Hörkörper

Back

2005-08-25T11:13:00.000+02:00

Definitely needed those days off. After some hectic months in Utrecht, holidays in Estonia and Latvia. So great... Definitely liked Riga. Loved Liepaja for some reason.. Small city, definitely not the "city that sounds" as the In Your Pocket Guide boasted, but simply very nice and charming. I can certainly imagine myself living there for a while. Getting up early in the morning, taking a stroll along the beach and then start writing...

New things are on their way already. Although I am still in Utrecht, I will be moving to London this September. PhD work at Goldsmiths College. Working title: "The Sounds of the Metropolis: Electronic Music and the Urban Geographies (or Spaces?) of Berlin, London and New York". Have a thousand ideas already, but the main and most difficult job for the following months will be to organise these ideas in such a manner that an intersting structure and argument will emerge.

Just as exciting is the fact that I can teach at Goldsmiths! Who would have believed that ten years ago when I worked during the holidays on building sites and studied construction (Bouwkunde)? Lecturer of a course on the "Creative Industries in an International Frame" and seminar leader of a course called "Music as Communication and Creative Practice". So much looking forward to this...

Anyways, I'm back.

delinking...

2005-07-06T16:22:00.000+02:00

maybe it's the summer, but more likely a general boredom with the enormous amount of e-mails i received each day, but i'm finally delinking myself from the net (well partially..).

No more fibreculture, spectre, empyre or microsound for me.

i'll try to survive from now on on my diet of nettime, nettime-nl and rohrpost.

Edition #16 of cut.up.magazine online

2005-06-15T23:17:00.000+02:00

Before you know it ... a new edition of cut.up.magazine is now online. www.cut-up.com Almost one year (well, since september) has passed and we're still alive! I'm especially very happy to see how we have managed to keep quite a high quality throughout this period. And all this without any cash to share or invest.

Relevant to this site. Definitely check the highly critical review of Medien Kunst Netz, edited by Dieter Daniel and Rudolf Frieling. Yes, the German scene... And take a look at the weblog of Arie Altena, who wrote this extensive review: www.ariealt.net

TTT

2005-06-12T23:25:00.000+02:00

Tenure Track Theory

...write in the margins of the book, whenever you're annoyed by opportunistic and superficial use of theory by, usually, US American - oh I do not want to lose my rather luxurious upper middle class salary - tenure track academics. very frustrating, especially since you're confronted with this stuff way too often.

('inspired' by Timothy Taylor's Strange Sounds)

Rohrpost

2005-06-11T12:24:00.000+02:00

Interesting 'discussions' going on at the German Rohrpost mailinglist on the new database of virtual art.

Check: rohrpost thread

And see the thread called "Database of virtual art: new thesaurus"

These are the kind of discussions I like: confronting and with a dash of nothing-is-really-that-great-so-a-pessimistic-stance-is-our-option-take-on-things.
Too bad these discussions always seem to take place among the same 5 to 10 men.... but it is an approach to things sorely lacking on the english and dutch nettime-lists. More negative critique please! ...

Generation Game

2005-05-22T14:42:00.000+02:00

Rereading some older issues of The Wire, I came across Toop's "Generation Game" (in issue 207, march 2001, p. 38-45). An interesting article, but what struck me was the introduction, since it seems to make use of a similar line of argument as the one adopted by Mariam Fraser (see previous post):

"Contemporary music's biggest challenge is to liberate sound from the tyranny of the composer."

What is it that makes writers analyse along these lines (contemporary music as part of the tradition of 'serious' composed music) and forget about other established traditions? What is it about 'the digital' in particular that produces such a limited view of history?

Making Music Matter

2005-05-20T12:26:00.000+02:00

In a recent edition of the journal Theory, Culture & Society (vol. 22, issue 1, 2005, p. 173-189), Mariam Fraser published an article titled "Making Music Matter". In this article she compared Cage's 4'33'' with Bruce Gilchrist's artEMERGENT project (www.artemergent.org.uk) and his Thought Conductor #2 piece.

Her main argument is that whereas Cage's 4'33'' provides a kind of temporal framework in which 'life' can be attended to by an attentive listener (thus displacing the author-composer as main point of reference), in Gilchrist's project something else is at stake.
A quote: "... the absense of a score in TC2, at least until the end of the performance, signals that something different is at stake. Unlike the score of 4'33'', which directs the musician as to how to capture sounds that exist in time during performance, the score of TC2 is the product of the time of the performance during which sounds are created. [...] I want to suggest that it is not the performance as temporal frame - it is not time - that 'contains' the pattern; rather, it is the performance of TC2 as event. I am redefining 'presence', in other words, in terms of 'some particular pattern as grasped in the unity of a real event' (Whitehead, 1985a: 130) (p. 178).

