Copying Machine Music Can Be Downloaded in Its Entirety at (Slight Return)

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STEFAN HELMREICH has elsewhere asked scholars to reflect on INTERVIEWED BY WALKER DOWNEY past projects, my below interview with REVISITATIONS Helmreich dives back into the finely textured world of Xerophonics and its myriad influences. Xerophonics: Copying Please Xerox and share it.

Machine Music Xerophonics: Copying Machine Music can be downloaded in its entirety at (Slight Return) https://doi.org/10.1162/thld_a_00686

The ubiquitous workplace photocopier, with WALKER DOWNEY: Let’s discuss the its rat-a-tat clacks and circular whirs, almost conceptual genesis of the project. As I dares the sleep-deprived graduate student understand it, the idea first came to mind or nine-to-five office worker to find something while you were hunched over a Panasonic like a groove in its alien drone. Anthropologist photocopier in the offices of NYU. Stefan Helmreich’s Xerophonics project, released STEFAN HELMREICH: More or on CD in 2003, through independent label less—though there were earlier data Seeland Records, calls the photocopier’s points, no question. I’d been fascinated bluff and actually makes music of its sounds, by photocopiers since I was a kid, running stitching together richly rhythmic (and off homemade comic books for friends, sometimes perversely danceable) compositions and, along the way, discovering all from the sonic profiles of common models. the weird mistakes these devices could Helmreich employed a modest arsenal of tools help me make. When I got to graduate in his construction of the thirteen tracks school and found myself spinning on Xerophonics—copying machine sounds off rafts of copies of grant proposals, were captured in situ with a Realistic Minisette- class readings, and other stuff, I 20 recorder, and these recordings were rediscovered some of those odd effects. processed and manipulated with an Ensoniq More than that, though, because I was EPS sampler—but these pieces unfold now often photocopying really long with a seductive intricacy. Xerophonics discloses documents, I began to tune into the a rich sonic microcosm at work in the range of rhythms these machines could photocopier: one usually left to warble on the generate. I became fascinated by the periphery of awareness. Never has a Xerox repeating sonic effects of processes such DocuColor 12 sounded this funky; never as staple sorting, auto-tray switching, has a Panasonic FP-7742 so convincingly rivaled double-sided copying, and more. Then, early industrial music. yes, one day at NYU—where I held Xerophonics has been rattling around in my a postdoc position before coming ears for several years now, and during the to MIT—I found myself considering conception of Thresholds 47, it loomed large in these sounds as possible compositional my mind; here was a project dedicated to the elements. Some of reviews of the sampling of the punishingly repetitive sounds Xerophonics CD tagged the results as of copying machines: an effective infinite regress “dance music for the disaffected office of repetition. In the spirit of our issue, which drone,” “grindcore for fanzine formatters,”

STEFAN HELMREICH is Professor of 1. Selena Hsu, “Review of Xerophonics,” 13; Ethan Smith, “Is It Live, or Is It Anthropology at MIT. He is the author of Splendid Zine, 2003, last accessed April 1, CopyMax?” WIRED, March 2003, 61. Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in 2003, http://ww3.splendidzine.com/review. 2. Hillel Schwartz, “De-Signing,” Critical Microbial Seas (University of California Press, html?reviewid=32573443113111984; Quarterly 43, no. 2 (2001): 57–59. 2009) and, most recently, of Sounding the Magazine staff, “Review of Xerophonics,” 3. Kenneth Goldsmith, “Sounds for the Limits of Life: Essays in the Anthropology Careless Talk Costs Lives, March/April 2003, Future Present: Not All Glitches Are of Biology and Beyond (Princeton University 37; Christopher Weingarten, “Weird Accidents,” New York Press, June 18–24, Press, 2016). His essays have appeared in Record: He Watches Channel Xerox; 2003, 46. Critical Inquiry, Representations, and The Wire. review of Xerophonics,” CMJ, March 2003,

