Sonic Thinking
Page 28
This is to abandon also reversibility between philosophy and science, and between science and music; non-musicology leads to practice “music” in a non-scientific stance to mutate music using scientific means related to the practice of science, as Jarrod Fowler says. The result of Non-philosophy and Non-musicology includes a generic matrix, which is transcendental at the same time, a generic matrix, whose idempotency functions are related to the real as determination-in-the-last-instance. Idempotency is a term of informatics that refers to a function that remains unchanged by doubling and iterating itself or by the addition of new functions, so the generic matrix is related to non-commutative identity which persists across variations and does not need any transcendence. Deleuze|Guattari renounce representation, but still in the name of perception and affects, which are always correlated to experience. And this concept correlates somehow to a certain phase of Laruelle, where the non-musical construction of the rhythmight of music and science is combined with hearing, hearing-in-rhythm, with musicological systems of listening. Laruelle would assert a further step, where non-musicology reduces philosophy, science, and musical objects to pure material, by starting to sample the material from within music, non-musical discourses such as science and philosophy. By cutting off the principle of musical sufficiency, the immersive properties of sound in relation to perception and affect are also cut off. Instead non-music-fiction is producing an irreflective and automatic processing of variables by variables, which is a fractal proliferation of models without transcendence. Audio, as the material of media pools, is not further related anymore “to a transindividually constituted prosthetic extension with reversible intentionality,” as Inigo Wilkins says.
In his latest works, Laruelle speaks of the non-standard method as a kind of immanent fiction that includes invention, construction, performance, etc., as a non-representative and non-expressive method that uses only abstract and pure thought for non-aesthetics and that does not need to appeal to the parallelism of philosophy and art.3 This demands neither thinking of sound as sonic philosophy nor thinking about sound, but an abstract theory of sound, a radical abstract theory that is absolutely non-worldly and non-perceptual, as Laruelle says. Music is not oriented to a world, nor is it perceptual; rather it focuses on the immanent character of music as such, being in music. Music is radical objectivation without representation or intentionality. Following Laruelle, this semblance of music must be no longer an imitation, a tracing, an emanation or a representation of world or of language, of affect or whatever. Rather there exists a non-world of music for both the musician and the philosopher of music. This non-world still exists in the present and is real, while non-music is always rooted in matter. At this point Non-musicology stops tracing the Rhythmicity of Rhythm in hearing-in-Rhythm through sampling-in-the-last-instance. As a kind of objectivity without representation, Non-musicology begins instead to sample material from science and philosophy, from musical material itself, to construct the immanent generic matrix of non-music, which is no longer overdetermined by the capitalist relation of production and circulation.
Notes
1See Dante (n.d.) and Wilkins (2013).
2See Deleuze and Guattari (1994) and Laruelle (2008: 200).
3See for example Laruelle (2013).
Works Cited
Dante (n.d.), Purgatorio Canto XXVIII, 7–19.
Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1994), What is Philosophy?, trans. H. Tomlinson and G. Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press.
Fowler, J. (n.d.), JMF075. Available online: http://www.jarrodfowler.com/JMF075.html (accessed October 30, 2015).
Laruelle, F. (2001), “The Decline of Materialism in the Name of Matter”, trans. Ray Brassier, Pli 12: 33–40.
Laruelle, F. (2008), Introduction aux sciences géneriques. Paris: Editions Petra.
Laruelle, F. (2013), Anti-Badiou: On the Introduction of Maoism into Philosophy, trans. R. Mackay. London: Bloomsbury.
Wilkins, I. (2013), Enemy of Music. Available online: http://irreversiblenoise.wordpress.com/2013/03/06/enemy-of-music/ (accessed October 30, 2015).
13
Sonic Figure: The Sound of The Black Soft
Julia Meier
[…] a-ha, a-ha, a-ha, a-ha, a-ha.
Electronicfucksonic (The Black Soft 2011)
Sound, generally, has the capacity to create a piece of information, a sign that can only be rendered and understood via a direct experience with and through the audible. This means that we basically are not able to grasp it intelligibly in our common coded forms of language. Sound is what affects us immediately and goes right into our body, thus it is rather felt through resonances and vibrations—most of the time rhythmic—that one absorbs almost osmotically.1
The human body in connection with its mind then becomes a resonating body itself that can be shaped through sounds—without making intelligible, graspable sense of it. Edgar Allan Poe’s epigraph in his famous tale The Fall of the House of Usher quotes De Béranger: “Son coeur est un luth suspendu; Sitôt qu’on le touche il résonne.” (“His heart is a suspended lute, as soon as it is touched, it resounds”) (Poe 1998: 109). The shaping is raw and pure without the distance of reflection but with immediate reaction.
