Country and City

I'm reading Raymond Williams' Country and City in my library office, and I realized that all my life I've thought of myself as a resident of the country. Corn fields, one-room schoolhouses, open land, and other farmer/cowboy identifications are suprisingly natural for me - someone who has lived their entrie life in the city.
I visited the country a few times as a kid and I remember mostly hating it, even though I loved to read about it - out in the country sometimes too. From what I've read of Williams so far, sounds like the English were the same way: writing about a rural England from their London apartments. What is this, corn stalk envy? A sort of agrarian psychic residue for city-boys? I can imagine some urban Londonite scribbling away while the Ghost of Feudalism Past prods him with a handful of chains - or a corn stalk maybe.

Capital Neighbors

Ben and I have fired up a little discussion of capitalism and art on the ICELU web forum. Here are few thoughts from that discussion:

I'm very fond of Ben's sober attitude regarding art-as-commodity, or art-as-action maybe. He's not interested in formalist beauty, in abstraction-for-purification, or expression in the romantic, emotional sense. "So mentally I try to strip the music of this beauty to reveal it as what it is: a product, a CD, a gift (this is what I try to create), a political agitator, a ritual. That's how I listen."

On the forum, I paired this approach with something that I took from reading Hardt & Negri's Empire - which is that the only way for the people (by which I mean "hackers" in the information-producers sense of the term that McKenzie Wark uses in his book The Hacker Manifesto) to avoid a kind of slavery in the grip of capitalist powers is to understand, embrace, and soberly wield the methods of capitalism: that is, all the lovely postmodern trappings of the information age. Rather than reject the methods of capitalism (commodification, informationalisation, etc) simply because they are used to cripple and marginalize - it should be the artist's goal to command these techniques and use them to dissolve the fantasy of a fascist super-community that one either belongs to or is rejected from outright (refuse to participate in the discourse of populist media? - you're now irrelevant, marginal, and dangerous). I put it like this on the forum:

Aesthetic homogeny is a tool (and really a fantasy) for the power behind the commodification of art - the myth of a "universal appeal" I think both grabs the wheel of art in capitalism to steer things away from the individual, and also dissolves the idea of community in favor of a kind of fascist super-community that you're either a part of, or nothing. So aesthetic naval-gazing is just the sort of spice to sprinkle onto the rhizomatic/postmodern community prototype - one that embraces the structures of power we have today, but turns them like a knife to cut apart that fantasy super-community.

It's the idea of the rhizomatic, postmodern, decentralized community prototype that gets me the most excited. I can see it everywhere, bubbling under the surface, and more often forcing change, dismantling the super-community brick by brick.

As Ben sees the rhizome:

I think when I talk about "industrialism" I think I try to listen with industrial ears - what complete listening is to me is hearing everything that made a particular piece of music possible. A very incomplete list for say a Sunday afternoon band concert would be: the construction worker who worked on the hall, the Fedex truck that delivered the music (and the factory workers who built the Fedex truck), the legislation in the House of Commons that lead to the formation of the colonialist military organization that originally commissioned a march for the recent acquisition of Bangladesh to the British empire - subsequent from which the composer of the second piece stole the second horn part for his trio section, the man who worked in a motorcycle who eventually begot the tuba player's grandpa, ETC. ETC. ETC.

Broken

I just found a very nice review of my record on the Grooves Mag site:

These songs are all about the comfort of smothering: The thickly layered sounds echo the familiarity of warm blankets, impenetrable snowfall, a mother's embrace. The whole affair seems like a gushy proposition, but Schoster approaches the challenge with consistency and style, backing up melodic content with chops in beat programming and signal processing. The sheer variety of sound sources used in the album's nine cryptically named tracks add up to a sonic scrapbook of sorts, cataloging conversations with friends, eerie voicemail messages, and interviews with fellow composers, adding necessary inhabitants to an otherwise depopulated landscape of pure tones and micro-beats. - John H. Degroot [read the rest]

Notes and Lines

I'm becoming interested in note based music again - really since Marcos played some Sciarrino for me the other day. Of course, the more I think about notes, and interact with notes, the old problems seep back to irk me.

