Minoritarian Music Revisiting Musical Noise Through

UNIVERSITY OF AMSTERDAM

MINORITARIAN MUSIC

REVISITING MUSICAL NOISE THROUGH CINEMA OF JIM JARMUSCH

A Master's Thesis

by Lev Fišer, a student of Arts and Culture: Music Studies, Graduate School of Humanities, University of Amsterdam

supervisor: prof. dr. Julia Kursell, Second reader: prof. dr. Barbara Titus,

Academic year 2017/2018

Acknowledgements

I express my warmest gratitude to prof. dr. Julia Kursell, my supervisor, and prof. dr. Barbara Titus, the second reader. They gave me considerably more than merely official supervision and grading. During their lectures and consultations with them, I have gained knowledge to be cherished for years to come.

This text would not exist without infallible support of my family. My parents have represented a point of stability in a life of uncertainty both in research and beyond. My friends can never be thanked enough for their kindness and reassurance.

* * *

Ministry of Culture of Republic of Slovenia ensured that my research was generously financed, for which I remain thankful. The ministry provided me with a grant for the entire academic year.

Abstract The goal of this thesis is to approach the music that is used by Jim Jarmusch in The Limits of Control (2009), a film he scripted and directed. On the basis of close listening and viewing, selected songs from the soundtrack were read as minoritarian music. Minoritarian music is a term newly introduced in this thesis, and it serves to conceptualise the particular musical expression either created or insterted by Jarmusch into his film. It is an attempt to (re)theorize musical noise and timbre. During the course of the research, significant correlations with the idea of the minor by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari were observed. Hence, findings of their work have been included into the argument in favour of minoritarian music.

The soundtrack case studies are songs and song excerpts by the groups Bad Rabbit, Boris, Sunn O))), and The Black Angels. They are based on electric guitar distortion, monotonous repetition, and superposition of disparate timbres. A comparative case study analysis to once again scrutinize the concept of minoritarian music is also included.

Key Words Jim Jarmusch, noise, timbre, minor, minoritarian music

Contents

0 Opening ...... 5

Methodology ...... 8 1 Jarmusch as a Musician ...... 9

The Limits of Control and Its Shift to Music ...... 12 2 Noise and Recognition ...... 17

On Timbre ...... 20 3 Toward Minoritarian Music ...... 25

On Minor Literature ...... 25 Toward Sound ...... 26 Minoritarian Music ...... 28 Minoritarian Music as a Material Imprint ...... 32 4 Expressions of Minoritarian Music ...... 34

Repetition and Its Frame ...... 34 Yorgos Lanthimos and Music in The Lobster ...... 38 Voiceover Narration and Beethoven's String Quartet op. 18, no. 1 ...... 40 A Music that Lingers: Fuzzy Reactor, Police Sirens, and You on the Run ...... 46 Coinciding Events: Sunn O))) and Boris in the Kidnapping Scene ...... 53 5 Conclusion ...... 58

6 Bibliography ...... 60

7 Appendix ...... 63

0 Opening

What if we fail to take music for what it is? Sometimes, what seems banal might not be such at all. Uncertainty remains regardless of experience, knowledge, and intuition giving the verdict of banality. Such disposition rarely seems to coincide with a scrutiny of our judgement. Understanding seemingly trivial things according to their proper content is central to the films of Jim Jarmusch. It deeply relates to their music as well. The object of this research are the songs of a 2009 film that he scripted and directed, The Limits of Control.

The film takes place in today's Spain. A mysterious loner is hired to carry out a criminal job. His contacts only give him cryptical information about things he needs to do to reach his target. The assignment involves countless hours of waiting. Days sometimes pass without him meeting anybody. He is often instructed to wait at a café, where time elapses as he observes the world go by with people attending to their daily errands, birds flying, bells ringing. There are occasions when he is joined by one of the informants. He silently listens to their tirades on art, science, human perception, and history. Each interlocutor tells about a different discipline – music, cinema, science, art in general, hallucination. The lone protagonist then presents a matchbox he has been given by the previous contact. The boxes contain coded messages which he promptly reads and swallows. By starting each day with tai-chi exercises, he trains the awareness of the surroundings. When in Madrid, he makes four visits to modern art gallery Reina Sofia, and views four different paintings in total, immersed in art and his relentless concentration.

It may be the case that this film requires repeated viewings, since it lacks a coherent plot to immerse the viewer. Whereas the story is simplistic, the film's power lies in its atmosphere, determined by thought-out frame composition and music. In fact, the latter was so important to the director that he decided to record some of it himself – in cooperation with a band that he at that time was a member of, Bad Rabbit.

It is here that our critical doubt may arise once again. How can something that is exclusively atmospherical contain artistic value? Should we assume that there is no artistic value, but a different meaning behind, what could that be? Rather than a cinematic work that addresses the thinking viewer explicitly, The Limits of Control leaves a bothering imprint on one's artistic

perception. Not particularly fulfilling or pleasant at first, it is a bothering piece of cinema that burns slowly inside us, questioning our critical judgement of film – and especially music.

How can the impact of music in Jim Jarmusch's The Limits of Control on me as a viewer be explained? How can the meaning conveyed by this music be theorized, and which musicological frameworks correspond to it? How can a subjective interpretation of cinematic music be articulated as a general approach to music listening? This thesis argues that despite the fact that any film music is embedded in cinematic narrative, film serves not only – or even not at all – as a skeleton for the songs to tie upon. Instead, it provides a superposition of meaning to the music. In The Limits of Control, this makes the music convey its proper substance whether it is reproduced in- or outside of the film. The case studies are used to prove this. Along with the film by Jarmusch as a primary research object, a Yorgos Lanthimos film from 2015 will serve as secondary case study to conduct a comparative analysis. The Lobster is considered for its recurring use of Beethoven's String Quartet op. 18, no.1, second movement. The test analysis proposes that any cinematic music can become minoritarian if minoritarian framing is imposed on it. However, the comparative enquiry also shows that music turned minoritarian by sound imposition does not exist outside of the imposing context. Selected excerpts in The Lobster show another, contextually confined way of music becoming minoritarian whereas The Limits of Control represent a source of minoritarian music that has place even outside of cinematic context.

Music in Jarmusch's films is given a concise coverage in Sara Piazza's Jim Jarmusch: Music, Words and Noise. The book provides an engaging comparison betwen the earlier films – his graduation attempt Permanent Vacation, and a project where Jarmusch worked together with Wim Wenders – Lightning over Water, directed by Wenders and Nicholas Ray. Piazza compares the films' concluding sequences, but stops at short descriptions of their music, even though it is the sountrack that she claims to be a decisive factor in the comparison.1 More importantly, she touches upon the power of music's projection, stating that music renders a passage of time perceivable – even visually, and thus impacts the overall film's expression.2

1 Her approach to the music of the Lightning sequence consists of labeling it as “[...] a saxophone and piano [that] strike up a melancholy tune,” whereas the Vacation sequence features “John Lurie's saxophone [which] blends in with the slow, constant and, at times, slightly dissonant Indonesian gamelan [...],” as well as Lurie improvisation on Over the Rainbow theme. Compare Piazza, Jim Jarmusch, 71. 2 Piazza, Jim Jarmusch, 83: “In the white monochrome image [Antoni Tàpies' painting Gran llençol (1968), technically a white cloth fixed to canvas to form a rectangular shape, and framed] that hypnotizes Lone Man

Piazza does not discuss cinematic influence on music. My thesis fills the ensuing discursive gap. Firstly, I propose that music in The Limits of Control does not change the film narrative, but rather that the music's substance is amplified by the visuals and the constitution of the soundtrack. Secondly, given that my close listening largely involved only listening without watching, this thesis shows that music preserves such emphasis on its substance also when not performed in cinematic environment.

Sofia Glasl's Mind the Map: Jim Jarmusch as a Cartographer of Pop Culture3 more systematically addresses Jarmusch's correlation of sound and cinema. However, the phenomena that have originally described sounds become analogies that help her interpret his films. For example, sampling becomes a narrative trait in his film Coffee and Cigarettes. Rather than to concern music, it is used to explain recurrences of certain phrases from the dialogue. Similarly, tracking is used to explain an overposition of character traits on protagonists by the films that have allegedly inspired Jarmusch.4 On the other hand, conceptualizing sound effects such as resonance and feedback as cinematic, not music theory5 presents a starting point for interpreting the music in cinematic sense. Filmic dimensionality of assembling and then retouching contents of the frame also corresponds to Jarmusch's idea of musical collaboration, as he stated it in a conversation on his project with the lutenist Jozef van Wissem:

What's so beautiful about Jozef's music is [that] he uses very minimal structures like palindromes . . . I see it like he is painting the foreground and the details and I'm putting a kind of wash of the background in of clouds and trees . . . I really think of it as Jozef's music and I am like . . . on film sets you have a guy called a ʻscenicʼ who paints all the backgrounds, you know, if you need a wall touched up or to make it look older, and I'm kind of the scenic guy in this duo. I really like that position a lot because I love music that has spaces in it that make it cinematic.6

who cannot take his eyes off it, the power of the music's projection and appeal assumes – as far as the spectator is concerned – the crucial role of rendering the passage of time perceivable and, in some way, visible.” 3 The original title is Mind the Map: Jim Jarmusch als Kartograph von Popkultur (Marburg: Schüren Verlag, 2014). 4 Glasl, Jim Jarmusch, 69–73. 5 Ibidem, 63–68. 6 Piazza, 83–84, after Schafer, “New Sounds: Jozef van Wissem and Jim Jarmusch.

Methodology

Methodology consisted of close watching and listening to the case studies. To facilitate collection of information, transcription techniques were used. More precisely, some soundtrack excerpts were rendered into space-time notation7 or regular Western staff notation. Since numerous examples were impossible to convey graphically, verbal descriptions had to be used. Such labels were applied particularly to timbrally complex music, and mostly concern the sound of distorted electric guitar. The method was that of Robert Morris' contour theory as applied by Ciro Scotto.8

To theorize music that fails to yield analytical results if approached by studying pitch sets, rhythmical pattern development, or chordal harmony, I have decided to use the concepts of noise and timbre. Noise is understood, in part after Gilles Deleuze, as an empirical entity that is initially disregarded by our perception.9 As such, it represents a new way of perceiving music given that the listener succeeds in acknowledging noise in the first place. Timbre is in a close relation to the problem of noise perception. An analytical term, it involves the recognition that noise mostly fails to receive.

This entire work is an attempt to derive minoritarian music as a term to describe sonorous expressions that are bound to noisiness that is in turn produced with the loss of the meaning – the significance that has been addressed by genre-oriented music theory through time. In sculpting the idea of minoritarian music, the primary method remains immersion into the case studies, whereas the secondary research technique is that of close reading, especially of the work by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.10 The minor in minoritarian music correlates to their idea of the minor. Nevertheless, an effort has been put into distinguishing between what shows in the relevant film music, and what is proposed by the two authors. The connection

7 This notation divides the five line staff longitudinally into units of half a second. According to a temporal scale thus sketched, note heads are placed so as to designate their pitches. Their duration and timing is conveyed by the graphical distance between the heads. 8 Scotto, “The Structural Role of Distortion in Hard Rock and Heavy Metal.” Music Theory Spectrum 38, no. 2 (2017): 178–199. 9 Compare Higgins, “A Deleuzian Noise,” 53, italics in the original: “[...] the ground or noise will be the absolute difference of empirically resounding sound as given to the listener's senses, and the signal will be that which the listener may recognize through the application of a model of listening.” The empirical ground of noise is not disregarded entirely, but only in its part that spreads beyond what can be acknowledged by the listening model. 10 Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).

between close viewing and listening on the one hand and detailed reading of their texts on the other is always that of correlation, never a bare application of Deleuzoguattarian theory.

This thesis contains five parts, numbered from zero to four. Parts 0 and 1 stand for the general opener and for the introduction to Jarmusch as a musician, respectively. Chapter 2 presents the concepts of noise, recognition, and timbre. Afterwards, outline and explanation of minoritarian music are presented in correlation to minor literature (3; Toward Minoritarian Music). Subsequently, Expressions of Minoritarian Music feature analyses of selected excerpts in The Limits of Control, and a concise rounding up of the the findings. The chapter also includes a comparative analysis of minoritarian music in The Lobster, preceeded with a proper introduction to the examples. Lastly, the conclusion as number 5 sums up findings of the research.

1 Jarmusch as a Musician

Jim Jarmusch directs and scripts films that are distinctive for their slow pace, cryptical dialogue, depictions of everyday life details, and last but not least, important role of music. Permanent Vacation, his first feature film, marked the idea of the wandering protagonist, lost in existential uncertainty. Similarly, questions of one's life perspective permeate Down by Law, where the lives of three men disintegrate after they have been thrown into jail and coincidentally placed in the same cell, facing their striking dissimilarities. In Night on Earth, taxi drivers are inspired by the passengers who represent entirely different modes of existence, not to mention Dead Man's William Blake, a bookkeeper who became a wanted killer, wandering the North American wilderness with his Indian friend Nobody. While some of the films have been acclaimed by critics and audience alike, there are works that many consider borderline experiments with the viewers' taste and patience. As Marc Masters has written, “Whatever story he's telling, Jarmusch likes to give his characters – and his audience – ample time to think about it.”11 This holds particularly true for The Limits of Control (2009).

Jarmusch states that the artists who have really inspired him are those who express themselves in their own form. Citing film directors (John Cassavetes and Robert Frank) and musicians (Ornette Coleman, Thelonius Monk) alike, he reliquishes respective formal constraints of music and cinema. Treating music cinematically by becoming a “sound scenic,” and cinema

11 Masters, “Sqürl EP #260,” Pitchfork, July 19, 2017, https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/squrl-ep-260/

musically by structuring films as seemingly random sequences of ordinary events, he seems to focus more on the content itself than its ordering.12 It is as if the form of his stories were not determined by him, but by chance of everyday occurrences – and this applies to music as well.

