Techno
Collapse
Sound in the Age of Mechanical Malfunction
Delivered
as part of the FLUXUS retrospective @ RMIT Gallery, Melbourne,
2000
Published in Like No.15, Sound Art Special, Melbourne, 2000
Influidity of sound in Fluxus
There is something undying about Fluxus. A longstanding
haven for artists to use sound as a platform for their ponderous
ruminations on how to stage conceptual strategies within
the exploded paradigms of the postwar gallery, Fluxus flaunts
sound as an imaginary space wherein one can fantasize an
escape from music. With its neo-dada and pre-yippy anarchism,
Fluxus toyed with ‘the beyond’ as a conceptual
utopia wherein one could hear symphonies in shortwave radio
static, musicality in chalk scraping, and virtuosity in
hack-sawing. Today still, art students thrill to this para-transcendental
feature of Fluxus flights of whimsy, looking at blurred
action photos of be-suited men from the 60s engaged in maniacal
acts with pianos, violins and sheet music, imagining how
thrilling it must have ‘sounded’. Today still,
Fluxus is a reservoir of signage; of gestural statements
which enact conceptual ‘soundings’.
As conceptual art, there is much that fascinates in the
museographic interpolations of the Fluxus compendium. Yet
there has always been something remarkably ‘unsonic’
in Fluxus’ collective excursions, protrusions and
bachannales. While Cage’s recorded works still test
the limits of experiential phonology (perplexing one as
to how one ‘listens’ to the recorded ‘thing’
which is but an occurrence in a wider sonic realm of existence),
the bad live audio of most historical Fluxus events is material
proof of the events’ primacy as action/gesture to
which sound was always subordinate. (The live Fluxus events
I have attended over many years have been worse.) If Cage
replaced his brain with one big throbbing ear, Fluxus members
– despite their kinship with Cage – replaced
their ears with two miniature brains. The result has been
and remains a trail of perceptually shallow sono-musical
artifacts: dry, lumpen and influid. While Cage often waxed
lyrically about the act of listening, it remains that there
is anti-music and there is anti-music. Some of it –
like Cage’s Fontana Mix (1958) sounds awesomely post-musical;
some of it is as interesting as listening to the sound of
a computer keyboard typing out an artist’s statement.
(And no: that isn’t meant to be a smartarse conceptual
piece on my part – although it could be a Fluxus piece.)
Ultimately, Fluxus is but a museographic recording of the
outside world. It was only rare figures in Fluxus like Cage
who ushered ‘the outside’ into the auditorium,
into the radiophonic apparatus, and into the compositional
process. Fluxus theatricalized this desire without realizing
the cultural space of their gestures, and in doing so generated
acultural art and asonic sound.
The modernist will to destruction
The sonic emptiness in the sound of most Fluxus work is
not surprising. Just as the formal genealogy of video art
grew with vulgarity from the residue of bad sculptors who
knew naught of the electronic media, the narrative morphology
of Fluxus sprouted from the bemused esoteric ramblings of
bad poets who knew less about sound. It is in this soaked
ground of poetry that Fluxus takes seed, clinging to a hallmark
of modernist poetics: the expression of beauty in violence
and the aesthetics of destruction. Be it ethical moaning
about being stricken with an ‘awareness’ of
this, or the self-centred wallowing on the ejaculatory throb
inherent in ‘critiquing power’, modernist poetics
love crises and catastrophes as much as the romantics jerked
off to sunsets and sunflowers. Superficially, Fluxus appears
to move past this. It doesn’t. Fluxus is comprised
of the same molecular grain of destructiveness which anxiously
leavens both existentialism and expressionism. With its
matrix of shattered violas, doused microphones, upturned
pianos, decimated music boxes, degraded tape-recorders,
enflamed vinyl records and chainsawed record players, Fluxus
provides but one of many incendiary dots along the historical
fuse which links Tchaikovsky’s cannon fire in The
1812 Overture (1812) to Jimi Hendrix’s detonation
of The Star Spangled Banner (1970).
Might I be wrong here? Maybe Fluxus is not about destruction.
