Collaboration is Always Vanguard

Here is another example of what happens when the most contemporary styles of three genres collaborate to co-create a new artifact. (Music and direction by Hiroshi Kizu, dancing by Masako Yasumoto. Check the youtube blurb for more details. )

My thoughts: The cinematography stands alone at the beginning, silent, stunning. Then, contemporary butoh-esque movements reflect sampled, culture-free sounds. Awesome. New. Vanguard. Yes!

I think electronic music in particular is a medium that can reach the most people, while also becoming a new, global instrument stripped of national, ethnic imprints, not totally, but almost totally (it's still elitist). The sounds are manipulated versions of "real" sounds, whose origins are hardly recognizable. The listening mind gives up at trying to identify them--it gives up and says "OK. This is new. This is a new sound; I don't need to place it." In other words, the mind goes blank and then goes global, riding sounds that evoke nothing national or cultural, nothing ethnic like a guitar or drum or human voice would. Instead, electronic music evokes a time period, a generation, which is the global, informational generation happening right now; electronic music brings to mind and manifests the inter-national, informational, electronic, post-formal, gay marriage age, on the internet, in the vanguard, and collaborating like rabbits.

Also, it should be noted that vanguard technology always gives rise to vanguard music; creation is always a four quadrant affair, as Ken Wilber would say, with the arts and interior aspects of an event correlating with the sciences and exterior aspects of the same event. The left and the right quadrants, the interiors and the exteriors, co-construct and co-evolve each other beautifully.

Are we surprised that the new instruments are computers? They are like the exterior fingertips of evolution, those little robots, and they don't just make music! They make all sorts of useful, vanguard tools. Computers are somehow the key to this whole entire thing of evolution and the unrelenting drift toward a planetary culture. Just think: The Human System, seamlessly connected to the evolving planet and stars, made a computer, and the computer made art and information global, free, and accessible. Computers are keys to a global world, beyond nations, just like their mind-altering children: electronic music and video art.

Integral to this artifact's musical expression is the pure, shamanic dancing, which is of a style also seemingly detached from any certain culture or time period. If it must reflect one, it reflects this current period's desire to integrate, include, and utilize what came before.

Dance is expressive to a shared impulse in everyone, yes? And all cultures, all over the world, all throughout time, have been moving to the beat and expressing emotion with dance. In fact, all three art forms collaborating in this video--music, dance, and composition--are at the very core of our human expression; they go all the way back to the beginning, don't they? This style of dance is primitive, as is the beat, as is the drawing and composition (small and large figures, central composition), and yet it also contains classical postures, jazz, evocative poses, and electronic, unnatural movements which cement it in the avant garde, the tip of evolution. Its style goes beyond but includes all previous styles. That is one common pattern of evolution of all of the quadrants: build upon what came before; move up by reaching down.

And now, on a similar, avant garde, Japanese note, here is the elven queen of collaboration herself: Bjork, with Opiate and Eiko Ishioka, butoh-esque body-paint and dance, modern special effects, and evocative pulls that are the sign of very deep, very vanguard art. "Her sexuality spills out of her body, becoming an entity in itself that she can manipulate, enjoy and communicate with. Bjork's fresh self-discovery makes this more of an interactive experience than the mere watching of another music video." I totally agree, Spike.com.