Audio Poverty

For this talk I will be examining the way in which experimental and avant garde art has traditionally usurped and reinvented new and obsolete media as platforms for launching their art into the marketplace. I will also examine the reciprocal relationship between the form of the music and the media it is presented on while demonstrating how they have informed each other. I will trace the development of this ‘alternative’ marketplace from private press LPs and samizdat/self-published books/zines/chapbooks through the underground cassette scene and on into the current explosion of home-burned CD-R labels and imprints. I’ll highlight the potential of new technologies for instant documentation and immediate dissemination, pointing out how they favour avant garde art process while documenting some of the more interesting experiments in the form. As owner of an underground record store and mail order outlet I’ll also discuss the new underground marketplace and associated culture that has sprung up in the wake of the internet, CD reissues and easily affordable home technologies and show how they have informed new music and been hi-jacked for alternative useage, taking new technology and using it as the basis of establishing a radical new form of folk art that still favours the actual over the virtual. I’ll look at CD-R and cassette labels like American Tapes, Japanese imprints like ZSF and Throbbing Gristle’s Industrial imprint as well as discussing the music of current underground groups like Ashtray Navigations, The Skaters, Skullflower and Matthew Valentine.

David Keenan