theo parrish s/d

i know, tim: we'll let "the community" decide

barring that, we'll ask the narrator from "losing my edge".

"take him out, and with luck he'd get it. Because there was something to get there, which was different from other stuff. "

Is the "something to get there" something that exists independently of the listeners who are there doing the getting?

I mean, a "genre" as such does not really exist as a concrete thing. It's a mental exercise whereby we group disparate records together under the one heading. The fact that many of us basically agree about what a genre is (at least, we know it when we hear it) and so have specialist record stores, DJs, club nights etc. - all that doesn't change the fact that the notion of genre exists in our heads. We choose to see commonality between two trance records and call them trance. We could chop up the music in different ways if we want to (e.g. "I'm really into 135 bpm music").

So the "something to get there" is as much the shared understanding of other people on the dancefloor as it is the music. You need both sides of it. This is the kernel of truth in your Sumatra example: of course someone participating in the dance feels more of the dance than someone merely hearing about it. But nothing in and of the music itself determines that that dance is the appropriate means by which the music ought to be experienced. What does that is the shared values of the group of people who use the music in that way.

So when you say "if you haven't been to Sumatra and witnessed a dance you won't "get" Sumatran music", what you mean to say is "if you haven't been to Sumatra and witnessed a dance you won't "get" the way in which Sumatran music is used by Sumatrans".

That's still a very important statement that's worth thinking about, but it's a different statement entirely.

I think perhaps good dog you're confusing subjectivity with shallowness or obstinate ignorance.

Like, if a school kid says "I don't care about what other people say Wuthering Heights is about, in a subjective world my interpretation is the only one that matters to me" - well that's a stupid way to approach learning about literature. I saw a kid make this exact complaint on TV as part of a special on how literature teachers were "indoctrinating" kids by pointing out gender or class-politics issues in texts.

The mistake she makes is not to assume that her experience of the text is valid (it is), but that her opinion is static, that nothing ever could change her mind, that she already has all the information that might influence her understanding of the book.

But that doesn't make her teacher right if they claim that Wuthering Heights is *really* about Heathcliff as the a symbol of the working class. The "meaning" of the book is a matter of contention among many literary scholars all of whom are very smart and have read a lot.

So, similarly, the guy with the five jazz CDs who obstinately claims that they're the best 5 jazz albums in the world is a bit of a dick, and the guy with 20,000 has every right to think so.

But that doesn't mean that, if the guy with 20,000 jazz CDs thinks that one of the other guy's 5 albums is shit, he is right and the other guy is wrong.

Because there's probably another guy with 20,000 Jazz CDs who disagrees with his fellow collector and thinks it's a great album.

But nothing in and of the music itself determines that that dance is the appropriate means by which the music ought to be experienced. What does that is the shared values of the group of people who use the music in that way.

What hath technology wrought? It is those shared values which gives the music it’s meaning in the first place. Roy Montgomery takes the Flying Nun sound and its genre values and does X, Y and Z with it, then releases records which people find “lonely” and therefore impute various associations (the lone genius, etc) from that. That’s fine, people can take things however they want, but it’s perfectly legit for a Pin Group fan from Christchurch to turn around and say “You’ve got it wrong. I was there. Roy is a beermonster, and that record was just him mucking about. Let me explain” etc.

So to answer the question of who you are to believe, who is right and who is wrong: you take those two POVs, and then you listen to the record again, and you see what you can hear differently. You can make up your own mind of course, and most of us do that directly from the music, using our understanding of its shared values it is trying to express (genre, etc), using the music we’ve heard before and the pleasure zones we’ve developed in our brains through that. But then if you were to make a list of things that came after that – and after all this discussion is about which view should prevail through the power of words and about how to convince people to your POV: I say that objective information trumps subjective fantasy every time.

after all this discussion is about which view should prevail through the power of words

quite rong

But that doesn't make her teacher right...

