From Ryan Richard Whitehead Sent Wed, Oct 15th 1997, 23:20
From Ryan Richard Whitehead Sent Wed, Oct 15th 1997, 23:20
> of a group of people and stated that his "style" is supposed to be > disjointed and cut up sounding - Thats fine, but dont call it dance > music... If the mixing is so bad and the beats so off and the > scratching resembles something that is more likely to result from > bumbing into a turntable with your hip than hand manipulation HOW CAN > YOU "DANCE" TO IT??? > I guess that what I'm trying to say is this: If you are all about > RANDOM noise that his DJ style is great - Its fucking perfect at being No personal attack intended, but there are some points here that i find slightly problematic. To simplify, i'll remove them a bit from the Spooky context. Point 1: "if the mixing is so bad and the beats so off . . ." there is a definition at operation here--an implicit bias. good mixing=matched beats. mixing (v): to match beats. one point of djing is that you begin to see music functionally, not definitionally. music is what it does as part of the environment you create for it and with it. THE POINT . . . mixing is a function as well. it doesn't mean to simply match beats . . . it means creation, complexity, layers, indifferentiation, a seeming inability to undo which is sometimes followed by the very deconstruction which we felt impossible . . . sometimes the point is to emphasize the doing. imagine your stirring water into a powder--there is a lot of mixing prior to the homogenous liquid which we can see analagously as the Matched Beat. the bumbled scratch can be a sonic artifact, a history lesson--a reoccurance of that torn moment where some dope realized that it sounded good . . . it was a real sound, a concrete sound, it was the idiom of vinyl, what happens when vinyl is liberated from histrionics and the trumpetting of other voices. Point 2: "Random noise" many people still feel that putting random before noise is like saying VERY two times in a row or like saying bad rap--just an emphasis in case you forgot that all rap is bad and all noise is random. i've never seen him perform, but i've seen Otomo Yoshihide of Ground Zero and Christian Marklay maul needles, break records in half and rub them like tablets across the stylus, pick up technics and drop them, slam a microphonic guitar down on the platter and watch it lazy susan.. Marklay literally constructs records in a concrete way: breaking records apart and piecing them together in new orders, playing them like grooved cut ups or fold ins. they are random\ texts as Burroughs texts are random, as automatic writing a la Breton was random. preparation can happen at any point in the creative process--the thinking about, the mulling over, the torn exchanges of imagined hands before accessing their content . . . improv is far from random. check out otomo yoshihide's "Pekinese Opera" or Ground Zero's "Consume Red". Marklay's new collection of works from 85 (?) to 92 (?) is also a good point to explode into. you can find them at forcedexposure.com william burroughs The Third Mind, written with Brion Gysin, is also a good book to check out on the cut up fold in tip. gotta go to class so excuse the frozen mind in the word rush, ryan whitehead