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"Iam interested in the "wrong" use of musical technology in the production of music, and the semiotics of "wrong" sounds. Before going further, a few concepts should be addressed: music, technology, and the glitch. First, whether or not the sounds contained herein constitute music is not at all the point of this project; I find the music to be much more interesting than defending it as such. Second, for the purposes of this project, "musical technology" encompasses all the tools used to create the resultant sounds. This technology may range from instruments (e.g., pianos and guitars), to record/playback hardware (e.g., CD players, phonographs, tape players, and computers) and software, to recording media (e.g., CDs, records, magnetic tape, etc.) which includes pre-recorded mass media products. Lastly, the glitch: "1. A minor mishap, malfunction, or technical problem. 2. Electron. A false or spurious electronic signal caused by a brief, unwanted surge of electric power."1, or in terms of music, "the Cut-Copy-Paste-Funk of the most unessentialist sounds ever, the clicks, the movements from one to zero made audible to and from a computermusicgeneration…" (Kösch: 2000). My fascination with the musical appropriation of the glitch served as my point of departure, but I soon realized that, fundamentally, the aesthetic appropriation of mistakes, the unexpected, or "wrong" processes is nothing new in the arts, and especially not in music: Free Improvisation, Turntablism, and tape-based musics are all obvious examples of such practices. Of course, that is not to deny the power of such practices in a larger context: that of pop (music or culture) where formulaic processes are the key to success. I do not think that any of the musics represented here actively seek/sought to be successful in pop terms, but rather, to successfully execute their ideas. Their music may or may not be a reaction against pop music or pop culture, and may or may not be subversive in intent. In many cases it probably flows from the individual(s) irrespective of any grand intent. Certainly, there is no doctrine by which all of these musicians might be aligned. Instead, all of the music represented here are united by their repurposing of phonotechnology in the production of new sounds. This rejection of proper (or at least time-established) use of technology is accompanied by a rejection or radical readjustment of musical traditions, which often results in the creation of new genres: Glitch Electronica, Turntablism, tape music and Musique Concrète, and Free Improvisation (especially via extended technique) are some of the more well-known genres to emerge from such experimentation. Genre distinctions are often more useful to promoters and distributors that they are to musicians. The codification of genres is necessarily against expansion and experimentation: a common denominator of these musics. In fact, there is much cross-fertilization between the genres discussed here, if not in intent and technique, than perhaps in sonic effect. For example, much of Glitch Electronica is based on digital clicks (e.g., CD skips), digital noise, and error: effectively, the sounds of the system coming to a halt. These sounds may then be arranged, looped, repeated, processed, etc. by a variety of means. A DJ engages in a similar process when s/he places his/her hand on the record, stops its rotation, interrupts the linear groove of the track—again, bringing the system to a halt—and scratches. Similarly, in tape based music, Musique Concrète,2 and electro-acoustic music, sounds may be slowed to a crawl, sped up, reversed, distorted, etc. The cut and splice aesthetic practiced in tape based musics is spiritually akin to the "Clicks and Cuts" aesthetic of Glitch Electronica. Manipulation of musical technology is also found in abundance in the "genre" of Free Improvisation3 and with the practice of extended technique. In this project, Free Improvisation and extended technique are unique, as the musical technology subject to manipulation is more likely to consist of traditional instruments;4 though this is not requisite, it is the focus here. Extended technique and Free Improvisation are here lumped together for convenience; one does not imply the other. However, Free Improvisation is perhaps the area in which extended technique is most widely and consistently practiced. Some examples that come to mind are Derek Bailey’s pointillism (on guitar), Evan Parker’s circular breathing (on saxophone), Keith Rowe’s (of AMM) prepared guitar, and John Coltrane’s ensembles of the late 1960s. Ideologically, all of the genres represented here are very close: all involve the repurposing of various forms of musical technology. The sonic products of each genre are quite distinct (even within genres this is true). Yet another characteristic of these genres is their marginality. Simply put, they are unpopular: they are not pop and the general public does not appreciate them. The sounds are wrong. The concept of "wrong" sound may be used to describe the music produced by the "wrong" musical processes of artists in the genres here discussed. It is interesting to consider how these sounds are coded as "wrong" and why some people find them desirable. No doubt much of it has to do with traditional concepts of music and the fact that these alternate forms of music are actually treated as such, i.e., they are recorded and distributed as records, tapes, and CDs, meant to be listened to for enjoyment, just as any other music might be. There are those who make a case for alternate forms of listening, such as "phenomenal listening," but these academic exercises are perhaps second in importance to the listener’s enjoyment. In order to account for the perceived wrongness of sounds, I became interested in the semiotics of wrong sounds: what do these sounds signify, and perhaps more importantly, how do they signify? The answer to the first question is, in part, obvious. Glitches, for example, are sounds of error, especially in a musical context. They signal the interruption of the program and the breakdown of the system; they often lead to frustration. When we hear them coming from our stereos, we immediately get up to make sure that our record/CD/cassette player is functioning properly and that the record/CD/cassette is not