We might consider the idea of “models” for the arts, and even “model arts.” For instance, two model forms for the nineteenth century were the novel and the opera. What these two forms have in common is that they represent large-scale narratives in a time of not only History writ large, but also of the Hero, the historical agent. Personally, I have a great fondness for the novel, and, if push came to shove, I would probably say that the novel is my “model artform.” But then, I have great fondness for Jean-Paul Sartre. In my book about him, The Radical Project, I discuss the fact that Michel Foucault had somewhat sneeringly said of Sartre that the latter was “the last great philosopher of the nineteenth century.” Sartre not only lived in the twentieth century (1905–1980), he was sometimes referred to as “the philosopher of the twentieth century.” The title of the relevant section in The Radical Project was “A philosopher of his time after his time.” After all, if Sartre really was an anachronism in the twentieth century, then there would appear to be little to learn from him in the twenty-first. As improbable as it may seem for a book on Sartre, I compared what Foucault said with what Brian Eno had said about progressive rock, that rather than starting something new, it was really the extension (he might have said completion, even) of something old, namely late nineteenth-century Romantic classical music. Like Foucault, Eno argued that the time for such things had passed—not just Sartre or progressive rock, but even History, agency, and related notions.

Now, while it is the case that I read novels from many different genres, I have to admit a special fondness for science fiction, and, on any given day the likelihood is that I am reading a novel from this genre. As the reader undoubtedly knows, science fiction is somewhat suspect from the standpoint of “legitimate” fiction. That is a bizarre and ridiculous (and unsupportable) point of view, but there it is. Actually, I think that rock music and science fiction have this in common, and I will state the point rather bluntly: whoever thinks that creativity is not possible in either—and this is quite often the case with academics—is an ignoramus or a moron or both. There is plenty of actual creativity available in either rock music or science fiction, and that is all the further one needs to go on the “legitimacy” question. Science fiction has had its fans in rock music, Jimi Hendrix being a famous example; perhaps one sees a kind of “science fiction” perspective especially in progressive rock, even if this perspective might be considered quite “old school” by more recent standards. Actually, I like that idea—if some progressive rock is more in the mold of, say, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, or even Robert Heinlein (the reactionary dirty old man who, paradoxically, had an undercurrent of communalism, at least in novels such as Stranger in a Strange Land), then some more recent experimental rock, especially that in the techno and electronica genres, might be more associated with Philip K. Dick and William Gibson and other “cyberpunk” writers.

One thing that might be said of Gibson, one of my favorite writers, is that he is trying to tell stories in a time of fragmented narratives. Indeed, that is another reason, in addition to not having any more of a crystal ball to consult than any other informed reader, why the question “where is experimental rock heading” is a difficult one. Where is anything heading? The idea of the “heading” in this fragmented, one might say “cul de sac” time, is, to say the least, difficult, undecideable, and slippery. With the transmutations that resist synthesis it sometimes seems there is little more logic to them than simply “filling out the grid,” just trying to see what can be set next to what. “Tres gut,” “sehr bien,” as I sometimes like to say—what Fredric Jameson famously called the “postmodern pastiche.” There is a way in which John Cage’s procedures are inverted by the more recent combinations. Cage tended to start with an idea, some way that sounds and silences could assert themselves such that human intentionality would not get in the way. Thanks to sampling technology, some of our more recent mixmasters are starting at the other end, and perhaps they do not get to something like an “idea” when they are done. Can we put this with that?—is the question; and, if this does not at first sound so good with that, then we have even more incentive to try it. Doing it this way is itself an idea, of course, and the mixmasters know this—and to invert Cage this way is no less “legitimate” (to use that ugly word once again) than to do it the other way. But we might worry that the consequence of such a procedure will be to simply fill out the grid of all possible sounds and silences—which would then also seem to be part of what motivates the orientation toward timbre that many experimental musicians have lately. And yet, what else is music to do? The narrative fragments do not quite form a chorus, much less a story, but perhaps they do say something about all of the voices and possible voices that are struggling to be heard.

Part of what I like about science fiction is the element of “listening to the future” (to coin a phrase!). In progressive rock one often finds this paradoxical (or even contradictory) combination of anti-urban and anti-technological attitudes with science-fiction visions of a future utopia. The term I came up with for this is “sci-fi medievalism.” Whatever the merits of this strange combination (which I would associate somewhat with what might be called the “Romantic Marxism” of Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson, which is also to say that there is something very “English” about it), we might again make a comparison with more recent trends, where attitudes toward technology, the city and the countryside, romanticism, the future, and utopianism are significantly altered.

It may be that the novel could never serve as a “model art” in our time not only because of postmodern fragmentation, but even more simply because ours is not a highly literate period. Film culture, whatever one thinks of it (I tend to take a rather dim view on the whole, though I recognize brilliance in film here and there), has had a tremendous effect on music, going back at least to the Velvet Underground and Andy Warhol, and perhaps taking a major leap with Brian Eno. The idea of the “imaginary soundtrack,” often consisting in what Fredric Jameson called “image shards,” is a major influence in experimental rock (and even some less experimental rock, as with U2’s “Passengers” project, which Eno produced). But, to complete the thought, part of what I like about “listening to the future” is the idea that there might actually be a future that has humanity in it, even given all of the counter-possibilities that work to the contrary. That is, I take many science fiction novels, even some with what I might otherwise think of as a reactionary point of view, as expressions of faith in possible human futures. What I wonder about experimental rock today is whether there still has to be a connection between creative expression and something like this faith, so that even musical works that seem to celebrate fragmentation are reactions to a larger sense of narrative structure.

Even so, there comes a moment when such structures are essentially (or “practically speaking” might be the better way to put it) irretrievable, and another dynamic (or anti-dynamic) is in play, and there is no longer any connection with the “all that” of the nineteenth century, whether we are speaking of History, or even histories, agency, Sartre, or teenage symphonies to God. Has that moment arrived? Would it be a good thing for such a moment to arrive? Experimental rock music, along with the rest of cultural production, takes place around such questions, even if the artists are not always able to thematize them in these abstract terms.

Just to be provocative, I would say that the majority view on these questions, among those writing about avant rock, is what led many to criticize the epic work of techno music by Goldie, saturnzreturn. But then, I do not agree with the majority view—and yet I also do not think that one can take a novel such as William Gibson’s Neuromancer seriously, as I do, and not realize that we are entering a world that will be very different, perhaps qualitatively different, than the world in which we read Sartre and listened to those symphonies. And so music has to be different also, even if in primarily taking a position of resistance to this emerging world.

A simple question: what is going on with groups? I have already referred to the saying in rock music, “the group’s the thing.” Even with groups that have strong leaders, or even what might be called “principal composers,” there is a group dynamic that contributes to the uniqueness of rock as a musical form. Many pages ago I mentioned that many people think of Paul McCartney as a great singer and songwriter for the Beatles, without even realizing the Beatles also had a great bass player, and that walrus was also Paul. Another useful example is The Who, where almost all of the music was written by Pete Townshend, but the Who sound requires the distinctive musical voices of Roger Daltrey, John Entwistle, and Keith Moon. Take those stunning bass runs out of “The Real Me” (Quadrophenia) and you have a different song. Keith Moon’s style of drumming is both unique and divisive—many musicians would put him in their top five (I would), while others wouldn’t put him in the top one hundred. And Daltrey is one of the best “straightahead” rock singers. Ironically, simply as a guitar player, Townshend is the least distinctive of the lot. Personality-wise, the sometimes difficult relations among the band members also played a role in the musical output of the group. Another example that is possibly among the strangest is the case of Robert Fripp and King Crimson. Given that King Crimson has had little continuity of personnel over its more than thirty years of existence, including blocks of several years where there was no group at all, and given that the group exists when Robert Fripp convenes it, questions have been raised as to whether King Crimson is a “rock group” at all, at least in some more conventional sense. All the same, when King Crimson music incarnates itself in the form of the group, there is a dynamic that is entirely different from a project involving Robert Fripp and some sidepeople. The point is that even the examples that deviate somewhat from a more fully egalitarian situation, where every band member contributes equally to such things as composition, strength of musical voice, and say-so in the direction of the band, still confirm the basic ideal of rock music as a group production.

There are still plenty of rock groups, of course, both experimental and otherwise, but the group dynamics that were characteristic of bands in the period from about 1960 to 1980 or so seem to be in a state of transition. Taking experimental rock separately (though the same issues arise in rock more generally), there is a tendency either for individuals to work on their own, or for groups to be transitory and not last very long. Orienting the final section of part two of this book toward Björk and Jim O’Rourke is meant to be emblematic of this shift. I see four main reasons for the new and emerging situation, the first three of them simply aspects of the kind of social and personal relations that prevail in our go-go postmodern capitalist society.

