by Craig Reynolds
from Basta! v1n2 (Fall 1997)
Isn’t it too bad the void has no ears?
––Raymond Federman
Living outside the new American power centers we are like trees falling in a personless forest, condemned to make of our condition its own meaning. Many who recognize this predicament champion the blue–collar work ethic that paved the road to success for Ani DiFranco and the Goo Goo dolls; but the fact of existing without the reassurance that doing so matters is in and of itself significant––possibly even revolutionary. In Buffalo, where silence reigns even at the apex of the downtown workday, we are ennobled by the awareness that no matter what we do, silence remains (even when burying one’s head in the loudest of guitar rock symphonies) and speaking into the void is the best we can hope for . . .
ANI DIFRANCO & JONATHAN RICHMOND: CONFRONTING WITH QUIETUDE
When I first got my copy of Ani DiFranco’s Living in Clip, I immediately scanned to “Amazing Grace” and “Both Hands,” the 2 numbers recorded during opening ceremonies for Buffalo’s Marine Midland Arena––to hear how the experience of being there had crystallized on the plane of musical fiction. But as the first strains of “Amazing Grace” whistled into the room, what struck me was not that the occasion I had experienced in person had jelled magically in the transfer onto disc, but that the gaps into which that night ultimately sank had widened, or simply could never be filled.
It wasn’t that Ani was anything but great, but what the 2 songs on Living in Clip evoked in me was the overwhelming sense that Ani DiFranco, one of the few musicians/singers/songwriters today who can justifiably claim “relevance” by any definition of the word, had ceased to matter.
And in her conscious decision to do so, she memorialized the useless beauty of the creative individual (thereby engaging the overwhelming silence that greets even the loudest of voices).
When I listen to the Buffalo–derived songs on the 2–CD collection, I hear the silence of total indifference that greeted her appearance that evening. To be sure, the $50+ price tag meant that most Ani fans were unable to get in the front door, and even those who did were always over there . . . present only in the occasional howl or whistle braved against the silence of the imposing arena.
Brilliantly, Ani’s choice of songs seemed to embrace this silence and incorporate it into the performance.
“Amazing Grace,” as documented on Living in Clip, begins in nothing, braves an accapella statement of theme, and finally, struggles against its own echo with the help of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, which dances into indifference on its tippy–toes.
“Both hands”––the first song Ani played that night (if I remember correctly)––embraces silence even more directly. At its start, Ani assaults the symphonic rendering of the song’s melody with a brisk guitar chord, brushing away the phony pomp. In so doing, she manages to clear a space for herself––where she sings anyway, knowing full well that the futility of doing so is its own justification (isn’t the desperation of having nothing upon which to fall back the desired condition?), and speaking into the void is the best we can hope for.
At the time, the song’s stark, staccato chops, mixed with Ani’s unusually fragile vocals, seemed like a startlingly non–engaging way to engage the overwhelming space. I expected something large, the Ani equivalent of the rock star spectacle usually utilized to overcome such Promethean emptiness . . . but playing in that fashion would be too easy, if only because it’s the easiest thing in the world to be a rock star. Instead, as the discontent of bored hockey–fans grew increasingly apparent (“if I wanted to listen to Tanya Tucker, I’d go put the tape on in my car!” I heard one guy threaten, raising the level of absurdity a notch or 12 higher), Ani dove headlong into silence, reclaiming the freedom to emerge from it that precedes every musical breakthrough.
With her choice of songs that night, Ani preceded the dialogue she usually enjoys with fans and detractors alike (as essential as her fan loop is, the ability to speak in one ear, whether it sails out the other ear or not, is the most important thing), speaking in a new way into the building’s massive space like the air between clasped hands. Not only does the first strummed chord in “Both Hands” brush away its own accompaniment, it brushes away the audience, who was all too willing to retreat into a state of total detachment from the entertainment they had paid top–dollar to enjoy.
