First notes on “Technic and Magic” by Federico Campagna.
Number lovers, as in numbers for themselves with personalities. Thinking beyond the streamlined sequence of instruments, those mediation tunnels we gaze into with fear, ah, humans have long been scared of chaos. Penthouse of civilisation: how to instrumentalise the planet away from friction and disturbance, so that in the middle point of the infastructure we can find comfort. Mr. Exo says do not be angry, on his soft corpse cushion.
I’m interested in transcendence off the corpse cushion. Not mindfulness, neither transcendence beyond planetary frictions and disturbances or being angry sometimes :). Transcending instead beyond the categorisation of the known, that the exoteric misters point at from their cushions, confirming the cushion and silencing horror. The safety of the cushion is less intense and less beautiful, and sitting on the clean cushion you pick up a kind of synthetic dirt that blocks the pores.
Final project, how to deal with assesment criteria and maintain a creative intensity.
Notes on “A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None” by Kathryn Yusoff.
Undoing the world. The major event of civilisation is settler colonialism, Yusoff proposes in her acute analysis of western Geology’s foundational part to legitimising European imperialism. She proposes that by geologizing the subjectivities of black lives, through racialisation and inhumanisation of blackness, extractive infastructures were put in place without ethical complications. The genocide and slavery of people of colour in the beginnings of Empire were made legitimate by constructing a hierarchy of race that Yusoff proposes is a central component to the category of the human.
The “inhuman” category formed through the enslaved of African people into violent infastructures of extraction, beginning the mass production of coal, gold, sugar and cotton to kick start the European empire cities. Infastructures of resource extraction to provide for the comfort of white people. Pain au chocolat. Look at France’s breakfast tradition. Caffeine, sugar, butter, wheat. Chaining the people of the Earth for “pleasure”, a pleasure that is comfort, that is unfeeling the pain ravaging behind the empire. Caffeine, sugar, fat and gluten in excess surpress emotional intensity. Caffeine and sugar also fueled the British working class as they began to enter the coal mines. The pleasures of the bourgeousie was exported to the masses as external infastrucures elsewhere are sped up by technological progress. That means, the British working class gets a taste of the Captain’s healm of the terrible big ship. We are trying to jump inside the ship. Is there space for everyone? As in, destroy the ship, it’s terrible inside. Tea and cake does not replace the intensity and richness of corporeal entanglenment and feeling. I suggest that to recognise the suffering and grief alongside this empire is the only way to understand our next steps, out of hell. I’m griefcentric. This is not to romanticise the experiences of suffering as an experience of awareness, because the threshhold of violence to people of colour historically means genocide. Death leaves no space for a richness of feeling. We need to recognise exploitation, but not validate it. Validate survival as a signpost for change. Most interesting culture in the West comes from its silenced most exploited inhumanised populations, a meeting of trauma and understanding that produces richness. Since nectrophiliacs do not write great music. So to exit, is to listen to other voices that may sing the tip of grief, but realise this is a call for change, not to glorify and take the song, not to wear the song when we want to feel richness.
Does Yusoff blanket caucasian people in these terminologies of race? Many populations in Europe have experiences genocide and cultural devastation during the expansion of large Imperial powers such as Britain and France. Imagining solidarity between Ireland, Wales and Brittany, for example. Can this solidarity expand towards people of colour, as a resonance of experiences, or are these dynamics of colonialism very different? It was African people who were enslaved and traded for gold, and this intense history of suffering is rich for appropriation by those guilty enough. Growing up in Ireland we listened to African American hip-hop, while mute to racism in our own country. Historically, Irish people quickly assimiliated into whiteness while emigrating to the US during the ends of the Irish famine, and following Ireland’s step into whiteness is has become one of the richest countries in the world per capita. Solidarity is crucial, whereas the appropriation of grief is to protect the status quo.
