“Experimental Music” (Used 8 times)

Yer Tiz:

FUN—as I've come to know the Philadelphia-based combo, its sounds and membership, I realize how truly appropriate the name is for what they do. FUN are able to apply clever, inventive, fresh ideas to their improvised music-making, minus all the beard-stroking and pretentious, high-minded, music-conservatory-based conceptualization and back-patting that often accompanies similar activities.

For their FUN Go! America! tour, a 50-year project that involves one performance a year, each in a different state, on the very date that that state was inducted into the Union, FUN came to New Jersey on December 18th, to WFMU's Studio B, to render two unique, smartly conceived and individually distinct long-form improvisations. The concept of the tour alone is staggering, and relies upon FUN's members having access to interstate transportation, and living long enough, to execute the mass concept in its entirety.

Backed by an American flag, adorned with their name in silver duct tape, and a host of gear ranging from plastic soda bottles to radically modified electric guitars, Mat and Jonny donned Kennedy and Nixon masks ("lifelong enemies") to render their first set, which begins with the delicious sound of carbonated-beverage-pouring, and takes flight from there. Set two, entitled "A Stroll In Jersey City," involved a studio-stationed, close-mic'd cel phone, into which they called in, while walking around the neighborhood of WFMU's building, making music from whatever they encountered on their walk.

Engineer Bob Bellerue and myself certainly had a great deal of FUN, recording the sets and watching the action put forth live and in person. These sets were broadcast the following Friday a.m. on My Castle of Quiet, though it was critical to the concept that they were recorded on Dec. 18th, the very date of NJ's 224th anniversary of statehood.

Thanks again to Mat, Jonny, and their friend Kevin, all of whom were present for the rendering of similarly intriguing sets on the Castle on the last day of December 2010, that material also resulting in a dynamic set of remixes, aired on the show the following February. Thanks as always to Bob, for his invaluable, sterling engineering skills, and to Tracy Widdess, for once again rendering my performance photos into art.

We're in a golden age of listening right now.  Of course, the dissemination of new music has been greatly broadened due to the ubiquity of the internet and things like Sound Cloud and Band Camp.  That's one level of the new model of making music, and it has it's beauty.  For some reason, whenever I run across a sound cloud track of weird prog rock from Italy or yet another dub remix of the Imperial March from Star Wars, I wonder if this is what someone like Cornelius Cardew or Hans Werner Henze (during his "music for the people" phase) had in mind when trying to connect with the masses through new music.  Something tells me that it isn't, but that they would appreciate it on a certain level anyway. 

The next level is the proliferation of apartment sized record labels.  This is a commitment.  This is about serious people being serious about serious music.  It doesn't matter if it's grime or dubstep or lower case or ultra-minimalism.  These are the believers, the proselytizers and the people that we need to bake cookies for and buy a beer the next time we see them at the local bar.  They are sleeping on boxes of CDs and LPs.  They are desperately trying to get someone else's music noticed by the press and the listening public because they believe in it and think you should too. If there is anything that even begins to make up for the amount of my time the internet has wasted, the fact that it is easier for these people to exist has more than made up for it.

But, this post is about the OGs...the original proselytizers and educators, some who have stuck in there for years, bringing those that find their way to them a little joy and something new to think about...these are labels like Pogus, Mode, XI, Lovely Music, CRI, New World, Aum Fidelity, Tzadik, Intransitive, Broken Research, and the list goes on and on.  Some have sadly fallen to the dust, but others are going strong.  All of them existed before owning a label was easy and cool.

The Open Space is one such label.  Run alongside a publishing concern of the same name, Open Space has consistently had the good faith, courage, and audacity to produce music 99.9% of even the experimental labels active even now would most likely deem "marginal".  Note that "marginal" does not mean "unimportant".  When I began at DRAM, this label was a complete mystery to me.  The covers were very plain: white background, black lettering with the names of the composers and compositions on the cover.  I was attracted to them in the same way I was originally attracted to the simplicity of old Jandek LP covers.  I started diving in and listening to the pieces.  I didn't like them all.  That's easy to admit for any label.  However, there was an excitement of knowing you were going to get something new and fresh, something to think about and argue with your friends over in our cubicles.  That excites me. That's what music should do, right?  Well, the Open Space is doing it.

