Banished for storytelling
Apr. 28th, 2007 01:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusLast night Hisae and I went to see Yasunao Tone in concert at Ausland. It's a good place to go on a Friday night, because it's not at all susceptible to the "Friday night vibe" (it also happens to be next door to our favourite Japanese restaurant, Sasaya). There are no concessions, in other words, to partying, to rowdy drunkenness, to "aggressive normality", to commercial club promotion. Ausland -- a non-profit art venue run by the squat above it -- is all art, all the time.
Ausland's austere programming is reflected in the architecture; it's a bare, stark concrete box, like a little Evangelical-Lutheran church hidden in a basement. Instead of a lectern, there's a trestle table on the stage. This is a "trestle table venue". Have you ever noticed that the legs of a trestle table form two big capital As? Each of those As stands for "Art". On top of the trestle table -- this cheap wooden plinth for art -- sits a mixer spilling with a spaghetti of wires. This is the format for an avant garde concert. We know it. It's safe, even comforting.
We take our seats. On our right is a serious young man, hunched intensely over a copy of The Wire magazine. Ah, The Wire. A magazine from whose pages I've been so thoroughly, so inexplicably banned that even the review of the You Are Hear Sessions (2002-2006) in the current issue mentions just about every artist on the album except me. Will they ignore my brilliant forthcoming collaboration with Germlin? Well, they managed to review just about every Anne Laplantine record except the one she made with me.
On our left sat a woman who "introduced" herself when taking her seat with a snatch of singing, so it was clear she was an artist of some kind, and a bit of an eccentric to boot. She was meeting and greeting various people in the audience, but I noticed something a little half-hearted about their enthusiasm. They'd only acknowledge her at the last moment, then express great surprise ("Oh, hi Shelley, you're here too! How's it going?") and be all hand-squeezy, cheek-kissy with her, then melt away after briefly hearing her news (she's working at Tesla right now, has a presentation of her work coming up). In fact, some acquaintances seemed to drift away, mentally, even while standing in front of her, twisting their heads around to look for other friends, and only snapping back to her when she said "Oh, I bumped into Constantine recently..." at which point they'd seize her hand again, as if to say "Darling! You're still here in front of me! How wonderful! Constantine! Where?"
This woman -- she turned out to be vocalist Shelley Hirsch -- was clearly someone pretty nodal in the scene. Yasunao Tone came over and chatted with her for a while. He's over 70, yet so cute and compact and beamy with smiles (one of which he threw at us as we eavesdropped) that Hisae and I discussed kidnapping him and taking him home to replace our rabbit. We imagined him playing in the garden, leaping around the flowerbeds in delight.
His performance, though, was disappointing. I'd heard just one piece by Tone before coming to his concert, his Anagram for Strings, a beautiful slidey acoustic piece full of his Fluxus roots. His live show, though, was entirely made up with bombastic glitchy digital textures played off CDs (he invented the damaged CDs trick long before Markus Popp adopted it). It lacked musical dynamics, variety, subtlety, vulnerability. Lit by a table lamp, Tone cut a dignified and humane figure on the stage in his small steel-rimmed glasses, the essence of serious concentration. Yet it felt like he was doing little more than assert his authorship of a thing too random really to have been authored in the first place, and too abstract to appeal to the human ear.
There was certainly something liberating in Tone's self-awarded freedom from the imperatives of entertainment. In a world where entertainment is the main source of bombast, though, it was a shame that his alternative to entertainment had, itself, to be so bombastic. One precious moment when he framed some sounds with valuable margins of silence aside, there was little respite for the ear. But still, you could feel sort of special to be in here on a Friday night. You could feel virtuous that none of the sugar of entertainment was in your chosen... entertainment.