For instance, the other day we saw the LU Symphony play a Dutilleux violin sonata - I don't remember what it was called, but it was great. Maybe great then especially because it followed the heavy and gross lines of the William Tell Overture (or "the Lone Ranger" as Paul overheard an older gentleman describe it) - so Dutilleux's traditionalism didn't bug me, all I heard were the quiet spectral moments when cymbol rushes blended darkly into a mass of velvet cello.

Anyway, afterward, Jen was telling us about one of her favorite parts, and referred to the "high E" to orient us to the spot she was describing. She was just using the language that was most comfortable for her - a practical language that comes from working daily with scores. Nevermind that none of us (Bryan, Paul, or I) had actually seen the score for the piece, had perfect pitch, or in Paul's case (since he knew the piece) had sat down to transcribe it -- nevermind all that. What irked me at that moment was the way that note name was being used - it was being used exactly, to decribe a sound, to stand in for a sound. Words don't stand for sounds - or, what I mean is, words don't stand for sounds in any exact way. In fact, I'd say the only attraction in using words to stand for sounds is that they'll always be imperfect stand-ins. It's that loss in translation that's fun, where the magic happens. So I was irked, coming from a performance of a piece that seemed to me to shine for its skill at stepping away from the shackles of notes (into the world of sounds, spectrum, color, fluidity, etc) only to be described with this audiovisual term that conjures a dead black spot on a stark white page. Ugh.

It reminded me of the danger in scores - for them to devour the sounds they should be enabling. And it reminded me why on Friday I found Sam Adler's music to be as dead as those dots on the page - except for his piano piece, and I'm convinced it had something to with the fact that he was forced to use non-standard notation to realize the inside-piano bits.

All that aside, I'm excited to use a score, and an acoustic ensemble - it doesn't seem like a waste of time anymore, I see a glimmer of hope again. Thanks Marcos!

Alphabet Tones

I got Nathan Michel's new record "The Beast" yesterday, and it's really lovely. I want to be like him when I grow up. To live on a stipend from Princeton which pays him to make records for Tigerbeat6 and Sonig - that's a nice dream.

In the realm of dreams, I also got more LaMonte Young yesterday. One day, I'd like to visit the Dream House. For now, mornings in my drone-soaked room with a hot cup of tea are suiting me well.

Spectral Folk

iTunes needs a del.icio.us-style tagging system.

I just recovered my external harddrive from the EMC studio, where it has sat since my computer was sent in for repair a few weeks ago. It was nice to have a very small collection of music for a while - I found myself going deeper with a given record than I may have otherwise, simply because it was the only one of its kind I had to choose from. For instance, I've been craving the drone for a solid week or more. I got my satisfaction from Stars of the Lid (and an actual physical Kranky comp) until a few days ago. Now I'm chewing through LaMonte Young, Terry Riley, Tony Conrad, COIL, and Stockhausen's Stimmung again. Kaija Saariaho has gotten some heavy play as well - along with some other academic acoustic music, mostly of the IRCAM orbit. So what?

So, I realized that I suck in my music in loose associative categorical waves. I could say that I'm now into my Minimal-Drone collection, and my Academic DSP collection, or my Academic collection, or my Academic Folk, or Laptop DSP, or Spectral Folk collection, etc, etc. That's where iTunes is failing me. I want to sift through my collection for the sort of loose and rhizomatic categories that del.icio.us gives me for bookmarks. I'm tagging away with the custom genre box, but it's just not the same. Where is my statistical feedback, broken into clouds of popular tags and the like?

I guess I'll put on some Roger Reynolds and cross my fingers that a miracle will occur in Cupertino.

Snow Drone

I'm not sure when it started, but I just looked out my window and it is snowing. I feel a little bit like I conjured the snow - I'm in the middle of a suite of perfect snowy-day activites: Reading Middlemarch, sipping a mug of hot green tea, and listening to the drones of LaMonte Young (Dreamhouse 78'17).

Speaking of drones, I was met with a happy sound when I surfed over to the polyfusia site this morning: a track from the new Clifford/Kealoha collab.