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Understanding the unpredictable

There seem to be two fundamental tendencies in music today: On the one hand, a move towards complete virtualisation, where tracks and albums are merely released as digital files. And, on the other, an even closer union between music, artwork, packaging and physical presentation. Where do you stand between these poles? 

We are old fashioned and we like artefacts. I have watched enough turnover of formats in the digital domain to be pretty sceptical about the longevity of digital environments and digital storage. Remember floppy disks? 3.5 diskettes? Memory sticks? Zip drives? SCSI ports? I do. Implicitly, I am collector scum and I still have big boxes of noise cassettes from the 1980s that I love, and tons of vinyl at our house, and old photocopied zines. I think digital is great and has lots of advantages and obviously it’s the dominant media/medium/pathway at the moment. But I don’t see people twenty years from now caressing their old mp3s, while I am still listening to my Misfits record that I bought in high school. 

MCS says:  Decidedly toward the latter- that’s why we’ve released the Ganzfeld EP in a limited edition with headphones, eye goggles and extensive liner notes about the project. We want people to be involved in a tactile way and to be informed, through language and image, about what they are hearing. That makes us old fashioned- we’re attached to the metaphor of “the album” as in the “photo album”- something to touch and leaf through and pore over in order to feel a connection. 

The role of an artist is always subject to change. What's your view on the (e.g. political/social/creative) tasks of artists today and how do you try to meet these goals in your work?

This would take an entire book, or series of books. It’s an unfair question in that sense- I risk trivialising the stakes by shrinking them down. 

Music-sharing sites and -blogs as well as a flood of releases in general are presenting both listeners and artists with challenging questions. What's your view on the value of music today? In what way does the abundance of music change our perception of it?

Music is “in decline” insofar as it no longer functions within culture as the go-to medium through which to construct an adolescent identity. My high school had rap kids, punks, deadheads, goths, etc. all forms of personhood that rode piggyback on musical styles that had clothing styles tethered to them. That’s less and less appealing to young people because music has been shattered into a million sub-genres which are all supposedly accessible from the same pipeline.

Social media has stepped up, not so much to “take music’s place” as to offer the chance to do something different in the place formerly occupied by music. The change has wiped out all sorts of economic models for how to be a musician, and the claim that we should all just go out and tour more is a fantasy that isn’t sustainable ecologically or economically for most artists. It’s a devil’s bargain, insofar as there really are exciting new ways to get your work out there, but the collapse of the recording industry and with it the economic models of label support, really do change what kinds of records get made and what kinds of records become economically unviable. 

The normalisation of ripping and downloading music has gutted an entire industry and its attendant landscape, for bad and for good. You can say “oh just make your record at home”, and that works for some artists like us, but it’s not going to let a record like, Van Dyke Parks “Song Cycle” come into existence- that takes gullible major label cash, and that’s not going to get thrown at creative oddballs anymore. 

How, would you say, could non-mainstream forms of music reach wider audiences?

The web is the obvious answer, but to propose it risks collapsing into some cyber-utopian 1990s fantasy. Yes, people can search for all sorts of things, but they have to know what they are searching for, and you can’t impose or legislate curiosity itself. Film and television and advertising are other avenues, but there are heavy trade-offs about what happens in the process of this encounter. We’d rather start with the work we want to do and then do the disseminating later rather than construct work with imaginary person X or Y in mind as an ideal listener- and larger media tend to involve anxiety about how to not scare anybody away.

Usually, it is considered that it is the job of the artist to win over an audience. But listening is also an active, rather than just a passive process. How do you see the role of the listener in the musical communication process?

We work to solicit interpretive desire, so that the listener feels a need to understand and learn about what she is hearing. We want to activate listening by foregrounding both jarring encounters with real sound, sourced in everyday life, with everyday objects and heavily artificial / constructed / untrustworthy moments. We hope that the tension between these components will make people worry about what it is that they are hearing and that it will generate a kind of audio-puzzle for them. That’s our hope. But of course you can’t actually determine how and in what way people encounter your work, and that open-endedness is just part of the process.

Reaching audiences usually involves reaching out to the press and possibly working with a PR company. What's your perspective on the promo system? In which way do music journalism and PR companies  change the way music is perceived by the public?

PR companies disseminate “one sheets” and “press releases” which subtly colour the metaphors, comparisons, and genre pigeonholes used to describe the music- that’s their job. Music is a rare case in which you get to really “write your own ticket”- but only to a point. There is always a risk that a tendentiously written press sheet becomes itself the subject of hostility if it’s pretentious, exaggerated, or over-reaching. Which is why “indie humble pie” is the standard self-presentation stance. In part to pre-empt an ambient hostility in the face of a surplus of creativity relative to the amount of attention that people can reasonably be asked to pay. We tend to go for the TMI approach- tell people far more than they want to know about each detail of the music, not because it’s a sneaky strategy but simply because we are blabbermouths who cannot shut up.

Please recommend two artists to our readers which you feel deserve their attention.

Kassel Jaeger aka Francois Bonnet is fantastic. So is Jim Haynes. Both are composer/ sound artists worthy of further attention in our opinion.

Visit the Matmos website at vague-terrain.com 

 


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