Iain Cameron's Diary
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2002-04-20 - 12:54 a.m.

In the 1980s a new artmag started in the UK - title BLOCK. It was written by philosphically oriented art critics from the less prestigious parts of Higher Education. I bought a few copies at the time. Then this February I got a compilation cheap in the basement of the Museum of Modern Art in NYC. I read an article about the correspondence between Guy de Maupassant and the painter Marie Bashkirtseff. She wrote to him and as the correspondence developed played games with her identity - changing gender , changing age and class`. The author quotes someone new to me - Luce Irigaray - on the way women "play with mimesis". Like Cindy Sherman but 100 years earlier Marie B photographed herself in different guises. Irigaray comments generally: "to play with mimesis is for a woman to attempt to recover the place of her exploitation by discourse, without letting herself be simply reduced to it. It is to resubmit herself to ideas - notably about her elaborated in a masculine logic - but in order to make visible by an effect of playful repetition what should have remained hidden."

Guy de Maupassant was rather at the other extreme believing that women's only legitimate right is the right to please and that woman's true domain and arena of power was in love.

This is classic Hegel - the one who is oppressed and forced to be the slave to the desires of the other wins a superior insight and authenticity in manipulating the instruments she uses to service the master. This thought is one of the roots of Marx's vision that the working class would one day prevail. But is also how Marie establishes her own identity in a precarious and hostile environment as she resolutely persued her own destiny as an artist. Peversely one can be truely oneself in manipulating the language which the rest of the world uses to maintain one's inferior status.

This is one of the main ways in which feminist inspired art helped established the era of post-modernism in the 70s and 80s. It is surprising but quite inspiring that a female artist pre-discovers this strategy a 100 years earlier. I have also seen the idea of "ecriture feminine" - a deceptive and tricksy use of language - used to justify Sylvia Plath's notoriously difficult appropriation of Holocaust imagery in her poetry.

Men's movement analyst sometimes discern a similar strategy in Nick Drake's writing where the subject is shadowy and shifting. I would certainly see Poor Boy in those terms. And I think it is important to recognise that this is an observation about power relations - as Hegel suggests - rather than anything intrinsic to gender.

But there are the continuing stereotypes of the male with the hard analysis and stable hierachy and the female with the flux of identity. But there are good reasons to see male identity as transient in different ways and in a complex relation to flux.

I wonder whether I should be fixing more of the stuff that I am doing musically. I can think of lots of reasons why not - i have not longed fixed Plundafonix and I am gradually getting the feeling that it is as it is for good reasons. I am doing a certain amount of remastering using the enhancer and adding lines - in improvisation, not really in recording. I am using the Casio CZ101 - the Casio response to the Yamaha DX7 in the mid 1980s - in monophonic mode sometimes with two tones mixed, one of them is often an electric piano. I am thinking about the gestural aspects of solo keyboard lines using the pitch wheel and the small scale keyboard. There is some of this on Plundafonix but I am a bit sheepish about as I am not a keyboard player. Its more like an experiment - what would keyboard lines be like if they were played like some rock guitarists work - heavily positional fast pentatonic playing? I am also building very fluxy WAVs - tonight I did one with a phrase from the Vaughan Williams song on Plundafonix - which is itself both pentatonic and shifting in key centre. I put one guitar line on and wondered about adding another. There is a two guitar line version of Cross Time No Changes which I rather like and I have been adding a keyboard line to that but not keeping any of them.

I listened to ESP again - having read some more reviews. One way of thinking about it is as a step beyond the extraordinary live version of My Funny Valentine which is on the live album of that name. The step beyond is taken partly by letting Ron Carter, Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock write the music. But Miles also has a vision of how it should sound and told Herbie not to play that much. And of course when he puts a chord it is seldom a straightforward - so the harmony is very fluxy even where the tune has changes. And the rhythm section is really on and pushing out. The soloists sound quite often as if they are playing "time no changes".

The second tune is by Ron Carter - Eighty One. Some critics get excited about it as an anticipation of jazzrock and Herbie Hancock's Maiden Voyage. This isnt the point -

indeed the relevance of Miles use of electric instruments isnt the fact that he was using rock devices. It is much more about how he used the studio to make albums.

Eighty One does have periods of eight to the bar but the interest is really in the way that shifts into swing some of the time and the way Ron Carter plays across the beat underneath the eights - making the rhythm both strong and fragile at the same time. There are harmonic and melodic innovations as well - the IV chord in the second bar of the blues is minor even though its a major song. It has space a lot of space in the second four bar section - and just one stab from the horns off the beat. In the last four it follows the unjazz harmony of V7 and IV7 but the horns sustain a long tonic over that with a little blues phrase to finish. So its full of surprises and a lot of these are negative - simpler things than you might expect or nothing at all.

This music is nearly 40 years old but to me it sounds extraordinarily fresh - less the solos which I tend to know by heart but more the back line which is especially clear with the remastering. This is the record where Miles' second great quintet begins to pick up speed and is a prelude to a series of magical albums - Miles Smiles, Nefertiti, the Sorceror which create music at a level which to mind hasn't quite been reached since - partly because the writing is so innovative and the improvisational formats are often new eg horns play the theme throughout and the backline improvises like mad. I heard Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter perform duets about three years ago - and again I had the sensation of extraordinary freshness. This may be because of the age I was when I first heard the music - but I used to think that was the reason I liked Kind of Blue.

I have a duplex version of My Funny Valentine on Plundafonix - I think it was the last thing I put on. It goes by the title Steve and Dusty's Bloody Valentine. The first part is a loop taken from the intro of a Dusty Springfield song where she regrets the kind of love she is drawn to. This is then loosely phased in the way Steve Reich did on eg Its Gonna Rain. The MFV is played with a closely miked flute - fairly dry - with a fair amount of chromatic interpolation and abstraction of the theme. In the second section its played on guitar with occaisional bits of electric piano. The guitar uses a relatively bright single coil tone rather than the usual full tone used for jazz - so its more like punk-country. The couple of tracks which follow that are much mellower with drones and Pythagorean fifths which are very calm also some low brass.

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