'Deconstructionist' Music

assume those posts abt anco and the white stripes are jokes? cuz the anco album is just sensibly and traditionally sequenced, and the white stripes were just a two-piece blues rock revival outfit.

Well, you could say that about HCtI, but it still functions as a deconstruction of the rock-album in my view. You might call it 'traditional', but I haven't heard any other noise-album (and AnCo was heavily indebted to noise-music at this point, and Black Dice in particular) work this way. Most of the time, noise-albums makes me feel like symphonic paintings (Beaches & Canyons really sounds like three paintings of beaches, and two of canyons) or travels (stuff like Vision Creation Newsun).

But it's of course true what they say up-thread about deconstructivist art/interpetration

reconstructionist music

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

http://web.pitas.com/tashpile/noise1.html

^^ required reading

from wiki:

The White Stripes have cited the minimalist and deconstructionist aspects of De Stijl design as a source of inspiration for their own musical image and presentation

I'm not that serious about it. I should just stick to polls.

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.

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

A related line of enquiry here would be the notion of the rhizome as outlined by Deleuze and Guattari, who were not pure deconstructionists but whose thought shares some common ground with that of Derrida. A lot of '90s electronica (Oval, Mouse on Mars, maybe even Autechre) might be seen as rhizomatic in the way it refuses linear and binary hierarchies

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUN3RNM6iiQ

^^ at 00:40 he deconstructs an already deconstructed song

US Maple feels like the right answer but also i don't really know wtf deconstructionism even is

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXLqMB6vBic

I'm kind of thinking about bands like US Maple the trashmen 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.

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

http://www.rejectedunknown.com/art/books/RichardMeltzerTheAestheticsOfRockBook.jpg

This may be a boring response but I always thought Spoon had done this really well with "Kill The Moonlight" on a less extreme level than may be what is being sought out here.

mark sinker piece works about as well if you read every third word/paragraph/volume

I'm kind of thinking about bands like US Maple the trashmen 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.

― the late great, Tuesday, September 4, 2012 12:35 PM (5 minutes ago)

don't think playing real shitty and wrapping yourself in toilet paper = what dog latin was getting at

LOL at contendo taking on sinker

you must be this tall to ride this ride, mister

anyway enjoy your list of arrhythmic bands, i will go be pedantic somewhere else

A related line of enquiry here would be the notion of the rhizome as outlined by Deleuze and Guattari, who were not pure deconstructionists but whose thought shares some common ground with that of Derrida. A lot of '90s electronica (Oval, Mouse on Mars, maybe even Autechre) might be seen as rhizomatic in the way it refuses linear and binary hierarchies

― my father will guide me up the stairs to bed (anagram), Tuesday, September 4, 2012 12:30 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol. if you want to think about schizophrenic development or whatever baroque classical is gonna be an easier place to see the sights. but asking about "deconstructionist" music doesn't make a whole lot of sense because critical/conceptual models like this are meant to be applied, not recited in musical/genre form or whatever. this is why examples of the concept in the arts (that are cross-genre or "non-linear" or dj spooky) are always kind of bad or boring imo.. the art isn't meant to be a slave to the concept, the concept is supposed to liberate the art or the production of the art or w/e.

let the art see itself in new ways, not compel some ham-handed cross-genre exercise or dress up a 'generative' (boring) max object.

the radically de-assimilative possibilities that contenderizer envisages would more properly be found in a late post-punk record such as swell maps' 'jane in occupied europe'

swell maps situate themselves within the bloated stomach of the soi-disant 'progressive rock band', but employ the ornery durations and literary allusions of the progressive to bayonet the very stomach that they parasitize

every track emerges, blinking and unloved from the undigested animal matter coagulated within the forebowel of king crimson, the canterbury scene or late floyd -- and collapsing from the wound we find chuck berry, captain beefheart, the silver apples, brutalist echoes of the old rock amid the baroque redunancies of prog

swell maps take this raw fibre, this grist, and redeploy it in surprising fashions using the minimal instrumentation of white-heat punk, but this is not mockery: it is trans-substantiation

you're Paul Morley and I claim my Art of Noise 7"

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-uOGpdecUr8E/TllNNFCqxSI/AAAAAAAABlw/E_XvbWAM0vQ/s400/boskothedoughboy8.bmp

pictured: the soi-disant 'progressive rock band' (note distended stomach)
not pictured: the swell maps

the gnomic pictogram reveals nothing, except perhaps that you admit that your rosy-eyed claims for the deconstructive possibilities of the providence noise scene of the late 1990s were glib mendacity?

btw contendo i think a lot of people would argue that the mummies are at least as calculated in their "playing real shitty" as, say, us maple or pavement

^interesting "well-formed" genre tensions in a record are just that, interesting (or not interesting, this is so contextual and not absolutist). deconstruction is about taking one of those statements and giving it a sort of full accounting-for, showing how these statements are created, what the language process is, how the psychoanalytic/material field invests the statements and the production of them. i think it has to be extra-musical in order to work (but isn't music always extra-musical, see what i did there).