His cinema plays with what we disregard is insignificant – the workings of everyday life. The way coffee is drunk, the manner in which a cigarette is smoked or a bird has flown is central to his films. So central that the story might indeed be told through them, even though it would sometimes lack unities of time, place, and action.13

As a musician, he started out in 1981 Lower East Side New York as a keyboardist and singer in the group Del-Byzanteens. The music was deemed art-punk and compared to Velvet Underground and Television.14 The song that had a greater impact on the scene was Girl's Imagination. It contains a bass ostinato along with a driving drumming pattern that is at times rejoined by repetitive guitar chords or short melodic fillings underlined by synthesizer sounds. The highly repetitive structure, over which unfold the lyrics, is dominated by a strong tonal center that is enforced by frequent semitonal deflections in an upward direction, giving the song a phrygian feeling.

To trace his subsequent musical development means to leap two decades into 2009 when Jarmusch, organist and sound engineer Shane Stoneback, and drummer Carter Logan recorded songs to be inserted in The Limits of Control.15 The name of the band was Bad Rabbit. They issued only one album, Film Music from the Limits of Control.16 However, their efforts continued under the name Sqürl, and resulted in a soundtrack for Only Lovers Left Alive, Jarmusch's next cinematic project. Subsequently, they released a trilogy of albums. EP 1 and EP 2 were issued in 2013, whereas EP 3 came out the year afterwards. Recently, the band also produced EP 260, as well as album collections of songs from the films Only Lovers Left Alive and Patterson, along with a session from Third Man Records studio.17

12 See Piazza, Jim Jarmusch, 83–84. 13 Cf. Aristotle (transl. by H. S. Butcher), section VIII. For the disunity of action, consider the films by Jarmusch Coffee and Cigarettes and Night on Earth, the plots of which are fragmented into shorter stories connected by the protagonists' profession and repetition of certain phrases. 14 Piazza, Jim Jarmusch, 63. 15 Sqürl World, “Bad Rabbit: The Limits of Control,” a website entry at http://www.squrlworld.com/bad-rabbit- the-limits-of-control/ 16 Ibidem. The album features four songs: Sea Green Sea, Dawn, Dusk, Blue Green Sea. 17 Sqürl World, “About Sqürl,” a website entry at http://www.squrlworld.com/about-sqrl/

In 2012, Jarmusch records two albums with the lutenist Jozef van Wissem: Concerning the Entrance into Eternity, and The Mystery of Heaven. The songs feature arpeggiated chords on lute repeating and gradually embellished, as on Apokatastatis (Restoration) from Entrance. Whereas Wissem establishes a firm ostinato with a particular regard to the lower end of lute sonic spectrum, Jarmusch provides distorted electric guitar insterts, based on a play with feedback. They are static, monolithic sounds that despite being in a duet with lute live their own expression, since they embrace the anachronism between historical connotations of lute, and electric guitar timbre. Jarmusch and Wissem seem to play one past the other. Each infused in his own envisaging of the present musical moment, their parts differ fundamentally in the idea of attack, and tone. Each part is thus only a division of the whole, with their interplay pushing the albums forward. In The Mystery of Heaven, lute gives more space to the electric guitar. For example, it is entirely absent from Flowing Light of the Godhead. These two albums feature no percussion, and except for a brief spoken word contain no lyrics either. As for the rudimentary harmonic underlining with tonal functions and intense play with different kinds of guitar distortion, Wissem and Jarmusch clearly relate to Sqürl.

Sharing similarity with Wissem-Jarmusch projects, Purple Dust18 by Sqürl is an example of Jarmusch's use of feedback. Feedback is a technique used to sustain and highlight the tone generated on the electric guitar. As the feedback loop is established, a high-pitched howling ensues, and represents an uninterrupted continuation, albeit with a transposition, of the previously rendered tone. Feedbacking signal is considerably higher in amplitude. In spite of the possibility of the mastering process to reduce the difference between volume of the regular tone and the feedback, Sqürl rarely do that. Instead, Purple Dust features a distinctively feedbacking ending which is a loud indulgement in the use of this technique. The howling sonority emerges through the sound mix, and makes the overall listening experience more dimensional.

To achieve dimensionality, the band make ample use of the stereophonic recording technology to distribute melodic figures around sound space. Their music is constructed as a net of disparate sounds, spread around the listener's imaginary hearing space. The most important factor in producing the feeling of musical space is the positioning of the band's amplifiers and drums on live concerts. Moreover, this also depends on the studio mixing of tracks in the left or right signal. The band uses sharp volume contrasts between sounds as another dimensional

18 EP 2, ATP/Recordings [ATPREP05] 2013, digital audio streaming.

emphasis. The sounds are distinguished by their original pitch (sometimes, it is hard to discern), and by articulation. Electric guitar string bending is common, and is performed in small intervals. If there are multiple tones involved in one sonorous event, the resulting “melody” has a very narrow span, dominated by movement of semitones and whole tones. In Purple Dust, repeating notes are avoided in favour of the regular oscillation of the tone's amplitude, achieved by sound effects, that results in a close imitation of a quickly reiterating tone.

From the songs for The Limits of Control, the expression of Sqürl has evolved in two directions: One is a greater focus on chord progression, as witnessed in Francine Says19, where the transitions between chords are more clearly pronounced, as well as denser. To illustrate, a Bad Rabbit recording Sea Green Sea is essentially built upon one D major chord, whereas Francine Says explores the main functions of G major tonality, adhering to the principles of verse and chorus structure: twice the verse, then the chorus with a distinctive harmonic twist, even if only a temporary orbiting around a minor harmony. Furthermore, Sea Green Sea does not feature a distinction between verse and refrain, which Francine Says does. Even in EP 1, denser harmonic rhythm is already present – compare Little Sister, an irregular twelve-bar blues with swift chord changes at the cadences. Additionally, Sqürl songs started to feature vocals by Jarmusch, whereas Bad Rabbit works have no lyrics. On the other hand, Sea Green Sea features a rich texture of guitar “licks,” small melodic fragments that Francine Says lacks in its constrained verse-chorus form, instead adhering to functional harmony. To sum up, soundtrack music for the film is less clearly moulded into a coherent form, but rather relies on a complex texture. The second way of development, which seems to be inspired by noise rock from other bands featured in The Limits of Control soundtrack, leads to an even greater emphasis on guitar distortion. It is prevalent on EP 260, especially in The Dark Rift.20

The Limits of Control and Its Shift to Music

The music of Bad Rabbit has much in common with the everyday feeling of Jarmusch films. Its particularity and eclecticism raise a thought that the sonorous material is indeed assembled spontaneously. His statement that he prefers music to contain cinematic spaces is only an additional argument telling us that such music is not aleatoric, but most likely an improvisatory

19 EP 3, ATP/Recordings [ATPREP06D] 2014, digital audio streaming. 20 EP 260. Sacred Bones Records [SBR-179] 2017, digital audio streaming

creation, intentionally adhering to a diversity of small events in his films.21 Such a diversity would then span across filmic events in narrative focus, and those that are merely in the background. A description of Bad Rabbit on the Sqürl website reads: “Their sound is percussion-heavy with detuned and droning guitars, loops, and cassette recorders, drenched in feedback. The music melds everything from chopped & screwed hip-hop to country to stoner metal and soundtrack-like atmospheres.”22 Especially suggestive is the designation that the songs contain soundtrack characteristics.23 Curiously enough, even certain later works of Sqürl feature the same description – that the musicians had in mind a score for an imaginary film. However, sountrack is not merely a cinematic score. It also designates a succession of sonorous events, a combination of sound from disparate sources, and a final mix of all sonorities contained in the narrative.

Jarmusch's use of soundtrack points toward a musical style not to be built upon foregrounded musical characteristics, yet nevertheless evoking the viewer's attention. In this discussion, foregrounded matter stands for features placed in the soundscape in such a way that they draw attention – accompanied melodies, emphasized harmonic sequences, distinctively articulated motives upon which a song is built and structured. Regardless of its background-oriented and even atmospherical musical traits, The Limits of Control channels our attention toward the songs. This is due to the rudimentary plot, and to placement of music where the narrative action is not important.

Jarmusch himself has put that his role is sometimes more one of a scenic rather than a musician.24 Therefore, he works in the background of musical process, sometimes leaving the composition of melodies and harmonies to others, and rather applying sounds of a specific timbre to the mix.25 In this case, referring to timbres without exact pitch designations makes

21 Piazza, Jim Jarmusch, 83–84, after Schafer, “New Sounds: Jozef van Wissem and Jim Jarmusch.” 22 Sqürl World, “Bad Rabbit: The Limits of Control.” 23 Aside from the soundtrack suitablity of the songs, Nick Neyland of Pitchfork suggests that Sqürl's Pink Dust from EP 1 resembles another song, abundantly featured in The Limits of Control, Boris' Farewell. Compare Nick Neyland, “Sqürl EP,” Pitchfork, May 20, 2013, https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18077-squrl-squrl- ep/ 24 Piazza, Jim Jarmusch, 83–84, after Schafer and Jarmusch, “New Sounds,” ep. 3256. Scenic is a film crew member responsible for surface treatment on the set, such as painting an imitation of a certain material, for example. 25 Compare his recording with Jozef van Wissem. “The Mystery of Heaven,” Sacred Bones Records [SBR-079] 2012, digital audio streaming.

sense because Jarmusch has explictly stated that he uses the electric guitar more as a noise generator.26

My task is to dispute the position that these songs make no sense outside film and that they require an understanding through recognition of familiar patterns, through imposing a meaning on them. As an alternative, I claim that what nevertheless is dependent on visuals of The Limits of Control is an initial discovery of the music's proper meaning. Rather than altering or imposing it, the visuals prevent us from making sense of the music metaphorically. Thus, one can listen to it in a way that has been intended by Jarmusch and his collaborators.

Proximities are especially prone to disregarding: monotonous repetition of chords and melodic fragments – or harmonic overtones as an inherent proximity of pitch, sometimes termed timbre. By way of the absence of a linear narrative, using a recurrence of similar events, The Limits of Control inclines to the lowered sensibility of the viewer, only to raise the sensibility of the film's listener. The soundtrack-like quality of music, I argue, is a pervasive factor in this film. It means that due to the effects of fading in- and out- of the songs used, as well as by the utilization of the drone in almost all of the chosen case studies, each song gives an impression to be a part of a larger whole. This thesis, however, states that such a bond of coherence bases on the similar structure of individual songs, on their distribution of expresive musical means.27 The film case studies can be ascribed to genres. The classification is only an endeavour to illustrate the music in question, and does not play a role in the argument.

Song Title Performer Genre

Sea Green Sea Bad Rabbit Neo-Psychedelia

Boris Fuzzy Reactor Neo-psychedelia with Michio Kurihara Contemporary Rock Blood Swamp Sunn O))) with Boris Drone Metal

You on the Run The Black Angels Neo-Psychedelia

26 Jarmusch, “Board to Death,” YouTube video, 13:02, posted by "EarthQuakerDevices," January 31, 2018, time cue: 1:30: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvoGlcLwPIk 27 As in Branigan, “Soundtrack in Mind,” 51, the idea of listening to the objects not signhted belongs to Rudolf Arnheim and his blind hearing. According to Branigan, Arnheim envisages an unexlopred art of blind hearing.

Bad Rabbit, Boris, Sunn O))), and The Black Angels all belong to contemporary rock genre. Rather than inventing a groundbreaking, new musical expression, the genre withdraws into what has been there all along – sound.28 Repeatedly, the literature treats contemporary rock as a response to an intesive genre emergence in the last decade of the twentieth century. The dense stylistic invention – in part also a matter of musical marketing rather than expressive invention – corresponded to departure of the bands like Oasis and Blur from their local scenes into larger commercial environment.29 The term indie nevertheless continued to denote smaller-scale record label productions with a limited market reach, and hence musical exclusivity. During the nineties, indie rock began to produce subgenres, such as post-rock, space-rock, and lo-fi, and featured experimentation with electronica.30 Given the recent historical context, it seems logical that contemporary rock does not try to revive older genres. However, the thesis case studies feature an exception, since The Black Angels represent a revival of the garage sound, and sixties' psychedelia.31

The psychedelic in musical neo-psychedelia refers to a strong power of the songs to immerse the listeners along the entire hearing spectrum, and to present multiple complex instrument parts at the same time. The resulting texture is dense, and due to a heavy use of effects, especially reverb and pitch manipulation, the complexity all of a sudden loses its distinctive textural meaning, and rather comes across as a simplistic sound experience driven by either a recurring drum beat pattern, or the monotonous bass line. Hence, the term denotes blurring the relative complexity of the texture in ample use of sound effects, which provokes an analogy of psychedelic music with indulging in the related psychactive substances, prominent at the inception of psychedelic music in the late sixties.

Drone metal is a musical style with the prominency of heavily distorted guitar sound, usually lacking regular meter. Tempo is extremely slow. Vocals, if they are featured, are either growled or screamed. The statement by Owen Coggins is very illustrative: “Slow to the point of tense stasis, tracks extend to the limits of recording media, and performances stratch beyond the

28 Crauwels, “Contemporary Rock,” MusicMap, [2016], https://musicmap.info/ 29 Bennett and Stratton, Britpop, 2010, 93. 30 “Indie Rock,” Explore: Indie Rock | AllMusic, [2011], https://www.webcitation.org/5wTaUVdId?url=http://www.allmusic.com/explore/style/d2687 31 See Crauwels, “Contemporary Rock,” 2016.

endurance of some audience members: minimalist structures at maximum volume.”Furthermore, Coggins situates drone metal around the bands Sunn O))), Om, and Earth.32

The chosen case studies are constructed not so much upon the parameters of melody, harmony, or motivic development, but rather feature repetitive rhythmical and motivic character, are timbrally diverse and multilayered, often without a clear delineation of which layer – an instrumental part, for instance – is emphasised.

