BY MYLES OAKEY, 2016 CUTCOMMON YOUNG WRITER OF THE YEAR
Our bodies are carriers of culture. As we stand in front of culture, we reach out to make sense of it, absorbing it through our experience. A sense of openness to new experience can lead us anywhere – likely somewhere we didn’t expect to be.
Josten Myburgh seems to have taken a sense of openness with him when he began at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts; and now, as a composer and performer, he acknowledges how his interests from footwork and hip-hop to electronic music to free improvisation have developed to be about not just about aesthetics, but about the social and cultural aspects of music-making in communities.
In the Perth scene, Josten runs Club Zho, Church Series and iMprov programs through Tura New Music; and now, in partnership with others, has established Tone List, a Perth-based record label that supports exploratory music genres. Recently, the label received funding from Tura to acknowledge and support Tone List’s commitment to gender equality, an issue in which Josten asserts a considered voice.
Josten will divert most credit thrown his way, insisting what he does and why he does it isn’t about him or his achievements. As a ‘white, middle-class male’, he realises his own biases in the conversation on gender equality, but clarifies that he only intends to speak for himself in hope that the conversation will continue further – starting with us, now.
In your view, whose responsibility do you think it is to be a voice for gender equality? Is it the labels like your own Tone List, organisations like Tura New Music, or the performers and listeners themselves?
In general, all arts institutions, or people with power in the arts, have a responsibility to help represent the underprivileged or oppressed and provide them with safe spaces to show work. At the simplest level, this is just saying that we disagree with the narrative that history has painted – that composition and performance of music is principally the realm of the straight white man. If one doesn’t do this, they’re accepting that cis-male dominance in the music scene is okay, which is either sexist (they’re dominant because they’re ‘better equipped’ for the role) or ignorant (the idea that those problems are in the past and the work towards equality has already been done – demonstrably not true).
When I started organising concerts, I only thought about presenting music I liked. At some stage, I was awoken to the importance of diversity, gender parity etc. in curation by some friends who were already working really hard on it, in Perth and in other cities. I realised this was something that I had the ability and power to change, and so I just started paying more attention to it. Now, especially after some particularly key events, I am feeling the atmosphere of the scene change – people are going out of their way to let me know that they feel included, or empowered, by being part of the scene. I think happiness and sweetness in a community is one of the most politically powerful qualities it can have, and one of the best ways to cultivate this is making a community where everyone feels welcome. So for me now, though it’s principally about responsibility to offer opportunities to the underprivileged to make change for the future, it’s also about making a better atmosphere for everyone.
I can always do better and I’m open to discussing, privately or publicly, other ways we might improve, so I treat this interview as a platform for expressing my ideas so people might better be able to comment and help us expand upon our perspectives and do as much as we can to move towards a more inclusive scene.
Moving towards your musical life, what albums, artists, or concerts have provided you with a personal experience that you’ve found influential, or that have inspired your music?
I think a sincere list of artist has the potential to be not-that-pretentious:
Will Guthrie, Thembi Soddell & Anthea Caddy, Kynan Tan, Richard Dawson, Joanna Newsom, Illogical Harmonies, Eric Dolphy, Joe Panzner, Madlib, Knxwledge, J Dilla, RP Boo, Anne Guthrie, Lindsay Vickery, Stuart James, Cat Hope, Alice Hui-Sheng Chang, DNA, Sarah Hennies, Michael Pisaro & Graham Lambkin, Polvo, Igor Stravinsky, Shani Mohini-Holmes, Diego Chamy, Olivier Messiaen, Talking Heads, Jim Denley, John Cage, Dale Gorfinkel, Roananax, Toshimaru Nakamura, Adam Asnan, Michael McNab, DOLL, Giovanni Pergolesi, Antoine Beuger, Aviva Endean, Talk Talk, Eva-Maria Houben, Alessandro Bosetti, the Wu-Tang Clan, Sébastien Roux, Laura Steenberge.
Despite the list, I want to clarify that the musical experiences that really matter to me are the ones I share with my friends; the most defining moment in my musical life has been being blessed with the privilege of having a role in nurturing a community of experimental music practice in Perth. Watching a friend find something they haven’t found before or create something beautiful matters far more than anything else to me. In the past, I haven’t listened to enough music from women, which is something I’m trying to work hard on now.
What is it about the social, cultural, and political context of free improvisation that resonates with the ethos of these genres?