this is all off the cuff and imprecise, i'm just thinking out loud, hope it makes sense to others. some xps

showing how these statements are created, what the language process is, how the psychoanalytic/material field invests the statements and the production of them

when does music not do this

i think theres a lil bit of gnomic contenderizer in there too somewhere or am i making that up

― *rolls eyez on me* (D-40), Saturday, July 9, 2011 7:31 PM (1 year ago)

i'm gonna have to look that word up

there is more deconstruction in a single bar of surfin' bird than anything ever released on the ghoulish hit parade of DFA records, brainchild of bloated feederist charlatan james murphy

The car analogy upthread is good. Maybe I should have called this thread 'disassembled' music or something because the accurate description is that - you take a car, you take it apart, and you're left with a pile of stuff which is still made of car but no longer a car which ou can then rebuild into something completely different.

when do you know when you've subtracted a drum fill and when you've taken a song apart?

btw contendo i think a lot of people would argue that the mummies are at least as calculated in their "playing real shitty" as, say, us maple or pavement

― the late great, Tuesday, September 4, 2012 12:59 PM (2 minutes ago)

oh yeah, absolutely. i love budget rock. i don't wanna get all pedantic and arguey here, but i think that pussy galore's playing shitty read as antirock or "about rock" in its moment and would say the same of u.s. maple. mummies just wanted you to have a good time with some beer and toilet paper.

when do you know when you've subtracted a drum fill and when you've taken a song apart?

― the late great, Tuesday, September 4, 2012 1:03 PM (2 minutes ago)

want to know the jeopardy clue that occasioned this question

once you find out what gnomic means, perhaps you could gaze into the eyes of james murphy and consider whether this cretinous moonface could every yield an ounce of deconstructive intelligence

http://i.imgur.com/zpH5l.png

showing how these statements are created, what the language process is, how the psychoanalytic/material field invests the statements and the production of them

when does music not do this

― the late great, Tuesday, September 4, 2012 1:01 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

oh yeah it's definitely already 'there' but like a car that runs it's hard to know how until you open the hood. continuing the car analogy, why would anyone want a car that doesn't run.

pussy galore's playing shitty reads as antirock only to those who have never heard a royal trux record, or who like shit

the point is not what the mummies wanted to do - though mind you, these guys were friends and neighbors with negativland and the residents at a time when humorless diy hardcore had swamped the scene, even in SF - but that they accomplish everything on the "list of things deconstructivist bands do"

If we begin to discuss the rhizome as well, this thread will probably veer off-course, but actually the 'rhizome' is introduced in A Thousand Plateaus in a discussion of literature, and the chapter very much seems to imply, that modern art 'should' be rhizomatic (ie taking non-rhizomatic aspects of art and saying it leads to fascism...) Also, there is a chapter in there which I would think should be called On the Refrain in the English version or something like that (I read it in Danish), which is actually about music, so a discussion of rhizomatic music should probably start there. There's a whole lot about Boulez and other Darmstadt-stuff, a bit about jazz and minimalism, and it's really not that interesting. I remember reading it, and thinking that James Brown/Fela Kuti/Neu/On the Corner/Future Days etc seemed much more relevant.

But this is kinda off-topic.

you been reading kodwo eshun or something?

xp

except time signature, though they "problematize the beat" by knocking over the organ instead of parping to the rhythm

http://www.mille-plateaux.net/theory/download/raynolds-thewire.pdf

mark sinker piece works about as well if you read every third word/paragraph/volume

one might argue that's because he's making a consistent and well-supported point

but an expression always functions like a machine (deleuze and guattari again), even taken apart or broken down ones, but broken-down machines can easily be machines of rigidity imo. again i'm thinking of dj spooky style intellectualizing which ends up being an art world calcifying machine. vs. a band like swell maps who seem to have a lot more life in their music. this is a little bit received ideas about both, though i do really like swell maps. dj spooky i'm not all that familiar with beyond some 'writings' lol.

xp to frederik b. - thanks for that, i'm unclear on the rhizome and haven't read a thousand plateaus but that sounds otm to me.

The disappearance of the individual subject, along with its formal consequence, the increasing unavailability of the personal style, engender the well-night universal practice today of what may be called pastiche. This concept, which we owe to Thomas Mann (in Doktor Faustus), who owed it in turn to Adorno's great work on the two paths of advanced musical experimentation (Schoenberg's innovative planification and Stravinsky's irrational eclecticism), is to be sharply distinguished from the more readily received idea of parody.

dj spooky is not good imo

dj spooky is contenderizer in musical form

pussy galore's playing shitty reads as antirock only to those who have never heard a royal trux record

at one time, this described quite a few people

taking apart an object only to reconfigure it as something new is collage

http://www.exoticwireart.com/Images/composite.jpg

that's not the best example, but i'm sure everyone has see the booth at a local community art fair where the objects are made of household objects.

i think dog latin is saying that us maple is more complex than the naive art of the local art fair

i am contesting that