From Sean Cooper Sent Tue, Jul 28th 1998, 07:57
From Sean Cooper Sent Tue, Jul 28th 1998, 07:57
>>I just picked up Explores We. First let me say that I appreciate noise. >I both like & understand Richard James=EDs music and Autechre is >one of >my favorite bands, but I do not get The Farmers Manual. > >Hmmm....you just might have to be more patient with Farmers Manual. You >said that you appreciate noise, but you probably meant you appreciate >noise in small doses when combined with more recognizable song >structures. Autechre and Aphex dabble with noise, but they use it >sparingly to texture their music. With Farmers Manual, all you are >getting is just the pure noise. In "Explorers_We", The noise is the >music. this is an interesting little meditation on fm starting up here. sometimes it's hard to know what to make of that group. and as such, i thought i might just post the following excerpt from a jon wozencroft [touch/fuse/aer] interview i did just after the fuse conference a few months back here in san francisco, where farmer's manual-related side project SKOT gave their mind-scrambling debut performance. i don't know if this interview will ever really see light in full-text form, so i thought i may as well just throw it in here where it might stick. ----------- sc: How do you suppose somebody like, say, Farmers Manual fits into that? Earlier you were talking about getting caught up in techniques and at that point all you're expressing is technology. From one perspective, it's possible to listen to Farmers Manual and say that that's what they're doing. That they're merely expressing the limits of the technology that they're using. jw: There are certain exceptions to the rule, which you can never explain or anticipate. But people suddenly and intuitively find a tool or an instrument that they are so connected with and able to use in a particular way: Farmers Manual to me are doing a kind of punk with the computer, and they have an undertanding of the computer that my generation had an undertanding of the tape recorder and an understanding of the tape machine. I could never do what Farmers Manual do. They are able to rewire, literally rewire, the kind of aesthetics of the circuitry, the kinds of sounds that you get out of Pro Tools and all these Mac-based hard-disk editing programs. They...they're difficult, Farmers Manual. >> But are they doing more than that. Are they doing more than expressing >>technology? Oh yeah, I think so. I think that if I was to get intellectual/theoretical/explanatory about Farmers Manual, that I would say they were taking what Lyotard and Baudrillard talked of as being <em>micronarratives,</em> and they're taking something that in 1971 would have been a two-hour piece and doing it in two minutes. And in Farmers Manual you'll have a sequence of sounds that might last 10 seconds, but that 10 seconds could, if you wanted it to be looped, it could go on for five or ten minutes. So a lot of what Farmers Manual are doing is also talking about time compression, and about how you relate the creation of space and the marking out of space by doing something that is very -- well, they would use the word <em>brutal</em> -- that's very...resistent. They're, I think, trying to create new forms, and in doing so challenging all of the conventional relationships between a musician and a studio, a musician and a song, a musician and a particular format -- which we're all brought up with, which is the three-minute pop song -- and they're doing, like, 10 songs in three minutes, or even 50 songs in three minutes. And so you get one of their CDs and it's got 60 or 70 indexes on it. To me, that's all talking about micronarratives, talking about the kind of fragmentation of experience. They're taking all of these fragments and editing them together so that they create this kind of completely self-combusting chemical reaction. People often think, and they've accused me of it, that these things are improvised, that these things are just thrown together because we liked the noises. No, no. These things are constructed in the way anyone would use color or the way anyone would use words in a text. They're finding sounds that they find interesing or unique, and they're editing them together. You can think of it as strips of film, you can think of it as a lattice, like a hypertext kind of thing, and it's also forcing you, the listener, to rethink your relationship to intervals, harmonies, progressions: how much of something do you need to feel a relationship to it. I love music that, initially, makes me think, "I'm not sure about this," that I have to listen to a few times. It's a challenge, and you want these things to push you forward. You don't want always to have things that tell you where you already are. What's the point? -------------- [thanks jon!] sc