Music

by Achim Szepanski

Project for book & compilation: Ultrablackness of Music

When we look back it seems that Mille Plateaux was always dark. We never confirmed techno-utopism, accelerationism or Eshuns afrofuturism. Rhythm, not speed was the term. As we wrote: »If Rhythm is distinct from metrics, we enter the field of non-frequency politics, the politics of productive difference, which includes the fact, that Rhythm is distinct from science, and therefore non-musicians us science and music as pure material. Here, they also start to reduce discourses of philosophy to pure material to achieve – always in interaction with hearing-in-rhythm – pulse “rhythmights.” Parallel to the objects of non-musicians an unified and non-representational theory or a music-fiction has to simulate philosophy and to catch for the essence of music-being and the fractal-being of musical objects, and yet treat them through hypothesis, deduction and experimental tests. The non-musicological term rhythmight opens up to experimental methods of rhythm production: we can now speak of Rhythm in terms of clicked music. We find here transversal disjunctions, heterogeneous temporalities and spatial components, that overlap and coexist in a track; in the invincible evidence of its short signal and contextless reference, the click opens various potentials to move on without giving any noticeable association. Through the concatenation of signs something like indetermination starts to be indicated, whereby failure can become part of music. Failure is not an inscribed meaning in clicks and cuts, but rather a referential that indicates possibilities of previous and emerging sign concatenations. In the nameless “in between,” meaning is constructed with the help of signs that are not what they pretend to be.Through reference to other signs, a momentum of meaning is produced, because a sign like the click realizes différance, suspended presence, while also referring to signs to come. Similarly, the pulse can be understood as an inherent stress that falls on certain metrics or beats. While listening to the clock, one might hear “tick-tock” instead of “tick-tick,” because every other beat is more stressed than the beat before.«

Today the conditions for electronic music have changed dramatically. Pop and Techno are both monsters of the culture industry. It seems that Adornos critics on jazz was not conservative, but revolutionary. Creativity and art are deeply intertwined with the financial system. Art is instruced by the logic of the derivative, which isthe emblematic technology of the financial system and a form of speculative capital. Now the management of risk allows one to reconceive the financial system and the idea of creativity itself. When speculators buy an artist’s work they take a risky position and collection means nothing more than the diversification of risk. The speculation on art and artists does not need any individual judgment, it depends just on benchmarking with other collectors. In this way art is just a subfield of modern portfolio theory, which needs risk management and diversification strategies. Also the affirmation on technology lost its power, technophiliac and technophobicare examples of a naive technologism – there is no way for new reentry of technophilia, a belief in the liberating power of tech in and of itself. Its all about liquidity which demonstrates the power of the artists system as such..

Music seems different, because it cannot reach the status of the derivative, but its still massive influenced by the ideology of creativity. What to do? Maybe there is still a line to the outside through an un-becoming that dissolves the game we are given as a gift for the shame of our affirmation of the system. But its not enough to move from light affirmation to dark critics, we must move from dark to black, to the blackness of a newasthetical science, which begins from the posture of the black, communing with the blackness of the real. It is this transition – from black as a music you hear, to black as a non-music you don’t hear, to black as “nothing-to-hear” (and you’re hearing it). Neither just an aesthetics of music nor a metaphor for knowledge, black is inseparable from the conditions of thought, from a project of political-aesthetic requirement. The ultimate gift of black music might be a new vision for destroying the world. Its a pure negative music: »Negative Musik / Die Ärmsten! Wenn sie Stille überhaupt noch kennen, dann nur noch als Löcher im Kontinuum des Lärms –während wir noch das Glück gehabt hatten, den Lärm kennenzulernen als Unterbrechung der Stille. “Negative Musik” müsste man heute komponieren, Musik, die sich aus Lärmpausen zusammenzusetzen hätte.” (Günther Anders, 1965)

In this essay we try to explore non-representationalism in music, which has to be connected to the question of non-representational aesthetics. The philosophers of immanence – Deleuze/Guattari and Laruelle – have something in common: Since the mid- 1980s they reject the discourses and techniques of post-structuralist interpretation of music and art in favor of constructing an aesthetics rooted in immanence and non-representationalism. Deleuze/Guattari work on the problem how the relationship between immanence and multiplicity could be thought. They describe a world of pure multiplicity in which all multiplicities are equally immanent und include immanent transformations within a given set of virtualities. Multiplicities actualize themselves as occasions/events or as blips of singularity in heterogeneous assemblages. In this way the transcendental must get immanent, which means, that the universe is not digital at its core, but analog. Deleuze/Guattari and Laruelle agree, that representational aesthetics has come to an end, but they do not agree on what form immanence should take in aesthetics. While Deleuze/Guattari prefer the productive capacity of matter, Laruelle insists on the immanent and generic logic of the Real/One.

For Deleuze/Guattari is one of the guiding questions in „music“, if the unformed can be heard as sound within the framework of the audible or music. But the unformed is not noise. So another question is, if there exists a passage between sound and noise, made possible by musical events (not music). When deterritorialisation brings a long a de-structuration of the articulated sound, which is a kind of deterritorialised and reterritorialised noise, this implies a state of the unformed that is still audible, but definitely not as organised music; such kind of „music“ or the audible is no more a representation or mimesis, but a becoming. For Deleuze/Guattari such (unformed) sound-becomings takes place within a three dimensional floating space (rhizom) rather than in a two-dimensional, vectorial one.

In his current period Laruelle is in search for a quantum thought, that is free from its mathematical expression, that he finds reductive. One of quantum thoughts principle is „superposition“ or the standing wave of rhythmic superposition, a kind of concept, that resonates somehow with the work by Lefebvre, Deleuze, Stengers, and Whitehead, but also with recent sound studies. The Laruellian concept of “superposition” neglects two treatments of sonic thought, so to invent sonic thinking as non-representation (that is, thinking sonically rather than about sound). Laruelle illustrates an incommensurability of sound’s closure, hermetically seperated from other material, theories; and he illustrates an incommensurability of the relation and exchange of sound, which is porous enough to permit heterogeneous assemblages without imposing them. While closure includes representation as thinking about sound, permanent exchange between sound and thought tends to confusion as it converts or even fuses thinking and sound. This con-fusion reflects the belief of experimental electronic music in its first period (from Russolo through Schaeffer and classic musique concrète) that everything in the world is musical, an unrecognized belief associated with what Jarrod Fowler calls the Principle of Musical Sufficiency.(1) Non-musicology by contrast breaks with the idea that everything is musical and develops a science of music as well as a „music“ related to science (e.g., Xenakis’ use of stochastic processes). For Fowler, “the program of Non-musicology is to use musicology to construct alien theories without those theories being yielded by the Principle of Musical Sufficiency: ‘All is not musical, this is our news.” (2)

Sonic thought or Non-musicology composes theory as its own object and therefore delivers a kind of echo to the work of the muscians, to their way of the becoming-of-music. Laruelle starts to write a new music-fiction.

What is noise? The conception of noise under the aspect of irreversibility is associated to a logic of radical contingency. On one side noise is observer relative, so it may be measured by systems according to their degree of randomness, their algorithmic functions, on the other side noise is observer independent, as radical contingency or hyperchaos noise exceeds human capacity of perception for capturing it as a phenomenal information. The definition of noise as failure or disturbance presupposes the position of an objectivized ideal in and of science, to exclude noise and the composition of noise, thus thinking the Real always as a correlate of thought. Here we are already in the middle of the problematic of Laruelles Non-musicology, which situates music as a poduct of science, their methods of numerical measure (as material), and (which is more important) as the construction of some kind of audible non-order, which might be not measurable. Non-musicology starts on this plane as a different treatment of music and experimental science, breaking with the idea, that everything is musical and therefore developing a science of „music“, which does not become science itself. The infiltration of Non-musicology into musicology means the mutation of music using scientific methods to investigate a pluralism and hybridisation in a generic science, which does not comment musical objects in a reflective way, but concentrates them around a problem, of that Laruelle has had in his early phase no idea, but that musicians had already generated.

Non-musicology breaks not only with musical self-sufficiency or structured science of music, but also articulates another break that does not so much involve a new subversive immersion of the audience into the conditions of hearing as it leads to the ecological anticause, what Fowler calls a different hearing-in-Rhythm, which is identical with Rhythm insofar as Rhythm is different from metrics and recurrence.

What is Rhythm? First, Rhythm is a temporally extended pattern that can be described by information-processing systems through several parameters summarized by Inigo Wilkins: spatial, temporal, amplitude, frequency and superposition. (3) While processing systems involve an observer-dependent reality of Rhythm, it is possible to discover the existence of Rhythms that are beyond human sensory perceptual capacities through technology, math, and science. Second, it has to be asked whether or not there is a simple opposition between noise and Rhythm. The answer is no, because we can define Rhythm as the relation of identifiable and unidentifiable processes that allow the incommensurable chaos to pass into an order of difference, a degree or quantity of non-linear and non-rhythmic noise. Rhythm may exist at many degrees of dynamics and magnitude. It may emerge from noise, whereby the simulation of noise through stochastic processes demonstrates that the process of the enfolding of Rhythm and signals offers a large quantity of heterogeneous movements occurring at different time scales and frequencies. But still noise has a larger dynamics and magnitude than Rhythm. Noise is foreclosed to rhythm, to sound and music, to any ontological or epistemological theory.

If Rhythm is distinct from metrics, we enter the field of non-frequency politics, the politics of productive difference, which includes the fact, that Rhythm is distinct from science, and therefore non-musicians us science and music as pure material. Here, they also start to reduce discourses of philosophy to pure material to achieve – always in interaction with hearing-in-rhythm – pulse “rhythmights.” Parallel to the objects of non-musicians an unified and non-representational theory or a music-fiction has to simulate philosophy and to catch for the essence of music-being and the fractal-being of musical objects, and yet treat them through hypothesis, deduction and experimental tests.

The non-musicological term invented by Fowler, “rhythmight”, opens up to experimental methods of rhythm production: we can now speak of Rhythm in terms of non-periodic pulsed or clicked music. We find here transversal disjunctions, heterogeneous temporalities and spatial components, that overlap and coexist in a track; in the invincible evidence of its short signal and contextless reference, the click opens various potentials to move on without giving any noticeable association. Through the concatenation of signs something like indetermination starts to be indicated, whereby failure can become part of music. Failure is not an inscribed meaning in clicks and cuts, but rather a referential that indicates possibilities of previous and emerging sign concatenations. In the nameless “in between,” meaning is constructed with the help of signs that are not what they pretend to be.Through reference to other signs, a momentum of meaning is produced, because a sign like the click realizes différance, suspended presence, while also referring to signs to come. Similarly, the pulse can be understood as an inherent stress that falls on certain metrics or beats. While listening to the clock, one might hear “tick-tock” instead of “tick-tick,” because every other beat is more stressed than the beat before. This repeating stress is the pulse; and in music different sorts of pulses can be overlapped and constructed by grouping beats together in different milieus or patterns. The technique of inhuman music forces a temporal division into such nuanced patterns, which only machines can perform with perfect precision.

With Deleuze or Boulez we can speak of rhythm in terms of non-periodic pulsed or clicked music. There is a transversal disjunction, which is articulated in the track intern and in relation to other tracks, and this achievs the transition of „Clicks and Cuts“. Transversality is originally a topological concept meaning an extending over, lying across, intersecting without a resulting coincidence, while transversal music caulks the „cut“ between actual and virtual on the rise of the performance itself, by mutating from a device designed to connect the past with the present into a newly future-orientated one. If we listen to a track, we always hear other things, which Deleuze describes as forces, duration, sensation and lightness, depending how tempi, rhythm and sound are variied. For heterogenous temporalities and spatial components, which overlap and coexist in a track, the click opens in its invincible evidence various potencials to move on, as the signal is short and without contextual reference, so no remindable association can be given. Only through the catenation of signs something like indetermination starts to get indicatory, whereby failure can get part of music, but, as we said, failure is not a inscribed meaning in clicks and cuts, rather a referential, which indicates possibilities of previous and coming sign catenations. In the nameless in between meaning is constructed with the help of signs, which are not, what they pretend to be.

This is quite close to Heinrich Kleists proposal, that for producing powerful rhythmights the puppet player has to become itself an automat, insofar as a machinist has to relocate himself into the emphasis of the machine, while empasis is here armed with a new attraction, which correlates to the following: when non-frequency-politicians are listening to the clock, they hear “tic – toc – fuck the clock” instead of “tik – tik” because they know, that the beat or metrum has to be stressed: the relation between the different speed of waves and the maxima of intensity or timeless degree of different waves constitute a dispersion, which cannot be measured. Exterior to the clockban non-frequency-politics is the supertrace, is the tracing of the immanent rhythmicity of Rhythm in the hearing-in-Rhythm, as Jarrod Fowler says, it is „flow an sich“ or the quantum, because the generators of non-frequency-politics are always oversweeping the beat of the significant “ding ding ding ding.”

Here we find a hotspot to non-music in a Laruelian sense. Laruelle claims a dispersive a priori of theory, which is not primarly related to music, but related to the foreclosed and indifferent Real in-the-last-instance, posing the question: how can a generic and real but nevertheless transcendental and a priori term of difference be constructed, an a priori of difference that is a matter of an immediate given condition? (4) If we relate the apriori or the axiom to music, we will find an answer: The relation between the different speed of waves and the maxima of intensity (or the timeless degree of different waves) involves a dispersion. This is a oraxiom of Rhythmight, which means that the philosophical distinction between theoretical and practical aspects of thought has lost its power. For example, the theoretical practice of music, which invent new oraxioms, uses as ist material sample politics, which is oscillating between an actual pool of samples and the capacity to create new samples.

Samples are nowadays part of the mediapool, regardless of whether they are saved on analog or digital media. Sampling includes the program-controlled, machinic transformation of the musical material with special features, transposing, time-stretching or cut up, etc. Sampling is a technology for access and transformation of media material, by grasping the signals of the media of transmission. Sampling subverts the purposeful transfer from source to destination. Instead of an exact process of mapping the input onto the output, sampling activates a production process, using the signal subtracted from its functional and contextual environment. As condition of that production, it is a sampling-in-the-last-instance.

Going from sampling to so-called pulse rhythmights, produced with techniques through immanent and generic methods of percussive flights and differential structures of sound, attends not to being-in-the-world, but being in music. A music that remains radically immanent, Rhythmight is constructed from the heterogeneity of Rhythm as foreclosed and incommensurately sampled-in-the-last-instance and binds at the same moment the methods of Rhythmics to ecological hearing-in-rhythm. The relation between Rhythm and hearing remains still unilateral: it only goes one way. The unilaterality of Rhythm doesn’t imply that music can be reduced to Rhythm, but that, aside from its territorial motives and melodic landscapes, music is in-the-last-instance Rhythm and heard from Rhythm. While Non-musicology imposes a unilateral relationship between Rhythm and hearing, hearing-in-Rhythm cannot affect Rhythm, while Rhythm is foreclosed to hearing-in-Rhythm.The scientific exology (the scientific closure of paradigms, knowledge etc.) of hearing, which arises from the indifference of Rhythm, must hallucinate music as metrics, order, and composition by ignoring the radical ecology of Rhythm, which is related to non-music’s objectivity without representation. (5) At the same time, rhythmight corresponds to a relative ecology (perception of music) that is today permanently infiltrated by the convertibility of money, the processes in which the virtuality of value is actualized as price. At this juncture Non-musicology has to indicate a radical mutation of the radical ecology of Rhythm according to the foreclosed Real.

(Non-musicology countermands the inscription of the differenziant value, which is the prevalence of money in all his registers – semiotic value and the beat of the significant, which counts the metrum as price instead of the tic-toc of the pulsating difference as non-price. Punctuated production time of the code is permanently inscribed in the body of music. At this point, one may mention that there must be a clandestine relation between non-frequency-politics and High-Frequency-Trading. The latter can be understood as a complex technical system in capitalist finance, that generates the production of noise and at the same time reduces the information gradients, operating at a high rate of data streams and coding noise. With High-Frequency-Trading financial systems try to regulate the randomness of assets in minimal scales of time, to anticipate the fluctuations of price politics. Complexity is here the random effect of acceleration towards volatility, which can lead to an intentional production of noise, for irritating traders and the financial machines. But in relation to music we prefer here not to speak first of absolut contingency, like one might do with Quentin Meillassoux, instead we follow what distincts electronic music from High-Frequency-Trading, because the former in its decomposition in the form of non-music exceeds measurability; acceleration, which is necessary – it can be also slowness – for decoding scripture and codes, should not lead to the hyperreal of Baudrillard, which introduces the universal trauma of capitals realism, instead acceleration in its different modes should lead to a kind of non-dialectical negativism.)

Through tracing the rhythmicity of Rhythm in hearing-in-Rhythm, and thus through Sampling-in-the-last-instance, Non-musicology develops a new radical ecology of rhythm. It starts to sample material from science and philosophy, from musicial material itself, to construct the immanent generic matrix, which is no longer overdetermined by capitals relations of production and circulation, rather the transcendental construction of a kind of objectivity without representation.

If Non-music or non-standard music is, as Inigo Wilkins says, situated in the “non-standard phase space” between periodic sine tones and non-periodic or non-individual complex transformation and modulation, it might fall within the same theoretical neighbourhood as Dante’s bourdon or Messiaen’s compositional techniques. (6) The latter combines listening to the rhythmic singing of each individual bird and the overall Rhythm as an orchestra. On one side, there is no total rhythmic disorder, analogous to the incommensurability of closure, as unrelated tones do not couple with one another; on the other side, the birds are not synchronized to the ticking clock, as though a regular pulse would allow them all to share a common beat. Now, it looks as though non-frequency-politics would be nothing other than a re-invention of Dante’s bourdon; but the ritornello of the birds as accompanied by the noise of the wood is not only a musical sensation. It forces Rhythm via an interaction with hearing-in-Rhythm, in order to find a radical objective music, which includes the refusal of the world, even the refusal to create alternative worlds, yet demands the Real as foreclosed to the world. Rhythmight produces tension and solidification at the same time in hearing-in-Rhythm, while non-musicians become aware of how to subtract Rhythm from the metrum, endlessly mixing and remixing the conditions and relations of rhythmights and at the same time separating fragments from these mixtures in order to use these autonomous theoretical fragments indifferent to the musical structure.

Laruelle would reject Deleuze & Guattari’s treatment of music as the capture of affects and percepts (including relationship between material and forces) and would instead postulate to music an autonomous theoretical order, a non-scientific thought according to the radical immanence of the Real – the Real, here, understood as foreclosed and indifferent, without mirroring aesthetics or knowledge or being mirrored by science; the Real, which has to be thought as neither a meaning nor a truth but rather as immanently given-without givenness. The exteriority of the Real is being-nothing, which confronts being with nothingness. This demands the Real as foreclosed to the world. By reducing all transcendental thought to pure material, thought can be developed according to the syntax of the Real. Instead of a truth, which has its telos in the white silence of a full speaking, in which even the Real should be countable, Non-musicology presents an incestuous con-junction of the quantum-principles of superposition (immanence of one-in-one) and non-commutativity.

Where Deleuze & Guattari distinguish between scientific variables, artistic varieties, and philosophical variations, Laruelle’s Non-philosophy reduces all concepts of philosophy and philosophy itself to pure variables. (7) Non-musicology reduces philosophy, science, and musical objects to pure material, by starting to sample the material from within non-musical discourses such as science and philosophy. By cutting off the Principle of Musical Sufficiency, the immersive properties of sound in relation to perception and affect might be also cut off. Non-music instead produces an irreflective processing of variables by variables, a fractal proliferation of models without transcendence.

Here we are confronted with radical differences in the aesthetic conceptions of Deleuze/Guattari and Laruelle. The movement and the relation of sound molecules itself, their catenation happens for Deleuze/Guattari in the context of rhythmical territorialisation and de-territorialisation, which they describe as the ritornell, a kind of crystallisation of time-space, the temporalisation of space and the spatialization of time. Within the ritornell body, earth, rhythm and sound events are shortened with the intensity of the body without organs. Non-musicology in this context could be subsequent to Laruelle understood as the production and tracking of Rhythmicity of rhythm in hearing-in-ryhthm, as an event of compression, which writes itself as an effect of the rhythm construction of the ritornell. As such „music“ or the audible has a fractal dimension, which cannot be reduced to metrics, number and beat time, and maybe to objects for philosophers. And non-frequency politics would force the dance through the territorialised ritornell, which constituens is rhythm and its apparatus, the drum. Rhythmight is producing tension and solidification at the same time in hearing-in-rhythm, while getting aware, how to subtract the metrum. TIC-TOC- fuck the clock! means the principle, while endlessly mixing and remixing the conditions and relations of rhythmights and at the same time seperating rudiments from these mixtures, in order to use autonomous (theoretical) fragments, a theoretical order of contingency (to music), which implies to make use of artifical techniques in a different way as musicians do and at the same write new music-fictions, which are still related to music and the audible – a non-scientific thought according to the radical immanence of the Real in-the-last-instance, the Real here understood as foreclosed and being-nothing, without mirroring something or being mirrored. Laruelle’s generalized fractality of thought is a radically unfolded plane of immanence without reflection of the world, while destroying the empirico-transcendental doublet by its distanceless adequation.

This is to abandon also reversibility between philosophy and science, and between science and music; non-musicology leads to practice „music“ in a non-scientific stance to mutate music using scientific means related to the practice of science, as Jarrod Fowler says. The result of Non-philosophy and Non-musicology includes a generic matrix, which is transcendental at the same time, a generic matrix, whose idempotency functions are related to the Real as determination-in-the-last-instance. Idempotency is a term of informatics, that refers to function thats remains unchanged by doubling and iterating itself or by the addition of new functions, so the generic matrix is related to non-commutative Identity which persists across variations and does not need any transendence. Deleuze/Guattari renounce representation, but still in the name of perception and affects, which are always correlated to experience. And this concept correlates somehow to a certain phase of Laruelle, where the non-musical construction of the rhythmight of music and science is combined with hearing, hearing-in-rhythm, with musicological systems of listening. Laruelle would assert a further step, where non-musicology reduces philosophy, science and musical objects to pure material, by starting to sample the material from within music, non-musical discourses such as science and philosophy. By cutting off the principle of musical sufficiency, the immersive properties of sound in relation to perception and affect are also cut off. Instead non-music-fiction is producing an irreflective and automatic processing of variables by variables, which is a fractal proliferation of models without transcendence. Audio, as the material of media pools, is not further related anymore „to a transindividually constituted prosthetic extension with reversible intentionality“, as Inigo Wilkins says.
In his latest works, Laruelle speaks of the non-standard method as a kind of immanent fiction that includes invention, construction, performance, etc. as a non-representative and non-expressive method that uses only abstract and pure thought for non-aesthetics and that doesn’t need to appeal to the parallelism of philosophy and art. (8) This demands neither thinking of sound as sonic philosophy nor thinking about sound, but an abstract theory of sound, a radical abstract theory that is absolutely non-worldly and non-perceptual, as Laruelle says. Music is not oriented to a world, nor is it perceptual; rather it focuses on the immanent character of music as such, being in music. Music is radical objectivation without representation or intentionality. Following Laruelle, this semblance of music must be no longer an imitation, a tracing, an emanation or a representation of world or of language, of affect or whatever. Rather there exists a non-world of music for both the musician and the philosopher of music. This non-world still exists in the present and is real, while non-music is always rooted in matter. At this point Non-musicology stops tracing the Rhythmicity of Rhythm in hearing-in-Rhythm through sampling-in-the-last-instance. As a kind of objectivity without representation, Non-musicology begins instead to sample material from science and philosophy, from musical material itself, to construct the immanent generic matrix of non-music, which is no longer overdetermined by the capitalist relation of production and circulation.

1 Jarrod Fowler, “JMF075” http://www.jarrodfowler.com/JMF075.html (accessed April 30, 2015).
2 Fowler, “JMF075”
3 Inigo Wilkins, “Enemy of Music,” http://irreversiblenoise.wordpress.com/2013/03/06/enemy-of-music (accessed June 14, 2013).
4 Laruelle, “The Decline of Materialism in the Name of Matter,” trans. Ray Brassier, Pli 12 (2001): 33-40.
5 Fowler, “JM075”
6 See Dante, Purgatorio, Canto XXVIII, 7-19, and Wilkins, “Enemy of Music.”
7 See Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); François Laruelle, Introduction aux sciences géneriques (Paris: Editions Petra, 2008), p.200.
8 See, for example, Laruelle, Anti-Badiou: On the Introduction of Maoism into Philosophy, trans. Robin Mackay (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).

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ROOTS AND WIRES

6/1/2018

Erik Davis

Index

Foreword 55

Polymetric Thought and Dub Improvisation by Obsolete Capitalism

Text Roots and Wires 59
by Erik Davis

Biography 87

Polymetric Thought and Dub Improvisation

by Obsolete Capitalism

The present essay by Erik Davis, written in 1996, is of extraordinary importance for our series of books and for the rhizosphere thought in general. Despite its 22 years of age, the essay still displays its keenness and foresight. If it is true that it maintains the captivating vibration of the 90s, the essay of the Californian writer has great merit according to the metamatic perspective of the Strong of the Future: it enriches the Deleuzian thought with the “polyrhythmic splendour” of the Afro-diasporic cultures of the last part of the ‘90s and of the new century.

To be even more explicit we can say that after Guattari (1992) and Deleuze’s (1995) death, the scholars’ approach to rhizospheric thinking was running the risk to crystallize in a rigid and textual reading of the pages of A Thousand Plateaux and, above all of 1837 of the Refrain. The consequence was that the musical discourse seemed to be mummified in French itineraries of the French-German direct relationship among Proust, Schumann, Wagner, Schoenberg, Berg, Mahler, Boulez, Stockhausen, Messiaen, with the only “correction” brought by the hegemonic musical approach of the ‘60s and ‘70s: the relationship between improvisation, alea, and contemporary Western music. It was represented by the American wave of Cage and of minimalists like Reich, Riley and Glass, extended up to the Italian composers Bussotti, Nono and Berio. However in 1837 of the Refrain, the “unsaid” and the “unheard” is represented by the explicit lack of references to polymetric and polyrhythmic minor music, in particular of those rhythms and sounds from the vast world of black culture, both African and American. Not to mention the lack, in A Thousand Plateaux, of another great non-European musical tradition, including Indian and Middle Eastern Arab music. Finally the complete lack of all musical experimentation out of the academic tradition, generically represented by the non-mainstream pop and by the Western underground music like the electronic music in its various forms, increases the danger of a premature ageing and drying of A Thousand Plateaux.

Deleuze and Guattari’s new concept of rhythm, repeated by the first wave of commentators, is then very European, white, masculine, academic and elitist. It will be only in the 1990s, that Achim Szepanski, Kodwo Eshun and Erik Davis will update the minor sound lines with the revolutionary nucleus of rhizomatic thought, that is to say the philosophy of Rhythm and Chaos in A Thousand Plateaux. In particular, the anti-Cartesian and anti-Ordo Geometricus axis of Erik Davis’ essay offers an excellent rhythmic counter-tempo between Deleuze and Guattari’s thought and the “polyrhythmic splendour” of contemporary music “against the beat” such as dub and drum and bass. It redefines a new language, a real sonic esperanto, that is a new underground urban axis, between rough metropolitan dimensions, afro-diasporic rhizomatic lines and polymetric, polyrhythmic African music.

It is therefore thanks to the revolutionary significance of essays such as Roots and Wires that today we can finally draw a powerful abstract line passing through Deleuze, Nietzsche and Guattari’s chaosmotic philosophy, Glissant and Gilroy’s Creole and Caribbean intellectuality, the ground-breaking minor electronic music of a cyber globalized world, and the rich, ancestral rhythmical heritage of traditional Western African cultures.

Erik Davis’s essay paves the way to a new form of non-metric thought, which we consider the prelude to new modes of existence, as outlined in the chaos-opera Chaos Sive Natura, in favour of nonpulsed men and times...

Roots and Wires

Polyrhythmic Cyberspace and the Black Electronic

An early version of this piece was delivered at 5CYBERCONF, Madrid, 1996. It was later published in Paul D. Miller, ed. Sound Unbound, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008).

Where are we? The collective mindscapes we both find and lose ourselves within seem to be rapidly mutating: the compressed “urban” density of an increasingly globalized, networked, and overpopulated world; the twilight zones introduced by media saturation and the collapse of master narratives; the blurry boundary regions between identities, ethnicities, bodies, cultures; the virtual interdimensions of cyberspace. These new social and psychic morphologies demand that we reimagine space itself.

One thing is clear: the Cartesian coordinate system will no longer suffice as our central conceptual or tactical model for the spaces that surround and shape us. We need more complex folds, more permeable milieus, more capable disorientations. We need models that avail themselves to intensive as well as extensive spaces, to voids as well as substances. We need images and allegories that can somehow suggest the yawning multiplicities and complex networks that lurk on the horizon of thought and experience like the yawning hyperspaces of science-fiction’s headier cosmologies.

Groping for models of contemporary space that evade or pervert the Cartesian coordinate system, we would do well to recall Marshall McLuhan’s distinction between visual and acoustic space. For McLuhan, “visual space” did not refer to the sensual dimension encountered through human vision, but specifically to the linear, logical, and sequential perceptual and cognitive array constructed by Western Renaissance perspective, linear type, and ultimately alphanumeric characters. We know it from Descartes and from William Gibson: a homogenous space organized by an objective coordinate grid that simultaneously produces an apparently coherent individual subject who maintains control over his or her unique point of view. Not only do we “naturally” overlay this panoptic grid onto the far more ambiguous field of actual vision, but we have embraced it as the dominant conceptual image of space itself.

McLuhan believed that electronic media were subverting visual space by introducing “acoustic space”: a psychological, social and perceptual mode that eroded visual space’s logical clarity and Cartesian subjectivity, returning us electronically to a kind of premodern experience what he once called, with characteristic sloppiness, “the Africa within.”[1]

Simply put, acoustic space is the space we hear: multi-dimensional, resonant, invisibly tactile, “a total and simultaneous field of relations.” Though these “holistic” properties are important, I’d like to sidestep the simple unity that holism implies by stressing the co-dependent play of multiplicities within acoustic space. Unlike visual space, where points generally either fuse or remain distinct, blocks of sound can overlap and interpenetrate without necessarily collapsing into a harmonic unity or consonance, thereby maintaining the paradox of “simultaneous difference”.

On top of its value as an alternative, refreshingly non-visual model of cyberspace, McLuhan’s notion of acoustic space opens up a historical and cultural dimension of cyberspace that has often been overlooked: the musical spaces produced predominantly or wholly through electronic means. After all, from the invisible landscapes of Cage and Stockhausen to the analog explorations of dub reggae producers and synthesizer wizards in the 1970s to the digital soundscapes that shape the ambient, jungle, and hip-hop of today, a significant portion of electronically-mediated music has been explicitly concerned with constructing virtual spaces.

In this paper, I am interested in one particular zone of electro-acoustic cyberspace, a zone I’m calling the Black Electronic. I’ve dubbed the term from the British cultural theorist Paul Gilroy, who uses the phrase the “Black Atlantic” to denote the “webbed network” of the African diasporic culture that penetrates the United States, the Caribbean, and, by the end of the twentieth century, the UK. Gilroy considers the Black Atlantic a modernist countercultural space, a space that, for all the claims of black cultural nationalists, is not organized by African roots but by a “rhizomorphic, routed” set of vectors and exchanges: ships, migrations, creoles, phonographs, European miscegenations, expatriot flights, dreams of repatriation. The image of the criss-crossed Atlantic ocean is essential for Gilroy’s purpose, which is to erode the monolithic notion of roots and tradition by emphasizing the “restless, recombinant” qualities of Afrodiasporic culture as it simultaneously explores, exploits, and resists the spaces of modernity.[2]

So I’m using the Black Electronic to characterize those electro-acoustic cyberspaces that emerge from the historical-cultural context of the Black Atlantic. Though I do believe that some of the “roots” of these spaces lie in West Africa, I am more concerned with their decidedly “rhizomorphic” behavior as they criss-cross that acoustic dimension that David Toop has called, in a slightly different context, the twentieth century’s “ocean of sound.”[3] In particular, I want to explore one specific zone within the Black Electronic: the remarkable acoustic spaces that emerge when the polyrhythmic sensibility found in traditional West African drumming encounter those electronic instruments, at once “musical” and “technological,” that record, reproduce, and manipulate sound.[4]

Drumming Up Polyrhythmic Space

When we consider the question of how the temporal flux of music conjures up the qualitative sense of space, we do not usually turn to rhythm. Instead, we consider ambient sound, noise, echo, and the sense of dimension introduced by variations in pitch and widely distributed tonal clusters. Rhythm even seems to cut against the subjective construction of musical space, slicing and dicing the acoustic dimension into purely temporal events. But I would like to suggest that West African polyrhythm carves out a unique and powerful dimension of acoustic space by generating an array of autonomous milieus which are layered, stacked, and constantly interpenetrating a “nomadic” space of multiplicity unfolded on the fly. Polyrhythm impels the listener to explore a complex space of beats, to follow any of a number of fluid, warping, and shifting lines of flight, to submit to what the hip hop act A Tribe Called Quest calls “The rhythmic instinction to yield to travel beyond existing forces of life.”

It must be said that the West has a rather repellent history of reducing African and Afrodiasporic culture to its rhythms. At the same time, we should not let Hollywood images of “savage” and “frenetic” drumming (or the more subtle distortions that emerge with over-generalized discussions such as my own), obscure the pivotal role that rhythm plays in West African aesthetics, social organization, and metaphysics. Nor should the evident psycho-physiological power of drums and their intimacy with dancing bodies obstruct their more abstract, conceptual, or virtual powers. As I hope to imply throughout this paper, West African drumming can serve as an excellent analog model for a variety of pressing technocultural discussions about distributed networks, the philosophy and perception of multiplicities, and the emergent properties of complex systems.[5]

Though I prefer the looser and more playful term polyrhythm, traditional West African drumming is perhaps more accurately described as polymetric. The meter is the standard unit of time that divides European music. In most symphonies or ensembles, all instruments basically follow the same meter; the shared rhythm is counted evenly and stressed on every main beat. We thus call Western rhythm divisive because it is divided into standard units of time. But the traditional rhythms of West African music are considered additive, a term which already gives us an indication of their fundamental multiplicity. The music’s complex percussive patterns bubble up from the shifting and open-ended interaction between many different individual drum patterns and pitches. As John Miller Chernoff puts it, “in African music there are always at least two rhythms going on.”[6]

In order to notate this music, which is traditionally passed on mnemonically and orally, Western musicologists are forced to assign different meters to different instruments–hence, “polymetric”. Written down, the measures that organize the repetitive beat sequences associated with each instrument can be of variable lengths and time signatures. Neither the bar lines nor the main beats associated with each instrument coincide, but instead are “staggered” throughout a music whose rhythmic motifs are constantly appearing and disappearing. Individual musicians thus practice what is called “apart-playing,” maintaining a definite distance between their beats and those of the other drummers, a “space of difference” which refuses to collapse or fuse into a unified rhythmic “point.” In turn this produces permanent conversations or cross-patterns between each drum, a dialogue which is also a complex dimension of difference introduced between elements that are themselves often quite repetitive and simple.

Though this description is overly schematic, we can nonetheless understand that polyrhythm has little to do with pure repetition. As Deleuze and Guattari point out in “On the Refrain,” their crucial chapter on aesthetics from Mille Plateaux, “It is the difference that is rhythmic, not the repetition, which nevertheless produces it: productive repetition has nothing to do with reproductive meter [my emphasis].[7]” Even to call West African drumming “polymetric” is already to define it from a perspective it eludes. As Deleuze and Guattari write, “Meter, whether regular or not, assumes a coded form whose unit of measure may vary, but in a non communicating milieu, whereas rhythm is the Unequal or the Incommensurable that is always undergoing transcoding. Meter is dogmatic, but rhythm is critical: it ties together critical moments, or ties itself together in passing from one milieu to another. It does not operate in a homogeneous space-time, but by heterogeneous blocks. It changes direction.”[8]

But what exactly constitutes these “milieus” within an actual polyrhythmic ensemble? “Every milieu is vibratory,” Deleuze and Guattari write. “In other words, a block of space-time constituted by the periodic repetition of the component. Every milieu is coded, a code being defined by periodic repetition.”[9] It seems clear: each specific milieu is a block of space-time produced by the exacting repetitions of each individual drum. Polyrhythmic communication thus unfolds as an interdimensional play of milieus a mutating array of slices, splits, folds and fusions; an acoustic hyperspace. “One milieu serves as the basis for another, or conversely is established atop another milieu, dissipates in it or is constituted in it. The notion of the milieu is not unitary: not only does the living thing [the dancer/ listener] continually pass from one milieu to another, but the milieus pass into one another; they are essentially communicating. The milieus are open to chaos, which threatens them with exhaustion or confusion. Rhythm is the milieu’s answer to chaos.”[10]

And with the ancient mediation of the drum, this potent play between chaos and rhythm carries us outside of theory and into the dance of lived multiplicity. Polyrhythmic music provides a primary and unusually intuitive avenue, not just to conceptualize, but to draw these heterogeneous spaces, chaotic passages and communicating milieus into our bodyminds as we weave ourselves into the polyrhythmic ensemble’s fibrillating tapestry of molecular beats and criss-crossed percussive patterns.

To demonstrate just how polyrhythm mobilizes philosophical concepts, I want to turn to Chernoff’s excellent African Rhythm and African Sensibility. In the following extensive sample, which I have cut and spliced from various points of his book, the author, self-consciously writing from a Western perspective, unfolds a sort of pragmatics of polyrhythmic listening. Though the philosophical aspects of his discussion are only implied, I ask you to listen as well for these overtones:

The effect of polymetric music is as if the different rhythms were competing for our attention. No sooner do we grasp one rhythm than we lose track of it and hear another. In something like Adzogba or Zhem it is not easy to find any constant beat at all. The Western conception of a main beat or pulse seems to disappear, and a Westerner who cannot appreciate the rhythmic complications and who maintains his habitual listening orientation quite simply gets lost…The situation is uncomfortable because if the basic meter is not evident, we cannot understand how two or more people can play together or, even more uncomfortably, how anyone can play at all… We begin to ‘understand’ African music by being able to maintain, in our minds or our bodies, an additional rhythm to the ones we hear. Hearing another rhythm to fit alongside the rhythms of an ensemble is basically the same kind of orientation for a listener that apart-playing is for a musician a way of being steady within a context of multiple rhythms…Only through the combined rhythms does the music emerge, and the only way to hear the music properly, to find the beat…is to listen to at least two rhythms at once. You should attempt to hear as many rhythms as possible working together yet remaining distinct.[11]

Because listeners are forced to adopt any of a number of possible rhythmic perspectives–subjective assemblages which themselves reorganize the acoustic space that surrounds them–Chernoff rightly insists that they are “actively engaged in making sense of the music.”[12] We must enter into polyrhythm; by selecting particular rhythmic clusters, and cutting and combining them with other beats, our bodyminds generate a sense of coherent flux within a space of multiplicity, a kind of balanced line of flight that constantly criss-crosses a shifting and unstable terrain. Listening and dancing to polyrhythm, we thus tactically participate in the phenomenon of emergence, as fluid lines arise from the complex and chaotic interaction (or “communication”) of numerous smaller and simpler repetitions and individual beats.

Within the music itself, these emergent nomadic lines are mobilized by the improvisational figures introduced by the lead drummer. Playing over and against the stacked repetitions of the other musicians, the lead drummer improvises not so much by spontaneously generating new patterns as precisely cutting and splicing the beats and figures of the other drums. As Chernoff writes, “The drummer keeps the music moving forward fluidly, and by continually changing his accents and his beating, he thus relies on the multiplicity of possible ways to cut and combine the rhythms.”[13] The lead drummer’s lines thus emerge from a space of multiplicity that constitutes the ensemble’s virtual dimension.

And what the lead drummer deploys most forcefully is the cut or the break. These intense, almost violently syncopated “off-beat” lines criss-cross and interfere with the other rhythms, pushing and pulling at the dancer-listener’s precarious internal sense of the beat. Though these assaults can be quite intense, they should not go too far: “A musician should deliver not too many and not too few offbeat accents because people can get thrown off the beat, and a certain point either their orientation to the rhythms will shift or they will begin hearing the separate rhythms as a single rhythm.” [14] Establishing an analogy with nonlinear dynamics, we could say that the lead drummer must maintain an open field of competing rhythmic attractors. The game is to push the beats to the edge of bifurcation without allowing them to settle into a singular basin of attraction. For listeners that means remaining constantly open to productive chaos: to the disorienting surprise of beats struck earlier than expected, or to the little voids that open up when beats are unpredictably dropped out–an experience Chernoff brilliantly likens to missing a step on a staircase.

While it’s fruitful to speak of polyrhythmic experience in the language of the dance, we should also remember that the body so mobilized may be entirely virtual. As Richard Waterman points out, “African music, with few exceptions, is to be regarded as music for the dance, although the ‘dance’ involved may be entirely a mental one.” [15] And I’d like this figure of the “mental dance” to lead us into cyberspace, into the simultaneously premodern and postmodern spaces opened up by the tactile yet disembodied electromagnetic beats of the Black Electronic.