According to Fraser, "three fundamental implications follow from this conception of TC2": "first, given the radical relationality that constitutes an event, it would be impossible to conceive of any aspect of the performance existing independently of it. Second, "there can be no single author of contingency ... and no single subject-listener." Third, this conception of an "indivisible multiplicity" "dislodges from TC2 the kind of presence which 4'33'' implicitly assumes (that is, presence understood in terms of corresponding self-identical unities: one time, one space, one happening)." "By drawing the listener away from the immediacy of the performance as it is being performed, TC2 seems to be signalling that its sound pertains not solely to the individual who sits at the centre of the stage, but to a pattern that cannot be contained by the stage." (p. 179)

As I was reading this interesting article, however, some questions kept returning.

Is this piece still that radical if one positions it not within the European classical tradition, but within another tradition? Concerning Fraser's first point, this impossibility to conceive of any aspect of the performance as existing independently of it, seems highly applicable to the tradition of free improvisation. It sometimes seems that critics of the classical tradition are making such an effort to problematise the role of the composer etc., whereas other traditions simply discard his (yes, usually his) role altogether. Maybe I'm wrong, but the re-routing of the composers' activities through the digital - a database in the case of TC2 - is interesting, but seems less radical or liberatory than is assumed in Fraser's article when observed from the standpoint of a different tradition.

Concerning the third point - the fact that the pattern cannot be contained by the stage - it could very well be that this is where one should locate 'the new'. Free improvisation can, of course, be interpreted as contained within a temporal and spatial framework, whereas this is much harder in the case of TC2. Nevertheless, even here it seems to me that maybe Fraser's approach is somewhat limited by her conceptualization of this event in a more or less semiotic or poststructuralist way (as you can see, I am struggling here with the right vocabulary): she analyses the piece as a surface phenomenon. More importantly, she seems to conceptualise the subjectivity of the participants as a surface phenomenon.

My hunch is that TC2 would be differently interpreted if approached from the perspective of music and memory. Ok, so TC2 evokes patterns that cannot be contained by the stage. But doesn't something similar take place when seem from the subjectivity and memory of the audience members or the musicians? The musicians of TC2 produce certain sounds - and the score-music relationship might have been problematised - but their way of producing these sounds is structured through years and years of training and listening in certain contexts. In the case of TC2, this simply means that these various 'personal' embeddings contribute to a deconstruction of the "immediacy of the performance". Seen from this perspective, however, the difference between TC2 and other music is not that different, since all sound is always mediated through memory. Listening to Bach, getting bored and thinking of your studies; watching a garagerockband perform and thinking of getting wasted and how the music of this band is good, but not quite as raw as that other band you saw last month; etc.

Here it might seem useful to approach this question of the digital and the analogue from the perspective of memory. Besides a form of cultural memory (the automatic association of, say, blues with African-American traditions etc.), one is also dealing with embodied memory (the habitus of the instrument, one could say) as well as technical memory (which is probably the same as embodied memory, but useful to address the fact that digital technologies as used in TC2 'determine' (as in: make possible some things and impossible others) the range of possibilities.

As you can see, I am struggling with these terms myself aka any help / thoughts of other readers appreciated : ))

Urban Screens blog

2005-05-11T14:41:00.000+02:00

Of course, it is way too visual for my kind of taste : ) , but Mirjam Struppek - who will be organizing a conference on Urban Screens at the Institute of Networkcultures in September - has just opened a blog linked to this conference. Watch it for interesting links etc.

culturebase

Toop vs Watson

2005-05-05T16:33:00.000+02:00

There is a great review of Toop's Haunted Weather, written by Ben Watson, in the latest edition (29) of Mute.

Although I think he is somewhat hard on Toop - since I did enjoy reading the book and although he does write like a columnist (others would say essayist), many of his analyses are clear and to the point - as one of a few Watson points out exactly what keeps bugging / annoying me when reading Toop's work: his almost complete acceptance of the world as in flux etc etc and his avoidance of political and social questions/problems.

In other words: read the review! oh yeah, and check the site he runs, together with Esther Leslie, for more inspiration: http://www.militantesthetix.co.uk

Dance Dance! oh yes..

2005-05-03T10:20:00.000+02:00

ok, for all of you who have not yet woken up to the call of post-rock, post-capital, post-rave, post-whatever, there is a new list on dance cultures:

http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/dancecult-l_listcultures.org

the word "doof" ... gives away the Australian source//

anyways, check it, and let's see if we can go beyond the 'shut-up-and-dance-cause-even-if-it-doesn't-look-like-it-we-are-still-engaged-in-politics' attitude that is still so pervasive within this academic field. Let's say I'm positively sceptical..

