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2 videos and a lot of venting
StoreTags: video, stop motion, minimal, crap
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So I've been in NY for about 7 months, and have been getting kind of disillusioned about the scene here. I grew up reading about mind blowing events that would happen with regularity. John Cage was friends with Jackson Pollock, and Merce Cunningham (among others) and they all met frequently at some bar where they would talk about stuff then put together mind blowing works. I've been scouring the scene pretty hard since I've gotten here, and have yet to find something that really blows me away.
Aside from that, I can't even find SAFE experimentalish stuff. Things that are categorized under the umbrella term experimental because they come out of a tradition that has its roots there. When searching for shows, I tend to find a lot of minimal house, or free jazz. 12k, although based in NY, only has shows in europe as far as I can tell. Big venues like Roulette and The Stone have very "safe" experimental artists. I saw Fred Frith and Pauline Oliveros live, and although I liked it a lot more than most of the improvised music I've seen in NY, it left a lot to be desired. Other venues claim to book experimental artists, but that usually means an indie rock band that's too crappy to go mainstream. In order to apologize for their lack of skill or musicality, they claim to be experimental, but it really means that the balance is waaay off, and there's no sense of rhythm even though they're clearly trying to lay down a beat.
This brings me to my main rant. I love the work of Keith Fullerton Whitman, Sebastien Roux, Joe Colley, Rhys Chatham, Rafael Toral, Sawako, and a whole lot of other artists who might either be impressive to name drop or wankerish. I don't really care. I love their sounds, and I know that there are other people who do as well. I know there are people who are even more underground who do stuff in a similar vein...or perhaps they do something TOTALLY different and mind blowing, however, there's a good chance I'll never be able to go to a show to see them since they don't have a drummer and a singer who will whine about crap that the kids are into these days, and yet they're far too tonal to interest the academic pricks. I would have thought that if I'd be able to see these artists live anywhere, it'd be in NY, but I was horribly mistaken.
I'd like to emphasize that I'm not looking for personal glory. Playing shows and seeing them are 2 different things. I'd like to be able to leave my apartment every now and then and actually see a show that defies both popular music and academic wankery. I like watching academically sanctioned concerts, and I like going to punk rock shows, or seeing disco dj's or whatever. It's all good, but the stuff that really blows my mind is impossible to find. I'd love to see a laptopist live who didn't feel the need to rock the beats.
I'm totally disillusioned. Here are 2 videos I did almost a year ago. Both are studies in micromovement...nothing new, but new to me. They don't really mean anything and I'll be the first to admit that I don't know crap about video. I basically liked the idea, so I made them, and will hopefully make more in the near future. This isn't really the proper place to post them, and they won't make you want to dance or laugh or anything. Like most of the tracks I post, I'm doing it because I don't really know what else to do with them.
I'm at the point where I'd much rather people think I suck at what I do than to feel like I need to do something people would like. I've made music (electronic and otherwise) that has seen MINOR popularity, and it never feels as good as the stuff that risks having the pa turned off in the middle of your set, or the curtain closed.
Feel free to start a flame war. It might lead to interesting conversation/debate.
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06/29/07
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reehc
Maybe the good stuff is really badly promoted and so hard to find?
I think that everywhere in world there are far too many ropey indie bands
or maybe you should start putting on your own nights?
& I think you should make more videos, I really liked them.
06/29/07
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Fredo
Hey, Bryan...
NY has changed. Drastically. It was always a place where people came to "make it" but it used to be a place where you could afford to live on a very low budget. No more. Not even Brooklyn. Everything is just too f'ing expensive, and the audiences that shell out dough are on the whole not so imaginative. There's a mammoth yuppie vibe permeating NYC in every neighborhood.
Back in the early 80s and through to like '92 NYC was awesome. It seemed more innocent, although also more violent. It wasn't a spoiled rich couple with matching cell-phones and multi-media devices sipping matching Starbucks... The subway system was super scary, and that was part of it's excitement. I used to ride it and would almost explode with inspiration whenever the lights would go out (which happened on a regular basis and they would often stay out for minutes at a time.) There were drugs sold in the streets. Sex in the alleys and on quiet trains. Much more music and art venues everywhere...
