I finished reading the book of Morton Feldman’s writings, ‘Give My Regards to Eighth Street” which was, for the most part, very enjoyable.
There was one point that stood out to me, that applies to my own practice:
- Music has generally been valued on its “systems approach”, meaning that people praise or criticize the system of creating or composing the music, more than the sounds themselves. Pure interest in sound seems to be frightening for people in some way, or at least not interesting.
I have engaged in this myself. For example: my album Ad Hocc explained the process quite explicitly on the album artwork. This was seen by some as a joke, criticizing a systems approach to music, and seen my some as seriously supporting and engaging in it. I’m not actually sure which I was consciously pursuing at the time (both?). But on the other side of the systems, there is a massive focus on environmental sound on that composition. The sounds take center stage, much more than the process of composing it.
I am actively veering away from calling what I do with sound “music”. To some extent because of this systems mythology of the past. This is not to reject the past, just to recategorize my efforts to give them meaning to me and help me find motivation to continue to pursue them (music is not worth pursuing in my current view).
What I do with sound is focused on “sound”. In the world at large, I consider it “art”.
I am on a constant quest for sound. I bring a recorder with me everywhere I go (and if I don’t have it, I use a smartphone). There is an aspect of my practice that concerns documentation. My medium of choice is sound, as opposed to something like photography.
To me, as I write this, the most interesting development in sound is binaural and spacialized audio – a feeling that the sounds are occurring in relation to and/or moving around the listener. The listener is the subject of the art, the protagonist of the story. Their sensory world is the canvas upon which the sounds paint their colors and textures.