User:Niek Hilkmann/Reading, Writing & Research Methodologies 2012/2013/Reading, Writing & Research Methodologies 2012/2013
Some descriptions
Resurrection of the genius was an installation-piece consisting of a variety of audio-visual equipment connected through different pieces of audio- and video wire. A composition of around eight minutes was manipulated and distorted through the equipment and its features. The audio-piece itself consisted of three parts: industrial field-recordings touched game music and the digital simulation of a heartbeat. Different carriers, such as DAT, VHS, MP3 and CD, were used for each part and got combined with differently tuned speakers, for instance a built-in one for a TV-set, stable monitors and computer speakers. The TV-set also visualized it’s audio-input through the digital intervention of a external audio-driver, responding with visual white noise to the electrical current of the heartbeat. The setup was created three times, incorporating audio-equipment available in the room. In each case the space was darkened with only the television screen delivering a beam of light each time the heartbeat sounded.
Why? How?
Making merely formal music without a context or mediated base is something I try to avoid. I believe that the function and meaning of information in itself is also determined by its carrier. A medium has a formal place and meaning within a culture. Contemporary media, analogue or digital, do not hold a neutral stance in their relation to human beings as consumers and creators. Before any meaning can be called certain in any sort of way, there have to be asked a lot of questions. Everywhere in this consumerist world there is a sense of loss, which is kindled by change in the broadest meaning of the word. Nothing is something without it eventually ceasing to be exactly that. This understanding of decomposition is precisely the thing that causes me, whoever that is, to act and to do that now and here. The drift, the urge, the inescapable feeling that it is an absolute necessity to act, seems unavoidable, unsustainable and above all insatiable within an ever changing world. That is why the electrical currents and audio in this piece manifest themselves in an changeable form, accentuating its relativity.
To what agree did it succeed? How could it fail?
As far as connectivity is concerned, the artwork certainly managed to 'connect' on a technical level. However, as an installation piece the work could have been better integrated in its environment. I think that the visibility of the connections and different media was one of the essential elements for the work to... well, work. To put it otherwise, the work didn't explain or reveil itself enough within the place it occupied. Because of that it could be interpreted as a big bulk of equipment by the public. What was actually happening didn't reveal itself enough, it was not enough even though it worked.
Sowieso is the second album I recorded under the alias Yoshimi! and was released in februari of 2012. It consists of 11 songs about conceptual disorder and existential crisis and is sung in Dutch. Practically each instrument that occurs during the album’s 38 minutes duration is played by me. There are few electronic sounds to be heard, but the arrangements include twelve string guitar, piano, ukulele, bass, mandolin, conga, drums, harmonium, rababa, qua zeng qin, bongo, dizi, accodeon, trumpet, darbuka, cello, euphonium and violin. The recording, mixing and production of the music was also done by me in a non-studio environment. Last but not least I produced the artwork and released the record through my own music platform KIKVORS which handled promotion and distribution.
Why? How?
Within this world there is an aggressive focus on matters that distract from any realistic alternative discourses. The creation, expanding and uncovering of hidden histories goes hand in hand with the undermining of banal historically and culturally raised entities that mass media and the historical canon force upon those who inhabit a culture. I see it as my personal duty, mission, target, goal and indeed, quest, to provoke thought about these sorts of forced cultural artifacts and create a secondary history which stands next to it, not only as an alternative but also an equal, at least as meaningful and perhaps more subjective and personal. The part and the whole, places and times, everything exist next to each other. This is however only in service of the beatific human tragedy that can be uncovered in even the most banal sort of rusty tin can lying in a wasteland if only one would take the time. Therefore, the production of this album is in itself a reflection upon the incorporated function of music production within a cultural framework. Songs in themselves contain a function which, when reflected upon, cause an almost traumatic experience for the listener who is used to ignoring omni-present popular music. This neutral, yet fascist function of sound was precisely what I wanted to undermine by using Dutch lyrics (the album is of course intended for a Dutch listening audience) and putting the songs in a harmonic popular framework with disharmonic interruptions. The commercial dis-succes of the album proves that the conventional incorporation of music still holds strong!
To what agree did it succeed? How could it fail?
One of my goals was to undermine the regular commercial pop discourse. To succeed in this, the album actually had to be embraced by a large public that either was in on the concept or was going to be because of what the music essentially is. When the album failed to reach 'the charts' and only got recognition within the circles of an alternative audience, by which I mean listeners who presumably like undermining and experimental music from the outset, I discovered that changing an all-embracing discours of popular music is hard through the same medium. The possibility of failure is to be found in the acceptance (or the lack of it) by the public. Because it did not 'catch on' in an broader sense the album became a conceptual structure with potentially unanswered questions called from within.
What are the common concerns
As you have read, I consider all my work incomplete in some sense or another. This is mere logic, because true illuminating and grand art is (in my opinion) an unreachable goal within the spoiling atmosphere of an consumerist world focusing on speculative relativity. What I try to present is the struggle with this impossibility, which is the only thing a human being can resort to in the light of death and decay. The notion of being forced to strive for the imposible is of course a very existential affair. However, the clash between man and meaning can manifest itself through a clinging on the property of things and media, or better said; the world around us, or better said; that which is destined to be lost forever.