1995 - TECHNO: Psycho-Social Tumult (Remix) - TechNet

Texto

written by Jason Skeet and Howard Slater and circulated as flyers (and a record insert) in London 1994-96 re-published 2012 in datacide twelve http://datacide.c8.com

NOISE AND POLITICS - TECHNET MIX NOISE AND POLITICS - TECHNET MI

The following samples are taken from the book Noise: The Political Economy of Music by Jacques Attali. The open ended ideas in the writing can be used to comment on any form of music, but we have found it useful to connect it to the subversive, autonomous and political implications of techno. It is a book of contradictions and enigmas - not least those concerning the author himself: a former advisor to François Mitterand he was lately the Head of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development before he was forced to resign from his post because of scandals surrounding the amount of funds he had spent on furnishings for his office in Broadgate and his own private jet plane. With this in mind Noise is the testament to the way that it is possible to use language to fabricate an aura of radicalism whilst remaining reactionary (ie. He is an academic). Or the book may be a heartfelt outburst, the secret scribblings of an aide tramping the corridors or power and smelling smoke... Or...a book 132 pages long

Our science has always desired to monitor, measure,abstract, and castrate meaning, forgetting that life is full of noise and that death alone is silent...Noise bought, sold or prohibited („wholly or predominantly characterised by an emission of repetetive beats“ - Clauses 58/60 CJB)...Nothing essential happens in the absence of noise.

Among sounds, music as an autonomous production is a recent invention. Ambiguous and fragile, ostensibly secondary and of minor importance it has invaded our world and daily life. Today it is unavoidable, as if, in a world now devoid of meaning a background noise were increasingly necessary to give people a sense of security.

Music heralds, for it is prophetic. It obliges us to invent categories and new dynamics to regenerate social theory, which has become entrapped. Music makes mutations audible. It has always been in its essence a herald of times to come...if it is true that the political organisation of the twentieth century is rooted in the political thought of the nineteenth, the latter is almost entirely present in embryonic form in the music of the eighteenth century.

More than colours and forms, it is sounds and their arrangements that fashion societies. With noise is born disorder and its opposite: the world. With music is born power and its opposite: subversion. In noise we can read the codes of life, the relations among people. Clamour, Melody, Dissonance, Harmony. It is at the heart of the progressive rationalisation of aesthetics, and it is a refuge for a residual irrationality; it is a means of power and a form of entertainment.

Any theory of power today must include a theory of the localisation of noise and its endowment with form. Equivalent to the articulation of a space, it indicates the limits of a territory and the way to make oneself heard within it, how to survive by drawing one’s sustenance from it. And since noise is the source of power, power has always listened to it with fascination. Eavesdropping, censorship, recording and surveillance are weapons of power. The technology of listening in on, ordering, transmitting and recording noise is at the heart of the apparatus. To listen, to memorise - this is the ability to interpret and control history, to manipulate the culture of a people, to control its violence and hopes.

The theorists of totalitarianism have all explained, indistinctly, that it is necessary to ban subversive noise because it betokens demands for cultural autonomy, support for differences or marginality: a concern for maintaining tonalism, the primacy of melody, a distrust of new languages, codes, or instruments, a refusal of the abnormal - these characteristics are common to all totalitarian regimes. They are direct translations of the political importance of cultural repression and noise control...to make music tranquil, reassuring and calm.

Everywhere we look, the monopolisation of the broadcast of messages, control of noise, and the institutionalisation of the silence of others assure the durability of power. Musical distribution techniques are today contributing to the establishment of a system of eavesdropping and social surveillance channels for the circulation of orders. The monologue of standardised, stereotyped music accompanies and hems in a daily life in which no one had the right to speak anymore.

The distinction between musician and non-musician undoubtedly represents one of the very first divisions of labour, one of the very first social differentiations in history, even predating the hierarchy of class. What is called music today is all too often only a disguise for the monologue of power. Music now seems hardly more than a somewhat clumsy excuse for the self-glorification of musicians and the growth of a new industrial sector, the channelisation of desire into commodities to such an extreme as to become a caricature.

But a subversive strain of music has always managed to survive, subterranean and pursued, the inverse image of noise control: popular music, an instrument of the ecstatic cult,and outburst of uncensored violence. Here music is a locus of subversion, a transcendence of the body. At odds with the official religions and centres of power, these gatherings of marginals have at turns been tolerated, offered integration into official culture and brutally repressed ("13 people were arrested after 70 police in riot gear surrounded a derelict block offlats...barricaded by 200 party goers, some of whom threw missiles" - Liverpool, 1991). Music, the quintessential mass activity, like the crowd, is simultaneously a threat and a necessary source of legitimacy: trying to channel it is a risk that every system of power must run.

We are condemned to silence - unless we create our own relation with the world and try to tie other people into the meaning we thus create. That is what composing is. Doing soley for the sake of doing. Inventing new codes, inventing the message at the same time as the language. Playing for ones own pleasure which alone can create the conditions for new communication. A concept such as this relates to the emergence of the free act, self-transcendence, pleasure in being instead of having.

Composition thus appears as a negation of the division of roles and labour as constructed by the old codes. To listen to music in the network of composition is to rewrite it. The listener is the operator.

Composition, then, beyond the realm of music calls into question the distinction between the worker and consumer, between doing and destroying; its beginning can be seen today, incoherent and fragile, subversive and threatened, in techno’s anxious questioning of repetition, in its foreshadowing of the death of the specialist.