Free improvisation presents us with the possibility of allowing people to make use of their innate musicality, which might have been suppressed by the idea which society projects on us: that music belongs to the realm of a few experts, rather than all of us together (as it is in so many folk music cultures around the world). Mattin reminds us that this music used to share the stage with Pink Floyd, so I don’t think it’s hopeless to imagine that it has a lot to offer even people who don’t know anything about it yet.
In free improvisation, I am finding a way of dealing with, being together with and mutually growing with other people, and as someone with somewhat of a leadership role in putting on workshops and concerts in Perth I feel like I am finding something I can really do to offer a lot to others that similarly are looking for a way of making music in a way that is meaningful to them.
It sounds like you take influence from artists of experimental improvisation beyond an understanding of how it’s composed and why. For most, I would assume, developing an understanding is the only way they come to terms with it.
I like these two quotes: David Byrne said: ‘Music is very physical, and often the body understands it before the head’. Alice Hui-Sheng Chang says: ‘For me, music is an experiential language. If you try to decode everything with your mind, perhaps you’re not actually enjoying the music?’.
I appreciate a certain level of nerdiness and enthusiasm for weird structural connections and complex forms; plenty of people love making intricate things, and appreciating how something made is totally part of how we can engage with some art form. But in the end, I’m far more interested in engaging with the experience itself: a performer, on stage, by themselves or with others, doing something, the result of which is something happening. Music must be communicating, offering or expressing something that language can’t, otherwise probably no one would make it. So rationalising something discursively by writing or talking about it always requires some loss of resolution as it’s transmitted from one medium to another. Of course, there is much to be gained from talking about music (just as there is a lot to be gained from dancing about architecture), but for me the experience always comes first, as it always has in music I’ve loved. Relating to my childhood experiences of listening to music: you can’t write down The Bilinda Butchers’ voice or Kevin Shields’ guitar tone, you just have to bathe in them.
You have described a sense of ‘playfulness’ in your improvised music and suggested that life needn’t be taken too seriously. In your experience, what is the danger of being too serious?
The fluxus artist Robert Filliou’s answer to the question ‘what do artists do?’ is ‘they organise creatively their leisure’. I’m very serious about what I do, but what I do is also leisurely and relaxed, and is connected to the way that I live generally. I was talking about this with my collaborator Emilio Gordoa in Berlin, recently – even with hectic schedules, constantly performing, rehearsing, recording and scraping by on very little money, everything still feels pretty relaxed, good and somehow things always seem to work out. ‘Seriousness’ in art sometimes seems to have a lot to do with professionalism, masculinity…career-building things, which don’t have much to do with the kind of community atmosphere I’m interested in. I prefer this idea of exploring how to creatively organise leisure, and I agree with Filliou that this has the potential to be massively inspiring to myself and others.
In writing about your musical life, you described a conscious divergence from wanting to become a ‘real composer’. What is it that you choose not to identify with?
A recent workshop I attended had a two-hour discussion on ‘the scratchy sound’ (heavy bow pressure on a string instrument) and why all new music compositions should use it. I don’t want to call out the people involved (and many people were just listening, not involved in the discussion) but the fact that this even needs discussing in new music circles makes me want out! And an extremely overwhelming majority of people involved in this discussion/workshop were men (at least 90 per cent). So I guess being a ‘real composer’, at least as I am defining it here, seems to often involve possessing and dealing with a certain history and knowledge-set, and of course this history is largely defined by white men.
There’s a discussion between John Cage and Robert Filliou where Cage discusses the possibility of an education where no old ideas are handed down; instead of focusing on teaching a pre-existing system, we constantly engage in the creation of real, new and meaningful ideas that could only exist as the intersection between the people involved in their creation. Maybe this is idealistic, I don’t know – but it’s beautiful, isn’t it? I would rather have these kinds of discussions and engagements and see what happens, rather than trying to acquire a set of skills or knowledge before I do anything (this is also my rejection of the idea that ‘you have to know the rules before you break them’).
Although, this is nothing about opposition. The comedian Stewart Lee, when asked whether he would be able to keep up with the razor-sharp competitive comedy on Mock the Week, says: ‘I can’t do it, but I don’t think you should anyway’. But then, despite his comedy deriving a lot from criticism of mainstream comics, he also holds a pretty strong respect for them and an acknowledgment that they’re pretty funny people. I think this is an attitude I try to have – a strong respect for ‘real composers’ and what they do, but way less of an interest in what gets you on certain programs, festival lineups, etc.
See Josten Myburgh perform with his free jazz and electronics quintet ßß (eszetts) at 7.30pm, November 7, as part of the Automatic Sound Series.
Image supplied. Credit: Josh Wells Photography.