These questions may stem for a desire to define the human, which in my understanding has been a theme in my music composition which I often define as “anthropological storytelling.” Who’s the human? There’s a strong desire for me to hold onto my humanism, but it also comes steeped with a melancholia, an unfullfillment, meaning the humanism is an idealism, a belief. May be a wildness that we can imagine, beyond the boat, beyond structure, fluid, chaos, yet something else, love. Love without grief is a poor love, a fake love. Love without recognising the suffering is not love, but active ignorance. The cultures of love or institutions of love go from scary music to soft nice music as they transition from confrontation to sedation. I want confrontation yet not the coolness of it, not obsessing darkness, acknowledging and still holding the love. Love is courage is grief. When I thought I wanted out of theory, black studies has transformed my imaginaries and widened the intensities, stimulating a question of action.
Notes on “Capitalocene, Waste, Race and Gender” by Francoise Verges.
“As defined by geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore, capitalism is a global regime of vulnerability to death. The slave trade on which capitalism was built produced humans as waste and destroyed the cultural/natural world of indigenous peoples and of the continents colonized by European powers. The slave trade had a long-term effect on the African continent, its population, and its landscape, bringing filth, desolation, and death. The slave ship was a space of filth, feces, blood, and flesh rotted by the shackles of slavery. It was said that if peoples in the colonies noticed a foul stench drifting onto shore, they knew when a slave ship was coming.”
The production of vulnerability, precarity, without the safeguard of life, a vulnerable race, to provide comfort and wealth to the settler nation. Racism emerges through the necessity to inferiorise an exploited population for the comfort of the settler nation. Racism and white supremacy is also active in the foundations of these events of colonisation: to believe that the destruction of a population is worth the generated wealth.
“Race became a code for designing people and landscapes that could be wasted.” Codeification: thinking beyond essentialism of ‘biology’ through the feedback loops/hybridization, and resistance to, racisalisation.
“waste generated by Western imperialism or produced for the comfort and consumption of privileged white people ends up being dumped on racialized people, either at home in impoverished racialized neighborhoods, or in the countries of the Global South.” The word comfort is crucial, as comfort is not a need for life, or more life, but based in fear. Dramatic histories rooted in the pathetic fears of the white nation. Ursula Le Guinn’s “Earthsea” touches on the emotive fuels of our necrophiliac systems, the death drive. From the fear of death pulses a desire for control and domination.
“Racialization is created by white supremacy to make its world clean while destroying other worlds.” The fear of the end of the world is for those who already have a world, have owned world, identify historically with their world. Anna Tsing’s framework, for example, contradicts many white heterosexual academic’s collapse anxiety, suggesting that each life has their world, and assemblages of life meet in shared worlds. How do colonised populations, queers and other groups who have never had a “world”, or had right to the “world” feel towards the collapse dogma?
“The time for decolonial caring/cleaning (for reparation), for caring and cleaning what has been laid to waste in the past, clashes with the accelerated time of neoliberalism.” How to organise awarness for cleaning labour in this accelerated time.
“If the Anthropocene proclaims a sudden concern with the exposures of environmental harm to white liberal communities, it does so in the wake of histories in which these harms have been knowingly exported to black and brown communities under the rubric of civilization, progress, modernization and capitalism.” The white liberal communities are afraid because they cannot escape this catastrophe. The nonhuman agentive planet eventually has some neutralising factor. This way we could arrive at an anthropocene through collective despair, when electricity fades and stock is invalid. Perhaps some populations will be much more adapt at survival at this point. This idea of justice after collapse resonates’s with Halberstam’s “The Wild Beyond”, an essay prologue for Fred Moten’s Undercommons book. In this proposed necessity of destruction, how to you target the right people/systems without the rest?
Meanderings for WIP show next week. I will play an interview with two cleaners that I recorded last year. Preliminary ideas were to loop the interview on a small mobile speaker, attatched to some kind of cleaning equipment, and place the speaker in different locations around the university.
The directness of this installation set up felt mediocre to me. Positively it hacks the opportunity of the WIP show for a political campaign. Broadcasting the campaign. The loudness sat wrongly in my mind. I was thinking that we are so well adjusted to blocking noise and symbols around us. Using loudness and amplification for a political ending does not reflect my vision at the moment.
