<div> <font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">great exchange.</font><br>
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-----Original Message-----<br>
From: Kim Cascone <kim@anechoicmedia.com><br>
To: microsound@microsound.org<br>
Sent: Sun, 18 Jan 2009 4:44 pm<br>
Subject: [microsound] gaza drone<br>
<br>
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<div style="margin: 0px;">thanks for this post, kim.</div>
<div style="margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><br>
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<div style="margin: 0px;">i have been thinking about this question since the initial post was made. i</div>
<div style="margin: 0px;">wasn't interested by the clip because it seemed to me more or less</div>
<div style="margin: 0px;">traditional program music, the sort of thing that would have a score</div>
<div style="margin: 0px;">including sequences for foley guys who would provide appropriate</div>
<div style="margin: 0px;">clippety-cloppity sounds when the horses on which the fox hunters are riding</div>
<div style="margin: 0px;">zip across the pastoral environment just before the basses and tympani start</div>
<div style="margin: 0px;">a froth to announce a coming thunderstorm.</div>
</blockquote>
<div>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</div>
<div>[think elaborate worlds faire exhibits circa 1965 or so]</div>
<div>I can remember seeing similar things on TV e.g. Smothers Brothers show</div>
<div>the Vietnam war nurtured this style via 'protesters' or 'peaceniks' finding a way to express their views by appropriating techniques used in propaganda </div>
<div>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?) </div>
<div>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</div>
<div> </div>
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<div style="margin: 0px;"> the problem with that, beyond</div>
<div style="margin: 0px;">it's tedium, is that it presents a flatly representational surface at a</div>
<div style="margin: 0px;">point where such surfaces are themselves politically (and cognitively) a</div>
<div style="margin: 0px;">Problem.</div>
</blockquote>
<div>this is the role of propaganda: to simplify/reduce complex subjects then categorize them into easily digestible labels</div>
<div>and while the Gaza YouTube video was considered out of context for the microsound list</div>
<div>it might have been the cartoon-like surface that led people to dismiss it out of hand</div>
<div>also, there is a cultural naivete when being presented with 60's style politics - one that induces a feeling of 'embarrassment' for some</div>
<div>although Obama seems to have resurrected a Web2.0 simulacra of this using the peace symbol and an abstracted 60's style poster art </div>
<div> </div>
<blockquote type="cite" class="">
<div style="margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="">i think it's particularly difficult to make direct political statements</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0px;">through frameworks that see in representation, and the conceptual apparatus</div>
<div style="margin: 0px;">that enables it, an ideological problem. </div>
</blockquote>
<div>this is why there is so little political statement in experimental music</div>
<div>there have been some interesting attempts of political expression by </div>
<div>Fredric Rzewski, Ultra-Red, Cardew, Art & Language, AMM, Gang of Four, Test Dept etc. </div>
<div>but none have really taken hold of the publics imagination in any way that deconstructs 'false consciousness' </div>
<div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div>
<div>see:</div>
<div><a target="_blank" href="http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/55565/gang_of_four_and_pop_music_as_marxist.html">http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/55565/gang_of_four_and_pop_music_as_marxist.html</a></div>
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<div style="margin: 0px;"> i thinks this generates problems</div>
<div style="margin: 0px;">not only for bourgeois forms of representation (the conceptual apparatus</div>
<div style="margin: 0px;">that you see made semi-material through television coverage of the world,</div>
<div style="margin: 0px;">the tight focus on particular sequences of events, the erasure of context,</div>
<div style="margin: 0px;">it's replacement with the voice-over which tells you what the sequence</div>
<div style="margin: 0px;">you're watching "really means" in terms which are synched in their</div>
<div style="margin: 0px;">arbitrariness to the arbitrariness of decontextualized</div>
<div style="margin: 0px;">factoid-reality...whence the operative power of the discourse of "terror")</div>
<div style="margin: 0px;">and its marxian inversion. i think the idea of "what's really happening" is</div>
<div style="margin: 0px;">a problem, one that opens onto ontological-register work---and newer forms</div>
<div style="margin: 0px;">of sonic organization can be framed as performing such work in that the</div>
<div style="margin: 0px;">enact alternative approaches to information and it's organization--but this</div>
<div style="margin: 0px;">material (i suppose---i can't think of a better term at the moment, even as</div>