Rock groups, at least in the classic period, involve friendship and other forms of personal bonding, in ways that are somewhat akin to being in marriages and families. Perhaps a qualified empirical researcher could examine whether the fate of the rock group dynamic has run parallel to the fate of marriages and families. It is simply harder these days to keep relationships together (whether these are relations of intimacy—and being in a band can be a very intimate experience—friendship, collegiality, or family membership). This will come as no surprise to anyone. The ability to hold a band together is affected by the same winds that whip other relationships around.

There are new logistical problems at the point where members of bands are living in different cities or even different countries or continents. Initially this sort of thing happened with major British bands, such as the Rolling Stones, for the purpose of avoiding taxes. Now it happens for all sorts of reasons, and quite often just because of personal taste in where a person would like to live. But what that says is that, if “the group’s the thing,” it isn’t the main thing.

The newer forms of technology, and especially the digital revolution, have facilitated the scattering of band members, so that people can work together to some extent even if they are separated by hundreds or thousands of miles. We probably have not had enough years to see fully what is gained and what is lost in such arrangements. A parallel that might be useful here is with “distance learning” experiments in education, which some colleges and universities are seeing as a potential cash cow and possibly as a way of phasing out the costs and hassles of dealing with too many flesh-and-blood faculty members who are usually griping about something. Basically, the idea is that the instructor is in front of a digital video camera, and the student is watching a computer screen in the privacy of her or his home. “Discussion” takes the form of a chatroom or perhaps conference call. Rock groups that function similarly simply phone in their parts, so to speak, and then someone has to assemble them. One thing that is common to both examples is that the aim of the technology is to simulate to whatever extent possible the experience of being in the same room, but without the logistical issues involved in making that actually happen. Although I have not taken part in distance education experiments in my university, it is not unusual these days to find students having more and more of a “screen mentality”—a tendency toward the visual, an inability to take notes because anything important can be looked up on the World Wide Web later, a tendency to think of everything in terms of quantities of information, a tendency to tune in and out of class just as one would with one’s computer screen at home. The technology that allows musicians to assemble works without being physically together may not have these sorts of problems to the same extent, but there is still a kind of disembodied sensibility involved in not being able to hash things out face to face. I could imagine that this technology will develop to a much greater extent, perhaps ultimately using holograms and multiple cameras and whatnot to simulate much better the experience of playing together. Even so, and without being overly judgmental about it, this technology is changing the way rock musicians work in qualitative and radical ways. One of those ways is that it is a very small step from not working with your band mates in a physical situation to just dispensing with the band altogether, and simulating what used to be the different roles of different musicians using technology. Some very good albums have been made this way, for sure, but the tendency now is for more and more musicians to go this way—because, after all, then one does not have to deal with logistics and personalities—and then the group becomes less and less “the thing.”

Lastly, and again some sociology and demography would be useful here, but there seems to be a marked increase lately in the tendency to make a fetish of photogenic singers. The “group” is just a bunch of guys in the background, it doesn’t particularly matter who they are or what kind of musical voices they have developed. Björk is a difficult case here, because, although she is plenty photogenic (much more than she is homogenic!), to the extent that her music features her voice (and often it doesn’t), the music is not simply the servant of nice physical features or catchy melodies. Furthermore, as much as I like the Sugarcubes, Björk’s post-group music is more interesting, and she brings together some very interesting musicians to play it. Björk, however, is the exception that proves the rule. Although the fetish for photogenic singers may not have much of an effect on experimental rock, certainly it is playing a role in decreasing the space and orientation toward groups. If experimental rock is not pulled in this direction by the general trend, this will still be further indication that we are now in a time when experimental rock and the rest of rock (and “pop” music) find themselves in two different worlds.

For my part, I will be happy if experimental rock does not go in the direction of almost exclusive focus on the singer, because I think that orientation toward the group is one of the great things about rock music.

Two of the dichotomies that have been set out in this book have to do with the questions of technique and composition versus improvisation. These dichotomies are somewhat operative in rock music generally, but they become especially acute in avant rock, or, we might say, what is simply happenstance in the rest of rock music becomes the source of controversy and principle in avant rock. It is one thing to not have so much in the way of technique; it is another thing to actively avoid or refuse technique, as a matter of principle. There are two ways, or perhaps stages, where this sort of thing becomes interesting and potentially innovative. The refusal of what might be called “conventional technique” (one attempts to become a very skilled guitarist on the order of, say, John McLaughlin or Steve Howe—I mention these two because they are very skilled with chords and time, and are not anywhere remotely near the legions of “lead guitar” wankers out there) might be interesting in some sort of “initial stage,” such as we see with the Velvet Underground, where the refusal leads to the discovery of new sounds. I would associate this form of refusal especially with untapped possibilities of the electric guitar (and amplifiers). Sonic Youth would be among those who took this sort of thing further, and in a direction that was still interesting.

However, there comes a point where this form of the refusal of technique becomes no longer interesting, and where it cannot be musically justified on the basis that John Cage opened some door to it (Cage’s motto was “make it new,” and after awhile there is not much new in just letting an electric guitar play itself) or that Cecil Taylor is just “randomly bashing away” on his instrument (he isn’t). So then it is time for a second stage of refusal, and this is where the refusal of conventional technique becomes a new language or nonconventional technique. To take a major example from jazz, it isn’t the case that Pharaoh Sanders lacks technique. What is the case is that he has taken numerous “effects” of playing the tenor saxophone, especially overblowing and biting on the reed, and made his own language out of them. Surely, if this were the refusal of technique pure and simple, then any Tom, Dick, or Mary could pick up the tenor and do what Mr. Sanders does—and, of course, they cannot. When it comes to the way that such an approach has been taken within rock music, however, it is sometimes harder to discriminate between the merely lazy and the truly interesting. But this is where, again, I would hold up Sonic Youth as the exemplars—they have forged their own kind of technique that is largely outside of conventional playing.

To be good at creating and, shall we say, spelling out compositions is also a matter of technique, and I do worry that much avant rock is avoiding this technique in the name of improvisation or perhaps spontaneity. Unfortunately, the refusal of composition interacts a little too easily with a refusal to improve one’s instrumental (or vocal) skills. What do I mean by “composition”? The reason I used the words “spelling out” is that I certainly do not mean that composition is only the ability to write out musical scores in the conventional way. Really all I mean is some form of communication whereby band members can decide to play (or not play) certain notes, beats, sounds, or silences at a certain time, a certain loudness, a certain force or lack of force, and so on. There seems to be a decline in either the ability to do that with any level of complexity, or in the desire to be able to play this way, or both. This kind of refusal of technique is not a healthy thing, it seems to me. I am thinking of the sorts of musicians or listeners from the sixties generation and younger, but especially younger, who are “not impressed” with groups that could play a work of the complexity of, say, “Close to the Edge” (Yes) or, just to rub it in, “Tarkus” (Emerson, Lake and Palmer). The goal of attaining virtuoso or near-virtuoso instrumental skills (which I define as mastery of the instrument to the point where complexity is not an issue) can be a double-edged sword, as everyone knows by now. And, it is a good thing that rock is a genre where everyone feels invited to participate, at whatever skill level. However: (1) we ought to be very suspicious of a false populism that has room for the refusal of technique (which is not the same thing as valuing simplicity over complexity), but not for the perfection of technique; (2) we ought to be very suspicious of the use of rock music’s participatory ideal as cover for simply not practicing. In the United States, there has been a decline in school music programs and other venues for young people to learn to play an instrument. Technology plays a role, too, at the point where a young person comes along having never played any other instrument than a sampler or beat box. It isn’t that there is anything wrong with this in some absolute sense, and perhaps musical instrument instruction will simply go the way of instruction in typewriter repair (the last schools for this craft closed in the 1990s). As with all paradigm shifts in culture, something will be gained and something will be lost. Some sort of dialectical evenhandedness would require that the commentator accept that what is lost is made up by what is gained. For my part, however, I cannot accept this—although I am fully willing to admit that this could mean that my present age renders me resistant to some of the changes that will undoubtedly come. Be that as it may, there is a danger of one-sidedness in the new music at the point where refusal of technique informs attempts at “improvisation.”

Sermons about how we all need to keep working on our chops aside, however, the creative musician avoids being trapped by dichotomies, whether of technique or its refusal, or of composition and improvisation (which can never be strictly separated in any case), or what-have-you. If vocabularies have been exhausted, then some forms of instrumental virtuosity can become mere anachronisms, perhaps not unlike whatever particular skills associated with using a manual electric typewriter that are not transferable to using a personal computer. While it is not a pleasant thought, for me at any rate, that the violin or saxophone or bass guitar or drum set might at least retroactively be understood as simply forms of technology that can be surpassed and thereby rendered obsolete, this has happened before. But perhaps this time is not yet upon us, and, at the very least, it seems to me that there are new forms of electro-acoustic music still to be discovered in rock. One irony of some of the new music that is made entirely in the cybernetic domain is that, even while a significant part of it is meant as “body” music, it is far away from being tactile in its creation. Rather than shutting down creativity, then, the new elements that have emerged from electronica may very well be at the start of showing their possibilities. It is early days yet, and one hopes that there will be many years and stages of new interfaces to come.

