actual influence on Blanche: Lydia Tomkiw & Algebra Suicide https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

actual influence on Blanche: Family Fodder http://youtube.com/watch?v=80a...

mostly though we were influenced by our senses of humor and spirit of protest against square concerns like "influence" that together cast art as a Franken-concoction of intentional evocations & austere considerations & by what our amazing friends in Brattleboro -weren't- doing

the limited reaction Blanche got never failed to mention our "simplicity"... knowing the musicians I do, I wouldn't want to overstate the complexity of the Blanche music. and "complexity" wouldn't be on my imaginary list of Most Important Qualities music might have... that said:

I remember playing Wink With Both Eyes for Jon Appleton right after we'd finished it... he was smiling a lot. he said "play me some of the stuff that's popular right now." we pulled up some Pitchfork playlist & every 4 bars he'd gesticulate like something huge was about to happen

but of course it never did. "they're letting you guys do all the work for them!" I was young and it was meaningful to be included by people like Jon & Blue, musicians I admired, as someone doing something interesting. but I knew I couldn't "do anything good" with that validation

just like I can't "do anything good" with all the méconnaissance in public reactions to Blanche, which were either directly a result of the music journalism bubble that was about to burst, or influenced by it...

art stakes its life outside of discourse, including the artist's. that Duchampian casting of the audience as somehow essential, I can take as true only negatively. what's most vital resists interpretation. the best exegesis would better found a new work than explain an extant one

also it's not like our friends were supportive, or constructively critical of what we were doing. the notion that friends should be or must be supportive of one's art, is asinine and juvenile. anything I've accomplished flies in the faces of my friends... it can't be otherwise!

anyway, the notion that Fiery Furnaces/Stereolab --> Blanche/Fievel can to my mind be rejected as (1) low-level misogyny and (2) "RIYL" thinking inherited from the worst tendencies of internet cataloging/industry PR niceties. sorry, it's just too complex. try playing it. haha ☮️

for both the just-a-listener & practitioner alike, concepts like complexity are unstable because they are necessarily relative. dissonance only exists in contradistinction to consonance, etc...

I was "influenced" early on, before making albums, when I was thinking of poetry as my central thing, by discussions of this in Agamben (on Aristotle), Rabinow (on Dewey), & in negative theology (Berdyaev, Bankei, etc)... which I think led to a general view of art as heuristic.

or "heuristic plus," in the sense that you also hopefully get a beautiful object out of it! but mainly you learn through the experience of shepherding a form into existence that hadn't existed before. & what do you learn about? well, what is there to learn? well, how to live...

much was made of Ariel Pink's methodologies... wonks like Simon Reynolds got publishing contracts trying to dress it up as "hauntology" etc... & then the MFAs came and started retroactively justifying their attempts to become famous indie darlings adorned in sumptuous Theory™️

but I bring up Ariel because, I only just confirmed last week that he was "punching in"... (Chris Weisman still insists he doesn't know what that term means 😂) but it's not like I needed to "know" that... his arc is a perfect example of music-as-heuristic. why? well:

he was proceeding bit by bit, focusing on discrete gestures, on micro detail work, with the gestalt in his peripheral. working like this, you don't have the luxury of pretending to know what you're doing. you're just hammering at a given gesture, then the next...

punch in 1 million times, then boom, suddenly you have something like "I Wanna Be Young," just tremendously complex. for years he didn't even think "I'll play this at a show," it was too hard. it took Kenny Gilmore to help manifest that. which made new things possible heuristic

I'm as impotent as anyone to put words to why certain forms/processes feel replete with life. but at least I've scavenged my own terminology/investigative methods. we should all reject all terms, frames, start over. reject mine! it may... be possible... to learn... how to live ☮️

what a bunch of meandering bullshit, sorry!!!... anyway everyone's "dumb" again now (I like it actually) and it's currently very cool to be rich, etc (the easy answer to "how to live", if you can get and stay there). the world is crumbling, despotic chaos, algorithmic rule, etc

the place of art is now nakedly un-revolutionary... it actually makes those Dimes Square kids kinda cute, confusedly holding the smoking gun of the alt-right, protesting "but but but"... art has always been a mere confection of power. but its heuristic value is HUGE

is this heuristic value a counter-hegemonic value, of revolutionary use? sure, could be, has been before. but not necessarily. could also be really useful for organisms trying to make the most of their limited existence. & I'm not talking about therapeutic value

what we term art is well-poised to teach the practitioner about polyvalence. polyvalences, I guess: of different kinds. starting with: you are you and you also aren't. you willed this material into being and you also didn't. etc revelations about the function of language

these stupid thoughts brought to you by the Epstein-Barr virus and its endlessly hallucinatory archipelago of fevered micro-states