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1987
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Source: Media Arts
http://media-arts.rmit.edu.au/Phil_Brophy/AvantGardeRock.html
First published in "Missing in Action: Australian Popular Music in
Perspective," Verbal Graphics, Melbourne, 1987
Avant Garde Rock: History in the Making?
By Philip Brophy
The idea of merging rock music with avant garde art is not as far fetched
as it sounds. It can be demonstrated even on a mainstream level of
entertainment, ranging from David Bowie's acting career to Laurie
Anderson's recording career. It is then no big deal these days for most
avant garde artists (whatever their field) to engage in commercial
activities, as it is for popular entertainers to venture into the obscure
artistic areas. Such moves are indicative of a period that art and
entertainment are undergoing. It has been happening for the past eight
years and is sure to continue for eight more.
Perhaps we are in what could be called 'the decade of the shift': a time
when artistic and cultural activity is generated not so much by a sense of
unease or progression (feelings which seem so distant now), as it is by
restlessness. These 'shifts' often are primarily motivated by a desire to
wander across culture, into new areas, to experiment with the fusion of
artistic sentiment and audience expectations.
Culture, of course, has never been able to stabilise or maintain the
categorical divisions which it has either inflicted upon itself or been
burdened with. Still, dominant views of rock history have generally
favoured mythical scenarios, where categories were and are stable. Perhaps
there was, once upon a time, an era that did belong to the wild and
restless youth. A time when we had something we could call youth, people we
could call teenagers. But what was then known as rock'n'roll has now become
rock culture. The spirit has been replaced by the problematic, in that
whereas rock'n'roll was celebrated or attacked, rock culture is now
consumed or analysed. The furore and fever still exist, but they are now
pushed through different channels, as a result of the way that rock culture
has awkwardly spread itself across society.
The face of rock'n'roll its mythical identity has grown old and flabby as
well as having undergone numerous facelifts, beatings and breakdowns,
caused predominantly by factors such as :
1 the diffusion and multiplicity of age groups and social identities
associated with particular music styles (parents liking Michael Jackson,
while their children like Elvis)
2 the accumulative splintering affect of subcultures changing the meaning
of style as unwitnessed by mainstream culture (when is a punk not a punk?)
3 the institutionalisation of the recording industry (now the call of "Long
Live Rock'n'Roll" merely equals "Hurray For Hollywood!")
4 the tension that now exists between rock culture and pop culture,
exemplified most accurately by the current state of rock journalism (weekly
claims of "I have seen the future of rock'n'roll" amount to no more than
the belief in the spirit of Rock'N'Roll and the awaiting of its second
coming/judgement day in all the pap and pulp of pop).
5 the commandeering of the top 40 as a site for artistic subversion,
marking it no longer as a void where content automatically kills content.
Did the following groups 'just' make pop records: Kraftwerk, Adam and the
Ants, Flying Lizards, Grandmaster Flash, Prince, Sigue Sigue Sputnik even
Bob Geldof, Paul Simon or Samantha Fox?
It is under these such conditions that the rock/art merger occurs. Chain
reactions here are never simply chronological or linear and it should be
remembered that as these turbulent currents of change scatter cultural
barriers in every direction, their related historical sediments are
changing too. We are not merely adding new ideas on top of the old we are
changing our perception of what we thought were the old. When rock music is
merged with avant garde art, or vice versa, a mutation is born that gives
new and complex insights into both how we interpret art history and how we
define rock culture. Rock culture and art history engulf each other in a
simultaneous consumption that makes it difficult for us to separate the two
from each other as they were. Each area is equally affected by this
cultural restlessness, this overcoding of styles and saturation of
theories, to produce the phenomenon we call avant garde rock. As unnatural
as it sounds, it does stand as a sure sign of the times.
To find a method of defining rock and art as cultural entities becomes
increasingly difficult. Only through recourse to a traditional and somewhat
out dated paradigm of viewing history could such a separation be argued.
When the broad field of entertainment encompasses mergers of disparate
artistic identities (eg. David Bowie and Nagisa Oshima, Debbie Harry and
David Cronenberg, Billy Idol and Tobe Hooper, The Dead Kennedys and H R
Geiger. David Byrne and Twyla Tharp, Tuxedo Moon and Winston Tong, Psychic
TV and William Burroughs) and projects of transnational fusion (eg Giorgio
Moroder and Metropolis, Laurie Anderson and the Top 40, Echo and the
Bunnymen and the drummers of Burundi, Brian Eno with Sony, Run DMC with
Aerosmith, Bill Nelson with the Edinburgh Theatre Company and in Australia,
tch tch tch and the Sydney Theatre Company, Ivor Davies and the Sydney
Dance Company and David Chesworth and the Nimrod Theatre Company), striving
for purist definitions of art and/or rock can become painfully narrow. As
the wires of rock and art are crossed, the result is sometimes short
circuits and sometimes surges of power. For the good or bad that is where
the energy of avant garde emanates from and that is where we must go. The
avant garde today, like rock itself, has to be seen in terms not of what it
should be, but of what it has become.
