"Any act of episodic (autobiographical)
remembering must include a representation
of the self in the context of the remembered
event"...
Japan-based Terre Thaemiltz – an award
winning electroacoustic laptop musician,
a queer activist, with roots as a house
DJ in New York's notorious transgender clubs,
and as an ambient music producer –
has a firm stance on reconfiguring notions
of performativity and trangenderism. In
performance, he stigmatises the embodiment
of the self as spectacle, without the need
for additional theatrics. Furthermore, insight
into the perceptual shifts of the listener's
experience through his studies on processing
techniques and ideas on digital composition
are found in Thaemiltz's observations. This
is manifold in his theoretical writings
that accompany his audio compilations on
his own Comatonse label and on various renowned
labels including Mille Plateaux, Caipirinha
and Instinct. Terre Thaemiltz brings the
Lovebomb tour to Sydney @ Disorientation
Lanfranchis Memorial Discoteque Thurs June
10, Fabrique, Brisbane Powerhouse Sat June
12, and Kaleide Theatre Melbourne, RMIT
University, Fri June 18.
Lovebomb
is prompted by socio-political threads verses
the universal concept of love, but could
you elaborate further on what is behind
the Lovebomb project? Is love a euphemism
for random acts of violence, and the instability
of our geopolitical climate?
“Lovebomb” is about getting
away from the notion of love as an act or
emotion, and seeing it as part of social
ideology – a mechanism through which
we attempt to express and manifest certain
desires and concerns. Rather than love being
in opposition to violence, we can see that
love relationships actually facilitate violence
and other behaviours that are socially unacceptable
outside of the context of a love relationship.
For example, relations of family and lovers,
which socially presume the presence of love,
tend to contain types of emotional and physical
abuse, which are clearly unacceptable and
intolerable in other settings. Outside the
framework of romance, we can see how a terrorist's
actions are an act of love conceived as
protecting the people and/or ideals she
holds dear. On the macro level, nationalism
and the love of community becomes a means
of justifying violence and aggression toward
others, such as America's love of
freedom to justify bombing the shit out
of Afghanistan and Iraq.
Love is not in opposition to violence, nor
a cure for hatred, but actually an integral
part of the justification for violence and
hatred. I would argue love does not bring
people together, but rather divides. For
every group united by love, that same group
is setting itself apart from others. This
can be seen in couples that turn increasingly
inward and lose contact with friends, as
well as nations whose nationalist ideologies
separate them from non-nationals.
Does Lovebomb
derive from the 18th-century classical period
of the romanticists, where much of the attitude
and artistic output was reactionary to the
rationalism and conservatism of social hierarchies
in order to be something more emotional,
transcendental and visionary?
Hmmm, I'm not sure if this answers
your question, but let me say that ideology
is closely related to economics and justifies
the powers that be. Modern Western romance,
and models of love, are closely related
to the emergence of the bourgeoisie, the
development of ideas of independence, self-determination,
and the ability to think for oneself. We
believe we have rights. We believe we are
creatures of choice, and our choice in lovers
is the ultimate manifestation of our freedom
of choice. This continues to be the root
of the Lesbian and Gay movement, right?
I think this vision is clouded.
For example, this is Pride Week (TM) in
Australia. In my eyes, the globalisation
of Pride activities has had a tyrannical
impact upon sexualities in non-Western cultures.
Pride is the ultimate commodification of
Lesbian and Gay identity. It packages very
specific models of what it is to be Lesbian
and Gay, and rather invisibly markets those
identities to other cultures via capitalist
marketplace systems through easily digestible
formulas of rainbow flags and Western parades.
For example, in Japan where the history
of same-sex partners has not been about
an essentialist Lesbian or Gay model of
“sexual determinism from birth”
until the introduction of such ideas from
the West, we now find that it is easier
for people to consume the rhetoric of Pride
(which conforms to the Capitalist social
format), rather than to think through traditional
sexual systems, which are more complex.
