I wrote the following open letter (and sent it to friends and colleagues) in December 2004.
I post it here as someone recently suggested that it could be interesting as public domain material, possibly reaching into a larger readership.

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dear Friends,

I resolved myself to share the following thoughts with you. I do so only in the hope to positively contribute in the discussion concerning the present state of worldwide musical creativity, especially in close conjunction with the technological (and thus political) frame within which such creative activities take place today (in the Western world, and elsewhere as well).

Some months ago, a "call for contributions" was circulated by the Berlin _club transmediale 2005 conference_. The conference theme was "Splendid Isolation". I made my proposal. It was rejected. Fine, no problem. It is very likely that the curators of the _club transmediale_ received more interesting proposals than mine! I trust them completely, so I have little doubt that they were right in preferring other proposals and contributions.

If there is any relevance to this trivial story, that is certainly not on a personal level. Just like many other little stories that we all have sooner or later witnessed, I believe, it reflects broader cultural (political) trends in today music-related activities, and especially in the relationship between musicians and technologies.

I know many (composers, concert organizers, festival art-directors) who are genuinely interested in listening to, and in better understanding, the artifacts (music, CDs, performances, DVDs, videos, writings, etc) of intelligent "non-academic" musical activities (once called "underground", there are and there have been so many definitions), although maybe these composers, intellectuals, organizers etc. may not share, or may only partly share, the pop-culture background those creative productions are born of. That genuine interest is witnessed by many recent publications and creative collaborations on related themes.

However, and in sharp contrast, I doubt that, beside surface appearences, "techno noise" or "experimental" or "electronika" music practitioners, and related intellectual fora (maybe including _club trasmediale_) have genuine intellectual curiosity for what other musicians do, except of course those who fall within strictly self-stipulated genre boundaries and, more in general, within the boundaries of a very clearly recognizable pop-culture background.

I am not new to these behaviours. Some years ago, a respected New York artist, whose production is dubbed "experimental noise" in fanzines and magazines (sometimes called "the duke of noise" by practitioners in those circles), contacted me because he had a special interest in aspects of my work, which (he stated in an interview) was a source of inspiration to him. We started a project together, it resulted in a very interesting compositional collaboration. When we sent out our CD demo to the very same labels that usually publish my newyorker friend's "noise", all of the labels said a clear "no" - which meant: "no, because we hear something here that makes it unacceptable, or not fitting into our circles".

It is only ironical, but very very telling, that when we sent out our CD proposal to labels that publish more "serious" avantgarde composers, they too said "no", because "we do not publish this kind of trendy noise tracks".

An "electronika" label recently put out a CD with remixes of Xenakis' Persepolis. Somebody suggested my name as one of the composers to be involved. I was told, later, that the guy who runs the label knew me for my own, independent work, and that, thus, he didn't spend one second to think whether he should or should not invite me. (Of course he did not, and, after hearing the CD he issued, I am grateful to him.)

Many self-proclaimed "experimental techno" musicians and festival organizers claim they are interested in the pioneering work of composers such as Xenakis, Cage and others. Some of them candidly claim they work in a line that follows the revolution first sketched by Italian futurist musicians from the 1920s. They are ignorant of the fact that the Art of Noise was first and foremost a political fascist manifesto (at the same time, some of them described themselves politically committed "sound acktivists"). I presume these guys want to provide themselves with what sounds to them as intellectually acceptable roots. To some extent, this effort is understandable - were it not at odds with directions and actions actually pursued. An "experimental techno" festival in Naples, last year contacted me because they had heard of my familiarity with Xenakis electronic music, and they wanted to plan a Xenakis-hommage concert. But when we discussed the concert program, they traced back immediately and stopped the collaboration. They were not at all interested in Xenakis electronic works, they were interested in their own self-appointed "experimental" remixes of Xenakis music (much like the Xenakis destructuration that was first proposed in Berlin, at the "off-ICMC" in year 2000).

In another occasion, two years ago, I was solicited to review a CD by a famous Berlin-resident artist, working at the boundaries between ultra-minimalistic sound (so trendy) and visual art (the guy also runs his own label company, just like many in this area - that is another interesting phenomenon, but we can't touch on it here). It was for me an interesting thing to do. Yet, in the circumstance I had no feedback at all from this famous artist, himself completely sucked up in his "splendid isolation", probably in the conviction that getting the opinion (on his work) of somebody that he deemed so different and distant was not worth of a minute of his life. I had deemed his CD worth of some hours of mine, spent in preparing the review.

To summarize my point, the self-called non-academic experimental music practitioners have the very same exclusivistic attitude that could and should be contested to composers and institutions more grounded in academic music culture. And to some extent, they represent a perhaps much more closed, self-referential, and elitarian circle than the circles they themselves (not without reason) call elitarian. So, in essence, all that they achieve for themselves is just another instance of "splendid isolation", one pursued in the name of breaking with isolation, and one they probably presume it's better justified in today's world because it is grounded in pop-culture and in a wholly mediatized mind-set. In short, they are another "academy" (an exclusive club, elitarian in nature), but one designed fit to survive in the worldwide marketplace, because it itself accepts and fosters market ideology (while presuming to foster the end of ideologies and to contrast globalizing market policies - but that's got only to do with aesthetics and aestheticization, another issue I cannot go into here).

The question of course remains to be tackled as to what it means "academic" (and related connotative words, like "institutional"). This is quite hard to do, and I am certainly incapable of that. Maybe another short little story can help to clarify at least what is understood as "academic" by "avantgarde noise" and "techno" musicians that call themselves "non-academic". In 1998 I was commissioned an electronic composition to include in a CD produced in Koln. The CD also included tracks by some stars of the "electronika" scene (people whose most profound, radical and ground-breaking question often comes down to: "should there be a 4/4 beat or not, in my next track?"). The friend who produced the CD was very happy with the piece I had contributed, because - so he said - "it stands up by itself in the collection, reflecting a more academic approach". I asked him what he precisely meant with that. He said, "well, you start with a concept, you had a plan, you think about what you do". Wow.... What an (inadvertantly) revealing answer... (The answer, though, was maybe for this friend NOT as a way to congratulate...). Ironically, a review of this CD that appeared in an Italian weekly pop-music magazine (called Musica!, it circulates every week in the number of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, as it is given out in bundle with the daily newspaper La Repubblica), described this work as "seven minutes of insignificant, badly thought-of background noise". (The UK magazine Wire had a better insight, and reviewed it positively because, "while it is a very formally organized composition, it sounds informal and free".) Needless to say, that many people with academic musical background would be (and have been) horrified upon hearing these strange sounds, and would probably not even use the word "music" to talk about it.

It should not go unnoticed that if the Koln CD came to be reviewd in widely distributed magazines, that of course happened mainly thanks to the tracks that were composed "not thinking about it".

So, should I (however preliminarily) conclude, based on these annotations, that just by "thinking about it" I confine myself out of the self-appointed "anti-academic" AND out of the "academic" world? And should I conclude that the two, in essence, are just different representations of the same? If anything they behave like the same when they happen to confront with (not only) my sounds, such that these sounds reveal aspects they share.

These are just questions that I liked to share,