Please Don't Upload – Terminkalender

ON SONIC AND CULTURAL PERIPHERIES INTRODUCTION TO AMBIANCE, GENDER AND SPACE.

Lecture by Terre Thaemlitz within the frame of the Lecture Series of IBK summer term 2021. In English.

In this lecture artist Terre Thaemlitz revisits his influential early writings and sound productions. Her critical analyses of the conditions of 1990s ambient music scene corresponds to our investigations into the interdependencies of Gender u/and Space.

From the original Couture Cosmetique release accompanying essay 1997.

https://comatonse.bandcamp.com/album/couture-cosmetique-transgendered-electroacoustique-sympotomatic-of-the-need-for-a-cultural-makeover-or-whats-behind-all-that-foundation

“[Music’s] order simulates the social order, and its dissonances express marginalities.”
-Jacques Attali, Noise: A Political Economy of Music

“While the development of Queer-positive imagery and graphics exploded with AIDS activism in the 1980’s, sonically we have little more than, ‘Hey-hey, ho-ho, Homophobia’s got to go!’”
-Dont Rhine, Ultra-red

It has been suggested by myself and others that certain subgenres of what has come to be known as Contemporary Ambient music propose a complication of cultural processes by subverting the spectacle of melody and questioning the social functions of active and passive listening techniques. Similarly, while the genre remains dominated by male producers and cannot claim to transcend the conventional heterosexism and gender biases of the electronic music industry, it incorporates discourses which involve the active disclosure, inversion and convolution of sonic and experiential relationships. The result is a vehicle of layered contents and contradictions that extend to the very manner in which it allows for the generation of multiple political discourses while most forums for reception are despairingly a-political and Humanist in tone (an often frustrating passive-aggressive circumstance).

To exemplify this concept of contingency upon the contradictory, the sounds developed for Couture Cosmetique emphasize residual noises produced by some of today’s more popular digital synthesis techniques - including granular synthesis, pitch/time convolution and heterodyn filter analysis - bringing into focus those sounds which currently exist in a repressed state at the periphery of popular contemporary music production. In this manner, the limitations of such audio technologies are used to intimate new functionalities which remain excluded or omitted from popular development - a metaphor which may be applied to the construction and utilization of post-Industrial technologies in general. [….]

I have found that this methodological framework for constructing audio has many similarities with non-essentialist factions of transgenderism [from gender confusion to Drag Kings and Queens] which also seek to complicate social processes. Transgenderism does this by actively questioning constructions of gender and sexuality, while its exploitation of essentialist constructs of femininity and masculinity reference social contextuality. It is this referentiality which I feel makes non-essentialist transgenderism a more viable platform for gender analysis than methodologies which propose a transcendental breach from those cultural influences they critique. However, as with a-politicism within the Contemporary Ambient genre, transgenderism’s ability to develop such analyses is largely overwritten by larger factions and popular discourses which embrace essentialist concepts of sexual and gender identities. (released July 1, 1997)

Originally released under license from Comatonse Recordings in 1997 as a CD (US: Caipirinha Productions, 1997) CAI-2002-2; and (Japan: Daisyworld Records, 1997) SYDW-0005D. Contracts have since expired and all rights reverted. Recorded at Meow, New York. Produced, mixed and arranged by T. Thaemlitz (BMI). Design by Terre.