Webspinna Battle

Genres are funny things. Do they even exist? How nuanced do two similar elements have to be before they're different. How much do they influence one another? Yes, genres really are hard to pin down. For our Webspinna Battle, Amy and I decided to explore the conceptual stylistic spectrum of detective noir and horror. As sister styles, we felt that personifying and representing them would highlight their differences, but also demonstrate their similarities, showing that in some ways the idea of "genre" has some really blurred lines. We also felt that by exploring the idea of genre relations, we were taking the plagiarism theme a step further. The Battle of our personas was to some degree about plagiarizing each other's stylistic elements, and which one really has a corner on "dark" or "rain" or "screams". Although horror is older, these genres sort of developed together over the years, it's up to the audience to decide how much they used the "cut-up" method mentioned by William Burroughs in The Ecstasy of Influence.

While in the Webspinna Battle, I realized that many of the other groups did more of a "performance", with multiple tracks that corresponded heavily to actions. I was extremely impressed with this approach, but ours was somewhat different. We poured our creative energy more into overlaying multiple tracks at once to have a constant rhythm that corresponded between us, and into what the tracks themselves represented. For example, some of the specific characteristics of my genre, noir, were some more obvious ones such as rain, gunshots, a detective voice over, police sirens, but also some farther stretches such as sound effects from Batman: The Animated Series and Sean Connery introducing himself as James Bond. The reason for these is because they each carry very specific elements of noir films and have been heavily influenced by them. In this sense, they too have "cut-up" and recycled the style and are branches of the same tree. Amy had a similar approach with her sounds, using many different movie scenes that have developed into what we think of horror as today. Some of the crossover, such as screams, sirens, and rainstorms, were played interchangeably to link the two genres.

To create some sort of narrative in our battle, we tried to have key sounds that the other would respond to, indicating it was our turn. For example, Amy playing a scream caused me to turn down my tracks, and as I would fade out I would play something about a "dame." Me playing the track of a machine gun would do something similar. We both overlaid our sounds with musical remixes of noir or horror soundtracks; mine was a dance mix of a song from the video game L.A. Noire, and hers was a remix of the Psycho theme. By trying to make our performance more of a song, we emulated Pogo's approach. A similar idea is the annual Pop Remixes that mix up specific sounds and beats to emulate that year. By combining, contrasting, remixing, and remaking the elements of genres that mesh within one another, hopefully we were able to create something of our very own.