Some final thoughts on music and chess . . .

The enigmatic model of the line is thus the very thing that philosophy could not see when it had its eyes open on the interior of its own history. This night begins to lighten a little at the moment when linearity—which is not loss or absence but the repression of pluridimensional symbolic thought—relaxes its oppression because it begins to sterilize the technical and scientific economy that it has long favored. In fact for a long time its possibility has been structurally bound up with that of economy, of technics, and of ideology. This solidarity [solidity?] appears in the process of thesaurization, capitalization, sedentarization, hierarchization, of the formation of ideology by the class that writes or rather commands the scribes. Not that the massive reappearance of nonlinear writing interrupts this structural solidarity [again, “solidity” might be a better translation, although the French is indeed solidarité]; quite the contrary. But it transforms its nature profoundly.

—Jacques Derrida, of Grammatology

       The wisdom of the plants: even when they have roots, there is always an outside where they form a rhizome with something else—with the wind, an animal, human beings (and there is also an aspect under which animals themselves form rhizomes, as do people, etc.). “Drunkenness as a triumphant eruption of the plant in us.” Always follow the rhizome by rupture; lengthen, prolong, and relay the line of flight; make it vary, until you have produced the most abstract and tortuous of lines of n dimensions and broken directions. Conjugate deterritorialized flows. Follow the plants . . .

       Music has always sent out lines of flight, like so many “transformational multiplicities,” even overturning the very codes that structure or arborify it [make it tree-like]; that is why musical form, right down to its ruptures and proliferations, is comparable to a weed, a rhizome.

       [U]nlike trees or their roots, the rhizome . . . brings into play very different regimes of signs, and even nonsign states. . . . Unlike a structure, which is defined by a set of points and positions, with binary relations between the points and biunivocal relationships between the positions, the rhizome is made only of lines: lines of segmentarity and stratification as its dimensions, and the line of flight or deterritorialization as the maximum dimension after which the multiplicity undergoes metamorphosis. . . . The rhizome is anti-genealogy. It is a short-term memory, an anti-memory. The rhizome operates by variation, expansion, conquest, capture, offshoots, . . . . What is at question in the rhizome is a relation to sexuality . . . , the animal, the vegetal, the world, politics, the book, things natural and artificial . . . that is totally different from the arborescent relation: all manner of becomings.

       Let us take a limited example and compare the war machine and the State apparatus in the context of the theory of games. Let us take chess and Go, from the standpoint of the game pieces, the relations between the pieces and the space involved. Chess is a game of State, or of the court: the emperor of China played it. Chess pieces are coded; they have an internal nature and intrinsic properties from which their movements, situations, and confrontations derive. They have qualities: a knight remains a knight, a pawn a pawn, a bishop a bishop. Each is like a subject of the statement endowed with a relative power, and these relative powers combine in a subject of enunciation, that is, the chess player or the game’s form of interiority. Go pieces, in contrast, are pellets, disks, simple arithmetic units, and have only an anonymous, collective, or third-person function: “It” makes a move. “It” could be a man, a woman, a louse, an elephant. Go pieces are elements of a nonsubjectified machine assemblage with no intrinsic properties, only situational ones. Thus the relations are very different in the two cases. Within their milieu of interiority, chess pieces entertain biunivocal relations with one another, and with the adversary’s pieces: their functioning is structural. On the other hand, a Go piece has only a milieu of exteriority, or extrinsic relations with nebulas or constellations, according to which it fulfills functions of insertion or situation, such as bordering, encircling, shattering. All by itself, a Go piece can destroy an entire constellation synchronically; a chess piece cannot (or can do so diachronically only). Chess is indeed a war, but an institutionalized, regulated, coded war, with a front, a rear, battles. But what is proper to Go is war without battle lines, with neither confrontation nor retreat, without battles even: pure strategy, whereas chess is a semiology. Finally, the space is not at all the same: in chess, it is a question of arranging a closed space for oneself, thus of going from one point to another, of occupying the maximum number of squares with the minimum number of pieces. In Go, it is a question of arraying oneself in an open space, of holding space, of maintaining the possibility of springing up at any point: the movement is not from one point to another, but becomes perpetual, without aim or destination, without departure or arrival. The “smooth” space of Go, as against the “striated” space of chess. The nomos of Go against the State of chess, nomos against polis. The difference is that chess codes and decodes space, whereas Go proceeds altogether differently, territorializing or deterritorializing it (make the outside a territory of space; consolidate that territory by the construction of a second, adjacent territory; deterritorialize the enemy by shattering his territory from within; deterritorialize oneself by renouncing, by going elsewhere . . .). Another justice, another movement, another space-time.

—Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

Well, we aren’t going to unpack all of this. I’m not sure what it means to say that chess was played by “the Chinese emperor”—which one? Chess originated in India around 500 to 600 CE, taking a more modern form in Persia only a few decades later. Chess seems to have been spread around Asia by Buddhist monks, and perhaps even originated as a means for teaching religious and philosophical ideas. There was a “Golden Age of Islamic Chess” in the eighth to tenth centuries CE, and by about 1000 chess was widely known throughout Europe. There are a few who argue that chess actually originated in China; at the least the game was taken into China by Buddhist monks early in its history. (Some argue that chess is even much older than fourteen or fifteen hundred years. But neither this nor the Chinese origins hypothesis has been substantiated.) There are also Asian forms of chess, such as Xiangqi (“Chinese chess”) and Shogi (“Japanese chess”), and it is most likely the former that was played by the aforementioned “Chinese emperor.”

It is not quite true that all chess pieces remain “what they are,” at least not since about 1475 CE. At that time “took place the most significant of all changes during the recorded history of the game,” namely the convention whereby a pawn that makes it to the furthest rank can be exchanged for any other piece, and most often for a queen. (See The Oxford Companion to Chess, 2nd ed., p. 173.) Indeed, it was also at this time that the queen was instituted as a piece—previously the king was accompanied by a “first minister” (known variously as the Firzan, Firz, or Fers in the Persian world). Thus, in carnivalesque fashion—and, notably, this change occurred in Europe, not in India or Persia—the putative “least” of the chessmen can change both class and gender, and thereby become the most powerful piece on the board.

Go is considerably older than chess. Indeed, in one of the most famous Western manuals for the game, The Theory & Practice of Go, Oscar Korschelt writes (originally in German) that “Go is the oldest of known games.” Korschelt cites sources that place the origin of Go at last as far back as 1000 bce, and possibly another thousand years before that. I would like to quote Korschelt’s comparison of chess and Go at a little length, because—strange as it may seem—it sheds light on some issues in contemporary experimental music. Korschelt wrote his book in order to attract Europeans to Go; so, while it is interesting on all kinds of levels to compare chess and Go, Korschelt was also interested in showing players of the former the appeal of the latter.

Our chess circles would recognize that the ingenuity and depth of skill in Go are fully a match for chess, and it would soon be cherished as highly as chess.

Chess and Go are both antagonistic or warlike games, that is, they are both governed primarily by skill in tactics and strategy. But the form of conflict typical of chess is like the warfare of olden times in which the king was the center of the struggle and the battle was lost with his downfall. In this sort of knightly struggle victory or defeat was decided more through the exceptional virtue of a single noble or group of nobles than through the mass action of the commoners as parts of an overall strategy.

Rather than being the image of a single struggle as in chess, Go is much more like the panorama of an entire campaign or complex theater of war. And so it is more like modern warfare where strategic mass movements are the ultimate determinants of victory. . . . As in modern warfare, direct combat, without supporting tactics, rarely occurs. In fact, to engage too soon in direct combat frequently spells defeat. . . .

Whether chess or Go offers more entertainment is a difficult question. Unlike chess the combinations in Go are afflicted with some monotony because there are no pieces with different styles of movement and because once placed in the field the stones are fixed. But that defect is compensated for by the greater ration of combinations and by the greater number of places on the board where the battle may rage. In general, two average players of fairly even skill will find more enjoyment in Go than in chess. In chess it is fairly certain that the first of two evenly matched players to lose a piece will suffer defeat unless he can exchange it for one of like value. Without such an exchange after a loss the rest of the game is mostly an ineffective struggle against predictable defeat. (pp. 6–7)

Korschelt wrote The Theory and Practice of Go in the latter part of the nineteenth century, and this is a salient point. Much as Albert Einstein’s teachers were recommending that he pursue some field other than physics, because all of the basic problems had already been solved (the rest was just mop-up, not needing a mind the caliber of Einstein’s), it was widely argued at the end of the nineteenth century that chess was exhausted—it had run out of steam. It turned out, of course, that steam had run out of steam, and what came in its place was special and general relativity and, in the case of chess, the hypermodern movement.

