can Jason Lescalleet change the world?

[anasara]

...

http://www.see-this-sound.at/works/196

So is Morris a 'musician' a 'sculptor', 'painter', 'carpenter' or artist?

fwiw: morris most definitely considered himself a sculptor (or at least identified as such, particularly after his work with the green gallery and 'primary structures' exhibition). i'm sure you're aware of the 'notes on sculpture' essays... and of course this was in part an act of legitimation (i.e., why is plywood worth looking at and how does steam function aesthetically?). similarly, many of the earliest experiments in non-musical (read: post-Cagean) sound in the visual arts identified with sculpture. otherwise how could they be coherent in traditions of art history? morris' box is a great example of this, as are works by michael asher and max neuhaus and even, i'd say, certain aspects of la monte young.

this might be tangential to the thread's proposed topic, but it illustrates the difficulty in assessing 'musical borders'... despite broader trends of 'de-materialization' (e.g., lippard) - and, later, what krauss refers to as 'expanded' - sound in the 1960s and 1970s seems to have, in a sense, constructed its own borders (even if non-musical). i think what you and mynameissally are trying to get at is whether or not there is an 'expanded field' of sound and what would that look like. kim-cohen suggests 'extended text', cox 'sonic materialism', among others.

back to morris, the same year as 'box with the sound of its own making' he published a text piece titled 'blank form':

"blank form is like life, essentially empty, allowing plenty of room for disquisitions on its nature and mocking each in its turn."

james meyer says: 'the purging of content from [frank] stella's work is an affirmation of the medium. the blankness espoused by morris is an absurd blankness, a disruption of any certainties; it is the emptiness of cage which, like (but not exactly like) life, mocks any attempt to explain it."

so maybe it's just a matter of acknowledging borders but realizing the futility? certainly bergson didn't advocate disavowing mathematics entirely.

anyway, i don't know why we've gone from eai to postwar aesthetics - as jon mentions, at times forty or fifty years back - but it seems to be a common move in these discussions.

But that’s a good clear article, Ansara, thanks for posting that, though I think I remain slightly sceptical.

yeah, i think he's onto something (and i've probably internalized a bit too much of it myself) but i don't agree that we have to strip representation entirely... otherwise, where is there room for social concerns? politics? ethics?

but i guess that's the big question?

[faster]

Couple quick things: I've long thought that Mattin (& now--apparently, hard to tell, still--jliat) are basically romantics, their Platonic ideals casting an ignoble shadow on all of our scrabblings and failures down here in the cave as they cling to relentlessly teleological (Oedipal?) demands on history.

I know the real work of trying to find a small plot of new musical land, reaching to make some sense of other people's attempts at their own efforts to do the same, and communicating with people from completely different backgrounds and with drastically different points of view is messy, leaky, fraught with misunderstanding, more dependent on triangulation than accuracy, but it's what we have, and holding ourselves as somehow outside and above the discourse is almost surely self-deception.

There's also something fundamentally uncharitable about assuming that when someone says they want pleasure or aesthetic enjoyment they really just mean they want low or mindless entertainment or some kind of conservative reinforcement of their existing preferences and cozy worldviews. Aesthetics, enjoyment, and pleasure are tremendously complex and varied, by no means limited to something mindless or unexamined, and they can absolutely include things like criticism, theory, assumption-questioning, etc.

[Jason Brogan]

deleted

[anasara]

Back to the initial proposed topic of the thread, I think that a reason for which many find Mattin to be frustrating or tiresome, among others past and present, is that much of what has been done with regard to music was done decades ago with regard to the visual arts (cf. Lippard and Krauss).

personally i think the problem is their isolation from one another, as if engagements with sound weren't important (if not central) to the paradigms that lippard and krauss discussed... its just that the non-musical rhetoric precluded any association with music as such. or, vice versa, that issues of presence, spectatorship, and even materiality, are extrinsic to musical practice as well.


but i also think it's suspect to genuinely compare someone like robert morris (or _fill in the blank_ ) and mattin as partaking in the same (or even similar) understanding of politics. i referenced 'notes on sculpture' earlier... toward the end of the series he begins to realize the imposing nature of his boxes (i.e., their 'authority' and 'power' over the viewer) and started filling galleries with packing peanuts instead. i don't think mattin would really care to shy away from confrontation.

[RJMyato]

I ppretty much forgot this thread existed but in light of the past six pages i recommend the dude in the OP just start avoiding old people who think they're "not ideological," listen to EAI records for inspiration on the side, and start attending grimy house shows instead of "concerts"

[jliat]

I wrote quite a long reply – but it did seem very self-pretentious. And its difficult with the time lag to give individual replies to those posting from the USA. In reply to Hayao Yamaneko – I hope to have a paper in the next edition of Tacet – "Two Experiments" soon? And I'm aware of the naivety of the ideas of art in 'Art after philosophy'…

And thanks for the pdf links –

[Hayao Yamaneko]

Slightly regret the tone of my post above, but not the content. Simon makes a similar point in a better way - it's the slightly messianic quality that's the problem, not the idea that any of this is worth exploring. Actually in the context of this area of thought being discussed on IHM I think all the people arguing the Mattin/Brassier/etc axis here are going about it pretty well.

