Avant-Garde
Rock
History In The Making?
published in "Missing In Action - Australia Popular Music
In Perspective", Graphics Publications, Melbourne, 1987
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has been replaced by the problematic, in that whereas rock'n'roll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 in 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.
