two critical texts put pHonic in context.
But it works by Micz Flor
Standing Reserve by Drew Hemment
But it works by Micz Flor, Germany
Micz Flor is a writer, media developer and cultural worker. He is based in Berlin, and also works at the Center for Advanced Media in Prague. Micz has organised many cultural events and symposia, including the sound-based exhibition One Bit Louder at Video Positive in Liverpool. On the side he attempts to foster the 7"/online sound label SueMi.
His text for pHonic explores the development of muscian's experiments with the internet and early critical attempts to categorise these activities.
Standing Reserve by Drew Hemment, UK
Drew Hemment is a writer, curator and producer. He is Director of futuresonic, an organisation which aims to develop novel perspectives on sonic art through both theory and practice, with a dual interest in promoting original work and exploring innovative configurations of sound, artist and audience. futuresonic runs an annual festival of sonic pleasure and audiovisual arts in Manchester, UK
His text for pHonic looks at the idiosyncracies of electronic sound, digitally produced music and the fusion of art and technology.
But it works - by Micz Flor
Berlin, July 2001
Music has a long tradition of mercilessly challenging mainstream aesthetics. Partly this is due to the biographical and chemical make-up of an army of pubescent dissidents who get their hands on sonic machinery across all continents at a challenging age. Each generation just has to re-invent the wheel. And god bless them they do.
But partly this seems to be the inherent nature of the type of people who make sounds. To illustrate this observation, I would point towards a very special breed who was borne out of the 80s - the decade which spent all energy on digitising formats - and the 90s - the decade which consequently connected all digital devices with each other. I would point towards a species which has not yet found a brand on its own, but forced institutions and journalists following their path of production into inventing numerous neologisms, mostly orbiting the bizarre construct of 'creative technology'. I would point towards the type of people who would dedicate their creative spirit to a misuse of the telephone network, these types who work and experiment with sound and Internet.
Most viscously, such people have made tactical use of a paradigm from generations earlier, the times when Free Jazz would haunt similar institutions and journalists. Then, the same sonicly minded species managed to escape all potentially reasonable aesthetic discourse. They established that from then on there was nobody to say what's good or what's not. It made sound, that's enough for them to know. This victory of the producing class over the receiving class was essential to all following generations of an avant-garde of sound. If it hadn't been for those fragile years in the aftermath of the second world war, people like Stockhausen would definitely have been victims of publicly organised humiliation.
This was an early victory but the second milestone was still to come. The point at which it was established that not only there was no objective measure possible, neither was skill an issue anymore. What was left to do was to establish a mode of working where the avant-garde musician would indeed not produce any sound at all. This is not to say that s/he could not. The issue was more, that the system within which the art was embedded was pushed in the foreground and the art it carried was secondary. The usual scenario would consist of a fistful of journalists surrounding a musician with his gadgets who would be explaining what was about to happen. Many times such demonstrations would not make any other sound than the heavy breath of the recipients, the clicking keystrokes and the fiddling of the knobs. Finally, the ritual would be concluded with the emphasised remark of the artist - "But it works" - and such assurance was all they ever needed to know.
Looking back at the earlier examples of Internet based sound works, it is important to point out that those sound artists working in the field, would approach the Internet from a completely different angle than almost anyone else. Yes, they would fantasies about what-would-be-cool-to-do and develop quite a number of features. But more importantly, they would work with what they had at their hands. The technology available was the common denominator, and the things you can do with it. In contrast, most other developers in the world of networked technology, would dedicate their creativity to enhance the infrastructure in order to establish a working solution in the future. Such infrastructuralists would be in stark contrast to the experimentalists who had already proved the beauty of a 4bit sample. 640 kByte of RAM is more than anyone will ever need.
The inherent split between the producer and the audience would become a raft. The audience would approach the artist with the expectation of 'hearing' a piece of work. And in the case of Internet related work, the curiosity of what the Internet 'sounds' like. On the other side there were the new musicians with a fascination of a new instrument they had received. The fascination for the producers with their instrument would be as new to this world as the instrument itself. There were (and still are) things to do with this new sonic toy that are beyond any other scenario within which one would make music. The number of things you could do, the variety of social set-ups which would replace the rehearsal room, the auditorium, the street, the record shop, the label - and many more constructions from out of this world. The break-off point in this scenario was most of the time the clear distinction of process and product. Whereas the audience requested the product, the musician would be selflessly lost in the process.
The most appropriate form to include this Internet based contemporary music in festivals would therefore be the 'workshop', which presented a room of equipment and some people to a wider audience. What exactly happened in this room was written on the outside of the bullet-proof glass, or found on the website. Mostly, curators would insist on handing out headsets to the musicians. After all, as long as you don't have to listen to it, it looks kind of interesting. And 'it works' they were pleased to announce.
This curious chapter is about to be closed. Today, the understanding of 'the Internet' has reached a level where there is a common knowledge about how it works, what can be done and what can not be done. To illustrate this, one can point towards the disappearance of the bizarre Cybersex fetish-wear which would announce the arrival of the Internet in the mid and late 90s. Stupid really, when you think of it.
