Notes On the Margins

onthemargins.com

About a week ago, April 30th to be exact, I saw one of my favorite all time bands, Meat Beat Manifesto (that makes two this month, including Autechre). They played at the Highline Ballroom in NYC. This performance was very special for me because I also got to meet one of my all time heroes, Jack Dangers, while tagging along for an interview.

I promised not so say much, and the interview was rather short, so I was left with many unanswered questions, some of which bubbled up during the conversation and the show. Jack has always been an innovator, even as, but also because - he holds onto older technologies, like the Synthi 100, and references past musical movements - he is still very much influence by Jamaican dub. The creation of something new by recycling cultural references and influences has been perfected by Meat Beat Manifesto over the course of their twenty year career.

What I really wanted to pick Jack’s brain about, aside from what he likes most about the Jamaican sound system days and the UK Bubblers (I have the record too), is why putting together the sound and image has become central to MBM’s art.

During the interview, and in many others, Jack talks about this kind of visual sampling style, similar to what EBN and Hexstatic were doing at the same time in the 90’s. He briefly commented about the use of video sampling as a way of engaging the audience while still relating to the music. This kind of display he contrasted with the eyecandy that often results from a visual counterpart that doesn’t come from sound samples since it is not directly connected to the music.

I agree that seeing video samples scratched and manipulated on screen, and hearing them directly add to the performance, does the job of making an explicit connection and creating a more complete sensual experience. I would add that it has the effect, possibly also intended, of expressing a stream of consciousness or exposing what could be locked into our subconscious. What we are seeing on the screen is so many cultural images that we have ingested over the years, sometimes accessible by memory, sometimes buried - these references are selected, orchestrated and manipulated on screen by Jack Dangers and Ben Stokes, then they are freeze-framed and fade away.

This kind of visual expression of sound is a literal connection - What is seen is heard. It can tell a story (or we somehow need to create a story out of what we see). Video sampling leaves us with an impression, a visual memory of the music. Rather than it being superior or more relevant than a more abstract visual counterpart, I think it is just one pole of the spectrum. Both poles serve to provide more information about the sound - in this case the direct video representation reveals the context of the original, carrying with it cultural references (which may or may not actually mean anything when pieced together).

More about this spectrum later.