PROBES #18
Transcript
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 #18 drums have their day; then they start flying around the room. Kitsch becomes cutting edge. And all thanks to advances in recording technology.
In PROBES #19 Chris Cutler continues to look at the importation of exotic instruments, in this case from Africa, in pursuit of a specifically non-American American expression of culture and politics.
In PROBES #17, we trace how the gamelan collided with western notions of music and exotic percussion spread like a virus into every field.
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.