Quote:
|
Originally Posted by atsonicpark
Basically, the band is an explosion of my consciousness, and whatever I'm interested in at the time is what comes out.
|
First of all, I'm not an academic of your music. So with all the best will in the world, I can't be arsed to download things that may or may not refute my point.
The point I'm making - and the point I make with nearly all musicians - is that proximity is a real danger in talking about your own work. I've recently started moving more in 3rds than 6ths and 4ths - this is a pretty radical departure for me, but I'm well aware that it's utterly minor to an audience. Perhaps this is a case of pessimism - I'd say my music is an extension of my consciousness, and while I'm aware of people who think what I'm doing is 'diverse', it really isn't. I live in my head, so I suppose I have the privilege of knowing where it all comes from. I suppose I'm skirting around questions of verisimilitude and 'authenticity', the latter of which I hate. But to pick up on that - whenever anyone says they're 'borrowing from ethnic music' - let's say West African poly-temporal drumming for the purposes of argument - I tend to feel that what they do is at best - and that's not immediately a bad 'at best' - do a approximation of that tradition. We're attached to different pulses, different swings and emphases, so if we throw a load of differently-timed percussions together, it'll always be a verisimilitude of that tradition. Again, this isn't a bad thing, but it is a question of accepting our failures and inability to inhabit nuances and subtleties. There was an interview in the Wire ages ago where Tony Allen was talking about Jaki Leibzeit's 'Africanisms', and he sort of said, 'yeah, it's the beats but not the rhythms' (or something like that). Leibzeit is amazing, of course, but his is only an approximation of African music. For myself on violin, I've assimilated a load of Maqam techniques in an utterly inauthentic way that means it sounds
sort of like what I'm aiming for, but ultimately fails (which I'm happy enough with). Funnily, to a lot of audiences my technique sounds like any vague 'other' - I've been told I sound Chilean, Jewish, Irish, Romani, Indian [etc etc] - everywhere except where I'm consciously stealing from, seemingly.
This is a pretty long-winded point - sorry about that - but essentially I'm saying that what I hear in your music is precisely the opposite of what you seem to hear in it - you have a solid and consistent aesthetic. The thing is, if you do one track that's 90 seconds with 500 meticulously-prepared riffs, and another track which is a spontaneous, discontinuously framed improvisation, there is literally no difference between the two as far as anyone except the most assidious listener is concerned. What you do consistently is this sort of jump-cut ADHD thing - I just listened to less than 20 seconds of peroxide rubbing alcohol [...], which sounds no different, in terms of structure, impetus, ideas, ideology, construction, recording fidelity, aesthetic (etc) to most of what I've heard of SS. Latter SS is
better, by a large margin, but it's still exactly the same person, exactly the same consciousness and general aesthetic making it.
For another comparison - there's a point in later Mozart where he stops obviating the ostinato basslines. It doesn't stop sounding like Mozart, but it's a massive change to the structure. Proximity - if I was more of a scholar of Mozart, the gradual transition might be equivalent to a complete lobotomy, a new composer - but as it is, I'm audience - it all sounds similar
enough.
Or for another comparison - you know that whole Zorn/ Patton thing, Painkiller and Bungle and so on? As is probably obvious by now, I hate all that bollocks - but there's always this smug thing with them where they seem to think that including loads of things under a single umbrella constitutes 'diversity' - in fact, for most people (or me at least) the constant barrage actually elides all differences in the traditions they're simulating. Theirs (and this isn't a comparison with yourself, because you have more interesting influences) is an utterly boring aesthetic of assimilation, discontinuity and pastiche. It doesn't matter that they're putting tradition or genre x next to genre y, the song itself becomes a single aesthetic monad where difference is destroyed by the arc of the narrative - or rather, what you get is a verisimilitude of music
in general where all specifics fall from conscious attention.
Of course, I'm pretty austere on this matter - though I'm obviously as guilty as anyone of appropriating things, and there's nothing wrong with that. I just think that an individual tends to define their aesthetic less by their conscious identity and more just by
existing; and for the audience (regardless of some overly-enthusiastic reviewers) that'll mostly appear as a unitary aesthetic. That unitary aesthetic may be expansive and fluid, of course, but it'll still more often appear as such.
Sorry, that's incredibly tl;dr.