loopholerecordsdotcom

Why Multimedia Art

2007-02-01T12:20:00.000-08:00

“ For musical research to be “pure,” autonomous, centered, its object would have to possess an essential nature, so that we could say what belongs to music, what is proper to music. We might conceive this essence as a starting point on which we agree, or as a goal that the field is trying to discover, a limit that the discipline asymptotically approaches. But such an essence does not exist. It is not merely that we are reluctant to define music nowadays or that we prefer to speak of “musics” in the plural. Any definition of music has meaning only within a relational and ever-changing network of disciplines.”

--Kevin Korsyn, Decentering Music

“The crossings or hybridizations of the media release great new force and energy as by fission or fusion. There need be no blindness in these matters once we have been notified that there is anything to observe.”

--Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media

Prelude
This message, from a certain point of view, will self-destruct. This message, from a more adequately informed vantage point, will self-reconstruct. I intend to expose and explore the tension between these points of view, and between the ensuing obliteration or reconfiguration to which each bears witness. This text will oscillate, will in manic turn play a physical object, a sham allegory, and a provisional realization of its academic, abstracted “content.” This shape-shifting is in no way novel; indeed we find ourselves surrounded on all sides by objects that evade our best efforts to name them, classify them, nail them down. We might allow such resistance to provoke anxiety. Alternatively, we might draw our inspiration from the ways in which the objects of our scrutiny slip unencumbered through our discursive traps, and as artists endeavor to circulate such artifacts of our own.
Such artifacts are already in wide circulation, tethered to variegated media while sitting squarely in none, complexes of sound, text, and image that mutually confirm each other’s relevance, lucidity, and communicative power. Further, they can exist in concert with not only the multiple media from which they draw expressive breath, but also the methods by which they are produced, reproduced, distributed, and ultimately consumed. Once we glimpse the network in its totality we acquire nothing less than a cultural imperative to work inside this web of interlocking canvases. “Music,” the essence that in Korsyn’s account does not even exist, ostensibly plays a significant role in organizing and contextualizing the other activities of this nexus. But it is not the whole story.

The Artifact Breached
All rhetorical flourish aside, the ultragenre or Gesamtkunstwerk to which I refer is the ‘record.’
The literal record’s overthrow by the CD and, more recently and perhaps more significantly, by the mp3, renders the term simultaneously problematic and resonant. ‘Record’ as a name has the merit of accuracy in terms of abstract constitution: in a very real sense we create and distribute ‘records,’ time capsules, collections of snapshots and captions that stand in for the bloc of time over which the imprinted music took shape.
The literal record’s dispossession by digital media, however, transmogrifies the artifact, disconnects it from its physical bounds, from, in Walter Benjamin’s account, “its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.” In this particular the record has undergone a radical change, one only exacerbated by the technological capacity to produce identical copies. Again invoking Benjamin, the “original” evaporates: each digital copy is a genetic clone, whether burned to disc or ripped to mp3 player. Among many composers the sentiment of getting on board the digital revolution prevails, and for many good reasons. By doing so with abandon, however, we miss important opportunities: we surrender the canvas that is the physical artifact, and content ourselves to produce commodities when we could be making art.

