I always look with a skeptical gaze on those who mourn the death of “new-ness” in the art form of their choosing. It’s not that such impassioned lamentations are totally without merit, but too many of them demand this “new-ness” with no additional qualifications, and this naturally results in the petitioners being served up a “new” dish that doesn’t live up to the expectations that were never clearly communicated in the first place: “no, not like THAT!!!,” they may cry in exasperation. Then we have to go through the wearying motions of ascertaining just what type of new-ness is desired: are we talking merely about new techniques and formal gestures? New types of people doing things already well-known, but previously inaccessible to them? Are we really after something so alien that there is absolutely no conceptual vocabulary with which to describe it, or is just some “incremental” novelty good enough? Just determining the precise coordinates of “new” already feels like a futile exercise or like pointless stalling for time when one can just be freely creating instead.
I was recently forwarded a sort of call for contributions to Inverse Prompt, a digital audio compilation on Mark Harwood’s eclectic Penultimate Press imprint. Somehow I get the impression they wouldn’t want to be dragged into an extended discussion on the problems of idealized novelty in art, but the text accompanying this call – especially its more or less accurate dismissal of the “new-ness” of electronic music - is nevertheless a good springboard for a renewal of that conversation. Here, quoted in full, is an expression of benumbed fatigue with would-be novelty, which precedes a description of the more vital, humorous compositions that P.P. would like to receive in its place:
Inverse Prompt has grown from the amount of demos and albums pitched to us for release. A reaction/motivation to the sheer lack of ideas, originality and inspiration usually contained within. Not naming names, not blaming blames. It is what it is, the world.
Basically the leverage of steam to crank this compilation into gear was catapulted from the appallingly predictable bland content of most of these offerings.
“We are a duo from Torino working with extended technique and computer interfaces to create a lush ambient field of sound which pushes the boundaries of contemporary music…”
Sorry. It doesn’t. It’s yet again a predictable noodle with your chosen instrument then run through electronic sound fields which we have all encountered for decades now.
There’s nothing new about electronic music. At this stage it’s about as ‘new’ as a television set.
I’d personally [rather hear] the sound of a skunk liking a piece of bark [“liking” in the original, but I assume “licking” is meant here instead] than your latest audio-kunst.
Penultimate Press has more eclectic bona fides than most, and so has claimed some high ground from which to rail against bad attempts at novelty. While their catalog can still fall prone to a sort of “cliché of the unexpected,” “predictable unpredictability,” or the presence of formal constraints which are just well-disguised rather than totally abandoned, their eye-rolling disdain for phony attempts at The New is worth discussing in a larger context. This all-call does after all refer to a “we” which is sick to death of all this sound-alike swill, and this private fatigue is thus transformed into a more wide-ranging collective matter. Who exactly is the “we” here, and do they have any reason for needing “real” novelty beyond the alleviation of boredom and the enrichment of personal experience?
Before attempting to answer that, it should be acknowledged that similar complaints arise from the curators of genre-based music labels serving everything from country music to punk rock to hip-hop. They, too, have their inboxes being overloaded with petitions to hear the music of aspirants who sound exactly like “x” or “y” heroes of their respective genres. Yet curators of “avant-garde” or “experimental” electronic music, so-called, run into an additional problem with this kind of thing. Whereas these genres just mentioned can fit into an existing tradition without causing too much complaint, and indeed might cause more griping by dispensing with traditionally tried-and-tested formulae, the “tradition” of the avant-garde is to relentlessly innovate and expand the vocabulary of art as a whole. The non-“dance” (read: not popular) varieties of electronic music were hatched not just to comment on but to outright initiate societal upheavals against tradition; to make good on the enthusiastic, antagonistic proclamations of early documents like Guillaume Apollinaire’s L’anti-tradition Futurist. Repudiation of the past been a component of avant-electronica since its conceptual beginnings over a century ago, and as such formal novelty was regularly a primary, if not the paramount, reason for dealing in this trade.
