The Cloude of Unhearyng

(Or: A series of random and incomplete late-night thoughts prompted by revisiting the music of Harry Partch for the first time in nearly two decades.)


[...]   Firstly, I recognized the architecture within within the first frame, because I immediately felt a twinge of homesickness. Which was odd, because despite two decades spent in Chicago, I never heard any mention of Partch ever having lived or worked there. I associated him exclusively with the West Coast, assumed he might have spent some time on the East Coast, but could never imagine him having reason to venture inland.

[...]   The story’s been told, by David Toop and others, about how the composer Claude Debussy encountered Indonesian gamelan music at a Parisian international expo in 1889. He was enchanted by it, having – lazing about on an adjacent grassy space, having dozed off at some point in the performance, awaking a long time later to hear the same music going on with little variation, for hours on end. It apparently gave him some sort of epiphany, about other types of music – “all-night” musics that were infinitely open and modular and had a logical and purpose all their own, obliquely interweaving itself into one’s experience and awareness, following any of the usual Western ideas about beginning or end, progression or development or focus, etc.. He wrote about it in his journals, made notes to perhaps incorporate his impressions of this music in his future compositions, but died before ever getting round to exploring the notion. His friend and associate Erik Satie proved more ready to venture down that path.

[...]    Re, that last thought...

There’s nothing like going to something you saw advertised as a performance by a “gamelan ensemble,” and being confronted by a bunch of local white folks (townies, essentially) coming out to clang away on water kettles and marimbas. This has been known to happen. Reason being that apparently at some point in the early-mid twentieth-century, gamelan music became something of an exotic ethnomusicalogical fixation in the U.S.,and the music departments of many major universities clamored to acquire all the instruments involved in making the music. Which they still own, and would otherwise be mouldering in storage if some of them hadn’t started some sort of community-outreach programs to bring people in to learn how to play them and give the occasional free-to-the-public performance.

File under: "Not what I had in mind." I don't know who’s to blame for this, but I'm fairly sure Debussy and Satie can't be held responsible.

[...]   By the time Tortoise released their 2nd album (1996's Millions Now Living Will Never Die), people around town were already starting to talk shit about them. You know how it is – the backlash. Once the artist in question starts to get widespread recognition, everyone who claims to have gotten in on the ground floor gets all churlish and sneeringly dismissive. Perhaps this was the reason the group so quickly adopted the Never-Play-Your-Hometown policy that they'd adhere to for about a dozen years thereafter.

But in there sudden absence, they inspired their share of imitators around town. Small outfits with unconventional instrumentation and approaches. Lots of realtime dubbed-out knob-twisting and reverb-soaked sound manipulation, or with percussive elements taking the lead, often more openly structured and unresolved than what rock audience would've wanted or been conditioned to ever expect. I recall one such ensemble that had a marimba as their central instrument as seemed to be quite smitten with the music of Morton Feldman. There were enough of these types of groups around that for a while you might've wondered if the whole "post-rock" sound was going to be the next big underground thing in the city. Nothing doing, as it proved to be short-lived, with only one of two of the acts in question ever getting around to recording anything before splitting up.

Tortoise meanwhile, were making themselves scarce about town. "Last time I saw those guys," one local backlasher was recorded as saying, "They did nothing but play 'Tubular Bells' for forty minutes. Doubtlessly in reference to when the band started working with vibraphone and marimbas; a phase that seemed to be inspired more than Steve Reich than anything else, although I remember wishing at the time that they would've instead steered it more of a Partch-like direction.

Habitat # 8 (Preface)

"It was during the nineteenth century that the 'building' became distinct from the 'monument,' a distinction that slowly entered architectural terminology. Monuments are characterized by their affectation or aesthetic pretension, their official or public character, and the influence exercised on their surroundings, while buildings are defined by their private function, the preoccupation with technique, their placement in a prescribed space. The architect came to be seen as an artist devoted to the construction of monuments, and there was a question of whether buildings were a part of architecture at all.

"There was a terrible loss of meaning that followed the extensive promotion of the building and the degradation of the monument. The monumental was rich from every point of view: rich with meaning, the sensible expression of richness. These meanings died over the course of the century. We may deplore the loss, but why return to the past? Negative utopia, a form of nostalgia motivated by a rejection of the contemporary, has no more value than its antithesis, technological utopia, which claims to accentuate what is new about the contemporary by focusing on a 'positive' factor, technique.

