Dan Deacon and the perils of ad spaces and RIP Stockhausen
After the Rolling Stone debacle with RJ Reynolds, there’s now news that another ad in XLR8R magazine has pissed off experimental composer Dan Deacon and for including him in a Greyhound ad, which DD fumed about in an angry, explicit bulletin post on MySpace. Laptop act Wzt Hearts weren’t too thrilled about being in the same ad either, asking in a bulletin board if they could sue the company for this. Mags are doing trial and error experiments figuring out how to get cash for a dwindling ad rate base and this can probably be chalked up as a failure but expect to see other experiments like this as they try to figure out the changing landscape.
Speaking of composers, you might have heard that Karlheinz Stockhausen just passed away. Though I admired his early work (especially his early electronic pieces), I was also kind of disturbed by the cult that was built around him, sometimes at the expense of other composers. How many times have you heard a mindless blurb that someone was “influenced by Stockhausen” without much understanding about what that means? I hashed some of that over in a blog post last year. I also have a hateful letter he sent me years ago- I guess I’ll have to dig that out and frame it now (or at least put it on Ebay). For now, this is an interview he did in 1997.