I’m imagining discretion, quietness and something requiring engagement. During a workshop with Rory, we put the speaker on the floor. I had the strong desire to do face the cone into the ground, an anthroporphic figure fallen, failing, giving up, and strangled by wires.
The potential of storytelling with the technology brought more questions to my installation. There is the audio file of the cleaners, but also the medium play the file.
I want to place a speaker on a stand, lying down, with a pillow beside the speaker. The audio recording of the interview will play quietly from the speaker. To engage with the work the audience must lie down on the pillow with the fallen speaker, to be close to the voice, to relax into it.
The title is “The Gift of Study”. The closeness of observation, the care of listening, the gift of studying. The positionality created by the installation encourages a moment of pause for another voice. The title suggests that listening is an offering, and that we study to listen. It may also suggest the space for studying is a gift. The cleanliness of this space is a gift from the cleaners.
There is a tension between the comfort of the pillow and the discomfort of social inequality discovered through listening. There may be an irony in the distance of study. The speaker is strangled, weighed down by its own position, yet the audience can roam free. The student chooses when to study.
This autonomy feels crucial to my current vision, to give a choice in interaction to not force a political campaign onto the audience, who may have a variety of ways they act and participate. Soft invitations, discrete sharing of knowledge, a refusal to amplify amidst loudness, in search of another way to solidarity.
Moten and Harney on study.
What if the students had no interests, no campaign, met needs in their surroundings beyond the thin wall of their learned logistics.
The cleaner’s strike requires a fuel of attention and care. This morning we carried out the first Breakfast Club, with students, cleaners and other staff. There was a pocket of peace created. Planning beyond action, but in making a momentary pause for eachother. Moments pass and we warm together, building trust. The simple yet profound meaning of gathering.
There is a strong feeling of other voices in the world around you. Those buzzy Other dimensions, flicking leaf a step beyond tethered ground.
When you don’t look they appear laughing as shaking matter, old children expanding out of mud, new forms on the peripheral of fantastic shapes and sizes, yellow, red, wet silver mud. When you don’t neccessarily look you are surrounded by a cacophony of laughing voices. They giggle at your bag of tools weighing, the narrow lens of a crinkly head, forehead.
They giggle at your urgency to produce a Beautiful description of unfurling, worlds that have not yet made answers. Lame poetry on the edge of the tongue. You’re listening now and they say, notice the quietening of movement, as you walk beyond the narrow path. When static tension becomes passing waves. Imagine your fuzzy head in an expanding chamber, when tension becomes wave. Imagine the intensity of wideness.
~
Sadness too hovers over the purple canopy. Look at the horizon string. You’re in an English field in winter. The clean bare trees make a purple tinge murmuring stories, a different edge, an old colour that marries your eyes well in a timeless dark, flat bubbles of fear under the belly. Here the silouettes of tree branches have a weight. You wonder what was made in the English field?
A deep and murky kind of isolation, that sends you hunting for the next epiphany with your mind’s lassoo. In this large field your mind is tiny and long like a wobbly arrow. Under the purple canopy you big sigh, again. What is the mind without searching? “I am nothing without looking.” When the turning of the world seems mute, a grey non light solid frozen in the centre of things.
Intensity and isolation, other parts of Nature.
The voices giggle you onwards as gusts in dry twigs, facing the emptied out belly of winter, soft winds through hollows, ready for birthing. Beside the sad another feeling lay. You’re listening to the passing of wind through dry birch twigs, opening the gift of patience. Opening, when the view of a turn in the path shows shining sun on a mossy wall, enscribed with patterns unseen. A new spectrum of worlds.
Sitting on a bench for one, facing Burgess park’s pond. The geese swam towards me as I started to play the melodica, then they slowly exited the pond near my feet, off away. The practice seems to perform a protagonist observer, and the offerings of melody being rejected is a funny situation.
