New track on mah myspace, recorded this eve. Have discovered my computer no longer creates its’ own feedback like it used to, so I have to create it now by leaving mics just close enough to the speakers.

Bit of a new bio on the site too, trying to make the point that while I may not make especially technical music, what I try to do with every piece I create is have something in it that might make you think of something else, make you sit and listen to what your head is saying in whatever space you’re in.

Or something like that, I don’t know, I just don’t want to over-complicate things.

Here’s a new picture of an old man smoking. The idea is that they tell me stories, don’t know if you’re picking up on that.

On Wednesday myself and our web admin Taran successfully launched the website and first issue of ‘goofbang’, the digital zine for artists around Australia and the world. After launching a fairly lacklustre and ugly blogspot account (the current holder of this blog), Taran offered me some space on his mail server and set me up with a hosting site at nearlyfreespeech.net, and we then spent two weeks building the site, laying it out and fixing all the things that werewrong with the zine when it was prematurely published the week before.

We’ve now got a wonderfully functional, good-looking yet simple site that makes a great home for goofbang. Check it at:

www.goofbang.com

As I dove into the internet to find answers as to what Relational Aesthetics are (for weekly readings in CFI at school), I browsed the wiki page which wound up confusing me. From what I gathered, solely from the wiki page, Relational Aesthetics is a book by Nicolas Bourriaud about the modern art movement he has entitled ‘Relational Art‘; a practice that presents art as a representation of the entirety of human relations as a whole, rather than having an individual focus point in other forms of art. The only thing I can relate this to personally is the idea of a flash mob, in which a group of people gather together through their phones to perform a surprise dance or choreographed move that is viewed by a large number of people. Bourriaud says that

‘the audience is viewed more as community. Rather than the artwork being an encounter between a viewer and an object, relational art produces intersubjective encounters. Through these encounters, meaning is elaborated collectively, rather than in the space of individual consumption.’

…and I’m still confused. It seems to be a very hard thing to pin down, just exactly what Relational Art is, or does. Further internetting led to me to take a peek at some more links, which led to a documentary about Relational Art, done by Ben Lewis for BBC4. The site which hosts the video, UBUWeb, has a screenshot in the left corner of their website from Un Chien Andalou, which I thought was a nice piece of synchronicity to my earlier post.

Upon watching the documentary, the idea and concepts of relational aesthetics in art became more clear. Like all art movements, there are are many different levels that relational art can operate on, like dealing with the interactivity of the art, the functionality and usefulness of the art, and how ‘relative’ it is to a group of people or, to a lesser extent, the individual. It still, however, seems elusive, unable to completely describe itself, to summarize and get back to me with a solid idea of what it is, exactly, which is not a bad thing. I feel it’s just a symptom of youth of the movement, something all types of art must go through at some point.

A few quotes popped up during the documentary that caught my attention, the first being an excerpt from the short film about the concepts of relational-like art and its’ practice, Vicinato II.

‘My nightmare, is walking through the woods in the snow, surrounded by people pointing out how nice it is to be walking through the woods in the snow, with other people pointing out how nice it is to be walking through the woods in the snow….’

The meaning is unclear in the doco, but from what I can garner from the very brief discussion about it is that things like forests and nature have been preserved and protected to a point where its very safe and harmless, cleaned and sterilized (in the eyes of these particular artists). The nightmare comes from the other people feeling the need to bring attention to the fact that they are walking through the woods, which is nice, which denotes to the derisive artists that these people are not thinking, not challenging, not progressing. A very cutthroat ideal, in my book, but interesting nonetheless.

The second quote is

‘When you feel good, you are more willing to speculate and less willing to plan.’

This quote fits in interestingly with the previous one, alluding to the point that if people feel good, comfortable, relaxed in their surroundings, they are less likely to realize the trappings they are falling under and less likely to work out a way out of it. It follows a very left wing, anti-capitalist ideal of subversion and thinking for yourself.

As for Nicolas Bourriaud, I feel that the banner that he is trying to drape over these modern relational artists is a good one, but seeing as it is still so early in the life of this alleged art ‘movement”, it would be difficult, also a little preemptive, to try to label artists as falling into the very broad category of relational art. Who knows, someone may come along in five years and come up with a better term to describe it.

Some names to check out if you want to read some more; Vanessa Beecroft, Phillipe Parreno, Rikrit Tiravanija

A piece by Rikrit Tiravanija, dirty dishes from a meal cooked at an exhibition of his work.