One might argue that the avant-gardish element of Internet based sound art has been lost, if it is so generally and widely understood. And I am not saying this would be wrong to say. At the same time, today is the first time where such works of art can be presented to a sufficiently skilled audience. And this is not to say that 'skill' relates to any special training. Instead skill relates to the implicit knowledge of everyday culture. The world we live in today has seamlessly caught up with the avant-garde which combined digital formats and networks with sound over the past ten or twenty years. In a high-bandwidth discussion, suddenly it is clear that the 4bit sample is not just plain ugly, but it is here to stay. And it works.
Standing Reserve - by Drew Hemment
July01
Exploders, cracklers, buzzers and scrapers were the 20th century's first DIY sound machines, 'noise intoners' built by the Italian Futurists to blast perception out of the claustrophobia of nineteenth century art. This was the curtain call for a century of exploding boundaries between art and technology, a century of innovation driven by accident and misuse that both swept away the ideal of the autonomous artist and tore open the closed set of possibilities inherent in technology and instrument design.
EACH INSTRUMENT, EACH TOOL, THEORETICAL OR CONCRETE, IMPLIES A SOUND FIELD, A FIELD OF KNOWLEDGE, AN IMAGINABLE AND EXPLORED UNIVERSE. TODAY, A NEW MUSIC IS ON THE RISE, ONE THAT CAN NEITHER BE EXPRESSED NOR UNDERSTOOD USING THE OLD TOOLS, A MUSIC PRODUCED ELSEWHERE AND OTHERWISE
(Jacques Attali).Machines used for purposes they were not designed for, that function by breaking down. The drum-machine which ignited the house revolution, the Roland tr-808, was bought cheap on the second hand market following its premature discontinuation because of its failure to emulate real instruments. A similar case was the Roland tb-303. Notoriously bad at what it was designed for, simulating bass-guitar lines, it was very good at making mistakes. Its programming procedures were so complex that the operators intentions would become lost and unexpected results appear out of the confusion - with the mistakes proving more interesting than what was intended. Soon the misuse became the norm, as the unique squelching sounds produced by its filters came to define a whole genre of music: acid house.
TOMORROW, WITH ELECTRONIC MUSIC IN OUR EARS, WE WILL HEAR FREEDOM
(John Cage).No longer enmeshed in the parameters set by traditional instruments and musicianship, sound was unleashed. Its de-composition intensified when the availability and creative application of digital sampling technology set the foundations for the further quantum leap of drum n bass. Musical perception became reconfigured through the infinite expansion and decomposition of the sonic instant. Reversed, stretched, speeded up. Colours and shapes in sound dematerialise the dancefloor and shapeshift the crowd.
IT IS NOT THAT MUSIC OR THE WORLD HAVE BECOME INCOMPREHENSIBLE: THE CONCEPT OF COMPREHENSION ITSELF HAS CHANGED; THERE HAS BEEN A SHIFT IN THE LOCUS OF PERCEPTION OF THINGS
(Jacques Attali).Musical perception has become microscopic. No longer focused on the messages of songs or the organisation of harmony it has opened up a new world in the space between the beats. Synthesisers and filters generate infinite textures, and sound byte science (sampling) explores the virtual potential of sonic matter.
WHAT CHARACTERISES THE WORK OF THOSE MUSICIANS RADICALIZED BY THEIR RELATION TO BIT-ORIENTED REPRODUCTIVE TECHNOLOGIES IS THE EFFORT TO RAISE THE TECHNICAL PRECONDITIONS OF THEIR MUSICAL MATERIAL TO THE LEVEL OF CULTURAL EXPRESSION. THAT IS TO SAY, THEY STRUGGLE TO MAKE AUDIBLE THE NOISE/INFORMATION POLARITY THAT BOTH GROUNDS CONTEMPORARY LISTENING AND UNDERMINES IT
(Martin Heidegger).Morphing the medium. Electronic music screens and sculpts the noises of the user interface, the grain of the machine. It is a celebration of the texture of expression, a manipulation of sounds and a soliciting of distortions.
AT THE PRESENT STAGE OF REVOLUTION, A HEALTHY LAWLESSNESS IS WARRANTED. EXPERIMENTATION MUST NECESSARILY BE CARRIED ON BY HITTING ANYTHING . . . NOT ONLY HITTING, BUT RUBBING, SMASHING, MAKING SOUND IN EVERY POSSIBLE WAY. IN SHORT, WE MUST EXPLORE THE MATERIALS OF MUSIC. WHAT WE CANT DO OURSELVES WILL BE DONE BY MACHINES AND ELECTRICAL INSTRUMENTS WHICH WE WILL INVENT
(John Cage).Whilst digital culture breeds a generation of acolytes and the space race its cadets, artists on the electronic frontier turn to redundant analogue technology to get their kicks and basslines. Retrofuturism. The gleaming exteriors and shining preset sounds of the latest keyboards are rejected as audio artists turn to the technologies of the past to generate the sounds of the future. [The audio software ] Cubase retains metaphors of discrete instruments and linear time whilst the mutant music machines of Cristian Vogel and the Aphex Twin and the smash and grab tactics of post-Coldcut sampling keep the revolution off course.
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