"eai" isn't a textbook definition, it's merely a shorthand way to refer to a general area of music. there are obviously a million shades of grey within it, as well as just outside it. purely semantically, it's even more useless than you point out here. since it obviously contains some all-electronic work, thus logic follows that it should also contain some all-acoustic work, meaning semantically it refers to all improvised music, even though that's obviously not the point. you touched on most of the defining factors, but one other which should be discussed is that of collaboration versus solo projects.

I personally think what would be more useful than saying this record belongs here, this one there, etc., would be the coining of a new term altogether to define this area of music, preferably without the word "improvisation" involved. the four alternate terms Dan mentions also all have innate problems, as he goes through, I personally wouldn't use any of those (I used to use "onkyo" for Otomo/Toshi/Sachiko/Taku et. al., but now I just refer to them as "the Tokyo crew"). my current term of choice is "atmospherics", although Tomas wasn't crazy about it, but I'm OK with sticking with "eai" as a shorthand term when necessary.

anyway, my energy goes much more into continuing to produce the records that (hopefully) continue to blur and push boundaries, so I'll leave it to others to decide what they would like to label and define them as. it's quite possible that coming up with a truly universally satisfying genre name would help to mark the beginning of the end of the era of real creativity in this area, a major reason why I stopped trying to do so a couple of years ago.

also, I have to mention that the title of this piece brings to mind one of my favorite genre definitions of all time, from "What is Soul?" from the first Funkadelic record:

"What is Soul?"
"Soul is a hamhock in your cornflakes."
"OH YEAH!"

so maybe "eai" is soba in your paté? :)

I agree with Jon Abbey about "shades of grey". Perhaps it would be more useful for us not to think of EAI as a classical category with necessary and sufficint conditions for membership. Instead, we can think in terms of a continuum of different degrees of EAI-ness and a range of relevant variables that can be taken into consideration to determine the extent to which any given object is EAI.

speed is an important variable, i think. compare "wonderful world" to "wrapped islands" - one important difference is the pace at which new material is introduced and existing material is modulated... slowmotion-music? sounds silly...

i understand your concern about terminology, dan - but keep in mind that specially in the field of "experimental" music originality ("to come up with something new") is a major concern, i wouldn't say "the less something fits into a genre the better" but for many musicians it goes along these lines, doesn't it? it seems pretty impossible to keep track with genre terminologies in this world, i think.

I like including "improv" but removing "electro-" and "acoustic" since neither is really necessary, aand I'm not sure what they add. But what sort of improv? Non-jazz, non-baroque, non-this, non-that. How about non-soloing, non-accompanying improv. It's long, but for me, that pretty much does it.

leaving aside the clunkiness of that proposed term, this music isn't all improvised, and you could even make the argument that it's impossible to truly freely improvise on a laptop, you need to program something beforehand (I think this is true, I'm not an expert on the technical end of things). as the good Mr. Rowe is increasingly prone to saying, we need a better word than improvisation.

non-soloing improv: NSI ... sounds kinda dangerous... and it already has a website and all: http://www.nsi.org/ ... perfect.

Great ruminations, Dan, and great comments so far by all. As I've often said and written, one of the things I find so provocative about this music (whatever we're calling it) is that it's so pleasing to listen to even as it problematizes itself (i.e. it continually evades our attempts to capture it linguistically).

I'm not going to propose a term here, but one way I've often thought about this stuff (AMM and progeny) is as process-dominated rather than being concerned primarily with content and/or expression. Clearly this is not the only music, improvised or otherwise, with such concerns, nor is it the case that content is an afterthought (though at times expression may be). But if the question is "what links Kevin Drumm's 'Sheer Hellish Miasma' to 'Tint' to the Sealed Knot?" then maybe it's that the musicians involved are working within an implicitly acknowledged field of constraints (instrumentation, foreground/background, no solos, whatever) that distinguishes this constellation of music-making procedures from others. In other words, general acceptance of or fascination with a very open-ended (but clearly distinct from others) process is what marks this music in some ways.

Just a thought.

before picking a name, it would probably be a good idea to determine what aspect of a musical creation qualifies it for consideration as 'eai'. it's clearly not instrumentation, technique, or volume, probably not influence, and i don't think it's reasonable to judge by what is absent (solos, tonality, groove, etc). whatever that aspect might be, perhaps that is where the quality of the music can be evaluated? i've tried to nail this aspect down in terms of an aesthetic of blended atmosphere, outside of individual voices and gestures, but again the definition ends up non-unique. so the problem remains.

or something.

m

my wife and work friends, seperately, independently, refer to a lot of the music I enjoy as "noise music".

