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Experimental Music?
This one's more of a question than anything else: Somewhere late in that Finnish thread, Jon Dale made the comment that he's generally not real fond of "experimental" music in general, as it has too many "prescriptive" aspects...
I'm interested in folks' thoughts on experimental music, both to make sure I'm clear on what Jon was meaning there, and in general. I'm assuming he was referring more toward the "structured art music" end of things?
I'm partly curious because, as broad as our coverage has always been in Deep Water, that's one area we've not ventured into so much -- jazz sure, electronics plenty, freak out rock yes indeed, but I think I also tend to find a lot of that approach kind of, I dunno, dry maybe? I'm always open to different views though...
I know it's lame to quote oneself, but hey, I'm slack. Here's what I said earlier:
> then again I'm not a fan of 'experimental music' as
> a genre or codification. It all gets a bit too...
> prescriptive.
The problem I have is with the ease with which things are labelled 'experimental music' and the boundary policing that goes on within the term. ie. The term experimental is often only accessed within a 'structural art music' discourse. I mean, what does experimental mean? Its scientific basis is that 'relating to or based on experiment', which could easily mean someone messing with new technology in a Protools studio while working on the new Blink 182 album. The music results from experiment - ergo, it is experimental.
But the term is of course codified, applied in genre formulation: so 'experimental' actually means 'left-of-centre', 'not mainstream'. The 'experiment' factor isn't really relevant (to follow through on the earlier discussion at Finnish Free Folk, I hear nothing particularly risky about the Paavoharju record, for example). But experimental can also mean 'founded on experience/empirical' - well, crikey, that's all music, innit.
This is all pretty clear stuff and I don't think I'm saying anything new. Experimental is a codified genre: it signifies beyond its 'initial meaning'; it has been claimed, and indeed claimed by very culturally/racially specific artists/observers.
It might be interesting to study the etymology of 'experimental music', but what's more interesting to me is a) avoiding the term entirely due to its vagueness or b) articulating the value systems inherent within received application of the term. In which case, experimental is only 'experimental' within certain frameworks, is insistently and dogmatically self-referential.
Significantly the break in the techno bulwark where it was suddenly 'accepted' by certain 'tastemakers' [always a worrying thing] as somehow experimental music (an assignation it still, thankfully, regularly problematises due to the overriding functionality of the genre - Simon Reynolds says interesting things about the coterminous nature of functionality and experiment in dance music in his excellent Energy Flash) was when it was 'indie-fied'. A similar thing happened in the mid to late 1990s with R&B. Significantly the 'experimentalism' is always positional, ie. these artists deserve your attention because they experiment in an immediately understandable manner; these other artists are lesser because they do not engage in this manner. I am completely complicit with this, so am not pointing any fingers - neither have I been re: experimental music in general; it's just interesting stuff to talk about...
(I mean ie. my use of Blink 182 as a (by inference negative) example says a lot about how I position myself etc. Also the fact that the 'codification' of experimental is still an issue for me means I play into the very cultural specificities that engender said codification.)
I hope that helps explain my problems with the prescriptive nature of experimental music, but it probably just looks like psychobabble, and is certainly nothing that hasn't been said better before. I kinda feel all the above is pretty simplistic so I'm looking to other people to extend the argument and make it a bit more dense/illuminating.
Word to what Jon said, and I don't think I could have even come close to codifying the dichotomy of labeling music (or pretentiously, oneself) as experimental as Jon has. I guess I like to go back to my foundations in physics/engineering. One conducts an experimental event or series of event to prove/disprove a hypothesis. Inherently, if there is already a theory or law in place you are reinventing the wheel, or just learning, not experimenting. Therefore the very idea of music being experimental is problematic for me (and only me I'm saying at this point, because I'm coming at it with my world view, like we all do). What hypothesis can a piece of nominally experimental music hope to prove or disprove? I guess there are certain experiments with sound one can conduct and test them against the effect one hypothesizes, but I don't think acoustics and/or psycho-acoustics can fall within even the most free definition of music.
What a lot of so-called experimental music is doing from what I can see is playing around with the elements of music, adding and subtracting things like rhythm and melody and instrumentation to stretch its boundaries. Some is stochastic, rigorously so, and some is free/improvised, and perhaps that is what they should be called. I suppose if you have a species of music that seems designed to put the listener through some kind of test and then measure whether that listener comes out the other end with a received "musical experience" or not, then that can be deemed as an experiment of sorts, though hardly a one conducted with the scientific method front-and-centre. Liminal work is issued without any real measurement other than whatever feedback is gained through "Tastemakers", fans and friends, all of whom have baggage or agendas. Certainly I feel like I've put to the above sword many times with results ranging from the head-scratching to the infuriated.
So let's not confuse what artists like Davenport and Wooden Wand in the US and a lot of the Finns are doing as experimental. A lot of it tribal/primitivism, and some of it is tinkering and in all cases ones mileage varies and Caveat Emptor. Maybe Surgeon's Law "99% of Everything is Crap" is a little misanthropic, but its head is in the right place if not its heart.
I've been holding off on responding to this and the free folk forum in hopes that other folks would get involved (HEY PEOPLE! JUMP IN ANYTIME, THE WATER'S FINE!), but what the hell...
I understand all yr points Jon, and I don't think they're psychobabble. After reading it over carefully I wonder though if we're talking about a response to a variety of music (defined by whatever parameters we put to it), or about a process of naming that can be seen as limited or inaccurate...
Is it the "types of sound production often referred to by the monicker 'experimental'" that is the issue here, or is it the "types of sound production often referred to by the monicker 'experimental'" that's the problem?
