Position 2000

About music & the anti-fascist existence

I am a part of a new international guard of experimental composers moving through the spheres of the electro-acoustic, the musique concrète, the serial and post-serial contemporary music, the techno, ambient, jungle & other micro genres of new electronic music and that music is making itself heard, comfortably navigate between clubs & concert hall, between (post-)popular youthculture &the avant-garde of 'contemporary classical'.

As a new dimension and complement to the orderly dialectics of classical Marxism it uses the theory of complexity: a method of complications and implications as an antithesis to the dialectic method of restricted sequence of cause and effect. To complicate means crossing the borders of categorization, exposing and even creating unexpected relations; like composers do in their computer, sampler and synthesizer based music and DJ's do in the mix.

Such is the praxis of the NEW AVANT-GARDE: a democracy of sounds breaking through predictable hierarchies of instruments, ensemble combinations and instrumentation (the usual privilege of voice in classical music, sax solos in jazz and guitar solos in rock music) and of narrative structures (the familiar dominance of plot and character in art).

Music is more than the reproduction of tones, it is a process to produce sounds and forces. The tone is first of all just a noise that is bound up in a canon of rules - and is only a tone in these circumstances. The music of the whole occident builds a system, creates models that filter the noise, the rauschen (a german word for rustle (leaves, silk, radio), rush (flowing water, wind), roar (storm, waves); rausch - intoxication, drunkenness; rauschend - rustling etc., orgiastic (party) swelling (music)).

Here the word is used to describe the electrical noise and allude to the other meanings of the words) and the currents of sound. The computer, the sampler and the synthesizer are machines that through the varied possibilities of sound synthesis and calculations not only make new sounds audible and new structure possible but also restructures the process of the production itself. It is the musical work with structures and sound material itself that allows new energies and intensities to be captured.

We are becoming deaf and musically unconscious when we hear nothing but perfect harmony, perfect structures, just new academism, repetition and its refrain. Perfect melodies and perfect chords in popular music, perfect structure, instrumentation and electroacustic sounds in the "new music" scene, just the circulation of clean and sound sound currents, cleaned of the noises and sounds that could disturb prosperity that's what music offers us today.

This use of chords, melodies, voices, structures and electroacustic sounds that claim to be the music itself, create an aesthetic of boredom, a self sufficient repetition and artistic conformity. The tracks are overwhelmed by signature tunes, the concert halls by "classical" compositions and "new music" academism. This is the potential fascism in music. People are being manipulated into passivity and confimity by the the computer sound, the synthesizer, the "new" pop tune and the "new music" academism . So the structure, the harmony, the chord, the sound even the tone itself must explode; one must open the door to noise itself, make even the channel to the sound currents quake.

That is the place for the NEW AVANT-GARDE to burst in.

I am in opposition to the heavy machinery of institutional philosophy and its blatant complicity to power, that is preventing rather than encouraging people to think. I find classical philosophy (and classical education in general and music education in particular) an immense school of intimidation delivering specialists in thought and music, and in addition pressuring outsiders to conform to the phenomena they've come to fight.

My music and words should function as a tool kits for an anti-fascist existence. My music is a strategy and subversion, my compositions and writings should escape even my own intentions; the more unplanned uses that my music and words take on the more it pleases me.

Those are the fundamentals of my music; I work with methods, instruments and tools that can directly inspire the process of producing sound structures, which will molecularise (break down) the forms of music and at the same time expand them. The new music-machines (synthesizers, computers, music software, algorithms) don't function by technologically or musically defined precision ideals, but rather continuously produce unpredictable results, complications and implications. All this by multiplying noise, sounds, politics, notes and creating interfaces for the new.

Dror Feiler

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