Excellent questions, Dan. Your comments re: Sugimoto and Akiyama have crossed my mind before. Afraid to say that trying to determine a proper label for music is in vain. I realized that as a teen when Jethro Tull beat out Metallica for best Metal Group in the Grammys. But eai does just fine as a flexible, referent category, I think.

Oh yes, and in the spirit of Jon's post:

"Soul is chitlins foo young."

I don't think the fact (if it is one) that programming is necessary to use a certain device to make sounds prevents it from being improvised upon. After all, you need lungs (or fingernails or a guitar pick to "play" a trumpet).

In fact, the thing I don't like about "atmospherics" is that it doesn't require improvisation, which I think Erst-style ea-i does. Elevator music is at least intended to be "atmospheric."

Improv seems to be the one essential requirement of e-ai. You just have to disqualify, jazz (or blues or Celtic or whatever) riffs, baroque continuo or church organ improvs. I think "non-soloing, non-accopanying" does this.

It is long though, so I propose "NON-i music" (which also has the anti-ego thing going for it). I think I'll start using it!

Music of absence. Self-referential improv. Klein-bottle music. Brownian improv. Translucent music.

Actually, now that I think about it, "lowercase improv" is perfect. Look a few of the participants on the original "lowercase sound" compilation: Jason Lescalleet, Oren Ambarchi, Roel Meelkop, Michael Northam....."lowercase" need not necessarily be quiet (didn't Daniel Menche put out an album on trente oiseaux?) The word has the lovely quality of being able to pick things out without being easily definable on it's own (like pornography!) and hence flexible while being plenty descriptive. If you go back early enough in the archives for the lowercase mailing list, you'll see some pretty intense debates about what "lowercase" actually meant. As far as I remember, what people ended up deciding was the the genre name followed from the mailing list, rather than vice versa.

So, whatever isn't purely "lowercase improv" can just be "lowercase." Great! I'm sticking with it.

Plus, if you talk to many people in the NYC multimedia community, you quickly realize that "EAI" stand for Electronic Arts Intermix (http://www.eai.org).

not sure how you can call Schmickler, Fennesz, Pita or recent Kevin Drumm lowercase anything. if Menche put out a record on TO, I bet it was a pretty damn quiet one.

maybe the result of this thread will be that each person picks out a genre name that works for them. :)

as far as i can remember, the menche on TO was pretty noisy.

A negative name seems the best choice, since so many of the defining factors are, on the surface anyhow, negative ones (no solos, no 'lead instruments,' no groove, etc.). How about "stripped music" or "twintot" (the latter being an acronym for "that which is not those other things")?

I think EAI is a fine name whatever its lack of precision. The point in having a name is whether the referent is clear to a specific audience, and I think this one has the currency to allow most people to understand what you mean when you refer to it. In any case, linguistically speaking, you can't prescribe a new practice with regard to naming. It has to evolve. That's why I made the comment over on the Rebecca review that I've noticed that EAI is starting to morph into "erstwhile" as the new nomenclature. You see it in places like the DTMG mailings where Bruce Gallanter says things like "erstwhile-like" to refer to other music in the genre. Or in other sectors one sees descriptions like "erstwhile music" or "the music that revolves around the Erstwhile label," etc. I like the phrase "erstwhile music" for its other resonances as well. Al brings up the fact that his wife and others refer to his music as "noise music". Well the Japanese word for noise is "onkyo." but it's more cumbersome when you try to differentiate one kind of noise (Merzbow) from another (the more restrained, minimal sides of onkyo--where experimental ambient is probably a better description, except for all the inherent problems with the use of that term). If you're a jounalist and you want to have a more precise vocabulary to describe this music, you're still going to have to pair up any new terms with the older EAI in order to be understood by your audience. So arbitrary changes of vocabulary aren't going to work. I'd be satisfied with preserving the term EAI or since the label Erstwhile is putting on the more high-profile festivals and releases these days, the term "erstwhile" is going to be come the new term of currency for the older EAI over time.

Eddie Prevost proposed "metamusic" in No Sound Is Innocent as a description of what AMM does. It has a nice ring to it but I'm not sure it's at all clear what he means by it, except insofar as it's defined implicitly by the AMM canon itself.

I'm not really very interested in the issue of naming--I think the more abstract the name chosen, the better, so "onkyo" (which is meaningless to the non-Japanese speaker), "lowercase" & "eai" (as a euphonious string of three letters, rather than as short for "electroacoustic improvisation") are all fine by me. What I am interested in are other matters:

1) is there broad agreement about what "counts" as eai?