If she has better info or a better grasp of the story, etc, does it make her more right than the school kid? Does relativism have a sliding scale of correctness or are there as many answers as there are people?

let's just give all kids 100% on their English exams

don't start.

can you imagine though, if everyone got 100% on their english exams, how horrible the world would be.

i actually gave all of my kids 100% on their final exam last year.

of course, the point of the test wasn't what the students *couldn't* do, but rather what they *could* do. so i gave them a task to do, and if they could complete the task they'd get a 100%. i wasn't so interested in picking out the gaps in their knowledge. as an expert, i could pick out so many. but that didn't transmit to me a whole lot of useful information, nor to them.

maybe it is because i actually am a professional teacher that i am so forgiving of people for not "getting" detroit techno. after all, if i held "not getting it" against people, i'd never be able to do my job effectively. also it's important that i realize the difference between "getting it" and "doing things exactly the same way i do".

i will admit that post ("let's just give all kids 100% on their English exams") is the first one on this thread that really got me heated. it's that fatal work/fun intersection.

"If she has better info or a better grasp of the story, etc, does it make her more right than the school kid? Does relativism have a sliding scale of correctness or are there as many answers as there are people?"

I dunno, IS Wuthering Heights about class struggle? I tend to think that's a big stretch, but I enjoyed discussing the idea in my final year of school.

If the student told me that her interpretation of Wuthering Heights was that its predominant theme was of how the extremes of passion (love/hate) can become indistinguishable from one another, I would say she was closer to understanding the themes of the book than her teacher who thinks it's about class struggle. (this is not necessarily my exact view of wuthering heights btw, I studied it too long ago to remember precisely what I thought about it)

On the other hand, if another student took the teacher's interpretation and wrote an essay supporting her own view, I might find it much more nuanced and persuasive than the first student's essay, even though I might agree with more of the basic tenets of that first essay. The second student may have shown a greater awareness of the context in which the book was written. She might have conducted a closer reading of the text, with more textual examples to support her argument than the student used. She might simply write more coherently, poetically and persuasively. She might structure her essay more effectively.

So, what mark should i give each of them? I would be inclined to give the higher mark to the person who wrote the second essay, even though based on my own reading of the book I think they have less of a grasp of what 'Wuthering Heights' is 'about'.

Interpretation isn't a single sliding scale from right to wrong. I hate it when people throw in the word "relativism" here and then say something like "let's just give all the kids 100% on their English exams", as if there was no choice available except that between a single right answer and the absence of any judgment at all about rightness/wrongness.

As in my answer above, sometimes someone can be "right" and STILL not deserve 100%.

Likewise, who understands Roy Montgomery music better? The fan who has listened to it regularly for ten years and has written moving articles on its evocation of loneliness? Or the friend who knows Montgomery is a beermonster and "was there" but doesn't care about the records? Why does what Montgomery do or not do at the pub determine what his music is about???

"sometimes language gets claustrophobic."

At the risk of annoying tricky even further, I want to return to this point, as I think it's pretty much the central issue here, good dog's recent crusade on behalf of objectivity not withstanding.

If there's a meaningful debate here, it's not subjectivity vs objectivity but discursiveness vs non-discursiveness. The question being: is the experience of music something that is discursive or extra-discursive?

I think it's neither completely. Certainly the experience of music is sensual but never solely so, it's always mediated through conceptuality, which is to say discursivity. There is no "immediate" experience of music. This was my point re tricky hearing music as "empty" - so many such notions are actually borrowed from metaphors, which interpose themselves between the music and yr ears at the moment of reception. Even simply recognizing a kickdrum and its purpose in a house track entails an awareness of the "language" in which the track speaks.

I don't really believe that music contains ineffable (that is, indescribable) qualities or properties. I do believe that the relationship between its (describable) qualities or properties and the experience of those qualities/properties by the listener can approach ineffability in a limited sense - i.e. it is impossible for me to write an account of my experience of a piece of music that fully accounts for my reaction to it in such a way that you can entirely share in that. Although I don't think it's a pointless task either: it's just that there is an infinitely receding horizon of identity between my experience and my discursive account of my experience.