Dubbing the Drum

Among the pantheon of the Black Electronic’s mental dancers, alongside such varying figures as Sun Ra, George Clinton, Jimi Hendrix, Grandmaster Flash, and Derrick May, stands one Lee “Scratch” Perry, perhaps Jamaica’s most inventive reggae producer and one of the leading wizards of dub music the mutant spawn of reggae produced entirely in the studio from prerecorded rhythm tracks. Explaining the esoteric correspondences between rhythm and the body, Perry once wielded out the roots cliché that “The drum is the beat of the heart.” But the bass, he said, “is the brain.”[16] More than just subverting the common cultural association between bass frequencies and the “base” moves of the hips, Perry was suggesting that drums and bass make head music, with all the various resonances that term conjures up abstraction, drugs, interiority, virtual worlds. As Perry put it when discussing his preference for mixing tracks without vocals: “the instrumental is formed in the mental.”[17]

Of course, Perry’s instrumentals were also formed in the machine, and it’s this imaginal network between the machinic and mental realms that opens up both the disembodied architectures of cyberspace and the more abstract dimensions of the drum. West Africa’s polyrhythmic ensembles can already be seen as deploying a kind of abstract machine, its enormous intensities engineered with a notable coolness, precision, and craft. As Chernoff writes, “A drummer avoids ‘rough’ beating because the precision of play is necessary for maximum definition of form…the truly original style consists in the subtle perfection of strictly respected form.”[18] This crisp and cool sensibility informs the Black Atlantic’s unique reconfiguring of the physically alienated or “mental” labor necessary to engineer electro-acoustic cyberspace, and goes a long way to explaining why, as Andrew Goodwin perceptively notes, “we have grown used to connecting machines and funkiness.”[19]

And I’d like to trace this connection back to the analog 1970s, when Jamaican producers and engineers created dub reggae by manipulating and remixing prerecorded analog tracks of music coded on magnetic tape. Dubmasters like King Tubby would saturate and mutate individual instruments with reverb, phase, echo and delay; abruptly drop voices, beats, and guitars in and out of the mix; strip the music down to the bare bones of drums and bass and then build it up again through layers of distortion, percussive noise, and electronic ectoplasm. Good dub sounds like the recording studio itself has begun to hallucinate.

Dub arose from doubling–the common Jamaican practice of reconfiguring or “versioning” a rhythm track into any number of new songs. At a time when “roots” reggae was proclaiming a literally religious mythos of folk-cultural authenticity, dub subtly called it all into question by dematerializing and eroding the integrity of singers and song. There is no original, no motherland outside the virtual, no roots that are not at the same time rhizomes remixed on the fly. Yet by improvising and mutating its own repetitions of prerecorded material, dub added something distinctly uncanny into the mix. Dub’s analog doppelgangers, spectral distortions, and vocal ghosts produced an imaginal space no less compelling in its own way than the virtual African Zion that organized so much reggae’s Rastafarian longings. And for all its unmistakable Caribbeanisms, dub’s concerns with warped analog spaces, electromagnetic noise, and technologically-mediated disorientation also recall the explorations of German progressive rockers in the early 1970s. Like the lo-fi analog electronic experiments of Can, early Klaus Schulze, and very early Tangerine Dream, dub too is a kind of kosmiche Musik. As Luke Erlich wrote, “If reggae is Africa in the New World, dub is Africa on the moon.”[20]

But while the space of dub is certainly “out” in both the extraterrestrial and Sun Ra sense of the term, its heavy use of echo also produces a sense of enclosure, an interiority that, along with a variety of moist and squooshy effects, conjures up distinctly aquatic surroundings. With dub we do not find ourselves in the cold and rather cheesy deep space of SF soundtracks and bad hippie synthesizer music, but in a kind of “out” inner space, a liminal womb. This unresolved spatial tension not only explains the “druggy” or even “mystical” qualities of the music (qualities rooted in psycho-physiological effects that erode the experiential division between interior and exterior), but also explains why 70s dub so powerfully anticipates the virtual spaces of today–spaces which seem at once extensive and implicate (or implied), intensive and unfolded, inside and out.[21]

While the almost psychedelic qualities of dub can be attributed to its “spacey” effects, and perhaps to the role of ganja in both its production and consumption, the heady pleasures of the music arise at least as much from its trippy polyrhythmic playa play that further unfolds possibilities latent within the reggae beat.
Strictly speaking, modern Jamaican dance music adheres to the same 4/4 beat that drives the vast majority of Western popular music. But when dub hit the scene, reggae’s “dread riddims” were already unusual in accenting the second and fourth beats of the measure and in “dropping” the initial beat, all of which produced the music’s unmistakable snaky pulse. An even more crucial element of reggae rhythms was the pivotal role played by the bass guitar. Back when Jamaica’s “sound systems”–basically mobile discos–were playing American R&B in the 1950s, the techies gave their American grooves an unmistakable Jamaican twist by severely amplifying the bass, transforming R&B’s low end into a veritable force of nature– the kind of bass that does not just propel or anchor dancers but saturates their bones with near cosmic vibrations. The rock steady music which morphed into reggae anchored the beat with the bass guitar rather than the drum kit. This deterritorialized the drums, allowing musicians to explore more polyrhythmic percussive play outside and around the main beat. As Dick Hebdige points out, by the end of the 70s, drummers like Sly Dunbar were playing their kits like jazz musicians, improvising on cymbals, snares and tom toms to “produce a multi-layered effect, rather like West African religious drumming.”[22]

Dub translated this rhythmic complexity into acoustic cyberspace, using technology to further destabilize the beats and to stretch and fold the passage of time. While stripping the music down to pure drums and bass, they also thickened the mix with extra percussion and what the producer Bunny Lee called “a whole heap a noise.” More importantly, dubmasters introduced extended counter-rhythms by multiplying chunks of sound (voices, guitars, drums) through echo and reverb, producing stuttered pulses which split off from the main beat and generate cross-rhythms as they stray and fade into the virtual void. Dub is not strictly polymetric, as it rarely sustains such staggered apart-playing for very long. At the same time, by abruptly dropping guitars, percussion, horns and keyboards in and out of the mix, dubmasters teased the rug out from under the listener’s habitual rhythmic orientation toward the 4/4, creating a subtle virtual analog of the tripping, constantly shifting conversations of West African drums.

Quite like master drummers, many dubmasters would improvise their studio mixes on the fly. This should not surprise us, for West Africa’s polyrhythmic ensembles already anticipate the breakdown of the distinction between the mechanical labor of the recording engineer and the creative labor of the musician–a distinction that organizes much popular music production and that dub and later electronic dance music dissolves. One can see polyrhythmic ensembles as an assemblage of various distinct rhythmic “tracks” whose molecular beats are remixed, cut, and spliced through the cool mediation of the master drummer, his apparently spontaneous” and “chaotic” cuts introducing noise that becomes signal, feeding back into and enlivening the ensemble’s “total and simultaneous field of relations.”

By giving flight to the producer’s cybernetic imagination, dub created room within Afrodiasporic culture for a cyborg mythology grounded in technical practice. Here’s Lee Perry again, explaining his almost animistic relationship to the machine:

“The studio must be like a living thing.The machine must be live and intelligent. Then I put my mind into the machine by sending it through the controls and the knobs or into the jack panel. The jack panel is the brain itself, so you’ve got to patch up the brain and make the brain a living man, but the brain can take what you’re sending into it and live.”[23]

Here we are on the imaginary border between the premodern and the postmodern, between roots and wires, an imaginary mobilised by Perry’s whole persona and astounding career. Claiming at various times to be “Inspector Gadget,” the “Super-Ape,” or “The Firmament Computer,” Perry also pioneered the use of phasers, drum machines, and the borrowing of existing records to “scratch” in a patch of sound. Aesthetically exploiting the electromagnetic play between information and noise, Perry integrated signal degradation directly into his thick and spongey polyrhythmic textures as the producer Brian Foxworthy points out in Grand Royal, “Tape saturation, distortion and feedback were all used to become part of the music, not just added to it.”[24] Perry would also plant records and tape reels in his garden, whirl like a dervish behind his SoundCraft mixing board, and blow ganja smoke directly onto the tapes rolling through the battered 4-tracks at his Black Ark studio. As Perry told Toop about the Ark, “It was like a space craft. You could hear space in the tracks.”[25]

This kind of surreal Afrodiasporic science-fiction also appears on the cover art of much dub. Mad Professor’s Science and the Witchdoctor sets circuit boards and robot figures next to mushrooms and fetish dolls, while The African Connection shows the Professor–significantly wrapped in European safari garb–reclining at a West African tribal dance, the jungle trees housing bass woofers and tape machines while the sacred drums nestle EQs. Scientist Encounters Pac-Man at Channel One shows the Scientist manhandling the mixing console as if it were some madcap machine out of Marvel comics.

It’s perhaps no accident that in Jamaican patois, “science” refers to obeah, the island’s African grab-bag of herbal medicine, sorcery, and occult lore. In his book on the trickster in West Africa, a study in “mythic irony and sacred delight,” Robert Pelton also points out the similarities between modern scientists and traditional trickster figures like Anansi, Eshu, and Ellegua: “Both seek to befriend the strange, not so much striving to ‘reduce’ anomaly as to use it as a passage into a larger order.”[26] We could ask for no better description of the technological tricks pulled by the great dubmasters.

It’s a Jungle In There

While the torch of golden-age roots reggae has passed mostly into the hands of bad hippie bands, dub’s deeply technological imagination has enabled it to make a rich and multi-layered transition into the cultural science of the digital regime. Today’s “digi-dub” relies on no live instruments at all, its roots electronica whipped up with keyboard patches, computers, and sophisticated drum machines. At the same time, contemporary acts like Twilight Circus continue to make superb classic dub using all live instruments–the only anomaly being that Twilight Circus consists of a single white Dutchman named Ryan Moore. In fact, while British dub acts like Alpha & Omega and Zion Train wrap themselves in heavy Rastafarian imagery, many of them consist entirely or mostly of white Britons. I While the torch of golden-age roots reggae has passed mostly into the hands of bad hippie bands, dub’s deeply technological imagination has enabled it to make a rich and multi-layered transition into the cultural science of the digital regime. Today’s “digi-dub” relies on no live instruments at all, its roots electronica whipped up with keyboard patches, computers, and sophisticated drum machines. At the same time, contemporary acts like Twilight Circus continue to make superb classic dub using all live instruments–the only anomaly being that Twilight Circus consists of a single white Dutchman named Ryan Moore. In fact, while British dub acts like Alpha & Omega and Zion Train wrap themselves in heavy Rastafarian imagery, many of them consist entirely or mostly of white Britons. I mention this not to accuse anyone of cultural appropriation (a particularly tangled argument given the perpetual borrowings and miscegenations that characterize both traditional and modern popular music), but to indicate that the virtual logic of the Black Electronic is not rooted in ethnic facts but rhizomatically spreads through the increasingly open-ended and hybridized zones of electro-acoustic cyberspace.

As the fine British music compilation Macro Dub Infection argues in both its title and selections, dub is better seen as a technological virus, its silly putty beats, active silences, and bubbling, booming bass as nomadic codes that have wormed their way into a host of musical genres: ambient, industrial, trip-hop, techno, pop, jungle, and even experimental rock. Indeed, dub helps erode the artificial differences often erected between these musics, rendering such generic categories increasingly subservient to an open conversation between forms.

At the same time, one particular electronic contagion does stand out in its digital transcodings of the technologically mediated polyrhythms that characterize 70s dub: jungle music, aka, drum’n’bass. With its dizzying tempos and nonlinear beats, jungle is certainly one of the most aggressively polyrhythmic dance musics ever spawned in the modern West. And yet much of is generated entirely on personal computers. Distorted soul samples and rude boy taunts are layered over smooth R&B chords; giddy hi-hats and hyperfast snares teeter on the edge of collapse; machine-gun martial beats and ominous basslines liquefy your gut like an apocalyptic undertow. If dub is the studio on cannabis, jungle is the computer on cannabis and DMT.

Though a multicultural scene, jungle is still essentially the first homegrown dance music to spring directly from Britain’s black population, making it \perhaps the most significant mutation of the Black Electronic since techno originator Derrick May read Toffler’s The Third Wave or hip hop producers began to build tracks with samplers as well as turntables. While dub is one definite influence, jungle’s roots are, appropriately enough, tangled, and the following sketch drastically oversimplifies its etiology. In the early 1990s, when electronic dance music producers started whipping up the repetitive beats of techno to ungodly velocities, some folks took to speeding up breakbeats as well (breakbeats are the stimulating chunks of rhythmic surprise drawn from other records and that form the bedrock of American hip-hop). The resulting music–known as hardcore, or the more descriptive drum’n’bass–became something like breakbeat’s mutant British twin, unfurling a tactile, hacked up mix of drums and bass that foregrounded its own recombinant production like few other dance musics. Over time, the bass got thicker and dubbier, so that soon a slow ganja pace chugged along beneath the amphetamine snares; various cross-overs with the ragamuffin toasts of Jamaican dancehall MCs helped fix the name “jungle” in the public’s mind just as the music started seeping out of the underground.[27]

Upon first encountering jungle’s maniacal tempos, one suspects that in the Deleuzian contest between chaos and rhythm, rhythm has conceded defeat. Here’s Simon Reynolds, describing hardcore for ArtForum in 1994: “Sped-up break-beats are reverbed, treated, ‘time-stretched,’ and overlaid with itchy’n’scratchy blips of sounds that evoke the mandible-rustling telecommunication of the insect world. Polyrhythms are piled on, oblivious of the ‘correct’ way to organize rhythm: a spastic soundclash of incompatible meters (funky hip-hop breaks, dub reggae sway, Latin rolls).”[28] At the same time, jungle does resemble “correct” polymetric drumming in allowing dancers to satisfactorily hook into and pass between different rhythmic milieus nested within the same cut: one can skank to the slow bass pulse or attempt to articulate the frenetic, unpredictable multiplicities exploding up top.

While jungle’s programmed percussive samples are thickly layered, sped-up, and hyper-syncopated, in most jungle tracks they stumble across downtempo dub lines that ultimately anchor the madness. But in the hands of the music’s more aggressive and experimental creators, jungle can induce a remarkably delicious sense of disorientation, as reverbed cymbals and chopped-up snares savagely tug against the bass beat, upsetting the listener’s habitual desire to “fill in” the music with a comprehensible rhythm. The stronger jungle tracks also intensify their breaks (the passages dominated by cuts and cross-rhythms) to a degree that shatters the usefulness of the term “syncopation.” For these reasons, intense drum’n’bass produces for many listeners the same kind of disturbing confusion that West African drumming does; only instead of being threatened by the “frenetic” chaos of the “primitive”, they are threatened by the digital chaos of sampled code complexifying out of control.

In a sense then, one must “learn” to listen and dance to jungle’s complex and extremely recombinant rhythmic language. Many of the rhythmic units in jungle, such as the “Amen, Brother” sample, are generic and constantly recycled, cut and pasted across the thousands and thousands of tracks that today’s junglists crank out on their PCs and Amigas. Novelty lies at least as much in the recombinant rearrangement and pacing of these generic elements as in the generation of novel motifs and sounds. I am reminded here of Chernoff’s emphasis on the abstract precision of the many patterns that underlie West Africa drumming, and his point that “new forms are built from simple modifications of existing patterns, perhaps through the replacement of a single note.”[29] Moreover, new forms are perhaps less important than the fresh rearrangement or pacing of received elements that everyone recognizes. As Chernoff writes, “It is the duration of time that a drummer plays a particular rhythm, the amount of repetition and the way the rhythms change, to which the drummers pay attention, and not so much any particular rhythmic invention.”[30]

On the one hand, the junglist’s attention to the crafty assemblage of beats makes their rhythms more supple and compelling than those you find in other electronic dance musics, almost “organic” in their densely articulated gestures and “chaotic” organization. And yet one also senses that drum’n’bass is on the verge of unfolding some strange new non-Euclidian dimension, as cyborgs like Photek, 4 Hero, or Peshay painstakingly engineer an abstract space-time architecture from nano-beats that have been spliced and diced in a digital cuisanart.[31]

Jungle shares with dub the visceral root of the bass, as well as the deft deployment of gaps and silences that stretch and rend spacetime, opening little voids that cannot help but empty us out of ourselves. But in contrast to the aquatic, resonant, almost meditative zones opened up by dub, the spaces generated by the more intense junglists emerge as a perpetually morphing array of compressed, malformed, and fractured “intermilieus.” In part this distinctive mutation in the spaces of the Black Electronic arises from the qualitative distinction between digital and analog modes of production–a difference whose effects are particularly notable in electronic music.

But the jarring hyperspaces of jungle arise at least as much from the music’s almost eschatological polyrhythms, its deployment of “heterogenous blocks of space-time” that cut across the conventional dimensions of acoustic space. Just as jungle significantly reorganizes the possible vectors and gestures of the physical dance, it radically reorganizes the “mental dance” as well, propelling us into a compressed space of multiplicity that both challenges and reflects the larger mutations in our contemporary world-space. Perhaps this is what Marshall McLuhan glimpsed when he said that “we live in a single constricted space resonant with tribal drums”.[32] We are timestretched to the edge of the timeless, but a timeless that has nothing to do with the eternal and everything to do with the immanence of multiplicity.

Notes
[1]Thanks to Paul Miller, aka DJ Spooky, for this reference.
[2] See Paul Gilroy, “The Black Atlantic as a Counterculture of Modernity,” in The Black Atlantic, (Harvard, 1993), 1-40.
[3]While I don’t want to imply that there is some black or African “essence” that persists unchanged in electronic space, I also share with Gilroy who takes the position he calls “anti-anti-essentialism”–the sense that the lived realities of culture and history act as a powerful restraint on the loopier postmodern celebrations of radical constructionism. Rhizomes are not roots, but they still conform themselves organically to the actual shapes of the land they encounter.
[4]I will basically ignore political and sociological questions, concentrating instead on the technical, philosophical, and even science-ﬁctional aspects of polyrhythmic cyberspace, and I do so quite self-consciously. In American culture especially, black music has long carried the burden of representing the folk-cultural body, which is either demonized as “primitive” or lionized as an authentic and “natural” corrective to an abstract West identiﬁed with mind and machines. Besides eliding the fact that, as Gilroy argues, the African diaspora is actually integral to the West, this opposition tends to erase what is my core concern in this paper: the extraordinary technological dimension of modern black music’s musical, aesthetic, and even mythic imagination.
[5] Along these lines see Ron Eglash, “African Influences in Cybernetics, ” in The Cyborg Handbook, ed. Chris Hables Gray, (Routledge, 1995), pp. 17-28.
[6]John Miller Chernoff, African Rhythm and African Sensibility, (University of Chicago, 1979), 42.
[7] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, (Minnesota, 1987), 313.
[8]Ibid.
[9]Ibid.
[10]Ibid.
[11] Chernoff, scattershot citations.
[12]Ibid, 50.
[13] Ibid, 112.
[14]Ibid, 100.
[15]Cited in Chernoff, 50.
[16]Video documentary, “The History of Rock: Punk,” PBS.
[17]Interview, Grand Royal, issue 2, 69.
[18]Chernoff, 112
[19]Cited in John Corbett, Extended Play: Sounding Off from John Cage to Dr. Funkenstein, (Duke, 1994), 19.
[20]Cited in Corbett, 23.
[21] This ambiguity can be captured in one simple query: Is the Internet exploding or imploding?
[22]Dick Hebdidge, Cut’n’Mix, (Comedia, London, 1987), 82.
[23]Interview in David Toop, Ocean of Sound (Serpent’s Tail, London, 1995), 113.
[24] Bob Mack, “Return of the Super Ape,” Grand Royal, 64.
[25]Toop, 114.
[26]Robert Pelton, The Trickster in West Africa (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1980), 268.
[27]For these reasons and others, “jungle” is not a universally accepted terms, and many still prefer the more descriptive “drum’n’bass.”
[28] Earlier draft from author.
[29]Chernoff, 112.
[30]Ibid, 100.
[31]As Simon Reynolds points out, the jungle scene hosts such copious and rapid mutations that singling out its stars denies the collective intelligence that drives its recombinant creativity; citing Brian Eno, he says that we should speak not of “genius” but of “scenius.”
[32]Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy (University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1962),31. The contemporary space of digital multiplicity is also generated by network computing as it shifts from centralized linear processing to a distributed and increasingly recombinant ecology of multiple processors, chunks of code, applets, and decentralized and increasingly autonomous routines. Mainframe computers like Danny Hillis’ Connection Machine can be seen as “multiplicity machines” that use a networked array of different processors to simultaneously attack problems. Many of today’s artiﬁcial life researchers, exploring the unpredictable collective properties of virtual spaces that attempt to model natural, social, and economic processings, are also concerned with the “emergent properties” generated by the complex interaction of numerous small components and simple rules of behavior.

Biography

Erik Davis was born during the Summer of Love within a stone’s throw of San Francisco. He grew up in North County, Southern California, and spent a decade on the East Coast, where he studied literature and philosophy at Yale and spent six years in the freelance trenches of Brooklyn and Manhattan before moving to San Francisco, where he currently resides. He is the author of four books: Nomad Codes: Adventures in Modern Esoterica(Yeti, 2010), The Visionary State: A Journey through California’s Spiritual Landscape (Chronicle, 2006), with photographs by Michael Rauner, and the 33 1/3 volume Led Zeppelin IV (Continuum, 2005). His first and best-known book remains TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information (Crown, 1998), a cult classic of visionary media studies that has been translated into five languages and recently republished by North Atlantic Press. He has contributed chapters on art, music, technoculture, and contemporary spirituality to over a dozen books, including Suzanne Treister’s HFT: The Gardener (Black Dog), Future Matters: the Persistence of Philip K. Dick (Palgrave), Sound Unbound: Writings on Contemporary Multimedia and Music Culture (MIT, 2008), AfterBurn: Reflections on Burning Man(University of New Mexico, 2005), Rave Ascension (Routledge, 2003), and Zig Zag Zen (Chronicle, 2002). In addition to his many forewords and introductions, Davis has contributed articles and essays to a variety of periodicals, including Bookforum, Arthur, Artforum, Slate, Salon, Gnosis, Rolling Stone, the LA Weekly, Spin, Wired and the Village Voice.

taken from:

here

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Techno-Futurism: Noise, Dissonance, and the Global Avante Garde

12/7/2017

by Steven Craig Hickman

Luigi Russolo – La Musica 1911

To enrich means to add, not to substitute or to abolish.

—Luigi Russolo, The Enharmonic Bow

“Noise,” as an idea, a subject, a field, an instrument, came upon the scene with a power and swiftness that transformed all of science and our views of the nature of matter. At birth, it solved the major issue of its time, perhaps, the greatest idea of all time—the existence of atoms.

– Richard Feynman

There are sounds and they are of various kinds. Yet, noise has its own secret history, one connected to the 20th Century and its birth in the avante-garde of Italian Futurism. Luciano Chessa tells us in his Luigi Russolo, Futurist: Noise, Visual Arts, and the Occult that Luigi Russolo (1885– 1947)— painter, composer, builder of musical instruments, and a member of the Italian futurist movement from its inception— represents a crucial moment in the evolution of twentieth-century musical aesthetics. He is generally considered the father of the first systematic poetics of noise and by some even the creator of the synthesizer, and his influence on the likes of Edgar Varèse, Pierre Schaeffer, and John Cage is well documented.1

As Luigi would tell us in his essay Art of Noises: “Ancient life was all silence. In the nineteenth century, with the invention of the machine, Noise was born. Today, Noise triumphs and reigns supreme over the sensibility of men. For many centuries life went by in silence, or at most in muted tones. The strongest noises which interrupted this silence were not intense or prolonged or varied. If we overlook such exceptional movements as earthquakes, hurricanes, storms, avalanches and waterfalls, nature is silent” (see Art of Noise).

Luigi would strike up the call of all modernisms to return to the streets, to enter the life of the dissonant matrix out of which all life emanates, to as Henry Miller so aptly put it:

To be born in the street means to wander all your life, to be free. It means accident and incident, drama, movement. It means above all dream. A harmony of irrelevant facts which gives to your wandering a metaphysical certitude. In the street you learn what human beings really are; otherwise, or afterwards, you invent them. What is not in the open street is false, derived, that is to say, literature. Nothing of what is called “adventure” ever approaches the flavor of the street. It doesn’t matter whether you fly to the Pole, whether you sit on the floor of the ocean with a pad in your hand, whether you pull up nine cities one after the other, or whether, like Kurtz, you sail up the river and go mad. No matter how exciting, how intolerable the situation, there are always exits, always ameliorations, comforts, compensations, newspapers, religions. But once there was none of this. Once you were free, wild, murderous….

– Henry Miller – Black Spring

Luigi himself would express it poignantly in his manifesto: “…let us cross a great modern capital with our ears more alert than our eyes, and we will get enjoyment from distinguishing the eddying of water, air and gas in metal pipes, the grumbling of noises that breathe and pulse with indisputable animality, the palpitation of valves, the coming and going of pistons, the howl of mechanical saws, the jolting of a tram on its rails, the cracking of whips, the flapping of curtains and flags. We enjoy creating mental orchestrations of the crashing down of metal shop blinds, slamming doors, the hubbub and shuffling of crowds, the variety of din, from stations, railways, iron foundries, spinning mills, printing works, electric power stations and underground railways.” This sense of the vibrancy of things, of the machinic presence of irritation and disruption, of noise as a source not of fear and disgust, but rather as the singular power of life churning away in the midst of our modern industrial world, the world of capitalism was at the heart of this strange turn toward noise. This was the moment just before the great engines of war would crash down over Europe bringing a new noise: a noise full of dread and defeat and death. This would be the regressive noise of fascism leading back into the dark primitive romanticism of terror and blood.

Above is Luigi with his Intonarumori which were a family of musical instruments he invented in 1913. They were acoustic noise generators that permitted to create and control in dynamic and pitch several different types of noises. Each instrument was made of a wooden parallelepiped sound box with a carton or metal speaker on its front side. The performer turned a crank or pressed an electric button to produce the sound whose pitch was controlled by means of a lever on top of the box. The lever could be moved over a scale in tones, semitones and the intermediate gradations within a range of more than an octave. Inside the box there were a wooden or metal wheel (whose shape or diameter varied depending on the model) that make a catgut or metal string vibrate. The tension of the string is modified by means of the lever allowing glissandos or specific notes. At one end of the string there is a drumhead that transmits vibrations to the speaker. There were 27 varieties of intonarumori with different names according to the sound produced: howling, thunder, crackling, crumpling, exploding, gurgling, buzzing, hissing and so on. (see Valerio Saggini Intonarumori)

We know that in 1914 he caused a riot after presenting his program using these multifarious instruments. The program comprised four “networks of noises” with the following titles:

Awakening of a City
Meeting of cars and aeroplanes
Dining on the terrace of the Casino and
Skirmish in the oasis

Luigi had high hopes for reintroducing the sensual element of everyday life into peoples lives through music, and especially through the dissonance and interruptions of noise. As he stated in the final sections of his famous manifesto:

Every manifestation of our life is accompanied by noise. The noise, therefore, is familiar to our ear, and has the power to conjure up life itself. Sound, alien to our life, always musical and a thing unto itself, an occasional but unnecessary element, has become to our ears what an overfamiliar face is to our eyes. Noise, however, reaching us in a confused and irregular way from the irregular confusion of our life, never entirely reveals itself to us, and keeps innumerable surprises in reserve. We are therefore certain that by selecting, coordinating and dominating all noises we will enrich men with a new and unexpected sensual pleasure.

-Luigi Russolo – Art of Noise

OUT OF NOISE: Futurism And Its Progeny

Franz Kafka admiring ironically the painting by Delaunay, Homage to Belriot, expressed this futurist ensemble with its singular and powerful image of the aeroplane and its caged rider, saying, “One can see his erect upper body above the wings; his legs extend deep down into the machine of which they have become part. The setting sun … shines on the floating wings.” He goes on to ask: “What is happening? Up there, 20 metres above the earth, a man is imprisoned in a wooden cage and defends himself against a freely chosen invisible danger. We, however, stand below, wholly caught up in a trance and watch this man.”2

This notion of being entranced, of being caught up in a trance would become central to both futurism and its hypertrance descendants from those like Eric Satie who would use what he termed found sound, on to the latest worlds of that began with such musicians a Lou Reed‘s double LP Metal Machine Music (1975); and, onward to the nine nights of noise music called Noise Fest that was organized by Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth in the NYC art space White Columnsin June 1981 followed by the Speed Trials noise rock series organized by Live Skull members in May 1983; as wells as, the first postmodern wave of industrial noise music appearing with Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire, and NON (aka Boyd Rice); and, on to the portmanteau Japanoise, with perhaps the best known being Merzbow (pseudonym for the Japanese noise artist Masami Akita who himself was inspired by the Dada artist Kurt Schwitters‘s Merz art project of psychological collage); and, even, the ambient, microsound, or glitchdigital scene described by Kim Cascone as the “aesthetic of failure”3. One could add much more to this lineup of experimental music and sound cascades of noise culture, etc.

This is just a sampling of a world-wide scene that has even entered such notable additions as the Detroit techno scene – a type of techno music that generally includes the first techno productions by Detroit-based artists during the 1980s and early 1990s. Detroit techno artists include Juan Atkins, Derrick May, and Kevin Saunderson. A distinguishing trait of Detroit techno is the use of analog synthesizers and early drum machines, particularly the Roland TR-909, or, in later releases, the use of digital emulation to create the characteristic sounds of those machines.

But underlying all these variations is a the notion of noise itself. What is noise? Maybe a better question is – What does noise do? How does it enter our lives, what impacts does it have, how has noise shaped us since the advent of our hyper-technological society, and what repercussions has it had on our cultural and political worlds? In my own quest to understand the roots of fascism, and of its continuing impact on ideology across the planet through its various and secretive initiatives within the fabric of our global neo-liberal statist or global governance agendas, I’ve begun, along with my friend, Edmund Berger – Deterritorial Investigations Unit, both art and music as tools of the avant-garde of these many eras have impacted our lives even if we are not fully aware of that fact. The subtle enchainments of command and control that permeate our own surveillance society had their roots in this Era of Noise.

Deleuze and Guattari in their Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia would tells us that the “territorial machine is … the first form of socius, the machine of primitive inscription, the “megamachine” that covers a social field” (141). They would show us how the very underpinnings of history and society form the social machine that “fashions a memory without which there would be no synergy of man and his (technical) machines” (ibid. 141). For them capitalism was the final megamachine, the “semiautonomous organization of technical production the tends to appropriate memory and reproduction, and thereby modifies the forms of the exploitation of man” (ibid. 141).

Edmund Berger in a recent post Sound Hacking: Further Reflections on Noise and Noncommunication outlines an alliance between noise and noncommunication that gives us a detailed understanding of the economic and political implications of this history. As he tells it when we consider the notion of noise as an “aesthetic mode aligned with moments bound up in the emergence or production of new subjective processes” we must consider two aspects: first, the questions of the vibrational infrastructure of the noise itself: how is the noise produced, with what intensity or solemnity, how audible is the noise, how is it directed, from what distance is the noise traveling, how does the architecture impact the noise, how do the bodies in the proximity of the noise, be it those catalyzing it or those receiving it, react?”; and, secondly, the “points of cultural expression, a tapestry woven from but not limited to lifestyles, politics of class and sexuality, experience, subjective environments, and degrees of accessibility” (see here). He explains in detail these aspects so I’ll not go into them here, but recommend the reader to take a moment and read his post. At one point he admits that maybe this opening out of the futurists toward the sacred and irrational should not be condemned but reinvestigated:

Instead of condemning the desire to explore the otherwordly as escapism, we may do well to approach rationality from the perspective of Henri Lefebvre, who saw this force as one that has withered away the capacity for experience and intensity. “The mysterious, the sacred and the diabolical, magic ritual, the mystical – at first these things were lived with intensity.” … For Lefebvre, like Guy Debord and Raoul Vaneigem, the machine of industrial produced an enclosure around everyday life which detached the individual and the group from a lived experience of authenticity (what these individuals analyzed was attacked by the countercultures of their time, with the resurrection of the shamanic and the esoteric coexisting alongside the more directed political aspirations of civil rights, the anti-war movement, and the greater hopes for a different age). (here)

Michel Serres puts it, ‘we are surrounded by noise. And this noise it inextinguishable […] We are in the noises of the world, we cannot close our door to their reception’ (Serres, 2007, 126). For Serres, at least, noise comes before any meaningful system as its transcendental field, which is why noise can never be fully eliminated. In this perspective all living systems in their negentropy are temporary escapes from entropic noise, but escapes that are destined to failure by the laws of thermodynamics. In more aesthetic terms we might think of noise as ground, and meaning as figure, rising from the ground, but caught within its field in order to function . More basically, what any system necessarily excludes as noise are all the levels of organization above and below it that include its own conditions of possibility, hence the informational account of noise as a lack of organization being a state of fundamental distortion. Noise is indeed static or interference but not that of an unorganized chaos so much as patterns of organization alien to the norms of a specific system – that which Serres refers to as ‘the parasite’.4

As Cary Wolfe would describe it in his preface to Serres book The Parasite:

…“noise” (for the English reader) forms the third and unsuspected meaning of the French word parasite: 1. biological parasite ; 2. social parasite; 3. static or interference. As we know from classical information theory and its model of the signal-to-noise ratio, noise was typically regarded as simply the extraneous background against which a given message or signal was transmitted from a sender to receiver. For Serres, however, “as soon as we are two, we are already three or four.… In order to succeed, the dialogue needs an excluded third” [Genesis, 57); we may begin with “two interlocutors and the channel that attaches them to one another,” but “the parasite, nesting on the flow of the relation, is in third position” (53). For Serres, then— and here he joins a line of systems theorists that includes figures such as Gregory Bateson and, later, Niklas Luhmann— noise is productive and creative: “noise, through its presence and absence, the intermittence of the signal, produces the new system” (52). Or as Bateson puts it in the very last sentence of his seminal essay “Cybernetic Explanation” (1967): “All that is not information, not redundancy, not form and not restraints— is noise, the only possible source of new patterns.” 6 Luhmann helps clarify and develop the point in his major work, Social Systems (1984):

“The difference between meaning and world is formed for this process of the continual self-determination of meaning as the difference between order and perturbation, between information and noise. Both are, and both remain , necessary. The unity of the difference is and remains the basis for operation. This cannot be emphasized strongly enough. A preference for meaning over world, for order over perturbation , for information over noise is only a preference. It does not enable one to dispense with the contrary.”

This is exactly what Serres has in mind when he asserts in The Parasite that “systems work because they do not work. Nonfunctioning remains essential for functioning.” Given the basic informational and communicational paradigm of “two stations and a channel,” messages are exchanged, and “if the relation succeeds, if it is perfect, optimum, and immediate; it disappears as a relation. If it is there, if it exists, that means that it failed.” Thus, he continues, “Relation is nonrelation,” and if the channel that carries the message “disappears into immediacy,” then “there would be no spaces of transformation anywhere.” In this context his apparently paradoxical assertion that “the real is not rational” makes perfect sense (79).5

This opening out to the Real was at the heart of the later Lacan, who as Zizek tells us the “paradox of the Lacanian real is then that it is an entity which, although it doesn’t exist (in the sense of “really existing,” taking place in reality), has a series of properties. It exercises a certain structural causality; it can produce a series of effects in the symbolic reality of subjects” … He goes on to say:

If we define the real as such a paradoxical, chimerical entity which, although it doesn’t exist, has a series of properties and can produce a series of effects, it becomes clear that the real par excellence is jouissance: jouissance doesn’t exist; it is impossible, but it produces a lot of traumatic effects. And this paradoxical nature of jouissance offers us also a clue to explain the fundamental paradox which unfailingly attests the presence of the real: the fact of the prohibition of something which is already in itself impossible. (see The Lacanian Real: Television).

Zizek in another context in his book Less Than Nothing will describe how the noise of an interruption, and irritable recognition of its affects upon the mind causes a certain clarity of mind to develop:

…as soon as I talk to my sister— who is sitting and working behind me— about this matter, I realize what hours of hard thinking have not been able to make clear to me. It isn’t as if she was telling me in any direct sense. … But since I have some vague thoughts that are in some way connected with what I am looking for, then once I have embarked on the formulation of the thought it is as if the need to lead what has been begun to some conclusion transforms my hazy imaginations into complete clarity in such a way that my insight is completed together with my rambling sentence. I mix in inarticulate noises, I draw out my sentence connectives, I use appositions where they are not strictly necessary and I use other rhetorical tricks that will draw out speech : in this way I gain the time to fabricate my idea in this workshop of reason. …

Nothing in all this is more useful than some movement on the part of my sister, a movement indicating that she intends to interrupt me. For my strained mind becomes even more excited by the need to defend this inherent right to speak against attack from the outside. The mind’s abilities grow like those of a great general who is faced with a very difficult situation.6

This movement of interruption, the irritable expectation or influx of noise in the environment engenders an excitation in the brain, that engenders the very thought in its crystalline form that he was seeking through those many harmonious struggles through certain texts and thoughts. This notion that noise can engender order, bring a sense of clarity to thought and reason, force the mind to defend itself against this secret intruder, or parasite (Serres), seems an accurate portrayal of the shock of the Real that Lacan spoke of.

Greg Hainge will offer us an ontology of noise which “is immersive because there is nothing outside of it and because it is in everything”.7 Indeed, noise is not only multi-medial , arising in many different kinds of forms and media, engaging many different senses, sensations, responses and affects, it is medial insofar as it is always in-between, produced in the passing into actuality of everything, both animate and inanimate – a false dichotomy in any case as has been suggested. Noise, this is to say, is the trace of the virtual out of which all expressive forms come to be, the mark of an ontology which is necessarily relational:

If noise inhabits everything because everything is in actuality formed out of noise, then what noise ultimately points us to is the relational ontology according to which the world comes to pass, the way in which there is nothing that falls outside of the event, of the realm of process, of an existence formed only through the heterogeneous assemblages of different forms of expression which inescapably and incessantly contract the virtual into the actual.- (Hainge, ibid. KL -396)

This notion of expression rather than description brings us to the notion of an ontology of process as against an ontology of substance and objects, the sense that it is out of the Void in Zizek’s sense that things, entities, objects (the phenomenal realm) come to be. Yet, as he tells us “there need not be a split between the operations of noise as a philosophical concept and its manifestations in expression, that it is not necessary to separate out the ontological from the phenomenological” (Hainge, KL 578). Finally, he states:

Noise, then, makes us attend to how things come to exist, how they come to stand or be (sistere) outside of themselves (ex-). Noise, then, is fundamentally about ontology, and in order to sketch an operational taxonomy of noise, it is only fitting that each of the categories to be used should also address how things come to exist (-sistere). Let me then suggest the following:

Noise resists – not (necessarily) politically but materially because it reconfigures matter in expression, conduction and conjugation.
Noise subsists – insofar as it relates the event to the field from which expression is drawn and thus subtends all being.
Noise coexists – as its ontology is only relational and does not come into being by itself but only as the by-product of expression.
Noise persists – because it cannot be reconfigured or recontained, cannot become thetic as it passes into expression, but remains indelibly noise.
Noise obsists – since it is fundamentally anathema to stasis and thus opposes all illusions of fixity, pulling form beyond itself through expression and bringing about the collapse of meaning.

– Hainge: (Kindle Locations 585-597)

In his conclusion he tells us that if “we cannot talk about noise as though it is a thing with a core, definable essence, we can nonetheless talk about what it does, about its operations , and attempt to find in the multifarious sites, subjects, objects, texts, expressions and channels in which it arises some commonality or shared principles that allow us to talk about it in terms of an ontology” (Hainge, KL 5944).

Yet, there is the politics of noise as well, of a movement, of a transgressive marshalling toward change that process thinking brings to the table. As Stephen Mallinder will remind us in the introduction to Alexander Reed’s Assimilate: A Critical History of Industrial Music:

The inspiration of Dada offered a guidebook of how to go about deconstructing a world that did not adequately represent the one we actually inhabited. Suitably driven by Duchamp, Tzara, and other past pugnacious artists, this was a sincere if somewhat naïve attempt to tear up the plans and devise new strategies. Process meant the rejection of traditional methods and instrumentation. The recording studio became the most valuable writing tool; tape machines, effected voices, “treated” instruments, tape loops, and drum machines. Song structures and linear arrangements were abandoned; the logocentric norm of most contemporary music was dismissed for a sonic democracy. The music was intended to be primal, visceral, and provocative. Noise, for us a Sheffield birthright, was the most effective tool in the box. Although most at the time were unaware of many of the readings into the inherent political and social power of noise, it was clearly a language of subversion. Noise defied order and control. It was a musical taboo. Sonic belligerence. 8

This notion of a resistance to the command and control systems that seek to enslave us in a global system of power and knowledge, a biopolitical structure of governance and law that uses the Infotainment Industrial Complex to hook us into its reality matrix, its illusionary world of ideological jouissance scrambling the codes that have allowed us to fall into apathy and indifference. Noise brings us out of sleep, makes us irritable, induces a sense of belligerence and defiance, a militant and aggressive assertion of our power to remain free and collective, productive of solidarity and global justice. As Deniz Peters explains, “The hopes of this modernist aesthetic were on the machine, not only on the noise machines make, but, just as importantly, on the mechanistic production of sound; that is, the hopes were tied to the image of the generation of sound using a perfectly suited, untiring and infallible body. …”9 Maybe Henry Miller had it right all along when he said that we’d need to distinguish where the noise comes from and not go daffy just because you hear an explosion under your ass.10 In his text Genre is Obsolete, Ray Brassier points out that the commodification of experience now takes place not only at the ideological level but at the neurophysiological level.11 Noise pervades us like those impossible entities and processes dark matter/dark energy. It interrupts our harmonious lives, our walk-about sleep world of capital, it makes us irritable, and wakes us from our lethargically desperate lives and forces us to acknowledge aspects of our affective relations that have for so long been repressed and silenced by the zombie consumerism of the free market socius. As Brassier puts it:

Much contemporary critical theory of a vaguely marxisant bent is compromised by conceptual anachronisms whose untruth in the current social context is every bit as politically debilitating as that of the reactionary cultural forms it purports to unmask. Just as ‘noise’ is neither more nor less inherently subversive than any other commodifiable musical genre, so the categories invoked in order to decipher its political potency cannot be construed as inherently ‘critical’ while they remain fatally freighted with neo-romantic clichés about the transformative power of aesthetic experience. … Technology is now an invasive component of agency. Neurotechnologies, including cognitive enhancers such as modafinil, brain fingerprinting, neural lie-detectors, and nascent brain-computer interfaces, are giving rise to phenotechnologies which will eventually usher in the literal manufacturing of consciousness in a way that promises to redraw existing boundaries between personal and collective experience and recast not only extant categories of personal and collective identity, but also those of personal and collective agency. The commodification of experience is not a metaphor played out at the level of ideology and combatable with ideological means, but a concrete neurophysiological reality which can only be confronted with neurobiological resources. (Brassier, 69)

In our age of neural implants and invasive technologies we may one day wake up and realize our reality is a commodity produced moment by moment by the engineering elite of some technocapitalist global order unless the noise can begin to break through the chinks in the metal cavities of our encased minds. As Brassier reminds us to “eradicate experience would be to begin to intervene in the sociological determination of neurobiology as well as in the neurobiological determination of culture. Here, the cognitive and cultural import of art cannot be separated from its formal and structural resources: the radicality of the latter must be concomitant with the radicality of the former” (Brassier, 70).

