ihatemusic

I still have to get round to actually listening to this, but I ABSOLUTELY LOVE the idea of it - well thought and done!

I like it too and have thought about doing something similar for years, but in a way I think it reinforces the idea of a "star system," which (at least from my very peripheral vantage point) is kinda silly in an area of music with next to no audience, in which we're all the underdogs.

I'm also wary of the possible "gotcha" factor, and I'm conflicted about the usefulness of ever revealing who made what. It sorta reminds me of my recent policy of not identifying instrumentation: I originally did it because I wanted to discourage listeners form trying to figure out who played which parts on a record, but I can't help suspecting it makes that approach an even more seductive puzzle (I see this in a lot of record reviews that try hard to tease out people's parts, and are often wrong ass wrong).

On edit: This sounds more critical than I intend--the thoughts above are all inchoate at best and the product of much ambivalence--I don't have conclusive opinions, just a bunch of muddled hunches. And the remains of a pastrami sandwich, which I'm saving for later.

Yes, I agree that it’s bananas having star systems in areas of music as marginal as this, but they undoubtedly exist (and IHM is one of the spaces where stardom is constructed and negotiated); the sheer silliness of it doesn’t make it go away. [And I should make clear that I don’t consider myself to be somehow outside of such things; I’m uncomfortably aware that – in spite of my unreconstructed egalitarian principles – I sometimes find myself responding to musicians and recordings in very different ways depending on how much in awe I am of the people concerned] Clearly my intention is that The Anonymous Zone might help dent or subvert the operation of such star systems, but if in a year’s time someone can convince me that The Zone is in fact somehow reinforcing them, then I’ll shut it down.

And yes, I too am wary of the ‘gotcha’ factor, so in the blurbs and publicity I’m trying to play down that aspect in favour of people actually just listening to the music instead. [Have you heard any of the pieces yet, Joe? While I’m sure that some won’t be to your taste, I’m equally sure that most people at IHM can find at least a couple of things in there that they’ll like]

As to the idea of maintaining anonymity for ever, I considered that as well, but decided that because part of the motivation behind The Zone is to get more attention for the music of various unknown or marginal people whose music I like, then the only way that can happen is if I ultimately do reveal who is behind the pieces.

But it’s all a bit experimental, and I shall doubtless adapt the way it operates as I see how people engage with it (or don’t).

simon reynell wrote:Yes, I agree that it’s bananas having star systems in areas of music as marginal as this, but they undoubtedly exist (and IHM is one of the spaces where stardom is constructed and negotiated)

I'm not entirely sure that the kind of preferences and evaluations people make on a scale this small can be considered a star system. Without such consideration of proportionality and scale I'm not sure what remains of the designation, in fact. (again, haven't thought this all the way through--if thinking out loud is cluttering up your thread we can do this by PM...)

simon reynell wrote:Have you heard any of the pieces yet, Joe?

Not yet, but I will for sure.

faster wrote:I'm not entirely sure that the kind of preferences and evaluations people make on a scale this small can be considered a star system.

Yes they can. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_syste ... mmaking%29
I think it's a very good idea. All we need now are anonymous reviews to go with it (are you intending to post people's comments on the music anonymously, Simon? I see you've already linked to a couple of star reviewers )

Dan Warburton wrote:

faster wrote:I'm not entirely sure that the kind of preferences and evaluations people make on a scale this small can be considered a star system.

Yes they can. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_syste ... mmaking%29

I fail to grasp your point--if hollywood films and their budget, reach, and cultural impact (yes, even back in the 1920s) are in any way proportional to the scale and impact of improvised music today, it's news to me. News by which I will remain unconvinced.

I think there are a few salient phrases in there that are relevant to what we're talking about here (in the sense that any area of cultural activity attracts its own dedicated following, it's inevitable that certain personalities assume more importance than others, be they performers or crrrrritics) but let's not labour the point. Let me listen to some of the stuff (three down, many more to go) and report back.

simon reynell wrote:This idea of being able to "See" objectively what it is before one, without the contamination of prejudice."

See, I'm pretty shocked anyone alive now would even consider that as a possibility in any situation ever.

that's Keith who said that though, isn't it?

anonymous wrote:Resisting identification seems almost impossible for some...

Charon wrote:that's Keith who said that though, isn't it?

faster wrote:

simon reynell wrote:This idea of being able to "See" objectively what it is before one, without the contamination of prejudice."

See, I'm pretty shocked anyone alive now would even consider that as a possibility in any situation ever.

