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Looper's Delight
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Fascinating discussion on the origins of current 'out' music. My own musical education was purely the product of spending my teenage years in Berwick upon Tweed and spending all my money on records that I'd never heard of... I bought anything and everything from Zorn to Metheny to White Noise, Air, loads of prog rock (underrated for its influence on 'out' music methinks, due to the current 'uncool' status of early Yes/Camel/Focus albums...), napalm Death, Sonic Youth, Extreme Noise Terror, The Cure, Messiaen, Stockhausen, and then the usual pop stuff that teens in the 80s listened to - duran, Nik Kershaw, Howard Jones, Wham, loads of metal stuff like Rainbow and AC/DC, Uriah Heap, then into jazz via fusion bassists like Stu Hamm, Stanley Clarke and Jaco... ...the point of this rather incomplete and untidy timeline is that I grew up in a musical community where distinctions were non-existent - we would listen to anything - we (meaning me and the other strange musicians I hung round with at school) would listen to tapes of computer games loading up!! We were into sound, and that could be Cyndi Lauper or it could be Shoenberg. There were no boundaries, so being 'into' out music, or new music or jazz or whatever didn't even figure. It's nigh on impossible for me to trace my own musical influences, which makes it all the more interesting when people pick up on things that I haven't heard for years but did make an impact on my at the time, and hear them in my music... But when I'm playing, or writing or whatever, i'm not thinking in and out, pop/rock/post/blah blah - it doesn't even come into it. That not to try and claim any sort of 'total freedom' - I have influences and certain things that I return to time after time, and I guess there's a coherence to what I do, but it's not formed by thinking to hard about party lines. I am fascinated by all the music that got me to where i am (and rather embarrassed by some of it...), but I never think of it as being a stylistic thing, just different ways of using melody, harmony, rhythm and good ole' fashioned noise! :o) there's a heck of a lot to be said for growing up in insular backwater communities where the London/Berlin/LA/Paris/New York/wherever impression of 'cool' and acceptable are a million miles away. I remember watching documentaries in the late 80s on Zorn and Sonic Youth - it was on the South Bank Show, which in the UK is the emblem of all that is up its own arse about art and hipness, but i didn't know, didn't care, and instead went out and ordered Spillane by Zorn the following day, and terrorised the 6th form common room at school with it for weeks! ...there's a slight ill-ease with using myself as an example in a discussion like this - I hope it doesn't come across as 'I'm so liberated' - that's not it at all. I've got loads to learn and discover about out music, but am twarted often by hearing stuff that just sounds to 'knowing', that sounds like it's trying to hard to push boundaries that are better left to theorising - like tracey emin's 'my bed' instillation at the Tate Modern in London - if she'd installed it in a locked room and told us about it, it would have been genius. To actually look at some daft woman's stained sheets and still try and think of it as the expression of that which she spent ages describing sort of missed the point for me... :o) Steve www.steve-lawson.co.uk