I remember a movie theater on... I guess West 4th street... I believe it is now a post card shop (I kid you not) that showed art films and oddball double features. I would visit it regularly. One day the lights in front of the theater were taken out and replaced with red lights. I went to check it out... the theater had gone porn. Just for one single day. Next day it was normal again. Weird!
Also I can remember seeing Fellini's Casanova down in the South Street Seaport area in a theme-theater which had mechanical pirate dolls on it's stage. There was maybe only three or four of us in the theater. It was one of the most magical shows I can imagine.
In fact, sometimes I wonder if some of my recollections of NYC from my late teens through to my late twenties were dreams. But I know they were real. It's really sad to see what the city has become. It's much safer, sure, but, again, it feels like a spoiled yuppie now eating an ice-cream cone whilst texting about a sweater it just bought. Ugh.
06/29/07
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Fredo
Loved your fan film, by the way. How did you edit that? Must have been a bitch! Very interesting study...
06/29/07
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Fredo
The Whitney had a show of Bill Viola's that filled the whole museum and that totally blew me away, btw. That was about... 6 years ago maybe?
Did you know that in Soho it used to be that you had to prove that you were a painter before they would let you sign a lease for an apartment? This is back in the 60s and 70s I'm referring to... and the leases were very cheap.
06/29/07
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Tripnik
ha! Fredo, I just realized that you're playing soon. You'd better bring it or I'll make you the topic of my next rant!
Your yuppification theory of NY is interesting and also sad. I wonder if the same thing is going on in california. While show hunting, I see a lot of things that look interesting happening in the bay area, but then again, when I was show hunting in Wisconsin, I'd find a lot of interesting stuff happening here. It's probably a nasty 'grass is greener' effect.
The fan film was automated. I tried to time the rotation of the fan in bpms, then set my computer/dv cam to take a snapshot at that interval. The speed of the fan fluctuated for various reasons, though, so it ended up really jittery. I totally stole this idea from kfw's turntable experiments.
reehc: The fact that interesting shows COULD be going on right now and I'm just not hearing about them due to poor advertisement or not looking in the proper places makes me even more anxious. My roomates and I have been talking about opening our loft up to use as a venue to hopefully try to create a sense of the artistic community we were hoping to find, but first, there are a lot of logistics involved that need to be ironed out. Second, we'd still need to find people doing the sort of stuff we'd want to host. It's a good suggestion, though, and one that should be pursued more aggressively on our side.
06/29/07
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Fredo
I'll do the best I can, hopefully sing well and all that, but again, one nights rehearsal... That said, I was planning on doing another night in August... maybe we could work out an 8Bit performance there too. And if you have some other friends whose music you really love we could talk about doing a long night of music. I know that me and my friends all have the same goals that you have. We all just want to feel the solidarity and inspiration of being part of an exciting movement, or just be working around interesting folk could be good!
06/29/07
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bbwax
are cities in general burnt though? portland seems to be going strong judging from this site.
maybe artist communes will make a comeback. new technology would help. eco-friendly housing, self-sustaining wind and solar power, crops. but if all the artists are living on communes might be hard to find an audience. you'd have to bus them in for shows/events, hehe.
06/29/07
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quip
you just summed up alot of what i feel about music as a whole in my city.
i live in a thriving metropolitan city, leeds. i am told repeatedly by the media that leeds has a blossoming music scene, more musicians than anywhere else. so why then when i go out and sound engineer bands do i have to see so called indie bands pretending to be punks and dressing up like their dad. there is nothing new here. no new territories explored at all. there are some great bands agreed. but recently having had the experience of programming a festival line up i found it a very tiring experience to get through all the rubbish.
basically the idiots are winning and you new neighbour has a bmw. experimental music will always be marginalised, but to not have any in a large city
is completely rediculous. and it saddens me to hear new york has gone the same way.