There are two possible ways of doing this. The first is to see the avant
garde of rock as a pitiful bastardisation of the original thrust of
twentieth century avant garde art, a cooption of the polemic intensity that
motivated the radical nature of its ideas and pursuits. The second is to
acknowledge its nature as mutation, as an artistic activity born of visions
that arise more from a developed social environment than from a studied
historical lineage. The first approach is idealistic. The second is
realistic. Avant garde rock, then, is neither the future of rock'n'roll nor
the heir to avant garde practice. It is simply another cultural mutant that
requires reclassification and re evaluation.
As a category 'avant garde rock' is a contradiction in terms. Essentially,
the historical tradition of avant gardism is one of finding new forms and
perspectives. The rock'n'roll tradition works on a feeling for formula,
reworking and restating existing forms so as to tamper with the surface
image while holding respect for the soul underneath. The I newness' in
avant garde art is absolute. In rock'n'roll it is checked by currency and
controlled by transience. By honing in on this tension, we can get the
clearest picture of what avant garde rock might be, by seeing precisely
what the relationship between rock'n'roll and avant gardism entertains and
rejects. As a musical style, avant garde rock typifies the external tension
between the conventional and the unconventional in rock. As a cultural
phenomenon, it identifies the avant garde as displaced and misplaced. A
lost soul in a historical purgatory the Now.
Avant garde rock in its current manifestations exists in what could loosely
be termed a post punk era. For sure, 'post punk' is as frustrating a term
as 'avant garde rock', but it does point to punk music as being some sort
of reference point in the ongoing history of rock music(s) and not as being
just another music style. The birth of punk music is of historical
importance because it was a musical type that used history (the history of
rock) as fuel for its energy, its force and identity. Its statement was in
its declaration of itself as present, rejecting the past not merely
comprising 'different' musical types and ideologies, but as a period of
history: gone and dead; old and used.
Since the punk explosion of 1976/77, rock music has, in the strangest
sense, been reborn, relived and rewritten. This has occurred through an
ongoing process of rediscovery of the roots of rock and pop. The 'back to
basics' manifesto of early punk soon gave way to opening the door into the
1960s quite an irony, considering the anarchic tone of living in the
present that punk so violently championed. This then led to other doors
(the fifties, the seventies, the forties) and before you knew it, rock
music was a maze of rediscovered corridors with too many doors, with too
many signs and too many rooms full of rediscovered values: Mod, Ska, Glam,
Psychedelia, Bluegrass, Jazz, Futurism, Soul, Be Bop, Disco, Swing, Funk,
Swamp, etc. The term 'post punk' aptly describes this confused and
confusing museum department store resignation, leaving specific definitions
and qualifications for those who are willing to grapple with them.
Certainly, punk music, wavering as it did between journalistic dogma and
novel bastions of taste made many people loose their appetites for the
artistic in music, embarrassed as they were by the excesses of avant garde
jazz rock, symphonic rock and Kraut rock. (Note that even people like Sun
Ra, Cluster and Tangerine Dream have since been artistically reclaimed,
while people like Herbie Hancock, Peter Gabriel and Yes have since crossed
over into mainstream popularity. The times are always a changing.) Those
attempts at experimentation were condemned as being either ideologically
unsound or hideously unhip. It took at least a full year of the New Musical
Express and Melody Maker's lyrical waxing on the politics of punk before
many were able to welcome Can and Captain Beefheart as warmly as the New
York Dolls and the Stooges. New roots for avant garde rock had to be
established away from the more immediate atrocities, before it was all
right for groups to start being progressive in the most menial of ways
(which usually meant using a synthesiser on a couple of tracks on side two
of their third album). Just as rock music in general is motivated by a
guilt ridden view of the past (be it Billy Joel rediscovering the great
lost eras of pop, or the Modem Lovers' return to a raw state of musical
naivete) the post punk condition of avant garde is formed along similar
lines. Which is to say that both the avant garde of rock and the mainstream
that it supposedly sallies forth from are equally embroiled in a
romanticisation of past periods so long as the present warrants them as
being relevant and suitable for associating with. The slogan 'Fuck Art!
Let's Dance!' (originally a cheeky quip from Madness which has since been
turned into a moronic dogma) still casts a long shadow.
