'Deconstructionist' Music

I know next to jack shit about Derrida or modern architecture, but I find myself fascinated by something I often hear described as a "deconstructionist" approach to making music.

I take this to mean (more or less) breaking things down to their most basic components and then building them back up in a way that differs from the norm. Maybe someone can fill me in on a better definition of what deconstructionism is about - particularly when it comes to music.

Still, I'm interested in this - the idea of un-genres, un-music - using the void as the sculpture rather than the sculpture itself etc...

It's probably better if I use some examples here rather than rambling.

I'm kind of thinking about bands like US Maple who formed with the intent of stripping rock down to its barest components. The result is a stilted Beefheartian sound that is still recognisably rock music (guitar/bass/drums/vox, pentatonic scales etc) but structurally fragmented - unorthodox time signatures and meters, vocals based on "tones" rather than lyrics.

Black Dice do this too - in their early days as a hardcore band that eschewed traditional structures and later as an electronic/noise outfit, essentially turning whatever genre they dabble in on its head.

I'm also very interested in what the producer Actress does. He often describes his compositions as being "studies" of other tunes. My favourite track by him, 'Hubble', is supposed to be an exercise or study on Prince's famous 'Erotic City' b-side. While it doesn't sound much like the song that influences it, 'Hubble' could be the result of what happens if you put 'Erotic City' into an airlock and then blast all the pieces into space, rescuing only a resulting fragment for deep analysis.

This kind of approach to songwriting or composition fascinates me in a similar way to generative music. The idea of making something sound chaotic and fragmented through a highly logical and meticulous method.

I'd like more recommendations on this kind of thing. I'd be especially interested in this technique being applied to pop.

Is Low by Bowie not the motherlode of this idea? Deliberate (wilfull, even) experiments in composition and structure and tone and texture etc etc?

US Maple are probably the most Derridean band I know of, stripping back the layers of 'rock' symbolism to a single truth, then building back up again. But I wouldn't call it un-music, even if that's what it sounds like to unfamiliar ears: the stuff US Maple and even mid-period Don Caballero were doing was intricately arranged and intensely rehearsed, with every single element thought about and probably agonised over. You should see the short documentary on YouTube on the making of US Maple's Acre Thrills, which goes a little into Al Johnson's lyrical and vocal technique in particular: there are lyrics for every song, and he had his own notation for how he should pronounce different words, where to put emphasis, how to breathe on this line or that line, etc. Most vocalists don't get so involved in their work.

^^ Yes, I love this idea. Meticulous, rehearsed semi-chaos. Maybe Troutmask is the year zero for this kind of thing?

We're gonna need to be careful to differentiate deconstructionist from meticulous from experimental here, I suspect.

Dog, there's a thing called jazz...

Yes I'm aware of jazz thanks

Unless you actually take the time to understand what deconstructionism means and THEN define how you think it relates to music this is just going to be another thread featuring a load of people listing records they think are vaguely experimental or a bit weird.

US Maple remind me of Pere Ubu quite a bit too, although I'm not sure how much Pere Ubu would fit into this category? Maybe by New Picnic Time they would have.

*sorry for being snotty Sicko, I was referring to deconstructivism in rock/pop. As opposed to jazz/avant-classical in which I'm certain there are myriad examples.

You also need to really understand the motivations and techniques of the musicians / composers, too, otherwise it's just speculation.

Matt, well that's it I guess. I'm not that familiar with the tropes and theories, but if anyone can help with a clearer definition of how this would work, that would be cool. In my mind I can differentiate what a deconstructivist pop/rock band would sound like (or at least their approach) compared to mere umbrella experimentation. Just prefer to have someone who's more familiar with the term to help define it.

You also need to really understand the motivations and techniques of the musicians / composers, too, otherwise it's just speculation.

― Sick Mouthy (Scik Mouthy), Tuesday, 4 September 2012 12:37 (43 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

In the case of Black Dice, US Maple and Actress their motivations and techniques have been made pretty much explicit by said artists.

promising thread this one

just to make it explicit "deconstruction" as critical/philosophical technique has really got nothing to do with the aesthetics of most musicians, the only record that springs to mind as remotely Derridean wd be Scritti's Provision wherein Green seems to be digging at the aporiae in the way 80s soul sounds as well as in explicitly lyrical ways.

the problem is that "deconstruction" in that sense is nothing to do with "stripping down" in the way you might guess if you haven't read Derrida. the other problem is that the best answer to "what are Derrida's ideas?" is 'read Derrida'"

you're no fun

Scritti's a great example of what (I think) I'm edging towards NV. We are on the same page here, despite my admitted ignorance to the practices and theories behind deconstructivism in the philosophical or critical sense of the word.

