Haunted by the Glitch Technological Malfunction - Critiquing the Media of Innovation

Figure 1: Chipped Discs. Created by Joe Gilling. 2020.

Joseph Gilling Digital Music and Sound Arts. University of Brighton, UK. AG317 – Final Research Essay Supervised by Holger Zschenderlein 13th January 2021

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Table of Contents

Abstract ...... 3

Introduction ...... 4

The Art of Noises (Case study 1: Oval - 94 Diskont) ...... 6

Hauntological Music (Case study 2: Burial - Untrue) ...... 9

Post-Digital Aesthetics – Responding to Kim Cascone ...... 13

Postmodernism and Plunderphonics ...... 15

Conclusion ...... 18

Bibliography ...... 20

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Abstract

The glitch: an unexpected moment in a system resulting in the appearance of a malfunction. Commonly found within software, video games, digital images, film, and audio. In a world of digital perfectionism and sleek sonic design, why do we now seek to re-associate the sounds of computational error into contemporary music? The “aesthetics of failure”, and subsequent glitch music sub-genre, emerged in the 1990s, deliberately using and exploiting technological systems as sound materials for composition. Whilst exploring the technological innovations and artistic movements compounding the rise of this new musical phenomenon, we will also investigate the genres link to French philosopher Jacques Derrida’s concept of hauntology. This will give us an insight into the human anxieties associated with a wavering faith in technological progress and modernity when it came to the turn of the millennium. Whilst the last century was spent perfecting the sound recording, the availability of the glitch has revolutionised modern music. We now seem to be entering a “post-digital” era, concerned primarily with the rapidly changing relationships we have with technologies, as well as our increasing dependence on them. The internet has provided the ultimate archival space to reminisce and re-contextualise all sound materials, even those once seen as defective.

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Introduction

Glitch music may appear to be a recent phenomenon since it was only coined in the late 1990s. However, as we explore the genre, it is apparent its paths echo pre-owned compositional techniques and early noise culture tendencies, from the sound works of twentieth century musique concrète, to Luigi Russolo’s Intonarumori (Noise-Maker) performances, to the abundance of miscellaneous electronica subgenres found today. In Virtual Sound (2003), Janne Vanhanen exclaims:

If there were an emblematic sound of today’s digital music, it would be the sound of a skipping CD.1

After first being encountered as an “error” during the playback process, it has now been repurposed as the raw material for musical composition. The “aesthetics of failure”, as mentioned by Kim Cascone in the Computer Music Journal (2000), epitomise the state of contemporary music production today.2 Computers, against popular belief, never really make mistakes. Programmers and users make mistakes. The glitch is less of an error and more of an unexpected output which makes us aware of the medium, its structure, and its politics. We simply place the onus of malfunction onto the machine. The glitch can be defined simply as an unexpected moment in a system that calls attention to that system, which is otherwise hidden. Today we begin to question why artists would be driven to use the latest technologies only to negate their capacities to produce a “perfect” end product. The apparent “errors” of machines mark the dawn of an age where technologies lead us to question what it really means to be human. As art continually grows to reflect our lives, we begin to hear the crisis and disparity of society through the music of our time. Jacques Attali (1985) believed that, “Our music foretells our future. Let us lend it an ear.”3 As the computer became the “primary power-tool” for creating and performing electronic music, the glitch became the by-product: technological imperfection and irregularity, which could not be controlled until now.4

The hauntological music movement also arose around the turn of the millennium, however the term hauntology stems from Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx (1993).5 Hauntology resonates with a digital generation, reinvesting in the traces of lost futures inhabiting the present. Glitch and hauntology intertwine and augment the aesthetics of technological malfunction and degradation in

1 Vanhanen, Janne. Virtual Sound: Examining Glitch and Production. Contemporary Music Review. 2003. p.46. 2 Cascone, Kim. The Aesthetics of Failure: Post-Digital Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music. Computer Music Journal, Vol. 24, No. 4. 2000. p.13. 3 Goodman, Steve, and Dawsonera. Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear. MIT Press, London, Cambridge, Mass. 2009. p.49. 4 Cox, Christoph, and Daniel Warner. Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music. Bloomsbury Academic, London, 2017. p.551. 5 Balanzategui, Jessica. Haunted Nostalgia and the Aesthetics of Technological Decay: Hauntology and Super 8 in Sinister. Horror Studies 7.2. 2016. p.241.