* * *
A few months later, immediately after seeing Soul Coughing at The Ogden Street Concert Hall, where, coincidentally, I recall seeing Ani DiFranco bopping around in the midst of the throng in front of the stage, I caught Jonathan Richmond for $2 at Star Bar. $2 was an amazing, unbeatable price for a performer of his pedigree, although I arrived too late to receive the full benefit of my cover: a handshake and a personal greeting from Mr. Richmond at the door––
By the time I arrived, he was already deep into his performance, although we didn’t know it for another 5 minutes or so. The room was packed shoulder to shoulder, and the music emanated so quietly from the stage that the bullshit banter, clinking glasses and moans of annoyance that clamored around us nearly succeeded in erasing Richmond from the show we were presumably all there to see––by Richmond's choice perhaps?
Like a somnambulist driven from the pit of non–existence, Richmond played on, a bizarre rock pantomime like the image of a hand stenciled in negative against a cloud of black spray–paint. Although you couldn’t hear him, you couldn’t help but be mesmerized anyway––by his stage manners, which were as fluid and poetic as a silent movie: fey, ballerina–esque gestures of such absolute ephemerality that it seemed as if he might, at any moment, fade into the spotlights, never to be seen or heard from again. I was absolutely enthralled. In the midst of a few songs, Richmond went so far as to remove his guitar from his shoulder and lay it on the ground, thus freeing up his arms for the slow dance of elbows by which he punctuated his dainty little dream songs, and the drummer (his only accompaniment) continued swinging along lazily to the sweet sounds of silence. I couldn’t believe what I wasn’t hearing! How long has it been since the essential architecture of rock theatrics has been challenged in any significant way? I was more impressed with what I wasn’t hearing than almost anything I’ve heard in years!
As Ani had done at the MMA, Jonathan Richmond’s muted performance turned the audience’s demand for noise against itself, brilliantly rebounding the inherent, one–sided absurdity of performing for an audience ... back at that audience, which was forced to react ... and the confused response was equally interesting. At one point, a particularly obnoxious heckle escaped from the back of the crowd––“we can’t fucking hear you!”––to which Richmond responded elegantly: “I could hear you and you’re the same distance from me as I am from you . . . and we have amps, so if you can’t hear me, that’s not my problem!”
It was an absolutely brilliant response consistent with the paradigmatic shift in the audience–performer relationship it signaled. At this juncture in the ongoing history of popular music, volume is as stifling a performance cliché as the laser light show or the revolving drum kit, an easy fix in lieu of content in lyric, conscious social positioning or a defined musical direction. It used to be that volume engaged all these issues; when Pete Townshend worked his amps to the point of exhaustion––in the service of pure noise and volume––he conjured the power to scare, intimidate and bully everyone whoever gazed in awe at his freakishly monumental nose––in the name of youth, useless and rude––and then proceeded to deconstruct his own authenticity through abandonment to self–abstraction. Noise was a medium, an artist’s material chosen for its rough textures, its indeterminate harmonies.
Since the mid–sixties, the concepts of self–destruction, noise and volume have been well developed, but few bands seem interested in exploring the silence that succeeds the clichéd crash, perhaps because the rock audience today is as conservative as the old men in whose ears Townshend’s power–chords rattled like an apocalypse. When confronted with subtlety, gesture and silence, the impatient audience at Star Bar didn’t know what to do and reacted both typically and a–typically at once––by producing the expected, required, conventional noise itself, which only cast Richmond’s “anti–material” in greater relief.
To confront the audience with quietude!––it is the greatest punk gesture I for one have ever experienced, infinitely more upsetting than the cold recitation of “buzz–saw” power–chords most punk bands rely upon. While it advertises dissatisfaction, punk rock in late 1997 fails to acknowledge the particular conditions of what’s going on both inside and outside the world of music, the shift in hierarchical power from the silent (‘50s, ‘60s), for whom rock was a virus, to the loud (‘70s, ‘80s, ‘90s), for whom rock is as official as a backyard barbecue in black socks and plaid Bermuda shorts.
