An Evening With Scott Walker & Friends
Scott Walker in pointy boots
I’ve been listening to Scott Walker all summer. I compiled this semi-chronological streaming mix of his “music,” alternately interspersed with other artists either directly or indirectly influenced by him. Walker starts off as a crooner and winds up as a kind of concrete noise poet (or something) — thus running the gamut from Nick Drake to Swans (a gamut no one else has even conceived of as a gamut). The following excerpts from Deleuze/Guattari‘s A Thousand Plateaus, Chapter 4, section III seem applicable:
Only when the voice is tied to timbre does it reveal a tessitura that renders it heterogenous to itself and gives it a power of continuous variation: it is then no longer accompanied, but truly “machined,” it belongs to a musical machine that prolongs or superposes on a single plane parts that are spoken, sung, achieved by special effects, instrumental, or perhaps electronically generated (96).
When one submits linguistic elements to a treatment producing continuous variation, when one introduces an internal pragmatics into language, one is necessarily led to treat nonlinguistic elements such as gestures and instruments in the same fashion, as if the two aspects of pragmatics joined on the same line of variation, in the same continuum (98).
It’s not that Walker is all that great of a poet per se, or all that great of a singer per se, or all that great of a composer per se. But he has gradually arrived at this deterritorialized trajectory modulating between embodied poetry and a poetic composing. It’s all the more disturbing when you listen to his practice (d)evolve over time in the mix (it starts unhinging at the song “Nite Flights”).
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7 Responses to “An Evening With Scott Walker & Friends”.
I’ve been really enjoying the all the Sister organizations linked from Deep Young.
http://deepyoung.org/sister/index.html
My favorite is:
“That Word Which Means Smuggling Across Borders, Incorporated”
Jason
Hi Jason,
two additional organizations biographically related to “that word…”:
http://spurse.org
http://mildredslane.com
I’ve been a huge Scott Walker fan for years… funny to see this on the netpoetic site. I’ve only done blog post about him myself, a little tour of his career through Youtube:
http://www.arras.net/fscIII/?p=274
Curt
i’d love to be able to rehear your playlists
compilations
Unfortunately you did not archive them, or…?
Best
andreas jacobs
Hi Andreas,
Correct, no archive of the broadcasts. Ethereal radio. I did compile a list of the first 50 broadcasts, but not the audio: http://deepyoung.org/radio/master.html
Here are the only two archived broadcasts:
http://deepyoung.org/radio/popmantra.html
http://deepyoung.org/radio/jordan.html
who is curt cloninger what does he do for a living ?he obviously doesnt know much about Scott Walke r who was voted worlds best singer in the sixties an d his songs from that time were pure poetry . the songs Scott wrote were , and still are fantastic nobody could sound as good as he did. From the sixties to know he has progressed further than any other musician I will admit i jumped a few times when i first listened to drift but i soon got used to it and it is great i love it Iwould suggest curtc leaves the dictionary alone and use normal every day words also he should listen to some of Scotts earlier work before making remarks that he is not a great singer song writer or poet
Hi Diane,
http://playdamage.org/76.html
Best,
Curt
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