Contemporary Issues in Sount Art

hope and fun

demo album

6 tracks so far, this is my sound submission for the Contemporary Issues in Sound Art module. I have been writing these compositions over the last few months in alignment with my theoretical research.

The project ‘hope and fun’ is a development in my compositional style from my previous reflective ambient music towards a hyper kind of dance music. oops, everything is dance music! This music has an accelerated form that could encourage latching on to with movement.

This kind of hyper music I have been writing for the last two years for live performances, but I have never formed them into finished compositions. The music is full of earworms and frazzlement, and I avoided exploring it for a while. Writing this music was somehow isolating and difficult in the way the compositions consumed my mental states into the frying pan, but I was excited about what was coming out so I continued to write. It felt like an amplification of my own frazzled states, trying to hold onto the heart while going through stress and metamorphosis in the fast pace of London.

The holding of the ‘heart’ is a kind of longing. The heart could be a grouping of those evolutionary technologies of compassion, solidarity and awe that formed over millienium of collective, collaborative living. The longing is a part of our desire for those feelings of connection and love between humans and non-humans. It’s an idealism that is represented through ‘naivity’ of melody and la la la.

My third little album was called ‘The Longing Waves’ which I released in 2020. I wrote this on the liner notes: “What can be heard, what is left, is the longing waves, these ruminations, little rumbles under a solid plastic world. Sometimes they flower into a piece of art that renders heart, or a little smile; a ‘connection’. With enough ‘connection’, we can collectively realize this destructive truth: that we are looking in the same direction. The truth that will destroy our plastic nests, and to reveal a love nest underneath. Remove these shackles to a love nest! It’s here, to be embraced, expressed and to be danced with.” It sounds so naive! I feel the power of naivity and idealism. I also believe my viewpoint has changed through recent theoretical research, and destructive forces become sonified in my music.

I have always had simple melodies running around in my head like earworms. When I started composing I tried to make them sound more cool but it didn’t work! Now I embrace my simple naive melodies and believe in their potential.

I have not wrote about my compositional process while writing this music, because it somehow interupts the process. I wanted to avoid contextualising this music, but now it is interesting to reflect and notice how my compositions related to my research. My questions about accelerationism and the idea to inject some kind of ethics into accelerated music were explored through my creative practice.

I will write some words on each composition.

the bridge ~ The title is inspired by Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi’s concept of the bridge, “The bridge over the abyss of the absence of meaning can take many forms: falling in love, tenderness, collective creation, hallucination, and movement.” The composition goes through a change halfway through the track, where previous elements are deconstructed to form a joyful opening, a happy together frazzlement. The beginning is sort of pensive, so to me it feels like the opening of a question. Perhaps a friendship over a question, and I wrote it after meeting a new friend in Portugal with whom I shared resonant visions and awe. The composition incorporates melodies from old Irish music, and also percussive form from trap music. I was excited with this because I am interested in exploring my Irish heritage with reforming elements into contemporary music form. I was excited that I made a slappy beat with hearts floating around it!

side eye w bird ~ I write most of my compositions at my desk in my bedroom, which has a window above that faces the garden. In moments of intensity I would catch eye contact with a bird. I imagined we could share similiar angst for an environment that we both share. This track explores that ‘interspecies heart’ or something.

donkey drop ~ another track that explores longing within other species. Where I grew up in Ireland there was a donkey who had a field to themself. I always felt a strong longing from donkeys. I thought it would be fun to incorporate animal voices into the drop form that resembles USA dubstep, injecting a wholesome story into a popular form. Thinking of post-irony, holding our attraction and repulsion to ‘commercial’ or ‘pop’ music as a sort of post-hegelian dialectic. Making it funny and making a point.

another day grr’reidhlean ~ the most frazzled. Reidhlean is gaelic for a field for dancing and games. The rooster melody is another expression of earthly longing. To me this track represents a rising out of depressive states. Sometimes people think I am happy all of the time because my music sounds ‘joyful’! I imagine joyful aesthetics, like hope and fun, may not be ignorant towards regimes of power and violence, but could be a way to explore that darkness while holding an ideal. The claim for hope and fun is directly related to my experiences in London club scenes that lean towards aesthetics of nihilism and ‘darkness’. People want to be cool, but maybe we hide vulnerability! This track has little screams between the drops that could suggest another day of stress. Maybe this is a form of sonic vaccination with added hope vitamins.

