[ongoing]

Autolux

[10.2006]

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BHB: interviewer character in Autolux Electronic Press Kit
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qm45MkXXT_o


This is Not a Band: Autolux Program, Part 1
by Benjamin H. Bratton

KLF
PIL
SSP
Screamers
Malcolm
Whatever....

It’s not that music is over; it’s that bands are over (and DJs too.) No more bands ever, only ideas communicated sonically.
   
Digital music in 2007 should work like sheet music did before mass radio. As the first real Industrial music distribution medium, sheet music was user-friendly code intended to be reworked and reperformed by each listener/player. In their own way, sheet music user experiences of the pre-electronic era were analogous to today’s mashups: people receive music in the form of an expert code (printed notation or zeros/ones) and then personally perform that code for their friends, always adding and changing it to taste. The performance of that code was/is social, open and involves a lot more than music into the story.
   
That is, music, in whatever medium, is also a cultural code. That’s what makes having favorite bands meaningful. It’s part of how you see the world, not just what you listen to. The cultural code of music is not just about sounds or the songs for sale per se but constitutes specific “taste communities” rallying around important differences. Sometimes the music signals differences so profound people get killed over them.
  
For the musicmaker, the ideas express a certain perspective, approach, style and values that could (and do) animate many projects besides songs.  Like the signatures of artists or designers, applied to a painting, sculpture or spoon, they still retain their perspective/message. The idea of the band can be applied to a whole range of real material and virtual cultures.


   
Twentieth-century models based on marketing and monetizing  fixed and unremixable music commodity units include several dying and decrepit institutions. Among them are the locked silver platter and the conglomerate label. But they are only part of the problem. Worse is that the format of “the band” is so stale and so redundant that any creative invention within its given parameters and dictates is frustrated at every turn.
   
I’m in the band: Record 35 to 50 minutes of music broken into 10 to 13 discrete songs/titles. Pay a multinational corporation to pay someone else to burn the 10 to 13 sound units onto aforementioned shiny silver platters and truck these platters to stores.  Travel to many different bars and stadia, and recreate the performance of the sound units for a paying audience. Do interviews with press and discuss influences and inspiration. Repeat cycle. Repeat.
   
Today bypassing the silver platter/retail store stage (and even the label) and selling sound units via the Internet is an important variation to be certain, but it only seems radical in relation to the total inertia of the rest of the tedious script. The real obstacle to good new shit is the format of the band as a cultural producer itself.
   
A “band” is always a very specific, narrowly defined concept that includes sound, image, fashion and event (like a brand), but despite the relative creative freedom this implies, band members/employees (especially in the American context) take their given job descriptions way too literally.

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Being a DJ, producer, label owner or a club promoter once seemed promising creative escape routes from the formula (and maybe they still are). But they also each, so quickly, became such trite formulas that these positions are just as unsatisfactory. As ever, we’re left with deaf amphetamine casualties, youth pimps and desperate scenesters but precious few actual ideas. Et tu Tony Wilson?
   
There lots of precedents for innovating the band format into a more omnivorous cultural platform: multichannel nation-states like Wu-Tang Clan and NSK/Laibach; faux-Situationist media pranksters like The KLF, Sigue Sigue Sputnik and Malcolm McLaren; original programs for the Screamers and Public Image Limited as “multimedia collectives”. You can think of your own examples. Better yet you can invent new ones!      
    
New songs are not enough. There are plenty of songs. New delivery media are also not enough. They simply make the same tired “band format” more efficient without changing what a band is and does (the point-and-click instant publicity of MySpace doesn’t help much either). Again, we don’t need new bands, we need new things for bands to do.

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So what to do…Where the kids in the 1970s picked up electric guitars, today they pick up Maya and After Effects. It means there are new interminglings of music and design cultural codes now at work—whether or not we have good names for them yet.
   
That’s fine; names will emerge through (1) using the cultural format of the band to advance a larger design agenda that uses sound as its key vehicle and (2) using that  larger design agenda to focus and amplify music’s luscious, generous codes, letting them do what they really want them to do.
   
For Autolux this includes product design, architecture, cinema, fashion, cell phone hacking, software and “difficult events”. In each case, good sound is a central element. Autolux will continue to make songs and release CDs, and will most definitely play concerts, but these are only a few of the Autolux interfaces available to you.  For some people they will be the only interfaces that matter, and for others, they won’t matter at all.
  
 Over the course of the next several months, the program and calendar for these will continue to be specified and realized.




Next: Autolux Program, Part 2: In 15 Minutes Everyone Will Be Famous

Tags: branding, center for design and geopolitics, physical media

Published: 10.24.2006

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