It’s always nice to discover there are more people that share the same feelings about music; no rules, no boundaries.
While doing some research (read: surfing on the internet) I bumped into Tim Perkis’ website NoisyPeople.com, the homepage of his first feature-length film Noisy People.
Noisy People is, as described on the website “a feature length video documentary that opens a window into a tightly-knit group of unusual sound artists and musicians from the San Francisco improvisational music community.“
I found some excerpts of the documentary on YouTube. Here’s one that really amazed me! Standard rules how to play instruments? “Fuck that!,” as Djll, the guy in the movie, says.
Djll’s Trumpet
There’s more where that came from, on this YouTube Channel. Check it out.
But that is not everything…
On the website you can also find a very inspiring essay about the film. Written by Tim Perkis himself. The essay contains some lines that are really close to the Lalalab vision that it’s not about styles, or genres, or names, or agreements. But that it’s about the “cracks” between different musical practices that allows us to discover new approaches and angles!
But what of the music itself? While its practitioners form a strong creative community, there is plenty of disagreement among them about what it is they are actually creating. The music seems to exist in the cracks between different established genres/communities/practices, by turns appearing on the margins of jazz, or rock, or electronic dance music, as a form of contemporary Western (classical) art music, or as sound art — a variant of the plastic arts and not properly music at all. Over the years the names used for this family of musics are most notable in their meaninglessness: New Music, Noise, Creative Music, Improvised Music, Avant Garde Music, Eclectic Music, Free Music, Sound Art. All essentially empty names.
Tim Perkis, Feb 14 2007, Berkeley
Interested in the San Franciso Bay Area musicians? Here’s some more info about the artists profiled in the documentary. Enjoy.