Right: and maybe the Futurists really just needed a good
hug to make them feel better about life. It is hard to not
see the orgies of formal violence and gestural decimation
which pepper visual modernism with slashes, splashes, splays
and spurts as symptomatic of a particular type of action-statement
in mark-making which 20th Century music composition and
performance generally avoided. Following this logic, it
is to be expected that of all the wondrous works created
by the pantheon of the orchestral avant-garde (Ives, Partch,
Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Varese, Bartok, Ligeti, Crumb, Messiaen,
Penderecki, et al – most of whom, it must be noted,
Cage critiqued in one way or another), the Fluxus movement
and its preoccupation of ‘action as art’ is
perceived so relevant to the gallery and so antithetical
to the concert hall. But in all its radical gesturing, the
‘reactionary actionism’ of Fluxus is integrally
tied to the musical Academy as a binary inverse of that
institution’s power: Fluxus’ most potent statements
need that damned grand piano in order to destroy it. Again
and again and again. “Who destroys the piano these
days?” Only Fluxus.
The romantic championing of Fluxus’ innate chauvinism
– its withered penile wit, its yawning pranksterism,
its bargain-price rebellion – is typical of the support
given to all transgressive art moves which mold the body
of modernism as a heroic vessel for the valiant projections
of ‘ground-breakers’, ‘barrier-crossers’
and ‘envelope-pushers’ (note those hymen-rupturing
terms). Like so many modernist movements and their intersticed
homages, Fluxus betrays the same boys’ club sentimentality
which revels in the supposed liberation unleashed by what
in many cases is grown men behaving like children. And just
as how any school yard will create a fictive power space
for nerds, dags, weirdos and oddballs to congregate and
share their inadequacies, Fluxus replicates the same arena
of therapy: part global-baptism, part international networking,
part transcultural essentialism. A tincture of Zen, a daub
of Futurism, a hair from Hemingway’s stubble, a drop
of sweat from the brow of Duchamp playing chess, a faint
memory of having once heard a radio somewhere, and the warm
woodgrain of a cello once held between the thighs of an
upper middle-class virgin. Mix it all up and spatter it
across the gallery like a fecal expulsion of your renouncement
of the conservatism of the art establishment and pop culture.
Exhaustively document it and pathologically fawn over your
little scribbles, wax droppings and crayon smudges like
an overwhelmed fetishist. Claim renewal, rebirth, rejuvenation.
Be Fluxus.
Those who are deaf to noise
Fluxus undoubtedly enjoyed a cathartic, tantalizing moment
in its rebuttal of the musical Academy and its ossification
of the fuller potentiality of sound. In doing so, they
promoted a ‘sono-gesturalism’ in place of
the musical gesturalism which had become the authorial
trait of compositional practice in the first half of that
century. But 20th Century music – incorporating
the redefinition of music for that century – did
not need Fluxus as either comrade or enemy. Nor, I would
argue, has it required Fluxus’
hyper-personal diaristic drivel to articulate that redefinition
of music into the collapsed territorial shifts of ‘sound’.
Yet it remains that Fluxus is cited within art theory
more than any other phase of 20th Century music as a
prime mobilizer in conceptualizing a cultural breaking
of the sound barrier. Those who cite Fluxus in this way,
it should be noted, are usually deaf and dumb when it
comes to sonic literacy. Picking up on the poetic rhetoric
of Fluxus-speak and being unable to discern the lack
of phenomenological aura of Fluxus-work is to be expected
by curators, writers and artists in the visual fields.
Less acceptable is how Fluxus – along
with many sound theorists from John Cage to Brian Eno to
R. Murray Shaffer – have been taken at the value
of their words more than their actions, artifacts or
analyses. That is, their ideas – ranging from
the inspired to the insipid – have been acknowledged
without locating them within the most basic of cultural
contexts. Fluxus quips about ‘noise’ can
illuminate only if one presumes that forms like cinema,
musique concrete, rockabilly, bubble-gum, heavy metal,
techno and glitch have not made a single mark on the
planet.
