Worm Up Festival (IT), Milan

Why popular art forms are so often nothing more than hype machines?

Answered by Edgar Froese

Let me answer with a perfect statement from Ken Egbert of Tone Clusters magazine who wrote the following notes for a TD anthology release a few years ago:“The eternal problem: music cannot exist in a vacuum. It needs patrons to thrive; unfortunately, music shares this problem with every other creative enterprise. Squeeze any art form into the predetermined template of the marketplace and most of the brilliant corners get rubbed off; taking chances becomes hazardous to commercial health. A new musician, group or sound, once recognizable to the masses, quickly breeds clones. Perhaps the Austrian psychoanalyst Carl Jung was right when he said that conformity is an adjunct to fear. So the concept of what sells gets repackaged again and again in slightly different forms. New studio gadgets continuously elbow out past gizmos. The hype machine of the record labels and press canonizes today’s new face while simultaneously burying a dozen more. Music lives in an endless now.” End of quote. No one seems to be interested in the fact that behind a piece of art there is much, much more than just a dollar sign. The artist has become a servant to the stockholder value scenario. What a plunge!