wld be tempting to claim 'james brown live at the apollo' in how it completely takes apart the notion of the music they're playing as songs having any semantic content at all, plus five decades worth of black american music history as having any semantic content. but then it does want to reinscribe some kind of transcendent presence at the centre of that (ladeezundgennermunaryuhreadyfuhSTAR TIME) but i suppose you could claim james brown always stands at the edge of himself, or at least occasionally goes off mic

'the present lover' (bonus: vladislav delay has probably actually read some critical theory)

also James' transcendent presence in the context of the live show is at least partly erased by the record's status as sound object with his showmanship obscured or displaced. JB feels like a generally good answer to deconstructionist music now you mention it, problem being that once you think about something post-structurally then everything can feel like a good answer

yeah, those two are actually just the last two records i listened to

"No More 'I Love Yous'" is explicity written in the flush of 80s pop post-structuralism too iirc, tho probly more Barthes than Derrida

the only real audience noise on live at the apollo is for brown dancing in instrumental breaks, which we have no access to; all the audience noise in the breaks between songs (at the 'music') is overdubbed

v/vm's 'the death of rave' (james leyland kirby has definitely read some critical theory)

now i am just sitting here trying to think of clever 80s pop hit examples

everything with an amen break in it

actually i'm now certain that simon reynolds has made that argument with a straight face somewhere

well like i say it was definitely a "thing" in the 80s, difficult to read a Melody Maker or NME without somebody dropping a Barthes reference and that was undoubtedly feeding from/into the mindset of a certain set of musicians, probably a result of critical theory first taking off in unis at the end of the 70s/beginning of the 80s

just need to work Vanilla's "No Way No Way" in here somehow, or ponder how Artful Dodger's "Movin' Too Fast" functions as a paean to différance at the same time as it gets the dancefloor moving

aporiae between the vocal and the musical content are a v. long-standing trope tho, way way before Jacques D et al

kind of the least intersting approach to deconstructive music tho, i like yr reading of Live at the Apollo better

deconstruction is an interpretative practice so i'm hesitant to suggest that a particular album is more deconstructed than another. if anything, music seems to resist deconstruction more than other mediums since genre + sound already seem fluid + boundaryless / undermining initial hierarchies. i think there are questions of ownership tho that make sense to read deconstructively - who owns a particular sound or genre (both culturally but also in terms of essential performer/listener relationship) - is it in lipstick traces where marcus writes that a really punk concert would include a moment when an audience member takes the stage and says, "ok, now this concert is over it is my concert now" etc (or maybe frank?).

i'm not too fond of deconstructivism as an umbrella term applied to skeletal, disjointed rock music but to each its own i guess.

some stuff from the top of my head not too dissimilar to the maple/beefheartian offbeat approach described upthread:

first 2 gastr del sol records

storm and stress (ian from don cab trying his hand at more abstract, jazz-not-jazz kinda territory. the guy's guitar playing was pretty unique during this period, to say the least)

gorge trio - dead chicken fear no knife (1st record only. the later stuff sounds more like skronky improv vignettes)

natural dreamers (john & chris from deerhoof. surprisingly melodic anti-rock)

the italian band starfuckers and its offshot sinistri

joan of arc - the gap

rope - widow's first dawn

grand ulena - gateway to dignity

i guess i'm done now, will try to come up with more of this later.

http://f.cl.ly/items/3t0f0z2l0m3Y041T2h1P/Screen%20Shot%202012-09-04%20at%2010.07.40%20AM.png

I bet Derrida was a right laugh at parties.

Deconstruction, as I understand it, doesn't produce any post-rock.

kinda more interesting question to me is what music texts would be theoretically productive pieces fertile for deconstructionist reading. for me mahler (esp #9) - who fastens low brow ideas about film scores (obv this is esp true about adagietto in #5) + almost carnivalesque 3 ring circus performance sounds to his otherwise more deliberate composition (or the insertion of his heartbeat - this biological rhythm - into classical genre).

max i swear i have seen you earnestly attempt to explain deconstruction on one of these threads

haha on several of these threads, probably

most recently on the lupe fiasco thread

kinda more interesting question to me is what music texts would be theoretically productive pieces fertile for deconstructionist reading. for me mahler (esp #9) - who fastens low brow ideas about film scores (obv this is esp true about adagietto in #5) + almost carnivalesque 3 ring circus performance sounds to his otherwise more deliberate composition (or the insertion of his heartbeat - this biological rhythm - into classical genre).

