M.B. final sale copy (again)

It looks like one more copy of my limited / signed Micro Bionic book + CD package has miraculously appeared for sale, and is now available for someone who really wants it.

I should re-iterate here all of what I said in the previous "M.B. last copy for sale" post, but with a heightened degree of urgency. After this, I really will have no more copies for sale until the paperback is in print. Keep one step ahead of the online auction site vampires / speculators, who will store the book in a "cool, dry, smoke-free environment" until I meet with some horrible death or public scandal, and then offer it for sale at an absurd exorbitant price.

7/7/09 UPDATE- SOLD OUT AGAIN :(

Belsona Academy

The following open invitation / 'all call' has been posted already to people on my mailing list this week, so apologies if this is making the rounds again for the 2nd-3rd time already. I figured putting this out on the 'blog-o-sphere' would make it open to a wider number of participants outside my inner circle. Anyway:


I'd like to invite you to participate in a new podcasting project of mine, entitled The Belsona Academy- this is going to be a high-quality podcast based on new electronic music, electronic-based sound art and sound poetry. Each show will be 23 minutes in length (about the length of your average U.S. TV show when the advertising is cut out.) Once I’ve collected material for a minimum of 10 shows, I’ll make new episodes available to the public every week.

One purpose of the show is to give audiences something they haven’t heard before, so I’m accepting any of the following materials for the show:

• Exclusive, unreleased sound pieces
• Exclusive interviews (conducted with me via Skype or telephone.)
• Recordings of yourself discussing your creative process; talking about why / how you created a specific work(s).
• Mini-‘lectures’ or essays on any key aspect of modern sound
• Excerpts from live performances (preferably soundboard recordings, but anything is fine.)

Any combination of the items on this list is welcome, of course.

With this show, I hope to provide an educational service relating to the sonic arts, building on the themes of my first music book ‘Micro Bionic’ and my upcoming book ‘Unofficial Release’. I also hope to fill a large gap in the 'podcast' world, which seems to feature very little in the way of new computer music, 'noise', electronic voice manipulation and concrete poetry, cut-ups, generative music, post-Industrial intensity etc. etc....This will, of course, provide a nice bit of promotion for yourselves as well. When all the material is collected for the shows, I hope to make a limited edition DVD available and to provide sale copies to all the contributing artists (this is still in the ‘planning’ stages, though- nothing is set in stone yet.) There will be no editing or censoring of submitted works.

If you would be willing to contribute anything like this, please let me know. Anything you contribute should be a minimum length of 5 minutes, and a maximum of 20 minutes (I will require at least 3 minutes to introduce you and your work, and to make all the other typical “radio DJ” gestures.) Spoken portions don’t have to be in English, but I will require an English text translation that can be downloaded by listeners from the iTunes shop. Sound quality of submitted pieces should be as high as possible- either send uncompressed .wav / .aiff or an mp3 of 320kbps rate.

If you have any questions, please write me here.

7/4/09 update- a couple contributions have already come into the show, from the always reliable Francisco López and some other new names...the ball appears to be rolling.

Wonderland

"We are not interested in communication. What we are interested in is inspiration rather than expiration. To be able to inspire, you have to first be able to expire, so it means expiring a certain state of the body to create a vacuum- this vacuum creates an aspiring tension that allows an 'I-don't-know-what' to fill in this vacuum, this 'I-don't-know-what' then takes the shape of the envelope that contained this vacuum and thus this vacuum is then filled with this "I-don't-know-what" finally becoming a fullness, yet different from the previous fullness. That is where the polarization between us and the audience is created.

If we consider mind to be matter and matter to be mind, then it becomes possible to experience and actualize processes that classically come within the category of 'spiritual sensations,' in terms of shapes, surfaces, volumes, tensions, pressures. Nature abhors a vacuum. Any vacuum tends to be filled in, that is the great physical and spiritual law, the pneumatics of love. We only comply with this law."

[snip]

"This 'I-don't-know-what' is something that can't be named because we do not want to know its name. If I ever should name it, it would be something dead that could no longer operate as a principle of knowledge, for the key to everything is mystery, a pit of mystery."

-Etant Donnes in conversation with Yvan Etienne, April 2000- from the book / CD Wonderland (limited to 1,000 copies, deleted)

Knowledge of Self

Q:What do you think is the worst prejudice today in the so-called avant-garde area?

A: Fear of knowing oneself that tries to pass itself off as sophistication. The fear that fully expressing yourself is psychically, socially or economically dangerous. That if you’re making art and want to eat, compromise is inevitable. It’s not. I still find it especially saddening when artists compromise themselves and their work to avoid threatening their economic support, or the possibility of ever receiving any. That very limited way of thinking has an adverse affect on all of us.