Complex positional play came to the fore with the hypermoderns, such that what Korschelt says about losing material in an exchange does not strictly apply. Ordinary mortals playing through the games of Garry Kasparov or Viswanathan Anand or Judit Polgar will certainly see no end of strategic complexity. But what does this say about linearity or what Deleuze and Guattari call “striated space,” the sorts of things that many contemporary avant-garde musicians, sometimes citing the aforementioned, are attempting to escape?

Hypermodern chess, which was initially formulated by Aron Nimzovich and Richard Reti, has much in common with “postmodern” trends in philosophy, architecture, and other forms of cultural and intellectual production, especially the displacement of the center. Nimzovich and Reti formulated their ideas in a Central- and Eastern-European milieu that was exceedingly rich in intellectual and cultural ferment: it was the time of Wittgenstein, Freud, the Vienna Circle, Schoenberg, Einstein, Kurt Godel, the Prague Linguistic Circle, the “Blue Rider” painters, and so on. Displacement from the center was the order of the day. I wonder if “chess,” as conceived by Deleuze and Guattari in their analysis, has more in common with Korschelt’s late-nineteenth-century conception than it does with the extraordinary complexity of chess since the time of the hypermoderns. In other words, in what they say there are assumptions about what has been “played out,” exhausted, or about what is in the end part of an authoritarian social structure that ought to be resisted—chess as the carrier of “state philosophy.” This terminology is part of a recently emerged trend that calls itself “postmodern anarchism” or “poststructuralist anarchism,” and which takes inspiration from Guy Debord and the situationists, and philosophers such as Michel Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, and Jean-Francois Lyotard. (Notably, Jacques Derrida is cited less often, and Jean-Paul Sartre is often used as a whipping boy. See Todd May, The Political Theory of Poststructuralist Anarchism, and Lewis Call, Postmodern Anarchism.) Being a mediocre but enthusiastic chess player myself, and not knowing how to play Go (people ask me if I am going to take it up, but I tell them that I am too busy losing at chess at the moment), still, I think that chess still has some creativity to demonstrate—its historic moment has not yet passed. But then, I am one of those who still believes that the transition to a communist society must still pass through a period in which the working class and oppressed people constitute their rule in the form of a state (though not only this, of course).

Well, that is a larger question for social theory, and undoubtedly the thesis that chess still has something to give is not dependent on the idea that the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie has to be overthrown and supplanted by the rule of the proletariat (or is it?!). The reader may find it interesting, by the way, that Marx and Lenin were both avid chess players, and reportedly quite good (“for amateurs,” as they say), while Mao would play Go at the drop of a hat, and recommended it to the soldiers in the Peoples Liberation Army as a school for strategy. This is far afield from music, but we need to learn from all three of these game strategists if we are going to change society. But then, I am sufficiently Hegelian to believe that there is some sense in which chess, Go, music, and social formations are all imbedded in a human history that is in some sense “common.”

However, what comes a little closer to musical questions is the way that the chess/Go comparison resembles what I set up in the first part of this book as the Schoenberg/Stravinsky comparison, which had less to do with their music per se than with the dynamic of “next step in the logic”/“some other logic.” What has changed in the time since Schoenberg and Stravinsky were composing is that, while the search for other logics on the part of the latter, as well as Bartok, Gershwin, and others, was still fundamentally a gesture toward the “outside” of Europe from (to use Derrida’s expression) “a certain inside,” now it is undeniable that the Third World has begun to “stand up” (as Mao said of the Chinese people in 1949).

One might also, however, set the dichotomy not in terms of “another logic,” but instead we might consider the idea of “escaping logic,” or at least escaping certain entrenched logics, or trying to stay outside of them. Three little bits of information might prove useful here. First, while there are now computer programs that can beat grandmasters at chess, there are no such programs in the case of Go. We can safely assume that this has nothing to do with lack of computing skill in Asia. Instead, the existence of high-powered chess programs means that, at least up to a point, there are algorithms for playing the game. In other words, the mathematical complexity of chess, at least (if not the psychological and other forms of complexity), can be captured in formulas. Of course, every chess player beyond the most basic level applies some sort of formulas in playing—build strength in the center, protect your king, develop your pieces, advance your pawns, develop knights before bishops, don’t trade pieces when you are behind in material, and so forth. There are exceptions for each of these rules, in actual chess practice, but the exceptions can be formalized to a point as well. Whatever the limitations of computer chess, the fact that it has been developed to a fairly high degree, while there is no such development in the case of Go, seems to speak to Deleuze and Guattari’s claim that chess is characterized by “striated” thinking—it is much more “arborial” than “rhizomatic.” The musical lesson would seem to be that, to escape linearity, one should look to a model such as Go rather than chess. Or, quite apart from whether one cares about these games and the kind of comparison I am taking up here, the point is that musicians might rightly wonder if a certain “Western” linearity is exhausted.

Second, if chess is a game of the “state-form,” an interesting inquiry might be made into how both chess and Western musical forms have fared in parts of the world where the state is a relatively recent phenomenon. In a paper presented at a conference on Africana philosophy (at DePaul University, February 2001), Bruce Janz applied the Deleuze/Gauttari arguments about chess and Go to the question of state formation in Africa. Of course, the “state,” in the modern, Western sense, has been imposed upon African territories by colonialist and imperialist powers, and it has been an almost unmitigated disaster. One might infer that chess would also not “work” well in Sub-Saharan Africa, and in fact this seems to be the case. When I raised this question with Professor Janz, he answered that there is a game that is played widely throughout Sub-Saharan Africa, called by various names, the simplest of which is “Mbao,” and this game is much more like Go than chess. By the same token, it seems that the forms of “Western” music that fare the best in Africa are those that have at least partial African origins to begin with, namely jazz and rock.

I would like to add to this an anecdote that might shed further light on what was just said. Some years ago, when I was in graduate school, I shared an office with an African woman from Sierra Leone. Her training as an undergraduate in her home country was in analytic philosophy, and she had come to the United States to do graduate work in this field, and in the philosophies of David Hume and Bertrand Russell. If you know anything about these figures and analytic philosophy in general, you know that the tendency is toward a kind of philosophical austerity. (I have done some work in this field and I find this tendency both a blessing and a curse.) One predominant trend within analytic philosophy is to apply Occam’s Razor, as it were, to any subject (or object) that is not capable of formulation in logical terms or verifiable in public, empirical terms. My African officemate was an enthusiast of this trend. But one day, as we were chatting amiably in the office, she asked me if I believed in spirits, demons, ghosts, and the like. I said that I probably did not, at least in the way that she meant (now I’m not so sure), and I asked her if she did believe in such things. She said that, heaven help her, despite her whole philosophical training and orientation, there was an “African” side to her that could not help but believe in such things. Unfortunately, these two sides of her life were tearing her apart, and about a month later she had a nervous breakdown. This seems to me to be an exemplary case of “capitalism and schizophrenia” (to take the larger title of Deleuze’s and Guattari’s project, of which A Thousand Plateaus is the second part) of a sort that is not often discussed by postmodern anarchists.

Perhaps a political lesson could be drawn here that also applies to music. In the contemporary world, we have to look at the “next step”/“other logic” dichotomy in global terms, and this includes having an awareness of the way the world is constituted by a new, but violent “unity” (“one world, ready or not”), and by deep divisions. I think that I would say to Deleuze and Guattari that chess still has something to give, despite its limitations. I wonder if, in the appreciation they show for the music of Pierre Boulez in A Thousand Plateaus, they are not agreeing with this claim to some extent.

Third, it would be interesting to compare artifacts of what might be called “chess culture” to those of “Go culture.” Here I must admit to both ignorance and frustration. There is a culture surrounding chess that yields something like a “chess aesthetic,” in the form of novels, films, painting, and perhaps most of all, music. The valuable website maintained by New York composer John Greschak, “Connections between Music and Chess,” traces “chess music” in classical music, jazz, and rock. Among the composers included are John Cage, John Lewis (pianist in the Modern Jazz Quartet, whose The Chess Game is based on Bach’s Goldberg Variations), and Jon Anderson (from Yes), as well as others who are not named Jo(h)n. (To find Greschak’s site, just put “chess and music” in your search engine.) My ignorance and frustration has to do with not knowing if there is a similar “Go aesthetic.” My experiences thus far are limited to the novel The Master of Go by Nobel-Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata, and the anime film, Ranma ½. Thus far my search for “Go music” has been fruitless, other than recalling that the group that the great Japanese percussionist, Stomu Yamash’ta, formed with the great Santana drummer, Michael Shrieve, back in the late 1970s was called “Go.” I do not know why there would not be a culture of Go comparable to that of chess, so I am assuming that I simply have not found it yet. Perhaps the culture of Go is more oblique, less apparent; perhaps one would find such a culture in the composition of Toru Takemitsu, for example. But my larger point is that comparison of the artifacts of each culture might tell us something about what is supposedly a univalent or at most dialectical “Western” or “modern” approach to thinking and music, as opposed to a culture and thought of difference. And my even larger point is that I tend to think that, as experimental music begins to take the rhizome rather than the tree as its model, it will have to grow in that direction on the basis of the tree, the tree will have to evolve in that way. Otherwise, the tendency is to fall into mere exoticism and Orientalism.

