Spin me a tale

[imomus]

I'm spending the day on ICE trains, getting from Berlin to Holland, then performing in the evening, wearing funny clothes and making stuff up.



I planned to give Click Opera a holiday today, but at the last minute I thought I'd post this photo and ask you, dear reader, to make stuff up yourself: a short (fifty words or so?) narrative related in some way to the picture.

I won't say anything at this stage about what the photo is, who took it, who's in it, where or why it came about. Think of it as a Rorschach onto which you can project whatever you like -- a rumination, a story about the characters, a joke, a piece of philosophising, a weather forecast, a sci-fi scenario, a haiku, a fashion report. Be creative, be kind, give me something interesting to read when my iPod crackles to life in the Dutch wifi!

Comments

Interview with Eno (yet another side note)

[endoftheseason.livejournal.com]

Here it is:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/4838918/Brian-Eno---interview-with-the-producer-of-U2s-No-Line-On-The-Horizon.html

I have a question for Momus regarding one bit of the interview and an assertion regarding a second bit:

1.) Question

"Yet for all the millions who line up to feel that Irish embrace, U2--and in particular Bono--also attract a lot of vilification. Why does he think this is? 'Snobbery, primarily,' he says, smiling to reveal a solid gold incisor worthy of a rap star. 'It's most pronounced in England. There's a tendency for people who are in the business of art--critics, writers, people who consider themselves insiders--to distrust anything that is easy to like. There's an assumption underlying this that people are quite stupid, and if a lot of them like something then it too must be quite stupid.'"

Do you find this to be true (the part about English sorts in the business of art, not the part about the gold incisor) and do you agree that it's a Bad Thing?

2.) Assertion

"'I try to close down possibilities early on. I limit choices. I confine people to a small area of manoeuvre. There's a reason that guitar players invariably produce more interesting music than synthesizer players: you can go through the options on a guitar in about a minute, after that you have to start making aesthetic and stylistic decisions.'"

This business about the superior creativity of guitar players is colossally true. There can be no argument.

Re: Interview with Eno (yet another side note)

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I love Eno, but I disagree with these points on populism and guitars.

Creativity is platform independent, and to say that it depends on having few options is the same kind of argument as saying it depends on having many options. It also supposes that creativity is what happens when you're not making aesthetic choices (like choosing sounds).

There are fewer differences between synths and guitars than Eno is allowing here. If you want limitation, synths got it -- that's why many of us like 8-bit sounds and use them almost exclusively. And if you want complexity, guitars got it, if you include all the electronic processing required to make them sound the way they do on records. The Edge's trademark sound is 10% guitar (plink, plink, it goes, unamplified) and 90% electronic processing, amplification, feedback, etc. Once you include that in the definition of "guitar", you have to admit that the instrument does not escape the supposedly-bad "mire of options".

I think Eno's views contain the very idea he's condemning in art critics -- the idea that people are stupid -- but he just applies it to musicians. They must be given fewer opportunities to be stupid (ie, according to Eno, making choices) and more to be creative (ie playing, per Eno). But it is also creative to make choices.

Out of Eno's ambient records, the least satisfying, for me, is Apollo, and that's because it uses guitars prominently. They take the record to a place of sentimentality, and reduce its power.

On the populism question, the art world very much needs to question populism, because contemporary art is frontier cultural research. Things will sound and look wrong, be difficult, be disturbing, be underwhelming, boring, absurd, ugly. Things will alienate most average viewers and listeners, for whom impact happens in already-established ways. Art needs to keep revaluing, reinventing and reassessing everything, and that requires it to be emotionally and intellectually difficult.

I'd add that a dilettante has to be more than a pop singer who also champions political causes. The "Scaramouche of the Synthesiser" knows this, deep down.

Re: Interview with Eno (yet another side note)

[subalpine.livejournal.com]

i've just been thinking about the first eno i ever heard, 'lanzarote' from 'the shutov assembly' played on a late-night radio program, and what an impact the cluster of electr.tones at about 0:07 in the video had on my conceptions of music at the time:


after that, the first eno album i bought was 'apollo', and the overtly sentimental tone of a lot of the playing really took me by surprise (and again now hearing it for the first time in 10+ yrs)


i haven't read the whole quote in context yet, but this guitar players invariably produce more interesting music than synthesizer players idea really strikes me as remarkably off the mark, and especially so in the context of supposedly limiting options..

Re: Interview with Eno (yet another side note)

[subalpine.livejournal.com]

> you can go through the options on a guitar in about a minute, after that you have to start making aesthetic and stylistic decisions

Having exhausted in a minute (& eight seconds) the sound options his guitar was capable of producing, Otomo san was ready to get creative,

right?