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Drone and Apocalypse is an exhibit catalog for a retrospective of
twenty-first-century art. Its narrator, Cynthia Wey, is a failed
artist convinced that apocalypse is imminent. She writes critical
essays delineating apocalyptic tendencies in drone music and
contemporary art. Interspersed amid these essays are "speculative
artworks", Wey's term for descriptions of artworks she never
constructs that center around the extinction of humanity. Wey's
favorite musicians are drone artists like William Basinski, Celer,
Thomas Koner, Les Rallizes Denudes, and Eliane Radigue, and her
essays relate their works to moments of ineffability in Herodotus,
Aristotle, Plato, Pliny the Elder, Isidore of Seville, Robert
Burton, Hegel, and Dostoyevsky. Well after Wey's demise, the
apocalypse never arrives, but Wey's journal is discovered. Curators
fascinated with twenty-first-century culture use her writings as
the basis for their exhibit "Commentaries on the Apocalypse", which
realizes Wey's speculative artworks as photographs, collages, and
sound/video installations.
Is music property? Under what circumstances can music be stolen?
Such questions lie at the heart of Joanna Demers's timely look at
how overzealous intellectual property (IP) litigation both stifles
and stimulates musical creativity. A musicologist, industry
consultant, and musician, Demers dissects works that have brought
IP issues into the mainstream culture, such as DJ Danger Mouse's
""Grey Album"" and Mike Batt's homage-gone-wrong to John Cage's
silent composition ""4'33."" Demers also discusses such artists as
Ice Cube, DJ Spooky, and John Oswald, whose creativity is sparked
by their defiant circumvention of licensing and copyright issues.
Demers is concerned about the fate of transformative appropriation
- the creative process by which artists and composers borrow from,
and respond to, other musical works. In the United States, only two
elements of music are eligible for copyright protection: the master
recording and the composition (lyrics and melody) itself. Harmony,
rhythm, timbre, and other qualities that make a piece distinctive
are virtually unregulated. This two-tiered system had long
facilitated transformative appropriation while prohibiting blatant
forms of theft. The advent of digital file sharing and the specter
of global piracy changed everything, says Demers. Now, record
labels and publishers are broadening the scope of IP
""infringement"" to include allusive borrowing in all forms:
sampling, celebrity impersonation - even Girl Scout campfire
sing-alongs. Paying exorbitant licensing fees or risking even
harsher penalties for unauthorized borrowing has become the only
options for some musicians. Others, however, creatively sidestep
not only the law but also the very infrastructure of the music
industry. Moving easily between techno and classical, between
corporate boardrooms and basement recording studios, Demers gives
us new ways to look at the tension between IP law, musical meaning
and appropriation, and artistic freedom.
Contemporary electronic music has splintered into a dizzying
assortment of genres and subgenres, communities and subcultures.
Given the ideological differences among academic, popular and
avant-garde electronic musicians, is it possible to derive an
aesthetic theory that accounts for this variety? And is there even
a place for aesthetics in twenty-first-century culture? Listening
through the Noise explores genres ranging from techno to
electroacoustic music, from glitch to drone music, and from dub to
drones, and maintains that culturally and historically informed
aesthetic theory is not only possible but indispensable for
understanding electronic music. The abilities of electronic music
to use preexisting sounds and to create new sounds are widely
known. Author Joanna Demers proceeds from this starting point to
consider how electronic music is changing the way we listen not
only to music, but to sound itself. The common trait among all
variants of recent experimental electronic music is a concern with
whether sound, in itself, bears meaning. The use in recent works of
previously undesirable materials like noise, field recordings, and
extremely quiet sounds has contributed to electronic music's
destruction of the "musical frame," the conventions that used to
set apart music from the outside world. In the void created by the
disappearance of the musical frame, different philosophies for
listening have emerged. Some electronic music genres insist upon
the inscrutability and abstraction of sound. Others maintain that
sound functions as a sign pointing to concepts or places beyond the
work. But all share an approach towards listening that departs
fundamentally from the expectations that have governed music
listening in the West for the previous five centuries.
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