On the Guitar

As an improvising sound artist, I was recently asked in an interview for a French magazine why I stuck to old hat stuff like playing the guitar, why I didnt radicalise my practice and get a sampler or something? I controlled my rage and politely expressed my disbelief that new technologies have rendered musical instruments anachronistic. I personally dont subscribe to any such notion.

While digital technology, sampling, and so on, may have broadened the tools with which we can make music, or noise - they have not abolished anything. The guitar, like the koto, the mbira, the bullroarer and the putaatara, is a perfectly legitimate tool for making music, or creating sound art or whatever you care to call it. In addition, the guitar comes pre-loaded with a lot of extra-musical cultural significance. The fun is in the doing of something unthought-of with what the French interviewer correctly described as an over-determined instrument. I find that this aesthetic vandalism creates cultural resonances one can work with; the image of Jimmi Hendrix as phallic marauder can be invested with other contradictory content, while still referring to the archetype. This sort of game is not by any means played out, so long as it is not the central reason for the activity, but rather informs or provides a commentary on the central activity - which in my case is the attempt to say something from the self itself

For me the guitar still has endless possibilities, especially once the tyranny of the song is overturned. Freed from the need to produce any sounds resembling traditional harmonies, melodies, chords, or rhythms, freed from the expectation of performing within the limits of what is conventionally regarded as music, one is able to interact with the guitar in a way that realises its true potential as an amplified plank with resonating strings attached. If the goal is merely to wring a sound out of the wood, metal and plastic - preferably a sound youve never heard before - then the rules of the game change completely, and ones interaction with the object can become considerably more spontaneous. As a corollary to this, in performance such extended technique (or weird shit) on the guitar may appear so disconcerting to the audience, that will upset their ideas of what the experience of watching someone play the guitar might consist of. Using the guitar purely as a noisemaker has the effect of gutting the troubadour archetype of the guy with the guitar. The bits of the archetype are still there, the rebel (actor), the guitar (signifying object), the stage (context) but put together in the wrong order. This defeats the learnt expectations of the audience, most of whom will be lazy listeners merely looking to have repeated back to them the form of cultural experience they have already had and crave again in a sort of blanket-hugging atavism. Once this disjuncture has been effected, and the audience have been thrown into a state of doubt, one can enter the gap of opportunity and present them with something to which they will actually really have to listen. The guitar as loaded cultural signifier is vital to this process, its abuse is the jemmy-bar that opens the window of opportunity to admit the unwelcome shock of the new.

In terms of the guitar the possibilities are truly endless, once one accepts a free praxis of hardware. On the one hand one can move towards a prepared guitar form of practice. I have a guitar that has screws set in the fretboard to interfere with the strings and certain frets pulled out, thus preventing it from being tuned and played conventionally. One can also take a leaf from the conservatory-trained avant-garde, and pick arbitrary combinations of strings and then restring the guitar, perhaps while playing the same pieces or routines, in order to see what eventuates. Or one might use the resulting new tonal terrain to move into an entirely new practice of subject/object interaction. Self-defeating strategies are central to my method of work, this being the practical realisation of the aleatoric principle bequeathed by John Cage. The main thing is to keep surprising oneself, as well as the audience, in that way every performance involves giving the utmost to the audience, or nothing at all.

Running alongside the freedom resulting from adopting an undetermined strategy towards the guitar as sound-maker, which we may characterise as the freedom to; is its inverse. This freedom from is the discipline of freedom within arbitrarily-chosen limits, the self-limiting freedom from distracting faux-choice between this instrument and that, or between this sampled sound source and that. Having made, or had made for one the choice of the electric guitar over other potential contenders in instrumentation, certain parameters of sound are set. While the guitar can, in the right hands, make a universe of noise, it cannot take the sounds of a Hammond organ and reproduce them at will in any octave, it cannot reproduce recognisable human speech, and it cannot perform cut-up operations on pre-recorded pieces of music. On the other hand, as we observed above, it comes pre-loaded with cultural signifiers of various sorts, which can, if strategically employed, provide considerable munitions for the struggle to establish an artistic praxis of one sort or another. In this way the over-determination of the guitar can be transformed from a perceived weakness to an actual strength.

The French interviewer also referred to the negative image of the guitar, by which perhaps he was referring to the hang-over from the tedious rockism polemics conducted in the English popular music papers in the 1980s. It may be that indifference to this comes easily to one confined to such a provincial backwater as New Zealand, but I have a far from negative image of the guitar, despite being only too well aware of the gender baggage with which the guitar is loaded. Here in the 70s the guitar was everything in popular music, as I guess it was elsewhere. Once I had started listening to punk rock at secondary school I found that it was actually the sound of guitars that made me get excited, more than anything else about the music. Not the melody, or the chords, but the sound of over-amplified steel strings reverberating in front of a speaker cone. This adolescent epiphany still informs what I do; a touchstone I share with many other artists of my generation. For me the guitar is a totem; my efforts with the guitar underpin every piece of sound praxis I attempt in an artistic sense. I have the courage to experiment with other things, when I have the urge to do so, because I am anchored in this guitar thing. Some may say that this enthusiasm for the guitar marks me out as a hopeless reactionary. I, however, dont feel that the means by which one expresses oneself can be taken in isolation from a social/cultural context. I believe that it is what your spirit is saying that is most important, and the form this expression takes is to an extent secondary. For me the form - electric guitar music - is an historical accident, in a way it was a choice made for me, I have just gone along with fates game in becoming a guitarist. The real trick is to express something inherent to myself, and uniquely of myself, in this more or less arbitrarily chosen activity.

