Just Do It – Gamuso

In January I played an intimate underground show with the Just Do It crew as co-guest with DJ Wada at the Gamuso Art Bar in Asagaya. As always the hand crafted monster stereo sound system was tuned to perfection and the audience was energetic and attentive to detail, a perfect combination to get deep and introspective and then gradually wind everything up to a dramatic climax.

I did however nearly get into a fight during my sound check and for anyone who knows me this is absolutely unheard of considering that I have the patience of a mountain glacier filmed in slow motion and tolerance level to match, how else could I get all that crazy automation done?

Let me preface this recap with a little background history, explain why this event is so special to me and why the person I took issue with crossed a line I will not stand to have crossed.

The Just Do It crew have supported me, my music and my live shows for a number of years. They have shown me nothing but the highest artistic regard and they have a dedication to dance music that inspires me to make music and perform it at my best. Their parties never make money, it is techno for techno’s sake and it is real and honest.

Over the years they have accumulated a small and passionate following of techno-educated regulars who listen to an eclectic range of electronic music and when I make sly references to other genres or play one of my many in-set practical jokes (like dropping a mashup of Micahel Jackson’s Billy Jean with this crazy video and an interview with Oprah Winfrey) they get it straight away and from this a kind of crazy dialog with them has emerged and I am able to riff with the audience based on this history.

I love these guys very much and respect them even more, I made this set especially for them.

So there I am doing my sound check, I have been putting it together for about a week and I am on my third day of little to no sleep – one studio session, timed by my internet connection, standing at 18 straight hours and more – so at this point I am very tired, very hungry and very excited.

While I am setting up (it is around 10pm) a French man and his two female Japanese cohorts wander up to the dance floor from the bar below. It’s a very relaxed atmosphere so no one cares if they sit in on the sound check or not and we go about tuning the sound and setting levels.

As a tradition the crew always does the final system level check with Kirk De Georgio.

This track has immense emotional meaning for all of us because when we do the outdoor festival in summer this is the song that signals the sound system is ready to go and that the party is on!

I get goose bumps just thinking about it.

This is precisely when this prick decides to start humming and hawing about when the “real” music is going to start. He does the usual and predictable rant on how this music has no soul, machine music for automatons and so on but I pass him off as a drunk idiot, we are all entitled to our opinions, and I of all people know how niche this music is, I am fully aware that it is not everybody’s cup of tea and I really have no problem with people not liking it

BUT this guy wouldn’t leave it there.

The design of this set is to get attention, go deep, go really deep and then burst above the surface to float and play in the clouds. So as my sound check progresses the music gets louder and more intense – unfortunately so does the Frenchman.

It’s a a fucking level check but I can hear this guy complaining from across the dance floor getting more and more upset that the machine music is taking over, there are no real instruments, there is no emotion – yada yada yada,

I am starting to get irritated.

So as I get louder and more intense, so does the French man who by this time is on his feet and looking very upset that no one is really paying attention to him but we are all focused on getting ready for the event so his chimping and chest beating for the ladies (who are goading him on) is the least of our concerns.

But here’s where he crosses the line. I reach the highest level peak of the set, I step out onto the dance floor to hear the system from the audience’s perspective. I am concentrating on the levels with the engineer when I am unceremoniously pushed out of the way (of my own music) by the French man who then proceeds to walk towards my gear and the speakers goose stepping and sieg heiling in time to my music.

I am too stunned to react at this point, so much so that I just go back to my gear and start to wind up the sound check.

It all sounds good and I just have one or two more intense spots to preview and then I have to re check that all the loops are syncing correctly (horrible phasing on the kick otherwise). To do this I have to jump from place to place in the set, cutting the audio to silence from time to time and each time I do a mute the three burst into loud applause, cheering and whooping that the music has stopped and loud jeers of disapproval when it starts up again.

It is very loud at this point but the they are even louder and I simply slam the music off and scream at them to.

“SHUUUT THE FUUUCK UP!”

The whole bar, even down stairs, goes dead quite, like that scene in a western where a fight is about to break and even the piano music stops.

There is this moment of fight or flight and the Frenchman doesn’t quite know what to do.

I yell at him again.

“SHUUUT THE FUUUCK UP!” You have no idea what you are talking about so shut up and go somewhere else.”

I have never had my music or my friends so disrespected by anyone. I was shaking and fuming so I unhooked my computer went to a local curry bar and had an awesome dal with nan and when I returned to the venue the three of them were gone.

Thankfully their energy departed with them and the rest of the evening was fantastic,

I have said it before and I will say it again, DJ Wada is one of the finest techno DJs on the planet.