After ten minutes I fall into a lovely trance, playing outside. I am not imagining channeling anything, immersed. Out of the little head. This is a different medium to producing digital linear music inside. I feel more livened rather than scattered. More melting rather than contracting. How funny that both mediums create interesting results. My digital DAW is much more practiced, there is a stronger portal there. But right now it turns me off, the idea of listening to something again and again, gathering and freezing time.
A dialogue between both mediums: the base for this composition was recorded outside, then I came back to the laptop, the studio, to add layers, revisiting and rewriting the memory. Off the grid.
Something to follow is prolonged disengagement with virtual communications, as a method to enhance spatial connectivity and cerebral intensity. Turning off my phone and going for a walk. Does the internet not increase cerebral intensity? Acceleration contracts feeling into a shallow basin with wheels. It’s only the head on wheels, a brain on little legs running.
To slow down may not be serene and vibratory, it might also be thick mediocrity. Today my eyes and lungs are tired yet I refuse the temporary healing that stress brings, I’m in it for the long haul.
Notes on “One Dimensional Music Without Context or Meaning” by Mark Fell
Wear the stupid costume of music as a performance of one’s aesthetic prejudices, maybe to achieve some kind of personality.
Mark Fell’s ‘costume’ idea for music listening comes from his analysis of the cultural values loaded within music’s temporalities and structures. The structure of music compositions and their particular representations of time means we must adopt a sort of ‘costume’ to agree or let in the music. Taking certain notions of linear time for granted means we can absorb linear melodic scores, for example. He outlines ‘method listening’ as a way of listening that foregrounds this role play and performativity required to participate in different music activities. This is his reaction to the pitfalls of Oliveros’ ‘deep listening’ which he claims is an attempt to transcaend one’s culture and personality to experience the world in a deeper manner. ‘Deep listening’ from this perspective is problematic because “we cannot unlearn our cognitive development” (Fell). I’ve always found the capitalising of Deep Listening strange enough.
Fell cleverly avoids aiming for an objective music listening, beyond the fictional constructions of our costume, by saying that method listening is a way to avoid questions like “what is the general structure of the self and who specfically am I?” That these questions may be a burden of infinite inwardness, whereas accepting our performativity with media is to know there is no non-performance, no neutral state.
While he seems to problematise the linear time narratives embedded in Western scored musics, the problem that Fell focuses his writing on is when these narratives in music are used to prove the linear nature of time. By making this distinction between a narrative in itself and the use of a narrative to create objective truths about our reality, Fell leaves the narrative open to our enjoyment. To safeguard it’s lack of objective truthmaking potentiality, Fell simply calls music listening a “stupid costume” His use of the word ‘stupid’ echoes Chul Han’s idiotism, which calls for an “authentic” self expression, uncontextualised in conventional understanding. I see this relationship because both validate a variety of expressions or interpretations of the world and music, while the negative tones of “stupid” and “idiot” avoid those validated expressions being used to produce objective truths about the world. Fell’s costume and Han’s idiot are contained, self-related fictions that say nothing beyond themselves. Yet in the tricky flux of chaos, there may be no truth to come back to. Musics in their own story making they may shape how we see our world, in the sharing of voice.
Relating to my practice: going out with melodica, playing tunes. A terribly silly costume of the protagonist observer, gathering melodies from nature. A naive intention to observe, to imagine a beauty around us. Forcing harmony?
Drone folk: what kind of temporalities are performed through drone musics? Is this the sounding of the eternal now? Melodies fly over the drone, but there is a sense of presence.
Beginning meanderings for “Walking Music”, a successor to last two Summer’s “Rock Music” events; outdoor listening in public parks with a participatory sound system. “Walking Music” brings the sound system on the move. Bringing mp3s on a walk.
The medium of an mp3 player, radio transmitter, receivers and bluetooth speakers makes it possible to create a large, immersive and partipatory sound system that is also light and portable. With our radio transmitter and receivers we ask members of the public to bring their own bluetooth speakers to participate in the sound system.
