#michael denning

[thelonguepuree]

seeking recommendations

books, articles on communism in the US during the 1920s and 30s—theory and practice, histories of the CPUSA and other organizations/movements ...

I know some stuff— Denning’s Cultural Front, sections in Robinson’s Black Marxism and Kelley’s Freedom Dreams

specifically I’m researching Louis Zukofsky and Muriel Rukeyser

any suggestions much appreciated ! 💕

[dustedmagazine]

Listed: John Davis

John Davis’ fitful musical career features drastic temporal gaps and changes of fortune, but you could sum it up in three words — on his terms. The music he recorded for Shrimper and Communion between 1993 and 1996 used then-current lo-fi aesthetics as a poetic platform to express wonder and curiosity. His association with Sebadoh’s Lou Barlow yielded several more albums and one fluky hit, “Natural One,” which was released in 1995 on the soundtrack to the movie Kids. After that he established a career in education and didn’t record for a decade and a half. Spare Parts (Shrimper, 2015) is a gloriously uncategorizable expansion of the spirit of those early records on a different soundstage; imagine if Scott Walker made a record as diametrically warm as the cruel chill of the rest of his oeuvre and invited François Bayle and Milford Graves around to help out. Davis’ latest album, El Pulpo (Arbouse, 2017) covers more new ground by using assertive rhythms and international instrumentation to frame considerations of the havoc wreaked by Big Agriculture. Davis is currently working on a new record with producer Scott Solter which is planned for release in 2019.

John Davis

Whenever I read lists like this I’m more interested in discovering one or two things I didn’t know about before, rather than understanding someone’s personal canon of influences. I don’t think it would surprise anyone if I said that “Orange Claw Hammer”by Captain Beefheart and “Know” by Nick Drake were a major influences on my first solo record, or that the drum solo on “Sputnik’s Down” was inspired by Charlie Parker’s “Koko.” I assume if you’re reading a website like this that you already know about those records, and that you’re probably more interested in music as an ongoing process of discovery rather than building something like the Lincoln Memorial dedicated to The Stooges and The Velvet Underground. If there’s one thing that pleases me about today’s indie music culture vs. that of my youth (say 1985-1992), it’s that it seems less narrowly tied to one lineage of influence and more peripherally curious and polycentric.

Art Melody—“Kari Ka Kian Fô”

The emcee is from Burkina-Faso and the producer is French. It’s a very economical record clocking in at 11 songs in 25 minutes with no filler.

Baaba Maal & Mansour Seck—“Muudo Hormo”

I think this is my favorite song of all time. I have no idea what the lyrics mean and have not been able to find a translation yet.

Susumu Yakota—Sakura

Incredible album. The flanger he put on the drums on “Hisen” tickles my spine and “Kodomotachi” sounds like a really pleasant nightmare.

Else Marie Pade—Electronic Works 1958—1995

Copenhagen avant garde electronic artist who was active in the Danish resistance movement and imprisoned by the Nazis in WW2. The avant-garde can have at least as much patriarchal baggage as any other social group, so this Important Records reissue lives up to its billing.

Jacob Kirkegaard—Erdfjall

This is the true rock music: an album of recordings of subterranean geological happenings in Iceland, made by a generational heir of Pade in the Danish avant-garde. (The two have also collaborated together.) Did Led Zeppelin ever record something as hot as the sound of volcanic activity? As sexually provocative as the premise of making a record by sticking microphones deep inside the earth? No, they did not.

Hossein Alizadeh—Hamnava’i

I’ve been listening to a lot of Persian music in recent years thanks to some tips from my former high school art teacher, whose wife is from Tehran. I was lucky to see Alizadeh live a few years ago which taught me to appreciate the popularity of this music in the Persian diaspora - it was packed!

Kayhan Kalhor—Scattering Stars Like Dust

Another master of Persian classical music, this time of the kemenche. I bought a cheap kemenche online but couldn’t really get anywhere with it—I’ll leave it to the experts.

Gary Stewart—Rumba on the River

Fantastic bookon the music of the Congo, about which I knew nothing before I read it, having heard more about music of Ethiopia or Mali to the east or west of Africa. Franco in particular was a revelation.

Michael Denning—Noise Uprising

One of my favorite genres of recordings is 78 rpm records from the first half of the 20th century. I got into 78s via the Secret Museum of Mankind series, Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, and early jazz records I bought because Cecil Taylor had cited them as influences. This book changed my experience of those records from an ahistorical encounter with sounds that were merely unfamiliar and beautiful to a listening experience rooted in the connections Denning draws in this book between working class records made in port cities of colonial empires in the ‘20s and ‘30’s, and the subsequent process of decolonization that unfolded after WW2. Start this video at 5 minutes for a taste.

