Re: [-empyre-] quickies for the panelists

["tobias c. van Veen" <tobias@rhizome.org>]

hi Glenn, 

Thanks for posing a number of questions all-round..
I've now got a bit of time, so let's dig into the issues a bit.
 

> Tobias, after being involved with microsound for a while now, do you
> still think microsound is academic and sterile?

I think coming from an engaged perspective--anarcho rave-culture--to
non-public experimental practice is like hitting a sudden slowdown in
experiential acceleration... like slamming the breaks after driving 110 mph
for a few years down the freeway of illegal sonic activities only to
discover a really well-designed Taco Bell holding up the freeway traffic...

Microsound--like much "avant-garde" experimentalism these days--fails to
hold life by the nut, so to speak, and seems predominantly situated within a
reflective, inwards-gazing framework. Somewhat of the historical irony of
.microsound is that one of its primary movers & shakers, Taylor Deupree, who
runs 12k records [http://www.12k.com] was a renowned hard techno producer &
DJ and infamous member of the live hard techno trio, Prototype 909. I own
his early 12"s from the mid-90s... although it is not quite the case that he
reversed his earlier career; his interests have always also lain in ambient
music, like most (hard) techno producers (thus his involvement with SETI).
However, there is somewhat of a turn, perhaps a revolution in the records of
.microsound. For me microsound is not an "evolution" of electronic music,
but rather perhaps one of the consequences of the death (via sell-out,
consumerization & appropriation) of a subculture, and indeed, of the
"subcultural" model in general. In a way, I think many producers have, for
lack of a better model, "interiorized" their production, producing
laboratory-like sonic experiments or intensive, meditative pieces after
years at the wheel of hedonism. This is simply a turn or spin--and for the
record, I enjoy Deupree's work immensely as well as that found on the
label--and at its best this moment is, perhaps, a very meditative one, one
for pause, one for sinking, peacefully, into the sonic bath of the moment.
My own practice is first & foremost engaged with phonography (field
recordings) so I can fully appreciate this. But I am also a
techno-turntablist, so I also approach microsound from a hyper-energised
perspective that breeds its imagination on speed.

Simply, microsound is somewhat the product of experimental electronic music
production that is no longer tied to a mobile, underground subculture
existing in the real that grapples with practical & immanent problematics of
its existence--ie the terrain of the political, ie, rave culture. Instead it
has been grounded as an "art form," which is to say, it is almost wholly
virtual, with no actual life-practice attached to its creation (unlike, for
example, Situationism, Surrealism, or the early avant-garde etc).

The shift from hard techno to .microsound in Deupree's history is somewhat
of a shift from a "minor" musical form (in the sense of D&G) to
(paradoxically) a macro-musical form that is micro-sonically oriented. But
this too is seeing its shifts. The most recent turn of microsound is its
connections to other genres--such as the piggybacking of microsound
techniques, sounds, etc. as "glitches" and "clicks and cuts" in other areas
of music & sound experimentation--and its transactive hop _out of sound
completely_. And with this latter hop out of sound we see its theorisation,
the theorisation of microsound itself, and the attempts to think microsound
technique in distribution, net.art, video art, and other terrains. This too
is producing its own culture, but one which is global and no longer "under"
mainstream or pop-cultures in the way "subcultures" were in the 80s and 90s.
Instead we see the arrival of a global "micro.culture," one which is
connected & savvy, and which primarily communicates via the Net and gathers
at certain nodal points: the Mutek festival in Montréal, Sonar in Barcelona,
and beginning to include events such as Ars Electronica, Transmediale, Next
Five Minutes, and so on. This is of course building from the global networks
established by global rave culture and teknival organisation. The connection
between, then, the post-raver element of the microsound community and the
wider net.art / tactical media communities is only just being made at the
same time that microsound and other experimental electronic practices are
hopping back to their raver past, hopping sideways to shake hands with
post-rock, realising their affinity with New Music, and so on... the
similarities to the rise of independent media (indymedia) & alternative (not
"anti," a misnomer) globalization gatherings / protest is also becoming
immanent. There is a new political here, and this is a sonic aspect of its
movement (the unrecognised element of Murray Schaefer's acoustic ecology has
yet to be plundered... but this is rich in potential). If anything,
.microsound is structurally an immanent music of the Net & such global yet
nodal gatherings, at least in its distributed, nodal form, although its
_content_ remains interiorized and still bound to a retreat from the real
via a closed circuit aesthetic. It is when the content of microsound breaks
out of its interiority--or we could say, attends to the exteriority already
carrying away or echoing the glitch and the sonic particle--that microsound
achieves momentum. We witness this here, for example, and I agree with and
echo similar sentiments made by Trace and others on this topic.

