself, then only the heavens can lie beyond the masterpiece and the lowly analyst finds himself analysing an immaculate conception.

[24] Suppose, however, we adopted the methods and the impartiality of ethnomusicology and abandoned our overblown and presumptuous theories of genius and 'universal music', which play no part in the history of folk music (or can it be that throughout the centuries the poor have produced no musical genius?); suppose we viewed the musical achievements of our own barbarous tribe as dispassionately as we do those of the Yoruba of West Africa, among whom works of art appear clearly as products of society rather than as personal creations. If such methods and approaches enabled us to describe the social function and the socio-psychological function of art music in Western society, they would already have answered questions of fundamental importance.

Listening to Music

[25] To most people music implies at least two levels of articulation, each of which is comprehended or simply thrown into relief by reference to the other. This referential process lies at the heart of our musical comprehension. The first level is found precisely in the hierarchical structure of socially evolved musical scales constituting something analogous to language. The elements of the second level - the choice or arrangement of sounds according to a given technique or style - must already be endowed with meaning. They must have been systematised at the first level so that there are a priori conditions of communication. The first level consists of real, if unconscious relations. The modernist composer, however, has abandoned the first level of articulation and attempts to operate on only one level. Thus there is no referential system as in modal and tonal music, or the music of all other known cultures. What is the effect of this on the listener? One strives to share in the music's impulse, to respond to the power of its internal logic. But in this music the impulse often appears arbitrary and the logic is that of a game. The harmony has no discernible structural function, as in tonal music, and the melodic elements are now being asked to play a more fundamental role to compensate for the loss of syntax. If the piece is to succeed, these elements must be invested with extraordinary significance, a superhuman feat which perhaps only Schoenberg has achieved with any consistency, and this probably because of the traumatic nature of his message.[20]

The Present and the Future

[26] What then are the tasks facing committed young musicians today? Eisler recounts a story of his encounter with young English composers in London in 1961 on the occasion .of a performance of his Deutsche Sinfonie (1934-47).[21] During his stay in England, Eisler met several prominent young English composers and listened to tapes of their music. The differences between the pieces seemed to him to be minimal; they were all basically on the 'doom and gloom' theme, sometimes made explicit through words. Tempos were largo, poco largo, molto largo and so on. When an andante passage came along Eisler was delighted. These were gifted young people with a real feeling for musical sound, but at one point he felt obliged to tell one young man that his music was so unremittingly sad he could hardly bear to hear any more. He asked him to go away and write an allegro, suggesting that with so much sadness his music was too one-sided. When the composer insisted that he was incapable of writing an allegro, Eisler told him to go for a walk and observe the world and that he would find an allegro. He probably did not intend his words to be taken literally but we can see what he was driving at. Unfortunately few of our composers today have heeded Eisler's advice. On the contrary, they wring their hands in despair, or worse still they create a fantasy world of game-like activity which provides a precarious retreat where they can hide not only from the real world but also from their real selves. I have heard some contemporary allegros, but the music has usually been silly and I do not think that is what Eisler had in mind. He once wrote:

A composer is not 'progressive' simply because he uses the twelve-note method. The content of his music must be progressive. This means that the composer, through his music, must address himself to the problems of contemporary society.[22]
The student, too, through his study of music, should address himself to those problems. I have already intimated the kind of musical study I believe would bear fruit. Investigate the content of music. How can the history, sociology, psychology and the analysis and aesthetics of music be made to ask each other more exact questions? Should not students spend less time and energy on analysing the note-to-note procedure of Maxwell Davies's Symphony and considerably more time on trying to understand why contemporary British culture needs and promotes certain composers, and why, for example, the performance of a new Symphony, unloved by millions, should warrant publicity on national television news? Form study groups and organise seminars. Review the various critiques of current and fashionable trends in contemporary music. Initiate a reassessment of serialism, for example, with reference to its proponents (Schoenberg, Leibowitz, Perle, Rufer, etc.) and to its critics (Bush, Cardew, Eisler, Hindemith, Lévi-Strauss, Marothy, etc.). Always know the object of criticism. Never degenerate into philistinism. Subject your ideas to the criterion of practice. A lot of talk about art is abstract and formalist. It is tempting to use abstractions to obscure the true nature of our musical activity and they form a kind of escape route from the real world. We can dream of cosmopolitan audiences, universal music and posterity, but these are question- begging concepts. For what audience are we performing? Whose needs does this music serve? For what kind of 'posterity' am I composing?

[27] Look for ways in which you can serve your local community with music. For example, there are plenty of old people's clubs you could contact. But never play down to people: talk about the music, create a congenial atmosphere and try to raise standards. If you have a political commitment to the Left, contact political societies at universities and trade union groups, and otter programmes containing some works with more explicit political content (Berio, Britten, Bush, Cardew, Eisler, Henze, Nono, Prokofiev, Rzewski, Shostakovich, Wolff) and initiate discussion. Above all, put your music to use.

[28] Finally, in the light of my previous comments, I guess it would not be hard to deduce my present attitude towards experimental music. My disenchantment began when it finally dawned on me that this music bore precious little relation to the real world. Primarily its relation was to other music to which it responded at best with wit, charm and irony (as in the work of Gavin Bryars, Howard Skempton and John White) or at worst with a shrug, a giggle or a raspberry.