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/thld_a_00686 by guest on 24 September 2021 “surprisingly danceable coffee-break suggests?). The photocopier’s status as disco,” and “motorized cacophony.”1 a living relic appealed to me (fig. 1). Those all seem right to me, since I was I also, as I got deeper into the project, seeking, in part, to work with and became interested in the wider amplify some of the repetitive rhythms archaeology of photocopiers. Gathering of everyday office and academic life. the sounds of machines to sample— WD: It’s a great “origin story,” because that which I did using a tape recorder, another experience—of rote copying, stapling, and living fossil—I undertook a kind of field printing—has been universal to most academic survey of machines around Manhattan. and professional spheres for, what, the last half The NYU machines turned out all century? There’s a quiet, quotidian relatability to come from one company, Kinko’s there, but of course, the project works to blast machines from another. One could map that open: the sounds that usually slide beneath regions of the city—I became particularly the register of attention are made strange fixated on Chinatown, Midtown, and through “displacement” and “amplification” (to Harlem—by cataloging their populations use Hillel Schwartz’s terms).2 of copying machines. So, if there’s SH: Yes, what are photocopying sounds? a culture of the copying machine—to What do they make us think about adapt Schwartz’s “culture of the copy” as we distractedly take them in? And how phrase—there’s also an institutional might displacing and amplifying them— sociology that shapes which machines putting them on an album like end up where and when.4 Xerophonics—help us learn about them? WD: I invoked Schwartz’s work earlier because One of the early reviewers of the album, you included a quote of his from The Culture Kenneth Goldsmith, writing in the of the Copy, which you just mentioned, in pages of the New York Press, read the the original liner notes to Xerophonics (fig. 2). project—alongside [The User]’s Symphony You’ve also, though, turned to his work on #2 for Dot Matrix Printers (2002)—as or around authenticity elsewhere, dialoguing a sign of nostalgia for a time before the with his 2001 “De-Signing” essay in your clickety-click quiet of laptop typing 2006 Grey Room article “The Signature of and laser printing. He heard Xerophonics Life.” Can you speak to how your academic as an historical “commentary on the work might have informed this project? phenomenon of writing made audible,” Were there threads in your scholarship in suggesting that it harkened back to the early two-thousands—on simulation and Erik Satie’s use of a typewriter in his 1917 Artificial Life, for example—that fed into “Parade,” or Leroy Anderson’s 1950 its development?5 “The Typewriter.”3 I think that’s right, SH: Maybe. But I didn’t immediately that the project was about the weird think of Xerophonics as having any displacement in time and history that connection to the anthropological work many of us feel at photocopiers these I was finishing up at the time on Artificial days, when so much of the rest of Life and the computer simulation of our document lives are about soundless biological systems, though it wouldn’t be PDFs or emails that depart from difficult to say that both projects were our virtual mailboxes with those weird about cultures of machinic replication— simulated whooshing sounds (are we of documents, of theories about vitality. supposed to be hearing paper airplanes, Still, other intellectual curiosities— as the accompanying “send” icon mostly about music, sound, noise,

fig. 1 Above, Photograph demonstrating an early Below, Joseph C. Wilson with the Xerox 914, the xerographic printer, showing Chester Carlson first automatic office copier to make copies on 4. See Hillel Schwartz, The Culture of 5. “Whereas Artificial Intelligence attempted such things as minds.” Stefan Helmreich, the Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable to model the mind, Artificial Life workers Silicon Second Nature: Culturing Artificial (center), inventor of xerography, and Joseph C. plain paper, at a rate of seven copies per minute. Facsimiles (New York: Zone Books, hope[d] to simulate the life processes that Life in a Digital World (Berkeley: Wilson, Xerox CEO from 1946 to 1966. Courtesy Courtesy of the Xerox Corporation. 1996). support the development and evolution of University of California Press, 1998), 8. of the Xerox Corporation.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/thld_a_00686 by guest on 24 September 2021 and property in the age of digital I was also interested in how Xerophonics reproduction—did shape the project. could, in its form, call attention to some I was interested, for example, in of the earlier musical works by which Xerophonics as a compositional it was inspired and which, in some way, experiment in what it would mean it sought to repeat—even if, of course, to copy the sound of copying—a kind with a difference. It will not have escaped of meta-comment on sampling and the notice of some listeners that the on the ownership of sound. Here, CD’s subtitle, Copying Machine Music, is Schwartz’s The Culture of the Copy was a pun on Lou Reed’s famous noise LP, a huge influence. I later gave Schwartz Metal Machine Music (1975), for instance. a copy of the CD, and he ended up What else academic or conceptual? writing about it in a talk he gave titled, I was keen to think about copying “Ones of a Kind and Originopoly.” machines as material artifacts—and Here’s a passage: as artifacts that never fully worked as advertised. In any long copying job, Consider Stefan Helmreich’s recent things inevitably go wrong. They glitch. album, Xerophonics. . . . On the I had been interested in the aesthetic CD are thirteen cuts, each of which of the glitch at least since the experimental replays sounds made by a different music group Coil had released their copying machine. Ones of a kind. . . . Worship the Glitch EP in 1995, an event So even the literal sounds of literal that music writer Rob Young picked copying drift away from the up on in The Wire in a 1999 piece he wrote meanings and contexts we had been called (what else?) Worship the Glitch.7 certain of, becoming something else, Glitch as an approach and species of something other. music was, in retrospect, an interesting An old trick, this elemental switching point between those genres turnabout, this de/recontextualized of industrial music that made use of listening, but nonetheless cautionary: power tools, oil drums, and sheet metal original and copy are binary stars and those genres of electronica that pulling at each other in dynamic inquired into the sound of errors possible and decaying balance; is there any to realize with electronic devices (fig. 3). point to debating which should be Think of Kraftwerk, but with busted subsumed by which? synthesizers. I wanted to get at errors in Originopoly is my term for the repetition, thinking of them as sources political, economic, and theological of invention. strategy that, like radical WD: How, then, might your thinking around fundamentalism in legislation, Xerophonics have predicted (or even shaped) education, and religion, denies your later scholarly engagements with sound the commonalty of our standing and sound studies? You’ve written, for example, in aftermaths that gradually, on the crucial roles sound plays in scientific inevitably drift away from any working environments (notably submarines), original. Originopoly wants both to and in its attention to the audible “sickness exalt the first fleeting instance and health” of machines, Xerophonics does reveal into an eternity and to control the the manner in which sound brokers our direction of every aftermath. . . .6 collaborative “work” with copiers.8

