Making a hash of things
Dec. 1st, 2004 01:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomus'This is my workshop and I'm working here... These are my source, inspiration source for the pictures. Nature things.'
'I'm familiar with this kind of feeling, always unsuccessful,' says Tori Kudo of Maher Shalal Hash Baz in programme 1 of series 2 of Swedish MTV's This Is Our Music. 'So sad! I'm always sad with this work. I'm using clay, this is my clay, it's my garden clay, it's white, very white, I like it. So I prepare clay and glaze by myself, not buying. This is for wine cooler.'
Up until now I've only been vaguely aware of Maher Shalal Hash Baz. I knew they were signed to Stephen Pastel's Geographic label, and when I met Bill Wells in Tokyo this summer I heard a lot about Tori, who often collaborates with Bill. But I found the clips of Tori as both a musician and a potter very compelling and will certainly be listening to him in future. His attitudes to failure, to error and to nature seem very Japanese, and contain a wisdom I'm very interested in. He exemplifies the Shinto attitudes I was trying to capture in what's perhaps the strongest track on my forthcoming album, 'Life of the Fields'.
'I'm not a good potter at all,' says Tori. 'But anyway I dig the ground and take clays and I make glaze using chaff, rice chaff, it contains silica, silica makes this colour, white. Yes.' 'Do you see a connection between doing this and the kind of music you do?' asks the interviewer. 'Yes, both areas always facing mistake and error! And I get used to be in the situation, so I get used to be unsuccessful. Ha ha ha!'
'Mistakes and errors' have been one of my main musical interests for the last four or five years. The sheen of perfect music, music with 'impact', music that 'gets it right', not only bores me to tears, it seems to me to be 'Platonic'. For perfect music seems to seek to rid itself of the contingencies of its physical production, and of the bodies of its players, in an attempt to get close to 'the music of the spheres', or Plato's realm of ideas. Those who strive for perfection (and every western studio engineer will stop the tape at the merest hint of a rogue click) seem to seek, as Wire put it, 'The Ideal Copy'. Cage railed against the tendency of trained musicians to cerebrate endlessly about the relationships between notes, but to seem incapable of hearing, really hearing, a single note. Since Cage, and since the 'orientalisation' of serious music (both classical and pop), these dogmas have shifted. Ensembles like the Scratch Orchestra and the Portsmouth Sinfonia, and electronic pop music influenced by Japanoise and Glitch, combine two strong traits of the anti-Platonic western tradition -- democratisation (anyone can do it) and an increasingly 'oriental' or Japanese attitude to 'failure'. For these movements see accidents and imperfections as something to be celebrated, as they are in the Japanese art of pottery known as yakimono.
My favourite show this year was an event in Omihatchiman where tea ceremony was combined with 'aesthetics of failure' electronica. At this show there was a beautifully Japanese collision of old and new, united by respect for nature. As the tea house lady asked us to admire the texture of cracks in the bottom of our tea cups, music was being generated by a perspex box of crickets, whose movements, detected by motion sensors, triggered electronic sounds which mingled with their singing. Failure and nature, these two recurrent Japanese themes, emerge strongly as positive values in Tori Kudo's interview.
There's a gorgeous clip of Tori sitting by a shinto way-marker in his home town of Matsuyama, singing a song about an 'open field with a window, open field with no child'. His guitar playing is deliberately, fascinatingly broken, and, like Derek Bailey's, it brings us close to the moment, makes us pay attention to the cracks, the textures, the contingencies, the particularities, the oddities of the sound being produced.
When I look at someone like Tori Kudo, I see someone far ahead along the path I'm on myself. I feel as if I've been lost in western 'Platonist music', music that attempts various kinds of perfection which turn out to be only pastiches of various kinds of escape from the here and now. My demos have always been better than my finished songs, and the more I work on music the more respect I have for unprocessed sound, random sound, 'broken' sound, the sound of here and now, the sound of nature. Anders Edstrom's film about Derek Bailey, 'ONE PLUS ONE 2', which I saw at the Purple Institute in Paris this July, was a fabulous document of this sensibility and perhaps my favourite film of the year. I briefly lapsed into a kind of poetry after seeing it:
The extraordinary inserted into time sideways;
Massive attention to rubbish renders it important.
Swaying twigs, Derek's wife; shabby London windows.
The old man's trainers, the old man's computer, the old man's
Improvisation. The metaphysics of ugliness. In the audience
Familiar Paris Japanese faces; Hiroshi, Masako, Mayumi...
Everybody slightly older, slightly more themselves.
Perhaps learning to appreciate texture and patina and the passing of time is part of learning to appreciate the process of ageing itself? Perhaps loving life only starts when leaving life (slowly, slowly) begins.
