'Extreme Music' by Michael Tau
How do you define music?
What do you define as music?
In his book, Extreme Music: From Silence to Noise and Everything In Between, Michael Tau tries to get his arms and ears around a question that may have an infinite number of answers. The author gives equal weight to the medium and the message, as he allows the outsider stories to be told.
Milwaukee has a rich history of imaginative visionaries, some of whose comments are included as well.
“One man’s noise is another man’s music,” Dave Szolwinski (Fuckface, Go-Go Slow)
Sometimes genres are broken down into sub-genres at the whims or manifestos of those creating the art. Harsh noise wall—long unchanging blocks of pure noise, speedcore and goregrind are at the outer limits. The author offers a convenient guide for listers looking for a BPM (beats per minute) shorthand: 250-500: speedcore, 500-1000: splittercore, 1000+: extratone. While that may be an obvious example, Tau sets aesthetic parameters to the wind, venturing into everything from content to visuals to scarcity.
“…when Marcel Duchamp basically said Art is whatever I call Art, it opened the door for that to be applied to almost any creation,” Jason Wietlispach, composer and head of Soutrane Recording Company—the Oak Creek-based label that specializes in experimental jazz/avant-garde sounds.
Found sounds, the idea of music that was not necessarily meant to be released as such, or limited vanity projects, might deserve just as much attention in some circles as anything else. These could include a frustrated sixth-grader’s album of primitive rock or personal poems set to music. Ethical and legal questions aside, these sometime-voyeuristic projects veer from the creepy to legitimate versions of folk art. Often their soulfulness can’t be denied, as documented by The Shaggs and Wesley Willis.
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“Of course, music can’t be defined. It can be performed and heard,” Rick Ollman, Milwaukee multi-instrumentalist and improviser.
An average LP record holds 20-22 minutes per side. CDs typically can offer 74 minutes of music. But what to make of Bull of Heaven’s 2010’s release Like a Wall in Which an Insect Lives and Gnaws? The MP3 file of slow moving drones and loops is four terabytes in size; the three million minute piece would take 5.7 years of a listener’s time. Digital technology changed everything.
“When the vibrations/sounds that are always around our ears may become ‘organized’ by creative intent or by any random occurrence,” Darren Brown, founder of Boy Dirt Car, characterizing music.
The category Anti-Records might include records made of different grades of sandpaper; records meant to be played on players the listener doesn’t mind damaging; a record with no grooves or records pressed in an edition of one. Microcassettes, 8-tracks, USB drives, SD cards all might have their appeal.
Yet, Tau realizes the importance of the vinyl era in packaging: Andy Warhol’s zipper and banana art on major label albums by the Rolling Stones and the Velvet Underground; scented LPS from Peter Tosh’s herbal Bush Doctor to Katy Perry’s cotton candy; picture discs from psychedelic splatter to clear vinyl to gruesome imagery.
In his conclusion, the author writes about the recent discovery of a collection of mysterious recordings that may in fact have been a spoof on the sub-culture of obscure and extreme music. “What the future holds is anyone’s guess.”