On the other hand, there is a dimension of the “after Cage, what?” question that is mere Eurocentrism. This is the case even if—indeed, especially—the question is raised in purely “analytical” terms, because then the assumption is that the limits of Western reason are the limits of all possible reason. But when we go “beyond the West” (or “beyond rock”—and the lovely thing about rock is that it always wants to go beyond, it doesn’t have any hang-ups about going beyond itself), to look for new sounds, we have to be aware that all vibrant musics are always looking for new sounds and new ideas. The Western propensity has been to approach the musics of diverse non-Western cultures as though they are static artifacts. The irony is that this gesture also reinstates linearity. The challenge is to transcend linearity from within linearity itself, not to simply jump from Western reason to some supposedly timeless non-Western cycle. To put it provocatively—as well as in a way that, I hope, leaves it clear that the “next step” must be an experiment, and therefore not susceptible to calculation alone—the challenge is to play “guerilla chess.”

       Sonic Youth, nyc ghosts & flowers (Geffen CD, 2000).

       Yoko Ono, A Blueprint for the Sunrise (Japan Society/Harry N. Abrams CD, 2000).

       R. L. Burnside, Wish I Was In Heaven Sitting Down (Fat Possum Records CD, 2000).

       Tortoise, Standards (Thrill Jockey CD, 2001).

       Stereolab, The First of the Microbe Hunters (Elektra CD, 2000).

       Radiohead, Kid A (EMI CD, 2000).

       ———, Amnesiac (EMI CD, 2001).

       King Crimson, the construKction of light (Virgin CD, 2000).

       ———, Heavy ConstruKction (Discipline CD, 2000).

       White Out, with Jim O’Rourke, drunken little mass (ecstatic peace CD, 2000).

       Björk, Selmasongs (Elektra CD, 2000).

       ———, Vespertine (Elektra CD, 2001).

       William Hooker, The Distance Between Us (Knitting Factory CD, 1998).

       William Hooker, Christian Marclay, Lee Renaldo, Bouquet (Knitting Factory CD, 2000).

       Sonic Youth and guests, Goodbye 20^th Century (SYR CD, November 16, 1999).

Once more into the breach. Looking at this list of albums, we might ask of the twenty-first century, Are we there yet? The rub is that, all of those who thought that Jean-Paul Sartre was stuck in the nineteenth century will find that it is not so easy to get out of the twentieth, either. The avant-garde sensibility is not only one of “going forward,” but also of momentous changes that come in the blink of an eye. Teleology and eschatology, line and unexpected—even monstrous—new things that appear seemingly without antecedents. Or perhaps I simply chose certain albums to consider at the end of this story—what’s the plot? A predominant feeling in these albums, in any case, is a certain wistfulness, even if intermixed with a cyberpunk edge. On Kid A, Radiohead follows “Optimistic” with “In Limbo.” Haunting line from the former: “I’d really like to help you man, I’d really like to help you man.” If the world is at an impasse, then we explore that impasse—as Walt Whitman put it, “Society waits unformed and is for a while between things ended and things begun.” Or W. H. Auden: “Nothing can save us that is possible.” What looks like mere cynicism is sometimes instead a peculiar and vertigo-inducing version of the now barely-breathing wish for redemption and exhaustion from the mindless complexities of life.

My own wistful feelings are evidenced by the fact that there are no techno albums here at the end, and most of the music is played on instruments long associated with rock music. There are plenty of post-rock instruments here, however, with Jim O’Rourke on laptop computer, Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood on Ondes Martenot and Thom Yorke’s voice running through vocoder, autotuner, and whatnot, Christian Marclay’s turntable artistry, and Robert Fripp’s and Adrian Belew’s six-stringers rarely sounding like guitars. Indeed, for anyone who listened to King Crimson circa Lizard or Larks’ Tongues, it is hard to imagine them as a “guitar band” in 2000, with the same instrumentation as the Kinks. The construKction of light doesn’t sound anything like Something Else (ahem). But there they are: two guitars, bass, drums. Sonic Youth, too; Radiohead: three guitars, at least in principle.

There are a million labels now, many of them coming out of electronica. We have hip-hop, trip-hop, and I think trip-bop went across the radar screen somewhere along the way; soon enough we could have hip-trop, a beat-heavy and sampledelic version of Brazilian Tropicalia. Oh wait, Tom Ze and Arto Lindsay are already there. It is the time of the mixmaster (or mixmatrix), to be sure. Two other labels that might prove useful are “chamber rock” and “deconstruction.” Both are familiar. Although some of the artists discussed here perform in larger venues (mainly Radiohead), most are found in more intimate settings. The basic idea is that even those artists who are capable of filling larger halls approach the gig with a non- or even anti-“arena rock” attitude. This is very hard in these days when rock fans have gotten very comfortable with the idea that a concert is a time for partying and incessant talking (on a cell phone, even), as if the music is background and sometimes annoyance. The sort of folks who would go to hear Stereolab or Björk or King Crimson are generally a bit better than this, but still. (The last time I saw King Crimson, which was late October 2000, as of this writing, there was a fellow sitting in front of me who would shout “Bruford!” after every piece. This was a version of the group that did not contain Bill Bruford—perhaps the reason for the shouting, but who knows?) As the worlds of mainstream and experimental rock get further apart, however, perhaps the chamber-rock sensibility will sink in further with the listeners as well. I think this would be a good thing, even if avant rock does not quite need to be played in conditions of concert-hall bourgeois respectability, because then the idea that an experimental-rock concert is a laboratory for sonic exploration is foregrounded. In addition, the connection between the performers and the audience is actually strengthened, because the common element is listening, not showing off.

R. L. Burnside might be called a “traditional” blues musician, but now he has fallen in with the hip-hop crowd. Avant rock is music that breaks with blues orthodoxy, so the question arises as to where that leaves the blues, proper. There are many great blues musicians playing today, of course, from Koko Taylor to Jimmy D. Lane, but can the blues be innovative even while staying within its own bounds? That’s a hard one; it seems as if, as with country music, the parameters are fairly narrow, or else we aren’t really talking about the blues (or country music) anymore. The alternative is to mix the blues with something else, as, say, the Jimi Hendrix Experience or Cream did with psychedelia. On Burnside’s Wish I Was In Heaven Sitting Down, as well as his earlier Come On In (Fat Possum CD, 1998), the “blues parts” are plenty raw, and the “hip-hop” parts are, in a sense, mere scaffolding. The music is not so much a true synthesis or even hybrid, as a demonstration of what happens when you put two different forms side by side. It works. And yet the most powerful track is pure blues, plus a little bit of scratching, the album closer, “R. L.’s Story.” Burnside’s narrative of family members who have been murdered in small-town Mississippi, Memphis, and Chicago is sad beyond words.

Some might challenge the presence of Radiohead in a discussion such as this. Indeed, the excellent cover article on the group by Simon Reynolds (the title, “Walking on Thin Ice” has a nice Yoko Ono connection) in The Wire (July 2001) opens with three paragraphs of worrying about how some will say that, “a group with this kind of commercial heft and such a degree of mainstream consensus of praise behind them simply has no place on the front cover of a magazine known for championing mavericks and margin dwellers” (p. 26). Reynolds praises Kid A for playing a major role in “rejuvenating the moribund concept of ‘post-rock”’ (p. 26). The fact that the June issue of Mojo also featured a cover story on the group doesn’t mean that The Wire is going commercial, but instead that Radiohead is doing something that people who care about the quality and future of rock music can appreciate. I wonder if the term might be “deconstruction.” It’s not only that the group zigs when you expect them to zag, or that they deal in fragmented narratives as well as anyone, but they have a very clever way of taking rock expectations and turning them inside out. Indeed, these last two points interconnect, because the whole synergy—the music, the singing, the lyrics—makes you think, “there’s a story there, I wish that I could get to it.” Someone is hurt—what happened to them? You know that you will never know, and yet you cannot turn away from wanting to be let in on the secret.

The specter of deconstruction is introduced here, too, because it seems to me that we have not really heard enough “Derrida music” to go with all of the “Deleuze music” that has been created in recent years.