Timbre is therefore a crucial concept to keep in mind when discussing such musical expression. In this thesis, it is theorised both with regard to philosophical treatment of the term by Gritten33 and with regard to empirical approach in music psychology, especially evocation of the research by McAdams and Giordano.34 The enquiry's references to McAdams and Giordano serve as a signpost to possible empirical elaboration of this research. Indeed, the motivation to produce a new theoretical framework grows entirely from a speculative thought to open this thesis. The forthcoming case study analyses revolve around interpretation – both of how timbre and noise can be thought and the interpretation of the music itself. A crucial part of thinking music in the chosen case studies is the proposal of a new concept, the so-called minoritarian music. The minoritarian quality relates to a book by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Envisaged as a literary trait, minority in the book nevertheless fits the scope of my research. Firstly, Deleuzoguattarian minor involves losing-sense of language via word or phrase repetition – “losing sense” as an abandonment of prevously established meaning and a pursuit of a new one. Secondly, political impact of minor literature – itself a product of diasporas – applies to withdrawal from cinematic plot towards music, which is difficult to grasp without reconsidering a question as political as that of what is noise. Thus, minoritarian music is relevant as a scrutiny of what and whom one should listen to. Thirdly, the word minoritarian corresponds to aridity, poverty of expression, present both in minor literature and, I argue, in what I term minoritarian music. However, minoritarian music stems from case study analyses, and not from theorizing on the groundwork by Deleuze and Guattari.

Throughout the thesis, noise is used to acknowledge and theorize the very timbral aspect of this music. Thinking about noise brings us to the emancipation of that which is considered an

32 Coggins, Transforming Detail into Myth: Indescribable Experience and Mystical Discourse in Drone Metal” Global Metal Music and Culture […] (New York: Routledge, 2017): 312, 315. 33 Gritten, “Depending on Timbre.” 34 McAdams, Giordano, “The Perception of Musical Timbre.”

interference to the signal: imagine, for example, Bach's corale awash in electric guitar distortion; some will say that the distortion was an inappropriate addition that wrecked the piece's expressive intention. Despite taking it for disruption, one can reflect on noise as an agency that allows us to question the models according to which we understand music. If there are no models applicable to a certain combination of sounds, then this does not mean that the combination is nonsensical. Rather, it shows that the music in question bases on different principles.

2 Noise and Recognition

In his book Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts, Douglas Kahn defines noise as a non-musical phenomenon, which can provoke and stand for thinking, or provide a groundwork for it.35 In contrast, my endeavour is to recontextualise noise in music where noise is not (yet) accepted as a valid artistic expression.36 Rather, my goal is to provide an understanding of noise as a formative quality of the music that is pushed aside as inferior in its presupposed support of another expressive medium. I am interested in noisy music that is deemed explicitly functional – cinematic music. My task is to perceive noise as a musical element, and to show how it can create music without embracing functionality.

If noise is considered to be “that constant grating sound generated by the movement between the abstract and the empirical,”37 the abstract is a way of reducing the noisiness of the message – discerning that signal fraction left intact from it. However, noise itself could constitute a message. For the message to be perceived, the unacknowledged onthology of noise has to be distinguished from undesirable interference. It seems that the definiton of noise does not make any sense, if it only implies disregarding. In the end, all distributions of sound are somehow meaningful, the question is only who or what acknowledges them.

35 Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat (Cambridge: MIT, 1999), 25–30. 36 Accordingly, the thesis does not deal with musique concrète and forms of electronic music that feature artificially generated sounds, because noise as non-signifying sound has already been deemed their constituing element: “One thing that remained tenaciously extramusical, however, was what was usually called imitation. However it may have been invoked past or present – noise, sound, reproduction, representation, meaning, semiotics – the primarily sonic has been recuperated into music with relative ease while significant sound has met with great resistance.” Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat, 102, commenting on the development of mid-twentieth century European and North American musical avant-garde. 37 Ibidem, 25.

The film music used in this thesis, given the broadened definition of music as minoritarian provided in the next chapters, largely depends on accepting noise as a discoverable, not ignorable entity. This seems to be one of the ways to think the chosen case studies beyond cinematic functionality. Even though all film music, no matter if it has been written exclusively for a film or not, is embedded in cinematic narrative, film is not neccessarily a skeleton for the songs to tie upon. The Limits of Control provides a superposition of meaning to its music, only for the music to be able to convey its own meaning. Consequently, the film is not only a medium any more, but becomes a way of listening. Songs that above all feature rich arrays of timbre, may at first be treated as music with atmospherical function. However, when the visuals have no narrative action to offer, claims of atmospherical music are refuted. This is because the songs acquire good part of the attention that is normally targeted at the visuals, and hence do not fit the concept of “unheard” atmospherical music.38

The second way of thinking this particular cinematic music outside of its functional value is to acknowledge the creation of musical noise. Far from being only a random sensual occurrence, noise is also created by excessive repetition. When a motive is repeated for too many times, its conventional meaning thus heavily overstated, it becomes noisy. Its appearance no longer serves to quench our symbolical desires of discerning the rhythm, melody, texture, or the musical instrument involved. The readily recognizable messages have come across. Now, it is time for the ones yet to be recognized. Similarly, noise is created by a sound sequence, coherently bound together, where recognitions of individual sounds undermine each other, thus yielding a perception that we commonly label noise.

In the text A Deleuzian Noise/ Excavating the Body of Abstract Sound, Sean Higgins discusses “the problem of an abstract structural model aimed at signal recognition: it [the model] defines noise as its outside—as corruption or non-signal—and thus fails to account for its signal's immanence to a more essential noise.”39 Inverting the relationship between noise and signal means to perceive what is said to be a signal – a sentence spoken in one of the world's languages, or a musical phrase by Beethoven – as an essential noise.40 Conversely, the remaining, unrecognized noise – for instance a sound with no specific pitch or rhythmical identity, but rather timbre-based – is now heard as a signal.

38 The matter is discussed in greater detail in the subchapter Towards Minoritarian Music. 39 Higgins, “A Deleuzian Noise,” 52. 40 Ibidem, 52.

In this thesis, noise is treated as a phenomenon not only to offer something that transcends recognition, offering us sensory experience that changes our way of perceiving. In addition, it is also discussed as a disregarded entity, in order to highlight the thin line between the acceptable and the disregarded in music. Timbre carries a central role even in unrecognized noise. The contact between music and linguistic discourse thus shifts to concern timbre. As a consequence, the emancipation of the unrecognized noise will base on our sensuality rather than rationality. However, the thought as a foundation of Western metaphysical system41 can then hardly be preserved as a central tool of the discourse on noisy music.42 The problem is important because thought is to a great extent signal recognition. Departing from disctintively lettered discourse centering on music theory, then acknowledging a stance envisaged by Roland Barthes as the insufficiency of the adjective in discussing music,43 thinking noise becomes a description – and not even an accurate one. Moreover, recognition does not limit itself to what Higgins calls “the absolute difference of empirically resounding sound as given to the listener's senses,”44 but also overarches to that which fails to be recognized according to characteristics of its empirical existence. How can one tell when the object that we recognize is really there? In this thesis, I term the recognition of something that is not actually there – or more precisely, an imposition of meaning to a certain object – a metaphor.

Only by discussing how the unrecognized or what is beneath metaphorical overposition is created, we can avoid both recognition as a driving force of thought in general and metaphorical overposing. The creation of noise always begins with a sound that can – as everything – readily be interpreted metaphorically. A temporal fragment of any sound can always be suppressed by a metaphorical imposition. However, when more sounds are concatenated over a period of time, their recognitions undermine each other, creating an awareness of noise. If the fragment in question is subsequently repeated over and over again, the combination of partial recognitions is quickly considered senseless by the listening subject. Similarly, if the recognized sonority is succeeded by a non-repetitive heterogeneous sound sequence, the recognition of uniquely the first sonority is still considered senseless. This is the

41 Ibidem, 53. 42 Regardless of the fact that the question can be exxpanded to include most disciplines, not only music and musicology, the focus of this work is to scrutinise the understanding of music, hence the limitation in focus. 43 In Barthes, the predicate is even said to function as a protection of the imginary of the subject (hence of the music, exposed to discussions which subjectify it) not to be lost. It seems, however, that the imaginary cannot be compromised at all, given that the flawed functionality of the adjective. See Barthes, “The Grain of the Voice,” Image, Music, Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977): 179. 44 Higgins, “A Deleuzian Noise,” 53.

case when the sonority belongs to sounds concatenated after it. By belonging to a concatenation, I mean an uniterrupted flow of sound, or that the sound is a part of the same crescendo or decrescendo, or that we consider it to come from the same source, for instance a musical instrument.

Due to gradual emergence of any noise, the thesis' chapters on minoritarian music involve considerations of repetition, fade-ins and -outs in cinematic soundtrack, and tonal attack. In addition to describing how music can linger, the common denominator of minoritarian music is a transparent, minimalist texture of clearly articulated monotonous metre. Such textural distribution is governed by timbre, which evades clear recognition by preceeding other tone properties (pitch and rhythmical beat), presenting itself as a process – a determinator of what happens after the attack.

On Timbre

We now understand timbre to have two broad characteristics that contribute to the perception of music. [...] (2) it is one of the primary perceptual vehicles for the recognition, identification, and tracking over time of a sound source (singer's voice, clarinet, set of carillon bells) [...].45

Timbre is the first characteristic to be heard – or performed, present before a pitch is clearly articulated, or a beat in rhythmical pulse is established.46 It is also present as the sonority continues with a more or less clear pitch and/or rhythmical identity. However, timbre as the chronologically first sonic characteristic is not necessarily the same as timbre which ensues along with pitch, rhythm and harmony, hence the distinction between the attack and sustain portions of a sound. A mediator between our hearing and listening, it is the most elementary quality of sound. It can itself define the listener if he becomes aware of the impact that the present musical moment has on the immediately forthcoming musical future – for instance, how a specifically articulated tone defines the coming phrase. Alternatively, timbre remains unaccounted for in the act of hearing, when the sonority only permeates our immediate

45 McAdams, Giordano, “The Perception of Musical Timbre,” 1. 46Gritten, “Depending on Timbre,” 6: “Timbre points to its own future, spiralling back into itself, into the attack portion of its spectral envelope. Lacking duration, evading measurement, it is the start of sound, and can only start again and again.”

perceptive present. Because it is the first sound characteristic to be perceived, it determines what happens immediately after. The sound just before pitch and beat are perceived is said to be a part of the same unit as the ensuing tonal and rhythmic properties. Thus the attack determines the matter to arrive next, even though it may be a perceptually distinctive sound.47

A limited set of timbral characteristics and their designations has been proposed by Ciro Scotto.48 Even if the classification primarily applies to electric guitar sound, it can also be used on other musical instruments and human vocals, along with the application to timbral alterations in post-production mastering. Pursuing an innovative structural view on rock and metal, Scotto departs from the adaptation of contour theory by Robert Morris. The latter stipulates that any characteristic, ordered into a row between two extremes (low to high, transparent to dense, monophonic to multiphonic, and so on), with its elements defined relatively to one another without exact intervals between them, can be represented in contour space. Contour space is set by two axes: the first features a succession of particular elements one chooses to compare, the other their temporal succession. The latter, a time axis, is not measured in temporal metric units, but features only a numbering of events.49

Primarily, contour theory was made for melodic analysis. Contour space elements were termed c-pitches.50 However, contour spaces can be used for any sequence of musical articulations which can be relatively distinguished from each other. Because timbre is hard to describe by adjective in absolute terms,51 contour theory is a practical resource for framing different

47A projection which stems from an attack, clearly, means that we recognize the sonorous characteristic of the attack, imposing it on a timbre which “comes next.” As such, timbral recognition is a limitation in sound perception and reproduction. Contrary to Gritten (see the note directly above), I argue that timbre is not a text to be projected from the attack onto the upcoming timbre, but rather a power trajectory, departing from the attack into the listener's anticipation. Anticipation can be questioned, scrutinised, even negated. In contrast, projection determines what is to come, and it makes no sense to deny it since it is already haunting the present moment. 48 Ciro Scotto, “The Structural Role of Distortion,” 178–199. 49 Elizabeth West Marvin, “A Generalized Theory of Musical Contour,” (PhD diss., University of Rochester, 1988), 66–67. 50 Ibidem, 66: ʻMorris defines contour space (c-space) as a type of musical space “consisting of elements arranged from low to high disregarding the exact intervals between the elements.”17 These elements are termed “c- pitches” (“cps”) and are “numbered in order from low to high, beginning with 0 up to n-1,” where n equals the cardinality of the segment, and where the “intervallic distance between the cps is ignored and left undefined.”18ʼ References in the original, after Morris, Composition [1987], 340 and 26, respectively. As can be discerned from the proposed discrepancy between low and high and from the fact that contour space elements were termed c-pitches, contour was first seen as a melodic characeristic to be used in the application of the theory for melodic analysis. 51 Reading Roland Barthes, the adjective is not merely an attempt to render the subjectivity of music, but rather a manner of the subject's imaginary to protect itself. Uttering adjectives, and, according to Barthes, assembling

timbres in a musical work or even accross different musical works. As such, a timbral c-space enriches the adjectival description of timbre. Therefore, it allows us to “read” the music subjectively.