2) I'm interested to hear Jon questioning the use of the word "improvisation" here, as I've found myself increasingly uncertain whether that's really the right term to use. See the discussion I smuggled into the review of Veliotis's Radial in the February Paris Transatlantic.

3) So if "improvisation" goes out the window as a key defining term (or is so altered in its nature that it's not "improvisation" in quite the same sense that other musics like jazz or free improv are "improvisation"), this does leave questions about what are the distinguishing characteristics of this area of performance (which is I guess what Dan's really getting at, not really the mere question of what name to call it). In that Veliotis piece I had tried, clumsily enough, to put my finger on one potential way of looking at this--as a change in the "stance" of the performer.

"not sure how you can call Schmickler, Fennesz, Pita or recent Kevin Drumm lowercase anything."

They're not lowercase. "lowercase improv" does not equal "erstwhile-y". Pita and Drumm are working in a pretty well defined noise context. Schmickler There's a section in Wittgenstein's "Philosophical Investigations" where he's dealing exactly with this problem. I don't have the section in front of me, but here's the bit quoted in Morris Weitz's "The Role of Theory in Aesthetics" (the quotation marks are going to get pretty hairy here):

"What is a game? The traditional philosophical answer would be in terms of some exhaustive set of properties common to all games. To this Wittgenstein says, let us consider what we mean by 'games': 'I mean board-games, card-games, ball-games, Olympic-games, and so on. What is common to them all? - Don't say: "there *must* be something in common, or they would not be called 'games'" but *look and see* whether there is anything common to all. - For if you look at them you will see not something that is common to *all*, but similarities, relationships and a whole series of them at that...'"

Also, one I like by Rudolph Arnheim: "It is the buisness of the theorist to inspect the tools and demand that they be clear. At the same time, he is darkly aware at what the reckless practice of the arts has done to his standards in the past and will do to them in the future. Having delivered his admonition, he secretly puts some trust in the messy shrewdness that has so long been the hope of the human civilization." (somewhere in _Film As Art_, i can get the citation if you want it)

I think we should get away from those content-heavy names as the content may be shifting.

I suggest to name it "Dieter".

please pass on to Mr. Weitz that what all games have in common is competition, either against someone else or yourself.

Nirav, my problem with the term "lowercase" is that I feel like it necessarily means low volume, even though you say specifically above you don't think that's true. for me, it is. I was on the lowercase mailing list when it started up, and I remember thinking that the primary thing that connected the music under that umbrella was the quietness of the sounds. words have different connotations to different people, that's what lowercase means to me.

here's the part of Nate's PT Veliotis review that he referenced above:

"It's worth turning back to Veliotis's statement from the website, which on reinspection is significant for its nonchalance over questions of whether this is "improvised" or "composed" music - Radial is simply denoted a "structure of continuous sound and/or silence". So which is it, improvisation or composition? For an earlier generation this was a crucial question, and the answer to it carried a lot of ideological freight (see Derek Bailey's pungent manifesto Improvisation), but increasingly I'm inclined to think that neither term can be meaningfully applied to so-called lowercase music. Consider, for instance, the distance between the implicit stance of Bailey's kind of improviser - the agent of point-by-point, moment-by-moment renewal and change - and that of the lowercase improvisor, whose actions might often better be described as "adjustment" or "maintenance". The latter role can be quite literal, when the performer becomes an overseer of technologies which can operate continuously on their own - turntables, feedback, electronic loops, radios, motorized fans, etc - but Veliotis occupies much the same, somewhat elevated position on Radial even though he's working with something as traditional as unamplified cello. Am I the only person who finds himself less and less confident in using words like "improvisation" and "composition" under these circumstances? I spoke recently to a friend of how this kind of playing might represent a "third way" - the term's ugly Blairite connotations don't carry across the water to Canada, but even so it's not a term I like much. We are probably still waiting for a terminology that really feels right - that seems in accord with what it's like to make this music, to listen to it, or to witness it in performance. —ND"

I think this gets back to what tomas said above, about speed being a important variable. maybe you could explain what you mean by that a little more, tomas?

eai as it's used here, at least, seems to apply primarily to a shared aesthetic rather than a process. And that aesthetic is not necessarily related to the (perceived) low-volume/low-velocity "lowercase" (that's how James Coleman described lc to me, at least), nor is it constrained by combinations of electronic and acoustic sound sources, or even improvisation.

The term bothered me at first, when I realized that it was being used to describe the music from an aesthetic position, rather than the "method" position that it implies (literally), but a) there's nothing I can do about it b) it didn't bother me very much, and c) I have no interest in creating, defending, and evangelizing a new term (although "Dieter" gets my vote for now). It's easy for me to say "free music" because that's how I approach what I do: I try to attain "freedom," although I know perfectly well that there's no "there" there.

