MISSION STATEMENT (and a collection of questions that emerge from said mission statement).
HUH WHAT? (which will also be referred to as HW) is an experimental collection of performances (formatted into a concert), using the genre conventions and philosophies of both punk and contemporary art (CA) music to explore language in a more esoteric and abstract way.
- Why is it named HUH WHAT? It’s symbolic of how I want the audience to respond when they witness the concert. Whether they like it or not isn’t particularly important. The aim when creating HW isn’t “good” or “bad” art, nor “meaningful” or “meaningless” art, but art of such an absurdist magnitude that an audience member will be confused no matter what.
- What is the point of exploring language? Language is such a vast and ever-present facet of human society, and the way that language is questioned or critiqued or explored in the modern era is nothing particularly more than “this word is spelt weird” or “this word sounds weird”. It’s a shame, because language is very intriguing, from strange etymological origins to the transformation of a word’s meaning over the years. Additionally, it’s one of the topics that literally everyone knows about, and as an artist, that can be exploited. In HW specifically, language is explored both in the written form, interrogating the glyphs and the graphic form of letters, and in the aural sense, how the words come out, and what they do and don’t mean.
- Why punk and CA music, and what conventions/philosophies are you using? Punk is important to me personally; my uncle has been somewhat prominent in the Perth punk scene for as long as I can remember, and punk music, especially the esoteric genre-mashes like folk-punk and ska-punk, have been staples in my music listening since high school. It’s the familiarity with the punk ethos of low-skill-level and being unapologetically loud and abrasive mixed in with the sound world of other styles that mixing punk with CA music, a style I have and continue to study through university, seemed to be a necessary step in my artistic career. As for what I’m taking from CA music, the very idea of scoring a piece on staves, the distortion and mangling of that traditional scoring technique, and graphic/textual integration of scoring, are all CA tropes, all of which I know can be influenced by punk.