I'm not sure that I ever experience language as "claustrophobic" in the way that tricky means, if I understand him correctly.

http://www.indierockfan.net/images/31242f.jpg

heh. i didn't think we were really finished. it's just that in some sense the position i am supporting via playing the devil's advocate has become a bit of a caricature though i do support a part of it (i.e., that which constitutes the ineffable/mysterious, but which is obviously a product of experience as vahid so eloquently demonstrated. i think it is dangerous to explain away intuition, but here we are discussing it and it's generally a positive thing so there you go. it is hard to do effectively without parable i think. maybe we can add "extra-linguistic" to extra-discursive.) so obviously i think this, "Although I don't think it's a pointless task either: it's just that there is an infinitely receding horizon of identity between my experience and my discursive account of my experience." is otm.

i think i should have said "sometimes language creates claustrophobia" because it involves choices that ultimately flatten out complexity. and also the bit about respecting criticism could have been better phrased as "i find it useful" and that's useful less so as a tool for say, discovering new music (that's just too easy now) and more so as learning how someone else relates to music and culture.

"The difficulty only begins then when an agent of the community seeks to assert to people outside the community that the community's myth also governs them.

indeed, i don't think it's come up yet, but there is a lot of "if you have to ask ..." going on in that stance and that is potentially the most destructive thing about it although it is there because of much bigger reasons than music. there's a strict door policy at this club.

The second student may have shown a greater awareness of the context in which the book was written. She might have conducted a closer reading of the text, with more textual examples to support her argument than the student used.

Exactly. So whether a reader find something persuasive or not depends on factors such as the critic's awareness of the context the art was made in, their grasp of the idiom it is working in, their awareness of the purpose of the art and how it is intended to be consumed. These are objective matters where there can be a single right answer, or at least where one answer can be more right than another.

Just to note: I'm not defending the idea that the only people who can talk about TP convincingly are those "in the community"; I'm just that evidence for your argument most definitely comes in a sliding scale, and "imaginary worlds" and such like are right near the bottom

it still doesn't sound right to me. if adventurous musicians (sun ra, joe meek, klaus schulze, kraftwerk, derrick may, chain reaction etc etc) can make music based on "imaginary worlds", why can't a fan base their listenership on the same?

basic channel dudes weren't reacting to a dancefloor that already existed, or working in a tradition that had already been established. same for derrick may and kevin saunderson and gang.

and as a somewhat related tangent: their music wasn't great because it carried with it the essential elements of sharevari, or george clinton, or kraftwerk or whatever. the greatness is in the stuff it got wrong, the stuff that didn't fit with the existing elements of other musics. that was the stuff that made it techno. just like with jungle or disco or garage rock or whatever, the parts that didn't fit, that didn't turn out just like the tradition the artists were working in, were the parts that made the music great, that made it a template for future traditions.

basic channel dudes weren't reacting to a dancefloor that already existed, or working in a tradition that had already been established. same for derrick may and kevin saunderson and gang.

lol really?

so these dues invented dj culture from scratch in 1992?

they paid their dudes

So that is how the palais schaumburg record was made while Moritz was in the Vacuum!

I don't remember if Theo's talk at Red Bull Music Academy has been mentioned, but it is worth watching.

hmm, i guess i didn't make it clear enough for you, mike.

one line of argument is that all that "our musicians" are doing is furthering the line of "our tradition". and musicians who are making bad music, that we don't like, are too far removed from "our tradition", and so they don't get it, they screw it up because they haven't been exposed enough to "our tradition" or "our community" or whatever.

the problem with this argument is that it doesn't explain how basic channel, who were djs, and involved in vinyl culture, and making what they hoped was a worthy part of the lineage of chicago house, detroit techno, dub reggae, etc, managed to make something that sounds completely different from all three of those things. you can't just pick up a basic channel record (even "lyot") and say "this is just an incremental step forward from ...", the way dazz and rick james might be an incremental step forward from earth, wind and fire or kool and the gang.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/28731037@N02/

rate these people on a scale of 'radical subjective' to 'geircock'

goddamn djs look dorky

lol local h photo in there

Basic Channel was an incremental step forward.

Their claim to fame was that they took the dx100 and the 909 from detroit and chicago and loaded Todd Terry's Sp1200 with minimal synth and dub influences instead of NYC hip-hop/electro.

If you knew how the records were made you would realize that the leap you think they took wasn't that great.

And for the record they didn't really use an SP1200, it was a Studio 440.