Philosophically I agree with you, Joe (though I'm surprised at your shock as there's billions of people who believe that perception can give unmediated access to an objective reality; that's still the common sense of the age). But the point they were making, and for me what's interesting in many of the responses I've had up to now, is how 'difficult' some people find it when confronted with what Richard calls "raw sounds, disembodied from personalities or history". I think I underestimated how challenging this would be (not for everyone, I'm sure, but more than I expected). While a lot of people (as with Ard above) find the idea of The Zone immediately appealing and quite liberating, the actual experience of listening to the 'raw sounds' does seem to disrupt and disturb some people's listening habits - which is perhaps a good thing, but I don't know.

faster wrote:

anonymous wrote:Resisting identification seems almost impossible for some...

Charon wrote:that's Keith who said that though, isn't it?

exactly !

simon reynell wrote:the actual experience of listening to the 'raw sounds' does seem to disrupt and disturb some people's listening habits - which is perhaps a good thing, but I don't know.

Well, sure can't hurt nobody.

I've listened to seven of them so far, and - perversely, perhaps - find the music less interesting for not knowing anything about who did it or where it came from. Unlike Richard (Barrett), I find comparing things absolutely essential (if not the act of criticism is relegated to mere description, which is my principal gripe with Richard Pinnell's reviews). My overriding impression of what I've heard so far is one of rather bland uniformity (the word "orthodoxy" comes to mind, heh heh), and unlike Richard, I'm not tempted to guess who might be responsible for it. Of course, that's partially my own jaundiced listener fatigue, but I'm still waiting for a real surprise, a new direction for this music to follow.

Thanks for listening, Dan. Interesting that you find an 'orthodoxy' in the pieces. My intention was to cast the net wider than I would for CD releases, and include some pieces that I felt were done well but aren't quite my usual thing. Most of the pieces are certainly very different from what I'm currently working on for CD release (which you'll also dislike, by the way!)

Anyway, Brian Olewnick kindly spent his 4th July holiday listening through and then reviewing all the pieces for his blog Just Outside: http://olewnick.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/ ... mally.html
Interestingly his responses are very different from Richard's for several of the pieces. Thanks, Brian.

It's not a question of disliking - what's there to dislike? it's all superbly recorded and, as far as I can tell, executed with great skill and dedication - as much as not being.. surprised. The fault, dear Brutus, in not in the stars but in myself. The basic idea behind the project though, forcing listeners to confront the music alone without preconceptions and prior knowledge, is very interesting and I'm delighted you posted the pieces. Intriguing to compare the responses of Messrs Olewnick and Pinnell too - I wonder what they'd write if they listened to each of the tracks five, ten or twenty times. I doubt they ever would - I know I couldn't, if only for lack of time, but I suspect the music wouldn't stand up to repeated listening in the way that the Tsunoda Pisaro does. Anyway, a similar move in the art world would be appreciated - perhaps people would realise what a lousy, second-rate artist Basquiat (to pick an example off the top of my head) was.

how can these be considered "raw sounds"?
They are compositions or improvisations similar to the music Simon produces.

or "disembodied from personalities or history"?
well, I said it above, these sounds have not been released on Giorgio Moroder's site, but on Simon's. So there is both a personality and a history.
But even if I had found the tracks as "eai-untitled.mp3" on slsk, it's the music and the inheritance of what has come before that counts, not so much the name of the musician.

I do agree with some of the points Jesse makes with respect to the bias memory imposes on our listening habits (and not only), but, (as I posted on fakebook) I don't quite get the concept of the exercise yet. Maybe it's hard after "consuming" on artists for so many years. Moreover, for me the early magic of Jazz was partly because of those Blue Note and Impulse covers, the writing the photos.
I feel it's more photos, more context, more getting to know the players, that's needed. Not less.

@dan - de gustibus non est disputandum and all, but if i ever needed a sign that you've gone completely daft, it would be your assessment of basquiat as lousy and second-rate.

anonymous zone text resumed!

Excuse the length, but I wanted to respond to Yannis/Bedouin’s post, and it led to some extended thinking-aloud.

