![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
m_d_hI was thinking about picking a slightly different pen name, one that wouldn't sound 100% American male anymore, so I was wondering whether "Mattin" is a name, and it is, but the DuckDuckGo search engine led me to a Basque artist from Bilboa who already goes by the name Mattin -- as one word -- and the more I looked at what he's been up to, the more entranced I became with how he thinks, and now I finished listening to a one-hour experimental album of his (Lagos Sessions by Billy Bao).
And then I bought it; I want to listen again on some good speakers rather than my good headphones.
And now I'm getting more excited about making my own music again. But will I put the time into it, taking away from my relaxation time? I've gotten into a groove of work, chores, exercise, relaxation, that's mostly been working for me during Quarantine, compared to the difficult emotions I had for much of last year. I want to spend more time creating music, but I'm concerned about giving myself too many things to do, all work and no play ... I'm afraid of turning music into work by creating an expectation for myself ... it's more something I want to focus on after I retire, or after I'm living by myself in a lower-maintenance dwelling.
-----
I like that Mattin takes the phrase "experimental music" seriously. Even more seriously than Autechre, which was my last extended foray into listening to experimental music. After listening to Mattin for an hour I feel like he blew up what I used to consider music. He focuses on improv, performance art, confronting audiences rather than catering to them, and theorizing about the role of art both under and apart from capitalism.
He used to give away most of his expansive oeuvre without charge on his website, but he says he lost most of it -- didn't say how -- I presume a hard drive died and he hadn't made backup copies -- but as an improv artist he doesn't seem too upset about it -- which reminds me of the architect Frank Lloyd Wright, who would probably be appalled today if he were to discover that many of his buildings are not lived in but are preserved without change as tourist sites.
Recording music is like drowning that prehistoric dragonfly in amber and displaying it on a shelf millions of years later, excised from its context. It's dead. It's never going to sound different, it's never going to grow. Recording music fossilizes sound, trapping us in a past.
But, then, so is writing, a form of recorded speech, it's dead. As soon as I finish typing this, it's dead. As a photograph is dead, a motion picture is dead. A painting or sculpture is dead. I never thought of it all this way before, but if you aren't interacting with others, give-and-take in real time, you're surrounding yourself with the dead.
Growing up, when I spent my school bus commute reading books instead of interacting with my fellow students, I was retreating into a world of the dead. More literally so when reading an author who was no longer alive, but the published work of a living author is no less dead. Think about what we mean when we say we're attending a "live" performance. How did that adjective come to fit our description? Perhaps when recordings first arose, people experienced them as voices of the dead.
And then I bought it; I want to listen again on some good speakers rather than my good headphones.
And now I'm getting more excited about making my own music again. But will I put the time into it, taking away from my relaxation time? I've gotten into a groove of work, chores, exercise, relaxation, that's mostly been working for me during Quarantine, compared to the difficult emotions I had for much of last year. I want to spend more time creating music, but I'm concerned about giving myself too many things to do, all work and no play ... I'm afraid of turning music into work by creating an expectation for myself ... it's more something I want to focus on after I retire, or after I'm living by myself in a lower-maintenance dwelling.
-----
I like that Mattin takes the phrase "experimental music" seriously. Even more seriously than Autechre, which was my last extended foray into listening to experimental music. After listening to Mattin for an hour I feel like he blew up what I used to consider music. He focuses on improv, performance art, confronting audiences rather than catering to them, and theorizing about the role of art both under and apart from capitalism.
He used to give away most of his expansive oeuvre without charge on his website, but he says he lost most of it -- didn't say how -- I presume a hard drive died and he hadn't made backup copies -- but as an improv artist he doesn't seem too upset about it -- which reminds me of the architect Frank Lloyd Wright, who would probably be appalled today if he were to discover that many of his buildings are not lived in but are preserved without change as tourist sites.
Recording music is like drowning that prehistoric dragonfly in amber and displaying it on a shelf millions of years later, excised from its context. It's dead. It's never going to sound different, it's never going to grow. Recording music fossilizes sound, trapping us in a past.
But, then, so is writing, a form of recorded speech, it's dead. As soon as I finish typing this, it's dead. As a photograph is dead, a motion picture is dead. A painting or sculpture is dead. I never thought of it all this way before, but if you aren't interacting with others, give-and-take in real time, you're surrounding yourself with the dead.
Growing up, when I spent my school bus commute reading books instead of interacting with my fellow students, I was retreating into a world of the dead. More literally so when reading an author who was no longer alive, but the published work of a living author is no less dead. Think about what we mean when we say we're attending a "live" performance. How did that adjective come to fit our description? Perhaps when recordings first arose, people experienced them as voices of the dead.