Ephemerality.

[Woebot]

This is gonna be pretty slight so bear with me

It strikes me that the general drive with regards to music (possibly a reaction to capitalisms strategy of "burn the past") is to try and make it as eternal as possible. Musicians and the machine of production seem to try to engrave music with as much permanence as possible. The whole drive of the industry, in the manner that people are encouraged, lured even, to buy music as a way of "fixing it" is centred around this.

As you go deeper into the underground of music, rather than finding the same tactic which characterises pop's consumption (stockpiling) you find composers like La Monte Young trying to build musics which last millenia. Even the whole mp3/digital approach to music seems like a tactic to preserve music forever. Backed up your hard drive?

Rhetorically speaking here, is there a music which strives in the other direction? Towards impermanence and emphemerality. A fleeting music?

 

[john eden]

Ritual music is for the moment, I think.

Maybe improv also?

 

[martin]

It could be interesting to explore auto-destructive music . Musicians could have vinyl lathe cut in a way that the recording dissolved into inaudible crackles after 3 plays. Ditto 'implanted' disc rot for new CDs. Or if a tape, once exposed to air, immediately began to fade, forcing the listener to play it instantly in order to hear the whole thing. It's a nice thought, the song terminating itself at any given point, depending on atmospheric conditions and time restrictions.

 

[nick.K]

back in the mid-90s eno and toop spoke of generative music as the way forward. in theory the music never repeats itself, given the right rules and parameters.

 

[bassnation]

As you go deeper into the underground of music, rather than finding the same tactic which characterises pop's consumption (stockpiling) you find composers like La Monte Young trying to build musics which last millenia. Even the whole mp3/digital approach to music seems like a tactic to preserve music forever. Backed up your hard drive?

i'm not sure i'd agree with mp3 == permanence. digitial media is notorious for its ephermeral nature. even removable media has a fixed lifespan thats not comparable to piece of vinyl. in fact there is concern that this period of time may be a new dark age when looked at by historians of the future. wandering off topic slightly, theres lots of our culture on web pages which are then subsequently removed. what will be left for people to ruminate and pick over from our digital culture?

i'd also say much of the music that we obsess about and collect - old skool jungle being a case in point - was not made with permanence in mind. it was manufactured to fit into a rave set, a night maybe comprising of 100s of tunes, a moment on the dancefloor then lost forever. i doubt any of those artists envisaged people like us painstakingly putting discographies together and scouring ebay for that great tune you heard once in a field near essex in 1992.

martin also raised the point about creating records with a deliberate life span - wouldn't this apply to dubplates? some of them never get released and they certainly have a short lifespan!

 

[egg]

It strikes me that the general drive with regards to music (possibly a reaction to capitalisms strategy of "burn the past") is to try and make it as eternal as possible. Musicians and the machine of production seem to try to engrave music with as much permanence as possible. The whole drive of the industry, in the manner that people are encouraged, lured even, to buy music as a way of "fixing it" is centred around this.

not sure about this.

there are 2 copyrights in any piece of music - the basic composition or conceptual existence (the songwriting), and any number of instances of that being played live or recorded (the performance).

record companies sell recordings of a performance, so it is in their interest to promulgate this idea of a definitive performance, the ultimate expression of the concept.

but what most people, i think, enjoy and buy into, is the composition - hence a ringtone, humming a tune in the street, hearing a cover version in the pub are all part of their experience of the track.

i'd agree wiv bassnation that digital/the web (mp3s, ringtones, web radio and so on) are actually doing more to dislodge the idea of one fixed performance than otherwise. reason being that as we can all access more info (which in music's case means e.g. demo versions, alternate takes, unsanctioned remixes, bootlegs, live versions, covers) what it reinforces is what they are all based on - the underlying conceptual relationship between the notes.

not fully thought thru though.

 

[Ness Rowlah]

then there's Jarre's experiment with "exclusive permanence". Can't remember the title
- but he made a record which was pressed in a "run" of exactly one copy (LP around 1980 ?).

Then he burnt the master.

It's mentioned in "The Great Rock Discography" (Martin C Strong).

 

[egg]

then there's Jarre's experiment with "exclusive permanence". Can't remember the title
- but he made a record which was pressed in a "run" of exactly one copy (LP around 1980 ?).

Then he burnt the master.

It's mentioned in "The Great Rock Discography" (Martin C Strong).

hahahahahaha!
did he go on to invent the klf?
genius!

 

[francesco]

then there's Jarre's experiment with "exclusive permanence". Can't remember the title
- but he made a record which was pressed in a "run" of exactly one copy (LP around 1980 ?).

Then he burnt the master.

It's mentioned in "The Great Rock Discography" (Martin C Strong).

The title was "Music for Supermarkets"

 

[francesco]

Are Thomas Kooner Permafrost or Gunther UN peu de Neige Salie experiment in communicating nothing (the first) and drowing in absence (the latter) related to ephemerality?