Within a rock context that owes a great deal of its construction and
development to the media, avant gardism loses its essentialism and is given
instead, arbitrary smattering of what appears to be 'new' within the
rapidly paced yet narrowly spaced realm of the present in rock, or, what is
in. As this rock changes and grows, this newness is tied up with being in
the right place at the right time. A regeneration and diffraction occurs in
Australian avant garde rock in its relationship to whatever might be
happening in England, the United States or Europe, furnishing an ongoing
chain of groups that have plugged, knowingly or unknowingly into a whole
series of informational tangents that skirt around the globe with a limited
life span. In the mediarisation of rock music, rock journalism, in
particular the prophetic, yet sycophantic tone that the bulk of the English
press has fostered for the past decade, is not, as one might think, caught
between supporting the old and seeking the new. It is caught between
seeking the new and manufacturing the new. The thirst for newness becomes a
form of gluttony and obesity in that every 'new discovery' (Salsa, Disco,
Industrial Noise, Swamp Music, Now Romanticism) only satisfies temporarily.
The nature of each newness is never fully evaluated as an organic structure
with a continuing life. This leaves an assessment of the situation as a
facile identification of everything being seen to be the same: 'the latest thing'.
In the golden period of the battle between punk ideology and post punk
aesthetics (mid 1977 to 1978) there were nine major groups which were
seminal 'latest things. Being in the right place at the right time, even
though some had been around since 1975/76, they released records which
caught the imagination of anyone waiting for punk to develop beyond its
birth. Some of their work is as exhilarating now as it was then. Some of
them survived by adapting artistically or commercially to change.
The Residents (San Francisco) were and are the quintessential avant garde
rock band because they openly attacked the history of rock'n'roll and its
very nature. Apart from their obscurantist theatricality, they are seminal
in redefining the cover version as an act of deconstruction and distortion.
Devo (Akron) were the first band to satirise contemporary middle class
America a tactic which took the English press quite a while to comprehend.
As the Residents are dadaist, Devo are situationist, producing a hybrid
form of modem rock that not only bore them mainstream success but also
musically exemplified their theory of devolution a theory that rings truer as time goes by.
Suicide (New York) applied a performance art perspective on Iggy Pop and a
reductivist, electronic perspective on classic rhythm and blues rockabilly
riffs to produce a psychotic, angst ridden poetry performance backed by a severe Farfisa drone.
James Chance/Lydia Lunch (New York) and certain offshoots such as the
Contortions, Pill Factory and Teenage Jesus and The Jerks, evidenced a
total fusion of punk and artiness. In a show of sadomasochistic desire and
frustration, they took nihilism to an extreme, producing a piercing, noisy
art rock designed to destroy and self destruct.
Pere Ubu (Cleveland) were the most concrete exponents of experimental rock,
extending groundwork laid by the Mothers of Invention, Captain Beefheart,
Henry Cow and Faust. Not overtly concerned with any precise, presentable
image, their innovations were musical and aural, solidly imbedded within rock traditions.
The Pop Group (London) were the most short lived but perhaps the most
influential of these groups. Whereas Pere Ubu fractured rock form, The Pop
Group did likewise with rock style, creating a reggae dub mix of free form
funk in a wild exorcism of soul, history and politics.
Ultravox (London) followed Brian Eno into the realm of post glam electronic
dilettantism, overlaying their own pseudo futurist synthrock beats with
nightmarish sci fi imagery. (Slightly harder edges were provided by early
Human League, Thomas Leer, Robert Rental and The Normal.)
Cabaret Voltaire (Sheffield) fortuitously combined definitive art school
pretention (dada, futurism, surrealism, musique concrete, electronics,
performance, multi media) and gained recognition through a mystifying yet
incoherent mix of such elements, propped up by pedestrian drum machine programs.
Throbbing Gristle (London) were probably the most musically uninspired
group, as their confrontational mode of address in performance and
manifestos spoke with more intensity than their naive and insipid
"industrial" (sic) doodling. However, their influence has been widespread:
in the manipulation of sound (volume, texture and rhythm) to generate a
physical effect upon the listener and in the obsessively researched
presentation of information to overload the imagination and the senses with
data locating society's manifold repressions and oppressions.
While rock is stereotyped as "sex drugs rock'n'roll', avant garde rock's
quest for otherness is comparatively detailed and involved. The aesthetics
established by the nine groups above were shaped by interests that at best
can be described as morbid, macabre and maniacal. Interests that have
spawned an immense network of subjects, influences and fetishes over the
past decade, such as (in no particular order):
bodily functions, thought control, social demographics, subversion,
cultural repression, science fiction, death, medical surgery, forensic
science, concentration camps, war atrocities, mass murder, genetics, sex,
suicide, psychosis, torture, Satanism, orgasm, sex mania, abnormal
psychology, chance processes, eastern religious rites, self immolation,
witch purges, sado masochism, state authority and power structures,
obsessive sex drive, environmentalism, terminal illness, industrial noise,
organisms, biochemistry, machinery, Catholicism, futurism, vocal chants,
politics, musique concrete, horror, censorship, factories, electronics,
terror, mutants, drug effects, monsters, systems & process analysis,
deformities, pain thresholds, freaks, Zen, chemical waste and abuse,
anatomy, myths and legends, primal screaming, information control, concrete
poetry, media, conspiracy theories, found objects, parasites, violence,
aural/ audio research, constructed instruments, pornography.
