experimental music second draft

8/2/2019 Experimental Music Second Draft

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Adam Devlin

At exactly nine o'clock, stage lights are extinguished. A hushed, fettered crowd gathers around the

center of the room as a dark figure wearing a hood protrudes from the ground, as if it were being pulled

up slowly by a great invisible hand. All around this mysterious figure are devices and instruments of

indecipherable importance, buzzing patiently and glowing with miniscule lights. The room exudes a

palpable sweat of anticipation. The figure takes their place, and slowly begins to play. An enormous

keyboard - draped with silk scarves and glimmering golden foil - resonates brilliant sound through two

stacks of ten foot speakers on both its sides, shrouding the willing audience in a blanket of ethereal bliss.

This is one idea of what a performance of experimental music might resemble. More often,

however, these ten foot speakers are two foot amplifiers, covered in scuff marks on all edges and

borrowed from a friend (of a friend). The elegant, regal instruments are, instead, a single toy piano,

purchased from a thrift store. And that brilliant golden sound that fills the air? That's the underwhelming

(yet cheerful) plinking melody produced by someone who never learned to play piano, tapping away with

incorrigible enthusiasm. Because, despite all the reasons you might think they oughtn't, they're expressing

themselves in a new and original way. That is what experimental music is about. And in Florida, its

presence is healthy and thriving.

Experimental music, in its broadest terms, is undefinable. Loosely, the term (as a musical concept)

arose in the early-to-mid twentieth century and was used to define a subgroup of musicians and

composers whose works stretched the boundaries of what was normally considered conventional

music. These days, however, the word experimental is a loose term, which can be applied to any

musician, composer, producer, or artist who attempts to create art that is new in some way.

In other words, to have your music labeled experimental, you don't have to do much. Think of

experimental music as a massive umbrella, under which every kind of art-curious bystander and ordinary

citizen can get under. Anyone with an instrument can create experimental music, and even that's not a


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strict requirement. Floridian musicians flock from all around the state to cities like Gainesville, St.

Augustine, and even Tallahassee, to perform at experimental concerts. These are usually hosted at houses

or impromptu DIY community spaces, and often paid for out of pocket by the promoters themselves. The

performers don't appear out of financial interests or careerist prospects, but usually out of genuine love

for their community, and for the chance to be heard. It's a kind of therapy, in a way; anyone is welcome to

play and the only thing the audience will desire from a performer is that they express themselves.

The existence of the experimental scene in Florida is indebted to a tight-knit group of passionate,

expressive performers, of inimitable personality and countless backgrounds. Like many of the other

experimental music groups popular in the United States and abroad, the attitude of the community is

defined by the way those performers treat each other and how they create their music. In Florida, music is

a free forum; a blank canvas for new means of expression. That shows through in the music. Current acts

in Florida range from groups like S.E.X., a two-member performance art group which features a healthy

dose of equal parts saxophone and sexual tension in its arsenal, to improvisational cassette-and-record

player manipulations by Gainesville resident Ironing, to the de facto leader of the Florida cassette tape

movement - Hal McGee, a 3 decade veteran in experimental circles who has over 100 published releases

and countless collaborative efforts put out under his own name. There's also older, more legendary groups

born and raised in Florida, like Dino Felipe, a critically lauded oft-collaborator who has made everything

from experimental noise to post-punk to underground pop music and dance music. On the rock side,

there's the delightfully vulgar Harry Pussy, whose violent, sexually charged noise rock stood as a

testament to the cleansing power of loudness during the mid 90s. And there's the perpetually

underappreciated but always performing Laundry Room Squelchers, whose literally destructive live

sets are as much property damage violations as they are performance art.

Further back, there are strains of popular music deeply devoted to Florida, and to the experimental

scene which boosted them into the spotlight. Take, for example, death metal - an extremely dark, atonal

subgenre of metal music based around death, decay, and impossibly difficult-to-play songs - whose


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strongest ties are to Florida and the metal bands active in the state back in the 1980s. Bands like Death,

some of the very first pioneers of death metal back in 1983, who were formed in Orlando and succeeded

through the onset of the tape-trading craze. This craze was also equally responsible for the creation of

Miami bass, sometimes called booty bass, an offshoot of electro-funk and hip-hop which started

right around the same time that black metal did - probably not in the same room, however (although that

would have made for an interesting sound).

The unique thing about experimental concerts these days is that seeing an immaculate, infectious

hip hop set right next to twenty minutes of barely audible droning or a grown adult in a cardboard robot

costume is entirely a possibility when you attend. Experimental concerts have always been a grab bag of

talents and styles, and the greater the scene has grown in Florida, the more consistently unexpected each

show has been. There are plenty of unskilled performers and noise-happy squelchers, but there's just as

many ambitious musicians and craftsmen, seeking to form a new kind of sound from the ground up.

Experimental music has no rules, but that doesn't mean its practitioners don't occasionally engage in

models of higher composition.

Take Florida artists like Jim Ivy, Kris Gruda, and Jamison Williams, for example. Each are

celebrated and acclaimed performers, with impressive histories of traditional musical education behind

them. Ivy and Williams are trained saxophonists and composers, who have organized and curated

experimental concerts to explore the intricacies of their instruments. Gruda is a multi-instrumentalist and

classically experienced guitarist who teaches jazz and classic rock when he isn't crunching his guitar into

a fury of mind-melting glossolalia. They are also closely tied to the Gainesville experimental collective

Action Research, a group run by Ironing's Andrew Chadwick, which organizes concerts and promotes

local music throughout Florida. Chadwick is an experienced experimental musician, techno composer

and DJ, but also former owner and main operator of the now extinct Boxcar Records, a

rock/alternative/indie label which released music in the mid 90s and early 2000s (he's also one of the

nicest guys you'll ever meet).


