t.g.p.b.

2011-09-11T02:09:00.002+01:00

Housekeeping:

Two fairly old reviews on bleep43 that I forgot to link to.

Emptyset - Demiurge

and

Dalglish - Benacah Drann Deachd

Frighteningly busy at the moment. You're lucky to even get this out of me.

Re:View

2011-06-29T17:47:00.000+01:00

Outside of a strictly academic context, most of the writing I've been doing lately has been reviews. I plan to continue even though I'm aware this makes for quite a tedious online presence, an aging expanse that becomes increasingly empty, littered only with infrequent links to short pieces elsewhere. Happily though, this has opened a pathway back towards a basic function of listening I used to take for granted: I'm forced to engage with music. The listening habits that shaped my younger self, evolving with me as I emerged from youth into my twenties (well, it's hardly adulthood is it) have become fragmented and transitory. I barely listen to a track all the way through before skipping to another I've been reminded of, let alone a whole album. The very idea of linearity seems somehow quaint as I've been seduced by an aesthetics of disruption. It's the Wikipedia of listening; every piece of music now seems saturated with hyperlinks to other tracks, sounds, genres, moments. Perhaps this is heightened by listening to sample based music while writing for academic institutions: citation anxiety. The author is long dead but the reader has forgotten to be born. All we're left with is a cavernous space, filled with echoes. Content is replaced by reference; samples of samples of samples without sources.

Old news. But it gets claustrophobic sometimes.

It's something of a balm, therefore, to be challenged to respond. To sit down and concentrate on one thing - for however short a period. I've wondered if this is disingenuous, perhaps I should embrace the chaos, quell these Luddite impulses. Nevertheless. What a joy music can bring when you invest your time in it.

I'd not heard of Jasper TX a month ago but his newest album is one of the finest things I've come across in a long time. This is probably due, on my part, to the replenishment of vigour that comes from a renewed engagement with sound. Be that as it may, the album itself seems to have been crafted in a way that totally and wilfully negates the techno-cultural drift towards stilted listening. A tonic to the dominant, if you will.

Shangaan Electro

2011-06-29T17:29:00.004+01:00

A review of the Shangaan Electro stop-off at the Rich Mix for the Morning Star here. It's been edited fairly substantially, for space reasons I imagine, so director's cut below.

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Type the word ‘Tshetsha’ into YouTube and a cascade of videos, with hits in the hundreds of thousands, overflows onto the screen. This is already an unprecedented level of proximity to the ‘microgenre’ of Shangaan Electro, a dance craze that originated within the confines of the town of Giyani, in Limpopo Province, South Africa, and is still largely limited to its environs. The chance to experience the spectacle in the flesh is a rare one: there is just one more UK date following this evening’s performance as part of the Blaze summer festival organized by the Barbican. The latter continues over the summer months as a tribute to the host boroughs of next year’s athletic extravaganza (‘Europe’s largest cultural quarter’), inviting international stars and less familiar cult acts to share the limelight across a number of East London venues. Tonight the Rich Mix arts centre accommodates the dizzying talents of DJ Nozinja, vocalist/dancers Prescillan and Mujaji and two Tshetsha Boys as they spearhead the mission to take the bafflingly multisensory assault of Shangaan to the rest of the world.

The night opens with DJ collective Secousse playing the sort of pan-African selection of soukous and kwela that wouldn’t sound out of place at a Stoke Newington capoeira picnic before evolving into the digital hybrids of kwaito and kuduro. Although occasionally breaching the barriers of taste in its omnivorousness, the journey sets the scene for the headliners themselves, flying forward into unknown sonic territory whilst always taking time to glance back into the wellspring of tradition. Shangaan pop (‘tsonga disco’) takes harmonies from traditional Zulu music, marrying them to rhythms brought in by Portuguese colonists and commercial sensibilities gained from disco.

The ‘electro’ version made by today’s youth accelerates and mutates this alliance of roots and future, gorging to excess on its own inimitable characteristics and progressing with only the barest of influence from the Western world. The most noticeable difference is the pace. Nozinja’s productions wear their BPMs like badges of pride as he explains that he is going to ramp up the tempo from a lumbering 145, up to a blistering one-eight-FOUR (the ‘four’ is spat out like the slap of a gauntlet) beats per minute – the speed ‘when bones break’. Indeed, the skeleton seems more hindrance than help to the two female dancers performing the xibelani dance at this level, hips gyroscoping, decorated skirts flying.

The exhausting level of concentration is apparent as their upper bodies remain in stately repose and serenity casts over their faces. This is in stark contrast to Sjinedo and Julius, the two boiler-suited Tshetsha Boys, whose faces contort and bodies convulse in a taut balance between frenzied abandon and masterful choreography. At different times evoking the Charleston, Chicago footwork, even Cossack dance, as well as indigenous Zulu forms, it is testament to the mangled genealogy of global dance and seems the only response appropriate in the context of such schizophrenic music.

In Giyani, the music is an emphatically social custom, a bubbling locus of participation. Although attempts by the troupe to involve the audience were admirable, most seemed confused by the prospect, aside from one or two recognition-seeking hipsters. Consequently, the ninety minutes seemed to drag in places, as the repetitive music offered little in the way of respite for a passive audience. The presentation of this sort of cultural activity, divorced from its origins, will always be an uneasy one, yet it is clear that the energy of Nozinja and his crew will continue to infect crowds until the craze reaches epidemic proportions.

2011-06-17T10:56:00.001+01:00

in other news... I am now on twitter.

@tgpb85

Let's see how this pans out.

Hardcore Art on Art Action

2011-06-17T10:37:00.005+01:00

My Morning Star review of Mark Leckey's BigBoxStatueAction is up here. I believe all performances have now been performed but it's worth catching in future if possible. The exhibition 'See, We Assemble' at the Serpentine, including his incredible Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, is still running for another week or so however.

Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (Mark Leckey)

Phallology

2011-05-19T23:01:00.001+01:00

‘It is altogether hopeless to language the phallic instrument’, Lacan says, which is perhaps why he prefers to mathematise it instead. Yet nonetheless we try.

Penis. Organ. Dick. Prick. Willy, knob and todger in this country. Member. Rod. Dong, schlong and weiner in the land of the brave. On dit bite en Francais, während der Schwanz in Deutsch ist. All seem inadequate for that ‘pointy extremity’ poised with fantasy.

Willy is puerile and pliant, like a yoyo, extending and contracting with cartoonish elasticity. (K)nobs, graspable, comedic and shiny, are only really wielded by Rik Mayall in the eighties.
Penis is clinical, slim, invoking the surgical precision of an instrument that slices. Anagrammatically (we all thought Saussure went mental!) we s-n-i-p-e, with hidden gunfire, picking victims off, one by one.
The (vital) organ, with its facility for Frankie Howerd-calibre double entendre, takes us a little closer to the phantasmic plasticity of this most mutable of appendages: the life-giving entity, the flesh and blood; the sacred instrument, the tactile device, its amenity to being played.

This multi-valent phallic vessel, swelling on the flow of signification, is partially anchored, I would suggest, with ‘cock’ - a word whose unconscious vitality brings together a potent cocktail of possible associations, from the domineering to the pathetic. The symbol, like the object, is loaded, just as a gun is cocked, with unearned arrogance, absurdity and the promise of brutality. The girth of the O and the piercing plosive K turn COCK into a battering ram: never flaccid, impossibly eager, there is no cock in repose. In the pervasive fantasia of hardcore pornography, writes Stephen Maddison, ‘there are no soft cocks and no display of the process of male arousal - only up-standing penises’, a ‘biological fiction’ that is swiftly becoming a ‘biotechnological reality’. Even when deflated, cock remains alert, coquettish even, coyly hiding itself in plain sight, but largely (and sometimes very largely), cock is cocky, presumptuous and insouciant, cocking a snook at those embarrassed by their lack.

In its polysemy, Cock is marked by multiple veins: those traits or conditions which form channels or vessels through which the word becomes distended with potency. Cock is thus an exemplary pharmakon, that drug (either poison or remedy) which Derrida takes so that he might rehabilitate Plato’s Phaedrus by breaking it apart. In this case, following Madison, we might say that the pharmakon is now vivified by Viagra. The cockness of Cock is prosthetised by a chemical synthesis, so that it might permanently hold ‘that complicity of contrary values’, to quote the venerable deconstructionist, who goes on to say that ‘this “medicine” is not a simple thing. But neither is it a composite [...]. It is rather the prior medium in which differentiation in general is produced’. Cock holds within itself a multiplicity that remains in opposition, sustaining constant conflict, and thus embodies, literally, the necessary precondition of dialectics. One only need raise one cock for the entire battery of linguistic, symbolic, biological, technological and pharmacological cocks to usher forth, as in the metonymic dreamwork, revealing the unfurled unconscious of phallogical language.

Yet too many cocks, as they say, spoil the broth, and there is one significant feature that eludes Cock. It might involuntarily wake us up in the morning with its hysterical, insistent alarm cock-crow, like a battle cry, anxious for the fight, but pride, in the Shakespearean sense, naturally comes before the Fall, a cock up of biblical proportions, something which cock dare not admit. For cock’s bulging tumescence hides the shame (die Scham) which lies beneath. The richly connotative yet simultaneously exclusionary Cock is deliberately sidestepped by Stewart Lee when, in the course of discussing his experience of an endoscopy, he describes ‘my penis, my two testicles’ as ‘the source of my shame’. This choice of words, as always with Lee, is very deliberate. In a footnote to this section in his recent book, he dwells on the revelation, asking:

how much more vulnerable do the stringy ‘testicles’ and the floppy ‘penis’ sound than the consonant-crowned ‘cock’ and ‘balls’? There’s no shame in having a cock, in having balls. But having a penis and some testicles sounds awful, like an ailment, or as if a deep-sea eel and some dangly pasta have been unceremoniously stapled to a man’s groin, before he is forced to dance naked in front of a Liverpudlian hen party in a subterranean Greek restaurant.

There is no shame in Cock, it is rather a beacon of declaration. The strutting Cock displays in order to conceal what it is not, what it must not be. Cock is the driving seat, the cockpit, of male ego. In his stand up show ‘Shame', Sun shagger of the year Russell Brand, who has shamelessly built and dissolved a career out of his sexual exploits, discovers his own humility (or lack thereof) when confronted by COCK-MEN, men who emanate from their COCKS.

Cock-Men. To be a cock-man is to be a man stultified by original shame. For, if 'the cock is involved in their every action', then every action is thus constructed around the banishment of shame.

In the discourse of stand up comedy, shame is often invoked as a provocation of the absurd. Part of the paradox of the comic is that he presents himself on stage in order to publicly articulate his ineffable private vulnerability. (‘Hey, this is just an anecdote to you, I live this shit’ Brand says elsewhere – unconvincingly, for we know that his life is an anecdote for him himself, first and foremost.) And we laugh at the incongruity or we voice our disgust towards the lack of decorum, possibly both at the same time. Sinking a depth charge into the mass-felt Real, the comic thrusts forward, riding high on a wave of false audience affirmation. Whereas the cock-men pitch up Cock as a parasol in order to keep their shame in the shade, Brand displays a simulacrum of vulnerability in an effort to render Cock impotent.

If shame is inexpressible then Brand is, by declaring and wallowing in his shame, remarkably unsullied by it, while his cock-adversaries, who ‘might as well be ejaculating all over the airport’, are burdened with the authentic experience of a shame that cannot exist in the domain of the logos (appropriately enough, they can only communicate via a ‘pre-linguistic rumble that will baffle Chomsky’). The cock-man is ‘like a monkey’, bereft of the faculties of ‘insight and analysis’, such that it does not recognise the phallic properties of its own banana.

By invoking the pharmakon, we can posit Cock as one of the starting points of philosophy. In his misjudged eloquence, Brand is of course guilty of the kind of sophistry by which Plato was so dismayed. By confronting shame he instead constructs a Cock-persona of his own out of hyperphasic excess, which only serves to bury it deeper. Yet there is a very (R)eal sense in which the relationship between Cock and shame forms the founding ontological moment - what Lacan puns as a 'hontology'. It is the relationship between the overdetermined and the inexpressible. If we are looking for the logic behind the body without organs then we could do worse than to start with the organ with-out the body.

Breakers Know

2011-05-07T22:56:00.004+01:00

My review of last Sunday's Breakin' Convention at Sadler's Wells was in yesterday's Morning Star. In the interests of accurate self-representation, if you'll allow the oxymoron, the piece I actually wrote appears below. And despite the strange (mis-)leading sentence claiming that it 'didn't quite hit the mark', the show was actually really great.

---

Breakdance has obtained a metonymythic status: as one of the five elements of hip hop, it conjures up a hypermediated fantasy of the late 70s Bronx cottage industry that birthed it. Once it had crossed oceans and class-barriers, the style quickly became overdetermined, signifying a huge array of cultures and ideologies – including those it once adopted a stance against. Breaking now seems a cute anachronism, a museum-piece of cultural nostalgia subsumed into advertising, vapid talent shows and bland Hollywood movies.

Various performers at the Breakin' Convention's Sunday line-up offloaded this burden of history by playing with the clichés of its past and present lives, most inventively in Kenichi Ebina's Eclipse~Ninja. Parodying coin-op soundtracked blows one minute and geisha striptease the next, it was not the most tasteful routine on display – that award goes to Clash 66's glitched out heart monitor duet – but one that revelled in the improbable mythology of hip hop martial arts, climaxing in an impeccably-timed strobe-light airwalk that, even when seen, took some believing.

At its best, as in Morning of Owl Crew’s intricate Harmonize, the event explored the plasticity of the human form: supple bodies became interchangeable components, mitotic fluids, shifting molecular structures – breakers catch each others’ suicide falls; windmill legs are secured by steady hands; individuals fuse into the group dynamic. This submission of self-control through micro-measured poise suffused the evening, particularly in the wincingly-titled ‘Dark Solo’ performances. Whether it was Theo Godson's schizotic self-against-self routine, where internal struggle played out in convulsive choreomania, bones cracking at the impact of invisible fists, or the inverted spasms of love (or rape: the margin between passion and pain becoming increasingly uncertain as the piece progressed) showcased by Ella Mesma's EVOL, dance became characterised by its performers’ surrender to an unseen other.

Control of bodily motion thus maps effortlessly onto images of socio-economic manipulation, as with Morning of Owl’s shuffling zombie bankers, coins cascading out of pockets with every pop and lock. Though of a very different tenor, Big City Brains’ hour-long epic The Human Robot closed the evening by following a similar narrative. With a wry smile, the dancers navigated the short typographic leap between ‘commuter’ and ‘computer’, shamelessly regurgitating every man-machine stereotype from Metropolis to Kraftwerk. Though shades of fear and bureaucratic paranoia emerged through the intonation of lines like 'timetables and graphs / sorrows and laughs', the choreography remained more cartoon than nightmare, signaled by the arrival of a miniature dancing Megatron controlled by the shape-throwing wheelchair-bound antagonist, somewhere between a leering Hawking and a Virilio-inspired ‘citizen-terminal’. The message was clear: humans have perfected the art of mimicking the robot – the robot will never be able to dance the human.

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Breakin Convention
Kenichi Ebina
Clash 66
Morning of Owl Crew
Theo Godson
Big City Brains

nineteen-haunties

2011-02-01T16:20:00.003Z

past(iche) / present / future

placeholder post

2011-01-28T15:20:00.003Z

it's bloody 2011. we need to have a talk, you and me. ask ourselves where we're going with this. sometimes i think we want different things. i don't want us to just go through the motions. we deserve better than this.

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a short article of mine can be read in marvellous postgraduate journal Dandelion, sprouting epiphytically out of the branches of this post.

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coming soon:
(responses to) responses to unrest
commentary on some music that truly deserves it
creation
flagrant self-promotion
something else entirely

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is a mere repository good enough? some prescription is required. without calling for a manifesto, coherence requires boundaries; despite the best efforts of broca's area, writing is (so far) syntactically ill-equipped for the transparent representation of cerebral currents. early spring is the time for pruning.

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no 2010 round up. tragically, however, the following have been almost forensically overlooked in everybody else's.

Part Time Education / Full Time Occupation

2010-12-08T22:11:00.004Z

Just come back from the occupation currently taking place at Birkbeck. This is significant because, being an institution that specialises in part time and evening study, and consequently housing a student body made up of full-time workers, parents and other non-traditional students, it is one that many never thought would be occupied. It's also my own college. There's a really nice atmosphere, one of open dialogue and debate (for three solid hours by the time I left this evening) that I'm sure is familiar to occupiers across the country.

It was established that David Latchman, Master of Birkbeck, though he may have spoken out against inordinate HE tuition fees in the past, will categorically not be opposing the cuts as the current proposals are generally viewed as a 'win' for PT education, and it was accepted that the university system that emerges from these debates will be (for better or for worse) radically different to the one we know. So, much of the discussion that I witnessed centred on Birkbeck's radical origins and continuing commitment to widening access, many asking in what ways the college might specifically react to the cuts within its position as a figurehead for PT education. Ideas richocheted around the room of the best ways to productively and cooperatively engage with the public, of ensuring the inclusiveness of academic thought and, more generally, questioning the status of the university within a wider social context, pleasingly echoing some of the ideas collated by Nina Power almost exactly a year ago on a free/proletarian university.

It is important to remember that, whether it be for a certificate or diploma, or postgraduate qualification, the ability to study part time both enables those who would not usually consider institutional education to do so and opens up the possibility of debt-free education for those whose wage packet will (just about) allow it. PT education is a wonderful thing and a body that institutionalises this ethic is one that inspires optimism. Yet the diffuse backgrounds and incentives of students at the likes of BBK are both an asset and a site of potential impotence. A student body for whom its education is necessarily a secondary consideration is far more difficult to mobilise in unity and act in the name of causes like this. They will undoubtedly have much to contribute but they may be working when the time comes to march, they may not be able to organise childcare to attend the meetings, they may simply be too tired for direct action. Especially if they have an essay to hand in. Is it any wonder, then, that the Browne Report is lenient on PT education? This is a vision, remember, in which education is a means to an end, which is employability and no more. This is not a vision that aims to foster any possibility of collective mobilisation of antagonism or critique.

It is up to occupations like BBK's to bring these considerations to bear on an already complex set of issues. By the looks of it, they are already leading by example.

Quick, sign the petition!

Help! Track IDs Required

2010-10-12T10:35:00.003+01:00

what are these tunes??? taken from an old mixtape of unknown origin, now so degraded that it's impossible to listen to - hence both sound like they were recorded inside a boiler with an old man's shoe.