4 a way that casts a dark pall over optimistic notions of progress and innovation.6 Mark Fisher suggests media culture has now been marked by “*…+ anachronism and inertia *…+” in which “*…+ cultural time has folded back on itself, and the impression of linear development has given way to a strange simultaneity.”7 The fragile condition of the digital domain is often overlooked, given our cultural obsession with algorithmic cloning of ourselves into the virtual, and having constant access to instant information. It is only when the machine comes across an algorithmic error that the illusion is broken. The past has lost its ability to disappear due to digital cultures total access. Similarly, the future no longer has the charge it once did.8 We are empowered by technology yet mesmerised by our analogue pasts. To claim we are in an age of innovation is to now acknowledge that our lives are saturated with failure.

6 Ibid; p.243. 7 Fisher, Mark. Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. Zero Books, Winchester, UK. 2014. p.24. 8 Reynolds, Simon. Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to its Own Past. Faber, London. 2011. p.425.

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The Art of Noises

Noise is primal: pre-linguistic and pre-subjective. The “noisy” urban landscape, increasingly experienced today, is paradoxically created by ourselves, the ones most affected by it. As we trace the origins of glitch music, our attention is drawn to the outbreak of machine music that characterised the middle years of the 1920s.9 The industry that grew up around recorded music in the twentieth century helped give the age of the machine its distinctive soundscape, just as the railways and factories of the industrial revolution had done a hundred years earlier.10 The existence of “noise” since then has progressed into a recognisable drone, characterising the urban landscape. Regarded as the sound of excess, noise no longer only represents excessive materialism. In the internet age, noise is also the best metaphor for the excessive quantities of information with which we are faced on a daily basis.11 For Luigi Russolo and the Italian Futurists, noise could produce a variety of different timbres, some resembling the sounds of nature or the machines of industry. Russolo spoke about The Art of Noises (1913), when creating his Intonarumori, pleading for us to “*…+ break out of this limited circle of sounds and conquer the infinite variety of noise-sounds.”12

As technologies exponentially developed, the ear began to seek out music with greater dissonance, stronger tonalities, and harsher timbres, thus becoming ever closer to the “noise-sound” experience Russolo predicted. Historically, the Futurists were not alone in their celebration of atonal aesthetics. Composers of Baroque music used repetition, imitation, and dissonance to transmit affect.13 Likewise, the use of repetition and imitation in glitch and other electronic dance music genres today effectively repurposes unwanted noises into music. To Russolo, this new radical listening experience emerged from embracing the sounds of technology and industry. He concludes that these noises were desirable rather than disturbing.14 Futurist music was filled with constant juxtapositions and the unbiddable negation of all harmony. Noise, arriving from the confusion and irregularities of life, began to reveal itself to audiences with innumerable surprises.15 We now have the ability to control and organise these once overlooked sounds.

Little more than a century ago, music could be described with relative ease. Ever since the rise of avant-garde experimental music and the democratisation of music production technologies, distinguishing between music, noise, and even silence, has become increasingly challenging. Eighty

9 Russolo, Luigi. The Art of Noises. Vol. No. 6. Pendragon Press, New York, 1986. p.1. 10 Hendy, David. Noise: A Human History of Sound and Listening. Profile Books, London. 2013. p.265. 11 Ibid; p.311. 12 Russolo, Luigi. The Art of Noises. Vol. No. 6. Pendragon Press, New York, 1986. p.25. 13 Church, Scott. Against the tyranny of musical form: glitch music, affect, and the sound of digital malfunction. Critical Studies in Media Communication. 2017. p.322. 14 Hendy, David. Noise: A Human History of Sound and Listening. Profile Books, London. 2013. p.320. 15 Ibid; p.258/259.

6 years after Russolo’s manifesto, German electronic music group, Oval, picked up where the Futurists left off.16 Oval trained audiences to refocus their attention away from the sounds they were hearing and towards the interface.17 The group pioneered many familiar glitch aesthetics known today. They exploited optical laser reading compact disc (CD) drives by writing, damaging, and editing the physical discs. The resulting binary glitching and malfunctioning sounds were then sampled and composed into musical pieces. Most well-known perhaps for their fourth album, 94 Diskont (1995) released by Mille Plateaux, Oval deconstructed digital audio and showed audiences that the very interface which transported musical data could also be used as the raw materials for composition. Markus Popp, the audio designer behind the moniker Oval, calls himself a selector and arranger of his process compositions, as opposed to a composer. He stated that he never directly controls the generation of musical material himself, but instead designs systems and processes in which the technology derives the sounds.18 Oval’s work can be seen to have drawn influences in part from earlier avant-garde experimental musicians such as Satie, Antheil, and Cage, transforming everyday sounds into music.19 The track “Store Check”, from their 1995 album, reveals Oval’s undeniable instinct for the pleasantly irritating, the indistinct, and the dreamlike. The piece begins with a sound palette only comparable to the noises produced by early dial-up internet access: clicks, cuts, flickering feedback, and noisy textures. The jumping compact disc produces fragmented and peculiar rhythms adhering to an aesthetic overtly against digital perfectionism and innovation. This trailblazing glitch masterpiece finds the beauty within the malfunctioning technologies of digital progression. Music, immortalised by the machine, allows the sounds of failure to flourish in a technologically driven modern world.

