Interview 12/09/03
Golan
Levin and Paul Miller (DJ Spooky) in conversation with
Rosanne Bersten, Linz, Austria.
Picture: Paul Miller, taken by Rosanne Bersten
© Rosanne Bersten 2004. If you wish to buy this transcript for publication, please e-mail me.
In this transcript:
[1: digital musics ]
[2: collaboration and creativity ]
[3: music and the avant-garde ]
[4: maywa denki, reggae and authenticity ]
PM: (talking about a Greg Egan story) This one party where you realise that people are committing suicide at this party, his stuff always has a really dark edge to it, it’s like neo gothic horror, near-futuristic.
RB: ...and half the time it’s quantum phsyics and half the time it’s bio-genetics, he’s really sharp and he’s a mathematician, his web site’s unbelievable because it’s hard core maths and quantum physics. He’s a total recluse.
So, Golan, would you call what you’re doing music?
GL: No.
RB: What would you call it?
GL: Well, what you saw the other night, I’d call it new media performance or audio-visual performance.
RB: How do you feel that this new media performance fits in with the parallel development of digital musics at the moment?
GL: Well, actually -- Paul will probably disagree with this vociferously but -- in many ways, music’s at a dead-end right now and the way it’s not at a dead end are branching out from the last twenty years of albums that are released by record companies and toured by bands and I would say that there will still always be a market for that and people will still always need music that involves recognisable tunes and that they can move their ass to, and I have no contempt for that at all, in fact I’m actually jealous of dance music, I think it can effect people in profound ways. But in terms of development of music as opposed to people’s need for music, development of art music and avant-garde music, people will probably grill me for saying this but I don’t find anything particularly interesting happening for example in the digital musics category of ars electronica. The winning selection is a bunch of people who basically dork around in the studio and make interesting sounds and then release them on a CD, you know, music concrete or that expanse of painful or unpainful industrial sounds and so forth and this has been done for twenty or thirty years, coming out of Horace and Eno and all that. When I tried to think of the future of music, I made the concert two years ago which was the choreographed ringing of people’s mobile phones, you know, this is not an album I’ve produced in a studio where I’ve tried to make the most painful possible sounds.
I think that that kind of music is at a dead end, and I think that the new territory in musics as far as the avant garde is concerned involves branching out into different domains and that’s why for example, in my own work, to the extent that it is music, I’m trying to do things outside of what you can hear or what is even listenable on an album.
PM: Well, the whole idea of creating an environment is something that’s really important right now, I think so much of what’s going on in music culture is a reflection of this whole peer-to-peer issue, the networks, MP3 file exchanges, and just making some annoying squeaky sounds isn’t necessarily so avant-garde, it was something that was done thirty years ago, you look at Stockhausen, at Perez, even Stravinsky —
GL: Sure.
PM: All sorts of stuff.
GL: Or in terms of the idea of using the studio as an instrument, I mean there’s an article by Eno from 1974 about doing this.
PM: Yeah, people have been doing this the whole last century.
RB: What’s your response to the whole sine wave thing?
PM: I just think that the whole idea of what people think about as art music...
GL: I think it hurts.
PM: ...I think right now, you’re right, a lot of that is a perceptual dead end, where people are not necessarily taking the medium outside of just making some squeaky sounds. I’m interested much more in an idea of social engineering and that entails the idea of hybridity, openness to all sorts of globalised issues, stuff that takes you out of your local little scene. You know, I travel a lot but I also do a lot of collaborations with people from all walks of life, precisely because that keeps things interesting.
GL: If I had to be a juror [at ars electronica] and I was restricted to looking at things that could be recorded on albums, I don’t even know what I would do, I think I would find very little of interest. I think the making of environments is an example of that, the mobile phone symphony or performance or intervention, this to me is an environment that doesn’t reproduce well on CD at all because the whole thing is happening on a hundred cell phones.