-Massimo Ricci in conversation with John Duncan, 2005

This response of John Duncan's has been whirling around in my head for some time now, and has served as a reminder of how easy it can be to pass oneself off as an 'avant-garde musician' simply by stringing together a number of confusing or oblique gestures that wow untrained ears with their complexity. But complexity of technique is not always an allegory for complexity of personality, and pure formalism is not always an indicator of of intelligence, depth, or -in Duncan's estimation- self-actualization. The fact that these things ARE sometimes equated in the public mind maybe reflects more upon society as a whole than upon experimental musicians, but the latter aren't entirely guiltless in helping to 'string people along.'

Indeed, the act of bypassing debates of technique and virtuosity, in order to simply lay oneself out for the audience and say "take me as you will", is something that is becoming increasingly rare- but perhaps because audiences themselves share this insecurity in respect to self-knowledge. Perhaps witnessing a brutally honest artistic exegesis is an unwelcome invitation for them to do the same; a disquieting reminder that they are piling diversion upon diversion in an attempt to stave off pre-mortem cognition of what really moves and shapes our actions.

This is not to say that all musicians that exhibit virtuosity are being deceitful, or that musicians who erect some elaborate scaffolding of novel techniques around them are being evasive and hiding from a more honest assessment of themselves. I'm not interested in making an absolute dichotomy of "anti-formalist artist = direct, honest artist" vs. "formalist artist = artist fearful of introspection." There are plenty of people in either camp who would contradict these simple equations. But, again returning to Duncan, there is an adverse effect which results from technical 'sophistication' being seen as a valid substitute for the natural, completely open transmission of deeply personal experiences.

Of course, the relationship between tech-obsessed, formalism-obsessed 'avant' artists and their hungry audiences is a symbiotic one. They appear to be making each other happier, and that on its own is no bad thing. The artist gets to take it easy and wield any number of tools, from pure abstraction to ironic appropriation, without having to disclose to much about himself / herself. The audiences get to increase their hip cachet by having "gotten" something that most "normal" people cannot "get." The only thing is that this is a very short-term happiness accompanied by the diminishing returns that typically accompany any artificial breakthrough, and, worse yet, it stymies further developments by reinforcing the notion that specialized artistic knowledge and musical vocabulary is a secret to be closely guarded. For many, relinquishing that secret to others would ruin the fun of being in an exclusive untouchable culture...with such a mindset, how does the whole of creativity ever progress beyond mere technological updates?

Formalist / technical artists may not be the "badguys" in relation to artists made roughly in the John Duncan mold, but it must be said that the latter artistic type is the catalyst of future artistic development. It's understandable why many artists choose not to make "self-knowledge" the goal of their work, because it can reveal things both positive and negative about one's personality: still, acceptance of a reality where only 'positives' exist is an unhealthy model for music and for all aspects of life.

M.B. last copy for sale

If anyone is interested, I am selling my personal copy of the Micro Bionic book at this link. This and several other rarities, useful pieces of musical equipment etc. will be going up for sale on my Belsona site within the coming days.

This is your absolute last chance to get a copy of this edition before the Ebay collector market prices it beyond the reach of those whose last names aren't, say, "Saatchi" or "Rockefeller..."

UPDATE 6/27/09: LAST COPY SOLD AS OF TODAY, SORRY :(

Arte Postale Centennial

The estimable Vittore Baroni, with whom I've been in contact over the last couple weeks, has forwarded me the following invitation to participate in the 100th issue of the long-running Arte Postale mail art magazine. This may be of interest to anyone looking to commemorate the 100th anniversary of artists using sound (read: people not trained as musicians).

++++++++

2009 marks 100 years from the first Manifesto of Futurism. In 2009 will be published the 100th issue of Arte Postale!, a mail art magazine that I started thirty years ago, in October 1979. What puts in relation the two events is sound: Futurist Luigi Russolo’s Manifesto The Art of Noise is a milestone in the history of the experimental and weird sounds that I have been promoting since the early Seventies in my journalistic work for a long string of publications (Rockerilla, Velvet, Vinile, Urlo, Sonora, Underground, Rumore, etc.). Music was also the theme of the first three issues of Arte Postale!, so I return to the subject in this open invite to the hundredth issue.

