THERE ARE DAYS WHEN
everything I see seems to me charged with meaning: messages it would be difficult for me to communicate to others, define, translate into words, but which for this very reason appear to me decisive. They are announcements or presages that concern me and the world at once: for my part, not only the external events of my existence but also what happens inside, in the depths of me; and for the world, not some particular event but the general way of being all things. You will understand therefore my difficulty in speaking about it, except by allusion.
Italo Calvino, from If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler
From Samuel Beckett’s “Watt”
Here he
stood
.
Here he
sat
.
Here he
knelt
.
Here he
lay
.
Here he
moved
,
to and fro
,
from the door
to the window
,
from the window
to the door
;
from the window
to the door
,
from the door
to the window
;
from the fire
to the bed
,
from the bed
to the fire
;
bed to the fire
,
fire to the bed
;
from the door to the fire
,
from the fire
to the door
;
from the fire
to the door
,
from the door
to the fire
;
from the window
to the bed
,
from the bed
to the window
A few weeks ago, I found myself on the train from Poughkeepsie, New York (my home town!) to Manhattan. I found a fascinating traffic light on the way there. Look at how yellow it is! What audacity!
As engrossing as this encounter was, this is not a post about a traffic light.
I have the idea to choreograph a dance piece in which each of the dancers is given a set of headphones. The music playing through these headphones would correspond with music listened to by one audience member. The audience members would be instructed to turn the music on and off at will.
The dancers would be taught various steps, but the order in which they put them together and the times of rest would be up to them.
Essentially, this would be an exercise in seeing the way music and dance come together to create a work in tandem without one prefiguring the other, in design - an art piece left entirely to chance.
The dancers can never be certain of the starts and stops of the music; the audience might be informed that it is an audience-participation piece, but they (ideally) wouldn’t know what their role in the work would be.
ESKIMEAUX is pretty amazing. I saw them play here on Saturday. I’d call them “shoegaze”, but if you don’t like shoegaze or don’t really know what shoegaze is, what would that do? They’re great! Just listen to them!
Passenger’s side window of my car -
after driving 790 miles from Poughkeepsie, New York to the outskirts of Louisville, Kentucky, without stopping for more than ninety minutes to nap.
Somewhere near Lexington, Kentucky
Last April, I was at the University of Pennsylvania for their annual music festival Human Barbecue (by the way, UPenn Pi Lam is the only cool frat house in the entire world. Just saying!). While there I saw some graffiti that said:
( ( ( ROBOTS MAKE MUSIC THAT IS CLOSEST TO THE EARTH ) ) )
… This bothered me because I tend to think of acoustic and electronic music as constitutive of binary opposite. By which I mean, they can’t coexist in the same body of meaning - and by that I mean, the scope of my taste in music. I love electronic music (a la Devo, Kraftwerk, Terry Riley) as well as acoustic folk music. Sometimes, I get the feeling that the latter is more “real”, as if the closer the instruments are, in age of technological development, to the beginning of mankind, the more “close to the earth” or “natural” the music sounds. This is problematic for me as an electronic musician, because people generally think of “natural” as good.
Electr(on)ic/acoustic represent opposite genre classifications - music is often referred to as either electric or acoustic. However, listening to Andy and the guys rock it out on Saturday made me realize that the pleasure I take in music is that of the unreality of the alien machine, the transcendent Other with which I connect via music.
Music theory codifies a science that humans cannot understand, because in attempting to understand it we are experimenting on ourselves. We cannot experiment on ourselves in a manner that is fully impartial, obviously - therefore music is remote. After all, we ascribe human qualities to sound: is A-Flat happy or sad? Do fast drumbeats make you dance, or do they make you nervous?I see music as an analog to the work of the mariner or the astronomer; the scientist who studies distant depths and heights. Maybe the student of writing and literature, perhaps. Oh yeah, erm - check my myspace. I make music, too!
Happiness.
I shot this with a Canon Powershot G11 at my friend’s show last Saturday. Check them out.