Luciano Floridi describes the notion of ontological friction which refers to the forces that oppose the information flow within (a region of) the infosphere, and hence (as a coefficient) to the amount of work and effort required for some kind of agent to obtain, filter and/ or block information (also, but not only) about other agents in a given environment, e.g. by establishing and maintaining channels of communication and by overcoming obstacles in the flow of information such as distance, noise, lack of resources (especially time, memory space and processing capacities), amount and complexity of the data to be processed, and so forth.12 He describes a new set of agents in society, the inforgs, as “informationally embodied organisms, entities made up of information” that exist in the infosphere. Inforgs are natural agents situated alongside artificial agents, existing as part of hybrid agency that is, for example, a family with digital devices such as digital cameras, cell phones, tablets, and laptops. In our time we’ve seen a slow shift toward an informational ontology rather than either materialist or idealist, or shall we say the merger of the two in a wider framework that includes them both in a new perspective. Noise will play its part in the transgressive movement of information as the radicalization of an oppositional politics that seeks to interrupt, disrupt, and irritate the technocapitalist state apparatuses and its global system of governance.

Afterword

I’ll need to leave off now… hopefully will add a part two that will show some of the inner history of some of the bands from the different periods that have contributed to this new musical form. Music has become for many the greatest extension of popular resistance in our time. Hopefully we’ll be able to shed a little light on that in the future…

A book that someone just reminded me about by Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century appears to be a good overview of this whole modern and postmodern period of music, I haven’t read it yet but will over the coming weekend.

1. Chessa, Luciano. Luigi Russolo, Futurist: Noise, Visual Arts, and the Occult. (University of California Press, 2012)
2. Marjorie Perloff. The Futurist Moment. (University of Chicago Press, 1986)
3. Cascone, Kim. “The Aesthetics of Failure: ‘Post-Digital’ Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music”. Computer Music Journal 24, no. 4 (Winter 2002): pp. 12–18.
4. Hegarty, Paul; Goddard, Michael; Halligan, Benjamin (2012-05-31). Reverberations: The Philosophy, Aesthetics and Politics of Noise (p. 3). Continuum US. Kindle Edition.
5. Serres, Michel (2013-11-30). The Parasite (Posthumanities) (Kindle Locations 150-160). University of Minnesota Press. Kindle Edition.
6. Zizek, Slavoj (2012-04-30). Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (Kindle Locations 12947-12949). Norton. Kindle Edition.
7. Hainge, Greg (2013-03-14). Noise Matters: Towards an Ontology of Noise (Kindle Locations 396-400). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
8. S. Alexander Reed, (2013-05-08). Assimilate: A Critical History of Industrial Music . Oxford University Press, USA. Kindle Edition.
9.Peters, Deniz. Introduction. Bodily Expression in Electronic Music. Eds. Deniz Peters, Gerhard Eckel, and Andreas Dorschel. New York: Routledge, 2012. 1– 16.
10. Miller, Henry (2012-03-03). Tropic of Cancer (p. 143). . Kindle Edition.
11. Ray Brassier. Genre is Obsolete Multitudes, No. 28, Spring 2007
12. Floridi, Luciano (2013-10-10). The Ethics of Information (p. 232). Oxford University Press, USA. Kindle Edition.

taken from:

socialecologies

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Drone Music as Apocalypse

12/6/2017

by Steven Craig Hickman

Drone music excels in creating and maintaining tension. It aestheticizes doom, opening a door onto once and future catastrophes, those that are imminent and those that, once believed to be imminent, are now detours in a past that turned out otherwise. Drone music is apocalypse itself is a phenomenon that flouts interpretation; it is a literal rendition of the ineffable, something that exceeds or evades or defies speech. Apocalypse as cataclysm draws a line between the present and the future, presence and absence. It is an emptiness, a threat or a hope of a revelation (“ apocalypse” literally means “unveiling”), but it is unthinkable insofar as we cannot claim to have already lived it.

Apocalypse in modern parlance is a dreadful thing to contemplate, even though it is not clear what exactly will expire once apocalypse has happened. We may think of apocalypse as the end of the world, or the end of humanity. But apocalypse needn’t necessarily be either, for humanity’s apocalypse could well consist of being reduced to living in pre-industrial conditions. This would be a drastic turn of events, surely, but not so much an apocalypse for our species as for our culture and technology. The meaning of “the end of the world” is even obscurer, for even the most pessimistic anticipations of apocalypse tend not to proclaim that Planet Earth will disappear.

What, then, will end?

A hyperobject as conceived by Tim Morton, apocalypse is something we can theorize or foretell, but not know in its entirety. We know of it only obliquely through works of art that speak of it (such as Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops) or that speculate about its attributes (such as Basinski’s The River). And while I agree with Morton that the end of the world has already occurred because “world” means a series of ideas about what life should and should not be, we should nonetheless understand that the recent usage of “apocalypse” indicates a belief that the worst is yet to come, that apocalypse is an event from which humanity will not emerge. This sense of “the end of the world” is aesthetically significant, for as this book demonstrates, it drives much of our art and culture and feeds our political malaise and spiritual cynicism. The writer Cynthia Wey takes apocalypse literally to mean the end of human existence on Earth, although she acknowledges the inherent narcissism in apocalyptic theories that harp on humanity’s disappearance to the exclusion of any other object or being. Many of us share Wey’s parochial notion of apocalypse, for we assume that if we ever do experience apocalypse, it will be just as we are about to disappear.

-Joanna Demers, Drone and Apocalypse: An Exhibit Catalog for the End of the World

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socialecologies

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Pauline Oliveros – Big mother is watching you

11/21/2017

"When we hear the rhythmic line being displaced by the computational process we hear alterations in the relationships between sound intensities which constitute the rhythm. However, we also obtain information—however partial—about computational processes within the mechanism generating the sounds...

With computer generated sound in particular, it is possible to locate the sound in a wider containing system rather than in the speaker diaphragm alone. From the purview of a computer musician or critic, locating the sound in a vibrating object alone may constitute an arbitrary and incomprehensible excision: for the succession of vibratory events may manifest an organizing process whose generative mechanism includes (say) a computer-audio system and gestural inputs determined by performers or various environmental contingencies."

'Sonic Art and the Nature of Sonic Events' - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 2010 1

- David Roden

"In the summer of 1966, Pauline Oliveros devised a setup at the University of Toronto Electronic Music Studio that allowed her to ‘. . . [play] the classical studio in real time’ (Pauline Oliveros Interview). The setup employed tone and noise generators, amplifiers and tape machines with feedback loops. In her own words: ‘The whole set up was quite non-linear and required careful listening and instantaneous responses to play’ (Pauline Oliveros Interview). ...

In listening to these pieces we are listening to the system itself and the process of the sounds becoming. This type of work engenders a different listening strategy than a piece of tape collage. Content still matters as does materials that are input to the system, but rather than the form being determined solely by a sound’s morphology (micro) and juxtaposition (macro), the interaction within (and with) the system endows it with form. In Oliveros’ case, techniques suchas a ‘. . . double feedback loop between channels . . .’ lead to a ‘. . . continuous reiteration of attack until: it decays, a new attack occurs, or a resonant mode is activated . . .’"

'Noise/Music and Representational Systems' in Organised Sound · August 2006 2

- Doug van Nort

references:

'Sonic art and the Nature of Sonic Events' in the Review of Philosophy and Psychology, pp. 153-4 by David Roden (https://philpapers.org/rec/RODSAA-2), published (2010)
Noise/music and representation systems in Organised Sound, August 2006 by DOUG VAN NORT ( https://doi.org/10.1017/S135577180600145 ) , published online: 14 August 2006

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SOUND HACKING: FURTHER REFLECTIONS ON NOISE AND NONCOMMUNICATION

11/13/2017

By Edmund Berger

We have become so accustomed to violence through entertainment that transgression itself has become merely another capitalist performance. How then do we elevate art, how can it be a reaction to the Other instead of its medium? How must we act when yesterday’s transgressions are today’s commodities?

– Andreas Burckhardt i

Sound

When we consider the topic of noise, as an aesthetic mode aligned with moments bound up in the emergence or production of new subjective processes, we are taking into consideration an assemblage built from two primary parts. The first of these is the questions of the vibrational infrastructure of the noise itself: how is the noise produced, with what intensity or solemnity, how audible is the noise, how is it directed, from what distance is the noise traveling, how does the architecture impact the noise, how do the bodies in the proximity of the noise, be it those catalyzing it or those receiving it, react? So on and so forth. The vibrational infrastructure of noise is at once a matter of the noise’s sonic dimension, as well as the affective response to it. The second are the points of cultural expression, a tapestry woven from but not limited to lifestyles, politics of class and sexuality, experience, subjective environments, and degrees of accessibility.

Neither the vibrational infrastructure or the points of cultural expression can be cleaved apart from one another; each is intricately woven together. We could never pose, nor should we desire to pose, an argument in which we strive to answer which came first: noisy aesthetics as a sonic force, or the cultural war machines. When the Italian Futurists began feverishly penning their odes to frantic speeds of technology (“we jumped, hearing the mighty noise of the double-decker trams,” their opening manifesto readsii), Francesco Pratella and Luigi Russolo praised the howls of the city, the most primitive of percussive instruments, free verse, and end of the ballad as an instrument of revolution that would come together from preexisting elements. The Dadaists, having both succeeded and dethroned the Futurists, filled the walls of the Cabaret Voltaire with an “indefinable intoxication,”iii a generation of the sonic, as a scream of revolt against stale bourgeois stagnation. The same goes for the punk rockers, be it the nihilists of New York City or the post-Situationist leftists in Britain.

Digging into this noisy assemblage will reveal an extensive archive of affective responses. We shall not list them in full, instead touching in passing on two of them. The first affective register is dread. Noise generates unease; it clouds the sonic environment with its own fragmenting excesses and overrides directives of the communication channel. In the presence of a particularly visceral noise experience, one could even feel the immediacy of danger: Brechtian theater collapses away in the face of explosion and chaos’s specter. Dread, however, is never a sensation of immediacy. It is a feeling of something that is impending, like a ghostly manifestation of some near future event hovering over the now like a cloud. Dread allows us to project forward into this future, as it is the affect of anticipation being folded into the now. It is abstract, beyond words, but it blankets the whole of the body.

The second register is, paradoxically, the affect of opening. Opening is the sensation of virtuality; like dread, it is abstract in that it is formless and exists along a line where language breaks apart. Opening is the mark of the horizon of possibilities. Energetic and affirmative, opening speaks of things that can be done, a rousing to action. In the noisy continuum, these two registers often coexist in a symbiosis that appears as contradiction, but it is in fact this very non-synthesis that lends agency. While the Futurists ran the lines of speed straight into the maelstrom of fascism, they were undoubtedly, in the words of Kodwo Eshun, “the first media theorists of the twentieth century,”iv capable of tapping into the dread of the ambiance of the technologically-mediated pre-World War I European society and mapping out the coming dissonance. And when the war finally broke across the landscape, it was “inside the cabaret” that the Dadaists “abandoned the need for justifications; then like lovers seeking a way out of an illicit affair all of them contrived endless escapes the next morning, and surrendered again by sundown.”v Speed and war was their reality, conflict and chaos was their art. The horizon was unfolding at the cracks, and a noisy schizophonia pointed towards that beyond.

Freud himself indeed spoke of the link between his “discovery” of the death instinct and World War I, which remains the model for capitalist war. More generally, the death instinct celebrates the wedding of psychoanalysis and capitalism; their engagement had been full of hesitation… Absorbed, diffuse, immanent death is the condition formed by the signifier in capitalism, the empty locus that is everywhere displaced in order to block the schizophrenic escapes and place restraints on the flights.vi

Everywhere in noise is a muted sort of nostalgia. As the presence of dread and opening indicates (not to mention the self-proclaimed name of those early media theorists!) noise has a certain futurism imbedded within it. Unlike the ‘signifier in capitalism’ that impedes fluctuation and rebounds the spiraling movements of deterritorialization, it rushes onward in the places beyond now by looking towards immanence. At the same time, the noise continuum betrays a certain conscious nostalgia. It has continually looked backwards at its predecessors, cataloged its influences, but it has never constructed a lineage of itself. Lineage itself is an implication of debt owed; it is much better to approach the continuum from the perspective of the rhizome. Pick a spot to start, and radiate outwards. Follow the branches, the splinters and eruptions, finding no end and no beginning. One could pick the point when noise collides with rhythm in the form of dub: follow its chains down into the multiplicity that Steve Goodman refers to as ‘global ghettotech,’ a “radically synthetic counter to ‘world music’ that connects together the mutant strains of post-hip-hop, electronic dance music… from kwaito to reggaeton, to cumbia, to dancehall, to crunk, to grime, to baile funk, and others.”vii Or one could follow these chains into certain modes of krautrock and post-punk. In another instance, we could start from Futurism and the transition to Dada, and then Neo-Dada and Fluxus, to Downtown Music, into punk and then post-punk and industrial. We need not limit ourselves to musical forms solely – what of the binds that move from Dada to Surrealism to Situationism, and from there to Germany’s Kommune I? Krautrock, particularly Amon Duul, can be found here – and we recombine again.

From this perspective the rhizome of the noisy continuum appears as a contagion (we should not be surprised, then, that dub has been described as just that), a force blossoming at so many ruptures, not as a motor of action but something to be invoked, channeled in one form or another, and injected into the relays of cultural, political, and musical networks. That it becomes enfolded, at so many junctures, into commodity-form is countered by the fact that it appears to be perpetually pushing onward, evading capture by changing its mold despite the encompassing of differences across the terrain of the market, driven by its own delirious rhizomatics. The image of the rhizome has come to stand in for infinite circuits of communication in an ever-expanding space. Such language is precisely that of Empire, with its drive not own towards limitless commodification but also connectability. The rhizomatics of the noise contagion, by contrast, is a negative force that jams communication, impedes signals, and the markets the environment for which it intervenes for a simultaneous destruction and evolution. Hence the presence of the affective registers of dread and opening: dissolution and recomposition are precisely the reasons noise is invoked.

Communication is always a bringing together of a this with a that. Each is connected to another that, and each to another this. There’s no beginning or end, and there is always an excess or lack to any particular communication, a more-than or less-than. But for there to be connections there have to be disconnections – excommunication. Something or someone is excluded, be it heresy or noise or spam.viii

Fury

In “Excess, Machine, Culture,” I hoped to chart three inseparable dimensions in noise aesthetics: noise as mutation (or more properly, the catalyst for mutation), as otherwordly, and as noncommunication. The first two of these dimensions are bound the affective registers of dread and opening: it is the otherwordly that is so often a provocation of dread, the internal sensation produced when one encounters a great unknown before them. By detaching dread from the significations that come with it, we can realize a point in which dread need not be an invocation of death: pragmatically and experimentally exorcised, it can be coupled to opening, that is, mutation, the transformation from one state to another. Opening is affect, but mutation is the force that opening anticipates.

The dimension of noncommunication will be familiar to readers of Deleuze. It exists in a tactical register through his musings on the creation of “vacuoles of noncommunication, circuit breakers” to slip between the cracks of the Control Society.ix A vacuole, in the biological sciences, is an organelle, a subunit existing at the cellular level, that exists within a membrane that lacks a universal form, shifting its composition to reflect the dimensions of the cell that it exists within. The term reappears with frequency elsewhere in Deleuze’s oeuvre; as far back as Anti-Oedipus, we find the vacuole appearing in conjunction with and as the organizational logic of lack, a “deliberate creation” of the “dominant class” to ensure the functionality of the market economy.x Deleuze and Guattari go to great lengths to detach desire from lack (“Desire does not lack anything,” they write; “it does not lack its object. It is, rather, the subject that is missing in desire, or desire that lacks a fixed subject…”xi) Nick Land described Anti-Oedipus as an “engineering manual… a package of software implements for hacking into the machinic unconsciousness, opening invasion channels.”xii Perhaps, but the work is of its time – the schizoanalysis it speaks of takes as its target a specific formation of capitalism that is dominated by disciplinary apparatuses and machines. The abstract machine had yet to develop its engine powered by communication. The turn to vacuoles of noncommunication is a remarkable reversal of these earlier positions by looking to a specific generation of lack as a key to revolutionary action. Praxis in Anti-Oedipus is crafted by the accelerationist image of overflowing; by the ’90s, it is built through the image of breakage, disjunction, and interruption.xiii Yet here we still persist in evading essentialist binaries: at the moment we establish breakdowns in the communication channels (or in the parlance of information theory, noise), we establish a lack that is also in excess of the system as it is something beyond it, that can’t be contained. It becomes a voice or a force from an outside where the dividing lines of “more than” and “less than” cannot be contained within themselves – the otherwordly.

The specter of the otherworld haunts media history and theory. More often that not it takes the position of the supernatural or the spiritual; from the violence of media portrayed in J-horror or the X-Files, to the (mis)use of communication technology by paranormal investigators to probe the unknown, to the Spiritualist’s utilization of mirrors and radios to communicate with the dead. Beyond these examples, we can see how the ability to uncouple communication from proximity has, historically, been associated with the mysterious and the bizarre: Olivier Grau has provided a series of examples, such as Athanasius Kircher’s proposals for a gigantic cylindrical mirror that would allow him to depict the ascension of Christ amongst the clouds, or Agrippa of Nettesheim’s own insistence that transmitting messages via mirrors could remove any question of distance from the occasion.xiv Such reflections and ruminations, a snaking chain stretching back through Gnosticism as beyond, and onward through Theosophy and the parapsychologists of today, are for Grau a negative to be warded away; they are an “irresponsible escapism into irrational and religious realms…”xv But perhaps Grau’s dismissal is wrong, and that there is much to learn from the irrational and the impulsive; after all, the division between irrational and rational, impulsive and plotted, secular and sacred is fraught with ruptures and strange allegiances, where one explodes into the filiation of the other and shifts it accordingly. Instead of condemning the desire to explore the otherwordly as escapism, we may do well to approach rationality from the perspective of Henri Lefebvre, who saw this force as one that has withered away the capacity for experience and intensity. “The mysterious, the sacred and the diabolical, magic ritual, the mystical – at first these things were lived with intensity.”xvi He notes that while the rationality of what was then the industrial society of high discipline eliminated these elements, they persisted through modernity in subdued, commodified forms: talismans as toys, the mysterious as the strange, the bizarre little more than a “stimulant” to spice up the everyday. But the mysterious, the sacred, and the profane holds sway for him, for Lefebvre’s flight to the outer realms of Marxism put him into orbit the with noisy avant-gardes of modernity – the Dadaists, the Surrealists, decadent poetry and ultimately, all the heretical sects, movements, notions, and occulted sensations that fed these things and polluted bourgeois Enlightenment like a miasma.

For Lefebvre, like Guy Debord and Raoul Vaneigem, the machine of industrial produced an enclosure around everyday life which detached the individual and the group from a lived experience of authenticity (what these individuals analyzed was attacked by the countercultures of their time, with the resurrection of the shamanic and the esoteric coexisting alongside the more directed political aspirations of civil rights, the anti-war movement, and the greater hopes for a different age). In this enclosure, the thirst for otherness is cleared with the wine of the marketplace. The Red Army Faction would express this with a great clarity, despite the great unfortunate nature of their response: “The system in the metropole has managed to drag the masses so far down into their own dirt that they seem to have largely lost any sense of the oppressive and exploitative nature of their situation, of their situation as objects of the imperialist system. So that for a car, a pair of jeans, life insurance, and a loan, they will easily accept any outrage on the part of the system. In fact, they can no longer imagine or wish for anything beyond a car, a vacation, and a tiled bathroom.”xvii Otherwordly = Other = Alterity, a vanishing point, a horizon that crumbled away. Without alterity, there cannot be any mutation or becoming; there is only stasis in a runaway system of capitalized exchange. And for there to be alterity, there must be an unknown that is accepted and interacted with. This is what is at stake in Societies of Discipline and Societies of Control, for the mutation of subjective processes is always what has provoked power’s offensive. “A certain type of worker during the Paris Commune became such a ‘mutant’ that the bourgeisie had no choice but to exterminate him. They liquidated the Paris Commune just as they did, in a different time, the Protestants on Saint Bartholomew’s.”xviii The heretics are always eliminated.

McKenzie Wark plugs straight into the underground stream of heresy with his invocation of the Furies – “a pack of beasts,” a “flock of indefinable number,” an “incontinence of form.”xix A swarm forever in a state of becoming, they persist as a negative, always screaming “never!” in the face of power’s apparatuses. Most importantly for us here, “the Furies can only get their due when conceived from the point of view that attempts to be inhuman itself, as can happen at the discursive extremes of science and poetry, those twin attempts to expunge the reciprocal and human point of view from communication.”xx Furies = Noncommunication = Unhuman = Alterity. He makes an uneasy alignment between this figure and Hardt and Negri’s multitude; indeed, for just as communication requires noncommunication to exist, noncommunication enters into the realm of communication when it moves, perhaps precisely through the creation of vacuoles. Wark calls this interruption “xenocommunication”; unlike the Multitude, which is approached from the Deleuzian sense of affirmation, xenocommunication, as an ever-present borderline, can be approached through the via negativa, referencing the negative theology of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, Meister Eckhart, and St. John of the Cross (not to mention Georges Bataille) that straddles its own borders between orthodoxy and heresy.

“When I first came across the word ‘dada,’” [Hugo] Ball wrote on 18 June 1921, “I was called upon twice by Dionysius.”… It was a mystical code, “D.A.-D.A.” – a doubling, John Elderfield writes in his introduction to Flight Out of Time, “of the initials of Dionysius the Areopagite, one of the three saints who were to form the subject of [Ball’s 1923] book Byzantinisches Christenum….”xxi

When speaking of Dada’s birth, Ball recounts a communication with an absolute otherness embodied, in his almost certainly fictional tale, by one of the most known of the via negativa;Dada, the great noise against bourgeois society and state, war, capitalism, psychoanalysis, the whole edifice of modernity, appears almost as channeling. Wark describes xenocommunication as a portal between two things: “The portal between unconsciousness and subject is controlled by psychoanalysis. The portal between subject and object is controlled by phenomenology. The portal between object and object is that which object-oriented ontology… would like to control.”xxii Xenocommunication is then something that, under the gaze of power, becomes subject to regulation. It thus governed, in the network topology of the current abstract machine, by protocols and becomes the sight of an immense struggle. To deregulate xenocommunication is a noisy act, as it disrupts the priorities of a given communication channel. It becomes not so much a state to aspire to, but a tactical weapon to be wielded. Deleuze at least sensed this, in his dialogue with Negri: “Computer piracy and viruses, for example, will replace strikes and what the nineteenth century called ‘sabotage’ (‘clogging’ the machinery).”xxiii In the network age, piracy and contagions need not be relegated to the computer alone, for the computer itself is both a universal metaphor (from the human brain to the cosmological system) and an engine for power’s new forms of organization.

It is the writings of Jacques Attali that four stages of musical development are laid out: sacrifice, representation, repetition. Each can be further correlated to the four Foucauldian/Deleuzian stages of society: pre-sovereign or tribal, sovereign, disciplinary, and control.xxiv In this genealogy, music is born as a sublimation of the violence of ritual sacrifice, which noise represents and serves as a stand-in for the pre-earthly divine fog. “Before the world there was Chaos, the void and background noise.”xxv Music is then prayer, a portal to this realm that is also an affair of power in that monopolizes the capacity for violence, regulating it while providing security against it. We know from Bataille, operating in the formless contours of the via negativa, that transgressions like sacrifice are communications and limit experiences that explode mediation; and yet it is in sacrifice that the earliest forms of exchange economies are found, in the trading this for that. Music, like the religion that has supported so much in the development of capitalism, has assisted in detaching this absolute transgression from communication in order for its evolution and continuation.

Attali’s final stage, composition, is by far the most perplexing. It is “beyond exchange” “noncommercial,” and operates “as something fundamentally outside all communication.” This is an anticipation of revolutionary modes against the Control society, speaking like Deleuze of noncommunication against the onslaught of power-laden hypercommunication. Like Vaneigem’s aspirations, composition is ludic, playful; it is akin to Wark’s Furies in that it “proposes a radical social model, one in which the body is treated as capable not only of production and consumption, and even of entering into relations with others, but also of autonomous pleasure.”xxvi Like the schizophrenics of Anti-Oedipus, it is “nourished on the death of codes.”xxvii

Hear me well: composition is not the same as material abundance, that petit-bourgeois vision of atrophied communism having no other goal than the extension of the bourgeois spectacle to all of the proletariat. It is the individual’s conquest of his own body and potentials. It is impossible without material abundance and a certain technological level, but is not reducible to that.xxviii

iAndreas Burckhardt A Sanctuary of Sounds Punctum Press, 2013

iiF.T. Marinetti “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism” Le Figaro, February 20th, 1909 http://www.italianfuturism.org/manifestos/foundingmanifesto/

iiiHugo Ball, quoted in Greil Marcus Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century Harvard University Press, 1990, pg. 204

ivGeert Lovink interview with Kodwo Eshun “Everything was to be done. All the adventures are still there.” Telepolis October 7th, 2000 http://www.heise.de/tp/artikel/6/6902/1.html

vMarcus Lipstick Traces pg. 217

viGilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia Penguin Classics, 2009 (reprint edition) pg. 335

viiSteve Goodman Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear MIT Press, 2012, pg. 198

viiiMcKenzie Wark “Furious Media” in Alexander Galloway, Eugene Thacker, and McKenzie Wark Excommunication: Three Inquiries into Media and Mediation University of Chicago Press, 2014, pgs. 160-161

ix“Gilles Deleuze in Conversation with Antonio Negri” Futur Anterieur Spring, 1990 http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpdeleuze3.htm

xDeleuze, Guattari Anti-Oedipus pg. 28

xiIbid, pg. 26

xiiNick Land “Machinic Desire” Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007 Urbanomic, 2013, pg. 326

xiiiSee also Andrew Culp’s (Anarchist Without Content) “Dark Deleuze” project, notes on which can be found here and here.

xivOlivier Grau Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion MIT Press, 2004, pg. 280

xvIbid, pg. 284

xviHenri Lefebvre The Critique of Everyday Life, Volume I Verso, 1991 (reprint edition) pg. 117

xviiThe Red Army Faction “The Black September Action in Munich: Regarding the Strategy for Anti-Imperialist Struggle” November, 1972 http://www.germanguerilla.com/red-army-faction/documents/72_11.php

xviii Felix Guattari and Francois Tosquelles Pratiques de l’institionnel et politique Matrice editions, 1985, pg. 53; cited in Maurizo Lazzarato Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity Semiotext(e), 2014, pg. 15

xixWark “Furious Media” Excommunication, pg. 156

xxIbid, pg. 157

xxiMarcus Lipstick Traces pgs. 207-208

xxiiWark “Furious Media” Excommunication

xxiii“Gilles Deleuze in Conservation with Antonio Negri”

xxivGoodman Sonic Warfare pgs. 51-52

xxv Jacques Attali Noise: The Political Economy of Music University of Minnesota Press, 1985 pg. 28

xxvi Ibid, pg. 33

xxvii Ibid, pg. 36

xxviii Ibid, pg. 135

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CHAOS SIVE NATURA

11/8/2017

Electric Tree and Electronic Rhizome

by Obsolete Capitalism Sound System

Index

Chaos Sive Natura 13
by Obsolete Capitalism Sound System

Tracklist 34

Biography 35

This text will be presented on 20th, 21st, 22nd November 2017 at the 2nd International Conference on Deleuze and Artistic Research [Aberrant Nuptials] at Orpheus Institute in Ghent (Belgium) and will accompany the album “Chaos Sive Natura” (2017) by Obsolete Capitalism Sound System for the label Rizosfera / Nukfm.

CHAOS SIVE NATURA
Electric Tree and Electronic Rhizome

by Obsolete Capitalism Sound System

“Me thought I saw one of an exceeding great stature, and an infinite greatness call me by my name, and say unto me, “What wouldest thou Hear and See? or what wouldest thou Understand, to Learn, and Know!” 1

(Poemander, Hermes Trismegistus)

“I would say that for Spinoza there is a continuous variation —and this is what it means to exist— of the force of existing or of the power of acting”

(Deleuze, Cours Vincennes - Lecture, Transcriptions on Spinoza’s concept of affect -24/1/1978)2

The present work does not have a starting point but many starting points, centres of strength and lines of movement that compose it. One of the dynamic points is shown by the title: Chaos Sive Natura. It is a Nietzschean paraphrase of an expression by Spinoza, Deus Sive Natura, God thus Nature, in his main work Ethica more geometrico demonstrata. For Spinoza, Nature is theophanic3: God is immanent to nature. Nietzsche, who considered Spinoza a forerunner4 of his philosophy, radicalizes the formula of equality between nature and deity5 with a more sinister expression, Chaos Sive Natura. Such a variation and removal occurred in 1881 in Sils-Maria in the same period when Nietzsche wrote of himself “I am one of those machines which can explode”6 and at the same time when, crying and singing of joy, he created the concept of Eternal Recurrence. The development of the concept that lies in Chaos sive Natura is unexpectedly not present in books like The Gay Science or in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, respectively published in 1882 and 1883. We find it instead in an unpublished notebook about the preparatory and narrative development of the concept of Eternal Recurrence. The notebook is known as M-III-1 and it was written in the summer of the year 1881, later collected in Colli & Montinari Italian edition of Unpublished Notes or Posthumous Fragments as fragment 11 [195] e 11 [ 197 ].7

The conceptual and argumentative development of the Eternal Recurrence has an eloquent title: Outlining of a new way of living and it is divided into four books by Nietzsche:

“First Book: in the style of the first part of Ninth Symphony. Chaos sive Natura: on the dehumanization of Nature. Prometheus is chained on Caucasus. Write with Κράτος cruelty, thus “power”.

Second Book: Fast, skeptical, Mephistophelian. “On the assimilation of experiences”. Knowledge = a mistake that becomes organic and organizes.

Third Book: A deepest passion and a hyperuranic sublimity are here together expressed for the very first time: “On the happiness of the lonesome” - he is the one that once was «part of the others» and has now reached the peak of independence: the perfect ego; only now such an ego can feel love, because in the phases that do not reach the top of loneliness and self-domain, something different from love lies.

Fourth Book: dithyrambic breath. «Annulus æternitatis». Desire of living it all, once more and infinite times.

The incessant transformation - in a short time you have to pass through many individuals. The means is the incessant fight.”8

Spinoza deified Natura, substantia aeterna, attributing it a «celestial» status where God represents its most secret principle. On the contrary Nietzsche’s will is to de-deify and de-humanize it, freeing it from our «world» and making it a shapeless, aimless and ever-becoming Nature. He affirms in his The Gay Science: ”The total character of the world, by contrast, is for all eternity chaos, not in the sense of a lack of necessity but of a lack of order, organization, form, beauty, wisdom, and whatever else our aesthetic anthropomorphisms are called.”9 Both Spinoza and Nietzsche are «affirmative philosophers» of life as well as deniers of the moral order of the world, of the personality of God and of that «final aim», resulting from a time and divine-paced progressive action.

Speaking of an indifferent and immoral God, as a result of his own and Spinoza’s theories (respectively Eternal Recurrence and radical pantheism), Nietzsche asks himself:

“Does it make sense to conceive of a God ‘beyond good and evil’? Would a pantheism in this sense be possible? If we remove the idea of purpose from the process do we nevertheless affirm the process? - This would be the case if something within that process were achieved at every moment of it - and always the same thing. Spinoza attained an affirmative stance like this insofar as every moment has a logical necessity: and with his fundamental instinct for logic he felt a sense of triumph about the world’s being constituted thus”. (Fr. 7[71]) (2003: 118)10

Denying the final aim of the «process» or beheading it, is the first post that associates Spinoza, Nietzsche, Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus with the work Chaos Sive Natura, metaphorically defined as an «acephalic» project.

What is particularly special and appropriate to our ends, is the recall of Beethoven’s ninth symphony by Nietzsche to better outline the tone in his first book Outlining of a new way of living. Here he finds a sonic parallelism with the first movement of the symphony, Allegro ma non troppo, un poco maestoso. Nietzsche, musician himself, with wishful compositional ambitions, fervent supporter and later denigrator of Wagner, often conceives concepts in musical terms. Chaos Sive Natura then needs a tempestuous, unbridled and majestic tonality like Be ethoven’s first movement of the Ninth Symphony. Its structure in fact is a sonic architecture where the variations of the themes, the polyrhythmic solutions, the overtures with clustered themes, the counterpoints and the musical figures chasing one another, all produce an impetuous and heroic lacerating movement. What Nietzsche finds particularly close to his own concept of Chaos are the constant opening and closing of the musical thematic groups, where no one dominates the others so that the formal moment of the first movement is represented by the indeterminateness of the sonic plans as they enter the symphony.

The fact that Nietzsche’s chaotic spatialization is similar to Beethoven’s, clearly shows up when we ask ourselves What is Chaos for Nietzsche? It is an abyssal continuum which moves per motu proprio and that has been freed from divinity, order and aims: an inscrutable «ring» spinning around without a centre and where all dynamic peripheries represent lines of energy in a never ending metamorphosis. Pure blurry nature. In the first movement there is a chaotic incipit represented by the imitation of the tuning of the musical instruments in the interval of the initial chord. This «technique» enables Allegro ma non troppo to express a sonic undetermined which recalls the chaotic, primordial, indistinct limbo of Nature.

Nietzsche’s topological and ontological indetermination of his idea of a chaotic continuum may be compared to the feeling of uncertainty that Beethoven conveys through the wild blurry and dissonant musical outcomes of his first movement. The «head» of the musical theme of the first movement has melted in a plurality of combined sonic plans. With relevance Nietzsche will write in his aphorism n°109, inspired to the concept of Chaos sive Natura, that the chaos “must never be called an [anthropic] melody”11 because as Messiaen says, “music is not the privilege of human beings: the universe and the cosmos are made by refrains”12. The sonic theme of Chaos, far from being solely a harmonious link to human realm, passes through Nature as an escaping force from the nets men have arranged for it. The problem will be then how to make an alliance with the powerful chaos forces, disputing men’s «false privilege» and reaching the place where the «big universal noise» - in opposition to Boethius’ musica mundana - clashes with the micro-noise singularities of the contemporary and future machines of men.

An important question for the relationship between music and chaos is the one that Nietzsche poses in his fragment n°84 in The Gay Science:

"In short: was there anything more useful than rhythm to the old superstitious type of human being?"13

In fragment 84 Nietzsche lists the reasons why ancient people, in particular the Greeks, invented and used «rhythm» in poetry, music, dance, assembling the various artistic expressions in only one act. The German philosopher talks of «superstitious utility» because the integration of the rhythm in the speech “reorganizes all the atoms of a sentence, bids one to select one’s words and gives thoughts a new colour and makes them darker, stranger, more distant.”14 Hence the paradox: what is today considered «useless», we mean poetry, was at those ancient times of a great importance, because the verse was better remembered than ordinary, practical and straightforward speech, especially for anthropomorphic gods of ancient times. “The rhythmic discourse was supposed to make a human request impress the gods more deeply.”15 This suggests the superstitious nature Nietzsche confers to the utility of poetry in its origin. The philosopher adds: “one wanted to take advantage of that elemental overpowering force that humans experience in themselves when listening to music: rhythm is a compulsion it engenders an unconquerable desire to yield, to join in; not only the stride of the feet but also the soul itself gives in to the beat - probably also, one inferred, the souls of the gods! By means of rhythm one thus tried to compel them and to exercise a power over them: one cast poetry around them like a magical snare.”16

Nietzsche does not simply offer the description of the role of coercion of the rhythm. Even before the Pythagoreans built the philosophical theory about the educational contrivance of poetry, the German philosopher writes that “one acknowledged music to have the power to discharge the emotions, to cleanse the soul, to soothe the «ferocia animi» - and indeed precisely through its rhythmic quality. When one had lost the proper tension and harmony of the soul, one had to dance to the beat of the singer”17

Such a therapeutic power of the music was possible when “one began by driving the giddiness and exuberance of their passions to their peak, that is, one drove the madman wild, made the vindictive person drunk with lust for revenge. All orgiastic cults wanted to discharge the ferocia of some deity all at once and turn it into an orgy so that the deity would feel freer and calmer afterwards and leave man in peace.”18

Music is a form of taming and pacification both in cult and profane field, exerting a «magic» force on those who are tired from work. Nietzsche brings the examples of the trireme in 6th and 5th b.c. century, rowing people who followed the rhythm given by the figure of the aulete, a flute player on the Attic war ships. The philosopher says that for each finished action a good reason to sing is always present because “... whenever one acts, one has an occasion to sing - every action is tied to the assistance of spirits: incantation and conjuration seem to be the primordial form of poetry.”19 When we consider, Nietzsche explains, that the invention of the hexameter has been attributed to the Delphi Oracle tradition, we can easily understand that the intention was to «conquer» the specific God, in this case Apollo: “The way the formula is pronounced, with literal and rhythmic precision, is how it binds the future; the formula, however, is the invention of Apollo, who as god of rhythm can also bind the goddesses of fate.”20

To be able to bind the future and therefore the god of rhythm, it is necessary to give some metric form to the poetic and musical discourse. Without verse/rhythm we are nothing and are left at the mercy of the future, on the contrary with verse/ rhythm we may be quasi-gods and are able to force our future. This can happen with any verse, bar or passage, because as Nietzsche says “even the wisest of us occasionally becomes a fool for rhythm, if only insofar as he feels a thought to be truer when it has a metric form and presents itself with a divine hop, skip, and jump.”21

“Feeling to be truer” through the rhythm, “subverting” the future through a “peculiar, magic cadence” able to alter its essence, is another aspect that links Spinoza, Nietzsche’s incessant transformation, the god of rhythms, with the acephalous project of Chaos Sive Natura.

Another centre of forces that enter our sonic-ship leaves from a flourishing electronic laboratory of our times called Electric Tree. It is an abstract jazz unit which includes in its free style composition, electronic improvisation. Composed by Franco D’Andrea (piano), Andrea Ayassot (saxophone), Luca Roccatagliati (electronics), the trio is grounded on D’Andrea’s figure, a cultured sensitive musician with a huge intellectual curiosity. He has been an icon of European Jazz since his first experimentation with Perigeo in the 70’s, to reach a more personal and intense style in between free jazz, blues motifs and recalls of Monk’s aphoristic phrasing. Ayassot is an imaginative saxophonist led by musical paths which cross European contemporary music, jazz and Indian ragas. Roccatagliati offers breakbeat experimentations that open to chaos forces, paving the way to abstract electronics, thanks to his peculiar rhythmic sensitivity, Latin and Jazz traces and a total dedication to Afro-futuristic bass culture. It is from Electric Tree laboratory that Obsolete Capitalism erratic lines set sail.22

Whereas D’Andrea marks New Orleans as original fulcrum of jazz and meeting point of polyrhythmic sounds from central and western Africa with the harmonious Atlantic European experience, Obsolete Capitalism moves the focal point of the sound to an imaginative Jamaica, linking it to north-eastern African hypnotic acoustics, which suggest slow and deconstructed lines derived by dubbing practices of masters like King Tubby and Lee Scratch Perry. To the Atlantic Electric Tree, Obsolete Capitalism Sound System offers the electronic diasporic rhizome, thus molecularity of perpetual variations, dancing iridescent morphemes in electronic darkness. Deleuze writes: “Meter is dogmatic, but rhythm is critical.”23 O.C.S.S. is a”rhythmic dance” in the Nietzschean way of incessant form, of timbre intensity, but its concept of the “rhythm” is Deleuzian.

