The Smell, Los Angeles, California
29 March 2001
The stages faces a room which cages a particular piece of modern art and the reflection is this: levelor blinds painted with barcode marks bracketed by (0) and (1) and a neon word consci divides ousness. White of the eye stares back towards the white of another eye. Yet, is consciousness the answer? Perhaps we’re asking the wrong question. Still – what questions are here to ask? Well, besides that one. A certain level of banter pervades. Keep in mind that this is all pre-game musings on another, less pervasive level of banter.
Now the image of the anti-Haino arises. A figure in white plies the tunes of a faraway place and other time – gently and with tambourines and banjo. Shoes are glued to Dame Darcy‘s and she proffers the two-step (“…or maybe the wah-TWO-si!”). There are recordings of this woman dueting with birds in a barn. Someplace. A matter of timing. The experiment in modern experience (cf. Floh de Cologne, Current 93, Sparifankal, Caroliner Singing Bull). And so on. How deeply is the oral tradition (discounting Oral Constitution, mind) entwined with experiments in sound? How deeply has one attempted to extricate itself from the other? “In the pines, in the pines, where the sun never shines…” Not-knowing – a tenuous tenacity, that – is the cornerstone of the tradition of experimental music. So too is it with most other stones in life. A plectrum on the auto-harp: “You think you’ve had enough of the autoharp, but you haven’t!”
And so on.
-David Cotner-
