Random Record Review I: Killing Joke--Fire Dances

      In my effort to come up with some approach to keep myself writing, I thought that I might take up a bit of record reviewing.  Rather than looking at new records, however, I'm going to write reviews of records randomly chosen from my collection.  I'm not sure that it's going to translate into a lot of folks reading, but it seems like a good way of working on my writing skills as well as listening to records that might have been left moldering on the record shelves.  Additionally, it will renew my commitment to writing about music, which has dropped off a bit, lately.  My tentative plan is to turn this into a weekly exercise.  The first choice is the 1983 Killing Joke album, Fire Dances, and album that I am fairly certain was purchased from Cheapo Records in Minneapolis, although I probably couldn't tell you which of the stores in the chain it was purchased from.  I'm reviewing the LP version of the record, rather than the reissue with bonus tracks.  In any case, here goes....

      Truth be told, my engagement with Killing Joke as a band has been fairly limited.  I own this lp, an earlier album, and the cd reissue of the 1985 lp, Night Time.  Like a lot of other folks, I first heard Killing Joke on MTV's 120 Minutes, through the video for "Eighties", which is on Night Time, and is, fairly predictably, my favorite lp from the band.  My general impression is that this aesthetic choice identifies me as a fairly casual fan of the group, rather than someone in the inner circle of their 'fandom.'  From the little research that I have done on the band.  Fire Dances was released after a brief hiatus of the band, caused by singer Jaz Coleman and bassist Youth's escape to Iceland in order to "survive the apocalypse." (The election of Thatcher and the Falklands War seem about as reasonable as it gets for signs of the apoapocalypse, I guess.  The album also features a minor line-up change, as Youth was replaced by Paul Raven on bass.  In any case, let's move on to the music.

     To begin, the record fits fairly comfortably within post-punk generic conventions, which are admittedly fairly broad.  With the exception of the dance oriented, "Dominator", the songs are built on a fairly conventional vocals, guitar, bass, drum set up.  With the guitar and bass taking the same sort of melodic and distorted sound of bands such as Joy Division and early Siouxsie and the Bansheees. (Early Echo and the Bunnymen might even be a better reference than Joy Division.) It moves away from some of the denser, more metallic sounds that linked the earlier records of the band with the efforts of Amoebix amongst other acts, to a lighter and more open sound.  The drums break out of that tradition, though.  They're up in the mix, and are the most obvious reference to the sort of proto-industrial sound of the band, pushing towards the mixture of percussion and repetition that would dominate that particular form of dance music.   It also contributes to the communal feeling contained in the lyrics, which becomes explicit in the song "Let's All Go (To The Fire Dances" and is expressed through the chanted lyrics, "Move in on them" contained in the synth driven track, "Dominator."  (A track that seems to stand between DAF and the later work in Nitzer Ebb)  It's a communalism that is remains subcultural in nature, calling for gatherings of song, dance, and sex, rather than any sort of explicit political change. (They also feel a little bland, and Jaz Coleman's normally powerful and distinct vocals lose a little of both those qualities with the communalist effort.)

     Overall, it's a pretty decent record, and the songs do a pretty good job of holding your attention.  The lyrics aren't spectacular, but there's nothing particularly embarrassing in them.  Bass and Guitar provide fairly good texture and melody throughout the tracks, but I'm not a big fan of the drums at times, which fall into the kind of stiff rhythmic qualities that often define the electronic industrial dance music that was later influenced by this sort of sound.  It's unfortunate that the band didn't draw more explicitly on some of the dub influences that you could find in their earlier music.  The tracks that worked the best were the ones that stayed in the more conventional post-punk/rock that would define the band's next album, Night Time.  The one exception is the track, "Dominator", which managed to do the best job of linking the band's sound to the dance aesthetic than the others, which felt a bit forced at times.  (I'm particularly thinking about "Rejuvenation", but the first half of the album feels a little rhythmically forced.)  Additionally, there's a bit of a tendency for the songs to blend together.  Nothing stands out in the way that they do in some of the other albums.  To tell the truth, the album strikes me as a transition between the earlier albums, and the direction the band would take with Night Time and the albums of the late 1980's (which I haven't heard, but are evidently slightly boring in their attempt to repeat the success of Night Time with reduced results.)  So, I liked the record, and I don't see myself getting rid of it, but I also don't see it getting a lot of repeat play, either.

      I think I'll leave it there.  Hopefully, I will get to another random record choice some time next week.

On Dubstep (Or What I Really Don't Understand About It's Recent Success))

       Up until recently, I was pretty excited by the increased popularity of dubstep.  I had been listening to the subgenre for quite a while, going back to the early releases by Kode 9 and the Space Ape and Burial that I discovered through the British music magazine, Wire. Through that publication I discovered Skream, Shackleton, Pinch, and Horsepower Productions, and others. In a significant manner, the genre helped me develop an interest in electronic music, getting me into everything from Underground Resistance to minimalists like Robert Hood and Ricardo Villalobos, to artists such as Four Tet, Rhythm and Sound, Lone, and Ekoplekz, not to mention a lot of significantly older stuff.  To put it another way, early dubstep allowed me to recognize the value of electronic dance music as an art form.  However, I recently realized that when I talked about dubstep, I meant something substantially different than most folks.   It turns out that the dominant force in dubstep in the United States is some guy called Skrillex, who is kind of terrible.  Although I shouldn't be terribly surprised, dubstep has mutated in the U.S. context from its moody and syncopated origins in its original U.K. context to something boring, macho, and mechanical in the United States.  To give you a sense of the contrast in sound, here are some of the U.K. acts that I am interested in.

