From Alex Reynolds Sent Tue, Oct 6th 1998, 14:47
From Alex Reynolds Sent Tue, Oct 6th 1998, 14:47
"Means From an End", is, by and large, a purely conceptual exercise; your basic, bare-bones "Thaemlitz" product. Enjoyable, in parts, and excrutiating and annoying in others'. Barring the odd track, Terre takes a loop and violently disassembles the loop into its fundamental components: melody, beat structure, etc. which -- according to Thaemlitz -- act as metaphors for certain conceptual understandings of heterosexist, racist, status-quo-maintaining, causal frameworks (phew). Terre runs various destructive filters on the components, which are then recombined into the "track". The process is deconstruction; the result is the reconstruction: the various social contexts that are remixed, if you will, and collected into a body of work that is relevant to the individual listener. The physical process and the artistic result are both literally "means from an end," specifically, the argument that music *does* have contextual meaning though its specific manipulative components: "This [remix] process bears similarities with general processes of social recontextualization, wherein previously constructed histories (end points) are filtered and reconstituted to advocate a particular cultural agenda (means, or middling of a past with transformative desire)." (Thaemlitz, liner notes) Thaemlitz takes a loop with, in his mind, a particular social subtext, and reconstructs the track with the idea of "opening a discourse" on the process of behavior control through the consumption of mass-media product (here, music, but it could be any form of creative knuckle-flexing). He asks: What is music made from? What agenda or agendas are reflected in the music's components? Why do people spend hard-earned cash on Prodigy, Orbital, and Puff Daddy? No answers are given -- but that's not the point, here, I don't think. I disagree with one point he makes, that the reconstructions are subject to "interpretive abstractions" -- this renders the end (track) meaningful to all in individual ways, and, therefore, meaningless on the whole. That entire "scenes" are built around schools of artform pretty much negates this statement. Gender-bending was never my strong suit, so I can't answer your last question. Everyone keeps referring to Mr. Thaemlitz as "he", and "he" doesn't complain, so I guess it works. <opinion>His sexuality is important insofar as it answers questions about his music.</opinion> Alex ___ Does anyone have [means from an end]? I got a cd by Terre Thaemlitz a super long time ago, and now I have the most recent one. Does anyone have any comments about his most recent work? Is Terre a he or she or neither? thanks. - -daniel. __________________________________________________________________________ Alex Reynolds Distributed Support Specialist Department of Biology School of Arts & Sciences Computing University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA email:xxxxxxxx@xxx.xxxxx.xxx phone:215.573.2818 Interviewer--what do the words mean? Brian Eno--what do the chords mean?