November 2017

mo vs poMo (1)

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It's amusing to read Daniel Albright's writings on Modernism -- brimming with enthusiasm and insight as if Beckett and Schoenberg were alive today and needed explanation -- alongside Jonathan D. Kramer's book Postmodern Music, Postmodern Listening (2016), which treats Modernism as a slightly tainted artifact of the distant past, deserving no sympathy or apologetics. In a series of posts we'll consider this disjunction.

Kramer's book was published posthumously so he can't be blamed entirely for the following passage from Chapter 1.1 (footnotes omitted):

A more subtle and nuanced understanding of postmodernism emerges once we consider it not as a historical period but as an attitude -- a current attitude that influences not only today’s compositional practices but also how we listen to and use music of other eras. Umberto Eco has written tellingly, “Postmodernism is not a trend to be chronologically defined, but, rather, an ideal category or, better still, a Kunstwollen, a way of operating. We could say that every period has its postmodernism.” Jean-François Lyotard suggests a still more paradoxical view of the chronology of postmodernism: “A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant.” Lyotard seems to believe that before a work can be understood as truly modern, it must challenge a previous modernism. Thus, to take Lyotard’s example, Picasso and Braque are postmodern in that their art goes beyond the modernism of Cézanne. Once their art has achieved this postmodern break with the past, it becomes modernist. Similarly, certain music of Mahler, Ives, and Nielsen, for example, becomes postmodern by going beyond the modernist practices of such composers as Berlioz, Liszt, and Wagner.

This statement isn't paradoxical so much as it is confused: "Picasso and Braque are postmodern in that their art goes beyond the modernism of Cézanne. Once their art has achieved this postmodern break with the past, it becomes modernist." "Going beyond" suggests belief in progress, which elsewhere Kramer says is a Modernist trait, not Postmodernist. Ditto, "breaking with the past." So, all these artists going beyond other artists would seem to be flavors of Modernism, not something new that requires definition.

[continued in next post]

truth begins at 404

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A minor point, but look at the way Daily Kos' 404 page is phrased:

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This is boilerplate used by many sites but Kos doesn't have to use it. Suggesting first that the visitor might have mistyped a URL blames the victim -- nice. The page "may have moved," or it may be a Kos-hosted blogger took down content, as appears to be the case here.

"The Curious"

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"The Curious" [6 MB .mp3]

Heavy on the white noise with no softsynth "little melodies." Made with low-res synth beats, vocal samples, and semi-ambient noise triggered by a Eurorack (analog) sequencer, then recorded, timestretched, and further edited in Tracktion's Waveform DAW running on a Linux PC. Vocal samples include a gritty Streets of Rage soundbite (hat tip kiptok) and some random kid on my block (whose parents signed a release - jk).

Most of the audio comes from ADDAC Systems' Wav and Ultra Wav sample players, which handle beats with reasonable timing as well as random blorts triggered by cv inputs. Other Eurorack devices used are Doepfer's A-154/155 sequencer and VC-DSP effects module (for reverb and chorus). A "found" drum loop provides additional rhythm.

"The Hidden Masterpiece"

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"The Hidden Masterpiece" [.mp3 removed -- please listen on Bandcamp]

Made with modular synth beats, notes, and semi-ambient noise triggered and synchronized in Tracktion's Waveform DAW (using MIDI clock out), then recorded and edited in Waveform.

Most of the audio comes from ADDAC Systems' Wav and Ultra Wav sample players, which handle beats with reasonable timing as well as random blorts triggered by cv inputs. Other Eurorack devices used are Doepfer's A-154/155 sequencer, MIDI sync, and VC-DSP effects modules (for reverb and chorus). Some melodic riffs were added using the Helm softsynth and Waveform's Collective sampler/synth (gotta have those little tunes) and a "found" 909 drum loop provides additional rhythm.

The title comes from Balzac's famous story of the master painter whose never-before-revealed life project, a portrait of a beautiful woman, turns out to be a morass of vague, indecisive swirls with a single perfectly rendered foot. This has no bearing on this song but it's a good title.

tiny mix peaks

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via

On the eve of the Twin Peaks reboot launch, Will Neibergall published a thoughtful essay at Tiny Mix Tapes about this particular TV-series-as-meme and how it's viewed by millennials (or at least the one writing the article): a failed show that resonates as a fictitious America even less palpable than it was to its original target audience. "One of the many reasons you love Twin Peaks," he writes, "is that its characters feel like people you know in real life, even though everything else in the show feels very unfamiliar. Twin Peaks makes you nostalgic for a time you don’t remember and a place that doesn’t exist."

From this reaction, Neibergall extrapolates how an even-further-removed generation will appreciate the show:

Maybe those viewer-subjects live in a huddled condition, in what philosopher Peter Sloterdijk calls “ecological stress communes,” pressed inland and away from cultural centers now remembered and revered like ancestors, jostled about by resource scarcity, plagued by ridiculous fantasies of aliens and sea people punctuated by actual disaster, war, and collapse. Or maybe these troubles loom on their horizon. In the face of these real nightmares, do they dream of ending up in a place like Twin Peaks, of grappling with its fake demons? Maybe future Twin Peaks viewers see in it a refreshingly provincial vision of encompassing crisis. A town where a yellow light still means “slow down” resonates abstractly with them. They are absorbed by the dark forces stirred out of the brown-gray American forest, by the murder of the cocaine-addicted homecoming queen and secret prostitute. Maybe, naive to the reality of their own circumstances, they feel like Dale Cooper chasing after those elusive and idealized spirits.

Neibergall wonders whether the 2017 version will be any good:

[W]ill Twin Peaks really walk and breathe more freely, as if awoken to a new life, and find something like that original sense of purpose? Or will it lose its way again in the smoke and mirrors of a shoddily constructed model of the public?

Twin Peaks 2017 pressed on with the occult narratives that seemed scatterbrained in 1991, creating actual mythology out of a hairball of modern paranoiac concepts. The atom bomb and its proximity to Roswell. Causality loops controlled by mysterious "lodges" and entities that seem to work at cross-purposes. A red-curtained room with chevron-patterned floor that serves as atrium to those nether-spaces. Human suffering in the form of a creamed corn-like substance that vomits inexplicably out of character's mouths. A parade of unexplained urban "types" having late night conversations in Twin Peaks' impossibly large bar. Audrey Horne's afterlife in a hellish marital scenario. Musical acts that all seemed to have moved to LA to be "Lynchian." A cornucopia of aging and/or mothballed actors, still strutting their stuff.

These elements mesh somehow into a poignant whole that binds the loose ends of the original series and redeems it retroactively. Whether its characters still feel "like people you know in real life" takes back stage in the Lynch/Frost uber-saga, or counter-saga, of supernatural interventions in mixed-up, SNAFU'd America.

Whether any of it will be of value to future eco-stress communards can't be guessed. Judging from current fan involvement on the Twin Peaks Wiki and other sites, the show speaks to the here-and-now. Mythologies begin with cults, and it's not unimaginable that this one might blossom, so that when our descendants ponder when it all went wrong they will know -- when the Woodsmen appeared above the gas station, of course. "This is the water and this is the well. Drink full and descend. The horse is the white of the eyes, and dark within." In Bob's name we pray.

It's "just a TV show," but also a kind of poetry of shared repressed nightmares. Including, but not limited to, Wally Brando.

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