dance without organs ~ referring to the Deleuzian concept of a body without organs; the potential of a body without organisational structures. Dancing has always been a great metaphor to me, in how subconcious desire could interact with a changing environment. A world in motion requires movement into it. A fluid jiggly self releases stress and offers connection. Sometimes I have very happy accelerated states where things rush into place. The sound design and music reflects this merging with and fluidity with an environment.

hey end 🙂 ~ I wrote this song a while ago. Another song about forcing joy. There is no escape, so let’s have fun! I was definitely reading about the end of the world when I wrote this. I thought, if the end of the world has already happened, if the cracks are glowing, then let us seize the opportunity. Collapse is a terrible opportunity. New ideas are possible when we become disullioned with violent paradigms. This song utilises acceleration to spread a message of naive longing, through the cracks, into the rushed body. I felt very inspired by my amazing friends who would create joy in difficult moments.

The music has expressed my desire to fit my style into more popular forms. When I built my acoustic sculpture for the exhibition, I felt a moment of disconnect with what was happening around me in music scenes and cultural production. The calling for slowness and ecological intimacy felt like it dissipated into thin air with no one there to hear it. I felt a desire to form my music into an accelerated form that coud reach more people. When I play this music live some people enjoyed and danced to it. People said it made them happy. In regards to my essay on sonic vaccination, I feel like this music parallels the parodoxes of our modes of liberation. I am involved in many harmful infastructures to try to make my messages about longing, hope, love, vulnerability. So many things are problematic! I couldn’t deny my longing to make this music. I hope to release it with a label this year, and that it may go on to inspire some kind of hope or heart or something.

A note on vulnerability, the sound design in many tracks sort of represents and frazzlement, things falling apart, being a bit clumsy! The melodies call out like a vulnerable heart. Being vulnerable towards something harsh. I want to express the idea that its ok to feel tension and stress in contemporary life and fall over sometimes! We don’t need to march around like bosses.

Immersive Arts

Ancient immersivity.

I organised group listening workshops before a performance evening in Spanners, Brixton from my collective Roca. We thought by meeting outside in a park and then walking to the club together it would increase the intimacy potential of our event. This footage is from our 3D immersive surround sound system!

Seb, Asia, Teo, Jané, Weronika, Magda and myself

Last Summer we organised multiple outdoor events with a radio system to transmit and amplify live performances without needing a lot of equipment. For this event it was not possible to set up the radio system so I thought we could do some shared activities together. For this activity, one or more people are instructed to stand with their eyes closed. The rest of the group circle around them and make sounds.

At the beginning of the activity we were quite playful and wanted to surprise eachother. It was clear that the soundmaking position was as stimulating for the participants as the listener postion. I felt it was so are that I improvise with my voice, that I didn’t know what to expect when my body tried to make a new sound. People enjoyed playing together and making eachother laugh.

The participants had different reactions in the listener position. People quickly became overwhelmed when there were lots of soundmakers moving quickly around the space. It became clear that the soundmakers should intend a calm experience for the listener. When they slowed down and made quieter sounds, the listeners were able to focus more on the subtleties and the wider soundscape beyond, bringing a calm sensuality of space and motion. Most people enjoyed the quieter sounds more. If I organise this activity again I would like to add an instruction for quietness or subtley, perhaps as a place to arrive at or throughout the activity.

I noticed people would be curious to ask how it went for the listener and discuss the process together. When I was the listener, I felt a playful connection and warmth from the soundmakers. With the right intentions I imagine this practice to build intimacy between people, their environment and their own bodies. I am very interested to pursue research into group soundmaking and listening practices in my final year!

