The durian scheme, or what's wrong with "experimental" music

What could today's avant-garde learn from a notoriously smelly fruit?

Roland Goeschl, Large Cube, Inclined (1967-68), MUMOK, Vienna (Photo: Ray Philp)

In 1856, the English naturalist Alfred Russell wrote effusively about a “food of the most exquisite flavour.” Published on the margins of botanical academia, his account of a fruit he’d encountered in Borneo proclaims its “perfectly unique character,” though he went on to say that it also resembled:

“A rich custard highly flavoured with almonds… there are occasional wafts of flavour that call to mind cream-cheese, onion-sauce, sherry-wine, and other incongruous dishes. Then there is a rich glutinous smoothness in the pulp… which adds to its delicacy. It is neither acid nor sweet nor juicy; yet it wants neither of these qualities, for it is in itself perfect.”

He was talking about durian, whose odour is habitually compared to old socks, rotten flesh and raw sewage. All the same, it draws cultish devotion from people who, like Russell, insist on its unsurpassable sensory appeal.

It strikes me that adoring critics of what we might call difficult music face a similarly sticky problem: how to reconcile an intense affinity for prickly art that to almost everyone else sounds like dog shit.

***

In his recent book about Arnold Schoenberg, Harvey Sachs begins with the Austrian composer’s contrite admission to a new acquaintance: “You can see it isn’t easy to get on with me. But don’t lose heart because of that.” It remains a big ask. The experience of Schoenberg’s music is comparable, for me at least, to reading Ulysses in Basque; there are rules that govern his compositions, but the effect on all but the academic’s ear is barely distinguishable from anarchy.

I can’t claim special knowledge of the code that unlocks Schoenberg’s music. There is a flinty pleasure in Pierrot Lunaire, a sensuous and arcane melodrama in which the vocal accompaniment rises and falls with the music in diabolical whirlwinds. But there are other pieces that Sachs himself describes as exhibiting “hyperemotional” qualities (Erwartung); elsewhere, orchestral flourishes amount to “random overkill” (Die glückliche Hand). That’s politespeak for total bobbins.

I’m not so curious about Schoenberg’s music as I am the revelation that he and other members of the avant garde promise. What rewards await the listener willing to encounter, in C.S. Lewis’s turn of phrase, a “hostile novelty”? And how might we justify the existence of challenging art beyond a selfish interest in it? In Thomas Mann’s novel Doctor Faustus, the composer Adrian Leverkühn, a stand-in for Schoenberg, offers a conventionally elitist answer:

“To allow only the kind of art that the average man understands is the worst small-mindedness and the murder of mind and spirit. It is my conviction that the intellect can be certain that in doing what most disconcerts the crowd, in pursuing the most daring, unconventional advances and explorations, it will in some highly indirect fashion serve man - and in the long run, all men.”

The exaggerated stakes, the false note of altruism, the sneer towards normie taste—it’s deliriously petulant. Still, like a fool, I can’t help taking Leverkühn’s side, even if I also wouldn’t be caught dead keeping his kind of company. That’s because I have a funny relationship with experimental music; I am repelled by and attracted to it in the same breath. A lot of the mannerisms that come with it seem freighted with a desperation to be taken seriously. I therefore can’t.

There’s a better argument for art that confronts the limits of established taste. In creative walks of life, there are those who do and those who follow—pioneers and disciples. Then come the chancers and second-raters. These latter groups effect the bloat that swells an inspiring musical style. The self-perpetuating normal that follows, what we come to understand as mediocrity, harasses culture to open the gates to more of itself. What experimental artists do, moreso serving a devotional idealism to art itself than “all men,” is to change the locks.

***

In the introduction to Distinction, a landmark text on taste and cultural capital, Pierre Bourdieu describes the “pure gaze,” a mode of perception that situates art as an “autonomous field of artistic production”—that which exists for its own sake. The pure gaze valorises form and style over what art may “mean” or represent. In other words, it makes possible the preference for the cosmic abstractions of Piet Mondrian over, say, this early Dutch still life.

We could say that experimental or underground music encourages this gaze, since the implicit claim among these artists is that whatever the current rules are, they are being broken and redrawn. A familiarity with form is the price of admission. This understanding between artist and audience is secure so long as these evolutions in style are navigable by a community large and devoted enough to follow them.