The Art of Noise – a British studio project instigated
by pop music producer Trevor Horn in 1983 – released
their second single Beat Box Diversion 2 (1984) with a video
clip featuring a very young girl directing three big oafs
to totally destroy a grand piano. Having no vocals save
for the odd non-sequitur sample, the clip is edited to the
onslaught of programmed beats, transforming it into a synchronized
symphony of destruction as the three terrors plane-saw,
chainsaw and jack-hammer the piano to shreds. What with
a sample of a car engine ignition and rev comprising the
central melody, the song and clip form a canny and direct
encapsulation of the popular history of noise: from Luigi
Russolo’s anti-piano manifesto The Art of Noises (1913)
to John Cage’s invention of ‘the prepared piano’
(1938) to the Fluxus group’s destruction of the piano
in events like Philip Corner’s Piano Activities (1962).
Spread throughout this sono-musical cultural debris is a
grime fertilized by those art trajectories – namely,
an overlaid history of record production invoking the sonic
experimentation of Ennio Morricone, Joe Meek, Esquivel,
Burt Bacharach, Brian Wilson, Phil Spector, Lee Perry, Jimmy
Page, Mike Leander, et al. Tacky, silly, obvious, cynical,
self-conscious, overloaded, transitory, ephemeral –
Beat Box Diversion 2 is a good example of the culture of
noise and sound which intersects pop music far more profoundly
than the cult of miniature wooden boxes and artily scrawled
music manuscripts which are still preciously executed in
the name of Fluxus.
In its grandiose cartoon of the grand piano attack, The
Art of Noise provide one of many examples of the celebratory
absurdism which accepts the destructive impulse in modernism
as a given, a granted, a gone argument. No big point; no
great revelation; no critical recourse. Art-as-destruction
and destruction-as-art are important tropes still in contemporary
art and culture, and notions of destruction in 20th Century
music – more so than any of the visual arts –
withholds great phenomenal complexity which has been more
vibrantly filtered into pop music than it has been dialectically
extended by the more respected realms of inquiry promoted
by Fluxus, sound art or acoustic ecology. In the truly expanded
realm of the sonic (and that means everything from taped
prayer calls in Istanbul to Toru Takemitsu’s score
for Onimaru to Metallica in concert to Pauline Oliveros
underground) the ancient, mythical and classical symmetry
of the creation/destruction binary flickers like a thin
conceptual flame. For sound is the collapse of energy into
itself: its life is a biorhythmic feedback of its own generation,
dispersion and reflection. It cannot be destroyed and as
such it is more powerful than all the objects of its destruction.
The bulk of what has been labelled ‘noise’ throughout
the 20th Century – either as hateful damnation or
gestural embrace – is quite simply an admission to
an inability to listen.
Sound as destructive creation
There is something undying about destruction. Luigi Russolo’s
intonarumori or ‘noise machines’ – beloved
by visual artists mainly because of the quaint photographs
of him surrounded by these strangely formal black-box contraptions
– have never really been acknowledged in relation
to their sono-cultural acoustic environment. At the turn
of the 19th Century, one of the major forms of pre-designed
musical consumption was ‘music boxes’: those
tinkling mechanisms often hidden in small personal valises,
fob watches or charm necklaces, where the act of opening
them triggered a wound-up spiked metal cylinder to prick
a series of tiny tuned metal prongs. Sounding like a miniature
celeste, their delicate ‘tinkerbell’ tones would
sail forth, and for centuries prior had been linked to the
intimate, the feminine, the magical. Russolo’s response
to the barrage of tinkles which beautified, sedated and
entranced the modern world at the fin de scile was to aggressively
employ the same principles in the form of grossly enlarged,
untuned, hollow, bass-heavy boom-boxes, inside which a hand-cranked
shaft connected to brutish cogs which caused harsh and violent
clickity-clacking. Running at high speeds, the reverberant
sound of the gnashing wooden teeth generated the timbre
of a horrific mutation between a cello, an swizzle stick
and an organ grinder. A typically macho-Euro gesture, the
same cock-throbbing noise is to be found in gabba techno
and happy hardcore pumping out of V-8 engines burning rubber
at traffic lights in the outer burbs. The rumori of Futurism
has never left us.
When considering the relations between the pithily conceived
binary of creation/destruction in the age of mechanical
reproduction of the sonic, key factors should not be ignored:
1. All technology is destructive through its amplification
of scale, its shift into virtuality, and its bodily replacement.
