The year in (anything but) music
Dec. 22nd, 2006 12:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusIf music didn't exactly die in 2006, it certainly felt sidelined, jilted, demoted, decentred, dethroned as the exemplary creative activity, the most vibrant subculture. Even the days of new movements like Freak Folk and new messiahs like Devendra Banhart felt far away and a million years ago. From where I stand (and I'm not standing here by accident), visual culture now occupies the central position music once did. I don't just say that because art fairs are booming, because art has become a better investment even than property, or because I spent three months as a performance artist and got gigs in as many galleries as rock venues. The signs are all around us.
It was the year when the megalithic mastodons of music toppled. Institutions like Tower Records and Top of the Pops crumbled and fell. David Bowie, whose 1972 TOTP appearance changed my life as it changed many others', crowned his year with a comedy song on the Ricky Gervais show Extras. And the death of Ivor Cutler, a staple of the John Peel show, reminded us again that the central pole of UK alternapop's big top still hadn't been adequately replaced, and perhaps never would be.
Meanwhile, new institutions came along to replace the old mastodons. Web 2.0 brought us YouTube and MySpace, which became the way most of us discovered and shared new music, and relived old. If someone mentioned a band, YouTube was the place I went first to hear their music. I even released a couple of "YouTube singles" myself, Frilly Military and Nervous Heartbeat off my 2006 album, Ocky Milk (which popped up on quite a few album of the year lists, thanks everyone). Note, again, in the YouTube-ization of music, the sly upstaging of audio by visual content.
MySpace (which I refuse to have a presence on, but can't avoid consulting) continued the "famous for 15 people" trend. It was here we discovered new acts like No Bra (who I'm pleased to say will support me at my gig at The Spitz on January 4th) or Nobuko Hori or Joe Howe aka Germlin. It was here too that we kept up with musical friends and collaborators; O.LAMM's shiny and massive "Monolith" album, the new Konki Duet.
Other friends, seeming to recognize the crisis in music, pushed at the boundaries, or the exit: Toog made a record using a bird as the main artist and threatened to do the same next time with a tree. Meanwhile Anne Laplantine gave up music to play go, like Duchamp quitting art for chess.
I completely understand Anne's decision. 2006 was the year I decided that roomtone was preferable to the endless flow of iTunes muzak. My eulogy for pop music came in the form of the catchphrase ubiquity is the abyss and, inevitably, accompanying Wired News article Hell is other people's music.
The music I ended up tolerating best this year was appropriately quiet and self-effacing. Gutevolk's Hirono Nishiyama made, I think, the record of her career in Tiny People Singing in the Rainbow (due early next year). Kansai band Popo made a lovely minimalist record called Kibito. And I titled my appreciation of The Mountain Record by Yuichiro Fujimoto In Praise of Quietness. Kahimi Karie's 2006 record, like Cornelius's, drew its strength from quietness and self-deprecation too.
I found myself listening a lot to the trilogy of records made by Ryuichi Sakamoto and Carsten Nicolai; Vrioon, Insen and the EP Revep. Sure, in one sense these are coffeetable ambient records, 20 years after Eno's groundbreaking On Land, the embourgeoisement of the Clicks and Cuts movement. But in another they're formally beautiful, with lots of space allowing you to admire the clarity and elegance of the suspended shapes and colours, or just get on with other things. Even the videos (and Insen came out as a luscious live DVD with visuals by Karl Kliem) were minimal and elegant. But wasn't I more excited by the fact that Sakamoto had edited an eco-sex magazine? Like Cornelius, whose videos eclipsed his slight singles, style leader Eye Yamataka seemed more interesting for his visual activities than his music.
When things are dead you spend a lot of time at the museum; I got interested in Enka, Cambodian khmer cassette pop, Nyahbinghi reggae, and rediscovered the great Jake Thackray thanks to a brace of BBC 4 documentaries. There was also an outbreak of what I call epigone pop in the form of some shameless coffin-snatching by Charlotte Gainsbourg, who enlisted the usual suspects to pastiche her dead dad's style. I preferred Jarvis as a radio journalist, though, guiding us through the history of the British art school.
The death of Syd Barrett made one wonder whether the switched-on art student wouldn't have skipped straight to painting if he'd been born in 1980. It wouldn't necessarily have been a betrayal of music: he could have become an artist like Luke Fowler, whose film about Cornelius Cardew was one of the best things I saw all year.
My favourite new guitar band of 2006 was New Humans. But is "guitar band" really the right term for a project which "began out of bassist Mika Tajima's art practice and continues to be a large part of her investigation of space and minimalist concepts"?