What's in danger of ossification, I suspect, is the aesthetic (which clearly includes plenty of extra-musical criteria) - the danger comes partly from the disproportionate attention it gets and the universalizing rhetoric it inspires. Danger is good, though, so hey uh.

I've met (highly touted) players in the Tokyo (off-site &c) scenes who *demand* an agreement in ad hoc situations to limit sound-choices to onkyo-ha style (deliberate, quiet, sparse, self-consciously "focused"), and I've definitely noticed a growing trend for players to avoid playing situations in which potential partners might not share their specific aesthetic (and the aesthetics can get maddeningly specific!). In contrast, the nobody kids in Potland and L.A. seem to be having real fun, even when it hurts (and I'll even go so far as to say that aesthetically they have few challengers).

Tom Djll, bay area trumpeter (and electroacousticist by any definition, witness Mutootator), wrote a piece that drew the ire of the SF/Oakland crowd in which he ranted about these partitions and calcifications. To his credit, he mostly asked questions and he didn't name names, but I agree with his kernel that it *is* psychologically dangerous to snuggle ourselves up only amongst those who share and support our (comfortable) little preferences. I'd love to play on the street with Ami or Ichiraku.

Reminds me: played a basement show in Boise in 2001 with a K records singer-songwriter (Myrah?), a Kentucky stoner-metal band. We blew spitties and jostled broken electronics, and an "art debate" ensued. It was very refreshing to hear the teenagers arguing about whether we were "music."

As I've said before, I suppose, these hairs ain't gonna just up and split themselves.

Glove,

Jabez Fister

PS: I should probably have written

...whose actions might often better be described (not pejoratively) as "adjustment" or "maintenance".

yeah, Nate, I'm still trying to decide what I think about that sentence. one thing that came to mind after reading that was that a few years ago, I used to go see Gerry Hemingway play a lot. the contexts I would see him in tended towards the more abstract and textural, but almost invariably in each set, he would go into what Earl Howard (my mastering engineer and a frequent collaborator of Gerry's) called his "multiphonic solo". Earl and I discussed this, and agreed that while it was always impressively virtuosic, Gerry actually often used it as a mental break, where he didn't have to concentrate nearly as hard, and could just let muscle reflex take over.

"please pass on to Mr. Weitz that what all games have in common is competition, either against someone else or yourself."

You gotta see some toddlers play--or older kids playing with Barbies! There's even a whole genre of "cooperative games" in stores now.

BTW, I still haven't heard why I shouldn't include any abbreviation for "improv" in my "NON-i music" moniker. I'm under the impression that
if anything is essential, that is. (At least I don't see why the fact that computers, samplers, etc. must be programmed counts as any sort of counter-example to this principle.) Anyhow, until my lovely name gets into common currency (which should be quick with all of us on board!) and connotative evolution becomes inevitable, I proclaim:

All NON-i shall be (mostly) improvised.

Thus it is said and thus it shall be.

I've long thought that "improvisation" is much more useful as a placeholder than as a designator of a quantifiable thing. Certainly, in a Western culture like ours in which the divisions of labor that characterize the roles of spectator, participants, and creators have been re-calibrated -- thanks to Duchamp and Cage and Barthes and Warhol and Tarrantino, to name but a few -- then certainly our concepts of "agency" and "affect" are going to be altered as well. If one is going to broach the subjects of agency and affect, as Nate does in his Veliotis piece, it seems to me that, in addition, one is going to have to address an often painful peculiarity of the human condition: consciousness, or one's relationship with one's self. Musicians do form important relationships with objects -- tools -- but what is more important is how the understanding musicians develop of their chosen instruments grows into a form of self-knowing. We simply do not have a good description of improvisation as a cognitive experience, much less any sort of agreement on how to what degrees the improvisational act is an intellectual, emotional, spiritual, and kinetic one. I believe it is questionable to call the state in which musicians create music in the moment a mode of thought at all, simply because music-making is not an entirely mental activity to begin with. Does improvisation depend on technical virtuosity and training, that the gap between intention and execution be virtually non-existent? I suppose you could brand this an athletic point-of-view, one that would also prescribe that success be measured within a system of constraints (out-of-bounds; the shot clock; illegal contact... harmony, melody, rhythm). Or does improvisation really require that "beginner's mind", that peace be made with chaos and entropy? One must be attuned less to oneself than to a field of musical consequences. One inhabits a sonic ecology, but this does not mean that accord always obtains. It may be to one's advantage to adapt adversarial postures. But I do not think that overt manifestations of will and fully individuated action would be welcome in such surroundings. To say that, in this kind of improvisation, there are no solos, and that it is egoless, is also to say that it depends upon no one individual for leadership. I also have reason to belief -- mostly feel -- that these two conceptions of the improviser, crudely described as they may be, also describe two sides of a cultural divide. (The gulf between could be said to be occupied by "listening" and all its implications.) I would venture to say that each side would also feel very differently about striking "improvisation" and "improviser" from their discourses.

