Category Archives: music

http://erstwords.blogspot.com/2009/07/field-recording-and-experimental-music.html?m=1

“Maguchi Bay is a very ordinary fishing bay in Japan, a quiet place,” he recounts. “But the place was mysterious for me. There are many piers and breakwaters at the bay. When a contact mic is attached to one of the smallest and oldest piers, a huge amplitude of very low frequency sound is spread there. It was an unusual case in my field work. I discovered the low frequency about ten years ago. The mysterious thing for me is that this low-frequency vibration doesn’t relate to any sound that one hears in the air. First, I thought that it was the effect of the wind shaking the pier. But then it happened when there was no wind. Then, I thought that the sound was the vibration of a distant ship resonating across the bay, bouncing off the hill and making itself felt under water in the bay. But this guess was wrong too, as it would have been possible to detect the sound with the air microphone. It was so mysterious.

“My next guess was that there was a cause at the bottom of the sea,” he continues. “So I asked a fisherman who lives there. His answer was that the seabed terrain was extremely rugged. The water currents at the bottom of the sea are terrible. So the low frequencies came from the seabed. It was the vibration of the underwater currents hitting the pier supports where they met the seabed. The low frequency that I observed is an essential feature of Maguchi Bay and it’s directly related to the structure of that place. It only became a fishing bay when a lot of breakwaters were built to calm down the terrible sea currents. So there is a local history that I became aware of through the low frequency. I came to love the place, which I’ve known since I was a child, more than before. This is an ideal example of my field work.”

“We leave nothing. We leave, really, nothing….And I think that the biggest possibility on this world that we have is to create the nothing. But to create something — the nothing.”

-Reinhold Messner

Diedrich Diederichsen

I pick up a musical instrument and produce a sequence of tones. These tones enchant my surroundings and me as I produce them. At some point I grow tired, the tones cease, and the enchantment passes. My favorite quotation about this phenomenon can be heard on the Radio Hilversum recording of Eric Dolphy’s last concert, which took place in 1964, just before he died because no one could treat his particular type of diabetes, one that occurs only in people of African descent. Dolphy said: “When you hear music, after it’s over, it’s gone in the air; you can never recapture it again.” What I produced has vanished without a trace; it created no value—nor, however, did it depend on a providential nature and the miracles of the land of milk and honey. It was me.

I myself, using my talents and abilities—that which belongs to me as a human being and sets me apart from the animals—gave expression to something; that is, I lent inner states, which are also exclusively mine, and yet whose form is familiar to all other human beings from their own internal, subjective states, a form that was understandable to others and may thus have been beautiful. I realized myself as a human being in the dialectic between my nature as a unique individual and my nature as a social and collective being, and I did so entirely without economy, without reification, without the creation of value, without storage, costs, or profits, without the calculation of future time and hence without speculation, without interest or the creation of secondary value, and without valorization.

This is how utterly utopian music is, or rather how utopian it would be if it could exist in this way, as music in itself.

…

So while we see that the notion of an absolutely valueless music—a music free of all value, valorization, or fixation—has often been projected into the past, its actual place would have to be in the present and in the future, and not just because we are speaking about utopia. Except in Arcadia, such a music has never existed as a social practice. On the other hand, it may have existed innumerable times as a mode of communication detached from society, as the song one sings to oneself, the whimsy with which one rhythmically structures one’s steps, the drone that one produces with one’s own body as a resonating chamber. And out of those countless individual moments that never solidified into objects, when individuals or little groups had musical experiences that had nothing to do with musical objects or any social purpose, music and music-like behavior have gained the reputation of being able to touch one’s most intimate subjectivity.

The Point! is a fable that tells the story of a boy named Oblio, the only round-headed person in the Pointed Village, where by law everyone and everything must have a point. Nilsson explained his inspiration for The Point!: “I was on acid and I looked at the trees and I realized that they all came to points, and the little branches came to points, and the houses came to point. I thought, ‘Oh! Everything has a point, and if it doesn’t, then there’s no point to it.'”

Musicians

“Because we have this idea with musical performance, because we’re connected to notation, that material needs to be fixed. The thing I got the most from Max was thinking: you know, maybe I could add this note 70% of the time, and it increases from 1 to 70% of the time over the course of three minutes. That’s a totally different way of thinking about musical form.

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There are all these ways of layering time in non-linear ways. I think that is kind of the essence of our experience these days; it’s a barrage of information. But how do you turn that barrage into something that conveys something understandable. I think that’s what you were asking about musicality. That’s what I’m doing: trying to take my ideas and make them more understandable, more approachable.”

“…the more than 1000 years old musical tradition of Komutia, where the musician acts as a mediator between the world of sounds and everyday existence.”