Here is my contribution to the show.

(unedited watch your ears please!)

Media Fodder 6: Conversing with Contemporary Art – Part 1

Or Why a Child Couldn’t Paint That.

In 1964 Pierre Brassau exhibited 4 avante-garde paintings in Goteburg Sweden to favourable reviews, but it later turned out to be a hoax perpetrated by a local journalist to put art critics to the test.

The “test” being the typical and now tired variation of “Can critics of contemporary art distinguish between an authentic piece of art and a painting by a child, ape or hoaxster?” and the hoax being that Pierre Brassau was actually a chimp called Peter who liked eating cobalt blue more than actually painting with it.

This kind of set up, or variations of it, has been done many times before. Check out Tuymans Experiment where Luc Tuymans “…one of the most important painters alive today…” tests the public’s ability to acknowledge a mural he paints on a busy street; or read the Washington Post article in which they have Joshua Bell (a highly acclaimed contemporary violinist) playing in a DC subway at rush hour to see how the general public will react to a virtuoso performing on a three million dollar 17th century Stradivarius if they have no idea who is playing it.

In Tuymans’ case his street mural is largely passed by without a second glance and Mr Bell is taken to be just another busker on the street, until one passerby recognises him from his performance from the previous night at the library of congress and stops to listen.

In both examples the results are predictable, indeed the average Joe often cannot tell the difference between authentic and inauthentic art and on occasion neither can the pros, but so what?

The general knee jerk reaction at this point is a lot of finger pointing, name calling and shaming, as if some major point has been made and the facade of contemporary art has somehow been torn asunder exposing it as a vacuous vessel bereft of any value or worth.

You see! Art’s all just a bunch of pretentious pompous pretenders parleying preposterous hypotheses.

But it isn’t.

Art is a kind of grand conversation with the past, present and future, and being aware of this helps in understanding what is going on in Western Contemporary Art.

Art, as with any conversation, is all about context.

Much as great writers reference classic stories, reinterpret them or write essays on them, so do good artists who use color, line and composition as their words, and they reference symbols and themes from art past and present and, in the instance of geniuses like Picasso, art in the future to come.

To understand contemporary art it is useful to know what artists are trying to express presently in contrast with their own past work and the works of other artist examining similar or related themes. Should you take the time to delve into this aspect of art, it will reveal not only an internal conversation within each artist, “What am I trying to say, do, express or deconstruct?” but an external “Grand Conversation” with other art and artists too, “I agree or disagree with this notion and technique and I present my own versions of them here and in this way and this is why.”.

Knowing this places the artists into a historical time line and from this context we can determine their contribution to art.

The thing is, just like meeting other guests at a dinner party, what one artist has to say may bore you to tears in seconds and yet another may captivate you for a life time.

That is where I think the real subjectivity in art comes from, the choosing of which artist’s conversation you want listen to, and because it is subjective it doesn’t necessarily mean the artist you like is contributing in an “important” way. “Importance” in this case being a measure of the range of influence, disruption or impact one artist has in other artists work and how significant their ideas or techniques are when set within 10, 20, 100, or 300 year time lines.

This dynamic conversational history is important and oft overlooked when trying to understand a single, and ultimately baffling piece of work that sits outside of any context other than the show or gallery it appears in.

A perfect example of this is the artist Piet Mondrian whom I think is one of the most misunderstood artists of the 20th century by the general public.

It is very difficult to understand his art and why it is so important without at least some idea of how he arrived at these paintings, the arguments he had within himself and with other artists, his early works compared to his later works and, most importantly, understanding the historical context in which he painted.

His contribution to art paved the way for a slew of historically significant works and artists and his influences are still widespread 60 odd years after his death.

“A child could paint that!” is a common response to first encounters with his paintings, but it is a gross underestimation of the sophistication of his work, and let’s not even begin to discuss Picasso to whom such a statement would be the ultimate compliment.

What makes great art and artists is not necessarily their actual paintings or works of art but rather how much the ideas they convey contribute to this “Grand Conversation”. Is the artist only talking about ideas already explored in a more imaginative way by someone else? Is the artist bringing a fresh new way of looking at something old, or a new way of looking at the world and art entirely? Is the artist bringing some life to a very long and historied conversation that has seen and heard an innumerable amount of ideas and thoughts before, and is at times bored of its own company?

Will this artist’s ideas be remembered the next day through ochre hangovers and water color recollections?

How eloquently and effectively an artist expresses themselves in this “Grand Conversation” is how they establish themselves, and by a process of elimination the strongest and most influential ideas prevail and become historically significant.

