Category Archives: music

Excerpts

from

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“…a conception of sound as a continuous, anonymous flux to which human expressions contribute but which precedes and exceeds these expressions.

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At its best, ‘sound art’ opens up or calls attention to an auditory unconscious, a transcendental or virtual domain of sound that has steadily come to prominence over the course of the twentieth century.

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Background noise [le bruit de fond] is the ground of our perception, absolutely uninterrupted, it is our perennial sustenance, the element of the software of all our logic. It is the residue and cesspool of our messages. It is to the logos what matter used to be to form. Noise is the background of information, the material of that form. Background noise may well be the ground of our being. It may be that our being is not at rest. The background noise never ceases; it is limitless, continuous, unending, unchanging. It has itself no back- ground, no contradictory. Noise cannot be made a phenomenon; every phenomenon is separated from it, a silhouette on a backdrop, like a beacon against the fog, as every message, every cry, every call, every signal must be separated from the hubbub that occupies silence, in order to be, to be perceived, to be known, to be exchanged. As soon as a phenomenon appears, it leaves the noise; as soon as a form looms up or pokes through, it reveals itself by veiling noise. So noise is not a matter of phenomenology, so it is a matter of being itself.

‘In short,’ Moles concludes, ‘there is no absolute structural difference between noise and signal. They are of the same nature. The only difference which can be logically established between them is based exclusively on the concept of intent on the part of the transmitter. A noise is a signal that the sender does not want to transmit.’

This sort of relativity would seem to put signal and noise on a par with one another, allowing noise an ontological place of its own, one no longer subordinate to signal. Yet this relativism, too, privileges signal. It construes the distinction between signal and noise (or music and noise) solely from the perspective of communication and meaning, and of human intentions and values. And yet, before there were creatures to exchange signals, there was a generalised noise: the crackling of cosmic radiation, the rush of the wind, the roar of the sea. And, even now, every signal is issued against the backdrop of this noise. As Serres puts it, ‘noise’ is the background hubbub of life, the ceaseless sonic flux. Just as objects fill visual space, noise is what fills the auditory field: the hum of fluorescent lights, the rustling of leaves or fabric, the sound of traffic, radio static – indeed, all of these combined. It is from this background that any signal comes to the fore, temporarily drawing our attention to it and away from the background noise.

This virtual field has, for Leibniz, a truly cosmic significance. Each of the ‘minute perceptions’ that unconsciously determine conscious perception is itself the effect of causes that ramify out to infinity. Each individual wave is the result of a multitude of forces: the speed and direction of the wind, air pressure and temperature, the temperature and viscosity of the water, and so on. As a result, each conscious perception is the local registration of the entire state of the universe at any given moment. And the same is true of memory. The reservoir of memory contains not only particular memories or experiences – traces of all the past events I have experienced – but everything to which those experiences and memories are connected – namely, the entirety of the past.

Vibrations do not disappear, but dissipate, echoing all the while, for energy is conserved. Every vibration, every sound, hangs in the air, in the room, in bodies. Sounds spread out, they become less and less contracted, they fuse, but they still remain, their energy of vibration moving the air and the walls in the room, making a noise that still tickles the strings of a violin playing weeks later. Every sound masks an entire history of sound, a cacophony of silence.

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‘Is the universe noise?’ Kosko asks, and then continues:

That question is not as strange as it sounds. Noise is an unwanted signal. A signal is anything that conveys information or ultimately anything that has energy. The universe consists of a great deal of energy. Indeed a working definition of the universe is all energy anywhere ever. [T]he noise-signal duality lets a sincere pan-theist counter that he loves or wants God and that God just is the entire universe but spelled with fewer letters. So to him the universe is not noise but one big wanted signal.

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Leibniz’s other prominent auditory example approaches this idea from the other side. For the man who lives next to the watermill, it is not the parts but the entire sound that is – or has become – imperceptible. This sound has ceased to be remarkable and has become ordinary, unconscious, background. Leibniz thus makes it possible for us to grasp the distinction between signal and noise not as one between part and whole, ignorance and knowledge but as one between the singular and the ordinary, perception and its conditions of genesis, the actual and the virtual.

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…in a lecture on Leibniz, Gilles Deleuze offers just such a suggestion. ‘One can conceive of a continuous acoustic flow that traverses the world and that even encompasses silence’, he writes. ‘A musician is someone who appropriates something from this flow’

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As Cage once put it: ‘Music is continuous; only listening is intermittent’ (1982: 224).

