I’d like to take up a thread that has run throughout this conversation: the role of (what should we call it?) experimental music today in bringing new audiences to sound art and new interest in the field. Micki cites PanSonic, Vienna’s Mego label, and others; Steve notes the importance of Sonic Youth, Merzbow, Spacemen 3, DJ culture, etc.; Branden mentions the Table of the Elements label, which has released work by younger artists such as Jim O’Rourke and David Grubbs alongside classic work by Tony Conrad, Rhys Chatham, Arnold Dreyblatt, Pauline Oliveros, and others; Steve remarks on the role of music in the work of artists such as Stephen Prina, Mike Kelley, and Rodney Graham and alludes to the work of “art bands” such as Electrophilia, Workshop, and Van Oehlen. Then there are figures such as Carsten Nicolai, who straddles the worlds of post-Techno, neo-Minimalist visual art and sound-art installation.

All of these figures form part of a homegrown culture of musical experimentalism that has arisen in the past decade or so outside of both the world of rock/pop/dance music and the world of art music. And this experimental culture has actively traced a genealogy that includes Sonic Youth, Christian Marclay, Krautrock, Glenn Branca, free improvisation, punk rock, the Red Krayola, Minimalism, Cage, musique concrète, Futurism, etc. If you trace the various strands of this genealogy, you are pretty quickly led to classic sound art, Conceptual art, Fluxus, etc.

So there are clear affinities between this experimental musical culture and the (re)emergence of sound art. But are there relevant differences between music and sound art? Does the gallery or museum setting itself transform the one into the other? In Grey Room last spring, Mike Kelley criticized the Pompidou’s “Sonic Process” show for its “embrace of popular musical forms such as DJ-based dance music.” According to Kelley, the critical discourse around such musics falsely lays claim to avant-gardist strategies. While Kelley was not objecting to the identification of music with sound art (his own outfit, Destroy All Monsters, is arguably both), he was objecting to the admission into art institutions of “such popular forms of music, which are diluted forms of more complex and radical sources.” Kelley’s essay leads me to ask: Are there relevant and important lines to be drawn between music and sound art?

One other name to add to that list of pop musicians who brought an awareness to new generations of sound art/experimental music would be Björk—with her collaborations with Matmos, playing recordings by Chris Watson as part of her preshow, etc.

I always come back to this definition, which works for me: Music can be defined by sound in time, while sound art may be defined by sound in space. I realize that this doesn't work for everyone or all genres or subgenres; but personally, it has connected to my own definition of what I do and how I think about "sound art"—creating work that is open-ended, that may be experienced in a few minutes or hours, exploring sound as a physical medium rather than a temporal one.

There is also the issue of commodity that may be an influence for some about how certain works are categorized or catalogued and distributed. This too is something that we could address in this discussion, particularly given the nature of Artforum, which promotes and, many would say, advertises contemporary art. Here we are discussing a medium that has still to prove itself on the level of art-priced product.

In terms of the needed sound art–history book Stephen mentioned as well as the inclusiveness of art-related band music that Branden mentioned—while it wasn't a history in the traditional sense—I was thinking that one thing that was a huge influence on me was the Broken Music catalogue (1989), which was an exhibition of LPs that connected the LP as an object to the art world through sound, music, cover art, artist bands, etc. I remember being obsessed with the Dubuffet liner notes from his sound experiments, reprinted in that book, for years before I was ever able to even hear the recordings. I think at this stage, around 1990, the terms "sound art" and "experimental music" were much more interchangeable. The whole field seemed more open in terms of influences and possibilities.

I love Stephen's description of music as "sound in time" and sound art as "sound in space"—it really does get at something that speaks about the difference in the way the two things are experienced and intended, which I think is pretty huge.

I think Mike Kelley's rant is somewhat justified (although one could say the same of a lot of visual art at this point as well); but on the other hand it can be somewhat dangerous to dismiss things simply due to style. Conceptually, Carsten Nicolai's work and Panasonic (or PanSonic) is perhaps different than the dance music Kelley is speaking of. But their work would also fit nicely into what he calls "DJ-based dance culture" because it is beat-based, and basically you can still shake your booty to it.

Where are the lines drawn, and who gets to draw them? The interesting thing about David Toop's "Sonic Boom" show was that, along with someone I would consider a sound artist in the traditional sense, Christina Kubisch, it also included people like Scanner, Eno, and Lee Ranaldo, who approach sound from a very different place and have all made music that exists to some degree in popular culture. If you eliminate Kelley's conflict with style (because I am pretty sure he wouldn't have a problem with a sound-art show of Japanese noise music) and look more at Stephen's comment about sound art as "sound in space," you get to a deeper discussion, I think, about intention.

I agree with Kelley that simply placing music in a museum and presenting it as anything other than music can be problematic. But I think the real discussion becomes: Is it simply music being presented as sound art—and, again, how do we determine such things? It's fuzzy territory. I can't remember the name of the Rodney Graham piece from a few years ago where there's a film projection of him taking a hit of LSD and riding his bike backward through a park to a very Pink Floyd–sounding pop song; but it's not that far from a rock video. I loved that piece (and the funny thing is that I can still hum the tune even though I saw the piece two years ago :-)

If I didn't say it before, I believe that quote about "sound in space vs. sound in time" is borrowed from Max Neuhaus. (I've never been 100 percent sure where I came across it or whether I made it up to suit my needs. I think it's Neuhaus.)

Also, in addition to Broken Music, the other excellent book is Sound by Artists, from Art Metropole (1990). It did a good job of bringing together sound and contemporary art histories up until that time.