Michael Hudson—Global Fracture

If Noise Uprising presents the soundtrack to decolonization, this book is a classic account of how the US crushed plans made by the former colonies to gain control over their industry, agriculture and trade - ie, to establish economic democracy - in the 1970’s. Tony Allen’s autobiography is a good example of the destructive effect this could have on music. The great drummer writes about how “the music thing in Lagos was finished since around 1978 because nobody was safe in the night anymore” due to increasing violence in Nigeria due to the corruption that came out of the struggle over the country’s oil. I chose Fela Kuti’s “International Thief Thief” here not only because it describes the process by which nominally independent new African leaders “of low mentality” were chosen and controlled by multinational corporations, but also because I don’t quite like the groove of this 1979 record as much as earlier ones like Zombie. The reason? Tony Allen quit in 1978 along with several others from Afrika 70, Fela’s original band. So this still great record also captures something of the feeling of loss that Allen writes about in his book.“It was the oil that made everything go haywire in the country. Believe me, if Lagos could have been left to develop naturally from where it was back in the ‘60’s, it would have been something else by now.”—Tony Allen

[thelonguepuree]

The ideological link between rhythm and race that has inflected much musical discourse over the last century was forged during the modernist generation … [and] emerged alongside the eruption of the unsettling plebeian phonograph musics in the colonial ports … For many, the distinctive nature of these new rhythms was captured in the notion of 'syncopation,' a more or less technical term for the displacement of accents to the weak or off beat, that emerged, in [the 1920s], as a keyword in the popular discussion of the new rhythms … The commonplace notion that the rhythms of [global vernacular] musics could be understood through the category of 'syncopation' led many to hear them as simple ornaments and to dismiss their originality; 'syncopation is new for popular music,' Adorno writes, 'but by no means for art music.' However, as Carlos Sandroni has argued, the very term 'syncopation' was less an adequate way of understanding the rhythmic character of the musics—he is writing about samba—than a metaphor that mediated between the vernacular musics and the dominant musical discourse. A concept drawn from Western musical theory, where it denoted a sense off rupture or dislocation and depended on the non-syncopated, it was an uneasy match for musics where the 'irregular'—the variety of asymmetrical formulae—was the rule. Despite its inadequacy, the notion of syncopation was, he argues, adopted into the local knowledge of music, giving it a musicological sanction and becoming a seal of authenticity: syncopation should be seen less as a scientific concept than a kind of 'native-imported category like café or mango.'

Michael Denning, Noise Uprising: The Audiopolitics of a World Musical Revolution

[sivavakkiyar]

At the same time, writing about music takes place on two radically different scales: grand generalizations about the meaning of music in the evolution of the species (its relation to language, to the order and disorders of the brain, to the sounds and songs of other species); and “rough guides” to the musical marketplace, micro-histories of specific genres and artists. The traditional sense that music is a fine art lives on in the residual culture of “classical music,” which has lost much of its former glory and occupies a small market niche, while retaining some degree of cultural capital. And the older sense that music-making is a political act— which led Plato to assert that “any alteration in the modes of music is always followed by alteration in the most fundamental laws of the state” — has also receded to the fringes of the musical marketplace, where the germ of an alternative culture lies in songs of protest affiliated with social movements. It is not that the contemporary world of music lacks an audiopolitics, but rather that it is coded as the politics of the market: who owns and controls the sound files. The politics of intellectual property and piracy have eclipsed the politics of musical form or content.

Michael Denning. Noise Uprising: The Audiopolitics of a World Musical Revolution (Kindle Locations 90-99). Verso. 

[fairest]

“The Hungarian composer Béla Bartók sought pure folk music, Denning said, not the popular music played by gypsies for money. The search for authenticity or purity is short sighted, if not misguided, I think, because it fetishizes tradition and allows no room for development and change. In the early phonographic era, Denning said that the song was considered more important than the performance—improvisation was secondary. This attitude reversed. (Reinhardt, for instance, listened to and learned Armstrong’s improvisations.) In addition, a reliance on Western interpretations of exotic music declined. Before 1925, American listeners got Tin Pan Alley renditions of Hawaiian music. Folks no longer needed W. C. Handy’s written notations of the blues because, ten years later, they had the immediate gratification of listening to Armstrong and Bessie Smith. There may have been better trumpet players in New Orleans twenty or thirty years before Armstrong, Denning said, but we don’t have the recordings to prove it.”

[boardnroom]

"When you place the needle upon the revolving phonograph record first a noise appears. As soon as the music begins, this noise recedes to the background. But it constantly accompanies the musical event ... The slight, continual noise is a sort of accoustic stripe." Theodor Adorno - Current of Music: Elements of a Radio Theory cited in Michael Denning - Noise Uprising, The Audiopolitics of a World Musical Revolution