Unlike previous forms in popular music techno has concentrated on being an instrumental music and as such almost defies writing that attempts to discuss it. Words are useless, unable to define the effects that sound frequencies and speeds of beats have on the mind and body. The content and form of the music combine into meanings that lie beyond words.

NO MORE WORDS

A rejection of words in the form of vocals to a song allows the listener a far more open field of exploration, a space where it is possible to discover those immanent thoughts that are beyond syntax..you enter a room and perceive something as already there, as just having happened, even though it has not yet been done. For words guide us to order, they instill in us the need to have others speak for us; they make us receptive to the fixity of imposed meaning. If being without words is meaningless then techno hints at the possibility of any and all meaning...a living and illicid speech where listening is not judged as passive but part of a process of communication. Techno evades the exhausted vocabulary mouthed by lyricists and legislators, anarchists and authoritarians. When words do appear in techno they are sampled from elsewhere. They become another noise element in the layers of sounds, to add to the energy of the music, for humour or a defiant pose. Sampling offers the possibility that the world is audible, available for everyone to continually rearrange, re-mix and fuck up...you do not feel yourself lately. Or you feel like another self. Techno also points to an outcome of digital technology that originals of things no longer exist. In this fibre space of endless copying, control over ownership of ideas becomes completely unenforceable. Techno is dynamic, ever changing, always on the move and never finished. Records are re-mixed together by DJs to create new compositions. There is never a final product. Everyone has their own top ten or can disperse with the notion of a rating systems altogether. A techno party is something more than entertainment, the relationship between consumer and product is pushed to a limit where they merge...you change all the time, nobody knows where you’re at, not even you...and nostalgia for an alphabet fades in the rapid path of strobelights. Speed increases, space expands, a new culture emerges...a culture of aphasia in which ideas and identities slip and slide constantly...if you close your eyes you lose the power of abstraction. We stumble across limits to conceptualising, it is time to learn how to judge society by its sounds and not by its words.

listener as operator

‘I do not write experimental music...my experimenting is done before I make my music. Afterwards it is the listener who must experiment’. Edgar Varese

In any discussions on the reception of music there are two common and inter-related assumptions: music is seen as an art form that is responded to physically and if it is granted any ‘intelligence’ it is as a spiritual or mystical consciousness. The difficulty of talking about music leads to an apprehension of the listening experience manifested by the media’s promotion of music makers as personalities. This advances a cultural mechanism whereby the producers of, say, a record are held in higher esteem than its consumers. But beyond the production/consumption dichotomy and the cultural inaction this creates there lies a social arena that enables the interpretation of apparent division. The listener as operator. The dancer as engineer.

Meaning is generated socially. Without dialogue there can be no meaning. Without interaction there can be no communication. The production/consumption dichotomy intends to regard listening to a record as an activity devoid of creative in�teraction, as passive. But this negates the experience of listening as a social activity. Leaving aside notions of consciousness itself being formed in a process of social interaction and concentrating on the record maker, even on this side of the dichotomy we see not the work of individual genius but someone in creative interaction with music technology (a process of fusion, development and adaptation), with the whole history of a given genre, with an assumed audience and context for the record. Factors such as experiencing a record, through anticipation and expectation, and hence of gathering meaning from the record, let alone dancing to it, are hardly even talked about by the producer/consumer dichotomy.

Look at another form of audible communication, language. Rather than perceiving language as a stable edifice that speakers inhabit as a ready-made system, language is more accurately apprehended as a continuous generative process imple�mented in the social-verbal interaction of speakers. Rather than dealing with ‘signs’ that are abstracted out from the process of their generation, language operates between speaker and addressee with both parties informed by the other: the speaker can only speak with an addressee in mind, the addressee too, can respond and be the speaker - both sides are impregnated with each other. Language is perceived as social-interaction, and there is still to take into account the context of the exchange, the notion of ‘inner voice’ etc.

Following on from this it is possible to speak of a ‘space between’ when we talk of communication as dialogue. Being intangible this ‘space between’ gives little concrete evidence of its existence and so theories of communication can fall back on one of two poles: the individual communicating (psyche) or the system of language (signs) - the first yields ‘stars’ and ‘personalities’, the second, musical notation. Furthermore, with music it is possible for this ‘space between’ to be materialised as the record. So the record becomes a conceptual space, a machine that the listener operates. The record is not simply a communication that must be interpreted and fixed down but a place of interaction where meaning is generated by both the music maker and the listener.

The listener is involved in a silent production that never ends and becomes engaged in a creativity that flourishes at the very point where practice ceases to have its own language (a know-how without discourse). This practice of the listener, this operating the record, can relate to its manifold uses: mixing, scratching, sampling, slowing up, speeding down, burning, smashing, lock-grooving; using it to dance to, as a psycho-physical energiser. Whatever its use the record cannot exist without the response of its audience, without the active perception and inner responsiveness of the listener that is just as able to take something different from the record, to invent and experiment anew, to make connections. The record does not say it all, its sounds generate a different movement in the paths of the conceptual operation of the listener than they had in those of the producer.

This is a wider sensorium than the delineation of producer and consumer suggests. For listening simultaneously demands openness to a surrounding world. Even at its most private, listening is about being socially connected, about making meanings. Listening is an activity that anticipates and expects. Being far from passive, it actively follows the desires it unleashes, opening itself up to communication and allowing subjectivity to mutate and merge. By being opened and joined, by desiring the sounds, by being engulfed by them, means that listening, once it occupies the ‘space between’, can no longer be satisfied with reproducing models but can change minds. Listening is social-inspiration.

Enlaces

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