This was, weirdly enough, the first lecture I have been able to physically be there for, which was nice for sure, but it does kind of feel like being dropped right into it even though I’ve been trying to be attentive to what is going on. Regardless, the class was mostly talking about a text from a prior week called “Glitch/Failure: Constructing a Queer Politics of Listening” which is a Journal by Andrew Brooks. I can’t say I got much out of it to be fair, not that I don’t understand it or anything it’s just that the ideas never really lingered. It does kind of make sense though as to why Queer spaces I am in tend to have more openness to alternative medias and more esoteric musics, but I guess it feels kind of obvious even without much theory, but maybe it is a product of me already being a part of these spaces myself that I feel that way, I don’t know.

The second half of the class was spent enjoying Supercollider, which I have had minimal experience with prior due to friends trying to show me how to use it a couple years back, but with this being more of a “teaching the absolute basics” than prior, where friends were trying to just throw me straight into making a track kind of, I found getting fixated on mouse position-based chords really beautiful, and spent most of the class making sine chords. Very wonderful.

I have nearly finished the Alan Licht book, I am not such a fast reader but I guess the constant back and forth on the train is a good motivator. I downloaded a lot of Alan Licht albums as well to get myself in that headspace of not only appreciating Alan’s historical recounting of the ideas but also appreciating how these ideas translate into his own practice through his approach to guitar. It feels like an apt way to read it, fully absorbing myself in the language and sound of a person, which is kind of funny, prioritising the author over the topic which he is giving a pretty impartial view on and seemingly trying to remove himself from. For certain though, the later parts of the book have been teetering off into what I feared the book would be, which is purely just a constant stream of naming things without much further depth than just naming them, and the section about No-Wave which is very briefly justified under the term, as Alan Licht’s definition of Sound Art can be vaguely summarised as Sound made by Artists, which No-Wave also was a movement of. Anyway, some more choice quotes;

Brian O’Doherty – “A music that has a surface constructs with time. A music that doesn’t have a surface submits to time and becomes a rhythmic progression.”  Pg 136.

I don’t have much to add other than the description of rhythm being a submission to time, it is quite beautiful imagery.

“Wolf Vostell’s de/collage music” focused on “all noises which are propagated when a form is destroyed,” claiming that all that is left of the form in the wake of the destruction is the sound. Indeed, he did a version of Satie’s Furniture Music in which he smashed the furniture; and in the piece Kleenex he smashed one hundred lightbulbs.” Pg 148.

Most of the things I wrote down are kind of less to do with a topic, more just things I would like to know more about, and I am very surprised that Wolf Vostell has never been mentioned to me, as this work seems very aesthetically aligned with Gx Jupitter-Larsen’s and some of The New Blockaders’ work in that it is creation of art using documentation of or remnants of entropy and creation of joyous noise. Basically, this demands further research after I finish reading this!

“Dennis Oppenheim did one untitled performance (1971) in which he placed a dead dog on top of an electric organ, which would theoretically produce sound by holding the keys down with its weight until its body deteriorated into nothing.” Pg 151.

I guess this is a different means to a similar ends as the prior work, being that as sound as a document of entropy and the focus on impermanence and duration, this in more stark, visceral means which I do appreciate. I did however kind of talk about this topic in the audio paper we did last term, so I don’t really want to repeat the same thing through different wording, but I guess duration could be seen as an enemy of sorts for a sound work which could be explored for the “issues in sound arts” prompt, and a suitably long / loop based work could be used to explore the durational means.

It is becoming quite clear now – especially as this is the only class I have been able to attend so far and it is the last before the spring break – that I am quite far behind where I should be at, as it was mentioned that after the break we should have a 1k – 1.5k word draft of our essay ready to submit, and I still haven’t got a topic nevermind started the essay. Reading this book has kind of set me in a good mood to explore things I already enjoy more inquisitively though, and I think a lot of what I enjoy I still find confusing as to what is appealing psychologically rather than purely sonically, so maybe similar to what Alan has possibly accidentally done, maybe I could illustrate my own aesthetic ideals and influences in art by narrating some of its lineage.