The Dressing of the Tongue (Sound Festival)

I am at the Sound Festival in Aberdeen. I am using the internet service at ACT. 

Sound is all about 'New Music'. This translates as 'music within a broadly classical framework (acoustic instruments, composition, no teenage girls singing about sex in their scants) that recognises the role of electronics but doesn't have a large audience'. 

My facile definition is not exactly challenged by the sector's self-descriptions.

I have had a great many ideas at Sound this weekend, inspired by the programme of In Cahoots, the conference organised by New Music Scotland. Some of those ideas were inspired by the speakers.

(Rob Kennedy made a cool point about how artists often use the word 'collaboration' when they really mean 'working with a community, taking their participation and not crediting them as co-creators', making it an analogue to the business practice of internships... or the festival practice of relying on volunteers to staff events).

One question that bothered me all the way through a solo clarinet recital was the problem of naming. The previous night, a dismal set of programme notes - rich on anecdotal detail, but poor at describing the actual structure of the performance - had sent me into a dreamless sleep... listening to a piece entitled Weird Machine, I pondered whether the actual composition would be any different had it been named Alien Landscape. Or Odd Animal. Or, since this is what it conjured for me, Masturbating on Citalapram.

Calling it Weird Machines - and justifying this by describing it as an attempt to compose a piece that captured the sound of a machine that runs according to unknown mechanical rules - seemed an imposition. Masturbating on Citalapram is far more descriptive. There was plenty of heavy breathing and fingering: it fragmented into a series of irregular rhythmic attacks, took way to long and ended with a triumphant squeak. Besides, the issue of libidinal discomfort caused by anti-depression medication is not covered enough in the arts. I bet SMHAFF would book it for 2016.

Although In Cahoots has a theme of collaboration (with an incidental obsession in the Sound Festival for stuff about astronomy), the debate for me has become words and their meanings. Is the exclusion of pop from the New Music rubric a sensible attempt to protect a niche enthusiasm, or an act of cultural snobbery that mystifies certain genres as high art? What is collaboration? Is using the metaphor of a critic trying to achieve orgasm an appropriate critical response to a clarinet solo? 

Homily on Jericho

I don't wish to sound like Philip K. Dick, but... what if The Bible is a prediction of the future rather than a history of the past. I'm thinking about sound and how it can be used as a weapon (thanks to Goodman's Sonic Warfare), and I am thinking about the battle of Jericho, where Joshua blew his horn and the walls fell down.

I looked it up on Wikipedia, and it seems as if my rough idea (there was a battle, but the trumpet trauma was a mythical addition) is probably contested. They haven't found the smoking ruins of Jericho that would fit with the Biblical story - at least, they are not sure. But I rather like the idea that The Book of Joshua is a mash-up, containing a bit of history (the Judaic conquest of Canaan) and a bit of futurology, vouchsafed to the author through whatever magical trance he conjured.

The Book of Joshua becomes like an early example of cyberpunk fiction, where future technologies are part of an ongoing conflict between the powers of good and evil... and another impeccable source explains that the story was probably written after the fall of Jerusalem, when the Jewish nation was in exile and wishing for reunion and repatriation. The myth is full of meaning, full of hope and uses the past to make the present bearable.

The parallels with cyberpunk and afro-futurism are inescapable. A downtrodden people dream of a time when they can usurp the technology of their masters, and become the players instead of the played. Simon Reynolds (in War in the Jungle) talks about how the fantasies of drum'n'bass are laced with darkness, that the bleak world conjured up is a place where the technocrats of dub can defeat the system through thaumaturgical science.  

Anyway, this is less like Philip K Dick and more like Borges - a deliberate misreading of the text, an ahistorical reading - can reveal hidden interpretations. But I don't think that I am out of the loop of Biblical exegesis... check out the picture. Notice how the artist dressed Joshua's Young Team? He was messing with anachronisms, too..