October 16, 2004
a light moment, mostly music
I'm very tired. I just want to rest after experiencing the surgeon's knife on my feet. The pain and drugs are knocking me around a bit, leaving me spacey and immobile. I'm a bit disappointed because I wanted to hang about the galleries this afternoon.
Another kind of show.
Matti French
via the always excellent Dr. Meno.
So I'm at home listening to Squeezing out Sparks (1979) by Graham Parker and the Rumor. I'm revisiting the 70s from the perspective of pub/punk music rather than the 60s.
Jenny Watson, "self titled" 2004, watercolour on paper, diptych.
I reckon that Parker produced one of the best pieces of music to come out of the late seventies pub/punk boom. It got me thinking about us still needing song and dance storytellers (such as Bob Dylan) to fill the void in meaning we all share from living in a market culture; story tellers that need not be rogue radicals or princes of protest.
But I go back to listening to the spacey exploratory sounds of Grayfolded. This was created by John Oswald. He took around a 100 live performances of the Grateful Dead's freeflowing Dark Star jam between 1968 and 1993, and then built, layered and folded them to produce a new, recomposed piece of music. This is the good side of postmodernism in music.
John Oswald calls the technique plunderphonics. Another example--the Grey Album.
An interviewwith John Oswald. An article on recontextualising the musical data that surrounds us, then juxtaposing fragments to create new meanings from old.