Top 10

For as long as anyone can remember popular criticism has been reduced to making lists of "the best" of a certain genre, year, artist, etc...

I personally have nothing against this, but it seems to be taken a little to liberally by most publications (electronic and otherwise) lately. Pitchforkmedia has a new top ___ list every month, and as history will tell us, overkill devalues the original product (to speak in blatantly capitalistic terms.) So I will never (I hope) release a "top" whatever list of anything, I'll say that I like things, or what I interpret things as, but you won't see a top ten list coming from this face, nope.

The format of the top ten list seems to function in popular culture as a sort of canonization of material. Let's take Pitchfork's top 50 albums of the year lists. They tell readers, from an authoritative source (an authoritative source being anything someone is reading to learn about something new to them, in this case music) "these are the best albums of the year, one must enjoy them." This, I suppose, is what criticism boils down to anyway, the canonization of texts (or documents) but this is such a dumbed down version of criticism that it results in pure drivel. Albums are taken not of someone's own accord, but on someone else's, a so called "authority" and I'm sure this relates to capitalism in it's purest form somehow, I just have to finish thinking through it before I bring that 'round.

To Be Continued...

Ken Jacobs, Sunn O))), Martin Arnold, and Steve Reich

Recently, a re-imagining of culture, and really of semiotics in general, has been much on my mind, by way of various approaches to audio visual representation.


Ken Jacobs
Ken Jacobs is a film maker who, using found footage, shifts the focus and context of the images and brings things, before unnoticed, into plain sight. This includes, but is not limited too:
Backgrounds
Extras
The Physical Screen Itself
and more


Sunn O)))
Sunn O))) is a group, led by Stephan O'Malley, who record for Southern Records. They play excessively long metal songs, in which one chord is frequently sustained for lengthy periods of time. This creates room to explore each chord individually, and takes them out of the traditional context of the metal "riff."


Martin Arnold
Martin Arnold is a filmmaker from Austria (I think, correct me if I'm wrong) who takes small portions of "classic" cannonized films and stretches them in a way, repeating the smallest movements over and over, thereby putting them in a whole new context. (if you have the chance to see a print, please do)



Steve Reich
Steve Reich is an experimental musician and composer, often lumped in (whether fair or not) with the "minimalist" "movement" of the late fifties onward. In the sixties he made several tape loops of speech, which repeated over and over, much as the films of Arnold, but more freely, as if the sentences took on a life of their own.