Date: Sun, 25 Apr 1999 13:13:31 -0700
Subject: Re: avant-noise


Beware - looong reply...



At 8:04 PM +0100 4/24/99, Gerald O'Connell wrote:

>How about German electronic 'rock' from the seventies ?  Into that ?

I think I did say that I was VERY into the current IDM music - I just
didn't think it was that "avant-garde."  I hope you don't take me as being
negative about it - I just think that a lot of expectations are placed upon
it and maybe it's in a little rut.

To answer your question - I am not totally into German electronic rock from
the seventies, but a lot of the 30 and 40 year olds that I know are still
really into them and try to push it.  I'm in my mid-20s - I guess that
music happened when I was under 10 years old and I wasn't really able to
appreciate it in its context so it hasn't made that much of an impact on
me.  I do like Kraftwerk a lot.  I've heard something of Klaus Schulze' but
I don't know what.  Someone played some Can and some Neu for me maybe two
years ago - I don't know - it didn't really register so I can't say I
remember what they sounded like.  I'm in Los Angeles and I believe that one
of the members of Can or maybe Neu came to perform at an indie rock club in
SilverLake called Spaceland.  I went to check him out, but the line was
down the block, it sold out fast and the promoter wanted something like $30
for this performance.  I left.

I try to keep up with the newer electronic music.  I can just be curious
about anything before 10 years ago and have different people tell me about
it or play cuts for me now and then.  I can't say I know where it comes
from.  I can say that I have a shallow grasp of the significance of the
older stuff (unless I read about it in an anthology of critical writing or
something and that makes an impression) - having just altogether missed it.
You said that you hear echoes everywhere around you now - these echoes are
my starting point - they're pretty exciting to me, but I know that they
aren't necessarily innovating the medium.  I don't collect vinyl.  In LA,
everyone is a dj/aspiring dj - so there's plenty of people to mooch mix
tapes off of.

Here in Los Angeles, I'm more impressed by some of the New Music concerts
that happen now and then - maybe because they're more performance-based.
Over a year ago, The Corticle Foundation had a big series of experimental
and new music events.  Some of it was very interesting, some just really
loud and annoying.  The California EAR Unit is the resident ensemble at LA
County Museum of Art and they perform works by new composers doing
interesting work, Cal Arts has a good music program and sometimes alumni do
performances.  KXLU has several Specialty Shows that run the gamut
featuring - noise, new music and traditional forms (like gamelan), weird
stuff like a woman from Idaho that regularly sends in a tape (hours worth)
of the aliens or sometimes the angels that speak in tongues through her,
Psychotechnics and Sadayatana respectively.  There's also a program on
called Alien Air Music featuring more of the ambient end, Tangerine Dream
and new agey type stuff.

My background with all this is fairly recent - maybe five or six years -
but it's been hectic - and there are big gaps.  In 93-94 I was the curator
for the Downey Museum of Art part of the MOCA citywide exhibit of John
Cage's Rollyhollyover.  I got to meet a lot of enthusiastic people through
that and many of them composers, like Carl Stone and Matt Easton.  It was
new to me and interesting.  I started going to more of new music concerts
after that.

I also started to Rave around that time.

This list  - the avant-garde list was my first introduction to e-mail lists
- two or three years ago - I asked a friend a question and he said he would
post the question on a "mailing list he was on."  I had him post a question
for more information about German avant-garde radio in 1950s-60s, horspeil
(sorry, spelling this wrong and missing the umlats) that I'd read about in
Semiotext's Radiotext, and the response on this list was amazing.  This was
a much more active list then.  Some people had actually participated in the
movement, I got feedback as to where I could get tapes, I was scolded about
forgetting the umlats. And the thread kept branching and I was blown away
by what I was seeing here.  After that I joined a few other lists and one
was the Cybermind list and I was blown away by this conference they were
hosting in Perth Australia, but that was happening simultaneously, through
e-mail, irc, newsgroups, video broadcast, etc.

When you talk about the avant-garde in the electronic music medium - I
think it's become much more complex than simply sampling or methods that
are internalized in the work, perhaps what's avant-garde is what happens
outside of the work - how is it delievered, where is it performed, in how
many forms, can these be juxtaposed, branched, and then what happens?

Another cool event on the internet that happened around this time was that
Absolut Vodka did this series of net events called Giant Ant Farm.  They
rented a store front in Venice and had a different resident artist (visual
artist, performance artist, writer) each week who would perform and you
could give them input through a telepromter.  You could also go down to the
physical storefront.

And another possible tie in here is that I made these friends who throw big
music events in the desert.  The last big one had 13,000 people show up,
and just one thing after another happened to complement the set.  They had
these amazing visuals that were projected on the limestone cliffs, etc.
Apparently this sort of thing happens all over the world.  They just happen
and you just have to chance upon it.  What does it mean when 13,000 people
chance upon something that is three hours out in the desert or up in the
mountains?

