Visionary Music
When I starting keeping an ear and eye to EOTO two years ago, I had no prior experience with the duo's wildly different band-of-origin, The String Cheese Incident. I knew nothing about these guys, actually, except that they were trying something that combined live instrumentation with software audio looping technology to create improvised electronic music – and that, as a looping musician uninterested in retreading someone else's creative terrain, I would do well to pay attention.
I've always been ambivalent to folk music, because for so many it's a shelter in the comforting conventions of the past – an escape from the buzzing confusion of modern life in the platitudes and tired imagery of yesteryear. Folk is too frequently a narrow answer to broader questions, the musical equivalent of quoting Scripture to someone asking for advice on open relationships.
I've spent a lot of time on this blog looking at technologies and philosophies that are reshaping our relationship to music...but little time on the musicians putting it all into practice. And so I'd like to take a moment to spotlight a group I think has a lot of potential.
I have been consumed by thoughts regarding the changing role of the artist in our culture. As I started to mention in my previous essay ("The 3-2-1 of Musical Performance"), there are – even in the narrow and unimaginative relationships between contemporary musicians and their audiences – at least three different depths of intimacy, three different lenses through which the rules of performance can be observed. The performer, in recognizing the audience as Impersonal Other (It), Personal Other (You), or Self (I), projects radically different characteristics on the concert environment.
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