In A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari introduce a concept of Rhythm different from Nietzsche’s. In the pages of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, the god of rhythms is substituted by the dreadful god of the Rhythm, the god of Chaos24. It is important to start from the idea of Chaos as introduced in A Thousand Plateaus, in particular in the chapter entitled 1837:

On the refrain. Deleuze and Guattari describe it as follows: “Sometimes chaos is an immense black hole in which one endeavors to fix a fragile point as a center. Sometimes one organizes around that point a calm and stable “pace” (rather than a form): the black hole has become a home. Sometimes one grafts onto that pace a breakaway from the black hole. Paul Klee presented these three aspects, and their interlinkage, in a most profound way. He calls the black hole a”gray point” for pictorial reasons. The gray point starts out as nonlocalizable, nondimensional chaos, the force of chaos, a tangled bundle of aberrant lines.”25

The «gray spatiality» is then indistinguishable, untraceable, a point-form cacophony and chaos a clot of forces crossing colossal abstractions. More radically, Deleuze and Guattari say: “Chaos is not the opposite of rhythm, but the milieu of all milieus” and “What chaos and rhythm have in common is the in-between—between two milieus, rhythm-chaos or the chaosmos”26

Hereby we witness an overturning in the concept of Rhythm as it has been acknowledged since ancient times. From a genealogical, anthropological and ontological point of view, Nietzsche identifies in the rhythm the poetic «compulsion» needed to open the sacred to the profane so to reach the cosmic forces of the future. Deleuze, on the other side, operates a cesura between the «rhythm» seen as the cadence of measure, and the «Rhythm». The Meter of the rhythm is a measure-rule imposed by men to decode any territory, while the pace of the Rhythm is a critic intrusion, an anomaly, a rhythmic singularity, a pure meeting-event among different milieus. Deleuze and Guattari write as follows: “It is well known that rhythm is not meter or cadence, even irregular meter or cadence: there is nothing less rhythmic than a military march (…) Meter, whether regular or not, assumes a coded form whose unit of measure may vary, but in a noncommunicating milieu, whereas rhythm is the Unequal or the Incommensurable that is always undergoing transcoding.”27 Through the above lines runs the echo of experiences marked by the «aleatory music» which strongly influenced XX century contemporary music of artists like Xenakis and Boulez. With an appreciation of Breakbeat science, originally derived from the afrodelic and diasporic tradition, and through the use of its pulsed rhythmic unit - the single beat, Obsolete Capitalism Sound System offers a possibility to overturn the codified rhythm. Dub and breakbeat techniques, sampling and turntablism variate the rhythm dissolving and reworking the metric code, distributing always renewed space-time blocks. ”Every milieu is coded, a code being defined by periodic repetition; but each code is in a perpetual state of transcoding or transduction (…) [the rhythm] produce[s] a difference by which the milieu passes into another milieu.”28

In the wake of writers like Erik Davis, Kodwo Eshun, Steve Goodman, McKenzie Wark, Louis Chude-Sokei e Achim Szepanski29, Jamaican bass culture has become the great catalyzer of the music experimentation since ‘70s, through beats and remixes practices jammed with western urban black electronic experimentation. The polyrhythmic and polymetric vibratory of the afro-digital psychedelia subverts the reproducing measure: from King Tubby to Kool Herc, from Dillinja to Burial, the scheme of repetition with no variation is no longer present: milieus and rhythms re-appropriate their centrifugal force and take off to an imaginary Atlantic, creating an analogical and digital diaspora full of imaginative, utopian lines, fugues, back and forth returns30. In fact “rhythm is never on the same plane as that which has rhythm” being it New Orleans with its primordial jazz or Monk’s New York recalled by D’Andrea, Dillinja’s London or Russolo’s Milan. Deleuze will say: “…chang[ing] milieus, taking them as you find them: such is rhythm.”31 Landing, bifurcating, jumping as it happens with Underground Resistance’s afro-germanic sound of Detroit, Zulu Nation’s suburban Autobahn from New York, Kool Herc’s phantasmatic Jamaican vibes, Burial and Valve Sound System’s London, as well as D’Andrea’s rhythmic echoes of Monk’s New Yorker aphorisms. Everything vibrates “and all three at once: forces of chaos, terrestrial forces, cosmic forces: all of these confront each other and converge in the territorial refrain.” It is from the Chaos that Milieus emerge because “It is the difference that is rhythmic, not the repetition”. 32

If the spatialization of the milieu as theorized in Deleuze is no longer uniform because it postulates the non existence of an absolute space, than we can subvert the Cartesian philosophical coordinates that have been ruling our western world since XVII century. Starting from 1837: Of the Refrain the project Chaos Sive Natura tries to elaborate a path of musical transcoding because “a code is not content to take or receive components that are coded differently, and instead takes or receives fragments of a different code as such.”33 This happens for example in the first track entitled Bass Slight Swinging where the two bass-lines, reworked in Adrian Sherwood’s “rough” On U Sound style, mix with Klee’s slight swinging sails34 which lead the secret movement of the track, offering an oscillation between the sails and the bass in a precarious balance between Abstract and Figurative. The same «tres/passing» is present in D’Andrea Dancing Colors’ desert dub version, where the dancing colors of the desert turn into rhythms and spaces which intertwine with visual compositions of the most famous Italian colorist director, Michelangelo Antonioni in Zabriskie Point (1970). Particularly in the scene where the two protagonists, in a post-coitum suspension, are surrounded by the bright color of the improbable red cabins and by a shade of white-grey-pink colour of the alien mountains of the Death Valley, we discover Paul Klee’s indefinite gray point of his chaotic materic lines. To conclude the analysis of the rhythmic sequence-plane, we may consider the narrative development of La Machine Informatique dub where the fragment on the «computer machine» stated by Guattari in Vincennes (1975) about the impending algorithmic and computational reductionism of the data-economy, becomes a «sonic writing» thanks to a Jah Wobble-style bass-line which engages with Electric Tree’s abstractions and the soundtrack horns of Enemy (Villeneuve, 2013), a movie focused on the fascist pattern of a «world order» in today societies of control. A composition inside a chaosmos is in other words the fragile sum of forms in a continuous transformation, of rhythmic paces and of «timbres», impossibile to be written in traditional music notation, being the unresolved, the challenge thrown by Roccatagliati’s electronic improvisation to Electric Tree’s abstract jazz.

If, according to Deleuze, the «territory» “is not a milieu, not even an additional milieu”, but “an act that affects milieus and rhythms, that «territorializes» them”35 what OCSS experiments with Chaos sive Natura is the mobile creation of a sonic surface, a chaotic plane where the space of the sound-to-come is changeable, deformable in n-dimensions until the creation of a n-sphere, a rhizosphere. Nature, thus Chaos, as music36. Among the possible thousand virtual ways of making a Refrain of a diverse thought work different, OCSS has chosen the Rhythm non-science, namely the non-orientable accelerationism, where the non-oriented acceleration of a sound no longer represents the rhythm that makes its velocity change - the derivative of velocity with regard to time - but the Rhythm which changes its milieu every time the sound «marks» the passage between a milieu and another, becoming in such a way the derivative of the milieu with regard to time.37

A topological rhythm, a new topology of sound which accompanies in a randomly «chaotic» way the raise of the mutation between analogical and digital, between sonic and timbric planes, between the «becoming sound» of the Rhythm and the «becoming rhythm» of the sound, among sonic objects, between melodic landscapes and rhythmic characters. In short a chaos-interval which “becomes rhythm, not inexorably, but […which] has [always] a chance to”.38

Similarly, even Nietzsche’s fragment The Strong of the Future39, known as the “accelerationist fragment” so dear to accelerationists today, is «Rhythm», a rapid deafening change of milieu, or a fast scream40 to the homogenizing of the dwarfed species in industrial societies of any time. On such a Rhythmic edge, outlines a deep echo between the anti-mechanistic «process» of the revolutionary path, as expressed in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus and the acephaly of Spinoza’ and Nietzsche’ s anti-deterministic «process».41

Chaos sive Natura’s last definitive conceptual post is the Chaosmos event opposing the Cadence-Dogma, the eternal sacred «constraint» of the god of the rhythms.

A sonic passage - hopefully not worse than those preceding it - implying obscurity of sounds, abysmal intensity, sonic intermittences taken to the limit of the rhizosphere:
non-orientable accelerationism.
Chaos Sive Natura: “Dance” to Chaos Rhythm! “Is that what you want?”42

Coda: Barrel-organ song and little Recurrence43

“We can’t stand it anymore’, they shout, ‘stop, stop this raven-black music! Are we not surrounded by bright mid-morning? And by soft ground and green grass, the kingdom of the dance? Was there ever a better hour for gaiety? Who will sing us a song, a morning song, so sunny, so light, so full-fledged that it does not chase away the crickets but instead invites them to join in the singing and dancing? And even plain, rustic bagpipes would be better than the mysterious sounds, such bog-cries, voices from the crypt, and marmot whistles with which you have so far regaled us in your wilderness, my Mr. Hermit and Musician of the Future! No! Not such sounds! Let us rather strike up more pleasant, more joyous tones!”44

Biography

Obsolete Capitalism is a collective for pure independent research. Selfdeﬁned as “gypsy scholars”, the collective deals with philosophy, art and politics. Obsolete Capitalism edited and published «Moneta, rivoluzione e ﬁlosoﬁa dell’avvenire. Deleuze, Foucault, Guattari, Klossowski e la politica accelerazionista di Nietzsche» (OCFP, 2016), «Archeologia delle minoranze » (OCFP, 2015) and «Birth of Digital Populism» (OCFP, 2014). With Rizosfera publishing house, Obsolete Capitalism released «The Strong of the Future. Nietzsche’s Accelerationist Fragment in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus» (Rizosfera/SF001), «Acceleration, Revolution and Money in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-OEdipus» (Rizosfera/SF002), «Deleuze and the Algorithm of the Revolution» (Rizosfera/SF004) and «Dromology, Bolidism and Marxist Accelerationism» (Rizosfera/SF009). It is also editor of the online blogs Obsolete Capitalism, Rizomatika and Variazioni foucaultiane. The collective has a sonic sub-unit under Obsolete Capitalism Sound System moniker: it has released «La machine informatique dub» (ﬁrst 12 EP, Rizosfera/ NUKFM, 2016) and «Chaos Sive Natura» (ﬁrst album, Rizosfera/NUKFM, 2017).

1 The Corpus Hermeticum of Hermes Trismegistus, The Second Book called Poemander, p.5, Blackmask Online, 2001, http://www.hermetics.org
2 Deleuze, Cours Vincennes - Lecture, Transcriptions on Spinoza’s concept of affect 24/1/1978
https://www.gold.ac.uk .
3 Baruch Spinoza: Ethics.
4 “I have a forerunner, and what a forerunner!” Nietzsche’s letter to Overbeck 30th July 1881.Nietzsche reads Spinoza again in the summer 1881 in Sils-Maria thanks to the work of Kuno Fischer Geschichte der neuen Philosophie where the first volume - dated 1854 - is dedicated to Descartes’ philosophy and his «school». It is there that Spinoza is mentioned.
5 In his Ethics Spinoza theorized a distinction referring to nature: natura naturans and natura naturata.
6 Letter to Gast 14th August 1881, Sils-Maria. Pierre Klossowski p. 55 Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle. Translated by Daniel W. Smith The University of Chicago Press.
7 Friedrich Nietzsche, Kritische Studienausgabe. Band 9. Nachgelassene Fragmente 18801882. Edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. München and Berlin: Deutsche Taschenbücher Verlag and Walter de Gruyter,1988.
8 Nietzsche, Nachlass 1881- 1882 , Fragment 11 [197].
9 Nietzsche, aphorism 109, entitled Let us beware! The Gay Science Book Three, p.109 Cambridge University Press, 2001. We noticed that in the third book of The Gay Science some “refrains” refer to the concept of Chaos sive Natura, in particular from aphorism 109 to 113. Fragment 113 has been often quoted in Anti-Oedipus.
10 Nietzsche, Writings from the Late Notebooks. Trans. by Kate Sturge, Cambridge University Press, 2003.
11 Nietzsche, The Gay Science Book Three, p.109, Cambridge University Press, 2001.
12 G. Deleuze, F. Guattari: A Thousand Plateaus p. 309, University of Minnesota Press, 1987. The «coda» of the chapter entitled 1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible is inspired to the «cosmic» musical Messiaen’s work and to that line where the becoming music of the chaotic sound and the becoming non musical sound of men, meets and clash.
13 Nietzsche, The Gay Science Book Two, p.85, Cambridge University Press, 2001.
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid., 84.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid.
18 Ibid., 84-85.
19 Ibid., 84.
20 Ibid., 85.
21 ibid.
22 Obsolete Capitalism Sound System thanks Electric Tree for allowing the use of their sounds recorded at the live concert at Teatro Asioli in Correggio (Italy) on 22nd May 2015. Later on Electric Tree has recorded a double CD, published by Parco della Musica Records in April 2016, entitled Trio Music vol. 1.
23 Deleuze and Guattari A Thousand Plateaus p. 313, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1987.
24 This God of the Chaos-Rhythm, or Chaosmos, the vicious and abyssal god of the various orders of the disorder, looks at us smiling. He resembles Klossowski’s Baphomet - Prince of Modifications or Blanchot’s - The Laughter of Gods recalling Klossowski when saying “...when a god wanted to be the only God, all of the other gods were seized with uncontrollable laughters”. What possible relationship then between Apollo, god of the rhythms and safety and Chaosmos, god of Chaos-Rhythm and of infinite multiplicity?
25 Deleuze and Guattari A Thousand Plateaus, p. 312, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1987
26 Ibid., 313 - Deleuze and Guattari consider each milieu as vibratory, a space-time block formed by the periodic repetition of the component.
27 Ibid - On the transcoding of the rhythm, the musical expression “Afropean” by Electric Tree already represents a pure vibratory milieu.
28 Ibid., 314 and 315.
29 Erik Davis, Roots and Wires, published in the volume edited by Dj Spooky Sound Unbound, MIT, 2008; Kodwo Eshun, More Brilliant Than the Sun, Quartet, 1998 (about to be republished by Verso Books, London in 2018); Steve Goodman (a.k.a. Kode 9), Sonic Warfare, MIT Press, 2009; McKenzie Wark, Black Accelerationism, Rizosfera, 2017; Louis Chude-Sokei, The Sound of Culture, W.U.P., 2016; Simon Reynolds and Katja Diefenbach: Mille Plateaux and Technodeleuze. Achim Szepanski’s Interviews (1994-1996), Rizosfera, 2017. We definitely agree with McKenzie Wark’s declaration in his Black Accelerationism: “But in many ways the original and best text on accelerationism was about Blackness – Kodwo Eshun’s More Brilliant Than the Sun” http://www.publicseminar.org
30 Such a diasporic counter-culture has been described by Paul Gilroy in his The Black Atlantic (Harward University Press, March 1995) - See first chapter.
31 Deleuze and Guattari A Thousand Plateaus p. 313, 314 University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1987. In terms of «Rhythm and Chaos», Milan in the first years of XX century was very close to the big capitals of the Afro-American diaspora. Russolo’s manifesto The Art of Noises influenced European XX century music as well as jazz. The rhythmic encounter/clash between Russolo’s first noise sound period and Russian composer Stravinskij’s fury, is one of the main centre of forces that has influenced Chaos Sive Natura. Francesco Cangiullo (Futurist writer and painter) described an evening in Milan in Marinetti’s house (1914) when the Ballets Russes met the Italian noise music with Russolo and Pratella. “An acoustic resonator crackled with thousands of sparks as a fire creek. Stravinskij bolted emanating a hiss of joy and he stood up like a spring. A rastler rastled like silk skirts in winter or like young leaves in April…. The frantic composer pounced on the piano looking for an onomatopoeic extraordinary sound...while the dancer [Massine] moved his experienced legs… Diaghilev went like: Ah-ah-ah-ah, as a quail. That was his highest form of appreciation. By moving his legs the dancer wanted to show that the weird symphony was danceable” (from F. Cangiullo, Serate futuriste, Ceschina, 1961).
32 Ibid., 314.
33 Deleuze and Guattari A Thousand Plateaus p. 314 University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1987.
34 Paul Klee, Sailing boats, gently moving, 1927.
35 Deleuze and Guattari A Thousand Plateaus p. 314 University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1987.
36 Chaos and Rhythm do not necessarily deal with the radical contemporary bruitisme but they both refer to the noise as a necessary heterogeneous compositional element.
37 Non-orientable accelerationism is a new branch of «topology applied to the sound». Under this aspect we define that the velocity of a sound is the rhythm with which it changes its position in the space, and that the acceleration of a sound is the rhythm with which it changes its velocity, while the non-orientable acceleration of a sound is the Rhythm with which it changes its milieu. Its sonologic law could affirm that a sonic mass times its non-orientable acceleration equals the chaotic force the mass is subjected to. It is probable that no differential equation may calculate the variable (a.k.a Rhythm). The continuous variation of all sonic components (plan of consistency) is then the direction non-orientable accelerationism tends to.
38 Deleuze and Guattari A Thousand Plateaus p. 313 University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1987.
39 Nietzsche The Will of Power, Fragment n.898 - (9 [153] Colli-Montinari: Nietzsche’s Unpublished Writings from 1885 to 1888).
40 About “...strange configurations will arise instead in the widening cracks and blind spots of the megamachine as it proceeds deeper into its meltdown stage” read the enlightening essay by Edmund Berger published on Deterritorial Investigation Unit blog https://deterritorialinvestigations.wordpress.com
41 We refer to the famous passage about «which revolutionary path» to take to subvert capitalism, expressed in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-OEdipus. This passage is defined as the «rhythmic moment» of the accelerationist philosophical movement today.
42 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Epilogue, Aphorism 383 p. 248 Cambridge University Press, 2001.
43 Nietzsche, Friedrich, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Trans. by Adrian Del Caro, Cambridge University Press, 2006.
44 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Epilogue, Fragment 383 p. 247-8, Cambridge University Press, 2001 - In the last two verses Nietzsche parodies the Fourth Movement in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Beethoven in this movement will write “Oh friends, not such sounds! Let us rather strike up more pleasant, more joyous tones”. Wagner, who loved Ninth Symphony, directed it many times, and one time in Bayreuth in 1872 where Nietzsche was present. Beethoven’s incipit to Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” - a metron refusing Chaos in favour to a stellar future welcomed by a benevolent «lovely father» - could only be mocked by Nietzsche of The Gay Science. Nietzsche’s final passage of The Gay Science, entitled Epilogue, marks the Chaos philosopher’s definitive valediction from “Beethoven’s signature tune” used in any political horizon, which Deleuze rightly defined “potential fascism of music” (A Thousand Plateaus, Minnesota University Press, 1987 p. 348).

Chaos Sive Natura: Electric Tree and Electronic Rhizome

(Rizosfera/Nukfm, 2017)

Tracklist

1. Bass slight swinging (Hommage à Paul Klee)
2. Afro Abstraction (Xamaycan Funeral March remix)
3. Notes for a quasi-living theory
4. Rattling self-propeller
5. Monodic (Dubmodic remix)
6. Dancing colors (Zabriskie Point remix)
7. Afecsana blues
8. Irenica (Private Collection, R.E.)
9. La machine informatique dub

Available on
https://obsoletecapitalismsoundsystem.bandcamp.com/releases

Publishing House: Rizosfera - Series of Books - The Strong of the Future
Anti-copyright, November 2017 Rizosfera

http://obsoletecapitalism.blogspot.it

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A Brief Guide to the French Rave Revival

11/5/2017

by Su Baykal

Minimum Syndicat

About four years ago, French youth, looking for a place to escape from the everyday, began throwing parties in abandoned warehouses, playing electronic dance music. The first parties to gain traction were hosted by organizations like Fee Croquer, Contrast, and New’s Cool. Gradually, these parties became more popular, attracting bigger crowds and planting the seeds for what would become a full-on rave revival in France. Rave’s genre borders are somewhat porous—the term can also refer to acid house, acid techno, hardtechno, hardstyle, gabber—but what they all have in common is their unpolished sound, chaotic style and tempo that usually stays well above 130 BPM.

Appearing first in the U.K. in the mid-to-late ‘80s, rave first made its way to France in the early ’90s. Empty theaters and warehouses hosted parties that attracted hundreds of young people. Umwelt, a techno producer and DJ who was playing at the first raves in Lyon, France, in the early ‘90s, remembers its earliest days. “It arrived in Paris in 1990. The first party was thrown by the ‘Rave Age’ Krew, and on radio with Maxximum. Back then, no one was famous. Then, everything started becoming more professional. Today, a new generation wants to get out of all that. This ‘90s sound is coming back. People want sincerity—they’re a little more open now, they want to return to the source. The music is more original today, more roots, harder productions compared to the ‘00s. There are more brute sounds now. It’s darker.”

Today, a community of producers are both reviving and adding new perspectives to the classic sound of rave. According to producer duo Minimum Syndicat, “The movement is bigger now than it was in the ’90s—at least in France.” The community is also tight-knit; artists remix one another’s tracks, release albums on one another’s labels, and share bills at parties. For all its new energy, the scene does still have some growing to do. For one thing, it remains largely male-dominated. As producer Sentimental Rave explains, “You don’t find a lot of women [playing at raves] in France. People are surprised when I play—they don’t expect it.”
While France may not be the only place experiencing a resurgence in rave culture, Sentimental Rave explains that French productions often are “more delicate. The raves are more melodic and slower—more subtle.”

While the producers in this list are just a small sample of the rave-inspired music being made in France today, they all offer a clear representation of the new sound’s darker sound. Their music spans a wide range of genres, from hard and acid techno, to gabber and hardcore, to something called frapcore. This is the sound of French rave today.

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A Brief History of Post-Metal

11/4/2017

by Jon Wiederhorn

Godflesh, Neurosis, Earth, and True Widow.

Back in 1994, British journalist Simon Reynolds coined the term “post-rock” to describe the atmospheric, jazz-inflected experimental music of the London band Bark Psychosis. The name resonated through the indie rock community, and before long, critics were using the term to describe acts as diverse as Tortoise, Mogwai, Sigur Ros and Godspeed You! Black Emperor. While most of these bands had their own sound, they shared two elements in common—a penchant for drifting melodies and the desire to expand beyond established rock boundaries.

While the post-rock community quickly grew, it remained fairly exclusive. It didn’t immediately value the stridency and aggression of metal, even at its most experimental. Yet several metal bands that shared a number of post-rock attributes had existed for years. As those inventive bands became acquainted with post-rock, the artistic tone began to shift, and a growing number of post-hardcore and experimental groups started incorporating familiar elements from the post-rock canon: ambience, offbeat experimentation, downcast melodies and psychedelia. Each evolution of the scene helped inspire the next wave.

Today’s post-metal bands dabble with a wide variety of styles, including black metal, shoegaze, prog, folk, doom, and classical. Here’s a brief guide to how the scene evolved from a bunch of musicians bored with conventional metal, to a global community of artists with a love for aggressive music, and a need to express themselves through emotionally revealing sounds from the fringes of the underground. Like any list, there are going to be some omissions. Think of this instead as a loose timeline tracing the evolution of a sound.

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BEHIND THE SCENES OF BERLIN ATONAL 2017

10/23/2017

Helena Hauff, Wolfgang Tillmans, Pan Daijing and Regis before they hit the stage at Berlin’s epic festival.

Over the last few years, Berlin Atonal has established itself as one of the most important music events in the world’s collective consciousness. Since rekindling it’s epic legacy that which began way back in 1982, the festival has become a vital site for a panoramic overview of the currents in underground electronic music. Operating within Tresor, Globus, Ohm and, of course, the hulking husk of concrete that is the main Kraftwerk stage, the festival provides a place for the imaginative fringes of techno, experimental and modern classical music to collide and collaborate. It’s because of that forward-thinking spirit that we profiled the festival’s sound in our YouTube and Apple Music playlist series.

To celebrate the 2017 festival, Subframe Media has put together a short video documenting the festival’s magic. And with a brilliant lineup ranging from Carla Dal Forno to Wolf Eyes, Stockhausen, Apeiron Crew and Pan Daijing, there was certainly plenty to celebrate. The video features beautiful shots of the main Kraftwerk stage as well as many of the performances held throughout the week all filmed, edited and directed by Nicola Cavalazzi, Elena Santamaria and Florence Jiminez Otto. It also features conversations with luminaries such as Roly Porter and Helena Hauff before they take the stage. It will have you crossing out those Atonal dates for 2018 already.

Watch the whole documentary below.

Berlin Atonal 2017 - short documentary from Subframe Media on Vimeo.

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NOISE ON NOISE

10/22/2017

By Zafer Aracagök

Passing now from the genus to the species, I have to denounce as the most inexcusable and scandalous noise the truly infernal cracking of whips in the narrow resounding streets of towns; for it robs life of all peace and pensiveness.

A. Schopenhauer

0.
Or rather, what did Schopenhauer hear when he was disturbed by the cracking of whips and decided to write about noise? What was it so disturbing in the cracking of a whip? A philosopher from whom Nietzsche borrowed immensely and forced this borrowing to a point of distortion. A philosophy of noise? Yet, is it possible to philosophise about noise? Did Nietzsche philosophise about noise?

“On Din and Noise” [i] by A. Schopenhauer – a rare essay in which a serious philosopher, a philosopher of the will, seriously gets involved in noise and philosophises about noise. A question of resonance between the cracking of a whip and the will of the philosopher. And also a question of resonance between Schopenhauer and Nietzsche: two types of resonance.

The first type of resonance is about the tension between a philosopher (his resistance) and the interruptive power of the cracking of a whip. Whereas the resonance between Nietzsche and Schopenhauer is a catastrophic event and it gives way to distortion; and, moreover, its giving way to distortion is not something that can be addressed to “perception” in the Schopenhauerian sense of the word. Already in Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy, it is not something which takes place as something visible or audible. This type of resonance between Schopenhauer and Nietzsche is the one with which I would like to put this essay into resonance.

In other words, I would like to remix in this essay what was already remixed by Nietzsche – that is, Nietzsche’s remix of the Schopenhauerian tension between will and contemplation into a relationship between the Dionysian and the Apollonian – by way of reintroducing into this remix the question of the hearable. Finally, I will claim that it is one of these two types of getting into resonance which lays bare a certain understanding of noise, and which also forces Schopenhauer to the claim that he heard the noise.

I. The Question of the Immediate

One possible way of tracing such a moment of distortion between Schopenhauer and Nietzsche passes through a scrutinisation of the question of the immediate which can be found located in the way Schopenhauer produces a critique of the symptomatology that is generally presumed to exist between ‘the kernel and the shell’[ii], or the inner and the outer nature.

Schopenhauer’s critique proceeds by way of pointing to an abyss which is usually forgotten by scientific or conceptual knowledge. What the latter do in face of such an abyss is to bridge it by means of representations. However, since all representations in the end refer to the principle of sufficient reason, they can never give us an adequate knowledge of this kernel, of what lies beyond our representations. Our representations do not belong to the kernel because time, space, and causality are the characteristics of the conceptual knowledge, and, therefore have got nothing to do with this beyond, with this kernel. The essential failure of our representations emanates from the direction they assume when they are producing scientific truth or knowledge. Schopenhauer’s critique is not directed towards the impossibility of bridging this abyss between inner nature and outer nature; he claims only that the way we bridge the abyss with conceptual knowledge is wrong. For in the metaphor of shell and kernel the direction is from outside towards inside, that is any act of representation brings its form to what is formless from the outside, and this form does not belong to the kernel. Schopenhauer’s aim is therefore to reverse this direction. For him, since the relationship with the kernel cannot be maintained through the mediation of representation, or the concepts, the philosopher must find a way to get rid of mediation by offering a way from inside towards outside.

However, as the two volumes of The World as Will and Representation[iii] bear witness to, how to eliminate the question of mediation proves to be a rather rigorous one, and it is exactly at this point things start becoming more complicated. These moves are most conveniently traceable in the definitions that Schopenhauer produces for terms such as, “concepts”, “Idea”, “Will”, “Perception”, “the thing-in-itself”, “representation”, and also in the way he picks up certain words for certain purposes.

First of all, the move from inside towards outside without mediation is determined by Schopenhauer by an attempt to define the Ideas as in opposition to concepts. Concepts in that respect are characterized by being ‘representations of representations’.[iv] This means that their relationship to Will is only secondary whereas that which is in a primary relationship to the Will is the Idea. If the concepts’ relationship to the Will is determined by the mediation of Ideas of which the concepts are copies; what relates the Idea to Will is Perception (Anschauung). Concepts, the tools of science, cannot function without introducing into their object a temporality and a spatiality: it means that they can produce knowledge about their object only with respect to something else, that is with respect to some other representations. In contrast, Will, or the thing-in-itself is that about which only a fixed meaning should be produced. The foremost distinction between Ideas and concepts is maintained by Schopenhauer by referring to Kantian characteristics of the thing-in-itself. Accordingly, Will or the thing-in-itself do not admit any form of causality determined by time and space because ‘they are only the forms of our knowledge, not qualities of the thing-in-itself.’[v] This means that Ideas assume the duty of the “objectification” of the Will, and they are ‘what Plato called the eternal Ideas or unchangeable forms’.[vi]

The term “objectification” (Objectivation) certainly has a central role in the philosopher’s distinctions between concepts and Ideas with respect to representation. For example, whenever it is a matter of a relationship between his favourite concepts, such as between Will and Idea, Body and Will, Will and the thing-in-itself, Schopenhauer pays special care to use “objectification” instead of representation (Vorstellung).Without doubt, it is because, for Schopenhauer, representation is what concerns the concepts which mediate knowledge only through the shells. In contrast, objectification is the word which is supposed to enable the philosopher to get rid of the question of mediation.[vii] Thus the primary position of an Idea with respect to Will by means of the employment of the word “objectification” is what saves the Idea from being a representation, a mediation on the way to the Will.

Such a move, or such a privileging of the word “objectification” over “representation” thus (only) initially enables Schopenhauer to theorise the immediate by eliminating the question of the mediation, or, to find a place where representation does not apply; and, without doubt, through this move he not only becomes capable of regulating the relationship between his favourite pairs of concepts, but also capable of overcoming the dialectics which govern the conceptual knowledge. This and similar moves take place most spectacularly when Schopenhauer accounts for 1) the relationship between the body and the will; 2) ‘On the Possibility of Knowing the Thing-in-Itself’ in the second volume of The World as Will and Representation; and, 3) the work of the genius with respect to the call of the sublime.

1) For Schopenhauer, the kernel is the Will and the Will is the thing-in-itself, yet how do we know it? Without doubt, through our body. The body, or, rather the actions of the body, are what make one aware of the immediate relationship between body and the objectification of the will. Objectification is that moment of my being aware of the will through my body’s actions without any act of representation (that is, without an image). Schopenhauer thus places the question of the objectification of the will into a framework of a symptomatology where symptoms do not act as representative of anything but as those by means of which the will is objectified in the body. However, in the mean time, he also introduces his favourite term Perception into the discussion. He says: ‘The action of the body is nothing but the act of will objectified (objectivierte), i.e., translated into perception (Anschauung)’. [viii] And what is striking here is that Schopenhauer does not say translated into “Vorstellung” but “Anschauung”.[ix]

For sure, Schopenhauer’s intention is to problematise the relationship between the kernel and the shell, and thus to save it from a simple-minded symptomatology. However, does the introduction of the word objectification constitute a different schema, a schema different from representation? Doesn’t it mean that that which is problematised is being reappropriated here in a supposedly unproblematical way, as if to call it “perception” or “objectification” can save it from a schema of representation? Schopenhauer acts as if there can be a way out of representation, or furthermore, as if one can offer a new model of representation. Everything revolves around this question: Is it possible to determine a place where representation does not apply (where the question of mimesis can be forgotten)?

2) That perception (Anschauung) cannot be thought in a schema other than a representational one haunts the work of the philosopher once again especially in the chapter 18 (‘On the Possibility of Knowing the Thing-in-Itself’) of the Volume II.

Here, it is as if Schopenhauer is setting barriers upon barriers against the return of phantoms by reasserting the symptomatology that he already did in the first volume. The immediacy that determines the relationship between will, perception and body this time is taken from a different angle that leads to the upsurging of an immense question: What is the relationship between the Will and the thing-in-itself? Schopenhauer’s answer is ‘I teach that the inner nature of everything is will and I call the will the thing-in-itself’.[x]

In the same chapter, a few paragraphs earlier, Schopenhauer writes about a certain modification that he brings to Kant’s theory. He quotes Kant:
All concepts which do not have their basis a perception in space and time (sensuous perception), or in other words, have not been drawn from such a perception, are absolutely empty, that is to say, they give us no knowledge. But as perception can furnish only phenomena, not things-in-themselves, we too have absolutely no knowledge of things-in-themselves.[xi]

Schopenhauer admits this but what he is critical of is that immediacy is what distinguishes Will from all the other objects of knowledge. So as against the nothingness, or the emptiness of the Kantian thing-in-itself, he proposes that the Will which he holds as identical with the thing-in-itself presents us with a ‘relative nothing’:
If the will were positively and absolutely the thing-in-itself, then this nothing would be absolute, instead of which it expressly appears to us there only as a relative nothing.[xii]

Then it means that in contrast to what Schopenhauer defends, the will is not the thing-in-itself; it is different from the thing-in-itself for it has some immediate attributes which make themselves felt and known in a representative schema – hence its relative nothingness differentiates it from the absolute nothingness of the thing-in-itself. Then it also means that the Will acts as a representative for the thing-in-itself. The thing-in-itself reveals itself by using the immediacy of the will.

Strangely enough, without giving us any clues about how this different representative schema differs from the ordinary one, Schopenhauer closes the matter. Apparently, he decides. Yet despite this decision, that is, a decision that decides to theorise the immediate, one realizes – as one reads Schopenhauer – that the immediate cannot be theorised unless within a dialectical schema. What can one do with immediacy?

Immediacy calls for a theory of the event. Can one theorise the event? Will Schopenhauer accept this call?

3) If all this can be taken as producing a decision upon something which cannot be decided, such a decision requires also an agent who can decide. This agent – a mediator par excellence – is the genius who is mainly characterised by Schopenhauer as an agent with immense powers of contemplation.

If art is characterised with a density for “pure contemplation” in the name of the apprehension of the Ideas, and their communication to the others, the genius, for Schopenhauer is the agent who is capable of assuming two duties at the same time: 1) apprehension, or perception of the Ideas; and, 2) their communication to the others.[xiii]

Given these duties, the genius, in other words, is a mediator between the Idea and the artwork. With exceptional powers of contemplation and perception he endeavours to snatch the Ideas from the ‘thraldom of the will’,[xiv] and thus gives them a certain aspect of communicability in works of art. Most important of all, the objects of knowledge of the genius are the Ideas which can be obtained, not via abstractions, that is by referring to other representations, but only through perception. Schopenhauer’s stress on the importance of the perception of Ideas is of course related to his interest to preserve the distinction between concepts and Ideas. Therefore, when the genius is related to the contemplation, or the perception of Ideas, in his duty as the mediator between the Idea and the artwork, he should never refer to representation (Vorstellung) which characterizes the concepts. As we have seen before, Schopenhauer introduces different words at different times in order to get away from the determinations of the word, Vorstellung; and this time, with the intention of stressing that the genius’ duty has got nothing to do with representation, he employs a different word: repetition (Wiederholung).[xv] Hence, the Ideas apprehended by the genius are not representations of the Will, but their immediate objectifications in his perception, and the artwork which he produces out of them are not the representations of his perceptions but only their ‘repetitions’. Thus, the genius’ capacity of perceiving the Ideas is determined by the distance he keeps from the call of the Will.

The extreme form of this duty which even threatens the genius’ endeavour to be a will-less subject can be found in Schopenhauer’s description of the sublime.[xvi] Sublime, in Schopenhauer, functions as the genius’ resistance to the call of the will – a call which threatens not only the endeavour of genius towards the contemplation of the Idea, but also the theory of the will-less subject of knowledge. Hence, the enumeration of arts in Schopenhauer comes as a response to the danger, threat which is directed to the subject from the realm of the Will. Arts in that sense constitute a shield against these dangers and protect the subject from such an abolishment. Various arts are thus put into an order according to the degree of protection they present.

Schopenhauer’s theory of art is without doubt haunted by the same issues that lead to the question of the untheorisable. However, instead of stressing once again these conflicts that are due to Schopenhauer’s application of his theory to arts,[xvii] I would like to show next what happens to the question of the untheorisable, the question of the immediate when it comes to theorising music. Because, one can argue that it is especially here Schopenhauer realizes that his theory of the Will suffers greatly from some unresolved conflicts, and he develops some moves which, rather than resolving these conflicts, amplify them to such an extent that music transforms into a “sublime” object par excellence.

II. Music

After this, we find that there is yet another fine art that remains excluded, and was bound to be excluded, from our considerations, for in the systematic connexion of our discussion there was no fitting place for it; this art is music.[xviii]

All the theory of art that Schopenhauer produces until he introduces his theory of music concerns the specular. In other words, under the light of a decision taken to theorise the immediate by means of a different terminology (which nevertheless cannot eliminate the representational character of his theory), all the arts are categorised on the presupposition of a distinction between Anschauung and Vorstellung, and also the presence of a genius, who will “perceive” the Ideas and “repeat” them in his artwork. However, now, Schopenhauer realizes that a theory of music that follows from an unresolved question of the immediate will create problems basically due to following reasons: 1) privileging of Anschauung over Vorstellung does not explain anything anymore when it comes to music because music is aural and escapes the specular; 2) that music is aural means that it is more immediate than other arts, and therefore does not need a mediator as ‘objectification in Ideas through Perception’. In face of these difficulties, Schopenhauer miraculates another strategy which even he himself cannot demonstrate[xix] or verify. To paraphrase Schopenhauer, music’s relationship to the world is utterly complicated because music, unlike other arts, does not come as a copy of something which precedes it; or, better, that which precedes music cannot be represented. Schopenhauer cannot ‘demonstrate’[xx] this but it doesn’t stop him from another move whereby he takes music one step closer to Will. Hence, he concludes:
Thus music is as immediate an objectification and copy (Abbild) of the whole will as the world itself is, indeed as the Ideas are, the multiplied phenomenon of which constitutes the world of individual things. Therefore music is by no means like the other arts, namely a copy (Abbild) of the Ideas, but a copy of the will itself, the objectivity of which are the Ideas.[xxi]

When Schopenhauer moves music one step closer to the Will, his intention is obviously to tame what does not fit into specular schema – for, he has realized now, that which does not fit into specular schema is bound to function as a threat to his theory of the sublime, because it is formless (as Will), and given its immediacy, it casts a threat to the genius[xxii]: it can absorb the genius into itself.

However, there are also other things, dangerous things that this move leads the Schopenhauerian theory unto. First of all, when music is thus pushed closer to the Will, a certain characteristic of arts for Schopenhauer, that is their power of copying (Abbild), which is supposed to disappear does not disappear. Hence, he has to preserve “copying” together with “objectification.” On the other hand, a relationship of copying can be established only with respect to a model. Yet here, what takes the place of a model is the Will, which by, definition, is formless. If this were a relationship of Vorstellung, yes, then music in this new place could be understood as that which gives form to what is formless. But Schopenhauer says “objectification” and “copying.” At that point, we should be reminded of the last resort that Schopenhauer used between the Will and the thing-in-itself in order to explain the immediacy between the two, and the question of the ‘relative nothing’. If music does not require the priority of Ideas in order to be music, then it means it has its own power of giving form not via Vorstellung, that is, via representing the Will, but by “copying” what cannot be represented, which is, according to Schopenhauer, not nothing but a ‘relative nothing’. Yet, even so, the relative nothing is that which requires a form in order to be understood as such, and hence, it cannot exist outside a representational schema.

But how is it possible that music can give form to what is formless as long as Schopenhauer doesn’t accept that it is a matter of Vorstellung?

Is it music that Schopenhauer is theorizing or something else?[xxiii]

Here is something which does not come after the event. Schopenhauer is treating that which does not come after the event in a dialectical schema. This something is “music”, according to him.

III. Nietzsche

In The Birth of Tragedy, there are numerous references to Schopenhauer:
1) In section 5, Nietzsche disagrees with Schopenhauer on the question of the lyric poet because Schopenhauer follows traditional ways in approaching the lyric poetry.[xxiv] The lyric poetry for both modern aesthetics and Schopenhauer is ‘an incompletely attained art that arrives its goal infrequently and only, as it were, by leaps’.[xxv] For Nietzsche, on the other hand, the “I” of the lyric poet, Archilochus, can never be taken as an alibi for a subjectivity because ‘its “subjectivity”, in the sense of modern aestheticians is a fiction’.[xxvi]

2) In section 16, Nietzsche quotes large paragraphs from Schopenhauer on the question of the copy – that ‘music is the immediate copy of the will itself’. Does Nietzsche follow here Schopenhauer’s will to offer a new mimetic model which was supposed to distinguish music from all the other arts? Or, does he acknowledge Schopenhauer’s failure by offering a strange relationship between the kernel and the shell, Dionysos and Apollo, the-thing-in-itself and appearances?

I offer these cases with the intention of pointing out to a central issue which, remaining concealed in the discussion, gives way to a notion that all is a matter of what Nietzsche decided to “borrow” from Schopenhauer. This point is where Nietzsche quotes Schiller in order to support his thought on the subject and the lyric poet:
Schiller has thrown some light on the poetic process by a psychological observation, inexplicable but unproblematic to his own mind. He confessed that before the act of creation he did not have before him or within him any series of images (Bildern) in a causal arrangement, but rather a musical mood (musicalische Stimmung). (‘Within me the perception (Empfindung) has at first no clear and definite object; this is formed later. A certain musical mood comes first, and the poetical idea only follows later’.)[xxvii]

First of all, what kind of a mood is that? Why is it musical, that is something aural, instead of being something specular? Whether it be aural or specular, perception (Empfindung: ‘percept: an impression of an object obtained by use of the senses’[xxviii]) is what follows a ‘musical mood’ which ties the act of creation to an experience of the aural.[xxix]

What I would like to question here is whether in this very quotation Nietzsche sees a passage from chaos to figure, from inner to outer nature, as for example, Schopenhauer would put it, or a certain relationship between two realms which can best be described as “resonance”. [xxx]

So now if we return to the question of the lyric poet, Archilochus, in both Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, one essential difference between two philosophers can be found in the differences each assigned to the relationship between the formless and the formed. For Schopenhauer, such a passage requires a fully-formed subject, who is a subject only insofar as its integrity is preserved as against the call of the Will, the formless matter: this step should be taken once and for all, without leaving behind any possibility of a return to the formless (though, as we have seen, in Schopenhauer the experience of the sublime always carries this risk of falling back). Yet for Nietzsche things are obviously different:
Hence our aesthetics must first solve the problem of how the “lyrist” is possible as an artist – he who, according to the experience of all ages, is continually saying “I” and running through the entire chromatic scale of his passions and desires. Compared with Homer, Archilochus appals us by his cries of hatred and scorn, by his drunken outbursts of desire. Therefore is not he, who has been called the first subjective artist, essentially the non-artist?[xxxi]

So, for Nietzsche, if there is a border between the formless and the formed, it is there not as a rigid line of separation between two realms but as a border, constituted anew at each attempt of constructing oneself as a subject. In other words, for him, it is a matter of resonance on both sides of a border which constructs and destroys the very border in question, and hence the passage remains always as a problem. Yet, if Nietzsche problematizes this crossing, the passage from chaos to the phenomenal, what should we think about the music that Schiller is talking about?

