150 People In The World: the Wire magazine

[jon abbey]

i'd rather just check something out that sit through turgid descriptions that make, i don't know. . . nmperign and english sound exactly the same. "hisses, crackles, and whooshes tell us that these instruments *aren't* being played as their makers intended. the players build up a focused and steely layering of texture, preferring amm's 'laminal' approach to the give-and-take of older improv forms."

that seems to be like 90% of the improv reviews in both the wire and STN.

-jesse

ha ha, dead on.

[Dan Warburton]

.

[jkudler]

NB: i'm going to take this up in the other thread.. . .

-j.

[Jared McKinley]

i'd rather just check something out that sit through turgid descriptions that make, i don't know. . . nmperign and english sound exactly the same. "hisses, crackles, and whooshes tell us that these instruments *aren't* being played as their makers intended. the players build up a focused and steely layering of texture, preferring amm's 'laminal' approach to the give-and-take of older improv forms."

that seems to be like 90% of the improv reviews in both the wire and STN.

-jesse

ha ha, dead on.

No it's not dead on, it's a crass generalisation. 90%? Name names, name issues, add up the reviews, let's do the math.
And while you're doing that, you write a paragraph explaining / describing the difference in sound between English and nmperign. Remember you've got 250 words to cover a whole disc, including setting it in the context of its creators' output, giving basic info about recording dates and places where appropriate, background on the musicians if they're not household names (most aren't), description of music and where necessary, packaging, track titles, etc, and finally some sort of value judgement. Oh, and remember you're writing the review to be read by people who know probably next to nothing of the genre. Let's see you do it without whooshes, crackles and hisses.
It takes me about four hours - exclusive of time spent listening to the disc - to write a Wire review. How long did it take you to write that last post?

I tend to agree with Jon, et al. But I am not sure if that is because the Wire is a bad zine, or because there is a more general problem with EAI criticism. Most music criticism was built around a music that follows some sort of classic musical rules: even avant jazz or lots of 20th century composers salvage some sort of something from "music" as most people know it: some sort of melody line, some sort of chordal rule, some sense of rhythm, something. EAI is really one of the first musics that totally leaves all of that behind. It seems as if it has tried to get as far away from music as it can to see what will result. I thought this problem was brought up well by you in PT. But in general any critic of EAI has to establish new rules by which to describe the music. Because there IS something there more than "that is a cool sound". There are moods. There are general impressions the album leaves. But the terminology we all have to describe this stuff is really insufficient because it was all developed around music with musical rules we could latch on to. We could talk about tonality. We could talk about rhythm. We could talk about counterpoint.

But that is why I love this stuff so much. Because it is really interesting, at least to me. It is a developing art, even if only 150 people really care (I suspect that there are a lot more than that). It is exciting that an art can entertain us, but we struggle so much as to what we enjoy so much about it. It brings up aesthetic values that, at least in music we lack the language for at this point.

I have always thought music was far behind the visual arts. The visual arts left literal representational techniques with a lot less inertia. That is not to say that many people still don't get why Rothko is cool. But that revolution in art happened and passed a long time ago. Even people who dislike that stuff begrudgingly agree that it is art-there is not the resistance to that sort of art that there is to EAI.

But, as I have said many times before, music seems to be a lot more of a nostalgic art than the visual arts. You don't generally take a Rothko home with you (maybe a reprint), but you DO own music recordings. People are very possessive, defensive about their music. And that is why to this day Schoenberg is still a controversy. The world of music has resisted change every step of the way. It probably doesn't help that music has always been very closely associated with religion.

That is my take on this subject anyway. I prefer reading PT or Olewnick's blog, or just scan the pages here. But I find most writing on EAI to be totally difficult. I myself have tried and failed to write convincingly about the stuff. But I find that failure very interesting.

[yonhosago]

What's EAI?

[Charon]

what makes a person qualify as one of the 150?

[negative potential]

I have always thought music was far behind the visual arts. The visual arts left literal representational techniques with a lot less inertia. That is not to say that many people still don't get why Rothko is cool. But that revolution in art happened and passed a long time ago. Even people who dislike that stuff begrudgingly agree that it is art-there is not the resistance to that sort of art that there is to EAI.

But as has been pointed out here before, music has always been "abstract". It's not a representational art like painting used to be. It deals in pure sound.

I get and agree with your point about some contemporary musics existing outside of formal notation systems, but it can be done without the painting comparison. It obscures more than it really explains, as seen by your falling into teleological assumptions (music being "behind" the visual arts, as if they are both following some pre-arranged linear itinerary).

There is an interesting book in German, Eske Bockelmann's _Im Takt des Geldes_ (roughly, "In Money-Time"), which makes the argument that time-meter in music, and the ability to listen in time-meter, emerges simultaneously with the increasing quantification and rationalization of society in the late middle-ages/early modern period. If anything, the argument could be made that musical notation is something like a historical abnormality, a brief exception in world history to how people usually make and experience music. When making these teleological arguments about the arts that take representational painting or musical notation as a normative point of reference, there is the tacit assumption that Western European culture and society are the rule, rather than a global and historical exception.

You don't generally take a Rothko home with you (maybe a reprint), but you DO own music recordings.

But I don't own the actual moment in time-space when the sounds emerged. Recordings, like fine art prints, are also reproductions. Unlike fine art prints, perhaps, a recording can be an aim in itself, not merely a document of an original, but it is still recorded sound.

[joeperucki]

what makes a person qualify as one of the 150?

Those who "still care".

[faster]

Fixed:

What's mustache ride?

[yonhosago]

Fixed:

What's mustache ride?

You are such a creep.

[undo]

Fixed:

What's mustache ride?

you know, it's the leering face of brian peppers that really makes this one...
(go ohio!)

[jpeatt]

what makes a person qualify as one of the 150?

We're going to have T-shirts.

[mudd]

i'm pretty tired of seeing that picture.

m

[RFKorp]

i'm pretty tired of seeing that picture.

m

likewise. How many more posts until the next page?

[mudd]

oh i dunno. 150?

m

[Charon]

what makes a person qualify as one of the 150?

Those who "still care".

i guess this comes back to the "did people stop caring, or was it always like this?" thing....


i guess we could do some sort of poll "do you still care?"

[jon abbey]

right, because throwaway lines in capsule reviews should be deeply analyzed for weeks.

[will]

right, because throwaway lines in capsule reviews should be deeply analyzed for weeks.

Especially because it didn't hit a nerve or anything.
Reviewer: "Hey people who like unpopular things, the things you like are unpopular"
150 people: "HOW DARE HE ARRRRRGHHH"

[jon abbey]

it didn't really. the tone is annoying, but if Dan didn't "put the cat among the pigeons" as he likes to do, no one here would have said a thing.

[Charon]

hit a nerve? just set some thinking going is all....... unlikely that it will come to anything, though

if there are only 150, there are only 150, so what? not like we're all going to start doorknocking to spread the good news or anything I guess