Recent events have sparked me to change my musical venturing from the somewhat pathless olt project to a more vivid, uncharted area for myself in what I’ve chosen to term Transmissions. I work predominantly with live, processed feedback from my home computer run through Ableton Live, as well as bass and guitar feedback to create a space for listening. Not many people actually want to listen to me ramble with feedback for 20 minutes or so, but I want to meet every single person that does.

olt signified a transition, from trying to make music unsuccessfully to suddenly having an output and making multiple pieces of music at a time. Stepping back to look at it now, it was a very formative period and I feel as though I’m moving more into a collaboration/live setting, incorporating the self-generated noise into a room with other self-generating noises.

I hope to include these creations in classwork that I’m doing for my Bachelor of Theatre Production at the VCA, keeping the ball rolling in terms of output and also still releasing, hopefully at some point, the planned split 3″ CD release with Reuben on my good friend Damien’s LaMachine label. He’s not had the best time of late and I wish him the best.

If you have any work that you need a soundscape for, please let me know. I’d really love to incorporate some foley sound into my practice too.

http://www.myspace.com/transmissionsreceived

Finished that assignment that the last post was about. For this class I have called CFI, we had write a 500 word essay on an archive, be it public, personal, virtual, whatever. I chose my music collection, which has shifted and expanded significantly over the years. I had alot of trouble squeezing in everything I wanted to talk about, there was so much more back story I wanted to give, but alas 500 was the limit. So I generally stick to pointing out that it is an archive and I talk about how I organize. it. Anyway, shutup, read it yourself.

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We understand libraries as a fairly common thing; a source of information, an archive of knowledge, something we utilize every day of our lives and often without realizing it. Any collection of old objects you have around your house can be described as an archive, a systematically organized series of back-ups that over time form a collection. For this assignment, I have chosen my music collection, an archive that is dearly loved by me and meticulously organized.

I decipher my record collection in many different ways. For starters, I have my collection spread across several platform types, including CD, MP3, Cassette and Vinyl. I started collecting music from around 13 (now 25), using multiple cassettes and recorded songs from Triple J, often getting two tape decks and dubbing tracks across to make mixtapes. I began filling them up with songs from CD’s I had bought or borrowed off friends, and my collection steadily grew. Over the following years I spent a fair bit my earned money on music. My collection swelled gradually, buying around 2-3 albums a week and taking a long time to actually digest them all in my brain. I got used to listening to so much music at once that in college a pair of headphones barely ever left my head. I had moved on to CD’s entirely by this point, making mix discs of mp3’s I had downloaded and burnt onto CD for use in my trusty discman. I would pull in full albums very slowly over a dial-up connection and listen to them gleefully, embracing the technology and finding new music constantly. On more than a few occasions I would rip my entire CD collection onto my harddrive, just to bolster the size of files that I had at the time, and to add more albums to the collection. In the year 2000 my mp3 count was around 3000, it now floats around 17,000 as I’ve run out of harddrive space to fit it all. I share my collection online now and then as well.

My file system for my MP3s is designed very simply, with a folder in the root directory for the artist, then a subsequent folder for each album. I have alot of songs that aren’t from any album like a b-side or live track, and these are put in the artist folder or in a Misc, Live or otherwise named folder. Each file has an ID3 tag, which is an info file encoded onto each MP3. Music software can read this and you can tag it with any information you like, such as artist, track name, number, etc. It is a constant struggle to maintain tags for such a large file system, with new albums coming in all the time, but I try to keep it tidy.

Since 2006 I have now held a top albums ranking, making a shortlist of my favourite 50 or 100 albums, then chiseling them down to a lower number, coming out with 10 in 2006 and 25 just recently. It is a tiring process but it is somehow satisfying knowing that you have a list of the albums that have meant the most to you in your lifetime. Find a copy of these on the overleaf.

Favourite Albums List 27-11-06:

1. Jeff Buckley – Grace (1994)
2. Pink Floyd – Dark Side Of The Moon (1973)
3. The Beatles – Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967)
4. The Doors – L.A. Woman (1971)
5. At The Drive-In – In/Casino/Out (1998)
6. Boards Of Canada – Music Has The Right To Children (1998)
7. Led Zeppelin – II (1969)
8. Coldplay – Parachutes (2000)
9. Metallica – …And Justice For All (1989)
10. Nine Inch Nails – Broken (1992)
11. Radiohead – Kid A (2000)
12. Marilyn Manson – Smells Like Children (1995)
13. Gomez – Liquid Skin (1999)
14. The Dandy Warhols – Thirteen Tales From Urban Bohemia (2000)
15. Tool – Undertow (1993)
16. Faith No More – King For A Day Fool For A Lifetime (1995)
17. Kyuss – …And The Circus Leaves Town (1995)
18. The Tea Party – Splendor Solis (1993)
19. Fugazi – Repeater (1990)
20. Death From Above 1979 – Heads Up (2002)