It’s to do with meaning, which forces its way up like a root growing under a pavement – it breaks the paving stones. Many people would like these neat stones in a nice grid, but unfortunately there is this tree with all its pressures and necessities and you have to follow it.1 What we could not say openly we expressed in music 2 Slick lyric blocks history 3 6 EDITORIAL (VERSION) 16 TWO LETTERS ON HARMONY Sean Bonney 22 MY LIFE Anne Boyer 32 ITINERANT IDEA-ISM Seymour Wright 38 NOW IS THE ONLY PLACE WHERE THINGS CAN ACTUALLY HAPPEN: AN INTERVIEW WITH JOE MCPHEE Stevphen Shukaitis 52 TNOONA / TENDERNESS / SBN-A-1 66K Howard Slater 56 GHETTO THERMODYNAMICS Dhanveer Singh Brar 66 ELEGY, OR THE POETICS OF SURPLUS Commune Editions 76 A MUSICAL PUKING Alberto Savinio 80 HARDCORE TILL I DIE Kev Nickells 102 MEDIA, SECESSION AND RECESSION Anthony Iles & Eve Lear 138 CRUEL OPTIMISM OF THE WILL IN BAY AREA PUNK PRODUCTION Johanna Isaacson 162 THE SABOTAGE OF RENT Matteo Pasquinelli 174 THE FACTORY SONGS OF MR TOAD Martin Glaberman 178 AND SOMETIMES THE WHOLE ROOM WOULD BE SINGING: MUSIC, GENDER AND FACTORY LABOUR UNDER INDUSTRIAL CAPITALISM Emma Robertson, Michael Pickering & Marek Korczynski 200 AURAL CONTRACT: FORENSIC LISTENING AND THE REORGANIZATION OF THE SPEAKING-SUBJECT Lawrence Abu Hamdan 226 EXCURSIONS INTO THE NEGATIVE FIELD Simon Yuill 232 A LETTER TO THE EDITORS Iain Boal 251 CREDITS / CONTRIBUTORS EDITORIAL (VERSION) We cannot say what new structures will replace the ones we live with yet, because once we have torn shit down, we will inevitably see more and see differently and feel a new sense of wanting and being and becoming. What we want after “the break” will be dif- ferent from what we think we want before the break and both are necessarily different from the desire that issues from being in the break. Fred Moten This is the first issue of a new journal called Cesura//Acceso. 1 The journal positions itself at the intersections of music, exper- imental politics and poetics. We want to ask what it could mean to practice politics through music or to think music through politics. A pause in the line, ignited. The pause that ignites. The break, in fire. Acting together, cesura and acceso 2 offer a way of thinking towards a politics or anti-politics that is moving towards the break, moving within its imaginings, and confronting the lim- its of those imaginations. The process of the project itself started in 2013, but has emerged from years spent in conversations, protests, performances, groups, gigs, work, workshops, frustrations, trips, records, books and questions that we have shared and explored as friends. From our experiences of musical and political communities in London, we felt that a space was needed to produce and reveal connections across genres, mediums and attentions. We’ve seen music acting both as a spark for ludic collectivity and a distraction from en- croaching police lines. It is in the entanglement of these seeming- 7 ly oppositional functions that we find our line of enquiry. The journal works through the collective interests of many of its writers in how music functions—as anaesthetic, catalyst and symptom. It is our attempt to contribute “a tool and a provoca- tion” against capital—towards energising discourse, cultivating alliances, confusing taxonomies, hardening resistances, antag- onising norms and finding the “outer-spaceways”. We hope to stimulate the interchange of experience, questions, ideas and material between disconnected spheres of practice in music and politics. As the percolating bubbles 3 at the ghost-tide 4 of capital spill a sedative toxicant into and onto every skin of an idea of love, every body of resistance—music has been subject to the expanding il- lusion that culture and its aesthetic materialisations emerge out of, and quietly return to, an apolitical vacuum at the service of decoration. In contrast, if, as has recently been argued, the common horizon of art and radical politics in the present moment is an autonomy of process 5 ; improvising impurely; attempting to evade valorisa- tion; then music, a most vernacular of art forms, enmeshed in our ! everyday life, labour and “free time” offers a stealth politics, “hid- den in plain sight”. Despite a complex relation to the commodity form in the mobilisation of radical affect, the collison of digitisa- tion with the music industry has created a dynamic force in the destruction of profit. For us, music can be understood not simply as what presents it- self in the context of sound-phenomena-organised-in-time-and-ex- changed-for-cash within the factory of post/industrial capitalism, but also, as an aesthetic-poetic-political mode of enquiry, a mode of perception, a way of learning and sharing—in and outside of the vibrations of sound or the marks of language. Music