There is some other hurt in these albums. Sonic Youth’s A Thousand Leaves (1998) was already part psychedelic dirge in memory of Allen Ginsberg (especially the long track, “Hits of Sunshine”), and I wonder if the passing of the great bard still hovers over nyc ghosts & flowers—or perhaps the subject has broadened to mortality in general. The title piece is especially eerie, the lyrics and sense of dramatic build-up much more careful than what one usually finds with this group. The noise freak-out can be great, and no one does it better than Sonic Youth, but (the album’s title song) “nyc ghosts & flowers” shows what attention to composition can reveal. Elsewhere on the album, Kim Gordon once again shows what it means to make a certain nonchalance into an artform, with “nevermind (what was it anyway).” Leaving the question mark off from the parenthetical question just reinforces the point. “Boys go to jupiter to get more stupider/girls go to mars, become rock stars”—not the greatest line, but funny. Of course, many boys do well enough at getting stupider right here on planet Earth. Sonic Youth is assisted by Jim O’Rourke on three tracks, and he also co-produced the album. As always, I wish for more bass in the music, not only to fill out the sonic spectrum—it’s all very trebly, as usual—but also to get some contrapuntal action going with drummer Steve Shelley.

Much more sad is Björk’s music for the film, Dancer in the Dark. Titled Selmasongs, after the main character in the film, there are moments of levity and even silliness, for sure, but even these contribute to a very dark sensibility in the context of the film as a whole. People seem quite divided on Dancer in the Dark, and on Björk’s performance as Selma. My only ambivalence concerns the very fact of Björk appearing as an actress, because I would hate to see her taken away from music by the seductions of the film world. Reportedly she has said that this is the only film she will ever do. I wish her every success in this resolve, the problem being that she was pretty much amazing in the role. The film is not easy to watch; to me it was almost unremittingly tragic. Björk is not cute here, and rarely even coy. She is an awkward woman in a terrible situation, or a series of such situations, and her perseverance and optimism only make things worse. The ending is painful and heartbreaking. The whole film, and especially the ending, is an indictment of American “justice.” The closing recapitulation of the opening “Overture,” with its weighty, low brass, affected me physically.

So, Björk continues to do new things. “I’ve Seen It All,” from the soundtrack, features Thom Yorke. (Apparently Björk and Yorke were supposed to perform a vocal duet at the 2001 Grammy Awards, but Yorke pulled out, and Björk was left singing with a tape, from whence derives some of the recent parodies of her as weird and crazy.) I had hoped to have a new, complete (Selmasongs is only thirty-two minutes long) Björk album to discuss here, and such an album was supposed to be released in June 2001, but it was delayed. And now, at the last moment—August 28, 2001—here it is, finally! Vespertine is Björk’s first “album” since 1997’s Homogenic. Expectations, accordingly, are running high—therefore, it would perhaps not be fair to make more than a few preliminary comments here. The instrumental elements of the album are somewhat similar to those found on Homomgenic, strings and electronic beats. The addition here is the use of choir and harp, the latter played by avant-garde composer and instrumentalist Zeena Parkins. Björk also uses musical boxes on several of the songs. As before, Björk has co-composers and co-arrangers on some of the songs, but she did most of the work herself. In that respect, I appreciated this statement from the Urb magazine cover story that accompanied the release of Vespertine: “While everyone thinks they know what she’s about, few see Björk’s true nature as a devoted music nerd and electro-acoustic composer who spends countless hours talking about snare sounds and editing noises on her laptop” (Tamara Palmer, “A different sort of bird,” Urb, Sept. 2001, p. 125). Don’t hate her because she’s beautiful—instead, disrespect her because she’s intelligent: that’s what the photogenic crowd has figured out recently, and their instincts are true.

The term “electro-acoustic” comes up again in Palmer’s article, and it is an interesting way to think about Björk’s more recent music. Here is her own description of what she is doing, from an interview with Palmer:

I’m really interested in blending together electronic music with our everyday life to prove that’s actually how we’re living . . . . I guess my attempt is to take just the life we’re leading every day and make magic out of that. Just to be honest, those are the sounds [of life]; it’s what we hear all the time . . . I like extremes, I guess: very raw acoustic things and then very pure electronic beats. To me, electricity comes from nature. Like acupuncture—something several thousand years old triggers the electricity that’s inside us within our nervous system. (p. 125)

Even though there are a few new sounds and textures on this album, and even though in general approach it follows in the footsteps of Homogenic, it is actually a more austere group of songs, and very private. Even though they have their splashy and loud moments, all of Björk’s albums are quieter than people tend to think—or perhaps it is hard to hear how quiet they are. Vespertine is the quietist of them all, and, with the possible exception of the first song on the album, “Hidden Place,” there is a great deal of flow but very few “hooks.” After the success of Dancer in the Dark, Björk might have been expected to go for even bigger pop success. Instead she is continuing to develop her conception. There is no guitar here, and the “standout” instruments are all of the “subdued” sort, primarily harp and celeste. One of the songs—“Sun in my Mouth”—quotes from poet e.e. cummings, and the final song features a sample from the electronica group Oval. To say that something is “vespertine,” means that it comes forth at night, like the introspective evening prayers of cloistered nuns. Björk as a nun is a hard image to wrap one’s mind around—the cyborg seems more appropriate—but there is an element to her persona, no matter how much she flamboyantly puts herself out in the world, that is fundamentally inward. Hence her evensong. But all of this is upon the first couple of listenings, and it will be interesting to see how the experience of this album fills out. Regardless of where Vespertine will eventually sit on the scale from good to very good to excellent, however, what is most gratifying is that Björk’s commitment to creativity in music seems unshakable.

A Blueprint for the Sunrise is even shorter than Selmasongs, at about twenty-four minutes. It is also a “soundtrack,” though this time for the YES Yoko Ono book that is the companion to the retrospective exhibit of the same name. I saw the exhibit in Minneapolis, and was thrilled that the “White Chess Set” was set up in a public area where people could play on it. We didn’t get very far! Unfortunately, the Blueprint CD does not come with any information about who is playing on it. The music does not break new ground, really, but it does place Ono’s vocal instrument in some new settings, including a grunge meets techno scenario that is provocative.

Wistfulness returns with Tortoise and especially Stereolab. The former has kind of “creeped out” its sound a bit, with metallic and alien noises intruding and drifting through the more friendly, vibraphone-led parts. I must say that I despise the album cover—indeed, it is a demon to be cast out. I’m not referring to the outer cover, necessarily, though here is another example of what looks like a studied, annoying nonchalance. Instead what I am referring to is the back page of the booklet, which is purportedly presenting the information on who plays what on the album. Please send contributions toward purchase of a good microscope! Am I the only one who is peeved by this sort of thing, album information presented in a way that can only be meant to frustrate the listener, to say nothing of wrecking his or her eyesight? There is an aspiration toward anonymity on the part of Tortoise, and indeed of many of those in the Chicago avant scene, and aspects of that are laudable, I suppose. Maybe the credits on the Standards cover are meant to reinforce that. The anonymous feel extends to the music, as well, but here I appreciate more the collectivity the group achieves. Is it so wrong of me to want to know, in the midst of this, who played that synthesizer riff? Perhaps. In any case, one of Tortoise’s prime virtues is their ability to preserve space, and to avoid fighting greedily over who is going to fill it up. Percussionist John McEntire even describes this virtue in terms of passivity, but also in terms of democracy (Jim DeRogatis, “Tortoise’s John McEntire: Post-Rock’s Sonic Genius,” Modern Drummer, July 2001, p. 90). I would say instead that there is a good deal of active democracy at work in Tortoise’s music, a conscious collectivity that seeks and values the contribution of the other.

Significantly, in the interview cited above, the group that McEntire mentions in connection with Tortoise is Stereolab. (In addition to his superb, understated skills as a percussionist, McEntire is a talented sound engineer; he did some of the work on Microbe Hunters as well as Sound-Dust.) Both groups specialize in repetitive, groovy grooves, rendered sweet by instruments such as vibraphone or Farfisa combo organ, with minute changes over extended periods. This is not Philip Glass minimalism, or even Discipline-era King Crimson incrementalism, but it is not unrelated, either. It’s the Serge Gainsbourg element, that avant-lounge thing. The previous album, Cobra and phases, had electric-Miles leanings; the new one is scaled back by comparison, and might be considered simply a further elaboration of the Stereolab sound. That being said, Microbe Hunters is a fine example of the Lab language. Of course, what they have over anything remotely similar is Laetitia Sadier’s voice, which is also where the wistful element comes in. It would be easy to hear a merely nostalgic quality to not only the voice but also the combo organ, but I think the nostalgia is for what might have been after May 1968. One of my favorite things about Stereolab, therefore, is that they are very much a part of the “it’s a different world now” form of post-sixties rock, and yet they still have that connection.

