Underskog

Sex Tags Mania slipper sin attende plate under Ultima 2009. Plateslippet foregår på Filter Musikk (Skippergata 33, Oslo) 19. September klokken 14:00 og er akompagnert av tekster fra Erlend Hammer, Attila Lote og Henry McFenry. De to første tekstene vil bli publisert i Ultima sin siste festival avis, mens det siste essayet blir presentert på plateslippet.

Beautiful inside my mind forever.(utdrag)
^{BY ERLEND HAMMER}

The festival is a period of celebratory cleansing. It used to be carried out in archaic societies to rid the village of excess produce before the arrival of a new season. The festival represents both the cyclic nature of time passing, and whatever specifics a particular society had chosen to use as markers to end or start a new season. Today Christmas and Easter are the only remnants of the pre-modern festival that we tend to celebrate in the Western world, and these have taken on very protestant qualities. In fact Protestantism isn’t so much antithetical to the festival as it is actively hostile towards any form of fun. So the festivals are no longer the corporeal, bacchanalian orgies of excess that we imagine they once were, and which so many modern theorists and artists have longed for. Today the festivals are more brainy affairs and deal with religious matters, or more typically, take shape as cultural events that are plotted into the calendar in sufficiently spread out ways so that they don’t collide. So you have jazz festivals in August, contemporary music festivals in October, more mainstream music festivals in May, and so on.

In some ways, at least according to the logic of the people who pay for art in contemporary social democratic societies, this is how culture works. The cultural sphere has come to be dominated by these big events, whether they are music festivals or art biennials, and this is comfortable to those who provide funding. It’s easier to keep track of what’s going on, and it’s easier to have results to show off in return for the money spent. People who don’t really care about cultural activity, but who feel that they should, are satisfied that their work has borne some kind of clearly visible fruit.
Meanwhile those who are actually involved in the everyday process of cultural production continue to struggle to keep the practice going also in those months in between whenever something big is going on. This, for example, is the life of a concert venue, a club, or a record label. And it is certainly the life of the artists and musicians who spend their time producing the work that the rest of the culture industry lives off presenting to the world.

The festival today is still a form of ritual, but if is one in which the participants form a temporary social unit that symbolizes community more than actually representing it. The audience at festivals like Øya or Ultima are drawn together by a shared interest, but are somehow, because of the nature of the festival, perceived as a temporary community whereas there is normally as little interaction in between them as there is between people who watch the same TV-show. The festival is an important provider of the experience of the event. Across most forms of music culture, from underground techno or punk to mainstream pop music or contemporary classical music, the event is the structuring principle. The events may vary in size, but they are organized in the same way and perform the same function within a particular logic of cultural economy. The structure of habitual course that is created by the festival looks like this: everyday-spectacle-everyday. Recently, or somewhat recently, this structure has been put under scrutiny and pressured by criticism because many are starting to think that the festival, the momentous event during which energy is released, is too much in line with the structural logic of late capitalism. The event is too often used to draw attention away from the non-event, which is perceived as a mere sub-practice that exists to provide content for the event.