RB: Talking about collaboration, one of the things that interested me here were the Audio Pad and Block Jam stuff and the different ways of making the dance music you were talking about before but with the visual interface becoming a part of the performance in a way that someone just standing in front of a laptop is not.
PM: I can literally compare between a dance music environment and a soundart environment, because I did two different events. I was also going to do this [Iannis] Xenakis thing but I did a collaboration with him a couple of years ago but I didn’t want to do a squeaky noise thing, it just would have been a different vibe, my style would have been more of an ambient take on his work and then format wise I just didn’t think it would fit. No disrespect to anyone doing that kind of stuff. I think it’s a big world and if somebody doesn’t like something or has an issue then check out something else, it’s aesthetics and difference.
RB: What do you think about the performative aspect of someone standing in front of a laptop as music?
PM: That’s fine. If that’s what they get their kicks out of. I think it’s about pleasure and people need to do what makes them feel happy. If they get a kick out of it then more power to them.
GL: That’s a very tolerant attitude and I do basically agree with you in that if people want to go see a performance and there’s a guy playing a laptop then that’s all good. Personally, I find it manifestly and completely uninteresting. I mean, again, suppose you say, hey friends, let’s go out and dance, and there’s a guy in front of a laptop, great, but in terms of what’s interesting, in terms of where we are today, I’ve seen laptop performances and they’re manifestly uninteresting, and for a number of reasons...
PM: But you’re watching the person as if it’s a performance, whereas you should be watching and/or listening and/or watching the screen or projection, you don’t need to watch the person.
GL: Well, sure, but as far as performance goes then this is not the future of performance, this is what I’m saying. The future of performance is not some guy standing behind a laptop doing something completely opaque with probably nothing contingent and nothing at stake in the situation.
RB: Which is why I’m interested in AudioPad. James Patten and Ben Recht have a table with light sensors and little perspex markers. One is drum, one is bass, one is pitch, one of them is a star shaped thing that’s the microphone and another is a starshaped thing that’s the ‘allow alteration to start here’. This is their interface. To make the music they move the markers around, it becomes a visual representation of the sliders so the audience can see what is being done, in an artistic way.
GL: It puts something back into what’s at stake in an live performance, which is that the performer might mess up and not only that, you could see possibly how they might mess up or that there’s something different from occasion to occasion because you can see that the performer is actually doing something.
RB: I also wonder about the ability to visualise collaboration through that.
PM: Let’s put it this way. Because I move through so many different scenes, I mean I check out reggae, I check out hip hop, I check out noise rock, I check out downtown avantgarde free jazz, I check out digital media scene...
GL: You can have an anything goes attitude...
PM: Right, because I move between a lot of scenes, I really have to be open and chilled out about things. What I find interesting is when people critique my performance, each person brings a whole lot of perceptual baggage about what a DJ should be or what an artist should be or what a writer should be, so my issues normally with the sorts of perceptual apparatus that’s applied to me rather than what I would apply to other people so that’s why I’m just like hanging... I really do try to invoke that sense of tolerance and openness in my own views of other people in the hopes that... you know, like last night, when I did the Duchamp piece, I think people were watching me as a DJ and not as an artist, and because of that the expectation and the perceptual baggage that came with that, they were expecting beats, they wanted to get some sort of dance thing doing and I was doing some ambient sort of weird art/noise mixed with... I don’t think it was like the Xenakis thing where it was like disturbing and annoying sounds, it was much more like atmospheric, I was timestretching and sampling Duchamp’s vocal piece where he’s talking about the art of selection and editing and I was editing him saying stuff and timestretching and pulling snippets out of his discussion, kind of as a fun thing about the artist as shareware so to speak, but the perception and the perceptual baggage that people brought with them didn’t allow them to critique the performance as an art piece, it had them critiquing it as a DJ piece, where it’s not dance, what’s going on...
GL: You can’t keep a beat, what’s wrong with you?
PM: Right.