Text, Sound, Image: Toward an Ecology of Means
“Music has sometimes evolved,” began Harvard Professor Daniel Albright at a recent Princeton University colloquium, “by usurping the strategies of other artistic media, particularly painting and narrative literature.” For Albright this “transvestitism” constitutes a kind of magic-act: music endeavors “not to illustrate a text” or visual artwork, “not to emphasize a text “ or visual artwork, “but to be a text;” or visual artwork—in the latter case music somehow “flattens and congeals onto a visual surface.” These “boundary transgressions,” committed by composers like Berio (in commandeering the strategies of narrative literature) or Feldman (in commandeering the strategies of abstract painting) provide, in Albright’s account, the “counter-narrative” to the aesthetic puritanism of such critics as Adorno and Clement Greenberg. Narrative, the “boundary transgression,” and counter-narrative, “the strict partitioning of one medium from another,” together tell the story of modernism, point and dissonant counterpoint.
Against this modernist couplet, indeed against modernism itself, we might read a higher-order counter-narrative, in which music, rather than usurp/reject another genre’s strategies, serves as an anchor for a network of messages in multiple media, as in the case of the record, the artifact with (potentially) organic visual and textual components. “The old structure of ‘Art’ music,” claims Chris Cutler in File Under Popular, “is incapable of developing the aesthetic and productive power of the new productive media, because these media innately favour more co-operative, less hierarchical relations.” (Cutler, 36-37) The cooperation to which Cutler refers is presumably between bandmates, co-composers, but we might imagine cooperations and sublimations of hierarchies between the very genres which constitute the artifact itself, the visual, textual, and aural components that together become the multidimensional art object. Similarly, if a crucial component of the “new media,” namely the recording studio, “strongly favors the reuniting” of the roles of performer and composer (Cutler, 35); we might imagine, instead of Albright’s conflation of the object with the strategies of other media, an amalgamation of subjects, a new unity between performer and composer. In this formulation Cutler is certainly persuasive, but what of the intoxicating possibility to take this conflation further, that this new hybrid subject, this composer-performer, might adopt the strategies of other forms in the way Albright suggests of Berio and Feldman? Can an artist working among these new media appropriate an even greater number of their creative postures?
The composer at work produces an inordinate amount of material waste: notes, drafts, prose descriptions, abstract form sketches, in short anything that takes physical form that doesn’t ultimately end up in the definitive score or the digital rendering. We typically view score or digital rendering as the full realization of our creative efforts, so file away or dispose of the material excess and move on to the next composition. If we locate the composition, however, as a single element in a complex nexus that might also contain text and image, our material excess might become the raw material of the physical artifacts onto which our sonic realizations are pressed. In short, we consciously make a record, and in so doing reinvigorate the lost aura of the digital clone. We move toward an ecology of means, transforming the scrap pile into elements of sublime transformation. We forge “other unities, other sources of coherence, that may cut across and subvert those we have been trained to recognize.” (Korsyn, 38) I include this text in the nexus: after it makes the requisite rounds it will be destroyed. Or rather, it will be reconstructed.

Methods of (re)Production
The methods by which we might accomplish such reconstructions are limited only by the artist’s imagination. Bear in mind the imperative, however, to reinvigorate the digital clone with the “aura of the work of art.” (Benjamin) For instance, if I create a collage out of this text, torn to shreds, against a backdrop of staff paper on which I’ve sketched a series of melodic and harmonic ideas, snap a picture of it, and then use copies of this photograph as the jewel-case insert to accompany the CD of music composed out of those very harmonic and melodic ideas, and inspired by the text which described the process in the first place, I’ve solved only part of the problem. The “original” now exists, doubtless, but “the quality of its presence is…depreciated” (Benjamin) by offering only its representation, the copy of the photograph, in each unit. If, however, I take the same collage and cut it into 4.25” squares and include one of these squares in every jewel case of a new release, I’ve at once destroyed the original and reconstructed it across time and space: the “original” is the impossible refabrication, as a jigsaw puzzle, of disseminated, scattered objects.
Further, I necessarily limit my output, creating only the number of units that the collage, cut into appropriate size, will yield. We at once enter the system of commodity-creation and subvert it on its own terms. We say yes, we will indeed reproduce our work, but no, we will not reproduce it beyond the bounds of its integrity as artifact. The means of production and means of reproduction elide. We become “guildsmen” practicing a “guild craft,” in Cutler’s words, as he describes Sun Ra and his Arkestra hand-decorating records in the tour bus before a show.
“The technique of reproduction,” writes Benjamin, “detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence.” If, however, we marry the processes of production and reproduction, we “enable the original to meet the beholder halfway,” all the while retaining “the quality of its presence” as the original, definitive work. Or rather as a piece of an original that has been destroyed, then reconstructed across time and space. We “subvert consumption on its own grounds.” (Cutler, 77) The lowly CD and is associated materials become nothing less than original and irreproducible works of art, bearing the marks of exploded process, the literal hand of their creator. The musical content may be identical between items, but the vessel that transports it is unique, singular.

Networks, Channels, Markets
There exist vast networks for the distribution of independently produced records, ways in which music that flies below the radar finds its gentle listener. “Even the traditional reason for signing to a major—better distribution—makes less sense now that the chain stores have started to stock product from independent distributors,” notes Eric Weisbard. One need only tap into one such independent distribution network to give the record wings; the door to blow open no longer leads to the hi-tech studio, but rather to a series of channels by which independent artists might extend their reach. Though heralded as a small-scale revolution, the new door’s presence is as problematic as the old door’s, and not because of its reluctance to open. Independent labels using independent distribution networks are still pushing commodities, being “unpopular” perhaps most significant of their virtues. More units traveling down more channels is, unfortunately, still the ideal, whether we envisage a major-label release or that of an underground buzz band.
The record conceived from the beginning as a singular work of art and (re)produced with aura intact need not play along, for reasons of simple mathematics: when one is trafficking in individual artworks, one needs to make (and sell) far fewer. We leave the music-market and enter the art-market. Or perhaps we take up a new, heretofore unseen position straddling the two, just as we take up a new position as conflated subject: writer, artist, composer, performer, assembly-line worker, record label, independent distributor…

