Letch's mentions of the Legendary Stardust Cowboy (versus?) Henry Flynt bring to mind the question of intent. Flynt came from a direction informed by the Minimalist/Fluxus avant-garde, so dragging hillbilly sonics into a High Art context was probably Fluxal eye-poking, but was the Ledge looking to explode a form, or just so eccentric in his vision he couldn't help but demolish it? I'm not elevating one approach or the other here, but does an avant garde move have to be a planned leap forward?
I think Sonic Youth are a third case, sort of an inversion of what Flynt was doing - they're operating in rock territory but in a manner openly feeding off avant energies, both directly (the Branca influence; use of tonal centers; 20th-c classical covers) and indirectly (rabid enthusiasm for avant sound and visual art). I can't decide where to place the Butthole Surfers - Sarah Vowell argued for their place among the avant garde based on live insanity, but sonically I'd lean more in the direction of brilliant pastiche. And what about someone like Sun Ra, who went from R&B to skin-peeling synth blasts to jazz standards?
This's tangential, but I've been thinking a lot about the Rev. Al Green's sermons, which bleed in and out of song without a clear demarcation between the two, in a way that's always struck me as powerful and extremely sophisticated free improvisation. I don't know gospel well enough to qualify it as avant gospel, nor am I certain to what extent it's improvised, but on a good Sunday morning he nails the sublime.
- posted by Chris @ 8:24 PM

 
Though it's late and I'm bleary I thought that I would take a stab at our form thoughts again. I guess when Leydon was mentioning an appreciation of formal limitations and what can be infused therein, it ocurred to me that this space encompasses some of Selvig's examples as well re: Cash, pedal steel and Merle. I think that if I were looking for a real avant country or sumpin' that I would offer up something more along the lines of Henry Flynt (listening to his "Hillbilly Tape Music" this evening propelling these thoughts) where he sorta restructures the country twang and fiddlin' into a minimalist drone context. Definitely not alt.country whatever or anything working within those same formal spaces but to my mind the real avant garde is when someone gets real real gone for a change and that means more that speeding up Blue Moon of Kentucky but say gets at least as far out as The Legendary Stardust Cowboy got on his Mercury single "Paralyzed". I guess where things get sticky for me is whether the Ledge just pushed those formal limitations out into orbit but still manages to retain the sense of that form, meaning that he doesn't make "avant" grade, or whether that barrier shattering drum and trumpet duet means that he has crossed the avant sound barrier. Flynt is an easier example since dovetailing his Fluxus drone concerns with country or "traditional" music was a conscious act of shredding and merging those boundaries.

Another example is that when I think historically, I have always thought that The Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows" musta sounded as earth shattering then as say The Butthole Surfers "Sweatloaf" did to me in 1987. Now I used to think that "TNK" was pretty fucking avant but anymore it seems the real avant in the Beatles case was the Stockhausen rips they sampled in the background and that their pastiche was brilliant, but it is basically a catchy pop-song drenched in avant-psych noise appropriated from McCartney's trawls through the local art scene. (And yes, it was Paul who twigged to this stuff before John stumbled into his own fluxus scenario).

Now I want to make it clear that in no way does this lessen the importance or the impact of say Cash's Sun recordings or the haunting caterwaul of some of the Carter Family's recordings. Like Leydon I think that that there are supremely sublime moments to be had under the formal limitations of an artists chosen genre. Those forms become a backdrop within which to imbue genuine emotion and history and as Selvig as pointed out there is a lot of flexibility within those forms. But I think that when I listen to Henry Flynt or Branca I am listening to avant-garde music, when listening to The Ledge or Sonic Youth I feel that I am listening to a form being stretched.

Whether or not this is a right distinction, or useful or whatever, well I look forward to yr comments.

As an aside I wanted to point out for Leydon that the pure music concept is something borrowed from Peter Kivy's book "Music Alone" and it's use by Roger Shattuck as well(I think) to, as I understand it, talk about (usually) symphonic music as being without words and therefore something "pure" and therefore interpretively "open". Don't want to get too deep into that one just pointing out the reference.

I also wanted to point out that Mauricio Kagel's "Acustica" was touted to me by Rick Carlisle of Orpheus as being the "Acoustic Metal Machine Music" back in the late 80's.

- posted by letch @ 12:50 AM

 
Leydon, I'm afraid a group called Zeitkratzer beat you to the punch on the acoustic MMM (Brother Lou even played guitar on some live performances), and you might think of Bruce Russell's Maximalist Mantra Music CD as a rock-instrumented interpretation. Johnny Cash would have been avant-garde country if Rubin had contact-miked the bedpan. Seriously, I think Cash's Sun stuff was avant in its day, and still sounds great. Pedal steel players were onto seriously screwy tunings way ahead of Glenn Branca.

So yeah, form is the meat of the matter here, and the tension of working within a form and expanding it is what keeps things interesting. If you work too slavishly within the form, the music has the 1-2 of a pacemaker - see the blues band at a bar near you, or the laptopper in the art space next door. Someone playing Bach's solo cello suites is playing something that demands slavish adherence to the form, yet they can still be played sublimely.

Speaking of form, do you mean country is mannerist as in a sonic equivalent of the Renaissance Mannerist painters? That's interesting - certainly some parallels in terms of them being decadent forms. When I think of Mannerist art, I'm thinking more of the really odd stuff, like Archimboldo , though some painting with a broad brush (har har) lump Michelangelo, El Greco, all kinds of people in there. With Archimboldo in mind, I've thought of musique concrete and other such post-Cage repurposing of sound as mannerist music, but not C&W. I haven't gone as far down the White Americana route as Leydon (yet), but I've been enjoying the heck out of Merle Haggard - I love it when he'll have some delicate Spanish Classical guitar filigree and then blasts it out of the way with a big old Telecaster beer belch, the Country version of cinematic mise en scene, or the Art Ensemble if you want to keep it strictly musical. Avant country yet again.

Agreed that the true test of music is to engage the listener/participant, though I think due to constraints on the amount of time we can spend listening to music, the good stuff holds up under repeated listening, and the best has something new to offer whenever you return to it.
- posted by Chris @ 11:23 AM