Focusing on timbral aspects of distortion, Scotto derives a concept of dist-space [distortion- space] from dyn-space [dynamics-space], a contour rendering of perceived loudness, in order to demonstrate the structural role of distortion in songs by Metallica, Korn, Dream Theater and The Pixies. His dist-space schemas of the songs show a believable trajectory of musical development, which is led by shifts in distortion types. However, a problem remains regarding more precise definition of sound as clean, overdrive, crunch, distortion, and CS/N,52 respectively, the labels he uses as distortion region specifications.53 To discuss the matter, he consults a statement by James Hetfield, one of the guitarists of Metallica. “Distortion always starts with the amp . . . you can recognize Marshall distortion in an instant; that's why I shied away from that and went with MESA/Boogies.”54 As Scotto also comments, distortion is not merely a matter of manipulating amplifier settings, but equally about studio post-production. Hence, the only possible approach to its classification is aural analysis, rather than research into the workings of the sound source, which is processed by too numerous and nuanced alterations of the original signal. Initially, one has to decide upon the guitar and playing technique, then on which sound effects, amplifier, and speaker cabinet to use, not to mention post-production sound editing. For this reason, I make use of the spectrograms,55 in order to visually represent different timbral structures. According to the classification, derived from listening to music and reading spectrograms, selected excerpts are discussed as featuring different distortion characteristics. Specifically, the terms overdrive and distortion are used most commonly and in accordance with figure 1. In addition, the term feedback is also used to

discoussions on music by creating epithets, is therefore an overshadowing of what music really is. Barthes, “The Grain of the Voice,” 179. 52 CS/N denotes a pulse wave or noise, a signal space completely saturated sound. Scotto, “The Structural Role of Distortion,” 185. 53 He proposes that distortion designations, present in dist-space, be not only labeled verbally, but also shown mathematically. For this end, he uses a function F(A) = D, where A represents amplitude and D stands for distortion. Clearly, the intensity of distortion rises from clean to CS/N, and somehow distortion could be measured more objectively by using amplitude data. See, for instance, the abstract of Scotto, “The Structural Role: “An application of Robert Morris's generalization of countour theory, dist-space couples sequential time to a sequentially ordered dimension of discrete distortion regions whose foundation is the distortion function F(A)=D and spectral analysis.” A second determinng factor would then be a spectral analysis. 54 Scotto, “The Structural Role of Distortion,” 179, after “Guitar Player: Distortion,” 1992, 59. 55 The spectrograms were generated by Overtone Analyzer from Sygyt Software.

describe the sound produced by electric guitar amplifier, which is again collected by the guitar pickups, forming a loop of ever-raising volume and modulation in overtone structure of the sound.56

Figure 1 Scotto, “The Structural Role,” 184: the five types of distortion. Apart from classification through distortion type, timbre will be approached in terms of instrumental layerings, and its articulation. Instrumental layers will be discerned by attentive listening. However, instrumental performance can shift to the timbral aspect of sound when two instrumental parts are impossible to discerned individually. Fuzzy Reactor by Boris and Michio Kurihara, and Blood Swamp by Boris and Sunn O))) are relevant case studies to feature such amalgamation into unitary timbre.

Thus we touch upon the problem of what to appropriate timbre designation to. Whether one acknowledges it or not, timbre is always prone to be ascribed an unclear identity. It is often considered simply as the sound source itself – a clarinet timbre, for example.57 However, typical timbres are rare, and empirical sound almost always diverts from the ideally sounding clarinet, if there even is such an instrument. There is always a trait present in the sound that sets it apart from its alleged source identity.

The problem manifests when sound cannot be reliably interpreted using source designation. Instruments from the same family are prone for such confusion, as are instrument parts which employ electronic sound processing. Sound alteration can bring them close to other, source- designated timbres. For example, an electric guitar tone can strikingly resemble human voice.

56 Hartmann, Principles of Musical Acoustics (New York: Springer, 2013), 185. 57 Oxford Music Online. s. v. “Timbre(i),” by Murray Campbell, acessed 5 July 2018, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo- 9781561592630-e-0000027973?rskey=4413yx&result=1

Furthermore, the very idea of source is evasive. After all, music composition is often about envisaging sound yet unheard. Musical discourse, however, cannot establish an identification with such an internal timbral source. Concerning the notion of minoritarian music which is to be established in this thesis, its timbral trait is rather about defying the identification with the sound source. As an alternative, timbres should rather be heard as amalgams of both sound and sonic source identities. Consequently, sonorities, which have priorly been listened to as predominantly musical (song timbres, for instance), lose their distinction to sonorities normally claimed to be non-musical, such as cinematic sound effects.

Is timbre a noise, or noise a timbre? Considering the power of identification of musical instruments that timbre carries regardless of its empirical denotation proposed here, the second option seems more plausible. However, what applies for a series of sounds, each of them recognised differently and the recognitions showing incompatibility one to the other, can also be understood as a specific timbre of the particular sound combination. If concatenation of sounds is disruptive to our recognising agencies, therefore producing an idea of the unrecognizable, timbre is in itself noise.

However, since the timbre seems to be the closest musical concept to noise, it seems valid to start and buid this discussion on it. Not neccessarily to disasemble the case studies in order to distinguish diferent timbres, or to perform any similar analysis. Rather, timbre's determining of the sound to arrive immediately after, as well as of next song excerpts in film can further be extended for the agency to make an impact on the music that is to be made, in general. Here, the paradox ensues: for the timbre to affect music so profoundly, it has to be accumulated into noise. Noise in itself is unrecognizable, and often disregarded. The disregard may not assume an absolute form, but may nevertheless include an aesthetic judgement of this noisy music. At this moment, the work of Deleuze and Guattari comes into play – discussing minor literature, they explicitly write about the bareness, aridity, and poverty of language.

3 Toward Minoritarian Music

On Minor Literature

The term minor literature has been invented by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. An art expression, it appears when an author is forced to write in a foreign language. Not only is the language foreign. Let us imagine that for the writer, it represents a mode of estrangement, inhibiting his expression. It is unsuitable to produce a literary work. However, the mother language has perhaps atrofied due to years of neglect during his expatriation. Along with other reasons irrelevant to this discussion, he is left with no choice but to use a language foreign to his art.

In consequence, the writing adapts. Ample, but estranging foreign vocabulary shrinks to accomodate the culture of the diasporic community the author is part of. Some meanings are forgotten, others freshly imposed. Furthermore, personal concerns of fiction protagonists become increasingly bound to an expression deeply rooted in any minority – a political striving. In addition, it delivers a collective utterance of the respective minority and hence abandons the linguistic structure of the majority. Minor literature establishes a collective assemblage of enunciation, which withdraws from endorsing individual subjects as fiction narrators and/or characters.58 Instead, minority writing conceives crowds, which function as agents of narrative development and carriers of identity. Often, they are engendered as entire communities, as in works by Franz Kafka, chosen as the primary reference point by Deleuze and Guattari.

“Almost every word I write jars up against the next, I hear the consonants rub leadenly against each other and the vowels sing an accompaniment like Negroes in a minstrel show.”59 Aside from acknowledging its expressive shift, Deleuze and Guattari speak of their main case study, the literature of Franz Kafka, as minor music: it is “a language that moves head over heels and away.”60 It features non-articulated sounds overcoming the importance of articulated, symbolic ones, pulling the expresion from conventional sense into utterance that is hard to grasp. The meaning is deterritorialised. Still inherent in the word as an empirical entity, it has left the linguistic framework. Such expression forms a new core of the literary language that Klaus Wagenbach defined by incorrect use of prepositions, overuse of pronouns of that which refers

58 Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 18. 59 Ibidem, 23, after Kafka, Diaries, 15 December 1910, 33. 60 Ibidem, 26.

to them, multiplication and succession of adverbs, use of pain-filled connotations, and significantly, a key role of accent as forming the internal tensions of words and a specific placement of vowels and consonants as a part of an internal discordance.61 To sum up, language begins to lose representative function.

It is very telling that minor literature is defined in negative terms. In an accessible historical insight in the emergence of expressive minority in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, one reads about deterritorialisations of all sorts. Why do Deleuze and Guattari write of Albert Einstein as providing “deterritorialization of the representation of the universe,” or of the Alban Berg's “deterritorialization of musical representation?”62 Why do they speak of the refrain's withdrawal instead of seeing new territories, new knowledge? One can assume that despite the dream of becoming-minor,63 minor literature is caught between having withdrawn from the symbolical use of language, and partly remembering symbolical linguistic meanings left behind. As such, minority is not an oppositional, symetrical Other to the major, but rather features an imprint of the major to sustain its own subversiveness, becoming-minor. Moreover, there is an opportunity to read minor literature as a departure from the literature of societally recognized “great authors” – as something different and perhaps not as well articulated.

Toward Sound

When minority authors reshape the language of the majority for themselves, a shift of meaning takes place. A word, for example, changes its lexical value, its meaning abandoned. It does not merely transfer to a new significance. Rather, there is a time in between, as the deterritorialisation of articulated sound leads into reemancipation of the sound as such – noise. For a shift in the meaning of the word is also an awareness of its noisy nature, which endures even when a new significance is imposed. This is why “[t]he sound or the word that traverses

61 Ibidem, 23. 62 Ibidem, 24 63 The term becoming stands for defying the binaries, according to which our communities are ordered: the binaries of male – female, white – black, adult – child, human – animal, and so on. Rather than contesting one of their respective poles – male, white, and adult, for instance – one should change the identities that these designations stand for. The idea of male or female is thus somewhere beyond the binary's instituted characteristics. Binaries of abstractions can also be found. One of them is that of major and minor. I argue that relativisation of this binary, which would logically result in becoming-minor, is never entirely fulfilled because of our linguistic symbolism rooted so deeply both psychologically and socially.

this new deterritorialization no longer belongs to a language of sense, even though it derives from it, nor is it an organized music or song, even though it might appear to be.”64

The sound of the transitory moment, which is deprived of sense, requires another infusion of meaning, different from the new expression of minor literature. Since it is still susceptible for the creation of metaphors, parts of it become personalised and their sonic characteristics compared to generally recognized agencies. Metaphorical agency originates from the shift in linguistic meaning from major to minor. Should the transition proceed without an intermediary stage, there would be no need for such a metaphor, which Kafka considers a redundancy. He aspired to write without metaphors, yet the tendency seemed to manifest in his diary.65 After all, it is a widely-spread manner of understanding and explaining – so wide in fact, that it can transcend the lettered language and enter other means of expression, among them the combination of music and moving image.

Even though the metaphor does illuminate a part of the noisy nature of minor literature, parts remain which cannot be grasped by it – simply because they have not been recognized, but disregarded. In this case, it is beneficial to employ a way of expression which does not directly address the noisy nature of sound – a moving image, for instance, which does not synchronise completely to the rhythm of the minor utterance. By a seeming incompatibility, new aspects, so far evasive to our recognition, can be acknowledged. Simultaneously, minor utterance is protected from simplified explanations: the other expressive medium provides a reading of the first. Thus, minor utterance is not merely confined to grounding a metaphor.

By reterritorialising articulated sound fragments in metaphor, understanding is indeed lost as a consequence of a complete deterritorialisation of sound as an empirical occurrence. In addition, articulated sound merely derives from sense, but does not contain it. Language, displaced from sense in such a way, “no longer finds its value in anything but an accenting of the word, an inflection.”66 In his diary, Kafka writes about losing his “useless head for a moment,” while he focuses on a short word – the mutual exclusivity of sense and nonsense is a defining trait of the minor literature – what is meaningful in it is the beginning and end of each phrase, an inception of the coexistence of sense and nonsense, and the repetitive nature of

64 Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 21. 65 Compare ibidem, 22: ʻWe are no longer in the situation of an ordinary, rich language where the word dog, for example, would directly designate an animal and would apply metaphorically to other things (so that one could say "like a dog"). Diaries, 1921: "Metaphors are one of the things that makes me despair of literature."ʼ 66 Ibidem, 21.

language on the line of flight. Deleuze uses child behaviour as an example how phrase repetition makes an escape from sense.

The characteristic that I am drawn to in the minor literature is its aridity, or poverty. The two terms stand for a tendency to write it off as something irrrelevant, carrying no value – a valueless art. What such judegement is usually based on also belongs to the arid, or poverty. It concerns expression, and designates a subfield of the banal. Since the banal in music is not only rudimentary style, but can also assume complex, elaborate forms, the banal and arid/poor do not overlap entirely, the latter being parts of the former. What is banal on the poverty and aridity in minor is constant repetition which highlights sound as an empirical phenomenon – the repetition of vowels, words, phrases. What is termed arid/poor is the process of losing linguistic sense.

Minoritarian Music

With conventional meaning of the major, symbolic language redefined, a momentum might appear when in minor literature the lapse of stable symbolic interpretation allows for deflection from styles of conventional signification towards those of explicit sonority of word.

A dream of “consonants [that] rub leadenly against each other and the vowels [that] sing an accompaniment like Negroes in a minstrel show”67 is a step towards the emancipation of noise. The noisy matter is acknowledged, but still treated metaphorically. Minstrel show, which Kafka imposes on it, is a political statement, making the workings of minor language grotesque as if they were depictions of the American black community in the beginning of the 19th century.

In cinematic music of The Limits of Control, the power of the metaphor rapidly fades. Illustrative potential supposedly present in objects with similar characteristics – a fluid river flow expressing a “fluid” melodic trajectory, for instance – is superposed by cinematic picture. Music fails to be listened to metaphorically because the visual narration of cinema itself has become this very illustration. Hence, the film's music is an act of resignation, a withdrawal from metaphorical affordance, a retreat to the sound itself. Cinematic image is therefore a political dream of minoritarian music, it is a dream of the circumstance which even allows for the affirmation of minoritarian expression. Hence, this dream is active, because it acts as a

67 Ibidem, 23.

highlight towards musical minority, or rather, keeps the metaphorical imposition of meaning at bay.

Minoritarian music68 reflects upon its simple harmonic, melodic, and rhythmic patterns by centering on noise, which manifests on different levels. One of them is timbre. Abundantly present guitar distortion, however, is not only an important feature of the songs individually. It also seems that distortion is used with the other musical parametres (especially harmony and melody) being inhibited. Hence, it appears to be the highlighted trait of Bad Rabbit, Boris, and Sunn O))) songs discussed below. Another level of noise occurrence is a matter of perception. Minoritarian music involves such succession of sounds that challenges models, according to which one normally listens. If it features pitches and chords, they are excessively repeated. Repetition gradually undermines any sense in our listening recognition of a particular tone or chord in the sequence. Instead, we are compelled to find other listening approaches. With regard to minoritarian music, this approach is an appreciation of sonority as such.69 To sum up, the obvious guitar distortion noise relates to the noise which is only uncovered by the emergence of a new listening focus. Repetition is noisy inasmuch it aims our listening attention to the sonorous nature of this music, which we would in other contexts – in listening to European classical musical genres – consider a noise, a disruption. Furthermore, it is not only due to repetition that noise can be perceived. I argue that any musical trait that we cannot understand is, as a consequence, reduced to sound. Hence, minoritarian music is a music yet to be understood, and this is why starting to discover it by appreciating noise is logical.