To participate in Arte Postale! 100 you must:

- Send a mail art work that produces futuristic sounds or music (works that do not produce actual sounds will not be accepted).

and / or

-Create an experimental musical instrument and record an original sound piece, then send the recording (on cd-r) with a photo of the instrument and/or send the instrument itself: in the summer 2009 it will be played live by the BAU Artkestra in a public performance in Viareggio, documented in the magazine.

and / or

-Send 100 copies in the size of a cd booklet (cm. 12 x 12) of an original mail art work on the theme “Future Sounds & Music”.

Deadline: July 5, 2009.The materials submitted will not be returned.
A copy of Arte Postale! 100 will be mailed free to all the participants.

Send to: Vittore Baroni, Via C. Battisti 339, 55049 Viareggio, Italy

Vie Ici

One of the more successful interviews I've conducted for my "Unofficial Release" book, with Rod Summers of the VEC Audio Exchange, is now available here. As it's a fairly good-sized piece of text in and of itself, I won't say anything more about it here, other than that it offers some quite valuable insights on the nagging question of "The Artist + Technology." Just as importantly, it reveals some of the links between past participatory cultures (mail art) and the world of off-radar audio art, specifically of the electronic variety.

Let me also use this occasion to proudly announce the re-designing of my website once AGAIN; I've decided to finally make it look as if it hasn't been designed by 10 different people at once. Many of the gadgets that don't do anything to help its functionality have been or will be removed, although a variation on my immature 'candy factory' color scheme will remain. Should be easier to navigate with mobile devices now, too.

DoReMi

I did a little more archive-digging today, and found another rare item which forms a nice addendum to the Micro Bionic book project, or (on maybe a more forward-looking note) a bridge into the 2nd book. The consistent and ambitious ReR label used to put out a quarterly magazine and vinyl record combo package which, judging by the couple issues I found in the "Big Pink" record store in Osaka, provided readers with a delightfully un-pretentious crash course in the possibilities of sound, for the most part free of the usual polemical waxings and bromides disguised as musical investigations.

It was difficult to read the cover story on Pierre Schaeffer without going back to many of the sentiments expressed in my writing on Francisco López, indeed the latter artist is probably where he is today because of careful application of the former's idea(l)s- many of López' statements are near-perfect echoes of Schaeffer's comments from this period, although not necessarily the ones excerpted from this interview (P.S. was interviewed for this piece by one Tim Hodgkinson.)
________

TH: So there is nothing essentially relevant in the fact that the world we live in is changing, and that we might need to express new or different things about it?

PS: The answer is that the world doesn't change.

TH: There is no progress?

PS: There is no progress. The world changes materially. Science makes advances in technology and understanding. But the world of humanity doesn't change. Morally, the world is both better and worse than it was. We are worse off than in the middle ages, or the 17th and 18th centuries, in that we have the atomic menace. It's ridiculous that time and time again we need a radioactive cloud coming out of a nuclear power station to remind us that atomic energy is extraordinarily dangerous. So this shows the imbecility, the stupidity of mankind. Why should a civilization which so misuses its power have, or deserve, a normal music?

TH: Well, if you are committed to music, you try to reach, to encourage, the good in people, whatever that is...

PS: That could be wishful thinking. I'll bring in Lévi-Strauss, who has said again and again that it's only things that change; the structures, the structures of humanity, stay the same- and the uses we make of these things. On this level we are just like the caveman who makes a tool out of flint, a tool for survival, but also a deadly weapon: we haven't changed at all. The world has just gotten more dangerous because the things have gotten more dangerous. In music there are new things, synthesizers, taperecorders etc., but we still have our sensibilities, our ears, the old harmonic structures in our heads- we're still born in DoReMi - it's not up to us to decide. Probably the only variations are ethnological. There are different musical cultures, the music of ancient Greece, for example, in so far as we can know it, the music coming from the Hebrews into the Gregorian chant, the music of India, China, Africa, these are the variations, and it's all DoReMi...

[...]

TH: I'd like to turn now to the idea that, scattered all over the world, probably in tiny garrets rather than expensive state-of-the-art studios, there are people busily cutting up bits of tape, making loops, experimenting with tape recorders, and I would like to ask you if have anything you would specially want to say to these people.

PS: Well, first I can't pass the buck to them. I started all that. I think they have the great satisfaction of discovering the world of sound. The world of music is probably contained within DoReMi, yes, but I'm saying the world of sound is much larger than that. Let's take a spatial analogy. Painters and scultpors are concerned with spaces, volumes, colours, etc. but not with language. That's the writer's concern. The same is true with sound. Musique Concrete in its work of assembling sound, produces sound-works, sound-structures, but not music. We have to not call music things which are simply sound-structures...

-taken from Re Records Quarterly Magazine Vol. 2, #1 (March 1987)