Premier Rock Forum

I copied this to post it elsewhere, I'll leave it here as well just to see if anything comes out of it:

"While it is interesting to me the way that early experiments in the field of 'serious' music, notably Musique Concrete and Electronic Music, rapidly found their way into low cultural discourses (by way of The Who, Early Pink Floyd, Krautrock and so on), it probably wasn't until the rise of so-called Industrial music that 'pure noise' acquired an iconic meaning as a kind of musically neutral sonic statement of attitude (Who, Floyd, Faust were anything but musically neutral). This came along with the rejection of skill and musical literacy that characterised a faction of the Punk/New Wave that represented the post Who/Floyd/Faust generation. The main difference between the generations is aesthetic. An between identification with people or machines. It is, after all, easy to make 'sounds' - especially using new technology (samplers, computers) even if you have no musical training. I have no problem with that; it is liberating, it may help new musical forms to evolve, stripped of prejudice and habit. But that makes the question of quality more and not less critical. Ignorance may always be a handicap, but it is not automatically a virtue. Anyone can work with sound today, like the sound of what they hear and make a CD from it. The question for me is still, why? Why make a record? Why this kind of sound and not that kind of sound? Who and what is it for? Because I run a record label, I get a lot of CD's and cassettes sent to me. And more and more of them are drone-based, loop based and 'noise'-based. To my ears 90% of them sound boringly the same (surely America can only be discovered once). Boringly, because I can discern no organising structure, no content, no reason why they need to exist. I don't understand them (though obviously thousands do). For me there is sound that has meaning; that has some aesthetic value (and I would not therefore call it noise, Docksader, AMM, ZGA, Biota are good examples - this is rather music made with creatively stretched resources). Then there is sound that is irritating and formless (so that, to me, it continues to be no more than noise - unwanted sound). To my taste there is way too much of the second category and way too little of the first. After all, if you are going to make a new music with new sounds, that is a difficult and not an easy task. It requires a lot of problems to be solved and questions to be answered. It requires a kind of necessity: a reason to exist rather than not to exist. It is harder, not easier than most other musics because rules do not yet exist and have persuasively to be proposed. And. if in such music I don't sense innovation, a musical thread, a well-told story, critical appreciation, editing, intelligent decision making, a sense of colour, balance, structure, drama, development, tension, necessity - then I hear only noise. On the other hand, I have a particular admiration for works in which I do perceive those qualities. "

http://www.ccutler.com/interviews/interview.colli.shtml

From one of many fine interviews on his website:

http://www.ccutler.com/

one of the most talented musician I've seen . he is not only a great drummer ( henry cow , science group ...) . he is a great electro acoustic musician ! his drum kit is electrified . in fact it's not just a electrified drums ! it's a new intrument for a new music ! don't miss him if he do a gig near your area !!

Yeah, it's getting more overdone now but the only way I'm going to be in a band before I get out of high school would be that second category of "noise." At least it's not another Metallica cover band or emo band. That's really all we have here on Long Island.

chris cutler wrote:The question for me is still, why? Why make a record? Why this kind of sound and not that kind of sound? Who and what is it for?

This is such a good question. This one is huge for me. Every single musician should have this taped to their practice space.

Dylan wrote:

chris cutler wrote:The question for me is still, why? Why make a record? Why this kind of sound and not that kind of sound? Who and what is it for?

This is such a good question. This one is huge for me. Every single musician should have this taped to their practice space.

So he can question every motivation and be paralyzed by doubt and fear, right?

best,

I think this person is overanalyzing things. I enjoy making experimental music, and I enjoy listening to experimental music. Like all genres, there is some good, some bad.

No, every musician should have "Don't forget about your girlfriend" hung up in their practice space.

Chris

steve wrote:

Dylan wrote:

chris cutler wrote:The question for me is still, why? Why make a record? Why this kind of sound and not that kind of sound? Who and what is it for?