In a short program note from 1974, Neuhaus writes: "Traditionally composers have located the elements of a composition in time. One idea which I am interested in is locating them, instead, in space, and letting the listener place them in his own time. I am not interested in making music exclusively for musicians or musically initiated audiences. I am interested in making music for people" (Sound Works, Volume I: Inscription). This may be the source that Stephen is recalling. Yet, here, I don't think that Neuhaus draws the space/time distinction as starkly as Stephen does.

In many respects, Stephen's distinction is helpful. Sound-art installation very often is about filling a space with sound, inhabiting that space and that sound, and perceiving the ways in which the particular container shapes its sonic material. But I don't fully endorse the distinction. I think that the discourse around sound art has focused too exclusively on space. Much sound-art installation (and Neuhaus is exemplary here) has concerned itself with site-specificity, with the acoustic imprints of architectural spaces, etc. Yet sound is irreducibly temporal. And I think that the music/sound, time/space parallelisms can work to occlude the profound temporal experience of sound installations such as Neuhaus's.

If we look back at Neuhaus's remark, I think that what we find is not only a distinction between time and space but a distinction between two kinds of time: (1) the time of musical composition, and (2) the listener’s "own time"; (1) the time of "musicians or musically initiated audiences," and (2) the time of ordinary "people." I see this distinction, in Henri Bergson's terms, as a distinction between time (le temps: pulsed, counted time, spatialized time) and duration (la durée: nonpulsed time, time itself in its qualitative flow). It seems to me that sound-art installation can powerfully give us access to this latter kind of time.

I'm reminded of a set of remarks by Morton Feldman, who also wanted to free sound and time from musical composition and to allow both "to be themselves." Feldman wrote: "I am not a clockmaker. I am interested in getting to Time in its unstructured existence." "I feel that the idea is more to let Time be, than to treat it as a compositional element. No—even to construct with time won’t do. Time simply must be left alone." "Not how to make an object, not how this object exists by way of Time, in Time or about Time, but how this object exists as Time. Time regained, as Proust referred to his work."

I doubt I will articulate this very well, but while I agree with Christoph that the recent discourse around sound art has focused too much on space—I didn't take Stephen's comment (or Neuhaus's) to mean that there was necessarily always a connection of the sound to the space in terms of site-specificity or through conceptual thought—but for me it was much more about sound existing in a space to be visited, where the work loses the narrative structure of beginning and end that occurs in concert or even with a CD. With an installation, the viewer can enter and exit the work at will—it is almost "sound as space" as opposed to what Feldman says about music when he speaks of how an "object exists as time."

There are a lot things to pick up on here: music in museums; the collector's relationship to sound art; bibliographies; time/space; etc.

Funnily enough, during some correspondence I had with Nicolas Collins a year or so ago, he used the exact same phrase to make a distinction between music and sound art as Stephen used here. So perhaps there is a source, somewhere, for it.

I agree with Christoph when he suggests that it is perhaps too neat of a definition and that "space" gets an almost all-pervasive attention in talking about sound art. While I agree that a space for sound where one can enter and exit without being tied to a beginning-and-end temporal time line is something that sound art often pursues, I wouldn't want to let the experience of sound-through-time somehow not "belong" to sound art, and only to music or composition. I think of Janet Cardiff's audio walks, for example. They are very much about space but are also about duration, about the process of occupying a fictional sound world for a particular amount of time, and about creating a "story," with a beginning and an ending, that people follow through a blurry aural juxtaposition of space and time. Future, past, and present are very present and important components to the work, as listeners are made aware of not being able to place themselves in time.

Also, several sound artists take the very concept of sound extending itself across time as their subject. I think of Jem Finer's Longplayer, a piece meant to last 999 years, or Leif Inge's 24 Hour Beethoven. (Inge says, perhaps relevantly: "When I did this, I primarily wanted to make a piece where the duration is so long that the sensation of composition disappeared. It doesn’t really have beginnings or ends you need to concern about. You can enjoy the time you actually spend to get at it wherever in the piece you are.") There is also something about the accumulation of sound (over time) that can inform the art of sound in interesting ways. Sound functioning like dust: adding itself on top of itself layer by layer, over time. Memory, I suppose, is what I'm getting at—something that is very linked to time and something that is very relevant to sound art.

In reference to the mentions some have made about visual artists working with music, this, I think, is the source of a lot of confusion in the art world, with mistaking work that makes use of musical iconography (vinyl records, notes, sheet music, images of musicians, instruments, etc.) for sound art. I have read too many articles with "art of sound" in the title that go on to talk about Janine Gordon's mosh-pit photos, Sue de Beer's youthful punk rockers, Mark Leckey's speakers, Pipilotti Rist's pop-song remakes, Dave Muller's music geneologies, or even Christian Marclay's cut-up vinyl-record assemblages. While all of those works are very strong, I am not sure how much they have to do with sound art (although Marclay, of course, has made many seminal sound art pieces). Should these works that address "music" be thematically paired with pieces by Max Neuhaus, for example, as works that deal with "sound"?

I'm not sure that sound art (sound-in-space, say) is in any way more closely linked to art that features the objects or the imagery of music cultures than it is to abstract sculptural installations (or even to abstract grid paintings!) that make no direct reference to music.

Hmm . . . it's late. I hope that this makes some sense, at least.

PS: I also loved Rodney Graham's the phonokinetoscope (2001), which Steve mentions. It's a great juxtaposition of music (the song that is played) and space (the record plays in one room, and the projection is in another, separating how one experiences the spaces where the music is (and where the image is) and time (once the record is stopped, the projection stops as well, making the beginning-and-end structure of the piece very open-ended).