06/29/07
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j_chot
hey guess what!
you are fucking whiney. enjoy what you got.
make some "unsafe" experimental then.
I hear LOTS of REALLY experimental music in the boonies ("they're doing noise jazz with an electric cello and 42 effects pedals")
what the problem with newyork now adays is that it's gentrified. rent is too high. no real artists live there anymore. go to philly or san francisco
I hear austin is really great. HEY! one of my favorite bands the zom zoms come from austin!
06/29/07
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oxymoron
It's not surprising at all. At the same time, it represents an opportunity for you. If nobody else is doing it (or more likely not doing it with any panache), it's your chance to build a community. It will not be easy, but trust me it works.
06/29/07
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soundhdack
Personally, I think Rudy Giuliani did a lot to fuck up the creative soul of NYC. But so has copyright lawyers and legislators. See NYC was the place where people would rip one another off in games of oneupmanship. That entirely is what made NYC what it used to be. No Fear. Now it's all about property and lawsuits. Anyway, when I moved to Boston back in '92 NYC was still thriving. Hip Hop was only about 11-12 years old at that time and so all of the graffiti and mad art was still in high gear. I'm from the era of Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basiquiat, etc. When I grew up that's what was filling my head. So experimental had a very different meaning then because, really, new visions were being expressed on a constant basis, there were no real standards, and corporations had yet to lock things down the way they have recently. When you went clubbing back then it didn't matter if you went to a "gay" club or a "straight" club, the bouncers just wanted to know basically if you were cool with the scene. So there I was partying with every kind of person imaginable and loving it, and not feeling uncomfortable because I wasn't as "out there" as some of the people I hung with. So, I've been to the city recently and it is seriously missing that vibe I used to know. I can tell that 9/11 really put the fear into the city's heart, which is a damn shame because the sense of danger used to be part of what gave NYC its edge and its vitality. Now it's so fucking clean with 10 cops on every corner it seems. There's no way that Hank Shocklee or Andy Warhol could have done today the works they did back in the 80's, also the 60's in Warhol's case and not have been litigated to death in today's copyright/intellectual property rights environment. So is the city dead? I don't think so, but it's not the same, it's just had it's balls cut off. Which, of course, is a shame.
Btw, Keith Fullerton Whitman's music is great.
06/29/07
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craque
i've noticed this about NYC as well, even not being there. the experimental scene seems to have fled the big apple. or has it just fled the physical?
there's a lot of personal dynamic that happened in the 20th century that is disappearing in the 21st.
communication and collaboration is much less face-to-face. technology has opened up paths to new dimensions of working together, the world moves quicker, we connect in convenient ways instead of coming together in groups.
so i wonder if there's some critical balance between the population and the ability for experimental music to thrive. i've known artists who have 'fled' to other cities from large ones in the past decade, so maybe some large places just aren't for them any longer. maybe there's a new generation of experimentalists surging in our big cities.
i've been through a few towns and remember a lot more venues for truly unique individual performance, especially on a grass roots level. seems like these places are disappearing, i don't know if that's due to general gentrification or not.
06/29/07
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craque
oh cool vids btw, i enjoyed the 2nd one
06/30/07
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lunatinker
"i wonder if the same thing is happening in california"....
i believe it is. i did not find what i was looking for in SFbay 1.5 years ago...not even close.
Mc'donalds' developers galore, but no scene that i liked.
it is starting in portland, but will take a long time. coffee people disappeared but there are
still great neighborhoods and music nights. i'm digging the jazz/blues scene and the
ballroom that my GF's theater troupe rented now has full bar + music weekly.
there are rotating scenes and people, but portland is safer for me.
i would rather listen to not perfect but individually cultivated music of any kind.
portland hasn't lost it yet.
...hope things get more itneresting for you tripnik. you never know what's waiting around
the next corner or what will happen next week.
06/30/07
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tylth
i once read a book about nyc's underground, how there are lots of floors beneath it like a rabbit warren and that there'a a whole population of people giving birth and basically life there, maybe that's the place to be
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