In order to trace some possible answers for this question, let us concentrate on Nietzsche’s way of putting into “resonance” also the relationship between Dionysos and Apollo. For Nietzsche, dreams are where images, figures or appearances (Apollonian forms) are constituted as symptoms of an underlying substratum (Dionysian chaos) – as in a relationship between a kernel and a shell. With respect to its form-giving power, Apollo is therefore the god of the principium individuationis. However, in opposition to that Dionysos operates as the god of intoxication towards the destruction of what has assumed form. This way of describing the relationship between Dionysos and Apollo is rather well known, however things change dramatically when one adds to this description the following passage in Section 2:

Thus far we have considered the Apollonian and its opposite, the Dionysian, as artistic energies which burst forth from nature herself, without the mediation of the human artist (ohne Vermittelung des menschichen Künstlers) – energies in which nature’s art impulses are satisfied in the most immediate and direct way – first in the image world of dreams, whose completeness is not dependent upon the intellectual attitude or the artistic culture of any single being; and then as intoxicated reality, which likewise does not heed the single unit, but even seeks to destroy the individual and redeem him by a mystic feeling of oneness. With reference to these immediate art-states of nature, every artist is an “imitator” (Nachahmer). [xxxii]

Here, Nietzsche seems to be offering that “artistic” creation happens in a two-fold process where the folds cannot be separated from each other. If the bursting forth of artistic energies (Dionysian and Apollonian) finds an image in one fold in ‘the image world of dreams’, the other fold, developing in a parallel fashion, is determined by a destruction of these images. Therefore, the artist, within the ‘immediate art-states of nature’ is the one who never comes into being as such, or as a fully formed subject, because his/her coming into being is always interrupted by a battle between Apollonian and Dionysian forces. Such a relationship between the folds also eliminates the question of the first because, even if the Dionysian forces seem to be secondary in this process, they already contain, and are contained within, Apollonian forces, and the same holds true for the Apollonian forces. In other words, the two opposite forces are put into resonance by Nietzsche just to bar the “subject” from coming into being. And this is why here, Nietzsche does not talk about an artist: the artist only comes too late, after the event, as an imitator of this process with an end product, the work of art. However, as we know it from Nietzsche’s formulation of the tragic, the lyrist, (‘the non-artist’) is the one who can imitate this process in art works so that the Socratic truth never appears as such in a dialectical fashion. In other words, although the relationship between two folds seems to be determined by a model/copy relationship, this relationship is simulacral rather than mimetic because the passage between the formed and the formless is a simultaneous, continuous and a reversible process. Therefore, the essential question for Nietzsche, unlike Schopenhauer, is not “Can there be an art which actualises the immediate?” but “Can art point to the immediate?” For Schopenhauer, as we have seen, this art is music. However, in Nietzsche, this turns into a question that cannot be directly answered. He writes:

In the first place, as a Dionysian artist [the lyrist] he has identified himself with the primal unity, its pain and contradiction. Assuming that music has been correctly termed a repetition (Wiederholung) and a recast (zweiter Abguss) of the world, we may say that he produces the copy (Abbild) of this primal unity as music. Now, however, under the Apollonian dream inspiration, this music reveals itself to him again as a symbolic dream image. The inchoate, intangible reflection of the primordial pain in music, with its redemption in mere appearance, now produces a second mirroring as a specific symbol or example. The artist has already surrendered his subjectivity in the Dionysian process. The image that now shows him his identity with the heart of the world is a dream scene that that embodies the primordial contradiction and primordial pain, together with the primordial pleasure, of mere appearance. The “I” of the lyrist therefore sounds from the depth of his being: its “subjectivity”, in the sense of modern aestheticians is a fiction. [xxxiii]

I propose that at this juncture we should try to discuss that in the quotation above there are two types of music for Nietzsche. The first is the Dionysian type of music ( here the lyrist is one with the primal unity and ‘he produces the copy of this primal unity as music’), and it is right there, in face of an impossibility of thinking about music without mimesis, Nietzsche’s theory falls out of resonance with Schopenhauer’s and thus forces the relationship between the philosophers to resonance, distortion and noise.

The second type of music, the Apollonian one, comes on top of this as in a relationship of a model and a copy (‘The inchoate, intangible reflection of the primordial pain in music, with its redemption in mere appearance, now produces a second mirroring as a specific symbol or example’). However, as we have seen above, the strange mimetic relationship between these two types of ‘mirroring’ is opened up to the simulacral yet with one critical question to be answered now: Is it music that Nietzsche is talking about as far as the first type of music is concerned? Or better, can this “music” be heard?

For Schopenhauer, as we have seen before, music – theorised within a proximity to the immediate – knows no such Nietzschean distinctions; it supposedly does not, or should not obey to the rule of a model/copy relationship; it can be heard under every circumstances; and it can exist even when there is noone to hear it.

Yet, to obtain such a clarity of thought from Nietzsche is rather difficult because his relationship to the mimetic is determined neither by a rejection nor a pure acceptance. For Nietzsche, in other words, music, in contrast to all the theorisation with respect to the question of the immediate, still remains one step away from the ‘primal unity’ just as all the other arts. Music therefore can only be heard if it is music, that is, if it is formed within a model and copy relationship. However, if in the Nietzschean theory there is still no clear answer as to whether the first type of music can be heard, it is because of the way in which Nietzsche puts two types of music in a simulacral relationship where they are put into resonance, eliminating the question of the first. If one cannot theorise the first type of music, if it is that which escapes the theory, it is not because it cannot be heard but because it remains as the unheard within what is heard. Music and all the other arts are thus given a new position where they all point to the the question of the immediate without claiming to actualise it.The question of the immediate in Nietzsche is no more related to music, but to something unthinkable, or untheorisable, or, undecidable, or to something which is there as a different type of relationship between two realms, say, between, the real and the apparent, the will and the idea, the original and the copy, etc. – a matter of resonance and noise. But can one hear the noise?

IV. Noise

At this juncture, though in an abrupt way, as if to amplify the noise, I would like to be interrupted by a concern for what Schopenhauer thought about noise:
In the same way a great mind is no more capable than an ordinary one, the moment it is interrupted, disturbed, distracted, and diverted. For its superiority is conditioned by its concentrating all its powers, as does a concave mirror all its rays, on to one point and object; and it is precisely here that it is prevented by a noisy interruption. This is why eminent minds have always thoroughly disliked every kind of disturbance, interruption, and diversion, but above all, the violent disturbance caused by din and noise. The most sensible and intelligent of all European nations has even laid down an eleventh commandment, the rule, Never Interrupt! Din is the most impertinent of all forms of interruption, for it interrupts, in fact disrupts, even our own thoughts. […]

Passing now from the genus to the species, I have to denounce as the most inexcusable and scandalous noise the truly infernal cracking of whips in the narrow resounding streets of towns; for it robs life of all peace and pensiveness.[xxxiv]

I would like to draw attention to following possible remarks:
1) In Schopenhauer, the flow of thought is interrupted by the cracking of a whip. That which pertains to a flow is a flow for it pertains to a consideration of thought within time and space. Thought, then, is that which takes place within time and space. The genius is there to think, in time, in a flow, to stop the wheel of Ixion[xxxv] by perceiving the Ideas. So, what happens to Schopenhauer’s flow of thought at the moment of its interruption by a whip is that the latter destroys this schema of time and space in which thought takes place. Where he is drawn to after the experience of this crack is an atemporal and aspatial realm that does not allow him to continue his flow of thought. This atemporal and aspatial realm, as we know, is the realm of the Will according to the philosopher (just as in Homer’s description of what happens to those who listen to the Sirens’ song: they forget all past and future). It is a dangerous realm for it is where one cannot follow, or constitute a flow of thought – a realm of desires, bodily needs, a realm that is governed by madness. This realm cannot be represented except for this cracking of a whip. Hence, the realm of noise is also the realm of the Will because this is where the chaos is. Is noise that which comes from a realm that Schopenhauer failed to theorise?

2) The problem with this line of thought is that it hears what it describes as the unhearable. When it is heard, it comes as noise, and when it cannot be heard it presents itself as Will. And the cracking of a whip constitutes a threshold, an explosive line of demarcation between two realms. On the one side there is the realm of the Will, noise, the thing-in-itself, on the other, there is the realm of flow, harmony, music, thought. And the cracking of a whip is that which disturbs this line of demarcation with a blow and bars the messenger from making its message received.

As if one could conclude: we have music because we cannot hear the “ music”.

V. The Event

Let’s try to “visualise”, get the “perception” (Anschauung) of what happened to Nietzsche at a similar moment of hearing the cracking of a whip. The scene takes place in Turin and it is a moment of collapse. It is usually referred to as follows:
On January the 3rd 1888, Nietzsche was in the piazza Carlo Alberto, in Turin, Italy. Seeing a coachman brutally flog a horse, he intervened, and collapsed, shielding the horse from the whip. Carried back to his lodgings, he comes around, but he is no longer sane.[xxxvi]

Can one really perceive, represent, put into images, what happened to Nietzsche when he heard the cracking of the whip? What did Nietzsche hear? The noise that immensely disturbed Schopenhauer? We should doubt it. If it were noise, then it should have disturbed him. Did it disturb him? What is the limit of disturbance? Is “noise” there for us to hear? Is it possible to be disturbed by noise? An invitation.

NOTES

[i] Arthur Schopenhauer, ‘On Din and Noise’, Parerga and Paralipomena [1851] 2 vols, trans. E.F.J. Payne (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974; reprint 2000), Vol. II, pp.642-45.
[ii] When I write “the kernel and the shell,” I have in mind N. Abraham and M. Torok’s work on the same subject (The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis, Volume 1, ed., trans. Nicholas Rand (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994) and their critique of Freudian symptomatology which led to another work, The Wolfman’s Magic Word: A Cryptonomy, trans. Nicholas Rand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). Confronted with the impossibility of reaching the truth of the wolfman’s crypt, their theory turns into a deconstruction of psychoanalysis, where a clear-cut determination of any possible relationship between the kernel and the shell disappears.
[iii] Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation [1819], 2 vols, trans. E.F.J Payne (New York: Dover Publications Inc, 1969).
[iv] W I, p.40.
[v] W I, p.134.
[vi] W I, p.170
[vii] “…for us the Idea is only the immediate, and therefore adequate, objectivity of the thing-in-itself,” W I, p. 74.
[viii] see W I, p.100.
[ix] See especially W I, 103-4 for how such a privileging leads to contradictory conclusions where the body is taken both as a representation and not a representation.
[x] W II, p.197.
[xi] W II, p.196.
[xii] W II, p.198.
[xiii] see W I, p.185.
[xiv] W I, p.196.
[xv] See W I, pp.194-5. In other words, the genius – instead of representing – repeats in the artwork what he has perceived in the Idea.
[xvi] see W I,pp.201-2.
[xvii] For a detailed discussion on Schopenhauer’s examination of the conditions for art’s foundation see, Cheryl Foster. ‘Ideas and Imagination’ in The Cambridge Companion to Schopenhauer, ed. C. Janaway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 213-251.
[xviii] W I, pp.255-6.
[xix] “I recognize, however, that it is essentially impossible to demonstrate this explanation, for it assumes and establishes a relation of music as a representation (Vorstellung) to that which of its essence can never be representation, and claims to regard music as the copy (Nachbild) of an original (Vorbildes) that can itself never be directly represented.” W I, p.257.
[xx] That Schopenhauer cannot verify this point is worked by Lawrence Ferrara in his ‘Schopenhauer on Music as the Embodiment of Will’ with respect to a thorough analysis of the work of Jean-Philippe Rameau, who appears as the prime example of Schopenhauer’s understanding of music. The main point of the article is to foreground a certain sense of merging of referentialism and formalism in Schopenhauer’s theory of music. Schopenhauer, Philosophy and the Arts, ed. D. Jacquette (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 183-199.
[xxi] W I, p.257.
[xxii] Let’s stop for a moment, and accept Schopenhauer’s theory without questioning his main presumption: if one cannot show, or demonstrate the represented, then it is a matter of immediacy that concerns and differentiates music from the other arts. Yet, wouldn’t then all the universe be transformed into a giant music machine without a composer, or a performer? What kind of a music is that? What happened to the genius? Why has he disappeared from the theory? Has the moment of sublime swallowed the genius? Certainly, Schopenhauer has an answer for that: music can exist even when there is no one to perceive it (see especially, W I, p.257).
[xxiii] Approaching this issue from a different angle, Lydia Goehr’s article takes the contradictions of Schopenhauer’s theory of music as bearing witness to the limits of theory which ends up in silence. She writes: “Schopenhauer revealed more about music through silence than speech, through what he showed indirectly by analogy than through what he was able to say literally. In this view, speech and silence, like saying and showing, are mutually dependent or correlative concepts. Accordingly what cannot be said or what belongs to silent discourse is revealed only by contrast to what can be said. The limits of what can be said determine the limits of what can be shown; or the world of speech delimits the boundaries which the world of silence must transgress”. ‘Schopenhauer and the musicians: an inquiry into the sounds of silence and the limits of philosophizing about music’ in Schopenhauer, Philosophy and the Arts, ed. D. Jacquette (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp.200-28 (p.215).
[xxiv] “Schopenhauer, who did not conceal from himself the difficulty the lyrist presents in the philosophical contemplation of art, thought he had found a way out on which, however, I cannot follow him.” Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1967) p.51.
[xxv] Tragedy, p.51.
[xxvi] Tragedy, p.49.
[xxvii] Tragedy, p.49.
[xxviii] http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary
[xxix] Quoting the same passage in his work, P. Lacoue-Labarthe offers the following remarks: ‘Nietzsche refers to this statement not only to prove the anteriority of the Dionysian (let us say, for the sake of simplicity, the musical) in relation to the Apollonian – concept, image, figure, etc. He cites it also, as demonstrated on the subsequent page, in order to attempt to think the unthinkable passage from chaos to figure, from the originary One (“which is pain and contradiction”) to phenomenality in general […] At the same time, and on the other hand, it is to show out of what abyss of the subject, out of what impossible originary identification with originary suffering is formed (sich bildet), through the mediation of the example (which is to say, for Nietzsche, the myth, or, if you will, identification in the common sense of the term), the “subject” in its modern definition – that “illusion”’. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography, trans. Christopher Fynsk (California: Stanford University Press, 1989), p.186.
[xxx] A concept which I elaborated in an earlier essay, ‘On Rhythm, Resonance and Distortion’, Pli – The Warwick Journal of Philosophy, 14, (2003), pp.129-156.
[xxxi] Tragedy, p.48.
[xxxii] Tragedy, p.38.
[xxxiii] Tragedy, p.49.
[xxxiv] from ‘On Din and Noise’, p. 642-43.
[xxxv] W I, p.196.
[xxxvi] http://www.demon.co.uk/natofeur/also.html

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TECHNODELEUZE AND MILLE PLATEAUX. ACHIM SZEPANSKI’S INTERVIEW (1994-1996)

10/8/2017

By Obsolete Capitalism

Achim Szepanski has been one of the “heroes” of the ‘90s thanks to the creation and the visionary promotion of his Mille Plateaux (1994-2004), the famous record label based in Frankfurt. Due to his peculiar philosophical theory applied to the digital culture, Szepanski has totally changed the electronic music panorama from top to bottom. His talent to choose an unusual and original direction and to give a radical cut to his discographic productions testiﬁed by the many labels he created (Force Inc., Mille Plateaux, Riot Beats, etc), has been widely recognized by the whole music stage and critics. In the present e.book we introduce two interviews done in the magic moment of the European mass explosion of the electronic music that coincided with the high quality level of Szepanski’s radical proposal. The ﬁrst one Making Sound Streams Quake, conducted by the German philosopher Katja Diefenbach, was inserted in the anthological book Techno edited by Philipp Anz and Patrick Walder (Verlag Ricco Bilder, 1995), the second, conducted by the English journalist and music critic Simon Reynolds, was published with the title Low End Theory on the April issue of the English music magazine The Wire in 1996.

Why a «hero»? Achim Szepanski has proved a «heroic» pioneering ability to translate and apply Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical theories to the ﬁrst musical and cultural wave of the electronic revolution of the 90s, bending and folding the rhizospheric concepts to the core of the new sonic esperanto. In such way he has created a subversive pragmatics of musical productions, aware listenings and social alternative dancing practices in differentiated contests as raves. Not only «electronic politics» but a philosophy of sound which turned into a guerrilla against the aural mainstream. Through his mutinous audio-activism Szepanski has built a war-sonic machine that enables him to be inserted together with Nietzsche and Deleuze in the present series of books about an accelerated archeology of the «strong of the future». Such sonic-war machine has supported in a chaotic and amusing way Italian oblique underground experiences like Kom Fut Manifesto, Red’ko, Mafﬁa Illicit Music Club and other entities able to raise the sound and the experimentation from the dance ﬂoor to a real political and artistic operation subtracting it from the «steel cage» of entertainment. To close the circle of the historical references and contaminations, we would like to remind that Low End Theory by Simon Reynolds was translated for the ﬁrst time in Italian by the philosopher Massimiliano Guareschi for Ultratomato maga-zine (n° 13/2002) – the house organ of Mafﬁa Illicit Music Club – in the Technodeleuze dossier.

The ﬁrst reason for Szepanski’s importance is connected to the movement towards the outside of Deleuzian philosophy – a ﬁtted abstract rostrum thought that hooks electro and cybernetics. In the ‘90s in fact it was necessary to connect such mo-vement to more urgent and popular requests of the electronic scene, building a short circuit between «inside» and «outside» of Deleuzian philosophy and maintaining a high level of artistic and philosophical proposal. The second reason is linked to the revolutionary intensity expressed by Mille Plateaux. Szepanski’s and Mille Plateaux artists’ work has made the Deleuzian-Guattarian rhizospheric accelerationist theories real in a very peculiar way: testing in the heat of the night and in the schizophrenic stamina of the danceﬂoor the quality and the intensity of the revolutionary link among very heterogeneous elements. Hence we are here dealing with an «outside» – a native intensity – that violently enters an «inside» – an unexpected Return – of the Deleuzian thought: a populated noisy chaos jumping into a silent plane of immanence, framed by the philosopher. The concept of Deleuze’s musical thought – his refrain – won’t be the same after Szepanski’s intervention, due to the destruction made by his explosive electronic grimace to the araldic Mille Plateaux music offer which ranges from the classic intellectual avantgarde from Schumann to Berg, to Cage and Stockhausen.

The revolutionary link evoked in Anti-Oedipus becomes for Szepanski an unexpected positive feedback which continuously absorbs input and output and subverts the wall between the entertainment and knowledge industry. The pragmatics built by Szepanski’s Mille Plateaux have become one of the moments – the most discordant, strident and noble – of the «machinic stratagem» which, once set free from the book page chain, avoids the bridles of the overall interpretation of the rising digital epoque.

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ECOLOGICAL ART AND THE RESILIENCE OF MODERNISM

9/22/2017

By Kilian Jörg

“Ecological Art is a worldwide art movement, the philosophy of which is based on ecological awareness, the harmonic coexistance of human beings and nature. It is a revitalizing movement in terms of materials used in works of art, which are in many cases, recycled and natural at the same time. Most of them emphasize the beauty of nature as a masterpiece, but one which is as fragile and vulnerable as our own life.”1

This definition of ecological art by Nohra Corredor, found at random via Google search, seems to me to portray a classical understanding of ecological art as some rather fuzzy attempts on such big romantic words as “harmony”, “beauty” “nature as a masterpiece” and finding reconciliation or revitalization within the ecosystem.

In this short essay I am proposing to broaden this term for it to encompass more than romantic images of beautiful landscapes, colorful assemblages of fruits and other objects found in ‘nature’ aligned to more or less ‘ancient’, ‘spiritual’ symbols like the spiral or the flower of life. Based on the insight that ‘nature’ – in itself a problematic term2 – is not only harmonic, but can as much be destructive3 and is far from “in balance”4, I would like to propose regarding some artworks as ‘ecological art’ which most people would not commonly associate with. In a time that is marked by what I want to call the resilience of modernism and machine fetishism, playing with the dirt and noise of industrial machines as well as experimentally embracing the lure of capitalist exploitation5 might turn out to be more ecological than producing easily marketable images of a “better world” in which all of us live in a simulation of peaceful co-existence with each other (human and non-human).

I am going to argue that art forms of machine music like Industrial and Electronic music can give new insights into our ecological problems, that are – first and foremost – a problem concerning our relationship with machines. To develop a better, more egalitarian and sustainable culture with them is at stake if we want to become more ecologically aware – and in this, the above mentioned art forms can help us to achieve that. To make this argument, I will try to characterize our time as entangled with and paralyzed by an unexpectedly high resilience of modernism and show how a deep rooted machine fetishism is strengthening this problem by making us act counter-productively without being able to conceptually grasp the damage. After this theoretical framework, I will investigate how Industrial music can help us to emancipate from this problematic fetishism and will continue to move on to more contemporary, auditory6 art works, that can help us build a deeper relationship towards our machines.

Resilience of Modernism

We live in the period of the post-prefix. For several decades, we have and are still conceiving ourselves as post-modern, we live in post-colonial post-democracies, think about post-foundational politics and the problem of post-truth. Our philosophies are post-structuralist and post-human, in art there is talk about Post-Internet, post-conceptual and Post-Minimalism, our economic models are post-Fordian and our habitats post-industrial. Judging from our categories, we seem to know quite well, what we left behind – or at least, what we want to leave behind. However, there is no real understanding of where we actually are or want to go – and how we would want to name it. In a time of a global political and cultural backlash, we seem to fall back to the modernist categories we so desperately wanted to quit – and, quite horrified, realize that we are still modern. You can’t pronounce post-modernism without saying modernism7 – and in lack of any feasible alternative, we stick to the same old devastating schemes. We are post-enlightened modernists: we know of all its ecological problems, but we can’t find our way out of it. Frustrated by this, we turn our backs from any idealism that could make us believe in any positive change, affirm collapse and try to make our final days as shiny as can be. Shine bright like a diamond. Everything that kills me makes me feel alive. Make America great again.

Modernism seems to be very resilient. The term resilience can be described as “the ability of a system to absorb disturbances before unpredictably changing its structure from one equilibrium state to another“8. Modernism has been witnessing many disruptions, doubts and crises since WWI in the latest, but for now it has always been able to restabilze itself – our post-period is a symptom of this strong resilience: even after theoretically deconstructing it entirely, we are still entangled in it without any perspective towards a way out.

It appears to us ever more clearly that just running away from it by labeling us „post-x“ won‘t solve the problem: it much rather comes back in unpredictable ways, making us stunningly paralyzed by the return of what we believed we left behind long ago. It dawns unto us, that just declaring us post-x, without being able to define us without using x, does not suffice. Cynically, we shake our heads in bewilderness about „the stupidness of the common people“9, who will not change, inspite of all the deconstruction that has been going on. We resign to some hedonist escapism, be it in Berghain or in Thailand, and await the end of humanity.

For those of us who do not want to give in to this easy Christian image of the Apocalypse 10, I propose to examine this resilience of modernism more closely11. If mere denunciation and deconstruction do not suffice, we should still not give up hope. Much rather, we have to understand what makes our problem so resilient that it does not leave us that easily. We have to learn to acknowledge that we are all entangled with the problem, that we may love it, discover that we have – unacknowledged – always been in love with it. That it is our fetish, that we are obsessed by it and at the same time hate it. That we want it to hurt us and eventually swallow us.

Machine Fetishism

For this purpose, I am proposing to examine the machine- or techno-fetishism of our age. According to Alf Hornborg, modernism is characterized by a fetishism for the machine12, that hinders us from seeing their ecological impacts and entanglements. Modernists are, according to this theory, believers in the magical powers of the machines, that – since the European Renaissance – put their spell on us and promoted us to the technological Utopia of the now, in which everything is just a click away. According to this fetishist’s history, it was the brilliant minds of male, white geniuses, direct descendants of Prometheus so to speak, who brought us the godly fire and made our lives on earth ever more heavenly. Based on epistemological dualisms like that of mind and body, culture and nature, male and female, modernism promoted a technological appropriation of the world that allegedly helped everybody to live a better, healthier and wealthier life.

What this story misses is that, as Alf Hornborg claims, technology is per se a product and the materialization of unequal distributions of material as well as social wealth. Since the Renaissance, global inequality did not diminish, but aggravate to a large scale, making today’s inequality higher than ever in the Middle Ages13. That this, even today, appears like a surprise for most people, is because of the deep rooted machine fetishism in our modernist culture.

To illustrate this with example of the history of the steam engine: In our classical modernist understanding, it was the genius of James Watt, who – by the mere power of his cognitive abstraction – invented the steam engine, which is commonly considered to have triggered the a chain reaction of technological development and expansion that was later called the “Industrial Revolution”. This story, however, completely disregards the fact that the steam engine was already know in Ancient Greece as well as in – at least as some suggest – 14th century China.

What discerns those two milieus from 18th century Great Britain is not the absence of great minds, but their different economic and ecological situations, both of which did not make large-scale use of the steam engine economically profitable. “The British shift to steam power was a response to the world market demand for great volumes of inexpensive cotton cloth. Much of this demand came from slave traders in West Africa and slave owners in America, and these very slaves supplied the British cotton textile industry with inexpensive raw material.”14 The massive increase of machine use is due to the complex global ecological web of exploitation of people and resources that became dependent in direct or indirect ways to the euphemistically named Commonwealth. The Cartesian division, fueling scientific thought at the same period, seems to have been designed to hide exactly these exploitative structures and – up to today – understands technology as a result of abstraction and genius, prolonging the modernist tradition heavily based on such dualisms. “Although engineering knowledge is a necessary condition for technology, it is no a sufficient one. (…) The feasibility of the metabolic flows which sustain an organism is determined by its ecological context, whereas the feasibility of the metabolic flows which sustain a modern technology is determined by the world market.”15Without unequal distributions of wealth technology in its modern form could ontologically not exist.

The fethishised understanding of machines is one of the key factors for the strong resilience of modernism. Even within ecological movements, this Promethean romanticism of technology as a means of freeing humanity from material constraints is wide spread. Many believe that our ecological problems can be solved by massive investments in so called Green Technology. In doing so, they ignore the ecological embeddedness of technology, the fact that every machine – be it solar power or wind mills – is based on social as well as material inequalities and will contribute to a further extension of them. Culturally, we machine-fetishists are prone to ignore that many of our machines – be it the iPhone or the solar panel – can only exist because of massive global price differences in labor and distributions of resources like the more and more needed Rare Earths (it is no wonder, that both of these factors appear predominantly in China, the world’s manufacturer of technological tools today). Industrial machines are based on modernist exploitation and dualisms and their use will only strengthen them.

This cultural trait is so dominant, that even one of the most prominent critics of the global modes of exploitation called capitalism, Karl Marx, was seduced by the same machine fetishism. Although he saw and massively criticized particularly the British inequalities that arose after the so called Industrial Revolution, he perceived technology “as innocent ‘in itself’”16 and merely proposed a different way of organizing society, without tackling technology as embodiment of a particular social and economic situation as such. Classical Marxism was not able to overcome modernism, for it was as machine-fetishist as its capitalist opponent. As Gilbert Simondon would have it, the exploitation is not only a social problem, but a problem of our culture that does not have a proper understanding and place for technology17. Therefore the social problems that arose with modernism could neither have been solved by capitalism or communism, both have been – unknowingly – trapped in fetishist’s blindnesses, that feeds the resilience of modernism. To overcome the current Status-Quo, we have to not only renounce the exploitation we see, but examine how the same exploitation is embedded in the relationship with our artifacts – how we are entangled with this exploitation, how our current social organization is based on it.

What Marx as well as most other critics missed, was “that the human reorganization of Nature tends to be a way of physically establishing social inequalities” and “that humans can stabilize their social relations by anchoring them to artifacts of various kinds”18 – in the modernist case: (industrial) machines. What distinguishes us from – for example – baboons – is that we build and stabilize or social relations into the artifacts we use.19 Modernist machines are therefore tools to stabilize the modernist world order of capitalism. If we believe we can solve the problems of modernism with same machines, we will always end up aggravating the situation despite of our best intentions. The fact that we do not immediately see the social injustices and ecological devastations machines cause “is made possible by displacing environmental impacts to other areas, populations, or social categories.”20

Although the wealthiest countries of the world (USA, Canada, greater Western Europe and Japan) are characterized by the most intense use of machines, the consequences of this use are shifted to the exploited areas, forming a central aspect of same exploitation. It is, therefore, no wonder that although – for example – Indias or Chinas per capita ecological footprint is much lower, you can see the devastations, the pollution and the dirt & downsides of industrialization much clearer than if you roam the streets of Amsterdam, Tokyo or Boston. The outsourcing of ecological catastrophe is part of the capitalist exploitation examined on a global level. This is visible today and will – with all likeliness – aggravate in the next decades, if we do not emancipate from our fetishist relationship with machines and see how they are a means of prolonging the Status-Quo. To overcome the strong resilience of modernism, we have to build a new, emancipated relationship with the artifacts that shape our world.

However, to emancipate from technology does not mean to get rid of it – as much as emancipation from your parents does not mean to kill them. Much rather, it entails a more coherent understanding of how we share and define our planet with machines. We will have to develop a culture that is more aware of them, that does neither fetishize nor hate the machines but understands their desires, needs and problems. For achieving this, the movement of Industrial music can be regarded as some kind of Avant-garde.

Loving the destruction

“it’s me
it’s me
I see nothing
nothing that I can drink
I bite my tongue
and drink what I can
open up another door
Do not open
Do not open
Do not open”21

“Hör mit Schmerzen” – Listen with pain or “Musik muss weh tun” – music has to be painfull – are some of the slogans of Industrial Music. Bands like Throbbing Gristle, Nitzer Ebb or Einstürzende Neubauten around Blixa Bargeld (to which the two slogans above are attributed) started to work with sometimes painful, always noisy industrial machinery in the late 70ies and 80ies. They appropriated bulldozers, jackhammers and chainsaws as musical instruments to deliberately disturb and sometimes even hurt people. There is a musical sub genre called Danger Music that is defined as “based on the concept that some pieces of music can or will harm either the listener or the performer.”22 Einstürzende Neubauten celebrated the tinnitus, Merzbow tried to find the most disturbing and painful noise, Throbbing Gristle idealized23 and sometimes even performed self-mutilation with machinery, Yamantake Eye’s band Hanatarashi once even drove a bulldozer into his audience. “Some of the band’s most infamous shows included Eye cutting a dead cat in half with a machete, strapping a circular saw to his back and almost cutting his leg off, and destroying part of a venue with a backhoe bulldozer by driving it through the back wall and onto the stage24“.

These kind of artistic endeavors tried at one level to reach new limits of provocation that went even further than Punk25, but on an other, more subtle, and sometimes maybe even unconscious level they tried to research new aesthetics and even beauty in our heavily machine-dependent, industrial and post-industrial worlds26. “Krach ist die moderne Melodie”27 – Noise is the modern melody. The pain resulting from the machine noise, which we encounter frequently in our every day urban lives, when we pass construction yards, train stations or bigger streets, is encountered with an affirmation, seeking to find a more a coherent – neither rejective nor fetishised – stance towards modernist machinery.

“Everything is Muzak
Everybody is becoming the same
How late might it be?
Power is a conveyor belt
and my ears are wounds
it is so shallow here.”28

To overcome machine fetishism, one will first have to look into the eye of what one so far called magic. One will no longer merely look into the smooth areas of our pseudo-Utopian surfaces, but will also incorporate the dirt, the devastation and noise of the machines that create them. This affirmation can help to develop a more coherent understanding of modernism, with all its up and downsides.

Of course, this is a dangerous atitude, for it involves incorporating and even identifying with all the dark sides of modernism, even fascism.29 But to look away from these irreducible and important parts of our world will not make the machines stop their dirty work. It will only make the outcome less controllable. If ecological art contains only images of harmony, beauty and peaceful coexistence, it will continue to serve the same function as art in modernism: it will, like Caspar David Friedrich, help us to look away from the harsh realities, creating small escapist bubbles of surface-beauty that hide the global exploitation from the exploiters.

an internet meme putting C.D. Friedrich into a post-industrial setting

New beauty

In turning our senses on the whole of our modernist world (rather than only the rare stretches of the fetishised beautiful, unspoiled or high-tech surfaces) one first encounters pain and horror, but after this first shock reaction, there is some beauty to be found in the rage of our machines. Rejecting modernist beauty does not mean to reject all beauty – it means to develop a new kind of beauty, one, that is more aware of the role of technology in our world.

After their first decade of violent noise music, Einstüzende Neubauten’s records became more and more calm and even harmonious (probably in a non-modern sense of the word). They did not stop using machinery and painful noise, but they slowly found a way of including it into something that a growing amount of people were willing to regard as beautiful. From 1993’s record Tabula Rasa, Ende Neu (1995) to Silence is Sexy (2000) and Perpetuum mobile (2004) there is a clear tendency towards another kind of beauty, that is sung and speculated about in Silence is Sexy30.

If we assume that the modernist machinery is getting ever more strong by our habit of ignoring or rejecting it, finding beauty in the beast31 is a first way of coping with it, of domesticating it and of emancipating from same machinery. In short: to find a way to live with modernism, benefiting from its advantages without unreflectedly destroying the ground on which we stand.

According to Gilbert Simondon, to develop an emancipated and just place for technology in our culture involves learning to see our machines as equal partners32. To overcome the alienation of machine fetishism (that results into a destructive ecological relationship) we have to learn that the idea of fully automated machines is a very primitive one. The independent (and lazy) human, surrounded by fully automated machines that do all his work, is a fetishized image that is unable to see the exploitation and destruction happening behind the pseudo-Utopian surface. As we have seen above, machines essentially require unequal flows of human as well as natural resources: if we do not do the work, it will be others who do it for us – even if this happens indirectly and on the other side of the world: in the Third World sweatshops producing our automated machines.

the studio of Sasu Ripatti

To emancipate from this primitive and ecologically hazardous image of the automated machine, we have to understand how our work can fit with the work of machines, finding an symbiotic relationship with them. A more advanced relationship is that with an “open machine, and the ensemble of open machines supposes the human as a permanent organizer, as a living interpreter of one machine in relation to another. Far from being the surveillant of a troupe of slaves, the human is a permanent organizer of a society of technical objects that need him like musicians need a conductor.”33

Most producers of electronic music34 were exactly those conductors of an ensemble of machines piled up in masses in their studio rooms. Sasu Ripatti aka. Vladislav Delay, one of the most acclaimed electronic music producers of the last 20 years, describes his studio as an instrument as much as he sees the world as an instrument35. His advise for producing good music is “learn from nature as much as you can”36 and he is using all sorts of machines, tools and found objects to generate his sounds. Simondon’s description of the conductor of technical objects could perfectly describe Ripattis way of music making: ”The conductor can direct his musicians only because, like them, and with a similar intensity, he can interpret the piece of music performed; he determines the tempo of their performance, but as he does so his interpretative decisions are affected by the actual performance of the musicians; in fact, it is through him that the members of the orchestra affect each other’s interpretation; for each of them he is the real, inspiring form of the group’s existence as group; he is the central focus of interpretation of all of them in relation to each other. This is how man functions as permanent inventor and coordinator of the machines around him. He is among the machines that work with him.”

Listening to records like The Four Quarters from 2005 or Visa from 2014, we can hear how the machines are lead by the conductor to play and interact freely. Ripatti is not a master of machinic slaves, which serve his autocratic purpose to create some shallow and standardized Vocoder-beauty like most contemporary Pophits are. He assembles his machines in a way that every one has its own, individual role, held together by human composition. Every sound can break out as it wants to a certain degree: Ripatti’s works are distinguished by an unpredictabilitly that forms its particular kind of beauty. It is this beauty, that expresses the sound of an egalitarian understanding of our machinic partners, necessary for a more ecological way of living in our highly technological world. In works of Electonic music like those of Vladislav Delay, we can find an artistic vision37 of what an ecological culture after the Anthropocene38 could look like.

Dirty surfaces

But today, of course, we are still far away from this ecological way of living – our mainstream cultures are deeply caught in the resilience of modernism, producing ever more blunt surfaces of simulated, romantic beauty, covering up the dirt of our machine fetishist world. Shine bright like a diamond in a constant loop, Everything that kills me makes me feel alive.

It is no wonder that Sasu Ripatti, a man who moved to the Finnish forests after 7 years of living in the heart of Berlin’s music business, avoids digital modes of Electronic Music39 production as much as possible. In his opinion, they are prone to produce and reproduce the same boring and shallow sounds, catered perfectly towards a neoliberal market logic, but having no real depth at all40. It is the shiny, beautiful and smooth surfaces, that cover up the catastrophic problems of our world.

Artistic approaches like that of Vladislav Delay or Einstürzende Neubauten discover an alternative, deeper beauty, that can lead us the way to a more ecological society. However, to create glimpses41 of this alternative way is not the only musical way one can describe as ecological. Another approach is to hijack the surfaces and subversively affirm42 their beauty, so the ugliness and horror inside the beautiful becomes uncannily apparent. In this discipline, the hyped Internet-genre of Vaporwave developed a certain mastery over the last years. Like in the Industrial Music discussed above, they try to reveal the pain in modernism. This time, however, the pain is not below the fethisist surfaces, but within them. The source of pain is somewhat turned upside down: its no longer the loud, hard industrial machines that cause the pain and inspired artists from the 80ies.

Today, in our long de-industrialised, post-industrial societies artists like Daniel Lopatin, Holly Herndon or James Ferraro on the contrary follow the smooth surfaces of the cyberspace, where everything is colorful and <3 , XD , o.O – to use a more adequate, though already again a little outdated language.

Of course, the Internet is as well upheld and essentially dependent on loud, dirty machines like huge server cities, electricity plants, production sites and silicium and other Rare Earth mines. But they are somehow hidden, far away from our view – and even if we would be close to them, most of us would still look away, into the infinite smoothness of our portable devices. However: this is still (hyperhyper?)-modernism, there is still pain. This is what artists that can be ascribed to the Vaporwave genre are able to reveal: on and in the shallowness they explore the pain that arises from this exhaustingly sterile beauty, from the Kitsch of the surface itself, that is beautiful and at the same time too much and hurtful43. They use cheap pop-melodies and cliché-Vocoder-voices all over, but contextualize them in such a way, that the effects are completely alienated and disturbing: suddenly, we realize the abyss behind the shallow beauty.

By doing so, they can make us aware of the real function of these surfaces: to cover-up. In a culture characterized by machine fetishism, it is interventions and détournements like these, that might contribute in waking us up from our modernist nightmare. That might free us from the hypnotization of our romantic surfaces covering up disaster and help us look at our real machinic world44.

As I hope to have been able to show in the last pages, ecological art can be much more than what it is usually assumed to be. Particularly some of the musical developments in machine music of the last decades contain a lot of different potentials to bring us closer to a non-romantic version of an ecological society. To create beautiful “ecological” surfaces must not be the task of ecological art, but much rather to help gaining a deeper understanding of our situation, its causes and its possible way-outs.

1 Ecological Art and Ethics – Adriana Bianco (1997) INTERVIEW with Nohra Corredorhttp://www.ecologicalart.org/ec.html
2 Compare for example: Michael Hampe, Tunguska, or the End of Nature: A Philosophical Dialogue, 2015.
3 Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence., 2016, https://doi.org/10.7312/mort17752.
4 Josef H Reichholf, Stabile Ungleichgewichte: die Ökologie der Zukunft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2009).
5 Compare my article “Be part of the problem, not the solution” at Entkunstung Jorunal: http://entkunstung.com/be-part-of-the-problem
6 In this I follow what my dear friend Lona Gaikis proposes to call an auditory turn in the arts, suggesting that there is a contemporary significant shift from the visual sense to the auditory sense as the main medium in the arts.
7For a good analysis of post-modernism see Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002).
8Alf Hornborg, Global Ecology and Unequal Exchange: Fetishism in a Zero-Sum World (Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2011).
9This dangerous attitude is not only deep routed within conservative elites, but as well among the left. Compare the enlightening article “Enemies of the People” by Angela Nagele: https://thebaffler.com/outbursts/enemies-people-nagle
10On an analysis of the role of the apocalypse in our discourses compare the chapter “ Merry Crisis and a Happy New Fear” in the book “To our Friends” by the Invisible Comitee.
11I am in preparation of a book in which I’ll try to give a bit more thorough analysis of the resilience of modernism.
12The following is a recapitulation of Alf Hornborg’s conept of machine fetishism. Compare: Hornborg, Global Ecology and Unequal Exchange; Alf Hornborg, Global Magic: Technologies of Appropriation from Ancient Rome to Wall Street, 2016.
13 Pommeranz The Grerat Divergence
14 S. 17 of Alf Hornborg: Global magic: technologies of appropriation from ancient Rome to Wall Street 2016.
15 S. 4 of Alf Hornborg: Machines as Manifestations of World-Systems: Implications for a Global Ontology of Technology. Sent to my by the author and to be published soon in Anthropological Theory.
16 S. 7 ibd.
17Simondon S. 165
18 S. 5 & 10 ibd.
19 S. S. Strum and Bruno Latour, “Redefining the social link: from baboons to humans,” Social Science Information 26, no. 4 (1987): 783–802. via ibd.
20 S. 15 aus Alf Hornborg: Global ecology and unequal exchange: fetishism in a zero-sum world, Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY 2011.
21 Blixa Bargeld, Stimme frißt Feuer (Berlin: Merve, 1988). German Original: “ich bin’s – ich sehe nichts – nichts was ich trinken kann – ich beiß mir in die Zunge – und trinke was ich kann – öffne eine andere Tür – Mach nicht auf – Mach nicht auf – Mach nicht auf” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFHnnhDo77U
22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danger_music (10.4.2017)
23 Compare the Lyrics of their track “A Debris of Murder”
24 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanatarash (10.4.17) Photos of the show can be found here: http://www5a.biglobe.ne.jp/~gin/rock/japan/hanatarasi/hanatarashi2/hanatarashi2.html(10.4.2017)
25 As Genesis P. Orridge, founding member of Throbbing Gristle, once said in an interview.
26 For a speculation on the connection between the emergence of Techno music and the disappearance of heavy industrial machinery from the Western world, see the text: Maschine-Werden by Jorinde Schulz and myself, published in Enegagée #3 – Begehren. Wien, Berlin, Utrecht: 2016. http://www.engagee.org/assets/-3-maschine_j%C3%B6rg_schulz.pdf
27 Bargeld, Stimme frißt Feuer.
28 Translated excerpt from “Die genaue Zeit” in Bargeld S.99. German Original: “Alles wird Muzak – Alle werden gleich – Wie spät mag es sein? – Die Macht ist ein laufendes Band – und meine Ohren sind Wunden – Es ist so flach hier”
29It is Adorno/Horkheimer’s central claim, that modernism necessarily produced fascism as a byproduct. To delve into the hidden realms of modernity thereby naturally involves a confrontation and sometimes even identification with fascism, as bands like Nitzer Ebb, Rammstein or Laibach demonstrate.
30Compare the Song “Beauty” on this record.
31In the earlier record “½ Mensch” from 1985 the band sings already about “a last beast in the heavens” – compare the song “Das letzte Biest am Himmel”
32p. 166 ff of Gilbert Simondon et al., Du mode d’existence des objets techniques (Paris: Aubier, 2012).
33p. 12 of Gilbert Simondon et al., Du mode d’existence des objets techniques (Paris: Aubier, 2012). – my translation
34This chapter is on electronic music production before the commercialization of digital music production with Ableton Live, which will be mentioned in the next chapter.
35In an interview with the magazine Future Music, Issue 285
36http://secretthirteen.org/secret-thirteen-interview-vladislav-delay/
37Our ocularcentristic language is limited in this regard, for it is much rather – and not by chance – an audion, than a vision, if this word would exist.
38Following Donna Haraway, I consider the Anthropocene not as a geological epoch, but as a transition phase we should leave behind as fast as possible. Compare Haraway, Donna: Staying with the trouble.
39Ricardo Villalobos shares the criticism on Ableton Live: https://www.residentadvisor.net/features/1128
40http://www.electronicbeats.net/the-waiting-game-an-interview-with-vladislav-delay/(ironically presented by Deutsche Telekom) – we do not necessary share his pessimism, for also this technology can be leanred and appropiated, we hope
41 Again a misleading oculacentric world
42 Laibach did the same with fashist aesthetics
43For the auditive experience of this weird mixture of pain and kitsch, which has an interesting, up-side-down resemblence of Industiral music, compare for example the two subsequent tracks “Still Life” and “Chrome Country” of Daniel Lopatin’s Oneohtrix Point Never’s 2015 Record R Plus Seven, Holly Herdon’s “Home” on 2015’s Platfrom or Burial’s track “Come down to us” on the EP Rival Dealer of 2013.
44In “Maschine-Werden” Becoming Machine (Translation in preparation) Jorinde Schulz and I propose to regard techno clubs as temples devoted to building new relationships to machines.