Nix Mix track IDs by tgpb

1: Samples the 'ruined church sequence' from the Wickerman OST. Also, "the largest sea mammal is a whale" vocal sample from BDP - 'Part Time Suckers', as also used in Mr Scruff - Sea Mammal (so possibly not part of the original tune). Sounds possibly DJ Vadim or maybe early obscure Luke Vibert?
2: No idea! Reminds me of introspective Depth Charge or Jack Dangers. Vocal samples possibly along the lines of: "kill kill kill"? / "what does love give..." or "what the fuck is going on"?

Other tracks included on the tape include Renegade Soundwave, 'Feed Me Weird Things' era Squarepusher, early Mr Scruff ('Chicken in a Box' era), Emergency Broadcast Network, Plug, Mike & Rich, Money Mark... So we're talking mid-90s slightly leftfield dance music here.

Any help will be so greatly appreciated that I don't know how I'll manage to come to terms with it.

UPDATE: The first track has been suggested as the Andy Votel remix of Sea Mammal by Mr Scruff which was on the Frolic EP Part 2. This sounds likely, however i can't find any audio to corroborate... anyone?

2010-10-06T16:48:00.002+01:00

ohhhhh goshhhh

Desiring the Machine - a thought on Accelerationism

2010-09-20T08:15:00.008+01:00

One of the thorniest points raised at the Accelerationism event at Goldsmiths last week came in the form of a question from the audience. How, in practical terms, it was asked, should the accelerationist act? Post-Fordist capitalism, it is held, holds within it an awareness that it sets out an unrealisable endeavour. It asks humans to succeed at a task where machines have failed, to homogenise and commodify human capacities. Under capitalist realism, the ideal of even the most banal office drudgery is that of the craftsman, the worker that takes effortless pride in their thankless task. It asks admin assistants, customer service, human resources, even middle-management, as well as public officials, health workers, manual labourers and – hang on tight and spit on me – even financiers to carry out an extra-human undertaking whilst retaining the (exchange-)value of humanity, in the full knowledge that they will fail. In this respect, it is the obverse face of the coin which states that totalitarianism – that most ashen-faced of ideologies – holds within itself a cynical core, which automatically counter-subverts those anti-totalitarian subversions that rely on satire and irony. ‘The ruling ideology is not meant to be taken seriously or literally,’ Žižek states in the Sublime Object. ‘Perhaps the greatest danger for totalitarianism is people who take its ideology literally.’

Should one, therefore, adhere to its every utterance so closely that its weaknesses become all too clear? Follow its directives to the absolute letter – fulfil every impossible task, every bureaucratic whim, every unnecessary health and safety measure – or worse, complete the workload in half the time, badger your manager for more, question his capabilities to provide you with adequate amounts of joyless drudgery, reductio ad absurdum, and, the logic goes, the real inadequacies of the CR project begin to glare out like the headlights of a joy-ridden truck emerging from the thinning fog. The conspicuous issue brought up in response was the understandably low chances of finding such a worker, who will freely devote himself to the accelerationist cause in the face of diminishing personal returns. In fact the freedom of workers to make such demands – even those that ostensibly benefit their employer – was called into question; the exemplar given is the call-centre worker who wields no power of his own and who follows a set script to the extent that even his dialogue is automated. In such a case, the worker’s task is not to provide help or to instruct – these functions, after all, can be fulfilled by an online form or touch-tone phone – but to disguise the impenetrability of automated bureaucracy behind the softened features of the human voice. The capital machine is forced to ventriloquise through human vocal cords, presumably until voice recognition and speech synthesis devices manage to advance their grain detection and replication algorithms.

But what if we relocate this worker to another sector? One considered more ‘desirable’ but no less inflected/infected by the cyborg rhetoric of capitalism. Let’s make him work in media, in fact let’s say he works in the music industry, for a major label. What then? Plagued somewhat by the antagonisms of the culture machine, he is nonetheless grateful to have a job at all in the current market and, because of that, all the more excited to be a part of the production and dissemination of the music he loves. Well, some of it. A lot of it’s pap, let’s be honest, but that’s OK, it’s the big-name artists that allow them to take a chance on the unknowns, the exciting new talent. He watches these two loci play themselves out in the management too; there’s the guys in suits, (no ties – we’re creative yeah?), stomachs like foie gras-ripe geese wedged into pressed pinstripes, sending sidelong glances towards the be-canvas-slacked overgrown indie kids with unkempt hair and beards, and lurching hip hop swaggerers with ‘big’ personalities, each reminding the other that there’s two halves to the music industry, that every product is a battleground between artistic endeavour and business sense. These twin moons, he sees, whose inclinations are diametrically opposed and whose trajectories may rarely cross, ultimately orbit a common mass, to which they feel the same gravitational pull. This is driven home to him in quarterly round-ups and listening sessions with new signings, where he is assured that everyone is part of the same family (yes, they use the word), every member of which has an equally valid contribution to make, that though there may be conflict between certain quarters, this is a healthy, sportsmanlike way for the company to advance, that market growth involves personal progression. Above all in these times of piracy, every member of staff, every valuable component of the company, must take on the public role of an uncle or aunt who teaches their forgetful nephews, the consumers, how to play with their children, the artists.

Hearing this, he retains some scepticism, but how wonderful, he thinks to himself, to work for a company that doesn’t treat its staff like automatons. He’s in charge of his own workload, no-one breathes down his neck, all he has to do is deliver weekly figures and produce graphically-representable results. They want to hear his opinions and ideas too, well he has those in spades. Gradually he meets others who manage artists, run their own labels, host radio shows, promote gigs, write for magazines. Maybe he should do that. It sounds like fun and, crucially, it’ll look great on his CV. He should use his contacts. Perhaps he can integrate it with his current role somehow (he doesn’t have a job, he has a role). After a while, and after hearing several stories fed back to him, he begins to realise that it’s ONLY those who have done all these things who’ve gone on to higher positions. All the people who are going places, he notices, are always at their desk before him and always there after he goes home. Perhaps he should put more hours in, impress the bosses, maybe get some breakfast with them, he thinks to himself; work is only fractionally about the task you have been employed for. The 37 hour week is simply a guideline, he slowly begins to realise, as he remembers the box he ticked in his contract, opting out of the EU working time directive…

In an industry such as this, the work-life balance ceases to be a balance at all and becomes a continuum – and one with a substantial grey area – so that the company excels at interpellating its staff. The boundaries delineated by job title are equally fluid, so that the accelerationist-oriented worker is free to make their demands for more work, to challenge their line-manager, to ask in what better way they can serve the company. Yet, far from destabilising the ideological structures set in place, the accelerationist ethic is hardwired in, seemingly reinforcing them. The music industry example given above comes from my own experience, yet I am sure that such a scenario is replicated in many of the more ‘desirable’ industries. The predominance of office-synced Blackberries and iPhones are surely evidence enough here. I have a friend who, while working briefly for a PR firm, found it very difficult to leave on time for his two-hour commute home simply because no-one else did, which is rather like the anecdote about not wanting to be the first to stop clapping Stalin. This story works as a parable by assuming the crowd is applauding out of fear, whereas in the desirable CR-led industries I’m thinking of, people will clap, stomp their feet and wolf-whistle their company ideologies out of choice. Employers in mass media, from the BBC to NewsCorp to Google, have certainly remembered the basics from their Althusser 101 courses – but so too have those in banking and finance for sure, as well as (though here I am on shakier ground) law, the military, and, to a lesser extent, education and the health service. Accelerationism ceases to be a method of resistance in this context and becomes instead an exemplar of capitalism’s aptitude for assimilating its would-be opponents.

2010-08-27T10:36:00.004+01:00

Matthew Herbert seems to have moved the goalposts for hauntology.

It's a Caretaker-esque re-imagining of the piece that remained unfinished at the time of Mahler's death, consisting of recordings of the piece played back in 'mordant situations'. In a coffin, out of a hearse, in the composer's cabin (pictured on the appropriately hauntographical artwork), and at his grave.

You can listen on spotify: Philharmonia Orchestra – Recomposed by Matthew Herbert - Mahler Symphonie No. 10

The glaringly obvious question remains though, with all the ghostly connotations, why did nobody at DG think to call it 'DeComposed by Matthew Herbert'?

2010-08-19T14:23:00.005+01:00

Au revoir to Frank Kermode. Though I have yet to read any writing of his beyond the odd article or review, I am aware of the influence he has had on a number of names I hold dear and the trajectory of what's now known as 'theory', literary or otherwise, in British academia over the last half a century or so. Au revoir and not goodbye as I'm now determined to get myself a copy of The Genesis of Secrecy to plough through for holiday reading.

On a happier literary note, the BBC have raided their archives to provide a three part account of British novelists in the twentieth century as imagined by the authors themselves. The first part of the triptych, dealing with interwar characters from Chesterton and Woolf to Huxley and Orwell, is still available to watch on iPlayer for a few weeks.
Potentially more exciting is the revelation that you can spend many a happy hour wading through the back-catalogue at http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/. Why not start with a 1968 Tomorrow's World report on the Moog?

English Delight

2010-08-18T17:29:00.009+01:00

Until 10pm tonight (!) you can listen to an episode of Fry’s English Delight on the inception and influence of the Qwerty keyboard. You’re not missing a huge amount if you don’t manage to catch it, frustratingly couched as it is in Fry’s default soft Middle England uncle mode of presentation which he can so easily slip into, but there is a discussion of the way in which the typewriter, subject of course to the same manufacturing processes as any other piece of machinery, from sewing machines to rifles (the other two mainstays of E Remington and Sons before manufacturing the first commercial Qwerty typewriter) fits in with our facility for the production of language itself. The issue of standardisation and of interchangeability of parts in order to increase production line efficiency foregrounds the following exchange between Fry and Prof. Doron Swade

Swade: ‘the issue of interchangeability is not really to do with the mechanisation of handwriting, if you like, they’re two separate issues. One was “how do you mechanise handwriting?”; another question was “well, how do you make these machines very efficient to produce” .... Standardisation was absolutely crucial for manufacturing things in parallel and the issue of interchangeability in relation to language in Qwerty is actually, metaphorically, is very profound because, in fact, there must be some respect in which our cognitive apparatus is the same, in order for us to be intelligible to each other”
Fry: ‘Oh that’s rather pleasing, so the physical version of reproducing a machine to write is reflected in the wider sense, if one wants to call it wider, of our own minds and the way that they interoperate with other human beings and are standardised in our, sort of, giving and exchanging of words’
Swade: ‘Absolutely, and the big lesson of Qwerty to some extent is the fact that it was standard, not necessarily that it was the most efficient, or the most ergonomically sound, but that it was standard.’

So rather than the typewriter industrialising language, the symbolic world of language itself lays the ground for industrialisation. This seems very convenient, the kind of delightful paradox that, one assumes, 'pleases' Fry as a contemporary Wildean aphorism. The obvious approach is to place such a dialogue within the context of Kittler’s Gramophone Film Typewriter:

‘I'm ashamed to tell of it. I'm ashamed of my handwriting. It exposes me in all my spiritual nakedness. My handwriting shows me more naked than I am with my clothes off. No leg, no breath, no clothes, no sound. Neither voice nor reflection. All cleaned out. Instead, a whole man's being, shrivelled and misshapen, like his scribble-scrabble. His lines are all that's left of him, as well as his self-propagation. The uneven tracings of his pencil on paper, so minimal that a blind man's fingertips would hardly detect them, become the measure of the whole fellow.
...

‘On the one hand, we have two technological media that, for the first time, fix unwritable data flows, on the other, there is an "intermediate' thing, between a tool and a machine," as Heidegger wrote so precisely about the typewriter. On the one hand, we have the entertainment industry with its new sensualities, on the other, there is a writing which (unlike Gutenberg's movable types) separated paper and body already during the production of texts. From the beginning, the letters and their arrangement are standardized in the shape of types and keyboard, while media are engulfed by the noise of the real--the fuzziness of cinematic pictures or the hissing of tape recordings.
‘In standardized texts, paper and body, writing and soul fall apart. Typewriters do not store individuals, their letters do not communicate a hereafter that perfectly alphabetized readers could subsequently hallucinate as meaning.
...

‘Only the typewriter provides a writing which is a selection from the finite and arranged stock of its keyboard. It literally embodies what Lacan illustrated using the antiquated letter-box. In contrast to the flow of handwriting, we now have discrete elements separated by spaces. Thus, the symbolic has the status of block letters.’

The thing that fascinates me about this passage is the insinuation that the separation of letters into keys, in removing the connecting swirls and flourishes of the handwritten word, also erases something 'nakedly' human from the act of writing; 'writing and soul fall apart'. Umberto Eco wrote something fanciful in the Guardian last year about how the demise of handwriting might actually elevate it away from mere practice and into an actual artform, envisaging a world where parents sent their children to handwriting school much like they might to a horse-riding school, 'not only to acquire grounding in what is beautiful, but also for psychomotor wellbeing.'

"Psychomotor wellbeing" is a marvellous phrase, especially when applied to the act of writing and embodies, I think, exactly what Kittler means by his easily misinterpreted comparison between handwriting and the human; not just gestural semiotics but the 'whole man's being, shrivelled and misshapen', the 'noise...fuzziness...hissing' of the individual that the typewriter cannot store. In this respect standardisation is exactly not 'reflected in the wider sense of our own minds', as neat as that metaphor might seem, and this serves as a perfect memorandum for why Lacan's symbolic is tied in a borromean knot and should not be taken alone as a signifier of the human. It is dangerous to reduce the nuances of language as manifested physiologically, through voice or handwriting, to the standardised exchangeability and interchangeability of the machinic and then expound the virtues of doing so on a popular radio broadcast.

Graff-ic Warfare

2010-06-30T15:58:00.006+01:00

Edit: I didn't realise yesterday that this, and another Ramm interview, was put up in honour of Rammellzee's death. Sad news and, as far as I can make out, a bit of a mystery so far, though Wikipedia does helpfully tell us that "he is said to have been working on math equations at the time of his death."

-----

Really great interview by Greg Tate with Rammellzee in the Wire from 2004. Bewildering and intriguing in equal parts - and so operating in the default rhetorical mode of the Afro-futurist canon - Ramm forges family links between the intricate decorative techniques of illuminated manuscript and florid wildstyle graffiti:

The bishops in 1582 stopped their knowledge because they couldn't read the monks' tax papers. They were getting too fancy so the bishops said 'I can't read this to tax the people'. If you look in the dictionary you'll see that the bishops stopped the monks because their power was becoming too strong with the letter. Those damn monks contradicted what the kings wanted. They wrote it the way they wanted to write it, in their style. The calendar monks sent a letter to the one place God cannot go: Hell. The light we had draws from a knowledge that was dim down there, so the knowledge was very faint but yet it was real, and with its energy passing through our bodies, we received it.

To hear Ramm tell it, the essence of writing on the trains was all about taking something back – not Krylon spraycans from local art supply and hardware stores, but the alphabet itself, whose true symbolic nature was mathematical, not phonetic. Ramm believes our native tongue was imposed on the letter by our biologically diseased species, especially the Roman Catholic church. As Einstein did with his equation E=MC2, Ramm employs the letter as a standin for universal electromagnetic forces. Surrounding the Earth, the charged particles we know as the ionosphere determine the structure of every living thing, from the weather to DNA. Before the Writers on the trains were stopped, just like the monks before them, they were subconsciously armouring the letter against exploitation and misdirection – hence the repeated imagery of arrows and missiles.

I can't help but wonder what Kittler would make of all this.

Nothing In This Post Is True But It's Exactly How Things Are

2010-06-21T23:17:00.020+01:00

I wanted to take further some of the tentative steps into thinking about conspiracy theory that I initially made here. There exists in conspiracy theory a mode of engagement with the world that exemplifies a greater public mistrust in the perceived face of technologised, bureaucracised, dehumanised society - in this sense it ties into a greater project of grasping what it means to ally oneself to the fragile concept of the human - and while we should refrain from treating it with too much gravitas, we should certainly resist the urge to write it off completely. The bulk of what follows is adapted from a presentation given to a group of co-MA students in early May and forms a response of sorts (though I was unaware of it at the time of writing) to this post on what is marvellously titled 'Conspiracy Theory Theory' from Jeff Kinkle at Cartographies of the Absolute, the blog attached to the forthcoming zero title based around cognitive mapping.

The title of this post comes from a book I was lent by my brother called Nothing In This Book Is True But It’s Exactly How Things Are, which is ostensibly a “new age” treaty on rebirthing and meditation as a path to achieving what the book calls “Christ-Consciousness”, through which we can reach the higher spiritual dimensions where we will find our destiny. By way of context, the book also takes in a history of our planet based around our origins in alien experiments, the battle between God and Lucifer, our evolution on Atlantis, the truth behind the Great Pyramids, sacred geometry and mathematical unity, the secret government’s possession of advanced alien technology, the creation of a colony on Mars and the impending polar shift. It is, one might say, a rather holistic narrative.

The tone is infectious and almost deliciously free of irony, consciously blurring the line between fact and fiction in order to call into question the sanctity of such a dichotomy. In the introduction to the book, Richard Grossinger writes that the story that unfolds within is:

one of many stories and also one of many versions of one of many stories. It is a story we are living, and it is a story we are changing to such a degree that it is becoming unrecognizable even as it is being absolutely and unambiguously revealed for what it is. That is why nothing is true and yet that same "nothing" is certainly how things are.

He continues:

So I leave it with readers to decide if this is all true or if none of it is true. Because in the end your own word must be enough. For this lifetime and for all lifetimes and universes to come. In fact your word is the only thing that will get you through.

Such a seemingly ambivalent approach to facticity is common in this kind of literature, as in the ‘Guide to the Reader’ that opens The Montauk Project, a book which ’uncovers’ some of the government’s experiments in time-travel and mind control over the course of the latter half of the twentieth century. The reader is advised that the book is ‘an exercise in consciousness’ with the data presented therein of the order of ‘soft facts’, which ‘are not untrue, they are just not backed up by irrefutable documentation’; ‘hard facts’, we are told, ‘have been very difficult to obtain’ due to the nature of the subject matter. Consequently ‘the book is being presented as non-fiction as it contains no falsehoods to the best knowledge of the authors. However, it can also be read as pure science fiction if that is more suitable to the reader’. In the world of conspiracy theory, fact and fiction are no longer separate; rather they inform and elaborate each other in a deeply self-conscious feedback loop. It is for this reason that Peter Knight’s book Conspiracy Culture, from which I draw quite heavily, features as much analysis of conspiracy novels, TV programmes and films as it does of the actual events they signify upon.

