Hugendubel.info - Die B2B Online-Buchhandlung 

Merkliste
Die Merkliste ist leer.
Bitte warten - die Druckansicht der Seite wird vorbereitet.
Der Druckdialog öffnet sich, sobald die Seite vollständig geladen wurde.
Sollte die Druckvorschau unvollständig sein, bitte schliessen und "Erneut drucken" wählen.

Sonic Wilderness: Wild Vinyl Records

E-BookEPUBePub WasserzeichenE-Book
240 Seiten
Englisch
AADR - Art Architecture Design Researcherschienen am08.12.20211. Auflage
Sonic Wilderness accesses the critical value of unusual vinyl records that concern our relationship with nature. These wild records reveal unconventional perspectives on the entanglements of human life with animals, gardens and plants. They form a lyrical unconscious exposing the conventions and ideologies of popular music, their warped perspectives and acoustic radioactivity comprising a resistance to enduring social, psychological and political conditions.

Mark Harris researches how language, image and music reveal everyday experience as remarkable. His art and writing concern avant-garde manifestations, including 19th-century utopianism, Surrealism, 60s communes, Beat poets and filmmakers, intoxication, sound studies and Caribbean poetics. Recent exhibitions and performances have occurred in Vienna, London, New York and Chicago. He is currently Professor of Fine Art at the University of Cincinnati, Ohio.mehr
Verfügbare Formate
E-BookEPUBePub WasserzeichenE-Book
EUR7,99
E-BookPDF1 - PDF WatermarkE-Book
EUR7,99

Produkt

KlappentextSonic Wilderness accesses the critical value of unusual vinyl records that concern our relationship with nature. These wild records reveal unconventional perspectives on the entanglements of human life with animals, gardens and plants. They form a lyrical unconscious exposing the conventions and ideologies of popular music, their warped perspectives and acoustic radioactivity comprising a resistance to enduring social, psychological and political conditions.

Mark Harris researches how language, image and music reveal everyday experience as remarkable. His art and writing concern avant-garde manifestations, including 19th-century utopianism, Surrealism, 60s communes, Beat poets and filmmakers, intoxication, sound studies and Caribbean poetics. Recent exhibitions and performances have occurred in Vienna, London, New York and Chicago. He is currently Professor of Fine Art at the University of Cincinnati, Ohio.
Details
Weitere ISBN/GTIN9783887789237
ProduktartE-Book
EinbandartE-Book
FormatEPUB
Format HinweisePub Wasserzeichen
FormatE101
Erscheinungsjahr2021
Erscheinungsdatum08.12.2021
Auflage1. Auflage
ReiheThe Practice of Theory and the Theory of Practice
Reihen-Nr.11
Seiten240 Seiten
SpracheEnglisch
Dateigrösse22943 Kbytes
Artikel-Nr.11911502
Rubriken
Genre9201

Inhalt/Kritik

Leseprobe


Riot Parks, Psychogardens and Black Yards: Sites of Labour and Alienation


Parks and gardens are spaces of physical and psychic turbulence. Songs tell of bad things that feel more incongruous for happening in pleasant green environments. Parks have frequently hosted mass protests leading to police repression. They have sheltered individual attackers who melt away into the undergrowth. Suburban garden flowers and shrubbery conspire to orchestrate a private hell of mental disintegration. It was the nineteenth-century illustrator J.J. Grandville who saw how middle-class park promenades, that conspicuously paraded new-found wealth and leisure amongst the flowers, could be depicted as a descent into horticultural in-breeding and atrophy.

In 1969 an epochal park furore pitched the Berkeley counterculture against ultra-violent Alameda County Sheriff s deputies, fuelled by Governor Ronald Reagan s animus against hippies and students. Two decades later a similar volatility that enveloped New York s Tompkins Square was addressed in songs by white musicians who were nevertheless blind to the experience of temporary residents of the park whose evictions had provoked those 1988 riots.

The underside to these exhilarating mass participatory acts are songs of the lone visitor dealing with threats in under-policed and secluded parks where lyrics concern casual violence in tranquil settings. This sense of precarity extends to private spaces, to those suburban psychogardens where mental health disintegrates in the deceptively benign setting of flower beds and trimmed hedges. Although farming has seemed an alternative to that suburban dead end, particularly with 60s communes, the reality of tedious farm labour has inspired songs about unproductive hedonism and dull cultural life.

All too often the urban park and vacant lot become refuges for a disproportionate number of homeless people who are then vulnerable to racial violence and forced evictions. Parks and public gardens have always been racialised, prohibiting access to people of colour or imposing horticultural collections pirated from elsewhere in the empire. If anything, the classification of public park masked the profit-driven botanical research that colonial botanical gardens served. Their intrinsic beauty in landscaping and plantings furnished the perfect cover for political and economic objectives. It should not be surprising that people of African descent have found little in organized nature to sing and write about. In consequence, songs of the private Caribbean garden by Junior Murvin and Barrington Levy allegorise the cultivation of Rastafari social harmony and support for black solidarity.

Black songs and poems concerning gardens turn to the private yard, ancestry and the nurturing of plants as analogies for community survival against the odds. Such songs affirm the historical value of the provision ground and herb garden for the formerly enslaved, required to grow their own food for survival on plantations. African American gardens in the southern United States show how smallholding enterprises endured with the pride taken in cultivating all the produce needed for prosperous family life. The Black Seeds and Archie Shepp s songs directly address this community touchstone while Lead Belly and Gwendolyn Brooks allude to the sanctuary of the private yard as it facilitates erotic adventure.