Always an episodic affair, King Crimson seems more so than ever. In the middle 1990s the group reconvened, with the Discipline formation of Robert Fripp, Adrian Belew, Tony Levin, and Bill Bruford, augmented by touch-guitar player Trey Gunn, and drummer/percussionist Pat Mastelotto. That was a lot of drums and wires (to recall the XTC album title), and the attempted “double-trio” never really jelled, at least in terms of compositions that made use of the possible contrasts. (Concerts were another story, especially in the case of improvisations, as 1996’s THRaKaTTak demonstrated effectively.) On the other side of the expanded Crimson, Bruford and Levin went off to pursue other projects (including their joint effort, BLUE—Bruford Levin Upper Extremities, as well as Bruford’s Earthworks; Levin also toured as the bass player for Seal). Apparently, four is the inevitable number for King Crimson: the Beatles have always been among the hovering spirits with Crimson music. Indeed, the Beatles spirit seems to be asserting itself even more in recent KC history. In the six-member group, the percussionists’ division of labor was supposedly along the lines of Bill Bruford as Buddy Rich and Pat Mastelotto as Ringo Starr—sort of “lead” and “rhythm” drums. Trey Gunn has had to step into the bass role in the ConstruKction group, and, like Paul McCartney (who took up the bass to replace Stu Sutcliffe and because John and George weren’t having any of it), he has emerged as a contrapuntal and timbral innovator. (More on what the “bass role” means in Gunn’s case in a moment.) Meanwhile, something of a “John and Paul” dynamic has developed between Robert Fripp and Adrian Belew. (Is there a shortage of a George Harrison in the group?) Maestro Fripp brings the edge, while Belew adds not only humor and melodicism (though many mistakenly assume that all of the “edgy” guitar solos are Fripp’s, and this is far from the case), but also the occasional silly love song. As with Macca, this latter tendency does sometimes go too far.

However, having seen two performances by the most recent King Crimson in the fall of 2000, it is my view that the ConstruKction formation is the best version of the group since the Larks’ Tongues/Starless/Red period from 1973 to 1974. Furthermore, this group promises to sustain itself and develop over a longer period than most of the other formations. Then again, the King could have withdrawn into another hibernation by the time this book sees the light of day. I hope not. I hope that the present KC keeps going for at least several more years this time. With the Discipline-era band, half of King Crimson’s population was American. Thrak took the proportion to two-thirds, and now the ConstruKction band is at three-quarters—a long, strange trip for a fellow from Bournemouth (Robert Fripp), the remaining English member. I suppose there might be something to be said about the “American leanings” of the recent constitution of the group; there is the connection, through Adrian Belew, to Frank Zappa, someone else on the edge of progressive rock and who would not have accepted the label as regards his own music. Certainly Bill Bruford always looked to America in terms of the jazz that has influenced him so much. But most of all these sorts of logistics are typical in our increasingly globalized world (three of the four core members of Yes live in the United States now, for instance—though I probably wasn’t supposed to mention them in this connection!). Still, it is strange to think of King Crimson convening, as it has for the past several tour preparations, for practices in Nashville, Tennessee.

Speaking of Music City, however, some avant-rock aficionados may be shaking their heads at a discussion of King Crimson at the end of this book. The fact that this group has been convened off and on since 1968, always to push the envelope of rock music, ought to count for something. King Crimson has maintained (with perhaps only a couple of minor lapses that appear all the more insignificant in the larger context) the highest standards of musicianship throughout these decades—and musicianship is not something that is always appreciated in the rock avant-garde. To return to the earlier categories and discussions, King Crimson has dealt with the question of technique through its transcendence—when you have sufficient technique, then it no longer appears as a musical question—and, though the music often leans toward improvisation, there is no shortage on the side of composition. In other words, Crimson has consisted in musicians who can have interesting musical conversations.

Sometime in 2000, Robert Fripp made the observation in his online diary (at the Discipline Global Mobile website) that the latest incarnation of the group is the first one that he would call “King Crimson as rock band.” This after working through various other labels—progressive, art, fusion, heavy metal (actually, no one else called King Crimson this, to my knowledge, but Fripp said something along these lines in the Larks’ Tongues era), and new wave. Well, there was never anything wrong with playing rock—you can be as creative there as anywhere, that’s what groups such as King Crimson show. Still, now we do have King Crimson with two guitars, bass, and drums: no more mellotrons, reeds, violins, piano, double-bass, and so on, and the guitars are always electric ones. Now, it is true that the guitars are running through digital effects that allow them to sound like almost anything, and the fact is that they rarely sound like guitars. My one complaint here is that, except for a clever piano sample that Belew sometimes employs (at the Thrak concert I attended I assumed that Bruford was somehow doing it), there are not only no longer any sounds that have either the bite or the delicacy of acoustic instruments, there is also not that great acoustic/electric contrast that King Crimson (and other progressive rock groups such as Yes, Genesis, and Jethro Tull) used so effectively in the days of yore. (Edward Macan contributed a very interesting discussion of the acoustic/electric contrast, in terms of gender, in his book on English progressive rock, Rocking the Classics.) I think there is more that can be done with this contrast, and it would be nice to see the present KC configuration work with this. For now, they are pursuing a synthesis of sometimes unremitting heaviness, the interwoven fabric of great complexity á la the Discipline era, and then the occasional song, if you can imagine that.

Pat Mastelotto has come forward as what I would call the “Alan White” of King Crimson, and I mean that as the highest compliment. People who know me and my work on Yes know that I hold White in the highest regard. Like Alan White, Mastelotto has no shortage of technique, he comes from a more mainstream rock background, he is following Bill Bruford, and he has risen to the challenge and demonstrated that he has his own creative contribution to make. Pat Mastelotto was previously the drummer for The Rembrandts, famous mainly for providing the theme song for the TV series, Friends. (In the video for the song, Courtney Cox pushes Mastelotto out of the way and takes his place on the drum stool; I suppose that she had the first shot at the Crimson position, but she would have had to have taken a large pay cut.) His drumming is a bit heavier than Bruford’s, as befitting the current direction of the group. Without compromising technique in any way, there is an element of Ringo Starr in what he is doing—and that is also the highest praise in my book.

Trey Gunn came along as a player of the Chapman Stick, a ten-stringed “touch” instrument that had also been played by Tony Levin in the previous two incarnations of the band. As I understand it, Gunn had also been a student in Robert Fripp’s Guitar Craft school, so he may have been something of a protégé. But no more (not that there is anything wrong with being Robert Fripp’s protégé, many of us would give our right arms for that); Gunn’s solo albums show that he has his own musical conceptions, and what he is doing on bass has to be seen to be appreciated. The reason I say that is, in the present KC incarnation, Gunn is playing an instrument that was built specially for him, called the Warr Touch Bass. As with the Chapman Stick, both hands are involved in pressing down on notes, and only rarely is the right hand (in the case of a right-hander, such as Gunn) used for plucking or picking. Gunn’s instrument, like the Stick, has ten strings. I don’t know that the sound of this instrument comes across adequately on the studio recording (or perhaps it is the inadequacy of my stereo); in concert the sound is unreal, and, though obviously this is the bass player in me responding, it is very instructive to see how Gunn actually plays the thing. He is not only very good at playing countermelodies with the rest of the group, his two-handed technique allows him to play at least two independent lines on his own instrument. At the expense of being a little reductive, it is something like having some very deep and heavy pipe-organ pedals as a foundation, with Jaco Pastorius gliding and surging at will on top.

As for the studio album, some of the songs work better than others. For what I think is the first time, King Crimson has included a blues song on one of its albums. It is a thoroughly warped and very Captain Beefheartish blues, devoted to the notion of solving all of life’s worries with Prozac, but still. “Prozac Blues” opens the album. It’s a funny song, but it doesn’t wear that well. (Oh well, a nod to Don and Frank.) I also found the closer, “Coda: I Have a Dream,” to be weak, at least lyrically. (The album also contains an improvisation that follows the last song, attributed to “ProjeKct X.”) In between these two bookends (which are not bad, just not sterling), the construKction of light is a very strong album. The title track represents a further development of the language of interweaving lines that was initiated with Discipline. “FraKctured” and “Larks’ Tongues in Aspic-Part IV” hark back to the Larks’ Tongues period, but bring that music forward through the subsequent Crimson music. “Part IV” is the most successful “Larks’ Tongues” since the first one. “The World’s My Oyster Soup Kitchen Floor Wax Museum” is a more interesting attempt at Zappaesque whimsy. Which leaves “Into the Frying Pan,” the most Beatles-like piece on the album and, in my view, the most successful. The swerving, pitch-modulated vocals, and the insistent, “I Am the Walrus”-like instrumental track, are vertigo-inducing. Indeed, when I played the song for my wife, she insisted that I take it off as she thought it was going to make her physically ill. Of course, I complied but I had to tip my hat to the achievement.

