[microsound] post-laptop era?

[David Powers]

Personally I believe that there is a problem with this hypothesis.

To begin with, I have yet to see a human/machine interface that gives
me the kind of nuance that I achieve when I play piano. Even if such
an interface existed, when encounters the problem of technological
obsolescence. The lifespan of technologies is too short, and for any
new instrument, there are no teachers and no tradition. Thus, it is
difficult if not impossible to achieve the kind of virtuosity that is
possible on more traditional instruments. This in turn means the range
of performance possibilities tends to be rather limited, or if I might
say so, even rather "amateurish".

However, I am even more disturbed by a trend I see arising as a result
of the prevalence of digital music making: I believe that much
important musical knowledge is being lost. If one considers the great
musical traditions of the world, which for me would include Indian
classical, Chinese and Japanese music, West African drumming, European
classical, jazz, and contemporary compositional practices, there is a
huge range of harmonic, rhythmic, melodic, and timbral knowledge and
possibility available. Yet, most of this knowledge is being forgotten,
leading to extremely narrow musical practices. Instead of mastering
the structural aspects of these musics, one usually encounters them,
if at all, as directly sampled appropriations.

The problem with this is that sampling (like the application of novel
dsp effects here and there) normally exists entirely at the surface;
it is in most cases merely a "sound effect". It has no impact on the
inner structure of a musical composition. Consider the difference
between the influence of Indian music on, say, John Coltrane's
saxophone improvisations, with a piece of music that merely samples a
sitar riff. The difference is obvious: by taking seriously the inner
structure of Indian music, and using the insights gained in this way,
Coltrane was able to produce a radical new musical space. Coltrane's
recording of "My Favorite Things" is precisely an Event, opening up
the space of freedom, proposing a new way of creating vibrations. One
might even say that at a certain level, the sitar sample is, in
Hegelian terms, an abstract negation of Indian music; it is simply an
empty signifier for an exotic Other; it refers to another tradition,
the better to avoid any real encounter, to keep this alien Other at a
distance. Coltrane's approach, on the other hand, is to wrestle with
the Other, not to reproduce it but to critically encounter it in order
to produce a synthesis that produces something really new, something
which is no longer just jazz, but is not Indian music either, nor is
it just a simple pastiche of the two.

In conclusion, I would say that one must distinguish between mere
progress, which in our day and age is only the passing of time under
the rule of capital, and the radically new which comes as an Event
rupturing the structure of reality and opening up new possibilities
for freedom. Technological progress is not bringing more freedom, it
is not opening up new possibilities, precisely because progress
remains entirely within the coordinates of the market place and the
society of controlled consumption.

If we wish to really discover what is new, in art as in life, perhaps
it is time to take a deep breath, to step back, and to not be afraid
of what is considered "old-fashioned" and traditional; not so that we
can slavishly recreate a tradition, but in order to find the seeds of
the new, the possibilities for freedom that lie dormant within the
accumulated cultural experience of the global human society.

~David

On Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 12:45 PM, Graham Miller
<grahammiller at sympatico.ca> wrote:
> the future is in control surfaces and human/machine interfaces...
>
> On 15-Dec-09, at 1:27 PM, Adern X wrote:
>
> IMHO in the last two years laptop moved from being a music generator to the
> state of a music controller. In other words, if some times ago laptop music
> used mostly sinewaves as input, now it seems more interesting doing realtime
> manipulation of samples (or somenting coming from audio inputs) or play with
> other (real?) instruments.
> The result is that it seems less "laptop-music" perhaps because, for me,
> music using sinewaves seems in a creative cul-de-sac.
> Hi!
> Il giorno 15/dic/09, alle ore 18:38, Kim Cascone ha scritto:
>
> over the past couple of years I've noticed interesting developments in new
> music
> one is the seemingly sudden plethora of laptop musicians
> the other is the death of laptop music
>
> interested in hearing opinions regarding the state of new music culture and
> .microsound
>
>
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> Adern X
> http://www.xevor.net
> http://www.myspace.com/adernx
> "Boredom is the mother of creativity" (Ron Arad)
>
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