 

       With this small and somewhat random sampling, I think a number of things are pretty clear.  Dubstep is developed out of the British electronic music scene, particularly out of remixes of 2-step garage music, drawing on the rich Caribbean influence on music in the U.K.  (To get a good sense of that hybrid influence, listen to the Ragga Twins and Shut Up and Dance) 1. the music is fairly diverse. The different songs fit comfortably within the genre, but we're offered a number of mutations, oscillating between the digidub influences heard in Skream and the Digital Mystikz to the percussion heavy work of Shackleton.  2.  The dub influence translates into an interest in that genre's interest in exoticism, which turns into an exploration of the the structures of migration found in the UK, particularly in the the work of Dust and Blackdown.  We're offered a diasporic and post-colonial musical formation.  3. The music tends towards the paranoiac and introspective in tone, rather than extroversion and aggression.  Portishead's Geoff Barrows argues that its a form of music best appreciated on headphones, wandering the empty streets at night.  To put another way, it's not all that macho.  Additionally, all of these tracks work well outside of a club setting, creating innovative and interesting music that bears introspective listening as well as dancing. 




    However, the music of Skrillex is considerably different, losing the experimentation and introspection found in the earlier examples in the subgenre.  Instead, we're offered a version of dubstep that is far more rigid, and at times, mechanical approach to rhythm. With it's heavy mixture of vocal sampling, relatively uptempo beat for the genre, and musical aggression, we find ourselves with a far more banal and uninteresting form of the genre.  Apparently, a lot of this stuff is called Brostep, now.  What I find disappointing is that it seems that this banalization seems the only way for the genre to move into the mainstream, destroying the very qualities that made it worth exploring in the first place.  I've long since abandoned the need for purity and exclusivity in the music I listen to.  If Shackleton sold like hotcakes, it would still be worth listening to, but I don't think that this is going to happen.  Instead, the dance floor is being transformed into another homosocial, yet heteronormative space, equivalent to the locker room.  The tedium of the genre's sociality is reflected in the formal qualities of the music.  Aggression when used creatively can produce interesting results within the genre.  The problem with contemporary dubstep is that it's aggressiveness is so tediously predicable, sounds rote and strangely dialed in.  The last record by The Bug offers a useful contrast to the predictable sounds of contemporary dubstep. 

     The question posed by the process of mainstreaming of dubstep is a fairly simple one, where is the genre going, and what impact will this have on electronic music as a whole?  Despite the fact that we can still find a number of creative records coming out, I'm not terribly optimistic about the prospects within the genre.  As the genre moves into the stadiums, I suspect we're going to find more figures such as Skrillex.  In a certain sense, the commercial failure of electronic dance music in the 1990's was ultimately a positive, rather than a negative thing, leading to experimentation, and putting a stop to the proliferation of mainstream acts such as Prodigy, The Chemical Brothers, and The Crystal Method (who brought the same sort of macho appeal to the genre.)  I'll be curious to see if the current crop of artists stall out like the earlier batch of artists, or if the stadium phenomenon is successful, in either case, most of the interesting music will probably be on the margins.

some labor day songs

      I just finished listening to a fairly mediocre Sound Opinions radio show focused on songs about work.  Their song selection, with the exception of a Bob Marley track, was white, male, and kind of boring.  In effect, the show replicated the rather problematic tendency in the United States of simply assuming that the working class and labor is a particularly masculine domain, and an overwhelmingly white one, at that.  Even within those limited parameters, the hosts managed to skip over a lot of good country and folk to play some fairly bland tracks by Lou Reed, amongst others.  Additionally, I was frustrated that none of the musical choices engaged with the class structures of the United States, instead focusing on the existence of such structures in England.  While I certainly am never going to complain about hearing the Clash, the choices seemed to naturalize the assumption that somehow this country isn't as defined by such structures as the UK.  (Needless to say, the far more orthodox choices by Katy Fox-Hodess on facebook have been much more enjoyable.)  Rather than simply stopping there, I thought I would put up a set of songs that I would have probably played in such a context.  These selections are a bit on the random side, and I will leave them without comment, although I will note that my first choice, the Ray Charles cover of Sixteen Tons, was not available on youtube.  Feel free to make suggestions or comment on my choices.

Variations on a Theme: Tower of Babel, Part 2

     To return to the theme of the Tower of Babel, I thought I would move from Fritz Lang's take on the story in Metropolis to Einsturzende Neubauten's take on the story in their song, Der Schacht von Babel (The shaft of Babel), contained on the 1996 album, Ende Neu.  The album constituted a number of shifts within the band, most notably the exodus of long-time member, F.M. Einheit.  The nature of the shifts was implicitly contained in the name of the album Ende Neue ('Ending New').  However, the record itself constituted less of a radical break than the album title might imply.  There is continuation of the shift away from the focus on transgression through noise to a more deliberate and focused exploration of sound, more complex compositional structures, and an interest in song, but songs such as 'Was Ist Ist' continued to gesture towards the transgressive history of the avant garde.  (Although, it is important to note that each of these references is exploration of the history of the avant garde.... a distinct shift from the annee zero approach of the previous work.)

     Returning to the band's engagement with the Tower of Babel, Der Schacht von Babel operates within the more meditative approach taken by the band, although there are some similarities with the re-appropriation of the folks song, Der Stuhl in der Hoelle.