Call for Proposals: The Art and Politics of Netporn

2005-04-18T10:15:00.000+02:00

so what about porn? Impress me with your experimental thoughts on netporn... political economy of porn, a porn-perspective on political economy, or even sounding out porn? Check:

Cut.up.magazine (http://www.cut-up.com) invites proposals for a special issue on the art and politics of netporn.

This issue is produced in cooperation with the Amsterdam-based Institute of Networkcultures (http://www.networkcultures.org) and will be published two weeks before their two-day conference on The Art and Politics of Netporn in early October 2005.

A growing number of theoretical and historical porn studies have appeared over the last decades, yet few have focused on the analysis of netporn as complex networks. We are therefore particularly interested in proposals that address activities such as blogging, p2p porn, queer aesthetics and webcamming, but also those that focus on the political economy of netporn through a mapping of its industry or an exploration of the relation between netporn and war.

Proposals are invited for articles of approximately 5000 words. They should be based on original research and explicitly address the specificity of netporn within these networks. Since our aim is to publish high-quality articles that can serve as a basis for further research, each article will be remunerated with 750 euros, excluding possible extra expenses.

The deadline for receipt of proposals is May 15, 2005 and may be e-mailed to bas@cut-up.com.

More information:
Bas van Heur
Cut.up.media
PO Box 313
2000 AH Haarlem
The Netherlands

Bring the economy back in...

2005-04-07T00:02:00.000+02:00

Received a reply by Omar on my article for cut.up.magazine (in Dutch) on electroclash/negroclash
In this article I argued - using the examples of electroclash and the more-or-less emerging genre (not really, but let's just use the word anyways) of negroclash in NYC - that much of contemporary journalism and the blogosphere is above all involved in a practice that might best be described as one of fetisjist utopics.
Most participants are so eager to find, locate and name The New that most of these writings have turned into a parody of critical journalism.
Maybe Omar and I actually agree to a large extent, since to a large extent he confirms my diagnosis (in at least half of his post).

Just a few thoughts on the last section then and on his fear of a "sociological demystification" of my argument that one should attend to political-economic processes when reviewing and discussing music.
I agree: it is o so easy to simply dismiss most music as the product of the culture industries etc. I also agree with Omar's argument that one should avoid these approaches, since they kill precisely what one wants to save: affection, emotion, utopia, ...

That said, I do not believe, however - and this is where Omar and I differ - that saving these affective aspects of music from the hands of the culture industries (or you may use the word 'commodification' or 'capital' here, if that makes you feel more comfortable) allows one to engage in a counter-tactic of "mystification". To a large extent, it seems to me that the power of such a tactic - in the last instance - is limited to moments of utopia within much more powerful processes of hierarchization and oppression.

I am - quite oldfashioned, I know - interested in shifting social structurations through music. In other words: yes, I am interested in questions of political economy, but above all I am interested in how music participates in - obscures or highlights - the reproduction of certain political economies.
Therefore, I find the rather too-easy (and typically mid-1990s) claim that one should reject binary schemes and embrace complexity, labyrinths, etc. understandable, but simply a too-easy-way-out. I mean, I agree, but that is only part of the solution. One should go one step beyond this and analyze how certain binary structures and other forms of in- and exclusion operate nevertheless throughout the field of music and popular culture. Simply noting that binarities and simple truths are wrong is good, but not enough.
Instead, I propose a post-1990s approach: try how questions of political economy are intertwined with aesthetic questions surrounding music. In other words, leave behind the mid-1990s approach that argues for a relative autonomy of culture in relation to the economy. Do not fall into the trap of economic reductionism, but do not fall into the trap of culturalism either.
This is something I tried in my article on electroclash/negroclash - hardly a perfect attempt, but an attempt nevertheless. Dancing to utopian moments is not enough.

no content///

2005-04-05T23:57:00.000+02:00

yeah, I know, hardly any content ... as of yet.. what to say. I'm a slow thinker? Well, actually I am, but I'm mainly working on my links. trying to get all these sites/organisations/people/etc. that have to do with the topic of my PhD on one freakin' page. looks shitty from an aesthetic point of view, but I need structure!

inspiration...

2005-03-26T17:49:00.000+01:00

shouts go out to the always marvellous Birgit for coming up with the beautiful term 'Hörkörper'.

Alive

2005-03-26T12:43:00.000+01:00

ok, so this is my first post on my first blog etcetera. will be mainly used as a tool for remembering sites, links, thoughts etc. Links that I come across during surfing... we'll see.