The art world also seemed to annex the best pop music when Bjork disappeared into the belly of whale-boyfriend Matthew Barney's new film, Drawing Restraint 9. Who knows if she'll ever re-emerge, and, when she does, whether there will even be such a thing as pop music left for her to cling to. Her collaborators Matmos made a record featuring the sound of semen, burning flesh, and the embalmed reproductive tract of a cow. Their Best of 2006 list appears in art magazine ArtForum.
When people did treat pop as if it had evolved into a serious artform rather than weakening and being annexed by visual culture, the results were terrifying. Scott Walker's The Drift, though utterly admirable in its ambition and originality, was too horrifying to listen to more than a couple of times. The record -- the last album ever made, in a sense -- spoke with a moral authority popular music no longer commands, and seemed to expect to be listened to with ears more adult than anyone currently has. Well, at least we still have eyes.
It was the year when the megalithic mastodons of music toppled. Institutions like Tower Records and Top of the Pops crumbled and fell. David Bowie, whose 1972 TOTP appearance changed my life as it changed many others', crowned his year with a comedy song on the Ricky Gervais show Extras. And the death of Ivor Cutler, a staple of the John Peel show, reminded us again that the central pole of UK alternapop's big top still hadn't been adequately replaced, and perhaps never would be.
Meanwhile, new institutions came along to replace the old mastodons. Web 2.0 brought us YouTube and MySpace, which became the way most of us discovered and shared new music, and relived old. If someone mentioned a band, YouTube was the place I went first to hear their music. I even released a couple of "YouTube singles" myself, Frilly Military and Nervous Heartbeat off my 2006 album, Ocky Milk (which popped up on quite a few album of the year lists, thanks everyone). Note, again, in the YouTube-ization of music, the sly upstaging of audio by visual content.
MySpace (which I refuse to have a presence on, but can't avoid consulting) continued the "famous for 15 people" trend. It was here we discovered new acts like No Bra (who I'm pleased to say will support me at my gig at The Spitz on January 4th) or Nobuko Hori or Joe Howe aka Germlin. It was here too that we kept up with musical friends and collaborators; O.LAMM's shiny and massive "Monolith" album, the new Konki Duet.
Other friends, seeming to recognize the crisis in music, pushed at the boundaries, or the exit: Toog made a record using a bird as the main artist and threatened to do the same next time with a tree. Meanwhile Anne Laplantine gave up music to play go, like Duchamp quitting art for chess.
I completely understand Anne's decision. 2006 was the year I decided that roomtone was preferable to the endless flow of iTunes muzak. My eulogy for pop music came in the form of the catchphrase ubiquity is the abyss and, inevitably, accompanying Wired News article Hell is other people's music.
The music I ended up tolerating best this year was appropriately quiet and self-effacing. Gutevolk's Hirono Nishiyama made, I think, the record of her career in Tiny People Singing in the Rainbow (due early next year). Kansai band Popo made a lovely minimalist record called Kibito. And I titled my appreciation of The Mountain Record by Yuichiro Fujimoto In Praise of Quietness. Kahimi Karie's 2006 record, like Cornelius's, drew its strength from quietness and self-deprecation too.
I found myself listening a lot to the trilogy of records made by Ryuichi Sakamoto and Carsten Nicolai; Vrioon, Insen and the EP Revep. Sure, in one sense these are coffeetable ambient records, 20 years after Eno's groundbreaking On Land, the embourgeoisement of the Clicks and Cuts movement. But in another they're formally beautiful, with lots of space allowing you to admire the clarity and elegance of the suspended shapes and colours, or just get on with other things. Even the videos (and Insen came out as a luscious live DVD with visuals by Karl Kliem) were minimal and elegant. But wasn't I more excited by the fact that Sakamoto had edited an eco-sex magazine? Like Cornelius, whose videos eclipsed his slight singles, style leader Eye Yamataka seemed more interesting for his visual activities than his music.
When things are dead you spend a lot of time at the museum; I got interested in Enka, Cambodian khmer cassette pop, Nyahbinghi reggae, and rediscovered the great Jake Thackray thanks to a brace of BBC 4 documentaries. There was also an outbreak of what I call epigone pop in the form of some shameless coffin-snatching by Charlotte Gainsbourg, who enlisted the usual suspects to pastiche her dead dad's style. I preferred Jarvis as a radio journalist, though, guiding us through the history of the British art school.