I met an anarchist in Tompkins Square Park

Parks are contested spaces whether fenced in for use by the residents of houses surrounding them, occupied by drug users like Berlin s Görlitzer Park, or by teenagers and lovers seeking community and privacy away from parental surveillance. They have also been lawless nocturnal havens where muggers, rapists and flashers may operate with impunity. Predators are shielded by the same features that afford seclusion and arboreal variety to park visitors. The received idea of safe urban spaces was grist for filmmakers like Michelangelo Antonioni whose 1966 Blow Up centred on a killing in a London park, unwittingly documented by a fashion photographer. The plot of The Conversation, Francis Ford Coppola s 1974 thriller, developed from a San Francisco park surveillance recording of a murder being planned. Park use is unofficially for families by day and more adventurous types after dark. Louis Aragon writes in Paris Peasant of a night-time stroll in the 1920s with friends through Parc Buttes-Chaumont, attending to the shadows and sounds of lovers on benches.

As if from the side of the Buttes-Chaumont lovers, The Fall s 1980 In The Park tells of plein-air sexual mishaps in the bruising staccato of their early uncooperative brand of punk. Singer Mark E. Smith s merciless and humorous lifelong examination of human vanities takes on a rare self-deprecating humility to admit flawed outdoor sexual adventures: I take you to the park up the road / But here is the rain / Rain makes policemen no threat / ⦠/ And we will have sex here / Here, here / Couch, shagged out / There s no hard-ons / It s just come and it s gone. Fifteen years on, the groove and romantic outcome are the opposite for Stereo Total s Dans Le Parc about passionate outdoor clinching without heed of passers-by: Allongé dans l herbe / D un parc de la ville / On oublie les passants / ⦠/ On est de la même taille / Ta bouche sur ma bouche / Tes pieds sur mes pieds / Nos deux sexes se touchent. Despite punk beginnings, Stereo Total s singer Françoise Cactus was an accomplished shape-shifter of music idioms, compounding homage with parody. Her adoption here of the languorous voice of a classic chanteuse restores to the lead guitar and snare drum accompaniment much of the rebel sexuality at the core of rock and roll.

Fig. 43: The Fall, Grotesque, 1980.

Where the likelihood of dangerous encounters is their focus, the lyrics and accompaniment of songs about parks conjure up zones suffused with menace. The entire park assumes an atmosphere of violence. Post-punk California band Subjects released just one record, a 1982 lyrically playful 12 EP overflowing with musical ideas that included Leather In The Park about the anxieties of venturing into such spaces. By blurring the properties of plant and predator, Subjects create an image where the total environment conspires to ambush the visitor: Creepers (watch your step) / Crying in the cracks waiting for you. / Creepers (over the grass) / Wear good shoes and be ready to move / over the grass in the park. / And don t smile, and don t talk. / when you walk through the park. Opening with a memorable guitar riff, continuously repeated to generate an unsettling urgency, the cleverly constructed and fast-paced song has vocalists Brenda Briggs and Dominic Willison exchanging lines with a briskness that conveys a sense of panic.

Fig. 44: Subjects, Leather In The Park, 1982.

Even if their music verges on punk impishness, the lyrics of Watford band Anorexia s 1980 Rapist In The Park are explicit in naming this fundamental threat to which Subjects only allude. Appropriately it s female singer Kim Glenister who accurately expresses this profound anxiety of women: Rapists lurk in the dark / wo oh o o o / Footsteps behind you in the park / wo oh o o o / They ll muffle your helpless cries / wo oh o o o / And haunt you with their evil eyes/ wo oh o o o / Time will not heal the scars / wo oh o o o / Because when you re raped / Your life is marred.

Fig. 45: Anorexia, Rapist In The Park, 1980.

In Tubeway Army s Down In The Park , the most effectively sinister park song of the punk era, singer Gary Numan all too casually references this violation: You can watch the humans / Trying to run / Oh look there s a rape machine. The record starts by repeating four low synthesizer notes to introduce the malice within the song s lyrics: Down in the park / Where the mach-men meet the machines / And play kill-by-numbers ⦠Where the chant is death, death, death / Until the sun cries morning. Phil Oakley s comment that Numan s music was exploring the problems of alienation explains the turn to a more mechanized sound and rhythm by these early electronic singles that focused on the estrangement of many economically and politically marginalized young people at the time (Reynolds, 2009: 294).

That the parks of Numan s and Smith s music were being repurposed by disaffected citizens into their own social spaces reveals how little was ever on offer in their home localities to help develop skills or deal with addiction and boredom. The music and lyrics of these songs turn to the microcosm of park environments to reveal how new forms of social life are remodelling modern cities. Numan s narrative of ambiguously gendered and schizophrenic machine-human identities depicts a space inhabited by damaged individuals out of necessity and fascination, and one where they will inevitably encounter more abuse: Down in the park with a friend called five / I was in a car crash / Or was it the war / But I ve never been quite the same.

Fig. 46: Tubeway Army, Down In The Park, 1979.

Jean-Paul Sartre s 1938 novel Nausea gives a comparable example of this sense of loathing in main character Roquentin s park experience of overwhelming nihilism and bodily dissolution. Roquentin has moved to a dreary regional town to write a historical...
mehr

Autor

Mark Harris researches how language, image and music reveal everyday experience as remarkable. His art and writing concern avant-garde manifestations, including 19th-century utopianism, Surrealism, 60s communes, Beat poets and filmmakers, intoxication, sound studies and Caribbean poetics. Recent exhibitions and performances have occurred in Vienna, London, New York and Chicago. He is currently Professor of Fine Art at the University of Cincinnati, Ohio.