     Both operate through the use of percussion, bass, and voice, and more specifically, simple and repetitive lyrics.  Those qualities are immediately apparent in the lyrics.

Wir graben den Schacht in der Abenddämmerung
Wir graben den Schacht von Babel
Zu hoch war bis jetzt unser Aussichtspunkt
Wri graben den Schacht von Babel
Mit Hölzern, sehr edel, verschalen wir ihn
Wir schachten den Tunnel von Babel
Selbst Strom für das Licht den verlegen wir drin
Wir schachten den Tunnel von Babel
Draussen das Fest erreicht den Höhepunkt
Wir graben den Schacht von Babel

We're digging the shaft of Babel
Our viewpoint was too high before
We're digging the shaft of Babel
With wood, most rare, we line it
We're mining the tunnel of Babel
We even lay out electricity for the lights in the pit
We're mining the tunnel of Babel
Outside the festivities are coming to a peak
We're digging the shaft of Babel
(Lyrics were taken from here.)

     Moving out of the specifically formal qualities of the song, the band presents the construction of Babel as the construction of a tunnel shaft, rather than a tower.  The shaft doubles as a site for the extraction of resources as well as an artifact in itself, one that is to be lined with the 'most rare' wood and supplied with electricity.  These activities are linked to a series of outside festivities, which are linked to the transgressive construction of the tower.  I think that its significant that the song takes on a similar form as the earlier exploration of the folk song.  Both seem to be gesturing towards the need to rethink the folk form to engage with the legacy of industrialization.  This shift isn't new for folk music, after all, the music of the 1920's and 1930's captured the rhythm of the locomotive and the drive of the assembly line.  This new exploration is engaged with the ruins of that earlier formation, capturing its rust and decay through the long history of the gothic.  Simultaneously, it demands that we understand our present moment as defined by the transgressive history of the avant-garde, a history that is intimately linked to the history of industrial production, and more specifically, its legacy of environmental destruction.  The orgiastic pagan celebration embraced by the avant-garde is linked dialectically with the construction of the mine shaft, the extraction of resources from the earth.  The modified folk form is crucial to exploring avant-garde transgression as legacy, rather than present, to recognizing its present as a form of ruins, which is available as the grounds for some new formation, but is no longer viable in and of itself.  The transgression of Babel then stands in for the combined history of the avant-garde and industrialization, the drive for the new, which the title of the album declares over.  The song and Neubaten's work in general doesn't seem to point to a solution, an escape from the labyrinth of ruins that make up the physical and ideological landscape of late capitalism, but they seem to gesture towards the importance of exploring this transgressive trace contained in its history, which is also the history of the mine-worker, the most direct analogy to Marx's metaphor for the history of the proletariat, the mole itself.

Cornelius Cardew's The Great Learning

I'm about to leave to find out about the results of the union election in about an hour.  This particular recording seemed to be particularly relevant, both capturing a sense of anticipation, and as a description of the process of coming together as a slate.  Whatever happens, I feel that we managed to embody many of the positive qualities that Rosa Luxemburg saw as central to the development of a conscious and militant proletariat.  Omni sunt communia....

Live Footage of Henry Cow/Call for Comments

     This is apparently the only live material of Henry Cow in video form. With the exception of the group's In Praise of Learning, the group's live material is much better than the recorded material. Fortunately, there is quite a bit of live material that is now available on record.  As I had mentioned in my first post, Henry Cow was both committed to creating music influenced by both the counter-culture and the avant-garde, as well as a genuine and long lasting commitment to radical politics.  After the group's breakup, the members continued to produce interesting art in the form a vast variety of groups (News On Babel, Art Bears, Science Group, etc.) and promoting other people's art through Chris Cutler's Recommended Records.
      In addition to that short note, I've noticed that there has been very little in the way of commenting so far on the blog.  I thought I would write a short note to encourage more comments and discussions.  I'm genuinely curious about what people think about the work included here, whether those comments are positive, critical, or somewhere in between.  I created this forum as a way of presenting my work to something that approximates a public, that is to say, presenting it to strangers as well as friends and colleagues.  At the same time, I was hoping to also have some sort of conversation within that setting, whether between strangers or friends.  In any case, I encourage folks to put down there thoughts on any of the postings that I have written over the past few months.  I hope to hear from you.

Interlude (2): Ionisation (Pierre Boulez Conducts The Ensemble InterContemporain)

Music Criticism and the Jungle Brothers "Crazy Wisdom Masters" Bootleg (subtitled: aesthetics and failure)

      I want to make a bit of a tangent from the group of topics that I have been dealing with for the past few days, and return to the discussion of music that I had brought up in a couple posts.  Something that I have been thinking about over the past few years is a particular rhetorical trope that is common in pop music journalism, the notion of a record or a group being 'ahead of its time.'  It's a label that gets applied to a wide variety of bands, but its a term that is most often applied to the work of bands such as the Stooges and the Velvet Underground.  According to this approach to analyzing music, the value of the music of those bands is reflected in the influence they had on contemporary music.  In the case of the Stooges, it is their influence on punk and metal.  In the case of Velvet Underground, it is their influence on gads of college rock bands.  (The primary narrative of rock journalism is that of the hidden father, it would seem.  We get nothing of the playfulness of Shklovsky in this process, no analogies to chess, no escape from the hetero-normative model.)