Yet, at the same time, what becomes increasingly apparent upon delving in is that, despite (or perhaps because of) this ambiguity, the word ‘Truth’ (capital T) is incredibly important within conspiracy theory circles: Nothing In This Book Is True..., David Icke’s …and the Truth Shall Set You Free and a host of websites from 911 Truth to The Truth Seeker and Whole Truth Coalition and of course popular sci fi TV programmes. Of course ‘Truth’ is a heavily loaded word, endemic to a number of fields, amongst them religion, philosophy, law, politics and ecology, for that very reason. Truth may imply an actual reality to which we don’t have access, our best account of the world as we experience it, enlightenment, righteousness, amongst other things.

With more than a hint of conspiracy, the Independent newspaper brought out a video in the weeks approaching this year’s elections claiming that their particular brand of thrusting journalism offered ‘the truth behind the UK general election’. ‘Truth’, we are told, ‘matters’, the implication being, in an everyday sense, to normal people (or at least Independent readers), not just those wrestling with the "big ideas". Scientology is a case in point: the official UK Scientology website defines the religion as ‘literally "the study of truth."’, and we are told that ‘no-one is asked to accept anything as belief or on faith. That which is true for you is what you have observed to be true.’ Not to belabour the point, it is nonetheless interesting to note Scientology’s removal of faith from truth, when for many religions the distinctionis not so clear cut. But, we may ask, can the search for Truth really be considered that helpful? In the midst of a recent discussion on Religion and Reason, Terry Eagleton asks:

why discovering the truth should be considered so desirable in the first place. Certainly Nietszche did not think so, while Henrik Ibsen and Joseph Conrad both had their doubts about it. What rancor, malice, anxiety, or urge to dominion, Nietszche might inquire, lurks behind this obdurate will to truth?

And so, the task is emphatically not to uncover the truth behind conspiracy theories, neither to vindicate nor condemn those who identify with the logic of suspicion. Conspiracy thinking can be radical and revolutionary; it can also be dangerous. You need not, of course, hold a belief in a totalising worldview; to a certain extent, we are all conspiracy theorists. According to Richard Hofstadter’s influential essay ‘The Paranoid Style in American Politics’, however, the paranoid style is characterised by a conviction that conspiracy is ‘the motive force in history’. Yet we are unlikely to reinforce or undermine such a style by lifting the veil on the Reality of Things. Such an approach, I would argue, ultimately ignores or misapprehends the premise that whether or not it is unfounded, such a logic commonly - and perhaps increasingly - forms a dynamic and compelling trajectory at work in the world. So dynamic, in fact, that we are forced to reassess common approaches to religious, political, cultural and technological ideologies.

Conspiracy theory’s unsettled position straddling fact and fiction forcibly invites a postmodern reading. Lyotard’s ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’ and Baudrillard’s hyperreal worlds of simulacra resound here. So too does a marxist-inspired reading of Conspiracy Theory as a ‘cultural logic of late capitalism’. Italo Calvino’s If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller is possibly the archetypal postmodern novel: starring, as it does, you as the protagonist, attempting to read If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller by Italo Calvino. As you progress, you are foiled from reaching beyond the first chapter by a printing error, having to search out another copy which, it becomes apparent, is not the same book. You become more and more frustrated as this recurs over and over again, with increasingly outlandish obstacles, from mistaken identity, to faulty translations, to overzealous customs officials and eventually a full-blown international conspiracy preventing you from continuing on from the tantalising opening of each new novel. Yet your persistence is unassailable! You are determined to get to the bottom of this, despite the fact that it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between the real and the fake novel, the fiction of each of the opening chapters and the meta-fiction of the overarching plot, almost to the point at which you – both ‘you’ the protagonist and ‘you’ the reader – begin to wonder whether you are reading Calvino or Calvino is writing you. From the position of the sceptic observer, this would seem to me the dilemma of the conspiracy theorist: whether to accept that some things will never be solved and acknowledge the futility of one’s agency in the world, or to chase down the truth and risk sacrificing the very notion of truth itself; to be sure it is a dilemma that is savoured but a dilemma nonetheless. Yet from the point of view of the conspiracy theorist themselves, the situation is rather more like that of the businessman who surrounds himself with mirrors in ‘In A Network of Lines that Intersect’, the seventh of Calvino’s internal novels you attempt to start, for whom ‘the soul is a mirror that creates material things reflecting the ideas of the higher reason’. For them, nothing is to be ignored because everything reflects the totality of the whole, ‘the bigger picture’, yet this totality itself is to be found reflected in themselves. The businessman tells us that:

curved mirrors can catch an image of the whole […] the totality of things, the entire universe, divine wisdom could concentrate their luminous rays into a single mirror. Or perhaps the knowledge of everything is buried in the soul, and a system of mirrors that would multiply my image to infinity and reflect its essence in a single image would then reveal to me the soul of the universe, which is hidden in mine.

Ultimately, the businessman is foiled by his own convoluted catoptric concatenations, finding himself uncertain of who to trust, reflected and refracted in everyone around him. Perhaps then, it is the task of the Conspiracy Theorist to construct their own narrative to avoid a similar fate. This is a topic to which we will return.

It may seem brash to talk of ‘Conspiracy Theory’ as a whole, unified view, for there are clearly many different types, both sublime and ridiculous. Yet one finds that they operate as variations on a theme, as oral traditions – for this is what it is – tend to do. Consequently, conspiracy theory has found its rightful place in the far-flung corners of the internet, where the medium matches the message,. Theories operate memetically, through the logic of replication and variation. Many theories are literal cut-and-paste versions of other theories, or simply take existing theories up to a point beyond which they diverge. For those unfamiliar with at least the broad brushstrokes of Conspiracy Theory, what follows is a rundown of the typical features of the contemporary paranoid style.

The vast majority of conspiracy theories begin (or rather, end) with the hypothesis that there is an elite global cabal who really run the world – Freemasons, Illuminati, or one of a host of other guises – operating ‘behind the scenes’, gradually unrolling their hidden plan for total world control, a New World Order, where only the subservient survive. Items on the agenda may include: a world bank; the instalment of a global leader; removal of national political borders; rolling back of individual rights and freedoms; population control; reinstatement of slavery and feudalism; religious and racial oppression. Methods by which this will be achieved may involve: the orchestration of national and international disasters; deregulated money-lending; mass brainwashing; human implantation of identification chips; choreographed mass hysteria through misleading media campaigns; assassination of dissidents; exploitation of public health services; genocide. Long-term goals are generally accepted to be increased wealth, comfort and peace of mind for the elite few; may include improved relations with extra-terrestrial societies; and occasionally have quasi-religious, apocalyptic undertones whereby it is only the elite who will survive a long-foretold devastating event.

Frequently, as we have seen, there is what has been termed a ‘new age’ tint to conspiracy theories, bringing in sacred geometry, astrology, homeopathic medicine, astral planes, alternative dimensions, immortality, our origins in alien interference and our future as newly conscious cosmic beings. David Icke’s hypothesis of Reptilian overlords, 8 foot alien lizard men who disguise themselves as royalty, politicians or other figures of authority is a neat demonstration of this. Often there is a tendency to interpolate aspects of religion into proceedings, with interpretations of the apocalypse in the Book of Revelations, Jewish longing for Zion and Egyptian religious mythology making the most common appearances. One of the most hallowed of conspiracy theorist relics is The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an anti-semitic text which posits Jews at the top of the elite, openly and explicitly plotting to bring down Western society ("WE SHALL ENSLAVE GENTILES"; "UNIVERSAL WAR"). The documents were exposed as a forgery in the Times in 1921, though this was admittedly a year after an editorial was printed in the same paper citing the Protocols as evidence of the Jewish plot. In an article entitled ‘False Protocols’, Umberto Eco comments that they are ‘clearly fictional, since in them the Elders brazenly spell out their evil projects; and though this might be believable in a novel […] it exceeds the boundaries of credibility that anyone would do this so shamelessly in reality.’ Nonetheless, we have already met the attractions of such a novelistic approach to the world and the fallout remains in the deep-seated belief by a number of conspiracy theorists that the number of prominent Jewish figures high up in politics, journalism, banking and the entertainment industries is evidence of no accident. Meanwhile, Icke’s Reptilians bear more than a hint of anti-semitic metaphor. Conspiracy theory is often by no means harmless.

Traces (and often much more than traces) of conspiracy theory are to be found in almost every aspect of mainstream media; from a generalised suspicion of power and authority to the supposition of a totalising regime, from bored housewives to journalists and documentary makers, conspiracy theory and entertainment overlap at all levels. Michael Moore’s documentaries enjoy international cinema success while films like Zeitgeist become cult classics within weeks of online release without ever reaching the big screen. Dan Brown’s books, such as Angels and Demons, last year made into a film that grossed nearly $500 million at cinemas, capitalise on popular conspiracy mythology, including the Knights Templar, the Illuminati and the Freemasons, in order to spice its otherwise rather mundane battles between science and religion’s claims to truth with esoteric rituals and symbols that are no doubt infinitely more interesting to the average reader. Books by Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo and Umberto Eco aim to engage more closely with the paranoid mindset of the conspiracy theorist, in which the world around us is one to be treated with inherent suspicion. The most playful of these, Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum, finds a group of bored editors inventing a conspiracy theory by feeding data into a computer program which plots connections between them. Pleased with their efforts, they nonetheless begin to get caught up in the seemingly reasonable narrative that the software generates. Eco himself has been a fierce critic of conspiracy theory and his novel can be read as a satirical caricature of its excesses. Though the plot follows similar trajectories to that of a Dan Brown novel, Brown, Eco has said, is in fact one of his characters. Foucault’s Pendulum plays with ideas of credulity in parsing fact from fiction, exposing a world in which, even when a cynical patchwork quilt approach to understanding conspiracy theory is taken – whereby clearly unrelated individual elements are contrived together by a human hand – the individual is still at the mercy of his need to derive truth from narrative. Paranoia is thus consuming even as it becomes itself a commodity - we need look no further than tabloid newspaper treatments of stories in which the public is likely to have a high emotional investment.

Conspiracies are similarly rife, it would seem, in the music industry, where music is used both to educate and to brainwash its audience. Hip hop has a long history of paranoiac polemic, particularly in gangsta rap, which has fed upon an afrocentric cottage industry of conspiracy theories placing the arrival of crack cocaine, guns and even AIDS in poor black American communities at the feet of the government. MC KRS-One confirmed in 1995 the now familiar rhetoric of fact-within-fiction at play, rapping ‘Reality ain’t always the truth / Rhymes equal actual life in the youth’. In recent years, one of hip hop’s most outspoken conspiracist voices has arisen in Immortal Technique, whose accusations range from the laconic to the labyrinthine. Meanwhile popstars are seen to be promoting the Illuminati agenda by disseminating subliminal messages of mind-control wrapped in sheaths of telltale symbols. In the below image you can clearly see Lady Gaga consciously imitating the traditionally represented pose of Baphomet, the pagan goat-like demon purportedly worshipped by the Freemasons, while the eye in her hand recalls the all-seeing eye of the Illuminati. In the account I came across, I learned that her name is indicative of the mental state we find ourselves in once we saturate ourselves in the music, while her repetitive, nonsensical lyrics are clearly not designed to encourage the listener to reflect on the existential nature of being-in-the-world.

If the one feature that unites all conspiracy theories is a search for Truth, it is a Truth that is based in an understanding that it is not to be found in the ‘official’ version of events – and here conspiracy theory collides with science, philosophy and religion. Similar antipathy towards the “official story”, coupled with a dogmatic search for an underlying Truth, can for example be found in both the religious right and the academic left. Eagleton writes that:

some postmodern thought suspects that all certainty is authoritarian. It is nervous of people who sound passionately committed to what they say. In this, it represents among other things an excessive reaction to fascism and Stalinism. […] The line between holding certain noxious kinds of belief, and holding strong beliefs at all, then becomes dangerously unclear. Conviction itself is condemned as dogmatic.

The Truth that conspiracy theories offer is so enticing, arguments such as Fredric Jameson's 'cognitive mapping' go, because it offers an escape from the confusions of (post)modernity, in which the logic of the intertext and the hypertext (where you can always ‘click through’ to another layer of meaning) replace traditional linear narrative understandings of the world, combined with an inscrutable and stifling bureaucracy. As I suggested previously, such a feeling manifests itself explicitly in political apathy, where individuals who are asked to shape their future are confronted by such an overwhelming amount of information that they cannot possibly understand the consequences of the options they are presented with. Yet what becomes apparent is that conspiracy theories offer not just a ‘way out’ but a radical repurposing of the structures that initiate this confusion in the first place, turning the data-saturated world of the hypertext that renders you impotent into a deeply empowering ideology that forestalls criticism by deconstructing itself; he who makes arguments with those political dogmatists able to recall a disarming array of facts and figures from the top of their head will likely experience deja vu when conversing with the conspiracy theorist.

Caroline Bassett’s book The Arc and the Machine questions the logic that narrative is no longer relevant in the hypermodern age of information, an age where we absorb data rhizomatically and which finds its ultimate structural tendencies in the internet. Drawing on Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutic theory, she argues that narrative remains ‘the central means through which humans interpret the world as they have grasped it through experience, stretching from fiction and history to lived experience.’ This narrativised experience of time recalls Milan Kundera’s discussion of his memory of the arrival of the Russian army in Czechoslovakia in August of 1968 in The Curtain, his treatise on the art of the novel. ‘Alongside the factual memory’, he writes, ‘there is another sort: my little country seemed to me stripped of the last shred of its independence, swallowed up forever by an enormous alien world’. Here he invites a phenomenological reading of an extraordinary political situation, arguing that history is more than just an encounter with events, that it needs to be understood in terms of its lived human experience:

Russian soldiers were ambling through the streets, I was terrified at the idea that a crushing force was going to stop us from being what we had been, and at the same time I realized with astonishment that I did not know how and why we had become what we were; I wasn’t even sure that, a century earlier, I would have chosen to be Czech. It was not the knowledge of historical events that I lacked. I needed some other kind of knowledge, the kind that, as Flaubert would have said, goes into “the soul” of a historical situation, that grasps its human content. Perhaps a novel, a great novel, could have made me understand how the Czechs of that time had experienced their decision. Well, such a novel has not been written. There are cases where nothing can make up for the absence of a great novel.

Here we find all the hallmarks of conspiracist thinking: the unfolding of incomprehensible real-world events; a sense of bewilderment and powerlessness; subjective uncertainty; a plea for humanity in the face of bureaucracy; and an ultimate recourse to fictional devices. Paradoxically, we search for stories in order to make sense of reality. In an increasingly networked world, we experience, in Peter Knight’s words, ‘the hope (or rather the fear)’ ‘that everything is connected’ and it is up to us to make sense of these connections, to map our own path that may meander around both fact and fiction in its search for meaning, rather than relying on existing ones. Bassett phrases it simply:

As computer-clock time and world time, computer space and real space, the real world and the world of the text, are increasingly brought into relation, the experience of everyday life as something operating across a patchwork of different spaces, each operating at its own clock-speed, becomes routine.

Yet should we not ask for more from our narratives? Ricoeur contrasts a hermeneutics of belief with a hermeneutics of suspicion, the former being ‘animated by faith and the willingness to listen’ and the latter ‘animated by mistrust and skepticism’. Hermeneutics is characterised by the twin acts of distanciation and appropriation; i.e of retaining a distance from the text while still being asked to interpret it. Responding to Gadamer’s claim that an equal balance of both is necessary for a full hermeneutic analysis, Ricoeur suggests that an emphasis on distanciation helps to propagate a healthy evaluation of the text; in his own words, it is ‘the condition of possibility of the critique of ideology, not outside or against hermeneutics, but within hermeneutics’. Thus the hermeneutics of suspicion stands at the very core of conspiracy theory, producing a critical standpoint that is inherently and necessarily removed from the hegemonic whilst existing inside its infrastructures and hence, so its followers would argue, forging the conditions required for social critique. This is all well and good, yet conspiracy theorists will often then tend to apply a hermeneutics of belief towards the very replacement ideology that is doing the critiquing. In this way, conspiracy thinking shoots itself in the foot by exhibiting an exaggerated logic of fetishistic disavowal – the formula Je sais bien, mais quand meme… – while attempting to subvert it: “I know very well that there exists a secret plot which controls my everyday existence, but all the same I act as if I am in charge of my fate” becomes “I know very well that I cannot know all this, BUT STILL I act as if it were the case.”

My own personal sense is that, as much as conspiracy theory, like Kundera, strives for a human response to a blank, incomprehensible, machinic future, it ultimately ignores the fallibility of humanity. This is not to fully embrace the reliance on chaos of Skip Willman's 'contingency theory' (via Jeff): we are not renouncing 'the attempt to grasp the operations of the social totality', on the contrary, we should remind ourselves that such operations are ultimately accountable to actually existing people, in all their multiplicities, acting both in their own interests and as a group (a reminder that could also be taken heed of by the worst excesses of abstraction in theory). The Illuminati, the global elite, are portrayed as masters of misdirection guiding the future exactly as they see it, puppeteers in both space and time whose devilish machinations always come to fruition, unheeded by the majority. Those in power who do not conform to this schema, whose faults are only too obvious (one thinks of the last leaders of both the US and the UK), we are told are mere pawns, chosen precisely for their ignorance and malleability. The flaws of humanity do not sit well in this representation, even to the point of positioning those in control as literally inhuman, as aliens or reptilian beings. But if the conspirator’s fallibility is underestimated, then so too is the theorist’s agency and this, I think, is the most problematic aspect of conspiracy theory. 'Knowledge' and 'Truth' are the only weapons that the theorist can ever hold as he becomes a victim of his own rhetoric. This is a charge that could also be levelled once more at religion and academia; yet if we are to operate within the model of these traditions, it is imperative that we elevate the calibre of discourse and engage somewhat more closely than we have been inclined to do so far.

