I’ve been reading texts on artist, producer, and self-proclaimed “non-musician” Brian Eno for years, and thought it might be a good idea to start tracking all of the books examining his work in my library. I extracted a list of all Eno-related texts from moredarkthanshark.org and added a few other rare titles from my own archive. Referencing data from my Goodreads account I built a spreadsheet to catalog which texts I’ve read, which I have in physical form, as well as the ones I have as ebooks. I then used an aggregate book search engine to secure physical copies of most of the texts I was missing to build as complete a library as I was able. There are three titles I’ve yet to claim, but they command higher prices than I was ready to import to the States for this first stage of the project.
Pictured below are thirteen of my favorite titles on the subjects of Eno’s work, and ambient and generative music in general. There was a week delay in the project after book #13 was lost in the post and I had to order another copy, but at last I have them all.
I was particularly excited to secure a copy of Sound Unbound published by MIT Press, which compiles essays on sample/mashup/remix culture collected by Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky), and which features a Forward by Cory Doctorow, my favorite essayist on the subjects of digital rights activism and copyleftism. And like the Moondog book I recently ordered, it is packaged with a companion compact disc of the works discussed.
Pictured are the following:
Brian Eno’s Ambient 1: Music for Airports by John T. Lysaker Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music by Christoph Cox Ocean of Sound: Aether Talk, Ambient Sound and Imaginary Worlds by David Toop A Year With Swollen Appendices by Brian Eno Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond by Michael Nyman Brian Eno: His Music And The Vertical Color Of Sound by Eric Tamm The Ambient Century by Mark Prendergast Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture by Paul D. Miller On Some Faraway Beach: The Life And Times Of Brian Eno by David Sheppard Another Green World (33 1/3 Series) by Geeta Dayal Brian Eno: Visual Music by Christopher Scoates Brian Eno: Oblique Music by Sean Albiez Music For Installations (companion book to the ltd ed. 2018 9LP vinyl box set) by Brian Eno
as well as the official Oblique Strategies deck Eno produced with artist, Peter Schmidt.
Also read but not pictured:
Music Beyond Airports – Appraising Ambient Music by Monty Adkins
I really look forward to diving into the yet-unread titles from this indispensable collection. These books will be wonderful company through the chills of winter and shall serve as an intellectually stimulating start to 2020!
Generation Z includes children born 1995-2009 (though these dates are not universally accepted as of yet.) With what movement in art, theater, dance, and music do they identify? What cultural value set inspires its growth and evolution? I am speaking of the “Belieber” generation. (For perspective, Justin Bieber was born in 1994 and released his first album in 2010 at age 16.)
Exhibit “A”
With my general understanding of the development of Western and world culture, I have a basic awareness the socio-musical climates which inspired the blues, big band, the birth of jazz, its many changes, the punk scene, art music, the renaissance of classical influence in progressive rock, the musical impact of the 7” single, the LP, the shift to FM radio, and the academic New Music movement in New York in the 1960s.
I understand the blurring and vanishing of the difference between so-called “high” and “low” art as the democratization of recording technology facilitated independent production and a cultural move away from the dependence on record labels and producers to record, market, and distribute one’s work in the digital age.
ProTools. Bandcamp. Social Media.
Who needs a record label?
I have fundamental knowledge of music and the arts up until and including the end of the rock era and the paradigm shift in the way listeners discover and consume music at the end of the 20th century from Napster-forward. FM and television have plummeted in popularity and neither bares any relevance to the generation who experience music through streaming networks and social media.
The last movements I encountered directly were the Icelandic-influenced popularization of post-rock and its inspirations lifted from neo-classical sound. I remember the rise of the indie-rock scene as a cultural reaction to the corporatization of music at the end of the rock era and the dominance of top 40 pop. Programs like American Idol and the interminable NOW! That’s What I Call Music! series worked to re-enforce the prevailing position of Clear Channel / Warner Music’s stranglehold on the emerging youth culture, effectively raising a generation to consume their product.
And so I posed the question to Quora.com – a forum of user-generated question-and-answer content.
