A riff on 'Extreme Music and the appeal thereof' from 2007, which was written for someone else's book but not ever actually used, the time-wasting twat-head (said affectionately but with an under note of annoyance)
EXTREME MUSIC
What is the attraction of extreme music? What can
"extreme" even mean nowadays, when the outer limits in every
conceivable direction seem to have been probed? Besides, extremity depends on
context and expectation. If
"extreme" has any meaning at all,shouldn't it be in reference to extremity
of affect, the intensity of what the listener experiences? But then, as we can
all surely attest, it's often the softest songs, the most gently seductive and
caressing sounds, that cut you up most cruelly. Bursting into tears is a pretty
extreme reaction to a piece of music, but I can't think of any noise record or
avant-garde work that has done that to me. Whereas Al Green's "I'm Still
In Love With You" or The Smiths' "There is A Light That Never
Goes Out" infallibly devastate. The
most recent thing to make this grown man sob was Kraftwerk's "Autobahn",
an innovative piece of music on many levels, but not really "extreme"
or noisy, on the contrary, all euphony and Beach Boys-like honey to the ears.
What choked me up wasn't the poignant
melody but the sheer aesthetic majesty of it, the spirit behind the work.
Conversely, I once fell asleep in a Galas
concert (and I was a fan and admirer of her music!). The singer was aiming to
conjure Old Testament levels of affliction, abjection and grief (the work was
inspired by AIDS as a modern day plague). Yet the undifferentiated pitch of
mind-rending anguish had the effect of lulling me into a doze. On the level of
affect, Galas's work was on the same level as Mantovani. Or a mug of Horlicks.
Nonetheless I remain obsessively drawn to the abstract
and out-there in music, and I'm not exactly sure why. That's not unusual: often
there seems to be a gap between the reasons we give for liking or validating
certain kinds of music and what's really going. With noise, free jazz/improv,
avant-classical, et al, there's a tendency to talk in terms of subversion or
challenge, an assault on staid sensibilities. The music is envisioned as an
edifying ordeal, a salutary and spiritually uplifting violation that will
expand the listener's horizons. But in this scenario it's always some Other
that is being tested and transformed; by definition, we are the the always already
expanded. If you approach
a work of art expecting to be challenged, you're no longer in a place where that
can happen.
Terms like
"innovative", "groundbreaking", "pioneering", are
equally problematic, because once you get past the first few listens, the music
necessarily becomes familiar; what was abstract and amorphous starts to take on
a shape, ceases to be disorientating. It's impossible to repeat the shock of
the new.
This is even more the case when we listen to avant-garde
music from a long time ago--Varese's pre-World War 2 compositions, the early
musique concrete of Pierres Henry and Schaeffer, Stockhausen's elektronische
works, or, in rock terms, Velvet Underground, early Throbbing Gristle, et al.
So what is going on when we go back as
listeners to experience a past breakthrough? Is that sensation even
recoverable, given that the present we inhabit is one where the breakthrough is
taken for granted, commonplace, perhaps
even institutionally sanctioned to the point of seeming worthy.
Clearly there's
a large element of projection by the historically-informed listener, a kind of
mental restaging of the moment of bursting through into the unknown. Curious
and paradoxical this may be, but it's absolutely integral to my enjoyment of
the music. Indeed it results in an arguably unreasonable bias against
contemporary artists working in those fields, on the grounds that, however
accomplished their work is, they are
settlers not pioneers; what Philip Sherburne calls an après-garde.
EXTREMITY
There's a certain strain of argument being touted in which the extremities
(global as well as musical) are where it's all happening--from freeform improv
to Jap-core noise, from NZ drone-scapes to quirked out neo-Krautrock to
Skullflower-style fuzzadelia. Apart from the insufferable cooler-than-thou
attitude that often seems intrinsic to this stance, my aesthetic objection to
all these initiatives is their tendency to end up as pure abstraction. And pure
abstraction isn't really that interesting. You can't do anything with it, or to
it--apart from just lie back and take it (in).
"A scribble effacing all lines" is how Deleuze & Guattari put in A Thousand
Plateaux, talking of the tendency of avant-garde artists to reterritorialise
around "the child, the mad, noise"--the aesthetic equivalent to such "fascist or
suicidal" lifestyle choices as heroin addiction, terrorism or joining a cult.
Musically, the quest for chaos can easily end up as a black hole of
undifferentiated, maelstromic miasma--as vast as the cosmos maybe, but in the
absence of any figure-ground perspective, it's effectively as claustrophobic as
a cubby-hole.
I subscribe to the D&G/Manuel Delanda line that the most interesting work
happens "on the edge of chaos". I'm interested in abstraction where it works as
a component of a groove ('ardkore, darkside, techstep) or an element within an
architectonics of audio-space (Chain Reaction). It's the thresholds, the
intermediary zones, that are really magical -- melody bleeding into noise,
songcraft struggling with psychedelics (My Bloody Valentine, Husker Du);
distortion + raunch (Hendrix's "Crosstown Traffic", Royal Trux's Cats and Dogs);
the Bataillean excess and surplus-to-requirements extravagance working within
and against the funktional minimalism (Prince, swingbeat); space + groove +
timbre (Can, Neu!, Miles Davis, Seventies dub). Punk to funk, the ethos is the
same: "restriction is the mother of all invention" (Holger Czukay).
Extremism? Well, on what scale are we measuring here? Very little out-rock,
avant-jazz, left-field electronica, etc. being perpetrated today really ranks
with, let alone exceeds, the outer limits probed by the Sixties freeform
brigades, electro-acousticians, and so forth. There's also the question of ego:
so much out-rock or avant-improv seems to partake of the Expressionistic Fallacy
(e.g. Caspar Brotzmann's scrofulously self-preening theatre of pain). This
interferes with the listener's ability to derive machinic use-value from it. You
just have to sit there and gasp in awe. It's about marveling at the Artist's
depth and intensity of feeling, rather than using the music to trigger
sensations and intensities in yourself. The impersonal, "objective" approach to
constructing rhythmic engines or kinaesthetic audio-sculptures can create just
as powerful feelings in the listener as the "subjective" school of Romantic
outpouring creativity. The idea that the former is mere artisanship whereas the
latter is true Art is, like, half a century out of date, at least. This is the
age of the engineer-poet, the imagineer.
Although drum & bass can make some preposterous claims about its experimentalist
reach, the truth is that its radicalism is always constrained with a quite rigid
set of parameters: at any given season, certain kinds of bass-sound, certain
kinds of breaks, and a specific tempo, are required by DJ's and dancers;
invention takes place within and against those constraints. The resulting
friction creates sparks. In hardcore dance scenes, constraints are a strength,
not a liability. At the very least, these parameters are no less likely to
produce strikingly listenable and intensity-productive results than the total
absence of constraints. Extremism can be as fruitless as any musical stance;
simply embarking with an experimental mindset does not guarantee results.
Leaving the rhetoric of extremity for those still interested in playing the cool
game (the fun wears off about a decade or so, lemme warn ya; there's always
something more marginal and listener-unfriendly than whatever outer limit you
set up shop upon) is a tremendous release. I can now confess that the
song-oriented Faust IV is my favourite of their albums rather than the hipper
Faust Tapes, that I prefer the boogie-fied crossover stab Clear Spot to Trout
Mask Replica, that the almost-funky Strange Celestial Roads is my fave Sun Ra,
that the Sly-and-Jimi influenced Seventies Miles pleasures me more than Ayler or
AMM screeching to the converted. I can consign those Merzbow CD's to that
No comments:
Post a Comment