I leave you with an imperfect yet perfect field recording of a Japanese girl called Hikaru, recorded last year in San Francisco. Hikaru made this 'poem' for an art school project involving many small, simple talking dolls, but you could think of it as perhaps the most fundamental creed of the Shinto religion, or one of the core feelings of the Japanese people, or a central tenet of 'the aesthetics of failure'... Personally, I hear here the same voice I hear in Tori Kudo's work. I link it not just to John Cage, Derek Bailey, Kim Cascone, Stephan Mathieu and hundreds of other wise musicians, but to Ryuichi Sakamoto's claim that a 'slow life' Japan might be a 'beautiful third rate place' where economic slowdown allows nature to return. Japan's deep understanding of the positive side of contingency and failure is perhaps the most compelling reason why the 'Japanization' of the world might save it.
'I'm familiar with this kind of feeling, always unsuccessful,' says Tori Kudo of Maher Shalal Hash Baz in programme 1 of series 2 of Swedish MTV's This Is Our Music. 'So sad! I'm always sad with this work. I'm using clay, this is my clay, it's my garden clay, it's white, very white, I like it. So I prepare clay and glaze by myself, not buying. This is for wine cooler.'
Up until now I've only been vaguely aware of Maher Shalal Hash Baz. I knew they were signed to Stephen Pastel's Geographic label, and when I met Bill Wells in Tokyo this summer I heard a lot about Tori, who often collaborates with Bill. But I found the clips of Tori as both a musician and a potter very compelling and will certainly be listening to him in future. His attitudes to failure, to error and to nature seem very Japanese, and contain a wisdom I'm very interested in. He exemplifies the Shinto attitudes I was trying to capture in what's perhaps the strongest track on my forthcoming album, 'Life of the Fields'.
'I'm not a good potter at all,' says Tori. 'But anyway I dig the ground and take clays and I make glaze using chaff, rice chaff, it contains silica, silica makes this colour, white. Yes.' 'Do you see a connection between doing this and the kind of music you do?' asks the interviewer. 'Yes, both areas always facing mistake and error! And I get used to be in the situation, so I get used to be unsuccessful. Ha ha ha!'
'Mistakes and errors' have been one of my main musical interests for the last four or five years. The sheen of perfect music, music with 'impact', music that 'gets it right', not only bores me to tears, it seems to me to be 'Platonic'. For perfect music seems to seek to rid itself of the contingencies of its physical production, and of the bodies of its players, in an attempt to get close to 'the music of the spheres', or Plato's realm of ideas. Those who strive for perfection (and every western studio engineer will stop the tape at the merest hint of a rogue click) seem to seek, as Wire put it, 'The Ideal Copy'. Cage railed against the tendency of trained musicians to cerebrate endlessly about the relationships between notes, but to seem incapable of hearing, really hearing, a single note. Since Cage, and since the 'orientalisation' of serious music (both classical and pop), these dogmas have shifted. Ensembles like the Scratch Orchestra and the Portsmouth Sinfonia, and electronic pop music influenced by Japanoise and Glitch, combine two strong traits of the anti-Platonic western tradition -- democratisation (anyone can do it) and an increasingly 'oriental' or Japanese attitude to 'failure'. For these movements see accidents and imperfections as something to be celebrated, as they are in the Japanese art of pottery known as yakimono.
My favourite show this year was an event in Omihatchiman where tea ceremony was combined with 'aesthetics of failure' electronica. At this show there was a beautifully Japanese collision of old and new, united by respect for nature. As the tea house lady asked us to admire the texture of cracks in the bottom of our tea cups, music was being generated by a perspex box of crickets, whose movements, detected by motion sensors, triggered electronic sounds which mingled with their singing. Failure and nature, these two recurrent Japanese themes, emerge strongly as positive values in Tori Kudo's interview.
There's a gorgeous clip of Tori sitting by a shinto way-marker in his home town of Matsuyama, singing a song about an 'open field with a window, open field with no child'. His guitar playing is deliberately, fascinatingly broken, and, like Derek Bailey's, it brings us close to the moment, makes us pay attention to the cracks, the textures, the contingencies, the particularities, the oddities of the sound being produced.
When I look at someone like Tori Kudo, I see someone far ahead along the path I'm on myself. I feel as if I've been lost in western 'Platonist music', music that attempts various kinds of perfection which turn out to be only pastiches of various kinds of escape from the here and now. My demos have always been better than my finished songs, and the more I work on music the more respect I have for unprocessed sound, random sound, 'broken' sound, the sound of here and now, the sound of nature. Anders Edstrom's film about Derek Bailey, 'ONE PLUS ONE 2', which I saw at the Purple Institute in Paris this July, was a fabulous document of this sensibility and perhaps my favourite film of the year. I briefly lapsed into a kind of poetry after seeing it:
The extraordinary inserted into time sideways;
Massive attention to rubbish renders it important.