A regeneration and diffraction occurs in Australian avant garde rock in
relation to whatever might be happening in England, the United States or
Europe, furbishing a chain of groups, knowingly or unknowingly plugged into
the information stream of those tangents skirting the globe. As such,
Australian avant garde rock groups are abused by internationalist jungle
drums as much as they use them.
The seminal period of mid 1977 to mid 1978 had its correlations in
Australia. tch,tch,tch and Jab were performing live throughout 1977, and
1978 saw tch,tch,tch joined live by SPK, Voight/465, Primitive Calculators
and Crime and the City Solution. (Early 1979 saw the first record releases
by tch,tch,tch, SPK, Voight/465 and Whirlywirld.)
Forging into the eighties, a list of subgenres or temporary phases of
newness in avant garde rock can be drawn up as a charter of recent an
previous trends. These phases, if not spawning Australian groups at least
created a temporary limelight for themselves and their audiences. What
follows might appear a bit off handed (or back handed), but it is just an
attempt to loosely gather groups which in some way have connected
themselves to this notion of avant garde rock. I reserve making value
judgements of any one group's merits or lack of abilities because they are
all worth listening to some perhaps not more than once. In my opinion, all
these groups constitute a mix of about 80% rock'n'roll and 20% avant
gardism, which leaves me with the question: Is rock'n'roll really so
conservative as to be baulked by such an influx of otherness? My listing
here really only refers to this oblique 20% avant gardism in each group and
therefore does not account for nor is concerned with the identities
peculiar to each of these groups.
Noise was/is seen as the ultimate confrontational device but its exponents
often only confronted their own mirrored image smoking nervously on stage
rather than an engaged, or outraged audience. Nevertheless, some incredible
sonic sculptures were once in a while created. (SPK, Nervous System, The
Primitive Calculators, Scattered Order, The Lunatic Fringe, Grong Grong,
The N Lets, That Fat Apparatus, Ya Ya Choral, SwSwThrght, Shower Scene From
Psycho, Man Made Haze, Bleak, Fragments, War Meat and the Dictator, Vormittaspuk.)
Jazz was on the cards for becoming cool again, although in the context of
avant garde rock it was not a jazz tradition that was carried on as much as
it was the playing out of a drama (sometimes well performed, sometimes
badly mimed) with things such as expressionism, improvisation, atonality,
or old swing movies. Its association with avant gardism was brief, as the
later eighties have been concerned with appropriating jazz under terms of
historicism and purism. (Laughing Clowns, Equal Local, Kill The King, Great
White Noise, Hot Half Hour.)
Metal left a quick gleam like a comet flashing by, as creative notions of
Futurism and journalistic fantasies of Industrialism struggled and continue
to struggle, to climb the hill of novelty to enter the valley of
progression. (Whirlywirld, SPK, Dilpidata, Transwaste Orchestra, Skin and
Bone Orchestra.)
Synthesisers was synonymous for a long time with the most pathetic notions
of avant gardism, only because the reactionary roots of rock could not bear
to be without the phallic support of the guitar and the fantasies of sex,
power and adrenalin. Already groups like Depeche Mode and The Human League
have been unproblematically viewed as pop groups and not avant garde
groups, leaving us with the difficulty in ascertaining degrees of
sophistication in different approaches to employing electronics.
(Metronomes, Ad Hoc, White Trash, Informatics, Laughing Hands, Modem Jazz,
Donna Detti, David Tolley, Nuovo Bloc, Couch, Artificial Organs, Ria and
the Normal, Systematics, Phillip Jackson, Testa Hausa, Transmachine, Patrick Gibson.)
Semiotics lead a life of mystery, clothed in ignorance and
misinterpretation by its critics and admirers alike. With too much
attention focused on (and alienated by) the theory rather than the
application, few people (groups or audiences) could extend the musical
relationships of such a practice out past a theoretical elite to groups who
weren't as vocal yet produced similar work. (tch,tch,tch, Rock'n'Roll
Cavemen, Slugfuckers, Use No Hooks, David Chesworth, Essendon Airport, The
Connotations, Zerox Dreamflesh, Competence/Performance.)
Cut Up usually and unfortunately owes more to William Burroughs (a
glorified cult hero as acknowledged by David Bowie circa Ziggy, Patty Smith
circa Horses, Psychic T.V. circa The Final Academy) than it does to Musique
Concrete or early (pre-1950) electronic music. As such, it appropriately
describes a numbed state of indiscriminate media fragments as a gesture of
plugging into a (dated) McLuhan esque view of the 'global village'.
(Severed Heads, Hugo Klang, Go Home To Your Precious Wife And Child,
Socciocusus, SwSwThrght, Gestalt, Loop Orchestra, Kurt Volentine, Art
Poetry, Ian Hartley, Tom Ellard, Institute of Tonal Generation, Shane
Fahey, Rik Rue, Browning Mummery, Bleak, Cutting Up People, Fragments, John
Gillies, Mauro Cavallaro.)
