Brandon Joseph & Tony Conrad

ISSUE Project Room

This is the beginning of the week-long series pairing musicians with writers, called the Littoral series, and it only reaffirms my belief in the necessity of criticism. At the previous concert (False Advertising), the singer gave her own mini-lecture on a piece before she performed it, and let’s just say it fell short and was totally uninteresting. This, however, was different: because pairing an outsider with an artist does not demand that the artist follow the criticism, nor that the audience perceive the music (or any performance, poetry reading or whatever) with the same outcome as the critic. Allowing outside criticism necessitates and confirms subjectivity, whereas the “voice of the artist” gives at least an illusion of objectivity. It seems clearer, now, why artist (poet, musician, director) lectures are so much more popular than critical evaluations; while criticism decimates the idea of correct interpretation, the artist’s voice brings it all back to a comforting place. Ezra Pound said it well, when (talking about music, ironically) he more or less rejects “artist statements,” saying that “the artist does attain precise utterance in his own medium.” *

Tony Conrad must believe in this form of subjectivity, not only because he did not give an artist’s statement but also because he showed a clip of himself from a documentary on the 60s underground praising the use of LSD. Psychedelic drugs, he said, reinforce the idea that all perception is subjective. Of course, this guy plays concerts in his PJs, so take that however you want to. I, at least, haven’t missed one of his concerts since I’ve been here.

* Taken from Pound’s “Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony.”

Kenneth Goldsmith

ISSUE Project Room: Park Slope

“Kenneth Goldsmith sings Roland Barthes” was the title. Goldsmith founded UbuWeb, on the basis that avant-garde works that are difficult (or impossible) to attain, are out of print, or sell for exorbitant prices on eBay should be free to all on the internet. I could not talk enough about how much I love UbuWeb and the sound samples it has provided me, of things like Ezra Pound reading his impossible poetry on an Italian Fascist radio broadcast.

First of all, September 11, big deal here (apparently), so Goldsmith begins by reading the TV broadcast (WABC New York) of the morning eight years ago, transcribed with all the ums and buts and stutters of the reporters and pundits. Reporters and pundits, the morning of, were calling for invading the Middle East–it’s just repetition, out of context, of what was said, but that was what made it powerful. Then, he sang Roland Barthes’ “The Rustle of Language” for about forty minutes to the string quartet playing Haydn and Webern. Inexplicable, but it’ll be up on WFMU’s Free Music Archive soon (or on UbuWeb), so I’ll re-post then.