damaged. These sounds also signify the interruption of a linear listening event, whether this is the lull of a 4/4 beat, or the flow of a song or of an album. Rhythmic repetition and song/album structure are all forms of narrative, the interruption of which is unsettling. It is no wonder that these sounds are not welcome in pop music. The glitch, even when looped into recognizable, danceable rhythms still seems to carry enough residual signification to prevent it from inducing pleasure in too many people. Though less concerned with electronics, Free Improvisation and the practice of extended technique signify similarly as above. By freely dispensing with rhythm and melody as a requirement of music making activities, musicians do away with two of the traditional elements of music, as well as two forms of narrative structure. While there certainly may be a flow, and it may represent a sort of narrative, it is not one that most are used to. Further, when musicians embrace alternative techniques of sound production on traditional instruments, the listener’s expectations are again thwarted; the instruments do not sound right; the musicians do not seem to know what they are doing. While the above may explain what these wrong sounds signify, it does not explain how they signify. This seems to be largely based on context in which the sounds are heard; this in turn is largely dependant on the type of listening in which the listener is engaged. Roland Barthes proposes three types of listening. The first, which Barthers calls "alert" listening, is one practiced by all beings equipped to hear. In this type of hearing, "a living being orients its hearing (the exercise of its physiological faculty of hearing) to certain indices … the wolf listens for a (possible) noise of its prey, the hare for a (possible) noise of its hunter, the child and the lover for the approaching footsteps which might be the mother’s or the beloved’s." (Barthes: 245) In this type of listening, one listens for sounds of danger or disruption within one’s environment. The way in which glitchy sounds signify disruption has already been discussed. However, this first type of listening involves expectations: one may listen for what one desires to hear. This is particularly true when one plays an album. A record/cd/cassette is played for a certain purpose, and one does so with certain expectations. The glitch subverts such expectations: it is an unwelcome surprise. To pick up Barthes’ analogy, it is like listening for the approaching footsteps of one’s lover, but being greeted by a thief. A person generally puts on an album for the purpose of enjoyment, but this enjoyment hinges on a set of expectations, for example how instruments should be played and how playback should sound. In general, the act of listening to music creates its own context; one with a set of unique indices: rhythm, melody, and timbre, which together signify "music." When one or more of these elements is removed, or altered beyond easy recognition, the product is less desireable. One who enjoys Glitch Electronica may put on a CD expecting to hear music based on the sound of damaged or skipping CDs, but for many, such sounds, even when sublimated via syncopation to a 4/4 beat, do not/cannot constitute pleasurable listening. The second type of listening, deciphering, involves "what the ear tries to intercept are certain signs. Here, no doubt, begins the human: I listen the way I read, i.e., according to certain codes."5 (Barthes: 245). A key concept here is code. The glitch is precisely the sound of damaged code, while Free Improvisation and extended technique tend to go against various musical codes. Furthermore, they often resist structural codes, such as choruses and refrains. Thus these musics tend to resist deciphering, existing rather as inexplicable ciphers, or foreign sounds. Musique Concrète presents an interesting situation as it is based on "normal" everyday sounds. For example, the sounds of trains in Pierre Schaeffer’s Etude aux Chemins de Fer are identifiable as such. The processes to which they are subjected however, transform them into something less identifiable, more surreal, and perhaps displacing. Furthermore, collage, a staple technique of Musique Concrète, tends to skew the easy interpretations of sonic codes by its rapid and sometimes nonsensical juxtapositions. That which cannot be interpreted easily, or at all, is often shunned or feared, or at the very least, is a cause of anxiety. I suspect that this holds true for music as much as anything. Barthes identifies a third "entirely modern" approach to listening, which "does not aim at—or await—certain determined, classified signs: not what is said or emitted, but who speaks, who emits: such listening is supposed to develop in an inter-subjective space where ‘I am listening’ also means ‘listen to me’…" (Barthes: 246-7) This is perhaps where the potential for aesthetic enjoyment of sounds, no matter what they are, begins. It does not require "determined" or "classified" sounds, leaving the listener to engage with the sounds he or she finds enjoyable or interesting. Further, by recognizing "who speaks" or "emits" one identifies the sounds as personal expression. What exactly is expressed is perhaps less important than the fact that it is the production of another human, and I posit that this is ultimately the appeal of all music: it is a form of communication, even if the substance of the communication is nothing but sound." Notes (Manifesto: Richenda Brim, Bryan Griest, Jason Vasche, Ryan Hildebrand)