At the same time, minoritarian music is not only an expression that we do not grasp. This would be too broad a designation for a specific concept. Far from only being a catalyst of listening to sound as noise, it also plays with depriving the listener of the recognizable musical codes. As the example of filmic use of You on the Run will show, the more meaningful, thematically diverse and rhythmically developed instrumental part is indeed placed into the background of

68 The choice of the adjective minoritarian was governed by a specific meaning of the word minor in musical context, which has nothing to do with minoritarian music. Apart from than, the opted-for term is not a synonim of the Deleuzian minor. Rather, it shares some conceptual traits with it. 69 The particular regard for the sound in music also corresponds to listening differently to timbre. Given the repetitive structure of minoritarian music and hence the acknowledged noise, timbre as identifying sound with a specific musical instrument is not compatible with the mindset that appreciates noise. Rather, appreciating noise means altering the notion of timbre to address the empirical sound, not only sound identities of particular instruments. Cf. this thesis, 23–24.

the song's soundspace. Therefore, the concept is not only a representation of something other, unknown in music, but it also stands for a distancing from known musical expressions.

For all the listed traits, which need not be present at the same time or all in one example, minoritarian music is prone to be disregarded as banal. Regardless, I argue that cinematic placement of minoritarian music plays a role of preserving the sonorous meaning and that there is something to preserve in the first place. However, the placement also works toward inaudibility as one of the principles in classical Hollywood practice of music editing, described by Claudia Gorbman. Two of the norms are “inaudibility” and signifying emotion.70 The Limits of Control appear to make music inaudible at first to invoke an affect, with the affect preconditioning subsequent attention to music as texture. I term such close succession of different functionalities atmospherical.

The storyline is made of ordinary activities, such as walking, sitting, observing. Where the act itself would appear dry and meaningless, music is often inserted. This becomes particularly clear when the contacts of Lone Man appear. Arrival of each is underlined by an excerpt from Boris' songs Farewell, or Untitled.71 Given that simple ordinary actions performed by contacts while arriving to meet the loner do not immerse the viewer into the film, Jarmusch can be understood as stopping short of making music completely inaudible. Instead, he makes it surface to the foreground of the overall filmic expression. Ample listening effort given to The Limits of Control soundtrack examples points to a lack of significant visual action in the film. Far from saying that Jarmusch does not refine his visual expression, music is how his script- writing proocess for the film starts: “[w]hen I write I'm listening to things that inspire me in the direction of whatever world I'm imagining. Boris, and Sunn O))), and Earth were really instrumental in me just finding a place in my head...”72 I argue that understanding these music excerpts as inaudible soundtrack elements is not valid. With the visuals deflecting the viewer's attention toward music, music cannot possibly be unheard, since it becomes the center, not the margin, of attention. Therefore, the atmospherical interpretation of it is only a theoretical imposition. While listening to the songs as atmospherical seemingly reduces them to simpler

70 Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 73. The other principles are: invisibility, narrative cueing, continuity, unity, and a discretion to violate any of the listed, if it serves another principle on the list. 71 Boris, albums Pink, 2005, and Smile, 2008. 72 Licht, Jarmusch, Jim Jarmusch unedited.

expressive structures,73 the focus on the music nevertheless affirms the perception of this film music primarily as an accumulation of sound. To sum up, the atmospherical label is only an act of evading the undiscovered noisy meaning of minoritarian music.

Even further distancing from known musical codes is attested in Jarmusch's personal combination of songs in the film. Having tied two song excerpts together by pasting the sound of car sirens between them, for example, he also encouraged the listener to cease using one particular manner of listening explicitly related to one of the songs. Rather, he made the audience listen to the entire collage through appreciation of sound. Similarly, the sonorous dimension of music is altered by superposition of speech, or inclinations in the texture which provoke us to listen to the sound, rather than its formal organisation.

Why minoritarian music? Contrary to Deleuzoguattarian ideas on aridity and poverty of literary style, minoritarian music rather gives an impression of expressive poverty as it conceals understandable meaning. However, noise is a timbrally rich phenomenon, far from semantic deficiency. Minoritarian music is minor in that it is becoming-minor. The idea of becoming is a Deleuzian formulation of undoing identities which have been rooted in our culture, but do not entirely correspond to our empirical world. Such identitites form binaries, such as the male – female duality, or those of animal – human, white – black, and so on. Deleuze argues that it makes no sense to suport the other, weaker identity, because it is itself created according to the dominant one. Instead, we have to redefine the state of being regardless of the established contrasts. Minoritarian music is placed between the pole of readily accepted meaning of musical characteristics, and the pole of complete alienation from any convention. It is located in between, moving away from invoking accepted understanding, and raising awareness of such distancing.

73 This statement is inferred from the supposition that subliminal musical perception only works with the performers highlighting simpler musical structuring. Otherwise, I argue that subliminality would become conscious listening.

Minoritarian Music as a Material Imprint

A problem with writing down the soundtrack of The Limits of Control, not to mention countless other similar films, is that the exact timing of the music, along with complex, mostly spontaneous melodic patterns of guitar solos is hardly possible to be accurately notated in any form. Significantly, the music in question is too attached to stylistic traits of tonal harmony,74 widespread time signatures, and instrumentation that inventing a new system of notation would mean to depart from partial clarity that the present system of notation does afford. Even if one devised a method of an accurate graphical and symbolical rendering of the music, this would mean that minoritarian music would lose its cultural influence. When a song is clearly notated, unequivocally put on paper, it is tamed, confined to the archive and hence torn from the immediacy of the life it was meant to live – a life in cinema and most significantly, beyond it. Reduction to a document does not only archive the song physically, but equally so mentally, because the listening can now be carried out through sight-reading, eschewing the need to listen to empirical sound. The translation of song sonority into writing ceases to be a call to action against regarding minor literature and minoritarian music as insignificant, impact-less. In contrast to placement of minoritarian music in cinema, writing the music down means imposing a syntax, recognizing a syntax. Consider, for instance, graphical insularity in the shape of Western note heads, their separation, their characteristic of being rounded up. Such a syntax is profoundly foreign to a good part of music, addressed in this thesis.75 If minoritarian music in cinema profits from cinematic imposition because it disables the simplifying agency of the metaphor, writing it down means that its syntax has been recognized and given to that simplifying metaphor. Furthermore, deterritorialisation of the language into the graphical is at the same time reterritorialisation towards the symbolical. Minoritarian music would not be arid any more, rather a re-collection of symbolical offshoots of the already existent majority in music.

To interpret the way minoritarian music sounds, one has to acknowledge its idiomatic nature. For example, electric guitar playing features ample use of overdrive, string bending, and pitch iteration. Even though putting minoritarian music down to paper inevitably means its reduction to the symbolic, and hence metaphorical representation, this thesis contains notation examples.

74 By tonal, I do not imply the harmonic hierarchy of fifths, but rather a tendency towards a central tone, which acts as an anchor for the musical texture: the central tone need not even be unambiguously central – it could also manifest as a pedal point, a sustained sound, or a occassionally resounding pitch with a disruptive timbre. 75 Obviously, the transcribed examples are notable exceptions.

Yet, these illustrations should not be read not as music in its entirety. Timbre, for instance, is an aspect that remains evasive to communicate. Rather, they show the structure that enables the listener's shift of attention from this structure toward the sound itself.

The first contatct whom Lone Man meets is the violin player. He proposes that wooden musical instruments have a memory – each note that is played on them is inscribed into molecular structure of the material by bringing it into resonance. He relativises the statement immediately after making it, saying “I suppose that as with anything, it is only a problem of perception.”76 Encountering the impasse of non-recognizable texts – which molecular structures clearly are – we are forced to acknowledge an utterance that transcends a mere imprint on humans. Minoritarian music, as any sort of music that leaves imperceptible material traces, also embraces an other way of its textualisation – it exists as a text, but an imperceptible one. Hence, materiality of minoritarian music is not only materiality of sound as material for pitch, melodic, harmonic, rhythmical articulation, but an actual imprint in palpable material. At least, so the film suggests.

76 Jim Jarmusch, dir., The Limits of Control, (2009 [first screening year]; Focus Features), time cue: 0:22:46.

4 Expressions of Minoritarian Music

Repetition and Its Frame

A sequence in The Limits of Control shows Lone Man standing on a terrace overlooking Madrid. He walks toward the edge, and admires the view. After an exchange of short shots, in turn featuring a close-up of his face and zooming into the cityscape, his view becomes blurred. Moments after, when the focus is regained, the view is very similar, but not the same. It has transmuted into a painting by Antonio López – Madrid desde Capitán Haya, a depiction of midday city skyline from 1936. One is only aware that a painting is shown when camera zooms out to film the canvas' frame.

The music of the sequence can be broken into three parts. The first is a repetition of distorted guitar chords (an accompaniment to Lone Man's immersion in the filmed real landscape), the second a distinctly arpeggiated “cleaner” guitar chord (occurring precisely when the focus is regained, a D major triad slightly anticipated by the triad's minor seventh), while the third features a drum entrance, starting at the moment when the frame of the painting becomes visible. We are listening to Sea Green Sea by Bad Rabbit.

The song opens with a repeating chord, played by overdriven electric guitar. Due to the accompanying diegetic sounds (rippling water of a swimming pool, also located on the terrace), the number of repetitions is determined only with difficulty. There is no sense of direction in their musical interpretation, nor is there any articulative difference between them. They establish a line of flight from sense, as if one were repeating a word. Bad Rabbit play with the recurring inflection until it vanishes. After the first sequence of the repeated chord, which loses itself into silence and atmospherical film sounds, another similar row of reiterated chords ensues, but their sonority lingers. The chord sustained, it becomes the background for disparate melodic fragments.

Melodic overpositions on the second repeating chord sequence, when it ceases to repeat and sustains itself, distinctively render the inflection of the tones, the opening of the sound with

fade-in by means of arpeggiated chords, or the electric guitar's volume swell.77 They feature an upbeat quality, a tendency to draw attention to the mere begining of their existence – an “inflection”78 of noticing movement and emotion that accompany both appearance and disappearance of the word.

The correspondence of the focusing out of the actual Madrid skyline visual with the fuzziness of guitar overdrive is an instance of a non-metaphorical imposition of cinematic picture as a deterrent for the metaphor. The sound or musical notation, always in the position to be interpreted verbally, by seeking out analogies with other life objects, is, curiously enough, met with unfocused landscape depiction. What is imposed on the viewer-listener, is thus a landscape devoid of focus, but the sound we should not proclaim as such too easily. Cinematic picture provides a friction between the blurred cityscape and the fuzziness of the distortion in order to make the listener pay attention to the distortion itself. Excessive repetition also helps in this regard. However, I argue that the anachronism between the blurred visual landscape and the traits of overdriven sound is not a condition for appreciating the sound in itself of Sea Green Sea, but only a pointer. There needs to be a specific distribution of repetitive sonorities in place which enables the line of flight from the meaning of music as a combinatory system to the musical meaning as an accumulation of sound. As a basis for the purely sonorous perception of the song, such distribution must be as neutral and transparent as possible. I argue that such frame can be discovered by understanding music and visuals abstractly. The literal frame of the painting the protagonist admires in Reina Sofia should correspond to a certain “framing” in music. This trait is a purely metrical phenomenon which first reflects in the guitar chord repetition, and later on manifests in the similarly pulsating drum beat.

Therefore, I argue that we can attribute the repetition to this abstract, transparent scheme, permeating all of the minoritarian music examples from The Limits of Control. Monotonous repetition of chords and drum beats points to a possible monotonous common denominator of all relevant case studies in this thesis.

77 An electric guitar technique of avoiding the initial atack sound of the note. It involves struming the string without immediately sending the sound to the amplifier, but rather slowly providing the amplifier input signal by means of opening the guitar's volume potentiometer, or volume pedal. The resulting note is deprived of most higher harmonic frequencies. 78 Compare Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 21.

Figure 2: This spectrogram features pitch frequency on vertical axis, and time on horizontal one, with coloration denoting volume: the warmer the colour, the higher it is. The schema is a detail from Bad Rabbit's Sea Green Sea. It shows clearly that musical matter is structured around pitch centers of about 450 and 800 Hz, and that the tones from the two centers repeat in alternation, even though they are present most of the time. The graphic also shows that in fact, the specific pitches keep repeating, or rather, pulsating, since they never entirely die out as sound. This constitutes the repetitive trait of minoritarian music that leads toward the listener's reorientation onto sound rather that melodic, or rhythmic structure. As for the latter, the red marks represent even, constantly recurring drum pattern. The spectrogram was generated by Overtone Analyzer, Sygyt Software.

The relation between the repetitive distorted chords, the distinctly arpeggiated D major guitar chord with an anticipated seventh, and the steady rhythmical pulse of the drums is governed by the editing of the visuals. The sequence of these musical events allows for a connection between rhythmicity of the reiterating chords and the drum beats. The first and second sequences of chords correspond to alternating and constantly zooming shots of Lone Man gazing at the skyline of the city and the view of the skyline itself. After the landscape becomes blurred, and clearer again as painting, the drum beats take off at the moment when the frame of the canvas enters the camera's line of sight. Additionally, we concur that the drum part only makes sense when prepared by the pulsating chord succession. According to what has been written, the respective guitar chords are attributes, along with the similarly pulsating drum beats, to the bare structure of the frame – a musical frame dividing sound into spaces between beats.