When King Crimson is great, they are often even “more great” in the live context. Heavy ConstruKction is a valuable document in this brief. As a live singer, Adrian Belew has become much stronger in recent years. Highlights of the three-CD live set include the beautiful and melancholy “One Time,” Belew’s amazing acoustic solo performance of “Three of a Perfect Pair,” and numerous improvisations featuring the trio of Fripp, Gunn, and Mastelotto.

Long live the Crimson King. I can only hope that there will be more King Crimson music to be played in this new century, and that there will be a King Crimson to play it.

William Hooker is quietly becoming a major force in the New York avant scene, especially in the company of either the Sonic Youth guitarists Lee Ranaldo and Thurston Moore, or musicians associated with John Zorn. The Distance Between Us is a little bit of a departure, strangely, in that it is a more straightforward jazz record, which all the same includes plenty of free playing, as well as two different arrangements of a Sonic Youth piece. Here Hooker leads a big group, including two saxophones, trumpet, and piano, as well as four different guitar players. Hooker represents the next phase in the progression of drumming in the school of Billy Cobham—jazz chops with a rock sensibility. More often Hooker is recorded in the duo or trio format, the latter being the case on Bouquet. The combination of Hooker with Lee Renaldo on guitar and Christian Marclay on turntables is the most effective of these small-group albums, I think. Personally, I am always interested in seeing new possibilities found for the trio format—perhaps it is the Buckminster Fuller or Hegel influence in me that takes three as the most perfect number (Pythagoras thought it was four), but the trio has the appeal that it is the most minimal form of the “group.” The Bouquet band brings the noise, for sure, but they are most effective when they quiet down a bit. Hooker will remain an important force.

You know that there is an avant-rock scene, with its own scenesters, when a new group appears with the words, “with Jim O’Rourke” added to its name. White Out also includes Lin Culbertson on synthesizer, flute, autoharp, and voice, and Tom Surgal on percussion. About half of drunken little mass (there are a lot of Catholics in Chicago!) was recorded live at two different clubs. My main interest in the album was to hear Jim O’Rourke jamming in a group context on what has become his main instrument in recent years, the laptop computer—Powerbook powertrio! O’Rourke also plays that outmoded box, the guitar, on the album. To be honest, I was expecting a good deal of “click-clack” music, but instead there is a nice sense of flow, especially thanks to Surgal’s jazz chops. He is also good with the gongs. Sometimes I am not sure what is coming from the synthesizer and what from the laptop, but I do think O’Rourke and the group are taking electronic music into a new domain of improvisation. In some sense O’Rourke’s use of the laptop is the latest realization of Brian Eno’s notion of mixing board as musical instrument, except that the library of available sounds is increased practically to infinity, as is the ability to modulate waveforms. As with a good deal of cyberculture, especially of the Wired-magazine variety, there is both a forward-looking, Neuromancer-ish quality to the music, and a 1950s, space-age “zowie!” feel. Meanwhile, the album and song titles are more akin to fifties beat culture. As wide-open as the possibilities are with synthesizer and laptop, it is the presence of the drums and here and there the acoustic guitar that ultimately make the album interesting—not the mere presence, as if these acoustic sounds are some sort of relief, but instead the contrast. This is good avant-chamber rock, and the album shows that there are still many contributions to be made by electro-acoustic music.

But we aren’t done with Jim O’Rourke yet, as he was one of the co-producers and musicians participating in an album that seems almost tailor-made for ending this discussion, Goodbye 20th Century, by Sonic Youth and numerous guests. A two-LP/CD affair, the album features works by major avant-garde composers from the twentieth-century, European avant-garde tradition, including John Cage, Christian Wolff, Yoko Ono, Pauline Oliveros, Steve Reich, and Cornelius Cardew.) One wishes for an additional “goodbye” album that would reprise Sidney Bechet, Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, Thelonius Monk—you get the idea.) For this effort, Sonic Youth is joined by Jim O’Rourke, William Winant, Takehisa Kosugi (who also contributes a composition), Christian Wolff, Coco Hayley Gordon Moore (daughter of Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore), Christian Marclay, and Wharton Tiers. As seems to be the order of the day around rock music these days, avant or otherwise, there is not any information provided regarding who is playing what particular instruments on any given piece. (Experience shows that it is not a good idea to make assumptions here, either. On SYR 3, one might have assumed that Jim O’Rourke was playing guitar or bass, when, in fact, he played drums on much of the album, and Steve Shelley played trumpet.) What we do learn here is that not all of the ensemble plays on every piece. Indeed, Yoko Ono’s “Voice Piece for Soprano,” only twelve seconds long, is performed by Coco Hayley Gordon Moore alone.

All four Sonic Youths, plus Winant and O’Rourke, performed on the three John Cage pieces presented here: two different versions of 1991’s “Six,” as well as a thirty-minute long rendition of “Four6,” from 1992 (the year Cage passed away, just shy of his eightieth birthday). Julian Cowley’s review of the album opens by paying tribute to the composer’s philosophy of possibility:

Arguably, the most important aspect of John Cage’s legacy was not his body of work but the gift of permission he passed down to subsequent generations. Testing his anti-authoritarian stance to the point of paradox Cage assumed cultural authority that permitted musicians who followed him to expand their working definition of music, and enabled non-musicians to reconceive themselves as musicians. Composition as proscription has in his wake been challenged by a sense of music as a basis for community, as an antidote to cynicism, a programme for exploration, or as therapy for mind and body. There have, of course, been challenges from elsewhere, but these have often promoted a particular musical style. Cage and his diverse sympathisers have tended to withhold definition, preferring to open up space which has enables others to act.

Sonic Youth’s farewell to the century effectively says thank you to some of the enablers. (The Wire, New Year 2000, p. 78)

Yes to all of this, but who would have figured that the most fitting tribute to the enablers would come from a rock group? And yet, on the other hand, and despite everything (by which I mainly mean the culture of pap and pabulum), what could be more appropriate? Rock at its best is a music of open-ended possibility. Its avant-garde edge is simply where rock’s ears are most open.

Although it is very hard to choose, probably my favorite pieces on the album are “Six for New Time” by Pauline Oliveros and “Burdocks” by Christian Wolff. The former was actually written for Sonic Youth by the composer, who is best known these days as the leader of the Deep Listening Band. Like Yoko Ono, Oliveros has had to find ways to function in male-dominated scenes; in 1961 she was the co-founder, along with Terry Riley, Morton Subotnik, and Ramon Sender, of the San Francisco Tape Music Center. Like Riley, Oliveros is sometimes associated with the beats, and her instrument in the Deep Listening Band, accordion plus the Expanded Instrument System, is exemplary of her Ginsberg-like preoccupation with breath. “Six for New Time” is also spacious and breathy, though here also with the eighth-note chiming guitars that is a Sonic Youth trademark. Part of the interest in the performance of “Burdocks” is not only the participation of the composer, as well as the whole rest of the assembled cast (excepting Coco), but also the fact that Wolff’s concert premier of the piece almost thirty years before (1971) featured David Behrman, David Tudor, Frederic Rzewski, and Gordon Mumma. Sonic Youth and company give a quite different reading, of course, which is what makes life interesting.

On June 16, 2001, Sonic Youth performed pieces from Goodbye 20th Century at a one-off concert at London’s Royal Festival Hall. They were joined by not only William Winant and Jim O’Rourke, but also John Zorn and Anthony Braxton. Glenn Branca and his trio opened. Sometimes things just come together.

And yet there is an unavoidable fragility to this music of our time, a music and a time when contingency asserts itself as never before—hence the feeling that not only the spirit of Cage is being reprised, but so is existentialism in its numerous dimensions. What’s next? We don’t know, and music now is becoming more about asking rather than presuming to have a definitive answer. Spread out, look, listen.

In the spirit of Cage’s and Tudor’s Indeterminacy, one last story from David Revill’s biography of John Cage:

Cage was also thinking of an opera, the instrumentation of which would include the prepared piano, based on the story of Mila Repa, a “Tibetan saint” who took the form of a thistle and floated over the landscape. He planned to employ the prepared piano, but the book which included the story had been borrowed from the library. By the time it was returned the idea of operatic narrative no longer interested Cage. (p. 103–4)

Surely this particular moment from Cage’s larger aesthetic of freedom is a bit too close to the aesthetic of flippancy that is all too common in our postmodern times. Therefore, let us close instead with a different comment from Cage, as well as one from Brian Eno, cited in a lovely essay by David Toop on the idea of “generative music” (The Wire, May 2001, pp. 39–45). Cage, in his conversations with Joan Retallack (in the book Musicage), refers to the moment in his development “where the process of composing was changed from making choices to asking questions.” Eno refers to a new approach to music that “is like trying to create a seed, as opposed to classical composition, which is like trying to engineer a tree.” Rock music still has the capacity to ask more questions; it will have a future as long as it further develops this capacity.