Pelleter ARK Machinic Geisters
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cover Projekt2_Layout 1 19.12.18 17:37 Seite 1 978-3-9817928-5-0 Picture: @newfrontears ➞ www.hebbel-am-ufer.de 3 Start playing. PERSISTENCE CTM FESTIVAL 2019 ADVENTUROUS MUSIC & ART 20TH EDITION BERLIN 02 CTM 2019 – PERSISTENCE 46 WE ARE THE HALLUCI NATION: Introduction AN INTERVIEW WITH BEAR WITNESS OF A TRIBE CALLED RED 08 INTERDEPENDENCE Lindsay Nixon JON DAVIES 52 MICROTONALITY AND THE STRUGGLE 12 ON LOOP AND IN THE CROSSFADE: FOR FRETLESSNESS IN THE MUSIC IN THE AGE OF MASS DIGITAL AGE PERSISTENCE Khyam Allami Josh Kun 60 ARKESTRATED RHYTHMACHINE 16 TRANS-MITTING BLACK RESISTANCE KOMPLEXITIES: MACHINIC Tai Linhares in Conversation with GEISTERSTUNDE AND POST-SOUL Linn da Quebrada PERSISTENCIES ARK 21 »ALL THAT IS SOLID MELTS INTO PR«: ON PERSISTENCE, RESILIENCE, 66 200 BPM ORGASM CLUB MUSIC AND AUTONOMY IN MUSIC Gabber Modus Operandi Ollie Zhang in ConversationEverything with Jan Rohlf changes 24 ALL UNITED 72 NOISE BOMBING:when THE SPIRITyou OF listen. IC3PEAK in Conversation with STREET NOISE Mariana Berezovska Indra MenusThe & Seanmusic Stellfoxthat moves you is just a tap away. New Sennheiser MOMENTUM 30 THE RADICAL ELASTICITY OF SOUND 80 PEEPING THROUGHTrue Wireless A FROWN: earbuds have intuitive Salomé Voegelin A DÉRIVE THROUGHtap controls. THE No PUNK clicky buttons. No CONTINUUMwires. Just exceptional sounding, 36 FAILING AT THE IMPOSSIBLE: Tim Tetznerergonomically designed earbuds that ATTEMPTS AT EMBODYING are ready to wear and can easily be MATRIARCHY 86 ENCOUNTERS WITH BEELZEBUB’S ~ recharged in the compact carry case. An Interview with Nguye^n + ORGANS – QUELLGEISTER #3: BUSSD Transitory by Kamila Metwaly Stefan FraunbergerSearch: MOMENTUM True Wireles 42 POP, POLITICS, AND PERSISTENCE: POPULAR CULTURE BETWEEN DELIMITATION AND ACTIVISM Luise Wolf MOMTrueWireless_198x285_MTW_EN.indd 1 21.12.18 11:50 63 The ARK project began as a drum-machine choir, thrown together ARKESTRATED RHYTHMACHINE in 2018 on the occasion of an exhibition at the Museum of Applied Arts in Hamburg: Mobile Welten oder das Museum unserer transkulturel- KOMPLEXITIES: len Gegenwart [Mobile Worlds or The Museum of Our Transcultural Present], a motley assembly of quaint old-fashioned machines, speak- MACHINIC GEISTERSTUNDE ers, and carrying cases coated in imitation leather or wood veneers, playing synthesised rhythms at the push of a button. It is the epitome AND POST-SOUL PERSISTENCIES of some kind of pseudo techno aesthetic, a sleek machinic imitation of seemingly human artisanship. But there is more to it than meets ARK the eye. Something pervades these unimposing apparatuses like a te- nacious swathe of mist, billowing through their corroded circuits, clinging stubbornly to their dusty surfaces. That’s how it is, with ghosts and machines. Not that the ARK drum-machine choir seeks to exorcise or invoke any ghosts in the machine. It simply lets these restless machinic souls pop up and play their part. It aims to make of them its familiars. Let’s celebrate the machinic Geisterstunde [witch- ing hour]! But hold on! »Drum machines have no soul!« This pattern is a form of anti-teleological temporal per- old reproach is as persistent as any belief in ghosts sistence. It holds (onto) something inasmuch as it in the machine. And as, for example, Louis Chude- keeps it in perpetual motion. And this something Sokei has recently shown, it imbues the notion of thereby also steps out of line. It drifts. Rhythmic machine with a recurrent diehard trauma. Since time is not hauntologically awestruck by the sub- time immemorial, »The soul« has served as a bru- limity of unredeemed futures past. For it knows that tal battleground for negotiations over »humanity,« such futures always have been, are still, and will one on which a white-male-dominated so-called forever be nestled in the present. »humanism« has denied a soul to all that it deems technologically or racially »other.« Which is why, So just what is it that so persistently clings to when Kodwo Eshun wrote his manifesto More Bril- and pervades these machines, refusing to be dis- liant Than The Sun some twenty years ago, he cele- pelled? Which Post-soul ghosts haunt their sounds brated Post-soul machinic musics as »anti-human- and patterns, or flit around their casings? Perhaps ist« in the emancipatory sense of the term, that is, the truly spooky thing about these machines is how as a sonic refutation of the endlessly brutal pro- much they want us to believe in those little ghosts duction of difference that goes on in the name of a of their own, within them. Certainly this drum-ma- tremulously soulful »humanity.