Could a band be made with the following instruments: guitar, tambourine, harmonica.
And if it could, what limitations would be set upon them, and what new freedoms might they find. There outta be a contest. 2 weeks to get your act together, and the first band to raise $2,000 wins.
Theres a value in driving toward minimalism. Phil Spector has gone to jail and he ought to take his “wall of sound” with him. I have to imagine (and I’ve read nothing on the subject) but spector was emulating the big bands through the kaleidoscope vision of the psycedelic 60’s. It was familiar, it was fresh, it was innovative. But its not anymore, and the idea that bombast equated to value is outdated and old. Let its final death knell be rung by the echo effect on the guitar of Edge. In fact let him please be the last acceptable notion and lets write these Nu-metal clowns off for good.
We go small, and we go simple because at some atomic level all noise has to have some meaning. As long as friction will exist, so too will sound. There’s almost an innate natural element to sound. You can tell when a belt on a car needs to be adjusted from across a parking lot because rubber and metal have a sound. Minimalism in music is primarily the idea that sounds to create noise is missing the point, that no noise is irrelevant, and that all noise can move together, as if forged, to create something. I’ve italicized that simply because I’m personifying sound. Sound cannot remain sound it must become an element of something larger.
If you’ve read my ramblings before, I always talk about musical instruments becoming characters as if in a play. The noise of an instrument becomes a character. In this regard, Phil Spector choose to ignore Shakespeare and embrace Stomp or Blue Man group; all visual bombast, the audio equivalent of the 4th of July, but without the culture, the flags, or Arthur Fielder.
The instruments selected above are for the most part played by hacks, or at least they can be played by hacks. They rise up, not in musty basements from the well watered soil of scale-training, or musical theory but of the gritty street corner notions of money, populism, and what sells. The street musician can tell when sounds great simply by the jingle of loose change in his instruments case, laid open on the sidewalk like a etherized patient.*
What comes from the roots of history and theory seem good, and what comes from money seems corrupted, but the technical always gives way to the techno: that mechanized autometry that sounds soulless. While its corporate origins seem bad, there is to be said in capitalism and music a very human element, as is most things in entertainment. Selling products can be about a fiscal bottom line, selling entertainment (services) is always about the emotion in people.
Their origins are simple and driven by fame and attention but they also make due with the tools at their disposal. Like survivalists in the woods, the novice musician will make a home from tinder wood, and a masterpiece from three notes. They also come to embrace a very technical element, counterpuntal interplay, as if through osmosis or telepathy. The musician that learns in a basement does so through a source of authority, with the implication being that the instructor is inherently correct. Learning to play with an instructor only serves to reinforce this notion when experiencing the styles of musicians out in the world.
But this argument isn’t new. This is the practical versus the academic. Can books beat experience, or tradition over innovation. While the notions discovered in the past aren’t overturned, the very premise of its application to music may begin a new trend not in droll theory but in how we perceive the noises and sounds people put to use. What was once background filler, let be political statement on most conducive theories to the brilliance of actors built from sounds.
*All due credit to T.S. Elliot