I've been a dj on KXLU Los Angeles for about 6 years now - doing a cultural
and literary affairs program.  There's plenty of crossover in the arts and
in indie rock, so it's been a good place to get an earful of what's
happening now.  I also go to a lot of electronic shows, clubs and outdoor
desert gatherings  There's a dj on KUCI in Irvine named Daniel Bremmer who
does a program called Space Discos for Fish Tacos and he features some
great IDM - I think the shows are either broadcast or archived on the
station's website.  It was just shut down, but for a while there was a good
pirate radio station running out of SilverLake, in Los Angeles playing some
of this crossover art/rock/electronic fare.

For a year, I worked on the proposal for an ambitious project - a mobile
modular multi-million dollar entertainment complex which was to travel
through Europe (in conjunction with the Rolling Stones tour) spreading IDM
and performance art and dj music and Stelarc-like cyborg bonanzas to the
rest of the world - T3 connections, the show broadcast through hundreds of
cams via internet, cams distributed to artists around the world who in turn
would broadcast back from their homes, motion capture suits for the masses
in attendance so that they could leave avatars of themselves on the
network, jumbo trons, bluescreens, networked games throughout the complex,
Metacreations - Bryce like visuals, etc.   The guy whose project it was
does the big Pink Floyd concerts - like the Wall concert in Berlin, the
sound and lighting for the last winter Olympics in Japan.  I would have
gotten to choose the talent.  It didn't get its funding - but it would have
been a great learning experience and just amazing if it had happened.  I'm
sure there will be other opportunities to get a good field of vision if I
stay interested .

I definitely come from a place where I can say that I haven't even
scratched the surface.

>Can ? Neu ? Amon Duul 2 ?  Popol Vuh ? Kraftwerk ? Guru Guru ? Klaus
>Schulze ? Ash Ra Tempel ?  etc. etc. ??

Do you want to send me a tape?  :-)

>I used to write articles about them for the UK rock press, but the
>editors generally didn't want to know.

There's a slightly larger and more receptive audience today.  Just because
of the popularity of the new stuff.  Do check out Wire Magazine from the
UK, it's well written and regularly homages the OG Germans, etc, as well
as, tie that earlier innovation with what's coming out today - the "echoes"
that you hear.

Here are the URL's of the stuff that I had mentioned to Damien in my
previous e-mail and some of the other mentions in this e-mail-

--The Wire Magazine
http://www.dfuse.com/the-wire/index.htm

--The Wire Magazine Mailing List
http://www.onelist.com/subscribe.cgi/thewire

--IDM FAQ and how to sub to the list
http://hyperreal.org/music/lists/idm/idminfo.html

--IDM aka Intelligent Dance Music
http://hyperreal.org/music/lists/idm/index.html

--Hyperreal
http://hyperreal.org

--IDM Web Ring
http://www.ithaca.edu/shp/shp99/jarnold1/idmring.html

The Cortical Foundation
http://www.cortical.org

The Cortical Foundation Links !!
http://www.cortical.org/resources.html

--Daniel Bremmer's Space Disco's for Fish Tacos on KUCI
http://www.peachfuzz.net/space/

--Carl Stone
http://www.sukothai.com

--The California Ear Unit
http://www.earunit.org/

>The music was 20 or 30 years
>before its time. During the seventies I would regularly see Bowie and
>Eno sneaking in at the back when these people performed in London, but
>they only talked about people whose clothes and attitude they copied
>when it came to interview time - the people whose musical ideas they
>constantly raided never got a mention !

Bowie's been trying his hand at drum n' bass and is getting kicked around
for it.

There's a film out called Modulations and it's pretty much overambitious
and disappointing - basically it's supposed to chronicle the history of
electronic music in an hour-and-a-half.  It dropped names like Cage and
Moroder and Theramin, but left out Can, Neu, Amon Duul 2, Popol Vuh, Guru
Guru, Klaus
Schulze, Ash Ra Tempel, also left out early industrial music - all of this
was not lost on the audience.  I think the audience has become more
sophisticated - a lot of these young djs want to know where the roots of
the music are and they have searched it out.

>There was a whole electronic/digital frontier being opened up in Germany
>at that time, it was really fascinating. I hear echoes everywhere around
>me now....

I'm playing catch up.  Not being a dj/record collector or a musician,
instead just a recent fan.  It's pretty deep water.

For Damien, if he's interested, in the popular side of electronic music and
where IDM fits in today, there's a good book out called, Generation Ecstasy
: Into the World of Techno and Rave Culture by Simon Reynolds, its well
writen and thorough enough.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0316741116/qid=925069589/sr=1-1/002-15631
94-3879862

Cheers,
Christine




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