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This bizarre crossroads of unskilled and skilled performers results in a judgment-free performance

every time, where amateurs can attempt to hone their craft and professional musicians learn to cut free

from classical constraints to reach new levels of skill. A common practice in modern composition,

called extended technique, has been coined to describe this shedding of traditional ideas about playing,

where skilled musicians create their own individualized language on their instrument. Only they

understand this system, and as they experiment with it more freely, they feed back into it and eventually

develop a unique, complex and wholly new form of playing. Popular proponents of extended technique

include classical composers such as Steve Reich, Derek Bailey, and John Cage, who famously would

attach different objects (pencils, beads, utensils, etc.) to the strings of a piano to produce a new spectrum

of sounds that he dubbed prepared piano.

This idea of an open-ended, free forum for expression is something of an anomaly in the artistic

world, which is sometimes why experimental music gets a bad rap from promoters and other local music

scenes. Traditionally, the western worldview of music the one that we've still hung on to for the past

few hundred years in America, along with carrying over the musical scales and theory of European

classical composition establishes some kind of audience versus performer relationship that is

considered sacred ground. To more reactionary musicians, the only appropriate visitors to a stage are

professionals; people who have perfected their work and are displaying a finished product, with a clear

message and an image. The modern notion of popular music is very rhetorical in this sense musicians

aren't just playing songs and making sound; they have a responsibility to entertain, which means having

stage presence, fitting a mold, and winning an audience over. This has been the case for music performed

in the United States for a majority of recorded music.

The only significant exception to this rule aside from experimental music has been folk music.

Blues and folk have long stood out at the common man's practice for musical expressionism, because

they aspire to feeling and authenticity over musicianship. Now, experimental music has become the

general term for traditionally non-commercial performances and recordings, and it welcomes everything


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from folk and blues to free jazz and pure silence, along with all the different opinions on what music is.

In Florida alone, you can find a plethora of attitudes about music and the relationship between

performer and audience, which fit into no real historical form. Different schools of thought rule these

performances, from pop deconstructionism (rebuilding music from the ground up) to independent/Do-it-

yourself punk aesthetics, and occasionally sheer anti-commercialism a complete detachment from

music as a commodity, music made for the sake of music and staunchly opposed to commercial

success. Some think music is tarnished by popular culture, and are working to recreate it with the same

tools popular bands use, in order to create a new pop, without all the awkward burdens of sales figures

and other irrelevant aspects. Others totally refuse any notions of rhythm or melody at all, and are

extracting a whole new kind of aesthetic out of music, one based around impulse, texture, and sheer

expressionism. There's a million other viewpoints on the spectrum as well, and they're all unique.

In 2009, Hal McGee embarked on a project known as the International Email Audio Art Project.

This mission, inspired by the mail-art collages of the 80s and 90s (interactive, collaborative projects

where artists contribute individual work to a greater piece and share it between one another via snail

mail) set out to catalog and capture glimpses of the experimental music world all across the continents. In

60-second snippets, musicians were asked to send an aural bit of identity to a file which contained up to a

hundred or more equally short works from other musicians across the globe. Once this piece, which could

consist of anything that artist desired, was completed, it was appended to the list and passed on to the

next person. By utilizing the free and open realm of expression that is digital mail, McGee captured,

however brief or eclectic, the spectrum of new musical ideas that are at work in the world. It is my

fondest hope that this project will promote contact, networking, exchange of sounds and ideas, McGee

says, among audio artists all over Planet Earth. The musical communities of Florida are reliant on that

sense of community to thrive and grow.

In Tallahassee, we have seen two venues close recently, which directly affect the way these

communities communicate with one another. The Engine Room and The Farside, both of which whom


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were extremely charitable to local experimental scenes, and whom facilitated hundreds of concerts of all

kinds, were a beacon of the kind of spirit which embodies the experimental community. Now, with a hole

in Tallahassee's DIY and musical venues, we need to rely on the support of that community to stay afloat.

The experimental scene is, unfortunately, not afforded a lot of assistance from the hands of the Florida

government, due to its noncommercial ethos, so the burden falls on the most capable members of the

local culture. Co-ops like Bread & Roses, the Railroad Square volunteer shops, and the (now closed)

Farside are or were nonprofit cultural centers run by our local communities which work solely for the

mutual benefit of its citizens. Local houses and DIY social networking groups work to provide constant,

reliable venues for local and out of town performers; staples of Tallahassee include The Mansion, AF

Haus, The Shark Tank, and countless others which are bound to come and go as their hosts graduate or

move to new locations. On top of that, local shops like Retrofit Records, Avant-Garb, All Saints, and

other Gaines St. institutions contribute to the community and keep the money within it, generating

income for mutual support. In collaboration with Florida State University, Tallahassee Community

College, and Florida A&M University, the artistic district of Tallahassee is working towards being a

cooperative, communally-invested center for alternative culture and arts, without an ulterior motive or

agenda. Likewise, in Gainesville, Jacksonville, St. Augustine, Miami, Orlando, and throughout the state

of Florida, these cultural districts work without alternate intent towards giving back in a variety of ways.

The experimental scene is unique not only because of the music or the freedom offered at concerts for the

performers, but additionally because it is primarily a nonprofit organization, and its only focus is keeping

the music on. If there's anything these swarm of dissenters, intellectuals, and other various irreverent

admirers can agree on, it's that everybody deserves a chance.

experimental music second draft

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