Cracked Media: The Sound of Malfunction
"Caleb Kelly's Cracked Media is a welcome addition to the growing body of critical writing on the role of sound in the history of modern and postmodern art. It convincingly extends Douglas Kahn's monumental Noise Water Meat by focusing on a powerful strain of contemporary sonic art: the creative misuse of audio playback technologies."--Christoph Cox, co-editor of Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music"For those of us who witnessed and accompanied the advent of the laptop music scene in the late 1990's, this book situates the movement within broader contexts of sound exploration in the 20th century. While theories of the everyday have been applied to music listening, they have not been used to discuss music creation. Kelly shows how the mechanisms of consumer music culture led to new directions in artistic creation. What we see is how the creative act in the age of mechanical reproduction becomes a music of cracked reproduction, and ultimately an art of manual mechanical deconstruction."--Atau Tanaka, Artist, Director of Culture Lab Newcastle(Atau Tanaka)"For those of us who witnessed and accompanied the advent of the laptop music scene in the late 1990s, this book situates the movement within broader contexts of sound exploration in the 20th century. While theories of the everyday have been applied to music listening, they have not been used to discuss music creation. Kelly shows how the mechanisms of consumer music culture led to new directions in artistic creation. What we see is how the creative act in the age of mechanical reproduction becomes a music of cracked reproduction, and ultimately an art of manual mechanical deconstruction."Atau Tanaka, Artist, Director of Culture Lab Newcastle