And that isn't to say that they didn't make great records, but it isn't like they pulled their sound out of thin air. They built it solidly on the technical advances of black dance music in the 80's. The chord stab, the 909 shuffle, the dx bass, the breakdown of the song via acid...

why don't you follow that up by specifying how "you're only reading ILM dance threads for the LOLs", then we'll have had the 30-minute course in mike taylor posting strategies 101

if adventurous musicians (sun ra, joe meek, klaus schulze, kraftwerk, derrick may, chain reaction etc etc) can make music based on "imaginary worlds", why can't a fan base their listenership on the same?

They can. It's just that when it comes to convincing other people of the worthiness of the music, it's much harder if all the evidence that can be mustered is strictly personal, or worse still, a bunch of wild guesses. I guess that's really my bone to pick here.

i'm not so much interested in convincing other people of the worthiness of the music i identify with, much more being convinced about the worthiness of music i *don't* get

hence the famous "vahid 180": "please, prove me wrong about this music i don't like ..."

mike taylor posting strategies 101

1) obtuse rephrasal "oh, so you're saying basic channel invented the vinyl record?!?"

2) arcane technobabble ... too specific to rebut without serious research, sets up aura of expertise. sorry, i don't think basic channel sounds like todd terry, but since i didn't cite the fact that basic channel used a studio 440 where basic channel used a sp1200, does my opinion even count.

3) "oh, i'm only here for the LOLs"

4) pithy, condescending advice: "you should really get out more"

fair enough.

What Todd Terry did for dance music(and he wasn't the only one but his style is the hallmark for this) was to use a sampling drum machine to grab loops(1-2b bar drum phrases) and hits(one time shots "can you feel it") from so many places that he changed electronic dance music from being about programmed beats(the 808 programmed like a drummer) and synths(used to simulate traditional bass, keys, leads...) to being about a collage of sequenced audio. This is a fundamental difference from the way the the first waved of Detroit Techno and Chicago house worked.

Because he was working with sequenced audio he was much less likely to create chord progressions and key changes. Harmonically he mainly used short loops or more importantly, chord stabs to create harmonic movement. Because he has so many percussion hits and drum loops going, he didn't need to worry about writing real songs. Sampling was new enough at that point in time that you could still sell records strictly on the novelty of the technology. He released a lot of dogs, but he also dropped several gems.

The reason this is important is because the way you make a basic channel record is to take a sampling drum machine(preferably an older lo-fi one like a 440) and samples several examples of a synth playing a minor 7th chord with a quick attack and a short release.

From there you take the multi outs of the sampler and run them into a mixing board with a 909 and a Dx100 playing the bass part. What you do from there is record the basic tracks through your mixer to the in's of your multi track recorder. Once you have actually recorded the tracks you then run a snake from the outs of the recorder back into into the mixer and you process, eq, and mix from the board to a stereo recorder.

One of the real big tricks is to run the outs from the processors back into the channels of the board rather than you the aux returns. This allows you to adjust the eq and volume of the wet signal but more importantly, it allows you to route that wet signal into the other aux sends of your board.

I can go into the programming tricks for the DX100 and the 909 if you like.

The reason Todd Terry is important is because he was one of the main guys who completely destroyed the idea of songcraft in dance music. He wasn't the only one, but his work was a radical shift. What acid started, he finished.

This relates to Basic Channel because their gimmick was to take the 909 shuffle and the dx100 bass line and apply Todd Terry's sampling aesthetic to to it. You just don't realize it belongs to Todd Terry because they hid it underneath a shit ton of processing as I described above.

Or to make it even more simple, they don't sound alike. They do however share an extremely similar working process. When you understand how the process works behind the curtains you realize how incremental it all is.

I am not saying that to be condescending, I am just explaining why I have the opinion I have.

so whose tradition was todd terry respecting

I am not interested in arguing about who is real and who is fake or how one experience is more meaning for or important. All I know is that Detroit DJ's were the first to play at the UFO club and later the Tresor and they set the stage for the Berlin techno scene in the early 90's. Something was communicated between Detroit and Berlin.