     Don't get me wrong.  I love those bands.  I remember hearing The Stooges for the first time on a alternative rock station some time in the '90's.  They played "I Wanna Be Your Dog."  I had never heard anything like it before.  I particularly remember the sound of bells that were added by John Cale's production, which introduced a droning quality to the piece, a quality also found in the vocals of Iggy Pop.  It was simple, repetitive and hypnotic.  I was obsessed, and it took quite a bit of time to track down that record in that period before the internet, and boutique record reissues.  My relationship to Velvet Underground doesn't have that immediate narrative, but those are records that I still listen to all the time.

      But I'm not sure why The Stooges relationship to a pack of mediocre punk rock bands or Velvet Underground's relationship to bunch of bad college rock band offers a very compelling explanation for why those records are so unique, so compelling.  Isn't that evident in the records themselves?  In addition, I'm skeptical of the value of influence.  After all, the first Dre lp and the first Snoop Dog lp led to a spate of terrible records in hip-hop, but despite their all too obvious misogyny, the two records are interesting and innovative records sonically.  For me, a pair of films make the point even more clearly.  George Lukas' Star Wars and Quentin Tarentino's Reservoir Dogs respectively led to a decline in Hollywood and Independent film, but I like both of those films.  Perhaps, the most productive approach to influence is the antiquarian approach, but this is drifting a bit.

      I've been thinking about this because of some material that I came across recently on the 'internet' recently from the original recordings from what would eventually become the Jungle Brothers third album, J Beez Wit The Remedy.  For those who are unaware of the band, the Jungle Brothers were hip hop group that was associated with the informal Native Tongues coalition that included groups such as De La Soul, Tribe Called Quest, and Black Sheep.  The groups could be connected through their common interest in expanding the sound of the genre.  They sampled jazz fusion albums, country music, sixties pop music, as well as a greater palate of R&B and funk.  In addition, their approach to MCing moved away from the aggressive, shouting approach that defined earlier acts such Run DMC, the Beasties, etc. to smoother, more laid back approach.  Lyrically, the groups oscillating between taking on serious political topics and a return to the sort of playfulness that defined early hip-hop, although, in retrospect, some of that political engagement was more conservative than initially thought.  (Something that Boots Riley has noted.)  But, I think that misses out on the primary political engagement of the movement.  Instead of looking to lyrics for politics, it would be better to look at the formal experimentation of the groups as their primary engagement, demanding hip-hop, which was so often not taken seriously by the record companies as product (to paraphrase a Roots sample) be taken seriously as an art form, as something that could move beyond novelty and the single format.  Form was the politics of the groups, operating through a combination of virtuosic play, which might be tied to the constant referent of jazz, juxtaposition, that is a commitment to originality and creativity in production and sampling, an alternative take on masculinity and sexuality, and a continuation of hip-hop's move from the single format to the album format.

     The band put out its first record in 1988, Straight Out of the Jungle, and its second album, Done By the Forces of Nature, in 1990.  Both those records were received fairly well, both critically and commercially, but didn't get the attention that were given to the more ambitious albums put out by De La Soul and Tribe Called Quest.  If you contrast the records, its fairly understandable.  The Jungle Brothers records lack the aesthetic coherence of those albums.  In addition, the records sample creatively, drawing from a variety of sources, but lack the kind of virtuosity found on the Prince Paul produce De La Soul and Tribe.  Compared to Three Feet High and Rising or that really long title Tribe album, the JB's albums feel kind of patchy and tossed together, although definitely worth the listen.  (Here are a couple examples from those records.)

      However, the group made a notable shift for its third record, working with outside MC Torture/Sensational and working with producer Bill Laswell, who was both involved in the avant-funk group, Material, and was contributed to Herbie Hancock's "Rock It."  There was a clear intent on the album to produce a more aesthetically demanding and complex form of hip-hop.  The tracks bring in an even wider range of sample material, ranging from more diverse jazz sources to the Stooges.  Laswell, who had a foot in both hip-hop through "Rock It" and the aesthetic avant-garde through groups like Material and Last Exit, was a perfect choice to produce the material, reflecting the group's aesthetic interests.  At the same time, there was a commitment to remain in the continuity of hip hop.  Reviewer Joe Kenney does a good job of expressing this juxtaposition, contrasting the group's work with other work's in the genre's avant-garde.  "Some of Tricky’s stranger concoctions are similar, and DJ Spooky as well, but neither artist strives to stay as true to the hip hop beat as the Jungle Brothers. Because, no matter how weird these four songs are, the bass still shakes your subwoofer, and the beats crush."  The record simultaneously holds a commitment the flow of hip hop and the strategies of disruptive juxtaposition, noise, and dissonance of the avant-garde, and it really works.  I felt the same kind of excitement when I heard these tracks as I did when I first heard the Stooges, or the Pistols, or Public Enemy. (hint: if you want to here some of the other material from the bootleg, and some of its much better than this, there's this crazy place called the internet, and you can find this with 'The Google'.)

       Unfortunately,Warner Bros. didn't see fit to release the record as it was produced, and put out a considerably modified version of the record in the form of J Beez Wit the Remedy.  The modified record neither fit in with the mainstream hip-hop at the time, nor did it hold on to the aesthetic innovation contained in its original form.  Despite some shining moments on the record, it leaves it soggy and awkward.  It's an understandably forgotten record, moldering in cut-out bins and used record shops.  The original form of the record has only been heard by a few people in its entirety.  There is a bootleg 10" from 1999, and a few other tracks have leaked, but it's difficult to imagine the album getting the proper release that it really deserves.  At the same time, it's difficult imagining that the record would have sold, even if it had gotten a proper release.  It's sound is alien to the main trends within hip hop, it still is. The Jungle Brothers quickly abandoned this approach to hip-hop, and have continued to produced decent work, but nothing of the innovation that can be found in the early work.  In addition, hip hop in its underground and mainstream forms has made no effort to take its approach as an influence. It's an aesthetic cul de sac.