Whilst new computational machines create new opportunities for artistic expression, they also raise socio-cultural dilemmas in relation to consumption and materialism. Today, technologies become archaic within a matter of a few years. This encourages a throw-away culture whereby consumers are forced into upgrading their devices, not because they no longer function, but due to software updates making them inadequate. Through Oval’s music, we begin to visualise the future we are pushing ourselves into. We are aware of it; we have the ability to prevent it, although so far we are yet to act upon it, slipping into a technological oblivion.

16 Church, Scott. Against the tyranny of musical form: glitch music, affect, and the sound of digital malfunction. Critical Studies in Media Communication. 2017. p.320. 17 Ibid. 18 Bates, Eliot. Glitches, bugs, and hisses: the degeneration of musical recordings and the contemporary musical work. Routledge, New York. 2004. p.220. 19 Ibid; p.221.

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Before Oval, no one really heard the compact disc. The CD presented itself as a “perfect sound forever”, and was also the first commercial audio format which did not exhibit its own audible artefacts with regular use.20 However, Oval were not the first artists to make music from skipping CDs. Yasunao Tone created a series of works and documented them in the album Solo for Wounded CDs (1997). Tone manipulated discs with tape and deliberately damaged the CDs in order to employ a process of “de-controlling” whereby the devices playback ability malfunctioned, producing sound materials which became randomly fragmented. Moreover, it is necessary to credit here the contributions of the global hip-hop phenomenon based on a similar concept: turntablism, scratching, and sampling of records.21 Glitch music exposes the fragilities of technological innovation, revealing an almost primitive pulsating memory of a time when everything was simpler. The resulting timbres appearing out of the genre can vary greatly, from the harsh extreme frequencies used in works by artists such as Ryoji Ikeda, to the more microscopic, spiritual, and self-referential sounds used by artists such as Alva Noto. Oval’s work, however, seems to reference what music was to become. The unwanted sounds of error have now been transformed into a sonically pleasing end product. These sounds would have been previously inconceivable without the knowledge and access to the technologies we have today. Our interactions with these technologies are crucial in understanding the glitch and realising our changing attitudes towards the digital domain. The glitch aesthetic has evolved into a commonplace musical artefact, representing a hope of reconciling the overwhelming pace of our society’s ascent towards a technological singularity.22

20 Richardson, Mark. A Glitch in Time: How oval’s 1995 ambient masterpiece predicted our digital present. Pitchfork. 2015. Web. 21 Ibid. 22 Jackson, Rebecca. The Glitch Aesthetic. Department of Communication. Georgia State University. 2011. p.13.

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Hauntological Music

There is a hauntological dimension to many different aspects of culture. Since around the turn of the century, the term has been applied to musicians who explore the ideals related to retro-futurism, cultural memory, and the reoccurrence of the past within the present. The haunting dislocated voice can be traced back to Thomas Edison. The phonograph was originally envisaged to be a means of preserving the voices of loved ones after death.23 The recorded sound revolutionised the way in which humans interacted with music forever. The issue today is that the electronic sounds produced between the 1950s and the 1990s still remain the sonic signifiers of the future, that being an anticipated future that never actually occurred.24 With ubiquitous recording and playback, nothing is ever lost; all recorded music has the ability to return. Simon Reynolds named this concept “Dyschronia” - the breaking down of time to a state in which it is no longer possible to securely distinguish between the present and the past. The traces of these lost futures unpredictably bubble up to unsettle the “pastiche-time of postmodernity”.25 One of the principle sonic signatures of hauntology is the use of crackle - the surface noise made by vinyl.26 Crackle prevents us from falling into the illusion of presence, provoking emotions of melancholy and longing for the pre- technological materiality of audio. Digital technologies and vast hard drive storage spaces available today have effectively turned us into ghosts. Not necessarily supernatural beings of whose presence we are unaware of, but in fact the “postmodern succumbing of historical time to the spectral time of recorded media.”27 When society has become more obsessed with archiving rather than innovating, the time has arrived whereby art and life loop into constant rewinds of events and sounds that have already occurred.