When I got home I googled the unpopular lady sitting next to me, Shelley Hirsch. I actually found her work very impressive. Sort of Robert Ashley meets early Laurie Anderson by way of Meredith Monk. Shelley engages (though ostranenically) with the world of entertainment, parodying all sorts of pop and jazz styles, and isn't afraid of telling stories. This, in purist circles, is frowned upon -- perhaps it's too close to the entertainment values that prevail in the big world outside. A New York Press review of one of Shelley's records, for instance, says:
"Half the album is wasted on embarrassingly corny narrative pieces. Straight narrative somehow seems at odds with avant-garde experimentation; it's very hard to pull off and the examples of those who have succeeded are few... Jean Luc Godard famously said that movies should have a beginning, a middle, and an end, but not necessarily in that order. If Shelley Hirsch had taken his advice and applied it to her new album States, she would have created a masterpiece." It sounds remarkably close to a silly parody review I once wrote of Stars Forever, ostensibly from a magazine called The Mire. "The tragedy is that, had Momus erased the story-telling tropes and released this record as thirty instrumentals," ran the review, "it would have been one of the best albums Warp never released".
This may be the explanation for my inability to get into The Wire's hallowed pages (laid out by my sleeve designer, James Goggin). Shelley too seems pretty much banned from the magazine. For some purists, narrative is taboo. Storytelling sucks. If you tell stories, you're apparently able to hack it out there in the big world, with its big sugary entertainment values. You're banished to the heart of Friday night, with its idiot drunks, its greedy promoters, its fucking, brawling, kissing and stumbling. Out there, everything is a story.
The Far In, Far Out World of Shelley Hirsch (PS1 Radio): Real Player or iTunes.
(By the way, the reason I don't think storytelling and the avant garde have anything to fear from each other is laid out in The Electroacoustics of Humanism.)
Ausland's austere programming is reflected in the architecture; it's a bare, stark concrete box, like a little Evangelical-Lutheran church hidden in a basement. Instead of a lectern, there's a trestle table on the stage. This is a "trestle table venue". Have you ever noticed that the legs of a trestle table form two big capital As? Each of those As stands for "Art". On top of the trestle table -- this cheap wooden plinth for art -- sits a mixer spilling with a spaghetti of wires. This is the format for an avant garde concert. We know it. It's safe, even comforting.
We take our seats. On our right is a serious young man, hunched intensely over a copy of The Wire magazine. Ah, The Wire. A magazine from whose pages I've been so thoroughly, so inexplicably banned that even the review of the You Are Hear Sessions (2002-2006) in the current issue mentions just about every artist on the album except me. Will they ignore my brilliant forthcoming collaboration with Germlin? Well, they managed to review just about every Anne Laplantine record except the one she made with me.On our left sat a woman who "introduced" herself when taking her seat with a snatch of singing, so it was clear she was an artist of some kind, and a bit of an eccentric to boot. She was meeting and greeting various people in the audience, but I noticed something a little half-hearted about their enthusiasm. They'd only acknowledge her at the last moment, then express great surprise ("Oh, hi Shelley, you're here too! How's it going?") and be all hand-squeezy, cheek-kissy with her, then melt away after briefly hearing her news (she's working at Tesla right now, has a presentation of her work coming up). In fact, some acquaintances seemed to drift away, mentally, even while standing in front of her, twisting their heads around to look for other friends, and only snapping back to her when she said "Oh, I bumped into Constantine recently..." at which point they'd seize her hand again, as if to say "Darling! You're still here in front of me! How wonderful! Constantine! Where?"
This woman -- she turned out to be vocalist Shelley Hirsch -- was clearly someone pretty nodal in the scene. Yasunao Tone came over and chatted with her for a while. He's over 70, yet so cute and compact and beamy with smiles (one of which he threw at us as we eavesdropped) that Hisae and I discussed kidnapping him and taking him home to replace our rabbit. We imagined him playing in the garden, leaping around the flowerbeds in delight.