The Man Machine

2010-06-21T21:51:00.004+01:00

As an adjunct to this post on the human, the machine and the voice here is its OST, a paean to the myriad approaches towards the granulisation of the voice (has anyone done a reappraisal of Barthes in light of granular synthesis yet? - note to self...):

Man Machine - Voices From the Circuitry

It comprises tracks old and new that make use of vocoders, talkboxes, pitch-correction software, speech/formant synthesis, anything that fuses the two indistinct worlds of humans and their creative tools and it's been an enjoyable romp compiling it, though something of a test of resolve listening to it. I've discovered some new artists - amongst them Neil Young's 'unrepresentative' phase, Phil Lynott's solo stuff, Black Moth Super Rainbow, Bon Iver, Imogen Heap - rediscovered some old favourites - see contrived IDM moments - and forced myself to listen to 3 albums' worth of T-Pain, nearly all of it not unpleasant. There is a deliberate flow to the sequencing but it possibly works best on shuffle; I particularly enjoy the sensual seam of syntho-sleaze that runs through Sly Stone, Zapp, Snoop Dogg, T-Pain etc, rubbing up against the disembodied/apocalyptic vox of Cybotron, Beastie Boys, Radiohead and the experimental playfulness of the likes of ELO, Jean-Jacques Perrey, Squarepusher and Stevie Wonder.

You will need spotify - I believe there is no longer a queue to create a profile for free though I do recommend the premium or unlimited versions of the software. I gladly accept further recommendations from the Spotify cloud, I'm sure I've missed an obscure john coltrane talkbox solo or an autotune opera (surely?!) or something - indeed if you have the new fancypants Spotify Social then you can drop them straight in my inbox.

Enjoy!

I Was Confused...

2010-05-06T14:31:00.004+01:00

I got up early this morning to get to the polling station before work, in order to register my first vote in a General Parliamentary Election. I'd been mulling it over for a few weeks and had found trying to pledge allegiance to any one party a stultifying practice, a typical floating first-time voter. I didn't want to vote tactically; neither did I want to vote in the mind that my say is unlikely to have any measurable effect, even though I knew my constituency (Tottenham) is a particularly safe Labour seat. Rather, I wanted to vote honestly, acting as if my vote was the only one that counted. All this went through my mind as I stood at the strange little wooden booth in the community centre, as well as an uncanny feeling of being at a Catholic confessional, and the surprise that I had to make my mark with a little wooden pencil like the ones you get in Ikea and not, as I had imagined, with a big blocky felt pen - the latter, I thought, would have inspired more confidence in voters to Make The Right Choice than a half-size HB.
As it was, I stared blankly at the paper for a few minutes and then wrote "I'm sorry, I really don't think this is going to work" at the top, before putting a big cross through all the names.

That'll bloody learn 'em.

it's ok, everything's fine

2010-04-26T22:50:00.005+01:00

I just watched this on ITV, agog.

Yes, agog. They could have just used this and saved themselves a load of effort.

oh wait, they did.

riff raff

2010-04-26T15:03:00.003+01:00

Though it would be foolhardy of me to wade headlong into the midst of the battle, I nonetheless still feel the naive flush of youth enough to stand from the sidelines and cockily toss these two monsters in, riffs that swoop and chug, making teeth clench and spine simultaneously contract and elongate; riffs that exult in their riffness:

and with that, I humbly bow out.

Out of the Loop

2010-03-04T11:58:00.006Z

I've just watched this clip of Mark Kermode viewing the recent Armando Iannucci film In The Loop alongside Alastair Campbell, who he subsequently interviews, during which I cringed so hard I got a headache. With his assumptions from the outset that the film is deeply injurious to the political psyche, Kermode repeatedly and tediously fails to get Campbell to admit discomfort at being confronted by his caricature in Malcolm Tucker, before resorting to a faux-matey-down-the-pub chat about the "heroic vulgarity" of office swearing. "I have a great sympathy for anything that portrays politics as essentially venal and crass because I think that, to a great extent, it is," announces Dr Kermode, as if that is even in the film's remit. As Campbell says, The Thick of It, the series on which the film is based, depicts a far more complex and interesting idea of politics than In the Loop, particularly towards the end of the recently-aired third series when Tucker begins to lose his grip on not just the spin, but his own identity. To me, this is a far more successful account of the cyclical intricacies of political endeavour, how it might be that even - especially - the 'masterminds' of government aren't able to escape the capricious Kafka-esque twists and turns of ideology-plus-ego that is politics. Campbell is absolutely right to pinpoint the shameful abuse of responsibility by figures such as Kermode, who comes across in this clip as smug and wilfully ignorant, ensconced in his left-leaning ivory tower. His response that the arts and media has a responsibility to step beyond lazy cynicism in order to avoid the sense of apathy and helplessness that is clearly endemic when the system fails to engage seems to be particularly salient and has a wider impact than simple alienation from the political sphere.

I, like Carl Impostume, have noticed a greater degree of interest in what you might call 'conspiracy theory' amongst friends and family over the past year and, though I am less inclined to be dismissive than he, I can sympathise with the frustration felt when in conversation with them. The overwhelming sense in which simply 'knowing' is liberating in itself, while conversely not-knowing is the sin from which non-conspiracists cannot escape. There is always another 'fact' or 'truth' that you weren't aware of, an endless series of non-sequiturs to which the only response can be cynicism or silence.
It is easy to draw parallels between this and public feeling towards the desperate confusion of the political situation. Quoth Zizek:

why should the democratic discussion in which the majority participates lead to better result, when, cognitively, the ignorance of the majority remains. The political frustration of the majority is thus understandable: they are called to decide, while, at the same time, receiving the message that they are in no position effectively to decide, i.e. to objectively weigh the pros and cons. The recourse to "conspiracy theories" is a desperate way out of this deadlock, an attempt to regain a minimum of what Fred Jameson calls "cognitive mapping."

Yet while conspiracy theory displaces ignorance with a map of forced connections that may or may not be real, the response remains the same, what Carl calls "reflexive impotence as historiography, deeply disempowering." We might view conspiracy theory as a kind of antipolitics, skidding transversally from left to right, both stultifyingly conservative and explosively liberal, turning frustration and helplessness into a virtue, a fetish even. The truth is consistently elusive because it is, as the X-Files had it, 'out there', and not in here. As in religious belief, empirical 'truth' is not what's important in the understanding of our reality - and why should it be? To insist this would be much like Richard Dawkins' attacks on religion as if it were a rival to science; the two, as Terry Eagleton likes to point out, are not competitors - that would be as if the arrival of the electric toaster negates the necessity for Chekhov.

I have never been politically-minded, never voted, never felt like the choice was a meaningful one. How to make sense of the very idea of politics in a climate of eternal doubt is a question which prevents itself from being answered as it engenders the feeling that I am in no position to do so. Yet like toasters and Chekhov, the public (by which I ostensibly mean me, with the conviction that there are many others like me) must reconcile phantasy with politics (if not with the political establishment) as a necessary force if it is not to surrender its influence.

Any idea how?

Vocalic Bodies

2010-01-11T17:39:00.011Z

I said I was going to write some more on the Human/Machine thing at some point. Here's some thoughts that flow on from my fairly hasty ones from last year, not attempting to answer anything, but just probing further, trying to situate an argument within the arguments of other, more able theorists, writers and musicians. I focus here on the voice and the Lyotardian Inhuman. Other thoughts should follow anon.

---

'For even if we have the sensation of being always enveloped in, surrounded by our own soul, still it does not seem a fixed and immovable prison; rather do we seem to be borne away with it, and perpetually struggling to pass beyond it, to break out into the world, with a perpetual discouragement as we hear endlessly, all around us, that unvarying sound which is no echo from without, but the resonance of a vibration from within. We try to discover in things, endeared to us on that account, the spiritual glamour which we ourselves have cast upon them; we are disillusioned, and learn that they are in themselves barren and devoid of the charm which they owed, in our minds, to the association of certain ideas; sometimes we mobilise all our spiritual forces in a glittering array so as to influence and subjugate other human beings who, as we very well know, are situated outside ourselves, where we can never reach them.'

---

Twenty years ago, Jean-François Lyotard posed the following question: ‘What shall we call human in humans, the initial misery of their childhood, or their capacity to acquire a “second” nature which, thanks to language, makes them fit to share in communal life, adult consciousness and reason?’ In doing so, Lyotard distinguishes between noun and adjective, between biology and ideology, between the human we are and the humanity we acquire.* This recalls Lacan’s mirror phase, whereby the child moves from the world of the Imaginary, unable to distinguish between self and other, inserting itself into the Symbolic realm, of language, difference and structure. In attempting to locate the Human in humans, Lyotard posits two potential sites, pre- and post-mirror – yet there is an inherent and eternal tension between them. The infant aspires to the progressive humanity of adulthood, while the adult is caught by the primal allures of childhood, both sides thus constituting an inhuman lack which the other is called to fill. Lyotard’s assertion is that this struggle leaves a ‘remainder’ – that of the Human, straddling the mirror and torn between two reflections: ‘[t]hat it always remains for the adult to free himself or herself from the obscure savageness of childhood by bringing about its promise – that is precisely the condition of humankind.’
The second Inhuman of adulthood is one of development and progress. If we again invoke Lacan’s Symbolic order, we can say it operates in ‘the world of the machine’. Accordingly, Lyotard goes on to state that, if the Human emerges from a process of inhuman differentiation, ‘[t]he new technologies and the media are aspects of the same differentiation’. Here (though rarely elsewhere) he is in agreement with Marshall McLuhan who describes technological advances as ‘extensions of man’, arguing that physiology and sensation is not limited to the human body but extends outwards through mechanical tools which experience on our behalf and whose mediation impacts on our understanding. I want to suggest that the tension between Lyotard’s two Inhumans resounds in the technologising of music. Further, I would argue that the friction between what we might call the Human and the Machine is an audible presence which we, as listeners, respond to in a way that sheds light on our humanity in a world where technology is pervasive.

We might define the Machine as a manifestation of technology – but clearly technology is not limited to machinery. That we devise tools for the most basic of operations is evidence of humans’ will-to-technology, we are ‘natural-born cyborgs [...] enrolling objects into their extended cognitive systems’ as N. Katherine Hayles puts it. According to Walter Ong, Plato’s avowal that writing is an inadequate substitution for the human mind prefigures the antagonism felt towards computer technology by many. Writing relies on external means to express that which is in the mind and is thus ‘inhuman’; it negates and destroys the human capacity for memory; the written word is passive and unresponsive, it is unable to explain what has been written; once an argument has been written, it cannot defend itself. It would seem therefore that a distrust of the externalisation of the inner subject has deep historical roots.
It is helpful to remember that the etymological roots of “technology” offer some insight into humanity’s recognition of itself in its own handiwork. Techne and logos, both terms of semantic complexity in classical literature, collide and bear a fruit which unites ideas of the internal self and the external creation. In Of Art and Wisdom: Plato’s Understanding of Techne, David Roochnik characterises techne by its historic oscillation in meaning between ‘skill’ or ‘craft’ and ‘knowledge’, and thus between a manufacture of necessity and artistic creation. Logos – emblematic of the word, or discourse – is, in Roochnik’s estimation, ‘virtually coextensive with being human’. Thus, “technology”, far from defining itself in opposition to humanity, already implies a union between the human and its mechanical extensions. Indeed the separation between humans and technology has been repeatedly questioned by recent theorists. Sadie Plant extends a critique of Cartesian dualism to this effect, claiming that ‘brain is body, extending even to the fingertips, through all the thinking, pulsing, fluctuating chemistries, and virtually interconnected with the matters of other bodies, clothes, keyboards, traffic flows, city streets, data streams’. She echoes Susan Buck-Morss’ assertion that ‘the nervous system is not contained within the body’s limits’, rather, the experience of sense perception includes non-corporeal influence and reaction ‘in the world’. The body and sensation form the meeting point between subject and object, ‘“out front” of the mind, encountering the world prelinguistically.’ Perhaps it is fair then to conceive of the ear as a selectively permeable membrane for sonic semiotics, a boundary between inner and outer, between physical sensation and mental comprehension, and as one site of Lyotard’s Human, reaching outwards and inwards, forwards and backwards at the same time...

'From the outset, this Postsoul Era has been characterized by an extreme indifference towards the human' writes Kodwo Eshun. 'The human is a pointless and treacherous category.’ Indeed, contemporary R&B addresses this indifference by reducing the emphasis on the human voice in relation to the exaggerated production values of the song, subsuming the ego of the singer inside the Machine. Singers generally retain their central driving force behind the song but, as Alexander Weheliye writes, ‘they do so only in conjunction with the overall sonic architecture,’ while the producer (and the studio) takes on an ever more dominant role, 'reconstructing the black voice in relation to information technologies'. From soul to post-soul to hyper-soul, the relationship between the voice and technology has naturally formed a key dialectic. It is easy to argue that the Human is most explicitly found in the voice, as it is – in its raw state – the most direct example of physiology acting upon sound, the least affected by technological abstraction. For Steven Connor, the voice is the representative of the human subject in the world: ‘my voice is not incidental to me; not merely something about me. It is me, it is my way of being me in my going out from myself.’ Technology extends human characteristics as well as subverting them. The purity of the human voice can be attributed the cultic value Benjamin ascribes the photographed human face: ‘In the transient expression of a human countenance in early photographs, we catch one final glimpse of aura. It is this that gives them their melancholic, matchless beauty. But’ Benjamin continues, ‘where the human form withdraws from photography, there for the first time display value gets the better of cultic value.’ Through recording and reproduction, the uniqueness of such a formation is undermined and cultic and display value are reconciled. It is easy to forget how the intimacy of a crooner such as Frank Sinatra or – even more so – Nat King Cole was made possible by the amplification of the microphone, without which the cultic aura of their hushed closeness would have been lost. Mass reproduction and headphone technology meant that these voices could be brought into the home and, eventually, inside one’s own head, in a way that extends the Human personal experience, rather than negating it. Even the microphone and the speaker, the most basic elements of incorporation into and expulsion from the Machine, are not transparent.
When Barthes argued for singing voices to retain their ‘grain’, he extolled the virtues of ‘the body in the voice as it sings, the hand as it writes, the limb as it performs.’ The materiality of the human body is said to be present in the corrugated terrain of the voice, the motion of the larynx and acoustic properties of mouth and sinuses shaping the sound through micro-pressure. Connor refers to breathing as ‘the most ordinary, necessary human function’, having associations with the spirit and connecting the materiality of ‘mere animal process’ with the soul. Echoing Barthes, the physicality of vocal production has been described as the major contributing factor in conveying emotion in the soul voice, a trait composer Olly Wilson has termed the ‘heterogeneous sound ideal’ of soul music. The soul voice is achieved by ‘alternating lyrical, percussive, and raspy timbres; alternating straight with vibrato tones; weaving moans, shouts, grunts, hollers, and screams into the melody; and juxtaposing unique vocal and instrumental textures’. In this formulation, soulful ideals are characterised by physical jouissance and idiosyncrasy and are thus resolutely opposed to the restrained homogeneity of “Western”, “white” or “classical” sound ideals, which are allied with the ideals of mass production. In dance music rhetoric the diva vocal has classically been deified. The sampled vocalist is usually one with roots in gospel and soul and selected for her (usually her, though not always) abundance of vocal grain. The intriguing case of Martha Wash shows how technology can liberate the grain from its human restraints. After Wash’s image was considered unmarketable, she was replaced in live performances and music videos for Black Box, C&C Music Factory and Seduction by much more industry-friendly figures like Catherine Quinol, a model who lip-synched to Wash’s performance on the backing tracks. With no vocalist credits given to Wash, all extra-musical signifiers of her presence were exorcised leaving her existing purely as a mechanically disembodied voice unwillingly controlling the movement of the lip-synchers mouths. Connor talks of ‘vocalic bodies’: ‘voices are produced by bodies: but can themselves produce bodies [...] phenomenologically, the fact that an unassigned voice must always imply a body means that it will always partly supply it as well'. This disacousmatisation generally went unrecognised by audiences who remained (and largely remain) unaware of Wash’s uncanny floating presence on the lips of multiple others; the insubordinate puppet's forceful eclipse of the involuntary ventriloquist.

Though ‘respectful’ treatments of a vocal sample will often leave the original untouched, it has been common to play with it in some way (‘play’ is used in all its polysemy), often exposing the mechanical foundation of the sample. In the music of Todd Edwards, vocal samples are notoriously edited to the extent that all that remains are a series of rhythmic groans, stuttering phonemes and occasional glimpses of recognisable phrases, wrestled from their original moorings and snapped to the sequencer’s pitch and rhythm grid, creating what Simon Reynolds calls ‘a melodic-percussive honeycomb of blissful hiccups, so burstingly rapturous it’s almost painful to the ear.’ This technique was adapted by UK 2 step garage musicians into the appropriately termed ‘vocal science’, hinting at the cyborg potentiality of such an approach. Reynolds has a gift for florid writing but his use of descriptors like ‘bliss’, ‘rapture’, ‘voluptuous melancholy’ and the like for a technique which submits organic sources to mechanical manipulation is telling. It is not the only time sacred and sexual metaphors have been used to describe vocal science: Edwards is a committed Christian often evoking the sound of spirituality through tracks titled ‘When Angels Sing’, ‘Be A Friend (God Calling Remix)’ and ‘I Hear Him’; Burial claims that pitchshifted vocals 'can sound sexy as fuck’; in the same interview Mark Fisher compares the degendered sound to ‘wounded angels’. The mechanically treated aural Human can thus simultaneously evoke reverence and desire through extended technological ecstasy, conflating cult and display and leaving behind the potentially divisive borders of the Human. ‘“Deconstruction” is not too strong a term,’ argues Reynolds, ‘for what is being dismantled is the very idea of the voice as the expression of a whole human subject.’
Vocal science treats the voice primarily horizontally; pitch adjustment tools like Auto-Tune and vocoders work vertically. At the point at which synthetic waveforms become shaped by human vocal formants (the resonant properties of the vocal tract, as in vowel sounds) - as in the vocoder and talkbox - at this point any Human element has already been subsumed into the world of electrical signals and impulses. Though any sound can be used as the carrier signal, the synth is by far the most common, the geometricity of tone presumably chosen as the polar opposite to the humanity of the voice. An early originator of this effect was the talkbox, a device which allows a musician with an electrically amplified instrument to control the harmonic content of the sound by adjusting the shape of their mouth. In the latter case the synthesis emerges directly from the performer’s mouth, a strange kind of reverse ventriloquism whereby the machine speaks us. When the talkbox or the vocoder are used in performance, it is easy to forget to breathe as the loudspeaker takes care of the voicing of the sound (approximate this effect for yourself by holding a mobile phone speaker to an open mouth while mouthing vowel shapes): we still ‘feel the complex, self-caressing dance of tongue, palate, and lips’ but ‘the pleasurable muscular rhythms of the breath being drawn in and released’ are no longer necessary. Our pneuma has been mechanically removed and we become a breathless puppet.