While I am engaged in terrible research about the end of humanity, doing activities like this make me feel hopeful about what simple practices can do for our sense of togetherness and environment. I am interested in how elaborate and abstract theory (end of the world) can inform simple accessible practices for constructive purposes (new worlds :D). The end of the world as we know it means we have an opportunity to imagine and connect in new ways.

This is my passionate belief in what immersivity can mean and a critique of the term’s usage in virtual reality development.

Frigid Happiness

Further notes on “The Soul At Work” by Bifo

In this chapter Bifo forms a great analysis of the affects of cognitive labour on our bodies, psyches and social relationships. Bifo loosely determines cognitive labour as paid employment and freelancing “creative” work that involves the processing and communicating of information. It seems that our general behaviours on digital media for communication and entertainment cause similar affects. The distinction between “pleasure” activities and “labour” activities is put into question.

Bifo describes how the competitive nature of cognitive labour isolates us from each other. We see other workers as competition and therefore we lose solidarity. Bifo claimes that due to automation of manual labour, it has become possible to reduce the entire production process to exchange of information. Virtual information is expanded towards infinity driven by the profit motives of the economic machine. Survival and competition becomes a semiotic production of symbols no longer based on sufficiency but infinitely expanding due to the infinite capacity of virtual information and the profit incentives of this production.

Bifo descibes the destructive nature of cognitive labour: “An infinite velocity of exposure to signs percieved as vital to the survival of the organism produces a perceptive, cognitive and psychic stress culminating in dangerous acceleration of all vital functions, such as breathing and heart beat, leading to collapse.”

Since cognitive workers are dependent on this labour for their own survival (duh :P) (or hm?), the signs they are exposed to are deemed crucial to this survival. What happens when the signs are changing too quickly to be able to comprehend their meaning, while chasing after them in belief of our dependence on them?

(What is our emotional dependence on social mass media?)

Bifo points out this is not an isolated individual experience. It is the formation of a collective panic, but it seems to create a feedback loop of self isolation. As we collectively panic our ability to care and support each other is weaker than the tendency to isolate and reach for the semi present connection we can recieve online.

Collective panic can lead to aggression and hate in small local bursts or in large, even national or international formations such as border policies, financial crashes and geopolitical conflicts. Bifo imagines this is not a problem that can be dealt with political persuasion or punishment by law, since it is not a political problem but cognitive stress based on the “infosphere’s excess.”

A question emerges: How can we manage and heal cognitive stress in an ever changing environment, when our own survival seems to depend on engaging with the “infosphere’s excess” to find work and make sense of what is going on?

Bifo proposes that a priviledged “virtual class” can isolate themselves from the physical destruction through virtual spaces. “The removal of corporeality is a guarantee of endless happiness, but naturally a frigid and false one, because it ignores, or rather removes, corporeality: not only that of others, but even one’s own, negating mental labour, sexuality and mental mortality.” By spending time in virtual spaces such as social media we can remove ourselves from the physicality of the pain of other bodies and also our own. Bifo proposes we need to analyse the virtual class in corporeal, historical and social terms to rematerialise virtual lifestyles.

I would like to hypothesize a manifesto of action to be derived from Bifo’s critique. We can aim to reduce our time in digital space, which has the capacity to produce an excess of information towards infinity and therefore leads to cognitive stress. We can aim to reduce our time in specific online platforms that use manipulative algorithms to entangle our attention and emotions into more cognitive labour. While the medium of a virtual space is problematic, certain platforms can be more stressful than others in the way our survival and social ranking is semiotized through likes, followers and instant messaging. These platforms encourage a competitive nature and lead to as much isolation as their proposed connective capactities. We can integrate embodiement practices into our lifestyles to reduce cognitive stress. If a person does not feel safe to engage with their body there are forms of therapy available to help heal towards embodiment. Of course humans have been practicing “embodiment” in different ways since recorded histories and the term is overly simplified. If we look within but particularly beyond western medical sciences we can find incredible resources for healing cognitive stress.

