[NewMusic] (no subject)

[Matt Davignon]

I guess I'm a bit tired of the belief that every sound a musician
makes is profound art. I understand that in experimental music there's
a lot of gray area, a lot of exploration, a lot of 'messing around',
and I'm ok with that. I like a lot of examples of the stuff that I
listed earlier as "things that make people think experimental music is
bad". But I'm an insider.

And sometimes one gets to the other side of that gray area, and you
realize that what you're listening to is pretty much sound garbage.
More than in any other genre (ok, maybe new age), experimental
musicians have largely refused to acknowledge those cases, and that's
what gives the genre a bad rep.

I'm no longer going to try to convince somebody that making poopy
sounds into a microphone, or turning it up to 11 is a statement of
artistic merit or emotional expression. Claiming that musical training
or years of experience assign profundity to one's poopy sounds is yes,
pretentious. There has to be some sort of value system. I think that
when something sucks, we need to be able to say "This sucks" rather
than "Hey man, fuck you!"

Matt