Re: What's experimental?

["Matt Davignon" <mattdavignon@gmail.com>]

Work has had me too busy to follow this entire thread.

I've started to have issues with the term 'experimental' in the past year 
or so:

1) It's hard to get two people to agree on what it means. For some it
means incredibly complex composition with microtonal systems and odd
meters. For others, no composition at all. Some people think
experimental means "very loud". And some people just think it's a good
generic tag to add when you don't want to say you play rock or techno.
2) Since the music is so diverse, it's much harder to pin down what's
actually "good". I think there's a notion in many subsets of the exp
music community that being "experimental" exempts one from criticism -
if someone doesn't enjoy the music, the only possible reason is that
they don't understand it. I think this provides an excuse for the
musicians to not get any better at what they do.
2) For some reason people go running for the hills when you say you're
going to play some "experimental music". I'm not sure if this is
because of #2 above, or if people have visions of some sort of
clinical research presented as performance. I'm not fond of the terms
"New Music" or "Creative Music" either, since both have a degree of
snootiness.

So instead, I've been working under a philosophy of "Personal Music".
That would never be a genre name. Instead, your name is the genre
name, and you as a musician are responsible for making it actually
mean something. The pressure's on you to figure out what what's
musically unique about yourself, and work out ways to make that
identifiable in your music. You can work free of genre-related
expectations (such as that all rock bands should have drums or that
experimental music should be challenging). That also means there
aren't standards to fall back on. If you want to add a drum beat, you
have to acknowledge that as a conscious decision, and not because it's
what's expected. The good news is, it doesn't stick you in a rut
either - if you want to change directions 10 years down the line, your
genre moves with you. A great example is the new Portishead album. In
some ways, it's completely different yet completely the same from
their last album 10 years ago. It's not what people were expecting,
but when they hear it, it totally makes sense.

But if people ask what I do, I still say "experimental". It's easier
to say than the previous paragraph.

Matt Davignon
www.ribosomemusic.com