His performance, though, was disappointing. I'd heard just one piece by Tone before coming to his concert, his Anagram for Strings, a beautiful slidey acoustic piece full of his Fluxus roots. His live show, though, was entirely made up with bombastic glitchy digital textures played off CDs (he invented the damaged CDs trick long before Markus Popp adopted it). It lacked musical dynamics, variety, subtlety, vulnerability. Lit by a table lamp, Tone cut a dignified and humane figure on the stage in his small steel-rimmed glasses, the essence of serious concentration. Yet it felt like he was doing little more than assert his authorship of a thing too random really to have been authored in the first place, and too abstract to appeal to the human ear.
There was certainly something liberating in Tone's self-awarded freedom from the imperatives of entertainment. In a world where entertainment is the main source of bombast, though, it was a shame that his alternative to entertainment had, itself, to be so bombastic. One precious moment when he framed some sounds with valuable margins of silence aside, there was little respite for the ear. But still, you could feel sort of special to be in here on a Friday night. You could feel virtuous that none of the sugar of entertainment was in your chosen... entertainment.
When I got home I googled the unpopular lady sitting next to me, Shelley Hirsch. I actually found her work very impressive. Sort of Robert Ashley meets early Laurie Anderson by way of Meredith Monk. Shelley engages (though ostranenically) with the world of entertainment, parodying all sorts of pop and jazz styles, and isn't afraid of telling stories. This, in purist circles, is frowned upon -- perhaps it's too close to the entertainment values that prevail in the big world outside. A New York Press review of one of Shelley's records, for instance, says:"Half the album is wasted on embarrassingly corny narrative pieces. Straight narrative somehow seems at odds with avant-garde experimentation; it's very hard to pull off and the examples of those who have succeeded are few... Jean Luc Godard famously said that movies should have a beginning, a middle, and an end, but not necessarily in that order. If Shelley Hirsch had taken his advice and applied it to her new album States, she would have created a masterpiece." It sounds remarkably close to a silly parody review I once wrote of Stars Forever, ostensibly from a magazine called The Mire. "The tragedy is that, had Momus erased the story-telling tropes and released this record as thirty instrumentals," ran the review, "it would have been one of the best albums Warp never released".
This may be the explanation for my inability to get into The Wire's hallowed pages (laid out by my sleeve designer, James Goggin). Shelley too seems pretty much banned from the magazine. For some purists, narrative is taboo. Storytelling sucks. If you tell stories, you're apparently able to hack it out there in the big world, with its big sugary entertainment values. You're banished to the heart of Friday night, with its idiot drunks, its greedy promoters, its fucking, brawling, kissing and stumbling. Out there, everything is a story.
The Far In, Far Out World of Shelley Hirsch (PS1 Radio): Real Player or iTunes.
(By the way, the reason I don't think storytelling and the avant garde have anything to fear from each other is laid out in The Electroacoustics of Humanism.)
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-28 12:17 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-28 12:28 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-28 12:46 pm (UTC)And by the historics journalists have existed far shorter time than storytelling, especially among musicians.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-28 12:56 pm (UTC)"Tone has taken these ideas even further in a CD-ROM project he's been assembling since 1996. He's doing another sonic translation of an ancient poetic text, this time the mammoth Man'yoshu, 4,516 poems dating from 9th century Japan, and considered an early masterpiece of the country's literature. Again the characters are transformed into pictures and then sound waves..."
and
"Musica Iconologos, an exercise in a variant on sound poetry taken to a logical technological extreme - text translated entirely into a long series of short phrases of splintering electronic noise..."
His mission statement is "to wake people up from the 19th century".
(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-28 01:00 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-28 01:19 pm (UTC)That arch, pretentious sphere who use an assumed penchant for obscurity in art to define themselves rather than seeing art in a humanist context as a means to reflection, a sphinx to challenge, a balm to the aesthete.
The old stars and the gutter (or Gombrowitz and the trampoline!) analogy comes to mind for it is within that synthesis, that symbiosis of the sublime and the prosaic that the most elevated in art happens.
