Or that an LP of Ali Akbar Khan came on the market. It was almost a miracle, in that sense, to find that an actual LP of Stockhausen came on the market. LPs or 45s or whatever were so removed from my worldview in the early Sixties that they were almost irrelevant. When asked about experimental music on record in the 1960s, composer Tony Conrad reached back across the decades and provided valuable context: There were exceptions, notably two series of LPs produced by Cage's composer colleagues and sometime collaborators Earle Brown (the Contemporary Sound Series) and David Behrman (Columbia Records' Music of Our Time series). Very little of this music initially circulated in the form of commercially released recordings. For composers and musicians whose work was not released until decades later, the landscape of avant-garde music available in recorded form would be unrecognizable. Thus the task emerges to articulate the conceptual distance between the creation of this music in the 1960s and its consumption in the present. For a genre of music whose work was initially encountered almost exclusively in performance, the ways in which listeners encounter experimental music has changed radically. The ease of access to recordings of this period has never been greater, and the cost of accessing them never less. With the recent establishment of online archives, a vastly larger number of these recordings have suddenly been made available. Why approach experimental or avant-garde music of the 1960s through its hostility towards being represented as a sound recording? Because when this work is experienced today, it is most often encountered in the form of a recording. And the record is the medium where the dichotomies of musician/non-musician and professional/amateur lose force. The record allows for the distribution of organized as well as disorganized sound. may become just another part of the world, no more, no less." 2 Records may not change, but they do travel. This is the person whose second collection of writings, A Year from Monday, was dedicated "To us and all those who hate us, that the U.S.A. Cage was an exceptional, tireless correspondent and a cheerfully committed internationalist who maintained a vast network of contacts. Logo for DRAM, formally the Database of Recorded American Music But one also would have expected him to acknowledge the potential embodied by the record as a medium of communication across geographical distances, to say nothing of time. It is the expression of a pioneer of works that were radically indeterminate as regards performance, works that on the basis of their design change significantly with each iteration, except when instantiated in the form of a recording. On the one hand Cage's opposition to the fixed form of the record, the tedium of the medium, could not be more straightforward. Remove the records from Texas / and someone / will learn to sing." 1 In his 1949 "Lecture on Nothing," he lamented, "The reason they've no / music in Texas / is because / they have recordings / in Texas. Indeterminate music, long-duration minimalism, text scores, happenings, live electronic music, and free improvisation were predicated on being experienced in performance they can be said to have actively undermined the form of the sound recording.Ĭomposers and performers in this period tended to hold sound recordings in low esteem, and John Cage set the standard for expressing antipathy towards them. Most new genres in experimental or avant-garde music in the 1960s were deliberately ill-suited to be represented in the form of a recording. In 1995 he founded Errant Bodies Press, an independent publishing house supporting work in sound art and studies, performance and poetics, artistic research and contemporary political thought."Remove the Records from Texas": Parsing Online Archives LaBelle reflects fluently on his artistic practice, drawing attention to the social dimensions of listening and manner in which sounds, in multiple variations, play upon public spaces, and drawing connections across media and incorporate video, as well as architectural and sculptural vocabularies into an expanded field that embraces rhetorical and spatial challenges. His work, based on performance, sound installation, recording and use of found sounds, focuses on questions of agency, community, pirate culture, and poetics, which results in a range of collaborative and para-institutional initiatives, including: The Listening Biennial and Academy (2021-), Communities in Movement (2019-), The Living School (2014-16), Oficina de Autonomia (2017), The Imaginary Republic (2014-19), Dirty Ear Forum (2013-), Surface Tension (2003-2008), and Surface Tension (1998-2002). Brandon LaBelle is a musician, artist, writer, theorist, curator, educator and editor based in Berlin.
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