OK, now we're really getting into the psychobabble, but... Names don't exist in nature, right, humans make them up as labels to categorize things (hardly a new point there, "this is not a pipe", etc.); genres are names for things we people make. Is the problem here that the term "experimental" is not an accurate label for the types of things people do under its aegis? Or is it that music that wants to call itself "experimental" often limits itself to certain narrow parameters in order to fit into that category? I can see that -- I've been at various "avant-garde" functions at which I recall thinking that the most genuinely radical thing that could happen would be a stomping soul beat and a blaring horn section, just to completely break up the self-enforced rule-following that was going on...
For me the bigger problem at the moment is simply how to discuss all the different new sounds that are being produced while being a) accurate, and b) not trite. I figure this is probably a good problem to be having -- it means that the music has gotten out ahead of (or at least beside) my abilities to label it, which makes me pay closer attention and appreciate it more in trying to figure it out. It also makes me try to think more creatively in trying to describe what's going on, and forming new neural pathways is always a good thing. Of course, as hinted at in the other going thread (which I'll reply to separately), sometimes what one ends up with is a question as to whether the creators really have a handle on what they themselves are doing, but that's a whole different issue...
If you think about it, 35 years ago the situation was pretty straightforward for someone wanting to write/talk about this stuff -- your genre labels were few and simple: "rock", "folk", "jazz" -- and whatever qualifiers you wanted to put on were more about description than categorization. Before the incredible proliferation of genrefication took over, such that we now live in this balkanized niche culture where there's often hardly any communication between regions... I mean, for instance, how much truck do most of the "new/wyrd/avant/free/whatever folk" folks have with the actual contemporary folk community (and vice versa)? (Personally I tend to figure that both could often benefit from a dose of the other, but that's yet another topic.) Again quite different from 35 years ago...
I don't have (and don't regret lacking) the same talent for understanding and describing music; I'm happy to leave that to more capable hands and enjoy the experience as reader. However, that brings another perspective to the question, and one worth throwing in, I hope.
For me the trouble with "experiment" can be understood in terms of medicine. Medicine can be the 'well structure practice of diagnosing and treating illness' or medicine can be 'some stuff we take to cure an illness,' but it's never a quality of the practitioner of the medical arts.
To whip Blink 182, because it's out there and they sort of have it coming to them: Blink 182 is no more experimental than a doctor is medical (or mediciny).
That use of 'experimental' is just a weak and opportunistic abstraction. It's merely a classification of marketing and promotion. The beneficiaries of the abstraction measure the quality of music in the fullness of the till and not in the imagination of the musician or listener.
I think there are experimenters in music. John Fahey springs to mind (and as a curious side note, I always pick up my guitar after I listen to John Fahey). I see Fahey as an experimenter who experimented with traditional modal tunes, intentionally punctuating melodies with odd steps between notes or chords at strategic moments. I find it familiar and other at the same time.
I can think of other experimenters, like Eric Satie, who had an intellectual purpose. He began with a social critique and sought to produce music that would reflect it. His music was either grotesque (incongruity without humor) or satire (public vice, private virtue). I love that I struggle to find find which it is -- and that somehow if I could resolve it, I would be able to tell you what -- if anything -- that distinguishes Eric Satie from Spike Jones.
So, my method is to look for author's description of the purposeful question or the proven result. If I can detect that, then I look for it in the music and try to use it as a guide to understand the richness of the artist and the art. If I can't detect that, then I dismiss the claim as marketing and toss it in the same bin that has 'revolutionary,' 'inspiring,' 'ground-breaking,' and 'THIS SUNDAY FOR ONE NIGHT ONLY AT THE GINORNORMOUS PAVILION IN DOWNTOWN MEGALOPOLIS, OVERBLOWN PRODUCTIONS PROUDLY PRESENTS [insert feeble band here].'
Christopher Curley mail: ccurley@io.com AIM: anarchist1848 Skype: curley_christopher
Well, one catches a whiff of something in the air from all these posts... 'experimental' is dead. Long live experimental? Nah, fuck it...
Check a couple of years' worth of 'outer limits' columns from the Wire.... the same names, similar approaches, over and over again. I can appreciate that historically there was a time when 'experimental' sound was pushing the boundaries of what folks would actually allow into their ears... but these days, all sounds are everywhere always. Most of my friends are dance music nuts and probably view my own music - longform drones, style-crossing, degraded melodies, weird silences - as anything but experimental. They hear wilder, chancier things on any average Friday or Saturday; and they can dance to it. It's no skin off my nose - I do the music I do because I love it - but it sure puts the worldwide 'scene' of xperi-music into perspective. It just isn't experimental at all. Try making 1500 people on a variety of psychoactive chemicals dance to the sounds of chickens and kids playing marbles - THAT is an experiment!!!
Anyway, all these 'new' techniques and strategies are not new. I was marvelling the other day that some German minimal techno I'd heard on an internet radio station had exactly the same sound design/production style as Queen's 'Another One Bites The Dust'... great track, that...
So - perhaps the dogged experimentalists out there should take a leaf out dance music's book and keep the scene fresh by changing the name of what they do every two weeks.... sub-trance-skonk; deep-glitch-squall; dub-drone; free-sub-tronik-folk.... work it, ladies...
xxxJim
Jim recommended that "perhaps the dogged experimentalists out there should take a leaf out dance music's book and keep the scene fresh by changing the name of what they do every two weeks.... sub-trance-skonk; deep-glitch-squall; dub-drone; free-sub-tronik-folk.... work it, ladies..."
I don't really have a comment, except to say that this is the best idea I've heard all week. A genre a day keeps anybody from being able to follow what the heck is going on... Instead of pretending they're too hip to care about what to call what they're doing, folks should get behind the concept, make confusingly descriptive genre names part of the whole creative process... Get those adjectives moving people!
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Joined: 2005-11-26