I was lucky enough to speak with Benjamin Boretz, who runs the label and whose music is featured prominently (as is J.K. Randall among others).  He was able to give me a very succinct philosophical synopsis of the way the Open Space works, and I think it makes more sense to leave you with that and a very generous playlist of some of my favorite pieces from the label, then to add any more of my memory and coloring to the proceeding.  I will say this though;

Open Space and labels like it....new and old....deserve your respect and attention.  They have a lot to offer.  I know FMA is the digital choir loft that I'm preaching too, but even us heavily enlightened types can forget to say thank you to the people that fill our ears with wonder sometimes.

OPEN SPACE Publications, and THE OPEN SPACE Magazine, are output from a community for people who need to explore or expand the limits of their expressive worlds, to extend or dissolve the boundaries among their expressive-language practices, to experiment with the forms or subjects of thinking or making or performing in the context of creative phenomena.

We want to create a hospitable space for texts which, in one way or another, might feel somewhat marginal — or too 'under construction' — for other, kindred publications.

The people who populate our contributing/editing/reading/listening community are composers (in whatever medium), performers, historians, ethnologists, theorists, critics, philosophers, scholars and seekers of any kind who feel drawn to participate with us in scouting expressive frontiers. We hope you'll want to join this exchange.

-Benjamin Boretz

Roulette, the major New York City venue for experimental contemporary music and intermedia art, is a key resource for established and emerging artists alike. Over three decades, Roulette has built an international reputation that is enhanced by projects like Roulette TV (mirrored on Vimeo and UBUWeb) and the amazing Roulette Concert Archive with streaming audio recordings dating back to 1981. While a Free Music Archive collaboration is in the works, Roulette's non-profit staff has their hands full as the venue prepares to leave Manhattan in favor of an incredible Art Deco theater in downtown Brooklyn (check out New Roulette) that will serve as Roulette's new permanent home. Coupled with ISSUE Project Room's pending move to nearby 110 Livingston, Downtown Brooklyn is about to become the place for experimental live performance.

Roulette eases into Free Music Archive curation with a fantastic set of recordings from EASY NOT EASY, a three night festival held in October to help raise funding and awareness for Roulette's new space. Curators Matt Mehlan (Skeletons) & Doron Sadja (MIRRORGATE, West Nile) asked a wide array of NYC's most exciting young artists to compose a series of "simple" new scores, as well as to perform scores by more established artists like John Zorn and Robert Ashley.

The EASY NOT EASY FMA Collection includes composers like Dan Deacon, Pauline Oliveros, Justin Frye (PC Worship), and Matana Roberts. Each night featured a different performing lineup, which included some staples of the New York experimental music scene who are already familiar to the Free Music Archive, like Richard Garet, Ben Greenberg (Hubble), Katherine Young, C. Spencer Yeh, Sam Hillmer (Zs), and many more:

Listen and join us in looking forward to what the future holds for Roulette!

From the very first second that I was given any kind of latitude to suggest labels and archives to the Database of Recorded American Music (DRAM), I had visions of being able to cull through and upload the entire Edition Wandelweiser catalog for streaming.  For those that don't know DRAM, it is an online research engine for colleges.  Its goal is to present the student with music that could be a bit more difficult to be exposed to through their normal course of study.  I thought, of all the labels out there, Edition Wandelweiser was the absolute model of what we should include.

After talking to Antoine Beuger (the head of Edition Wandelweiser), he graciously agreed to let us begin the streaming of his catalog on DRAM, and after a follow up conversation, I'm proud to say that he has agreed to let us use some of my favorite EW tracks as our first DRAM-related feature here on FMA.

How to sum it up? Edition Wandelweiser artists are definitely of a certain aesthetic.  I stop short of calling it a dogma, though, and that's what makes it interesting to me.  Loads of Silence, yes.  Minimalist, yes...to the degree that minimalism applies to music.  Conceptual, yes....but...this is that very special kind of conceptual music that has at its core the idea that the actual music, in its purely auditory form, has to be at least equal, if not greater, than the articulation of the concept that made it possible.  This is something I've always respected about composers like Tom Johnson (represented here on EW), Phill Niblock, Steve Reich, etc., and it is always great to find a label that consistently strikes this precarious balance between high thought and high art.