This is a really interesting thought:

i think what you and mynameissally are trying to get at is whether or not there is an 'expanded field' of sound and what would that look like. kim-cohen suggests 'extended text', cox 'sonic materialism', among others.

To take this into areas I imagine might get short shrift in spec-realist circles (I might be wrong) I wonder to what degree certain pop music fulfils the extended text idea - the complete weddedness of sound into culture you get there - where certain sound surfaces become signifiers and become tangled with projected personality and the rest of that mythology. And in another direction, Xenakis, where there's an interesting relationship between a really quite empirical and rigorous investigation of sonic-materialism (critique of fourier/dodecaphony), elements of mathematical idealism, a kind of hermeneutics of technology etc. etc.?

Cheers for the Chris Cox link.

I think a lot of my nervousness about a lot of these ideas is that there's a lot in this

I know the real work of trying to find a small plot of new musical land, reaching to make some sense of other people's attempts at their own efforts to do the same, and communicating with people from completely different backgrounds and with drastically different points of view is messy, leaky, fraught with misunderstanding, more dependent on triangulation than accuracy, but it's what we have, and holding ourselves as somehow outside and above the discourse is almost surely self-deception

So while I'm naturally inclined to theorybitching about this kind of thing, (and actually spent a long time with that as my main focus) I guess now I can only ever trust that stuff as a kind of musical warm-up exercise. At some point you get down to making something, and in that process some kind of (to borrow an image from a weird left turn earlier in this thread) transubstantiation of those ideas has to happen.

Shame Jason deleted his comments. I thought there were some interesting things there.

Cheers Jiliat

[jliat]

Well one thing from the Arche Fossil and Physics in Meillassoux et al. Is that "music" as *sound* is a very very insignificant phenomenon. Most of the planet is water, and vibrations in air within the known universe in both time and space is near enough to zero to be regarded as such – hence my interest in Noise. Noise as signal without data appears unlike music to be the predominant reality in a (Meillassoux) contingent universe.

Some notes on a presentation (given at Kent University last year )- around this idea here-

http://www.jliat.com/txts/NoiseVsCulture.pdf

[Hayao Yamaneko]

Cheers for the link.
Not sure what point you're responding to with this?

Well one thing from the Arche Fossil and Physics in Meillassoux et al. Is that "music" as *sound* is a very very insignificant phenomenon. Most of the planet is water, and vibrations in air within the known universe in both time and space is near enough to zero to be regarded as such – hence my interest in Noise. Noise as signal without data appears unlike music to be the predominant reality in a (Meillassoux) contingent universe.

And one point to complicate your interest in noise. Very little (possibly no) *interesting* noise is signal without data. The various statistically flat and normalised sources of noise - white/pink/etc. noise is not interesting. It becomes interesting when pattern/organisation (ie information) of some kind emerges in it or is applied to it. You could even (and quite easily with modern analysis software) do the maths to demonstrate this. That argument risks another kind of essentialism that disregards experience.

[jliat]

Well this is maybe off topic. But I agree – the very reason that noise is not interesting points towards its "reality". The "real" is not interesting. What is interesting is the act of correlation between the subject and the object. Audience / Musician.

Signification is interesting – but the world is not significant. To think otherwise is to re introduce some religiosity, some mysticism. Musical performance enact a signification – which is therefore essential religious. That note – that performance has a significance. Yet the universe – I'd argue is insignificant.

Humanity seems to have taken the useful tool of signification – and then misplaced it by assuming that the universe must therefore have a meaning and a purpose- and their life in it also. This is exemplified in the musical performance. In the presentation of art as something significant.

I have done some trivial maths using PCM data and plotting the STDEV




That really upset people!

[Hayao Yamaneko]

Man, every word and sentence typed in this thread (sometimes despite appearances) has significance and yet the universe apparently has none.
Is using words and syntax religiosity? If so we're all bloody wallowing in religiosity here.

I'm probably more inclined than some to credit and think with some of the thinkers you're attracted to here, so don't think I'm one of the people upset by that graph - I'm not - but StD and mean are so woefully inadequate as tools of analysis for music if only because they ignore time. And you can't argue against significance in "the real" and then go on to demonstrate that by using mathematical tools to illustrate relative levels of significance in "the real". For about 10 reasons even after we exhaust the most obvious couple.

[jliat]

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."


Meillassoux & the transparent cage…. The alternative he offers is contingency or hyper chaos. He argues for that. Using mathematics…


The stdev does measure time. Samples are taken at intervals. You get another strange measure – if you try to zip noise – it doesn’t shrink the file. You can zip music as it has structure. And silence zips the smallest. But I know people want music to be more!
"A few people sitting close together, emitting sounds over the course of an hour produced by the standard set of instruments, punctuated by an applause, etc., "

This strikes me as being no different to some religious gathering or service – add to that your belief that there is "more" to music – but this is not mathematizable – well I think that’s a very good definition of fideism – in Meillassoux 's book.

