Review:
"Caleb Kelly's
"Caleb Kelly's "Cracked Media" is a welcome addition to the growing body of critical writing on the role of sound in the history of modern and postmodern art. It helpfully extends Douglas Kahn's monumental "Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound" in the Arts by focusing on a powerful strain of contemporary sonic art: the creative mis-use of audio playback technologies. As Kelly ably theorizes it, the 'crack' is a productive break that articulates past and future, archaeology and innovation, analog and digital. Hence, this book combines an exhaustive survey and taxonomy of recent experiments with turntables and CD technology (Oval, Christian Marclay, Yasunao Tone, etc.) with a detailed genealogy of these practices that traces them back to earlier moments of sonic experimentation (Futurism, Fluxus, John Cage, etc.). Informed, but not overloaded, by theoretical accounts of phonography and digital media, Kelly helpfully sorts out what is at issue in cracked sound and places this at the cen
"Finally, a deep, scholarly accounting of the aesthetics of failure. Props to Caleb Kelly for laying bare the various histories of 'malfunction' as a compositional device. This book should be required reading for anyone working in electronic music today."--Kim Cascone, Composer and Writer
"For those of us who witnessed and accompanied the advent of the laptop music scene in the late 1990s, this book situates the movement within broader contexts of sound exploration in the 20th century. While theories of the everyday have been applied to music listening, they have not been used to discuss music creation. Kelly shows how the mechanisms of consumer music culture led to new directions in artistic creation. What we see is how the creative act in the age of mechanical reproduction becomes a music of cracked reproduction, and ultimately an art of manual mechanical deconstruction."--Atau Tanaka, Artist, Director of Culture Lab Newcastle
"Fans of both the scratch and the stutter, and those of us trying to make a connection between the two, will find this to be an excellent refresher course--or the gentle introduction they've been looking for. An invaluable reference on the origins of sampling in music and audio art, this book connects the dots and names names. I thoroughly enjoyed it."--Jon Nelson, Escape Mechanism, and www.some-assembly-required.net
About the Author:
Caleb Kelly is a lecturer at the Sydney College of the Arts, the University of Sydney, Australia.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.