The Funk train which was the only avant garde fetish that held enough
locomotion to be pushed into a variety of levels of commercial music,
ranging from a rejuvenation of dance music to the latest black music,
providing the historical undercurrent for white rock'n'roll. (Hunters and
Collectors, Essendon Airport, Pel Mel, Use No Hooks Big Band, Scratch
Record Scratch, Jim (Foetus) Thirwell, Bang, Government Drums, Thin Man
Station, The Whites.)
Performance has always been a predominant way of reacting against the
neutralised presentation of rock'n'roll (four guys on a stage doing their
thing). Performance art, dada manifestos, concrete poetry, multi media
events, primal screaming and environmentalist happenings all inspired
different groups to stage their events. (People With Chairs Up Their Noses,
This is Serious Mum, Jab, John Murphy, Zip Collective, The Lunatic Fringe,
Precious Little, The N Letts, tch,tch,tch, The Incredibly Strange
Creatures, Manic Opera, Slub, Jean Paul Satre Band.)
Conceptual (as in 'conceptual art') accounts for certain visual artists who
utilised the social form of rock and pop music, especially via the cassette
medium, to expand their concerns and deal with a different artistic
language. (Slave Guitars, The Anti Music Collective, Media Space.)
Art Rock may have been an old term but many groups were able to experiment
with rock form and style without the pomposity the term implied.
(Voight/465, **** ****, The Threeo, (Makers of) The Dead Travel Fast,
Players With Marionettes, Synthetic Dream, Crime and the City Solution,
Slawterhaus.)
Improvisation was an often dogmatic voice due to its harsh reaction against
more conceptualised modes of experimentation. Its connection with rock was
primarily under terms of spontaneity, although some of these groups worked
extremely hard at being spontaneous. (The Even Orchestra, Laughing Hands,
Jon Rose, John Gillies.)
Dance has become, for the later 1980s, an even more amorphous term than
disco was for the early '80s. Still, some groups experimented with the
contextuality of the term (via situationist approaches) and the formalism
of the term (via rupturing its recognisable surfaces). (Ian Haig, Severed
Heads, Scattered Order, Whaddayawant, I'm Talking, SPK, Gum, Asphixiation.)
Ambient is a broad genre, ultimately determined by Brian Eno's simplistic
notion of background music, as he derived it from Satie. Most so called
ambient work is a combination of improvised electronic constructions to
produce instrumental images, mood music and sonic landscapes. (Chris
Knowles, Paul Schutze, Laughing Hands, Scribble, Not Drowning Waving.)
Fusion typifies those bands which have deliberately and specifically worked
on a single or number of musical styles to produce a cognitive
stylistic/formalist reconstruction. This approach developed in the latter
half of the 1980s, concurrent with the heightened awareness of the precise
manipulative effect of musical styling.(The Bum Steers, Spring Plains, Mr
Bum & Mrs Ruby, Big Pig.)
Unconventionalism is an incredibly stretched way of summing up the unified
concerns of the Melbourne 'little bands' network. Following the direction
of 1978s No New York compilation album, the 'little bands' strove to bring
a harsh and sometimes painful edge to rock tradition without resorting to
any form of intellectualism. (A slightly more subdued anti intellectualism
was expressed by the considerably more organised M Squared recording
studios in Sydney.) (Ronnie and the Rhythm Boys, The Dee Rays, Thrush and
The Cunts, Too Fat To Fit Through The Door, Morpions, Oroton Bags, The Hoy
Family, Negative Reaction, Height/ Dismay, A Cloakroom Assembly, Splendid
Mess.)
Other: Simply, these bands are conglomerations of any combination of the
above generic strands. The result, though, is difficult to perceive as a
precise or defined identity. However, the general desire to experiment for
otherness remains. (Black Swamp Cha Cha, Mesh, Gary Doyle, Toy Division,
The Snails, God: The Movie, Hiroshima Chair, Limp, Psy Phalanx, Arf Arf,
The Tarax Club, Studio Testing, Cultricide, Mice Against God, Stephen
Harrop, Michael Tinney, Kindeebah, Box Music 2.)
Out of these categories it is interesting to note that many of these groups
have changed with the trends, or reformed to accommodate them. They
fracture their identity as a group or product by: (1) changing their name
each time they perform (eg cut up specialists associated with Sydney's Art
Unit performance space and 2 MBS FM's cntmprry ydtns show); (2) continually
forming new groups by shifting key members (eg Melbourne's 'little bands'
network); or (3) working on discrete and self contained projects (eg tch,
tch, tch). This does not at all diminish their stature or integrity, but
indicates the ease with which many people or groups are able to experiment
with new ideas as they encounter them. It could be that the avant garde
rock we have witnessed to date might be work in progress for something that
has not yet happened. This is especially important considering that very
few of these groups have worked with ideas that do not need to live as part
of the incessant rock media stream that charters so much avant garde
activity and short circuits it.