Releases from the British electronic musician Burial, conjure up audio-spectres out of the crackle, distant sampled voices, and disjointed swung rhythms he produces. The foregrounding, rather than suppression, of these sometimes accidental materialities represent Burial’s mourning of the London underground rave scene, a refusal to abandon the hope that it will return to the place it once was. Burial makes the most convincing case that our zeitgeist is essentially hauntological.28 This means that the past is now fully accessible at our fingertips, yet the challenge we face today is removing ourselves from this projected past, and moving into our own innovative futures. Burial’s track

23 Reynolds, Simon. Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to its Own Past. Faber, London. 2011. p.313. 24 Fisher, Mark. The Metaphysics of Crackle: Afrofuturism and Hauntology. Dancecult, Vol. 5, No. 2. 2013. p.45. 25 Ibid; p.47. 26 Fisher, Mark. Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. Zero Books, Winchester, UK. 2014. p.21. 27 Fisher, Mark. The Metaphysics of Crackle: Afrofuturism and Hauntology. Dancecult, Vol. 5, No. 2. 2013. p.48. 28 Fisher, Mark. Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. Zero Books, Winchester, UK. 2014. p.107.

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“Etched Headplate”, from his critically acclaimed 2007 album Untrue, sonifies undercurrent themes of modern world loneliness, reclaiming and re-contextualising sounds from the past. Burial’s work is fundamentally low fidelity (lo-fi), used intentionally in a self-referential and artistic way in order to reimagine a time when this aesthetic was the only available means of listening to recorded sound. The majority of vocal samples chosen for his works are generally indecipherable due to the harsh filtering and processing effects added, resulting in only a few key words being audible as they fade in and out. In “Etched Headplate”, the phrase, “I can’t take no more”, is a key repeating vocal sample which discloses to the listener the emotive and political standpoint Burial alludes to through his music. Most fascinating about this is the origin of the sample: an R&B track called “Angel” (2003) by singer-songwriter Amanda Perez, later covered by teenager Alicia Robinson on a self-documented, home-made YouTube video. This unusual sample source optimises Burial’s approach to music production: taking the unheard sounds of the past, which may be personal to him, or reflective of the melancholy he projects through his sound, and placing them in a reconceptualised form. The track, saturated with phasing glitch artefacts and vinyl crackle, is notable within the hauntological music genre, with its inspirations from the analogue technologies of the past, yet also represents features of the subsequent glitch music sub-genre. Burial’s obvious subversion of a “clean” sounding production style gives away his critique of sterile modern pop-culture and materialistic technological innovation. Technologies are, more often than not, now used for purposes manufacturers did not intend for. The success of Burial’s Untrue, being named one of the Guardian’s “Albums of the decade”, shows that his sound resonates with a digital generation, provoked by the flaws of technological progression and the resurgence of archaic aesthetics.

The very possibility of loss seems ever more irrelevant. Digital archiving means that the fugitive evanescence that long ago used to characterise, for example, the watching of television programmes – seen once, and then only remembered – has disappeared.29 Likewise, in the music industry, recorded music once cost a premium and live concerts were the more affordable option. This economy has since been flipped on its head - royalties from streamed music now account for next to nothing of an artist’s revenue, and live performance is more of a premium rarity. Record label Ghost Box grew a distinctive reputation around this re-dreaming of the past. The label, originally established as an outlet for the creations of producer Jim Jupp and graphic designer Julian House, has since released works which attempt to evoke nostalgia for a future which never came. Ghost Box’s uniquely surreal visual and musical output fused characteristics of library music with various pop-culture references to create a parallel reality built upon memories of a very British past.30 As

29 Ibid; p.144. 30 Pilkington, Mark. Hauntologists mine the past for music’s future. BoingBoing. 2012. Web.

10 humans and music consumers, we collectively love to reminisce over this past. Retro-nostalgia accounts for a huge discography of musical releases each year, proving that many listeners would rather re-live the emotions brought up by an old album than explore the variety of new releases available today.

Analogue technologies provide us with a kind of tactile physical experience that a purely digital interface has inadvertently begun to remove.31 Audiophiles find that vintage equipment has a warmth that they find lacking in many digital services. Digital audio workstations seem to simply echo their physical counterparts, haunted by the symbols, functions, and graphic visualisations of analogue technologies once commonplace in music studios. Since the democratisation of digital sound production software, analogue gear has faded from use, although appears to be making a comeback in recent years as artists attempt to find their sound within the realm of sonic nostalgia. In the mid-1990s there was a general feeling that electronic dance music had become tied to its tools.32 The software used for its production lead to a consistent output of material that all began to sound the same.33 Cascone identifies that the glitch became pivotal in demystifying technology to audiences.34 Not only did it reveal that digital media had its flaws too, but also that the very interruptive and irritating sound of the skipping CD could be the basis of great creative potential. Japanese sound and visual artist Ryoji Ikeda works with sound in a variety of “raw” states, he is most well-known for producing stark “bleepy” soundscapes. Ikeda’s works often explore cybernetic- inspired concepts and immersive experiences of sonified data. Modern audio editing tools now give artists the ability to zoom in on the errors and malfunctions of sound, bringing the listener’s awareness of them to the forefront of their works. The tools of composition now aid the composer in the complete destruction of audio files. The medium is no longer the message in glitch music; the tool has become the message.35