        To return to the topic I introduced this posting with, I feel that popular music criticism is far too obsessed with paternity and continuity, and doing so it loses out on the messy complexity of aesthetic production.  The untimeliness of material such as this, cul de sacs whose untimeliness deny the comfortable dialectical synthesis of the 'before its time' narrative, allow for this process to be recognized.  At the same time, the record has to be heard as a singularity, a particular aesthetic approach.  It's value exists in its own particular form and history.  Granted, there are pitfalls to this approach, tedious forms of  fetishization and snobbery that are always the danger of the arcane, but as left activist and science fiction author Chandler Davis notes, "diehard adherence to a heresy is in general less menacing to free inquiry than matter-of-course adherence to orthodoxy: because the heretic, being constantly challenged, is deprived of the illusion that his rut is the whole road." (Chandler 75)

A Brief Interlude (Art Ensemble of Chicago--Live in Poland)

I need to work and attend a meeting, so I will leave you with some footage of The Art Ensemble of Chigago in Poland in 1982.

More on AMM

      I thought that I would include a little more material on AMM.  Here is a video on Keith Rowe from the group, as well as a couple links to polemical and theoretical positions taken by pianist and composer Cornelius Cardew.  New AMM pianist John Tilbury has finally printed his long expected biography on the composer.  I haven't been able to read the biography, primarily because it's really expensive, but I suspect that it will be worth reading about Cardew's journey from working with Stockhausen in Darmstadt to his involvement in collective improvisational practices, and finally into Maoist politics.  (The compositions from this period are quite boring.  Prevost accurately describes them as 'public school music.')  At the end of his life, he was in a small, pro-Albania Marxist grouplet.  In addition, Cardew's experimented with new collective formations of music making, the Scratch Orchestra was the most notable of those, but he produced a number of different formations, often working with amateur musicians.

I thought it made sense to include something from Rowe.  My paper primarily works from the communal position taken by Prevost in his to recent books, but Rowe is an interesting artist in his own right, both artistically and intellectually.

Ubuweb has some very interesting material on Cardew.  Here is an earlier essay on the ethics of improvisation.  I probably would have quoted from it quite extensively if it had been readily available when I wrote the essay.   Perhaps, I will write more on it in the future, but it's clearly an effort to think through the process of working within the collective confines of AMM.  Unfortunately, the website has had to remove the material from the more polemical, Stockhausen Serves Imperialism, but in many ways, that essay is far less interesting than the earlier writing, losing a sense of both experimentation, as well as intellectual openness.  In addition, the site has a number of recordings from Cardew, as well as an interesting BBC documentary produced in 1981, after the composers death at 45.  He was killed in hit and run driving accident.

A Talk on AMM

This is a talk that I gave on the improv group AMM for a visual studies conference some time in 2004, I think. It's interesting going back to one's earlier work. Re-reading this, I can see some bad habits I had as a writer at the time. (I suspect that I will feel the same way when I go back to this work.) I have a tendency to put large sections of quotations into the work without providing the analytical work necessary. In addition, I don't think that I pushed the theoretical implications of failure as far as I could have pushed them. The paper is a little too neat for the topic at hand, and there are questions around subjectivity, collectivity, and authorship that could have been pushed further. A last note, the quotations from Prevost are drawn from his text, No Sound Is Innocent. The Chakrabarty Quote is from Provincializing Europe, and the Judith Butler Quote is from Precarious Life. This is obviously not a formal academic setting, but I thought I would cross some of my t's, at least. Here goes:

“Be reasonable—demand the impossible!”
--Paris Slogan, 1968.

“Let us speak plainly. Historically, the errors committed by a truly revolutionary movement are infinitely more fruitful than the infallibility of the cleverest Central Committee.”
--Rosa Luxemburg


     “Failure,” as Cornelius Cardew states, “is an interesting concept. He links it with goals, with intentional qualities. Intention produces failure. The products of the processes that we go through will never quite match up to the initial expectations that we have for them. The question then becomes what do we make of this gap? Do we see a lack in the situation, or do we see a lack in the forms that are used to engage in that situation? In his discussion of subaltern history, Dipesh Chakrabarty opens up a space for a need for a politics that pushes at the boundaries of known discourses, a “struggling, or even groping, for nonstatist forms of democracy that we cannot not yet either understand or envisage completely.”[1] Chakrabarty in part links this to a politics of despair, that is to say a politics that recognizes the limitations of its own forms and looks for its own demise in its experimentation. I want to look at the practices and the theories of the improvisational group AMM as a way of thinking through what that might mean.

     I suppose if I was to begin anywhere, it would be within the current situation. After all, Michel Foucault insists that all histories are in some way histories of the present. The present that haunts me is the state of the anti-war movement, a movement which flashed so brightly for such a brief moment and then disappeared just as quickly. It was a movement that was a profound failure, not because it failed to literally stop the war, but because it failed to produce a new form of politics that could deal with the current state of things. That failure, the failure to produce new forms, comes out of the fear of failure, or perhaps more precisely that the results of that politic will spin out of control of the grasp of its organizers.