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September Listings

9/12/2017

HIGHLY SELECTIVE LISTINGS

ISSUE Project Room: September at ISSUE is one important and exciting event after another. Particular highlights are the live bill of William Basinski, Kara-Lis Coverdale, and Yatta (9/7); the panel “Butch Morris & Radical Black Composition,” part of the Brooklyn Book Festival (9/12); and at the end of the month the two day FOR/WITH series that puts together avant-garde composers and performers like Christian Wolff, Michael Pisaro, Annea Lockwood, and Nate Wooley.

Roulette: Intrigued by Cisco Bradley’s article in our previous issue (“The Emergence of a New Black Avant-Garde: Experimental Music and Text”)? Then check out these performers he featured: Matana Roberts with “breathe…” on the 14th, and James Brandon Lewis with electronics on the 18th. Start the month there too, with the Resonant Bodies Festival (Sep. 5–7), new and avant-garde music for the voice and vocal performers, with Theo Bleckmann, Joan La Barbara, Kamala Sankaram, Hai-Ting Chinn, and the absolutely uncategorizable and dazzling Jennifer Walshe.
September 6–7: Ryoji Ikeda supercodex at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The opening nights of the Crossing the Line Festival (produced by the French Institute Alliance Fran¸aise), are a live performance from Ikeda, master of the sublime in digital media. Ikeda transforms data into exact and starkly beautiful sounds and abstract images, this is a unique opportunity to see his process in all its glory.

September 8: Upper Wilds at Secret Project Robot. Upper Wilds is a new trio featuring Dan Friel, Zach Lehrhoff, and Aaron Siegel with a debut record out on Thrill Jockey, Guitar Module 2017. Hyperactive and hyper-melodic, Friel’s songs get a more guitar-forward treatment after his 2015 largely electronic solo record Life; live, Lehrhoff and Siegel add a human touch on bass and drums. YVETTE, Sunwatchers, and GOLD DIME round out the bill.

September 9: WFMU’s Transpacific Sound Paradise at Issyra Gallery Rob Weisberg will be broadcasting from the Hoboken space from 6 to 9 p.m. Admission is free. The evening features live percussion-driven music from the likes of Martin Vejarano and the NYC Gaita Club, Tuk Buki Trio featuring Smokey Hormel, Akoko Nante Ensemble, and Maracatu NY.
September 8–9: 50th Anniversary of JOSHUA LIGHT SHOW at NYU Skirball. Way back when the current olds were young, psychedelia was, at its best, a way to get the mind of of the learned strictures of consumerist, bourgeois models. Take a trip there, and hopefully remain, via Boss Hog, Man Forever, and the wonderful electronic musician Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith—keep an ear out for the October 6 release of her gorgeous new album, The Kid

September 15: Protomartyr at Monty Hall. Detroit’s Protomartyr mark the release of their latest record Relatives in Descent. On their first record for Domino, the band still sounds like the musical equivalent of a Jim Jarmusch movie, one of the early black-and-white ones; or maybe also an imaginary film by a hypothetical American Wim Winders, Der Himmel über Detroit, with Vincent D’Onofrio in the Peter Falk role. The Gotobeds and Big Quiet open.

September 16: Sara Serpa at the Drawing Center. Serpa moves easily between traditional jazz vocalism, improvisation, and new music, and has one of the most elegant and beautiful voices on the scene. She’ll be performing her own piece, Recognition, as part of John Zorn’s The Stone at the Drawing Center series.
September 21: Chris Lightcap’s SuperBigmouth at Shapeshifter. Lightcap is a superb bassist, with a handle on some of the heaviest grooves out there. And by evidence of his albums with his ensemble Bigmout, he’s a superb bandleader as well. This gig will be the premiere performance for his new SuperBigmouth, a mashup of Bigmouth and his other group, Superette.
September 21–25: Blank Out at the Park Avenue Armory. The unique space at the Armory means one-of-a-kind experiences, and composer Michel van der Aa’s opera on the life and work of South African poet Ingrid Jonker promises just that. Soprano Miah Persson will be the sole live performer, accompanied by a 3D film that features baritone Roderick Williams and the Nederlands Kamerkoor.

September 27–30: Jonathan Berger’s My Lai, featuring Rinde Eckert, Kronos Quartet, and Vân-Áhn Võ at BAM. Kronos Quartet and Vietnamese musician Vân-Áhn Võ, along with tenor and all around astonishing performer Rinde Eckert, perform Berger’s monodrama, which approaches the Vietnam War massacre from through the lens of Army Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson Jr., who tried to intervene to stop the murder by the U.S. government, imagined in Harritt Scott Chessman’s libretto as looking back from his deathbed.
September 29–30: Maryanne Amacher’s Adjacencies at The Kitchen. The late Maryanne Amacher is primarily remembered, if only by a few, as one great electronic composers of the 20th century. Put the emphasis on composer: she created music for a variety of mediums through a variety of means, and these concerts are the posthumous realization (via Blank Forms and Amy Cimini and Bill Dietz) of a score not heard since 1966. Yarn/Wire percussionists Ian Antonio and Russell Greenberg play, Daniel Neumann and Woody Sullender manipulate the signals.

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DEAD DETROIT LIES DREAMING: TECHNO (ANTI-) ACCELERATIONISM

9/10/2017

By Benjamin Noys

Detroit may not be dead, but the corpse has already been consumed. Detroit is the site for symmetrical fantasies of dystopian social collapse and urban disintegration, on the one hand, and utopian urban gardening and the ‘greening’ of post-Fordism, on the other. It forms a type of national sacrifice zone – the sacrifice, which is to say the destruction, of a certain dream of urbanism. This is not only the classically Fordist dream of the city of production, a dream that gave the lie to the reality of white flight and racialized employment and housing, but also the post-Fordist dream of the transition to automated production-lines as exit strategy. Dreams died. Detroit is now confined to the past, but as an image of the future, as a threat, to the failure to embrace the ‘progress’ and ‘development’ that remains the capitalist promise, no matter how tattered and frayed.

In between these dreams lie the dreams of Detroit and the dreams of Detroit Techno. ‘Detroit Techno City’. Juan Atkins, creator of ‘Techno City’ under the name Cybotron in 1984,i said, in 1993, “You can look at the state of the city as a plus. When the new technology came in, Detroit collapsed as an industrial city, but Detroit is Techno City. We’re at the forefront here.”ii In the lyrics of ‘Techno City’: ‘techno city/ hope you enjoy your stay / welcome to techno city/ you will never want to go away’.

Detroit Renaissance Center under construction

That ‘forefront’ was not to last, with the musicians themselves, understandably, fleeing decaying Detroit. The techno city utopia of a new use of technology, of new possibilities for those living under the skyscrapers of the Renaissance Centre skyscraper complex, completed in 1980,iii did not materialize. Metroplex (a Detroit techno label founded by Juan Atkins) did not take place. If the Centre was conceived of as a ‘city within a city’, precisely an act against the city, another site of the implosion of the city and its deterrence,iv then ‘techno city’ remained only the dream of something beyond the ghetto. In another irony, the film Robocop (1987), the vision of urban violence and destitution for a Detroit of 2028, would use locations in Dallas, including their Renaissance Tower, for the headquarters of Omni Consumer Products.v The films screenwriter recalled, in 2013, that ‘the script for Robocop, a futuristic tale of decline, had a note scribbled on the top of the first page. It read: “The future left Detroit behind.”’vi

Dallas stands in for Detroit in Robocop

Detroit techno is now a musical form over thirty-years old, further away from today than 50s rock-and-roll was from my youth. Detroit Techno has been left behind. There is an ironic effect of obsolescence, which is ironic as the futures sketched by Detroit techno never arrived. They remain as encoded ‘alien’ messages from a future that did not take place. The Red Planet, a record label from early 90s Detroit, was here once on earth. Now the red planet is the site of NASA fantasies of alien ‘life’ or ‘planet B’, as an unlikely escape route from a dying earth. As North America was to maritime exploration, so Mars is to ideologues of space settlement.vii There is no planet B.viii Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora is the novel of that. Already Detroit Techno could be understood as that message. There is also, however, no planet earth, for the brothers from another planet.ix Our planet is estranged.

Cover of ‘The Beginning’ by Rhythim is Rhythim (aka Derrick May)

This sci-fi imaginary, one of the central forms of post-industrial Afro-Futurism,x was already a mix of kitsch, anachronism, mimesis of the hardened and alienated,xi and acceleration. It was a ‘night drive thru Babylon’.xiiThe music is the driving sound of the future, but also a sometimes-stuttering swirl, a movement forwards and backwards, a repetition that alters. Something new takes place. Something old takes place as well. Older dreams from the Fordist space race, as well as the new dreams inspired by robot production lines at Ford. The sci-fi imaginary is futurist and retro, placed on the fault line of those who did not belong to either moment. The wanderings of the former slave. The wandering that was not included within humanity, but was put to work, until there was, supposedly, no work left.xiii Acceleration, yes, why not even accelerationism. Escape is necessary, but also impossible. Detroit Techno was the sound of the impasse.

There is no true continuum within the Detroit Techno moment, hardcore or otherwise.xiv Instead, implosion of the continuum. Not that there was no desire for the future or for the smooth passage out of there. Teleologies were used as interruption: teleologies of guerrilla war (Underground Resistance), teleologies of eroticism (Blake Baxter, ‘the prince of techno’), teleologies of future classicism (Derrick May), teleologies of drive (Juan Atkins), to name only some. Something was dreamt. Something was desired. A proliferation of desires out of the immanence of a dying Detroit. Impoverishment, ‘a therapy of destruction’, and so ‘a learning to desire’, a form of immanence (which is perhaps why Techno is so easy to speak about in Deleuzian terms.xv This was an immanence that was not simply ‘smooth’, not simply flux and flow, but one that interrupted this space and desired another. It dreamt strange dreams and even death died.

It might still seem irresistible to turn to the language of accelerationism, especially cold accelerationism, to grasp the current state of techno.xvi The ice age of techno is our age. I have suggested, however, that this age is both continuous, in the sense techno was icy from the start, and also interrupted or disrupted, in the sense this ice age might be over. The psychoanalyst Sandor Ferenczi speculated that individual human development (ontogeny) recapitulated the development of the human species (phylogeny). As the development of the human species was marked by the catastrophe of the ice age, so individuals re-experienced this in the ‘latency period’ of our sexual development, between childhood polymorphous perversity and adolescent sexual re-awakening.xvii Trauma drove development and trauma also interrupted development, making a mockery of the future as we turn again to the past, to past traumas. Even if this was a fantasy, as even Ferenczi conceded, it is a powerful fantasy or myth of the psyche as fractured, as frozen, a glacial sheet in the head and body.

A fracture in the Antarctic ice sheet

Techno’s coldness seems another figuration of this catastrophic interruption and caesura. Against the smooth images of the emerging future and accelerated pathways to utopia, there is another side of the frozen catastrophe. That might be thawing, as seen in the retreat of the polar ice caps, but this thaw, in the case of techno, leaves it as a cold remnant in the ice. A frozen moment. The naked lunch. To switch to another form of sci-fi imagery we have John Carpenter’s ‘the thing’, awakened from the ice and probably ‘pissed off’. A mimic, a creature that wants to escape. A creature that will condemn humanity to extinction in 27,000 hours if it does. The mimic escaped. Humanity is not yet extinct. The mimic may have succeeded in spreading, but became unfrozen in the process. The moment is gone. Little remains.

Still from John Carpenter’s The Thing

The cold that comes now might be Roger Callois’s proto-fascist ‘Winter Wind’.xviii The winter is the time of orgies, festivals, celebrations. For Callois, the rising winter wind is ‘harsh, arctic’, and one ‘that kills the fragile, the sickly, and the birds, one that does not let them get through the winter’.xix It is a wind that cleanses the world, while those who remain inside warm themselves, outside roam ‘hardy nomads’ who are ‘intoxicated with the glacial, tonic violence’ of the wind on their faces.xx The creep of the glaciers will introduce the need for selection, a word already taking-on sinister meaning, before those who eyes pierce through our appearance; those with signs of health will thrive, those who are weak die. A new consecrated group of the strong will appear. While eerie and disturbing in light of incipient fascism, today the winter wind blows in the cold forms of social abandonment performed under capitalist crisis. Services are withdrawn, fires rage unchecked, water is unavailable or poisoned, and the police turn up to kill and leave, survival is all that remains. It can get very cold in Detroit in winter.

i https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3NfI9jbUGI

ii https://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2010/feb/15/cybotron-techno-city

iii https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance_Center

iv Baudrillard, ‘The Beaubourg-Effect: Implosion and Deterrence’, trans. Rosalind Krauss and Annette Michelson,October 20 (Spring, 1982): 3-13.

vhttp://www.dallasfilmcommission.com/robocop-dallas-locations-then-now/?
doing_wp_cron=1495533551.0528800487518310546875

vi http://edition.cnn.com/2013/07/25/business/robocop-neumeier-detroit-bankruptcy/index.html

vii http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2011-02/after-earth-why-where-how-and-when-we-might-leave-our-home-planet#page-2

viii https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/big-turnout-expected-for-march-for-science-in-dc/2017/04/21/67cf7f90-237f-11e7-bb9d-8cd6118e1409_story.html?utm_term=.70675409bc40

ix https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDKSmpe1rhQ

x Kodwo Eshun, ‘Further Considerations on Afrofuturism’, CR: The New Centennial Review 3.2 (2003): 287−302.

xi http://www.e-flux.com/journal/43/60197/mimesis-of-the-hardened-and-alienated-social-practice-as-business-model/
xii https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5kKUtTX0yU

xiii http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/wanderings-slave-black-life-and-social-death

xivhttps://www.thewire.co.uk/in-writing/essays/the-wire-300_simon-reynolds-on-the-hardcore-continuum_introduction

xv Frederic Jameson, The Seeds of Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 83, p. 90.

xvi http://www.electronicbeats.net/pattern-recognition-vol-9-cold-forecast/

xvii Sándor Ferenczi, ‘The Ice-Age of Catastrophes’ (1915), in Selected Writings, ed. and intro. Julia Borossa (London: Penguin, 1999), pp. 125–6.

xviii Roger Callois, ‘The Winter Wind’ (1938), in The College of Sociology, 1937–1939, ed. Denis Hollier, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), pp.32–42.

xix Callois, ‘The Winter Wind’, p. 42.

xx Ibid.

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HOW DO YOU MAKE MUSIC A BODY WITHOUT ORGANS? GILLES DELEUZE AND EXPERIMENTAL ELECTRONICA

9/5/2017

by CHRISTOPH COX

Gilles Deleuze wrote about music only in passing. Throughout his philosophical corpus, one findsa scattering of musical examples andreferences to the classical modernists (Berg, Messiaen, Varèse,Stockhausen, etc.) who were clearly his cultural heroes. Yet Deleuze never wrote about music with the same depth and dedication that he devoted to literature, cinema, and painting. It might seem odd,then, that, in the nine years since his suicide, Deleuze’s philosophy has come to be closely linkedwith music and, moreover, with a musical milieu very different from the one that he called his own.

For Deleuze has become the intellectual hero of experimental “electronica”—electronic music with its roots in hip hop, house, and techno rather than in the tradition of classical modernism. This relationship was initially marked by the release, a year after Deleuze’s death, of two compilations ofexperimental electronica presented in his honor: Mille Plateaux’s In Memoriam Gilles Deleuze and Sub Rosa’s Folds and Rhizomes for Gilles Deleuze. Since then, the discourse around electronica has referenced Deleuze at every turn.

What accounts for the curious connection between this philosophical ontologist and a music sceneabout which he knew little and wrote nothing? It is that Deleuze helps us to think how music mightbecome a body without organs. This indeed is the achievement of contemporary electronica in itsvarious forms (minimalist house and techno, ambient and noise composition, etc.). Thisachievement, however, is made possible by a genealogical series that connects heterogeneousmoments in the history of 20th-century sonic experimentation, moments that are marked by a singlepowerful trait: the impulse to deterritorialize musical form and substance.

The Plane of Consistency and the Body without Organs

What is a body without organs?

Rewind. All of Deleuze’s philosophy is an effort to construct a post-theological, naturalist ontology that reconceives beings in terms of becomings and events, actual existents in terms of virtual potentialities, fixed forms in terms of mobile particles and flows, homogeneous structures in terms of heterogeneous aggregates and connections, and hierarchical organizations in terms of a smooth horizontal surface populated solely by dynamic singularities, affects, intensities, speeds, and haecceities.1 Beings, forms, structures, and organizations, Deleuze tells us, are simply ways in which an essentially fluid and heterogeneous nature is temporarily contracted, captured, contained, or slowed down to the point at which its movement is imperceptible.

The theologian or philosopher of being (the Platonist, the Christian, the Kantian) will always assert the existence and primacy of a transcendent plane (a “plane of transcendence” or “plane of organization,” Deleuze calls it) that directs, organizes, and forms nature and becoming from without. (The philosopher of being says: beings are what becomes, the subject organizes experience, providence or progress directs the movement of history, the score governs musical performances, etc.) Yet, true to the naturalism of his philosophical heroes—Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Bergson—Deleuze asserts that there is only one plane, “the plane of immanence” or “the plane of consistency,” and that the existence of all beings and organizations can and must be accounted for by reference to materials and processes operating on this plane alone.2

“Plane of consistency” is one name for Deleuze’s basic conception of nature and the world. Another is the body without organs (BwO): “the unformed, unorganized, nonstratified, or destratified body and all its flows,” “that glacial reality where the alluvions, sedimentations, coagulations, foldings, and recoilings that compose an organism—and also a signification and a subject—occur.” In short, the BwO is the virtual field of the body, the domain of the basic particles and forces (“singularities,” “affects,” “intensities,” “ideas,” “perceptions,” etc.) from which an actual organism composed. “[I]n order to extract useful labor from the BwO,” Deleuze writes with Félix Guattari, the organism “imposes upon it forms, functions, bonds, dominant and hierarchized organizations, organized transcendences.” Yet, Deleuze and Guattari insist that the BwO always subsists and reasserts itself: “the body suffers from being organized in this way, from not havingsome other sort of organization, or no organization at all”; hence “a body without organs [. . .] is continually dismantling the organism, causing asignifying particles or pure intensities to pass ocirculate.”3 Through experimental practices, Deleuze and Guattari tell us, we can make ourselves BwOs.4

So long as we think of the body as a given functional form, says Deleuze alluding to Spinoza, we will not know what a body can do, what it is capable of.5 To become a BwO is to destratify the body, to reconnect it with the intensive, impersonal, transhuman matter that composes and surrounds it, to open it up to new connections and assemblages, to explore the innumerable things it can do beyond the restricted set of habitual actions that characterize the organ-ized body.6 When one does this, one transforms the body from a given entity with a specified functionality and direction of activity to a construction site of exploration and connection. One no longer actualizes merely the specific set of affects that constitute, for example, Man as a normal, rational, heterosexual, productive human being but the entire (or, at least a larger) range of affects of which this body is capable.7

Fast Forward: An ontology of being—that is, an “arborescent,” taxonomical ontology of things, forms, and species—will insist on making distinctions between nature, the human body, and music. (Music, it says, is a particular product of human beings who are particular parts of nature.) But Deleuze’s ontology of events, becomings, and haecceities does not distinguish in this way. For Deleuze, a body is simply a contraction of forces and flows. “A body can be anything,” he writes; “it can be an animal, a body of sounds, a mind or an idea; it can be a linguistic corpus, a social body, a collectivity.”8 If music can be a body or an organism, so, too, can it become a body without organs, a plane of consistency, or plane of immanence. With reference to John Cage and the classic minimalists Steve Reich and Philip Glass, Deleuze and Guattari hint at this possibility:

Certain modern musicians oppose the transcendent plan(e) of organization, which is said to have dominated all of Western classical music, to the immanent sound plane, which is always given along with that to which it gives rise, brings the imperceptible to perception, and carries only differential speeds and slownesses in a kind of molecular lapping: the work of art must mark seconds, tenths and hundredths of seconds. Or rather it is a question of a freeing of time, Aeon, a nonpulsed time for a floating music, as Boulez says, an electronic music in which forms are replaced by pure modifications of speed. It is undoubtedly John Cage who first and most perfectly deployed this fixed sound plane, which affirms process against all structure and genesis, a floating time against pulsed time or tempo, experimentation against any kind of interpretation, and in which silence as sonorous rest also marks the absolute state of movement.9

Suggested by Deleuze and Guattari passing, it is this musical idea that I want to unfold here. In the process, we will see that Cage and the classic minimalists, to whom Deleuze and Guattari attribute this practice, mark only a few of the many efforts at making music a BwO. Indeed, over the course of the twentieth century, through a kind of uneven development and by way of clandestine connections, each of the major domains of Western music (classical, jazz, and rock) has been submitted to this process—a process that experimental electronica takes to its nth power.

The Classical Work of Music and Its Deterritorialization

The 18th and 19th centuries in Europe saw the development and perfection of the classical work of music. Emerging from a fluid and non-literate musical practice, the classical tradition gradually instituted fixed works of art embodied in transcendent musical scores.10 Once thoroughly temporaland open-ended, existing only as evanescent performance andnon-identical iterations, music became a thing, a being, a kind of Platonic model that governed performance from without and in fidelity to which it was judged. This musical work (the score or Platonic ideal of the work) was (and is) not only atemporal but silent. Instantiated in musical performances, it nonetheless remained outside of their temporal and physical flow.

The classical work is governed by another transcendent mode of organization: tonality. The tonal system insures that musical unfolding is always tied to the tonic, from which it emerges, to which it returns, and which governs its selection of pitches along the way. Thus is musical becoming tied to being in the form of origin and telos; and thus is that thoroughly temporal art, music, transformed into a mere passage between those two fixed points. The sonata, song, and rondo forms that developed concurrently with the tonal system provided more overarching conceptions of development, tying musical becoming to formal and narrative expectations (absence-presence, conflict-resolution, etc.).11 Finally, the classical work found its apotheosis in the symphony, performed by an orchestra that is a vast hierarchy of parts, levels, and structures comparable to amilitary organization, governed by the authoritarian conductor, himself subservient to that absent (transcendent) genius, the musical composer.12

Such was the elaborate organ-ization of music at the beginning of the 20th century. And it is this that the vanguard music of the 20th-century slowly dismantled. Arnold Schoenberg accomplished arguably the first deterritorialization of the classical work. Between 1907 and 1909, Schoenberg abandoned tonality altogether, allowing his music to flow over the entire range of the chromatic scale. As such, his atonal pieces are fluid and without any inclination to resolve. No longer unfolding according to given external principles, they force the listener to follow their errant path from within. But Schoenberg would soon reterritorialize his music via the twelve-tone system, which again constrained tonal variation and directed musical development according to a pre-given scheme. Indeed, in the decades that followed, this reterritorialization became more and more severe, as Integral Serialism submitted every musical element (rhythm, dynamics, texture, etc.) to serial organ-ization.

Several other musical personae contributed to the deterritorialization of the classical work. Notable among them was Edgard Varèse, who freely abandoned the term “music” in favor of the description “organized sound,” calling himself “not a musician, but ‘a worker in rhythms, frequencies, and intensities.’”13 Varèse equally abandoned any real interest in form, pitch, or melody. Instead, he turned to the substance of sound itself, to the exploration of timbre, color, and loudness.14 In place of properly musical descriptions, he characterized his compositions in richlyphysical terms, drawing conceptual resources from chemistry, geometry, and geography. “Thinking of form as a point of departure, a pattern to be followed, a mold to be filled,” Varèse wrote, is a mistake. “Form is a result—the result of a process,” an impersonal process that, he believed,mirrors the formation of crystals:

There is an idea, the basis of an internal structure, expanded and split into differentshapes or groups of sound constantly changing in shape, direction, and speed, attracted and repulsed by various forces. The form of the work is the consequenceof this interaction. Possible musical forms are as limitless as the exterior forms of crystals.15

Prophetically anticipating the advent of electronic music and noise composition, Varèse wrote in 1936:

When new instruments will allow me to write music as I conceive it, the movementof sound-masses, of shifting planes, will be clearly perceived in my work, taking the place of the linear counterpoint. When these sound-masses collide, the phenomena of penetration and repulsion will seem to occur. Certain transmutations taking place on certain planes will seem to be projected onto other planes, moving at different speeds and at different angles. There will no longer be the old conception of melodyor interplay of melodies. The entire work will be a melodic totality. The entire workwill flow as a river flows.16

Varèse’s American successors, John Cage and Morton Feldman, further deterritorialized the musical work. Cage’s major contribution was to liberate music from human subjectivity, thereby opening up the “transcendental” or “virtual” field of music. 17 Cage insisted that music precedes and exceeds human beings. “Music is permanent,” he wrote “only listening is intermittent.”18 “Chance” and “silence” were his transports into this transcendental domain. “Chance” procedures allowed the composer to bypass his subjective preferences and habits in order to make way for sonic conjunctions and assemblages that were not his own, or, indeed, anybody’s (an “impersonal” and “preindividual” music, as Deleuze would call it). And “silence,” for Cage, named a sort of musical plane of immanence: not the absence of sound (an impossibility, he pointed out), but the absence of intentional sound that opens our ears to liberated sound molecules.19

Feldman, too, dedicated himself to exploring this “transcendental” sonic field. Claiming no interest in musical systems, structures, or forms, Feldman tried simply to provide a space for the experience of sounds themselves: their births, lives, and deaths. “I don’t have any secret,” Feldman once remarked, “but if I do have a point of view, it’s that sounds are very much like people. And if you push them, they push you back. So, if I have a secret: don’t push the sounds around.”20 As a result, Feldman’s compositions (or “assemblages,” as he preferred to call them21) drift, devoid of syntax or connective tissue, concerned only with the growth and decay of sounds, which glide by a different rates and speeds.22

Musique Concrète and Elektronische Musik: Schiz/Flux and the Univocity of Sound

An even greater shock to the classical musical work came with the advent of electronic music in its two basic forms: musique concrète (the tape composition that emerged from Pierre Schaeffer’s Paris studio in the late 1940s) and elektronische Musik (the classic electronic music of the European and American studios established in Cologne, Milan, and Princeton during the 1950s). Both practices bypassed musical notation and the standard chain-of-command that ran from the composer through the conductor to the performer and listener. Instead, concrète and electronic compositions were experimentally constructed in the studio by a composer who was also the sole performer. At the same time, musique concrète and elektronische Musik foregrounded the univocity of the aural plane. Recording tape effectively dissolved the distinction between “music,” “sound,” and “noise,” providing a neutral surface that could register any sound whatsoever and make it the raw material for composition. Hence, musique concrète could dispense with the entire tonal and instrumental apparatus, ignoring traditional musical sonorities and the various discrete instruments and instrumental families that produce them. The electronic signal equally affirmed the univocity of sound, folding the entire musical apparatus back onto a stream of electrons generated by an oscillator. Emerging from this univocal sonic phylum, electronic sounds are distinguished solely by speeds and slownesses, by the contraction or dilation of flows by way of filters and modulators—a fact beautifully illustrated in Stockhausen’s Kontakte, where, half way through the piece, a gurgling sweep is slowed down to the point at which it is heard as a woody pulse.

Though distinguished by the sources of their material (musique concrète works with found sounds, elektronische Musik with sounds built, or “synthesized,” from scratch), both compositional practices operated essentially by way of collage or montage: the cutting and splicing of sonic fragments to create musical assemblages. As such, they very literally model the “schiz” and “flux” that characterize Deleuze and Guattari’s “desiring machines,” those basic connections between singularities and intensities that arise from and dissolve back into the body without organs. Indeed, in relation to the highly regulated and controlled body of classical music, musique concrète and elektronische Musik are polymorphously perverse, celebrating the ability to connect any part (or sound) with any other. This is particularly evident in musique concrète, which (like its heir, turntablism) delighted in connecting, for example, piano tones and percussive knocks with the sounds of train whistles, spinning tops, pots and pans, and canal boats.23 As such, a musique concrète composition is what Deleuze calls a becoming or a rhizome, “a pure and dispersed anarchic multiplicity, without any unity or totality, whose elements are welded and pasted together by the real distinction or the very absence of a link.”24

Like Cage and Feldman, musique concrète and elektronische Musik also disclosed music’s transcendental dimension. Though they began with documentary material, musique concrète composers such as Pierre Schaeffer celebrated the fact that tape music could give access to sound itself, liberated from source or reference.25 Via various techniques (eliminating a sound’s attack or decay, slowing it down or speeding it up, playing it backwards, etc.), Schaeffer and others succeeded in abstracting sounds from their sources, thus eliminating all referentiality and shortcircuiting the auditory habits of listeners. Their ability to do this was aided by the fact that tape music was “performed” without any visual element to speak of: no performers or instruments, just pure sonic matter emitting from loudspeakers.

As such, electronic music is often criticized as “cold,” “impersonal,” “dehumanized,” “abstract.” Indeed, these descriptions are apt. Electronic music is anti-humanist music and ought to be affirmed as such. It opens up music to something beyond the human, the subject, and the person: the veritable non-organic life of sound that precedes any actual composition or composer, the virtual realm of preindividual and prepersonal sonic singularities and affects. Rather than a music of human desire (the singer, the performer), it is a music of machinic desire: the desiring machines of music and of the musical body without organs.

Minimalism: Non-Pulsed Time and the Plane of Immanence

Electronische Musik and musique concrète liberated sonic singularities and affects. But it was classic minimalism that made these fully audible. Minimalism also further challenged the classical work of music by opening it up to the outside and by constructing an immanent musical plane. Trained in the serial tradition, La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Pauline Oliveros, Tony Conrad and others came to form links with non-classical musics, notably rock, jazz, and non-Western traditions such as Ghanaian drumming, Indonesian gamelan, and Indian raga. Instead of writing for classical ensembles, they were inspired by rock bands to form their own bands, for whom they composed and with whom they performed.

More importantly, the minimalists were guided by an immanent conception of musical process and a new conception of musical time. They rejected the idea that music should be governed by a “plane of transcendence,” a hidden principle that guides and constrains music from without. Instead, they were interested in “immanent” musical processes that composer and listener alike could inhabit and on which they could be carried along. “Music no longer has a mediative function, referring to something outside itself,” wrote Philip Glass, “but it rather embodies itself without any mediation. The listener will therefore need a different approach to listening, without the traditional concepts of recollection and anticipation. Music must be listened to as a pure sound-event, an act without any dramatic structure.”26 Along the same lines, Reich wrote in a methodological essay: “The use of hidden structural devices in music never appealed to me. I am interested in perceptible processes. I want to be able to hear the process happening throughout the sounding music.” “While performing and listening to gradual musical processes,” he continued, “one can participate in a particular liberating and impersonal kind of ritual. Focusing in on the musical process makes possible that shift of attention away from he and she and you and me outwards towards it.”27

This is precisely what Deleuze calls “non-pulsed time,” as opposed to the “pulsed time” of classical composition. “Pulsed time” has nothing to do with regular, repetitive pulses (a key feature of musical minimalism to which we will turn in a moment). Rather, it is the time of narrative development. It organizes the musical piece into identifiable sections and landmarks, allowing the listener to know where s/he is and where s/he is going; and it sets up conflicts to be resolved that actively solicit the listener’s sense of narrative time. Hence, Deleuze tells us, pulsed time is the time of the Bildungsroman, the novel of education, which “measures, or scans, the formation of a subject.”28

The “non-pulsed time” of the minimalists is something else entirely. As Reich notes, it is totally impersonal and processual, caring nothing for “he and she and you and me” or for “hidden structural devices.” Minimalist compositions are not organ-ized by the composer (“My music has no overall structure but generates itself at each moment,” Glass has said; “once the process is set up and loaded, it runs by itself,” notes Reich)29; nor do they chart the progress of a hero, whether it’s the composer, the solo instrument, or the listening subject. Rather, as Belgian minimalist Wim Mertens notes, “[t]he music exists for itself and has nothing to do with the subjectivity of the listener [. . . .]; the subject no longer determines the music, as it did in the past, but the music now determines the subject.”30 That is, the non-pulsed time of minimalist composition places composer, performer, and listener on a wave of becoming that flows, shifts, and changes, but extremely gradually so that one loses any clear sense of chronological time (what Deleuze calls “Chronos”) and instead is immersed in a floating, indefinite time, a pure stationary process (Deleuze’s “Aeon”).31 Hence the extraordinary length of so many minimalist compositions (e.g., Glass’s Music in Twelve Parts is over four-hours long, Terry Riley’s Poppy Nogood’s All Night Flight lasted twice that long, and La Monte Young’s Theater of Eternal Music performances lasted indefinitely). Immersed in such extended pieces, one loses track of form and clock time and instead becomes aware of something else: intensive duration (“time in its unstructured existence,” as Morton Feldman put it).32 One also becomes aware of what Deleuze describes as “speeds and slownesses between unformed elements, and affects between nonsubjectified powers, as a function of a plane that is necessarily given at the same time as that to which it gives rise (the plane of consistency or composition).”33 Reich puts it in more musical terms: such extended, gradual musical processes open one’s ears to “[t]hat area of every gradual [. . .] musical process, where one hears the details of the sound moving out away from intentions, occurring for their own acoustic reasons [. . . .] the impersonal, unintended, psychoacoustic by-products of the intended process [. . . . ] sub-melodies heard within repeated melodic patterns, stereophonic effects due to listener location, slight irregularities in performance, harmonics, difference tones, etc.”34 Minimalist pioneer Tony Conrad offers a similar description: “Pitched pulses, palpitating beyond rhythm and cascading the cochlea with a galaxy of synchronized partials, reopen the awareness of the sine tone—the element of combinatorial hearing. Together and in pairs in all combinations, the partials combine. The ear responds uniquely.”35 In short, minimalist practice forgoes not only musical form but fixed and deliberate notes and tones, releasing instead what Deleuze calls “sonorous molecules.”

To generate and focus attention on these sonic particles and intensities, the minimalists developed a number of musical strategies. The long duration of performances is one of them (one that, perhaps, they owe to Feldman). But there is another, even more fundamental enabler: the fabrication of a plane of consistency on which these particles and intensities could be distributed and from which they could be made to appear. In the early 1970s, critic and composer Tom Johnson (responsible for the tag “minimalism”) described it this way:

The form of their pieces is always flat. They are not interested in building to climaxes, or in manipulating tension and relaxation, or in working with large contrasts of any kind. They keep their music flat, never allowing it to rise above or fall below a certain plane. In a way, this flatness is related to the idea of ‘all over’ painting. In both cases, there is an attempt to make all areas of the form equal in importance. The term ‘static’ is often used in reference to their music, since it never leaves this one level and never seems to be moving toward anything. Traditionally this word has been considered derogatory when applied to music, and in many quarters it still is. But in listening to the music of these composers, one soon discovers that static does not necessarily mean boring, the way we always thought it did. Many interesting things can happen all on one plane. A pitch changes slightly, a rhythm is altered, something fades in or out. They are not big changes, but they are changes, and there are more than enough of them to sustain one’s interest, provided that he can tune in on this minimal level.36

Minimalist music constructed this plane via two different means: the drone (La Monte Young, Tony Conrad, Pauline Oliveros, Charlemagne Palestine) and the pulse (Terry Riley, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Arnold Dreyblatt). Both provide a kind of uniform surface on which sonic micro-particles are distributed. Continuous or repetitious, both highlight duration, process, and difference. They instruct the listener: “Don’t listen for harmonic movement, formal development, or narrative progression. You won’t find any. Instead, listen to process, moment-to-moment movement, small shifts and changes in timbre, texture, loudness, speed.” Instead of the measured arc of the musical narrative, they focus attention on the flat plane and the nomadic elements distributed upon it.

Free Jazz as Anti-Production

The history of jazz reveals a movement of deterritorialization similar to that to which classical music was subjected. Established on the productive tension between composition and improvisation, the tune and its dismemberment, territory and deterritorialization, jazz has always celebrated the errant flow of a musical material never fully harnessed to structure and form. Yet from swing through bebop, jazz maintained the standard functional organization of music into background/foreground and melody/harmony/rhythm, assigning instrumental roles accordingly. Hence, periodic solos notwithstanding, the drummer’s role was to keep time along with the bassist and pianist, who were expected to maintain the underlying harmonic structure of the tune beneath the horn player’s melody or improvisations upon it.

The emergence of Free Jazz in the 1960s challenged precisely these features. In relation to the organized and hierarchized body of jazz, it served as a force of anti-production, disarticulating standard connections and dismantling established hierarchies.37 Free Jazz said: “Forget the tune, forget background and foreground, ignore established instrumental roles. Instead, treat each instrument as a sound-making device on par with every other. Play as an collective ensemble and release a collective energy.” Hence, pieces such as John Coltrane’s Ascension unleash torrents of sound, wild and intensely vibrating distributions of sonic particles and blocks.38

The allied tradition of improvised music pushed these tendencies further.39 Improvisation became the occasion for a mutual becoming: one musician meets another, perhaps for the first time, and music is made between the two, drawing each musician into a zone of indeterminacy with the other.40 The aim is to play with the other and against one’s established tendencies: music as a line of flight, a disarticulation of mental and manual habits. Improvised music equally deterritorialized the musical instrument and standard performance practice. Instead of treating instruments as a fixed entities to be mastered by virtuoso technique, improvising musicians came to explore the immense variety of ways in which their instruments can be made to generate sound: rubbing the body of the violin or the upright bass, playing only the mouthpiece or bell of a horn, singing into a drum head, etc.41 Paraphrasing Spinoza, the improviser says “we don’t yet know what an instrument can do.” Unsettled in this way, instruments, musicians, and music itself are freed up for new connections and assemblages.

Rock Desedimented

Notwithstanding its reputation for sonic and erotic liberation, few musical genres are more rigidly stratified than rock. Like classic jazz, rock is built from a standard instrumentation organized according to a basic spatial and auditory hierarchy: (from front to back) voice, lead guitar, rhythm guitar, bass, and drums. Rock is deeply human music that invests desire in conventional ways. It may be about the body and sexuality; but, for the most part, rock’s sexuality is genital and orgasmic. The rock song’s verse-chorus-verse structure organizes desire into short cycles of tension and release. Obsessed with presence and authenticity, rock cathects desire onto the voice and the story of love, loss, and rebellion it cries. Rock is equally tied to the visible gesture of the human hand. Hence, it fetishizes the live event and devalues recordings, studio effects, synthesizers, drum machines—anything not immediately visible, sensible, or present.

Of course, rock has always had a counter-tradition: the minimalist drones of the Velvet Underground, the machinic pulses of Kraftwerk, Can, and Neu, the ambient soundscapes of Brian Eno, etc. But only in the 1990s did these forces come together with others to fully challenge rock’s core ideology. As always, the provocation came from the outside—in the first place, from disco. Emerging from a largely black, Latino, and gay underground, disco unsettled rock’s macho sexuality. Machinic and repetitive, it equally threatened rock’s investment in presence, authenticity, humanism, and genital sexuality. Focused on the dancefloor (a mobile assemblage of bodies) and the ambiguous figure of the DJ (at once creator and mere medium), disco challenged rock’s individualism and its cult of personality.

In response, rock lashed out with an overtly racist and homophobic campaign, shouting “disco sucks” and organizing occasions for the mass destruction of dance records (the most spectacularly violent of which occurred on the night of July 12, 1979, when rock DJ Steve Dahl presided over a bonfire of disco vinyl between games at a baseball doubleheader in Chicago’s Comiskey Park). But such displays only confirmed what a profoundly disruptive tremor disco had sent through body of rock. Mainstream rock plodded on. But rock’s experimental fringe slowly began to forge alliances with the emerging DJ Culture that coalesced around a loose collection of musical forms: house and techno (disco’s heirs), hip hop, and dub reggae. Slowly but surely, these alliances began to desediment rock’s strata such that, by the mid-1990s, perceptive critics could declare the birth of “post-rock,” an international movement that represented rock’s self-overcoming.42 Rock and pop operate essentially according to the logic of the refrain, producing tunes, ditties, hooks, and choruses that get stuck in our heads and that we sing, hum, or whistle as we move through the world. “The refrain,” Deleuze and Guattari tell us, “is essentially territorial, territorializing, or reterritorializing.” It not only marks musical territory but psychic and geographical territory as well, soliciting memory and charting out zones of comfort and control. As such, “[t]he refrain is [. . .] a means of preventing music,” of capturing and restricting the flow of sonorous material. Conversely, “music,” in this special sense, “is a creative, active operation that consists in deterritorializing the refrain.” And, because the voice is the privileged vehicle of the refrain, “[m]usic is a deterritorialization of the voice.”43

Post-rock largely did away with the lead singer and, hence, with the hero and focal point of the rock song. Rock’s narrative structure soon collapsed as well, melting into an ambient pool or stretched out into an infinite drone or groove. While often retaining rock instrumentation, post-rock submitted these instruments to a profound détournement. Outfits such as Main and Flying Saucer Attack did away with chords and progressions, instead treating the guitar as an electronic tool for the generation of timbres and textures. Taking lessons from hip hop and techno, post-rock groups Techno Animal, Stereolab, and others supplemented rock instrumentation with samplers, drum machines, analog synthesizers, and laptops. Gastr del Sol and Tortoise embraced studio effects and manipulations associated with musique concrète and dub reggae, effectively countering rock’s obsession with presence and humanism.