"The meaning ascribed to monuments disappeared in the wake of a revolution that had multiple aspects: political (the bourgeois democratic revolution, for which the revolution of 1789–93 provided the model), economic (industrialization and capitalism), and social (the extension of the city, the quantitative and qualitative rise of the working class). The demise of the monument and the rise of the building resulted from this series of cyclical events, from this conjunction of causes and reasons.

"The monument possessed meaning. Not only did it have meaning, it was meaning: strength and power. Those meanings have perished. The building has no meaning; the building has a signification. An enormous literature claiming to be of linguistic or semantic origin is now seen as derisively ideological for its failure to observe this elementary distinction between signification and meaning. A word has signification; a work (at the very least a succession of signs and significations, a literature, a succession of sentences) has meaning. As everyone knows, the most elementary sign, letter, syllable, phoneme has no signification until it becomes part of a larger unit, becomes part of a larger structure.

"The destruction of meaning, a democratic as well as an industrial revolution, engendered an abstract interest in significations. Paradoxically, and yet quite rationally, the promotion of the building was accompanied by a promotion of signs, words, and speech, which erupted together with the significations to which they corresponded. The power of the thing and the sign, which complement one another, replaced the ancient potencies, endowed with the ability to make themselves perceptible and acceptable through the symbols of kings, princes, and the aristocracy. This does not imply, however, that political power disappeared; it was simply transferred to an abstraction, the State.

"The complementary powers of the thing and the sign are incorporated into concrete, which is twofold in its nature, if we can still continue to employ the word: a brutal thing among things, a materialized abstraction and abstract matter. Simultaneously — synchronically, I should say — architectural discourse, highly pertinent, filled with significations, has supplanted architectural production (the production of a space rich with meaning). And the abstract and flawed signs of happiness, of beauty, proliferate among concrete cubes and rectangles."

- Henri Lefebrve, excerpt from Towards an Architecture of Enjoyment, c, 1973. Recently translated by Robert Bonanno, forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press.

Koolhaas contra Greenspan

"...As such they manage to make a walk around the building feel not only unwelcoming, but surprisingly boring. CCTV's shape-shifting forms and daunting seventy-five-meter, thirteen-story cantilever make for stunning views from within and from a distance; they are least engaging from the sidewalk.

"This is a surprise, coming from the author of Delirious New York and a scholar of cities. Years ago Rem Koolhaas taught us to appreciate the richness of the culture of congestion, the tight interlocking of the public life in the street with the private lives of the skyscraper interiors. But at CCTV he trades Manhattanism for the internalized programmatic promiscuity of Bigness and the old city-killing model of the Corbusian 'towers in the park.' In a self-fulfilling prophecy, he argues against addressing the street because the political life that it once supported no longer exists. He treats the existing street as 'residue' and conceives of CCTV not as in the city, but as a city — perhaps the greatest flaw of Bigness. Bigness not only re-establishes architecture as an agent of exclusion, it negates any possibility of fostering inclusive congruency.

"In the end, CCTV is a spectacular object simultaneously rational and irrational, exuberant and withdrawn, monumental and unstable. Sadly, the one contradiction it doesn’t resolve is the choice between icon-making and city-making. Ultimately it rebrands architecture and avant-gardism in service not to the culture of congestion but rather to the society of the spectacle."

Ellen Dunham-Jones at Design Observer, from her essay "The Irrational Exuberance of Rem Koolhaas," published at the site last year and more recently reprinted in the Routledge anthology Architecture and Capitalism: 1845 to the Present. It's a fairly long read, one that may do little more than the echo the assessment of Koolhaas's recent work & career than a fair number of people formulated years ago. The essay has a narrative arc to it: From former architectural student of the radically-inclined soixant-huitarde generation, to current premier “post-critical” starchitect; with the author rehashing some of Koolhaas’s early theoretical yarns, insinuating that much of it may have been little more than the result of youthful contrarianism.

As far as the crux of the critique is concerned – it doesn’t seem like a difficult case to make. There’s a bit of an ad-hoc character to it, in which Koolhaas serves as subject due to s work being so conspicuous; but one could easily imagine a similar critique being directed toward any number of other figures. For instance, how about Zaha Hadid’s World Cup stadium in Qatar as monument to ruthlessly inhumane labor practices and the brazen corruption of FIFA? Or, similarly, Anish Kapoor’s “Orbital” Tower in London as the same, but with the IOC standing in for FIFA? Or – while we’re at it – the dwarfing, subsuming Bigness of Kapoor’s recent “Leviathan” installation as a visual metaphor the ongoing art-market bubble, and to the colossal dynamics of global finance? I suppose one go on. And if this sort of thing seems too easy, it’s because present circumstances make it so easy.

