www.aec.at  
 
 
 
 
Statement of the Digital Musics Jury
This year's digital music jury was faced with a dilemma: How can digital music be distinguished from any other category of music? Read David Toop's & Naut Humon's Jury Statement.

A new ambiguity: human and digital

By David Toop & Naut Humon

"If I was given a choice between listening to something I really liked and nothing at all – very often I would choose nothing at all."
David Toop


At this point in time, digital technology has become ubiquitous in our lives. Even for an acoustic guitarist, the recording, mixing, editing, mastering, distribution, promotion and playback of music is likely to be digital to some degree. In 2003, a digital music jury is faced with a dilemma: how can digital music be distinguished from any other category of music? Some relatively recent trends in music can be interpreted as a response to digital technology, even if the means of generating sound are located within the body or in instruments made from wood or metal.

Digital listening is one aspect of this change. The microscopic focus on small sounds allowed by the computer, along with the minute transformations typical of audio software programs, has affected timbre and form in many different types of music making. Even the reduced noise floor of recording and playback that comes with digitization has opened up new possibilities for performers exploring an unprecedented ratio of silence to noise, or inactivity to activity. In a broader context, the information overload characteristic of digitized societies has been the catalyst for a backlash where withdrawal, subtlety and silence are the watchwords.

Audio work produced from this philosophical position is essentially fugitive in nature, structured according to principles that are less clearly evident, the 'narrative' less transparently developmental or dramatic than any existing aesthetic of digital sonic arts. This raised excruciating issues for this year's jury (and juries to come) in that a prize such as the Golden Nica implies a 'masterpiece', a work unassailable in its completeness, its virtuosity and its mastery of technology, technique and form. And the problem might be that when you're getting into competitions, one is almost automatically looking for big statements and the smaller, more personal pieces are often overlooked in comparison.

But is this meaningful in the 21st century, in an era when change is so rapid and audiences are so fragmented and diverse? Do these shortened attention spans indicate any sort of real progress? The enormous impact of a breakthrough composition, such as Karlheinz Stockhausen's *Telemusik* now seems to be the mark of a previous era. For better or worse, quantity is one of the defining trends of digital music. The ease of recording on home computers with generic software packages, then burning CD-Rs of the results, has unleashed a torrent of technically capable yet often unengaging music. A striking aspect of many of the works that emerged out of the general morass this year is that they represent a positive sense of opening possibilities, rather than closure. At first glance the achievement can seem modest, yet the implications and influence may be far more profound than a noisier, grander work.

A good case in point is the winner of the Golden Nica in 2003, a recording of two duos: vocalist Ami Yoshida with synthesizer player Utah Kawasaka ("Astro Twin"), and Yoshida with Sachiko M ("Cosmos"), who plays the sine tones installed in a digital sampler. All of these players are engaged in a scene that explores minimalism, subverted technologies, restraint, silences and the outer limits of auditory perception. The scene is distinctly Japanese yet also international – part of a wider approach that can no longer be contained under any rubric of improvisation, minimalism, electronic music or composition. The players are very adaptable in one sense, yet they limit the range of their activities in order to avoid the 21st century temptations of all things being possible.

Terms such as strength or interaction are called into question, just as received views of music, noise and silence were challenged by John Cage in the 1950s. Above all, this kind of music questions the relevance of defining or celebrating any kind of audio activity in relation to a single technological approach. The utopian dreams of the 20th century have been tempered by experience. Our future as humans depends upon a relationship with technology that sustains our own humanity.

As digital musicians continue to actively consider the role that software plays in the character and identity of their special sound, one is led to wonder how much these processes color a listener's identification with unusual particularities an artist may be attempting to convey. Is the creator simply subscribing to an electronic genre's compositional expectation and style, or is there an effort to transcend trendy musical anachronisms to seek a technological transparency where obvious software demonstration seems to "disappear" into a deeper experiential organism? Traditionally, much of modern electronic music takes acoustic or synthetic source materials and disguises them through transformative signal processing or non-destructive editing techniques. Where developments in physical modeling programs attempt to emulate accurately older analog tape and instrument sounds, there is an equivalent opposite movement amongst some human improvisers with analog synthesizers, voice and live instrumental lineups who are conveying a "digital" attitude and influence in their works.

It is precisely at this junction that the realm of digital musics intersects with its analogue predecessors to realize a hybrid of fresh "audentities" not always tied to their anticipated sources. Several of this year's chosen selections reflected this increasing tendency to further blur these less-defined audio terrains.

The uncommon qualities we found in Ami Yoshida's collaborative ventures with Sachiko M and Utah Kawasaki represents inconspicuous areas of improvisation seldom investigated in the past years of Prix Ars Electronica.

Astro Twin & Cosmos seemed to constantly rise to the surface of our discussions as one of the primary examples in this younger, unassuming music milieu. There was reason to care but not be overly serious about all the intentions in their live explorations as they seemed to be surprised themselves at the subtle directions their sounds would move. Ami's voice, which is never really singing, sounds like a technical artifact from a cracked CD or something, against Utah's analog generated burstings that seem starkly digital in character. SachikoM's sine wave soundbeds affected Yoshida's vocals towards more insular utterances; a more personalized ‘cosmos'. of texture and nuance.
There was a premier moment when these two groups came on that changed the room and the atmosphere changed too, along with our focus. It was times like these that lingered in our memories and led to this Golden Nica surprise along with very significant others.

One of this session's honorable mentions is Foldings, a live document performed by Mark Wastell, Taku Sugimoto, Tetuzi Akiyama and Toshimaru Nakumara on prepared acoustic guitar, violoncello, turntable, contact mic., amplifier, air duster and a no-input mixing board. Here the electronics are scarce and the silences are long. So subtle are the live proceedings that the attention-tension level of the ensemble and its audience are extremely elevated. This commitment to sound as pure sound places a fresh hyper-awareness onto the players and non-players. Almost vanished are the overstated performance techniques of many generations in free improvisation. The new musician has nowhere to hide. The care and diligence taken in these sensitive surroundings must enhance the spare core ingredients of each microsonic occurrence. It is an improvisational language of defined methods and parameters imbued with a "digital" sensibility. This would have been an impossible recording in the pre-digital era. The people playing here have been listening to the kind of detail you get in digital music and are arriving at results quite different from the vinyl fidelities of former decades.

Both the Astro Twin / Cosmos configurations and the Foldings group reflect part of a reductionist music community which explores the concentration on this quieter, intimate aesthetic. There are parts in these recordings that remain underdeveloped, half-formed, or very fragile but acknowledging these remarkable smaller scenes reaffirms the Prix Ars Electronica open statement that a project that's quite obscure, less mature or even technically sparse can still obtain a fair chance at our yearly roundtable. This signal to the digital musics community should illustrate the constant challenge of creating new tools and sounds amidst a saturated climate where electronic music and computers are everywhere and nothing that special anymore.

But what can still be special is the long term effect digital music has interfused with other ways of making music. What we are questioning is how the active technology has shaped the music in good or bad ways. And in terms of issues of control, are groups like these moving away from this romantic idea of the composer somehow taking over or controlling every aspect of the listener’s response using technology to make a narrative connection? All of these approaches are in a state of flux and becoming very blurred and ambiguous. Our verdicts were mixed.


more
4.7.2003
© Ars Electronica Linz GmbH, info@aec.at