As a teenager obsessed with the Velvet Underground, Jonathan Richmond prayed at the altar of volume, but has since turned that whole experience inside out, challenging the imbalance of power that the institution of rock ultimately perpetuates. By embracing noiselessness, the silent performer becomes like a peacenik who goes limp in the arms of billy club–wielding police officers––totally aloof from the machinery against which he rails.
At Star Bar, Richmond offered the audience nothing and received nothing in return (like Ani DiFranco at the MMA). Facing an audience unwilling to move to be moved, he chose to steer clear of the machinery of power altogether, ceasing to matter! Not only did this set him free to gesture his way into a highly–nuanced, subtle form of performance, it liberated those members of the audience who were hip to his detachment. By dismantling the machine that heralds the rock experience as a manner of transcendence, Richmond challenged the escapist tendencies of the rock–n–roll lifestyle that keeps youth in comfortable shackles. Like Richmond on stage, those who danced and sang along to his performance did so alone, free from the herd, free from the conditioning invitation of the beckoning performer, and in silence, free from song itself. By confronting the club cliche, Richmond regained the moment that precedes music, the freedom to reject lost in the experience of having to listen, where the implication is submit or be subdued.
PERFORMANCE AS PRIVILEGED SPACE: AUDIENCE–SNAPCASE
To be sure, there was a time when silence was not the only alternative.
I remember seeing Snapcase at what was then Blind Mellon’s, an ‘80s holdover bighair bar wholly at odds with the ethos, style and substance of hardcore punk music––but the contrast only helped define the incredible shift in lifestyle that punk and alternative shows represented to many of us at that time. I remember the waitresses at Blind Mellon’s, who used to parade through hordes of androgynous hipster kids wearing tight, tiny blouses knotted just above their belly–buttons (two moons rising from the V of their open collars as obvious as these alternative kids’ bell–bottoms were ironic), Daisy Dukes and cowboy boots––hot to entice those among us old enough to toy with their test–tube shots . . . but I was too busy digging these incredible, skinny, faggy, flighty, ironic, romantic t–shirt kids who seemed to have a point and a context with which to make itl, which is more than I could boast when I was their age––
And I remember Blind Mellon’s usual patrons, some of whom would arrive before the all–ages portion of the evening had concluded. They would sit at the bar––men in long duster jackets and black cowboy hats ala Bon Jovi 1987, women dressed more or less like the waitresses, stroking their boyfriends’ long moussed up hair––as they scowled at the freaky kids moping around mysteriously on their dance floor.
As for the freaks, I used to see many of the same faces at every show, which proffered a great sense of community and power, especially when the band on stage was somebody like Snapcase, whose music was loud enough to fill the gaps in the community's mumble of revolt. There was a strange stir of sexual indeterminacy about that community as well, which had to do probably with a strange stir of sexual indeterminacy among its members, but also the fact that a lot of these kids were innocent in a lot of ways about a lot of things. Even more importantly, I think, was the fact that they were there in the first place due to a general reluctance to do things the right way, which always occasions the stirring indeterminacy of being free, the weird sense of, “we’re here, now what are we gonna do?”
One extraordinary thing about a Snapcase show was that this experience of existential indeterminacy was embodied in the performance itself. As the band set up, kids were scattered all over the stage––sitting on amps, crouched on the floor, loafing around like dumb–ass teenagers fried by television and video games, staring off into space, helping the band prepare. Whereas at most shows the kids arrive and passively ready themselves to be led out of their lives and into the pocketbooks of the band and its record company, the Snapcase audience was itself the means for transcendence, and when Snapcase ripped into its first song, the audience became even more central to the experience: kids in the front of the crowd jumped immediately on stage, jumped off stage, snatched the microphone, yelled something or other into it as loud as possible before losing it to another fan, ran around the stage, crashed into some other guys doing the same thing, dove off the stage and onto some guy’s head, who responded––like a tipped domino determined to destroy the whole pattern––by jumping up onstage and doing the same to somebody else. Absolute hysteria reigned in the mosh pit; the band simply stirred the chaos that eventually enveloped them (and justified them). I think I heard the vocalist sing actually only about 30% of the lyrics; the rest were shouted by various audience members handed the microphone out of the blue or who just grabbed it and went.