Rabbit Out of Hat
This message will now self-destruct, having attempted to sketch out a new model for an artwork that falls out of typical disciplinary bounds. This text describes the character of this artwork while serving as a raw material for its assembly. These are liner notes, collage fragments, constituent pieces that will eventually affix to a larger whole, one that will then dissemble yet again and scatter, accompaniment to an associated sonic imprint yet to be.

1 February 2007
Princeton

Works Cited
Albright, Daniel, “Belletristic Music in the Twentieth Century” (Lecture, Princeton
University, December 2006).

Benjamin, Walter, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (Web
Version, UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television, 1936, 2005).

Cutler, Chris, File Under Popular (New York: November Books and Autonomedia,
1993).

Korsyn, Kevin, Decentering Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).

McLuhan, Marshall, Understanding Media (Cambridge: the MIT Press, 1964, 2002).

Weisbard, Eric, “Over and Out: Indie Rock Values in the Age of Alternative Million
Sellers” (Village Voice Rock & Roll Quarterly Summary, Summer 1994).

the corporate art project (plus stolen logo here, similar to splenda)

2006-02-23T21:42:00.000-08:00

[the corporate art project being the umbrella name I give to all ideas, taken together that, in the hands of those who mistake the shadow for the substance, might be called a marketing initiative.]

2.23.06 Weekly Meeting

Minutes

Attendees:

Macaroni
Massey
Short

I. public/private systems/spaces

Name Change? (systems/spaces or spaces/systems?)
Art Demo on mfw tracks (mfo rediscovered/reassessed as mfw art demo)

II. galapagos show

Is not at galapagos
julie sells clothes
Art Gradient: massey, martonyi, julie

III. MUNY

a splendid idea
application in process
next step: letter, a sharpie, revisit add'l materials question

IV. Bangonacan

a long shot
CD DVD done, write letter, mark each (use sharpie from MUNY)

V. Princeton

please?
I will know soon, either way

VI. LRNAP

LVNVASAP
Keep Sunnyside in the family, despite fire breaking out down below.

public/private systems/spaces

2006-02-22T18:26:00.000-08:00

art and title for the new project. 2 sets of songs. Rather than make yet another EP, this one will be full-length, a dozen or so tracks, and will, as the name suggests, be about spaces and systems, public and private, how spaces and systems are neither and both (and how I personally divide the public and private into both/neither spaces and/nor systems, to run all of the iterations quasi-economically and with extra awkwardness.) Around half are from the bedroom: private, except that everyone in the surrounding apartments can hear while they're trying to do other things; and around half are from the new set: public, except there are no shows coming up and those that could hear as I practice are practicing themselves. As for system and space, privately I play the guitar, though the gestures I use are big and demonstrative and therefore earn their punch from an imaginary public display, while publicly it's the drums and the keyboard, though to do both at once is a kind of intimate freak-show that reminds you how much time I must have spent alone to run the body into submission. I was hoping the primaries would blend and become every color on the wheel, just like I hope the thing hangs together as a whole despite the drastic parities between time, space, and means. That's why it's a record, though. Putting it down makes the discrepancies intentional, makes a dialogue about their parity. Or I make the differences slowly disappear, on a gradient I blend the spaces, the systems, the public, the private. With faders, bells, whistles, language.

martonyi may "sign" to loophole records

2006-02-12T18:47:00.000-08:00

for immediate release

Baldur-

I may have found you another client and I have an idea, which you have already had but which I never totally understood:

the design for loophole, the three-discipline hierarchy, can be the same structure for all loophole artists. joe, for example, is the other client and was willing to pay a friend in michigan $500 for it, with no face-to-face contact and files transferred over email. His designs and writing and whatever else can link to loophole, but his own site can be on the loophole "template."

You could even treat it like blogger, where users essentially enter data into the interface you create, except instead of a blog you get this cool flash-animation and "remake your screen," ways to upload songs, images, writing, ways to change certain parameters (like background color, for instance, or "skin styles" for the player) on the viewer end.

open source website construction! the way you've been saying, the structure fleshed out over coffee for over a year. AWESOME.