The digital realm promised us nothing less than an escape from materiality; however, it has led us to a point where we feel obliged to fill the gap left in its void. Marshall McLuhan believed that individuals were more inclined to listen to older music because the internet provided the access to it. He called this “technological determinism”.36 William Basinski’s 2002 album Disintegration Loops is a great parable to demonstrate the switch from the fragility of analogue to the infinite replicability

31 O’Donnell, Bob. We’re living in a digital world, but analog is making a comeback. Vox. 2017. Web. 32 Kelly, Caleb. Cracked Media: The Sound of Malfunction. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. 2009. pp.270/271. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid; p.73. 35 Cox, Christoph, and Daniel Warner. Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music. Bloomsbury Academic, London, 2017. p.397. 36 Hogarty, Jean. Popular Music and Retro Culture in the Digital Era. Routledge, London. 2016. p.33.

11 of digital.37 The works record tape loops as they slowly destroy themselves in the very process of digitalisation. This fetishisation of retro underpins our present culture. Reynolds notes how the 2000s were dominated linguistically by the “re” prefix: revivals, reissues, remakes, and so on: endless retrospection year on year establishing a reminiscence of anniversaries to reflect upon.38 A crisis of over-documentation is looming whereby old media either directly permeates the present, or lurks just beneath the surface.39 Whilst conservation of media enables artists to explore vast catalogues of material, could this nostalgia be impeding our cultural progress? Perhaps the comforting memories and emotions evoked by hauntological music is the reason it continues to be so prevalent. Still, nothing seems to be new. J-Dilla, probably one of the most influential hip-hop producers of the last fifteen years, used library music and vintage commercials as the raw materials for his works.40 LTJ Bukem and DJ Shadow reverently exploited the “golden age” of “crate-digging” - successfully sifting through and recycling audio from decades of previous musicians’ compositions.41 Music today is powered by progressive technologies, however, more often than not, they are used as a tool to shuffle, rearrange, and jump back in time to the sounds of yesterday.

37 Fisher, Mark. Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. Zero Books, Winchester, UK. 2014. p.144. 38 Reynolds, Simon. Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to its Own Past. Faber, London. 2011. p.xi. 39 Ibid; p.57. 40 Ibid; p.361. 41 Ibid; p.323.

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Post-Digital Aesthetics – Responding to Kim Cascone

It is failure that guides evolution; perfection offers no incentive for improvement.42

The failures of digital technologies created a new kind of composer, using sonic materials which were once thought of as harsh, atonal, and disturbing. Glitches, bugs, application errors, system crashes, clipping, aliasing, distortion, quantisation noise, and even the noise floor of computer sound cards are all utilised by the modern day producer.43 “Our digital tools can only be as perfect, precise, and efficient as the humans who built them.”44 Kim Cascone examined our rapidly changing relationships with technology and analysed that we are entering a “post-digital” era whereby artistic practice is becoming more concerned with being human than being digital. The complete negation of futuristic aesthetics is not necessarily about being anti-technology, but being aware that our control of technology is an illusion. A jump or a skip is no longer a problem or fault, but a musical gesture in its own right.45 These sounds represent the modern world. The whirring of a computer fan or bleeps and crackles from a circuit board speak to us more so now than the music produced over the last century. We are bombarded by sounds at every living moment. The machines and tools which carry our economies are also changing the ecoacoustics of everyday life. Music has reacted to the louder soundscape; noise is the consequence.

Sound is a haunting - a ghost, a presence - whose location in space is ambiguous and whose existence in time is transitory.46 The act of listening to recorded music lies somewhere between psychological delusion and verifiable scientific phenomenon. Often the experience is a euphoric communal encounter and at other times a solemn, reflective, and private affair. As Christian Fennesz walked with his Discman, the CD would often skip and glitch out of its own volition.47 He enjoyed this auditory experience and believed it added to the allure of the music, almost as if each track would map his walk of the city streets. The music Fennesz produces is inspired by this listening experience. He begins composing on his guitar before treating the samples in a digital audio workstation, chopping and programming various parameters of the recordings to form a slowly developing ambient glitch aesthetic. Another collective interested in defining glitch music, in its early 2000s popularity, was the German experimental record label Mille Plateaux. The Clicks & Cuts series (2000) compiled the works of various electronic musicians who were pioneering the glitch music

42 Cascone, Kim. The Aesthetics of Failure: Post-Digital Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music. Computer Music Journal, Vol. 24, No. 4. 2000. p.12. 43 Ibid; p.13. 44 Ibid. 45 Young, Rob (Ed.) Undercurrents: The Hidden Wiring of Modern Music. Continuum, London. 2002. p.50. 46 Toop, David. Sinister Resonance: The Mediumship of the Listener. Continuum, London; New York. 2010. p.xv. 47 Ibid; p.59.

