#benjamin piekut

[sivavakkiyar]

Amygdala, by Henry Cow

and part of the preface to Henry Cow: The World Is A problem by Benjamin Piekut

[yt]

[hellocanticle]

The Agony and the Ecstasy of "Bang on a Can", a Socioeconomic History of Major New Music Innovators

The Agony and the Ecstasy of “Bang on a Can”, a Socioeconomic History of Major New Music Innovators

William Robin is a musicologist whose credentials (nicely enumerated on his web site) are more than adequate to the task at hand. This is a socioeconomic and political perspective on the seminal Bang on a Can organization. At its core, Bang on a Can is the foundational work of three people now recognized as major American composers: Julia Wolfe, David Lang, and Michael Gordon, all of whom met as…

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[nedison]

Deadness: Technologies of the Intermundane Jason Stanyek and Benjamin Piekut

Stanyek and Piekut explore the techniques and ethics behind posthumous duets and other such intermundane uses of audio.

We might even say that this is the only guarantee that sound recording offers: being recorded means being enrolled in futures (and pasts) that one cannot wholly predict nor control. 

Their phrase “singing ghosts in the techno-sonic realms of the intermundane” is a definitely a new favorite of mine.

[nedison]

It featured “4 boys in whiteface” wearing “Beetle suits” in a band called The Crackers. The action of the play is relatively straightforward: a band is introduced, takes the stage, sets up, and performs a song (“White shit white shit white shit / hocus-pocus in the clouds allright”). After their brief concert, The Crackers bow to the effusive applause of the crowd, “dainty and faggish and removed from reality swaggering like toygirls.” As dollars rain down from above, the band collects the money and packs up their instruments; it is revealed that their “geetahs” were plugged into the rear end of a black man who had been slumped underneath a black cloth at the back of the stage during the performance. The man wears tawdry remnants of a showbiz career: “falling down conk and raggidy [sic] sequined stage evening clothes.” The Crackers place this secret source of their power into a travelling case, placating him with a little money, some “white powder,” and “then one of the white boys put on a lady outfit, and kiss him on lips, then nigger, he swoon dead away in box, and white boys carry him off with them.”"

A description by Benjamin Piekut of the play Rockgroup, written in 1965 by Amiri Baraka from “October or Thermidor” in “Experimentalism Otherwise, The New York Avant-Garde and Its Limits”.