Auto-Tune as an effect, has seen a meteoric rise in overt usage since 2008, though it has been a constant, if (perhaps) subtle, presence in popular music for at least fifteen years. Subtle usage, as a correction tool rather than an explicit effect, can result in feelings of the uncanny towards the music industry’s presentation of the Human: the attainment of perfection replaced by perfection itself; an almost-but-not-quite reality where each singer sets the same benchmark, even though artist individuality is still at a marketing premium. One overtly unusual use of the technology, Champion DJ's ‘Baako’, filters the screams of a baby through the Auto-Tune software, snapping it to the pitch-grid and mutating atonal shrieks into a wistful, cascading melody. DJ/Rupture's response seems to be typical: ‘The ear likes it. The mind isn’t so sure [...] The aestheticized cry no longer corresponds to any normal emotion’. The use of the child’s scream only clarifies the conflict at the point of collision between pre-linguistic sensation (as Buck-Morss would put it) and internal comprehension of the digitally-enhanced aural posthuman. The artist uses the tension between Lyotard’s two Inhumans to exploit the discomforting discrepancy inherent in the sound of the technologised child; rooted in primal expression, the infant’s anguish is nonetheless more apparent, more Human, for reaching forward to the externalisation of the self through software tools. The more recent ‘Baby’ on Major Lazer's Guns Don't Kill People LP utilises the same source, adding patois commentary and making the transition from the first to second Human explicit: ‘Oh my goodness, you have built in Auto-Tune / Heh, better stop that mechanical crying soon / Heh, imagine, is just couple months ago you was in my testicle / Now you are screaming and walking great spectacle.’Mladen Dolar discusses the fetishism of the voice, using Michel Chion’s comparison of disacousmatisation to striptease, whereby the revelation of the origin of the voice, ‘the gap, the crack, the hole, the cavity, the void, the very absence of phallus’, is kept unfulfilled. The divorce of voice from body is an inescapable consequence of recording but the use of software editing in vocal science, effects treatments and devices like vocoders and Auto-Tune can not only further dislocate but actively relocate the humanity, the warmth and the sexuality of the visceral voice in the Machinic projections of the extended subject. The disacousmatised sound of the technological voice is fetishised in the ear of the listener because the implied ‘vocal body’ (as Connor terms it), the Freudian source of incorporation, remains at a distance; we halt at the fantasised voice alone, robed in the thin veil of technology, ‘just before confronting the impossible fissure from which it is supposed to emanate’. If this were not clear enough, Zimboo closes ‘Baby’ by evoking the object of the drive, the incorporation of the breast that the child’s scream demands, locating it across the inhuman divide: ‘I enjoyed my mother’s breast milk, I love all woman breast… / That breast is yours, this breast is mine / Don’t get out of line, heh’

Lyotard’s conclusion to his construction of the Human as the remainder of two Inhumans is that it is the task of artistic creation to restrain and oppose the second Inhuman, the Inhuman of development, by repaying the debt owed to the first Inhuman, that of childhood. ‘What else is left to resist with’, he implores, ‘but the debt which each soul has contracted with the miserable and admirable indetermination from which it was born and does not cease to be born?’ Yet, as we have seen, the Human can emerge as much more than simply the remainder of a pugilist dialectic. Individually, both Human and Machine can operate with floating significance, yet their co-dependence and self-perpetuation is both an audible defining presence in contemporary music and an influence upon today’s understanding of yesterday’s music. The human voice in today’s music is rarely unaccompanied by the spectre of the Machine. Yet whether the technology is used to enhance or mutate the material, it has been shown to redefine our understanding of what it can mean to be Human by showing what the Human can become. The sound of the technologised Human represents the twin logic of constructing the self through becoming other.

* Lyotard does not distinguish between the two (in)humans orthologically. For clarity I capitalise the cultural, ideological ‘Human’ and leave the biological ‘human’ in lower case; similarly ‘Inhuman’ and ‘Machine’ refer to ideal concepts, whereas inhuman and machine are merely evaluative judgement or ‘real-world’ object respectively. The difference is as in that between ‘a human’/‘a machine’ and ‘Human-ness’/‘Machine-ness’.

---

p.s. I'd like, at some point, to consider further the relationship between the Machine and the Spiritual (deus ex machina; is man ape or android?), the Sexual (ecstasy and sadomachinism) and the Psychotic (music from the cold world; the schizophonic subject - cf. Bonkers (both the Dizzee track and the Happy Hardcore series), the Rihanna track above, Eminem, Lady Gaga, fuck, pretty much all grime...) and how they all combine in the sound of the inescapably technologised self. It's already sounding pretty Foucauldian in terms of scope so don't expect anything too soon. I don't.

p.p.s. : reading...

Barthes, Roland, ‘The Grain of the Voice’
Benjamin, Walter, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’
Buck-Morss, Susan, ‘Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered’
Connor, Steven, Dumbstruck – A Cultural History of Ventriloquism
Dolar, Mladen, A Voice and Nothing More
Eshun, Kodwo, More Brilliant Than the Sun
Hayles, N. Katherine, ‘Traumas of Code’
Lyotard, Francois, The Inhuman
Maultsby, Portia, ‘Soul’, in African American Music: An Introduction
McLuhan, Marshall, Understanding Media – The Extensions of Man
Ong, Walter J., Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word
Plant, Sadie, Zeros and Ones
Prior, Nick, ‘Software Sequencers and Cyborg Singers: Popular Music in the Digital Hypermodern’
Proust, Marcel, Swann's Way (In Search of Lost Time)
Reynolds, Simon, Energy Flash (2nd ed.)
Roochnik, David, Of Art and Wisdom: Plato’s Understanding of Techne
Weheliye, Alexander, ‘Feenin: Posthuman Voices in Contemporary Black Popular Music’

2009-12-29T12:45:00.002Z

ooooh, they've found the future!

09 Hit Parade

2009-12-20T23:47:00.011Z

Here follows a rundown of the tunes that have tickled my chops this year. All tracks, no albums. And i'm not doing the noughties thing, considering that would encompass my entire listening life so far.
Weird really, that 2009 seems to have produced a glut of new music that I can really get on with. For most of the rest of the decade I've generally found more aural excitement in the music of times past than present - of course this is just a reflection of my own trajectory through music discovery. But far from the mass fragmentation felt by others (though admittedly Simon's talking about a more generalised 'music'), there seems to have been a coalescence of musical forms around the dubstep/grime/funky/house continuum with splatterings of dancehall, techno, soca, 2step etc., whereby a coherent mix could be crafted from what, only a year or two ago, would probably have been considered quite a diverse range of (dance) musics. Now there seems to be a 'whatever works on the dancefloor' vibe, which is quite lovely, and conducive to a meeting of genders, both in terms of dancefloor demographic and sonic semiotics. The ubiquity of the skank thing probably had a lot to do with that actually - there was even a skank medley at my office christmas party. And no matter what you think of the Migraine Skank, it's pretty impossible not to move when it comes on.
Anyway, here they are, ordered by how they seem to flow best. If the order were more hierarchical, btw, Party Hard would be at the top. Donaaaaaeeo. Dona-aaa-eee-o

What was that? Seriously, where did that come from?

Heard this on a Southend pirate. The DJ reliably informed me that it had 'blown up' Ibiza. Fair enough.

First heard this battering plastic swirl at Beyond, dropped by Scratcha (I think), which moved me from the bar to the floor. Reminds me of that joyenergizer tune, but a bit more tasteful.

L-Vis had a great year of putting out a kind of updated, punishing-but-fun booty hip-house that reminds me of the early warp stuff in its stiff rhythms and bass reliance.

Love that bass movement.

Chromatic scalar motion: the hip new melodic form for bass music?

Sceptical at first but when that bass descends it's difficult not to love it.

Got that tinny-stringed early grime feel sound; funky house? ominous house.

COOLY G @ BEYOND - not a single, but a great night.

This was exactly what Sirens needed.

Moving into major label territory - not TD's finest production but the DOK mix does lovely percussive things with the bass and that first beat drop.

The clarion call for 2009 it seemed.

Awkwardly time-stretched break + jungle bass ftw.

THE tune of 09. Twitchy, ominous and massive bass. And those strings sound like fucking Polygon Window or some shit.

Does marvellous things with the just-too-cheesy-for-its-own-good KIG original.

Repetitive but just massive. That bass, the weight of the claps and the "at the third stroke the time sponsored by accurist will be"-ness of the sample; it doesn't need to do anything else.

Strangely messy AND minimal.

Don't need to say any more about this.

Technically not released yet but can't wait til it is. The clipped-phoneme chorus choppage is rather beautiful after the languorous verses. Burial minus the attendant hauntology.

Two great tracks that defined his sound: making synths sound sexy - but a dirty sex. Great use of Sonic samples. Nothing else he's done yet matches these.

Took a couple of listens to get into this. But the bass was just too insistent.

Made me dance in Ministry of Sound. No mean feat.

One of the better tracks on the I Am album which, while rather lacklustre in general, still shat on Tinchy's. One day Chipmunk will turn into Kanye West, if he hasn't already.

Two Dizzee tracks that felt like assaults on the charts, unlike the insipid Holiday.

Tune. Nothing more need to be said.

I'll let them have their cynical 'return to form' for this track, because of the withered delicacy of that bell sound.

More fucked hip house. Good EP, not sure about the album. Probably the best thing he's done since The Gavel in my opinion.

While the EP was generally rather limpid, with its, what I imagine you would call, 'searing' synth melodies and overdone bass cliches, it did produce this track, which is SP-by-numbers... but good numbers, primes and so forth.

Rephlex seems to be cultivating a new in-house sound to update its 90s braindance one, what with the Analords, Tusses, Wisps and this jaunty slice of brain-italo.

Twisty head music. Wasn't sure about the vocals but got over them. Needs more than one listen and rewards.

This however, is a pretty devastating remake of the Lidell track and sees Tim operating at what I'm going to rather patronisingly call his 'full potential'.

Closing with a track from what was a surprisingly diverse and sensitive album. Here Tom seems to have found a way of burying his ego, if only briefly. Tellingly, this is the only concession towards 'guitar music' on this list. I am eclectic sir, honest!

END ---

Merry Christmas to all.

Further Adventures in Prancing

2009-12-02T23:12:00.006Z

More 90s nonsense this Saturday night from 10 as the Rhythm Is a Prancer crew take over a room at the LSE Quad, WC2. 5 hours of piano house, diva vocals and ill-advised rapping over eurobeats. not really. maybe. actually i think i want to play big beat this time.

People should attend for the following excellent reasons:
Single mixers - £1.20
Double - £2.30
Pints - £1.20 / 1.30
Glass of wine - 1.20
Bottle beer - £1.50

To ensure you get in for a fiver, make sure you click attending on the Facial Book page.

There will be other noises happening in other rooms - dubstep, electro, you know, fashionable music - but our one will be the only one with GUARANTEED Capella.

Death Beat Boy

2009-11-17T10:30:00.002Z

RIP Derek...

Money Talks

2009-10-23T17:14:00.010+01:00

In the video to Dirtee Cash, Mr Rascal appears as a Dickensian ringmaster, being pushed around a carnivalesque playground in which a Guy collapses lurchingly atop a roaring bonfire. While lottery ball balloons float overhead, a series of Dark Knight clowns, Punch and Judy politicians, hen night revellers, cartoon businessmen, footballers and massive-mammaried suffragettes disdainfully chuck the following on the fire:

Das Kapital - Marx
The Communist Manifesto - Marx/Engels
All Men Are Brothers - Ghandi
Making History - Stephen Fry?
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare
The Power and the Glory - Graham Greene
The Waste Land - TS Eliot
The Holy Bible
Jerusalem - Parry/Blake

Via a potent mix of grotesque symbolic gestures, of which the book-burning is the most (ahem) incendiary, the video calls forth a pretty dense intertext of questions about identity, power, class, tradition, high art, pop culture and, ultimately, blame. The masses are satirised to the point of revulsion and 'Literature' - even the mass literature of Penguin paperbacks - falls foul of their leering hedonism; Christianity, middle class values and egalitarianism suffer a similar fate; Capitalism's absence of self-critique is invoked by the burning of Marx (amusingly, presented in the orange-and-white colour scheme of Penguin's Fiction range). The text which most openly signifies flagrant Britishness is of course Jerusalem, the "green and pleasant land" of which is here going up in flames at the hands of a lecherous state and debauched populous. But what strikes home most conspicuously (especially when the cardboard cutout of the People's Princess appears) is how ridiculous these metonymythic constructs seem when we are confronted with them in such a concentrated space, how laden they are with the pride and ideals of a misguided nation. It is a subject which seems particularly potent after the absurd question of "to whom the image of Winston Churchill rightly belongs" managed to monopolise debate on the BNP Question Time for a full quarter of the programme. Indeed, the dada-pagan setting seems to give the Guy a particularly Wicker (or Straw?) Man-esque appearance, evoking a kind of cultural potlatch.

While we might question how much of this Dizzee himself intended, the track itself by no means steers clear of such territory. Focusing on the financial crash, Dizzee is at first accusatory ("they got bad credit, living on direct debit, in debt but they still don't get it") then beseeching ("Mr Politician can you tell me the solution, what's the conclusion, is it an illusion?"), finally repentant ("this is my confession, I can't fight, I'm in the forefront living for money"). The implication seems to be a classically theistic one - that redemption comes from within rather than by throwing the first stone - but taken as a whole, Dirtee Cash more readily undermines our instinctive reactions to events that question our ideological assumptions: not that blame lies within each of us but that blame itself is a distracting, and rather naive, dead-end.

2009-10-12T14:03:00.003+01:00

I will be indulging in some of my not-so-guilty pleasures tomorrow evening at the 'Rhythm Is A Prancer' 90s night some of my friends are putting on at the Legion in Old St. (check the delightfully cubist MS Paint flyer!)Catch me spinning some nuggets from my (arbitrarily distended) version of the 90s dance continuum, which begins with Pump Up The Volume and ends with the Armand Van Helden mix of Sugar is Sweeter. I haven't decided whether I should play any trance yet.

Facebook me up, bitch

spotifyperdub

2009-10-01T15:43:00.003+01:00

Apologies for the appalling portmanteau but it was the best I could do in my fervent state after noticing that...

...there's a shitload of hyperdub AND planet mu on spotify...

...which is very exciting. It's not complete by any means but it's a good start. Let's hope this is a good indication of things to come.

Parapraxis Par Excellence

2009-09-24T14:16:00.003+01:00

Seen on the bookshelf in the Religion section in the Foyles at Westfield, Shepherds Bush the other day:

It's possible, of course, that this wasn't actually a typo...

A Burbling Sensation

2009-09-07T18:28:00.007+01:00

In the post below, I cunningly used Bakhtin’s Carnival metaphor to describe the actual carnival in Notting Hill last weekend and then peddled out the hoary old Baudrillard quote from Wikipedia about Disneyland, placing them next to some stock pictures I found in a Google image search. Clever old me. My point, however, was not to draw dazzling new parallels between theory and contemporary events but just to express the fact that, despite being characteristically nonplussed by Notting Hill this year (as every year), I felt the impact of these two trains of thought far more profoundly than I have before.

Wandering around the streets of Kensington & Chelsea, abundant with crap, fire, noise and grotesque excess, I found myself suddenly far more aware of the symbolic reversal of (and interaction between) the orders and the overt hyperreality of the situation than I have felt before. This is more my own doing than any reflection on the changing nature of the event itself, which is fairly easily attributed to a more conscious engagement with these topics over the past year or so. Yet the effect was lucid and jarring.

The anarchy illusion was cordoned-off and the organised police presence, a mere caricature in the morning, became tangible later in the afternoon as streets were turned into one-way systems and the small clusters of smiling PCs (a cursory reminder, there to give directions to the nearest overflowing portaloos and have gyrating batties grind against their bullet-proof vests more than to keep the peace) disappeared and layers of HM’s burliest, take-no-shit constabulary took their place.

But whereas Disneyland is always there, appropriately for a music festival (ostensibly at least), Notting Hill Carnival is so transient (already, in fact, forgotten) that it becomes a hyperreal of time as well as space. As a result, we (by which I mean a mass ‘we’, not allied to any race, class or political cause) feel that anarchy/revolution is possible and that issues of race are surmountable for just long enough to prevent us from fully radicalising. For most of us (the same ‘us’), it is a kind of political tourism where we get to wander in the streets of anarchy for a day, safely to return home to our warmth, IKEA furniture and council tax at the end.

Caught in the middle of a thick crowd at what I think was the High Grade soundsystem as they threw down Donaeo’s Party Hard and the atmosphere blew up, I felt uncomfortably touristic – but one of those tourists that goes to the shit parts so they can say they’ve been to the ‘third world’ and it was ‘an amazing experience’. So densely packed we were having to move in sway with the crowd just to get through, there was a real feeling of submission to the music and its faithful throng. It was viscerally and scarily thrilling. There was no real roughage and everyone was having a good time yet the screwface seemed to be worryingly dominant and there was a real feeling of not wanting to raise any hackles. My instinct was to move away quickly yet at the same time I really felt that, if I had been looking for anything by my trip to carnival, this was it.

Further on in the same Stuart Hall article from which the Bakhtin carnivalesque quote came in the previous post, there is the following, lifted from Stallybrass and White’s ‘The Politics and Poetics of Transgression’:

Again and again we find a striking ambivalence to the representations of the lower strata (of the body, of literature, of society, of place) in which they are both reviled and desired. Repugnance and fascination are the twin poles of the process in which a political imperative to reject and eliminate the debasing ‘low’ conflicts powerfully and unpredictably with a desire for the other.

The implication again is of class tourism and the tone is negative. The description maps on to my own experiences and I find it difficult to assess my attitudes to the cultural mêlée, feeling both fascinated and repelled equally by both the abstract ideas and the social norms out of which they evolve. My knee-jerk reaction is a post-colonial distaste for this, a feeling that both positions inherently negate any real or valid engagement with a community or music as they imply placement on the outside; I have a burbling sensation that I should probably learn to remedy my own internal conflict first, before putting myself in such an uncomfortable situation again. However, I also suspect that fascination and repugnance often go hand in hand for those more –emically-minded as well and on reflection I find these two qualities are present in my engagement with every kind of music that I dearly love, not just that from which I am socially distant. After all, those who know someone best are often their harshest and most insightful critics.

