| |
|
|
| |
|
|
| |
Introduction
Interviews with ...
Jeph Jerman
Annea Lockwood
Alvin Lucier
Stephen Vitiello
Chris Mann
NBA.
What is sound art?
CM.
I always thought 'sound art' was a career move. John Cage went into mycology because 'mushroom' was the previous word in the dictionaries he consulted when trying to discover definitions of music. Other readers less influenced by oulipou were less interesting in their response, a damning indictment of nineteenth-century philology as practiced by twentieth-century hacks.
NBA.
Who is sound art a career move for? The musician moving closer to the visual artist? The poet moving into the recording industry? For it to be a move it must be different than its other, mustn't it?
CM.
A career move is a branding exercise. However, while Kodak discovered it didn't sell film, but rather something more generic, memory, the small traders were being small traders (and small traders define a move as more then of the same). Work may be interesting and require me, or deem me to be some sort of adornment and basically irrelevant. Branding is an early move in declaring my redundancy.
NBA.
How might you discern or decide which work requires you and which deems you irrelevant? It almost seems this wouldn't be knowable until a certain critical juncture where one or the other of you declares the terms of engagement.
CM.
Regardless of the color of the invitation (and it is mainly my responsibility to recognize the invitation (meaning is an act of charity bestowed by the observer)), if my participation makes no difference or when work only solicits my agreement, I am irrelevant. The terms of dialogue or the possibility of conspiracy are not in and or of themselves necessarily difficult to ascertain. They may, of course, be composed.
NBA.
You have said (written) "meaning has no consistency," would this imply an incident by incident interpretation of where you were relative to work?
CM.
While consistency remains the beauty of context, presumably the object of meaning is transparency. It would seem that the way to show compassion to that which fails to exist, is formally (that form is the incident of work).
NBA.
In that sense, how would the formal difference between the 'written word' and the 'heard word' construct differing responses in the receiver? I guess I'm thinking specifically, for me, the differences between reading, say, working hypothesis and listening to Machine For Making Sense. I react (or behave) quite differently to the two experiences, though I remain very aware of the strong artistic anchor points which connect the two sets of work.
CM.
Phenomenology obviously has a lot to answer for, though composing the psychology of perception is something to do.
NBA.
Could you describe "compositional linguistics" as you use the term? It seems to be a synthetic of poetry and critical writing.
CM.
Sometime early in your educational career at primary school a teacher makes a distinction between language and music. I was away that day and would like to think, probably wagging.
NBA.
Interesting. In Poetics, Aristotle says poetry springs from two predispositions of man: imitation and the pursuit of harmony and rhythm, which would indicate to me that your primary school teacher might have missed the primordial connection between music and language. Compositional linguistics, then, is replugging that connection? That would seem then to imply more an aural function than a written one, true?
CM.
Replugging a connection suggests validating a distinction which is different from failing to make that distinction in the first place. Aristotle's imitation is also a euphemism for agreement and agreement as we know is the cheapest form of censorship. Composing sense is about composing social systems (language is the mechanism whereby you understand what I'm thinking better than I do (where 'I' is defined by those changes for which I is required)), and sound is useful if you want your social system to work at night or around corners.
NBA.
So you're basically interested in psy-ops?
CM.
Rhymes with composer, right?
NBA.
A seemingly related quote of yours which I love is: "Sound is an unanalytic model of sense. It is a collaborator with no loyalties, no implications...sound is true imperialism." Could you explain this in a little more detail?
CM.
The mouth is a tourniquet regulating blood flow to the brain. Sense is an accidental byproduct. And is therefore the perfect traitor. I mean, I didn't know I thought that. (There is a beautiful recording of Louis Armstrong teaching Lotte Lenya how to phrase Mack the Knife.)
NBA.
You studied both music and Chinese in your formative years, I'm curious how the study of Chinese informed both the music and your subsequent linguistic work. I would think it formed a very instructive counterpoint.
CM.
I studied Chinese for ten years from the age of ten and for a bunch of domestic reasons this was also my introduction to grammar and so spending much of my adolescence trying to map a non-Indo-European grammar on to English.
NBA.
Did that grammatical difference also translate into approaching musical composition differently than you might have otherwise?
CM.
My parents did a lot of recordings in the aboriginal and other working class and immigrant communities, so I guess I was reasonably alive to the aural and Chinese grammar was my first experience of the abstracted ordering of these and other possibilities, so it's not so much how it differed from other models, but that it was the model of norm. It's a version of what is a pretty standard experience for the children of immigrants and it has been the case for a while that the majority speakers of English speak it as a second language.
NBA.
What were the recordings of? Speech? Music? Was this the soundscape of home for you, your parents recordings?
CM.
A lot of recordings were done in our living room (not every, but most weekends) on an old Ferrograph tape recorder and as neither of my parents were particularly technically minded, I became the default recording engineer. Recordings were epic poems in Greek, bush yarns, contemporary Australian poetry, German cabaret, medieval Spanish ballads, standard nineteenth-century flute repertoire, jazz, lyrebirds.
NBA.
My understanding of Chinese is very limited, but my impression is that the way alpabetic language represents speech and how pictographic language depicts speech are quite conceptually and functionally different. I mention this because one of the striking parts of your work to me is, as I mentioned before, how very differently I react to the reading of your writing (I go very slowly) and the listening to your audio work (I go very quickly). Not that there is a specific correlation of how this all works, but how would you characterize the conceptual or functional differences between your written and your spoken work?
CM.
Greek science and economics are both modelled on the meaningless Greek alphabet (meaningless in the sense that each letter has been shorn of any other significance) and the implications for politics are pretty obvious. The conspiracy that speech encourages between interlocutors seems to be both more sympathetic and politically volatile and while different media have different functions, I'm particularly interested in making stuff that requires or rewards a second take (which obviously includes asking your neighbor what they think), so reading with a pencil is more fun than without.
