Today, the music-world is characterized by a skeptical and often cynical attitude towards radical thought in music. However, this attitude is dominant not without a reason: it is due to the fact that today music is – as Alain Badiou has stated – ‘negatively defined’. The musical status-quo is no longer able to push any boundaries, nor does the cheerful and permissive attitude usually labeled as postmodernism, which blends genres and styles under the same joyful banner – challenging the emancipatory potential of music, its autonomy and its capacity to accomplish something new. Nevertheless, the ‘anti-mimetic’ notion associated with modernism is also not a viable option and has not been for more than thirty years. All of these positions are not able to respond anymore to the original vision of the avant-garde, which seeks to establish a connection between music and radical thought.
squib-box is a group of musicians and artists whose main goal is to promote radical thought through performance and to positively redefine the musical avant-garde. We do not consider the avant-garde as linked to a particular movement, discipline, style or genre, but rather to an uncompromising attitude towards experimentation and innovation that challenges the notion of what music is, its system of organization, subject matter and modes of classification.
squib-box seeks to redefine music by breaking with its barriers of identification: it aims to redefine the very core of how music is created, produced, presented and disseminated. We are also convinced that music’s radicalism does not lie in the attitude that currently is very fashionable in so called ‘Sound Art’, which associates sound to an intangible object that is disembodied from human action. On the contrary, we believe that the truly subversive possibilities of music and sound lie within the performative and in the collective action of gathering together to carry out, engage in and achieve a common purpose that might inspire new ways of thinking and forms of subjectivity. For this reason, the main activities of squib-box are centered on creating and producing performances that question the practices and ideas behind conventional forms of music-making.
squib-box consists of a collection of artists inside and outside of music which encompasses a wide variety of practices and genres including contemporary music, live-art, free improvisation, pop, metal, jazz, early music, ‘pataphysics, fine arts, martial arts, comic book art, etc… squib-box puts on events and releases recordings that combine all of these different artistic practices and musical backgrounds through experimental artistic strategies.
20 December, 2010