The music of the New York-based duo The Black Soft2 is best described as an eclectic mix of 1980s synth-pop, cinematic string sounds of film-noir, and some spiritual voodoo-like music, as well as elements of blues, industrial, dark wave, orchestral, and post-electronic music. The music is dominated by heavy beats and erupting voice improvisations over a soundscape that is built out of all kinds of noises. In almost every song rhythmically arranged human moans are used. The overall sound is sexually charged, and when the singing starts it is ecstatic and dramatically performed.
The song structures of The Black Soft are based on well-known musical patterns, but in order that sound is to affect us profoundly, it has to become something that is no longer recognizable. The Black Soft does work with clichés as well but they succeed in breaking and destroying them in order to be able to get rid of their cliché functions and thus to create something new and—in their best parts—something unheard, a kind of abstract sound or form where the cliché has been identified, but then has been “deterritorialized,” which renders sonorous forces that are not sonorous, in the sense of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s philosophy of creation.3
What becomes sonorous then in The Black Soft’s compositions, is the spasmodic, convulsive rhythm of what I would characterize as a “hystericized” body. The various voices and beats shift, overlap and clash and seem as if they are choking off, or swallowing themselves up. Hereby, staccato, short and hectic beats are not only those generated from the drum computer, but also the moaning forms the soundscape, which seems to almost suffocate. The listener gets viscerally affected and dragged into this convulsing sound body, thus “becoming” it him/herself.
Figure 13.1 The Black Soft. Kheraj, Evaan © 2012 All Rights Reserved.
If we were to visualize this convulsing sound body we could compare it to John Carpenter’s science fiction horror movie The Thing (1982) where a parasitic extraterrestrial life form assimilates other organisms and imitates them; a kind of mimicry process takes place where the resulting organism appears like its former organism but differs from it in a hostile extraterrestrial non-human way. The interesting section here is the part where the crew finds this “thing” in the middle of its metamorphoses, before it has completed the full assimilation. What is it precisely at this stage? In Carpenter’s movie the thing undergoing the process looks like a monstrosity, an amalgam of different “hosts,” be it animal or human, a mud-like undefined organism. This moment in which distinct parts intermingle, thus still oscillating between different entities, is the very moment in the horror film out of which the monstrosity is born. It is a monstrosity, but it is also the utopian idea of a new life form, something in between human, animal and alien. And if we omit the horror effect, then it is only a body that is life,
where it is not about being a human form or anything else, but where it is only about a living something.
In A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari show how a work of art can come into being, how creative processes can take place, and how this is related to the human body without representing it, but presenting it as a becoming-other that has manifested a bloc of sensations of dehumanized “affects and percepts” (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 312–13). In order to describe the parameters that are necessary to create music or art, they mainly refer to the biological theses of Jakob von Uexküll, and present their concepts of “territory” and “refrain,” which they have abstracted from geographically associated sonic motifs of birds.
Deleuze and Guattari delineate three examples or processes that together form the territory and refrain. First, a stable point in the midst of chaos has to be established: they explicate this idea with the image of a child who is afraid of the dark and sings a song to calm himself, it creates a calm and stable center in the heart of chaos (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 312). As Ronald Bogue explains in Deleuze on Music, Painting, and the Arts, this creation serves as “a locus of order in a non-dimensional space” (Bogue 2003: 17).
In the compositions of The Black Soft, this locus of stability would be a constant beat. The constantly repeating beats serve as a first pulse of what eventually becomes a song that gives a first stabilization or circling around and defining of a ground. In several songs they use live-recorded handclapping, which gives a repetitive first structure without being as artificially static as repeated handclap sounds from a drum machine.
Deleuze and Guattari describe periodic repetitions as coded forms that they define as a milieu: “A milieu does in fact exist by virtue of a periodic repetition,” but, as they further argue:
it is the difference that is rhythmic, not the repetition, which nevertheless produces it: productive repetition has nothing to do with reproductive meter .… Every milieu is coded, a code being defined by periodic repetition, but each code is a perpetual state of transcoding or transduction. Transcoding or transduction is the manner in which one milieu serves as the basis for another, or conversely is established atop another milieu, dissipates in it or constituted in it.
Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 313–14
Already this first grounding of the repetitive beats is not fully metrical, but stems from the pulse of the heartbeat, which makes them irregular, since the heartbeat is always a very new production of the organism, and never the same identical, repetitive beat (Bogue 2003: 18).
In this sense the overall beat in the compositions is already true rhythmic patterns that stake out a territory, but they have also become a milieu because they are not metrical. The drum machine beat corresponds to the handclapping, which corresponds to the heartbeat. In a sense they start to communicate with each other and thus have vibratory passages in between themselves. This serves as the grounding for a second milieu.
