[PREV - RIDING_DOUBLE]    [TOP]

THE_CRUDE_VIRTUOSO

                                             July 17, 2013

In the early 70s, I was watching Rock
n' Roll be displaced by increasingly
slick, heavily-produced mimicry, and I
was ready for the punk revolution, the     A particular peeve of mine
elevation of crude passion over            was symphonic strings
technical proficiency.                     slapped over the guitars
                                           and drums.
   I had a sense that
   being a trained                                       A cartoon version
   muscian was dangerous,                                of this story is
   potentially                                           that it was punk
   counterproductive.        But that's an               vs progressive
   You could get lost in     exaggeration of             rock-- but actually
   precision, you could      what I really felt:         progressive rock
   get corrupted by          I learned early on          was dying long
   convention.  Far          that the rough              before punk: punk
   better the clumsy         sound of punk               was more of an
   stumbling of the punk     records could be a          anti-disco revolution.
   novice...                 producer-manufactured       Torn T-shirts
                             illusion.                   rather than
                                                         pristine white
                                                         suits.

    In my later "work" in noise
    performance, I would intentionally
    avoid designing an instrument
    tuned to any particular scale--

    The hope was (and is?) that
    by picking up random pieces
    of scrap metal and using them
    in sound art, that this would
    push you into new, unfamiliar    UNINTENDED
    territory, it would make it
    impossible to do something
    trite.


        Then I began paying attention
        to the "bay area improv scene",
        and I found a community of
        musicians, most of them highly
        trained and very capable,
        who were nevertheless not
        at all trapped by that training.

        They easily stepped outside the
        bonds of convention at will.



--------
[NEXT - MELD]