[29] Bryars has correctly observed that much experimental music does not involve compositional argument. This lack of musical argument reflects the quietist philosophy which constitutes an important ideological component of experimental music. It presents a façade of neutrality, of disinterestedness, a 'take it or leave it' stance which is disarming. To attack it is like attacking a defenceless person, unless of course one considers its apparent neutrality a sham. In the 60s many composers of experimental music moved towards repetition and 'harmony', creating a haven for disenchanted musicians within the new flower culture, a rallying-point for drop-outs who required from music a more developed, more sophisticated aesthetic than pop music provided.

[30] Experimental music provides therapy; it has no other role because it is not developmental. It provides a certain content which is in demand, and in this sense it has cornered part of the contemporary music market. The rich and complex psychological states of previous music (of, say, late Beethoven) are ironed out, 'normalised', made fashionable to fit smugly with the anaesthetised demands of an average culture. The modern audience above all demands therapy and so extracts from a work that which may serve a therapeutic purpose. In the case of experimental music the reductive process has already been completed by the composer, the music is pre-packaged and the customer receives the prescribed form of satisfaction.

from:
http://www.experimentalmusic.co.uk/

2006-09-05T19:34:00.000+02:00

Biography
Zorn was born in New York City, and as a child played piano, guitar and flute. He studied at Webster College (now Webster University) in St. Louis, Missouri, where he discovered free jazz. Dropping out of college and moving to Manhattan, Zorn gave concerts in his small apartment, playing a variety of reeds, duck calls, tapes, etc. He eventually became a major participant in the fertile "Downtown" experimental music scene.
In the mid 1980s he signed to the Elektra-Nonesuch label. Since then, Zorn has been quite prolific, usually putting out several new records each year.
[edit]

Arts
His breakthrough recording was perhaps 1985's The Big Gundown: John Zorn Plays the Music of Ennio Morricone, wherein Zorn offered a number of often radical arrangements of Morricone's famed songs from various movies. The Big Gundown was endorsed by Morricone, and incorporated elements of traditional Japanese music, soul jazz, and other diverse musical genres.
Zorn owns the Tzadik record label and has worked with a large number of experimental musicians, particularly in improvised music. He is inspired by other artists and different musical styles. He has a special attraction to underground artists and musical styles that are extremely loud, wild, or creative. He is perhaps best known for his work with Masada, with Joey Baron (drums), Dave Douglas (trumpet), Greg Cohen (bass); Masada is an Ornette Coleman-influenced band playing compositions based on Jewish scales. The Masada songs are part of the songbook with several different arrangements. These include the Masada String Trio, Bar Kohkba, and Electric Masada. He has also played with Painkiller (a mix of grindcore and free jazz in which he is joined by Mick Harris of Napalm Death) and Naked City (an often aggressive mix of jazz, rock and thrash metal). He has also worked with musicians such as Bill Frisell, Gary Lucas, Wayne Horvitz, Derek Bailey, Cyro Baptista, Trevor Dunn, Mark Feldman, Fred Frith, Erik Friedlander, Keiji Haino, Bill Laswell, Arto Lindsay, Mike Patton, John Medeski, Ikue Mori, Robert Quine, Marc Ribot, Jamie Saft, Kenny Wolleson, and the Violent Femmes. He has written music for television and film, which has been collected in the ongoing Filmworks series of records on his Tzadik label. Some of these are jazz-based, others are classical.
Zorn has also written several "game pieces", in which performers are allowed to improvise while following certain structural rules. These works are in the main named after sports, and include Pool, Archery, and Lacrosse, as well as Cobra. He is also often noted for his postmodern, sometimes extreme, use of formal blocks, units which he combines and contrasts in various ways. Zorn discusses his history and the musical philosophy behind his early works in the book Talking Music by William Duckworth.
Most recently, he has become the principal force behind the opening of The Stone, an avant-garde performance space in New York's Alphabet City which supports itself solely on donations, giving all door revenues directly to the performers. Zorn holds the title of artistic director.
Zorn has lived and worked extensively in Japan and performs and records under the name Dekoboko Hajime, collaborating with and producing for numerous artists including Merzbow, Otomo Yoshihide, Melt Banana and of frequent collaborator Yamatsuka Eye. Many of these artists have now released albums on Tzadik and some regularly travel to New York where Zorn is based.

Eric Satie and the Importance of listening

2006-09-05T19:18:00.000+02:00

Satie's first Rosicrucian work is probably the slow little march Premier pens饠Rose+Croix, posthumously published and entitled by Robert Caby. It is presumably also identical to the Marche antique pour la Rose+Croix that is said to have been performed at a Rosicrucian soir饬 composed by one Bihn Grallon, a character in P鬡dan's Le Panth饬 a poor cabaret pianist much like Satie. Many of the stylistic elements that were to be characteristic of Satie's music in the first half of the 1890s appear in this piece in a concentrated form. This music came to be labelled, all-embracingly if somewhat inaccurately, as his Rosicrucian music: a slow, solemn tempo, soft tone (mainly piano and pianissimo), a sad and mysterious atmosphere, a systematic structure of repetition and transposition of smaller parts as a guiding principle, no time or bar-lines and triads constantly circling the tritone (in the Middle Ages known as the diabolus in musica but in this case probably acting as a symbol for the Trinity and the Rosicrucians: in this piece B minor is set aginst F major, E minor against B flat major, etc).

1st

2006-08-30T19:08:00.000+02:00

recovering.information.

john zorn's 'cobra'. and peeping tom.how many years to understand their meaning?

OPEN YOUR HANDS.EMBRACE.

have to go now.see you soon.