Brend

Recently there seems to be a growing trend in electronic music towards the "tribal" aesthetic. Polyrhythms, non-standard tunings, and vernacular sounds are becoming more familiar in the electronic vocabulary, but what is more striking is the general attitude towards the music making process itself. Technology is becoming a fact of life that all musicians will have to deal with, and the types of people you'd expect never to stray away from their drum circles and stoner metal bands are using the computer, drum machines, and sequencers. This provides for some interesting results, but the acceptance of many ethnic and vernacular ideas into the electronic vocabulary is not without problems.

Henry Flynt warns us that, more often than not, ethnic music has been incorporated into western music by simply inserting it as reference. In this case it is merely a surface treatment to existing structure and rules. Flynt argues that to embrace the vernacular or folk, one has to create new methods of notating and organizing sounds in ways that compliment their attributes. Lucky Dragons, the recording name of Luke Fischbeck, I think best demonstrates this attitude. Handclaps, bird sounds, tambourines, fiddles are not organized according to standardized western rhythms, time signatures, and scales (systems which were not made for these sources). Instead using applications such as MAX/MSP he creates his own processes to build songs with those pieces. Songs vary greatly in length, from less than a minute, to several minutes, never falling into the three to four minute pop standard.

Seeing Fischbeck preform live it is clear that his form of art is for his own self amusement, it is spontaneous, not governed by established laws, it is what Henry Flynt would call "brend." Flynt explains that "brend" is an experience at which you are unaware of value or your own personal valuing system, all of this vanishes leaving you with your own self enjoyment. While this may seem like a completely personal experience, "brend" can happen within a group of people. After about ten or fifteen minutes of playing on his laptop and flute, Fischbeck stood up, brought out a number of colorful ropes connected to one another, and passed them around the crowd. As they made contact with skin, sound emitted from the speakers, oscillating and harmonizing as different people touched the ropes, and made new connections through each other. It was quite a magical experience, the artist, the object being watched for our entertainment was no longer present, instead we were all part of the process, joined by system only measurable by our own connections to one another.

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