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…...........................…psychic vampire. wrote:The important take away from this thread: Taoism and Ring Modulators go together?
…...........................…psychic vampire. wrote:The important take away from this thread: Taoism and Ring Modulators go together?
I find when I perform on tour, I meet a lot of people in my audience who are into grindcore and death metal and stuff. I remember I was on tour, I think around 2003 – I was on a label which was primarily a subsidiary to a grindcore label, Release and Relapse – Relapse was a death metal label essentially, and Release was its experimental ambient side. I was mastering a lot of the release albums, in fact. I’m friends with a lot of these bands like Neurosis and such.
So this guy came up to have an autograph of one of my albums, and he had a shirt of one of these bands – I think it was Nile – and he had all these tattoos and piercings and tribal things. I said “Let me ask you – I see that you’re into metal – what do you find interesting about my music?” And he said, “You know, I can’t be angry all the time. Sometimes I want to relax and have something that’s not grinding, but I still like intensity, and your music fits that.” He said, “Your music is calming, but it’s intense – it’s not pretty, it’s deep.” And this was a guy who liked what we call Cookie Monster music (the vocals that grind in low noise, like the Muppets character), but there was an attraction to the deeper side of what I do from an audience thats into very dark music. I found a lot more of that than folks into New Age that listen to my work. I think my stuff is a little bit edgy for massage [laughs].
But yet it’s not dark music. I’m not a dark person. People think that about the album Stalker that I did with Lustmord because they mistake the theme as being about serial killers, whereas it’s really about Tarkovsky and the journey through the soul. I think part of it is that I’m not afraid of mystery, and I like the experience of awe and wonder, and for me that has to contain within it the shadows – it has to remind us of mortality, but also of the magic of existence. I truly want to create music that’s wondrous and mysterious, and it’s doesn’t bother me that much – if people want to interpret it as being dark or mellow or therapeutic, that’s kind of their problem.
…...........................…psychic vampire. wrote:The important take away from this thread: Taoism and Ring Modulators go together?
…...........................…psychic vampire. wrote:The important take away from this thread: Taoism and Ring Modulators go together?
…...........................…psychic vampire. wrote:The important take away from this thread: Taoism and Ring Modulators go together?
Originally, Matt McBane, who kind of came up with the term, and Judd Greenstein, who in particular brought it into the world of New Amsterdam, meant this idea of doing an indie, D.I.Y. thing that was outside the classical music industry mainstream. At the same time, one of the things that I didn’t talk about in my dissertation but I thought was interesting was: Why isn’t doing music by dead people in that context indie classical? It’s funny that it’s called indie classical, but playing Beethoven in a club wouldn’t fall under that as far as those people would define it. It meant contemporary music, by a certain scene of musicians, who wanted to call themselves that.
When you look at those definitions, you can always be like, Why isn’t it this? The easy answer is, It’s not that because that wasn’t part of their purview when they named themselves. They had an idea, they defined that idea in a particular way. Though they didn’t really closely circumscribe it, so if you read some blog posts and essays Judd Greenstein wrote in 2008 and 2009, he’ll reference the idea of indie classical having aesthetic implications. It’s only later where people had started to define it as a sound that he decided to really strongly say, “No, it’s not a sound, it’s this other thing.”
I think the floating signifier is important in that context. Although they may have meant for it to be this one specific thing, it’s not terrible for it to mean those other things to a certain degree. If you can add more definitional weight to a term, people will use it more. Just like indie rock. It maybe meant this D.I.Y. or alternative rock, but at the same time, in the 1990s, alternative rock was like four guys in a college band—there were sonic implications to that term as well.
Genre always has that. And if we think about this idea of genre not only being about sound, but it being about context, production values, where you see the music, how you feel when you see the music, all of those different aspects—then you can call indie classical a genre in that regard, and feel comfortable about the fact that it has this additive quality to it.
When ensembles or string quartets talk about themselves like being in a rock band, the thing is: It’s a different cultural economy to exist in an ensemble or string quartet. It allows you to have access to different resources, like non-profit funding. Hopefully you can make a career out of that in a way that you may not be able to unless you’re in a really famous band. For the most part, these ensembles do not tour in vans around the country, driving from place to place. I’m not criticizing people for wanting to sleep in hotels and getting paid significant amounts of money by universities and classical music presenters—I think everyone should get those resources. And increasingly, those cultural institutions, and especially university arts presenters, are working with rock bands and more multi-genre projects.
I do think there’s something maybe a little bit problematic about wearing the guise of being in a rock band while essentially—besides placing your music in the place where the rock band does its things—existing in a totally different cultural economy.
Also, indie rock, indie classical—these are both extremely white, privileged worlds. It’s not like [indie classical musicians] are stealing music from African-American blues musicians and placing it in a different context and getting a lot of prestige for it. But there’s always something a little bit problematic about the framing of questions of genre
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…...........................…psychic vampire. wrote:The important take away from this thread: Taoism and Ring Modulators go together?
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