Ludic yūgen: aesthetic as method in the art of recording

Gregg, Stuart Charles John

Ludic yūgen: aesthetic as method in the art of recording

Date

2017

Authors

Gregg, Stuart Charles John

Abstract

This doctorate has been conducted as a practice-as-research based project, resulting in the submission of the 2 hours of recordings of creative work for examination. The written thesis that accompanies the creative work has a tripartite structure, and follows the model described by Robin Nelson in the text Practice as research in the arts: principles, protocols, pedagogies, resistances (Nelson 2013, p.34). The first section, A Conceptual Framework, outlines the history and theoretical implications of the aesthetic of yūgen, surveying the evolution and etymology of the term and describing the traditional techniques used in classical and medieval Japan to evoke the aesthetic in the fields of poetry, painting and garden design. This section concludes with an investigation of the author‘s creative translation of the aesthetic of yūgen into the methods of ludic yūgen, as used in the author‘s creative praxis. These methods involve the use of miegakure, improvisation, omission, limitations, sparse means and the manipulation of shadows and darkness. The second section, A Location in a Lineage, reviews historical practice in the art of recording which has involved the use of the methods of ludic yūgen. The locating of these methods in the rock genre, specifically in the recordist tradition, is elucidated. The use of the methods of ludic yūgen by recording artists such as The Beatles, David Bowie, Brian Eno, Robert Pollard, the Bomb Squad, Beck, Pixies and others is described, and the researcher‘s creative work is revealed as belonging to an unacknowledged tradition of ludic recordists working in the realm of popular music. In addition, the role of humour in ludic yūgen, the ludic approach to music and the importance of the artist‘s unique voice are delineated. The third and final section of the written thesis is essentially a diary of creative practice, functioning as a linear exegesis that traces the development of the creative work and the evolution of the intellectual context in which that praxis takes place.