     This question, that is the question of the production of new forms, is one that preoccupies me. If I were to express the project for most of my intellectual work, it would be the relationship between artistic movements and revolutionary movements. This interest focuses on the question of form, or to put it another way, what I am curious about in this intersection is the way that the explosion of new forms of revolutionary movements make unspoken demands on the way art is made. We can see this in relationship to the 1848 revolution, the Bolshevik revolution, and the revolution of 1968 to just name a few examples. These movements put artists in a position where their former approaches to their craft becomes meaningless, or at least needs to be extraordinarily modified. I have no doubt that the ways they create new forms of art and of life also interfere with the formation of those political revolutions, but I emphasize the former given the radical size disparity between the mass movement of revolution and the relatively small size of artistic movements.

      This is particularly evident in the 1968 revolution, the first revolution, at least on one of its poles, that started from a demand for new forms of life, rather than out of the desperation of poverty or tyranny. This revolution was not only against capital and the state, but also against the older forms of counter systemic movements. It constitutes both a great crisis within communities of artists and intellectuals, and also a great burst of creativity. This can be found in film, painting, theater, etc. Perhaps the best example is the radical shift that occurs in the films made by Jean Luc Godard, which embrace the notion of producing a cinema that cannot be recognized as cinema. Music obviously wasn’t exempt from this process.

     We can draw two major sources of artistic transformation that produce the thought and practice of AMM. The first occurs in the field of modern classical music. The cultural dominant of the 1950’s in this field is serialism, which simultaneously challenges the musical forms of progression created in older forms of classical music, and simultaneously demands its own forms of crushing conformity. The response to this form primarily comes from the United States in the form an outside art that puts more and more emphasis on forms of aleatory sound, sounds that are not necessarily consciously constructed by the composer, such as Cage’s producing score on chance, etc. This trajectory also increasingly emphasizes the production of music as an arrangement of sounds rather than as notes.

      The second source can be found in the transformations that are occurring within jazz at the same time. This transformation can broadly be placed under the rubric of ‘free jazz’, although it had many other titles at the time and since then, such as fire music, the new thing, etc. Within this movement, there contained the same aleatory elements, but it also had another element that one could not necessarily find in the first. This focuses on a shift in cultural politics which sought to engage in the black cultural nationalism that was beginning to be emphasized in the mid-60’s. The other interesting trend was towards producing new forms of collectivity. The most interesting and long lasting of these was Chicago’s the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, but it was only one of many such artists’ collectives formed at the time. These were not only directed towards organizing concerts, but also took on pedagogical and political functions that tied into both the civil rights movement and the new left.

     AMM brought these two trends together within the context of the postwar welfare state of England. The earliest members of the collective, Keith Rowe, Edwin Prevost, Lou Gare, and Lawrence Sheaff all came out of the jazz scene in one form or another. Whereas composer Cornelius Cardew came out of the environs of the avant-garde of classical music, first working with Stockhausen at Darmstadt, and later working within the vein of the American scene. Their combination was driven by a desire for new forms on both sides of the discussion. Prevost argues that, “In 1965, AMM began a radically different kind of music-making. The prevalent notions of musical theory, practice, hierarchy, and structure…were replaced by the creation of, and engagement with, a sound world in which there was not even a formal beginning and ending. And, and from its first raucous explosions, it knew too that it was not only speaking in a new language but that it was talking about things not perceived in any musics the member-musicians had heard elsewhere.”[2]

     These are, of course, bold claims, but in the wake of Richard Wagner, not unusual ones. I think that the interesting innovation on AMM’s claim to a unique status in the development of the avant-garde was its linkage of this claim to radically new democratic practices. That is to say that AMM didn’t link its status to the position of the genius, which has haunted so much of avant-garde practice. Instead, the players produced this new form through collectivity, and more precisely, new forms of collectivity. This precisely links the concern with aleatory practices of the avant-garde with the forms of collectivity and cultural memory that are emphasized within radical jazz circles. But it takes the form of an interference between the two that produces a completely different form altogether, that will later be described by Prevost as a mode of dialogical heurism.

     This notion is developed by Prevost to come up with a way of describe dialogic relations between music that go beyond the structures of call and response that are developed by folk and blues forms and later get taken up by jazz. He describes it in the following terms; “Dialogue is the interactive medium in which the products of heurism are tested. Sounds are placed: placed in contrast to, in parallel to, in imitation of, in respect of, without regard to, other sounds. Minds struggle, coalesce, defer or acquiesce. Inner debate meets outer debate. Instant decisions dictate the immediate direction of the music…” This creative dialogue is directed towards finding new sounds, new possibilities. This can only be found in open forms of dialogue.

     Perhaps it would be best to give a brief description of the practices of AMM in its early incarnation. The group would play for about an hour and a half to two hours and a half. These performances were frequently defined by large sections of silence as the musicians engaged or stopped engaging with each other in any number of combinations. These concerts were free. There is some debate over the roll of the audience within this experience. Promoter Victor Schoenfeld felt that “the original relationship with the audience was dictated by AMM: “we’ll let you listen, but only if you let us play.” This presents the audience as being dictated to in a way. Whereas drummer Prevost tends to emphasize the engagement of the audience with the music, going as far as to point out the “almost proprietary relationship” that some members felt towards the music. I tend to find Prevost’s view more productive, as that it emphasizes the sense of interconnectivity that is felt within the improv community.