But as far back as 1969, the writer Hans Stuckenschmidt recognised the fractal predicament that music of the hinterlands faced: “As compositions and styles increasingly deviated from convention and tradition, and as composers pursued ever more some particular principle of style or technique, so the chances of music being comprehended dwindled. The message was dispatched but no longer addressed. At worst, it was a bottle thrown into the sea, its destination unknown.”

If it’s safe to say that there are far more singers, composers, songwriters, et al than there were 55 years ago, then, well, you see the problem. There’s nothing useful to say about whether or not there are too many musicians. But if most working artists today risk being a drop in the ocean, I worry that the consequences for music that deviates from some “norm”—increasingly difficult to establish in the first place as the half-life of novel trends shorten—may be existential.

The music journalist Kieran Press-Reynolds has reported on internet scenes that represent a hyper-individualised reproach to what Brian Eno once referred to as “scenius.” In a typical scenario for the world of platform-centric genres, a name for a specific sound has barely circulated (e.g. “sigilkore”) before it’s disowned out of boredom or misappropriated through opportunism. In the semantic vacuum that follows, an emergent musical form is ungraspable for all but the most feed-fried.

A common refrain I hear—most often from fellow music journalists—is that there is more great music than ever before, a fact which should be a source of bottomless gratitude for the plebs. Maybe so. But this embrace of plenitude smells to me like the feckless adoption of free-market logic that places the musical consumer at the centre of the buffet, with no regard for broader situational questions about, say, an artist’s ability to mature at their own speed instead of Daniel Ek’s.

The closing graf in Press-Reynolds’s sigilkore piece gestures to a persistent symptom of musical abundance that I regard as fatally superficial. In short, an obsession with innovation for innovation’s sake, which music journalists—and their successors, playlist curators—routinely overvalue at the expense of artists who are exceptional at the ordinary, and obsessive about craft to the exclusion of everything else—above all, hype.

“I can’t think of a recent scene that successfully named itself and survived more than a year. The fractured structure of the internet makes it difficult for communities to agree on tags—they’re not in a physical space and can’t rally around things like regional pride. The viralscape also discourages musical growth. After an artist gains traction with a microgenre they’ve invented, there are two outcomes: they sign and the label helps them dilute the sound (e.g. hyperpop), or it becomes a ‘type beat’ with endless derivative copies (rage rap, new jazz, etc.)… The scenes are suffocated and formularized before they have a chance to truly evolve.”

***

In Fear Of Music, a 2008 polemic about experimental music’s marginal place in public life, David Stubbs tut-tuts at a parodic tribute to Karlheinz Stockhausen by EJ Thribb in Private Eye, which goes like this:

“So, Farewell
Then Karlheinz
Stockhausen.

Famous modern
Composer

All together
Now –

Bing. Bang!
Three-minute silence
Knock. Knock.
Beep.
Plonk.
Bang!
Whirr…

I hope I
Have got
This right.”

As Stubbs mentions other newspapers and magazines that took the piss out of Stockhausen’s work, it occurred to me that there are worse fates in an attention economy than being laughed at. As a side point I notice that music coverage for a long while in the arts pages of newspapers has often amounted to, “RIP, boomer,” or, “We found something on TikTok.” The chasm between these two generational poles of nostalgia and metrics seems increasingly difficult to bridge.

I opened Fear Of Music hoping that it would light the way for me here, but I came away with an, err, unfortunate impression of the author. Stubbs talks up his love of comedy, but is consistently touchy and unfunny about his chosen subject. A number of baffling anecdotes reflect an adolescent snobbery—a story about his dorm at Oxford (yawn) and a woman named Pam makes him resemble not so much the writer of a Monty Python sketch as its hapless subject.

While Fear Of Music fails to satisfy Stubbs’ questions about the public’s preference for challenging visual art over its musical equivalent, he makes a useful observation about the latter’s singular ability to traumatise. If 20th century composers like Stockhausen were defined by dissonance because they sought to reflect the postwar era’s anxieties and disasters, there are countless examples of the contemporary avant-garde operating in a similar register.

But let’s be real—none of that is cutting through. The prevailing mood of this century’s most striking experimental music has been about numbing out: the private nihilisms of The Caretaker, claire rousay and William Basinski on the one hand, and—less impressively—the evocative fake-depth of corecore on the other. (One of my favourites along these lines, which is both conceptually rigorous and nice to listen to, is 106 Kerri Chandler Chords by die Reihe, AKA Jack Callahan.).

