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

- David Roden

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

- Doug van Nort

​references:

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?
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– Andreas Burckhardt i

​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.
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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.
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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.

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.
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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.

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.
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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.
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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 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.
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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
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xxviii Ibid, pg. 135

taken from:

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.

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)

​(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: 

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 «proces​s».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

​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).

​(Rizosfera/Nukfm, 2017) 

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

by ​Su Baykal

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.

by Jon Wiederhorn

​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.