Pink Guitars vs. the Negative Dialectic, II (Slight Return)

Aaron at ATTT, once again, with the followed belated (very belated) observations about Daniel Lopatins’s “Eccojams”:

“...Most of the rest of vaporware, not so much. I understand the gesture, understand the nostalgia, miss the bright techno future-vision of the capitalism of the late 1980s/early 1990s, but a lot of the music seems to get by just on the mere gesture of evoking that era. As if simply the choice to compose in a certain style were enough all by itself, with the actual composition a mere afterthought.

"To the point that the critique is almost lost and the composer has just substituted demo tracks of late 1980s synthesizers for, say, Italo disco or 1960s garage rock, as the thing to sound like with no desire to communicate anything beyond the aesthetic predilections of the composer.”

Which precisely gets at some nagging suspicion I’d had lurking in the back of my head ever since all the discussion about defining musics of the hauntological or vaporwavey pedigree – works by artists whose efforts pioneered or epitomized the micro-/sub-genres in question – was being kicked about so heartily some 5 or so years ago.

Nostalgia through a glass darkly: The loss of childhood innocence, via deferred and unrealized futures, and something something neoliberalism. I actually thought of some of it in similar ways myself, upon initial exposure. But that was my own subjective reaction, based upon an impression based in a network of association from my youth. And admittedly I’ve contributed to some of that discourse mentioned above, having written down my thoughts on it a while back.

But to Aaron’s remarks, especially the bit about “getting by just on the mere [musical] gesture of evoking an era.” Dicey business, that; especially if the era in question is exists in the minds of most listeners as a vague impression or set of clichés, on account of it falling – by dent of their age – outside their own direct experience. Musically, its mainly an example of form becoming content in the most “meta” of pomo ways, inthat it’s music referring to itself, or to its former self as it may have appeared in a previous incarnation. Music that is now looked back upon – through ironic twists of canonical filtering, an upended hierarchy in which the kitsch and marginalia of the past are given top ranking – as definitive of a previous zeitgeist. (And really, what age doesn’t/wouldn’t want to think of itself as some sort of zeitgeist?) Mere style as a sort of semantic signifier. Skrewd, woozy, deliberately degraded – a corrupted signal, at once both allusive and elusive in its suggestion of a particular point in time. A moment that long ago unmoored from its particulars, drifted well beyond the gravity of its original context. But of course we know that context is usually the first thing lost in the data stream, the news cycle, the deluge of information in an information age. In this instance the instance at how we arrived at this socio-political-economic moment, a moment in which the idea of “the future” might provoke as much anxiety as optimism: the context is a not-so-distant past that might recalled in some hazy or second-hand fashion, but can’t be reconstructed, reverse-engineered, let alone reclamated or redeemed. That’s the nature of the past – what’s done is done. And memory – be it personal or collective – is of little remedial use in such matters.

Object Lesson, II

Related to the topic of the prior post...

Of course, the pricing of an LP is – in theory, at least – based on the usual supply & demand principles, with the scarcity of a near-obsolete/technologically marginal format being the prime factor in the equation. Number of copies in circulation, etcetera.

Which brings us to the Wu-Tang Clan’s upcoming album The Wu – Once Upon A Time In Shaolin, of which there will be precisely one copy. A single copy, housed in a silver and nickle hand-carved box – presented as a unique objet d’art. The item will reportedly be sent on a tour of museums and galleries, where people will be allowed the one-off chance to bask in the glow of the album’s aura via headphones after paying an "entry fee," after which the thing’ll finally be put on an auction block to be sold to the highest bidder, the desired sum being in the seven-figure range.*

One might emphasize the word reportedly, because there’s a lot about the news item that suggests a media prank in the offing. If the enterprise seems a bit it preposterous, the accompanying proclamational text at the project's PR site hammers that impression home very squarely. At turns bombastic and apocalyptic, it makes a series of statements about the g music industry, all under the premise tap between popular music and “fine art” and the current state of the music industry, that the project in question would somehow tactically remedy or address anything connected with these situations. A bit droll, innit? Reuters finance contributor Felix Salmon argues that there’s the question of just much RZA and crew understand about how the artworld and its markets operate. Which would seem to be the case, but whether it’s a case worth arguing is another matter.