Offering these kids the microphone was like saying, “you’re free, now what are you gonna do about it?”––and the answer was more often than not a kind of wild, ecstatic dance free from style, free from rhythm, free from expression, free from meaning, free from sex, free from religion, free from politics, free from gender, free from collectivity, free from individuality, free from education, free from rhetoric, free from poverty, free from elegance, free from poetry, free from ineptitude, free from beauty, free from ugliness, free from pain, free from joy, free from embarrassment, free from music, free from bored youth, free from boring old age, free from food, free from meat, free from romance, free from sentimentality, free from hunger, free from jealousy, free from shame, free from community, free from fraternity, free from camaraderie, free from parents, free from Buffalo, free from Williamsville, free from Cheektowaga, free from Tonawanda, free from Kenmore, free from aloneness––and ultimately, free from one’s own aloofness––because everything means nothing!
When a kid jumped up onto the stage, grabbed the microphone, screamed a few lines, danced around as in pagan ritual, the effect was to paradoxically embrace all these issues while simultaneously rejecting them, to act without acting, to not–act by acting, to say something and nothing at once, to engage religion, politics, sexuality––without generating a new religion, politics or sexuality. A paradoxical transcendence emerged from these types of shows. Like self-immolating Buddhist monks, the mosh pit was a privileged space where kids could engage in a kind of existential, ontic authenticity that was certainly healthy but necessarily violent. The mosh pit was a space of privileged meaninglessness; bands like Snapcase knew this, and built it into their performances even when making impassioned political or social statements. Of course, when the jocks found out about mosh pits, and saw in the controlled melees breaking out in front of stages everywhere a means to extend the football season through the winter, the scene was no longer about nothing, it was about testosterone, misogyny and most importantly, the exertion of power over others, which effectively ruined the mosh pit experience (depriving us of a worthwhile celebration of nothing).
THE DESCENT INTO SILENCE: COPPER, TUGBOAT ANNIE, MILF
Between the winter in which I saw Snapcase and the the start of the summer 1995, the Buffalo music scene reached a crescendo that faded before many people had the opportunity to experience it. Besides Snapcase, who managed to build a following that spanned continents, Copper--who, incidentally, celebrated the release of their CD Drag Queen by opening for Snapcase that night at Blind Milleon's--was garnering a sizable following particularly in New York City, where their brand of Morrissey–inspired garage hardcore (featuring a scorching female voice) provided welcome relief to most of the usual, testosterone–heavy hardcore; Tugboat Annie, whose single “Jackknife” was in rotation on the Planet (101.1 FM), released one of the best, most fully–realized local albums ever; and Milf, one of the area’s only bands to succeed in taking risks musically, released “Antidote,” an album whose brilliance ironically memorialized the death of a relatively animated scene.
It wasn’t until I saw Copper in a New York City club that I realized the extent to which the group really mattered. That night, Copper crystalized into the kind of band that I would pay to see whether they were from Buffalo or not; they had reached a turning–point, and were growing into their own originality in a way that set them apart.
Due to inner turmoil, Copper didn’t last through the following summer.
The next to go was Milf. Distributed nationally by Caroline Records, Antidote garnered rave reviews all over the place, in numerous national magazines––and rightly it should have: the album abounds with heavily–layered, harmonically–complex textures, unusual song–structures, and boasts the marriage of big–guitar theatrics and punk rock understatement. Every song on that album is absolutely fucking brilliantly written and conceived and masterly performed. I figured it would be their breakthrough in indie circles and the reviews I read seemed to confirm that it could have been.
I saw Milf perform songs from the album above Mr. Goodbar in June that year. The show, in its tattered glory, its stunted brilliance, was a little Buffalo version of the Sex Pistols’ self–destruction on stage at San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom in 1978.
When not-beginning was no longer an option, the lock ticked forward and the band stumbled up to its instruments, made a lot of noise, stumbled out of its song or just let them end, and the clock ticked again, so we knew it was over.