<div style="margin: 0px;">i know this is not a good choice) doesn't operate itself as argument or</div>
<div style="margin: 0px;">demonstration. it requires the development of new analytic frames,built</div>
<div style="margin: 0px;">along what amounts to an alternate ontology, that can operate alongside new</div>
<div style="margin: 0px;">approaches to sound organization in a relation through which one type of</div>
<div style="margin: 0px;">activity extends and informs the other.</div>
</blockquote>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
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<div style="margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><br>
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<div style="margin: 0px;">and it seems to me that there is considerable distance to be traversed</div>
<div style="margin: 0px;">before such projects link to more conventional forms of politics, of action,</div>
<div style="margin: 0px;">if they do.</div>
</blockquote>
<div>agreed -- many of them have never even left the gate so to speak much less arrived at any definitive link</div>
<br>
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<div style="margin: 0px;">it might be that the furthest "we" can go is to enact and conceptualize</div>
<div style="margin: 0px;">alternate ways of thinking and seeing</div>
</blockquote>
<div>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</div>
<div>its the age old paradox of political commentary </div>
<br>
<blockquote type="cite" class="">
<div style="margin: 0px;">----these may end up being</div>
<div style="margin: 0px;">self-referential---they may not issue into a way of thinking politics that</div>
<div style="margin: 0px;">we know about--or it might. either way, it seems to me there's an</div>
<div style="margin: 0px;">interesting set of adventures to be had, new modes of failure to be</div>
<div style="margin: 0px;">explored.</div>
</blockquote>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</div>
<div>then 'electro-acoustic' music has an academia link and represents an intellectual class that is currently not in vogue in the US</div>
<div>witness the rampant anti-intellectualism encountered here from time to time</div>
<div>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)</div>
<div> <br>
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<div style="margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><br>
</div>
<div style="margin: 0px;">i have trouble talking about gaza sometimes.</div>
<div style="margin: 0px;">it seems to me a massive confirmation of the ways fanon described the</div>
<div style="margin: 0px;">dynamics of colonialism as a process that corrodes occupier and occupied,</div>
<div style="margin: 0px;">that issues into a kind of psychotic space structured by types of</div>
<div style="margin: 0px;">pseudo-rationality. </div>
</blockquote>
<div>and it is exactly this psychotic space might be the place from where real political content can flow</div>
<div>one excellent example was <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Helvetica; font-weight: bold;">Thomas Ashcraft: 'The Sounds of Dogs Eating The Faces Off Of Corpses In Iraq'</span></div>
<div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Helvetica"><b><a target="_blank" href="http://www.heliotown.com/Soundfields_From_Iraq_2007.html">http://www.heliotown.com/Soundfields_From_Iraq_2007.html</a></b></font></div>
<div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Helvetica"><b><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></b></font></div>
<div>it is this psychotic space (think: 'Apocalypse Now') that is bolted on to the side of post-modernism's fractured narrative</div>
<div>and one that could very well use microsound, glitch to help shape content</div>
<div>the accident or concept of failure intersects with the concepts of disorientation, disembodiment brought about thru informational overload</div>
<div>which also adds to the inability to 'know' reality via simulacra and mediation </div>
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<div> </div>
<blockquote type="cite" class="">
<div style="margin: 0px;">perhaps one could count the 400 fewer children who are</div>
<div style="margin: 0px;">alive in gaza after these past 3 weeks and arrange them as steps in a proof</div>
<div style="margin: 0px;">that leads in this direction.</div>
</blockquote>
<div>Gaza is a place of disorientation and psychosis - the children still alive are permanently scarred by this </div>
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<div style="margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><br>
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<div style="margin: 0px;">this seems to me to take you beyond folksongs that tell you earnestly that</div>
<div style="margin: 0px;">situation in the world x really sucks.</div>
</blockquote>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 </div>
<div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div>
<div>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</div>
<div>but that it found its way into the context of microsound is very interesting and raises many issues that are very worthy of discussion</div>
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