Q:What self-identifying art and music will emerge from a generation raised on a billboard chart of manufactured acts with no concrete musical ability (in the classical sense) and in an era where arts and music funding and education are at an all-time low?
I feared that an entire culture was being bred with no concept of the centuries of great works from which they can build upon, reshape and re-purpose to serve the values and needs of their own generation. What is next?
The first answer I received was not promising. In jest, a user offered:
“Hipsters. Banjos. Pocket camera art.”
…he left out “selfies.”
But the next answer I received completely shattered my preconceived notion that Gen-Z-ers were nothing more than “Belieber” simpletons. (And shame on me for oversimplifying the demographic.)
The response was offered by Quora user and future rockstar, Will Tuckwell. Will studied Music at University of Birmingham and offered a great deal of insight into the promise of his generation. He said:
Speaking as a musician and a member of ‘Generation Z’ (I was born in 1994), I feel optimistic about the future of the arts. I would disagree that American Idol et al have a stranglehold on youth culture. Young people have more of an opportunity than ever before to access great art of the past. (IMSLP and Naxos Music Library cover the vast majority of classical music scores and recordings, for example.) Generation Z can often instantly find a piece of music on the internet, which their parents, at their age, would have had to visit a library to access. The existence of large companies pushing generic music via mass media is not new to this generation – it has existed in one form or another since the popularisation of recorded music in the early 20th century. While their influence is not trivial, it is very easily avoidable most of the time (at least for me.)
Here are some of the areas of music and art which I will be interested to see develop in the future:
Electronic music software. Digital Audio Workstations which are now commonplace have the ability to emulate the methods of Musique Concrete and Electroacoustic composers, as well as the mixing and production techniques which evolved in recording studios. Also, programs are being developed specifically for the needs of experimental computer musicians, such as Max/MSP, Audiomulch and Supercollider. I would be very interested to see what kind of artistic conventions a generation of creative minds can establish with these new tools.
Pure Data (showing a netpd session)
Creative pop culture references, in particular sampling. Musical quotations are nothing new, although the invention of the digital sampler (not quite from Generation Z I know, but of increased popularity and accessibility in recent years) allows an artist to quote specific ‘moments’ in order to make a cultural point – for example, a composition which samples not just a guitar note, but a particular note or section of melody which Jimi Hendrix played in his Woodstock performance of Star Spangled Banner, comes loaded with countless cultural connotations in less than a second, in a way which no other form of composition could achieve.
“Dab” from John Oswald’s notorious
Plunderphonics EP (1988)
And the bizarre fad of Youtube Poop –
Increased intercultural reference in the arts in general. Our generation has it easier than ever before to instantly look up information, which allows lyricists to make increasingly sophisticated references.
“If you don’t get it, get a computer and Google it
If you find out all the reasons we the shit,
then you the shit”
Even if arts and music education funding are at an all-time low, access to the internet (and therefore culture) is widespread, development of a craft is mostly a self-led activity, and ideas and inspiration are free. I have no doubts that this generation will create vast amounts of great art.
As you can imagine, this response was entirely unexpected and has really given me hope about the future of the arts and music.
I pressed on, looking for other sources of Gen-Z and Gen-Alpha inspiration. This lead me to an article on 21st century composers (because apparently, THAT IS A THING.) A Wikipedia entry for 21st century classical offered a list of composers I could arrange by birth date. At the end of the list I found a name – Alma Deutscher, who was born in 2005.
2005.
I had to look her up. Youtube thankfully offered a video of her appearance on Ellen from October of last year. The eight-year-old has composed operas in her sleep, arisen and written the notation for each instrument entirely from memory.
And here is her own Quartet Movement in A Major, composed in 2012.
Anyone who follows this blog with any frequency knows how much of a stretch it is for me to dig a contemporary recording, let alone a modern track by a “band” instead of a composer. Even scarcer still are the selections I enjoy which contain lyrics and any sort of verse structure akin to rock.