The audience of disaffected hipsters scattered around the room, draped over beat up couches and arm–chairs, hanging in doorways, staring out the window as if the activity on Elmwood Avenue was truly buzzing, was the lazy opposite of the Snapcase crowd. Whereas Snapcase provided a stage for its fans to matter, Milf stumbled out of the spotlight and into the crowd, where they played music as if they were the ones hanging around lazily watching the music, drinking coffee and dragging on cigarettes. The band was brilliant, of course, but the line between brilliant and boring was totally erased. The people I went with moved out into the hallway where they could talk undistracted and others in the audience did the same. Before our eyes, Milf seemed to disintegrate into casual flip hipsterism. They just didn’t give a fuck one way or the other––about anything . . . about the audience, about the spectacle, about the release of their own minor–masterpiece, about their own talent as musicians. Song after song disintegrated before it was actually performed; numbers didn’t begin so much as unfold, their conclusions signaled only by the hum of indeterminacy and the buzz of soundless amps. It was beyond Milf to wrap things up neatly, to exhibit any pretense to polish, and the experience of watching them fuck everything up was glorious and infuriarating all at once.
Soon the set was over and the band dissipated into the night. The singer moved to Florida, the bass player relocated to Washington D.C. and the drummer sank into the obscurity from which the band had just barely emerged. By the end of the summer, Tugboat Annie had moved to Boston, leaving The South Loft Scene without a loft and without a scene. Ironically, at the moment of peak relevance, Buffalo proffered silence from the indie front––and this at a time when the Goo Goo Dolls had the number 1 single in the country, Ani DiFranco’s Not A Pretty Girl was topping the college charts and Natalie Merchant’s face appeared on VH1 every hour on the hour. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. We tossed the city in the river but it failed to float, so we all ended up in eternity.
MORTON FELDMAN: DISPLACING THE ALTERNATIVE
Now, as the second coming of punk defers to its inevitable third coming, and those of us unwilling to repeat the words we just finished uttering retreat into silence, the time has come to revisit the quiet anarchy of the largely soundless compositions of Morton Feldman, who served as Distinguished Professor of Music and Edgar Varese Chair at the University at Buffalo until his death in the mid–80s.
Transcending John Cage’s withdrawal from his own pieces, Feldman’s work utilizes silence in order to liberate sound from the mandate for sound, manifesting a kind of free–floating musical continuum capable of marrying something and nothing in a single phrase. As Peter Niklas Wilson writes in the liner notes to the Ensemble Avantgarde’s performances of Feldman’s tributes to his New York painter friends (“For Franz Kline,” “For Frank O’Hara,” “De Kooning,” and “Piano Piece to Philip Guston”): “Composition means defining sound space, and this is done just as much with the ‘black’ of the notes as, ex negativo, with the ‘white’ silence, the absence of sound. In its reduction of sound elements, its new balance of sound and not–sound, Feldman’s music attains the magical, floating quality that the composer admired in the early––nonfigurative––paintings of his painter–friend Philip Guston (1913–80): the complete absence of gravity of a painting that is not confined to a painting space but rather existing somewhere in the space between the canvas and ourselves, as Feldman once wrote.”
Feldman’s music achieves non–music through sound, combining the negative posture exhibited in Cage’s Zen–attitude with the composer’s innate ability and desire to project forward into music. As a point of creative orientation, Feldman’s method frees the composer from both sound and silence, as well as the audience’s need to be engaged (some compositions take 4 to 6 hours to perform, for example), anticipating and encompassing the issues that made my Ani DiFranco, Jonathan Richmond and Snapcase experiences so stimulating. As a figurehead for the world–renowned Buffalo avant–garde, I don’t know why Morton Feldman’s name is not on the lips of every budding music guy talking shop on the streets. Although many people simply cannot/will not hear him, he is one of the 2 or 3 true godfathers of the Buffalo independent music scene, and should be viewed as such. After all, the only thing more constrictive than a power chord is the need to hear a power chord, which is why the rediscovery of Morton Feldman’s music is both refreshing and imperative.