Regards - Thomas Scott.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-28 01:22 pm (UTC)insert tongue in cheek
Date: 2007-04-28 01:59 pm (UTC)-Roddy
(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-28 02:07 pm (UTC)might also dig http://members.aol.com/panaiotis/
Panaiotis a pretty far out there vocalist who also uses the laptop
to flay his voice in a million ways. used to work with the Deep Listening Band. If you wanna get in The Wire find out who likes you and hit them off, I'm sure the Momus sound might be to well admired for their ears, but the Momus performance always entertains and occasionally enlightens.
Peace.
A
(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-28 02:27 pm (UTC)Her stuff isn't bad, Infact "Black Sheep" I really liked, It's just not avante garde.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-28 02:34 pm (UTC)Like a cook that goes to all the trouble of making a perfectly good soup and then urinates in it to see if his customers love him enough.
You've got a great big badger streak of this too, Momus.
A cautionary tale...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfiqrkV_ZqI
(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-28 02:37 pm (UTC)MY DAD WONT LET ME WEAR MAKEUP AND FUCK BOYS AND HAVE SOME FUCKING PERSONAL SPACE, WELL FUCK YOU DAD!111!!
(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-28 02:37 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-28 03:00 pm (UTC)but really, I meant her style more than anything.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-28 03:07 pm (UTC)As is the case with design, architecture, clothing, etc., we apes have needs and limitations in our art, too. Something can be inscrutable, but shouldn't lapse into unintelligibility. We humans use relationships to make sense of things. No relationships, no art. It's far more challenging to push and pull at those nebulous margins than disregard them outright--find all those uncanny valleys along the rim rather than simply hurtle into the chaotic void (I won't bring up lines, squiggles and dots...)
Avant Conventionalism is an insufferable bore in a similar way that mainstream forms are. With mainstream fare, you know exactly what you're going to get and when--all structure, with very little improvisation. With avant conventionalism, you never actually get anything, which is just as tedious--no patterns, no form, no structure--hence, just as predictable. Maybe that is why earlier avant garde forays are more interesting and enjoyable that what came afterwards--sometimes you got it, sometimes you didn't. The event horizon exerts a pleasingly gentle pull.
Better to flit in the space between the two ossified conventions, throw in a bit of structure with the chaos, play them off of one another: showbiz schmaltz meets oblique narrative, folk meets glitch, silly moustaches meets pixels, etc.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-28 03:21 pm (UTC)hahaha!
...but yeah, could that video be anymore random? Maybe if you posted this
(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-28 04:18 pm (UTC)"Enlightenment" sounds beautiful on the stereo of a Ford Fiesta on a summer's day, as Jenny and I discovered today. Maybe I should let Tony Herrington know.
Shelley Hirsch
Date: 2007-04-28 04:45 pm (UTC)As for the person who compared her to Bjork above, all I can think of is that Bjork's supposed "all vocal album" Medulla was the precise breaking point for me. I bought the album thinking that it would be her best ever (a collaboration with Mike Patton!? OH!), but I gave it only about two listens and felt so embarrased and disappointed, I exchanged it the next day for the new Der Plan album (which was far better). I've barely listened to Bjork ever since.
Shelley reminds me that quite a lot of people are timid and unaccepting of artists who carry their art along with them in social circumstances, as if there was a barrier between the real and the unreal--a sort of love for Henry Darger within the gallery space, but a bit-lip in most civil circumstances. This, to me, is schizophrenic and unhealthy.
Perhaps people think that artists who are naturally quirky when they go out and about are grand-standing and self obsessed, something I can see as somewhat distasteful, but what if you can't help it? What if you really are like that all the time?
Narcissism aside, I get the same treatment in my little art-clique. I am so happy you wrote about this.
Along the theme of this sort of separation, which extends into the interplay of real and fake, how do you feel about Slavoj Zizek?
a'a
...and while listening to the Far Out World...
