Joel Kuennen
I went to Ryan Dunn’s studio and home at Enemy Gallery on Milwaukee Ave. In Chicago earlier this week to have a chat about sound art. As some may know, Enemy is located next to the blue line tracks and as I conducted this interview with Dunn, noise musician, sound and performance artist, I [...]
originally published in the Platypus Review, Issue 16, 2009
Bret Schneider
THE AESTHETIC experience of drone music is not just aesthetically defined, but socially and historically located. The significance of this location is especially intriguing when concealed in a music legacy that aims exclusively at the purely metaphysical presentation of sound – a music intent upon expelling [...]
Persian Electronic Music, Yesterday & Today 1966-2006
Sub Rosa
Bret Schneider
The double-disc Persian Electronic Music; Yesterday and Today 1966-2006 is yet another unearthing from the prolific archives of electronic music from the latter half of the 20th century. As such, these excavations often interrogate the developments of avant-garde music as it developed within a particular [...]
Bret Schneider
The reconstitution of the avant-garde in the postwar era was fraught with confusion over purpose, and guilt with picking up avant-gardism after the Holocaust. When Theodor Adorno suggested that it was barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz, he was speaking for an entire generation of artists, writers, and composers who felt the same paralysis, [...]
Autechre
Oversteps
released on Warp, March 2010
Bret Schneider
Samuel Beckett once said of the English language that he wanted “to drill one hole after another into it until that which lurks behind, be it something or nothing, starts seeping through.” The same could be said of Autechre’s impulse to meticulously interrogate given conventions of electronic music machines, resulting [...]
As a mass ornamentation, it summons the audience to rally together to annihilate their own subjectivity
“Sound art as a field only arises out of a reactionary abandonment of time in Western music.”