//psy:007
'Glitch Muzak as Prophecy'_Andy Greenman.
Printable version
|
"Music is prophecy.
Its styles and economic organisation are ahead of therest of society
because it explores, much faster than material reality can |
 |
This month I am going to explain my sonfier of choice at the moment, glitch music or nanoblip as championed by labels like Mille Plateaux, Scape and Fatcat. Why ? Because the blips, scrapes and glitches this music brings up are the last bastion of freedom for the aurally independent folkdevil.
From the Renaissance with its revival of Greek/Roman math and geometry adopted for the search for order. To the Enlightenment and its remix of the role of God in nature right up to the 20th century with Einstein's Theories of Relativity and the tweaky fallout of Heisenbergs Uncertainty principal that lead to the investigation of subatomic and theoretical physics, the focus of science has been getting narrower and narrower. The shift has been for refinement and microscopic detail. The advent of computing allowed mathematicians to achieve huge calculations not physically possible for humans, leading to the discovery of the Mandlebrot set and ultimately chaos and turbulence. The world, or rather our perspective of the world, is simply getting smaller. This takes us up to Eric Drexler and nanotechnology - the scientific methodology which allows the construction of matter using assemblers, (atom sized nanobots), which alter matter on amolecular level. So why am I telling you this, and what can it possibly have to do with music ? First lets go back and put the glitch in context.
Cut, Cut, Cut faster to New York 1980s, Grandmaster
Flash Hip-Hop
originator is on the decks cutting, scratching and pushing the fold, splicing
time and space with two copies of Chic's Good Times. That was the bomb. A
mindbomb. A sick realtime attack on the song's DNA code. Grandmaster Flash
the original hyperreal sonic biotech scientist unlocked the potential of the
song to be remixed, in realtime. Flash was not alone. Although operating in
a widely different space, highbrow composer Karlheinz Stockhausen had realised,
that:
"The discovery of DNA code, for example, is focussing on how you can create different species of beings by starting from the very smallest particles and their components"
Disco pioneers like Larry Levan were also working
on studio edits, extending the song for the dancefloor. Editing in new sequences
to extend the life and soul of a track. Creating chimera's aimed at dancefloor
domination. Prior to this Dub pioneers like King Tubby and Lee Scratch Perry
had been abusing their studios to echo, pan, crossfade and subvert the song
narrative and in the act of doing so create a new process called dub. Dub
changed the shape of the song, disco stretched the song for the dancefloor
and hip-hop modified the meaning of the song in real time. What they left
was a mutant. A form of music more concerned with effects, remixes and textures
than narratives, lyrics and finished songs. We end up by 1990 with Massive
Attack, content aggregators who channel the previous 20 years of music and
liquefied it into an unfinished symphony. Music can no longer be finished
(with the exception of Jem Finer) and listeners are becoming producers. We
are forced to trainspot to make sense of the aural map contained in music.
Music at the end of the 1990s was prophecy for forthcoming era of development,
attention to detail and increasing small sub-reflexive loops and beatz. The
auralscape is being hacked. We are hearing the afterbirth of the experimental
sonic terrorism of the above pioneers. There are rumblings of this, as musicians
refocus on the
miniature. Get back to science and start to examine the possibilities of
nanotech DNA splicing.
One of the first mutterings of the nu-era I heard came from the realm of Techno, where Richie Hawtin is regarded as king. His explorations of minimalism both via DJ sets and studio work are legendary. His latestendeavours have been to marry to two (as exhibited on Decks, FX and 909) transforming the mix (of static hoarded music) into an bio-organic entity via turntable, drum machine and effects unit. With his Artifacts series, Hawtin began to explore the residue left ringing in his ears long after the club had closed its doors. Talking to San-Francisco's Beta lounge, Hawtin described his new direction as a subtraction of sound its like the shadow of sounds that aren't there anymore. Most striking he talked about creating music that left just enough information for the listener to decode it.
Flip location to Germany, and to the Mille Plateaux label. The label is a living tribute to the glitch. Their last compilation 'Clicks and Cuts' was dedicated to
" the cut-copy-paste-funk of the most unessentialist sounds ever, the clicks, the movement from one to zero made audible to and from a computermusic generation, tat finds a new entente to be the departure of all relevance for the century to come".
The agenda is set. Artists like SND, Valdislav Delay, Pole and Kit Clayton are amplifying the sound of the underlying preconceptions of reality (essential size and time) as they morph into new rhizomatic dynamics. The static that holds together a Pole track, for example, becomes the star. We are listening to the leakage, the residue the gritty dirty bits of shit that stick and wont go away. And why should they. Digital art is all too often clean, sanitised and sterilised almost castrated of some of its essential qualities. Glitch allows the interference to seep back in, infecting our cultural space. It is not polite; it is an assault on our sense and sensibilities. As Mille Plateaux put it "Clicks no longer are a part of what can be imagined as a cultural process, they are its value, it's measuring, its money, rules, laws, content, communication and whatever transaction media give way to. Glitch is the currency of 21st century sound. More precisely it is the sonic residue left behind by the vapour of independence".
Glitch is the instantaneous transmission the sleek silicon future of static free instant optical throughput, but it is also social disintegration, the degrading dial-up backwater squeal. A reminder of what Paul Virilo calls the 'infographic illusionism' we are in danger of jacking into. (Paul Virillo-Open Sky)
As the web extends and generic content rules. Music and independent sonic sculpting is in danger of being swept away. Artists like Process, Kid606, Panacea and those above are the renegades operating at the liminal frequencies of our aural perception. They are pirates and defectors an "exotic rainbow coalition of rogues" (Peter Wilson-Pirate Utopias) .
Absorb their sonic pollution.