The above is particularly applicable at present as I’ve spent the past week delving deep into the masterworks of musique concrete and electroacoustic composition – recordings which not only abandon contemporary pop structures like lyricism and melody, but forgo the entire tonal system itself, instead favoring abstract and atonal plunderphonics!
So it is with immense surprise and satisfaction that I state the following – A user contacted me on last.fm this week and shared an unsigned band’s recent video… and I absolutely loved it!
They call themselves Museum – four gents from Berlin who self-released their album, Traces Of on their own label – beat is murder.
Traces Of followed the release of two EPs – Exit Wounds and Old Firehand but the 2012 single “The Law” is the fan-recommended track which introduced me to their work. (They actually do the whole lowercase-sentence-fragment thing but I’ve capitalized their releases here for the sake of readability. Sorry lads.)
Their official site is inactive, simply stating that the album’s release is scheduled for Jul 6, 2012, however the band appears to be active with a performance scheduled at FiestaCity 2014 on Aug 29th – Place du Martyr, Verviers, Belgium.
This recording came onto my radar at quite an opportune time. The first thing I noticed from the first 20 seconds of the tune’s music video was that the band had incorporated elements of tape music and musique concrete as the very foundation of the track.
The lyrics did not detract from the layering of minimal, looped sounds, as they too were cut up in a fragmented presentation which would have made Burroughs proud. And while the kaleidoscopic video effect is nothing new, it works well with the track.
Check it out for yourself – “The Law” from Museum.
I began the week with the discovery of a historic jazz release in the Netherlands which should arrive in the post in the next 10 days (Stay tuned for a special feature with high-res photos once it arrives!)
I had been compiling data on the milestones of free jazz and was very happy to find one of them re-issued by Impulse! Records in 2011 – the same label which released the original recording in 1968.
The psychedelic cover art commanded my attention when I found it in a local record shop, and while I had never listened to Archie Shepp before I knew I had to check out this record.
I previewed it for a mere 30 seconds – whetting my sonic appetite with Shepp’s free jazz psychedelic tenor frenzy accompanied by five (count ’em – FIVE) talking drum percussionists. 30 seconds was all I needed.
I instantly purchased the record and added it to my jazz collection, delighted by my discovery but slightly irked that there was no mention of this album by any of the free jazz essentials lists I had compiled. That’s just further evidence that you’ve really got to get out there and dig.
But on to today’s theme – Music Lit. I knew it was going to be an intellectually stimulating week when I found Julian Cope’s legendary music crit, Krautrocksampler offered up on the Web in PDF format. As you’re probably aware, this title is long out of print and the author has sworn never to reissue it. Copies surface on various marketplaces for hundreds of dollars. Thankfully, a dedicated fan painstakingly scanned every page of the book, and while it is hardly archival quality, it is the only way most of us will ever see the book.
This will be a pleasure to peruse over the coming weeks, even in its crudely-photocopied form.
I picked up another jazz book from a local used bookshop as it was only a few dollars and I was curious to see what a writer would have to say about jazz in the middle of the era. The bulk of the text was written in 1962, with the “jazz-rock” chapter at the end likely added for the 1975 and 1979 printings.
Erlich’s perspective of jazz is hardly academic, and clearly it is not intended to be. The book’s approach is that of a simple love of the genre and acts as a guided tour through the history of its greatest influences, from African drum music to field hollers all the way up to the Third Stream and jazz-rock era.
From a historical context the book successfully builds a fundamental framework of jazz’s legacy. The language is elementary and makes for an effortless read, with a circular structure of artist introductions, childhoods, development, and lasting impacts.
However there are many titles available which better-examine what will soon be a century of jazz culture. There are very few references to What Jazz Is All About anywhere on the Web, and even fewer reviews. I’ve since moved on to better-known resources for further exploration of the genre.
The History of Jazz by Ted Gioia is Amazons’ best-selling jazz text. I’m enjoying it thus far, and was happy to see that it included a Recommended Listening index at the end of the book.
I also ordered two highly-acclaimed guides to 20th Century avant-garde music – The Rest is Noise: Listening to the 20th Century and Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music.
