Clear Vinyl
Urban and Tribal Portraits reaffirms the idea of postmodern pastiche as a multimedia multisensory experience and sound as an ecosystem that is both aleatory and concrete, ephemeral and durable. In these binary paradoxes, a radical notion of the nature of collaboration, that is both chance induced and conversely conceptually worked out, is also established. The result is a work that exposes the fixed assumptions about the constructed boundaries and flows between musical traditions and practices. On its own this is the ultimately problematic place where many of the so-called musics concerned with the world reach an impasse, incapable as they are of questioning their own basic assumptions and ultimately end up strengthening those very same boundaries and flows that they had apparently set out to challenge.
Musci and Venosta go further, principally and more fundamentally, by picking away at the margins of pure sonorous events and musical material, noise and sonance. In doing so, Urban and Tribal Portraits repoliticizes the notion of pastiche, engaging as it does in a kind of ecopractice, turning the process rather than the musical object into the poetic focus of the work. Fixed categories are rendered ephemeral, temporal and spatial categories including the margins, so hard to overcome, between composition, improvisation, authorship, recordedness and live performance are deconstructed. In the end, where one would expect seriousness there is levity and where one might see some postmodern appropriative ironic juxtaposition there is intensity and respect of the magical organicness of the material sources.