A second process that Deleuze and Guattari detect in the structure of the refrain is a process that Ronald Bogue illustrates with the help of an image of a cat that sprays the corners of its house, the trees and bushes in the garden and thereby demarcates a dimensional area that it claims as its possession. Similar to the famous style element of squeaks that Michael Jackson spontaneously built into his flow of rhythm as a recognizable element that marks the “Jackson area” for the listener, The Black Soft “keep their place” by staking out their territory via the constant incorporation of their aforementioned moaning sounds. These are the demarcation of the field that they want to occupy.
The rhythmical moaning sounds of the second process correspond to the simultaneously-existing rhythm of constant beats and handclapping of the first process. At this point one could say that two milieus start to communicate with each other—the codes become transcoded. While being in a state of resonance, they open themselves up to chaos; they break the shell of the first establishment of a graspable, repetitious circle and create a space in between two milieus that is not fixed but communicating, reciprocally interacting, even superimposing each other, in a word: vibrating. The periodic repetitions are necessary to form a milieu but the milieu has to have the potential to move to another milieu, and while moving back and forth, oscillating between milieus, a different rhythm is created. As Deleuze and Guattari state, this difference then is what is rhythmical and not the repetition that has created it in the first place (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 314). A transcoding from one milieu to the other takes place because the grounding beat already evokes the moaning sound, which then evokes the melody.
Then the third step takes place: in the example of Ronald Bogue, it is “a bird [that] sings an impromptu aria at the break of the day, and thus opens its territory to other milieus and the cosmos at large” (Bogue 2003: 17). The third developing element in The Black Soft’s compositions, then, is when the sound of the voice breaks in and eventually builds the melody of a song. But the melody is never completely fulfilled. Most of the time the voice only slightly sketches the melody into the sound structure; with sudden starts and abrupt breaks—often in a hysteric manner, where the voice breaks excessively into pathos and a painful dimension:
Finally, one opens the circle a crack, opens it all the way, lets someone in, calls someone, or else goes out oneself, launches forth.… As though the circle tended on its own to open onto a future, as a function of the working forces it shelters. This time, it is in order to join with the forces of the future, cosmic forces. One launches forth, hazards an improvisation. But to improvise is to join with the World, or meld with it.
Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 311
According to Deleuze and Guattari all three processes have to appear simultaneously creating the refrain. The notion of a territory in Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy does not mean a closed space and time construct but an open whole, similar to their notion of a work of art. The idea of a territory serves basically to describe the artist’s unique qualities and his distinctive signature, his autonomy. It is just that the artist places a signature on to something in his or her own distinctive way:
The artist: the first person to set out a boundary stone, or to make a mark. Property, collective or individual, is derived from that, even when it is in the service of war or oppression. Property is fundamentally artistic because art is fundamentally poster, placard. As Lorenz says, coral fish are posters. The expressive is primary in relation to the possessive; expressive qualities, or matters of expression, are necessarily appropriative and constitute a having more profound than being. Not in a sense that these qualities belong to a subject, but in the sense that they delineate a territory that will belong to a subject that carries or produces them. These qualities are signatures, but the signature, the proper name, is not the constituted mark of a subject, but the constituting mark of a domain, an abode. The signature is not the indication of a person; it is the chancy formation of a domain.
Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 316
Thus we see in Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the territory that a certain kind of decoding or deterritorialization must also take place. They explain this openness of the territory in relation to Konrad Lorenz’s observation of the coral fish whose coloration (poster, placard) in their opinion is not fixed to sexual or aggressive stimuli (hormones being responsible for the coloring) but they suggest that its coloring has become expressive rhythm that is related to internal and external components of the territory. The coloring ceases to be functional and transitory but becomes expressive rhythm (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 315–16).
Deleuze and Guattari further state that “[a] territory borrows from all milieus; it bites into them, seizes them bodily” (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 315). But what the territory takes from milieus—“any milieus: materials, organic products, skin or membrane states, energy sources, action-perception condensates” (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 315) ceases to be functional but has to become expressive.
If we
agree that the pulse of the heartbeat as an organic production appears to become the musical beat sound in the compositions of The Black Soft, and that there must also be many other different kinds of milieus from which The Black Soft “borrowed” their sonic material (such as, for instance, urban noise, inhale-exhale sounds of the body, etc., that start to communicate and build a resonance) one can conclude that these underlying milieus and their rhythm have become expressive (see Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 315: “Territorialization is an act of rhythm that has become expressive”). Due to this process, they attain the territorializing power and autonomy of their distinctive signature.
It is important to note that expression does not mean the expression of human emotions in a representative manner. It is not a subjectively created expression of an emotion, of a sexual drive, of a certain kind of mood, etc., that appears as sound and as music. This would only be a cliché expression.4 The moaning sound is a necessity that is both controlled and accidental. It does not express anything, although we can take it as an expressive rhythm in the sense of a signature, the marking of a territory. But as an artistic musical manifestation it ceases here to be of personal or subjective quality. By means of deterritorialization, signature becomes style, and style is “figure,” in the sense of Jean-François Lyotard5 (see Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 318).