I argue that the noisiness of Sea Green Sea is one of symbolic poverty. Juxtaposing noise and pitch, the noise is correlated to the two depictions of Madrid skyline – one actual and one painted. The manner in which the music is applied to either of the two is inert. Sound is a non- intrusive meditative complement to the visuals. As such, the noisiness tends to relativise its diversity, spanning between the actual and the painted skyline. It is not here to provide a multifaceted musical expression, but rather to underline the similarity between the landscape and the painting through poverty of formal musical construction, and through richness of the sound itself. Chord repetitions and repetitions of the drum beat thus connect the two sides of noise – its empirical, timbral aspect, and the aspect of emergence of noise through repetition. The sound thus withdraws from recognized communicative power of music, represented by the D major chord arpeggio.

The cinema is not merely a metaphor repellent. It also structures the music itself, making it poor, making it arid. The questions regarding which trait of a song is the most significant – which instrument, part, or fragment – partially reterritorialise musical signs, or harmonic, melodic, rhythmical patterns. On the other hand, an attribute of repetitive noisy chords, as witnessed in the daylight sequence with the terrace view of Madrid, is an attempt to erase symbolical meaning from guitar music – by repetition of a sound or a group of sounds.

If a chord once represented resolution or tension, this tendency is neutralised by the chord's repetition. The excerpt from Sea Green Sea bases merely on a D-major triad with occasional deflections from it by quieter background guitar licks which bring a sharpened fifth, and a fleeting appearance of the deflection from perfect fourth to major third, relative to the chord's root. The only harmonic addition to the triad itself is the mentioned anticipated minor seventh, which nonetheless leads to no change of harmonic function. Not only does its harmonic function lose effect, the chord assumes another meaning – of what it is as a sound. Similarly, a chord that at its first appearance carries a specific articulation, making the listener feel as if it was going to develop into an elaborate musical trajectory, is deprived of that function by its sequence of reiterations. An expectation of a louder chord to succeed a quieter one, or vice- versa, is similarly erased. The focus of the piece is rather on simultaneity of expressions, notably of clean and overdriven guitar sound. There is also a layer of distorted-sounding noise that has no pitch definition whatshowever.

Yorgos Lanthimos and Music in The Lobster

If the Madrid skyline sequence engages music and cinematic visuals, a particular set of excerpts from my other secondary case study The Lobster features the threesided relationship between music, the visuals, and narrative voiceover.

The Lobster contains a diverse array of songs, spanning from chamber string music of Ludwig van Beethoven, Benjamin Britten, Igor Stravinsky, and Alfred Schnittke, guitar works from Gaspar Sanz and Fernando Sor, orchestral pieces of Richard Strauss to Nick Cave's rendition of Where the Wild Roses Grow, and traces of Johnnie Burn's music, permeating through characters' portable stereos. The excerpts by Ludwig van Beethoven, Benjamin Britten, and Alfred Schnittke feature distinctive violin ornamentation, pizzicato, and pitches of extreme height along with a distinct violin timbre, respectively.

A dark satire on modern relationships, the film sets an imaginary world where single persons live in hotels, where they have fourty-five days to find a parner, or they are turned into animals. Only couples can return to live in the City. However, there is a group of dissenters to the cruel dating system. The Loners, as they are called, live in the woods. Paradoxically, they also adhere

to cruel behavioural codes and punish any romantic relation by inflicting serious physical harm. The film follows David, a middle-aged man whom his partner has recently left. Worn down by the hotel life, he escapes to the forest, only to meet his romantic interest among the solitary dissenters. He falls in love with a woman, whom he regards as a possible partner since they are both short-sighted; in this fictional world, finding a partner without sharing an obviously similar characteristic seems impossible. Struggling to keep the relationship secret, the couple escapes to the City, but not before the woman, who turns out to be the film's voiceover narrator, is blinded for her romantic miscounduct.

In the second sequence (the beginning is rather elusive and carries no relevance to the discussion), the narrator recounts how David left to the hotel to find a new partner – or be turned into an animal if he fails to do so. The text is spoken over the first subject of Ludwig van Beethoven's Adagio Affetuoso ed Appasionato, op. 18, no. 1. Other, numerous sequences with Beethoven's quartet as an accompaniment and the speaking narrator feature David examining the contents of his new room, riding on the hotel coach to hunt down Loners, and so forth. Some of these sequences do not even develop the plot, but rather reflect on his urge to pretend, the narrator acknowledging that for David, it was easier to pretend to not have feelings for somebody when you actually do, than vice-versa. Similarly, the narrator speaks about how he avenged a violent death of his brother, killed by David's partner at that time.

Furthermore, we hear about how Loners return favours by giving away dead, seasoned rabbits, but also how he, having escaped from the hotel into the woods to join them, fell in love with a short-sighted woman, and how they developed a secret language to hide their affection from their cruel peers. When they first saw each other – the scene is also underlined with Beethoven – it becomes clear that the narrator is indeed David's lover, who also reflects on reckless punishments, inflicted on those Loners who dare to conduct romantic relationships. Lastly, there are two more instances, where the narrator is mute, and only the music plays: they accompany the lovers' escape from the woods, and their arrival in the City. All other voiceover instances feature Beethoven's music. However, the film features double superposition of codes – the imposition of both spoken text and imagetrack.

The visuals and voiceover narration concern things that form the context of the narrative. During the first time that Beethoven's Quartet occurs in The Lobster we learn about how David

was dressed when he left, whereas its second manifestation provides an inventory of the contents of his room – four identical button down shirts, a tranquiliser gun on the wall, and so on. Similarly, the focus on things is very strong on picture, which is often assembled as an array of identical objects such as pieces of furniture, or the fact that most characters wear the same items of clothing. Lanthimos' objectivation of people by largely filming them in pairs regardless of their interpersonal relation – along with a significant number of props being filmed in pairs as well (shooting range targets, pools, salt shakers, faucets) – endures throughout the entire film. If the voiceover text gradually shifts from enumerating things toward the narrator's statement of love between her and David, it quickly returns to embracing abundancy of products and lifestyles they would be able to afford once safely in the City.

Voiceover Narration and Beethoven's String Quartet op. 18, no. 1

The beginning of the second movement of Beethoven's String Quartet op. 18, no.1 is the film's most repeated musical excerpt. Given its refrain-like function, it gradually departs from its structural complexity. Its reiterations cause it to be broken down more and more into fragments. Almost always accompanied by the voiceover narrative, they are pushed to the wayside of predominant cinematographic plot expressed in the voiceover, and automatically regarded as partially redundant. Instead of their compositional complexity, which one would acknowledge listening to the piece in a concert hall, they become its reflections that base on sound – due to a specific imposition of the narrative voice. However, it would not have been so unless the excerpt was repeated so many times. The expression of the Beethoven excerpt seems to depart from the “parallelism – counterpoint” binary frequently used in film music studies to theorize the relation of image- and soundtrack.79

“From the aesthetic point of view, this relation is not one of similarity, but, as a rule, one of question and answer, affirmation and negation, appearance and essence. This is dedicated by the divergence of the media in question and the specific nature of each.”80

79 Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies, 14–15. 80 Ibidem, 15, after Theodor W. Adorno and Hanns Eisler, Composing for the Films (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947), 70.

Taking Eisler and Adorno's formulation of the connection between film, sound and image, the performance of the string quartet acts as a counterweigh to the explicitly storytelling spoken text. Moreover, the speech is emphasised and louder, so the music becomes its complement. However, the second movement is dominated by a distinctive lyrical melody, spanning from the second to the twelfth measure. Due to the apparent melodic nature, complementary function of the music is constantly evolving into something more – a non-narrative expression nevertheless afflicted by the sonority of text. The voice generates a sound that indeed suppresses music – specifically, when the speech comes to a stronger syllable emphasis. The piece thus breaks into parts between the emphases. In terms of sound, it is negated by the voice that follows the pattern of stressed syllables.

For the greater part of the film, the voiceover–Beethoven excerpts find no subjective correlation in the picture. Whereas the voiceover is given by a narrator who remains unidentified almost for an hour of the picture's running time, the string quartet as a non-diegetic insert never receives any visual manifestation.81 Since the narrator's text and the visuals do not always coincide either, the film features a multilayered asynchrony – a lack of mutual meaning of music and voiceover, voiceover and visuals, and thirdly, music and visuals.

In a narrow sense, the distinction between synchronous and asynchronous refers to the way sound is edited in relation to the visuals.82 Synchronous sound is what the viewer expects to hear when a new visual event takes place in film. Asynchronous sound attempts to avoid the redundance of hearing the already seen.83 To depart from handbook definitions, asynchronicity in film music would refer to a difference between patterns of accentuation of various sountrack entities, or across soundtrack and imagetrack. Our discourse focuses on the relation between music and voiceover inserts, syllable stressing in speech, and the texture of Beethoven's music.

We have mentioned that names and depictions of everyday objects permeate the film. Beethoven's music seems incompatible with this approach. Its elaborate texture refers to something which is not directly present, referring to it only in the parts between the spoken

81 Compare, for example, Prénom Carmen (1983), directed by Jean-Luc Godard, a film where the string quartet is at times not only seen playing the cinematic music, but also seen rehearsing, and being drawn into the plot. 82 James Buhler, “Onthological, Formal, and Critical Theories of Film Music and Sound” The Oxford Handbook of Film Music Studies. David Neumeyer, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 189. 83 Ibidem, 190.

accents. In all manifestations of the Beethoven excerpt, speech and music are rhythmically combined – a certain word is emphasized, and so the inflection marks the aural identity of the Quartet as well. Listening to the sonorous fabric thus, accentuation is equally a tool of repetition as in The Limits of Control. Not only do the fragments of music found between spoken accents gain another possibility to be appreciated as absolute music, this time disassembled into parts. Stressed syllables and musical beats assemble a repetitive sequence, where musical matter is drowned in the stronger sonorous inflection of the speech accentuation.

It is likely that the reason for inserting music under the voiceover was that a soundtrack gap needed to be filled. It would not be convincing to simply cut the diegetic soundscape and replace it with the narrator's speech. Such an abrupt change in sonic image could have been considered undesirable by Lanthimos for aesthetic reasons. However, Beethoven's melody does not seem an ideal choice for a background. Its pitch contour denotes a singable tune that is bound to evoke attention in the viewer. Since it transcends the filler function, the music assumes a more autonomous role – almost that of the absolute music, only that it is altered by the influence of spoken word. Therefore, the presence of Adagio Affetuoso ed Appasionato is preconditioned by human voice. Hence, the indirect presence of meaning can very well be an aesthetic one, the affordance that listening to absolute music provides, only that it is now concealed beneath vocal, and rhythmical overposition.

Even if sometimes music and speech can demonstrate a compatibility while differing fundamentally in character (one being lyrical, modeled on singing vocal inflection, and the other excessively phrased by strict punctuation, for instance), this is not the case in The Lobster. I argue that there is a profound asynchronicity between the string quartet recording and the narrator's part. The melody in Beethoven, featuring a distinctively singable contour, is a working of one long breath, since the first rest appears only in measure 9. On the other hand, the voiceover part is both more densely accentuated (some word emphases are unusually strong) and interrupted by speech of the characters simultaneously shown on screen.84

84 For the strength of the emphases, consult the film. An illustrative example can be found at the time mark 0:29:47. See Yorgos Lanthimos, dir. The Lobster (2015 [first screening year]; Film4 et al., prod.).

Figure 3 A transcription of the voiceover text, spoken along the second movement of Beethoven's String Quartet. Manually drawn lines denote corresponding timings of music and human voice. Yelow lines and the text they point to belong to the first voiceover sequence in the film (time cue: 0:02:37), whereas blue ones belong to the second one (time cue: 0:06:38). Underlined syllables of the text are stressed. Beethoven, Quartet No. 1, second movement, Lanthimos, The Lobster.

Figure 4 Transcription of the voiceover--Beethoven sequence at 0:52:16. Beethoven, Quartet No. 1, second movement, Lanthimos, The Lobster. Regarding the timing of the text to music, both this and the previous transcription have been done by this thesis' author.

The tension inherent in the excerpts is based on such incompatibility. It evokes a question of why would a piece of music be put into simultaneity with a speech of remarkable stylistic difference. The emphases so scarcely and pensively placed in Beethoven's melody, and so abundant in the voiceover contradict each other. They make the long-spanning form of the musical excerpt less noticeable (it is a four-movement work, after all).

Once again, the reiterating accentuation approaches the noisiness of sound. Repetition of emphases is made monotonous by enumeration of everyday objects, or by a grotesque manner of rethoric with words redundantly repeated. For instance, Adagio Affetuoso once illustrates the following phrase: “One day, as he was playing golf, he thought that it was more difficult to pretend that you do have feelings when you don't than to pretend that you don't have feelings when you do.”85 A tendency to combine speech and music leaves an imprint of rhythmical emphases, mostly induced by the narrator's voice. As a consequence, they punctuate the music, imposing an unusual hierarchy onto its structure. The points in melody made more important by vocal inflection are easily discerned and establish a hierarchy between themselves and those parts of the music which are simultaneous to the vocal emphasis, and hence suppressed. The emphases form a succession also by themselves, and this succession is a rather foreign musical code to Beethoven's expressive ideas. Hence, the meaning of monotonous repetition presents itself as noise, a disruptive agency to our musical recognition.