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The piece as a whole focuses on the very medium of sonic transport – air – and highlights the fact that sound is simply the result of pressure changes in that medium. Its subject matter – wind – is the most elemental of all phenomena and the most primeval sonic stuff. Wind is powerful, invisible and ever-changing. To focus on it is to transcend the limits of our ordinary ontology, composed as it is of relatively stable visible objects. For wind is pure becoming, pure flow. It is immemorial, but never the same. And it is nothing but the play of differential forces, differences in air pressure and temperature that generate immense currents, fronts and bursts across the surface of the earth – phenomena that are contracted by our ears (and by the microphone membrane) as sound.

The more I thought of the essence of music, the more conceptual I became. The element of sound disappeared. I thought “Feeling duration itself is music.”

– Mieko Shiomi

Erik Satie – Vexations

The first Australian performance, organised by David Ahern, took place in Watters Gallery, Darlinghurst, Sydney, on 21-2 February 1970. The performance lasted 22hours; The pianist was Peter Evans, who attempted the performance solo. After 16hours, having reached repetition 595, he stopped abruptly, and left the room. He wrote: “I would not play the piece again. I felt each repetition slowly wearing my mind away. I had to stop….People who play it do so at their own great peril.” Apparently his mind became full of “evil thoughts, [and] animals and “things” started peering out of the score at him.” However all was not lost; another pianist, Linda Wilson, came forward and completed the performance, reporting no ill effects.

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The act of performing or listening to a complete performance of Vexations cannot be compared to any other musical experience. As Cage observed, “the experience over the 18 hours and 40 minutes of those repetitions was very different from the thought of them or the realisation that they were going to happen. For them to actually happen, to actually live through it, was a different thing. What happened was that we were very tired, naturally, after that length of time and I drove back to the country… I slept an unusually long period of time, and when I woke up, I felt different than I had ever felt before. And furthermore the environment that I looked out upon looked unfamiliar even though I had been living there. In other words, I had changed and the world had changed… It wasn’t an experience I alone had, but other people who had been in it wrote to me or called me up and said that they had had the same experience.”

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Dick Higgins observed, “the music first becomes so familiar that it seems extremely offensive and objectionable. But after that the mind slowly becomes incapable of taking further offence, and a very strange euphoric acceptance and enjoyment begin to set in… Is it boring? Only at first. After a while the euphoria… begins to intensify. By the time the piece is over, the silence is absolutely numbing, so much of an environment has the piece become.”

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In Cage’s famous aphorism, “In Zen they say: If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, try it for eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and so on. Eventually one discovers that it’s not boring at all but very interesting.”

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In a poetic sense, Vexations never finishes – the 840 repetitions are themselves but an instant in the eternal present in which the music exists like some platonic form, obliterating memory, eluding analysis. In the words of an ancient Indian saying, “The music continues; it is we who walk away.”

“For example, we can notice how the turn to the singular engenders — and in fact requires — a limited engagement with the historical. By treating the internet as a monumental event that has shaped the entirety of the present, the post-internet, as both a discourse and a concept, gains its particular “currency.” History must be stripped of complexity, ossified and binarized, for the post-internet to function. This denuded sense of the historical is reflected in Olson’s understanding of the post-internet era, which for her “may be ahistorical insofar as it has no degree-zero.” This assertion’s appeal to generality, its belief in the total subsumption of the contemporary by the internet, refuses to countenance historical complexity, instead allowing for a subsequent assertion that “We are now in a postinternet era. Everything is always-already postinternet.” In these terms, history is rendered as a thing that happens, that has already happened, not something that can be shaped, that emerges out of economic, social, political, or cultural forces. The internet’s emergence can then be posited as a rupture, something that, by clearing away the vestiges of the past, announces a new future. In the face of this epochal shift, art exists simply to register these changes and to self-consciously comment on them from within.

No politics, no struggle, only content.

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The play […] is to desediment, to exfoliate, to renew the earthly and inseparable assembly, the habitual jam, by way of and in the differentiation of what will be neither regulated nor understood. All we got is us in this continual giving away of all.

Against the individual, Crampton is instead enfolded in a trans-generational play of influence that resolves itself into a sonic mantle that she takes on and continues. Ownership of this sound is less important than its persistence, ensuring that its legacies are respected, its attachments attended to. This is a mode of music-making for the present, one that neither shies away from history nor lets itself be overcome by it. It is a music-making that understands that history is made “under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.” The past does not recede into obscurity here, crushed by the momentousness of the internet. Instead, it is reworked, returned to the present in a new form, giving the lie to a historical consciousness constructed according to a series of pre-s and post-s.”

“Sung parts are more spontaneous and can be considered as quasi-field recordings, like extracts of dialogue that re-contextualize the instrumental, more overwhelming parts.”

“Whatever else is happening around you at the time gets sucked into the mix: A hissing heater or a honking horn might be confused for a purposeful gesture. That randomness, that possibility of a song changing with every listen”