Since player interaction and Cornelius Cardew’s Treatise, LRS has played some actual content, without prescribing influence. To perform, part-originally, predetermined pieces, together along with other graphic scores (constructed, but, somewhat paradoxically, free improvised) has seemingly been past tense. Over the year what has been played has been discussed. This being said, in retrospect (if at all), only the deliberate improvisation that LRS increasingly mind objectifying is towards the best and, at this point in time, the majority of approaches to elucidate the music have ended in the same result: an unravelling that, trying to serve as a particular delineation of the music, should be taken as far from nature.
Some digital as well as analogue effects have been taking up what, instrumentally, LRS used for some time: electric guitars, rubbers, nails etc. and, more so, both Wurlitzer and Rhodes electric piano. Of the range of abstracted instrumental techniques, effects have supplied extended sonic material, which conditions the sound of the instruments. It can be said that in the music-world the resulted filtration of sounds has become subordinate to specific pitched texture, a direction that has evolved out of a series of manipulated intents to create a functionality in which process bows to (past) method, each of course non-inseparable. Without purposes, the group created a coordination of their methodology towards sound production and overall sonic aesthetic, in which, over the year, the approach to rehearsals seems to have moved away from initial discussion into LRS, and towards the execution of a performance charged with the means to explore the primacy of music, specifically in the context of working towards being centred.
Semantically, this getting to a something- pre-existent, given and arbitrary- is opposed to the mechanical technique of discussed statement. Such writings upon the instrumental (or visual) artist approach the relation of work to personality. Music is in this context a limited, subjective medium, in which method reveals, via a process of manipulation, attempts to bypass the practice-through-process of nature. Bridget Riley has a point to such an extent. [The Eye's Mind: 1965-1999.] Player input is morphing from conventional acoustic methods to sonic means. The cultural baggage of tempered instruments has rather confined sound, being an execution and juxtaposition of various notes, which reflects the filtering of unpredictable properties, to control them. The gradual influence of sound-unpredictability, however, entails that the control of the performer revolves around deference to the sound source. Sometimes LRS source what can be other, collected and layered in the performance space, to pitch technical use as opposed to instrumental performance and the behaviour it encapsulates (acoustic music production supplies the performer with an unnecessary power.)
The interesting, vice versa dilemma of controlled by or controlling sound production raises an honest satisfaction as it forces the performer to question use, regardless of self. Mechanical acoustic instrumental practice (the situation of performers overtly generating manipulated events) retains personality as direct result of the extent by which the performer, improviser or composer character is within what is going on, in which the ethos of the music is to a large extent not arising from listening out for the unpredictability of everything: events which are sonically beyond subjective practice- procedure. Most (the major amount) of LRS tapes detail the issue as it arises, albeit at the level of ultimately subjective means. Counter-subjective balancing (back to objectivity?) stems from the inevitable effort and endeavour that seems necessary, in the light of work evolution. Instead of СselvesТ, it’s a group matter.
So, the dialogue concerning LRS may well be more than myself paring down and objectifying artistic expression. What I limit and delimit is more simply the consequence of my presence begging influence and results. The Medium, as already suggested, will out. Almost imperceptibly, I find my expressed means reduced: for anti-directionality is the presentation of change. Or, as with the gradual but continual events of Riley, the material can develop (paradoxically) as an inevitable continuum, through a gradually differentiated production. The consequences? Tendencies towards differential quality of mind states, with fewer whys in eyes. As much: sound is heard as its own drawn depiction. Or, more: to be is as occurring.
The integral is constant surprise, which to aim at is to achieve the willed: the ultimately seeming. The romantic personality has prescribed a self-conscious narrative drama, which has resulted in the processual tendencies of repetition (in art) and, culturally, reaction: publicly demanded music greyed-out by its rhetorical novelty. Against these ends, such devices as the reductivist function as means of being, in that the psychological event is weakened or evaporated. Let our own emotional make-up net these points! Pitch no music by her mediator! Otherwise, the manipulation of the composer results in a saturation of the particular over the freely subjective something or somewhere.