13 movement. As digital and mechanical errors were becoming commonplace with the rise of new technologies, the glitch was situated at the core of what it meant to be modern.48 A glitch’s ability to disrupt and challenge assumptions about media pinpoints the sonification of the music production process itself. The stutter of malfunction has become part of an established musical language of growing complexity.49

As new technologies continue to emerge, the critical function of the glitch aesthetic will persist. The music industry has spent over a hundred years creating devices that allegedly have higher and higher fidelity, but these simply introduce new glitches, hiccups, and errors.50 We cannot help but be exposed to these non-intentional sounds, the voice of technology speaking to us. It is the way in which we as humans react to innovation that pushes the glitch aesthetic forward. Exemplifying the failures of technological innovation, early versions of Macintosh laptops, running at 333 MHz, were reported to run too fast for the existing version of Cubase.51 The software’s inbuilt metronome would veer and stutter erratically causing huge imperfections.52 This paradox pinpoints a moment in time in which digital error, which rose from innovative technologies, also allowed for artistic experimentation, focused on our own failures. By entrusting human knowledge and behaviour to machines we now seem to express a great desire to allow algorithmic technologies to categorise our every decision. As James Bridle discusses in New Dark Age (2018), the unsettling truth about the modern world in an internet age is that we are now encouraged to behave like spectators of our own lives. We find ourselves becoming archivists of our own stories: we never experience live events because we’re too busy recording them.53 The burgeoning online archives offer endless temptations to look back and also contribute to the ever-growing cultural data mass of the internet.54 Whilst late- twentieth-century Futurism and innovation drove society into the state it is today, we have reached a momentous and pivotal moment which seems to have halted progression. At this moment, one can only envision looking back to the beginning of the twenty-first century as a time of overconsumption, greed, and uncertainty, when the effects of human actions began to reveal themselves.

48 Kane, Carolyn. Compression Aesthetics: Glitch from the Avant-Garde to Kanye West. InVisible Culture, No.21. 2014. Web. 49 Vanhanen, Janne. Virtual Sound: Examining Glitch and Production. Contemporary Music Review. 2003. p.47. 50 Bates, Eliot. Glitches, bugs, and hisses: the degeneration of musical recordings and the contemporary musical work. Routledge, New York. 2004. P.212. 51 Young, Rob (Ed.) Undercurrents: The Hidden Wiring of Modern Music. Continuum, London. 2002. p.49/50. 52 Ibid. 53 Fisher, Mark. K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher. Repeater Books, London. 2018. p.362. 54 Ibid.

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Postmodernism and Plunderphonics

One of the most significant features of postmodernism today is pastiche.55 Both pastiche and parody involve the imitation or, better still, the mimicry of other styles.56 The music industry, for as long as the recorded sound has existed, flourished around copying others, pilfering melodies, sampling, and adapting previous works. Collector-inspired creation is common today within “crate-digging” communities whereby DJs and producers hunt down records to reconceptualise. In a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, all that is left is to imitate and live off the decay of old materials.57 The electronic immortality of recorded sound raises many issues related to commercial ownership. If an artist composes a piece of music made entirely from the re-sampled sounds of another artist, does this represent a new body of work? And if so, who is entitled to the royalties? Working in this way has led to the past and present being intertwined in the human memory.58 If technological progress today continues to revive the past then perhaps this would explain how past projections determine our future now.59 Plunderphonics has challenged our current understanding of originality, individuality, and property rights. In the conception of traditional art music, rooted in these values, this has become problematic.60 To use the coinage of Canadian composer John Oswald, “plunderphonics” represents a more overtly recognisable sonic quotation of a previously recorded material, related to, but distinct from, sampling.61 Oswald found himself in breach of copyright protection after record labels contested his works which included, most notably, samples from Michael Jackson’s song “Bad”, which had been cut up and rearranged as “Dab”. Whilst Oswald’s audio détournement faced harsh criticism, it raised genuine questions about the paradigm of originality. Digital files can be replicated infinitely; knowing this, the idea that a digital file could have a monetary value of any kind would imply an unnatural scarcity. Yet capitalist ideology holds on to the knowledge that the majority of digital interface users will happily pay for software and data licenses which they will never actually own.