So I see .microsound popping out the other end, so to speak, as it globally
encounters a number of other _digital arts & political practices_. This is
where it's at, and it's inherent to the very technical structuration of
.microsound (its compositional method, its thinking of areferential sound).
And once it risks the limit of its interiority in transacting with other
information-systems, digital packets, and out into not only the real but the
virtual, it gains the momentum it has been waiting to embrace. Then we will
see the emergence of globalized micro.cultures. I think Mutek Chile is a
sign 'o the times in this respect: http://www.mutek.cl .


> Could you clarify your argument against the pop music/art music dichotomy in
> microsound--do you see microsound instead as existing somewhere in or near the
> non-binary Afrologic nexus you mention?


It's rather a sustained argument and primarily a considered & respectful
deconstruction of Kim Cascone's work. By this I don't mean a critique, as
there is much of value in Kim's work & if anything it reveals the paradoxes
of microsound that are somewhat touched upon above. Cascone has much to
offer and he is one of the first to think these connections. Although this
is rarely noted, however, his ideas are at complete theoretical opposites to
those of Achim Szepanski, whom I noted in the last mail. But so far there
has been little commentary on the disparate theorisations of microsound or
in attempting to take any of the claims seriously. A new column I am working
on, "immediatism" in the critical music magazine e|I, attempts to come to
terms with a few of these issues, along with their connection to net.art and
digital politics [http://www.ei-mag.com].

Back to Cascone. Cascone is primarily interested in the historical placement
of microsound in the history of electronic Western art music (we could trace
a lineage, as he does, from the Futurists to Musique Concrète to Xenaxis and
so on) and the vicissitudes of "live" performance with a laptop computer.
(He speaks of other issues in his other essays, but these are the primary
claims which I find exemplary). These claims can be found in his essay in
Parachute 107, "Laptop Music - Counterfeiting Aura in the Age of Infinite
Reproduction." 

[See: http://www.parachute.ca/107/extraits.htm#Laptop ].

To simplify Cascone's argument, Cascone claims that pop music manufacturers
"inauthentic aura" as commodity-spectacle through its focus on the spectacle
of "live" performance (following a "narrow" reading of Attali, and to an
extent, Guy Debord). There are two consequences of this manufacture of
inauthentic aura for Cascone:

1. when we come to see microsound performed on a laptop, we desire
spectacle, and we are disappointed when we see no signs of "performance" by
the "performer." The "live" is thus not "spectacular" enough and we see the
laptop-performance as thus "inauthentic" and "not really 'live.'"

2. we see the commodity-spectacle of pop music as "authentic / live / aura"
and the laptop performance as "non-authentic / non-live / lacking-in-aura."

Cascone's observations of this dynamic are worthy and a problematic within
laptop performance. The difficulty lies in his analysis of "aura" and what
he wishes to claim from this observation.

