Filed under: interview, music, oulipo | Tags: angil, bök, cage, evans, glass, hiddntracks, minimalism, mottet, oulipo, piano, reich
I am cross-posting this with my other, collaborative blog: ghostisland.wordpress.com
A few months ago I found this album by “Angil and Hiddntracks” called Oulipo Saliva, which was built with a great deal of interest in constraint, avoiding the use of the letter “e,” focusing on woodwind instrumentation, the use of an old untuned piano, and even avoiding the use of the key of E.
I would certainly recommend it–a carefully crafted piece at every level. Here’s their myspace page.
With experiments like this, results can be either gimmicky or a wonderful surprise. They are, in this case, pretty dazzling. I wrote a small piece about it and Mickaël must have had a google alert set up for his name, because he dropped me a message and then graciously agreed to have an email conversation with me about his music.
Here’s the text: I think you’ll find that Mickaël is an uncommonly aware, crafty, sharp, interesting, and friendly musician. I’ve let him know that I will be posting this here, and that you may be commenting on it. So, if you have anything to say, make sure to say it.
I would definitely recommend reading the conversation, he’s a lovely guy with a lot of things to say. My apologies for talking so much.
Filed under: NYTimes, literature, media, oulipo, technology | Tags: NYTimes, slate, technology, twitter
Much of what we do online has obvious analogues in the past: E-mail and IM replace letters and face-to-face chatting. Blogging is personal pamphleteering. Skype is the new landline. Social networks let us map our real-life connections to the Web. It’s not surprising, then, that these new tools deliver obvious social utility—Facebook is the best way to get in touch with old friends, and instant messaging is the quickest way to collaborate with your colleagues across the country. Twitter is different. It’s not a faster or easier way of doing something you did in the past, unless you were one of those people who wrote short “quips” on bathroom stalls. It’s a totally alien form of communication. Microblogging mixes up features of e-mail, IM, blogs, and social networks to create something not just novel but also confusing, and doing it well takes time and patience. That’s not to say it isn’t useful; to some people in some situations, Twitter is irreplaceable. But it is not—or, at least, not yet—a necessary way to stay socially relevant in the information age.
via The reluctant Twitterer’s dilemma. – By Farhad Manjoo – Slate Magazine
This may be true, but this is no reason to swear off Twitter. Yes, I am blogging about Twitter, I understand the absurdity of it. But might it be valuable to introduce a new form of communication that has no direct antecedent? Doesn’t this just mean that it has untapped potential for a differentiation in our manner of communication? I’m not sold that twitter is completely useless, though I am sold on the idea that it is completely distracting. Thoreau made an interesting point on the telegraph:
We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer the new, but perchance the first news that will leak through the broad, flapping, American ear will be that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.
On another point: there was a very interesting NYTimes article back in September that spoke to what sociologists call “ambient awareness,” which is, say, the awareness we gain of a person’s moods, health, etc, by sitting in the same room and consciously or unconsciously picking up on small, mostly non-verbal cues. Maybe your friend’s eyes are a bit red, or they are slower in responding than usual, seem sluggish, maybe there is just something about them that just seems different. The article compares the inundation of data we receive from social media to this sort of awareness. Granted, many people seem to view Twitter or Facebook as a contest in which you are required to make as many friends as possible, and this seems ridiculous to me, but as a tool to keep up with people you are sincerely interested in, it simply has no parallel or better in the past.
The communication media of the past had a more direct purpose of conveying an important piece of information: letters were written and rewritten so as to guarantee the truth and nuance of the prose, telegrams were studies in the economy of language, even an email is more important-information oriented than Twitter. Twitter is undirected communication, it is neither completely for someone else nor entirely for yourself. It allows for the harmless presentation of absolutely mundane details without the risk of wasting someone’s time who would rather be doing something else: “I ate a sandwich.” “My throat hurts.” “Celtics down already!” etc. The details are mundane, but may have the effect that a tv often does for people living alone: there are voices in the room. You gain an ambient awareness of those you follow. You can read a book, work on your thesis, etc, but there are voices in the room with you. Things my friends would find too mundane to tell me in an email are exactly the sort of thing they would mention on Twitter or if we were in person, just sitting down for a meal, or maybe watching tv together.
Furthermore, some people are truly masters of the short form: Felix Fenéon for instance wrote little more than tiny little stories based on the news of the day–which, incidentally, someone is posting on Twitter. Marshall Mcluhan also has a ghost-twitterer, and the form would make sense for any writer with a gift for terse, densely packed statements. As an illustration, here are some examples from NYRB’s collection of Feneon’s stories titled Novels in Three Lines:
A dishwasher from Nancy, Vital Frerotte, who had just come back from Lourdes cured forever of tuberculosis, died Sunday by mistake.