The Rest is Noise was a Pulitzer Prize Finalist and cracked the New York Times’ Top 10 Books of the Year. Audio Culture is a compiled volume of manifestos and writings from every music theorist from the first discussions of noise by Jacques Attali and Luigi Russolo to a piece about post-digital tendencies in contemporary computer music by microtonal composer Kim Cascone.
Best of all, Audio Culture includes a hefty index with a chronology of noteworthy recordings, a glossary and a Select Discography.
I also enjoyed watching a documentary film this week titled, In the Ocean – A Film About the Classical Avant Garde which sparked my further exploration of musique concrete.
One of the interesting things I took from the film was the discovery that Cage was really interested in Finnegans Wake (his 1979 mesostic composition, Roaratorio is entirely based upon the novel both in structure and in content.) And by delightful coincidence – what very title arrived in my mailbox just one day earlier?
The Law of Very Large Numbers is a beautiful thing in practice.
All these new music books inspired me to print up some appropriate bookmarks, so I made these… (extra points if you can name the jazz record which featured the Jackson Pollock print.)
So pick up the music books I’ve featured, check out Magic of Ju-Ju and I’ll be back next week with a fantastic new box set!
This is officially the 100th entry at The Innerspace Connection. I have wonderful things planned for the coming month, featuring more great music and original content. Innerspace has grown significantly in its readership in the last few years, and now I’m looking to you to find out what content you’d like to see in the next 100 posts.
I’m reaching out every active reader and passive lurker who follows this blog to answer this quick-and-easy 9-question survey. Your responses will help me deliver the content you’re looking for in the future. Thank you!
It was a wonderful weekend. My girlfriend spend it spinning Franz Liszt LPs, and I picked up the next installment of John Cage’s lectures and writings for my library.
I queued up one of my new genre autoplaylists of modern-classical piano works while I read. The list consisted of composers like Zazie Von Einem Anderen Stern, Ólafur Arnalds, Dustin O’Halloran (who you likely know from his collaboration with Adam Wiltzie performing as A Winged Victory for the Sullen), and selections from Reinbert De Leeuv performing the early piano works of Erik Satie.
This put me in a nostalgic Windham Hill mood, so I also threw in George Winston’s simple but enjoyable piano solos into the mix. I finished off the set with the Interludes LP from Mannheim Steamroller which excerpts all the interludes from the Fresh Aire series of albums. All in all excellent “thinking music” for a summer afternoon exploring the compositional processes of John Cage.
I’m still working my way through SILENCE: Lectures and Writings [50th Anniversary Edition] from last year’s Christmas wish-list. My girlfriend and I stopped into our local used bookshop and I was delighted to come upon Cage’s Empty Words: Writings ’73-’78 which picks up right where SILENCE left off.
Empty Words is hardly casual bathroom reading, as you can see from the random page selection below. But in the full context of Cage’s writings it begins to make (some sort of) sense.
I’ve just ordered another reference text – Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music by Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner. I came upon the title quite by chance while researching texts on minimalism, and upon reading a particular review of the book I instantly ordered a copy. Here is the review – from CMJ New Music Monthly.
“[Audio Culture] is an indispensable primer full of the theories behind noise, Free-jazz, minimalism, 20th century composition, ambient, avant-garde and all the other crazy shit your square-ass friends can’t believe you actually like. With writing and interviews from all the players in question (quoting Stockhausen is five points in hipster bingo), this book deconstructs all the essential ideas: Cage’s themes, Eno’s strategies, Zorn’s games and Merzbow’s undying love of porno.” –CMJ New Music Monthly, 7/04
The humor and wit of the review sold me 100% before I’d even read the item summary on Amazon. This is particularly noteworthy as I rarely read texts written after the late 1970s. (I have an affinity for Golden Age science fiction and classics of music non-fiction.)
I’ll be certain to post a review of the title, along with a second modern publication which I’ll keep under my hat for the moment.
ProTools. Bandcamp. Social Media.
The Innerspace Connection 