So what? So improvisation describes not a form but a process? Except that sometimes improvisation is treated as a formal description that carries some evaluative significance. All the use of the term improvisation really does is throw up a kind of signal: no documented planning initiative in place here. That said, who is to know how much discussion and interpersonal history exists a priori to the music thus made in the absence of certain referents. The use of "improvisation" as a description reveals more about the privileged -- informed -- vantage of the individual employing the term.

I would never conflate "eai" or whatever shorthand description emerges from this colloquy with "Erstwhile". I think there are many legitimate reasons why. First off, it isn't the sole label active in this "genre"... see Grob, Potlatch, Sedimental, Meniscus, A Bruit Secret, 4 For Ears, Mego... More crucially, there is a great deal of historical precedence for this music that seems so "new", and, although I don't believe it is necessary for the "casual listener" (whoever that is) to apprise themselves of what has come before, I do think those who wish to write critically about the music are under some obligation to cultivate at least a passing familiarity with that history: Italian Futurism, Xenakis (the electro-acoustic element, from his own musique concrete works to his architectural setting for Varese's Poeme Electronique), M.E.V. (the use of electronics in a "free improv" setting), more... There's no denying the importance of AMM in this history, but, come now, that collective, whatever their work history, the hardships of which I feel have been played up and transformed into virtues, does not exist in utter cultural isolation. Because of Keith Rowe's involvement, however, I have no difficulty acknowledging that AMM is much more central to the Erstwhile aesthetic than to "eai" (or whatever). While there is no question that many of the most appealing and most well-known documents of this musical activity have appeared on Erstwhile, the Erstwhile releases are anything but mere documentary records (pardon the pun) anyway. Judging entirely from comments Jon has made in a number of public fora (sorry, I can't give a catalog or get too specific without more time to prepare these comments), when he makes reference to the collaborative spirit of his endeavor, he's also talking about his own involvement. Jon isn't just accepting and rejecting takes of tunes ala Lion and Wolff. He is making aesthetic choices regarding the presentation of the music you hear on Erstwhile. And I'm not talking about packaging or the fact that he often "puts the Erstwhile groups together". (He has often talked about enjoying the collision of approaches, asking the Viennese to work with the Japanese, etc.) He may not be the photographer, if you will, but he is striking prints from the negatives. As a result, for this listener, Erstwhile is not representative of anything other than a rather singular aesthetic sensibility, informed as it may be the philosophies and preferences of others (Rowe, Earl Howard). Understand I'm not upbraiding anyone. In a sense, I am only paraphrasing John when he states:

"Anyway, my energy goes much more into continuing to produce the records that (hopefully) continue to blur and push boundaries... it's quite possible that coming up with a truly universal satisfying genre name would help to mark the beginning of the end of the era of real creativity in this area [a tombstone, "here lies..."], a major reason why I stopped trying to do so a couple of years ago."

I think the main thrust of Dan's piece is contained in his pointing to a "musical logic" that binds the works of these musicians who sometimes uses electronic tools, and sometimes don't, but who demonstrate a consistency of musical approach regardless of the presence of such instruments. "Eai", on a very simple semantic level, only addresses means of sonic production. If you think about the genre terms that are largely accepted these days, from "country and western" to "Impressionism", you see that very few of them are predicated on expressing a sense of how the music operates or is generated. (In fact, most genre terms are as arbitrary as "jazz"; they have their own weird poetry.) I think most of us feel that the non-hardware- and software-specific implications of the actual musical content, however, are much more important. Musicality transcends the mechanics of implementation, does it not? Not so fast... Gross generalization: the majority of artists working in this area are constructing phenomenologies of sound. I think we have moved far beyond "music", at least conventionally so, into areas that not even a tonal scientist such as Alvin Lucier has / had foreseen.

As Nate asks, I do not believe there is any consensus as to what “counts” as “eai”? But, as I see it, these to me are the major preoccupations of this music (name pending).

What I would really like to see is some more concentrated discussion of the emotional resonance, if any can be said to exist, of this music? "Austere" it may be in terms of what is deployed or used up, but I don't believe it is all equally sever in its effect. Or: if this music is at least in part about relationships as they have been made and modified by technology, does... and pardon this slightly anthropomorphic speculation... does this music require that its audience seek out and invent new relationships to itself?