The essence of this rambling post is, I suppose, the age-old question of my place in any kind of theoretical engagement with music which I am not socially engaged with. But, given I am white, (reasonably) middle-class and (supposedly) university educated, how can I reconcile this necessary distance with the lust for the ‘other’ music I find so much more exciting than that which is aimed at my demographic?

Hackneyed though it may be, it seems to be a question that is addressing itself to a lot of the ‘younger generation’ of bloggers: cf. the increasing dissatisfaction with Simon Reynolds’ assessments and theories; Rouge’s Foam’s ‘time for a new criticism’? I agree with Matt Woebot when he says that “to speak cockney is fine, for the University-educated to slacken their jaw and double their negatives ain't” but beyond this, I wonder if those of us in the middle should take some more time to consider more carefully our own position in relation to this music, especially if we want to theorise about it. Personally, I wonder if the repugnance/fascination conflict, rather than something to be denied or skirted around, might, with some investigation into how this dialogue relates to critical engagement, prove to be a more honest and fruitful path to follow.

Carnivalesque

2009-09-01T13:02:00.004+01:00

"Carnival is a metaphor for the temporary licensed suspension and reversal of order, the time when the low shall be high and the high, low, the moment of upturning, of 'the world turned upside-down'...Bakhtin uses 'carnival' to signal all those forms, tropes, and effects in which the symbolic categories of hierarchy and value are inverted. The 'carnivalesque' includes the language of the market-place - curses, profanities, oaths, colloquialisms which disrupt the privileged order of polite utterance - rituals, games, and performances, in which the genital zones, the 'material bodily lower strata', and all that belongs to them are exalted and the formal, polite forms of conduct and discourse dethroned...
"For Bakhtin, this upturning of the symbolic order gives acces to the realm of the popular - the 'below', the 'underworld', and the 'march of the uncrowned gods'. The carnivalesque also represents a connection with new sources of energy, life, and vitality - birth, copulation, abundance, fertility, excess. Indeed, it is this sense of the overflowing of libidinal energy associated with the moment of 'carnival' which makes it such a potent metaphor of social and symbolic transformation."

Stuart Hall - For Allon White: Metaphors of Transformation

"The Disneyland imaginary is neither true or false: it is a deterrence machine set up in order to rejuvenate in reverse the fiction of the real. Whence the debility, the infantile degeneration of this imaginary. It's meant to be an infantile world, in order to make us believe that the adults are elsewhere, in the "real" world, and to conceal the fact that real childishness is everywhere, particularly among those adults who go there to act the child in order to foster illusion of their real childishness."

Baudrillard - Simulacra and Simulations

2009-08-28T12:12:00.001+01:00

oh dear.

my sound

2009-08-26T15:31:00.004+01:00

Some of the recent music that, despite having little to no time to dwell on making, I have still felt compelled to make recently, is now audible at www.myspace.com/tgpb. I wouldn't have put it there if I didn't want others to listen to it so I suppose it makes sense to advertise it here. You know, to all my hordes of adoring fans. You might enjoy it, if you enjoy that sort of thing.

Anyway, if anyone does get round to listening, it'd be nice to hear some thoughts. Unless, of course, none of it inspires any thought, either negative or positive, whatsoever, just a dull throbbing absence where cogitative activity is usually found. Though it'd be interesting to hear about that too.

t.x

2009-08-03T15:36:00.004+01:00

I like how in the upcoming Why Not Carnival dubstep night, Hatcha will be playing a '2004 set'. Like those 'Back to 89' nights in 1994. But in that case the music really was drastically different - listening to the acid house heyday from the future vantage point of jungle must really have been a bit of a headfuck. Have we really come that far in the last 5 years? Is there really all that much to be nostalgic about? Haven't we just gone from dubstep to... harder, wobblier dubstep?

White Middle Class Boys in Urban Music Voyeurism Shocker!

2009-07-22T16:48:00.007+01:00

I don't know if it's something of an elephant that is tacitly ignored in whatever room the UK underground music criticism crowd hang out in but listening to Joe Muggs and Derek Walmsley discussing UK Funky, it's alarmingly difficult not to be reminded of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore's brilliant Bo Duddley sketch. It's an intriguing listen; they seem like lovely chaps who are genuinely enthused by the music yet the distance between them and the music they're so thrilled by is almost audibly tangible.

I'm certainly not saying that the two are misinformed, like the bourgeois 1960s critics Pete and Dud hilariously satirise - indeed they're probably more informed than most of the Funky producers themselves! And it's not the critical analysis/historicising aspect and florid language (the kind that irks some in print - e.g. references to 'narratives', 'house music's inclusive rhetoric' and the 'Funky Gestalt') that jars in this instance, nor the presentation of the music framed between electronic experimentalism and avant garde improv. This is The Wire after all, an institution without which the world would be a far poorer place.

But the refined home counties accent, the inflective tics, the turns of phrase ("quite so", "let's crack that on") the jauntiness, often verging on the edge of infectious approving laughter, are as comedically out of place when talking about inner city black music as they were 50 years ago. I'm not being derisive by the way, I'm well aware that the only reason I don't sport an accent like that myself is purely down to geography.
Moreover, they've succeeded in turning me on to some of the sounds of Funky, albeit (predictably enough) more at the techier, grimier end of the spectrum, your Cooly G's or Hard House Bantons, than the summery sounds of the Bongo Jam brigade. I will certainly be doing some more listening.

good things/bad things

2009-07-13T17:40:00.018+01:00

Good Things:

FACT Essential 20...

...Drexciya

...UK Techno

Both of these Essential lists have really reminded me what I love about electronic music. Of course they missed off Harnessed The Storm, which is odd for me, especially considering the inclusion of the Other People Place, which I never really 'got'. But that just gives me an excuse to wallow in Digital Tsunami for a while:

And the UK Techno list has given me some unexplored avenues to wander down, which I am very much looking forward to. Meanwhile:

---

That La Roux album cover, especially in its 12 foot tall billboard format.

Even though I've yet to hear a track of hers which equals In For The Kill, that image encompasses everything I loved about her presence in that majestic single. Now, I've seen Elly Jackson in the flesh and she certainly didn't look like that. The sheer amount of Photoshop involved is staggering, but perhaps not as notable as the fact that the image so clearly wears such extensive digital manipulation on its sleeve. It's simultaneously both baroque and plastic, like a mannequin with a glowing heart, pumping humanity through its polymers.

---

Bad Things:

Dizzee Rascal - Holiday

I've never before come across a Dizzee tune that I really dislike. I've been non-plussed before, as with most of Showtime, but never got as far as thinking "oh dear, this is bad" As much as I want Calvin Harris to swagger the fuck off, Dance Wiv Me was admittedly quite the tune. And Bonkers, while I was uncertain about it at first... after bouncing around manically to its propulsive off-kilter bassline at 2am in the newly opened Cable club a couple of months ago, it had managed to change my mind and secure itself as the blasphemous highlight of the evening (and I really wasn't expecting the UK no. 1 to topple Aux 88, A Guy Called Gerald, Luke Slater and Surgeon in the 'memorable moments' stakes.)

But this one is awful.

---

Florence and the Machine

This has been bubbling for a while: I just can't stand this woman. Seeking more attention than an only child with an inferiority complex at drama school, she asks, all faux-naive and 'rescue me' doe-eyed, "was that the wrong pill to take?" and compiles playlists like this one which looks like a speed-read through superficial hipster land. She routinely cherry-picks the most famous track by a cortege of relatively 'edgy' acts (Aphex, Dizzee, QOTSA, Jay Z), chucks in a few soul icons (Otis Redding, Etta James, Donna Summers (sic)) and adds a dash of half-post-non-ironic pop tunes (Beyonce, Rihanna) for good measure. The whole thing just reeks of the pursuit of indie cred with no evidence of actual engagement with the music, all of which might even have coalesced into the kind of uncompromising aesthetic position I admire, if I didn't hate it so much.

...just one more thing

2009-07-10T17:05:00.005+01:00

So it’s taken me a month’s worth of snatched 20 minute sessions in lunchbreaks to collate my thoughts in response to Rouge’s Foam’s response to my response to his initial post. It comprises replies to two of Adam RF’s two main complaints: a) that it is not often easy to translate ideas that relate to one culture to that of another, in this instance from performance-based music to electronic music; and b) that ideas of the Human and the Machine are too subjectively charged to have a great deal of use value. I’ve responded to and challenged these ideas, drifted off on new tangents, waffled a bit and generally talked about everything other than Wonky itself. So as much as this is a response piece, it is also (perhaps more so), a repository of fairly free-flowing ideas which I may well return to at a later date.

It’s quite long. Sorry.

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Ethnomusicological Approaches to Electronic Music – The Participatory Discrepancy

I don’t know that I made any particularly universalising statements although some of the Keil quotes may have been presented as such. This idea bears some further qualification though.
What is being identified is not a West–Non-West/Us–Them dialogue of alterity. I share Adam’s hope that we have left behind that inclination to romanticise the Orient and I have read and been in conversation with enough of those who offend the little ethnomusicologist on my shoulder (“oh that’s so Eurocentric” being a particular bugbear while at Uni) to want to sidestep such pitfalls.

It is, more simply, two poles of a spectrum quantifying musical perspective. The one pole imposes or locates itself within a fixed rhythmic ‘grid’ and the other is oblivious of that grid. The logic of the former approaches an ideal while the logic of the latter is that of deviation from the ideal. We might reconsider again in the context of Cartesian mind/body dualism – the mind typically seeks to discretely represent, quantify and explain things that it encounters whereas the body has no such need, it is able to exist and respond to continuous flow in time and space. Again, this distinction is not mutually exclusive; there is dialogue, interaction and a certain amount of dependence between the two. We might further ask if, as it might seem, the mind component maps onto the ‘Machine’ and the body the ‘Human’ but more later.

This kind of dialectic [Occident/Mind/Machine/Grid vs Orient/Body/Human/Free-time] is clearly (and somewhat deliberately) dangerous territory, particularly if we start excluding the mind from the Orient, or the Human from the Occident and the implication of the above, I understand, may be that the body (the suggested “non-West” component) has been privileged in my reading. But this response is surely culturally-conditioned on the part of the recipient. For me, the most interesting music occurs when this dialectic is shown to be inadequate and this is what my reading is about (though I recognise that it presupposes some dodgily colonial principals).
I should say at this point that I don’t consider myself able (or perhaps ‘ready’ would be the better word) to think ‘outside’ of the grid, though I have frequently been asked to (“you cannot understand this music using the tools provided by a Western upbringing”), and I have never encountered any real grievances. Either I am able to fit the music I study within my West-raised grid-concept, or I consider how it stretches or fits outside of it (in ‘free’ time for example). But there is always some sort of relation to the idea of the grid, and – for me – this has always worked just fine (admittedly, this has always been at a relatively low level of proficiency).

What is the grid that I keep referring to? Obvious on one level – in electronic music production it is the sequencer, the place where you position the notes. This could be a step sequencer, commonly 16 step, typically found on hardware drum machines from the classic Roland x0x machines, to more recent devices like the Monomachine or Machinedrum. We are now used to the piano roll sequencer in most software packages, like Reason’s below, which plots time on the horizontal against pitch on the vertical. Reason’s sequencer even has a quantise function which says ‘Snap to Grid’:

The piano roll sequencer in Propellerhead Reason

On another level, the grid is also found in Western notation. For what else is the musical System – the staves, barlines and time signatures – but a method of quantifying sound; in effect, snapping them to the grid?
Underlying both of these (there are plenty more but these will suffice for now), however, is the idea of the grid as a method of conceptualising and representing divisive rhythm. It is a means of understanding the ways in which we group sound which informs how we listen to music at the most basic level.
Generally speaking, this means divisions of 4 – as above in the piano roll and in the hardware sequencer (16 steps = 1 bar, 4 beats, 4 subdivisions of each beat). It is the subdivisions which are important here – each time you subdivide, usually it is by 4, allowing for perfect, symmetrical (un-wonky) patterns. This is what causes the even-ness of rhythm which we commonly hear. It is possible to play around with this in a sequencer of course, in much the same way as you might in a classical score; certain sequencers will allow for odd groupings of rhythms, of 5 and 7 notes for example, to be squished into the space of 4 or 8 divisions of the grid and I have experimented with overlaying different time signatures at different tempos (try 5/4 at 150bpm on top of 4/4 at 120 for a start), with pleasing results. But the fact remains that a certain degree of experimentation is necessary and neither these devices, nor classical notation is really up to the task of representing much beyond the grid (Messiaen’s birdsong transcriptions being a case in point)

This is where the Participatory Discrepancy comes in. The main objection to the PD as a tool in critical toolbox is that we can’t ethically apply it to electronic music because the “metrical essence…built into the sequencers and softwares that electronic musicians use” is unreconcilable with “musics that are performed in a more directly biological way”. This seems to misread my approach as the distinction between these two processes is exactly the distinction I was getting at. My argument was that Wonky processes deliberately move outside the electronic “metrical essence” (the ‘grid’ that I referred to above and in the previous post) by employing technical procedures that ignore or subvert the inbuilt (preset) rhythmic structures of machines.

Adam mentions that there are many ways of “getting ‘wonky’” aside from the shuffle button and in no way was I trying to suggest that this was a prime component of the new rhythmic style when I drew attention to the apt use of the word. As Woebot has proposed, a lot of these rhythms are not programmed at all but are the function of certain algorithms and processes which can be adjusted in milliseconds (i.e. continuous time), rather than (discretely) ‘snapped to’ (or ‘humanised’, away from) the grid. There is also the technique of creating rhythms by sight in a waveform editor. Burial has talked about using only Soundforge to produce his tracks: “If I used a sequencer my tunes would sound rubbish. Because I don’t have a sequencer…I got to shove it together and vibe off it.” These techniques exist outside the grid – unlike me, they don’t refer to the grid, either by adhering to it or breaking away from it.

Naturally, you argue that the ‘continuous’ time I boldy propose is still embedded within the (soft-)circuitry of the programme and is therefore explicitly dis-continuous (and ethnomusicologically exempt) but in reality you are limited only by your sample rate (or by the millisecond), providing as much depth as you could reasonably hope for, as far as the ear (and the body) is concerned. So I think the PD is applicable to musics based in electronic production – albeit with a little licence – and certainly no less than terminology traditionally reserved for Western Art music. Pleasingly (and independently of my knowledge when I wrote the original post), Keil actually agrees on this point: “I must be doing something very consistently in my writing that sends a wrong signal that PDs (Participatory Discrepancies) are strictly organic, live, in the moment and never techno or digital. Not so.” Amusingly (but not unjustifiably) he then goes on to suggest that someone should interview the guys at Roland as part of an enquiry into the relation between PDs and machines.

Although I had never intended it as such, Adam is right to dispute the direct connection between Wonky and dancing that, looking back on it, I probably did clumsily imply. I certainly didn’t intend to suggest that the music was designed with this specific function in mind – just that the unbounded rhythms present in the music remind me of rhythmic structures which are more closely tied to bodily movement, though they have clearly twisted or mutated (as Kode 9 might have it) far, far beyond that functional level. Rather than the music being the driving force behind dance, it is better understood as a faulty simulacrum of bodily movement (consider that ‘broken shuffle’ element) – perhaps a caricature of dance – or a phantom of dance music (certainly in Burial’s case). The latter certainly captures that ‘after the event’-ness of Kode 9’s reading – he makes it clear he’s talking about some sort of nuclear explosion but I prefer a reading that doesn’t ask what the event was.

Human vs. Machine

I’m glad this was picked up on (how could it not have been?) as it’s a distinction whose currency I’ve been mulling over for some time, trying to decide how best to apply it to musical examination. It’s problematic, as Adam has deftly pointed out, but richly so and, I think, quite a valuable field of inquiry.
The first thing to say is that it is no longer adequate, as we have plenty more than these two categories to consider: we might also consider from the perspective of the Human/Machine hybrid (Cyborg/Android) and the Mutant (the Human ‘gone wrong’) and the Alien (the advanced species/unknown/Big Other(?)); but we might also consider from the perspective of the Animal (the primal/tribal/simplistic); and how about the Spiritual (omnipotent/rapturous/unknowable)? Each of these (and there are many more) is flawed as a concept and each overlaps with other categories in their symbolic remit (the primal, instinctual, ‘animal’ aspect of humanity, for instance, or the Spiritual consideration of the Alien – a New Age reading of cultural product).

All this is well and good and potentially lots of fun, if you have enough time on your hands. But let’s get concrete. We should really quantify the relationship between signifier and signified; between terminology and musical practice. Adam writes:
“the simplistic, abstract categories of ‘human’ and ‘machine’ are ultimately so broad, relativistic and internally complex that any aesthetic perception of them or their supposed (but thoroughly problematic) dichotomous relationship is unlikely to be experienced on a practical level.”

I would argue that the relationship between the idea of the ‘Human’, or the ‘Machine’ and the aspects of the music I identified in my previous post is a lot more direct than Adam is prepared to grant me. Ideas of what constitutes the Human and the Machine in music can surely be quantified to a greater degree than simple subjective opinion (indeed much more so than terms like ‘cool’) with the application of some Peircean semiotics. In his response to my discussion, Adam’s allegation was that the terminology was too reliant on a symbolic exchange of ideas to be an explicit influence on the way an audience receives and interprets the music. On the contrary, my reading is reliant on a much more overt, causal (Iconic or Indexical) relationship than that of a culturally constructed signifier/signified. In the below examples, the musical features denote a real-world human/machine cause, rather than connoting an idea or concept of humanity/machinery.

- Loops (i.e. exact repetition) – Indexically linked to machine timecode.
- Stark tone/geometric waveforms – Indexically linked to oscillators/synthesis.
- ‘Live’ sound – Indexically linked to human performance. (Voice as Index of the larynx)
- Sample – Iconically related to human performance/original.

If we loop a sample of the Funky Drummer break and use that for the rhythmic basis of our track, we might end up with something like this:

We have a recording of a human drummer, stripped from its original contexts (firstly – through recording – as a one-off, non-repeatable event and secondly – through sampling [i.e. selection/application] – as one component of a specific musical whole). While the sound that was produced by Clyde Stubblefield is an Index of his performance (i.e. directly caused), the sample as used in Lyrics of Fury is only an Icon of that sound [the sample is not caused by the performance/sound, nor is it an exact copy – it is a representation of the sound created in that instance]. Both the sound and the sample are semantically linked to a human origin.