― Mordy, Tuesday, September 4, 2012 2:29 PM (6 minutes ago)

lol i don't think mahler himself anticipated visconti et al

how did lupe fiasco get turned into deconstruction. oh wait was he 'deconstructing' the word 'bitch'? right.

actually, i saw kanye using the tag #thewordbitch and i thought he was trying to cross-reference scritti politti

i ain't sayin' she's a heidegger

obviously the deconstructionistiest ray charles is 'what'd i say'

has anyone done a narrative history of the word 'deconstruction' in the wider culture

i don't think it needs to spend much time in ex-polys and green gartside cuz it's more of a slate.com thing

Seinfeld, Master of Its Domain: Revisiting Television's Greatest Sitcom

Opinion: The Private Sector Built Everything - Private Sector - Fox ...
nation.foxnews.com/private.../opinion-private-sector-built-everythin...
3 Aug 2012 – One of the more amusing distractions of this campaign has been the post-modernist deconstruction of Obama's "you didn't build that" comment.

this is like a HUGE pet peeve for me, admittedly largely b/c complaining about it allows me to show off

but i do find it REALLY annoying when ppl are like "lil b is deconstructing rap music" or "deadwood is a deconstruction of the western"

fashion is a big part of this, most of the daily mail results are from catwalk shows w/ margiela et al

i get a bit pissy about people using post-modernism for post-structuralism but hey language goes where it wants

i wouldn't leap to describe bway showtunes as a fusion of tin pan alley and jazz though. tin pan alley + music hall makes more sense to me, though jazz definitely figures in.

he means JAZZ not BOP

yeah, i know, even so

would like to learn a bit more about 19th century bway stuff tbh

yes, the jazz of the 20s was integrated or at least available to the broadway shows of the 40s, and i think the swing end of things in the 30s was available to them too

i don't think it was called broadway at that point, it was called music hall, right?

I think the style of musical theater is just a fusion of opera and other theatrical music with the popular music of the day. So during the jazz age it absorbed jazz, and in the '60s we got Hair and Andrew Lloyd Weber.

i mean, this is said to be the big pop number from the first modern-style broadway musical (instrumental version):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PREholMWYUQ

damn those dudes must be old by now. what year was that modern-style broadway musical? 1930?

xpost re: musical theater

each bit has its own independent thing from opera and other theatrical music, like music hall has its own musical vocabulary, broadway has a separate one, "show tunes" have their pieces

but yeah always it absorbs the other popular music of the day ... because like all popular music that's just what it does

it's from the black crook (ahem), had its broadway premiere in 1866!

he means JAZZ not BOP

There's a distinct continuity there though. Gershwin brought a 20s jazz influence into musical theater, then bop musicians in the '40s were heavily influenced by Gershwin, so by the time Coltrane covered MFT I don't think it's fair to say that there was a discontinuity between jazz and musical theater.

ha so probably a historically accurate take by the cornet crew

god only knows

well "oh show tunes how square" at least.

you cannot reasonably be arguing that 1) show tunes aren't a little square and/or 2) that hipness has nothing to do with jazz, right? there is an inherent squareness to showtunes that gets unsquared by jazz!

I mean, the irony is kind of that - jazz in the 50s/60s is cool as fuck, everybody knows it, it's a scene to make if you're hip; I think maybe when a non-jazz tune gets bop treatment there's that element present in almost any cover version of "look at this, a tune you might not have noticed is hip really is plenty hip" - but that is irony! Not the mean ol', bad ol', irony-as-insult that people seem to have in mind here, but literary irony - ironic juxtaposition of modes. It's a thing I think!

you cannot reasonably be arguing that 1) show tunes aren't a little square and/or 2) that hipness has nothing to do with jazz, right?

we live in a post keith jarret's sweaters era of jazz

benny goodman?

i agree that having " a love supreme" is almost as hip as having a sound of music LP

you cannot reasonably be arguing that 1) show tunes aren't a little square and/or 2) that hipness has nothing to do with jazz, right? there is an inherent squareness to showtunes that gets unsquared by jazz!

...I mean, the irony is kind of that - jazz in the 50s/60s is cool as fuck, everybody knows it, it's a scene to make if you're hip; I think maybe when a non-jazz tune gets bop treatment there's that element present in almost any cover version of "look at this, a tune you might not have noticed is hip really is plenty hip" - but that is irony! Not the mean ol', bad ol', irony-as-insult that people seem to have in mind here, but literary irony - ironic juxtaposition of modes. It's a thing I think!

― we don't wanna miss a THING!!! (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Wednesday, September 5, 2012 3:16 PM (24 minutes ago)

aero completely, ridiculously otm at this point. have to chalk any argument up to challops.

first on the agenda that tuesday was greensleeves, a traditional english folksong which had become a staple in the quartet's repertoire. the cynical might attribute it's inclusion to the success of my favorite things the year before - it is after all another jazz waltz with a simple melody. more likely commercial considerations just happened to concide with coltrane's own interests - the first of a succession of jazz waltzes which he used to further explore the waltz format.

