From Sean Cooper Sent Sat, Sep 4th 1999, 00:26
From Sean Cooper Sent Sat, Sep 4th 1999, 00:26
>Another part of me thinks we are building electronic music to be something >it is not, and even if the kids two or three generations listen to Ae, >maybe that wasn't how the music was intended to be. Maybe the stuff we >listen to *should* be rooted in time... Why does Good music have to be >timeless in order to earn the "Good" title? this is a very, very, very good point. western culture as a whole currently does not appear to be interested in producing art that is timeless. the whole notion of timelessness -- at least in the context of "autonomous" art -- is very much rooted in modernist/enlightenment ideologies that many artists have left behind in favor of distanced (or even situated) commentary, commercialism, eclecticism, etc. in a very broad sense, western culture at present seems far more interested in "breadth" than "depth," which means cleverness and novelty end up focusing people's energies over (arbitrary) notions of objective value. this is not a renunciation, just a sort of "symptomatology," as deleuze might say, of one of the mythologies of contemporary culture. of course, despite its lack of popularity, this is pop culture we're talking about, in a very rigorous sense. and longevity has never really been a concern. in experimental art it's the same -- it's a vast game of, as david toop described it in "ocean of sound," throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks. no matter how tacky the stuff (no pun intended), it can't stick for long. looking back at the albums i considered "classics" or "masterpieces" of electronica even four years ago, i find that very few of them have survived. also, experimental electronic music culture as a whole embraces as a primary motivation notions of development and innovation such that its own accelerated obsolescence can be presumed before the record button is even pushed. an interesting tie-in: in the latest issue of the wire, ian penmann gives a good thrashing to dr. atmo's "man made motion" as an embarassing throwback to early '90s ambient. an interesting "observation" since the album is, of course, early '90s ambient -- an illigitimate reissue of tetsu inoue's "slow and low," released in 1994. (oddly, the mag also manages to report on that scandal elsewhere in the issue, and penmann's review does not seem to be written with knowledge of the circumstances in mind -- a curious bit of editorial slapstick.) sc