Ceci n’est pas Clyde Stubblefield

These couple of seconds are then repeated (potentially ad infinitum), occasionally silenced and combined with other elements from disparate sources. This technique does not represent any human practice – there is no variation in rhythm, feeling, energy or tone, no fills and no flourishes. It’s plausible that the producer might intend the loop to stand in place of a human drummer but, in this case at least, it is very unlikely that the listener will hear it as such. Right away, in the opening few bars of Lyrics, we hear what I believe to be an explicit, though basic, occurrence of the Human/Machine conflict – even if we may have internalised and subjectivised these codes to the extent that we can easily divorce them from their origins.

Picking up on the other example in my original post, 2step/bassline vocal science operates in a similar way, with the human voice, perhaps the only pure Index of humanity, often charmingly imperfect in its girl/boy-next-door-ness, chopped and aligned to the grid in a way no human is capable of. In the context of the voice, it is interesting to compare the vocoder with Autotune: in their general usage, the former shapes synthetic waveforms using human vocal formants, while the latter analyses vocal frequencies to find their fundamentals, compares them to a preset scale (a pitch-grid, if you like) and then ‘snaps’ the imperfections to that scale. It is interesting to note how the vocoder transforms the Machine-Index using patterns which are only found in the Human, while Autotune transforms the Human-Index using patterns only to be found in the Machine.

So, ideas of the Human and the Machine can be directly and causally related to humanity and machinery, and it is for this reason that I have prioritised these categories in my discussion. Though I emphasised the presence of other readings (the Animal, the Alien, the Cyborg, the Mutant etc.) at the start of this section, it is only these two categories which are directly related to the end-sound that we hear, whilst the others are more visibly symbolic constructs. As far as I am aware, there is no direct Alien influence in the music we listen to, for example – though once again, perhaps we should interview Roland to see if there was any Alien intervention in the conception of the TB303…

In the oral cultures to which the Participatory Discrepancy is most commonly applied (and on which I commented in the original post), the rhythmic unorthodoxy is an Index of bodily movement (through performance) which, in turn, directly influences further movement (through dance). So the idea of the PD as a signifier of the Human is not so problematic; evidently this is not the case in much electronic music (including Wonky) where rhythms, harmonies and timbres are generally programmed in advance rather than performed in the moment (though the use of external MIDI controllers and automapping technology blurs that distinction).
So, in the context of the above, it seems as though there is a little backtracking, or rather, ‘reformulating’ to be done regarding the PD. there is clearly no Indexical link but perhaps there is something of the Iconic about the electro-PD in Wonky. In the case of Wonky, these rhythmelodic deviations are deliberately exaggerated way beyond any concessions towards the Human and I fancy that there is something of an Expressionist representation of the human PD in Wonky tunes (and judging by his original ‘Loving Wonky’ post, Adam may agree), though this is ultimately far more subjective. Really though, I suppose what I was getting at was indeed far more of a Symbolic relationship in that, through (what? 30 odd?) years of using machines to make music, rarely have we stepped outside of the grammar they impose upon us (the rhythmic ‘grid’, machine timing, tuning systems etc.). By deliberately exaggerating these ‘errors’, a generation of producers that musically reject the cultural grammar of the Machine has emerged.
Rather than ‘reasserting the primacy of the Human’ perhaps I should say that, for me, Wonky symbolises a movement away from the primacy of the Machine.

Moving from poiesis to esthesis, how do we interpret this dialogue in our listening? Adam is convinced that there are “so many multifarious interactions between what we might choose to decide are signifiers for ‘the human aspects’ the ‘machine (aspects)’, each perceived and understood differently according to the listener, that it’s impossible to play referee.” Although I have tried to downplay the significance of choice in the matter, the fact remains that if we cannot hear these aspects at work within the music, then the discussion is moot. My personal feeling is that, while we may not consciously or deliberately visualise this conflict, it is a constant, conspicuous presence, operating at the lowest and highest levels of the music.

It is at continuous play in all sample based music - looped breakbeats in hip hop and the HCC always make me feel slightly uncomfortable as there is that undeniable feel of a funk drummer existing in a context which no drummer could ever be a part of (i.e. perfect, exact repetitions, forever), especially if the loop is slightly ‘out’ (as it often has been). This is emphasised in SL2’s DJ’s Take Control where a sample is dropped in exactly on the second subdivision of the 8th beat of the loop, so that it falls just outside the feel of the groove (in the video below, 0:15, 0:18, 0:22, 0:26 etc.). As an aside, this effect also reminds me of jazz drummers dropping bombs, adding a further (esthesic – though it may be compositionally intentional) layer of human/machine complexity.

It is for this reason that I described this conflict as “the force which drives much of its inbuilt sonic energy,” in the first post. It can be described as the actual, tangible presence of the Human/Machine, as heard in the music. This necessitates both a poietic and esthesic analysis of the music; sometimes these do not match and we hear a human-caused element as mechanical or vice versa. Electroacoustic ‘gestures’ may be automated or shaped by hand-drawn curves in advance, but unmistakeably heard as a human element – hyper-human perhaps? Conversely, how many drummers compare themselves to machines? The constant practice involved in achieving excellence at a musical instrument, to perfect tricky passages, to embed the necessary actions involved in producing certain sounds in muscle memory – is this not just a form of automation? If it is possible, even desirable, for humans to be misheard as machines then how does this affect our understanding? Of course, all instruments are machines anyway, even the body itself is a machine of sorts, so can there be any music that is untainted by the aural stench of the machine? The dialogue is complicated and flawed, naturally, but I do contend that it is valid and vital to understanding the music of our age, if not all ages.

---

P.S. - Perhaps we can reconsider it in Simon Reynolds’ familiar “roots ‘n’ future” structure – the idea that the Hardcore Continuum “simultaneously casts backward to the past and forward to the unreachable horizon of the future” – to suggest Wonky recognises that so-called futuristic music of the last quarter-century often settled for simplicity and conformity in musical expression, even when its ideals pointed towards complexity and progress (a lively topic recently, it seems). I get the feeling that certain Wonky tracks again inverse that tendency and, in giving off the air of (backward-looking) tech-nostalgia – 90s computer game references (1 Up, Rainbow Road, Bubble Bobble etc., Sonic the Hedgehog samples and remixes) and Raymond Scott remixes (Lightworks, Melonball Bounce ) – somehow carve a path into the future with sounds and rhythms with which we are not yet comfortable (1000 Names – Melonball Bounce seeming to me the prime example of this).

P.P.S. – Adam suggests I am more at home with the post-Dilla style of Wonky, rather than the dubstep-oriented end and he’s probably correct. If I were to do a Rouge’s Foam – Kaliko style analysis of a Wonky track – I’m not, but if I were – it would be Melonball Bounce. Because:
At the time of composition, Raymond Scott was at the forefront of music technology, employing state of the art technology, as well as electronic instruments of his own design, to make futuristic incidental music that, musically speaking, relied on nostalgic ideas of childhood. There is now a cultural nostalgia attached to the sounds used; that cheery advertising bounce, the vocal timbre and the quality of the recording. Adam, in his most recent post, claims that “‘Nostalgia’ in art is often a futurist opinion”, which I think is true. But it’s equally true that futurism in art is often a nostalgic opinion. The nostalgia in Melonball is apersonal, as surely the two Bulgarian producers involved are sufficiently removed enough from 1960s American pop culture (more so than Dilla anyway) to not be conjuring up any private associations from their own childhood. What they are doing then is (as with the old-school computer game references) tapping into a cultural ideal from a previous age that is now indelibly marked with future-nostalgia, caught between two mirrors as it looks backwards and forwards simultaneously. I don’t know of any Wonky tunes that sample the Radiophonic Workshop (please correct me if I’m wrong) but, for the same reasons, I can’t see it being far off.
By allowing the sample to play out in its entirety at the start, we are taken behind the producers’ curtain and you can hear exactly how the initial tempo has been cut up to fit inside the slower tempo. This creates an awesome swing. Listen to how the skewiff hi-hat trips over itself while the vocals from the Scott sample constantly lurch forward in quite a different way from 2step vocals, as they try to escape the sluggish tempo. It’s quite lovely.

P.P.P.S. - Proto-Wonky

Couple more inappropriate examples of Wonky in action:

David Bowie – What In The World
featuring a decidedly 'gloopy' synth pattern throughout.

Paul McCartney – Temporary Secretary
another arpeggiated synth line which doesn't quite match. the 'broken' notes in it, where the synth tones briefly splinter apart are like little capsules of sublime.

Pop Music RIP

2009-06-26T09:43:00.002+01:00

Michael Jackson, look what you've done.

Participatory Discrepancy

2009-06-09T15:08:00.012+01:00

Interesting post on “Wonky” and the process of “Wonkification” by Rouge’s Foam here. Nice to get a musicological perspective on the music for once, if a little over-wrought – I’m not convinced of the necessity of transcription, other than as a visual aid to the comparison between Zomby and Stravinsky/Ligeti. He (please forgive the presumption that the writer is male, this is the first time I have come across the blog and the writing has that obsessively teleological undertone) even says as much when he caveats the analysis with a note on all the obstacles to transcription present in using Western notation (i.e. using a prescriptive technique to support a descriptive study). There are one or two other niggles I have as well, such as the suggestion that the Zomby track exhibits a metric modulation, which seems to me an attempt to assign unwarranted complexity – it does, but only in the most simplistic sense as the underlying pulse remains constant. A much more overt recent example of metric modulation, incidentally, occurs throughout Tim Exile’s ‘Family Galaxy’; while this track falls way outside of the ‘genre’ (such as it is) under consideration, it nonetheless exhibits significantly ‘wonkified’ tendencies such that we might consider this technique still relevant to the discussion. Elsewhere, the programmatic discussion of Ikonika’s ‘Please’ tends to distract/detract from the force of the otherwise rather more empirical approach.

Those reservations out of the way, however, the vast majority of the discussion is valuable addition to the output of a blogosphere which tends to ignore the nuts and bolts technical/musicological aspect of theorising about popular music. The ‘musical characteristics’ section, with its discussions on rhythm, timbre, texture and futher stylistic considerations is by and large spot on. It is this that has provoked me to ‘respond’ in a way, not to try and outdo Rouge’s Foam but to instead to bring to light some addenda, including concepts and terminology from other fields, which may also perhaps invoke response from others. The intention being, like, I suspect, R.F.’s, to add to a Foucauldian toolbox for other users to rummage through and use as they wish.

The main term I’d like to bring to light is that of the Participatory Discrepancy (PD), Charles Keil’s term that is used to discuss the rhythmic characteristics of some musics which, though often ‘unusual’ as we might think them (i.e. not ‘straight’ or metronomic), nonetheless form a metric structure that allows a community of musicians to ‘lock in’ (the concept is used here and all the below quotes come from this source - you have to scroll down the page a little). We might think of it as the ‘groove’ or ‘swing’ of a music; it is the aspect which grounds the elementary player in a jazz ‘feel’. We often think of swing as being in compound time, with the second subdivision omitted (indeed it is usually transcribed as such in western notation) but this is not necessarily correct as the subdivision before the beat may be pushed or dragged to change the feel of the rhythm – in other words, it may be ‘unquantised’ in reference to the background grid of compound time.

At first sight, this seems an unnecessary jargon for quite a simple concept but there is a vast array of different PDs, depending on the music and the cultural context in which it has evolved. As Keil states, “each person has a unique feel for time (and) bringing different or discrepant personalities together generates different kinds of swing.” R.F. says as much when he talks about the rhythmic tension in classic dub, which he admits is “probably down to performance practice rather than simply bad playing”. Indeed dub and reggae both have a unique PD, which can, if so wished, be expressed in a micro-measured ratio of short-to-long subdivisions and then (for example) be plotted over time to represent how the feel of the music shifts in relation to its changing function.

This is all well and good but I don’t suggest that this level of detail is needed for our purposes (whatever those might be). What should be taken on board, however, is the general nature of the PD and the phenomenon it represents.

Oral music that makes use of a PD is inherently tied to (informed by/influential upon) the human body, e.g. through dance. One PD that I am personally very aware of is that of the samba swing. On attempting to play in a samba bateria, I had first to wrestle with a rhythmic unit that I had never encountered before. The samba swing is unusual to many western ears because its PD takes place across four subdivisions of the beat, rather than the ‘usual’ two.

You can hear the swing in slow form below (weirdly, the only clip I could find is played by my old teacher):

As you should be able to hear, the swing consists of two halves: one in which the second subdivision is delayed (much like the ‘jazz’ swing above) and then a second half in which the fourth subdivision comes early and the swing is ‘pushed’. This is admirably explained here, from whence I gleaned the following helpful waveform representation:

Viewed as such, you can see how, at its most basic units, time in samba is constantly expanding and compressing, like a pendulum slowing from its lowest position to its highest and then accelerating back down again whilst retaining an isochronically consistent period of time in which the cycle completes. As the writer of the playing guide above notes, the swing derives from a ‘natural’ ‘human’ playing technique where rhythmic inconsistencies are allowed to flourish within the overall pattern.

This swing played with the technique described and up to speed:

I would also contend (as I have heard it argued) that this particular PD derives from the samba dance – as anyone who has watched a Brazilian booty in action can testify, the pendulum analogy also applies here.

We might even consider, in the light of bodily movement, the word ‘shuffle’, which nowadays adorns every sequencer, as an effect which introduces a PD that, on some sequencers, is even quantifiable and variable in terms of a percentage. The analogy between delayed time and shuffling, shambling movement is plain and reminds me of the ‘aksak’ of middle eastern music, roughly translatable as ‘limp’, which has come to define the relationship between short and long accents in the additive rhythms typical in that part of the world.

The parallels between the rhythmic idiosyncrasies of oral cultures and wonky are, I hope, becoming clear – above all, connections between so-called ‘imperfection’ and the human. It is the latter, a tendency towards the organic, which I wish to emphasise. As Kiel states, “Abstract time is a nice Platonic idea, a perfect essence, but real time, natural time, human time, is always variable.”

Moving (briefly) away from rhythm and to another oral music with which I am familiar, the music of Indonesian gamelan is designed to emphasise another discrepancy – that of pitch. Gamelan instruments typically come in pairs, which are slightly out of tune with each other. This adds a complex ‘beating’ aspect to what might be considered otherwise simple harmony which thickens the sound and accounts for its characteristically rich and disorientating soundworld. Essentially of course, this is another form of rhythmic discrepancy as the detuned notes throb at the rate of their difference, an effect particularly apparent with the lower pitched instruments.

This detuning is a recurrent theme across many cultures, all of which share this rejection of uniformity and perfection. Keil goes on to suggest that the avoidance of ‘straight’ time-keeping which so often typifies the music of oral cultures is evidence of a “cultural refusal to become civilized--fixed, printed, formalized, monumental, predictable.” He consistently equates this cultural refusal to comply with the perfect divisions of the (imaginary) rhythmic grid with an emphasis on the human aspects of music-making.

We might, then, start to define Wonkification (i.e. Wonky-as-process – the so-called ‘transversal’ Wonky) as rhythmic, harmonic or textural deviance at the micro-level. We might consider Wonky-as-genre as the fetishisation of this process. Keil himself states that “abstract perfection, absolute time, perfect pitch, ideal form, flawless performance, etc., are weird myths of the West” and that “music, to be personally involving and socially valuable, must be 'out of time' and 'out of tune”. Whilst this can be heard resoundingly in the rhythmic discrepancy of Samba and the pitch discrepancy of Gamelan, it is also as perfect a description of Wonky as you could hope for. It’s a striking statement to make because it suggests that social music tends towards a certain ‘wonkiness’ in order to connect with the human affect.

But how does the idea of the Participatory Discrepancy really relate to a music which exists purely in recorded form? There are no musicians who lock in to the groove but there are, it is supposed, dancers. Simon Reynolds has expressed his scepticism at the music’s danceability, and as R.F. notes, “due to the unquantised nature of many of its notes, ‘wonky’ can’t perfectly afford dancing.” I have suggested that it is precisely this nature that speaks to the body’s propensity for movement. It is quite clear however, that tracks in the Wonky genre exaggerate their deviances to an extent that imperfections must surely spill over into the dance domain. R.F. suggests, for example, “just a general 4/4 thang with certain ‘wonky’, stuttering qualities.”

Keil goes on to predict that “perfection would be the end of evolution…we have learned that nature is far less than perfect for a very good reason--for the same reason that nature is far more than mechanism.” It is this time-honoured conflict between nature and machine which I want to emphasise within this context. It seems to me that much of the music of the ‘hardcore continuum’ has been tied to this tension, this being the force which drives much of its inbuilt sonic energy. It might be said that, whether through the looped breaks of hardcore and jungle (inherited from hip hop) or the vocal science of 2 step, there has been an inclination towards ‘mechanising’ the human aspects through synthetic manipulation of organic sources. We might say that an initial submission to the technology principle (in looped samples) gave way to a fetishisation of this principle (in vocal/breakbeat science) as producers explored aspects that extended and transcended human ability. Wonky (as a genre and a technique) on the other hand attempts, via the methods described by Rouge’s Foam (non-quantisation, detuned synths, evocation of (nostalgia for?) old/broken technology etc.), in light of the Participatory Discrepancies described above, to humanise the machine. It surmounts the machine-complex and thus reasserts the primacy of the human.

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P.S. As if reading my mind, Simon comes in right on time with a quote from 1992: “The best thing about hardcore is that all the soul's been taken out. We’ve had 200 years of human element in music and it's about time for a change.” I was deliberately invoking oedipal terminology (technology principle / machine-complex) in my last paragraph and, appropriately, Simon goes on to codify the ‘swing’, ‘groovy’ and ‘human’ elements of the nuum as feminine with the ‘stiff’, ‘machinic’, ‘inhuman’ elements being masculine.

P.P.S.

‘Proto-Wonky’ was touched upon by Rouge’s Foam with Skream’s Midnight Request Line. I’d considered this myself, ironically, with the arpeggios on his 0800 Dub and it made me consider other proto-wonky tunes – not necessarily those which bore a direct influence on Wonky(-as-genre) as it is today but certainly those which exhibit wonky(-as-process) tendencies.

Aphex Twin – Windowlicker
It seems strange to think of the king of precision-beats in wonky terms but the out-of-tune aahs in Windowlicker are looped and mistimed in such a way that they clash with the straight beats beneath in a manner that is straight out of the book of Wonk.

Four Tet – Turtle Turtle Up
Not much to say really. Wonky as you like.

