Unpublished catalogue entry for the sound section DLux's D>Art 2005.
All of the works in this show require attention to the texture and the nature of sound itself, as well as to duration and how these sounds actually sit next to each other over time. In many ways the headphone is perfect for this attention to detail. Your ears are cocooned in your snug headphones, the rest of the world shut out… try closing your eyes. There is something very immediate in headphone listening. What is lost, however, is space for the sounds to play-out in, even if that space is the speaker box itself. It is often in space that these sounds collide and transform, music isn’t just the encoding on the disc.
What becomes clear with all of these works is the need for close listening, it is only through close listening that the intricacy of the drones and the specific nature of audio can be drawn out. Experimental musics require different efforts to the usual musical fair of pop and muzak. It is in the requirement for concentrated listening that the works in this show becomes truly transformative and generative. This close listening seems to resonate with Adorno’s demands on the listener in the 30’s and 40s, but maybe he was right as we are constantly distracted by technology. It is clear that in the face of mass networked distribution of music through the MPEG3 format it is Mac who have taken the lead in the re-territorialisation of a once tactical zone of culture and in doing so they have taken an area that was ripe for experimentation and quickly turned it into commodity and spectacle. In part this might be the reason for a turn against the computer mediated environment in experimental music as musicians return to earlier and perhaps simpler electronic technologies, shifting their practice away from the rhetoric of the computer driven entertainment industry.
In this show the call for concentrated listening requires the listener not be distracted by technology, but do we know the technology well enough that we can forget it or somehow move around it. To listen to this show, to hear it the listener must not be distracted by knobs and dials, they must ignore the desire to skip ahead. To hear these sounds one must ignore the space they are in and sit still. Once this is done the sound opens itself up for connections beyond the everyday.
All of the works in this show require attention to the texture and the nature of sound itself, as well as to duration and how these sounds actually sit next to each other over time. In many ways the headphone is perfect for this attention to detail. Your ears are cocooned in your snug headphones, the rest of the world shut out… try closing your eyes. There is something very immediate in headphone listening. What is lost, however, is space for the sounds to play-out in, even if that space is the speaker box itself. It is often in space that these sounds collide and transform, music isn’t just the encoding on the disc.
What becomes clear with all of these works is the need for close listening, it is only through close listening that the intricacy of the drones and the specific nature of audio can be drawn out. Experimental musics require different efforts to the usual musical fair of pop and muzak. It is in the requirement for concentrated listening that the works in this show becomes truly transformative and generative. This close listening seems to resonate with Adorno’s demands on the listener in the 30’s and 40s, but maybe he was right as we are constantly distracted by technology. It is clear that in the face of mass networked distribution of music through the MPEG3 format it is Mac who have taken the lead in the re-territorialisation of a once tactical zone of culture and in doing so they have taken an area that was ripe for experimentation and quickly turned it into commodity and spectacle. In part this might be the reason for a turn against the computer mediated environment in experimental music as musicians return to earlier and perhaps simpler electronic technologies, shifting their practice away from the rhetoric of the computer driven entertainment industry.
In this show the call for concentrated listening requires the listener not be distracted by technology, but do we know the technology well enough that we can forget it or somehow move around it. To listen to this show, to hear it the listener must not be distracted by knobs and dials, they must ignore the desire to skip ahead. To hear these sounds one must ignore the space they are in and sit still. Once this is done the sound opens itself up for connections beyond the everyday.
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