Emerging in the early 2010s, electronic music micro-genre “vaporwave” arose from a circulating internet meme culture. The primarily ironic, retro-revivalist-inspired genre takes inspiration from elevator and lounge music of the 1980s and ‘90s. The aesthetic is dependent upon the internet as a

55 Foster, Hal. Postmodern Culture. Pluto, London. 1985. p.113. 56 Ibid. 57 Ibid; p.115. 58 Sexton, Jamie. Weird Britain in Exile: Ghost Box, Hauntology, and Alternative Heritage. Popular Music and Society, Vol. 35, No. 4. 2012. p.563. 59 Ibid; p.564. 60 Günal, Atakan. The Age of Musical Reproduction and John Oswald’s Plunderphonics. 2010. Web. p.7. 61 Ibid; p.4.

15 carrier of data, especially in the cut-it-up, collage-oriented community of Tumblr teens.62 Vaporwave is about nostalgia for the early internet, simpler times, and low-fidelity technologies. Parody is also a key part of the aesthetic in the ways that songs are chopped up and edited. The genre also reflects critically on the inaccurate predictions made about the future. This parody capitalises on the idiosyncrasies and eccentricities of the original media to mockingly imitate its form. The recurrence of sounds from the past within the genre initiate what Mark Fisher called “the slow cancellation of the future”, this being our culture’s inability to articulate what the present means now.63 We simultaneously manage to project ourselves forwards and backwards in time.64 In the creation of art today, the internet acts as a cyclical data loop. We download files – editing them, recontextualising, and composing with online resources, before re-uploading and sharing the finished product back into the ever-expanding cloud catalogue of media. This activity accelerates the blurring of boundaries between reality and virtual. The “copyleft” practice also characterises this shift in attitudes towards users having the right to freely distribute and modify intellectual property, with the requirement that the same rights be preserved in derivative works created from that property. Opposed to copyright legislation, individuals upholding this artistic ideology argue against the concept of the ownership of data. Our presence is increasingly becoming less characterised by our physical actions and instead by virtual replications of ourselves online. Digital laws governing plagiarism and many other factors need to be updated to reflect current digital culture.

From the early origins of the blues, much of the most urgent, modern music on the planet has emerged from the bruised and bleeding edges of depressed urbanism.65 As a society, we perceive ourselves to be more lonely, depressed, and anxious, than any previous generation. On the surface, this seems paradoxical in a world more connected than ever before. However, the sounds of our time have begun to reflect the uncertain modern world we live in. Bruce R. Smith stated that “sound is the most forceful stimulus that human beings experience, yet the most evanescent”.66 Its intangible existence inhabits our everyday lives and can, for many, make day to day tasks more bearable. For Rob Young, the technological imperfections and irregularities of the glitch music genre reflect the colossal dynamic shift and depletion of naturally found rhythms in the urban environment.67 So called “sonic-airbrushing”, commonly found in popular music of the 1990s and

62 Bacon, Redmond. The Vaporwave Aesthetic – Ironic Nostalgia. Sound on time. 2018. Web. 63 Fisher, Mark. Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. Zero Books, Winchester, UK. 2014. p.2. 64 Horta, Arnau. Vaporwave: The Musical Wallpaper of Lost Futures. CCCBLAB. 2017. Web. 65 Goodman, Steve, and Dawsonera. Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear. MIT Press, London, Cambridge, Mass. 2009. p.171. 66 LaBelle, Brandon. Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life. Continuum. London; New York. 2010. p.xv. 67 Young, Rob (Ed.) Undercurrents: The Hidden Wiring of Modern Music. Continuum, London. 2002. p.47/48.

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00s, effectively removed all flaws and personality from an artist.68 Now, listening tendencies lean towards the re-naturalisation of the “digitally manipulated auto-tuned cyborg.”69 These aesthetics resonate with artists such as James Blake, whose releases are fragmented, electronic works, heavily influenced by underground British dance and bass genres, incorporating minimal and intimate vocals. Fisher notes that “listening back to Blake’s records in chronological sequence is like hearing a ghost gradually assume material form *…+”.70 Blake’s stripped-down approach, as opposed to the maximalist trends of contemporary music releases, allows a listener to feel more of a personal connection with the artist.

The aesthetics of failure are fundamentally postmodern. Glitch music, from the mid-1990s onward, revolutionised the direction of electronic music, bleeding into various subgenres such as drum ‘n’ bass, trip-hop, and techno.71 The glitch deconstructed music to the very fragments that made up recorded sound. Carsten Nicolai, more well-known under his alias, Alva Noto, is notorious for his contributions towards breaking glitch aesthetics into innovative and experimental digital music. Noto’s track “Uni Blue” (2018) exhibits his masterful sound design incorporated into disjointed, dark, ambient, and heavily distorted techno inspired dance music. The traditional drum kit is transformed into a selection of clicks, bleeps, and hisses. Hi-hats flicker broken rhythms over a thick sub-bass line whilst a distorted lead synth, mimicking an electric guitar, pulls the composition together. An individual who creates music is now seen almost as a collagist, bringing together ideas from a vast collection of possibilities and drawing the listener’s attention to a certain sequence of events. For John Cage, music was simply the “organisation of sounds”.72 Musicians are now like architects, finding form and structure out of the irregularities and varieties of sound sources available. The negation of all harmonic sense and meaning is vital to the glitch aesthetic. With silence being one of contemporary information culture’s rarest commodities, we use the sounds of malfunction to highlight the industrial innovation failures of modern society through art.73

