David Bowie’s Cut-ups
There is lot’s of stuff, floating in the ether, talking about the way David Bowie put together lyric ideas by drawing small pieces of paper with sentences or shorter phrases written on them out of a hat and seeing what sense they made (I’m an aligator! I’m a moma-papa coming for you!, say) influenced by the American author, William Burroughs use of the same method, himself referring back to the use of similar techniques (‘Exquisite Corpse’, automatic writing) by the 1920s surrealists.
Here is one of the more coherent pieces on Bowie’s use of the technique from Open Culture’s site, which links on to various other pieces, including Alan Yentob’s BBC documentary, Cracked Actor, shot in the mid 70s, when Bowie was first generating lyrics in this way. There is also a link to a BBC interview from early this century where Bowie talks about how he has continued with this and had someone write a program to take much of the effort – all those scissors and fragments of paper; all that glue involved in real-world cutting and pasting; – out of making lyrical fragments that way.
I think I may have done something similar – write a program to combine snippets of text – for the captions for Assignment 2. It was this that reminded me (again) of the need to write this post looking at this, and also at other bits of musical practice that I find myself thinking about as I have worked through DIaC and the earlier courses.
Tape loops and the orchestration of the random
It’s not just photographic artists like Joachim Schmid or Erik Kessels who are taking snippets of others’ work and putting them together to make new things and to fire off new associations in the viewer’s mind.
I’ve already spoken about the Beatles’ use of looped effects on Tomorrow Never Knows (the last track on their 1966 album, Revolver) in the initial post on my experiments with the software-writing, coding platform, Processing, but there are loads of other ways that loops can be used to make music, ranging across the spectrum of musical genres. John Lennon, went on to make much more heavily brutalist music concrete on his early solo albums and with Revolution 9 on the White Album. Away from the Beatles there is no end of other examples: Paul McCartney has made much of their being influenced by Stockhausen;and then there’s Steve Reich (I’ll take Music for 18 Musicians as my example here); and burbling away in the background of my childhood there was Delia Derbyshire’s creation for the Doctor Who theme…
And then there’s the way that the move from analogue to digital audio recording has allowed a marvelous stream of sampled music, taking snapshots of bits of earlier records and then to combining them to make new beats, tunes and backings – itself a form of aural collage – which then provokes the same sort of ‘but is it real music?’ navel-gazing and opprobrium as people playing around with photoshop and digital cameras have, more recently, in the field of photography.
After all, a synthesiser isn’t as real, or skilful or authentic as a guitar; a recording is not the same thing as a performance at all. And of course, a digital recording is infinitely capable of being reproduced now that we have entered the age of electronic reproduction…
Coda:
The day after I turned forty I went to see Kraftwerk at the Royal Festival Hall in London. For two hours, I watched four men in suits conjure up an evening of marvelous tunes and beats from four laptops placed on lecterns in front of them; behind them images flowed in a stream.
This wasn’t rock’n’roll and – looping back neatly to Bowie in his Diamond Dogs guise – it wasn’t genocide either.
Stuff is changing all around us and ideas from different areas of artistic endeavor are coming together. I wasn’t sure what it all meant then, as I sat in my comfy seat at the festival hall with a drink in my hand, and I’m not sure what it all means yet, but I’m still trying to work it out…
Reference:
The best thing I can do here (as it’s all stuff that’s been burbling in my head for ages and ages, and I no longer quite know what the sources for it all are) is to compile a vimeo playlist of some of the music that I’m talking about. I’ll do that once I’m back in London and update this accordingly.
- Open Culture is sited here: http://www.openculture.com/ (accessed 4/8/19)
Digital Image and Culture - Simon Chirgwin 