Just like Detroit and Chicago had their antecedents, so did Basic Channel.

so whose tradition was todd terry respecting

That is easy, you should know for yourself. He was using a sampler like a NYC hip-hop DJ would cut and scratch between records.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=JspJMW46n5k

haha i know about tt, ive played this in sets of rap and r&b before, im just trynna figure out how he navigates a world of conflicting traditions without pissing off the pipecock style gatekeepers

referring to 'just wanna dance' not 'weekend'

Do you think Todd Terry was worried about Pipecock when he made those records?

of course not, which is as it should be

i suppose this is just as retro as basic channel, but i think one of the best things to do with analog equipment is to string pieces of it together "incorrectly" so you have one synth acting as a filter for a drum machine or another synth. i suppose those inputs wouldn't be there if they weren't intended for use, but if you chain enough of them together you can get the richest sound palette for pads or filter sweeps or truly unique drum sounds. hook up a sampler and you are set.

Hiphop and house are 2 slight variations on the same concept. I dont see how you could consider them "conflicting" in any way.

Actually i'm really liking mike's current discussion. A much more careful and nuanced discussion of the transmission of ideas, "tradition" etc.

"Hiphop and house are 2 slight variations on the same concept."

And what, pray tell, is that concept, pipecock?

I'd be surprised to know that there was even a single concept for house or hip hop, let alone shared between them.

"Exactly. So whether a reader find something persuasive or not depends on factors such as the critic's awareness of the context the art was made in, their grasp of the idiom it is working in, their awareness of the purpose of the art and how it is intended to be consumed. These are objective matters where there can be a single right answer, or at least where one answer can be more right than another."

But they're not objective, good dog, because the argument is always the critic's interpretation of context, interpretation of idiom, interpretation of intention. Otherwise we'd find that learned critics would have hegemonic consensus regarding the relative value of different cultural products, whereas in fact (as per notions of humour), what constitutes "good" art gets more and more contested the more someone knows about art.

This is an epistemological quandary rather than an ontological one: the question isn't whether there really is a single "context" or "purpose" to art, but whether we can ever actually explain what that is without filtering it through our own experience, our own values, our own preconceptions etc. etc.

And there are so many factors that feed into a sense of the persuasiveness of someone's argument that it's very difficult to arrive at consensus - this is why we have politics. In politics, as in my example of the students, the more persuasive argument might be "objectively" wrong, because techniques of persuasion are precisely techniques of persuasion - they are not objective indicators of fact.

The conclusion that your argument leads toward is the fact that there is a generally accepted consensus regarding what constitutes a persuasive argument, rather than that there is a means by which objective "facts" about music can be established. I think it's very dangerous to conflate persuasion with fact - the danger of doing so should be readily apparent in the field of politics in particular. This is why we can describe something as "good politics" without actually supporting it or believing it. Likewise when people talk about legal judgments they might say that a particular judge's decision is "bad law" even though they support the outcome, or vice versa.

When my pro-class struggle student gets a good mark, it's not because she's "right" but because she has engaged in the essay writing equivalent of "good politics".

Tim, there are facts and there are politics about the facts, and what you wrote (which is very interesting) has very little room for the former. I once read a letter to the newspaper arguing that the reason Japanese drivers had so many accidents on NZ roads was because they weren't used to driving on the left. Very persuasive, a good argument against the racist anti-Asian driver sentiment floating around at that time. It could even have changed a few politicians' minds. Just one problem: they drive on the left in Japan as well.

The same applies to records. Either Basic Channel made music in an isolated bubble, or they took various strains of other music and synthesized them, or there was some complicated mixture of the two things going on. Phil Spector either wrote 'To Know Him is To Love Him' about his dead dad or he didn't. My point is simply that these things actually happened - there is only interpretation going on because the critic lacks crucial information; not because context, idiom, intention and a host of other factors are indefinables from the get go. My mum thinks 'To Know Him is To Love Him' is a sweet love song. I dunno whether to spoil her fun by telling her the facts. Or to put it another way: yes, there is Rashomon-style interpretation, especially in a field as nebulous as music, but if Kurosawa had filmed the incident properly, we'd know who was the killer

"They can. It's just that when it comes to convincing other people of the worthiness of the music, it's much harder if all the evidence that can be mustered is strictly personal, or worse still, a bunch of wild guesses. I guess that's really my bone to pick here."