Another way we could collectively deal with cognitive stress could be to increase our disembodiement. Imagine transhumanist biotechnologies that reduce the tension between the human and the machine, junk media that destimulates our imagination and desire, and hyperstimulating experiences that work as a vaccine for cognitive overload. I imagine these already exist in many forms, whether it is hardcore club experiences as vaccination, netflix as sedation or developments in immersive reality technologies that reduce our sensorial seperation between the real and the virtual. I think that these behaviours can be seen coping mechanisms for our current worlds. They can help each of us in different ways, but we may have confused these states of “frigid happiness” as something to strive for rather than a temporary release from suffering.

Not everyone has access to frigid happiness. Neither has all manual labour been automated. Bifo has made a sturdy critique by fixating on a certain part of the labour force, but what does it mean about other humans who are outside of the “virtual class”? I am confused by his projections of a collective psychosocial collapse from cognitive labour when many human bodies are still carrying out manual labour all around the world, without which the virtual class could not survive. Why is Bifo fixating on this class of humans when they represent a small minority? He writes “I’ll focus on the most innovative and specific forms (of labour), since they represent the trend that is transforming the whole of production.” I guess Bifo discusses what he can relate to, which reveals the limitations of his point of view and future predictions.

I am also carrying out my research on cognitive labour as a form of cognitive labour, disembodied from the mass of infastructure and other bodies that makes it possible for me to type, read, compose on my DAW, eat food and generally survive day to day.

Active Positioning

An exploration on forming a definition for the heart/humanity, and notes on “The Soul At Work” by Franco “Bifo” Berardi.

If the heart is impure, contaminated by otherness, then what could it possibly signify? What means a story of connectedness when alienation is constant? It seems the story of the heart is ripe with problems, bordering religious. It needs to be made flexible!

But is some idea of essence, of humanity, necessary in order to prove the wrongness of exploitation? Humanity is in evolution and therefore remains undefined in it’s present moment. The recent steps we make are unsettled and barely noticeable while our technological development makes it seem our evolution is accelerating. When “humanity” is totally subjective, then a total submission to machine intelligence becomes possible. Is this evolution of humanity or something else?

Herbert Marcuse, a radical philosopher from Berlin wrote this in 1964: “The liberating force of technology – the instrumentalization of things – turns into a fetter of liberation; the instrumentalization of (hu)man.” I am fascinated by the idea of a fetter of liberation: I feel this is an essential point we need to make towards our techno-optimistic cultures. To fetter, to chain, to restrain…

Bifo connects this to our economic model: “The economy, like a general semiotic cage, forbids the development of the potential still existing in the material and intellectual structure of technology.” The incredible infastructrucal development of our technologies loses any potential of radical social liberation due to the economic model they depend on. While capital “diminishes labour time in the necessary form” it tends “to increase it in the superflous form.” Only through superflous labour activity can we value an excess of production.

So through semiotization, a capitalist realism perhaps, our technological development can only function under a specific system of value making, where it loses possibility of total social liberation. Partial social liberation is essential to foster an emotional dependence with new technology. This emotional dependence will supply the new value making system with endless energy (superflous activity). The heart is entangled with the machine. I don’t believe we will be satiated through further development, but it seems like an inevitable cycle of longing and curiousity. Perhaps the only hope is restriction of possibility due to the collapse of material infastructures and semiotic production that leaves a gap for new thinking and new constructions. I imagine this collapse is already occuring so we don’t need to accelerate destruction but start imagining and building our healthier societies together.

To make the heart spectral… if the heart is an active position towards our encounters, then it does not represent a lost human essence but rather an idea of our potential. An active position depends on what is around us, a way of being that evolves with the surroundings, not lost but unwritten, capable of being wrote collectively, and wrote again.

Knowledge production: Human knowledge is not revealing/excavating truth, it is instead a feedback between our active comprehension that reacts and acts into our encounters, being formed by and forming with our environment. “TRUTH” is transformed as it is discovered, meaning that knowledge is produced. Let’s imagine a vulnerable encounter, a proclomation to love! Imagining might transform what becomes possible.

Critique of Accelerationism

Notes on “Critiqiue of Accelerationism” by Michael E Gardiner.

Gardiner engages left-accelerationist thought with philosopher Franco Bifo Berardi to explore a potential critique of accelertionism.

