[-empyre-] paradoxes and microcultures

[Glenn Bach <gbach@csulb.edu>]

Tobias,

So, you see microsound as a by-product of the collapse of the subculture 
of certain strains of outward-looking electronic music.  This 
inward-looking microsound then faces a paradox whereby its existence in 
the wider net culture is at odds with its self-referential content 
(viewed by some as neo-modernist--see Ian Andrews' "Post-digital 
Aesthetics and the return to Modernism http://radioscopia.org/postdig.html).

You celebrate the reflective mode of microsound, which "at its best . . 
. is, perhaps, a very meditative one, one for pause, one for sinking, 
peacefully, into the sonic bath of the moment," but you also suggest 
that microsound attempt to "transact[] with other information-systems, 
digital packets, and out into not only the real but the virtual . . . 
gain[ing] the momentum it has been waiting to embrace."

So, some questions, then, to Tobias and the group:

Is microsound a transition from the death of the subculture to the birth 
of the microculture?  Or certain subcultures yielding various offshoot 
microcultures, with microsound as a catalyst?

Unless microsound breaks out of the binary pop vs. art dialectic, it 
risks being a footnote to electroacoustic?

Is microsound too broad a term to encompass all of its manifestations 
(grains & clouds, glitch, clicks & cuts, microambient, et al)?

Is rhythm the answer?  A re-introduction of the pulse into the 
in-between spaces of the glitch, something deeper and more profound then 
simply the appropriation of glitches and stutters in the place of 
high-hats and kick drums found in micro-house or click-hop?

Lastly, could you expand on your mention of Schafer's acoustic ecology 
as an untapped model?

Best,

G.