Australia is not by itself in this respect either, as witnessed by the
imbalance of attention that is accorded to some groups and not others. I
list two inconclusive groupings here (in alphabetical order) the first
containing fairly well known names in avant garde and non mainstream
circles alike. The second grouping does not receive the same amount of
global attention.
1 Laurie Anderson, Cabaret Voltaire, Can, Captain Beefheart, James Chance
(et al), Cluster, D.A.F., Einsturzende Neubauten, Brian Eno, Robert Fripp,
Phillip Glass, Kraftwerk, Thomas Leer, Lydia Lunch, New Order, Pere Ubu,
Psychic TV, Robert Rental, Residents, Throbbing Gristle, Tuxedo Moon, A
Certain Ratio, Art of Noise, The Birthday Party, Cluster, (early) Devo,
Brian Eno, Contortions, Flying Lizards, Jim Foetus, John Fox, Golden
Paliminos, Jon Hassel, (late) Japan, The Pop Group, Snakefinger, SPK, David
Sylvian, Suicide, Swans, Test Department, 23 Skidoo.
2 Art Bears, Glenn Branca, Monte Cazazza, Cum Transmissions, Der Plan,
Doctor Mix and The Remix, DNA, Faust, Harmonica, Implog, Love of Life
Orchestra, (early) Mothers of Invention, Neu, Non, Polyrock, Elliot Sharpe,
Sonic Youth, Z'ev, Art & Technology, Beresford, The Bic, Blurt, Ciccone
Youth, Tony Conrad, Daniel Stephen Crafts, Ivor & Chris Cutler, Die
Todliche Doris, Eazy Teeth, Fred Frith, Robert Gordon, Bill Laswell &
Material, Arto Lindsay, Yoko Ono, Orchid Spangiafora, Andy Partridge, Mark
Pauline, Robert Quine, (late) Red Crayola, Roedelius & Moebius, Adrian
Sherwood, Touch, David Van Tiegham, Whitehouse, Trevor Wishart.
In terms of innovation in rock, and charting new areas for the sprawl of
avant garde rock, there is no real cause for separating the two lists, and
indeed, the hipness of the first list may implicate the second as being
hipper then thou. However, the notoriety the artists in the first list have
received has made it hard for the specific problems and attributes of the
second list of artists to be discussed. (I would argue for example, that
groups like Faust and Neu, through analytic fracturing and stylistic
recontextualization, offer a more in depth and intricate way of expanding
and adapting conventions of rock music than the drug like meandering of
Can. I would also argue that the strategies for dealing with notions of pop
are more skilfully deployed by the Love of Life Orchestra's method of
simulation than Throbbing Gristle's tactic of alienation. And Glenn Branca
more accurately represents the end of the line of contemporary composers
than Phillip Glass, who, by virtue of his considerably outdated modes of
experimentation, testifies to the lagged perception that steers the course
of rock along the road of what it thinks is innovative and progressive.)
Like all manner of social discourse, a particular dominant ideology can be
discerned in the hierarchical/hegemonic critical orderings of these groups.
Even within the discourse of avant garde rock, those groups with a stronger
attachment to the mythical soul of rock'n'roll (raw energy and social
rebellion) are generally more favoured by the rock market than those groups
which experiment more with rock forms and contexts.
And our problems do not end there. Moving into the latter half of the
1980s, the inaccuracy of the term avant garde rock is coupled with its
increasing inappropriateness. The post punk dichotomies which checked and
channelled its growth in the late 1970s have now relaxed, reformed,
multiplied. The notion of experimentation now figures as a formal set of
styles, figures, gestures and conventions, able to be simulated and
repeated, leaving new and unattended contexts to redefine the notion:
record production, media manipulation, ethnic fusions, stylistic
appropriation, multicultural pop, technological innovation, historical
quotation, etc. One can thus now experiment while sounding amazingly conventional.
Just as rock in general has embarked on a quest of rediscovering its
multi-layered histories, the categorical awareness of style is so accute
one can label any formal experiment as a particular subgenre or polyglot.
For this reason, one can no longer simply lump overtly 'non rock' trends
into a void of otherness. While transcultural projects continue to spread
and mutate across social and commercial spheres, avant garde rock continues
to congeal. Ironically, while the term has been extremely problematic, it
is now becoming most effective in economically labelling a historical
milieu. (Richard Lowenstein's film Dogs In Space, is a feature
dramatisation of the underground rock scene in Melbourne during the late
seventies and an example of the historical congealing of a supposedly radical epoch.)