Gardiner extracts striving points from the #Accelerate Manifesto by Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek to make a broad definition of what the accelerationists are about. They strive to drag the “present into the future – not blindly, but in a rationally-directed, ‘navigational’ sense.” In this form the Acc. are not describing a situation of acceleration but they want to form it out of a frozen moment, a repeating cycle of unharnessed potentialities without navigation.

Gardiner write “Accelerationism sees the intensification of certain tendencies in late capitalist as a way to escape its gravitational orbit, thereby allowing for a repurposing of the very material infastructure of capitalism itself, to universally emancipatory ends.” Accelerationism sees the liberatory potential of the material infastructure of capitalism, which it highlights based on a premise that this infastructure the only possible resource for inspiring the mass social change possible to overcome capitalist totality. It imagines capitalist infastructure as capable of producing an exit from itself / it’s demise through it’s ability to build technologies and process data in the speed of the machine itself, as in it is the machine itself. “An accelerationist politics seeks to preserve the gains of late capitalism while going further than its value system, governance structures, and mass pathologies will allow.” Williams and Syrnek.

In contrast Bifo critiques this call for liberation through the accelerated productive machinery as inherently prometheanist, a term that defines a human perspective of the environment as a resource and all environmental problemst to be overcome with technological intervention. Bifo instead calls for a “post-politics of ironic detatchment, aesthetic cultivation, and therapy in response to the systemic violence, unbridled competitiveness, and mass psychopathologies of our age.” He proposes that our bodies are not capable of meet the overwhelming flow of stimulation we are immersed in, and are therefore exhausted and disorientated.

Unintentional Design

Further notes on “The Mushroom at the End of the World” by Anna Tsing.

“Landscapes more generally are products of unintentional design… overlapig world making activities of many agents, human and non-human.” How exciting! Tsing points out the dramas and adventures of a landscape being an unintentional collaboration across species, lifeworlds and non-living forces.

Unintentionality is an exciting concept to apply to human and non-human activity. It seems that our shaping of the planet most certaintly reflects a human will but it is also in reaction to adverse circumstances. Our will to surive is totally influenced by that which is around us: the weather makes us build houses, the gut makes us search for certain foods, trees shelter us, materials offer possibilities for design and technology. We are totally entangled with other beings.

The confusing point of the anthropocene or capitalocene is that none of this “human domination” would be possible without the other materials and beings we are in action with outside and within our own bodies. It seems also that we live in a constant precarity that we try to overcome with further development. This precarity is beyond our own control. In a way the “anthropocene” could be seen as a natural disaster. There is another force however, that is to dominate, to colonise, to ascend precarity, that feels like it surpasses a will to live but it is a will to be superior. It seems like to attribute this mode to every human would be a terrible mistake since some humans colonise more than others.

Unintentionality could relate to the accelerationist theory of capital/machine being it’s own force with it’s own will. The will of the machine also participates in the construction of a landscape. In the accelerationst’s vision of the future, this will becomes a totality: everything becomes captial. Tsing relates to this when she describes capitalism as a machine, a “contraption limited to the sum of it’s parts.” But she makes clear that this is only a part of the economic situation: “This machine is not a total institution which we spend our lives inside; instead it translates across living arrangements, turning worlds into assets.” To understand capitalism as a force of translation reveals it’s part and dependency on other forces, meaning it is not a total force. This contrasts to the doom and gloom of accelerationist theories because it means for capital to exist it requires organic life worlds and desires to motivate and push into the machine.

A major point of Tsings is that capitalism has characteristics of an assemblage in the way it gathers and depends on goods and people from around the world. These “diverse patches of livelihoods help constitute capitalism.” Tsing asks that we “notice this precarious living that both uses and refuses capitalist governance… They tell us what is left, despite capitalist damage.” pg 134.

A music that represents this noticing would be polyphonic, a spectrum of voices both human and non-human. Tsing directly relates to music when she says let us “listen to seperate melody lines and their coming together in unexpected moments of harmony and dissonance.” A polyphony that changes and is unpredictable: alive, impermanent, emergent. I am imagining certain tools like randomisation, panning, spatialisation and layering as potential tools to show this moving assemblage of things. Would a new music form change the way we think and relate to this cloud of forces?

