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so, who's your favorite collective?
All right, a little bit of cheekiness is intended in the forum title...
But this idea of there being a lot of musical "collectives" around these days seems to keep turning up in various articles and discussions around here, so I figured it was probably worth raising as a topic of conversation.
Obviously, sometimes this concept really (or at least mostly) works -- see our interview with United Bible Studies, and all their related groups/projects/etc. (Agitated Radio Pilot, Murmansk, Amygdala, Magickal Folk of the Faraway Tree, Lost Roman Legions, Team Discovery Channel, and probably a few dozen associated groups I don't really have time to type right now). And what makes them work from my pov is a consistent vision of musical expansiveness but a genuine diversity in how it's expressed -- not to mention a remarkably consistent level of quality.
But it's pretty easy to think of lots of stuff like this going on at the present time, from all our Finnish friends, to the Jeweled Antler folks out in San Francisco, to Davenport in the midwest, to the likes of Feathers and Tower Recordings and Wooden Wand in the east, and of course there's the whole Music Your Mind Will Love You gang in Australia (Brothers of the Occult Sisterhood, Terracid, so many many more)...
So I'm interested in folks' thoughts about a) how's come there's so much of this going on these days; b) what makes it work or not work for you; and c) particular favorites (or otherwise) among all the groups and releases out there. I constantly have the feeling I'm missing out on things, in spite of being up to my gills in CDs I've not even played yet, so would love to hear some thoughts and ideas...
As far a recent collectives go, I really think the Jeweled Antler folks and Brad with his Foxglove label showed the way, and others picked up on it. I see the retrreat to a communal model of living and working as partly a response to the post 9/11 world (who wouldn't want to get away from what we've seen) and partly due to a rehabilitation of 60s and 70s hippie folk by a wide range on players, from collectors, to historians to musicians, There is a timeless attraction to that stuff, to be sure. Once you mix in free jazz and noise elements, you get the recipe for an escapist fusion based on a solid musical inheritance. The Finns have a leg up in terms of exposure because Fonal is a label that deals in production CD releases that get real distribution and real press. But I don't nesessarily think they are doing the most interesting stuff. I guess I'm with Kevin in thinking that the Irish have got the best batting average at the moment. The Deserted Village/UBS scene is endlessly fascinating, and I can see people listening to something like "The Shore that Fears the Sea" in 20 or 30 years time, whereas I don't hear that in a lot of other stuff. Just my 2 cents.
Such a flurry of activity out there, it's hard to keep a finger on the mutating qualities. The Tower Recordings splintering apart into all these different little quadrants. The Bummer Road quickly threatens to engulf them all. Snatch up anything and everything by these people you can find, including the recent "The Cowboy Road." Aside from the Jewelled Antler crew, there are furthermore tangential splinter groups, which of course intersect with the abovementioned Digitalis in the 'supergroup' Kyrgyz, but they could've just as easily popped up on Jewelled Antler as Digitalis. But also from JE you can find intersection in the Helen Scarsdale label, which covers more explicitly minimal electro noise space. Not necessarily a collective, but definitely a collectice performance type entity!
Currently, the Magik Marker's related Valley of Ashes are proving to be another heavy hitter in the full on free psych/slop/hillbilly scene with their 3LP monster Cavehill Hunter's Attrition, coming off like the best parts of some long lost smoked out mega jam that never ended. Think Amon duul 1 held up in the hills of Kentucky or early Royal Trux in an allnight superjam with The Dead C.
Actually I think Deserted Village really currently is the coolest around. I just got a package from them that included a CD-R marked "share on soulseek" which features something like 12 of their various ensembles. It's shared on slsk in the folder www.desertedvillage.com; my user name is lunar_discotheqe. The "music from the deserted village" comp is a great intro.
OK:
a) Can someone define 'collective' for me?
b) I'm guilty as heck of 'collectivising' two-fourty people who once played guitar within 2000 kms of each other, but what should be/are the parameters?
c) Shouldn't there be some kind of intent (musical or otherwise) behind collectivisation (beyond 'hey, we [just] want to play music we like'...)? I'm often staggered by the complete lack of rigour I find in self-acknowledged collectives.. The only collectives that I find genuinely worthy of the claim...Art/Language? Maybe the Scritti milieu? (Who were v.loosely interconnected anyway...)
Ah, this is what I was hoping for... the tough questions. In suggesting that "everybody today seems to be in a collective" in my original post, one emphasis would be on "seems" -- are all these things really "collectives"? Or is that just the latest presentational strategy?
That said, I think an overemphasis on defining the inherently fuzzy can also get in the way of grasping what's going on... I mean, is rigour a necessity from an operational standpoint? Is a manifesto important? Or are we talking about something more organic and "bottom-up" in some of these situations... Where are the boundaries around a gray area...?
How about a metaphorical Q: if a "band" (in the conventional concept) is like a nuclear family, with a limited membership and clearly defined roles, how does one make sense of something like the Deserted Village folks? Are they just a really loose and poorly organized band, or are they functioning in a genuinely different manner?
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Joined: 2005-11-26