It is quite difficult to locate and specify an Australian context for what
is essentially an internationalist trend this self inflating/deflating
category of avant garde rock. This is not to say that the Australian
exponents are derivative or imitative, or that current trends in mainstream
pop or underground rock do not operate in similar internationalist ways,
because where genre, or sub categories of musical style are considered,
every example carries its own identity. The problem of differentiating
avant garde rock along nationality lines, lies inlines, lies in tL
tx‹ the way that this stream of rock music connects with the broad
historical references and sources more than with localised social and
cultural environments. This means that within the wide spectrum of rock and
pop, the arbitrary flows that create various musical styles are subjugated
by a controlled concern for a music making that searches for a newness that
is more deliberated by the music maker than mediated by his or her immediate surroundings.
Australian avant garde rock then, starts and finishes with the fact that
people born and/or living in Australia make Australian avant garde rock.
But such a sub category carries no mysterious cultural traits that can
differentiate its content and substance from avant garde rock around the
world. It is no wonder that groups from Seattle, Brussells, Cornwall,
Vancouver and Canberra can provide remarkably similar work without ever
having heard of each other's work, simply by plugging into the same
historical sources and references from both the histories of art and rock.
As in so many instances, "Australianism" might work as a qualification but not a description.
In a strange way, this does have its positive side, in that whereas the
audience for what in Australia is called "underground music" (as featured
on most alternative radio stations) would be much larger overseas than
here, the audience for avant garde rock (as segregated by most alternative
radio stations as being 'weird', 'confrontational', 'experimental', 'arty',
'elitist', 'wanky', 'esoteric', or 'pretentious) here is comparatively
nearer in size to that of its overseas counterpart. The international field
is small enough to accommodate a less discriminating approach to the music
(from whatever country) by its audience. Australian avant garde rock as
small in size as it is appears to have the mysterious fortune of being seen
neither in terms of lack (ie an inferior Australian made product), nor as
culturally peculiar (ie boasting of a truly Australian quality) but as an
example of what basically amounts to a global direction in rock culture.
Perhaps the most underrated success stories of Australian exportation lie
in avant garde rock: from The Birthday Party to SPK, to Jim Foetus to Severed Heads.
There are however, peculiarities not in the way that Australian avant garde
is created, but how it survives in a public domain. Since punk and new wave
hit our shores in early 1977 (in waves that first lapped at the rock
magazine pages of Ram and Juke and then wiped us out with Pollywaffle and
Levi ads on television) many a bastard term had been bandied about. An
uncredited writer in The Australian Music Directory lumped together groups
like Men At Work, tch,tch,tch, The Crackerjacks and The Primitive
Calculators as all being "New Music"! while Stuart Coupe and Glenn A
Baker's book New Music, gave a global view of what in essence was just
contemporary rock music, but which used the same term in the context of
experimental music signified contemporary excursions into the philosophical
notions laid down by John Cage all sounds are music, silence does not
exist, the listener is the composer, etc. Similarly, streams of Australian
rock journalism are as likely to include Hunters and Collectors with
Laughing Hands in what would appear to be a radical departure in
categorization: avant garde rock. Yet the only thing that could tie the
above two groups together would be their non mainstream positions in rock.
A major Australian phenomenon (at least contrary to, say, English
journalism) would be the precise and direct classification of' mainstream
or Top 40 acts and the 'mixed bin' approach to anything not in the Top 40.
Pale attempts to rectify this don't work too well either, as the
classification always works in the negative: 'independent' (not signed by a
major label), 'experimental' (not adhering to conventional expectations of
form and content), 'alternative' (not part of mainstream activities,
pursuits and expectations), or 'underground' (not receiving broad media
coverage). As such, all these negative terms do nothing to specify the
nature of avant garde rock, short of taking it out of the 'mixed bin' only
to place it in the 'too hard basket' , humbly bowing to the historical
tradition of not understanding it.
Perhaps an even more major factor in defining the lack of place of avant
garde in Australia would be in the way that it co exists with other musics
in that void of Not Top 40. This, of course, is in the pubs. We now live
with the legacy of pub rock weighing us down to such an extent that whereas
once live music enjoyed a multiple choice situation outside the venues such
as Kooyong stadium in Melbourne and the Horden Pavilion in Sydney, we now
only have a profusion of bars, hotels and pubs from which to choose. The
early 1970s choice between a club, a discotheque, a town hall, a bar, a
coffee shop or even a drive in has now become a choice between certain
pubs. At the least, these days, these places are thought of in terms of
licensing laws and permits for the consumption of alcohol. This all works
so much so that "pub" is the neutralised name for a venue. The media
coverage of pubs now works to such a standardised format (the ubiquitous
Gig Guide) that alternative venues are quite difficult to promote.
