{"id":1520,"date":"2007-03-28T02:34:42","date_gmt":"2007-03-28T00:34:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/archives\/2007\/03\/28\/qwartz-award-wrap-up\/"},"modified":"2008-02-03T09:46:32","modified_gmt":"2008-02-03T08:46:32","slug":"qwartz-award-wrap-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/archives\/2007\/03\/28\/qwartz-award-wrap-up\/","title":{"rendered":"Qwartz Awards Wrap-up"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>We had a couple tix for the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.qwartz.org\/index.php?option=com_content&#038;task=view&#038;id=70&#038;Itemid=70\">Qwartz &#8220;Electronic Music Awards&#8221;<\/a> last Friday (went, despite knowing this would imply spending the rest of my week-end, reading up the works of Messrs. von Neuman, Morgenstern and Nash, a coffee IV hooked to my arm)&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Despite grand ambitions and a few catchy headliners (most notably: <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Bjork\">Bjork<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Pierre_Henry\">Pierre Henry<\/a>, both a last-minute no-show), the whole event had a very homemade vibe to it. Most of the MC&#8217;s time was spent calling for people to come on stage who often had apparently picked that time to go drink champagne or weren&#8217;t even attending to begin with&#8230; The show ended up running a couple hours late (we gave up and left shortly before the end, leaving only a very scarce crowd behind us).<\/p>\n<p>All this bickering notwithstanding, we had a cool evening: the live sets were <em>very<\/em> eclectic, ranging from \u00fcber-experimental stuff, to dancefloor-friendly, beat-heavy electronica. The people were friendly and the venue <a href=\"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/archives\/2007\/03\/23\/qwartz-music-awards\/\">absolutely gorgeous<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>A few random rantish thoughts:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Despite the lack of an artificial commodities market where such could be sold at inflated prices, music <em>does<\/em> have its dubious &#8220;white-on-white-with-white-shadows&#8221; school of contemporary artists. They tend to make 10-minute long tracks using a sine wave generator, some bubble wrap and a microphone for sole instruments.<\/li>\n<li>On the other hand, being a &#8220;serious&#8221; cutting-edge electronic artist making &#8220;dancefloor-friendly&#8221; tracks, apparently means 90% of the time, using the played-out-to-exhaustion <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Amen_break\">Amen break<\/a> like it&#8217;s 1998 and Drum&#8217;n&#8217;bass is the new cool shit.<\/li>\n<li>Erm. Was Drum&#8217;nbass <em>ever<\/em> cool? Yea, nevermind.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.sfeericle-records.com\/vitaminsforyou\/\">Vitaminsforyou<\/a> played one of the very few live acts I would have paid to dance to.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/cocoonmusic.free.fr\/\">Cocoon<\/a> had infinitely more ambition than substance. I have seen better post-situ art performances, waiting in line for Alcatraz at Pier 23.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.deleonard.com\/\">Leonard de Leonard<\/a> performed some pretty bouncy electro-hip-hop songs. Yet I couldn&#8217;t help notice they had little business being there: for all its cheeky joviality, the rapping wasn&#8217;t exactly Public Enemy-quality (kinda tried for it, though) while the &#8220;electronic&#8221; part ranked in the straight-outta-mom&#8217;s-garage league.<\/li>\n<li>Try as I may, Pierre Shaeffer&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Musique_concr\u00e8te\">Musique Concr\u00e8te<\/a> still bores the hell out of me. Oddly enough, Soares Brandao&#8217;s &#8220;Hommage to Pierre Shaeffer&#8221; wasn&#8217;t completely devoid of interest (watching more than listening, actually).<\/li>\n<li>Nominees and tracks that caught my ear : Wang Lei, Matmos (++), Electroluvs, Coloma, dr Bone, Hypo &#038; EDH, Bostich&#8230;<\/li>\n<li>Most of which (Matmos excepted) I wouldn&#8217;t dare putting up against any major mainstream electronic act (say, at random: Laurent Garnier, Matthew Herbert etc.) or even many smaller indie producers&#8230;<\/li>\n<li>Despite a list of nominees spanning (only?) half-a-dozen countries, the whole music selection had a heavy <em>French<\/em> feel to it. Perhaps a little too much systemic bias within the selection process.<\/li>\n<li>Foie-gras &#038; <s>marzipan<\/s> gingerbread makes for truly divine petit-fours.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>For somewhat more constructive insights on that event, you can check out <a href=\"http:\/\/sskizo.free.fr\/wordpress\/?p=279\">this post<\/a> (in French) from a blogger in my feed list who, as it turns out, also went.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We had a couple tix for the Qwartz &#8220;Electronic Music Awards&#8221; last Friday (went, despite knowing this would imply spending the rest of my week-end, reading up the works of Messrs. von Neuman, Morgenstern and Nash, a coffee IV hooked to my arm)&#8230; Despite grand ambitions and a few catchy headliners (most notably: Bjork and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":4,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[27,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1520","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-events","category-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1520","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1520"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1520\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1520"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1520"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1520"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}