I dunno, I mean I think often factual/biographical information is really useful in making a particular point but I think often a "shared fantasy" is as useful a way to "get" music.

Like, Vahid's story has made me want to check out Sun Ra much more than anything I've ever read about Sun Ra!

When we discuss music in a forum like this we're effectively sharing strategies of reception: you try to explain your relationship to the music which you think others might identify with (and, as per vahid, I love reading other people's strategies even if I don't click with the music they're referring to).

X-Post Good Dog, surely what you're saying though is limited to biographical facts-about-music rather than a qualititative determination of the music itself though. Yr Basic Channel ultimatum doesn't help us to say whether a review that celebrates the music's evocation of isolation or a review that celebrates its sonic continuation of the techno tradition are more "right".

Alternatively, does the fact that "To Know Him Is To Love Him" was written about Spector's dead dad mean that it is not a love song, esp. when so many singers have performed it as if it is one?

Yes, there are facts, but a determination of meaning and value always involves an implicit hierarchy of facts. For example, you might argue that the "fact" of Spector's intention is more important than the "fact" of the intention of the singers of the song. But what are you basing this on?

Tricky said:

"i think it is dangerous to explain away intuition, but here we are discussing it and it's generally a positive thing so there you go. it is hard to do effectively without parable i think."

Yeah I think the key part of this is "explain away". The danger you're pointing to in the discursive position is the belief that because something can be put into words it can therefore be exhausted by words. The fact that consciousness is like a language doesn't mean that consciousness is only language.

Having said that, I also think that what we refer to when we talk about "intuition" - especially the experience of music - is always already linguistic and discursive. This by dint of the fact that the music we listen to does follow certain rules (e.g "what constitutes a house track"), and we're engaging with those rules.

"i think i should have said "sometimes language creates claustrophobia" because it involves choices that ultimately flatten out complexity."

I'm reading this as meaning two alternative things (both correct):

1) That by trying to explain how the music works we're tying the experience of it down in concepts, concepts which do act to reduce the complexity of our experience because they subsume difference in sameness (in a prosaic sense: no kickdrum acts in precisely the same way in any two different tracks, yet when we talk about the kickdrum this difference or particularity is suppressed in the name of their shared commonality).

This is the sort of thing i mean by the vanishing horizon of identity between our experience and our articulation of that experience. Conversely (as per my point above), even "intuitively" we recognise the commonality between kickdrums because our ears apply a language that looks for commonality amongst pure particularity. We are already abstracting the experience of music before we try to find words to explain it.

2) That there is an experience of "disenchantment" at work when we do convert the experience of music into (pure) language. What felt like an evocation of "soul" becomes mere technique, what felt mystical becomes "merely" material. This creates a "flattening out" because everything becomes "merely" immanent, a function of good music qua music rather than good music as expression of something else, something higher, nobler etc.

Again I think this is real, but the sense of disenchantment is caused as much by an underlying contempt for the material as it is the by the disappearance of spiritual - that is, if we didn't identify value solely or primarily with the spiritual (or "soul", or "genius", or "self-expression") then we wouldn't crash so hard when these spectral presences turn out to be chimeric stand-ins for material things.

What we need in music criticism (esp. dance music criticism) is a more animist attitude to the "stuff" of music - a recognition that what we think of as spiritual is bound up in material things, that the two are in fact practically and even conceptually inseparable. E.g. a recognition that a good kickdrum can itself be "spiritually"* moving in and of itself, rather than because it reflects some "truth" about the music's creator etc.

*except, of course, that this sense of being moved is not even formally divided into the physical and spiritual, the two are one in the same.

Like the guy who dissed trance back a few posts ago: I could give him my perspective, play him X, Y and Z, ideally transport back in time to 2000 and take him out, and with luck he'd get it.

if you're talking to me, well i actually quite like a fair amount of trance, but this whole idea of there being "proper" trance vs... stuff that you don't like but others do (and is therefore inferior)???

i like tiesto and sascha and shit dude