Date: 2007-04-28 05:02 pm (UTC)And on a narcissistic note, I also make up stuff like this when I make faces to myself in the bathroom mirror at work (no longer in a toy store, but in an auto parts warehouse).
How does the old saying go..."Love yourself before you can love others?"
I obsess over other narcissists, because they project themselves, make themselves desirable, and though I love myself, I couldn't live with just myself.
Once and for all--it is a rather narcissistic act to be an artist in the first place, so... Like what Jean Cocteau displayed in his film "The Testament of Orpheus" while trying to draw a flower, he couldn't stray from drawing a self-portrait. I can also cite Balthus, and though he denied it, some of his characters looked suspiciously like him!
a'a
(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-28 05:23 pm (UTC)*have just spent an afternoon watching peter pan fanvids.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-28 10:32 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-28 11:05 pm (UTC)But just as you were saying that, someone else somewhere else in the world was saying (http://kleinempfanger.blogsome.com/2007/04/28/47/):
"I am enganchadísimo to this song of Momus; the other day almost I cry with her and everything. I feel affection by this Moshe Dayan of pop, niponófilo obsessive and intelligent analyst. The one of niponófilo sum many points in my scale of values, does not make lack that says it. Ah, his blog also is interesting. It seems to me precious, and I do not have more to say. Children of great puta."
(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-28 11:23 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-28 11:29 pm (UTC)Aren't we all "journalists"?
Date: 2007-04-29 12:38 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-29 12:46 am (UTC)I wonder what software he uses? I would guess Live, but I can't know for sure.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-29 02:10 am (UTC)Re: Shelley Hirsch
Date: 2007-04-29 04:58 am (UTC)It's also boring. I'll never forgive the remnants of the avant garde for turning out to be just another species of orthodoxy.
Perhaps people think that artists who are naturally quirky when they go out and about are grand-standing and self obsessed, something I can see as somewhat distasteful, but what if you can't help it? What if you really are like that all the time?
Well, in that case you're rare and beautiful, aren't you?
Re: Shelley Hirsch
Date: 2007-04-29 05:12 am (UTC)Anyway. There are very few people with that constant -energy- and fire directed towards imagination and creativity (if people even have it, it's usually not directed towards that kinda stuff). Those people start the new, but then get overtaken by groups of more orthodox individuals who establish, etc. etc.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-29 05:26 am (UTC)I wish more electronic artists did screencasts of them working, that would be very interesting.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-29 05:44 am (UTC)Re: Shelley Hirsch
Date: 2007-04-29 05:48 am (UTC)The E of Humanism
Date: 2007-04-29 05:55 am (UTC)However I really like the Luthern Letters, and that Holly"W" star system is planted in narcissism. Great review on betrayals.
The Performance experience Berlin and beyond.
What's the house special at Sasaya?
(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-29 06:25 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-29 06:57 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-29 07:15 am (UTC)stories
Date: 2007-04-29 10:18 am (UTC)Storytelling is great, and maybe it works best when nobody expects it.
The other day here in Paris I had this idea to have a talk about the metaphysics of playing the (empty) b-side of a cassette, that has a beautifull recording on the a-side. But that idea came after the concert.
Meanwhile, at the next das kleine field recordings festival in Berlin in August, I am thinkng of putting together a storyteller and a field recordist in one evening. But that is another story.
Greetings from Paris
Wire
Date: 2007-04-29 10:30 am (UTC)Years ago the NME did a review of Here and Now, starting off by going on about their free tours, cheap LPs, etc, then saying that the reason they have not been mentioned in the NME before is that they were crap - even though this was something that had never stopped them from reviewing an artist before. H&N had a kind of paranoid view of the music industry - thought they were a threat to it, and were treated as such: NME's attitude rather reinforced this view.
It's probably no consolation to find yourself favourably reviewed in Metro, is it?
TONE
Date: 2007-04-29 04:12 pm (UTC)