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January 31, 2012

Interview with Bruno Pronsato

Steven Ford (aka Bruno Pronsato) is a post-punk inspired techno artist who has been releasing electronic music on various labels ever since his 12″ debut, “Read Me/Silver City,” in 2003. Originally from Texas, Pronsato spent several years in Seattle before moving to Berlin in 2006 to concentrate on playing music full time. . . .

Listgeeks: One thing I always enjoy about your music is that things tend to be just a little bit “off.” Can you relate to that in any way?

Bruno Pronsato: I think working in techno/house (or whatever form of dance music you call your own), you’re pretty limited as far as looseness is concerned. Mainly, the object is to make people dance, and to make that happen easily you need to make your tracks “tight,” so that the DJ doesn’t have a difficult time mixing your track with the others. I have never really subscribed to that idea – I’ve always put a bit more importance in making what I make musical – at whatever expense. Being a drummer, a lot of the fun in creativity is making rhythms a tad different than the expected. A skipped beat here, a slightly misplaced snare there – coming from a rock background I’m not so tied to the idea of completely making things easy for a DJ

LG: Before you started releasing electronic music as Bruno Pronsato you actually played drums in a number of punk/hardcore bands and were strongly influenced by experimental indie music. Would you say you still draw inspiration from your musical past? What other sources of musical inspiration influence your sound these days?

BP: I still visit my punk roots, though it is a bit difficult to get into some of the hardcore I once enjoyed - I guess I’m just not that angry anymore. I still very much enjoy the more no wave/experimental stuff (if you can call it that) Gang of Four, DNA, James Chance, etc., and of course the sounds of My Bloody Valentine and the noisier side of 90s rock. These days, though, I’m listening to a lot of classical stuff – I’ve been really into listening to these gigantic arrangements and focusing on themes more than straight four bar melodies - I would like to get to a place like that some day.

LG: How would you say moving from the U.S. to Berlin has affected the way you work?

BP: Well, I think having such a huge amount of support from the European side (in general) has done a lot to advance whatever musical vision I might be chasing - Berlin has such a gigantic support system. I guess I have felt more of an ability to experiment. When you are in the U.S. making this music, you tend to look at what is ‘hype’ to sort of make out the direction of club culture, and that’s not really a good thing. Berlin is sort of it’s own world, and in many ways, the world now sort of looks to Berlin for the direction of club music (or it used to).

LG: It seems like the human voice (not singing necessarily) has grown to be a key element of your signature palette. Would you agree? How would you describe your use of the human voice in your music?

BP: I would definitely agree. I think I am trying to use the voice more as an element to slip in between spaces: fragments of words, breaths and on occasion full words and maybe a note or two…when I’m feeling really adventurous.

Posted on January 31, 2012 at 09:46 PM in Interview, Music | Permalink | Comments (0)

bruno pronsato

Posted on January 31, 2012 at 09:36 PM in Music | Permalink | Comments (0)

Nelida Pinon & Carlos Fuentes

Posted on January 31, 2012 at 09:30 PM in Books, Interview | Permalink | Comments (0)

Centro/Esquina

Vallejo Nocturno 2012- Corner

“The only photographs that truly exist are the ”innocent” images. We find them in the family photo albums or in the police archives. Beyond serving as a simple documentation of reality or of a certain aesthetic sense, they attest to the role of the photographer, of his implication, of the authenticity of his position in that moment. The compositions of light, narrative, are no longer, for me, fundamental problems but superfluous lies. What interests me today in an image? The perspective that has justified the act of photography, the interference of the experience, of the ongoing scene, the texture, the material, the meaning of the self-portrait, of the individual, the incoherence of the unfolding sequence, the maniacal reconstruction of the random experience – the photographs, like words, are meaningless when isolated…” -Antoine D’Agata

Posted on January 31, 2012 at 08:51 PM in Images | Permalink | Comments (0)

January 30, 2012

Interview with Paul Blackburn

From New York Quarterly :

NYQ: What poets have influenced your work?

PAUL BLACKBURN: W. H. Auden was an early influence. My mother sent me a copy of his Collected Poems when I was in the Army. When I was nineteen, I could write a pretty good Auden poem, and I feel that I picked up a formal sense of musical structure from him. In college I began to read Ezra Pound. His Personae, not to mention the Cantos, was an incredible revelation to me as to what you could do in terms of making music with different line lengths, and how, rhythm could be so rich and varied. I think I learned a lot of my ear from reading Pound. At the same time I was studying Pound, I was picking up influences from my contemporaries—Robert Creeley, Charles Olson and Cid Corman. I was learning to strip my style of as much as I could and get down to very simple statements while still keeping it reasonably musical. I think a lot of the William Carlos Williams influence came to me, not through Williams so much, as through Williams' influence on Creeley. In a review of my first book, the critic blamed both Creeley and me on Williams. I thought, "Oh, wow! I've got to read Williams!" So I got ahold of Paterson, and what was then his Collected Poems. I wanted to find out where my influences were coming from. I wanted to find out who my father was.

NYQ: Those contemporaries you mentioned—Creeley, Olson, Corman—-didn't you all form the Black Mountain School of poetry?

PB: Black Mountain doesn't do at all as a label; because presumably it should apply to the people who either studied or taught at Black Mountain College, and it doesn't. Robert Duncan taught at the college and contributed to The Black Mountain Review, but he really can't be considered to be Black Mountain. He's much more musical than many of the Black Mountain people. And he doesn't necessarily work from speech rhythms—he's more formal. Mostly what this Black Mountain thing is all about is what we were all working at—speech rhythm, composition by field, or something from that set of ideas. By 1951, Olson had tied a lot of it together in that "Projective Verse" essay. So we even had a set of principles to keep in our heads. But this is not to say that we were developing similar styles. Does Creeley write like Olson, does Olson write like Denise Levertov? In the end, every poet is an individual, and if you can group them it's because they drink together once in a while.

NYQ: You said that you "learned a lot of your ear from reading Pound." Your ear must play a great part in the writing of your poetry.

PB: Certainly the ear is a prime judge of what I've accomplished or have not accomplished. I wouldn't even know whether a poem was finished or not unless my ear told me. I think music must be in the poem somewhere. Poetry is traditionally a musical structure. Now that forms are as open as they are, each poem has to find its own form. It has to do with the technique of juxtaposition and reading from the breath line and normal speech raised to its highest point. But that's abstracting a principle. When you're writing, these things are at the back of it. It's almost as though your technique is in your wrists and you're sitting at a typewriter instead of at a piano. As far as I'm concerned, people who don't hear the poems are missing a good deal, and a poet who doesn't hear his own poems is missing everything. He's got to hear his own voice saying it. It's got to come off the page in a way that concrete poetry cannot.

Posted on January 30, 2012 at 09:22 PM in Books, Culture, Interview | Permalink | Comments (0)