Sunday, March 19, 2006
More Information About The Painful Leg Injuries's 9th Podcast Series "Rhythm Nation"
This 9th series of The Painful Leg Injuries Podcast all started when I gave up on listening to music when I work at home. I needed something to have in the background, but I kept getting lost in the lines of John Fahey's guitar or distracted by Spunk's numerous genre changes in one piece. So then it hit me, 24 hour news.
The soundbytes amaze me. There's so little information in a soundbyte what happens is that we end up knowing quotes and not having a clue as to it's significance. It's basically this; a story is chosen as the day's news item and there's about two views of that story that are portrayed, and repeated ad nauseum.
About three weeks the repetition of the term "IAEA" got stuck in my head like when I hear that Violent Femmes song "Blister In The Sun". It just gets stuck in my head on repeat until I've sung it to myself to death. I started thinking about those Steve Reich pieces "Come Out" and "It's Gonna Rain" and I was thinking, 24 hour news is just like that, except it never goes anywhere. So I collected every source I could find of newscasts where anyone said "IAEA" I then began a peice where this source is repeated over and over, but slowly as I move into making this musical, as I think of a connection of abstract sounds-scape to this news item, I think more about what the issue is really about.
This could theoretically forcce the listener to do the same. I am far from sugesting that I have any answers to our current politcal problems, I don't know shit. What I am sugesting is that as I go through a process of attempting to look into the structures of the sounds of these news items, someone who happens to listen to this may go through the same process and dig further.
A soundbyte cheats us of substantial information. When I read Walter Murch's tome about film editing "In The Blink Of An Eye", he says and I'm paraphrasing, that if you take the same footage and give it to 20 different editors you'll get twenty different films. He then compares it the fact that a chimp's DNA and human DNA are almost exactly the same. Without context or in the wrong context any bit of information becomes a monkey. The soundbyte is the removal of context. How many people in this country know any more about Howard Dean than "EEEEE-Yah!"?
And in who's hands does this information lie? The hands of those who will do whatever they can to sell us shitty food, cell phone contracts and pills that help you with twitchy legs.
I don't know how much this series of sound art actually accomplishes and I'm really stepping outside of my normal box of not making art or music that is about anything. So I'll probably regret this, but I feel good about this work right so I'll have to go on in this life tolerating my decisions.
This week's part 3 is "UAE" all sourced from one speech by our President. Doom and gloom are all around us (IAEA part 1 and H5n1 part 2), we are clearly in the wrong hands (UAE part 3 and NSA part 4) and we've got no one who can help (FEMA part 5). And there's clearly a one species to blame, birds.
Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy.