Electronica: The Becoming-Sound of Music

In myriad ways, experimental electronica is marked by this heterogeneous ancestry. Across the generic and traditional differences between classical music, jazz, rock, dance music, etc., it selects and intensifies a single trait: the impulse to make music a body without organs. In minimalist house and techno and ambient and noise composition, we find all the ways and means of doing this. Let us rehearse these procedures and clarify the ways in which electronica deploys them:

1. Disarticulation and Destratification. We saw that the classical composition, the jazz tune, and the rock song are bodies composed of fixed strata or organs (e.g., strings/winds/brass/percussion; voice/guitar/bass/drums) that capture sound and harness it to particular functions (e.g., melody/harmony/rhythm, the refrain, narrative development, etc.). Organized from without by a predetermined, transcendent scheme (the score, the chart, the song), they move in accordance with a pulsed time (the time of development, form, narrative, and the refrain). Experimental electronica disarticulates sound from the strata and liberates it from pulsed time. Sound appears in its virtualform: as a free-roaming flux, pure possibility, no longer or not yet attached to musical forms or functions. In place of narratives, melodies, and themes, we hear sounds themselves. We hear sonic forces, affects, singularities, and intensities, the grain of sounds, textures, timbres, etc. As Deleu puts it, “the inaudible makes itself heard and the imperceptible appears as such: no longer the songbird, but the sound molecule.”44 Recording under the apt moniker Gas, for example, German producer Wolfgang Voigt lets loose swarms of sonic particles, fragments of rhythms and melodies set afloat in vaporous drones. Francisco Lopez’s La Selva immerses us in the teeming soundscape of a tropical rainforest. Devoid of the visual clues that would allow us to carve up space and attach sounds to their sources, we are confronted with dense and vibrant masses of sounds differentiated solely by their speeds, textures, and timbres, and moving according to their own logics and rhythms.

This experience of sound itself is equally the experience of a non-pulsed time. For, we no longer track the subject of a narrative; instead, we are drawn into the impersonal, asubjective life of sounds. Time is no longer spatialized, charted, and territorialized by formal markers; instead, it appears as a qualitative immersive flow. Rather than structure and genesis, we hear process and duration. This connection between attentiveness to the life of sounds and liberation from chronometric time is richly noted by noise composer Bernhard Günter, who remarks that sounds grow, live, and die at different speeds, producing a variegated “continuum” in which time is “stretched and relaxed like a rubberb and” such that the listener loses track of clock time.45

2. Laying-out of a Plane: But experimental electronica does not unleash sonic chaos. For the plane of organization it substitutes a plane of consistency: a smooth surface on which sound particles are distributed, loosely held together, and offered up to experience. Noise composition, minimal techno, and micro house are organized from within, according to an immanent logic of presentation that places the listener in an immersive, indefinitely extended flow that highlights becoming, duration, and continuous regions of intensity.

The plane of organization can be likened to the sedentary, striated, hierarchical space of the city or the state. The plane of consistency, on the other hand, is like the smooth, open space of the desert on which the nomad roams. Electronica tracks are just like this: deserts of sound, the only landmarks of which are the singularities, haecceities, and affects that populate them.46 No doubt this is why electronica is fascinated with those archetypes of smooth space: air, sky, sea, ice—broad, open spaces on which elements can be freely distributed and connected.47 Indeed, Deleuze and Guattari’s description of the desert (“ice deserts” and “sand deserts” alike) nicely characterizes the soundscapes of Thomas Köner, Steve Roden, and Richard Chartier, and the minimalist beats of Jan Jelinek, snd, and Plastikman48:

[T]here is an extraordinarily fine topology that relies not on points or objects but rather on haecceities, on sets of relations (winds, undulations of snow or sand, the song of the sand or the creaking of ice, the tactile qualities of both). It is a tactile space, or rather “haptic,” a sonorous much more than a visual space.49

Reanimating the discoveries of classic minimalism, electronica constructs this plane by two different means: the drone and the pulse. Noise composition is the heir to the minimalist drones of La Monte Young, Tony Conrad, and Pauline Oliveros. It often presents blocks of sound that gradually reveal themselves to be composed of myriad microparticles.50 Rather than discreet tones organized according to background/foreground and charted by formal markers, it discharges molecular swarms of vibrating granules that immerse the listener, drawing him or her into a world populated solely by a sonic flux that permeates the body and makes of it a sonic force field. In some noise composition, it is not so much the dense drone but silence itself that forms the plane of consistency on which sonic particles are distributes.51 In the work of Bernhard Günter and Richard Chartier, for example, silence forms a surface from which microscopic sonic events spring into being and into which they fall back.

Techno, house, and their offshoots reanimate the musical strategy of pulse-driven minimalism, generating difference through repetition. Despite a superficial resemblance, the repeated pulse has nothing to do with a ticking clock or with the objective chronometrical time it marks. On the contrary, as the classic minimalists often noted, such repetition generates a peculiar sensation of time that is not extensive (directional, progressive, goal-oriented) but intensive (static, suspended, immersive, fluid), not quantitative but qualitative: the time of duration.52 The regular pulse shortcircuits the listener’s desire to listen for form, structure, or development, and instead focuses attention on the moment-to-moment appearance and disappearance of sounds, events, and intensities. In this way, repetition highlights difference. Fine-grained shifts in timbre, texture, interval and intensity take center stage, and repeated sounds begin to appear in different guises. “I was noticing that things didn’t sound the same when you heard them more than once,” Terry Riley told an interviewer. “And the more you heard them, the more different they did sound. Even though something was staying the same, it was changing.”53 Riley underscores the Bergsonian point that there is no pure repetition, since each repeated instance is inflected with those instances already accumulated in the memory.54 Minimalist house and techno tracks thrive on this conjunction of difference and repetition. Maurizio’s “m6,” for example, repeats the same two-note figure hundreds of times, each time bending, contracting, or drawing it out it to elicit different textures, timbres, depths, and speeds.55 Here, electronica learns from elektronische Musik and minimalism alike: rich in wild, sonic matter, classic electronic music was often too busy and structurally complex to make that matter fully audible; via minimalist-style drones and pulses, however, electronica puts this sonic stuff fully on display.56

Pause: The recent profusion of glitch-ridden electronic minimalism intensifies these two features of repetition (ateleological movement and the foregrounding of sonic matter).57 In a fine discussion of repetition in black culture, James Snead gives us a way of understanding this. Contrasting Europe’s obsession with historical-cultural progression and black culture’s affirmation of repetition, Snead writes:

In black culture, repetition means that the thing circulates (exactly in the manner of any flow [. . .]) there in an equilibrium. In European culture, repetition must be seen to be not just circulation and flow but accumulation and growth. In black culture, the thing (the ritual, the dance, the beat) is “there for you to pick it up when you come back to it.” If there is a goal (Zweck) it is continually deferred; it continually “cuts” back to the start, in the musical meaning of “cut” as an abrupt, seemingly unmotivated break (an accidental da capo) with a series already in progress and a willed return to a prior series.

A culture based on the idea of the “cut” will always suffer in a society whose dominant idea is material progress—but “cuts” possess their charm! In European culture, the “goal” is always clear: that which always is being worked towards. The goal is thus that which is reached only when culture “plays out” its history. Such a culture is never “immediate” but “mediated” and separated from the present tenseby its own future orientation. Moreover, European culture does not allow “a succession of accidents and surprises” [as Hegel characterized African culture] but instead maintains the illusions of progression and control at all costs. Black culture, in the “cut,” builds “accidents” into its coverage, almost as if to control their unpredictability. Itself a kind of cultural coverage, this magic of the “cut” attempts to confront accident and rupture not by covering them over but by making room for them inside the system itself.58

Against our expectations of formal development and narrative progress, the turntablist’s scratch or cut and the electronica artist’s glitch accentuate the value of repetition. The scratch and the glitch interrupt or pause the forward movement of the track, throwing it back upon a prior moment. Snead continues:

The ‘cut’ overtly insists on the repetitive nature of the music, by abruptly skipping back to another beginning which we have already heard. Moreover, the greater theb insistence on the pure beauty and value of repetition, the greater the awareness must also be that repetition takes place not on a level of musical development or progression, but on the purest tonal and timbric level.59

In affirming the value of repetition, then, the cut or the glitch detaches sound from its forward temporal and harmonic movement and instead draws attention to its texture and sonic matter. In Deleuze’s terms, the scratch and glitch “stutter” music, withdrawing it from meaning and instead display “a pure and intense sonorous material [. . .], a deterritorialized musical sound, a cry that escapes signification, composition, song, words—a sonority that ruptures in order to break away from a chain that is all too signifying.”60

Play: Repetition or the steady pulse can be thought of as producing a kind of “fixed plane” for the presentation of sound particles. But “fixed,” Deleuze notes, “does not mean motionless; it indicates the absolute state of movement as well as of rest in relation to which variations in relative speed themselves become perceptible.”61 That is, in the first place, the plane and the elements that occupy it are not ontologically distinct. The fat, grainy beats of Pan Sonic, the waterlogged throbs of Porter Ricks, and the tactile ticks of alva noto, for example, remind us that the repeated pulse is itself sonic matter, composed of the same stuff as the material that is distributed upon it: the univocal plane of electronic signals or digital bits. Secondly, house and techno are built from loops such that the only distinction between the steady pulse and the sonic figures that move across it is that of speed and slowness, regularity and singularity. Everything is at once rhythm and pitchtimbre; and whatever distinction we draw between these is relative, not absolute.

Nonetheless, the drone and the pulse mark out the plane or BwO that defines electronica tracks and holds their elements together in a provisional assemblage. As such, they model the plane of immanence of Nature itself, in relation to which they present a particular slice or plateau.62 Viewed on the scale of millennia, bodies, species, states, cities, and languages are like waves on an ocean, evanescent forms that dissolve back into Nature’s fluid mass. So, too, in electronica, tones and timbres come and go as the pulse carries on, or retreat back into the block of sound or silence from whence they came.

3. Distribution of Singularities and Haecceities, Affects and Intensities. The symphony was marked by thematic exposition, development, and recapitulation, the pop song by the alternation of verse and chorus (or refrain). But you don’t hum or sing along with electronica tracks. There are no tunes or refrains to get stuck in your head. Rather, electronica tracks are marked by musical individuations of a different sort. Upon their smooth spaces or planes, electronica tracks distribute sonic singularities and haecceities, affects and intensities: pure aural qualities, quantities, and aggregates disarticulated from melodies, forms, and structures.

Singularities and haecceities are events, moments when particles and forces come together to form an assemblage that attains some degree of individuation. On the surface of an ocean, a wave rises up, an eddy or vortex spins the surface downward, a warm current momentarily passes through—each of these is a singularity or haecceity, an individuation not of the subject- or objectkind but of the event-kind. These same sorts of individuations characterize electronica tracks. Oval’s “Textuell,”63 for example, begins with a stuttered flow composed of jittery ticks and a fuzzy tone that vibrates in the interval between two neighboring pitches. In themselves, these elements (ticks, tone, pitches, interval) are not yet haecceities or singularities. Rather, they hang together to form a basic surface or plateau. A few seconds in, a bass thud pulls this surface quickly downward then sends it leaping up to a new plateau marked by slower clicks, a richer and more resonant sonic palette, and a three-pitch figure. This is a haecceity, a sonic event in the flow of a track, an event that draws elements together into a provisional configuration and that marks a difference of intensity and sonic quality from that which precedes and follows it. The new plateau is soon traversed by more subtle, smaller-scale haecceities: flutters of woody pops, sets of shallow bell tones, dubby bass notes that slow the flow. A few minutes in, another major event: the shift to a new plateau, this one marked by a regular bass pulse and slow tonal shifts between the poles of a wider interval. For the remainder of the track, these various haecceities (plateaus, flutters, bell series, bass pulses, etc.) drift across the auditory space, recurring at different speeds and frequencies.

Haecceities and singularities provide the topography of an electronica track, the extensive dimension on which occur cuts, shifts, zones, levels, etc. But electronica tracks are described or measured by another dimension as well: by the affects or intensities that correspond to these haecceities and singularities. “Intensity”64 names the ways in which these singularities are sensually experienced, their peculiar quality and force. When we describe a track or its parts (haecceities, plateaus, intervals) as “cold,” “warm,” “hard,” “soft,” “sharp,” “bright” “sludgy,” etc. we are, albeit crudely, describing its “intensities,” the ways in which it affects us, the quality and quantity of the forces it transmits.

In a passage Deleuze alludes to often,65 Varèse already imagined a music delineated solely by its “zones of intensities”:

These zones would be differentiated by various timbres or colors and different loudnesses. Through such a physical process these zones would appear of different colors and of different magnitude, in different perspectives for our perception. The role of color or timbre would be completely changed from being incidental, anecdotal, sensual or picturesque; it would become an agent of delineation, like the different colors on a map separating different areas, and an integral part of form.66

More than a half-century later, contemporary electronica realizes Varèse’s vision. Noise composition—the work of Merzbow, for example—all but dispenses with musical form in favor of massive glacial or molten flows that collide, intersect, and interpenetrate to produce a textured surface of peaks, valleys, fissures, and plains. Pulse-driven electronica is equally marked by such “zones of intensity.” Minimal techno and micro house tracks flow like waves that rise and fall, tracing zones and levels of intensity as they flow.67 Composed of loops (waves) moving at different speeds and with different amplitudes, they create interference patterns marked by nodal points of intensive confluence. The work of Carsten Nicolai (a.k.a. noto and alva noto) is exemplary here. Deploying loops of various thicknesses, depths, and speeds, his tracks produce aural equivalents of the liquid ripples and patterns that characterize much of his visual art.68

As distributions of haecceities and intensities, electronica tracks invest desire in ways rather different than do rock, classic jazz, or classical music. In place of the tension and release that characterize rock and pop, and the conflict and resolution that characterize classical music, electronica substitutes myriad “plateaus”: “continuous regions of intensity constituted in such a way that they do not allow themselves to be interrupted by any external termination, any more than they allow themselves to build toward a climax.”69 Not verse and chorus, but thresholds and continuums of intensity, the confluence of flows, waves, or loops on a plane that is itself a plateau, an indefinitely extended continuum of intensity.

4. Construction and cartography of a body or assemblage. A track, then, represents a particular slice, section, or plateau of the sonic phylum. It is a plane of consistency or composition that selects, articulates, distributes, and holds together a set of tones, timbres, and rhythms. As such, a track forms a body, though not an organism: a body without organs. It presents the minimum of composition or consistency necessary to individuate a body without allowing it to harden into an organism.70

A body, Deleuze tells us, is not defined by form, function, substance, etc. Rather, its definition takes the form of a map [plan] that charts a piece of territory according to longitude and latitude.71 By “longitude,” Deleuze means the relationships to one another of the particles that compose a body (which is always a multiplicity). Following Spinoza, who argues that bodies are distinguished from one another not by reason of substance but solely by reason of the relationships of motion and rest, speed and slowness that obtain between their component parts, Deleuze describes the “longitudinal” relationships of a body’s parts to one another as “relations of motion and rest, of speeds and slownesses between particles.”72 By “latitude,” Deleuze means the affective and intensive capacities a body has in relation to other bodies, the concentrations of power and ability that distinguish it.

“Maps of speeds and intensities.”73 This Deleuzian (and Varèsian) form of description is ideally suited to the analysis of electronica tracks. They do not readily admit of description in terms of form and development; but they can be perfectly described in terms of longitude and latitude, “variations of speed between particles or molecules of sound,” and the “free floating affects” and intensities generated by these particles and their conjunctions.74 They lend themselves to geometrical, geological, and geographical description: description in terms of vectors, thresholds, gradients, peaks, valleys, and plains.

Abstract, molecular, machinic, and desubjectified, electronica tracks are simply selections of sonic particles set in relation to one another and in relationship to those of other tracks. At the longitudinal level, a track is a body, machine, or assemblage, a collection of sonic particles that occupy the same territory and that move at speeds measured in relationship to those of other particles. They form temporary conjunctions (loops, slabs, haecceities, etc.) with other particles and move together with them. At the latitudinal level, a track is defined by its intensities, its accumulations of force and their qualitative effect upon us. Longitude and latitude, speeds and intensities also measure a track’s relationships with other tracks, for a track is itself simply an element in a larger machine, the mix, itself a kind of macro-track. A track’s speeds and intensities, then, will determine which other tracks it can link with and what sorts of relationships (flow, rupture, affective modulation, etc.) it can have with these other tracks. The term “mix,” here, is significant, for it highlights the fact that, from the micro- to the macro-levels—from the level of a track’s component haecceities to the level of the mix as a whole—electronica tracks are not closed “compositions” or “songs” but open-ended, provisional assemblages that, at any level, can be connected with, or plugged into, other assemblages.

Such, then, is the anatomy of the musical body without organs. We have also traced its genealogy. It is marked not only by the perceptible haecceities and intensities that are distributed upon it but also by a set of historical singularities that stretch across the music of the 20th century and that supply its genetic code, its transcendental or virtual conditions of possibility. Listening to the classic minimalists in the late 1970s, Deleuze began to hear how music might become a body without organs. With the advent of experimental electronica—which, courtesy of Sub Rosa’s Guy-Marc Hinant and Mille Plateaux’s Achim Szepanski, Deleuze heard only in the last two years of his then ailing life75—all the forces of musical deteritorrialization are brought to bear and music has truly become a BwO. No subjects, forms, themes, or narratives; just flows, cuts, aggregates, forces, intensities, and haecceities laid out on the smooth surface of pulse and drone.

Discography

alva noto, Prototypes, Mille Plateaux MP 82
alva noto, Transform, Mille Plateaux MP 102
Eno, Brian, On Land, Editions EG, EEGCD 20
Cage, John, The 25-Year Retrospective Concert of the Music Of John Cage, Wergo 6247-2
Cale, John/Tony Conrad/Angus MacLise/LaMonte Young/Marian Zazeela, Inside the Dream
Syndicate Vol. I: Day of Niagara (1965), Table of the Elements TOE-CD-74
Chartier, Richard Of Surfaces, L–NE 008
Conrad, Tony, Four Violins (1964), in Early Minimalism, Volume 1, Table of the Elements TOECD-
Coltrane, John, Ascension, Impulse 314 543 413-2
Feldman, Morton, Why Patterns?/Crippled Symmetry, hat ART CD2-6080
Feldman, Morton, String Quartet (II), Ives Ensemble, hat [now] ART 4-144
Fennesz, Plus Forty Seven Degrees 56’ 37”/Minus Sixteen Degrees 51’ 08, Touch TO 40
Fenn O’Berg, The Magic Sound of Fenn O’Berg, Mego 031
Flying Saucer Attack, New Lands, Drag City DC137CD
Gas, Königsforst, Mille Plateaux MP 65
Gastr del Sol, Upgrade & Afterlife, Drag City CD90CD
Glass, Philip, Music in Twelve Parts, Nonesuch 79324-2
Global Electronic Network, Electronic Desert, Mille Plateaux MP014VN
Jelinek, Jan, Loop-Finding-Jazz-Records, ~scape 007
Köner, Thomas, Teimo/Permafrost, Mille Plateaux MP 35
Kraftwerk, Trans-Europe Express, Capitol CDP 0777 7 46473 2 8
Lopez, Francisco, La Selva, V2_Archief V228
Main, Hz, Beggars Banquet HERTZ016CD
Maurizio, M-CD, M
Merzbow, Merzbox Sampler, Extreme XLTD 003
Music Improvisation Company, The Music Improvisation Company 1968–1971, Incus CD 12
Oliveros, Pauline, Primordial Lift, Table of the Elements TOE-CD-53
Oval, Systemisch, Thrill Jockey THRILL032
Panasonic, Kulma, Mute/Blast First 9032-2
Plastikman, Consumed, Novamute 3048-2
Porter Ricks, Biokinetics, Chain Reaction, CRD-01
Reich, Steve, Works 1965–95, Nonesuch 79451
Riley, Terry, Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band: All-Night Flight, Organ of Corti 4
Roden, Steve, Four Possible Landscapes, Trente Oiseaux, TOC 005
Schaeffer, Pierre, L’Oeuvre Musicale, INA/GRM INA C 1006/7/8
Schoenberg, Arnold, Verklärte Nacht op. 4/Piano Pieces op. 11 & 19, Five Orchestral Pieces, op.
16, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Daniel Barenboim, Teldec 4509-98256-2
snd, makesndcassettee, Mille Plateaux, MP 69
Stereolab, Emperor Tomato Ketchup, Elektra 61840-2
Stockhausen, Karlheinz, Kontakte, Ecstatic Peace! E#87
Techno Animal, Re-Entry, Virgin AMBT 8/7243 8 40404 2 0/40405 2 9
Tortoise, Millions Now Living Will Never Die, Thrill Jockey THRILL025
Varèse, Edgard, Déserts/Equatorial/Hyperprism, Ensemble InterContemporain, Pierre Boulez,
Sony SMK 68 334
Various Artists, Clicks & Cuts, Mille Plateaux, MP 79
Various Artists, Clicks & Cuts 2, Mille Plateaux, MP 98
Various Artists, Electro Acoustic Music: Classics, Neuma 450-74
Various Artists, Pioneers of Electronic Music, CRI CD 611
Various Artists, OHM: The Early Gurus of Electronic Music, 1948–80, Ellipsis Arts CD 3670
Various Artists, Folds and Rhizomes for Gilles Deleuze, Sub Rosa, SR99
Various Artists, Return of the DJ Vol. I, Bomb Hip-Hop BOMB 2002
Various Artists, Return of the DJ Vol. II, Bomb Hip-Hop BOMB 2003
Various Artists, In Memoriam Gilles Deleuze, Mille Plateaux MP 22
The Velvet Underground, The Velvet Underground and Nico, Verve, V5008

Notes

1. These interrelated terms are discussed more fully below. Rigorous definitions would take us too far afield. For the moment, suffice it to say that all of these terms are ways of describing and individuating entities from the standpoint of nature conceived as a collection of heterogeneous flows rather than from the standpoint of the stable, bounded subjects and objects that make up our ordinary ontology. For Deleuze, what is given is this univocal, fluid nature; and ordinary entities are seen as temporary accumulations or contractions of the flows and micro-particles of which Nature consists. Hence, entities (or “bodies”) are individuated in respect of their relative speeds and slownesses (the internal, kinetic relationships among the elements that compose them), their “affects” (their dynamic relationships with other entities), and the degrees of intensity (accumulations of energy, force, or power) of these affects. Deleuze often calls such fluid, event-like individuals or entities “haecceities” or “singularities,” which he opposes to stable beings, subjects, or things. We can think of music in this way too. Instead of conceiving it as a set of given entities
(tones, pitches) that are articulated into scales, melodies, forms, and narratives, we can think of music more
physically or materially as a heterogeneous fluid substance (the sonic phylum) that is momentarily articulated into various speeds, intensities, and affects. All music can be conceived in this way. But, as Deleuze argues—and as I argue here—certain forms of music make this more evident and palpable than others.

2. On the “plane of immanence” and “plane of transcendence,” see Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), pp. 265–72 and Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), pp. 92ff. Manuel De Landa nicely develops the concept of the self-organizing “plane of immanence” in A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (New York: Zone Books, 1997) and Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (London: Continuum Books, 2002).

3. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), pp. 8, 4.

4. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 43,159ff.

5. Spinoza’s text reads “no one has yet determined what the body can do,” and, later, “they do not know what the body can do,” Ethics II, P, S in A Spinoza Reader, ed. and trans. Edwin Curley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 155, 156. Deleuze often refers to this text, paraphrasing it “we do not even know what a body can do.”

6. Of course, “[y]ou never reach the Body without Organs, you can’t reach it, you are forever attaining it, it is a limit,” a regulative ideal for experimental practices. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 150.

7. Brian Massumi offers a nice description of this process in his User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia (New York: Zone, 1992), 93ff.
8. Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. Robert Hurley (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988), p. 127.
9. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 267. Deleuze and Guattari refer to Reich and Glass in a footnote to this passage. A rather similar paragraph in Dialogues runs: “Some contemporary musicians have pushed to the limit the practical idea of an immanent plane which no longer has a hidden principle of organization, but where the process must be heard no less than what comes out of it; where forms are retained only to set free variations of speed between particles or molecules of sound; where themes, motifs and subjects are only retained to set free floating affects” (94; cf. 33). Indeed, when describing the “plane of immanence,” Deleuze often raises the example of music. In addition to the passages just cited, see Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, pp. 123, 126, 128 and Negotiations, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 43.
10. See Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, pp. 91, 93.

11. Deleuze and Guattari discuss this briefly in What is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchill (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), pp. 189–91, 195.
12. For a short characterization of the classical work, see Robert P. Morgan, Twentieth-Century Music (New York: Norton, 1991), pp. 1ff. For a similar critical analysis, see Christopher Small, Music, Society, Education (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1996) and Chris Cutler, “Necessity and Choice in Musical Forms,” in File Under Popular: Theoretical and Critical Writings on Music (New York: Autonomedia, 1993).
13. Edgard Varèse, “The Liberation of Sound,” in Contemporary Composers on Contemporary Music, Expanded Edition, ed. Elliott Schwarz and Barney Childs (New York: Da Capo, 1998), p. 207.
14. See Varèse, “Liberation of Sound,” p. 197.
15. Varèse, “Liberation of Sound,” p. 203. This is precisely how Bernhard Günter describes his own process of
composition. See “Interview for The Wire,” http://www.bernhardguenter.net/frame_int.html.
16. Varèse, “Liberation of Sound,” p. 197. This is an astonishingly apt description of the way in which much noise composition (e.g., Merzbow, PanSonic, Fennesz, Fenn 0’ Berg) works.
17. A composer, Cage remarked, should “give up the desire to control sound, clear his mind of music, and set about discovering means to let sounds be themselves rather than vehicles for man-made theories or expressions of human sentiments.” Cage, “Experimental Music,” in Silence: Lectures and Writings by John Cage (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), p. 10. Note that, following Kant, Deleuze distinguishes the “transcendental” from “the transcendent.” The former names the conditions for the possibility of actual sensual experience, while the latter names what transcends sensual experience altogether. The description of a “transcendental” or “virtual” field that precedes the subject occupied Deleuze throughout his career, from The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), pp. 100–17 to “Immanence: A Life,” in Pure Immanence, trans. Anne Boyman (New York: Zone, 2001), pp. 25–33. In the latter text, Deleuze elaborates on the distinction between “the transcendental” and “the transcendent.”
18. Cage, Themes & Variations (1982), in Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology, ed. Paul Hoover
(New York: W.W. Norton, 1994), p. 623. Compare Deleuze and Guattari: “music is not the privilege of human
beings: the universe, the cosmos, is made of refrains.” A Thousand Plateaus, p. 309.
19. “There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot,” Silence, p. 8. “[T]o me, the essential meaning of silence is the giving up of intention.” John Cage, in Conversing with Cage, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (New York: Limelight Editions, 1988), p. 189.

20. Morton Feldman, “The Future of Local Music,” in Give My Regards to Eighth Street: Collected Writings of
Morton Feldman, ed. B.H. Friedman (Cambridge, MA: Exact Change Press, 2000), p. 157–58.
21. Feldman, Give My Regards to Eighth Street, p. 196.
22. I owe this fine characterization to Kyle Gann, writing on Feldman in The New York Times (February 17, 2002).
23. Such are the sounds that make up Pierre Schaeffer’s Études de bruits (“noise studies). Pierre Schaeffer, L’Oeuvre musicale (EMF).
24. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, pp. 324.
25. See Pierre Schaeffer, Traité des objets musicaux (Paris: Éditions de Seuil, 1966), ch. IV.
26. Quoted in Wim Mertens, American Minimal Music, trans. J. Hautekiet (London: Kahn and Averill, 1983), p. 90.
27. Steve Reich, “Music as a Gradual Process,” in Writings About Music (New York: New York University Press, 1974). In his comments on musical minimalism and the plane of immanence (see note 9, above) Deleuze clearly has this text in mind.
28. These characteristics of “pulsed time” are presented by Deleuze in the “Vincennes Seminar Session, May 3, 1977: On Music,” trans. Timothy S. Murphy, Discourse 20:3 (Fall 1998), pp. 209ff.
29. Glass, cited in Mertens, American Minimal Music, p. 89; Reich, “Music as a Gradual Process.”
30. Mertens, American Minimal Music, p. 90.
31. On Chronos and Aeon (also Aion) and their relationship to music, see the “Vincennes Seminar” and A Thousand Plateaus, p. 262. Deleuze first introduces the Stoic distinction between Chronos and Aeon in The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin Boundas, trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990). Deleuze and Guattari discuss the difference between Goethe’s Bildungsroman and Kleist’s “pure ‘stationary process’” in A Thousand Plateaus, p. 268-9.
32. Feldman, Give My Regard to Eighth Street, p. 87. Discussing his late pieces, some of which last longer than five hours, Morton Feldman said: “Up to one hour you think about form, but after an hour and a half it’s scale. Form is easy—just the division of things into parts. But scale is another matter [. . . . I]t requires a heightened kind of concentration. Before, my pieces were like objects; now, they’re like evolving things.” Quoted by John Rockwell in his liner notes to a recording of Feldman’s Crippled Symmetry (Bridge Records, 9092A/B).
33. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 267–8. “Unformed elements” correspond to Spinoza’s “simplest bodies,” the atomic entities of which any composite entity (assemblage or multiplicity) is formed. See Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, p. 127, note 3.
34. Reich, “Music as a Gradual Process.”
35. Conrad, “LYssophobia: On Four Violins,” liner notes to Tony Conrad, Early Minimalism, Volume I (Table of the Elements).
36. Tom Johnson, “La Monte Young, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, Philip Glass,” originally published in The Village
Voice (September 7, 1972), reprinted in The Voice of New Music: New York City 1972–1982 (Eindhoven: Apollo
Art About, 1989), pp. 44–45.
37. On “anti-production,” see Anti-Oedipus, pp. 8ff.
38. John Coltrane, Ascension (Polygram)
39. “Free Jazz” generally describes a largely African-American tradition that emerged out of bebop and is associated with the names Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, (late) John Coltrane, Sun Ra, and the Art Ensemble of Chicago. “Improvised Music” generally describes a British and European tradition associated with the names Derek Bailey, Evan Parker, Han Bennink, Misha Mengelberg, and others. While “Free Jazz” often retained a connection to the blues, “Improvised Music” combined the liberatory impulses of Free Jazz with the sonic worlds of vanguard classical music (Webern, Cage, etc.).
40. On “becoming” as mutual deterritorialization, see “1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming Imperceptible . . .,” in A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 323–309.
41. For a further catalog and discussion of these “extended techniques,” see Derek Bailey, Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music (New York: Da Capo, 1992), pp. 98–102, and John Corbett, “Writing Around Free
Improvisation,” in Krin Gabbard, ed., Jazz Among the Discourses (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), pp. 229–36.
42. See Simon Reynolds, “Shaking the Rock Narcotic” The Wire 123 (May 1994), and “To Go Where No Band Has Gone Before: Rock Travels Past Its Own Borders,” Village Voice (August 19, 1995): 26–32.
43. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 300, 302.
44. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 248.
45. “I try to create a time continuum that gives the listener a chance to hear sound appearing, slowly presenting itself, changing, intertwining with others, being repeated in different configurations, and finally disappearing [. . . .] The basic measure of time in my music is slow, relaxed breathing, which I manipulate by slowing it, or speeding it up, in small, homeopathic doses, stretching and relaxing time like a rubberband. Most people completely lose their sense of [clock time] after awhile and can never tell how long the piece lasted.” Bernhard Günter interviewed in Halana Magazine 3 (Winter 1998), on-line at: http://www.bernhardguenter.net/int_halana.html
46. Edgard Varèse named his first electronic composition Déserts (1950–54). Reanimating Varèse’s impulse, Global Electronic Network titled an early Mille Plateaux 12” (and a subsequent full-length CD) “Electronic Desert,”, a phrase that has since become common in the culture of electronica.
47. See Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 480.
48. E.g., Köner, Teimo/Permafrost (Mille Plateaux), Roden, Four Possible Landscapes (Trente Oiseaux), Chartier, Of Surfaces (L–NE), Jan Jelinek, Loop-Finding-Jazz-Records (~scape), snd, makeSNDcassette (Mille Plateaux), and Plastikman, Consumed (Mute).
49. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 382.
50. For example, much of the work of Merzbow and Francisco Lopez. Jim O’Rourke’s “As In” and DJ Spooky’s
“Invisual Ocean,” both on Mille Plateaux’s In Memoriam Gilles Deleuze compilation, provide other good examples.
51. On silence as a plan sonore, see Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, p. 94.
52. See, for example, the comments of Philip Glass and Terry Riley in K. Robert Schwarz, Minimalists (London: Phaidon, 1996), pp. 9, 35. On duration as qualitative, intensive multiplicity, see Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will, trans. F.L. Pogson (New York: Harper and Row, 1960), chs. 1 and 2 and Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Random House, 1944), ch. 1. Also see Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Zone, 1990).
53. Terry Riley quoted in Schwarz, Minimalists, p. 35.
54. See the opening pages of Bergson’s Creative Evolution.
55. Maurizio, “m6 [edit],” M CD (M/Basic Channel).
56. On this feature of minimalism, see the opening section of Kyle Gann’s “Minimal Music, Maximal Impact,” New Music Box Issue 31, vol. 3, no. 7 (November 2001): http://www.newmusicbox.org/page.nmbx?id=31tp00; also see Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, p. 33.
57. E.g., the tracks and artists on Mille Plateaux’s Clicks & Cuts compilations.
58. James A. Snead, “Repetition as a Figure of Black Culture,” Black Literature and Literary Theory, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., (New York: Methuen, 1984), p. 67.
59. Snead, “Repetition,” p. 69.
60. Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 6; cf. also pp. 21ff. On “stuttering,” see Deleuze, “He Stuttered,” in Gilles Deleuze and the Theater of Philosophy, ed. Constantin V. Boundas and Dorothea Olkowski (New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 23–29.
61. Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, p. 94.
62. “The plane of consistency [of Nature] would be the totality of all BwO’s, a pure multiplicity of immanence [. . ..] A plateau is a piece of immanence. Every BwO is made up of plateaus. Every BwO is itself a plateau in
communication with other plateaus on the plane of consistency.” A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 157–8.
63. On Systemisch (Mille Plateaux)
64. Deleuze generally reserves the term “affect” for the description of organic entities (plants, animals, human beings). The term “intensity” is used more broadly to describe the nonorganic world (metals, language, colors, sounds, etc.). Hence my musical analysis here is largely in terms of the latter.
65. Deleuze’s oft-used phrase “zone of intensity” (e.g., A Thousand Plateaus, p. 156) is clearly taken from this
passage.
66. Varèse, “Liberation of Music,” p. 197.
67. See Deleuze, Francis Bacon: Logique de la Sensation (Paris: Éditions de la Différance, 1981), ch. 6.
68. E.g., alva noto, Prototypes (Mille Plateaux) and Transform (Mille Plateaux/Raster-Noton) and the visual art installations Milch, Fluid Interferenz, Hertz + Wave, and Telefunken.
69. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 158, cf. pp. 21-22. Also cf. Tony Conrad: “Western music, with its ever-present investment in progression, animates a sense of absence—of suspension and expectation. This irresolution corresponds to the conflict that provides a forward impetus in narrative story telling. Indian music also conveys feelings of suspension and resolution, but much differently—always in the presence of its object. Its operative figure is balance, or repetition, not absence and conflict.” “LYssophobia.”
70. See A Thousand Plateaus, p. 158 and Francis Bacon: Logique de la Sensation, ch. 7.
71. Deleuze’s clearest and most succinct presentation of this idea appears in “Spinoza and Us,” the final chapter of Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. See also A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 260ff.
72. Spinoza, Ethics II, P13, L1. Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, p. 123.
73. Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, p. 93.
74. Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, p. 94.
75. On Hinant’s and Szepanski’s correspondence with Deleuze, see Hinant’s liner notes to Double Articulation: Another Plateau (Sub Rosa) and Simon Reynolds, “Low End Theories,” The Wire 146 (April 1996).

(This article appeared in German translation as “Wie wird Musik zu einem organlosen Körper? Gilles Deleuze und experimentale Elektronika” in Soundcultures: Über digitale und elektronische Musik, ed. Marcus S. Kleiner and Achim Szepanski [Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag], 162–93. A version in Italian was published in Millesuoni: Deleuze, Guattari, e la Musica Elettronica, ed.Roberto Paci Dalo and Emanuele Quinz [Napoli: Edizioni Cronopio, 2006].)

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IMMANENT NON-MUSICOLOGY: DELEUZE/GUATTARI VS. LARUELLE

8/29/2017

By Achim Szepanski

For Deleuze/Guattari is one of the guiding questions in „music“, if the unformed can be heard as sound within the framework of the audible or music. But the unformed is not noise. So another question is, if there exists a passage between sound and noise, made possible by musical events (not music). When deterritorialisation brings a long a de-structuration of the articulated sound, which is a kind of deterritorialised and reterritorialised noise, this implies a state of the unformed that is still audible, but definitely not as organised music; such kind of „music“ or the audible is no more a representation or mimesis, but a becoming. For Deleuze/Guattari such (unformed) sound-becomings takes place within a three dimensional floating space (rhizom) rather than in a two-dimensional, vectorial one.

What is noise? The conception of noise under the aspect of irreversibility is associated to a logic of radical contingency. On one side noise is observer relative, so it may be measured by systems according to their degree of randomness, their algorithmic functions, on the other side noise is observer independent, as radical contingency or hyperchaos noise exceeds human capacity of perception for capturing it as a phenomenal information. The definition of noise as failure or disturbance presupposes the position of an objectivized ideal in and of science, to exclude noise and the composition of noise, thus thinking the Real always as a correlate of thought. Here we are already in the middle of the problematic of Laruelles Non-musicology, which situates music as a poduct of science, their methods of numerical measure (as material), and (which is more important) as the construction of some kind of audible non-order, which might be not measurable. Non-musicology starts on this plane as a different treatment of music and experimental science, breaking with the idea, that everything is musical and therefore developing a science of „music“, which does not become science itself. The infiltration of Non-musicology into musicology means the mutation of music using scientific methods to investigate a pluralism and hybridisation in a generic science, which does not comment musical objects in a reflective way, but concentrates them around a problem, of that Laruelle has had in his early phase no idea, but that musicians had already generated.

What is Rhythm? First, Rhythm is a temporally extended pattern that can be described by information-processing systems through several parameters summarized by Inigo Wilkins: spatial, temporal, amplitude, frequency and superposition. (3) While processing systems involve an observer-dependent reality of Rhythm, it is possible to discover the existence of Rhythms that are beyond human sensory perceptual capacities through technology, math, and science. Second, it has to be asked whether or not there is a simple opposition between noise and Rhythm. The answer is no, because we can define Rhythm as the relation of identifiable and unidentifiable processes that allow the incommensurable chaos to pass into an order of difference, a degree or quantity of non-linear and non-rhythmic noise. Rhythm may exist at many degrees of dynamics and magnitude. It may emerge from noise, whereby the simulation of noise through stochastic processes demonstrates that the process of the enfolding of Rhythm and signals offers a large quantity of heterogeneous movements occurring at different time scales and frequencies. But still noise has a larger dynamics and magnitude than Rhythm. Noise is foreclosed to rhythm, to sound and music, to any ontological or epistemological theory.

If Rhythm is distinct from metrics, we enter the field of non-frequency politics, the politics of productive difference, which includes the fact, that Rhythm is distinct from science, and therefore non-musicians us science and music as pure material. Here, they also start to reduce discourses of philosophy to pure material to achieve – always in interaction with hearing-in-rhythm – pulse “rhythmights.” Parallel to the objects of non-musicians an unified and non-representational theory or a music-fiction has to simulate philosophy and to catch for the essence of music-being and the fractal-being of musical objects, and yet treat them through hypothesis, deduction and experimental tests.
The non-musicological term invented by Fowler, “rhythmight”, opens up to experimental methods of rhythm production: we can now speak of Rhythm in terms of non-periodic pulsed or clicked music. We find here transversal disjunctions, heterogeneous temporalities and spatial components, that overlap and coexist in a track; in the invincible evidence of its short signal and contextless reference, the click opens various potentials to move on without giving any noticeable association. Through the concatenation of signs something like indetermination starts to be indicated, whereby failure can become part of music. Failure is not an inscribed meaning in clicks and cuts, but rather a referential that indicates possibilities of previous and emerging sign concatenations. In the nameless “in between,” meaning is constructed with the help of signs that are not what they pretend to be.Through reference to other signs, a momentum of meaning is produced, because a sign like the click realizes différance, suspended presence, while also referring to signs to come. Similarly, the pulse can be understood as an inherent stress that falls on certain metrics or beats. While listening to the clock, one might hear “tick-tock” instead of “tick-tick,” because every other beat is more stressed than the beat before. This repeating stress is the pulse; and in music different sorts of pulses can be overlapped and constructed by grouping beats together in different milieus or patterns. The technique of inhuman music forces a temporal division into such nuanced patterns, which only machines can perform with perfect precision.
With Deleuze or Boulez we can speak of rhythm in terms of non-periodic pulsed or clicked music. There is a transversal disjunction, which is articulated in the track intern and in relation to other tracks, and this achievs the transition of „Clicks and Cuts“. Transversality is originally a topological concept meaning an extending over, lying across, intersecting without a resulting coincidence, while transversal music caulks the „cut“ between actual and virtual on the rise of the performance itself, by mutating from a device designed to connect the past with the present into a newly future-orientated one. If we listen to a track, we always hear other things, which Deleuze describes as forces, duration, sensation and lightness, depending how tempi, rhythm and sound are variied. For heterogenous temporalities and spatial components, which overlap and coexist in a track, the click opens in its invincible evidence various potencials to move on, as the signal is short and without contextual reference, so no remindable association can be given. Only through the catenation of signs something like indetermination starts to get indicatory, whereby failure can get part of music, but, as we said, failure is not a inscribed meaning in clicks and cuts, rather a referential, which indicates possibilities of previous and coming sign catenations. In the nameless in between meaning is constructed with the help of signs, which are not, what they pretend to be.

