Hello everyone, I know this will seem like alot to read on top of the weekly readings for next week's class on audiovision, but it is really a great piece and, honestly, an easy read. I am sending you the first 63 pages of Paul Morley's fantastic book via e-mail today. It is a great piece to understand how to write on sound and engage more personally with it, beyond mere technicalities of pitch, wave, amplitude, and the likes. I am also very open to any suggestions you might have regarding specific things you want to see or hear during my class on september 20th. For now, I would also recommend you try thinking on sound and write a half page paragraph on a piece of music you think reflects some of the properties in sound Chion is discussing, or perhaps even just a particular piece that has your imagination wander in a different space-time frame of reference. You do not have to do this, but if you want to share your insight on a particular song or sound, feel absolutely free to do so. I will also conduct a little sound experiment for the first hour of the class or so before I actually engage with Chion, but I will not strictly stick to this text. Till tomorrow, Paul
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Hey Paul. Cool that you’ll be providing class notes and links; can’t wait to get your take on Rubber Johny—the spawn of Blair Witch and Eraserhead. I really enjoyed the Morley piece but couldn't get Ballard's voice out of my head while reading it. Is Kylie the lost prostitute in Concrete Island? I found the driving aspect of the narrative very Crash-like and the imagery in the language very Ballard-inspired but without the inherent violence—the accident without the hurt, music as Fantasy Island with Morley as Ricardo Montalban—to paraphrase your namesake Virillio, KM's music is to AL's as music without the unknown quantity. There were a couple of things I found disconcerting about his genalogy of sound... in tracing the lineage of interioriry from the room to the head... Alvin, like many experimental artists in music, film, literature, painting, stood on the sidelines until commercialism was able to co-opt his ideas and incorporate them into something that would make money. I think that Lucier's minimalist style has a "poor aesthetic" side to it that Minogue as a commodity and a fetish don't have. Further on this line, for me, Minogue is the tip of a brand called Kylie Minogue, the product or the result of a marketing effort where she is the face of a concert of producers, writers, arrangers, semi-anonymous studio musicians, stylists, publicist, hair and make-up artists blah, blah, blah.... we get far from the music very fast. The degree of involvement and personal exposure (revelation of the self as performance and as part of the artwork) is far greater in Alvin's lispy stutter that Kylie's synthi strut. If you separate the form from the content isn't the form very much like George W. Bush? A performance artist, a front riffing to the tune of everything behind him?
Cheers, Felix
Interesting to know.
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