68 Fisher, Mark. Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. Zero Books, Winchester, UK. 2014. p.174/175. 69 Ibid; p.175/176. 70 Unknown. The Secret Sadness of the 21st Century: Mark Fisher recommends James Blake’s Overgrown. Electronic Beats. N/D. Web. 71 Cascone, Kim. The Aesthetics of Failure: Post-Digital Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music. Computer Music Journal, Vol. 24, No. 4. 2000. p.15. 72 Cox, Christoph, and Daniel Warner. Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music. Bloomsbury Academic, London, 2017. p.27. 73 Miller, Paul D. (Ed.) Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture. MIT, London; Cambridge, Mass. 2008. p.5.

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Conclusion

Today, we all have an extensive relationship with digital culture. However, the glitch guise radically alters our awareness of the medium. According to Florian Cramer, the “post-digital” describes an approach to digital media that no longer seeks technical innovation or improvement, but considers digitisation as something that has already happened and thus might be further reconfigured.74 The tactful exploitation of digital and technological systems, instigating the glitch, breaks through many of the assumptions which govern our relationships with computers. Glitches look, sound, and feel the way they do today because of the technologies we have available and the way we chose to interact with them. We are witnessing simultaneously an epistemological and pragmatic shift in everyday life towards the use of computational systems to support and mediate life itself.75 To rebel against this, glitch music subverts the original intention of computational design and structures itself to show the insubstantiality, fragility, and malleability of digital sound sources. In the future, technologies may look, sound, and feel very different; however, they will still function under the same glitch ethos.76 Essentially, this hacking and data-bending demonstrates a human need to deconstruct the machine, creating a new aesthetic, embedding the initially unheard digital artefacts into music and art.

The glitch materialised out of silence, growing with exponential technological consumerism. However, it will always remind us of the imperfections of human endeavours.77

As for the anachronistic tendencies of contemporary listening culture, the digital sphere is seen to now provide a way for the past and the present to intertwine and influence each other. These ancestral echoes press upon the living, inspiring yet also coexisting with current media. With every new technological innovation and discovery, we seem to be further dislocating our physical presences away from the traditional notions of time and place. Smartphones, for example, encourage us never to fully commit to the here and now, fostering a ghostly presence-absence.78 This new aesthetic is a product of the environment in which we now live. Beneath the user-friendly interface, we are entering ourselves into the virtual as algorithmic data. Mark Fisher states “when the present has given up on the future, we must listen for the relics of the future in the unactivated potentials of the past.”79

74 Berry, David M. Postdigital Aesthetics: Art, Computation and Design. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke. 2015. p.152. 75 Ibid; p.1. 76 Briz, Nick. Thoughts on Glitch [Art] v2.0. 2015. 77 Young, Rob (Ed.) Undercurrents: The Hidden Wiring of Modern Music. Continuum, London. 2002. p.49. 78 Gallix, Andrew. Hauntology: a not-so-new critical manifestation. The Guardian Online. 2011. 79 Fisher, Mark. The Metaphysics of Crackle: Afrofuturism and Hauntology. Dancecult, Vol. 5, No. 2. 2013. p.53.

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Reflecting on my earlier statement, in attempting to define what music is today, we must also look at where it could be in the future, if this retro-nostalgic relationship with sound persists. One can only envision a certain yearning for the materialities of the past to continue as new technologies emerge. We continue to come to terms with a new way of living in harmony with machines. Accepting the disorder of life is in essence what makes us human. Hauntological music, and the glitch art movement, may fade over time in their original forms. However, they signify our culture’s desires to advance and innovate, whilst recognising our use of media from the past could be perceived as a hindrance to such progress. The post-digital aestheticisation of the glitch represents a very human response to the continually evolving digital landscape. Glitch art has become one of many responses reacting to our altered awareness of the intangible life-mediating machine.

Word count: 5,494

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Lectures

AUDINT. Unsound: Undead. Lecture. Jan 2020. Fabrica Gallery. Brighton, UK.

Mallinder, Stephen. Noise Theory. Feb, 2019. Digital Music and Sound Arts. University of Brighton.

Mallinder, Stephen. Recording and Sampling. Feb, 2019. Digital Music and Sound Arts. University of Brighton.

Papadomanolaki, Maria. Sound and New Media. Oct, 2018. Digital Music and Sound Arts. University of Brighton.

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