The death of Syd Barrett made one wonder whether the switched-on art student wouldn't have skipped straight to painting if he'd been born in 1980. It wouldn't necessarily have been a betrayal of music: he could have become an artist like Luke Fowler, whose film about Cornelius Cardew was one of the best things I saw all year.
My favourite new guitar band of 2006 was New Humans. But is "guitar band" really the right term for a project which "began out of bassist Mika Tajima's art practice and continues to be a large part of her investigation of space and minimalist concepts"?
The art world also seemed to annex the best pop music when Bjork disappeared into the belly of whale-boyfriend Matthew Barney's new film, Drawing Restraint 9. Who knows if she'll ever re-emerge, and, when she does, whether there will even be such a thing as pop music left for her to cling to. Her collaborators Matmos made a record featuring the sound of semen, burning flesh, and the embalmed reproductive tract of a cow. Their Best of 2006 list appears in art magazine ArtForum.
When people did treat pop as if it had evolved into a serious artform rather than weakening and being annexed by visual culture, the results were terrifying. Scott Walker's The Drift, though utterly admirable in its ambition and originality, was too horrifying to listen to more than a couple of times. The record -- the last album ever made, in a sense -- spoke with a moral authority popular music no longer commands, and seemed to expect to be listened to with ears more adult than anyone currently has. Well, at least we still have eyes.
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(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-22 12:09 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-22 12:10 pm (UTC)Why do you think Web 2.0 and visual culture are growing and pop music is shrinking? Your observations are dead-on but you didn't seem to put in a strong opiniion as to the cause.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-22 12:17 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-22 12:39 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-22 12:51 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-22 01:00 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-22 01:27 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-22 01:29 pm (UTC)There's a demographic element too, which that metaphor of India and China helps us reach. In the West there just aren't the young people any more to warrant a big vital youth culture.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-22 01:36 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-22 01:46 pm (UTC)Visual LJ
Date: 2006-12-22 01:54 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-22 01:54 pm (UTC)Re: Visual LJ
Date: 2006-12-22 01:57 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-22 02:12 pm (UTC)www.psouper.co.uk
(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-22 02:20 pm (UTC)(Is his return to relatively conventional sung pop records since then a kind of reneging, a longterm dieter going on a bulimic spree?)
(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-22 02:41 pm (UTC)www.psouper.co.uk
(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-22 03:05 pm (UTC)http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/debord/
I couldn't help thinking: Whilst in Debord's lifetime 5 people thinking and acting on the same heresies in London or Paris could rapidly change the fabric of societal life (if only briefly), it would appear that 500,000 people thinking and acting on the same heresies via the internet can change precisely NOTHING.
The internet is a VAST BLACK-HOLE, a DESERT THAT LOOKS LIKE A PARADISE that has swallowed music, politics, thought, conversation, creativity, and has given NOTHING BACK.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-22 03:19 pm (UTC)I'd not be so quick to call it the "last record ever made" because I truly believe that people like Scott Walker are possessed of a limitless, uninfluencable brilliance; once we've decided "That's it" we close ourselves--and I will never close myself.
Everything that looks like a frontier, can be suddenly and alarmingly uprooted and inverted, and that's the joy of it all, the joy of real "art".
I have the highest respect for your art too, no question, but I am just expanding on what you seem to love/fear in modern art/music, rather than help you close something that cannot and doesn't deserve to be closed.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-22 03:24 pm (UTC)For me, the world without music is too horrible to contemplate, but one must respect silence fully to fully respect IT. And that is where you are quite right.
time-efficient space
Date: 2006-12-22 03:39 pm (UTC)hahaha, but you DO have a presence on myspace:
ottospooky (http://www.myspace.com/ottospooky)
It's just that that presence hasn't been present since July 2nd 2006!
As for the demise of music. I prefer visual stimulation over aural because I control the timing myself, when looking at something, but cannot control the timing myself when listening.
When I'm on my computer and have the opportunity to listen to something, I usually don't because I'm already listening to something and don't want to change it.
As for video, I skip most youtube links but look occasionally, sometimes with the sound muted, again, because I don't want to interrupt what I'm alreay listening to.
I believe visual single-frame art, often in collage sequence, will be what captures people as they use their computers in the next few years to come. Because they can consume that art at their own pace, and without interrupting whatever important matters they may be resolving while at their computer, which they would have to interrupt if they were going to go listen to something.
The same goes with text. Yes, consuming text is sequential and takes time, but I can stop at any word I want, when I want. I don't have to see/listen to the whole thing. I can be scattered as I consume. And that suits me.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-22 03:51 pm (UTC)This reminds me of a story a friend told me from when he interviewed Blixa Bargeld, in the early '90s. We both worked for a college station, and had tried to do an interview with him either before or after his soundcheck, but he was obviously in a frazzled, generally pissed off mood... so, arrangements were made to drive up and interview him the next day, at his hotel.