The real problem though, lies in the social atmosphere generated by a pub,
which in turn creates a localised context in which a site specific music
making is produced. Unfortunately this narrows the breadth of musical or
other activities that could happen in such a locality. Pubs are no doubt
suitable for the rock tradition of a direct as possible relationship with
an audience (we even have its namesake subgenre Pub Rock), but they
facilitate a very predetermined listening perception. Like a big fat oaf,
the pub is able to declare all musics not workable within its environs as
stupid, pretentious and boring. The power of the pub most clearly manifests
itself in the way that alternative locales that are used cannot be
effectively maintained as sites of regular productivity. Few appropriations
of sites, venues, or contexts have been successful: SPK's performance at
the Sydney brick works, the 'little band's' use of the Champion Hotel,
tch,tch,tch's insertion into the gallery/museum system. (Varying and
unstable degrees of success were also to be found in the Clifton Hill Music
Centre, the George Paton Gallery, the Killayoni Club, the Seaview/Crystal
Ballrooms, the Mt Erica Hotel, the Prince of Wales Hotel, the Commercial
Hotel, the Met Coffee Shop, the Universal Coffee Lounge, the Glasshouse
Theatre, and the Union Theatre in Melbourne; Art Unit, I.C.E., the Hip Hop
Club, the Performance Space, the Mossman Hotel, Paddington Town Hall/Metro
Television, the Gap, the Departure Lounge, the Cell Block, and His
Governor's Pleasure in Sydney.) Ultimately, pubs house avant garde rock
under pseudo terrorist terms by 'taking over' a pub for a night. But this
approach is no different from having a male strip every second Tuesday
night. Avant garde rock remains a ghetto in a ghetto: far from Top 40
material and just as far from the cultural channels that have been set up
in opposition to the mainstream of rock and pop.
To argue that avant garde rock remains a ghetto because of its self
professed alienation, because of "what it sounds like", is oversimplifying
the case. In Australia, at least, avant garde rock is contextually snared,
positioned by a framework of levels of music production that traffic the
consumption and affect the perception of it as a music activity. To
translate it as the forefront of contemporary rock music gives a false
impression of our rock culture moving along in one glorious channel where
everything sits in its allotted place and where eventually, too, avant
garde rock will find its right place, due to the changes in the listening
perspectives accorded it. Alas, our ears have to do the least amount of
work because if avant garde rock ever does find a large thriving and
continuing audience in Australia, it will not totally be due to our tastes
having progressed but primarily because we have been socially and
culturally repositioned in a way that faces us in its direction. It might
as well happen with baseball as avant garde rock.
Ultimately, I am fated to flounder with definitions of rock music and avant
garde rock music, no matter what their differences appear to be nor how
safely they are able to hold their distance from one another. Strands of
reactionary rock music with their "Fuck Art! Let's Dance!" mentality are
just as condemnable as strands of avant garde rock that base their work on
a naive and shallow interpretation of the rock music it rejects. Also,
avant garde purists in the academic realm of the contemporary, experimental
and new music fields, rarely display the flexivity to accommodate the often
sloppy approaches to rock experimentation, while the bulk of avant garde
rock can at times be frustratingly uninteresting and uninspiring. The air
of negativity in these views is actually born of frustration with what
amounts to narrowness in perception in rock and avant garde rock which all
probably reaffirms the strangely nonexistent form, state and context of avant garde rock.
I can however resort to telling a story, one that I think illuminates the
awkward sense of place that avant garde rock may have. In 1976 1 had an
interesting discussion with a music teacher at the school at which I was a
final year student. We had been listening to twentieth century avant garde
composers like Stockhausen, Boulez and Webern. Being a bit of a rock head I
brought in a pile of Krautrock records from around 1972. It was Kraftwerk's
second album (1971) that finally broke him. After three sides of the double
album he couldn't hold it in any longer: "Why do they have to have that
goddamn pulse going through everything they do?" At the time I could not
understand his reaction. Only upon writing this article was I reminded of
the incident which I can now see in a different light. That 'pulse' was and
is, the dimensional barrier where rock starts and finishes for the serious
composer and the arch rock'n'roller alike. It is something that with the
most hard edged clarity, is alienated from the sphere of avant garde music
proper and with a startling sense of naturalism and realism is tied to rock culture.
The fact is that such avant garde rock groups are not disconnected from
rock music in general. They are displaced within it, entwined in a
contorting general consensus of do's and don'ts in rock conventionalism
while attempting to experiment under broader terms of sound and music. Even
though all avant garde rock artists continually disagree with one another,
they are unified in their rejection of academicism as a controlling (albeit
repressive) factor in experimentation. Self centred improvisationalism,
historical naivety and half digested concepts run rife in their attitudes,
but the work produced is sometimes capable of a freshness, looseness and
newness of which few experimental composers have been capable.
Avant garde rock is not divorced from rock: it embraces rock while it only
entertains avant gardism. It is segregated from dominant ideological flows
of rock culture, yet it is entrenched in its musical and cultural flows. It
is thus probably more appropriate and relevant for books and magazines on
rock and pop to be giving space to writers to come to terms with avant
garde rock than it is for conservatoria to open their doors and ears to
Australian avant garde. The latter is, I feel, fantasy. But the former is a
hopeful possibility.
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