2. All action is sexual due to its predication on force
through pressure and the establishment of the active event.
3. All sound is violence due to the manifestation of sound
waves, their displacement of space, and their rupturing
transformation of atmospheric density.
Russolo’s intonarumori – like so many inventions
and applications of ‘sonica’ – destroy
through acts of creation and create through acts of destruction.
As generators of extant, actual and visceral energy (ie.
sound heard by you in a space as opposed to an image stored
by you in your mind), they affirm the surface of the sound
world as a skin whose molecular decimation is the granularity
of its existence. While the Futurists can to a degree be
stereotyped as rev heads who welcomed the machinic into
the operatic, their legacy as ‘noise addicts’
is a major governing factor in the sonic age of mechanical
reproduction and all the attendant sonic detritus which
to this day still accrues from their original shock waves.
Most importantly, it is upon hearing Russolo’s intonarumori
(first recorded in 1977 by the Historical Contemporary Art
Archive of the Venice Biennale) that the precise nature
of their granularity makes sense. One can feel those chattering
teeth eating into the boxes’ mechanisms: these are
self-destructing machines, and in contradistinction to their
‘futurist’ impulse, they prophetically forecast
an age of mechanical malfunction.
The act of recording
A thin line separates reproduction from malfunction because
all media encoding/recording requires the destruction of
the very media which beholds its content, information, and
data. From hole-punched paper scrolls to wax cylinders and
rolls to shellac and vinyl discs to magnetic tape spools
to digitized laser discs, audio data digs into the calm
sea of media surface, rupturing that surface through a destructive
scrawl. The notion of ‘surface noise’ –
which people still foolishly believe has been eradicated
by digital media – has been as present in the 21st
Century as much as ink has seeped into paper for centuries
before. It is therefore typical and expected – rather
than reflexive or revelatory – that modernist sound
art practices have heightened ‘surface noise’
as an attempt to empty media of content and make contact
with its innate and abstract materiality. While classical
arguments on the ontology of objects centered on form/content
debates (how do you separate the two, when does one become
the other, etc.) modernist and postmodernist arguments on
the ontology of media is refocused at the micro-molecular
plane of acts, actions and actualities of recording. Like
the lunar surface of our skin and the wild forest of our
scalp, the recorded surface is revealed to be a complex
field of irregular undulations and ungainly indentations.
Across its scarred, scrawled and scratched terrain, there
can be no separation between the surface and its disturbance;
the skin and its scaling; the bed and its x. Thus, nothing
is either created or destroyed in the act of recording:
sound just materializes, for sound is the relation between
materials and the connections between surfaces. Sound is
material.
Zoomed-out from the micro-detail which defines and determines
the specifics and nuances of any medium’s ‘sound’,
the materialization of sound does leave its mark on the
human. The deaf and dumb society of ‘hearers’
(that includes most ‘visual artists’) fortunately
possess hyper-sensitive eardrums which respond to the sophisticated
aural and acoustic manifestations of those micro-markings
irrespective of the hearers’ consciousness of the
event taking place. One does not need to be a devotee of
Cage to experience the miniaturized whine of a mosquito
close to your ear at 3am. Nor does one need to have read
Russolo to experience the subsonic wrack of a train passing
overhead as you stand underneath its bridge. From the ringing
of our frontal lobes to the quaking of our pelvic bones,
our physical being is itself a recording device whose materiality
is as much defined by sound as it is by atmosphere, pressure
and gravity. We have scant cognitive understanding of the
bulk of its operations. It is neither mystical nor metaphorical
to state that we can feel these phenomenae in the material
sense.
Guts,
glitches and ghosts
It is this abject physicality of sound which is often forgotten
in the rush to make lofty and revolutionary claims for the
sonic by sound artists, acoustic ecologists, musical therapists
and aural architects. And it is the same abject physicality
which is transforming the social manifestation of sound
to such an extent that we may be in the midst of an inversion
of the ‘psychoacoustic’ (an understanding of
how the mind perceives sound) into the ‘physioacoustic’:
an understanding of how ‘the body perceives sound’.
