Max Kutner
Disaffection Finds Its Pure Form
minimalist / doom / guitar / drone / experimental / ambient
This music is an interpretation of several disparate thoughts I was having simultaneously in late-2012. The title comes from Jean Baudrillard's collection of observations on American cities and spaces. I was struck by some of the points covered in this collection and immediately found several ways to apply techniques based upon those points to my own creative work. It was and is popular for the public to raise both virtuosic performance standards and rigid intellectual conceptions highest as markers of quality and this terrified me as an inescapable condition of trying to draft anything without being inaccessible by a large swath of perfectly able-bodied potential listeners. In other words, over-exclusivity was something I never wanted to embrace in my work. When coupled with all of the other idiomatic pigeonholing of the electric guitar by pop culture and media, the task of both composing and playing often felt impossibly pre-determined and stifling to me.
"There is no seduction here, for seduction requires a secret."
Thus, with this piece, I sought to address these concerns by incorporation of opposing techniques with the Baudrillard text as a spiritual base. Where the electric guitar was often utilized in short song-forms I decided to use a vast long arc. Where the electric guitar is typically treated with various amounts of studio effects, here the only real effects were limited to distortions and slight reverb. Where the language of academic composition had leaned toward complexity and hyper-control, I decided to utilize chance by having 15 randomly assigned sets of rules for playing a two-page melodic fragment where all 15 sets would be doubled and performed simultaneously. The Baudrillard text "disaffection finds its pure form in the barrenness of speed" formed my underlying question: would the initial melody leave the largest impression on the listener or would it be lost among the dense chatter of all the guitars at once. Regardless of this history of the piece, it is my fondest hope that listeners will find their own unique meaning and appeal beyond that which is outlined in my explanation.
"For the desert is simply that: an ecstatic critique of our culture, an ecstatic form of disappearance."
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