This is such a good question. This one is huge for me. Every single musician should have this taped to their practice space.

So he can question every motivation and be paralyzed by doubt and fear, right?

Well, it didn't stop Cutler from making a massive amount of music and playing on dozens of records (quality ones, IMO), besides running an excellent label, etc. It just depends on how each person functions, I think. Some can afford to be that rational, some have to go almost all by instinct, and there's all levels in between.

Here are a couple more quotes, relatively relevant to the direction this took here. This one is for the patient types:

"A sampler is just a tape recorder, a clever, fast tape recorder. What the tape recorder did for music, exactly as you say, was to make any sound that you can hear a sound that it is possible to reproduce. Therefore, any sound that you can hear is now proper matter from which music can be made. It seems to me then that the problem you have raised is whether the category of music can survive the infinite expansion of sound into its domain? If we look back to the 16th or 17th centuries, music was determined by the structural organisation of instrumental and vocal sounds. And the range of sounds that was admitted to be musical was very narrow and consisted pretty much exclusively of notes. Therefore, structure took the form primarily of harmonic development and melodic transformation. Today you can have a car crash and a thunderstorm in your music, which are certainly not admissible under the old rules. To accommodate them, nothing less than new concepts of music and musical organisation are called for.

John Cage made an important contribution to this problematic by recognising and theorising the new status of sound in its relation to the listening public and their responsibility toward producing rather than merely consuming what they heard. Cage's method was to develop systems that would prevent him and his interpreting musicians from making conscious decisions about content and structure and by insisting that "all sound is music." Since he - as the composer - imposes no deliberate, considered order on the material, it now has to be for the listener to find the order in the sound she hears. Thus, music becomes a dynamic rather than a passive activity because the listener has to do a great deal of structural work: in fact, to hear-as music. However, I don't think that even this radical position threatens music as a category, since I consider the Cage of the aleatoric period to be a teacher rather than a composer. I say this in all humility because I respect him a great deal. Nevertheless, in his later years, he was not composing music in any sense that I would understand or employ the term, since for me, music must be an essentially communicative activity. To the extent that this true, one can consider music as a species of language, meaning that both parties have to work on any effective conversation. Whoever is producing and presenting the music has to be making a deliberate effort to produce something that those who are listening can take something coherent from. But, if I begin speaking to you now in an invented or aleatoric language, that would be the end of any communication between us, so I don't think we could call such speech language. If I apply the same argument to music - if I start to make random noises - then it makes no sense to me to call what I am doing music anymore. It may be interesting, it may be productive or evocative or surprising, but it's not music: there is no communication intended between the participants in any recognised tongue. I am not stating a rule here I am defining my meaning of word. For me, music has to be the deliberate and conscious organisation of material to produce some kind of mutual affect in the human environment in which it's produced. "

And this one, which I find says a lot in much less space:

"The 'deal' that I make with the public, my promise to them, is that nothing is meaningless, nothing is just there 'because'".

Bernardo, quoting Chris Cutler wrote:"The 'deal' that I make with the public, my promise to them, is that nothing is meaningless, nothing is just there 'because'".

This should be on every musician's practice space wall.

Seriously,

Steve, when you wrote:So he can question every motivation and be paralyzed by doubt and fear, right?

you were trying to get me, right? I mean, when you hear "the real deal", you know they've made the same or similar bargain with their audience. Conversely, when you hear something patently false, you know that band has brokered a deal with only themselves. If we were both to speak from personal experience, I think we might come to the same conclusions about our respective musical endeavors that Mr. Cutler has reached. All of your groups (at least the ones we know about) have made that same deal with the audience, while simultaneously staying true to your own, shall we say, "vision". You respect the fans enough to ask them to come along with you, and they respect you enough to make the journey. Or, as in the case of the jarheads at Lounge Ax who just wanted you to "rock out", they don't have the proper papers and are stopped at the border. Or something. I've analogied myself into a corner.