It is important to note that the speech rhythm is articulated more demonstrably than the emphases in music. Furthermore, emphases of the Beethoven's melody are scarce in comparison to those in speech. Music and spoken word do not aspire for the same meaning in their articulation. Whereas the string quartet movement highlights a lyrical melody, the accents of the narrator seem to act as a tool for clearer enumeration of physical objects that David encounters, or emotions and events he experiences. The goal of these rhythmicalities is not as important as the bare fact that they are different, and asynchronous in a sense that the meaning of Beethoven's music, referring to its absolute aesthetic value, is suppressed by another, enumerating affordance. To forge an analogy, the distribution of emphases in speech stands for the filmic visuals, whereas musical emphases represent an asynchronous sound. Therefore, asyncronicity between the voiceover and the string quartet performance is a matter of using

85 Ibidem, time cue: 0:42:16.

rhythm to different ends, but in this process of functional differentiation producing a concealed meaning of Beethoven's music. Concealment is to be taken with a grain of salt – after all, libraries have been written about the composer's work. However, using a different case study, one comes across an example where submerged meaning is not publicly disucussed. In its submergence, the characteristic only surfaces as a disruption. In itself, it becomes a demonstrable working of noise – an interference. In the upcoming case study, beginning with Fuzzy Reactor by Boris and Michio Kurihara, the interference is a friction between two song layers.

A Music that Lingers: Fuzzy Reactor, Police Sirens, and You on the Run

The components of Fuzzy Reactor are blurring the line between vocal and instrumental timbre. At times, the listener is not entirely aware whether he hears an electric guitar or voice singing wordless melodic figures. The guitar phrases, which can only hardly be distinguished from vocalising singing, are planted in the background of the soundscape. In addition, the listener also stumbles upon motivic cells that are clearly electric guitar- or vocal-sounding. Simultaneous to this overposition and pluralism of melodies, the only perpetuating parts are the drum pattern, and a low-pitched drone modulating its overtone structure. Additionally, the song also features a specific guitar part that plays with the feedback effect of the amplifier.

These different aspects of the soundscape combine into an accumulation of sound. Apart from timbral proximity between overdriven guitar and voice, the sound of the feedbacking electric guitar sometimes merges with the sound of the drone. Therefore, Fuzzy Reactor relativizes source identity of timbre. Alternatively, the song is an accumulation of empirical sound with many facets, which correspond to the enumerated instrumental parts. However, the fact that particular parts are often only barely heard gives an impression that they were not meant to be listened individually, but rather as a larger whole.

Figure 5 Fuzzy Reactor , as it appears for the first time in the film. Note the oscillation in the amplitude of high frequencies. The spectrogram was generated by Overtone Analyzer, Sygyt Software.

The spectrogram clearly illustrates how the sound accumulates and fades away in even intervals, forming an oscillating pattern. The changes are especially noticeable in higher frequencies. This repetitive structure testifies to another dimension of Fuzzy Reactor – one that is not directly related to individual instrumental parts, but to a song in its sonorous entirety. Corresponding to such amalgamation of sound, using timbre as identification of an instrument does not make sense. Discovering alternative timbral understanding is not the scope of this thesis. Rather, this writing is an aspiration to pinpoint the music that contains, and makes one acknowledge, such sonorous expression.

Fuzzy Reactor first appears when Lone Man is seen riding in a taxi from Madrid airport. One of the most psychedelic moments in the film, the short car journey is shot as an impression of the road passing by. The viewer sees toll stations, scarcely illuminated tunnels, fleeting traffic lights, and blurred silhouettes of the vehicles in front. Here, Jarmusch and the director of photography Christopher Doyle experimented with camera overexposure. Numerous cadres are too bright, dissolve in blindening white glow, or contain sun flare.

The second sequence featuring Fuzzy Reactor begins on one of the squares in Madrid, where Lone Man has just met with a stranger, about whom the viewer learns that she is a fan of cinema, along with that she has difficulties distinguishing films from dreams. Over a bottle of mineral water, she has told him about one of these experiences – a vision of a bird flying in a room full of sand, dipping its wing into it on the way towards her. After exchanging matchboxes, she leaves, but turns around to see him once again, simultaneously opening a transparent umbrella in spite of the sunshine. The moment when the umbrella is completely unfolded corresponds with the first downbeat of Fuzzy Reactor. The next shot depicts Lone

Man walking down an alley in the dusk, reaching a street called Calle de la Cabeza, which can translate both as Head Street or Skull Street. The next shot shows him standing on the terrace, admiring the nocturnal cityscape and at times turning the head to gaze one of his contacts swimming in the pool. Fuzzy Reactor ends as the concluding guitar feedback smootly transitions into howling of police sirens somewhere on the streets below. A new song fades in – You on the Run by The Black Angels.

The lingering of the feedbacking guitar sonorities in Fuzzy Reactor is pushed into the background, suppressed despite its formal primacy. Among repetitive beating of the drums and seemingly spontaneous, improvisatory guitar inserts, the prolonged tones of the feedbacking sound are bridging the temporal space that Fuzzy Reactor occupies, holding the rhythmical density of the drums and faster guitar licks together. However, the feedbacking guitar phrases are far from a refrain. Even though the feedbacking succession of tones is a set of fragments divided by noticeable interventions by the other parts, it never exposes itself. Rather, it is concealed in the soundscape, at times even confused with the continually sounding drone. It lingers between the drum rhythm, between the guitar phrases, and slightly above the atmospherical sounds when the filmic sequence proceeds to Lone Man standing on the terrace in the evening.

Lingering in minoritarian music is a paradox. On one hand, it represents hardly noticeable, but engaging song parts, trapped in their limited impact on the ear. Thus, they linger in the sense of slowly perishing as individualities, ceasing their expressive power to the entire song soundscape. Minoritarian music is about acknowledging noise as sound in its most disruptive quality. Hence, it cannot correspond to an instrumental part that is prone to being timbrally reduced to source – a musical instrument. On the other hand, the selected case studies show that such parts are preserved in the song texture for a longer period of time. Continuation of a rhythmic pattern is sustained and so is a high enough level of monotony to facilitate the line of flight resulting in disruptive noise.

The ending of The Black Angels' You on the Run used by Jarmusch presents an ideal example for the paradox of lingering. The excerpt features a distinctive guitar riff played directly over a guitar solo. As with the feedbacking melody, the more significant solo is suppressed and put into sonorous background. It is unusually quiet despite its high register, rhythmic density, and overdriven sound.

Figure 6 The excerpt from You on the Run by Black Angels (written down by the thesis' author), transcribed from the film soundtrack. Note that I have placed the considerably higher and more elaborate solo part on the lower staff. This is to demonstrate the dynamic difference between parts. The upper part is significantly louder.

On the rift between juxtaposition and recombination, such music is minoritarian in that it is a practical manifesto for the minor. Not only it is in itself a seemingly random collage of songs, hence scrutinising the style of each affordance of theirs. It additionally represents an array of intepretative possibilities. Evidently, all music does this to a certain extent. Yet in this particular case, the difference between the styles employed signals a significantly broader range of possible readings, and hence a suggestive foundation for the creation of other minor musics. When combined, the excerpts not only preserve their gathered cultural significance as individual songs, but they also form a complex with an entirely new possibilities of intepretation.

The word lingering means slowly perishing, or waning in strength or influence. As it is used in this chapter, it denotes a musical style, which is not merely applied to envisaging or producing music. Significantly, the position of a part in a soundscape can also be altered when the sound has already been recorded. This is what happens when Jarmusch takes the two songs, and inserts a siren sound between them. The order of the sequence is not important, if it is compared to the techniques used to fade the excerpts in and out, or to combine them so as to make a smooth passage from one excerpt to another. Whereas the beginning of Fuzzy Reactor excerpt is originally a fade-in, the cinematic cut is an abbreviation, a collage of different moments of the recording with the end preserved as in Boris and Kurihara's original.86 For the siren transition to match the subsequent Black Angels song, Jarmusch decided to fade in the conclusion of the original You on the Run recording. Furthermore, he transposed the entire clipping downward by a semitone,87 and faded it out.

Soundtrack sequence thus edited serves to accomodate the specific succession of shots. What is more, it also informs the very understanding of minoritarian music. It highlights the lingering potential of the music on its own. By either making the origin of sound weak and perishable (fade-in), or by giving it the inclination to perish (fade-out), cinematic edits to the songs point to the lingering in the musical matter left untouched by the editors: the feedbacking guitar, the inconspicuous drone, and the quiet solo.

The coexistence of disparate instrumental and/or vocal parts turns into a pursuit for the observer's attention. The closest discipline with a similar organisation is politics. Indeed, the layering of guitar, drum, and bass parts in You on the Run and Fuzzy Reactor point precisely to a discriminatory and thus inherently political understanding of musical texture – of how certain musical element is delegated to the foreground and the other to the background of the mix. The society works the same way in relation to behavioural conventions: as certain values dominate and overshadow others, as some individuals step in front of the others, thus music is organized so as to seen as an utterance ready to be termed “music.” For this end, conventional musical organization – putting primarily melodic instruments in the sonic foreground, for instance – is

86 Cf. Jarmusch, The Limits of Control, time cue 0:37:23, and Boris, Michio Kurihara, “Fuzzy Reactor.” Rainbow, Drag City [DC338CD] 2007, digital audio streaming. 87 Cf. ibidem, time cue 0:38:12, and The Black Angels, “You on the Run.” Directions to See a Ghost. Light in the Attic [LITA 033] 2008, digital audio streaming.

common. However, emphasizing an instrumental or vocal part does not mean that it is in fact a crucial component of the song. Rather, the tendency of musicianship is also to provide with content to be discovered by close listening. As a consequence, explanation of such music in political terms – by reading the loudest, the most highlighted, emphasized as the most important simply because it establishes musical coding, telling us that it is music what we are listening to – may become simplistic and unconvincing. This is why minoritarian music is arid, a desert, an animal burrow, dug into the bare soil, to use Deleuzoguattarian figurative language. Often, its foreground offers nothing inspiring.88 The disregard of the foregrounded traits makes the listener focus on foreshadowed ones, or on the entire sonorous image. Both due to our own doubt of whether non-emphasised matter is even worth listening to – and in minoritarian music this matter can indeed be repetitive, monotonous, even hard to discern from the foregrounded part –, and due to its imposed dominance one hears such music as barren, arid. What therefore makes minoritarian music arid is the agency disregarding the fact the music's essence is hidden in the soundscape, in the timbrally-oriented style, with the bareness of its repetition showing the way how to listen.

Minoritarian music, however, is not only about repetition, but also regards a deliberately flawed articulation of melody, harmony, and other musical parameters. Think of tones and chords muddled by guitar distortion, of melodic fragments deformed by the excessive use of delay, which function similarly to the line of flight of the reiterated motive. Apart from the simplest fragment repetition, taking the line of flight can also assume more complex patterns that feature combinations of several instrumental parts. Even then, the reiteration in the texture must be somehow ordered. One of the possibilities to organize such music is the form of a wave, as it manifests in Blood Swamp by Sunn O))) and Boris.

88 Importantly, the foreground is not meant as a sonorous entirety. Rather, it denotes the most highlighted individual musical feature: an instrumental part, for instance, or a harmonic progression.

Coinciding Events: Sunn O))) and Boris in the Kidnapping Scene

Despite obvious instrumental layering in the part of the song used in The Limits of Control, the three disparate levels do not work in a clear division. Rather, their combination forms a wave- like succession of musical events, in turn featuring each of the three timbres, or featuring a combination of the two. If we treat the excerpt contrapuntally, we can either read it as an overlapping of parts, a constant simultaneity – and is avoided so as to provide a fresh point of view –, or as a counterpoint which is actually more a sequence of musical phrases, complementing each other in succession and simultaneity. The wave-like pattern stands for a distinctive succession of musical material of lower pitch, followed by a higher pitch, and succeeded by lower-pitched matter again – or vice-versa. The certain “wave” need not encompass all of the three distinct layers. Sometimes, its directionality is even evasive, because two of the three parts are heavily distorted and create a sonic mixture where they cannot be told from one another anymore. If the attack of their pitches were shortened to provide a clear and sudden accentuation, this would disrupt the overall feel of the piece, which is mellow, sonically saturated, and most importantly, gradual in every entrance of a motive. As a consequence of gradualness, note attacks they sometimes overlap, so that the listener cannot tell what happened first.

By interpreting the motives as parts of the pattern, the overlapping motives, which seem to be simultaneous coincidentally, which through ecological viewing afford the song an anxiety. It follows that the emotional respons of anxiety is one, arguably the most rudimentary layer of meaning.89 However, further analysis uncovers that there is a rational element to the song, given in theway of the wave-like succession of events. As far as the music distances itself from

89The consideration of rudimentarity is taken from Martin Clayton's Introduction: towards a theory of musical meaning (in India and elsewhere). In the article, he refers to Charles Keil's concept of groove as “the direct experience of feeling through synchronised action.” Paradoxically, the Sunn O))) music excerpt also represents a correspondence with action – yet it is rather a stagnation – a passive immersing of the listener into the densely distorted soundscape. The anxiety is hence an expected feeling of the listener to attune himself to musical “action.” See Clayton, “Introduction Towards a Theory of Musical Meaning,” 9.

the filmic narrative, it equally departs from the musical narrative, and become as manner of distributing the motives in such a way that they once again form a sequence monotonous enough to divert the listener to noise. It is likely that the feeling of anxiety was also induced by the concurrent film scene , which shows Lone Man departing from Seville. On his way to the train station, he walks down a desolated alley. The mood is gradually darkening. First, he notices a film poster for Un Lugar Solitario, A Solitary Place. It shows the woman whom he met four days ago, and who is interested in cinema. Sunn O))) and Boris' Blood Swamp gradually fades in. Specifically, only the low distorted part is heard at first. Later on, other instruments appear, even though the excerpt is barely two minutes long. The protagonist witnesses a quick and violent abduction of the Cinema Woman. He hides behind the corner as two henchmen rush her off in a car.

