Podthoughts by Colin Marshall: “All Avant-Garde All the Time”

Posted by Maximum Fun on 29th March 2009


On the hunt for experimental video and public-access television archived online, your Podthinker posted an Ask MetaFilter queston on the subject in order to mine the knowledge of hepper net-dwellers. The most valuable return was a recommendation of UbuWeb, a behemoth repository of avant-garde content in video, sound, text and image form. Joy at this discovery of untold cultural wealth was matched only by confusion at navigating it. The site isn’t poorly designed — far from it, in fact — but the question of where to start looms large.

An effective solution, at least where the sound archives are concerned, is All Avant-Garde All the Time [iTunes link], UbuWeb’s limited-edition podcast that surveys and unearths treasures from its vast storehouse. It’s hosted by Kenneth Goldsmith, a man of indisputable avant-garde credentials: he’s not only a poet and programmer on the great WFMU, he’s also UbuWeb’s publisher and sound editor and the curator of the Popular Guide to Unpopular Music. It’s fair to say he knows his stuff, unconventional-media-wise, and it’s not as if most of us have a better tour guide standing around, waiting for to be asked for a jaunt through an enormous, forbidding artistic labyrinth.

On each episode, Goldsmith introduces and provides a bit of background on the day’s theme, whether it’s recordings from the legendary “three-dimensional” Aspen magazine [MP3], selections from the equally whispered-about Tellus cassettes [MP3] or just a grab bag. The content itself consists of a spray of short clips linked to the theme, and “short” is most definitely not an accidental descriptor; often, mere seconds go by before Goldsmith springs in and starts chatting about whatever it was we’ve sort of just heard a scrap of. Fortunately, everything played is available on UbuWeb for merely the price of the calories required to make a few mouse clicks, so the podcast’s listening experience is much enhanced by having UbuWeb open and at the ready in case the desire to hear something in full arises.

And that desire will arise. As with any avant-garde art collection, All Avant-Garde All the Time presents, in roughly equal measure, the intriguing, the mystifying and the unbelievably strident. That’s the nature of the experimental, after all; some of it’s going to work and some of it won’t, but when it doesn’t work, it does it impressively, almost viciously refusing to work. The appropriate idea to whip out here is that of emergence, of seemingly unrelated elements working independently and yet together to produce something nobody would have expected. Often, in the works the podcast highlights, the formula is some combination of words, abstract sound and delivery, whether emotional or technological. Sometimes the formula consists of a bunch of people dragging benches across the stage. (It sounds much as you’re imagining.)

Goldsmith maintains an admirable attitude toward all this, appreciating individual pieces for whatever is possible to appreciate about them. Sometimes his enthusiam verges on theatrical, and sometimes he displays that odd avant-garde-enthusiast tendency to deem something amazing without marshaling the necessary supporting evidence — one memorable moment of irrational exuberance comes when he claims John Giorno “predicted the internet” — but he just as often expresses wonder at how “insane” a particular work is. Don’t underestimate that; real insanity is hard to find.

Vital stats:
Format: curated avant-garde clips
Running since: December 2007
Duration: ~15m
Frequency: six-weeklyish
Archive available on iTunes: all

[Podthinker Colin Marshall believes himself to be avant the garde of podcast reviewing, though he is non-reclusive and can still be easily reached at colinjmarshall at gmail. Discuss Podthoughts on the forum here or submit your own podcast for the next by-Max-Funsters column here.]