[microsound] gaza drone

[jcespinosa at aol.com]

 great exchange.


 


 

-----Original Message-----
From: Kim Cascone <kim at anechoicmedia.com>
To: microsound at microsound.org
Sent: Sun, 18 Jan 2009 4:44 pm
Subject: [microsound] gaza drone












thanks for this post, kim.




i have been thinking about this question since the initial post was made.? i

wasn't interested by the clip because it seemed to me more or less

traditional program music, the sort of thing that would have a score

including sequences for foley guys who would provide appropriate

clippety-cloppity sounds when the horses on which the fox hunters are riding

zip across the pastoral environment just before the basses and tympani start

a froth to announce a coming thunderstorm.


this format of propaganda takes many forms -- the slideshow with folksong seemed to have been born in the 60's - when multimedia slide-show presentations were all the rage

[think elaborate worlds faire exhibits circa 1965 or so]

I can remember seeing similar things on TV e.g. Smothers Brothers show

the Vietnam war nurtured this style via 'protesters' or 'peaceniks' finding a way to express their views by appropriating techniques used in propaganda?

in fact there was an essay written about the semiotics of Jane Fonda's newspaper photo of her sitting in a tank with some VietCong - I don't remember the writer (Barthes, Sontag?)?

but I still think Godard was close to achieving an effective mix of politics and 'glitch' - i.e. the sudden, jarring collage of visuals and disembodied sound

?



?the problem with that, beyond

it's tedium, is that it presents a flatly representational surface at a

point where such surfaces are themselves politically (and cognitively) a

Problem.


this is the role of propaganda: to simplify/reduce complex subjects then categorize them into easily?digestible?labels

and while the Gaza YouTube video was considered out of context for the microsound list

it might have been the cartoon-like surface that led people to dismiss it out of hand

also, there is a cultural naivete?when being presented with 60's style politics - one that induces a feeling of 'embarrassment' for some

although Obama seems to have resurrected a Web2.0 simulacra of this using the peace symbol and an abstracted 60's style poster art?

?


i think it's particularly difficult to make direct political statements

through frameworks that see in representation, and the conceptual apparatus

that enables it, an ideological problem.?


this is why there is so little political statement in experimental music

there have been some interesting?attempts?of political expression by?

Fredric Rzewski, Ultra-Red, Cardew, Art & Language, AMM, Gang of Four, Test Dept etc.?

but none have really taken hold of the publics imagination in any way that deconstructs 'false consciousness'?




see:

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/55565/gang_of_four_and_pop_music_as_marxist.html



 i thinks this generates problems

not only for bourgeois forms of representation (the conceptual apparatus

that you see made semi-material through television coverage of the world,

the tight focus on particular sequences of events, the erasure of context,

it's replacement with the voice-over which tells you what the sequence

you're watching "really means" in terms which are synched in their

arbitrariness to the arbitrariness of decontextualized

factoid-reality...whence the operative power of the discourse of "terror")

and its marxian inversion.? i think the idea of "what's really happening" is

a problem, one that opens onto ontological-register work---and newer forms

of sonic organization can be framed as performing such work in that the

enact alternative approaches to information and it's organization--but this

material (i suppose---i can't think of a better term at the moment, even as

i know this is not a good choice) doesn't operate itself as argument or

demonstration.? it requires the development of new analytic frames,built

along what amounts to an alternate ontology, that can operate alongside new

approaches to sound organization in a relation through which one type of

activity extends and informs the other.

the best political audio I've heard are the Chomsky?lectures -- he seems to dig deep enough to get closer to what is 'really' going on







and it seems to me that there is considerable distance to be traversed

before such projects link to more conventional forms of politics, of action,

if they do.


agreed -- many of them have never even left the gate so to speak much less arrived at any definitive link



it might be that the furthest "we" can go is to enact and conceptualize

alternate ways of thinking and seeing


very often though these 'think different' ways of seeing/thinking are rendered moot since any attempt to be outside the system (affording?perspective) requires money/power which then places you back in that system

its the age old paradox of political commentary ??



----these may end up being

self-referential---they may not issue into a way of thinking politics that

we know about--or it might.? either way, it seems to me there's an

interesting set of adventures to be had, new modes of failure to be

explored.

also agreed -- it's difficult to include political content in one's sound work given the context 'electronica' has: hedonistic,?bourgeoisie, leisure, workers weekend?catharsis...etc

then 'electro-acoustic' music has an academia link and represents an intellectual class that is currently not in vogue in the US

witness the rampant anti-intellectualism encountered here from time to time

and this presents yet another conundrum: where to find a platform that hasn't been leached of its ability to transmit messages without being delivered coated in 'cartoon-sugar' on its way to the receiver (sorry for invoking this communications model - especially after pointing out that it is woefully?inaccurate?and simplistic)

?





i have trouble talking about gaza sometimes.

it seems to me a massive confirmation of the ways fanon described the

dynamics of colonialism as a process that corrodes occupier and occupied,

that issues into a kind of psychotic space structured by types of

pseudo-rationality.?


and it is exactly this psychotic space might be the place from where real?political?content can flow

one excellent example was?Thomas Ashcraft: 'The Sounds of Dogs Eating The Faces Off Of Corpses In Iraq'

http://www.heliotown.com/Soundfields_From_Iraq_2007.html




it is this psychotic space (think: 'Apocalypse?Now') that is bolted on to the side of post-modernism's fractured narrative

and one that could very well use microsound, glitch to help shape content

the accident or concept of failure intersects with the concepts of disorientation, disembodiment brought about thru informational overload

which also adds to the inability to 'know' reality via simulacra and mediation?




?


perhaps one could count the 400 fewer children who are

alive in gaza after these past 3 weeks and arrange them as steps in a proof

that leads in this direction.


Gaza is a place of disorientation and psychosis - the children still alive are permanently scarred by this?









this seems to me to take you beyond folksongs that tell you earnestly that

situation in the world x really sucks.

yes - I guess what I was saying was that the YouTube video is a symptom of a larger machine - one that afford us all a?privileged?lifestyle,?manipulated?buying habits,?predilections?towards technological arts and objects, and leisure time to consume and produce artifacts made with this technology 




it is this very machine that churns out this content which provides a surplus of psychic insulation and mirrors the technique corporate media uses to direct our thoughts and opinions

but that it found its way into the context of microsound is very interesting and?raises?many issues that are very worthy of discussion



















=


 





_______________________________________________
microsound mailing list
microsound at microsound.org
http://or8.net/mailman/listinfo/microsound



 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://or8.net/pipermail/microsound/attachments/20090118/e12e1512/attachment-0001.htm