Sonic particularities: generally a low fidelity with radio transmittion, general planetary and electrical disruptions of the audio signal, creating noise and effect. Spatialised as in: spread in space, outside, blending with soundscape. The audio signal is in mono due to the unorganised and moving spread of speakers. Each speaker’s particularity creates another kind of spatialisation: different textures from people’s personal devices. In “Rock Music” we had a central sound emitter, a boom box, creating a centre to gather around. The centre of “Walking Music” is the inaudible transmittion of a signal, spread unevenly by participants.
What to play? “Music” is suggestive. I would like to reach out to composers to compose audio pieces, that can be played as we walk together with this moving sound system. The composers are only instructed with the path of the walk. The compositions will not be shared publicly afterwards. This means there is a temporality to the composition, only played once, outside, listening together. This is the promotion of lived time in opposition to the linearity of chronological time. This brings the digital music file into lived time with others, questioning patterns of consumption, streaming and individual listening.
Improvisation with melodica, contact microphone and voice.
Trying a new set up using my melodica and recording my voice. Lots of delay helps build up intensity. Do I need to rely on this? I like delay.
Reflecting an urgent desire to build a new live performance and share more vulnerability. I want to medium of my performance to reflect the values of the music. Which requires presence and submitting. Live textures, voice, mistake. I am learning to sing and it is becoming a therapeutic practice.
It moved in a direction yesterday when I used the melodica to form a drone. This is very exciting. A single tone drone, or chordal drone, creates a strong vertical presence, in which I can make other sounds meander in and out. This feels like a turn away from my music project Boy Lucid, which majorly relies on horizontal story telling. I need to move towards a non-linear looping improvisation mode to feel grounded by my practice, rather than unhinged from the feet all the way up by repeated listening to printed sound.
The contact microphone acts as a tiny percussive instrument. Rubbing my finger against it sounds like walking. So many new conceptual pathways open up in this potential method of performance.
Field recording is a going out, experiencing, playing back: repeating this experience in a new form to build worlds. Optimistically it could be a collaboration. Darker notes swim beneath. I feel strongly this pull towards connective experiences with my environment. It feels important to practice my awareness for connection: a daily practice and dedication to arriving into the body and the sensations. To practice outward gazing, imagining beyond the desire to suffer in the self. I will risk pointing a direction for this music: to act as a space of grounding, slowing, grieving, observing beautiful worlds. We often don’t make time for this. I’m wondering, how much do I need to guide these practices, such as creating formal activities of walking, and witnessing that I may channel into my music?
Imagining beyond the end of progress; beyond the sublime virtuality that pretends an exit map. Back to the dirty ruins!
Herbert Marcuse said “The incessant dynamic of technical progress has become permeated with political content, and the Logos of technics has been made into the Logos of continued servitude. The liberating force of technology-the instrumentalization of things-turns into a fetter of liberation; the instrumentalizatlon of man.”
The distance between us. The human stumbles in the inevitable journey of our transformation. Our virtual technology has created a personal space for our liberation, and yet in it we are constantly exposed to otherness and carried in a rush away from the historical self, into a new kind of forgetting.
So it’s both the extreme self held tightly by accelerated rhythyms, reflections and voices of it’s own perceptual bubble. And a disembodied self; a removal from our historical flesh bag of emotions and memories.
I’m going to drink rosemary everyday and walk to remember. In the morning I will dedicate a moment to the unknown kin that will tickle my wings. And in the evening I will leak out these interactions into the form of music.
Listening, observing without judgement, staying with my own trouble, refusing to engage in the accelerated infosphere, yet I am part of that sphere, partly born from it. It’s so yummy and it’s comfortable to hang out in virtual space. Yet it’s so intense that I lose contingency, so my music gets shit.
What is solitude in relation to the current mass social media?
I want to paint this stumbling, this awkardness, of a longing to disengage, alongside a longing to connect. This is about a planet but us being on the planet. And also, a longing to engage, as the artist, a longing to share visions.
How do we practice this disengagement? Is the other further now, as we lie cosy in our perceptual bubbles, or is that the human condition?
How can music propose these questions, of the tensions within (dis)engagement? A new kind of failure, the failure to interact, the need for retreat, not into a glorious shining presence, but into the mediocrity of the thick.