[Seth]

That graph is missing a mental toxicity axis.

[anasara]

The stdev does measure time. Samples are taken at intervals.

correct me if i'm wrong, but i think by 'time' he might be inferring something more subjective... like 'duration' (fr. la durée) a la bergson: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/bergson/#5

"In the duration, there is no juxtaposition of events; therefore there is no mechanistic causality. It is in the duration that we can speak of the experience of freedom."



also, this thread can pretty much end because 'gabber' was plotted on a stdev graph.

[jliat]

The stdev does measure time. Samples are taken at intervals.

correct me if i'm wrong, but i think by 'time' he might be inferring something more subjective... like 'duration' (fr. la durée) a la bergson: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/bergson/#5

"In the duration, there is no juxtaposition of events; therefore there is no mechanistic causality. It is in the duration that we can speak of the experience of freedom."



also, this thread can pretty much end because 'gabber' was plotted on a stdev graph.

Sorry about that - it was done as a request! Anyway the graph was not done in all that seriousness originally – but it provoked such a rage – which was surprising.

I must admit the Bergson quote is difficult for me – or is it easy if subjective?

[Hayao Yamaneko]

You spec realist sorts love a straw man don't you?!
No, I didn't mean duration. I meant time. Just a couple of the non-subjective qualities of time lost in standard deviation are ordering and relative proximity of events.

Here's something else with Standard Dev - try applying some fairly gentle compression to the Mozart - ie not so it distorts, just to bring up the base volume and see what happens to it on your graph. Try reducing the volume of The Rita and see what happens to it. Bear in mind the listener has a volume knob at their control. Just by changing the volume of the files I can give you a completely different graph.

I've got no problem with people doing objective analysis of music using mathematics - I work crunching data for a living and I've spent a fair bit of time applying similar methods to music. I just think if you're going to draw conclusions from that kind of thing you ought to understand your tools and use them appropriately.

But this is a massive detour in an otherwise interesting thread.

[mynameissally]

although a little bit of a detour, some of Hayao's questions for jliat have popped into my head whenever i've come across his work. I find the argument for noise/signal without data that you (jliat) present here compelling, and it's compelling in the writings on your site, but realistically does something like HNW contain less signification than, say, a 10KHz sine wave?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3zeYV4oN2A

Are Vomir's fans (or is that Vomir? i don't know) swaying their bodies around with plastic bags over their heads because they are experiencing some sort of "truth" or what have you, or because they have some ridiculous fetishization of the sound coming out of the speakers that is no doubt produced by theoretical writings on the import of particular kinds of computer generated noise (that you're, i think, producing...)?



I was going to respond to some things that Jason said... he no doubt offered some of the most interesting contributions to this thread. Shame they're gone.

edit for jliat: the link for "Two Experiments.pdf" on your site is dead. I don't know if this is a glitch or if you're waiting for its publication in tacet or something. would love to read it.

[anasara]

I must admit the Bergson quote is difficult for me – or is it easy if subjective?

it's referring to his claim that there are, effectively, two concepts of time: in the first, mechanistic time (or mathematical time, or rational time), the concept of time is understood as a succession of particular and unique events. he uses an example of marking points along a line, as in, for example, the trajectory of a ball or even the galloping of a horse:



in the tradition of rational philosophy (and post-enlightenment thought in general) this has come to be an adequate gauge of movement. evolution in particular, as well as history in general.

bergson understands this as stilted and idealistic. rational thought tells us that muybridge's horse is moving afterall... but obviously it isn't. it's an illusion, which early film exemplifies.

so, the image can be broken up into parts (i.e., 'points' or 'specific events'):



like tracking the movement of a rolling ball, segments of the horse's gallop can, theoretically, be divided infinitely (hence, idealism). for bergson, this concept of movement is based on an misunderstanding of time, which cannot - in duration - be segmented into discrete parts. so, where are the moments between each frame in the image above? why have they been cut? they occurred, afterall... and that's the problem of mechanistic time: actual experience is reduced to an abstraction. subjectivity is removed, and replaced with something beyond 'the real'...

i think this is also why you and others (and myself and probably most of us on this board) are interested in noise and improvisation. it's also where you can begin to critique, if you want, ideology and engage in political discourse... to bring this 'massive detour' - admittedly - back on track.


edit:

You spec realist sorts love a straw man don't you?!

edit 2: i missed jason's posts... it'd be great to see them or get a summation. though i understand he must have deleted them for a reason...

[Hayao Yamaneko]

sorry
It just seemed a convenient reading of what I said if someone perhaps wanted to start making spec-realist style accusations of bourgious anthropocentricity.
But that evidently wasn't the implication and you didn't go there...

[RJMyato]

Hahaha oh my gosh not Jliat's dreaded stdev graph!!

http://chondriticsound.com/forum/viewto ... ilit=stdev