[-empyre-] microsound as music's digital praxis

["Trace Reddell" <treddell@du.edu>]

When hypertext first appeared on the scene, many of us were quick to note
how this form of electronic writing fulfilled much of post-structuralism. In
other words, the form/media of expression seemed to have finally caught up
with a new mode of content, and even the content itself.

Actually, Surfiction had been exploring possibilities since the mid-70s
along these lines, publishing "books" that were collections of loose leafs,
unbound, in a box; Federman published his concrete-typing novel _Take It or
Leave It_. Tom Phillips had done some similar feats with _A Humument_,
remixing a Victorian novel _A Human Document_ by painting onto the pages and
leaving only balloons of text remaining. Oulipou were likewise taking
game-playing with language to a new level. All of these works stressed what
Ronald Sukenick, after Emerson, called "formal thinking" -- as Sukenick read
Emerson, this was a mode of composition theory that acted as an antidote to
much of the then-current literary theory; subverted the academy (primarily
through creative writing programs at CU-Boulder and SUNY-Buffalo, where the
creative writing profs actively took issue with the attempts of English lit
faculty to get a corner on theory and writing about literature); took an
adversarial position to mainstream publishing habits (Sukenick, Federman,
and others launched the author-run Fiction Collective in 1976, I believe).

Most importantly, "formal thinking" provided a way to process the
imagination's formation of raw experience into artistic works. It did so
through works that openly addressed or revealed their own construction, so
that to a certain extent, the work functioned as its own critique.

After my initial "microsound-is-space-rock/ambience-under-the-microscope"
phase -- and after getting more into the glitch branch of things (oval,
pole) -- I began to suspect that microsound had something of this "formal
thinking" bit very much in the foreground. Microsound seems to me to be the
self-reflexive mode of music given digital conditions. This can be music
openly addressing its construction (often through its deconstruction), but
also engaging its own critique (not just as content/meaning-carrying device
but as media itself, physical storage material, social phenomena, and so
on). Many of our previous comments on this panel have pointed to
microsound's tendency to upset academic boundaries; to mix with other
art-modes/media; to upset traditional distribution modes; and to confound
established ideas about performance/delivery. I'm not saying that all
microsound does this. But this is, in my opinion, the greatest legacy of
many of these kind of works.

Do others of you on this list think this idea that microsound is deeply
related to formal thinking as I've described it, particularly in a kind of
self-reflexive way? If that makes no sense, would you please comment on how
your work embraces its own critique -- or, at the least, how you see a
praxis of theory/content and form getting mixed up in your compositions
and/or improvisations?

-=trace