What’s more, Feldman’s method mirrors the collapse of absolutes we experience every day but without trading old realities for new (as does a punk rocker rehashing old chords characteristic of last year’s rebellion). As Herman Sabbe writes in “The Feldman Paradoxes” (collected by Thomas DeLio in The Music of Morton Feldman): “Feldman’s music, in deconstructionist terms, is composed of no recurring, no irreversible significations; it is composed of ‘modulations,’ differences which are not oppositions but shiftings, ongoing dis–placements, de–centerings, un–fixings: a chain of differences, not a system of (reciprocally related) oppositions of fixed, constituted, essentialised meanings [. . .] More often than not, these shiftings consist of the proposal of (half denied) similarities which are like puns: homologues, homophones, homonyms, homographs [. . .] The chain of differences is, in principle, unending. This also tends to throw light on two of the most extraordinary, even baffling characteristics of the later Feldman works and aesthetics; their ever extending, seemingly exorbitant duration, and the ever decreasing definition and lessening recognition of single works as separate entities. The 6–hour quartet is but an excerpt––albeit an exemplary one––of that ongoing, illimited chain of signifying differences. And just as there are no isolated signs that uniformly correspond to irrevocably definite signified meanings, there is no isolated Work Identity, no perfect, delineated synchrony of definite related meanings as set apart from the unending diachrony of meaning (de–)formation.”
In this way, Feldman’s work potentially dispenses with the audience, the completeness of the traditional work of art, and the system of meanings those works mirror and ultimately reinforce––without necessarily embracing other alternative or compensatory meanings. Like the speaker of Yeats’s “The Gyres”––who cries What matter a greater, more gracious time has gone?––Feldman seems willing to let all possibilities play out in time.
Significantly, his reluctance to embrace other realities applies even to the systematic unwillingness embraced by Cage in his work, as Feldman writes in an essay entitled, “The Anxiety of Art”: “My only argument with Cage, and there is only one argument, is with his dictum that, ‘Process should imitate nature in its manner of operation.’ Or, as he put it on another occasion, ‘Everything is music.’ [. . .] Just as there is an implied decision in a precise and selective art, there is an equally implied decision in allowing everything to be art. There is a Zen riddle that replies to its own question. ‘Does a dog have the Buddha nature?’ the riddle asks. ‘Answer either way and you lose your own Buddha nature.’ [. . .] Faced with a mystery about divinity, according to the riddle, we must always hover, uncertain, between the two possible answers. Never, on pain of losing our own divinity, are we allowed to decide. My quarrel with Cage is that he decided. A brilliant student of Zen, he has somehow missed this subtle point.”
In this way, Feldman recognizes silence but does not submit to it, as Sabbe writes: “Unlike Cage, Feldman does not replace the metaphysics of God, Freedom, the Will, the Universe, etc. . . . with another metaphysics, i.e. the metaphysics of ‘transcendental positivism.’ [. . .] Unlike Cage, Feldman, who, like Cage, has replaced man as a creature of nature in nature, does not leave him there in tutelage, powerless, condemned to utter silence; he has also given him a new responsibility and thus restored him to a new dignity.” In Buffalo, where silence reigns even at the apex of the downtown workday, it is this dignity that each citizen has inherited, this responsibility that each artist must accept. Now is the time to break free from the silence in a way that can't be confused for rejecting it, but unfolds from it (like life from death)––into an alter–existence at the nexus of sound and silence, something and nothing, being and becoming . . . since silence remains, even when burying one’s head in the loudest of guitar rock symphonies (or the deafening cacophony of newspapers, television, and radio voices). The Buffalo Philharmonic exists to prove this: every note it sounds contains an implicit vacancy that threatens to devour its existence altogether. With each new season, music itself teeters on the brink of extinction, but why shouldn’t it? Existence is dangerous. Each new step is as empty as the first . . . but Cage’s 3’44” can’t be the last word––if anything (as Feldman teaches us), it’s the first word! The absence from which all life springs, the silence that engulfs us, is cause for celebration. In Buffalo, every day above ground is a good day. With Feldman as our forefather, every blank day should be cause for invention, celebration and surprise.