week 6: plunderphonia

artists have been deluding themselves for centuries with the notion that they create. in fact they do nothing of the sort. they discover. inherent in the nature of reality are a number of combinations of musical tones that will be perceived as pleasing by a human central nervous system. for millennia we have been discovering them, implicit in the universe – and telling ourselves that we “created” them.

- spider robinson, melancholy elephants.

a very interesting type of record collector is the one who makes a project of turning that collection into creative output, that is, collects to produce. or perhaps, in spider robinson’s terms, collects to discover. john oswald and his plunderphonics (the term he coined to describe his practice of pop-music collaging) is one of the most interesting figures. pioneer of the mash-up (the cross-breeding, so to speak, of highly recognisable popular music), oswald’s work is amongst the most brilliant and controversial achievements of the audio culture of the west in the second half of 20th century. inspired by the tape cut-ups of william s. burroughs and brain gysin, oswald began experimenting with musical cut-ups in the early 1970’s and issuing these cut-up compositions on cassette via his own mystery tapes label. in 1989 he released this cd:

 

week 6: something to do – with great gratitude – otherwise than

insofar as it acts as the arbiter of sanity and the proprietor of the illusion that is “being normal”, pop psychology can go piss up a rope. i often say to astrid things like: fuck you’re a strange creature. she usually protests in this little voice: no i’m not, i’m normal and i always say bullshit, if you were normal i would leave you in a second. and i would. normal is dead boring (as opposed to the alive boring, which is fantastic).

now this is not to say that there isn’t a real psychological dimension to obsessive record collecting and, of course, any kind of obsessive tendency is complexly involved in deep issues of the psyche (and a psyche is always in a body). the problem with the pop psychologising of record collecting is that by being such a stigma – social retards, misfits, etc – it misses the fundamental issue, and that is: people need something to do to keep going on. if we put cultural stigma aside, what is the essential difference between the endless accumulation of records and the endless accumulation of wealth and property? profit and property are obsessions on a mass culture scale, with much farther reaching consequences than lonely men with houses made from vinyl foundations.

 

upper hut posse & wire mc

i highly recommend this gig on friday night at the glasshouse bar (boooo!). head lining it are the awesome aotearoa crew upper hutt posse as well as the gumbayngirri man, wire mc. there’s also a film screening of (lead mc from upper hut posse) te kupu’s documentary ngatahi – know the links at UTS at 4pm on friday, at the level 5 lecture theatre in bon marche.

 

week 5: somebody keeps farting // steal the spotlight

i always think back to the time more than a year ago when i was eating dinner and having a few drinks at the courthouse in newtown with my friends briohny and james. james was interested in what i knew about the role of hip-hop in rural indigenous communities, and he asked whether there was a problem with corrupting or replacing traditional culture. i said what traditional culture? the culture where they wander nomadic through the desert telling dreamtime stories and painting dots on bark.

 

week 4: barney and friends

barney’s notion of the cultured world, and it’s music, reveals with such clarity how our understanding of other cultures is essentially no more sophisticated than what we teach to our children via television. but then sophie said very softly: how can you expect the children to know otherwise? which was not the point rachael was (excellently) making but cuts to the crux of what is perhaps more the point: barney controls (the boundaries of the world of) his friends. what’s instructive about the barney example is to see not merely that the vision of the world is childish, but how that world is presented. other cultures are marketed to children as images that can be recognised to fit the mould of a stereotype – complete with traditional costume, instruments and dance – and thus any understanding of these cultures will exist only on the level of an image that fits a type. if the image hasn’t any depth then how can we expect our understanding of other cultures to have any depth?

 

week 3: identity and locality // representation and event

the question was asked: can you think of types of music that are associated with particular places? and i felt an urge (resisted) to say: sample-based music produced in bedroom studios across the world. i guess this comes to mind because my flatmate and best mate tom, aka cleptocleptics, is a bedroom producer, and the room where i sit to type (like right now) is so local to his aural environment (or aural terrorism as i call it) that i can feel the vibrations in the walls. so my sense of his music is very physical, and also geographical, that is, i recognise the locality from which the sounds come (the room next door) whilst at the same time i identify the music in my body.

 

week 2: imagined community // representation // race

the pronouns we, us and our got a workout in class this week. and pronouns are fond of flexing their muscles in public, but it would seem they don’t take too kindly to questions about the nature of the way they flex. the flexing has enough tension in it already without those uncomfortable questions. what i mean to say is that the when someone says our music or we are more like this and less like that, the pronoun our and we functions in an inclusive and exclusive way. it imagines a border between that which is in our grouping and that which is not. the pronoun works to create such a imagined grouping so the rest of the sentence can appear to be saying something which has a basis. the pronoun is quite sneaky in that regard, in how significant what it does is in relation to how seemingly innocuous and common it is.

 

week 1: parallel practice: music & language

in class i mentioned the sublime as a way of thinking about the experience of music. the sublime, as a noun, is distinct from the adjective use of the word sublime, which refers to excellence, as in: you’re belly-dancing skills are sublime. as a noun, the sublime refers to the quality of sublimity (see the 7th meaning given on dictionary.com). it comes from the word limen, which is the threshold below which a stimulus is not perceived or is not distinguishable from another. so if something has a sublime quality it is affecting you on a level of which you are unaware, in ways you are unaware of. in other words, more is going on than your consciousness can comprehend.