microsonic materialism

[Joshua Maremont <thermal@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 2:11 PM -0800 3/25/00, Kenric McDowell wrote:
> zeitgeist...?

Certainly, and I think the spirit of this time would be in part one 
of machine fetishism:  the machine as a generator of value (returning 
to dialectical materialism), as an enhancer of desirability, as an 
all-encompassing activity, as a lifestyle, as a politics, as a 
religion, and as an organizing interpretive figuration.  A zeitgeist 
I would see as all-pervading, in the air as it were and underlying 
all acts of consciousness, and here I have had the interesting 
experience recently of self-conscious glitchery:  while listening to 
Stars of the Lid's "Avec Laudanum" last evening at very low volume, 
its sonic swells overlapped with the rhythmic clicking of the CD 
player's pickup, whose noises were intended to prevent mistracking 
and subsequent glitching yet added a new layer of not necessarily 
complementary sound to the melodic drones of the album, like a stoned 
drumcircle shrunken to rodent size outside of a Morton Feldman 
performance, as if the machine had its own Gould-mumbling 
interpretive idiosyncrasies in its rendition of analog guitar drone 
work.  It is interesting also to note that what we now describe as 
the "glitch" (oh Coil, what hast thou wrought?) is a digital 
phenomenon, and that digital phenomenon allow binary possibilities of 
working/not-working rather than the analog continuum of 
semi-brokenness, where one might locate scratching (or for that 
matter the prepared piano or Gyorgi Ligeti's turned-off organs) as 
nonbinary glitching.  And then there are the more subversive examples 
of unself-conscious glitchery, for example:  several years ago while 
standing between the two towers of what was the Chevron headquarters 
on Market Street in San Francisco waiting for a late friend to appear 
for a lunchtime excursion, I noticed that the muzak playing in the 
plaza between the two buildings was alternating between the expected 
narcosis of GRP lite-jazz vapidity and violent bursts of tempo 
discontinuity in which all of the players hammered out machinegun 
downbeats in superhuman unison; I wondered to myself - as passersby 
swam about obliviously - has muzak become dangerous?  is Naked City 
working as an elevator music group in some bizarre joke?  before at 
last realizing that the CD-player had been skipping and had 
transformed mind-numbing sonic syrup into crazed scronk with no 
notice taken by most of those grazed in the assault.  Here the 
unfetishized and undesired glitch participates in a very different 
aspect of the materialist activity - the dereification of music as a 
reliable emotionally-controlling device and its recontextualization 
as an unpredictable agent of confusion.

np - So Takahashi "Nubus"
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