1) ‘rawness’ / innocence
Yannis makes the valid point that the pieces on The Zone aren’t ‘raw’ if you take raw to mean without any context. No music occurs without context, and as the pieces on The Anonymous Zone appear on the Another Timbre website, they are linked to a particular history and to certain styles of music. So, although I’ve included a slightly wider range of music than you get in the CD catalogue, you know that none of the pieces is going to be Dixieland, heavy metal or Pibroch. I don’t see this as a problem. In fact I think that if labels have any function in the 21st century (and I sometimes wonder…), then it’s as a filtering system offering signposts to people who are into a particular genre but are faced with a bewildering ocean of music available on tap thanks to the internet. No single label is a perfect match for any individual listener, but over the past 5 years AT has built up an audience who know the rough area in which it operates. But aside from that broad generic context, I think the pieces on The Zone are as ‘raw’ as is practically possible.
It was Richard Pinnell who used the word ‘raw’, and he found it really draining to review the pieces. I suspect this is partly because when he came to them, not only was there none of the usual contextual information (names, instrumentation, recording details, cover design etc), but at that stage no-one else had commented on any of the pieces, so none of them had accrued even the slightest mass of critical history or reputation. The pieces at this point had a near-utopian innocence; they were available for ‘just listening’, as the musician I quoted put it above [yes, in the context of the AT website and the broad generic expectation that comes with that, but innocence is never absolute, is always already contaminated].
Now that Richard and Brian have reviewed them, the pieces have in a small way begun to accumulate a certain critical history and weight of expectation. I realise now that I hadn’t thought this through enough when I set up the site, because now, for anyone who’s read the reviews that are linked from the Anonymous Zone page, then, say, piece #M is no longer just a bald title, but is a trumpet solo from a concert that’s a bit Axel Dorner-ish and something which both Brian and Richard liked. Names, styles, approvals and assumed contexts have become attached to it and the sense of near-utopian innocence has been compromised.
This makes me realise that I should remove the ‘comments board’ from the AZ page, so that it becomes an option that people can link to and read if they want, but that for those who want their listening to be as raw / innocent as possible, then the AZ page itself should present the pieces without any comments or reviews adjacent, as near-utopian as can be.

2) context
Yannis says “I feel it’s more context that’s needed, not less”, and I agree with this. I think that context is important, especially in our area of music. So, for example, whenever a CD is released on AT, I conduct an interview on the label website with one of the musicians involved to try to explain something of the context of the music’s existence. And with the pieces on The Zone, the contextual information is not being ignored or denied, but deferred. When the identities of the musicians behind the pieces are revealed, there will be biographical information about the musicians, a text about the particular piece and how it was conceived and assembled, a discography and links to the musicians’ websites. So I’m not against contextualising music at all. But The Anonymous Zone is doing something else first, which brings me to…

3) the concept
I’m surprised that you ‘don’t get the concept’, Yannis, because I’ve had so many enthusiastic responses that it’s evident that most people ‘get it’ immediately – and several, like Joe above, have said that they’ve thought of doing something similar themselves (so I can make no claims to originality). I know it’s not lack of intelligence or malice on your part, so I’ll try to spell it out – and apologies if much of this is stating the obvious:

The Anonymous Zone comes in part from a reluctant acceptance that CDs are becoming obsolete. This is clearly an issue for a CD-based label like AT, so I spent some time last year trying to think of ways in which I could continue to promote music that I liked in a future in which CDs will play little or no part, and The Zone was one of the ideas I came up with. It uses the (few) advantages of digital distribution – no manufacturing costs, not being tied to ‘CD-length’ – and is, I think, more effective than standard downloads because it has an element of intrigue which attracts more interest than the pieces would if they’d just been yet more music online (and this is especially true for the unknown / marginal figures whose music is represented, which is important for me, as you’ll see below).
I also think that the sense of (near-)utopianism mentioned above is attractive to many people; the idea that you’re about as close as you can be to hearing music unencumbered by the baggage of expectation, reputation and preconception. Why is this (unattainable) ideal of pristine, innocent listening appealing? I think part of this is that to an extent we’re now drowning in contextual information about the music we listen to. You wrote of the pleasure you used to take in consuming every element of Blue Note and Impulse LPs – music, cover, sleevenotes – and I used to do the same with my records (though they weren’t jazz!), squeezing every drop of information I could from the liner notes so that I could get a better handle on the music I was discovering. But now, courtesy of google, we’re in a very different situation, with a surplus of information about even the most obscure music at our fingertips (as well as most of the music itself, of course). This is no bad thing – and as I said, I myself add to this contextual baggage at the AT site – but there’s a part of me that sometimes longs to be free of all that chatter, to lie down in the privacy of my bedroom and ‘just listen’ to the music (Utopia again).
Perhaps more controversially, I feel that the ideal of innocent listening is also attractive because it (appears to) enable us to temporarily sidestep what Jesse calls “the hierarchies of name, style and status”, those cultural pecking-orders, the name-checking and snobbery that inevitably grow up around any music scene, however small (and yes, I do it too, even though I don’t like it in principle). So Tilbury, Cage, Rowe and Pisaro (to name just four, most of whose music I like very much) are praised to the skies and so become stars in our little firmament, and are treated with a deference, attention and respect which can easily slide into an obsequious and uncritcal fawning (and yes, I do it too, even though I don’t like it in principle). At concerts, workshops and so on, I see in myself and in others the same sort of cringeworthy behaviour patterns that I observe in my day job when working with TV celebrities engaging with the public. And that gives rise to a sense of injustice, of democratic deficit, a quiet rage on behalf of those whose music I also love but who aren’t stars. Would anything done by Tilbury not give rise to a chorus of adulatory comments about the magic of his touch? What if he cocked up – would we be too starstruck to notice, or too scared to criticise? And what if somebody else, who also plays piano with a lovely delicate touch, but is completely unknown, releases a recording? Will we even hear it (unlikely), and if we do, will we give it the time and attention that we’d give to a new disc by John (also unlikely)? That’s inevitable, of course, but is it right?
So that’s the other motivation for The Anonymous Zone, and the other reason, I think, why so many people are attracted to the ideal of uncontaminated listening. OK, it’s utopian and is never totally achievable, but it just feels good to momentarily kick aside all those “hierarchies of name, style and status” that habitually entwine our listening. Of course if The Zone does have any effect in disturbing or loosening those hierarchies, it will only be temporary, and may itself lead to the emergence of new constellations that will in turn become rigid and restrictive. Such patterns and processes are inevitable in all musical scenes, but that doesn’t mean that the anti-hierarchical impulse is not worth fostering.