I’m not sure what subpercentage of the One-Percent might actually want to have the Wu as the “soundtrack of their life.” Strangely, the project is (once again, according to the website) the first in a series of such ventures by an entity calling itself – ugh – The Carmen Clandestine Experience, which purports to be "the world’s first private music service," about which there’s no further information to be found. By “private music,” one assumes this means: Music as luxury item sold to a sole deep-pocketed individuals or entities.

Perhaps the best comment I’ve read in relation to the Wu jawn is someone asking, “Maybe start a Kickstarter campaign to help ‘liberate’ the album?’”

Some would argue art’s ultimate value – or its greatest redeeming value -- is the role it plays in relation to the larger culture. A similar argument could be made music in relation to the social realm. In which instance, instead of debating if RZA & co. have completely misunderstood the nature of art; the better question would be if they've instead come to misunderstand the nature of popular music. Once again, providing this isn't all a joke/publicity stunt. Perhaps some barbed commentary about the inherent socio-economic contradiction of the one-time "music from the streets” getting too entangled with the exclusivist aspirations of gated community?**

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
* Certain details lacking in all of this. For instance: Auctioned off how, or through what venue? Does the Anglo-Moroccan artist who carved the box get a cut of the auction, or was he offered a flat fee for his services? Whatever the case, I hope all the contracts are in order, and that the involved parties sought proper legal counsel in advance.

**Either that, or it's the product of smoking too much cheeb over the span of many years. Which would make the project the other type of "high-concept." You decide.

Object Lesson I

I have to hold my tongue a lot. Or I try to, but I'm often sure I don't do it nearly as much as I should. I'm sure people who know me these days can predict my responses to certain things, can rely one show me to forego saying anything positive; but instead deferring to some other restaurant meal, or some other band, or selection of goods on offer or whatever -- to something better I'd eaten or cooked or seen/heard before, elsewhere. Ever the jaded city sophisticate, having lived in a heart of civilization for some two decades, and who therefore has a broader frame of reference/experience. Not that I scoff or snort dismissively or shrug it off "meh"-ingly. Most often, I just pass on saying anything that remotely sounds like any sort of a judgment call and defer to prior experiences. Which is probably even more annoying than being firmly, brusquely opinionated.*

I only mention this because this past weekend I went to a record show this past weekend; one held in my new locale. Vendors from a number of places, one have come from as far away as Detroit. His selection was much like that of the other sellers -- lots of stuff from the last days of vinyl, meaning: crates full of shitty rock and r&b from the 1980s. Dross and dregs. Not that it mattered much to me. I have enough records, thank you. Enough so, that many of them are still boxed up in storage while my wife and I inhabit a small short-lease place as settle into the new environ. So I'm not in the market in the market to compulsively buy LPs like I used to. It wasn't even my idea to go to the event, it was – for reasons I still don't fully understand – my wife's. If anything, it was a good excuse to stroll around the historic district of downtown now that some spring weather has finally begun to teasingly set in. One seller starts a conversation with me over the merits of the Temptations' Psychedelic Shack. He's a nice enough guy, and it turns out he runs a music shop in a neighboring town. From him I learn that Simeon of Silver Apples currently lives in the neighboring town in question.

Anyway: The other reason it didn’t matter was because the prices – for records both crap or worthy – were absurd. On which you can maybe blame the increasing scarcity of the format in question, as well as showroom mark-up. I walked away with a copy of the item above, which was in very good condition and priced at about 10% its usual.

Which brings me back to my starting point: If I scoff at the pricing, it's mainly because of nearly two decades of experience spent thumbing through in used record shops on the south side of Chicago. Seeing things I was used to see going for a few dollars now being slapped with asking prices ranging from $20-40. Or at least tempted to scoff, but more often snickered. Because yeah, record shops on the southside were good for certain things. You could go downtown to the Jazz Record Mart where you’d see an old copy of Grachan Moncur III’s Some Other Stuff, a copy on which the prior owner’s offspring had totally gone to town on the front cover with red and purple crayons, but which would still (apparently) command an asking price of $50. Or you could stick to the southside, where you could stood the chance of walking out with a copy of something like the below for ten dollars or less...