What Does “Prolific” Mean? Part 2
Round Table is a forum where artists, writers, musicians, and listeners can engage in conversation about the issues that impact sonic art. Each month a panel of four artists discuss and respond to each other on a chosen topic.
Current topic: What Does Prolific Mean?
Some bands and labels seem to crank out albums at a pace that makes listeners either race Pokemon-like to collect ‘em all, or else wonder about how much effort could possibly be put into each one. But what does being prolific mean to an artist? Or to a critic who writes about all those albums? Last week, Ben Hall wrote about the economic limitations on improvising artists who depend on a record label to publish their work. Over the next two weeks, we will hear from Mattin and Dan Warburton. Today, Brandon LaBelle, author of the new book Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life (2010, Continuum Books), weighs in…
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BRANDON LABELLE:
I have very distinct memories of visiting Aron’s Records in Hollywood. Beginning in the 80′s as a high school student, I’d drive into Hollywood on weekend mornings to spend a few hours sifting through the used bins of records, examining covers for signs of provocation and promise – I was not there to pick up the latest release, but to explore the unfamiliar, the mysterious, the daring. The used record bin was a source of discovery, and each record, with its scuffs and abrasions, a process of identification and attraction. I’m sure this memory resonates with many readers here, and for myself, this became a ritualized event deeply connected to the imagination and the emotional life.
These weekends eventually spilled over into weekdays years later, as I finally moved into the city. In the early to mid-90s, Aron’s also developed an “experimental music” section, thanks to the likes of Damion Romero who (if I remember correctly) became one of the buyers for the shop at that time; all of which coincided with my own deeper immersion into the culture of sonic art: the experimental music section became a site for connecting to the greater culture of noise happening out there in the world and within which I thought I might participate. I would enter the record shop and head straight to the experimental section, which was rather tiny in comparison to the other parts of the store. There I would look at each record, tape, and CD, reading carefully all their available notes, wondering about the sounds contained therein, while eventually selecting a few considered items to take home. From Cranioclast to Zoviet France to Organum and Arcane Device, not to mention all those noise tapes from Japan (Aube, et al), or the more conceptual projects of RLW, SBOTHI and the SELEKTION releases, having access to this material significantly fed my expanding sonic attitude, as well as the expanding noise scene in LA at this time. In the end, I attribute my own full-blown embrace of experimental music to these four or five bins found at Aron’s Records.
I recount these memories because the expansion and total restructuring of both the production and consumption of experimental music has radically shifted, as we know, replacing the ritualized search for that rare import to the downloadable file always already available. (In giving a quick google on Cranioclast – a group I have not thought about it in more than 10 years – I have already accessed more information on their activities than I ever knew before, not to mention accessed a few sound files.) In addition, the proliferation of experimental music and sonic work has certainly been influenced by the availability of digital tools, and the connective networking of sub-cultures across the globe through digital systems, making the sharing of sounds an extremely smooth action. Even now, writing this on my laptop I have within my reach an enormous amount of on-line work all within a few clicks. For myself, I take this as an extremely interesting and provocative development (which of course spans beyond the field of experimental music, to generate a “networked culture” which Kazys Varnelis highlights as a deep paradigm shift in society), which must also be heard to influence our listening habits: might the proliferation of sonic matter and dissemination point toward new understandings of music in general?
I’m reminded in turn of Adorno’s own critical appraisal of new modern forms of production, distribution and consumption of music in the 1930s, which for him stripped the aura of high art music to create a culture of regressive listening: making available the classics of modernism to radio listeners during an afternoon of house cleaning, for instance, developed within the public “certain capacities which accord less with the concepts of traditional aesthetics than with those of football and motoring.” Music for Adorno was relegated to a form of “entertainment.” I somehow wonder if the opposite is actually occurring today: even though the ability to consume musical material has intensified (and mostly on speaker systems that Adorno would certainly have something to say about), I feel that we may actually be listening with deeper creative and generative flair. The “process based art” Ben Hall maps out in his text is not only apparent on the part of the producer, artist or composer; but in turn, on the part of the listener and receiver, whose act of acquiring a given work, through an array of means, participates within a greater flow of identification and incorporation and sharing – how sound and music, because of their proliferating output and dissemination, find further points of contact within our lives, and importantly, as collective material.
Even though I may never experience again those great pleasures in finding one rare copy of a limited edition Zoviet France record, this also makes me appreciate how more connected I am to an ever-growing culture of sonic production and diffusion. This may also diffuse the intensity of our concentrated ear, as was noted in some of the respondent’s comments. Yet I wonder if this may only be part of the creative and critical movements of our contemporary auditory culture, as the flipside to the more positive suggestions I’m mapping here: with diffusion comes both the loosening of a particular system as well as new possibilities for connection. The degrading of the original object may certainly turn music into forms of pure information: immaterial code without “real” value. (The closing of Aron’s Records in 2005 after years of being the most important independent record shop in LA may remind of these proliferating consequences…) Yet the flows of information also find dynamic pockets of listening and appropriation to possibly create new forms of community – what drove Adorno mad was not so much the shattering of his precious moment of listening, but his understanding of music’s direct connection to questions of the social structure. For myself, I remain extremely curious and optimistic as to where the contemporary model of proliferation may ultimately lead us, and what forms of identity, politics, and intimacy, not to mention music, this may inspire.
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Brandon LaBelle is an artist and writer working with sound and the specifics of location. His work explores the space between sound and sociality, using performance and on-site constructions as creative supplements to existing conditions.
Tags: Adorno, Arcane Device, Aron's Records, Aube, Ben Hall, Brandon LaBelle, Cranioclast, Damion Romero, Dan Warburton, Hollywood, Mattin, modernism, Organum, RLW, Round Table, SBOTHI, Selektion, Zoviet France