Random and Confused or Organized and Intentional?

I like these articles for opening the possibilities of art and sound performance. Though each goes about it in a different way, each author/article seems to be suggesting that art has no boundaries. Realizing that sound can be noise or performance, coming from the same channel, helps to dissolve some prejudices people may have, particularly with regard to avant garde, or even modern art. What I don’t understand, however, is how something so random can still be art? Surely it is a performance, and meaning is not entirely lost, though unexplicably altered, depending on the “channel.” Is the message of anti-records and conceptual records to simply undercut the commercialism and capitalism that goes along with performance? Or are these simply self-expression? Do they have some deeper underlying meaning rather than to just destroy a record? The channel, of course, will change the art significantly. I imagine this YouTube video, “Anti-Record #3 by The Adjective Noun,” would be significantly different if played on a different turntable and would continue to change with repeated playings.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxrI561jqbw

How then, does such a random performance maintain enough of its original state to be art? More importantly, is the randomness itself the art?

As I am very unfamiliar with sonic culture, sound performance, noise, etc… I tried to connect all of this to something I can better understand. Hip-hop and dj performances are not completely different from anti-records. The underground scene and dj battles especially. As this video shows, this is certainly a performance and arguably art, and though the recording itself won’t change much. The performance/art could change dramatically depending on the venue, the turntables, mixer, speakers, amplifiers, other equipment, even the dj’s mood at the time. So even though this seems really planned and thought out, the art itself can be just as random and different as an anti-record.

http://www.djbattle.net/video_view.php?mID=46 (I apologize if you have to download this. I had trouble uploading the file from my computer.)

This video brings me to my second point. Considering last week’s discussion on the history of sound production and recordings, combined with Shannon and Rice from this week, I wonder how much these things have evolved or revolutionized? It seems that what was being done in the 1930s is still being done today. DJs, though not entirely of the same sound performance, destroy records to make a new sound. They “recycle records to create sound montages” like Paul Hidemith and Ernst Toch did in 1930; they experiment “with records, playing them backwards, varying speeds, etc.” like Edgard Varese in 1936; they stick “tape on top of records, paint over them, burn them, cut them up and glue different parts of records back together, etc.” like Milan Knizak in 1963 (some of this is visible on A-Trak’s vinyls.) All of this creates “new compositions” and plays into the idea that “no recording medium, it seems, can escape eventual manipulation by conceptual artists” (Rice). If this is the case now, in 2009, for both underground and commercial hip-hop, what has changed other than the technology? The techniques are the same though the quality may be different. The performers/artists are not radical, not even totally original in their methods. Perhaps this goes along with the theme that art has no boundaries and exposing oneself to the various possibilities will help develop a better understanding of/appreciation for, noise in all its forms.