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Kunst, the German term for art, is the root word of John McCartin’s ’11 embryonic record label, Kunstemporary Records. It seems like a strange title for a label that seeks to undermine the concept of a creative class. “Isn’t it dumb? I came up with it,” said Ben Cole ’11, who played at Kunstemporary’s first band showcase, Can’t-Fest.
Contradictions reigned at 148 College Ave. last Saturday, but we live in a world where going dumb is a compliment and “getting stupid,” an active goal. As the lumpenproletariat lounged in the kitchen pre-show smoking cigarettes, I talked with McCartin and Kunstemporary co-founder Adam Holofcener about their label.
McCartin and Holofcener went to high school together in Baltimore, Md. After being shut out of the Baltimore music scene by bands they had supported and booked shows for, they grew critical of what they termed the “post-industrial entitlement of the creative class.” The duo created their conceptual/digital “record” label during the summer of 2009.
By “record,” I mean to imply that technically the label has yet to release any physical records, although plans have been set in motion to release a 12” vinyl this summer. By “conceptual,” I mean that Kunstemporary is as much about the idea of art as it is about distributing music. Kunstemporary challenges the existence of delineations between genius and stupid, between artist and layman, and asks if there’s even such a thing as inherent taste or art or good or bad.
“We’re subverting subversion,” said Holofcener. Kunstemporary’s rhetoric is completely contradictory, but it is self-aware in its contradictions. In other words, the whole thing is an infuriating puzzle.
The concert opened with Cole, Leander Brotz ’11 and Nick Marmet ’10 playing improvised noise music. Brotz sang into an auto-tuner over the song “Fire” by Twista, while Cole played screwed (read: slowed down or, in musical terms, literally “retarded”) versions of “The First Cut is the Deepest” and “Bittersweet Symphony” by The Verve.
“Slowing music down is the new playing music at the normal speed,” said Cole.
The next group, a duo calling themselves The Other Rolling Stones, played conventional instruments instead of knobs and actually followed along with each other on handwritten sheet music. The band featured Holofcener on guitar, and was considerably more listener-friendly than the first act, but by Kunstemporary standards that’s not necessarily a mark of “good” art.
Indeed, much of the show seemed like it was more fun for the performers than for the audience. This wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, or, at least, it wasn’t until the beer ran out. Nor was it a problem for the musicians. According to Kunstemporary’s treatise, which is posted on their blog, “We do not want you to listen. We believe you should listen; however, we are not affected by your decisions in any way. We have finally surrendered. Do not worry: We will die someday.”
If you make the listener a mere accoutrement, then the audience/artist line cannot exist, and the category of “artist” becomes harder to define. In this way, noise music chips away at the stratified nature of a “creative class,” which is one of Kunstemporary’s stated goals.
Sampling, which lies at the core of much of Kunstemporary’s music, also blurs this line. To explain, McCartin cited “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” an essay by sociologist and media theorist Walter Benjamin: “Thus, the distinction between author and public is about to lose its axiomatic character.”
Written in an utterly beguiling style of media studies leetspeak, Kunstemporary’s website conveys the intelligence of its writers without managing to impart many accessible concepts. That is to say, it might be brilliant, but I’m really not sure.
“We are junkies to the thrill of the chase of the unlistenable object,” the treatise continues. Just as complete visual abstraction is viewed as the end-goal of a certain linear path of contemporary art, noise musicians view the abstraction of sound as the ultimate end of a particular line of auditory reasoning/resonance.
The third act was a set by Elodie Blakely ’12, who was playing live for the first time under the name Hiep Hiep Hoera. With ukulele in hand and the voice of an angel, Blakely fumbled apologetically with her loop peddle, but played a lovely set with eerie underpinnings. Blakely is currently the only girl on the roster, and is viewed as a potential Kunstemporary cash horse once the label begins releasing vinyl. Perhaps it is easier to commodify women.
McCartin, Holofcener and their friend Will Krieger from Wesleyan played last. The boys, who called themselves Goldman Sachs, thrashed around sampling and looping, alternately shouting incomprehensibly and muttering incomprehensibly. Krieger wore a ring bearing the inscription scheisse, which means shit in German. I thought it was an accurate description of their aesthetic. Honestly, the most succinct review of Can’t-Fest comes from McCartin himself, via Facebook, “goal: get yr friends to listen to you yell about things. strategy: call it a ‘concert.’”
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