Excepter's Election Day Protest @ Monkeytown Tomorrow
Image c/o Monkeytown
I’m sure you are all fully aware that tomorrow is Election Day. What you may not know is that Monkeytown will play host to Excepter’s “Election Day Protest”. A 16-hour endurance piece, the performance will begin at 8am and end at midnight.
Founding member John Fell Ryan was kind enough to answer some questions and shed some light on the project’s conception, preview the accompanying visuals, and touch upon the role protest plays when you’re an artist.
If you are unable to make it out to Monkeytown, you can catch the live webcast on Excepter’s site.
How was the Election Day Protest conceived, and what is its goal?
The initial goal of the Election Day project was to do a long, multi-hour piece. There aren't many opportunities for extended performances in the current music environment; so we aim to make the most of our luck to be able to do this.
Read more after the jump.
Do you enjoy longer endurance pieces? How is this conducive to Excepter’s process?
With free form, open-ended and reactive music such as Excepter it only makes sense for it not to stop; to keep on going. The length of the performance becomes a self-generating thing-in-and-of-its-self. You’d be surprised what you come up with when you run out of ideas. A little something-out-of-nothing is the basic, beatnik truth of consciousness through exhaustion.
How does the protest performance figure in the political process?
When we say this is a “protest performance” we do not mean “protest” in
the standard political sense. We do not have a list of demands. It is more about expressing a critical attitude towards the crisis between music by itself and music in society, using politics as a metaphor--Like Bob Dylan protesting writing protest songs while telling reporters that “all he did was protest.” Our aims are abstract, musical.
Then, you view the artist’s existence as subversive in society?
In a commodity-based society that only recognizes the quantifiable, to be an artist is an act of protest. Art is the ineffable. To people who
establish market value; who only perceive what can be measured, what you do is useless. Music is the invisible art; why else would it be so
devalued in our age of contact-free information. Our demonstration
forwards the idea that this disconnection from the unknowable is causing the current value crisis.
Finally, what do you visually have in store for the performance? How will it differ from previous Monkeytown performances?
So it is in the spirit of political re-brotherhood that we offer as much documentation as possible of our performance. We have the “technical Excepter” gathered to perform the video feed and Internet broadcast. While past Monkeytown performances have woven together camera effects and slowed-down Disney pics; this time we’ll be opening up channels to all of Television and other live media.