Swaying twigs, Derek's wife; shabby London windows.
The old man's trainers, the old man's computer, the old man's
Improvisation. The metaphysics of ugliness. In the audience
Familiar Paris Japanese faces; Hiroshi, Masako, Mayumi...
Everybody slightly older, slightly more themselves.
Perhaps learning to appreciate texture and patina and the passing of time is part of learning to appreciate the process of ageing itself? Perhaps loving life only starts when leaving life (slowly, slowly) begins.
I leave you with an imperfect yet perfect field recording of a Japanese girl called Hikaru, recorded last year in San Francisco. Hikaru made this 'poem' for an art school project involving many small, simple talking dolls, but you could think of it as perhaps the most fundamental creed of the Shinto religion, or one of the core feelings of the Japanese people, or a central tenet of 'the aesthetics of failure'... Personally, I hear here the same voice I hear in Tori Kudo's work. I link it not just to John Cage, Derek Bailey, Kim Cascone, Stephan Mathieu and hundreds of other wise musicians, but to Ryuichi Sakamoto's claim that a 'slow life' Japan might be a 'beautiful third rate place' where economic slowdown allows nature to return. Japan's deep understanding of the positive side of contingency and failure is perhaps the most compelling reason why the 'Japanization' of the world might save it.
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Tidings From Okubo
Date: 2004-12-01 12:36 pm (UTC)(From Tidings from Okubo by Nagai Kafu, trans. by Edward Seidensticker)
Re: Tidings From Okubo
Date: 2004-12-01 12:45 pm (UTC)Nations which are merely quaintly exotic don't survive as anything more than tourist destinations. It's Japan's distinction that it's found compelling modern ways of being Japanese, and exported these (technology, entertainment) to the rest of the world.
Love that 'open field' clip.
Date: 2004-12-01 12:52 pm (UTC)I saw Tori Kudo perform in a small basement venue in Musashi-koganei a few weeks ago. He waited through the other bands, then when it was his time to perform he started teaching the musicians from the other bands parts to a song he'd written. They got together and started playing. After about 20 seconds Tori stood up and waved his hands around for the others to stop. Then he started packing up his pottery and that was it! I don't know if he stopped because it wasn't working or if that was all he had planned to do, but it was a brilliant 20 seconds.
Every time I've seen Maher Shalal Hash Baz it has been a completely different and original experience.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-01 12:59 pm (UTC)Re: Love that 'open field' clip.
Date: 2004-12-01 01:02 pm (UTC)Oh, I meant to say in the comment above that Tori Kudo learned pottery in London, at Barnett College! So he's in some way a 'post-western' Japanese.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-01 01:05 pm (UTC)Don't know much about Jandek. Perhaps he lurks somewhere up the path.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-01 01:08 pm (UTC)Strange how revolutionary and rebellious and iconoclastic that sounds. "Pro-relaxation".
(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-01 01:09 pm (UTC)Oh blimmin' feck, it's all so slippery!
Re: Tidings From Okubo
Date: 2004-12-01 01:13 pm (UTC)I suppose, another reason is, although I really love the values that you describe, and agree they are part of Japan, I think they are unfortunately not very prevalent in the Japan I experienced (I came back at the end of March last year). In particular I think that love of nature is something that is far more talked about than practised in Japan. I certainly like Ryuuichi Sakamoto's idea of a slow life Japan, but I don't think it's arrived yet.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-01 01:26 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-01 01:29 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-01 02:58 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-01 03:28 pm (UTC)Mind you, this celebration of the accidental in the creative process. If you were to study a traditional art (especially pottery, calligraphy, painting) in Japan under a teacher, there's a long road to travel before your own accidents might be judged with approval rather than a smack round the head. There's a "not right" that's right and a "not right" that's wrong. The road to the potter's shed is littered with a thousand broken examples of the latter. You should check out some of the potters in Okinawa after your residence in chilly Hokkaido. In fact, you should go to Okinawa anyway. That's where I think you can really find something of this reverence towards nature more readily than the mainland centres. (And, yes, I know that Okinawa is really not Japan.)
I'm also feeling a slight desire to send you this duplicate copy of "Shinto in History: Ways of the Kami" so you can power up your Shinto knowledge, but I'm not sure how you feel about academic religious studies.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-01 04:53 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-01 07:08 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-01 09:15 pm (UTC)mercedes dymaxion
Date: 2004-12-01 10:46 pm (UTC)bottom of the page.
currently hiding on the beaches of northern california
sf area.
in a 72 mercedes benz with the an emphisis on long turm survival.
complete with surf boards
Sound systems
Date: 2004-12-01 10:48 pm (UTC)The English writer Andrew Wilson has written: "There is no metaphorical dimension, Cunningham's work is a presentation of fact. He relies on isolating sonic or other sensory elements from the conditions of their sources and through subtle framing makes us aware of that which would otherwise be disregarded. This hum that surrounds our lives, by being isolated, is also magnified and the dynamism and effect of everyday actions made clear".
http://www.stalk.net/piano/kana01.htm
Some of his solo albums are well worth investigating ( I can fill you in on the details if you are interested). Check his album work here: http://www.stalk.net/piano/adiscdc.htm
I hope you find this interesting.
