Why Rock? At Turbulence.org

As part of the guest curator’s season at Turbulence.org, Annie Abrahams and Clement Charmet have brought together various digital artists, perhaps more well-known for their visual arts than musical explorations. Under the banner of Why Rock? The pieces presented offer an intriguing exploration of digital music’s potential. One that is more aligned with ideas of DIY punk than what we imagine the current music scene to be.
“Is it because we believe 21st-century rock stars will emerge from the net ?”.

Is it?

Perhaps they will. Or perhaps it is merely that those who engage with “net art” (whatever it is we may be attempting to encompass with that phrase) and attempt to explore the questions that art often addresses through the digital are the sorts of people who will explore and create with whatever tools might be available to them, and are more willing to take chances?

Or perhaps the openness and self-publishing modality of the web allows artistic endeavour to exist beyond the business-model culture of the gallery/curator/art council-funded scheme of things, whereby a certain aspect of the public’s perception of work is that of “here is a painter”, “here is a writer”, “here is a musician”? Perhaps, therefore, it is within the digital that the full scope of artistic endeavour can be explored by creative types.

As Robert Frank said in an interview with Jack Sargeant “[…] I was always the kid who was making stuff […]”. And all artists are like that. Shelley Jackson may be most well-known as a writer, but she admits her creative output has many forms. So, perhaps it is just that the web allows these dualities to be public. Why can’t we be musicians and artists?

And so we turn to the subject of the review: Why rock? Hosted by Turbulence. In thinking about these tracks, do we contextualise them within the whole of the artist’s work or within a genre of music? It doesn’t really matter. What counts is that we listen and enjoy the sounds and occasional images. The list of artists here reads like a who’s who of contemporary digital arts practice:

a l e x e i s h u l g i n
p a v u
r i c h a r d s t a l l m a n
i g o r s t r o m a j e r
v . n . a . t . r . c .
t a l a n m e m m o t t
c o r y a r c a n g e l
c l é m e n t c h a r m e t
d r a g a n e s p e n s c h i e d
a n n i e a b r a h a m s
c l e m e n t t h o m a s
a l a n s o n d h e i m
m a r c g a r r e t t

Alexei Shulgin’s piece opens the catalogue to noise “rock” sounds that are both playful and thought-provoking. Enter Sandman, the track originally penned and played by Metallica, is channelled through a cheap-sounding filter of keyboards and low-fi wares. You want to listen and rock out, but you also want to laugh. When the vocals kick in, you finally see Stephen Hawkings as he would be if he had studied his rock history a little more and Unified Theories of Everything just a little less.

Igor Stromajer’s piece Oppera Teorettikka Internettikka stutters and flickers into life. What sounds like a troublesome fluctuation soon becomes the snickering and muttering of some distant voice, which – for this listener – evoked the soundtrack to one of David Lynch’s early student films (probably The Grandmother). It then dives into silence and emerges with a blast of sound. As the name suggests, this operatic piece, weighing in at 38 minutes and 14 seconds, is a journey of prog-rock proportions. Technically, more about the mixing desk and composition than other pieces, this blends in voice-overs explaining the process of nuclear fission and a distant voice speaking in what may be Latin. Then a dance beat breaks in fades. And on it goes, voices mixing in and being manipulated along with the crackle and fizz of electronica.

Annie Abrahams doesn’t want to be a nice girl. And she may not be, but her music makes you want to get to know her more. I Don’t Want To Be a Nice Girl , cuts a groove with a repetition of the title phrase over the top while guitar-style feedback runs through the whole song. You could dance to this piece, but not at your parents’ wedding anniversary party.

If there’s a unifying theme to this net. Exhibition, it’s the playfulness of the music. The composers/rock stars haven’t attempted to create deep, meaningful works. Instead, they would seem to have turned their backs on the deep knowledge of the technologies they have shown they have mastery of with their other fields of practice and decided to explore a simple version of what music can be. If you’ve been reared on a diet of Throbbing Gristle and Coil as I was as a teenager, then this music will be at once familiar and exciting. If your diet consisted of Robbie Williams and Ah-ha, you’ve probably been reading the wrong review anyway.

“Is it just a need to make an adolescent dream come true?”.

Who cares? Let’s rock!!