Perhaps you disagree, Yannis, or perhaps you still simply don’t ‘get it’ because you’re less impressionable than me, and can genuinely put aside knowledge of authorship and ignore all that cultural baggage when you listen to music. If so, I really admire you, but I think you’re a rarity.

simon reynell wrote:erhaps more controversially, I feel that the ideal of innocent listening is also attractive because it (appears to) enable us to temporarily sidestep what Jesse calls “the hierarchies of name, style and status”, those cultural pecking-orders, the name-checking and snobbery that inevitably grow up around any music scene, however small (and yes, I do it too, even though I don’t like it in principle). So Tilbury, Cage, Rowe and Pisaro (to name just four, most of whose music I like very much) are praised to the skies and so become stars in our little firmament, and are treated with a deference, attention and respect which can easily slide into an obsequious and uncritcal fawning (and yes, I do it too, even though I don’t like it in principle).

I have to say, I almost never see this "obsequious and uncritical fawning" in this area. first of all, everyone has their own personal pantheons, which sometimes overlap, but which generally aren't static. for instance, of the people you mention above, I'd personally be hardpressed to recommend more than a handful of Cage releases wholeheartedly, amongst the hundreds that are out there. even Brian O, who is probably the most public advocate of our area's equivalent of Sarris' 'auteur theory', was critical of the Pisaro and Tilbury pieces on the recent Fukushima comp. I've been critical of some of the releases/concerts of all of my favorite musicians (Rowe, Sachiko, Toshi, etc.), and while I really hate to name names in this context, Günter Müller was one of my very favorite musicians for quite some time, and I haven't connected with his current work for years now.

Would anything done by Tilbury not give rise to a chorus of adulatory comments about the magic of his touch? What if he cocked up – would we be too starstruck to notice, or too scared to criticise?

I think you're confusing touch and content here, he's had many releases where people have been less than moved by the content (recent AMM recordings, the one with Polwechsel, etc.). I don't ever recall him having less than a gorgeous touch, though, have you? it's certainly possible.

And what if somebody else, who also plays piano with a lovely delicate touch, but is completely unknown, releases a recording? Will we even hear it (unlikely), and if we do, will we give it the time and attention that we’d give to a new disc by John (also unlikely)? That’s inevitable, of course, but is it right?

you mean someone like Anett Nemeth?

that doesn’t mean that the anti-hierarchical impulse is not worth fostering.

I strongly disagree (no surprise). I think it's insulting to musicians with any kind of track record and to listeners who have spent time in this area.

I also think that this area is one of the easiest in the history of mankind to be able to break through to the top level of acclaim (whatever little that entails). I remember listening to the Dave Barnes/Graham Stephenson duo CD-R here with Keith, A/Bing it with the contemporaneous Dorner/Nakamura, and both of us agreeing that the former was much stronger even though the latter was by two of our favorite musicians (and similar instrumentation). people like the aforementioned Nemeth, Mitsuhiro Yoshimura, Will Guthrie, Seymour Wright, Stephane Rives, Arek Gulbenkoglu, all have come out of relative obscurity and made highly acclaimed records very quickly.

anyway, if you want to avoid hierarchies, the way to do it IMO isn't by listening to music curated by someone with a well-known aesthetic. a better way to do it might be to load up your iTunes with hundreds or thousands of hours of music, some that you've heard quite a bit, some that you've only heard once or twice, some that you don't know at all, and put it on random play.

every time you choose what music to play, you're feeding your own personal hierarchy, not that I personally think that's a bad thing as long as you're openminded and critical about what you're hearing, which, in my experience, most people in this area generally are.

P.S. I also think a lot of the criticism of hierarchy in this area can be boiled down to "why don't more people agree with my personal hierarchy?".