words by jace.
this is a single-entry archive page. click above for the now thing.
In 2004 I got to meet & hang-out with 2 true giants in my audio/cultural landscape: the Moroccan band Nass El Ghiwane & the American radio artist/wound technician Gregory Whitehead. Who?
UbuWeb just posted an MP3 anthology of 20 years of Whiteheads radio plays, performances and outcasts, along with a few of his writings. The MP3s range from his early tapes (where I first heard Ziggurat) to an 11minute excerpt from The Loneliest Road, a 2003 radioplay for the BBC with music composed by The Books (as soon as I heard Thought for Food I sent it to Gregory, he loved it, contacted them, and the rest is...)
I've always been impressed with the way Gregorys stuff circulateslooking for it directly is never the best option because his material moves simultaneously via several seemingly unrelated channels: cassettes traded in the old experimental mailswap circuit, pseudonym 7s, screamscape studies for local radio & audience telephones, commissions from the BBC, articles here & there, editor behind some definitive books on sound & radio. He sidesteps the usual categories of musician/critic, academic/street, high art/no-fi art, documentarian/confidence man, thanatos/eros, etc. Even at its most theoretical, his writing remains rooted, relevant.
I heard the tapes first. Whitehead's soundwork is viscerally compellinga lot of it is simply words, gasps, and utterances. Additional sounds set a psychological mood or unnerve. Yet it's playful--overtly funny, flirting with desire. It tells or suggests stories, though the narrative may be linear, cyclical, disarticulate, or straight-up impossible. Quality creepy + dead-on smarts.
from Drone Tones and other Radiobodies"
Radio is mostly a set of relationships, an intricate triangulation of listener, player and system. Its also a huge corporate beast, and the awareness that youre working within a highly capitalized network. Finally, there is the way in which radio is listened to, frequently in an extremely low-fi environment, with people listening on a car radio, or theyre in the kitchen and theyre cooking and theyre listening with only half an ear. To me, radio art comes to grips with all of that, it comes to grips with both the context of production and the context of listening.
UbuWeb
is a great resource in and of itself, containing all sorts of audio
gems & interviews from the 20th century avant-garde,
such as a 1967 Salvador Dal flexidisc, a 3-hour FMU interview
with Henry Flynt, Artaud, Dockstader (because Ive had no
schooling in traditional music I in a way start back where I suppose
hundreds of years thousands where the first guy picked up a rock or
something and started to me music is just very simply a matter of
tension and release.), Tzara, many many more.
& further quotes from Whitehead
+ +
The
eye is just a tough little organ, you can whack it with a hammer. But
the ear is a hole in the head, a hole full of delicate flora and
fauna that we spend a lifetime blowing out, then we go deaf and die.
Sound is ultimately conducted by your skeleton, it shakes your bones,
its your bones that do as much hearing as anything else, and that
is what explains the tremendous emotional power of sound, and the
emotional power of radio, the potential for captivation and hypnosis,
taking the listener into another zone.
+ +
But I try to use [the disembodied radio voice] in a way thats constantly hinting to the listener that theyre NOT listening to the voice of authority, though I will constantly play with the expectation for authority, because Americans are trained from a very early age that anything we hear on the airwaves has got to be the truth, thats the voice of authority. Orson Welles seized on this with his famous Martian invasion, which in turn provoked a wave of regulation of the airwaves, as the government need to restore the fiction of authority and authenticity. Then there was the master radio delusionist , Hitler, who had an immediate grasp of the tremendous power of the microphone, and the amplified voice, and who mesmerized an entire generation to obey the projections of his own apocolyptic myth. Im astonished at what people will believe, just because it comes down the tubes.
I mean if you think of the kind of news that you get on commercial radio: You give us 22 minutes and well give you the world...
So for me, to listen to those formats and those hideous delusional aspirations and those grubby commercial models in a way, and think of ways to get inside them and take them somewhere else, is very intriguing. To begin with the arrogance of absolute certainty --- the world in your ears ---- and then gradually bleed, minute by minute, into a nebulous zone where all boundaries, bodies, voices, themes and ideas blur into a each other, or into a fog of thought and feeling that is closer to some kind of lived truth. The voice of authority is part of what I call radio Thanatos, the side of radio that vibrates with death, as weapons or as control over communities. Then there is radio Eros, a radio of play, and attraction, a radio of productive illusion, a radio that brings ears together into some kind of fresh network. The best radio art hangs in the turbulence between the two. I want my next work to be a kind of navigational system for the turbulence, bewteen the scream and the laugh, perhaps, or between the horrific shudders of a sort of cultural Grand Mal seizure for what else can we call the Age of Bush? --- and the stubborn insistence of some other vibe: eros, affirmation, call it what you will. Life?
justin lincoln () - януари 14 2005
Wow !!! Whitehead is often fascinating. Great person to tip folks to....And I love UBU also.- - - - - - - -
lamin () - януари 15 2005
Get it right. It's "Dead Tones And Other Radiobodies".- - - - - - - -
lamin () - януари 15 2005
Holy smokes, Whitehead is astonishing.. what a brilliant soul. I'm fascinated.- - - - - - - -
Ed. - януари 15 2005
get it right Lamin! we *both* had it wrong: it's Drone Tones and Radiobodies. corrected. thanks for the tip-off. -jc- - - - - - - -
SebCatLitter () - януари 15 2005
Ubuweb> isn't that the spot that does the free MP3 sharing of People Like Us?- - - - - - - -
gee dub - януари 19 2005
dead tones and dread tones in the spirit of the ideas, both.- - - - - - - -
nate - януари 23 2005
i met whitehead last year and he was a really inspiring figure to talk to. It was funny because he answered a question about artists sampling his work and talked about your work and i was the only person in the audience who'd heard of DJ /Rupture. Sucks for them.- - - - - - - -
Bob Coakley () (URL) - декември 17 2005
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