RE-SEND: [microsound] microsonic materialism

[Joshua Maremont <thermal@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

A resending of the below, as the first one was garbled - or should I say beglitched.
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>reverb, immersive VR (spacious, environmental) is out, physical 
>manifestations of the digital/virtual (sculptural/physical) are in] 

One hopes that considerations of fashion are always "out" in experimental music!  My own definition of fashion being:  purveying the tasteless before popular taste has evolved to the point of spitting it out. 

As for materialism, I will take the reference back to dialectical materialism, and here I think the most appropriate metaphor is a modified version of commodity fetishism.  Fetishism, after all, is derailed desire (alright Deleuzians, start those machines):  for example, a person desires sex, but finding that socks are generally encountered on the way toward that goal (s)he begins to desire socks, which eventually become the capacitors for this desiring energy.  The key is that in the mechanics of erotic desire, the insertion of the sock - the fetish - is entirely accidental, but the accidental fetish nevertheless redirects desire toward itself away from the original goal.  I find that the current itch to glitch may be usefully examined within the structure of the fetishizing process:  a musical machine is a means of generating music - an instrument (and I return to the Heideggerian notion of the transparency of properly functioning equipment) - yet at a certain point the machine beco
mes so dominant in the associative matrix of musical pleasure that it draws desiring energy toward itself as the object of that pleasure.  With a fetishized love of the machine, it is natural that the warts and farts of that machine too will be incorporated into the expanding fetish.  And it is in the generalized gear fetish rather than in digital culture that one might locate the desiring structure of the glitch obsession.  Here I think, oddly enough, that at its extreme glitch music meets the similarly machine-cathected analog synthesizer music of perhaps five years ago, in that harddrives and code fragments are printed now on CD covers where centerfold shots of impossibly obscure synthesizer modules appeared not many years ago.  All of these devices and their various protruberances and flatulences are mere accidents on the way toward music - which I would add is materialist in its manufacture and distribution but not necessarily in its experience.  A friend once showed me a fetish 
magazine she had used in the bibliography of a paper for school, and the issue's most memorable photo was that of a high-heeled shoe walking across a sea of turkey basters - the month's winner of the dream-made-real photo contest.  I fear an obsessional discourse of the glitch is within binocular-viewing distance of the same sea, so perhaps swimming gear and beach towels should be fetched.

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