Foetus-art-terrorism: Deciphering genre, intertextuality and noise in J. G. Thirlwell’s early musical corpus (1981–1988)

Postmodernism as a state of mind, as a state of art: the fall of the grand universal narratives, the conflation of high/academic and low/popular forms of art. The cultural sphere’s commodification explicitly changed the way in which we see, feel, listen or even speak after World War II. Postmodernism, which can be conceived either as a condition or a new theoretical paradigm, lacks all sense of historical continuity and memory. Initially, postmodernism challenges what is actually perceived as Modernism, signifying a process of conflicts between old and new cultural and economic ‘modes’, or the artistic neologisms of the 1950s and the 1960s, which adopted a critical attitude towards the commodities while trying to overcome them. Thus, facing the postmodern reality could be a constantly demanding interplay between the author and the reader, the composer and the listener, and finally, the nature of the production of the artistic texts and the work of art in the realm of late capitalism. Postmodernism appeared in many manifestations in art; particularly in music, it can be located in the rise of composers such as John Cage after World War II. This work underscores not only a reaction to Modernism in music, but also stands as a sign of liberation and progress against established musical forms. This tendency can be traced in the divergence of popular music and styles in the 1960s and the 1970s, as expected by the ‘effacement of some key boundaries or separations’, which instantly dissolves the former distinctions between mass culture and highly academic modes of expression. Notably, the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s marked a very interesting transgressive period: a stage for a constant battle between popular forms of artistic expression and their respective mature academic competitors. The purpose of this article is to examine and analyse in brief Australian composer J. G. Thirlwell’s early musical experiments from 1981 to 1988 within the context of postmodernism in popular music, his diversity in genres, sounds and techniques, and to present his contribution within the realm of experimental music. Furthermore, the article addresses aspects of musical innovation, examining originality in an era associated with experiments in the sonic field and intertextuality as a creative process.