Six thoughts (for Kieran Daly)

1. Music is located in time; it occupies time. However, music is not simply a matter of duration. Duration means measured time. Sensation of time, on the contrary, refers to a particular awareness of presence. It involves a heightening of the senses and perhaps an ecstatic change of state.

2. Silence (in my work) is a direct - not symbolic or imaginary - encounter with reality. It is not necessarily calm and peaceful. I am not aspiring to a pretentious pseudo-mysticism. The silence may very well be confrontational and horrifying.

3. A network of dialectical relationships exists within my work: of sound and silence, of change and reiteration, of a subjective mental space and a physical world, of the maternal and paternal, of what is heard and what is thought.

4. My work is opposed to a capitalist culture that values both nostalgic humanism and the virtual, symbolic or imaginary experience.

5. I am not particularly concerned with new musical materials, new musical technology, new instruments and new sounds. I am, however, interested in new contexts and in finding new purposes for old materials.

6. My work is expressive but carries no message. It is expressive of that which can be expressed in no other way than in music. The work is universal in its address and yet the experience of it is subjective. Furthermore, the idea of a "public" is not its goal but simply one of its conditions.

What I am looking for, it's not really the expression through gesture, words, mimics, but expression through rhythm and a combination of images, through their position, their relation and their amount. Before anything else, the purpose of an image must be the exchange. But for that exchange to be possible, it is necessary that these images have something in common, that they participate together in a sort of union. That's why I try to give to my characters a sort of linkage, and ask my actors (all my actors) to speak in a certain way, to behave in a certain way, which is always the same one.

- Robert Bresson, from Michel Estève: Robert Bresson

About ten years ago, somebody asked John Cage, "Well Mr. Cage, aren't you troubled by all the suffering in the world?" And he said, "No I am not. There is exactly the right amount of suffering in the world." When I first heard it, I was quite revolted and disgusted by that statement, but in the ten years since I've come to agree with it totally: that to protest against the suffering in this world is an incredible insult to the victims of this world. Their suffering is exactly what they have received because of the conditions which are imposed upon them. To protest against suffering is to degrade suffering, without an understanding of why that suffering was made necessary. This is why I think that the Hans Haacke piece, which is a description of the trustees of the Guggenheim Museum, is to show nothing but the badges of their triumph. We know we are ruled. The question is not whether we are ruled or not. It's how we are ruled. And believe me, we are ruled not by the crimes of the people who rule us, but by their legal practices. [...] What we have to do is stop protesting and start understanding, because we can never overthrow the rulers who rule us unless we understand how they rule us.

- Carl Andre, statement from "Perimeters of Protest" Panel (1975)

Into Great Silence
a film by Philip Gröning

Six Favorite Recordings from 2007

Volume 3
Dogstar Orchestra


b-boim series [b-boim]
Radu Malfatti


Septet [IMJ]
Takefumi Naoshima, Hirozumi Takeda, Utah Kawasaki, Mitsuteru Takeuchi, Toshihiro Koike, Takahiro Kawaguchi & Yasuo Totsuka


The Room [Erstwhile]
Keith Rowe


Malignitat [Hibari Music]
Taku Unami


not BGM and so on [(h)earrings]
Mitsuhiro Yoshimura & Taku Sugimoto

New interview with Keith Rowe by Josh Ronsen