     This is a question that Prevost deals with explicitly in an interview. He explains that new listeners of improvised music have been produced as listeners in the rules structures of their former listening experiences, whether this is classical music, rap, etc. In his words, “The suffer what I call an aesthetic mismatch.”[3] There needs to be some way of allowing for that listener to understand the rules of the conversation that is occurring through sound. There is a “kind of specific analytical framework for free improvisation, as there is for every other kind of music. To deny this fact is in a way to deny entry for others into this world, and it also hampers the music’s development.”[4]
 
     Within that physical context, the musicians developed very distinct ways of engaging with each other. Prevost states, “There are, of course, no traditional roles in AMMmusic…. Decision-making and identity comes from the manner in which AMM treats its own history. It is beholden to each player to find a role within AMM. No specifics of performance are ever discussed. There is no formulated logic of direction; no particular encouragement to do a particular thing. AMMmusicians prefer not to know if a fellow musician has a strategy for a particular performance.”[5]

     This creates a condition where the collectivity of AMM is placed in hands other than the conscious wills of those involved in its production. This frees it up from coagulating into any particular form. It plays emphasis on ‘potentiality.’ There is no way of knowing whether the concert will be an enormous failure or a spectacular success. But at the same time, this music was produced in an atmosphere of a certain continuity. Unlike the practice of fellow improvist, Derek Bailey, AMM continued to work with each other over a long period of time, and that practice was dependent on a long series of conversations over matters of philosophy, religion, and politics. But, at the same time within that context, there was an emphasis of taking the music out of the hands of a sovereign individual, whether individual or collective.

     This moved to produce a form of music that sounded considerably different than other forms. This frequently came out of the use of instruments in non-traditional manners, or the use of random debris within the production of sounds. Prevost points out that frequently listeners would have difficulty labeling which instrument produced the sound. This lead to a frequent negative interpretation of their project, that it was not music at all. As Prevost notes, “I was first alerted to the idea that ‘free’ or ‘total’ improvisation was different from all other music-making when told what I did was not music! (In retrospect I am astounded by so impoverished a perspective: though it hardly discouraged me or my peers; quite the reverse.)[6]
 
     What is so fascinating in that statement, is the ‘failure’ of AMM to produce something that would be recognized as music was considered a matter of success, even a matter for excitement amongst the members. AMM was concerned with pushing this as far as possible, introducing any number of aleatory elements to the music. “Indeed, seeking failure itself was a possible route to success! For AMM these ‘controlled accidents’ were practiced variously: through random radio frequency switching: rolling empty tin cans across (and often off) the stage: testing the bowing qualities of an unknown metal sheet.”[7] The possibility for new sounds was no longer in the hands of the genius or even the craftsman; rather it was in the hands of the detritus produced within the context of a consumerist post-war welfare state. The material conditions of the collective are always at play within the production, and we are always aware that we do not choose the stage that we act upon.

     Cardew captures the goals of this process best in a comment in his essay, “Towards an ethic of improvisation. “We are ‘searching for sounds and for the responses that attach to them, rather than thinking them up, preparing them and producing them. The search is conducted in the medium of sound and the musician is at the heart of the experiment.”[8] This statement sets up an understanding of the production of music that cuts across the binary of the individual/collective. The individual becomes the site of experimentation and creation, but this individual, who is both experimented and experimenter can only exist within the context of a collective formation. After all, it is precisely the intervention of the unknown in the form of an exteriority that allows for change to occur, for the experiment to be meaningful.

     I think that we can think about the meaning of this within two conceptual frameworks. The first is the idea of undoing the subject that gets developed in the latest work of Judith Butler, particularly in her thoughts on a politics of mourning. This may sound counterintuitive, but both the music practices of AMM are tied into a certain notion of ecstasy in the sense that Butler invokes it. “To be ec-static means, literally, to be outside oneself, and thus can have several meanings: to be transported beyond oneself by a passion, but also to be beside oneself with rage or grief.”[9] The great joy that is desired through the collective improvisations of AMM and the mourning that Judith Butler describes both describe a situation where the subject is moved somewhere else.

     The process of grief or of mourning that Butler describes is an incredibly difficult one. We can see this in her description of the process, “one starts out the day with an aim, a project, a plan, but finds oneself foiled. One finds oneself fallen. One is exhausted but does not know why. Something is larger than one’s own deliberate plan, one’s own project, one’s own knowing and choosing.” It is a process of transformation that one is never in full control of, which will bring the subject somewhere that cannot be predicted in advance. And contrary to common sense notions of mourning, it should be a process that is communal and political.

     This expresses an idea very similar to Prevost in his practice of training musicians for improvisation. “No one is instructed or commanded, and the only recommendations are to put focus upon the instrument or material they are using in a fresh way…. And as a consequence each time in the moment of making music to try to do something—no matter how minor—that they have never done before: to move away from their normal habitual responses and to explore this environment. It is then suggested that they uses their own investigations in a progressive dialogue with the other musicians with whom they are playing.”

     I think that both of these processes point to a vulnerability that is crucial to a genuinely radical politic, but a vulnerability that is all too often refused by those within radical politics. There is no real possibility of transforming the world, without simultaneously transforming yourself. I don’t think that this is easy. It means being swept up by your work, by the movement. It means giving up the illusion of your autonomy as an individual. The experiences of a genuinely radical movement, whether artistic or political, are at times joyful to an inexpressible level, but they are also defined by despair, paranoia, and exhaustion. What the common trope to these affects is that they cannot be contained comfortably within the logic and reason of the liberal individual.

