'Deconstructionist' Music

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

mordy how much for the set i love those guys

also which one is supposed to be fela?

but an expression always functions like a machine

no way man

that's the machine of hate, the pretty hate machine

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"

― the late great, Tuesday, September 4, 2012 1:16 PM (9 minutes ago)

the "deconstrucive" bands i'm thinking of are characterized by music that is recognizably of a specific genre or tradition, but that is in some sense alienated from that tradition, and that deliberately creates a sense of sense of alienation or frustration in its audience. US maple produce something that sounds like "rock music", but doesn't provide musical closures and satisfactions typical of the genre.

the mummies' "budget rock" aesthetic is certainly hostile towards traditional notions of musical virtue, and the sound they produce is deliberately broken, but i think of them as happy formal traditionalists, reaching back to the basically mythological "wildness" of 60s frat rock. they break rock music, but seem to do this in pursuit of a purer and more primitive essence-of-rock.

xp poorly formed joek

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

yes and no. collage implies referentiality, that the pieces retain some of their original identity. sound-collage music exists, but is somewhat different from the sort of "deconstruction" we're talking about here, where the disassembled thing isn't a particular piece or set of pieces, but rather a governing set of expectations or rules.

xxp so you need to read that sinker article, particularly the part that says "war with yr neighbors, chillin' with yr friends ... or war w/ yr friends, chillin with yr neighbors?!?"

us maple sounds pretty much like rock music to me tbh

dj spooky is contenderizer in musical form

― Einstürzende Joebarton (Nilmar Honorato da Silva), Tuesday, September 4, 2012 1:25 PM (21 minutes ago)

ty

US maple produce something that sounds like "rock music", but doesn't provide musical closures and satisfactions typical of the genre.

us maple provides the closure and satisfactions typical of us maple, the # of us maple listeners who actually feel that sense of dislocation you guys are fetishizing rather than the comfy "ah just chillin' listenin to some derek bailey" comfy on the couch w/ cup of tea feeling is i wager a small percentage, they get the closure and satisfaction they expect of US maple and they expect of that corner of rock

btw 60s frat rockers don't actually wear mummy outfits

I thought this thread would be about 2000s music such as

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guZueuki4-Q

this is the great paradox of noise music - it is very very easy to quickly become inured to that sense of dislocation and to hear any sort of noise / chaotic / deconstructed / rule-breaking music as just more music w/ its own set of rules

anyway all music in the age of reproduction spirals inward toward its core meaning without ever reaching the ideal and along the way laying bare the "punctum" of affect (thx oxtober magazine) so i dunno what you are all on about

these guys just do it in a semi-boring and quite obvious "oh yes our album cover it's a raw SCRIBBLE do u see?" kind of way

[bandname] is not your regular [genre] band. though they do take influences from [genre] and [other genre], they also frustrate expectations by utilizing [technique] and [lyrical style adjective]. [nameofalbum] is a [improperly used academic term] of [genre] ideas that transcends similar artists. would you like me to set up an interview with [leadsinger] for a profile or send u a dropbox link so that you can review the new album?

seeing US Maple live is a big part of the whole thing IMO.

yeah it's like if don caballero actually got to falling-down-drunk stage instead of just teetering at the alcohol-fueled beat-up-the-drumkit-and-wrestle-the-furniture violent drunk stage

us maple deconstructed rock by changing what it meant to rock and to be a rock band