Frankie Knuckles/Jamie Principle – Your Love
The arpeggios in this are not only redolent of something like Kaliko but the 3-note pattern forms a nice 3 against 4 tension which is a common wonky technique, especially in the Knuckles version which leaves the straight 4/4 house beat until the 6/8 loop has firmly ingrained itself in your head. Stretching the point? Perhaps until you consider the sample being used to exactly the same effect in that Animal Collective tune, one of the wonkiest pop tunes ever.

More please!

tendencies in post-digital listening

2009-06-03T16:55:00.007+01:00

After a few months of fairly dedicated Spotify surfing, I’m beginning to feel some of the effects of the post-digital vision of music consumption. The choice available is ridiculous, encouraging you to delve into areas you wouldn’t normally (who knew that Black Lace have tracks called ‘Gang Bang’ and ‘Bullshit’, alongside the Birdie Song as part of their repertoire?) but, crucially, also enables you to sample from the well of music you would normally be interested in but never get round to (such as almost the entire Ad Noiseam and Cock Rock Disco discographies). Thus I think the accusation often levelled at software such as this that, given absolute choice, consumers are never as prone to let unexpected music into their sphere of listening as they might with radio, is – if not ungrounded – then certainly muted by the immense listening opportunity such software offers. Surely any listener open to the prospect of the new will have their curiosity piqued, to say the least.

However, I’ve begun to take stock of my listening habits over the past couple of days and I’ve realised that my attention span appears to have drastically reduced itself, to the extent that I find it difficult to make it through a full track, let alone a whole album. The aural world that I have the potential of swimming in is so vast, and so eclectic, that the opportunity cost of listening starts to become frighteningly apparent.

This is nothing new of course; a quick Google search demonstrates how critics have been bemoaning the death of the album as a consequence of single-track downloads for years. And the shuffle feature has introduced a bifurcated syndrome (not only deconstructing the album sequence but catalysing a skip-fetish whereby the anticipation to find out the next track incapacitates the listener’s ability to concentrate on the present one) which even has a name – Ipod ADD. But this is the first time I have acutely felt, not just the effects but an awareness of the reasoning behind it. I’ve started to normalise the behaviour. When making it through a 4 minute track of reasonably vibrant and engaging music routinely becomes a battle against those paranoiac urges that whisper you could be listening to something else, you start to wonder if this is the vista of hope it initially promised to be.

Of course, this is an immature response to an immature system. I may plausibly develop my listening practices in dialogue with the ripening digital propagation infrastructure and manage to overcome my infantile and impatient ears. On the other hand, the choice is only going to expand, exponentially so, and with it, the pressure to listen to it all. Christ, an insatiable cultural appetite used to be a good thing!

Every day we’re bombarded by choices, we need to make instant decisions. We’re in endless combat with our own environment with all its pace and variety, its choice and… over-choice.

The other habit I’ve noticed is that practically all the listening I do on a daily basis (which is quite a lot, on the face of it) happens in the office, on the commute or at night. Which means that it has to happen over headphones. Assuming I am not alone in my experience, this shift from public to private listening flies hard in the face of my theory that the post-digital music sphere, by eroding our constructed notions of authority and ownership and democratising the means of production, showcases a collective subconscious will towards an aural (or secondary oral) culture, whereby cultural produce is ‘owned’ by no-one but belongs to everyone. It is surely also true that the enormous availability of tracks fosters an eclecticism of taste that necessarily leads to hyper-individualism. Everyone is free - except they're on their own.

The twin movements towards orality and a collapse of the barrier between consumers and producers imply a corresponding shift towards a public listening experience. But the idea that everyone is listening to their own private playlist muddies the rose-tint of my spectacles somewhat. Despite the global interconnectivity of the digitally enabled music community, is it possible that, far from a digitised democracy of listening, what we will experience is aural onanism on an unprecedented scale?

a plastic-coated droplet of pure melodrama

2009-05-13T13:35:00.010+01:00

I thought i'd write something on La Roux, specifically In For The Kill, now that the dust has settled somewhat and she's been a little more assimilated into the pop sensibility.
I like her as a presence. I'm not utterly convinced by the songs but she's another example of an artist who's sonic innovation as a presence in their field is far more important than the vehicles on which it is carried (step forward Spor). That voice is a bit ridiculous. The backing tracks on In For The Kill and Quicksand are perfunctory at best - a little flat but necessarily so to replicate a motorik casio rhythm track.
La Roux realises that 'soulful' curlicues (the tumbling semi-improvisatory tails to certain notes) that originate in blues and gospel and pass into popular culture through big female singers like Mahalia Jackson, Aretha Franklin and through to Whitney and Mariah, have been stripped of their soul by a thousand copycats and x factor hopefuls. The technique is now an empty signifier, best understood as a museum piece (this doesn't mean it can only be understood in terms of its past, but that any real modern usage must aim to break free of this mixed lineage, to try and establish a new significance). Whether it is a studio contrivance or some inhuman technique she has perfected - a mixture of both I suspect - La Roux exposes the latent hysteria that has always been implicit in the technique and laminates it, a plastic-coated droplet of pure melodrama. (c.f. the absurd 12 second ooh at 3:40 in the original version).
'Bulletproof' falls down precisely by foregrounding the casio element and downplaying the over the top melisma that makes the La Roux of ...Kill so... 'distinctive' isn't the word. The Skream remix works because it realises this and distances itself from the vocal as much as possible, in terms of register, spatial positioning and action. There is no integration between the two parts, really, no attempt at an organic fusion, just a huge gulf of silence in the midrange, a clear emphasis of the awkward synthetic graft of the remix.

more spotify diving

2009-04-06T13:53:00.007+01:00

Spotify seems to be gaining a huge amount of content every day. consequently, listening to the mills brothers, or the golden gate quartet has never been easier.

and following up some of the albums acts like this have been compiled on is an awesome way of discovering stuff.
like "Kickin' Hitler's Butt: Vintage Anti-Fascist Songs 1940-1944". With track titles like "Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition" and "Stalin Wasn't Stallin'", it speaks for itself really, but don't let that get in the way of listening to the thing. I particularly enjoyed "Der Fuhrer's Face".

Further investigation shows that this is part of a series of 'vintage songs' (i.e. popular music between the Great War and the 60s) on a theme put out by Buzzola records. i look forward to listening to "Ride Daddy Ride: Vintage Songs About Sex" and "Space Guitar and Death Ray Boogie: Vintage Science Fiction Songs" in particular.

2009-04-03T14:45:00.006+01:00

Why has it taken so long for me to discover funk carioca? Probably an aversion to shoreditch post-colonial cool (c.f. favela chic... ugh... the very name makes me queasy), not to mention diplo/MIA.

still, spotify has come up trumps

I'm not a Portuguese speaker, but it's nice to hear some music out of Brazil which doesn't seem to mention the word "coração" once. The best tracks on that Mr Bongo comp are the ones that update the classic ny electro/miami bass sound with modern production techniques, yet still manage to sound horrendously raw, the Tati Quebra Barraco tracks being the bastards here, although i appreciate the debbie deb reference on the Raffa track too...
Weird how, for a non brazilian listener, the reconstituted electro that must have been so alien 25 years ago, now occupies the role of anchoring the giddying rush of incomprehensible vocal alterity in the familiar.
I wonder what the world of Planet Rock means to people on the inside of this music.

Kimya Dawson's Grain of Innocence

2009-02-23T15:34:00.005Z

This was written towards end of 2008 but never reached its intended recipient. Still relevant though, if a little haughty...

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I saw Juno for the first time the other day. It’s a quirky story of triumphant outsider-cool in the Napoleon Dynamite/Little Miss Sunshine vein. Juno herself is an annoying caricature of the post-ironic teen, revelling in a depthless collage of youth argot and implausible comebacks and the plot is contrived and shoddily moralistic but somehow the film stumbles into likeable territory anyway. Throughout, we swim in the unmistakeable soundworld of Kimya Dawson, a singer-songwriter-guitarist whose simple folky songs of adolescence and idealism charmed their way onto seemingly everybody’s i-Pod when the film first came out in the cinema early in 2008. Dawson doesn’t do singing so much as pitched speaking, but the amateurism works perfectly as the melodies flow straight from the world of nursery rhyme and the lyrics are delivered in a singsong metre that doesn’t really scan, venerating the naïvety of childhood. Bright eyed and hopeful, unashamed and unsullied by disillusionment, it’s all utterly, utterly charming.

I cannot stand her.

I’ve been trying to work out why I detest these catchy and inoffensive songs. It’s not the lyrical content – often her subject matter is inventive and laudable, aligning diverse imagery in arresting wordplay. She evidently wants me to like her, in one song going so far as to claim she’s “never met a Toby that I didn’t like” [Tire Swing]. But then, she hasn’t met me and, unfortunately, I’ve never met a Kimya Dawson song that doesn’t make me cringe so hard that I want to drill through my eardrums.

Part of the problem, I think, stems from the fact that she seems to so desperately long for ‘grain’, the concept Roland Barthes used to discuss the way in which humanity, personality and (forgive me, Roland) soul is expressed through music. It is the expressive warmth present in a performance that may not be technically perfect and may even derive character from its flaws; it is “the body in the voice as it sings, the hand as it writes, the limb as it performs”. Barthes used two operatic baritones as his example, comparing the polished performances of Dieter Fischer-Dieskau unfavourably with the more stirring imperfections of Charles Panzéra. In the 50s and 60s, the idea took on a sour undertone as record companies rushed to re-record versions of popular black American “race records” for the white middle American market, essentially ironing out the lascivious sense of grain that the black artists had brought to the song – while another wave of artists with no connection to black America felt so moved by it they tried their hardest to emulate it. Dawson knows all about grain. For her it signifies authenticity through imperfection in a world where we are surrounded by polished pop performances. These days, perfection, as it seems, is tarnished by marketing: there is no ‘body in the voice’ of the melismatic post-Arethra/Whitney/Mariah practice. Of course, she plays in a more folk-like tradition which consciously rejects the popular/populist vision of vocal technique but, for her, even this can operate in a way that obscures the humanity of the voice (the nasal, pseudo-yodel of Celtic song, for example). Humanity, unfettered and unmediated, is the key here. For Kimya, the only way to achieve a real sense of the granular, so to speak, is to shed the affectations and regress to a state that pre-exists technique: childhood.
Which is admirable, really, and a potent idea. Effective it would be too, if it weren’t essentially unsound.

Realising the pitfalls of sounding like the worst kind of cod-psychoanalyst, I nonetheless turn unflinchingly towards an idea put forward by Jacques Lacan. Lacan supposed that a defining moment of maturity in the young is the mirror phase, when the child begins to recognise himself in the mirror and thus initiates self-awareness. Crucially though, it is an awareness through the eyes of others; an understanding of the self is essentially an understanding of the other. Kimya Dawson’s infant persona, with its unformed sense of awareness, should be unconcerned with how others view her. The music should be an expression of reality through unblinkered eyes, no longer shackled by convention or the futile pursuit of perfection, operating mimetically for the audience and thus becoming a key to a perspective that maturity inevitably negates. The moment where it should coalesce is when the singalong campfire jaunt of ‘Loose Lips’ is shattered by lines like “Fuck Bush and Fuck this War”; vitriol is always more damning when it simultaneously deflowers innocence.
How unfortunate, then, that her veil is so transparent. The music is saturated in awareness, both of others and herself. Too knowing and self-consciously cute to be innocent, the sweetness is affected and abstracts the real Kimya from her sonic self. You know that little magazine that comes in the post from an organisation, a bank perhaps, which attempts to tap into the ‘youth’ market? They write articles containing money-saving tips, using informal typefaces and awkwardly inserting words like funky and hip, and then set them on a background of a notepad and paste them into the magazine at a jaunty angle. Beyond cringeworthy, it is actually quite insulting and largely unforgivable. Kimya Dawson is the audio equivalent of that magazine; we are listening to her idea of innocence, rather than innocence itself.

What exacerbates this is that her view of childhood is clearly informed by idealised adult nostalgia than attempts to engage with a real infant perspective, which saps the music of any of the excitement that may have saved it from mediocrity; children’s perception can be a lot more warped than Kimya gives them credit for. For proof you need go no further than Dave Soldier’s innovative project Da Hip Hop Raskalz, in which he helped inner city NY kids to record their own hip hop tracks. Dave’s guiding hand was there to operate the technology, showing them how to choose drum sounds etc. but the vast majority of the work is their own (including group names and track titles). Listening to these kids’ creations offers a much more brilliant and complex perspective of the world into which we’re thrown than Dawson is able to conjure. Observations more subtle than we consider a child able to pick up on are taken along surreal trains of thought so that we’re confronted with startling lines like “nobody messes with my chicken but me/I’m the man and the chicken P.I.M.P.” [The Looneytunes – Chicken Wing] (If you think I’m making this up then you can listen to all the tracks on the site above. Check out also the gruff ODB/Busta-style delivery of that particular lyric…)

Stinging critique of celebrity and the way in which its omnipresence encourages idolatry of the banal can easily be read into lyrics like, “the world is famous, the people is famous, the floor is famous, the wires are famous” and the repetitious hookline: “we’re famous just like Mary J Blige…we’re so so so so famous…” [The Famous Celebrities – We’re Famous] The rigid delivery – weirdly, sounding almost like Kraftwerk in places – emphasises the robotic. The most disturbing image occurs when fame flashes with violence as the kids joyously announce they are “superstar, superstar, superstars with a baseball bat.” The backing music is, quite frankly, mental.

Listening to Da Hip Hop Raskalz strikes me as a far more rewarding experience of truth-in-humanity than that of Dawson’s sappy tunes. Whereas, naturally, the kids exist inside the world of a child looking out, Kimya uses the language of an adult talking to a child – nursery rhyme melodies, whistling, simple major harmonies – but it never quite hits home. The lightness and space of the songs are weighed down by a saccharine falsity which rings through much louder and more piercingly than Dawson strained, droning voice. Desperately yearning for grain, the only reality she can produce is a flawed simulacrum of weak nostalgia. At best, the message is confused; at worst, just plain patronising.

I was encouraged recently by a blog-post in memory of Oliver Postgate, creator of cult children’s programming like Bagpuss and the Clangers, in particular lamenting the loss of his gently paternal narration: embodying “wisdom that had nothing to do with deflationary commonsense…[it was] the voice of an adult speaking to children”. In the world of contemporary TV, the writer astutely notes, “there are no children, there are no adults, there is no wonder: only adolescents in waiting, being spoken to by screamingly self-conscious adolescents in their twenties and thirties.” Sadly, as Kimya Dawson reminds us, this is an affliction which is in no way confined to the world of children’s television. By contrast, the music that really moved and delighted me in 2008 was that which sounded blisteringly uncompromising, particularly the live performances: Messiaen, Stravinsky, Autechre, SND, Slayer, Mastodon – all of them performances which did not condescend to their audience in any way. Certainly they all exist on a plane where audiences delight in being confounded so subversion isn’t really on the cards, but the fact remains that the intricacy, invention and sheer sensory brutality demands the listener make sense of and engage with the music; Kimya simply feeds us passivity.

In the mirror-phase Lacan was referring to a specific, transient moment but the development it represents – self-awareness – clearly takes place over a much longer period and usually only really comes to fruition in that most confusing and emotionally fraught of times: puberty (sometimes not even then). Kimya never once inhabits the child’s domain but nor has she matured enough to comment with insight. Her persona is stuck in the adolescent view of the self, with all the bewildered notions of idealism and nostalgia, convention and rebellion that go with it. Luckily this fits with the loose teenage self-discovery-through-trial theme of the film. One of the few moments that punches above its weight in the film comes when, after revealing her pregnancy to her father, Juno is reprimanded, “I didn’t think you were that kind of girl”, to which she instantly responds “I don’t know what kind of girl I am.” Hardly revolutionary stuff but certainly effective – and as convenient a nutshell for the film as a whole as we could hope for. So then, Kimya Dawson would seem a perfect match and, to begin with, that it is. But her repeated appearances continually drive home the realisation that there is no development in the protagonist, that to remain stagnant in a kind of faux-naïve, baffled bemusement at the world is supposedly far more beneficial than to face that confusion head on. Single-handedly, Dawon wrests any promise of a meatier plot from the film. As Juno grows dangerously close to her prospective child’s adoptive father they exchange musical influences, with the latter luring his protégée away from the juvenile concept of ‘punk’ (in its loosest sense) and towards the more textural world of post-rock/-punk – here signifying a more adult and dangerous world. But any flicker of promise is ultimately wiped away (“You know what? I bought another Sonic Youth album and it sucked... it's just noise”) so the film can close with our heroes back in Ms Dawson’s redemptive arms, playing – actually participating in – one of her miserable little songs. A travesty no less. But more than that, it’s a shame.

And ‘Kimya’… really. What sort of a fucking name is that?

2009-02-13T16:32:00.000Z

<a href="http://www.grapheine.com">Grapheine : Studio de création graphique graphiste free-lance agence de pub Paris Lyon graphisme</a><noembed> </object><div class="blogger-post-footer"></div> </article> <article> <p>2009-02-10T15:13:00.001Z</p> Mark Mulligan has pretty much nailed the zeitgeist - you can totally tell he's "been analyzing the digital music market for nearly a decade":<br /><blockquote><a href="http://musicindustryblog.wordpress.com/2009/02/09/music-as-free-when-discovery-becomes-consumption/">In fact, it could be argued that file sharing is becoming a technological manifestation of new behaviour patterns.</a></blockquote>Well done mate.<br /><br />Of course it is. The way we create, distribute and enjoy music - and all art/media/entertainment - has always been representative of behavioural trends. How could it not be? Actually, reading that article, the overriding feeling that struck me was "at last!", rather than one of pure scorn. At last, someone involved with the industry has made the connection that new technology and human behaviour are symbiotically linked and that cultural activity is as much a cause of the digital revolution as it is a reflection. Except that these behaviour patterns aren't new, they've just been dormant. The idea of music being owned by a specific individual was exactly concomitant with the development of technology - first printing, then sound recording - which meant that musicians could, first, turn the sound they created into a tangible artefact and second, disseminate it to a large audience, independent of their own presence. It was only a matter of time before an entire industry was built around it, buoyed along by the technology that was reshaping attitudes and behaviour towards musical creation. Surely it was only a matter of time before technology advanced to the point whereby creation and distribution could exist apart from (relatively recent) ideas of ownership?<div class="blogger-post-footer"></div> </article> <article> <p>2009-02-10T14:54:00.000Z</p> BLOG!<div class="blogger-post-footer"></div> </article> </main></body></html>