Re: [microsound] purple

[Oeivind Idsoe <ezueled@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Gareth Metford wrote:

> > i know i've resorted to "laptop" as an adjective one too many
> > times in the last month.
>
> Something which has come to worry me a great deal over the last year is the
> degree to which some of the discourse surrounding 'glitch' musics tends
> towards the mystificatory. Speaking as someone who actually *uses*
> sequencing software, hard drives, synthesisers etc. on a daily basis, and
> is aware of just how determined these devices are in practice, how
> essentially banal is their operation, it disturbs me to read phrases like
> 'the hard drive's gigabyte wilderness' (from Rob Young's piece 'Worship the
> Glitch' in The Wire #190/191).

Well, yes and no, I think. The operationals of a harddisk, or a computer for
that matter, isn´t, of course, mystic in its technical execution, but for a
user that isn´t too technically inclined it goes without saying that the bits
and bytes of the CPU doesn´t need to behave too unpredictably before an aura
of mystique surrounds the peripheral. I have experienced a few harddisk
crashes during the last few months (I have concluded that my disk is
terminally ill) and the sense of frustration and amazement over the disk´s
behaviour can easily lead to a kind of silicon metaphysics, simply because
there is no easy (accessible) explanation as to why the disk crashes
(particularly when I run a disk check application each time I shut my Mac down
-- "it worked fine yesterday"). So the phrase "the hard drive´s gigabyte
wilderness" is somehow appropriate, not as a reference to the actual technical
workings of the drive itself (as understood by fx. the people who
make/manufacture them), but as a way of describing the unpredictabilities that
the user experiences, or can experience, when working with a computer. In
theory, the harddisk, and every other computer part, is determined and
predictable, but in practice I find that it can do serious (unpredictable)
harm when it feels like it (ignore the anthropomorphism); there´s nothing
trivial about a serious crash. The last time it happened I got seriously sick
in my stomach because I thought I had lost all my important data. This is
where the metaphores and analogies would/could be born had I decided to write
about the crash a week after it happened.

Random freezes/crashes, which I´ve also had my fair share of during the last
few years (System 7.5 was terrible in this regard), can probably be explained,
but in some cases it can not. The latest version of the Mac OS, OS9, is
gigantic (in terms of the amount of required HD space and RAM) when compared
to the previous version, and when you mix this with the oh-so-sensitive
electronics of the computer itself problems might occur that was never
predicted, and might even never be resolved. This is where I think the
metaphorics *can* be appropriate, not for mystification, but, as I said, as an
apt description of the user-meets-CPU experience. I´ve been trapped in the
gigabyte wilderness too many times to not acknowledge its existence.

(what would happen to a guitarist if one day the guitar had six strings, the
next day four, and the third day it simply wouldn´t make any sound when he
strummed the strings? On the surface everything seems OK, but you would have
no idea what was going on beneath it. This is where the guitar could take on a
life of its own. Or at least that´s what the guitar player would/could think,
and justifiably so to some extent. Of course, the technician that looks at the
guitar might be able to explain what happened, but this doesn´t necessarily
contradict or negate the initial experience of the guitar player)

> Not simply because this is a phrase which
> wilfully misinterprets technical phenomena,

Can you actually say "misinterpret technical phenomena"? Shouldn´t one, as I
suggest, distinguish the actual, trivial workings of the technicalities, and
the phenomenology that might result from the human interaction with said
technicalities?

One might say there´s nothing mystical in the way the justice system works
(and I´m sure the lawyers and judges et al think of their existence within
this system as more or less nothing-out-of-the-ordinary -- it´s just a Job),
but Kafka sure composed some "spooky shit" using the courts as The Trial´s
backdrop. And what about the fetish portrayed in Crash? A car is surely
trivial as an isolated object, but insert the displaced human being and things
suddenly oscillate and escalate into something completely different.

> Hence, the abuse of technical terms becomes a critical abuse, a deliberate
> practice of disinformation, a political act.

I can´t say I see the problem with such a "political act" (can a music review,
or a novel, be non/a-political? isn´t every speech act an attempt to impose
oneself onto the world, thereby making it a political act?), although I think
your analogy between "a deliberate practice of disinformation" and the
"political" is a bit problematic, since it implies that the political is
inherently false.

Insert a harddisk into the cultural equation and the kind of thing that
happens in Worship The Glitch will happen. I think it´s OK and useful, as long
as one doesn´t confuse it with the "mad workings of science".

> Gareth

/Oeivind/