     This process is obviously not an isolated one, and is tied to collectivity. Even the loss of an individual exposes the profound interconnectedness of an individual with an other, but we are discussing the situation of music being produced in an ensemble. In her other latest book, Butler links this idea of undoing the subject to the broader topic of democracy. “Democracy does not speak in unison; its tunes are dissonant, and necessarily so. It is not a predictable process; it must be undergone, as a passion must be undergone. It may also be that life itself becomes foreclosed when the right way is decided in advance, or when we impose what is right for everyone, without finding a way to enter into community and discover the “right” in midst of cultural translation. It may be that what is “right” and what is “good” consist in staying open to the tensions that beset the most fundamental categories we require, to know unknowingness at the core of what we know and what we need, and to recognize the sign of life—and its prospects.”[10]

     The old social democratic politician, Edward Bernstein, loved to say, “The process is everything, the goal is nothing.” While I don’t think that Butler is precisely saying that, I think that it is pointing to a relationship between ends and means that sees the ends of a process being produced precisely through its means. This exists in a constant open constitutive process, one that is precisely productive because of its multiplicity, its antagonisms, its contradictions. This goes against even the contractual minimalism that rational choice insists upon. It means leaving those goals open to this in all of its ambiguity.

     This dissonance isn’t something exclusively linked to a hostile outside to the warmth of the interior of the group. AMM isn’t precisely a Janus faced structure. The agonistic structure of the music has played out within group dynamics. There were extreme tensions within the production of the group itself. Lawrence Sheaff was encouraged the leave the group just after the first album was produced. There was a brief time that the group played as two units due to the conflicts between Rowe/Cardew and Prevost/Gare over Maoism and the direction to go in response to that philosophy. Just recently, there has been another split in the group between Rowe and Prevost over the very texts that I have quoted.

      In this sense, we get a reflection of the very ‘failures’ that are so often found within the political practices that occur in the new left. The experimentation leads to incredible rifts and fractures between and within groups.    One can only think of the many permutations that come out of the Students for a Democratic Society for instance. This is traditionally read as the weakness of the new left. While I don’t want to downplay the real sense of frustration and pain that came through these moments, I also suggest that we see this in productive terms as well. These splits represent moments of difference and experimentation as well. One should remember what Dutch Communist Anton Pannekoek said on this issue, that there is no particular reason to unite behind a losing strategy
     The second conceptual framework can be linked to a notion of the unconscious. The production of the new, ‘the wonderful configurations produced by failure” come out of a collective process that linked to a structure of alterity. As drummer Eddie Prevost puts it, “Any creative act works towards an otherness. You experience it a few times and hope that it will come back, but you don’t know if it will. The playing is sometimes just a ritual and if you’re lucky you get beyond it. You have to build into the ritual the possibilities of that happening.”[11]

     The unconsciousness that is being expressed here is not the unconscious of Freud or of Lacan, although it doesn’t preclude their existence. Instead I would like to read it in terms of an unconscious of practice. This is a space in which I feel least sure of my ground. I would be tempted to focus this unconscious in a firmly Marxist footing, with the concepts of Luxemburg, Lenin, etc., and I wouldn’t be wrong. But for the members of the group, this concept is also tied to any number of non-Western practices such as Buddhism, Taoism, etc. The importance of this form of alterity is clearly important to the group and remains a horizon for my understanding.

     These two elements combine to produce a sense of sociability and a politic that creates other possibilities. Prevost continually links this to the broader conditions of the society that artists and their audiences live in. He discusses “Every peer group, faction, gang, party, etc., share life experiences and ensuing expectations; they are the substance of a sense of belonging. Together with this goes a language, necessarily created to express nuances of meaning and limit comprehension to those within the group. This semi-secret language not only conveys messages to group members and excludes those not sympathetic, but it also offers an alternative to the perceived established means of expression and the cultural priorities which dominate and control it.”[12]

     This reading is in part in a sociological mode, but I think that it has more possibilities than this. I am tempted to read it back upon the practices of Prevost and AMM itself. This ‘semi-secret language’ can be a form of art, a form of politics, or perhaps something that is outside of both of those. It points to a form of opposition that doesn’t operate in the sad logic of a statement such as “in the service of”, which constitutes so much of what constitutes politics and political art today. Instead, it reads the formations of subculture as an opposition that occurs in its own modes of sociability and language. Prevost insists upon this even for groups that fall out of his aesthetic tolerance, such as punk.

     Prevost reads the political possibilities of art immanently in its practices, rather than in the ways that it can be submitted to any politic. As he states, in an interview with Wire magazine, “I repudiate ‘politics first and art later’, an idea which has surfaced again understandably in these threatening times. Politics arise from our view of the world and what world and what kind of world we live in. Art is a powerful tool and a powerful cipher in making such choices. The way musicians play, the way they interact with each other, where they take their material from, their relationship to the materials for sound making, as well as how and where they place their music in the world, are all features of ‘the artwork’.

[1] Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 107.
[2] Prevost, No Sound Is Innocent, 9
[3] Ibid., 4
[4] Ibid., 4
[5] ibid., 25
[6] Prevost, No Sound Is Innocent, 1
[7] ibid., 19
[8] Prevost, 9
[9] Butler, “Violence, Mourning, Politics”, Precarious Life, 24.
[10] Judith Butler, Undoing Gender, 227.
[11] Eddie Prevost, No Sound Is Innocent, x
[12] Eddie Prevost, No Sound Is Innocent, 172