Technical limitations in terms of guitar playing can be a positive advantage in the creation of a genuinely alternative vocabulary for the electric guitar. To be technically limited in the traditional sense, can be combined with developing aptitude at an extended and idiosyncratic form of technique, that is predicated on rather different strategies from those of most players. If, as discussed above, one works with the guitar as a signal generator, and as a noise-maker in the acoustic sense, there is much that can be achieved with a complete ignorance of musical theory, notation and conventional aesthetics. I myself am not much interested in the specific frequencies and harmonics of the sound, or even making them predictable or explicable. My interest is in textures of noise, and juxtapositions that are often outside the vocabulary of real music. As stated earlier, the use of modifications to the guitar, and of tools and implements, can enable one to expand the palette of sound to a very considerable degree. This realm of freedom can be further expanded through the use of unreliable electronics to produce unplanned effects, and the use of generally shitty gear to ensure that therell be plenty of surprises in the ensuing racket. Breakdowns are thus part of the process of creation, which moves immediately to a point where mistakes are prima facie impossible, without once passing Go or soiling ones hands with fiduciary instruments. The key is to learn how to turn the unexpected to ones advantage, and keep fluent the expression of that which is within, which is the sine qua non of the artistic project.

If such practice can be described as insufficiently radical, as the French avocat du diable suggested might be the case, then these categories quite simply need to be re-evaluated. That interviewer also made a point concerning distortion, implying that since this amounts to using electronics, one could perhaps get rid of the guitar altogether. But the fact is, when playing an electric guitar qua electric, why not use effects? Im not Andre Segovia. The electric guitar is an entirely different instrument to the classical guitar, they really shouldnt even share a noun. The fact is, my instrument is actually my amplifier, the guitar is merely an aerial that picks up signals. Lately, when the mood takes me, I often unplug the guitar in performance, and just use the end of the lead on the body of the amplifier to play a solo. The real attraction of the guitar for me (as instrument qua instrument, apart from the cultural baggage alluded to earlier) is that it is a resonating object. Unlike the case with a keyboard or a sampler, where you just push buttons, with a guitar you have wood, metal, strings, wires and pickups. If you hit a string hard, it sounds different than when you hit it softly. If you hit it with an object, it sounds different again. If you smack the body of the guitar with a hammer while moving a five-pound flat-iron up the strings, it sounds different again, both at the instant you hit it, and for quite some time thereafter, in a dialectic of truly electro-acoustic attack and decay. Further, the pickup is a microphone that generates an electric signal, that too can be the subject of interventions. It changes depending on the signal path (effects) and relationship to the speaker (feedback). The electric guitar is a very sensual instrument, any movement can set it going. To say the guitar is dead because techno music is fashionable is at bottom a very lazy way to think. The art analogy would be to say that painting is dead because installation art is fashionable. On the contrary I dont think painting is dead either, or philosophy, for that matter. The true consequence of such a new development in cultural practice is that one can invest existing forms with a deepened significance by referring to practice in other areas. Only in this syncretising dialectic do we see the arising of a genuinely new thesis. If I am one of the few guitarists that will play with a flat-iron, that only goes to prove my point; that the limitation is not of the instrument, but of the instrumentalist, and his or her willingness to situate themselves in a realm of practical freedom.

The art world has proved adept in the last century at making more and more people ask global questions, such as what is this art?. Not merely petty discriminatory questions such as four stars or five?, but fundamental questions of quality that examine the most basic issues relating to artistic practice. In music, these global questions have tended to be asked too often only in small academic coteries, or by sub-cultures involved in the collective exploration of outside music. More people need to be asking questions like what is this performance? or what is this music?.

Once they do this they can ask even larger questions such as...

what is this noise?

and...

what is this silence?

It is on this kind of basis that we can begin to adopt a practical1 attitude to sound art of whatever description. Only in this way can we overcome the current counter-productive over-distinctions relating to music, art and noise.

Therefore we invite talented and audacious young musicians to observe all noises attentively ... This will give them not only the understanding of but also the passion and the taste for noises. Our multiplied sensibility, having been conquered by futurist eyes, will finally have some futurist ears... [and] every workshop will become an intoxicating orchestra of noises.2

Bruce Russell

Lyttelton, NZ

July 2000

1. cf. the eighth of Karl Marxs Theses on Feuerbach... All social life is essentially practical. All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice (1845).

2. from the eighth conclusion of Luigi Russolos: Futurist Manifesto (1913).