«When we make a creative world for ourselves, we’re really creating an extension of our physical selves», says Bay Area-based producer 8ULENTINA about their own artistic practice (photo: artist).

Living in Spectrums

Short Essay

In her episode for our podcast series Timezones, Bay Area-based artist Lara Sarkissian interviewed some of her collaborators and companions. One theme that recurs throughout the piece is the region’s interdisciplinary artistic footprint. In this essay, our author affirms this observation, traces it back to her own biography rooted between cultures and disciplines, and speculates on the fruitful potential of multidisciplinarity for creative processes.

All work is the same work. That’s what I tell people who ask me how I came to be a culture writer even though I studied biology in college. My shift from biology to writing wasn’t pained or discordant. It’s what artist Nadia Shihab, when describing her work in this Timezones episode, calls «a general entanglement of genres and forms». My dominant curiosities have remained with me all my conscious life. What has changed is the form.

Driven by Foundational Curiosities to Create

Those curiosities – my interest in systems and power, both natural and unnatural – lead me to biology first. Ecology turned out to be an appealing framework through which to try to understand the world, and when I returned home to the Bay Area it was a lens through which to explore the cultural and social ecosystems around me. Some analogies fit and others were awkward and discarded. Nonetheless, it remains fortuitous that the Bay is open to equivalences and shifts like mine. As a culture writer here, I took on an ecological framework, asking: how does a creative community function? What conditions – from policy to infrastructure to history – cultivate artistic possibility in a person and a place? Through this work I met artists like 8ULENTINA and Sofía Córdova who were similarly resisting single disciplines. Moving between and around different mediums, institutions, and margins, they were driven by their own foundational curiosities to create. Form came second.

This resistance to specializing in one instrument is maybe better contextualized by acknowledging the pressure artists feel to categorize their work neatly and forevermore. This insistence is an impulse entirely unnatural. Our own human history is too murky, too bloody for definitive boundaries and borders. «Whether that is how I practice my feminisms or how I am a queer person or the fact that I come from a colonized country that itself is the product of a violent mestizaje – I’m an afroindigenous person because of terrible histories of colonialism – but that is my reality. So there is no space, in my life really, to just work in one avenue», says Sofía regarding their art practice, that started in large-scale photography and has grown into sound, performance, music, and more.

The Original Premise of an Artist

And so in the Bay – specifically in its creative community – our interest in identities is a means to complicate them. An ethnic identity, for example, isn’t necessarily investment in nationalism, a racial identity can better be understood through a lens of colorism, sexuality is considered on a spectrum under the influence of time, and so on. These are dynamic states of being and so multidisciplinarity is a default for many artists. Shifts in disciplines and mediums are less jarring here. They happen as they need to happen – sometimes driven by economic and material scarcity. Artists are certainly not benefiting in any sustained way from the tech presence in our region. Other times, shifts are expansions sustained through collaboration with other artists. Fundamentally, I sense they’re driven by honesty – which is to say they follow the original premise that drives artists to create.

What is the truth? About ourselves and each other? In the interest of finding answers or finding new processes to ask these questions, it’s only natural that we use each tool we have access to, hybridize instruments when we’re called to and open ourselves to new languages and technologies. We ourselves are under the influence of many cultures, many systemic forces and pressures, natural and unnatural. Our identities – ethnic, sexual, gender – live in spectrums that better capture their dynamism. Our work will reflect these forces, the tensions and contradictions. Bay Area electronic music artist 8ULENTINA said it best: «When we make a creative world for ourselves to exist in, when we create a context for ourselves, we’re really creating an extension of our physical selves.»

The Timezones podcast series plunges into the world of artists and their practices, asking: what does living and working in culture and the arts involve in different countries, cities, and contexts today? The artists’ thoughts on their moods, their social, political, and intellectual realities and their philosophies (of life) have been worked up into experimental audio collages.

The podcasts run the gamut of formats and content, from straight journalism to experimental and documentary approaches, ethnography and fiction, sound art, and improvisation. The Timezones series endeavours to create new artistic forms of storytelling, listening and exchange across the boundaries of geography, time zones, genres, and practices.

The Timezones Podcast Series is co-initiated and co-produced by Norient and the Goethe-Institut.

Biography

Ruth Gebreyesus is a writer and producer whose work focuses on cultural products and their movement across physical and digital margins. Her writing can be found in the Guardian, SSENSE, KQED, and the Fader. She has presented on memes and Black digital production at the Oakland Museum of California and at the New Museum in New York. Ruth is currently working on a docuseries that examines the social and political implications of food production and consumption. Follow her on Instagram.