NBA.
You also seem to be working beyond the notion of the artist presenting a perspective or point of view but using your work as an invitation to investigate the ideas inherent in the work, so the work becomes the starting point, not the end point of the creative process.
CM.
Designing tools...or as Brun defines the composer: That without which something would not have happened.
NBA.
John Cage used your text for the piece Eight Whiskus, how did that come about?
CM.
Cage found 'words & classes' at Paul Sadowski's and we corresponded and later met in Washington.
NBA.
Was Cage influential at a point in the development of your work?
CM.
There are many attributes of Cage that are important to me (the politics of invention), but particularly his timing.
NBA.
What do you mean by Cage's timing?
CM.
He's in the same league as Buster Keaton.
NBA.
Are you a Beckett fan?
CM.
"!" Anyone who refuses to write in their mother tongue because it's too poetic is a friend of mine.
NBA.
Could you give me a little insight into the working processes of Machine For Making Sense? How much material is prepared and how much is improvised? Are directional indicators prearranged? I always think of Cage's professed dislike of improvisation and how that is sometimes so at odds with my perception of the universe at large.
CM.
Apart from one or two pieces that involved stopwatch games, the informing consciousness of Machine was (composing) listening. The only prepared material was the vocabulary that any member brought to the proceedings. Rehearsal consisted of deciding where to eat. Cage was a study in loyalty, though he very properly recanted his anti-jazz foolishness, but don't ask me where.
NBA.
When you record MFMS, are you all performing simultaneously? The timing is so furious and the action so organic, I'm curious about whether overdubbing is part of the process. An opportunity for rebuttal of sorts.
CM.
One take. Real time.
NBA.
When you say "vocabulary" I'm assuming you include text. Do you improvise texts much in your spoken work? When you work with Joel Chadabe, for instance, your readings are of previously written material.
CM.
For MFMS, I bring text which is to say a bunch of words in a particular order. Amanda brings a bunch of words, some in order. Jim and Stevie bring instruments which are usefully played in a restricted number of ways and Rik has a bunch of tapes and CDs and a pause button. We all bring muscle memory and a collective history. These constitute a vocabulary of sorts. All decisions or realizations otherwise are improvised. It's the only way I know to set about a conspiracy.
NBA.
Indeed. I assume MFMS has a live performance history, is that something that happens any more or is MFMS now defunct? And in that light, does the conspiracy spill over with regularity into the audience, is the kind of activity that MFMS engages in seem to inspire response? It's hard to picture people sitting politely while you all have on with it.
CM.
We worked together for I guess about seven years, mainly Australia and Europe, and Jim and Stevie and Rik and Amanda still get together on occasion. Altogether happier with an audient. Studios (including live to air) were not really our forte. We did do a mammoth radio extravaganza taking over a bunch of studios and venues in Sydney, but again that was with an audience.
NBA.
And the conspiracy? I assume MFMS was less about entertainment value than other artistic goals, any sense of how those transmitted?
CM.
As to whether Machine was a viable model for others, we're probably the wrong people to ask. Were we useful? Again I'd have to defer the question, but we were asked back. Entertaining? We had fun.
NBA.
And the conspiracy? I assume MFMS was less about entertainment value than other artistic goals, any sense of how those transmitted?
CM.
As to whether Machine was a viable model for others, we're probably the wrong people to ask. Were we useful? Again I'd have to defer the question, but we were asked back. Entertaining? We had fun.
NBA.
I certainly didn't mean to oppose the notions of merit and entertainment, obviously a healthy combination of the two is very effective both in the mind and the market. I think of entertainment here in the Neil Postman way, a constructed entertainment marketplace often empty of meaningful (or challenging) content.
CM.
Which explains how he is such a McLuhanite: the meaning in the market is the market, a price is just an advertisement for pricing, though the Catholic McLuhan might attempt to answer why one would do something which wasn't fun.
NBA.
Is there a reason that America was less of a venue? The classic receptivity question here, I guess.
CM.
The economics of playing the U.S. were unsympathetic. A dearth of festivals and general lack of cash. Otherwise, outside the U.S., people seemed less concerned about getting all of it and found the orchestration of levels of comprehension less daunting or less offensive.
NBA.
That's an interesting observation. Are Americans constricted intellectually by their notions of being "individuals", meaning, as an English friend of mine once observed: for Americans it's more important to have an opinion than to form one. Is intellectual ownership or singularity a problem in the States? Are we afraid of not getting things? Your work would certainly actively confront that.
CM.
I like the having/forming distinction. Particularly as regards opinions, the I'll-give-you-my-opinion-what's-the-topic school. And yes, intellectual property is America's largest export, and yes, in an information economy ('knowledge is power' is the advertising slogan of the Education Department), missing something, not getting it, is an issue. Chomsky's notions of well-formedness also have something to answer for (though it also helps explain how and why his transformational grammar was originally developed for the Defense Department).
NBA.
With Postman and McLuhan and Chomsky we've banged a quick left into media theory, which seems to be the 800-pound gorilla of electronic and information arts. How over-arching in influence do you see media theory today? It takes us back, in some ways, to the origin of this conversation, for me anyway, and the distinction between music and sound art...ideas of music coming from an instrument(alist), being played, and sound art being more a media construct, an audio virtuality.
CM.
There is no media theory. If there was media theory there would be more than one newspaper in this country 'confused' about invading Iraq. Cage: Music is everything we do. Brun: We are interested in the music we don't like, yet. Concerts by phone and concerts by radio meant that when Miles Davis claimed his first instrument to be a turntable, he wasn't lying. The rest, as Wittgenstein has it, is silence.
|||
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
