Devour Your Limitations!

In any given situation your scope of action is determined by specific contextual restrictions. These restrictions are very likely to be historically produced, serving certain interests. As somebody who works with noise and improvisation and often makes records (more often than not collectively), I find myself wondering what are the conceptual and ideological limitations regarding making records? This can not be answered without dealing with issues of intellectual property and what this implies: authorship, clear definition of what is the work and what is not, and the separation between producer and consumer.

Intellectual property has grown hand in hand with capitalism as a way of commodifying the intangible, the indefinable, the elusive... as a way of taming culture in order to frame it, make it stable and to be able to give it a value. Any classification or categorisation works as a way of achieving mastery and social control. But when I think of improvisation I think of it as elusive liquidity, in Duchamp's and Bergson's lingo, as a matter of 'passages' rather than 'stoppages'.

In an improvised concert situation, one throws a sound without knowing what other people will do with it. One of course is aware of the people that one is playing with but basically one is open to anything. Why should it be different when one makes a record?

Somebody mentioned the word plagiarism but this is nothing but a capitalist fallacy. As the Comte de Lautréamont said, plagiarism is necessary. Whenever one person takes something and uses it in another context, there is always a level of creativity going on. I do not want to make hierarchies between different levels of creativity. I have invented nothing. All I have done is take from somewhere else, and to think of this as theft is simply applying the logic of the police, which basically is what the notion of authorship does.

Noise is the asshole of culture where everything is possible, is about lack of respect, not only of previous ways of music making, but also lack of respect regarding the context that you are working with and the different ways that this context might try to normalise or tame the potential of this practice and your own creativity.

Anti-copyright.
Mattin, 2009

Mattin