« chine choir invokes the ancient forebears. Long button bars of rhythms conjured on the dusty cas- This is also why the ARK drum-machine choir choos- ing of machines from the 1960s and 70s go un- es not to pursue a classic, glossy, technoid aes- der the name »Afro« or »Latin American,« for ex- thetic. Once again, the Post-soul machine takes a ample. Pre-set categories that, at the mere flick of very different path than the chest-beating, macho, a switch, neatly divide the world of rhythm into a and kitsch techno fetishism of long-outdated futur- discrete series of supposedly clearly rooted pat- isms – kitted out in crumbling vinyl and fake wood terns, and that serve thus to preserve and perpet- veneers instead of highly polished chrome. The fu- uate cultural concepts based on a long-obsolete ture here is no longer synonymous with a teleologi- notion of linear genealogy. These simple switch- cal march headed for apocalypse across the killing es can be read all of a sudden as a postcoloni- fields of history. The future now takes the form of al atlas. They render navigable a wieldy collection rhythmic revolutions per minute in a variety of tem- of allegedly »roots« rhythmic idioms, put a handle poral dimensions. The future is the sheer potential to them, quasi, to make a conveniently packaged The panel of preset-buttons of the Maestro Rhythm King for other and diverse temporalities. Any rhythmic takeaway. Lineage and ancestry are newly recon- MRK-1. Photo: Hendrik Frank. 65 Top: The preset switch of the Wurlitzer Sideman, the first mass-produced electro-mechanical rhythm machine. Photo: Hendrik Frank. Bottom: A stack of rhythm-machines: the Keio Rockmate, Wurlitzer Swinging Rhythm, BOSS Dr-55, Ace Tone Rhythm Ace FR-2L, Wilgavox 2000. Photo: Hendrik Frank. figured from a pile of transistors, diodes, and resis- plexity than the strict binary counter of the crotch- tors. Yet it is precisely this belief in linear geneal- et, quaver, semiquaver, and so on. So let’s hear it ogy that drives the brutal phantom of distinctions now, one more time: funk has always already been made on grounds of ethnicity and »race« deep into a most complex time machine. the depths of these seemingly innocent and in- genuous machines. And such distinctions are not The devices assembled in the ARK drum-machine found there alone, but also in the latest updates of choir are somewhat younger than the still classi- electronic and digital Musicking Things, the inter- cally modern Rhythmicon, all dating from the 60s faces of which to this day drool with ethno kitsch. and 70s of the last century. And ironically, they do precisely that for which old-fashioned rhythm the- Simultaneously, however, the pattern’s unbroken ory was just – for funk’s sake – reproached above: revolutions per minute or the machines’ incessant namely, they measure musical time by a binary operation blurs the latent brutality of such defin- beat. An array of proto-digital circuitry is hidden itudes, or better: even renders them ambiguous. within their veneer-coated wood cases: cascad- When machines suddenly began grooving in the ing rows of binary switches that are tasked with 1970s – in the hands of Sly Stone or Little Sister, the technical translation of the unceasing passage Shuggie Otis or Eddie Harris, to name but a few – of phenomenological time into a disjunctive se- »getting into the groove« initially and primarily im- quence of singly addressable points in time. One plied riding high on rhythmic ambiguities. Rhythm of the most passionate debates in the philoso- may on the one hand mean nothing but taking the phy of time is turned into hardware at the heart of exact measure of musical time, but it is this act pre- these machines, without skipping a beat. Rhyth- cisely – that of definitively quantifying time – that mic time is technical time is switchable time. In allows time itself to be given shape. Groove is ac- the rhythm machines of the 1960s and 70s we find cordingly the creative play with and within the am- a phenomenon which, in computer technology of biguities that occur in the interstices of any strict that same period, had long-since disappeared be- beat. While the binary counter of classical music low the narrow frequency bands of human percep- theory eradicates such interstices – or in-between tion: time is technically discretised, and at such a spaces, one might say – machinic interplay lets speed, moreover, as to span a new (dis-)continuum their patterns groove. of technical feasibility above and beyond the gap- ridden sequence of points in time. Funk has always already been a machine in this regard. And the reverse likewise holds true, as in: Hence, technical circuitry too opens up an inter- technology has always already been funky, inas- stice, an in-between space that is vastly more com- much as it can never be reduced solely to the logic plex and diverse than its strictly binary ambiguity of its circuitry, i.e. to its technologic. So let’s spin ever suggests. Eleni Ikoniadou writes that »Rhythm that one more time: funk has always already been a may be one way humans have of accessing the machine.