Author Archives: d.perry

Erik Satie – Vexations

The first Australian performance, organised by David Ahern, took place in Watters Gallery, Darlinghurst, Sydney, on 21-2 February 1970. The performance lasted 22hours; The pianist was Peter Evans, who attempted the performance solo. After 16hours, having reached repetition 595, he stopped abruptly, and left the room. He wrote: “I would not play the piece again. I felt each repetition slowly wearing my mind away. I had to stop….People who play it do so at their own great peril.” Apparently his mind became full of “evil thoughts, [and] animals and “things” started peering out of the score at him.” However all was not lost; another pianist, Linda Wilson, came forward and completed the performance, reporting no ill effects.

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The act of performing or listening to a complete performance of Vexations cannot be compared to any other musical experience. As Cage observed, “the experience over the 18 hours and 40 minutes of those repetitions was very different from the thought of them or the realisation that they were going to happen. For them to actually happen, to actually live through it, was a different thing. What happened was that we were very tired, naturally, after that length of time and I drove back to the country… I slept an unusually long period of time, and when I woke up, I felt different than I had ever felt before. And furthermore the environment that I looked out upon looked unfamiliar even though I had been living there. In other words, I had changed and the world had changed… It wasn’t an experience I alone had, but other people who had been in it wrote to me or called me up and said that they had had the same experience.”

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Dick Higgins observed, “the music first becomes so familiar that it seems extremely offensive and objectionable. But after that the mind slowly becomes incapable of taking further offence, and a very strange euphoric acceptance and enjoyment begin to set in… Is it boring? Only at first. After a while the euphoria… begins to intensify. By the time the piece is over, the silence is absolutely numbing, so much of an environment has the piece become.”

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In Cage’s famous aphorism, “In Zen they say: If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, try it for eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and so on. Eventually one discovers that it’s not boring at all but very interesting.”

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In a poetic sense, Vexations never finishes – the 840 repetitions are themselves but an instant in the eternal present in which the music exists like some platonic form, obliterating memory, eluding analysis. In the words of an ancient Indian saying, “The music continues; it is we who walk away.”

“For example, we can notice how the turn to the singular engenders — and in fact requires — a limited engagement with the historical. By treating the internet as a monumental event that has shaped the entirety of the present, the post-internet, as both a discourse and a concept, gains its particular “currency.” History must be stripped of complexity, ossified and binarized, for the post-internet to function. This denuded sense of the historical is reflected in Olson’s understanding of the post-internet era, which for her “may be ahistorical insofar as it has no degree-zero.” This assertion’s appeal to generality, its belief in the total subsumption of the contemporary by the internet, refuses to countenance historical complexity, instead allowing for a subsequent assertion that “We are now in a postinternet era. Everything is always-already postinternet.” In these terms, history is rendered as a thing that happens, that has already happened, not something that can be shaped, that emerges out of economic, social, political, or cultural forces. The internet’s emergence can then be posited as a rupture, something that, by clearing away the vestiges of the past, announces a new future. In the face of this epochal shift, art exists simply to register these changes and to self-consciously comment on them from within.

No politics, no struggle, only content.

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The play […] is to desediment, to exfoliate, to renew the earthly and inseparable assembly, the habitual jam, by way of and in the differentiation of what will be neither regulated nor understood. All we got is us in this continual giving away of all.

Against the individual, Crampton is instead enfolded in a trans-generational play of influence that resolves itself into a sonic mantle that she takes on and continues. Ownership of this sound is less important than its persistence, ensuring that its legacies are respected, its attachments attended to. This is a mode of music-making for the present, one that neither shies away from history nor lets itself be overcome by it. It is a music-making that understands that history is made “under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.” The past does not recede into obscurity here, crushed by the momentousness of the internet. Instead, it is reworked, returned to the present in a new form, giving the lie to a historical consciousness constructed according to a series of pre-s and post-s.”

“Sung parts are more spontaneous and can be considered as quasi-field recordings, like extracts of dialogue that re-contextualize the instrumental, more overwhelming parts.”

“Whatever else is happening around you at the time gets sucked into the mix: A hissing heater or a honking horn might be confused for a purposeful gesture. That randomness, that possibility of a song changing with every listen”

“Cyberspace: The realm of pure information, filling like a lake, siphoning the jangle of messages transfiguring the physical world, decontaminating the natural and urban landscapes, redeeming them, saving them from the chain-dragging bulldozers of the paper industry, from the diesel smoke of courier and post office trucks, from jet fuel fumes and clogged airports, from billboards, trashy and pretentious architecture, hour-long freeway commutes, ticket lines, and choked subways…from all the inefficiencies, pollutions (chemical and informational), and corruptions attendant to the process of moving information attached to things – from paper to brains – across, over, and under the vast and bumpy surface of the earth rather than letting it fly in the soft hail of electrons that is cyberspace.” – Michael Benedikt in Cyberspace

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“The Web isn’t just something that happens in the world; it’s something that’s happening in you. When people set up e-mail accounts or personal web sites or join a chat room or create a MUD persona, what are they doing? They’re saying to the world, I AM. I signify. I am part of a large community. I am part of something bigger than myself.
“These are empowering acts. These acts are an expression of hope. These are spiritual acts. [In fact,] the adjective ‘spiritual’ simply refers to things which have no body, form, or substance. Spirituality is about things that are disembodied, things that are formless, things that are insubstantial, things that are virtual.”
“Spiritual experiences are, in fact, our business. Ours will be an economy of spirits.” – Game designer Brian Moriarty, 1996 Computer Game Developers’ Conference

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“Variously described as a ‘space that wasn’t space’, a ‘nonplace’, and a space in which ‘there are no shadows’ (William Gibson)”

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“The communication of sacra and other forms of esoteric instruction (memes) really involves three processes, though these should not be regarded as in series but as in parallel. The first is the reduction of culture into recognized components or factors; the second is their recombination in fantastic or monstrous patterns and shapes; and the third is their recombination in ways that make sense with regard to the new state and status that the neophytes will enter.” – Victor Turner, Betwixt and Between

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“We will all become angels, and for eternity! Highly unstable, hermaphrodite angels, unforgettable in terms of computer memory. – Nichole Stenger in Cyberspace

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“The notion of ideal forms in early Platonism has the allure of a perfect dream. But the ancient dream remained airy, a landscape of genera and generalities, until the hardware of information retrieval came to support the mind’s quest for knowledge. Now, with the support of the electronic matrix, the dream can incorporate the smallest details of here-and-now existence. With an electronic infrastructure, the dream of perfect FORMS becomes the dream of inFORMation.”

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“The analogy of Indra’s Net is very old, from Hindu mythology, whereby the universe is seen as a great net with a jewel at each intersection that reflects every other jewel in the net.” – Tim McFadden in Cyberspace

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from http://www.mysterium.com/cyberspace.html