More Brian Eno

I was so knocked out by that reference to the Wired interview in Ritchin's book that I found the entire article on line. It's pretty amazing. The following jumped out and grabbed me and said "Hi, don't I know you?" : )

Africa is everything that something like classical music isn't. Classical - perhaps I should say "orchestral" - music is so digital, so cut up, rhythmically, pitchwise and in terms of the roles of the musicians. It's all in little boxes. The reason you get child prodigies in chess, arithmetic, and classical composition is that they are all worlds of discontinuous, parceled-up possibilities. And the fact that orchestras play the same thing over and over bothers me. Classical music is music without Africa. It represents old-fashioned hierarchical structures, ranking, all the levels of control. Orchestral music represents everything I don't want from the Renaissance: extremely slow feedback loops.

If you're a composer writing that kind of music, you don't get to hear what your work sounds like for several years. Thus, the orchestral composer is open to all the problems and conceits of the architect, liable to be trapped in a form that is inherently nonimprovisational, nonempirical. I shouldn't be so absurdly doctrinaire, but I have to say that I wouldn't give a rat's ass if I never heard another piece of such music. It provides almost nothing useful for me.

But what is tremendously exciting to me is the collision of vernacular Western music with African music. So much that I love about music comes from that collision. African music underlies practically everything I do - even ambient, since it arose directly out of wanting to see what happened if you "unlocked" the sounds in a piece of music, gave them their freedom, and didn't tie them all to the same clock. That kind of free float - these peculiar mixtures of independence and interdependence, and the oscillation between them - is a characteristic of West African drumming patterns. I want to go into the future to see this sensibility I find in African culture, to see it freed from the catastrophic situation that Africa's in at the moment. I don't know how they're going to get freed from that, but I desperately want to see this next stage when African culture begins once again to strongly impact ours.

"Gossip is Philosophy"
-Wired Magazine

After Photography in the morning

Woke up this morning thinking about how I will be framing my presentation for a Faculty Conversation Series I'm doing at my job this November on my photography. Once this happens I can't sleep anymore because too many ideas start streaming in. I got up and found my Ben Long book, "Complete Digital Photography" and "After Photography" by Fred Ritchin.

I have been reading "After Photography" on and off since last fall. It is part photography critique, part revelation, and an incredibly important voice that helps me to understand the far reaching hand of the digital age passed our reality, passed our death? Ritchin, in one of the last chapters I read this morning entitled "Of Synthetics and Cyborgs," refers to an interview with Brian Eno, musician and multimedia artist, with Wired Magazine.

If I could give you a black box that could do anything, what would you have it do?

I would love to have a box onto which I could offload choice making. A thing that makes choices about its outputs, and says to itself, This is a good output, reinforce that, or replay it, or feed it back in. I would love to have this machine stand for me. I could program this box to be my particular taste and interest in things.

Why do you want to do that? You have you.

Yes, I have me. But I want to be able to sell systems for making my music as well as selling pieces of music. In the future, you won't buy artists' works; you'll buy software that makes original pieces of "their" works, or that recreates their way of looking at things. You could buy a Shostakovich box, or you could buy a Brahms box. You might want some Shostakovich slow-movement-like music to be generated. So then you use that box. Or you could buy a Brian Eno box. So then I would need to put in this box a device that represents my taste for choosing pieces.

I guess the only thing weirder than hearing your own music being broadcast on the radios of strangers is hearing music that you might have written being broadcast!

Yes, music that I might have written but didn't!

Will you still like the idea of these surrogate Brian Enos when they start generating your best work?

Sure! Naturally, it's a modifiable box, you know. Say you like Brahms and Brian Eno. You could get the two of them to collaborate on something, see what happens if you allow them to hybridize. The possibilities for this are fabulous.

What's left for us to do then?

Cheat. And lie.

Stuff like this makes my mouth hang open. Let your passes on loved ones live on in your heart. Brian Eno will live on literally through you. Creepy and amazing. I haven't even put my pants on yet.