Moreover, if the emphasis upon music is to continually represent or resemble the human-based, the result is a rhetoric stemming from events being directionally charged in an elaborated play of climax-repetition. To not dissociate psycho from musical elements, and to place performer on top of music, are western qualities of show against nature. When taste as dictate of western music is discarded, much development is sustained (sometimes, to like is to process codas and postscripts.) Abandoned, the service to musical, not banally individual, events has implications of vitality, where the bounds of aesthetic are pushed beyond gestural. A reductivist nature marks an attempt to come to terms with the greater identity of the sonic (Gursky and Riley, I think, serve as an example in the context of eyes.)
The culture of personal expressionist creativity is largely and sometimes massively standardizing. The romantic individual, therefore, has placed artistic development in the hands of modern culture states, with commercial industry increasingly a substitution for their outmoded aesthetic. The myth of the contemporary is, aesthetically, only a motive of romantic expression, an artificial misprision, which has been allowed by an appetite for cultural repetition. Something of this present delusion no doubt denotes not only a particular British public, but also music domains, whose concepts of presentation lives upon the societal mind in an attempt to dance to the realistic and modern- in which the artist remains ultimately an artifice [this all seems to have much point.] Electronic, technological music- the microchip culture, where use becomes narrative and treatment means form, suitably satisfies me. An art of industrial exoticism might therefore approach psychology, but such pieces, as determined by technologies, are a viable providing in use: an alternative to something which is asked (romanticist connotations dealt with by a reductivism of the individual.)
In the event that group interactivity blocks musical events, a necessarily different, mutually exclusive performance becomes independent of this encroaching. Other permutations of separate combination exist and by the elaboration of more of these the musical objects that are static combine to interact without the each other-esque empathetic tendencies of improvisers (could they ultimately disappear?) Replace each other with a bypassing of the group! Considered formally from this basis, formal differentiation of one another is weakened as music-form is mobilized.
Sometimes the object (result) strands the subject (approach towards it) in static terms. The rational presentation of forms tends to part such structures from their revolving as a series in time (yet a sectionalist undifferentiation would leave a sense of series- say a projection of a single sound-texture: a homogenous music canvas.) Because of western classical and commercial music construction there is a stigmatisation of the importance of complete, finite events at the expense of an accidental and possibly unfocused sonic development- free from the attempt at formal planning. In such music the formal is perceived as otherwise to the moment; yet both, as physically interdependent, overlap: a longer-term architecture is only the product of shorter-term passages.
Some improvisation seems to present the prolonged immediate- resulting in its macro narrative being almost of no concern to the improviser. However, this micro-myth is not borne out in the music of LRS, for aural perception is formally tangible. The improvised is constantly retained in the memory, objectifying the hypothetical, so attempts to perceive the improvised result in the inference of organisation of form and content within it, despite the methodology of its practitioners. Any improvised narrative may be measured, objectified and compared to the pre-conceived work of art- in which a precisionist approach is refined towards the stage of presentation as some kind of complete object. This rationalistic urge to make a music-experience intelligible also extends to improvising, for any performance precipitates the perceptual inference of process. Process, in the mind, becomes externalised as material conception, pre-empting, for better or worse, subsequent, conferred meaning. The abstract becomes intelligible and fixed by an authoritarian consciousness. Improvised abstraction may react against such perception, yet it cannot construct the unscientific (the counteractive cliche of interpretative gut-reactions in improvised music does not necessarily make de-control possible.) Through and though, the aesthetic positivism improvisers stage of blind attention falls short when considered alongside the music after the event. The procedure of retrospectively superimposing identity back onto the performance of music, pointing out that it remains largely cultural, may well have an effect upon the ethical commitment of the improviser, who, through working within an intentionally unattainable material framework, can be responsible in the sense of how to respond to its presented implications.
[March 2004: Valid at that stage, it is possible to doubt its able detail. A possible mistake, perhaps. Or (encouraging multiplicity)- a dual approach, along with the manipulation of passages of that account; alongside the performance of a repeated, point-to-itself, situation, stemming from it; largely focused on reaction to it (all to task). There, prevalent nuances- so easily perceived- of strata-weld within its texture, make it possible to directly stage the nature of the single song as increasing.]