I've been working to make my blogs all hang together. and writing a lot. And making CDs, over 50 copies of music for war are now ready for consumption. I originally posted all the mission statements in the same place, loophole records dot com but I've been updating them. Is there a way to take all of the current loophole records bloggish stuff and make it into a threaded together, single page that I can link to somewhere? probably yes, but probably I've not explained it sufficiently well.

that's all for now. I am excited. I'd say we'll talk tomorrow, in person, but we won't. That is fucked, but I am confident we'll stay in touch.

smashing
A

ps sorry dinner doesn't seem to be in the cards this weekend. Christine's not seen NY friends since she officially moved. But come to West on Sunday night, for sure.

pps what if when we pass an artist the resources, the template and such, that artist has been signed to loophole records. if martonyi takes the template, he has been signed? (This has the curious effect of the artist paying for access, access which ultimately benefits us by increasing the effective network. but it's not a true buy-in, that's just the result of this peculiar circumstance and particular time. Other peculiar circumstances that are not in the real business model include the way I continue to lose money.)

and we are back

2006-02-11T14:04:00.000-08:00

I solved a big problem just now:

when I open Noise, cut the shrinkwrap, pull the cd, 1-fold insert, and case, I wind up with a lot of waste. The shrinkwrap and the tray insert (the page below the cd itself, i.e. the "back cover") specifically. till today I've thrown away the shrinkwrap and stored the insert, inelegantly, in a box.

But just now I started folding the insert into a little square and wrapping it along with the cd in the 1-fold insert (turned inside out, of course.)

And now I am thinking in cases instead of single units, and packages of 50 from meritline instead of single CDs. And the single units are not "cases of Noise" anymore (literally and figuratively), they are "cases of warehous produced cds."

So here is the math, finally. To officially launch loophole records I set out this plan.

1. make music for war: the one-take demos from existing shipment from meritline: 100 CDs. They are in packs of 50. So I will make 50. Repack 50 copies of Noise on the way. The yield is 50 music for war and 50 noise, off a cost of whatever it cost me to make the record I can't even give away in 2001 divided by 30, which is how many cases I paid for, plus 22c per cd, whatever it cost to buy 2 rolls of red and blue tape, 3 bottles of blue, red, and black ink, 3 toothbrushes, and my time, which I really enjoyed. Each CD costs me very little. So I can realistically start selling CDs for a few dollars and quadruple or quintuple my money.

2. collect absolutely every sound I have ever created and then recorded and warehouse-produce a data cd with 1-fold insert, jewel case insert, cd, and tray, in an affordable quantity. then buy meritline pack in that quantity (more than 100, so they could be even cheaper than 22c per, which is not necessarily accurate) and more color inks, toothbrushes, and tape. Yield is n copies of everything I've ever done (a virtual, literally and figuratively, box set), where n=the lowest possible warehouse-produced run, and n copies of the next thing I do.

3. make a plan to buy another burner after you fuck this one up with ink.

4. keep writing. post this as a blog, entitled "loopholerecordsdotcom," which you've been working on for awhile. Link to it on thankyoucampaign, which is text and collective home. can I use thankyoucampaign.org to point to my blog? I bet I can. Splendid, really splendid. So now the collective has a place to read and interact, the writing has a home that links to everything else, the record company gets its own mission statement thread, and I get to be a writer, composer, performer, and businessman. And it will work. I have found a viable way to live in the world, through making art. Splendid, really splendid.

practice log/next steps/mission statement

2005-06-24T07:09:00.000-07:00

I recast "purpose" using pieces of the keyboard part that I'd recorded into the SPD-S on my father's piano. Over the summer. I remember being either in that tiny room at JR's or at my parents' house over the weekend and being barely able to do anything, but what I did do definitely broke through some barriers. I've so completely accepted the new approach that I forget how new it really is, I forget that I wasn't in a band, wasn't playing the drums, wasn't playing more than one instrument at a time. And I was trying to develop the definitive approach, the "final" version of my instrument. I've loosened that now, there are an infinite number of ways to approach the thing and I will do all of those that are compelling.
A few ideas:

1. December--Lit Lounge: BD, SD, HH, CYM, SPD-S (no pedals), MMT-8, K3M, RS-09, Tele
2. May--Eat Records: SPD-S (pedals incl.), MMT-8, K3M, RS-09, Wurly, Tele (requires 3 amps)
3. June--Tsunami Benefit: SPD-S (pedals incl.), MMT-8, K3M, RS-09
4. July--Bomber: BD, SD, HH, SPD-S (pedals incl.), MMT-8, K3M, RS-09, tele?