Joe, just addressing the Erstwhile part of your comments above for a second: the WHRB DJ sent me a CD-R of the 45 minute interview he did with Rowe for the festival last week. one thing Rowe said on there when queried specifically about Erstwhile is that Erstwhile is the first label he knows of in this area of music to not include any nods to free jazz in its catalog (paraphrasing), which is certainly consciously true, at least after the first few releases, and not something that ever occurred to me specifically before. you also could argue that most of the "eai" projects on the labels you mention involve musicians that I've worked with in other contexts.

I don't really disagree with the rest of your thoughts in that area (I do a little bit, like I think MEV are fairly irrelevant in terms of leading to anything, but it's closer to splitting hairs, so I'll leave it at that.)

I think the questioning of the use of the term improvisation shouldn't be thought of simply in terms of the fact that some groups and individuals involved with eaifwoabw have used/reintroduced composition into their work. This strikes me more as a dissatisfaction with improvisation than a reflection of the modes of operation described by Nate and Joe. I've not heard any of Sugimoto's recent work, or Rebecca (which from reviews appears to be an exception to what I'm about to post), but that seems like a change of approach rather than a change in thinking about an existing/developing approach, from what I've read about it.

The idea of "pieces", individual composers, is an old one, and I think it would be an incredible oversimplfication to say that eaifwoabw has gone full circle back to Cage/Wolff etc., although I don't want to jump back to that discussion.

The idea of maintenance and adjustment are interesting. In working with electronic musicians, I'm finding that as a wind player, the maintenance of sounds for long periods of time requires much more stamina than even the most fierce of free-jazz blow-outs. Even circular-breathing is best done at high volume and with rapid changes of notes (masking the necessary changes in embouchure and allowing for a quicker turnover of air). It hadn't occured to me until Nate's comment how different this process is for people using electronics (or even bowing), where the system may be set up and run by itself, leaving the musician, physically at least, to concentrate on other things. In terms of concentration, I think it requires a similar level of it in both instances to achieve decent results - there's little worse than unfocused playing on any instrument, but the physical process is quite different nonetheless. The tiny movements involved in manipulation of some older electronic devices perhaps come closer to that level of physical awareness - which I see as being increasingly closer to the process of the surgeon or miniaturist than that of the athelete.

Terms like these will always involve a certain amount of oversimplifying or, reductionism [!], if you will. The musicians involved will either rail against it, or embrace it as a badge of honor, or have a general ambivalence. I find terms like these to be useful to cut to the chase in a discussion or description, but always use quotations or a slight tone of skepticism or sarcasm when using them. But I often find a few descriptive words or other refence points (ie other musicians) to be just as useful.

As for "improvisation", I agree that it's "much more useful as a placeholder than as a designator of a quantifiable thing" [as joe says above]. In conjunction w/ a few other choice adjectives, you can roughly place a certain CD or artist within a certain framework as a launch board for some kind of discussion which is more about the aesthetics of it, which I believe are much more important than the process. And I definitely don't see it as a problem that people are tending to avoid situations where the music is not to their liking. If you're interested in investigating sonic minutiae, it does no one any good to play in a situation where that will be obliterated, and if that's not "true" improvisation or "improvisation" at all, then so be it. I don't think that's playing it safe. You can use anything as a safety net ("anything goes" can be pretty damn safe); some people will use certain pre-set factors as a safety net and others are simply trying to make a specific kind of music for a specific kind effect. Nothing wrong with that.

Terms:

The lowercase list was originally started to discuss a general area of art (music, painting, film, literature) that could be described as minimal, low volume, low velocity, etc. The key word being general. It wasn't designed to be a set of rules or a genre, just a place for the discussion of a certain ambiguous area of art.

The term reductionism is an odd one since it sounds like an insult. I know what people mean when they say they perform reductionist improvisation, but wouldn't that mean that they're dumbing down complex issues?

EAI is another know it when you see it tag. It could be a useful heading for a column of reviews in a magazine. You could argue over what's included, but in general, I agree w/ Jon's definition of soul from Funkadelic.

the closest they come to a conclusion in that song, by the way, is "Soul is you, baby."

Reductionism
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Reductionism in philosophy describes a number of related, contentious theories that hold, very roughly, that the nature of complex things can always be reduced to (explained by) simpler or more fundamental things. This is said of objects, phenomena, explanations, theories, and meanings. The term is often used to criticize an imagined position rather than to describe a real one.