Figure 7: The excerpt from Blood Swamp, as it appears in The Limits of Control. Time cue at the beginning marks the excerpt's position in the film as a whole, whereas the scale below the upper staff shows seconds. The notation is therefore spatial, and durations are given by ties. The cleaner part, given on the upper stave, features short tone sustain, usually between half a second and two seconds. whereas duration of the middle staff notes was impossible to determine exactly because there was a significant timbral overlap with the lowest part. Small ciphers of eight denote that the pitch concerned is transposed an octave higher. Drop-shaped note heads denote that the frequency of the tone concerned is gradually increasing, but nevertheless unable to be precisely determined. A note head between parentheses signifies an approximation of a tone's height. Transcribed by the thesis' author. 55

The music is not a subordinate to the narrative, since it organically grows from the filmic fabric by means of a long, gradual fade-in, supported by camera work and the overall design of the scene. On this level, it is yet treated as a complement to the narrative. On the next, it departs to form a narrative of its own: a pattern of musical events assembled into a sequence regardless of their timbral nature. Thus, the viewer's emotional proximity is lost. Not only is it absent from music – it deterritorialises music to such an extent that emotive character fails even to become a haunting agency. Rather, the corresponding visual cinematic work is, because it depicts Lone Man as he walks down a desolated alley, his determination compromised by a film poster on which the fair-haired lady, whom he met four days ago features as a protagonist.

The distorted drone part of Blood Swamp is caught between roughness of the minimalistic melodic line as one, and roughness of disintegration into particular fragments of distorted sound. This has always been what I have been imagining as the grain of the sound, holding a close relation to the visual grain, as in analogue photographs with light sensitivity set too high. Perhaps the roughness of the heavily distorted bass line corresponds to what elsewhere in music manifests as tonal tension. A dialectic of discovering the unstable, even the unknown, with a subsequent return “home,” to the center of tonality. Leaving aside the fact that the bass line in Blood Swamp is also defined by pitch (even though judging by the speed that the pitch changes one easily dubs it a pedal tone), the distortion might sound grainy due to similar inclination toward “home,” only that the sound is yearning toward a timbral resolution. However, there is no reference point according to which such a timbral resolution can be acknowledged. Consequently, the tension remains, and despite the longing for it to pass, the expectation remains unfulfilled. However, “homesickness” becomes a normal state at some point. Since no tonal or timbral resolution is reached, the music logically aspires to instill reconciliation in the very tonal and timbral inertness, which immediately shows as noise.

Combined with the music's own oscillatory narrative of a wave, the viewer is ready to acknowledge that functionality of the excerpt is not to create suspense, or to otherwise provide emotional involvement in the film plot. Rather, the emotonal neutrality of a rational pitch succession – as I understand Blood Swamp excerpt – allows for listening to film music outside

of film. Being minoritarian, it nevertheless survives outside of cinema (one of its artistic origins, the other being musicians who recorded the song), even only as an excerpt used by Jarmusch. This music is working, it is deterritorialising, even political in a sense that it departs from conventions of musical time, resolution, and emotional expression. It deconstructs artistic time, because one is not convinced when a certain pitch appears (compare oscillating crescendos, portamentos, timbre alteration, all applied to a single note), or which part of the note should we take as a reference point from which to build our listening interpretation from.

Secondly, it deconstructs the tension–resolution binary. Regardless of the fact that some pitches can be said to follow semitonal and dominant-tonic relations in the broadest sense, timbral resolution is never reached. Moreover, its nature is never even envisaged in the act of listening.

Thirdly, the excerpt affects our emotional involvement, and this is where cinematic emotional immersion replaces the musical one. The emotional value of anxiety and suspense migrates from the music into cinema at the moment when music is regarded as a rational construction, a sequence of complementary and anachronistic events. Complementarity manifests as pitch duplication, duplication via octave transposition, a melodic trajectory leading to it (often featuring a semitonal upward motion), as a filling of the void between notes of a certain voice by the other one. Anachronism is an inclination of such complementarity. If a melody does not clearly lead to a certain note, it nevertheless relates to it on the level of the song as a whole, if whatever musical element enters the void between two distanced elements of the same voice, it might as well contradict their aesthetic affordance. For example, the excerpt's smooth and clean timbre contrasts the distortion, yet it nevertheless interjects between the distorted motives.

5 Conclusion

This thesis has shown that a musicality exists, which intensively deflects from concerns about internal organisation of music. The deflection is present on numerous levels. Starting from smaller groupings, the idea of the motive as an expressive unity of tones, durations, and simultaneous sounding of more tones, has turned into that of repetitive patterns of a single tone, or of only minimal melodic span. Rhythm either follows the repetitive trait of pitch ordering – as the relevant drum patterns clearly show –, or withdraws from metre into duration of individual notes.90 Harmonic characteristics of this music build on basic principles of diatonic theory, or are present only latently – as contours of the narrow-spanned melodic fragments, mentioned before. Significantly, diatonic, chromatic, and microtonal harmony91 are immersed into timbral experimentation with distortion. Most often, the distortion is a product of electric guitar amplification.

I am arguing in favour of introducing a new musicological term. I see minoritarian music as a common denominator of the case studies chosen. However, the concept does not refer to a denial of known, commonly practised musical expression. As has been shown in writing and in notation, minoritarian music always contains traces of the musically known: harmonies, rhythms, even distortion, being a generic charateristic of rock. What is minoritarian in the music concerned are precisely these conventional fragments becoming something else by affecting the process of listening, especially listening recognition. By repetition and a lack of rhythm, musical traits become closer to the sound in itself than to the signifying sound. The entire idea of listening to music as sound amounts to the rehabilitation of noise. Importantly, the latter is treated as a Deleuzian concept, standing for a disruptive agency to our mental process of recognition, which works according to the models imposed on us, or created by us. Minoritarian music is noisy because it invokes noise. Lastly, and most superficially, it is also noisy because of its empirical sounding dimension – its timbre, always bordering on the notion of unrecognized sound sources.

90 Compare Sunn O))) and Boris, “Blood Swamp,” Altar. Southern Lord [SUNN62] 2006, digital audio streaming. 91 Ibidem, see especially Figure 7, where microtonal play shows in a sesquisharp tone.

At a time during my research, The Limits of Control and The Lobster seemed light years apart as approaches to music. The work advanced, and a conclusion arose that their unusual combination as case studies poses a crucial question. Evidently, cinema has played an indispensable role in theorising my main concept. Whereas chosen songs from Jim Jarmusch's film present an inception of minoritarian music, Lanthimos' choice of Beethoven's String quartet op. 18, no.1 questions cinematic roots of the concept. It is easy to notice that The Lobster was an addition in a later research phase.

Significantly, all of the characteristics of minoritarian music also apply to the second movement of Beethoven's string quartet. However, there is an exception. The speech is imposed over the performance of the String Quartet, which means that the excerpt could only function in a minoritarian sense in the particular cinematic context.

Regardless, one should not deem cinema as a root of minoritarian music. In writing this thesis, it rather worked as a method. Through simplistic plot and plenty of empty narrative space for the music to fill, The Limits of Control turned my attention to the songs. Simultaneously, it prevented the disregarding attitude, which is more likely to be imposed upon absolute, non- cinematic music. Therefore, minoritarian music is in itself not cinematic. Firstly because almost all of the case studies have been recorded and released independently from film soundtracks. Secondly, it exists outside of cinema for the listening appreciation as any other musical expression. To be appreciated, or justifiably criticised (I am not taking a standpoint in the matter of judgement), the listener must be familiar with its coding. This thesis is precisely about that – about the coding of minoritarian music, or how it can be listened to.

6 Bibliography

Adorno, Theodor W., Hanns Eisler. Composing for the Films. New York: Oxford University Press, 1947. Aristotle. The Poetics of Aristotle. H. S. Butcher, trans. The Project Gutenberg Ebook of Poetics, 2008. Last accessed 26-05-2018: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1974/1974-h/1974- h.htm Barthes, Roland. “The Grain Of The Voice” Image, Music, Text. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977, 179–189. Beethoven, Ludwig van. “Quartet No. 1,” String Quartets Vol. 1 Op. 18 Nos. 1—6. New York: E. F. Calmus Orchestra Scores, n. d. Bennett, Andy, Jon Stratton, ed. Britpop and the English Music Tradition. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010. Blake, David K. “Timbre as Differentiation in Indie Music” Music Theory Online 18 (June 2012), 1–18. Last accessed: 09-04-2018, https://search.proquest.com/docview/1487686515?rfr_id=info%3Axri%2Fsid%3Aprimo Branigan, Edward. “Soundtrack in Mind” Projections 4.1 (Summer 2010), 41–67. Buhler, James. “Onthological, Formal, and Critical Theories of Film Music and Sound” The Oxford Handbook of Film Music Studies. David Neumeyer, ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. [for e-book access data, see Neumeyer] Clayton, Martin “Introduction. Towards a Theory of Musical Meaning (In India and Elsewhere),” British Journal of Ethnomusicology 12, no. 1 (Music and Meaning, 2001): 1–17. Coggins, Owen. “Transforming Detail into Myth: Indescribable Experience and Mystical Discourse in Drone Metal” Global Metal Music and Culture: Current Directions in Metal Studies. Andy R. Brown et al., eds. New York: Routledge, 2017. Crauwels, Kwinten. “Contemporary Rock” Musicmap [version 1.0.1]. Last accessed: 04-07- 2018, https://musicmap.info/

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Discography [All dates are release dates.]

Bad Rabbit. Film Music from The Limits of Control. Lakeshore Records LKS 340832, 2009, digital audio files. Black Angels, The. Directions to See a Ghost. Light in the Attic [LITA 033] 2008, digital audio streaming: https://play.qobuz.com/album/0826853003322 Boris. Pink. Sargent House [SH-160] 2017 [first release in 2005], digital audio streaming, https://play.qobuz.com/album/0634457723825

———. Smile. Southern Lord [SUNN92] 2008, digital audio streaming: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGrLmrFEjeA Boris, Michio Kurihara. Rainbow. Drag City [DC338CD] 2007, digital audio streaming: https://play.qobuz.com/album/trr7i1qhq9u3a Boris, Sunn O))). Altar. Southern Lord [SUNN62] 2006, digital audio streaming: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxGroDkI52g Sqürl. EP 1. ATP Recordings [ATPREP04D] 2013, digital audio streaming via Spotify.

———. EP 2. ATP/Recordings [ATPREP05] 2013, digital audio streaming: https://play.qobuz.com/album/0888003514478

———. EP 3. ATP Recordings [ATPREP06D] 2014, digital audio streaming: https://play.qobuz.com/album/0889176064548

———. EP 260. Sacred Bones Records [SBR-179] 2017, digital audio streaming: https://play.qobuz.com/album/0616892472841 Wissem, Jozef van, Jim Jarmusch. Concerning the Entrance into Eternity. Important Records [IMPREC 348] 2012, digital audio streaming: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvaLDGwPMhY&list=PLKNtMWL8OuCjEe0JcyXq3Lb tUi35KwiMA Wissem, Jozef van, Jim Jarmusch. The Mystery of Heaven. Sacred Bones Records [SBR-079] 2012, digital audio streaming: https://play.qobuz.com/album/0616892083146 Various authors. The Limits of Control (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) Lakeshore Records LKS 340792 2009, compact disc. Various authors. The Lobster. Lakeshore Records LKS346602 2016, compact disc.

Filmography [All dates are release dates.]

Godard, Jean-Luc, dir. Prénom Carmen. Alain Sarde et al., prod., 1983. Jarmusch, Jim, dir. The Limits of Control. Focus Features, dist. 2009.

———, Down by Law. Alan Kleinberg, prod., 1986.

———, Coffee and Cigarettes. Jason Kliot, prod., 2003.

———, Night on Earth. JVC Entertainment, prod., 1992. Lanthimos, Yorgos, dir. The Lobster. Film4 et al., prod., 2015.

7 Appendix

Compositions in The Limits of Control92

Song title Performer introductory sequence Sea Green Sea Bad Rabbit Dawn Feedbacker Farewell Boris Untitled Fuzzy Reactor Boris with Michio Kurihara Blood Swamp Sunn O))) with Boris N. L. T. You on the Run The Black Angels Saeta La Macarena Por Compasión: Malagueñas Manuel el Sevillano Carmen Linares El que se tenga por grande Talegón de Córdoba, Jorge Rodríguez Padilla Omens and Portents Earth and Bill Frisell Franz Schubert: Ensemble Villa Musica Adagio from String Quintet D 956 Daft Punk is Playing at my House LCD Soundsystem

92 The list has been assembled according to the soundtrack CD, released after the film premiere , and according to the film itself. For the soundtrack, consult The Limits of Control, Lakeshore Records LKS 340792.

List of compositions in The Lobster93

Composer Composition Performing musicians Ludwig van Beethoven String Quartet op. 18, no. 1 Julliard String Quartet 2 – Adagio Affetuoso ed Appasionato Alfred Schnittke Quintet for Piano and Strings Borodin Quartet 2 – In Tempo of a Waltz String Quartet no. 2 Tale Quartet 1 – Moderato Dmitri Shostakovich String Quartet no. 8 in C Minor, op. Emerson String Quartet 110 4 – Largo Richard Strauss Don Quichote Fabio Luisi, Sächsische Variations I and II Staatskapelle Dresden Benjamin Britten Sting Quartet no. 1 in D, op. 25 The Takács Quartet 1 – Andante Sostenuto Kleon Triantafyllou Apo Mesa pethamenos Danai Nick Cave Where the Wild Roses Grow Nick Cave Roger Cook, Roger Something's Gotten Hold of My Heart Olivia Colman, Garry Greenaway Mountaine An anonymous author Jeux Interdit Rolland Ferrandi, Imelda Nagle Ryan Gaspar Sanz Baroque Dance Roland Ferrandi, Imelda Nagle Ryan Benjamin John Tomlin Million $ feat. Milla M Johnnie Burn Hot Shuffle [see the field Loner Dub “composer”] Bleep Disco Handbag Takis Morakis, Giannis Ti ein' afto pouto lene agapi Tonis Maroudas, Fermanoglou Sophia Loren

93 The list has been assembled according to the soundtrack CD, released after the film premiere , and according to the film itself. The Lobster. Lakeshore Records LKS346602