Even today, we still feel the ripples of the initial shockwaves, carrying with them the belief that there was a duty to innovate: aesthetic quality was judged by the degree to which a given work subverted or destroyed established patterns of existence, and aesthetic iconoclasm was in essence also a polemical undertaking. More ambitiously, the mutual arising of the Machine Age and avant-garde art occasioned a revitalization of a dream dreamt by Rimbaud and others; that poetry would no longer “give rhythm to action” or comment upon reality, but would completely manifest a new reality with the occult authority of a magician’s spell. With such high stakes at hand, Apollinaire made sure to warn his public as follows: “Marvels impose on us the duty not to allow the poetic imagination and subtlety to lag behind that of workers who are improving the machine…already, scientific language is out of tune with that of the poets.” He dreamed of a day in which we would “mechanize poetry as the world has been mechanized.”[i]
We can argue about the exact degree to which that dream manifested, but it seems objectively true that vanguard creativity and a utilitarian techno-scientific worldview have been locked in close embrace at least since the time of Apollinaire. Avant-garde is, after all, synonymous with “experimental” art in the public mind, and with that comes the image of a laboratory run with mental rigor and respectful solemnity. In this virtual space we are graced with additional issues of laboratory / chemical processes of purification, or extracting “essences” from more complex and ambiguous types of artistic composition. Paradoxically, while such novelty-minded experiments do result in some genuinely fascinating artifacts, these purifications often result in something that will not achieve a consensus recognition as “art” until decades’ worth of critical and theoretical apologias have helped to massage these ideas into the public consciousness. Until such time, their works run the risk of being not just incomprehensible but (in the words of Arthur Danto) “mere things” which are “semantically mute”.
The people presumably writing such texts extend the “laboratory” metaphor still further, being an expert class whose scientifically sound authority is trusted over the subjective experiences of individual artists: the gatekeepers of an “official” avant-garde will irrevocably limit the scope of what types of novelty are truly acceptable, often for the purely opportunistic motive of preserving status and sinecure. However skeptically I view their “official” narrative, I will confess some sympathies for the restless vitalism and dynamism associated with many figures canonically recognized as avant-garde: take for example “291” member Benjamin de Casseres’ application of the Bergsonian “constant flux of life” ideal, in which he claims “That which changes perpetually lives perpetually…incessant dying and renewing, incessant metamorphosis, incessant contradiction”.[ii] I jump ship, though, when I’m expected to believe the official dogma that each successive change represents a “progressive” development, that is to say, a qualitative and irreversible improvement on whatever came before it.
The idealization of pure innovation, the realization of which is again supposed to be more than “just” an aesthetic act, is very easy to know when you encounter it: it too often sets up “experimental” types of art that do not become “experiential” ones. Put another way, we end up with works wherein the content needs to assert its distinctness so badly, its communicative and relational abilities are mostly or completely diminished. The urge to let experimentalism guide creativity, rather than the inverse, gives us an empty “technicism” (as critic Renato Poggioli named it), i.e. “the reduction of even the non-technical to the category of technique.”[iii] “It is not against the technical or the machine that the spirit justly revolts,”Poggioli claims, but rather “against this reduction of nonmaterial values to the brute categories of the mechanical and the technical.”[iv]
With that in mind, it’s noteworthy how many of the celebrated stylistic “innovations” of 21st century electronic music to date have little to do with the progressive narrative of technology: we could say that innovation occurred in spite of continuing appeals to compulsory, ever-intensifying progress. Long-running Japanese “noise” combo Incapacitants would even make “no progress” a personal motto, and this attitude applied not only on their own onslaught of speaker-shredding releases but also to numerous others in a Japanese underground apparently fatigued by a “technicist” mainstream. Elsewhere there was “glitch,” a shorthand for a set of creative tendencies in computer-based audio that came from a place of apparent tech-criticism, exploiting the fallibility of our silicon self-extensions and generally aestheticizing the sounds of discontinuity and disruption (in my humble opinion, this methodology occasionally resulted in works of a legitimately surprising beauty and transcendence). Later developments like vaporwave, and the even more obnoxiously named “hauntology,” also seemed to be rooted more deeply in nostalgic reveries than in any sort of Futurist dynamism or acceleration fetishism. Those particular tendencies, for whatever else they might have accomplished, were one of the clearest rejections of the avant- / Futurist invective against the past: the hazy, languid, often under-produced melodicism of select vaporwave pieces often amounted to a daydream about futuristic visions that had become at last unattainable.
So we have here a paradoxical situation in which numerous manifestations of new-ness, few of them being “officially” sanctioned, are not concerned with the idea of progressive / cumulative novelty. This is interesting, but maybe more interesting is the roughly parallel development in which work stylistically comparable to “avant-garde” material is created by those with no historical context for what they are doing, and no knowledge of the “proper” artistic genealogies needed to earn a merit badge for avant-creativity. Yes, it may come as a surprise to those not firmly ensconced in progressive institutions like academia, but there is still a great plurality of the total human population for whom such a thing as “avant-garde electronic music” remains outside of their customary experience: engagement with such may not be new in the sense that something would be new to art world / media nomenklatura, but it is new to them. It’s particularly fascinating to observe what happens when the formerly “avant-garde” gestures are taken up as something fresh and vital by these non-institutional, amateur people who often take these activities more seriously than the cultural gatekeepers, who themselves typically value these actions as steps to greater novelty. That is to say, they are valued now only for their place in a linear history.