Ontological reductionism is the idea that everything that exists is made from a small number of basic substances that behave in regular ways. Compare to monism.
Methodological reductionism is the idea that explanations of things, such as scientific explanations, ought to be continually reduced to the very simplest entities possible.
Theoretical reductionism is the idea that older theories or explanations are not generally replaced outright by new ones, but that new theories are refinements or reductions of the old theory in greater detail.
Scientific reductionism has been used to describe all of the above ideas as they relate to science, but is most often used to describe the idea that all phenomena can be reduced to scientific explanations.
Linguistic reductionism is the idea that everything can be described in a language with a limited number of core concepts, and combinations of those concepts. (See Basic English and the constructed language Toki Pona).
The term "greedy reductionism" was coined by Daniel Dennett to condemn those forms of reductionism that try to explain too much with too little.
The denial of reductionist ideas is holism; the idea that things can have properties as a whole that are not explainable from the properties of their parts.

re·duc·tiv·ism
(click to hear the word) (r-dkt-vzm)
n.
See minimalism.

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re·ductiv·ist n.

re·duc·tion·ism
(click to hear the word) (r-dksh-nzm)
n.
An attempt or tendency to explain a complex set of facts, entities, phenomena, or structures by another, simpler set: "For the last 400 years science has advanced by reductionism ... The idea is that you could understand the world, all of nature, by examining smaller and smaller pieces of it. When assembled, the small pieces would explain the whole" (John Holland).

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re·duction·ist adj. & n.
re·duction·istic adj.

Not sure if that helps or not.

Yes, this does help.

"The term is often used to criticize an imagined position rather than to describe a real one."

This is how I've always seen the word used before its adoption as a musical genre. I usually associate it as a pejorative where the "simpler system" is contingent upon certain details being obliterated or misrepresented to serve the purposes of an agenda of one kind or another. As opposed to thinking of said simpler system as a microscosm, as some of the definitions above point to.

Yeah, Grey, you're right. I do the same thing with "genre" names: I doubt-quote them but they have use-value. Of course.

I think I chose my wods lazleleily however about improvisation and aesthetics. No value-judgement felt, if implied. Improvising is truly just a way of composing. My worry about people drawing their lines in the sand is much more selfish: if the people around me did that 5 or 6 years ago, I'd still be wheezing away by myself probably. It took (and still requires) countless aesthetically-clashing music experiences for me to get my fun. As a result, I've rarely been satisfied to have a firm aesthetic stance (again, selfish reasons: it bites me in the ass), and have tended to choose 2 options for ad hoc play. One is to be prepared for anything, including playing loudly (in which case there are always options: I could play loudly or I could listen and not play) and one is playing quietly (and not hear myself/not be heard: an option I tended to for several years).

Because I like playing music as a lifestyle choice, I find myself in those clashing situations frequently, and I get a lot out of them, not much of it aesthetic. The frequent general sense of disappointment gets useless fast, and some uneasy shape of "tolerance" develops. My most consistent playing partners have developed with me over the years and we are able to share (or at least superimpose satisfactorily) our aesthetic desires with no need for "tolerance." The players I seek out to play with more than a few times do things that interest me. Of course.

This is all first person because, of course, any other decisions people might make invite, but don't require, my approval.

"The idea is that you could understand the world, all of nature, by examining smaller and smaller pieces of it." John Holland

I do like this quote, but "Dialogue and Heurism" (the Heurism bit), plus even "experimental music" come quite close to that definition - the whole idea of experiments is examining small areas of something isn't it? It doesn't really say much about sound or interaction (although you could argue that sound (production) and interaction are de-emphasised by some musicians involved in this music).

eai hasn't got much currency in England that I know of - I only know it through forums like this, and one term that gets used a lot is "experimental improvised music", which has the same problem as "improvised music" or "creative improvised music" in that it suggests all other musics aren't improvised, aren't creative or aren't experimental, but still it removes the acoustic/electric/electronic terminology, which can easily be added - experimental electronic improvised music, or experimental acoustic improvised music.

eaeim - experimental acoustic electronic improvised music.

Replace "music" with "ongaku" (the japanese word for it - literally "enjoy sound"), and you get eaeio.

listen

I'd like to add that this "aesthetics" vs "methodology" debate has come up with a lot of my friends lately (players), and I've always read the "versus" as a misinterpretation: the "methodological" approach (when seen as counter- (or even worse, non-) "aestheticist," is an aesthetic, and vice-versa. So you're on the money when you say "'anything goes' can be pretty damn safe."

There's no escape from aesthetics. Preferences exist. They also change, and there can also be fertile ground when they rub wrong. Anything can be a safety net, and we all have our blind spots.

And, and.

