PROBES #17
Curated by Chris Cutler
In the late nineteenth century two facts conspired to change the face of music: the collapse of common practice tonality (which overturned the certainties underpinning the world of art music), and the invention of a revolutionary new form of memory, sound recording (which redefined and greatly empowered the world of popular music).
A tidal wave of probes and experiments into new musical resources and new organisational practices ploughed through both disciplines, bringing parts of each onto shared terrain before rolling on to underpin a new aesthetics able to follow sound and its manipulations beyond the narrow confines of ‘music’.
This series tries analytically to trace and explain these developments, and to show how, and why, both musical and post-musical genres take the forms they do. In PROBES #17, we trace how the gamelan collided with western notions of music and exotic percussion spread like a virus into every field.
Transcript
Transcript of PROBES #27, curated by Chris Cutler.
In PROBES #27 Chris Cutler tracks the modern composer from the scrapyard to the office, then through the living room and into the kitchen in search of new musical resources - including scrap-metal, typewriters, vacuum cleaners, dot matrix printers, industrial quantities of paper, telephones, and the humble bean.
Transcript
Transcript of PROBES #18, curated by Chris Cutler.
Transcript
In PROBES #16, banjos, mandolins, balalaikas and the jew’s harp are made to do unaccustomed and groundbreaking things.
Auxiliaries
In this auxilliary, bachelor pad hi-fi stereo exotica whips off its kitschy disguise to reveal a revolutionary core, abandoning boring documentation for a hyperreal exploration of novel timbres, impossible spatialities and radical fragmentation. This is where recording technology finally becomes aware of itself as an aesthetic rather than as a purely technical medium.
In PROBES #18, Chris Cutler raises lowly percussion high and introduces us in the hyperreal world of hi-fi stereo, pure listening and exotica.
Auxiliaries
In this new auxiliary Chris Cutler follows the gamelan, falls into further experiments with percussion and slides inexorably into exotic appropriation.
Transcript
We trace how the gamelan collided with Western notions of music and exotic percussion spread like a virus into every field.
Auxiliaries
In PROBES #16.2, we wonder how far you can go with banjos, mandolins, balalaikas, jew’s harps and ensembles of folk instruments. And it’s pretty far.