Publishing writing by musicians, artists, critics and listeners of contemporary music and associated arts practices.
Antoine Beuger, Manfred Werder, Michael Pisaro and Tim Parkinson. Chair: Will Montgomery
The following discussion took place at the Centre for Creative Collaboration, London, on the evening of Wednesday, 2nd November 2011. Presented by Polyply, the event served to introduce Cut & Splice, an annual festival of experimental music and sound arts produced by Sound and Music and Radio 3, and hosted by the ICA. Continue reading “Polyproject ‘Poetry as Score’”
Metonymy is a form of figurative language based on contiguity and causality, one that until recently has tended to receive critical short shrift when compared with metaphor, where the figuration depends on relationships of similarity. My PhD research (now available online at http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/4668) involved reexamining those aspects of metonymy customarily considered to be the source of its failings. Most prominent among these ‘deficiencies’ is the historically and socially limited nature of metonymic expressions. I contend that this can, on the contrary, be a powerful resource because of the way that it binds the metonymic expression to the real, which always lies beyond our control. This is in contrast to the way that metaphor risks making an idealist fetish of the individual imagination, viewed as an heroic striving to reshape the world directly through the acts of thinking and writing. I argued for the development of a concept of musical metonymy, characterised by linear dissimilarity, attention to the origins of and agency behind sounds, and an occlusion of the structural middleground. Continue reading “Dominic Lash ‘Inconclusive Paragraphs on Metonymy, Monochromaticism, Materialism’”
1. Outside
It is June 2010 and there is a Spitalfields Music Festival event going on inside east London’s St Leonard’s church, where Shoreditch High Street meets Hackney Road. In the grounds of the church, however, something altogether stranger – and perhaps only tangentially musical – is taking place: a composer is sitting alone a bench. Werder’s six-hour afternoon performance is so unobtrusive as to be almost invisible. He’s sitting towards the back of the grounds. He barely moves during the 40 minutes or so that I am there. He is simply – or not so simply – attending to the world. Continue reading “Will Montgomery ‘Five Ways of Looking at Manfred Werder’”
–What motivation would you say is at the core of your work?
I think what interests me most is to observe how there are always new constellations occurring in which experimental music can move on and keep itself alive. In the projects I have initiated I try to set a frame through which these mechanisms can be magnified enabling me to observe more closely and in detail at what happens, just like the arrangement of a scientific experiment. In my work at Q-O2 I get the chance to observe how communication leads to new constellations, ideas and forms. Continue reading “Julia Eckhardt ‘Collaborating Forever: Auto Interview’”
Catullus
Catullus is a long, snake-like creature with fur everywhere except for its belly. The fur is many shades of white, grey and brown, which provide good camouflage in the snow and amongst the rocks. It eats mostly small mountain animals, but can survive on leaves and grass when it finds it. It is often found in deep caves in dormant volcanic mountains in the centre of the Himalayas, but can also wander into town. It has two arms and two legs that can fold into large pores in its body. So it can either slither or walk upright. Continue reading “John Pisaro ‘Fantastical Zoology’”
Ramones – Ramones (Sire, 1976)
The albums we love have it easy. If they’re within earshot they can luxuriate in the praise—be it ham-fisted, needlessly abstract or recklessly passionate—heaped upon them. It’s a relationship complicated primarily, if at all, by extra-musical associations: various and sundry hormone- and/or adrenaline-churning experiences involving love, loss, theft, success, or abject failure. Continue reading “Adam Sonderberg ‘Tick Mark Studies’”
