In 2000, a microsound list thread entitled “Where in the world?” quizzed subscribers about their geographic location. At ninety-one replies, this thread is the 3rd longest on the list. The above illustration locates all 43,547 emails to November 2008 using IP addresses and the MaxMind geographic database. Circle size indicates relative quantity of posts from each city.
--On October 27th of 1999, Brian Behlendorf, Kim Cascone and Sean Cooper switched on an ezmlm mailing list connecting a group of sonic artists focussed on the instrumental character of the digital landscape: the common tools and detritus of the Internet Bubble. By September of 2000, the microsound list had pronounced itself an “unmediated” (unmoderated) discussion of “post-digital” musics and the cross-genre adoption of readily available DSP tools. Not long after, Cascone's essay “The Aesthetics of Failure: 'Post-Digital' Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music” appeared in Computer Music Journal. These two documents of microsound: one by an individual author tracing both past and future, the other a collective effort of (now) ten years duration, have an interesting relationship to one another, which I explore here briefly. Cascone's essay was of signal import, at least to the intended audience. Although the “electronica movement” might have been already familiar with his message, the CMJ readership found news in the “feedback” Cascone provided on how the DSP tools they had designed had affected “both the form and content of contemporary 'non-academic' electronic music.” Cascone noted the potential for exchange, made possible by the spread of high speed Internet access, but remarked on its lopsided nature, with producers both eager for new tools, and unable to get an audience for their music inside the ivory towers. The microsound list is a continuing case-in-point for this imbalance: dramatically few list posts have originated from .edu domains. Peaking at only 200 in 2002 (out of 7902 posts that year), the number has steadily declined since then. In spite of the initial impact of Cascone's essay then, the microsound list seems not to have engaged the participation of the academic and research communities.
Mailing lists are a relatively low tech way to bring a group of people together in conversation. The word “community” has invariably stuck to these groupings, but in an era of phishing, child-porn stings and cyber war, the utopian innocence of the early Internet has been pushed aside by corporate outcry demanding security over freedom of use. Whether intentional or not, this characteristic of the age has been reflected in the microsound list's structure as a unmoderated (“unmediated”) discussion. This “free” community has been a grouping of music producers, and not fans of particular performers or, for that matter, music styles. This renunciation of list management has not kept the microsound list from its crisis of form. As a discussion list, threads of conversation would be the natural outcome of reading and responding to daily postings. As a community of music producers however, announcements of events and recordings are critical to creative survival. Although noise is an attribute of particular interest to the microsound community, by March of 2005, the quantity of posted announcements was perceived to be overshadowing discussion, and the list was split in two to regain an appropriate signal-to-noise ratio. As the intent of an announcement is not to solicit a reply, discussion list posts without replies might be a definition of “list noise.” By 2004, announcements (or “noise”) had reached almost 30% of list traffic, and by March 2005, when the announce-list was inaugurated, posts with no replies might have constituted as much as 50% of postings.
Cascone's essay offers an image of the microsound community, albeit a simple one in keeping with his objectives of reporting on what's musically new, with its characteristics and lineages. Cascone presents a group of artists, linked not so much by style as by affinity in the use of digital technology in their work. This affinity is the “aesthetics of failure”: an ear zooming in to the background noise of the contemporary computerized landscape, creating instrumental work by “messing around” with it until sonically interesting errors are produced. Cascone offers a prediction (or request) for the future, suggesting that this approach should be formalized by the academic/research community in new tools, ones that enable effortless shifts of attention across the timescales of sound via (perhaps) a modern digital audio workstation GUI. The microsound list offers an embodied community to compliment Cascone's image, and ten years of postings pretty well fill in his essay's future. Although not the only way to approach such an immense and tangled network of discussion, a brutally brief look at some of the longest discussion threads certainly suggests those issues and attitudes that have captured community attention.
The use of digital sound tools and technological performance: those topics at the heart of Cascone's essay, received much attention. The March 2001 post “Performing 'Live'” asked subscribers “to share how they play live, and what some of the benefits and downfalls are to various ways of playing live.” This produced a flood of equipment descriptions at a time (apparently) when only few had discarded their Nord Modulars and Akai samplers for software and a laptop. Some, however, had a more improvisatory setup consisting of found objects and contact microphones, which occasioned comments like: “To me, the only elitist dimension of this discussion is the constant (and ridiculous) recommendation of expensive equipment as 'advice on performing.'” May 2007 brought a post which occasioned 73 replies: “I am new to microsound and would like to know if it is better to use Reaktor or MSP?” In addition to the expected arguments for one or the other software package, this thread gave more attention to the “reliability” of cracked copies of commercial audio applications, than the utility of Open Source software such as Pure Data or SuperCollider. The cultural and business context in which microsound is situated generated extensive discussion. The thread “new autechre” (2005) was a negative meditation on that group's then-new release Untilted. Autechre is portrayed as having given up its exploratory mission, and relapsed into a comfortable, Techno style appealing to larger audiences. Following in this line, the thread “microsound as pop music” (2002) is summarized in its initial post: “'Microsound' may not sound like Top 40 radio, but a fair amount of the music discussed on this list is packaged and marketed and distributed the same way, albeit with less of all mentioned. Stockhausen was at SONAR last year, Radiohead sampled Paul Lansky, Edgar Varese debuted Poem Electronique at the 1958 worlds fair.... How is microsound firmly not pop music?”
--And so the new technical paradigms have not been forthcoming: the microsound community continues to “mess around” in performance, conflicted by obligation to bond with audience, instead of create new vocabularies. True to its origins (as Cascone stated) in an “odd pairing of fashion and art music,” the microsound-style has abandoned (or been abandoned by) the electronica movement, and still waits for accreditation either as art or academic research. Microsound as process has seeped across genre boundaries, and can be found nearly everywhere in contemporary music creation. |
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