Striving to be *innovative* or *experimental* is almost invariably a blind alley as far as I’m concerned. Neither of them is particularly useful as a descriptor of music and the people who make it, and are pretty much always self-aggrandising when used by musicians themselves. If you make music just express yourself the best way you can, and if that’s a sound that people haven’t heard before (or have heard rarely) then that’s great and all, but no better than someone who has ploughed a strong and individual furrow in a particular idiom for an entire career who still sounds vital and alive. They’re buzzwords for the lazy, which is the exact opposite of what they’re intended to be. Unless those terms are thoroughly qualified they’re always short hand for unquestioned assumptions about the creative process and how its received.
I mean, take my aforementioned Feldman inspired piece. I made it using a two minidisk players, a CD player, a telly, a DVD player, a mixing desk and some effects. It’s almost all based on chance and the natural mistakes caused by pretty uncontrollable modes of expression (repeatedly hitting play and pause in time – but more often than not out of time – to a delay, and whatever weird distorted voices my telly/DVD/desk set up happened to be picking up after the telly was turned off). Was it innovative? Who cares? I wanted to make music and I can’t play any instruments besides drums. I wanted to make music with what I had at my disposal. Have other people made music using those methods before? Almost undoubtedly. You might be able to make a case for it being innovative in the context of me and what I knew how to do, but that would be to argue for innovation being entirely based on the individual and their situation and the pre-established techniques they’re aware of at the point of creation. That argument is not without worth unless it’s held as important above the musicians’ ability to self censor based on what sounds they like and what they don’t like, what they feel expresses them and what doesn’t. Likewise with being experimental. Yes, I had to adopt a trial and error approach to making music with those tools, to make mistakes and refine my approach. But a different musician would have done that with different criteria based on what they wanted to achieve, and so the act of experimenting with the methodology is practically no more *objectively experimental* than a rock band using a horn section if they’ve never done it before. My criteria for success with that methodology were to create a piece that maintains interest and atmosphere for eighty minutes, drawing on the austerity and complexity of a Feldman piece but coming from a completely different methodology. And crucially I wanted it to have a knife-edge tension, a creepy sense of the eerie and alien. I succeeded and am really proud of the results – possibly more so than anything I’ve done before or since – but not because I was aiming for anything innovative or experimental. I’m proud because I made a piece of music that – to me – expressed everything I wanted it to. And yes, if you’ve never listened to it or Feldman and then encounter both you’d be absolutely right to hail Feldman as the absolute fucking guv’nor, because he was a genius and I’m not. But that doesn’t change that I think my piece stands up well against his.
To an extent I’m at odds with the stated intent of this thread, its aims to examine nostalgia and newness as it relates to the music industry. That I’ve barely attempted to look at that is probably due to my disinterest in that industry, in that I see it as a bizarre beast that attempts to sit atop and control the wider phenomenon of music and exaggerates some of its more marketable characteristics and trends to their logical conclusions. I hate that most artists don’t earn much and I hate the notion that there may be pressures involved that are a factor in causing artists to choose not to express themselves in ways that are perceived by them and/or others to be unpalatable. But then there are creative artists who can use the demands of the industry as a working methodology in its own right and come up with amazing results, just as there are those who are naturally a perfect fit for that environment and its concerns. Their preferences and the industry’s preferences go hand-in-hand to shape each other.
I guess my one concern in this thread is that the love of the “new” is not turned into a straw man target of market demographics and industry concerns, that there is a real case for newness outside of the sales pitch. Hopefully I’m making that case… |