I am not saying those ways were necessarily
more “liberating,” but they
had more variables. If Pride is about helping
facilitate social openness, that is not
the case. To the contrary, it regiments
and restricts what is acceptable Lesbian
and Gay behaviour.
And, for many transgendered people like
myself, our relation to those behaviours
are continually blurred, broken and stretched
– often painfully. It is important
for people to see the ways in which Liberalism
and Western ideals of egalitarianism are
ultimately entrenched in very restrictive,
categorising ways of life. In that sense,
romance and love does not set us free. It
is an expression of our internalisation
of social patterns, and the ultimate conformity
of subjective emotion to social training.
There are pleasures to be found within that
– I do not believe in “Freedom”
or an ideal transcendence of tradition –
but I do believe there are those of us who
are forced to question these relationships
simply because they are too oppressive to
our particular circumstances. And, in my
experience, the social patterns which societies
at large consider most universally “human”
are the most insidiously inhumane.
At the Avanto
Festival 2003 in Helsinki, you opened the
festival with a narration on Lovebomb and
your critique on self-representation as
primordial to the live act. How did the
audience respond to this?
It's quite common for me to start
a show by announcing my dislike for “live
performance.” I really am not interested
in improvisation, or the conventions of
the stage. However, the economics of the
music industry require that I perform. In
order to try and make this a bit more interesting
for me, I try to find ways to break the
distance between stage and performer (such
as talking with the audience, which is quite
unusual for electroacoustique performers.
The ambient movement of the early '90s
contained a good deal of rhetoric about
the DJ as someone who decentralised the
spectacle of the stage and rock performance.
But, as we all know, ambient ended up in
hypocrisy with the rise of superstar DJs
like DJ Spooky and the Orb doing rock stage
shows with drummers and guitarists. It was
total bullshit. Out of this emerged the
current laptop-orchestra scene typified
by boys sitting on dark stages, illuminated
by the glow of their laptop screens. Again,
there was little to no questioning of the
relationship between audience and stage.
Academic and corporate sponsorship around
high-tech events also contributed to this
complacency.
So, I really think it is important to call
all of this into question. While the language
of my projects tend to focus on their role
as commodities in the audio marketplace,
several of them have performances that very
specifically serve as “performances
about deconstructing performance.”
For example, the Rubato piano performances
have always gone to great lengths to confuse
the boundaries between real-time interaction,
improvisation, and “faking it”
to pre-recorded tape. “Interstices”
also had a rather elaborate performance
that combined video, lighting, props and
theatrics (from macho laptop smashing to
placid feminine modelling). As a transgendered
person, it is also important for me to consider
how my performances relate to the transgendered
stage, and expectations around glamour and
camp. I'd like to think my emphasis
on “lecturing” and rather dry
humour is a critique to the more overt gesticulations
of camp culture.
I can hear
some '70s and '80s popular music
plunders in Lovebomb, and I'm wondering
what kind of modes of auditory appropriation
may be found in your music?
Sampling and appropriation have always been
of interest to me as ways of making references,
as well as identifying contexts of production
and the tastes of the producer. If you consider
music a form of discourse (which I do),
samples are like a writer's footnotes.
They inform a work, and help the listener
place it within a social framework. I find
it very frustrating that the legalities
around sample clearance are so prohibitive
and censoring, but of course, that is part
of the popular music industry's ongoing
agenda of perpetuating ideologies of “creativity”
and “authorship” which are so
important in a financial sense. It's
critical to the industry that people believe
music comes from the “soul,”
or something extra-social, since buying
music is so closely tied to ideologies of
consuming identity. It's classic commodity
fetishism, which wonderfully conceals the
workings of the industry.
Unfortunately, most producers also buy into
that ideology.
They were raised on it, and it's hard
to break through. They regurgitate it, perpetuate
it, and protect it. They believe music is
“universal,” but if so, why
are people so divided between genres they
love and hate? That is the ultimate sign
of non-universality! Ha, ha! I guess you
could say my modes of auditory appropriation
are based on a desire to debunk that way
of
thinking.
