05 February 2010 — Campus A Low Hum: Reflections
On the Friday afternoon, before taking the evening bus to Campus A Low Hum, I was lucky enough to go and see the Yayoi Kusama exhibition: The Mirrored Years, at Wellington's City Gallery. Included in this collection was a work from 2000 called Fireflies on the Water: an installation consisting of a small room in which the ceiling and all the walls were mirrored, and the floor - except for a small section for the viewer to stand on - was a pool of water. Filling the room were many coloured light bulbs hanging from their wires: the fireflies. Despite all the lights, the room was very dark, as it was otherwise unlit, so the effect was akin to nighttime, or space. It felt as if a "perfect" imagining of such a scene would consist of seeing nothing but the lights, the water and the blackness, but of course this couldn't be, for no matter where I looked, there I was, from all angles. If I looked straight ahead I was staring back, and if I turned my head in any other direction I could see the top of my head, my back or my profile. In one way, it felt like my own body was getting in the way of the artwork, but it was clearly no accident. The mirrors weren't there just to extend the space of the room, but to anchor my body within it. Unlike other installations in the same exhibition, in which I was able to stand in particular places and see nothing but the works themselves, Fireflies forced me to be constantly aware of myself as a body within the space. I was forced to reflect.
The label "independent" is becoming increasingly meaningless when used to describe musicians who have albums released outside of the major labels, but it is also difficult to claim that such a label is a genre of its own. Campus A Low Hum (formerly Camp A Low Hum, but this year it was at an old agricultural college, and was slightly school-themed) is, loosely, a small-scale music festival of independent bands and musicians, but the lineup features music from all sorts of genres (read about it all here, if you want to get a better idea of the festival itself). Nearly all of the bands that played there would be categorised as "indie", but it didn't have anything to do with their label, and it doesn't adequately sum up the range of genres that could be heard. There was something that tied the bands together though: perfection wasn't a priority.
Perfection in art is a myth because perfection in humanity is a myth, but some artists have had different relationships to the idea. Many artists have dealt with the notion of perfection in quite philosophical ways, but the mainstream music industry mainly approaches perfection in the same way that fast food companies do: by trying to remove as much that is organic about a product as is possible. All mistakes are removed in the recording process, and most secondary sounds (I may be inventing this term, by the way) are taken out also: the squeak of a drummer's chair; the sound of a finger sliding on a guitar string; the tapping of the keys of a saxophone. The sound of the singer breathing in is one of the few secondary sounds that are kept in many recordings, likely because it's more closely related to the primary sound in the listener's head. Even if perfection is impossible, most pop records at least aspire to it - forever chasing the perfect realisation of a perfect song. I don't think this is a good or a bad thing necessarily, it's just the way that studio recordings on pop records have evolved. Indie musicians not only don't seem to care about perfection much, they don't even seem to believe in it as a worthy pursuit, in anything tied to their music. No song is perfectly formed, no delivery is perfectly executed, and no sound is perfectly realised. And there is little distinction between the primary and secondary sounds. You know all the crackles and hums and screams of equipment malfunctions you get at indie performances? They're there because - whether they admit it or not - the musicians are happy for them to happen. If they really cared about such things they would ensure that their equipment was in better shape: it's really not as hard as it may seem. This is true of mistakes as well. Very few indie musicians play songs that they find particularly challenging to perform, yet they make mistakes all the time. It would be easy to criticise a band for not playing well enough, but it would be misguided. I'm not trying to be harsh when I say that if a musician truly cared about not making any mistakes during a performance, they wouldn't make any. But in indie music, accidents of all sorts happen, and it's why so many people love it so much.
Most of the bands I heard at Campus A Low Hum shared these traits. People made mistakes. Instruments didn't work. Arrangements were sketchy. The degree of competence at their instruments that many bands had would be seen as laughable in other genres. And all of this somehow added up to a music festival that, from what I heard over the weekend, was the highlight of many people's lives.