Greensleeves is included because Coltrane, in recent months has been studying folk music ... "it's one of the most beautiful folk melodies i've ever heard ... it's written in 6/8 and we do it just as written"

david wild from the reissue is the first, dom cerulli on the original is the second

I mean, the irony is kind of that - jazz in the 50s/60s is cool as fuck, everybody knows it, it's a scene to make if you're hip; I think maybe when a non-jazz tune gets bop treatment there's that element present in almost any cover version of "look at this, a tune you might not have noticed is hip really is plenty hip" - but that is irony! Not the mean ol', bad ol', irony-as-insult that people seem to have in mind here, but literary irony - ironic juxtaposition of modes. It's a thing I think!

ok sure. that's a pretty large leap from where the conversation started which was the idea of being "openly hostile or critical" of a genre and of the implication that My Favorite Things was an innovator of that attitude within jazz.

"a tune you might not have noticed is hip really is plenty hip" is a different attitude than "this tune is really not hip so isn't it funny that I would lower myself to cover it" or "this tune is really not hip so let me obliterate it beyond recognition" which are both dynamics that are arguably at play in certain rock covers mentioned itt. Or even "this tune is considered hip but it's really kind of trash so I'll cover it in a deliberately horrible way."

that also otm

xp

"my favorite things" LP is made of two gershwin compositions, one cole porter and one rodgers & hammerstein. nowhere in the original liner notes does anyone make note of any of the "square" sources, except at one point coltrane notes that lester young taught him to appreciate simplicity as a springboard to more complex expression (this idea is more vaguely pointed out than i make it sound)

and I'm not really convinced that the kind of irony you're talking about is so superior to the cynical, sarcastic amoeba irony you dismiss. basically to find MFT ironic you have to think it's sooo weird that a hip jazz cat would deign to listen to such square white music as Rodgers and Hammerstein which is kind of an adolescent and musically provincial attitude.

xp

nah i'm pretty sure he thought ella was a dunce

the late great is persuaded that there was neither ever hip nor square and certainly neither term ever had anything to do with jazz

and I'm not really convinced that the kind of irony you're talking about is so superior to the cynical, sarcastic amoeba irony you dismiss. basically to find MFT ironic you have to think it's sooo weird that a hip jazz cat would deign to listen to such square white music as Rodgers and Hammerstein which is kind of an adolescent and musically provincial attitude.

no you don't! this is your baggage on the word "irony" - you're hauling a bunch of assumptions and bizarre accusations to the table to stick to your point, which is rooted in zero. " it's sooo weird that a hip jazz cat would deign to listen to such square white music as Rodgers and Hammerstein" <--- this exists in your brain, but seems so attackable to you that you place it externally. nobody's saying it, except you.

maybe what coltrane, et al. were trying to do was posit that "hip" and "square" were meaningless signifiers...and moreover that perhaps it was hip TO BE square.

les rallizes denudes = music as event-machine!

i think he might have genuinely enjoyed "my favorite things" and "greensleeves"

greensleeves is a fuckin' jam who fronts on greensleeves???

lol upper m

i think he might have genuinely enjoyed "my favorite things" and "greensleeves"

the only people who contest this are the phantoms in yr brain tho

that's how i usually describe ILXors to my IRL friends

lol

do I know you by an old screenname I can never keep track of who people turned into

I'm singing greensleeves right now

one time in like school or something we were reading the canterbury tales and had to do some sort of performance based on diff stories and I went up in front of the class and sang greensleeves for like 5 mins because I forgot to do my hw

that strat did not work as well in math class

kids do your hw or you'll post itt

you might remember me as v4hid or m00nsh1p. otherwise our only connection is i think some superfans of yours from encinitas.

oh no shit! dude some of yr thoughts on music had a real impact on how I listen way back glad to know which person you are.

maybe what coltrane, et al. were trying to do was posit that "hip" and "square" were meaningless signifiers...and moreover that perhaps it was hip TO BE square.

^^^

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Maple

"who banded together with the intent of becoming the numismatists of rock and roll."

haha, who changed this?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1ZUYOIh8Wg

also how did this thread digress into a huge debate about coltrane and his ostensible kitschiness?

the usual way--one poster made a claim, two hundred posters registered disagreement.

i just listened to "my favorite things" yesterday with my family and was struck by how straight the reading of the song sounded

my parents who are definitely jazz squares and rodgers/hammerstein fans did not jump out of chairs and go "wtf is this madman doing to this song?!?"

When I read DL's opening post a few minutes ago I immediately thought "Big Flame!" - seems to me they were doing something close to what Dog Latin was on about in the mid-80s, in a post-punk / indie context. The reason I mention this is because they referred to themselves (half-jokingly I assume) as "cubist" - their last single was entitled "Cubist Pop Manifesto" and cubism might be a better comparison for the tendency DL was getting at than deconstruction?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KrkJ28c0fk

There's something to watch, not the most "cubist" of their stuff but whatevs.

Cheers Tim, I'll check this out.