Here we find a hotspot to non-music in a Laruelian sense. Laruelle claims a dispersive a priori of theory, which is not primarly related to music, but related to the foreclosed and indifferent Real in-the-last-instance, posing the question: how can a generic and real but nevertheless transcendental and a priori term of difference be constructed, an a priori of difference that is a matter of an immediate given condition? (4) If we relate the apriori or the axiom to music, we will find an answer: The relation between the different speed of waves and the maxima of intensity (or the timeless degree of different waves) involves a dispersion. This is a oraxiom of Rhythmight, which means that the philosophical distinction between theoretical and practical aspects of thought has lost its power. For example, the theoretical practice of music, which invent new oraxioms, uses as ist material sample politics, which is oscillating between an actual pool of samples and the capacity to create new samples.

Samples are nowadays part of the mediapool, regardless of whether they are saved on analog or digital media. Sampling includes the program-controlled, machinic transformation of the musical material with special features, transposing, time-stretching or cut up, etc. Sampling is a technology for access and transformation of media material, by grasping the signals of the media of transmission. Sampling subverts the purposeful transfer from source to destination. Instead of an exact process of mapping the input onto the output, sampling activates a production process, using the signal subtracted from its functional and contextual environment. As condition of that production, it is a sampling-in-the-last-instance.

Going from sampling to so-called pulse rhythmights, produced with techniques through immanent and generic methods of percussive flights and differential structures of sound, attends not to being-in-the-world, but being in music. A music that remains radically immanent, Rhythmight is constructed from the heterogeneity of Rhythm as foreclosed and incommensurately sampled-in-the-last-instance and binds at the same moment the methods of Rhythmics to ecological hearing-in-rhythm. The relation between Rhythm and hearing remains still unilateral: it only goes one way. The unilaterality of Rhythm doesn’t imply that music can be reduced to Rhythm, but that, aside from its territorial motives and melodic landscapes, music is in-the-last-instance Rhythm and heard from Rhythm. While Non-musicology imposes a unilateral relationship between Rhythm and hearing, hearing-in-Rhythm cannot affect Rhythm, while Rhythm is foreclosed to hearing-in-Rhythm.The scientific exology (the scientific closure of paradigms, knowledge etc.) of hearing, which arises from the indifference of Rhythm, must hallucinate music as metrics, order, and composition by ignoring the radical ecology of Rhythm, which is related to non-music’s objectivity without representation. (5) At the same time, rhythmight corresponds to a relative ecology (perception of music) that is today permanently infiltrated by the convertibility of money, the processes in which the virtuality of value is actualized as price. At this juncture Non-musicology has to indicate a radical mutation of the radical ecology of Rhythm according to the foreclosed Real.

(Non-musicology countermands the inscription of the differenziant value, which is the prevalence of money in all his registers – semiotic value and the beat of the significant, which counts the metrum as price instead of the tic-toc of the pulsating difference as non-price. Punctuated production time of the code is permanently inscribed in the body of music. At this point, one may mention that there must be a clandestine relation between non-frequency-politics and High-Frequency-Trading. The latter can be understood as a complex technical system in capitalist finance, that generates the production of noise and at the same time reduces the information gradients, operating at a high rate of data streams and coding noise. With High-Frequency-Trading financial systems try to regulate the randomness of assets in minimal scales of time, to anticipate the fluctuations of price politics. Complexity is here the random effect of acceleration towards volatility, which can lead to an intentional production of noise, for irritating traders and the financial machines. But in relation to music we prefer here not to speak first of absolut contingency, like one might do with Quentin Meillassoux, instead we follow what distincts electronic music from High-Frequency-Trading, because the former in its decomposition in the form of non-music exceeds measurability; acceleration, which is necessary – it can be also slowness – for decoding scripture and codes, should not lead to the hyperreal of Baudrillard, which introduces the universal trauma of capitals realism, instead acceleration in its different modes should lead to a kind of non-dialectical negativism.)

Through tracing the rhythmicity of Rhythm in hearing-in-Rhythm, and thus through Sampling-in-the-last-instance, Non-musicology develops a new radical ecology of rhythm. It starts to sample material from science and philosophy, from musicial material itself, to construct the immanent generic matrix, which is no longer overdetermined by capitals relations of production and circulation, rather the transcendental construction of a kind of objectivity without representation.

Laruelle would reject Deleuze & Guattari’s treatment of music as the capture of affects and percepts (including relationship between material and forces) and would instead postulate to music an autonomous theoretical order, a non-scientific thought according to the radical immanence of the Real – the Real, here, understood as foreclosed and indifferent, without mirroring aesthetics or knowledge or being mirrored by science; the Real, which has to be thought as neither a meaning nor a truth but rather as immanently given-without givenness. The exteriority of the Real is being-nothing, which confronts being with nothingness. This demands the Real as foreclosed to the world. By reducing all transcendental thought to pure material, thought can be developed according to the syntax of the Real. Instead of a truth, which has its telos in the white silence of a full speaking, in which even the Real should be countable, Non-musicology presents an incestuous con-junction of the quantum-principles of superposition (immanence of one-in-one) and non-commutativity.

Where Deleuze & Guattari distinguish between scientific variables, artistic varieties, and philosophical variations, Laruelle’s Non-philosophy reduces all concepts of philosophy and philosophy itself to pure variables. (7) Non-musicology reduces philosophy, science, and musical objects to pure material, by starting to sample the material from within non-musical discourses such as science and philosophy. By cutting off the Principle of Musical Sufficiency, the immersive properties of sound in relation to perception and affect might be also cut off. Non-music instead produces an irreflective processing of variables by variables, a fractal proliferation of models without transcendence.

Here we are confronted with radical differences in the aesthetic conceptions of Deleuze/Guattari and Laruelle. The movement and the relation of sound molecules itself, their catenation happens for Deleuze/Guattari in the context of rhythmical territorialisation and de-territorialisation, which they describe as the ritornell, a kind of crystallisation of time-space, the temporalisation of space and the spatialization of time. Within the ritornell body, earth, rhythm and sound events are shortened with the intensity of the body without organs. Non-musicology in this context could be subsequent to Laruelle understood as the production and tracking of Rhythmicity of rhythm in hearing-in-ryhthm, as an event of compression, which writes itself as an effect of the rhythm construction of the ritornell. As such „music“ or the audible has a fractal dimension, which cannot be reduced to metrics, number and beat time, and maybe to objects for philosophers. And non-frequency politics would force the dance through the territorialised ritornell, which constituens is rhythm and its apparatus, the drum. Rhythmight is producing tension and solidification at the same time in hearing-in-rhythm, while getting aware, how to subtract the metrum. TIC-TOC- fuck the clock! means the principle, while endlessly mixing and remixing the conditions and relations of rhythmights and at the same time seperating rudiments from these mixtures, in order to use autonomous (theoretical) fragments, a theoretical order of contingency (to music), which implies to make use of artifical techniques in a different way as musicians do and at the same write new music-fictions, which are still related to music and the audible – a non-scientific thought according to the radical immanence of the Real in-the-last-instance, the Real here understood as foreclosed and being-nothing, without mirroring something or being mirrored. Laruelle’s generalized fractality of thought is a radically unfolded plane of immanence without reflection of the world, while destroying the empirico-transcendental doublet by its distanceless adequation.

This is to abandon also reversibility between philosophy and science, and between science and music; non-musicology leads to practice „music“ in a non-scientific stance to mutate music using scientific means related to the practice of science, as Jarrod Fowler says. The result of Non-philosophy and Non-musicology includes a generic matrix, which is transcendental at the same time, a generic matrix, whose idempotency functions are related to the Real as determination-in-the-last-instance. Idempotency is a term of informatics, that refers to function thats remains unchanged by doubling and iterating itself or by the addition of new functions, so the generic matrix is related to non-commutative Identity which persists across variations and does not need any transendence. Deleuze/Guattari renounce representation, but still in the name of perception and affects, which are always correlated to experience. And this concept correlates somehow to a certain phase of Laruelle, where the non-musical construction of the rhythmight of music and science is combined with hearing, hearing-in-rhythm, with musicological systems of listening. Laruelle would assert a further step, where non-musicology reduces philosophy, science and musical objects to pure material, by starting to sample the material from within music, non-musical discourses such as science and philosophy. By cutting off the principle of musical sufficiency, the immersive properties of sound in relation to perception and affect are also cut off. Instead non-music-fiction is producing an irreflective and automatic processing of variables by variables, which is a fractal proliferation of models without transcendence. Audio, as the material of media pools, is not further related anymore „to a transindividually constituted prosthetic extension with reversible intentionality“, as Inigo Wilkins says.

In his latest works, Laruelle speaks of the non-standard method as a kind of immanent fiction that includes invention, construction, performance, etc. as a non-representative and non-expressive method that uses only abstract and pure thought for non-aesthetics and that doesn’t need to appeal to the parallelism of philosophy and art. (8) This demands neither thinking of sound as sonic philosophy nor thinking about sound, but an abstract theory of sound, a radical abstract theory that is absolutely non-worldly and non-perceptual, as Laruelle says. Music is not oriented to a world, nor is it perceptual; rather it focuses on the immanent character of music as such, being in music. Music is radical objectivation without representation or intentionality. Following Laruelle, this semblance of music must be no longer an imitation, a tracing, an emanation or a representation of world or of language, of affect or whatever. Rather there exists a non-world of music for both the musician and the philosopher of music. This non-world still exists in the present and is real, while non-music is always rooted in matter. At this point Non-musicology stops tracing the Rhythmicity of Rhythm in hearing-in-Rhythm through sampling-in-the-last-instance. As a kind of objectivity without representation, Non-musicology begins instead to sample material from science and philosophy, from musical material itself, to construct the immanent generic matrix of non-music, which is no longer overdetermined by the capitalist relation of production and circulation.

1. Jarrod Fowler, „JMF075“ http://www.jarrodfowler.com/JMF075.html (accessed April 30, 2015).
2. Fowler, „JMF075“
3. Inigo Wilkins, “Enemy of Music,” http://irreversiblenoise.wordpress.com/2013/03/06/enemy-of-music (accessed June 14, 2013).
4. Laruelle, “The Decline of Materialism in the Name of Matter,” trans. Ray Brassier, Pli 12 (2001): 33-40.
5. Fowler, “JM075”
6. See Dante, Purgatorio, Canto XXVIII, 7-19, and Wilkins, “Enemy of Music.”
7. See Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); François Laruelle, Introduction aux sciences géneriques (Paris: Editions Petra, 2008), p.200.
8. See, for example, Laruelle, Anti-Badiou: On the Introduction of Maoism into Philosophy, trans. Robin Mackay (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).

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Psychoanalysis and Music: A Resonance

8/29/2017

Novelist and psychoanalyst Gustavo Dessal interviews Karnac author Scott Wilson, author of Stop Making Sense

GUSTAVO DESSAL: Stop Making Sense introduces a special way of conceiving the relationship between psychoanalysis and art. There’s a long tradition of psychoanalysis applied to different cultural fields. In some cases the results have been fruitful, opening original perspectives and casting unexpected light on many subjects. But at the same time applied psychoanalysis runs the risk of becoming a sort of meta-language. You are very careful about this, and I appreciate the effort you make to prove that music can help psychoanalysts to go deeper in the comprehension of subjectivity, just as literature was indispensable for Freud to forge some of his concepts. How do you approach this exciting if delicate bond between psychoanalysis and cultural phenomena?

SCOTT WILSON: Thank you very much for your questions, and for addressing me in English. It is very generous of you, and I apologize for not being able to exchange with you in Spanish. I did not want to employ psychoanalytic discourse to discuss music without it in some small way contributing to the modification of that discourse. So while I do think it is possible and valuable to think about cultural phenomena from a psychoanalytic perspective – which is of course not the only perspective one can take – my initial impulse was in the other direction, to approach psychoanalysis from the perspective of music, or sound..

As you suggest, there is a long tradition of psychoanalysis applied to culture, particularly literature, art and film. The very best of this from Freud onwards has had a profound effect on psychoanalysis itself. What would psychoanalysis look like if Hamlet had not confirmed for Freud the Oedipus complex?

More recently, the clinic of the parlêtre and the sinthome was established by Lacan in relation to James Joyce. What is interesting about this long tradition, however, is the relative poverty of interventions on music. This flows directly from Freud himself of course, who disliked music and claimed to be stone deaf. Actually Freud gives a very specific reason for his dislike of music – which when viewed retrospectively, from the perspective of the late Lacan we can see is very significant. Freud says that his interest in art and literature is entirely bound to the intellectual challenge of interpretation that it poses, and he says that he dislikes music because he cannot interpret it. For Freud music is both beyond interpretation and experienced as something unpleasant, even painful.

I would suggest then that music was something real for Freud, in Lacan’s sense of the term. As we know, the contemporary Lacanian clinic is oriented precisely around the point where interpretation fails, thereby shifting our attention away from the unconscious structured like a language to lalangue or the real unconscious. This shift Jacques-Alain Miller actually describes as the ‘root chord’ of the late Lacan. By the way, when you start to look for musical metaphors in Lacan you suddenly find they are everywhere. Indeed, you do it yourself in your novel Surviving Anne. In the words of your analyst, ‘there is something that is always repeated, a tonal base that allows variations in every human being’. Your character goes on to say of his patients that this tone also lies at the basis of ‘the feeling that the world is not made for them’ and that ‘living can only be withstood if we admit the incurable discord within us’. You connect the individual’s discordance with him or herself, and with the world in sonic terms.

Is this tone another ‘name’ for the ‘signifier’ of ‘Y a d’l’un’? Is this tone something of the One-all-alone, the sound of the singular consistency of an individual’s mode of jouissance outside sense, experienced as a body event: a feeling of discord or dissonance? I don’t know whether you, or your character, intended this dimension of sound to be metaphorical, but I think we should take it quite literally, as a tone or a-tone that denotes the atonality of the One. That is why I appropriated the term ‘amusia’ where, to quote my book, ‘the “a” denotes the point of intimate exteriority of dissonance to the repetition that articulates music. The “a” denotes the noise not just left over from the cut in sound produced by music, but the point of singular enunciation and discordance with one’s own sonic reality’ (Stop Making Sense).

GD: When we read further in your book, we find that you make a turn and we are suddenly led to a ‘higher’ level: music is also a path to think about the contemporary social and economical paradigm. You don’t seem to be interested in Brian Eno and Yoko Ono (funny homophonies!) themselves, but as symptoms of the globalized discourse. This means going beyond their qualities as artists, but taking them as a way of dealing with the real. Anyway, it is not easy to understand whether you consider them as dystonic or syntonic symptoms of the capitalist discourse. For example, you state that Yoko Ono implies a rupture with the established conception of art, and nevertheless you admit her website is just a merchandising store …

SW: The idea that one can perceive a homology between music and a ‘social and economic paradigm’ was first suggested many years ago by Jacques Attali who argued that music, as a particular organization of noise, does not represent but provides a structure for future social order. This was what interested me about Brian Eno, Yoko Ono and Merzbow – all of whom produce music suggestive of future social order emerging from a present characterized by general (or ‘ordinary’) psychosis. One cultural symptom of this might be the dissolution of any clear boundary between noise and music that is heard in the ‘generative’ music composed by Eno’s computers, the John Cage-inspired silent national anthem of Ono’s ‘Nutopia’, and Merzbow’s noise-music of humanimality.

I’m interested in how many people have over the years found their work annoying or impossible to listen to – Merzbow’s goal, for example, was for a long time to produce music that was literally unlistenable. It is my contention that these artists amplify the amusical discontents of contemporary culture. In that sense, Yoko Ono is very much the patron saint of this book. I like those stories about how The Beatles’ recording engineers would routinely walk out of the studio the moment she began to sing. And yet, as a solitary voice said at the time, ‘Yoko takes music beyond its extremes … Yoko breaks through more barriers with one scream than most musicians do in a lifetime‘. (Stop Making Sense) Would it be totally outrageous to suggest that one would swap the entire Beatles oeuvre for one operatic Yoko Ono scream? In his own terrifying exchange, this was the sacrifice that Mark Chapman effectively made. But Ono did not scream the night he killed her Beatle.

GD: I found this concept of ‘amusia’ particularly interesting, because it has a ‘resonance’ (let’s keep the musical language) with the idea that writing springs somewhat from the impossible, from that which is impossible to write. This impossibility, as you say, is not what is left over, but the very cause of writing. Going back to music, I guess there must be a difference between this ‘a’ in the case of the subject who produces music, and the one that just enjoys (or not) music created by other. Is it so?

SW: One would assume there would be a different relation to music depending on whether one is a maker of music or an auditor, but I don’t think so. Music is always primarily about listening, and listening for that which escapes the grasp of hearing and of knowledge. One could say that one only hears what one already knows, one always hears an echo, but at the same time the music that animates and disturbs us always hints at something else, something strange and unknown. That is the same for the writer, the player and the listener.

Referring to his own music that he develops as part of a semi-mechanical process, Steve Reich says: ‘listing to an extremely gradual musical process opens my ears to it, but italways extends farther than I can hear’. (Stop Making Sense) This is a great description of a kind of wo es war of music, the effect of an audio unconscious. There are different types of knowledge and enjoyment related to music. On the one hand, there is the savoir-faire or technique of the musicians who know how to play. And there is unquestionably a specific pleasure related to playing music. But on the other hand, there is a knowledge associated with music that seems to be unrelated to this technical facility. How is it possible for an untutored listener to enjoy with great intensity music that he or she knows nothing about? Why isn’t music for that person just a jumble of sounds? Clearly we must suppose that someone or something somewhere knows something about it.

I would suggest that for musical beings, just like for speaking beings, enjoyment is related to knowledge, but that often we don’t know that we know. For example, it is a commonplace for musicians – even or perhaps especially great musicians – to have no idea where their inspiration comes from. Paul McCartney, famously, claims to have dreamt the melody to ‘Yesterday’, assuming that it had already been written by someone else. So we can then surmise that there is an Other, a locus of sound, of dissonance and repetition, that resonates through us and makes us musical whether we like it or not, whether we know anything about it or not. And that sound might be beautiful or it might not, but whatever it is, it is fundamentally related to the singular sound or noise that I am without meaning.

GD: Well, I’m not an expert on this matter, but as you say, it was a solitary voice who considered Yoko as someone who ‘breaks through more barriers with one scream than most musicians do in a lifetime’. Will history remember her in anyway, apart from being Lennon’s wife? Couldn’t we think that her screams wouldn’t have been so operatic if she hadn’t been who she was? In brief, can we in this case separate the scream from the screamer? In contrast, we don’t need Eno as a character to judge what he was able to do with those computers that make the music for him. In this context of, let us say, the social dimension of ‘ordinary psychosis’, how can we distinguish music (and art in general) from fraud?

SW: In this book I’m not really interested in whether the music I discuss is conventionally regarded as good or bad. I am not concerned to contribute to the canons of taste. The 20thC avant-garde has taught us not only that any sound can be music, but that music is an open system that can be defined by the most minimal principle of organization that need be only the distance between time t and time t’, as with Cage’s seminal piece ‘4.33’ where music is whatever sounds occur during the period of 4 minutes, thirty three seconds that the performance lasts.

At the same time, I would say in Yoko Ono’s defense that it is perfectly possible to demonstrate great skill, technique and savoir-faire in the art of screaming. She is an expert, but so was John Lennon, from ‘Twist and Shout’ to ‘Cold Turkey’. I find it slightly odd and interesting that you would refer to the possibility of ‘fraudulent’ music. That’s not the same thing as saying something is good or bad. It implies that there is some sort of theft going on. Fraud in art generally refers to someone faking the work of a famous painter, of course.

But I don’t think that is what you mean. Certainly it is true that this term ‘fraud’ came up regularly with regard to Yoko Ono, and for two reasons. First, because ordinary art lovers used to regard all conceptual art as a fraud, particularly in the UK. Second, this dimension of theft speaks directly to the sense that Yoko Ono ‘stole’ a Beatle, a ‘theft’ that led to the break-up of the group, thereby destroying all our Beatle pleasures. She attracted a great deal of hatred for that, and her work was described as ‘avant-garde crap’, ‘mumbo-jumbo’ and so on. Following the success of the YBAs (Damian Hirst, Tracey Emin, Sarah Lucas et al) in the 1990s, the British people these days love conceptual art; it is their favourite kind. And Ono’s influence on all this is now both recognized and respected. I have no idea what art or music will ‘stand the test of time’. It would no doubt depend on which history one read and who wrote it. If it was a history that valued the 20thC avant-garde, particularly Fluxus and the circle around John Cage to which Ono was a major contributor, then The Beatles would be a mere footnote to her esteem.

GD: Your answer clarifies a lot, and helps me to understand a little bit more about your concept of ‘amusia’. Beyond the specific jouissance a music maker can get from his or her capacity to play, you stress that we are all subjects of the audio unconscious. In other words, first of all we are listeners. I wonder if being listeners is comparable to being readers, or spectators. Does music involve the body like no other artistic expression? I don’t mean just the emotional response to art, but the way our body is summoned by music. In your book, you try to prove that nobody can get rid of the grasp of music, no matter if the subject loves it or hates it, because music seems to have a special connection to the mechanic of the drives.

SW: Yet again this is a very interesting and difficult question, the answer to which can only be speculative. In my book I suggest that it is always sound that ‘heralds the real’ and precipitates the ‘automaton’, as Lacan says. In Freud, as is well known, it is the trauma of ‘shell shock’ that provides the impetus for his reflections on repetition compulsion and the death drive. In Seminar XI Lacan uses the example of some mysterious ‘knocking’ that kicks off and forms the representational basis of one of his own dreams that was attempting to keep him asleep, poised between perception and consciousness.

But this kind of sound is always an echo of the traumatic encounter of the real that is missed, an echo poised between this encounter and the automaton. And we know from countless cultural examples how ominous can be those sounds in the dead of night that creak or bump without apparent reason. These are related to the unheimliche – there’s an excellent book on the uncanniness of sound by David Toop called Sinister Resonance that explores the way that sound, as Lacan says, ‘models the locus of our anxiety’ (Seminar X). Indeed, I would also point to Lacan’s Seminar X on anxiety, particularly the section on ‘What Comes Through the Ear’. It has been noted more than once that the ears – unlike the eyes – are always open and receptive to intrusions that directly shape and affect the body.

I do not want to speculate here about the effects of foetal audition, the idea that the foetus’s first intimations of an outside or an Other are heralded by sound, but Jacques-Alain Miller thinks it worth considering in his commentary on Lacan’s seminar. He suggests that the ‘anxiety of birth’ may be related to the ‘intrusion of the Other in the corporeal space of the subject’ (Lacanian Ink 27). And while he attributes this to the ‘intrusion of air into the aquatic space of the womb’ at the moment of birth, the violence of this intrusion has already been intimated by exterior noises, the bangs and crashes of everyday life, the mother’s voice of course, and her music. But above all, when looking briefly at Lacan’s seminar again, I was struck by the idea that sound shapes the body in the first instance in the form of the ear’s apparatus, in the very process of its audition. ‘The apparatus is what resonates and it doesn’t resonate at just anything … it only resonates at its own note, its own frequency’. Before it speaks, then, the parlêtre has a singular tonality that echoes around, even as it shapes, the ear’s cavity whose organic form Lacan suggests ‘bears a resemblance’ to the void hollowed out by the Other of speech. This a-tonality then subsequently haunts the speech of the parlêtre such that ‘our voice appears to us with a foreign sound’.

I want to ask you a question about the music of the analytic situation. I want to leave aside the specific question about music therapy, perhaps for another time. Rather, I want to return your previous question about the production and enjoyment of music to you in reverse form. To do this, I will ask you to consider the traditional analytic situation as a form of avant-garde music in the sense that it is an intense experience of listening. It has a definite time period, normally about 50 minutes – but as we know that can be curtailed if appropriate. It is an improvisation by two people for two people, but like all improvisations there is a framework, a set of conventions and expectations. One of which is that anything can be said.

While the term ‘performance’ does not do it justice, there is no doubt an element of performance. The main sound is speech, of course, but a very special kind of speech that is divorced from all other conventional forms of phatic or instrumental kinds of communication. You are not passing the time of day discussing football, ordering a coffee or explaining the theory of general relativity to a science class. Or indeed if any of these speech acts do arise, they instantly take on quite a different significance. And of course there is not just speech. There is silence. There are the noises of the body and its movement. There are the sounds of breathing. A sigh. Shuffling. The twisting of a chair or the creaking of a couch. There might be birdsong outside, or traffic noise. The ping of a mobile phone. Every sound may have a potential significance or indeed constitute a specific mode of jouissance. In the dialectic of this little duet-in-ambience, who is producing the music and who is enjoying it?

GD: You're right. The analytic session is an ‘intense experience of listening’, for both the analysand and the analyst. And I agree with you that a session entails speech, silence, and all kinds of phonic and sonic phenomena. When speaking, the subject enjoys and doesn’t want to know anything. He enjoys hearing the repetition of his same old story, or his same old chorus. The analytic experience should lead him away from hearing the bla bla bla of sense, to listening to ‘the sound of the singular consistency of an individual’s mode of jouissance outside sense’, as you say. The analyst, instead, is trained – or is supposed to be trained – not to enjoy while he performs his role. He must be a ‘saint homme’, who’s given up all jouissance.

SW: It was this idea about the priority of sound as bodily event that prompted me to ask the question concerning the analytic session that organizes sound into its own kind of music. In this music the (a)tonality of the body accompanies and renders strange the locus of speech along with all the other sonic contingencies that might interrupt it and set it off on another improvisation. I raised the matter of the location of enjoyment in an echo of your own question, and of course I know how essential it is that the analyst renounces all jouissance – in the same way that we would be appalled at the idea that a medical practitioner might get off on the bodies of his patients. However, I don’t see how it is possible for the analyst to engage his critical faculties through listening without the jouissance that underpins knowledge being somewhere on the horizon. Otherwise, we’d be computers. Is it the destiny of the analyst to be a robot fitted with a sophisticated listening device and interpretation software? It would have to be a quantum computer, of course, because ordinary digital computers can’t cope with the polyphony of signifiers.

GD: The concept of an ‘audio unconscious’ is quite challenging and not easy to understand. There is a tendency to conceive of the voice as object ‘petit a’ as soundless, with the exception of the psychotic verbal hallucinations. What do you mean by ‘audio unconscious’? Is it universal? Do all parlêtres have an audio unconscious? And if it were the case, do we have then two different unconscious, the audio and the other one ‘structured as a language’? Is your audio unconscious related to the Lacanian hint of a ‘real unconscious’?

SW: I coined the phrase ‘audio unconscious’ because I wanted to emphasize the sonic register of the unconscious not only in the sense of the ‘lalangue’ or ‘real’ unconscious, but also to see if we could think, in a way analogous to the unconscious structured like a language, an unconscious structured ‘musically’ in which sound is organized in a way homologous to social order. Silence is a crucial element in music, by the way, not just in the sense of its pauses and punctuation, but as its impossible yet logically necessary condition; the point around which the musical drive circulates. As I understand it, ‘lalangue’ is a site of pure difference that while it might be predicated on the mother’s tongue (or the mother tongue) is the basis not only subsequently of speech, but also music – and indeed in slightly different ways writing and other forms of mark making such as art and so on.

GD: Let´s move to another point in conclusion. You are in charge of a new Masters degree in Psychoanalysis in the UK. That’s great, psychoanalysis has had a long and successful existence in Britain, is that still the case in its universities? How about the Lacanian orientation? How did your project for a Master’s degree start?

SW: Thank you for this question! I am delighted to talk about this Masters course and the Graduate programme of which it is a part. The project had a rather glamorous start in the Eden Rock Hotel in Miami Beach (frequented by Hemingway, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall in the 1950s) at a conference on ‘What Lacan Knew About Women’. I was there to help Marie-Hélène Brousse, Maire Jaanus, Véronique Voruz and Russell Grigg introduce the new journal Culture / Clinic. The impetus for that journal has now morphed into The Lacanian Review and The Lacanian Review Online.

At this conference, Véronique and Natalie Wülfing suggested to me that they would like to set up a Masters and Graduate Programme in a British University taught with the support of psychoanalysts from the New Lacanian School in connection with the Department of Psychoanalysis at Paris-8 University. This Department was founded by Lacan himself, and the idea is to try and teach psychoanalysis along the lines set out by Lacan. Since the Philosophy Department at Kingston University already has a close relation with Paris-8 and colleagues with a strong interest in Lacanian psychoanalysis, I was confident that Kingston would be enthusiastic about setting up this programme. This proved to be the case and I validated it within a year. Véronique and Natalie offer the core courses and there are a range of options offered by myself and colleagues from Philosophy and other departments. It is by no means the first nor the only Masters in Psychoanalysis offered in London – there are others at Middlesex and Birkbeck College, London, for example – but it is the only one that is closely focused on the contemporary clinic of the Lacanian orientation. The Masters is now in its second year, and we already have a small number reading for PhDs. Our students are fantastic, very committed, a significant number of whom have a keen interest in becoming theorists and clinicians. However, psychoanalysis has indeed a very marginal place in British Universities these days. This new course is a rare and beautiful thing.

Scott Wilson is Professor of Media and Psychoanalysis at the London Graduate School, Kingston University, London. His books include Stop Making Sense: Music from the Perspective of the Real(Karnac, 2015); The Order of Joy: Beyond the Cultural Politics of Enjoyment; Great Satan’s Rage: American Negativity and Rap/Metal in the Age of Supercapitalism; and Melancology: Black Metal and Ecology. He is the editor with Michael Dillon of the Journal for Cultural Research.

Gustavo Dessal was born in Buenos Aires but settled in Madrid in 1982, where he now lives and works. He is a psychoanalyst, trained in Argentina and France. He writes essays about his speciality, and also fiction. His last two novels are Clandestinidad (Buenos Aires, 2010) and Micronesia (Buenos Aires, 2014). In 2014 he also published the essay El retorno del péndulo (Buenos Aires y Madrid, 2014) with Zygmunt Bauman. His works have been translated into English, French, Italian, Portuguese and Romanian. He works as a visiting professor in Spain, Argentina, France, Italy, England and Ireland. His most recent novel, Surviving Anne: A Novel, was published by Karnac in 2015.

The article is taken from:

karnacology.com

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"GSH"(ГШ): "It is necessary that consciousness corresponds to progress"

7/22/2017

The most original MOSCOW ROCK GROUP ABOUT HOW THEY DO NOT pop-music-corrosive-chorus and without Chris Martin

"GSH",(ГШ) founded by Katya Shilonosova and Yevgeny Gorbunov, is perhaps the most interesting and unusual Moscow rock band of the moment. Once they were called Glintshake and played the English-language alt rock in the spirit of Sonic Youth and Dinosaur Jr., but, having returned to the roots, they chose a new style, renamed and released the Russian-language album "OESHCH MAGZIU", inspired by the absurdity of the surrounding reality and Russian music - According to them, in the range from Mussorgsky to "Sounds of Mu". This year, "GSH", always effectively performing live, will appear at big summer festivals: on July 9 in St. Petersburg on Stereoleto 2017 and on July 29 at the "Afisha Picnic" in Kolomenskoye Park. Another project of Kati Shilonosova and Yevgenia Gorbunova, a semi-improvised collective of the Rtas, will perform on July 8 at the Moscow festival of underground music "Bol". Denis Boyarinov discussed with the musicians almost all the groups in which they played.

- What is the concept of your other group of ""Mouths" ?
Katia Shilonosova: To play and have fun.

- Why do you need another group for this?
Zhenya Gorbunov: Because the other especially not to have fun - must work, hard work.

Katya: "Mouths" turned out to be the most natural and most random way. And the music of this group is the most random. This is all the charm. We all really enjoyed playing together. Such a rarity, when people accidentally get together and they get to play music.

Zhenya: It's also a good way to relax your ego and conceptual thinking by doing something entertaining.

Katia: I would not say that we entertain others or have fun ourselves. For me, playing music is not fun and not work, it's a study of one's own possibilities. "Mouths" mostly improvise, and improvisation is very much like talking, dialogue. The more you play with other people, the more you understand how you are capable of communication at all.

Zhenya: The music dialogue in the group "Mouths" is a conversation between a drummer, a bass player and a percussionist about when the guitarist will shut up.

Katia: Sometimes it happens. Zhenya is very fond of chatting on the guitar.

- Tell us about your very first group.

Zhenya: Oh, I have something to tell.

Katia: Zhenya has class groups. They have an amazing photo shoot, where they all sat barefoot and cool interview that they give in the same orphanage sweater.

Zhenya: This is the second group. "Marble walrus" - no longer rub, but "Nakosya!"

- "Marble walrus" is the first group or the second?

Zhenya: The second. But in fact this is the second name of the first group.

Katya: One name is better than another.

Zhenya: And the first name was Nakosya. It was in Khabarovsk. We played Russian rock mixed with folk and acoustics. I played the accordion. We spoke at the meeting of doctors-psychotherapists.

Katia: It's very cool. Was it the case in the psychiatric hospital?

Zhenya: No, in some kind of conference hall. And at school in my class - they sang on the background of the school board. All stunned simply.

- Just like the group "Sounds of Mu".

Zhenya: Almost. We had a smaller scale. "Sounds of Mu", as far as I remember, at the graduation party, where half of Moscow gathered. And we had a performance for one class. But it was fun. Nobody knew how to do anything. The songs were exclusively about everyday living conditions - and alcoholics and drug addicts. But we also had improvised albums with names like "The last years of Father Frost's life" and "The Raspirator".

There are people who consider themselves avant-garde, they try to make everything as incomprehensible and impassable as possible. Send everyone in the ass. It's not about us.

- Katya, and your first group?

Katia: Compared to Zhenya, I did not have anything interesting. I had a group in Kazan, which existed for a couple of years while I was studying at the institute. We played what can be called indie rock. The usual group: I sang and played the guitar, there was a solo guitarist, a drummer and a bass player.

- What was your name?

Katia: You do not even need to write about this.

Zhenya: Recently, a dude came to Katya and said that he liked the group more.

Katia: He told me: then it was heard that you sang for yourself. I told him that I now invest a lot in what I'm doing. But all the same, he answered, earlier it was more difficult. I asked him if he was at the concert "GSH". He was not, but he already knows that this is not rubbish.

- It's amazing that he does exist. You're embarrassed to pronounce the name of that group.

Katia: The group was called Conspirators. At first we were called "Conspirators", and then renamed, since it was fashionable to do everything in English. And since I've never listened to Russian rock. From Russian music, I loved only the classics - since the time of the music school. And with Russian rock there was a tense relationship, because for my childhood I did not meet a single normal fan of Russian rock. They were often some sort of assholes. I had a conditioned reflex, and I denied this music.

- How did the Glintshake group start?

Zhenya: This story, like all the stories of the creation of the Moscow groups, is very boring.

Katia: Where does this chauvinism come from?

Zhenya: I noticed that the stories of creating groups in Kazan or Komsomolsk-on-Amur always have an element of despair, unsettledness and marginalism. And it automatically becomes interesting. And when the group gathers in Moscow, then what kind of marginalization can there be - there is still everything, even when there is nothing. We were just furious with fat and decided to play together. Rock. For some reason it seemed that very few people played rock.

Katia: We just had guitars, and we started playing them together. It is from the category - how to abuse old things.

Zhenya: Maybe we could not play rock. We had the energy of two people, which we had to put somewhere, and we applied it in this way.

Katia: The best comment was on our first EP on Lookatme. Someone wrote: "What an excellent drummer you have!" We recorded this EP together in the room, and the drummer was Ableton (laughs). We automatized humanity.

Zhenya: And then all of this bored us.

- "You do not seem to be bored with rock."

Zhenya: Rock is alive, as is Choi. Everyone is alive, and everything is fine, but we must somehow play in a different way.

Katia: It seems to me that the concept of "rock" has exhausted itself. I do not even know what kind of rock is alive. Someone recently wrote funny in Facebook: remember the main opposition of the 90's - a rock against rap? It seems that rap won.

Zhenya: In short, we are dancing on the scorched field and waving some flags.

- "They're still alive, though."

Zhenya: Yes, but it's life as in a clod of soil, in which millions of microorganisms swarm. They, as musicians, are everywhere. You go to the subway with a guitar, and besides you - two more people with guitars necessarily.

Katia: You mixed it up with the train to Leningrad.

Zhenya: On the train to Leningrad, apart from you, there are five more people with guitars at least. This group "Cockroaches" goes to St. Petersburg on a punk-tree.

In short, there is always life in this clod of soil. Sometimes it lumps from the lump to something decent in size and classified by scientists. I can not say anything about the "GSh" group, but we are fully confident that we are doing everything right.

- And what does "GSh" do now? Can this be described?

Zhenya: We continue the search for a musical language. We are inspired by various kinds of Russian literature - for example, advertisements and cold calls, which, in our opinion, are also part of the common cultural soil.

- "You're talking about the text, but what about the sound?"

Zhenya: We are using traditional means to achieve non-obvious communication between tools in order to get an unusual texture. It is part of the musical language, as well as melodism, which we draw from the works of Russian composers. We consciously try to rebuild our musical interior for a new melodism. In order to form your handwriting. At least to the peak of what is happening with the songs now - they are all written as if by one or two people.

Katia: Zhenya is hysterical now about the fact that all the pop songs of the world seem to be written by Chris Martin.

Zhenya: Everyone talks about self-expression, but, strangely enough, people write the same music.

Katia: Yesterday we started to argue whether a corrosive song is good. I believe that this is very good. Superpop for this and is calculated. I now remembered Olga Buzova, and her song played in my head.

- The NRKTK group, in which you, Zhenya, once played, wrote cautious songs.

Zhenya: We set this goal consciously and tried to achieve it. We always had a task to make a covetous refrain.

- Do "GSH" this task is not worth it?

Zhenya: No, it's not.

Katia: I can remember Olga Buzova's song, but NRKTK does not.

Zhenya: You just have not heard them for a long time. For example, my sister recently went to Birobidzhan and heard the song "Puma" there as a substrate for advertising fast loans.

- You in many interviews say that "GSH" is pop music, but pop music is a cautious chorus.

Zhenya: Not necessarily. There is a wider perception of pop music: for example, the band Slayer is also pop music, because it is popular, that is, it is understandable without any special additional knowledge. It's silly to think that if the guitar fuzes are more twisted - it's not pop.

Katia: With the advent of the Internet, it's hard to stay in the underground. I do not know what kind of music you have to write now to be misunderstood and stay in the underground. On the Internet there are always people who understand you. So now everything is pop. In this, and funny.

Zhenya: Our music is potentially massive, it's just a bit more difficult to perceive than conditional Olga Buzova. There are people who consider themselves avant-garde, they try to make everything as incomprehensible and impassable as possible. Send everyone in the ass. It's not about us. Do not separate people with your music, it's worth combining them. But it is also necessary to complicate the task for perception, because perception must evolve. Technologies are constantly evolving - heaps of new devices are appearing, neural networks, soon we will control technology with the help of thought, and people continue to listen to the most corrosive and stupid and say that, for example, Prokofiev is a very complex music. It is necessary that consciousness corresponds to progress.

translated by Dejan Stojkovski

The Article is Taken from:

colta.ru

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Carsten Nicolai – Spaces in Between

6/26/2017

Through his artwork, Carsten Nicolai overcomes the segregation of forms of sensory perception. Sound is made visible, light frequencies are heard. Sound, light, time, and space are the cornerstones of the work of the artist, who is making neither a political statement nor yet another self-reflexive discourse about art. Instead, he tries to investigate and penetrate the frontiers of perception, of which we have no conception but which do seem to have an effect on us.

Nicolai is experimental in his art in a scientific sense. He formulates precise conditions, clears away that which is unnecessary, defines environments in which his artworks can grow: sometimes through the influence of the public, sometimes through moments of disturbance, blurring, or chance in the system. Self-organized processes – for example, the formation of snowflakes in the air due to impurities and disturbances – fascinate him. Through the formation of self-organization and chance, Nicolai can step into the background as an artist and avoids the personification of his artwork. Such processes speak for themselves.

Carsten Nicolai began with painting – first, completely classic: oil on canvas. Then, however, with the exploration of new artistic possibilities, the search also began for other materials that would suit his objectives. The conventional canvas was replaced by translucent polyester frameworks within which the arriving light breaks and whereby the color in the picture is produced. Liquid-filled basins placed on loudspeakers through which digitally worked sound samples are played reproduce frequency patterns on their surfaces. Through the explosion of a gas mixture, the speed of sound at 334 meters per second is made visible in a glass tube. On his label “raster noton”, the artist publishes under the alias “alva noto”. His sound work is designed on an editing program that does not work in real time and therefore the sound must first be visually drafted in order to be heard. Nicolai considers his work in sound as visual work, he does not make music but instead calls himself a visual composer.

The artist, born in Karl-Marx-Stadt in 1965, has achieved great success with his work. Numerous prizes, almost twenty solo exhibitions in cities ranging from Berlin to Tokyo, Biennales, group exhibitions, as well as alva noto performances in the New York Guggenheim, Centre Pompidou, Kunsthaus Graz, and the Tate Modern. Although his work is appreciated worldwide, he is more concerned with those details, fragments, or parts in which – following the thesis of philosopher Marcello Viccini – all the information of the whole is retained.

text is taken from:

en.castyourart.com

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