There's another configuration, too..SPD-S (no pedals), K3M, MMT-8. That's a simple one, the "digital folk rock" thing. Also, songs with sampler alone would be rad. I would have approached this with real agony in the recent past, trying to find one way to deliver all of the music, and weeping over what was lost as I discarded "imperfect" drafts. But that's lost its steam. It's become predictable, you could say. Now the songs have the setup built-in, and another canvas is translating them across the different machine configurations. Again, an earlier version of me would have insisted on a version for all songs on each setup or some such other extreme thing. There's no steam in that anymore.

I wanted to play shows and that's what I'm doing. And I will bring my CDs with me. That's the basic idea. Come hear me play and jabber on the microphone, buy a CD for very nearly free, check the website. It's coming along. When there's no longer anything I can do that I find engaging, exciting I will size the situation up again. But my fear is driving my doubt, not the exhaustion of possibility. Fear that I am not good enough, fear that I've "made the wrong choice," fear of my own capacity for self-sabotage based only on not waking up. But I've woken up, I feel the resolve I have wanted to feel for so long but couldn't just manufacture.

Tonight I will label wires. Get set. I need to see about a keyboard stand...maybe lunch will be phone and keyboard stand.

Actually, lunch was for the keyboard stand and for a good conversation with Baldur about loophole records. We talked about the educational aspects, the community aspects. And also rationality and budget-consciousness prevailed regarding the stand. I will get a board cut at home depot and we'll see how that does.

The Bomber is going to be a good thing. Best foot forward. Still I'm not sure what I'll play exactly. Definitely the three from the other show. Then what? LSDF is hard and long and such, it sort of loses itself in the labyrinth. There's no wurly solo because I'm not bringing the wurly. But I could, but then there's the amp problem, and another distraction on some level, a big delicate piece, a heavy piece. For now I am thinking no wurly.

purpose
so sad
new ASR
+
go back
LSDF
ASR

maybe. we'll see after practice tonight. I like worksong. Staying on the stool was a real revalation. as much as I like to stand and play, what is lost is much, much greater than what is gained.

that's all for now. tonight, label wires and get comfortably set up and run the songs and stick with whatever feels compelling. last night it was the guitar, because it is finally filling out the room. That and the new purpose. I may run the benefit songs, to keep them fresh. Regardless, getting set up will be positive. knowing about X27 practice would also help, but maybe if I don't call they'll just forget about it.

home first, for a tape measure and tools? more likely I will take care of that tomorrow and save the hour of travel. that is all.

Stamps

2005-06-22T14:21:00.000-07:00

I need to make some stamps out of the units that Martonyi uses, then different colored ink pads, then lay it out for him. Another Music for Girls run. maybe, we'll see. Once I actually need to make more cds. The means of production and reproduction is a canvas. Those who work in the mills ought to own the mills. Art exists in infinite supply to fulfill infinite demand.

current projects

2005-06-16T18:43:00.000-07:00

Music for War

components:

Music for War: cover/invite

Set Matrix: eat

Set Iconography: bhs

blogger pages to adhesive paper for cutting copies. but 1st master reference copy, bound together. Then create the other copies from the master.

also available from loophole records page

mfg: 3 covers

wall canvases

memory

dead body photos?

free advertising

mfo, mfg art...process photos. photos in general.

portfolio

2005-03-01T19:17:00.000-08:00

artist name: massey

(title
format
year/instrumentation/availability)

the music for girls ep
cd ep
2005/solo/free dowload coming soon. loopholerecords@gmail.com for free hard copies.

music for strings and interference cnm edit
cd single
2004/solo+tape/free download coming soon. (out of print)

14.14 shoegazer edit
cd single
2004/solo + context compilation/free download coming soon. (out of print)

subpop
dots on paper
2003/orchestra/UNPERFORMED

from symphonia kriti:
iii. katastrophe
dots on paper
2002/orchestra/UNPERFORMED

from symphonia kriti:
i. diamorphosis
dots on paper
2002/orchestra/free download coming soon.

noise
cd lp
2001/solo collage/$5 loopholerecords@gmail.com
(music for girls ep hard copy included with all noise orders.)

music for strings and interference
cd single
2000/"tape"/free download coming soon.

on an isolated incedent
dots on paper, tape
2000/piano, violin, rock trio, tape/recording currently lost.

music to accompany revolution
dots on paper
2000/orchestra/free download coming soon.