Before jumping into the Seine, where he died, M. Doucrain had written in his notebook, “Forgive me, Dad. I like you.”
The Oulipo did wonders with constraint. Michael Agger in Slate brings up the possibility of Twittering as a new sort of Zen Koan. Or what of Twitter as the possibility for a haiku?
- old pond . . .
- a frog leaps in
- water’s sound
Which is all to say that the “lowered” level of discourse isn’t as bad as some would make it out to be. Sure, people will not always put in the thought to make a Twitter post as pithy as Oscar Wilde would (nor can we be sure Oscar Wilde wouldn’t be a boring person to follow on twitter), but the form is not to blame. It allows for both profundity and banality, both of which are valuable in equal measure. As for the banality of it: living in Scotland, I can keep up with my friends in the US, and they can keep up with me. I am privy to the small details of the lives of people I love, whether they happen to be witty (as they sometimes are) or just mundane (as most of our daily details are). Is that really so terrible?
And, in honor of my father who would always remind me when I was complaining that there was nothing good on tv that “It has an off button,” I will remind you that if you don’t like it, no one is making you use it.
This is a truly fascinating bit of music: Angil and Hiddntracks, during a post-gig discussion, thought about writing a bunch of songs for almost only woodwinds for want of focusing on that woodwind sound, also stipulating that all songs should avoid a grouping of chords particularly difficult for alto saxophonists to play. Angil runs with this–going two jumps out (changing (for this album only?) to “Angil,” and his supporting band to “Hiddn Tracks”), and shying from (mostly, ignoring his (frankly, sad) slipping on six or so grammatically-hard-to-avoid words) lyrics in violation of his organizing standards. So, this fun, this passing thought, quickly turns into a spry OuLiPo constraint, involving gaming both musical and linguistic. Lastly, as if this wouldn’t satisfy his compulsion to play, Angil bought a piano from a closing clothing shop (a liquidation) and, thinking that tuning it would probably ruin his fun, built all his songs on and around this bizarro-carnival thing (though his piano is commonly (and annoyingly) said to ring out with a “Tim Burton” sound), his band following suit, strictly and assiduously avoiding all violations.
So, in summary: a skillful dodging of constraint violations both musically and lyrically. Additional constraint and difficulty coming with his thrift shop bizarro-piano. A fascinating album, AND, might I add, a joy to own. Dazzling. A charming work of art with a sound of its own. Music for sad birds, an aviary symphony.
Worth looking into, I would say.
Angil and Hiddntracks – Oulipo Saliva
Eunoia is the shortest word in the English language that contains every vowel. Bök defines the word as meaning “beautiful thinking”. This book is a marvel of constraint. Its wonderful, beautiful, surprising, and just pretty amazing in general. I would link to the Amazon page for this book, but it turns out that Coach House Books has actually posted the entirety of the book on their website.
The book is technically a lipogram, or a work in which a letter or group of letters are missing, forming a constraint game for the author. Christian Bök has done this by eliminating all but one vowel from each chapter. Its really pretty amazing how far he is willing to go with the restraint, as he has extra rules that each chapter must follow.
All chapters must allude to the art of writing. All chapters must describe a culinary banquet, a prurient debauch, a pastoral tableau and a nautical voyage. All sentences must accent internal rhyme through the use of syntactical parallelism. The text must exhaust the lexicon for each vowel, citing at least 98% of the available repertoire (although a few do go unused, despite efforts to include them: parallax, belvedere, gingivitis, monochord, and tumulus.) The text must minimize repetition of substantive vocabulary (so that, ideally, no word appears more than once). The letter Y is suppressed.
Essentially, he has written a pretty astounding little book. If I remember right, it took him 7 years to put together, but can easily be read in an afternoon. The chapters begin to take on a character of their own. What starts as an impressive genre exercise also reveals itself as a thoughtful examination of the English language. Reading it might teach you a thing or two.
Some precedents, for those interested, are Alphabetical Africa by Walter Abish, in which he uses an alliterative device allowing in the first chapter for only words that begin with “A”, for the second both “A” and “B”, and so on and so forth. A Void by George Perec avoids the use of the letter “e” for the entirety of the novel. This is the most common letter in both French and English, so the translation is perhaps more of a work of constraint than the original was.
These exercises are all born out of the Oulipo school, which I will most likely talk about a great deal, these authors being one of my chief interests. More on that later.