The next day, my friend went up by himself to do the interview, and met Mr. Bargeld in a green, lush brunchy/cocktail and cigarrette friendly patio area at the hotel, where he was decidedly more friendly, relaxed, and social than on the previous day.
So, my friend starts recording the interview, and Bargeld said "Do you hear that?"
My friend clearly didn't hear that... at least at first.
"The crickets and the birds. But there are no animals here. They pipe in background noises. It's very nice, and it sounds like it belongs here. That's one of the reasons why I always stay at this hotel."
-------------
There is something to the idea that ubiquitous music = noise pollution.
I think it's more than just that, however. When I hear music in public nowadays, it's not in the same context as Musac when I was younger, with pop songs turned into timid, generic mush. Rather, it's pop songs AS itself... which, when presented in such a ubiquitous, inescapable form, is just as good as mush. Best hits of today, mixed with "oldies" from the '80s. Sure, you might have a few good memories of a particular song, but the intended effect is this background drone of commercial sedation. It's an ad for the album, an ad for the place you're hearing it play, it's an ad for who you are and what choices you make and where you and your generation like to shop... it's all just one big ad.
If this is some sort of new visual age, then we're certainly not seeing any enormous visual success tied to music. Early Bowie was far more visual and artistic than any of what we've seen in music this year, I'd argue.
Instead, there have been some notable music successes lately which are notably stripped down, both visually and musically.
Case in point -- Sufjan Stevens has been touring the country, selling out large venues within hours (http://www.asthmatickitty.com/tours.php?artistID=5). His quirky, often low-tech (http://img140.imageshack.us/img140/3185/xmassufbannerbp0.jpg) collection of Christmas songs (http://www.amazon.com/Songs-Christmas-Sufjan-Stevens/dp/B000HLDF0O) is ranked #24 over at Amazon. His most recent non-Christmas album, Illinois, is selling at #143. Not bad for a twenty-month-old album.
Although much of his music is folk / pop, in many ways, he is a minimalist (http://howardwho.com/blog/2006/12/06/sufjian-does-it-again/), both musically and visually. Critics love him, and you're probably more likely to hear him on public radio (http://www.asthmatickitty.com/images/sufjanstevens/sufjan_press1.jpg) or at the Kennedy Center than in a grimy club.
This, ordinarily, would be the kiss of death for most successful pop artists, but somehow, inconcievably, he's having incredible success.
Since when did this kind of thing start happening? Little commercial radio airplay, little attention from movies or television, and yet, here this guy is, with a ton of fans flocking to his concerts, most of them quite young.
In many ways, he is the anti-Bowie. Not particularly visual (http://www.sufjan.com/) or revealing, and yet, he doesn't feel the need to obscure himself either, in a Low-like haze.
In today's oversaturated, ubiquitious commercial environment, obviously low-tech banjo minimalism sells. If Tower Records and Top of the Pops went under, perhaps it had more to do with the fact that they were more about selling image and identity, as opposed to the music.
Re: time-efficient space
Date: 2006-12-22 04:00 pm (UTC)As for the fake MySpace profile, I just came across another one (http://www.myspace.com/momusarepirates) today, equally fake (but with a few more friends).
(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-22 04:14 pm (UTC)I don't know if I can do the Bowie v. Sufjan thing, except to say that Sufjan shares more than just a surname with Cat Stevens, who did very well and was around when Bowie was being "visual" in the 70s. I think there can be any number of mild, religiose soft rock singers with large cult followings, but there can't be another Bowie. But I may be quite wrong...
Re: time-efficient space
Date: 2006-12-22 04:14 pm (UTC)ooh sorry, I didn't realize it was a "fake" myspace imomus! No wonder they haven't accepted my friend request! lol
I watch movies all the way through sometimes. Sometimes they grip me. But that's when I've set aside a chunk of time and am paying attention to nothing but the TV. That's not when I'm at my computer doing a hundred other things.
Watched "A Streetcar Named Desire" the other night, transfixed. Would probably watch it again tonight if I hadn't already netflix'ed it back!
(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-22 04:18 pm (UTC)Well, that's the truest thing I've heard about this year. The fact that all I can afford is crappy secondhand vinyl is not the only reason I have for living in the past. *runs off to stare at Bolan*
PS: Booo at Bowie. Stop running with the celebs and do something, you big blob.