Richard G
(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-02 01:55 am (UTC)http://noise.hostarea52.com/main.php?p=13
he is great, I've loved mahar.. since hearing their track that came with the wire magazine a while back.
pottery is very useful too...
thank you momus.
tim (nz)
Tautology
Date: 2004-12-02 02:29 am (UTC)if wrong is the new right and right is the new wrong, then wrong is the new new wrong.
Re: mercedes dymaxion
Date: 2004-12-02 08:54 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-02 09:17 am (UTC)Poe inverted this to describe what your talking about in "The Conqueror Worm".
Re: mercedes dymaxion
Date: 2004-12-02 07:25 pm (UTC)...
tell her.
i locked my self out of the car this morn.
it frosted over my mercedes last night .
cars may not be cool
but i am conserving space and have forced my self to live very minimally . and pick my books carfully so i have context to no be crazy by
i try not buy my gas but syphine it.
so as to conserve even more.
and growing a garden to support a 4 person vegitarin diet.
in this car im am going to drive to chicago
with some ride shares. kidnap this girl named sarah pedal. make the rest of the sla album manifesto
drive back to california steal a sail boat and sail to cuba..
all while making a movie/video, the last new wave film to be lived.
i shall post better pictures soon of the dymaxion car. the only thing about it is instead of conservation biodesial and all its a gas gussling german muscle car.
sean and i talk about trying to influnce the right people into getting you a teaching gig at sfai. you know matmos has a conceptual sound class there. they have many japaese girls in there class many. almost all. they even teach about the ouliopo or what ever its called the poetic frech lititure thing....
well
caio i just lost my train of though as coffee and ... do that
perfect location for next blackmountian college as sign post of contemporary notions
Date: 2004-12-02 07:30 pm (UTC)68 miles north of san francisco in the next 5-9 years will spon the most avant-contextual art group/school
rivaling that of black mountian college
.like the babe ruth profit in me i see a future.
and it involes shaping information and the bucky fuller
world game.
Re: mercedes dymaxion
Date: 2004-12-02 07:48 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-02 08:28 pm (UTC)This reminds me of the rhyme style of the late Old Dirty Bastard. On so many of his tracks you could hear him wheezing and gasping in between rhymes. You could feel the spit hitting the microphone as he delivered his messy, fevered lines. Old Dirty Bastard bodily inhabited--and continues to inhabit--his songs. I think his stuff was about as far from "the music of the spheres" as one could get. He was, by his own description, low down and dirty, and dirty.
Re: mercedes dymaxion
Date: 2004-12-02 09:34 pm (UTC)Re: mercedes dymaxion
Date: 2004-12-02 09:41 pm (UTC)shinto kind of ideal is not only perticuler in japan, long time ago, it was an unversal concept everywhere in this planet.
There are strong parallels with 'the old religion' of Britain, pagan druidism. And also with the ancient Greek gods, and Hinduism. In fact, all over the world, before monotheism came along, there were nature cults and animism. Japan is a rare case of an advanced society which still respects its animistic nature cult. I hope other countries can rediscover theirs.
You projects sound interesting, and as usual with you, so very positive!
Re: mercedes dymaxion
Date: 2004-12-02 10:10 pm (UTC)=
shinto kind of idea is not only perticuler in japan,
collection.
sorry.
nick, fast reply, as usual.
>Japan is a rare case of an advanced society which still respects its animistic nature cult. I >hope other countries can rediscover theirs.
in urban area, this is may be questionable. seems like only surface...action does not followed by concept or something? i mean i think you still can distinct japan from other 'advanced' country from this term but... there is difinitly 'counterculture'=slow culture is growing though. plus in political situation sometimes 'kami' idea is controvacial, too. it's compricated.
Re: mercedes dymaxion
Date: 2004-12-02 10:12 pm (UTC)=
shinto kind of idea is not only perticuler in japan...universal
collection.
sorry. my broken english.
nick, fast reply, as usual.
>Japan is a rare case of an advanced society which still respects its animistic nature cult. I >hope other countries can rediscover theirs.
in urban area, this is may be questionable. seems like only surface...action does not followed by concept or something? i mean i think you still can distinct japan from other 'advanced' country from this term but... there is difinitly 'counterculture'=slow culture is growing though. plus in political situation sometimes 'kami' idea is controvacial, too. it's complicated.
Re: mercedes dymaxion
Date: 2004-12-04 12:27 am (UTC)