***

How, exactly, do you persuade people to try durian?

From personal experience I’d suggest lying about it. Years ago I brought some durian-flavoured sweets into my office at The Scotsman, knowing my colleagues, though sceptical in most situations, would scoff the lot without asking questions. I left a handful by my keyboard and waited for the requests to roll in. “Yeah, help yourself,” I’d say, but I avoided offering them—essential to the ethical success of the mission, which was to laugh without feeling bad.

Anyway, you know the rest. (“Yuck!”; “What the fuck are these!?”; “This isnae mango…”) But sometimes I wonder what would’ve happened if I’d left 100 durian sweets on my desk. I might have become the durian-sweet supplier to the chief sub and the rugby correspondent—”I must have more of this most exquisite flavour, pal!”—but probably not before being given the boot for very gross misconduct.

OK, what about this. What if I’d left 100 durian sweets on my desk every day for a month, perhaps as a provision of essential aid amid a national sweet shortage. Would that have led to a four-page supplement about a new Scottish delicacy—”to rank alongside the pungent power of Tikka Masala,” as a hacky phrase from that imagined pull-out may have read—that tastes like ripe banana in a burst nappy? I quit a few months later, my durian scheme unfulfilled.

***

In recent years I’ve nurtured a strong dislike for music in the vein of what Simon Reynolds has called “conceptronica.” I’ll be blunt: when the music isn’t toilet, it still feels like homework. What bothers me about it is the sense that artists in this cohort seem to feel confined by their own medium, perhaps even above it. In that world, an album is not just an album—it is a post-structuralist sci-fi opera about techno-fascism from a multi-hyphenate visionary. OK?

What I object to most, though, is the hard sell that these Ableton essays often represent. Through interviews and onesheets, artists unwittingly pre-digest the experience of the music, squeezing the space for the listener to meet a record on their own terms. The insistence that the work not only be interpreted but received in a particular way is not so much the revenge of the intellect upon art, as Susan Sontag had it, but the revenge of the artist upon audience.

In this context, “experimental music” is a description not of a method of inquiry but of an anti-genre; a set of atomised conventions that dares not describe itself for fear of exposing its clichés (not liking capitalism, expressing that atonally). Fresher ideas are found elsewhere. One example: innovative club tracks from Sao Paolo, Kampala and Mexico City, among other places, complicate the ever more fungible category of experimental music, such that it deserves to be made redundant.

***

A couple of years ago I went to a Zoviet France and Autechre show at the Barbican. I remember feeling very ill and dragging myself out to enjoy-slash-endure this thing. (For reasons long since lost to me, I wrote down “mouse playing violin” and “melodies are illegal” on the Notes app that night.) As the music bore down on me in the dark—Autechre lock the doors and kill the lights during gigs—I felt as though I was swimming in an oil spill.

What struck me about that gig was the whooping and hollering in a seated venue to this not-quite-music. One reason among many that Autechre can draw a reaction like that is that they have, simply, persisted. People stuck with them—no matter how freaky or abrasive the albums became. From 2001’s Confield and beyond, Autechre music—no doubt to the bafflement of the day’s critics—has grown into its own exotic delicacy.

That bafflement may have a simple explanation: Autechre don’t talk endlessly about what their work “means.” It is music, instead, of unfathomable depth and shimmering surface, rendering the material world as an envelope of discovery. That night at the Barbican, I made out bits that resembled collapsing girders, b-boy scratches, glittering constellations—all bent into impossible Butoh figures of texture, rhythm and sound. They captured the imagination by setting it free.

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The Microplastics Digest

What I’ve been paying attention to this past month.

LISTENING

• Pounding – Frank Bretschneider

• Pagan Tango – Chris & Cosey

• Dust Devil – naemi

• No. 1 In Heaven – Sparks

• Gonzo Goa Pt 1 & 2 – Various Artists

READING

• Larry David’s Rulebook For How (Not) To Live In Society – Wesley Morris (New York Times Magazine)

• I Want A Critic – Andrea Long Chu (New York Review Of Books)

• James Chance, 1953 - 2024 – Lucy Sante (The Baffler)

• Live At The Liquid Room, Tokyo, Jeff Mills – Gabriel Szatan (Pitchfork)