This is the most recent in the Unknown Public series — and it arrived in July 2006. Seventeen issues in fifteen years: so much, as I've said before, for being 'quarterly'. Issues 04, 05, 07 and 15 have been featured here previously.
The Re-invention theme of this compilation is more nebulous than most, but who cares if the music is interesting? And mostly it is. There's a loose strand of questioning what music really is, highlighting the experience of listening vis-a-vis composing, and focusing on found sounds and loops. Thus Will Menter writes, in his essay,
What constitutes a musical experience? Maybe we need to look more at how sound is received rather than how it is produced (bearing in mind that that term 'music' is shorthand for a large number of human activities that we find convenient to group together).
And Damiano Viscardi (a.k.a. Spaturno
I build my tracks on the chronometrical [fancy word for 'timed'] tracking of single urban events: the time taken by the subway train to reach the next stop, the rhythmic sounds of a locomotive, a car horn blowing wildly. Every single noise can grow up and become a sound. And every single event can become music. It's not about composing; it's about listening.
All of which kind of suggests to me that, when it comes to re-invention, most music makers are still working in the shadow of John Cage…
The two pieces that stand out on this listening, as both beautiful and witty, are Paul Lansky's Table's Clear and particularly Piotr Kurek's Music Box/Pozytywka. Nicolas Repac's Swing Swing bears an uncanny similarity to The Real Tuesday Weld's Bathtime in Clerkenwell, but I have no idea who if anyone may have been looking over who's shoulder.
As usual with Unknown Public, the CD comes in a very nicely produced hardback booklet with 25 pages of essays. I've only read those by Will Menter and Julian Maynard-Smith so far. Speaking of listening experiences, it's remarkable how just the perception that someone has laboured long and hard over compiling a CD like this creates the inducement to listen better. Nowadays there are so many compilation CDs (particularly the covermounts) that give the impression — accurate or otherwise — of having been put together in little more than an hour, and I find I can barely summon the energy to concentrate on listening.
And speaking of Julian Maynard-Smith, I think it may have been him who contacted me a year or two ago via one of those online social networks to ask if I'd be interested in helping to re-invent the Unknown Public website. As I remember it, the catch was that there was little or no money to pay me, but my particular worry was that, in order to a re-invention worthy of the term, quite a lot of work might be needed, and, when there's no money on the table, that would have meant me making a more or less open-ended commitment. As I was also reasonably busy at the time, I'm afraid I turned it down. It might have been fun, though, and another time (like now, for instance) I might have said yes.
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