is also of, and about, bodies (under and in flight from, capitalism)— and bodies are always participating in a generative vernacular of dance and somatics “intransigent toward the detectives of capi- tal” 6 ; disrupting capital’s alienations and dehumanising ontolog- ical cleavages 7 at the same time as presenting these for scrutiny. Experiments in politics, language and music are interconnected within spheres of survival, struggle and desire, imbricated in the often fraying fabric of our everyday lives. Cesura//Acceso probes how these entangled human-social-material practices deal with the tensions between trying to live more of a life, and trying to combat the oppressions that militate to limit any living. This journal explores—through music, politics and language— the means we have, in spite of limitations, to be part of an ecology of resistance and learning that includes skin, organs, ideas, imag- 9 ination, flight, asylum and history. It is also a project of unmask- ing both the roots and reproductions of increasingly opaque and complex malignant factors that sustain our oppressions, and the “unspent” political potential of music. To bring distinctions into proximity in the journal, there will be myriad manifestations from multiple origins and trajectories. Sometimes content will coalesce around particular themes and registers of language; at the same time we encourage the noise, friction and enquiry that emerges from the spaces on the un- derside of accord. The collection of contributions in this first issue form a partial representation of voices and positions that will change over time. The shape of this shifting landscape will emerge as future contributions and dialogues come into contact with conversations in previous issues. This issue does not fix a ter- ritory that new friends and perspectives are not permitted to en- ter: we will continue to encourage and accept open submissions. From within the fog of learning-by-doing, which has informed the autodidactic quality of the production of our first issue, we have attempted to be cognizant of erasures in representation and forces which act to reproduce normative imbalances along familiar lines of gender, race and class. We do not attempt to deny “the pre-written framework” 8 —that is, biases betrayed by our collective or individual genealogies—instead attending to these tendencies and responding to the problems they create as they surface during the process of working through the project. We will continue to work against confines of specialisation to balance academic, non-academic, concrete and oblique ideas. ! Somebody else’s idea of somebody else’s world Is not my idea Of things as they are Somebody else’s idea of things to come Need not be, The only way To vision the future What seems to be, need not be What need, had to be For what was, is only because of An adopted source of things Some chosen source as was Need not be, the only pattern To build a world on Sun Ra “Somebody Else’s Idea” 9 11 AKNOWLEDGEMENTS Cesura//Acceso is self-published and we don’t have the resources of a large publisher. We are subject to increasingly common and intense constraints—a lack of time, space, work, money and re- sources. We do not have any regular or institutional funding or support and cannot afford to be entirely self-funded. We relied on fundraising to pay for the production costs of the first issue. We have developed the journal from within the claustrophobic conditions of life lived in the city of London. That is, like many others with a similarly precarious trajectory—we cleave tempo- rary spaces to nurture our project—improvising against the vari- ous direct and collateral pressures of work and the city. Without the invaluable generosity, solidarity and help of friends, this pro- ject would not have become a reality. Thanks to: All our contributing authors, Howard Slater, Anthony Iles, all at MayDay Rooms, Mute Magazine, Eva Weinmayer/AND Publishing, Ben Noys, Christina Chalmers, Cara Tolmie, Mira Mattar, Trevor Brent, John Douglas Millar, Seymour Wright, Tim Goldie, Mike Levitt, James Janco, Caroline Heron, Ollie Burch, Mohamed Barakat, Tom Hirst, Ute Kanngiesser, Hannah Sawtell, Mathew Noel Todd, Arika, Stephen Shukaitis, Benedict Drew and all those who kindly donated to our fundraising initiatives. ! 13 sean bonney LETTERS ON HARMONY LETTER ON HARMONY AND CRISIS Thanks for your list of objections. I accept most of them: my vo- cabulary, my references (my identification papers) are for the most part things I’ve pulled from the past. Old films, old music: abstractions, commodities. Its exactly the same when I go to the supermarket. The in-store radio, the magazines, the DVDs: all of them register some kind of obsessive relationship with the culture’s recent past. Don’t think I’m moaning about it.