 

[carlos]

i think a lot of noise (as opposed to music) is ephemeral in a way- merzbow's original tapes were self-described "junk music" and meant to be disposable. noise exists only as something that is a complete sum of all its audio parts- there is no melody for you to connect with, and i think this makes it ephemeral- as soon as you've finished playing it, it has practically disappeared. people like wolf eyes, who insert riffs and grooves (of sort) are therefore not playing noise by my estimation.

of course- merzbow's tapes are now collector's items- so that didn't work out too well... and noise fans are notorious collectors. but i think they (or some) are collecting the artifact more than the audio content.

but the audio content is still (i think) ephemeral- as an idea if not in practice

i'm not sure i understand how capitalism works into the equation- i would think the idea to make music eternal is something that existed before capitalism

 

[robin]

i would have thought most mixes (as played in clubs or at parites)were by definition ephemeral,one of the things ive always liked about them...
occasionally one gets recorded somewhere,but this still usually just feels like a glimpse of what the music was like at the time...
i've the odd tape from around dublin when i first got into techno,listening to that kind of thing now there's a weird nostalgia that's different to listening to an album from around that time,it seems more like a vague impression of what it used to be like all the time or something

 

[carlos]

Are Thomas Kooner Permafrost or Gunther UN peu de Neige Salie experiment in communicating nothing (the first) and drowing in absence (the latter) related to ephemerality?

i made a joke about the "un peu" cd once to a devout guenter fan- and was told: "nobody bothers to turn up the sound and actually listen" - but the cd booklet has a note that says "play at low volume"- or something like that

i've played this cd at fairly loud volume for a room full of people and it was very disturbing- there is a lot going on. some fairly sharp sinewaves that you don't notice until they stop playing and some nearly inaudible bass tones. people called it "music for dogs"...

there's a few guenter interviews floating about- i wonder if he says anything about "ephemeral"

 

[ripley]

ephemerality and exclusivity

Seems like there's a connection in some circles between ephemerality and exclusivity - i.e. ephemeral means the experience of it is rare, and therefore more valuable....

what about dubplates?

 

[LRJP!]

It strikes me that the general drive with regards to music (possibly a reaction to capitalisms strategy of "burn the past") is to try and make it as eternal as possible. Musicians and the machine of production seem to try to engrave music with as much permanence as possible. The whole drive of the industry, in the manner that people are encouraged, lured even, to buy music as a way of "fixing it" is centred around this.

Isn't Capitalism's strategy (with particular regard to music/culture in general) to hold on to the past? Too freeze it as opposed to burn it? Creating copyrights that will last the length of an organisation’s existence as opposed to the 70 or so years(?) applied to an individual, is essentially creating stasis and favouring (specific?) preservation…

As you go deeper into the underground of music, rather than finding the same tactic which characterises pop's consumption (stockpiling) you find composers like La Monte Young trying to build musics which last millenia. Even the whole mp3/digital approach to music seems like a tactic to preserve music forever. Backed up your hard drive?

Computing methods for presevation, would seem at the moment to be nigh on worthless; isn't the only truly archival file format '.txt'? will it be consistantly easy to upgrade your soundfiles? Are they going to charge the people who legally downloaded an MP3 if they want to upgrade it??

 

[LRJP!]

Seems like there's a connection in some circles between ephemerality and exclusivity - i.e. ephemeral means the experience of it is rare, and therefore more valuable....

what about dubplates?

i love love love Kodwo Eshun's line about how dubplates completely undo Walter Benjamin's Work Of Art In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction thesis. All these unique, fully half-formed remixes wearing down into nothing...

 

[turtles]

Would suggest William Basinski's Disintegration Loops I-IV as definite meditations on the impermanence of music. He had a bunch of old tape loops that he noticed were slowly deteriorating everytime he played them. So he recorded them (thus making permanent thier impermanence) and you can listen as these (really amazingly beautiful) loops slowly disintegrate and and change their forms over time. Really mesmerizing stuff if that's your cup o' tea.

 

[puretokyo]

I am utterly terrified of ephemerality and consequently I hate and loathe it. I dislike improv, mixes, spontaneous jamming etc. By contrast, I adore 'definitive' artifacts and collections.

I suspect it ties in to my fear of death, and consequently fear of loss.

 

[Omaar]

I think that's a good point puretokyo.

I think that an issue people are talking about here is the decay from information to noise, from an organised sytem towards entropy. So its interesting that the topic of noise music came up.

I would say pop is actually deliberately ephemeral and fleeting. However it often uses nostalgia to sell itself, so it creates this weird temporal effect.

A lot of information generated in society at the moment will be lost - blogs and the like. I agree with whoever on this thread was saying that there will be an information void when historians look back at this point in history - although the volume of information being generated at the moment is greater than ever before, the amount of loss is pretty great too.

On a personal level, this volume of information makes me feel like I'm a drop in the ocean, and I feel an urge to create something permanent and lasting , to avoid death or the absence of self. I guess people get over that by breeding, but I'm not into that.

I downloaded a bootleg of the original radio show of that Jarre album on Soulseek (music for supermarkets) and quite liked it. I think that it was meant to be more of a comment on commodities and the music industry rather than a deliberately ephemeral work though.

 

[Backjob]

Contrary

I have to say I fundamentally disagree with the central thesis of this thread.

If you look at the progression of modern music it's gone on a journey from transparency to contextuality.

Even if rappers didn't shout "2004" at the start of records, you'd still need a huge amoung of temporally specific context to interpret the lyrics, because of the sheer volume of obscure slang and cultural references most rap records contain.

Riddim culture is also incredibly ephemeral - so many grime records exist only as responses to merkery, and devoid of their cultural context will lose a lot of their meaning. Like what would your grandchildren make of "Sad ass strippa" or "Dylan's on a hype ting"?

Yes, Kool Moe Dee and LL Cool J dissing each other has a certain degree of historical interest, but only because it was so public. I can't imagine today's mixtape beefs and grime scene clashes being known in the same way in 20 years time.

Now you could argue that this just means that in the future the music will still exist, but its interpretation will have changed. But I think this would be to ignore that the driving force behind making this music is for it to be part of a scene that changes rapidly with time.