02/17/96 - Dept. of Cultural Geography, Clark University, Worcester MA. v.1.1
11/25/96 - Gerrit Rietveld Akademie, Amsterdam. v.1.5
04/04/98 - Disastodrome!, South Bank, London. v.2.0
09/10/98 - Fall Of The Magnetic Empire, Knitting Factory, NYC. v.2.5
07/10/99 - The Savage God Festival, Lewes Live Literature, Lewes (UK) v.2.5.1
"1877 is Year Zero. Edison drones "Mary Had A Little Lamb" and initiates the Magnetic Age. Space, scale and the moment of performance, an expansive lexicon of sound, re-frames musical activity and the voice assumes the role of the mediator of scale that we now take for granted."
Excerpts:
"The fracturing of scale is characteristic of the Magnetic Age. Edison's scratchy, detached & alien reading achieved a significance beyond the meaning of the words used. Individual and intimate forms of singing become possible, and a heightened sense of theatricality means that any single human voice can take on an immediacy and humanity that transforms the range of narrative techniques. A man is speaking, not a simple musical functionary. He exists in a moment and in a place and time and then he is gone. He has a life and a mortality. Not only is he invested as a social mediator, but in craft terms-- accepting that musicianship is as a secret Brotherhood entrusted with craft secrets-- he stands as mediator between musicians and their intentions and the audience and its expectations. It's a powerful role that will come to dominate the art of the Magnetic Age. And in that moment of its birth is a glimpse of a world in which words will always fail. And at last the great progenitor can be identified. Thomas Alva Edison is the father of rock n roll. The coming of Elvis, as critical as it was, is a function only of time."
"Analyzing the sound of musical activity is like unpacking a Russian matroushka doll. The intentions of some set of human beings as expressed through their musical activity is framed by the spatial characteristics of a variety of microphones representing the virtual or actual soundscape of a performance space, including all sorts of sonic flotsam & production jetsam, which in turn is framed by the spatial characteristics of loudspeakers and brutalized by the imperial ambitions of Japanese multinational corporations as expressed thru contrived soundstage design, and which in turn is extruded into the no-doubt eccentric spatial characteristics of somebody's living room or somebody's car or somebody's headphones or some wretched bar. It's a hellish journey. And it's not over because, now, that sound, framed by frames within frames, provokes a negotiation & remapping in that gestalt of all the senses that we recognize as consciousness, causing it to resonate, to generate a perspective and scale, to propose a context in which Meaning can happen. It's Pavlovian. The bell rings and we salivate Meaning. It's the mechanism on which all of music hangs as an art & as a language. Posed a question the answer is reflex. And even if the scale of sound is nonsensical and cannot be imaged on a 1:1 basis, the gears will grind away until something shows up... because as far as you & I are concerned there is no acceptable alternative to Meaning."
"Ike Turner's Rocket 88 from 1951, frequently cited as the first out n out rock n roll recording, is about a car and a car is about space. The car is a form of poetic meter, only suburbanites and soccer moms think of it as transportation. A windshield frames the Big Out There in wide-screen, cinemascopic proportions while the car has a radio that frames a broadcast signal which in turn frames a recording which is in itself a complex of frames within frames, wheels within wheels, and all the while you yourself in either of the heavily symbolic roles of Driver or Passenger are navigating across a no-doubt wacked landscape from within this resonating soundscape frame-container and all the scales are fracturing very artistically and the gyroscope of your sixth body sense is flipping around getting pleasantly confused as to what exactly is the distinction between internal and external geographies... and that's what they used to call "Cruising." And in Old America the real artists did not work with marble or paint or even cine film, the real artist was a slob with a pint of oil and a set of spark plug wrenches."
"Culture is a swampland of disinformation, superstition and abuse. Words are weapons owned by the liars. Image is a shell & pea game played to bilk the rubes. The common man is abandoned, and for his pains he is mocked. Scorn pours out and drowns every hope before it can draw breath. Judgment is the only evil. We are dropped into the nightmare world of the internet, X-Files and Dianagate: uncritical, undiscriminating and full of self-interest. Culture is big business that's being run by small town chamber of commerce neer-do-wells. So it has been stripped of ordinary value. Yet in the cracks and seams of the world ordinary people go about their business, scrabbling Order & Meaning together using the materials at hand. It's a heroic chore-- ultimately doomed and empty but heroic still in a relative way next to the banality of establishment culture/anticulture which is just as doomed and just as empty but must be more reprehensible because of its cynicism, cruelty and passion for the darkness. Maybe it's an instinctive reflex for self-preservation that the common man turns to that which is beyond words: in this case popular musical forms."