For Cascone, then, the reverse is actually true: Pop-spectacle *actually*
manufacturers a "false" aura via the capitalist-commodity-spectacle schema
("manufacturing the live," basically) while microsound is in fact a bearer
of "true aura," as it pertains to none of the glitz of the spectacle. Flip
the binary, and we've got the truth of art. Microsound is actually true
aura, pop music is actually fake aura, it just pretends to claim itself as
the true via the machinery of the spectacle. This ties in rather nicely with
a reading of Attali's history of music from concerts to recordings.

Cascone thus requires a solution to the problematic of fighting,
essentially, spectacle's influence in determining the power dynamics of
aura. Cascone's solution to the boring-laptop-performance-dilemma is to turn
the "black box space" inherited from rave culture (no chairs, performer up
front, an "open source space," in my opinion) to the electroacoustic
space--chairs, performer in the middle, controlling the soundsystem.
Likewise, in a move analogous to physically embracing an
electroacoustically-coded space of listening, Cascone wishes to disregard
the previous thirty years of electronic music history (disco, house, techno,
electro, industrial, ambient and so forth) and to make a direct connection
between microsound and the electronic Western art music tradition
(electroacoustic, Musique Concrete, the Futurists, and so forth). The
electroacoustic space ensures a static body (no dancing!) and the exclusion
of rhytmic-electronic music also ensures that the history of "dance music"
remains unheard, reduced to simply a byproduct, if not a fully complicit
element of the pop-spectacle.

Perhaps, then, we need to question the binary pair of "aura" (and its
apparent lack) we commence with in Cascone. No doubt pop music manufactures
spectacle, but I do not think this is what is at issue in microsound. To a
degree Cascone's argument holds _as an analysis of a cultural discourse that
produces real affects_. But as a truth-claim (microsound is REAL aura,
spectacle is FAKE aura) it is a priori metaphysical, hierarchial, and
judgmental, and as such, it seeks to rewrite its own, pure history and
lineage.

Thus the issue of the "live" is a diversion from a neglected part of history
and the argument: that of rhythm. Rhythm in the Western high-art music
tradition is always neglected & assigned to pop, and rhythm, for the most
part, is the product of Afro-American culture as well as Jamaican dub
traditions, and generally of the "low arts," working classes, and so on. The
entire history of Afro-American electronic innovation & its collaboration
with white cultures--Chicago house, disco, techno, electro, turntablism,
hip-hop and so forth, all the way into acid house and rave culture, and
rewind back to the start to re-include industrial, for that matter--is
erased in Cascone's desire to make a direct connection between microsound
and Western high-art tradition. It is especially troubling given the
pragmatic connections elaborated above between microsound & (post)rave
cultures, if not micro-histories & mini-lineages (ie, Deupree as an
example). Cascone's argument also seeks to validate a certain history as
"cause" and "value" (Western electronic high-art) & to invalidate and
dismiss as irrelevant the "pop" histories of techno, house, disco--ie the
last 30 years. Whenever such an action is undertaken in a theoretical
context, one must seek the parameters, justifications, reasonings, and
subtle cover-ups being performed in such an act of historical erasure that
remains, perhaps always, violent.

The theoretical aspect of the argument is directly tied to this attempt to
exclude history in the writing of a continuous, unbroken Western-art-music
lineage. Rhythm is often if not always excluded from high-art. Rhythm is
associated if not insinuated as "pop," "spectacle," and seeks to
"manufacture" its value when it is "in fact" fake. Rhythm is, of course, of
the body, of sex, of gender, of race, of affect--all the naughty bits which
a removed, considered, reflective & interiorized high-art practice wishes to
bleed from its digital detritus. Rhythm is perhaps, after Kristeva,
feminine.

Cascone's argument, then, is entirely consistent with Western high-art
discourses that are as old as its underlying metaphysical and, when it comes
down to it, phallogocentric presuppositions to art as truth, pure aura,
cerebal, non-corporeal, static, unbroken lineage, and so on. It is entirely
consistent, for example, with much of Adorno.

