Microsonica
CD notes to 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 deadly statistical zone; it
is a hyperflux of scale and sensation which generates a
million tactile pleasures.