If we can agree that novelty does not need to be the single criterion for quality, then I believe it’s safe enough to shift our attention to other criteria for “good” art: in Oscar Wilde’s reckoning, this might be something like art that successfully “moulds [life] to its purpose”. Arguably, some of the most interesting contemporary developments come from non-academic artists, and those ignorant of (or uninterested in) the single, canonical chronology of Official electronic music. There is a whole world of creativity, some of it still unheard even in this age of massively expanded digital networking, which enjoys even “weird” types of electronic music because their sonic nuances are the best overall communicators and enhancers of present realities.
Now, I may be “speaking for myself” here as regards my own intentions and ambitions, but then again, maybe not. I can simply state that, as one of these extra-institutional amateurs, formal innovation for its own sake has become far less important to me over time, nor have I ever deluded myself (at least in the “mature, adult” phase of my existence) that I had landed upon unprecedented fusions of sensory impressions, philosophical propositions, etc. Indeed, many of the most personally satisfying moments scattered throughout my musical un-career have involved decoding existing mysteries (e.g. getting the right combination of controls to achieve a previously elusive sound) rather than unleashing something formally or conceptually inventive onto the world.
Sure, I just listened back to “Scambi” by Henri Pousseur, from 1959, and realize that I inadvertently created some almost identical passages of music with some off-the-shelf VST plug-ins and fairly common synthesizer modules. From the paradigm of the classical avant-garde this inadvertenet mimicry should be embarrassing, but for those who do not need social approval in order to create, and who maintain some psychological autonomy, this is just fine. At any rate, those who are self-conscious about being unknowingly imitative of others’ work should probably not worry too much: should we really be bruised by the condemnation of cultural guardians who demand an acute knowledge of their historical precedents while also demanding an attitude of absolute iconoclasm towards the past and “tradition”?
For artists who care about highly personal expressive qualities rather than the aforementioned, electronic music can become de-coupled (one could even say “liberated”) from its utility solely as a harbinger or accelerator of future developments, and becomes instead a toolkit for navigating the now: in engaging concrete reality, electronic music can be used for diagnosis of personal and social maladies, for immersive therapy, for protest, for enhancing or “activating” the environment around it (a favorite of Minimalist artists), and admittedly for some not very benign purposes (e.g. as a literal weapon on the “kinetic” battlefield).
Speaking of the not benign: this inventory of reasons for ignoring idealized new-ness must consider also the desire for a “new” aesthetics as subordinate to other forms of idealized progress, rather than as the equal partner that the avant-poets once dreamed of. Nearly every dystopian, “future noir” sci-fi film from Blade Runner onwards presents us with eye-popping wonders of technological novelty (hovering driverless cars, massive holographic projections, etc.) which fight for prominence against imagery of shocking barbarism, thuggishness, and human exploitation. The lesson of these cinematic tableaux, despite their effectiveness as a recurring sci-fi trope, has probably not been learned as well as it should: technical progress is not an automatic enabler of profound, positive changes in the realm of ethical conduct. If anything, this century has seen plenty of the complete opposite. The belief that novel values will proceed from novel things – whether these be the fancy driverless hover cars or some unprecedented tour-de-force of electronic sound synthesis – is no longer an avant-garde artistic idea at all, but a legacy of the Machine Age that has survived to become a doctrine permeating nearly all modern discourse. It is a linchpin of almost all propaganda and marketing, and has been prominently put in the service of our most unsavory activities from terrorism to mass pornography.
So, given that technical / formal innovation in art is unlikely to bring about a “new society” of increasingly positive values, and chasing after it may be unsatisfying for those whose lives don’t relate to accepted avant-garde chronology, what other reasons exist for us to feel compelled to novelty, and to make this the top priority of making art? Maybe the time has passed for nursing anxieties over such things, and it really would be better just to hear the sound of a skunk licking a piece of bark.
[i] Apolinnaire, G. & Shattuck, R. (1971). “The New Spirit and the Poets” in Selected Writings of Guillaume Apollinaire. New Directions Book.
[ii] Benjamin de Casseres (1912). “Modernity and the Decadence,” Camera Work, No. 37 , pp. 17-19.
[iii] Poggioli, R. (1968). The Theory of the Avant-Garde. Trans. Gerald Fitzgerald. Cambridge / London: Belknap Press / Harvard University Press.
[iv] Ibid.