I want to add my personal and dangerously essentialist belief in the heart to this cloud of forces. I imagine the tension and drawing of energy from capital towards different bodies requires a desire and ambition from those bodies. Desires for freedom and intimacy are translated into assets by the complex technologies of power. The longing of the heart to live and live outwards is the current moving through our machines. Love is here!

The heart is accelerated by the drawing out of desires and longing through instant communication. The longing for community and intimacy keeps us searching within our possible means, therefore accelerating our communication even more. The heart is there running inside the machins. Hyper heart!

Heart Hunter

Different holy states remain undiscovered in your now world. Hunt it with open wings and pores, shifting your position so the light tastes different. The end of the world is not enough to put your heart out… if your body can survive then let “the world” get out of the way to reveal the jittery bouncing of world-making things that tickle within and around your wingspan. Flying; you are flying but you are not. Go fly!

Salvage Accumulation

From Anna Tsing’s “Mushroom at the End of the World”.

“Lead firms amass capital without controlling the conditions under which commodities are produced.”

In exploring the matsutake mushroom, Tsing shows the conditions under which the mushrooms are harvested and traded are often personal and organic. Commodification can be understood as a part of a chain of events from the organic material to the profit. Other parts of this chain include personal relationships, longing for freedom, love!

There are many other forces and narratives to hold to understand the dynamics of capital. Capitalism is not a totality. It is a temporal translation of material into alienated product. This alienation is temporary in the way that there are other emotional affects happening in the lives of these materials and beings. For example when we give a gift, we often participate into a destructive global supply chain by purchasing an object. However the act of giving this to another person can cut a hole in the seemingly immortal alienation of the object, giving it meaning and a potential to carry emotion. Darkness prevades but is not the whole.

A new perspective! Tsing wants us to hold the realities while not succumbing to totalities. She preaches holding wide perspectives. To allow the personal and the organic to emerge in our experience of our worlds. We deserve to feel excited and entranced in the beauties that pervade our worlds. Destruction existing in the chain of an activity, such as typing on this laptop, does not define the whole process as destructive. This is not a call for total passivity. But it is recognising where we are at: a call for change can not be to end capitalism as we are in the trenches of such; we are dependent on these chains of production to survive. It recognises that between these translations of life to alienated product, there are many other narratives occuring. To see these narratives feels to me as to hold an active and enduring intention. In a way it is to overcome traditional ways of seeing, to stretch a hole between reason and logic, not to delete the past but allow a truth to come to our perspective. Not Truth, but that that reveals love. Love is present.

My current music is to show this intention, this pushing and holding open, the failing and the imperfections of that process, the love peaking through, the intentions, the longing of the spirit, the joy of being, of being within chaos.

Lucky Drips

Listening with machine.
Holding the walls open.
Arms strong.
Listening through capital for the persistence of soul.
Lucky to have arms, ears, a question.

Is the soul underneath, or is it throughout? Neither arms or ears are the essence, nor universal.

How does a soul speak out against exploitation? In a spectrum of voice: roars of passion, whispers of pain and love sing the machines, the people and the materials.

How to open the question itself: tear it apart, into parts, to see the assembly of forces that make up your question. See the longing and the joy that hold them together like sticky glue, to make your question possible. A narrative. Vertical tension.

The sad anti-capitalists have narratives fueled by longing and joy!

Psychopolitics/Idiotism

Notes on “Psychopolitics” by Byung-Chul Han.

~ Neoliberalism and new technologies of power. ~

The self is now deemed free of external limitations. The self now subjugates itself with internal limitations, those determined by the new technologies of power.

Han’s dark critique starts to crack open near the end of the book, with sillyness, stillness and idiotism.

So it’s not a fine answer to find <3. Narrative making, story making, he describes as a vertical tension. Holding the character in place. What is our own language that exists only to itself? Not always must we see the patterns and relate our experience to a specific knowledge system of reason

“Only the idiot has access to a wholly other.”