"I have nothing to say / and I am saying it / and that is poetry / as I needed it. As far as consistency of thought goes, I prefer inconsistency." (John Cage) "(...)Precisely Melgaço - like father, like son - the men of letters João Guimarães Rosa and Carlos Drummond de Andrade are from the same idiossincratic brazilian region; they´re from the same spiritual path, bypath, footpath. Spiritual family, ascendance. Ascension, essence. O.M.’s sound is endless, inexhaustible; his lingua poetry employs condensed figures and unorthodox syntax therefore he knows that the point of a poem is the beauty of the language. The function of poetry in his phonoworks is to preserve moments of extreme sensation and unique impressions. It is possible to make electro-acoustic * poesy music out of anything, especially out of zero, which etymologically also signifies...Cipher. 'I’m not afraid anymore of climbing the peaks where the clean and thin air wheights out, nor to leave the sterght out of my muscles... The empytiness dragged me to the center of the whirl of the great force, that how flows, fierce, inside and out of me... I leave that inevitable dances, around me, the dance of the swards in all moments. And I, truly, I am the center that doesn't exist except as a convention in the geometry of the abyss; I am the nothingness around which this movement spins... It is always a mistake not to close one's eyes, whether to forgive or to look better into oneself. I write, talk and sing in Polytongue because each phonopoem is build around a central symbol, idea, or metaphor from my particular and imprisoning Babel!' he, in high spirits, said. * 'The development of musique concrète by French radio engineer, Pierre Schaeffer (1910-1995), demonstrated a music composed from 'found' fragments of sounds which had been captured on recordings. His work was an electronic realization of the same kind of ideas which been proposed at the beginning of the century by Luigi Russolo with his l'arte dei rumori manifesto. Schaeffer's first works were originally done using specially constructed recording disk players and cutters with pre-recorded material taken from the archives of the French radio. He believed that sounds as concrete sonic events could be separated from the physical acts which created them and then given a new significance by being placed within the entirely different structure of a musical composition. Though Schaeffer's work essentially gave birth to way of working which has proliferated as electro-acoustic music during the last half of this century, Schaeffer himself, has largely recanted his earlier theories about abstracting sounds for compositions and assumed the stance of some of his critics.The development of Musik Electronische particularly in the early electronic music studio in Cologne was also of major significance to the development of text-sound composition. In particular there were the classic pieces which manipulated voice such as Karlheinz Stockhausen's Gesange der Junglinge (1955-56), Luciano Berio's Thema: Omaggio a Joyce (1958), Herbert Eimert's Epitaph für Aikichi Kuboyama (1960-62). These works approached the manipulation of language each from a different point of view, however they made a conscious use of vocal timbre as a parameter within their musical compositions. Text-sound composers have a somewhat different approach to the use of timbre and sound than electro-acoustic musicians who use the human voice for their primary sonic source. The blurring of these two different ways of working has caused some controversies and confusion. The basic difference lies in the observation that text-sound and sound poetry, emphasize the fact that vocal sounds are created by the body, and that the very act of their creation provides one with the structure for their arrangement. A good sound poem is structured from an internal system of emotional connections rather than an external one.' O.M.: a contemporary artist, he crosses over all musical boundaries. From Belo Horizonte city, Minas Gerais state, Brazil - the Composer, Singer, multiple Instrumentist, Arranger, Lyricist and Sound-Poet Melgaço possess an unusual depth: 'One day the veil falls and we are left stranded with the body, at the body's mercy... reduced to our fear, like in 'Triptych 1973' by Francis Bacon. And if some-one was presiding invisibly over that little horror scene, it was no apparatchik, or executioner, it was a God - or an anti-God, a Demiurge, a Creator, the one who had trapped us for ever by that 'accident' of the body he cobbled together in his workshop and of which, for a while, We are forced to become the soul.' " Poemaudiomegazine - São Paulo)
P o s t S c r i p t u m Sound poetry, in Larry Wendt's words, has probably always been with us in one form or another: as oral tradition in preliterate and non-western cultures, words of power like the Tetragrammaton and the Logos, glossolalia of fanatics and schizophrenics, the baby talk that is lost through the phonetic limits of learned language skills, voices used for advertisements and cartoons, to cite a few of the more obvious examples. In sound poetry the conventional hierarchy between sound sense and semantic sense is modulated and often reversed. The semantic sense does not necessarily have to be completely neglected but it assumes a more democratic role with the addition of any element that can be vocalized. Sten Hanson has described sound poetry as a combination of the exactness of literature and the time manipulation of music. As the result of a direction inward since the 16th century with the decline of manuscript colori and the rise of personal literacy, a study of language was the way to know God, his universe, the societies of man, and then the human soul itself. In the 19th century, a romantic view that the universe was a language became popular. Everything represented a collection of signs and symbols, which man could eventually interpret and understand if they worked hard enough at it. In the 20th century, a rebellion against the tyranny of print cultura and its reduction of all expression to that which can be notated, occurred. Sound poetry is part of that rebellion. This is not to say that sound poetry, exists without visual notation (see concrete poetry), but if such a graphic cueing system does exist, it is often highly individualistic, and can stand by itself as a visual object. For sound poets, like most other post cognitive artists of the 20th century, the work becomes the thing in itself, not an interpretation to be abstracted into something else. Work in this century which has been identified with sound poetry, has its beginnings in the onomatopoetic parole in liberta of the Italian Futurists. Though not strictly sound poetry, much of their activities presaged the development of the phonetic poem, and the activities of Russian Futurism and Dada. Language was not truly atomized however, until the introduction of electro-acoustic methods. This development provided both the means and a new way to hear the voice which could then be mimicked by non-electronic means. So, the Melgacian "Composition as Process":
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