Now, on the other hand, Cascone points out a very real problematic in the
invalidation of "live" performance on a laptop due to the fact that what we
seem to desire is spectacle-performance, and that this no doubt has
something to do with the pop-spectacle "we" are used to, ie
music-as-entertainment-commodity and so forth. But I think Cascone's
tactic--which is to reverse the claim and say Nope, actually microsound is
the REAL--is one that simply maintains the same system, the same claims to
aura, and in the process, attempts to invalidate an entire history, as well
as negate the body, alternative modes of music and lived experience,
Afro-Futurist histories, etc., via a general claim of "X is actually true, Y
is actually false" and so on. Perhaps we should consider that our desire for
spectacle is not necessarily manufactured, and that there is a difference
between rhythm, the body, and the movement of sound as a social force of
gathering and mobility from what I would agree with is the commodification
of culture and art to bland entertainment, often but not always in the form
of "pop" (I think it can also occur in high-art, for example, and this is
the reduction of the virtual to the numerical, to a calculation, an
exchange, something which is always at hand, and always irreducible, but
nonetheless can be negotiated and set to play, to dance. The virtual, to
theoretically generalise in this case, is the excess of temporality, of the
past and the future and of time in general, the ephemeral, perhaps the
unspeakable, and is perhaps the positivity of "aura," insofar as we read
"aura" not as authenticity or value, as Cascone appears to do, but as
potentiality and indeterminacy). Thus the desires we face raise a set of
questions that cannot be contained within Cascone's framework, and which
break the framework of Western art music entirely, if not put into play the
binaries of authenticity, aura, value, and so on, leaving us at the brink of
raising more potential aspects than we could ever possibly contain or
answer: "spectacle," "pop," "art," "high/low," "commodity," and so on, all
of which are underpinned by various assumptions about economy, exchange,
art, music, the body, and so on.

Cascone's solution to these problematics then, besides his argument, is the
practical move to essentially turn microsound to electroacoustic, at which
point the in-between nature of microsound--neither truly a popular
electronic music (at all!) nor an academic practice of the institution--will
simply collapse into, no doubt, a set of established granular synthesis
practices and modes of algorithmic and indeterminate composition as
practiced by various innovative electroacoustic institutions and artists. I
have nothing against electroacoustic music, but I wish to see microsound
differentiate itself by reinvigorating its position as a minor practice, an
experimental, hybrid electronic form, bound to no academic history although
plundering it, perverting it, sampling it, nor bound to a popular music
coda, although leeching it and setting upon it as a parasite, and thus
maximising its potentiality in this state--which is one of constant
oscillation or movement at the level of the global via a micro-intervention
of sound. For Cascone, I think this poses some theoretical difficulties, as
he constantly refers to a sender-->receiver, signal/noise model of
communication in music which is a priori disrupted by any theory or practice
of hybridity, indeterminacy, or practical minor emergence (ie as a set of
practices connected to pragmatic movements in and of the social).

Well... needless to say I've outlined some of this in a conference paper
that can be found here:

http://www.quadrantcrossing.org/papers/Laptops&Loops-UAAC-tV.pdf

I am also completing an article for FUSE magazine (Toronto) that seeks to
deconstruct this logic in Canadian federal arts funding. For the Canada
Council, if the music project which one is applying for funding for is
arhythmic, it is thus "high art" & can be funded. As soon as it involves
rhythm--movement, the body--it becomes "pop" and a low art, if art at all,
and it is shuffled between various funding agencies. Basically it becomes
invalid. This, for me, is is a subtle manifestation of institutionalized
preconceptions of art that bear traces of a racial-cultural prejudice that
speaks to an underlying negativity toward the body, a set of cultural
assumptions that, today, have been broken down in practice via rave, house,
techno and other electronic practices. And today, we are now seeing these
practice re-infiltrate the institution, academe, and the high-art realms as
they seek to change they very basis of this high/low art distinction, which
is causing the usual round of apprehension and debate if not backlash.

best, tobias