It must be remembered that the advent of phonology at the
start of the 20th Century exploded the societal ear with
a previously unimagined experience: the active reduction,
subtraction and modulation of frequencies from their original
acoustic source. In other words, people were hearing for
the first time a ‘non-manifestation’ of the
previously accepted reality of, say, the sound of a voice,
violin or piano. Early cylinder recordings back then would
have appeared as ‘unreal’ as the simulation
of a Hawaiian guitar on a Lowry organ appears to us now.
Today, we are bombarded with a gloriously glutted excess
of attempts to trigger the body as whole or fragment –
from the guttural swell of Jeff Mills ‘apparition’
of bass which transforms our skeleton into an aqueous shudder
to the diffused ‘indirection’ of 2k mobile phone
tingles which transform our temples into roaming mechanisms.
A significant consequence of the digital era is the totally
unironic return to the same ‘physioacoustic’
sensation of experiencing reduced frequency bandwidths in
forms and manners entirely reminiscent of 19th Century fin
de scile recording devices. While bass frequencies affect
the body’s totality – its bulk, mass, constitution
– treble frequencies synaptically ensnare our attention.
A low rumble can be subsumed into the background ambience
of our everyday noise floor, but high-pitched beeps function
as harsh ruptures and irritating incisions into the acoustic
continuum of our surroundings. If anything, high-end frequencies
dominate more than ever before, irrespective of any issues
of fidelity, mimeticism or veracity. Consider:
1. the film soundtrack’s privilege of the tinny human
voice above all other background atmospheres and frontal
effects
2. the telephone’s broadcast of funneled frequencies
of the human voice directly into the ear cavity
3. the lo-bit incorporation of tonal data into digital alarm
clocks and computer beeps designed to rupture the eardrum
with harshly inorganic waveforms
4. the acceptance of lo-res corruption in the presentation
of audio data on websites, CDRs and games in order to hierarchically
displace the material with significant visual/motion/interactive
data
5. the hi-end fidelity of digital recordings, hi-tech studio
samples and FM-synthesis simulations as an overload of waveform
data for the erotic aural massaging of the ear
6. the trend of ‘glitch’ music as an enrapt
collision between rarefied experiments in 70s electro-acoustic
music and prosaic and mundane malfunction in digital technologies.
The sonic - by virtue of its potential to signify and iconicise
– remains molecularly locked in a bind of hypermateriality
and abject connotation; between the stinging aural sensation
of hearing that tone, beep, or glitch and the way in which
that sound can be used to communicate everything from “you’ve
left your dishwasher door open” to “your insulin
levels are too high” to “I am the art of noise”.
All manner of encoding and decoding enacts a shuttle between
these two states, and provides further substance to the
argument that there is no such thing as noise – anywhere,
in any situation, or on any surface.
While The Art of Noise’s Beat Box Diversion 2 aptly
signified the pop cultural dawn of sonic simulation in the
realm of the musical, Oval’s Systemische (1996) similarly
signified the pop cultural dawn of sonic malfunction in
the realm of the digital. To this day, it stands as a charming
erotica of timbrel corruption. But to this day, nothing
has bettered the numerous times I have been in a noisy restaurant
and a Gypsy Kings’ CD has jammed into millisecond
sample-looping and transformed the environs into a warzone
which sonically hammers the customers to the extent that
I had been numbed by the Gyspy Kings’ folksy froth.
Recalling the late 80s’ grrl pop-noise group with
possibly the best name ever for a band – We’ve
Got A Fuzzbox And We’re Gonna Use It – most
supposedly cutting-edge ‘glitch artists’ and
‘laptop musicians’ should be collectively called
We’ve Got A Plug-In And We’re Gonna Use It.
For the power of glitch is not in the produce of artists
– despite the majesty that rock/pop acts like Oval,
Pole, Flanger, FX-Randomize, Farmer’s Manual, Matmos,
et al, convey in their compositions, and despite the sci-fi
pants-wetting which afflicts so many digitalists. (Remember:
it only took 3 years for a track from Oval’s Systemische
to be used to advertise Calvin Klein’s Eternity on
television.) No – sound artists of any persuasion
do not possess such power. The power of glitch lies in its
exposure of the act of digitizing as a hypermaterial consequence
of its place in a long lineage of mechanical malfunction.