Yes, and

Greg,

One thing you said about pre-set factors as a safety net. I see the choice of musicians to play with, your instrument, techniques you devise, preparations you've thought out or used before, all as pre-set factors that could be viewed as a safety net, or limitations to be worked through etc. I also think all of those things are very important (as is some kind of understood aesthetic area you're likely to be working in, something that can develop out of familiarity as much or more so than discussion) in making music that's going to have anything but the slimmest chance of success. I don't like the "anything goes" approach, or the idea that you have to have never played an instrument or object before in order to improvise using it, although I think there are a very few persons who have the consistency of approach to what they do to work successfully with very unfamiliar materials, not me, I need to focus on one or two things.

I see those pre-set factors as quite different to a composition, which if it's by one person brings into question ownership of the piece that's performed, and if by the whole group, simply seems to move all or some of the negotiation that takes place during performance into some kind of fixed, prior process.

Having said that, when I play with 9! (nine musicians, obviously, mp3s available >) we almost always draw up chart deciding which combinations of musicians will play together or sit out during the first set, which is usually one long piece with distinct groups entering and leaving based on those guidelines (this is usually done by someone five minutes before we start), but with no signals or timing involved. I view that more as a performance strategy than a composition, and one that can be ignored at will at that.

So perhaps we need to discuss what is meant by composition in these contexts, since it certainly isn't scores in the traditional sense.

damn no edit facility for comments. please excuse the messy link.

I'd be a bit careful in equating reductionism in philosophy with reductionism in electroacoustic music. The two uses of the terms are not synonymous and their histories are different. The term isn't very useful in music either, since it misreads the spareness of the sounds as a "lack" rather than as a "presence." In other words, the term "reductionism" in music always implies there was something to be "reduced" to begin with.

I'd be a bit careful in equating reductionism in philosophy with reductionism in electroacoustic music. The two uses of the terms are not synonymous and their histories are different. The term isn't very useful in music either, since it misreads the spareness of the sounds as a "lack" rather than as a "presence." In other words, the term "reductionism" in music always implies there was something to be "reduced" to begin with.

I'd also be a bit careful in using the Wittgensteinian notion of "game" in this context as well. For Wittgenstein, the term comes out of his very specific analysis of language and how meaning is produced in particular contexts.

Actually, I think part of Witt's point was that there isn't any essence of "game" either as he used it in philosophy or as anybody is using it here.

Apologies for my call and response methods here, but this is the easiest way for me to keep my thoughts relatively clear, so...

Joe - agreed that methodology and aesthetic can be very closely knit and don't have to necessarily be "versus" each other. And I'd also like to state that I was making no value judgments in my post. I was just questioning whether or not you were saying that "this" way was proper and "that" way was safe and I don't think you were saying that. I'm also one who is open to the infinite possiblities of a given situation. I think each situation generates its own system that may or may not have explicit or implicit rules, but either way the main focus should be on making good music. There's nothing wrong w/ pushing people, but it's also valuable to sacrifice yourself a little bit out of respect for who you're playing w/ and to make it "work" (which isn't to say that there isn't fascination in how things don't work [I'm a fan of that], but even that "works" on its own terms. sorry to get entangled here... moving on...)

Nat - as for pre-sets, I was responding to Joe's comment about explicit rules being a safety net. I think they CAN be a safety net, but only as far as anything can be a safety net. I wasn't intending to dismiss pre-conception of any kind and I would never dismiss limitations. As I said above, every situation generates its own system and aspects of these systems can easily be abused or utilized to the fullest. Any pre-conceived or purely intuitive ideas or concepts can be explored to the fullest and any of them can fall flat. Neither is inherently better. Case to case. As for composed vs. improvised, does it matter in the end result? David Tudor considered the specific organization of filters and modules in his electronics setup to be the composition, even though the application (performance) was not expressly structured.

Finally... Bill - you're right about using specific terms in different areas of study. Again w/ systems developing their own rules and terms.

I believe that reductionism in music tends to be rather fertile in theory, but when it comes to practice a bit sterile. What are you listening to when you're listening to nothing in a live situation with live musicians? You can also play with silences when you're improvising, but always by opposing them to produced events (sounds). As Toshimaru Nakamura put it, he is a passive player, and i believe that reductionism can be considered to a later extent, passive music.

where went
the intelligence?

where went
the intelligence?

Does playing a saxophone without modifying its physical nature mean that I am playing a composition by Adolphe Sax?

Does playing a saxophone without modifying its physical nature mean that I am playing a composition by Adolphe Sax?

btw & long overdue : walto was right about Wittgenstein.

more than 3 years later the "there isn't any essence to the word 'eai'"-implication is even more obviously true.