Microsonica

liner notes for Lazy's Microsonics CD, Doctor Jim Records, Melbourne, 2002

The video is slowed down. The onscreen millisecond clock ticks over. Some guy took 3 milliseconds too long in lifting his left leg 2cm so as to hurdle some other guy to grab some ball and shoot it through some barrier. He lost the point. You lost victory. They lost the game. And a contract worth millions of dollars.

The terror of the telescopic and microscopic collapses Nietzchean and Darwinian determinacy into the other, signaling do-or-die life-and-death scenarios which thrill and decimate those who traverse its mass. Sportscasting fetishes the milli as a world subdivided so hysterically as to propose a mystical aspect to the gridlocked mathematical dogma of height, weight, speed, distance, velocity. If there is a virtual to be inhabited, it is in this realm of the microscopic: a space which renders you colossal and gargantuan while preventing you access to the dynamics which occur at substrata levels.

Mimicking the trounced-up drama and glory of a sports spectacle, the cinema often propels you into its vacuous Grecian heart. A mother dies. A father strives. A child cries. Slow motion vision hammers us with fatality: it is too late to undo what has been done for us to do in slo-mo. Speciously, sound 'slows down' too, mimicking the mechanics of WWII tape technology. The incongruity of it all is as blatant as it is rampant. While the scopic fetishes the nano-momentality of time, passing before your very eyes, the sonic needs no recourse to analogue, metaphor, narration.

Sound slowed-down is never the sound it was. Sound - as energy - endlessly transforms, reinvents and restates itself. That down-pitched snap of a wafer is now the detonation of a dam wall. That deep drone of a sewage plant is now the thump of a Styrofoam cup . Freed from the pale referentiality of the visual, Microsonica opens aural environments for you to enter and become subsumed by. In sound, the space between milliseconds is not a deadly statistical zone; it is a hyperflux of scale and sensation which generates a million tactile pleasures.


Text © Philip Brophy. Image © Lazy / Doctor Jim Records.