NY Times art critic Michael Kimmelman explains it eloquently here and here.

Now, considering this “Grand Conversation”, how is one to respond to someone entering into it and deliberately hoaxing the participants?

An ape’s paintings may look like an avant-garde painting, even to the trained eye, but remember an ape would NOT paint like a human and such a new style, be it in the brush strokes, color or composition would be very exciting to some critics and collectors looking for a new conversation.

But once a work is revealed to be the that of an ape it can no longer be taken seriously as art even if it fools the experts.

If paintings were actual words the ape’s would read, “BLRBl BLRBL MWAH MWAH” and what kind of contribution to the “Grand Conversation” of art is that?

Descanso 002 Collaboration Track – Grape Coin.

I provided Kyoto based Artist Baiyon with a few sounds and he put together this dirty bass driven Tech House track for his new Digital Label Descanso.

You can hear/buy it at beatport, iTunes and Kingbeat

The re-mix by Takuya Morita is fantastic and the release has already received some great feedback from Anthony Collins (CURLE, VAKANT, FREAK N’CHIC, BANG BANG) who says, “nice stuff would love to get 320 MP3 of this release”; Mathias Kaden (Freude am Tanzen, Vakant Records) who says. “great,thank you so much!! I really like the spirit of the record….”; and Jay Bliss (BangBang, Dynamic) who says, “Really love and would like to play the Tayuka Morita remix. Thanks!”

The title from the song is a tongue in cheek reference to to a conversation Baiyon and I had over drinks after a show at Club Metro in Kyoto.

We were talking about dance floor dynamics and I described to him several interesting experiments involving Primates and the teaching of certain learned value systems.

As a live performance artist I am very interested in crowd dynamics and crowd manipulation so these kinds of social experiments on our genetic cousins, though loosely related, fascinate me.

Grape Coin is a reference to a Harvard study in which economist Keith Chen wanted too see if highly sociable capuchin monkeys could understand the concept of money, that is, the fungiblity of an abstract token (with an abstract value) into a resource of tangible value i.e. a coin-like token for one grape.

Here are the actual articles; Capuchin monkeys don’t work for peanuts and The unexpected results of teaching monkeys how to pay for things.

tl;dr (too long didn’t read)

Simplified.

Monkeys learn to use objects to pay for things. They do a “task” get “paid” in tokens and are taught to exchange the tokens for things like grapes or slices of cucumber. Grapes are sweeter and more desired and the tasks to obtain them are more difficult so therefore the grapes have a higher value than the cucumbers.

When the tasks are switched, that is easy tasks now pay grape coins and difficult tasks now pay cucumber coins the monkeys stop “working” because, it seems, they understand it is unfair to work more for less.

This shows that, like us, monkeys are capable of understanding a sense of justice, the first time this has been observed outside the human species. It is a remarkable observation and it starts to blur the line between us and our fellow simians, but where the division blurs almost entirely is when…

“Something else happened …, something that convinced Chen of the monkeys’ true grasp of money. Perhaps the most distinguishing characteristic of money, after all, is its fungibility, the fact that it can be used to buy not just food but anything. … in the monkey cage, Chen saw something out of the corner of his eye that he would later try to play down but in his heart of hearts he knew to be true. What he witnessed was probably the first observed exchange of money for sex in the history of monkey kind. (Further proof that the monkeys truly understood money: the monkey who was paid for sex immediately traded the token in for a grape.)” – Times.

Media Fodder 5: Audio Myth Workshop

Self proclaimed propeller head Ethan Winer explodes some audio myths and pokes a rational finger at $20 000 power cables.

Joining him (all too briefly) are Poppy Crum a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins who conducts research on neural circuits in the auditory cortex involved in hearing in a complex acoustic environment, and fellow scientist James Johnston chief scientist for DTS.

The first 10 minutes are a crudely edited but worth watching and Mr Winer’s presentation starts in at around 09:40.

He does interesting side by side comparisons of “high end” and “low end” sound cards, dithered and undithered recordings (can you really hear the difference?), demonstrates what phase shift sounds like, compares high- and low-end converters, teaches proper test methods, explains why hearing is not as reliable as test gear, and much more.

Audio Myth Workshop

Media Fodder 4: Breaking 10 000?

Interesting 3 part series and interview with Tom Silverman (Tommyboy Entertainment) about New Music and the numbers of “New Artists” breaking into the music selling industry.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

According to the third article only 12 artists sold over 10,000 albums in 2008 for the first time out of 105,575 new album releases that year.

Here are a collection of criticisms of the numbers.