Links

Steph Kretowicz: «When Culture Nurtures the Tech Industry» (Norient)

Lara Sarkissian: «The Bay Area’s Interdisciplinary Artistic Blueprint» (Norient)

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TIMEZONES – Season 1

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The TIMEZONES podcast series plunges into the world of artists and their practices, asking: what living and working in culture and the arts involvse in different contexts today? Season 1 with a focus on Nairobi, Belgrade/Sabac/Zurich, Delhi, the Bay Area, and Rio de Janeiro.

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Published on September 30, 2021

Last updated on April 10, 2024

Topics

Belonging

Creativity

Ecology

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Portrait of Guy Baron (Photo: Robert Bartholot, Berlin 2021).

Post-Euphoria – A Practice-Based Music Research: Part 1

Short Essay

by Guy Baron

In a four-part series, Guy Baron reflects upon the making of his album Post-Euphoria. Utilizing practice-based research, he examines notions of nostalgia in relation to lost experiences and club music.

DAW-based strategies of electronic music production used to connote aspects of recollection and missing are at the heart of my practice-based research. Engaging in a range of electronic music-making practices, my research creatively responds to the concept of «post-euphoria» – conceived here to describe a subjectivity with which lost, yearned-for experiences relating to electronic dance music are recollected and reimagined. It presents an original body of musical work that expressively interprets post-euphoria as a musical aesthetic, using Ableton Live and incorporating electronic dance music-inspired motifs alongside elements of songwriting. The study thus explores ways in which nuanced and complex meanings relating to retrospection and reminiscing can be articulated musically, establishing a musical vocabulary that is concerned with the residual and the faded and with what remains once perceived blissful experiences subside.

Conducting the creative work, I developed music production strategies informed by discussions of production mediations (Brøvig-Hanssen and Danielsen 2016) and sonic metaphors (Demers 2010), whilst symbolically foregrounding DAW-induced production traits. This includes creating what I define as «production embodiments» to figuratively suggest aspects of recollection and transformation: from slowing-down and time-warping electronic dance music samples («22–122») and utilizing a sustained freeze-mode reverb («Epilogue») to connote an attempted prolonging of fleeting euphoric moments, to incorporating fragmented quoted vocals («Forget U»), grain delay («Reprise») and audio-to-MIDI conversions («Too Late», «Residue») to metaphorically suggest a fragmented and transformed memory of perceived euphoric experiences. Musical repetition, shortened compositional structures, elaborated outro sections, and volume fade-outs are further utilized to figuratively embody haunting and decaying euphoric experiences, in such a way that sheds light on the relationship between musical form and meaning.

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Unfulfilled Euphoria

In addition to using such production embodiments, I further employ characteristic elements of electronic dance music to examine how euphoric feelings associated with this type of music can be presented as mutated and missing. These elements, to which I refer as electronic dance music tropes, include intensifying build-up sections (Solberg 2014), which are presented throughout the body of work as stripped down and never-resolving – establishing a sense of unfulfilled euphoria by foregrounding the absence of key electronic dance music elements, such as a kick drum. In addition, I create reworks of my own musical recordings as an act of «self-remixing», reflecting intertextuality between different recordings and a revisiting of my own productions to musically portray the idea of transformed recollections.

Undertaking this research and developing the recorded body of work enabled me to examine how retrospective subjectivities relating to electronic dance music can be articulated through employing music production technology, to further the relatively sparse practice-based research in this field. In addition, and as a global pandemic made dancefloor euphoria seem like a distant memory, my concept of post-euphoria received a whole new layer of meaning to include reminiscing to a time and place in one’s life – and in our collective memory – that may never quite be what it once was. Enchanted by lost nights out and lingering on remnants of a faded euphoria, this is where my musical journey into the realm of post-euphoria begins.

List of References

Brøvig-Hanssen, Ragnhild, and Anne Danielsen. 2016. Digital Signatures: The Impact of Digitization on Popular Music Sound. Cambridge: MIT.

Demers, Joanna. 2010. Listening Through the Noise: The Aesthetics of Experimental Electronic Music. New York: Oxford University Press.

Solberg, Ragnhild Torvanger. 2014. «Waiting for the Bass to Drop: Correlations Between Intense Emotional Experiences and Production Techniques in Build-up and Drop Sections of Electronic Dance Music». Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture 6 (1): 61–82.

This article is the first of a four-part series on the practice-based music research project «Post-Euphoria» by Guy Baron aka Semi Precious.