6. Hillel Schwartz, “Ones of a Kind and 7. Rob Young, “Worship the Glitch,” The Wire 8. On the submarine soundscape, see Originopoly,” (talk presented at the 190 (December/January 1999/2000): 52–56. Stefan Helmreich, “An Anthropologist fig. 2 Design of Xerophonics: Copying Machine Music, Conference on Originalkopie/Praktiken des See also Laura U. Marks, “Arab Glitch,” in Underwater: Immersive Soundscapes, CD booklet with tracklist and liner notes, released Sekundären, Universität zu Köln– Uncommon Grounds: New Media and Submarine Cyborgs, and Transductive Kulturwissenschaftliches Forschungskolleg: Critical Practice in North Africa and Ethnography,” American Ethnologist 34, on February 25, 2003 through Seeland Records Medien und Kulturelle Kommunikation, the Middle East, ed. Anthony Downey (New no. 4 (November 01, 2007): 621–41. (Seeland 524). May 24, 2003). York: I.B. Tauris, 2014).

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/thld_a_00686 by guest on 24 September 2021 SH: That’s a good question. Yes, sound “Inutiq’s critical engagement with can be used as a diagnostic of how signal, noise, and glitch to re-present well machines are working. In the liner the North—as well as the archive— notes of Xerophonics, I quoted Julian as an unstable, dynamic idea, instead Orr’s ethnography of photocopying of a static apparatus of the colonial machine repairers—and maybe that’s imagination.”10 You can listen to worth reproducing here: one version of the piece here: https://culanth.org/articles/952-em- One set of sounds indicates where arcticnoise-em-and-broadcasting- the problem occurs . . . and yet another futures. So, noise as critique. indicates that the controlling logic WD: Xerophonics nicely binds together (or at has just crashed. In older machines, least brings into collision) two distinct artistic the succession of noises narrates genealogies: on the one hand, it slots into to the experienced ear the progress of a lineage of sample-based music stretching the operation, and should it fail, from Steve Reich and King Tubby to John the last noises suggest where to look Oswald and J Dilla; on the other, as you’ve for the problem. Perhaps more acknowledged, it evokes the visual art of the obvious are the sounds of mechanical sixties and seventies that latched onto the distress, as mechanisms bind, ease and elasticity of the photocopier: zine bearings go bad and squeal, or pins culture, Mail Art, and new mixed-media practice. slip out to stop the rotation of a shaft SH: Yes, and it was also meant in completely while an overzealous part as a contribution to at-the-time-in- drive belt thumps away, skipping one play conversations about sampling, tooth at a time.9 reperformance, and fair use. I’d bring Vicki Bennett’s “People Like Us” project So yes, I suppose the sound of machines into this conversation, too. She’s been as indicative of their desired and situated doing astonishing audio-visual collage use started to fascinate me around the since the early nineties, cross-wiring time of Xerophonics. I had also started sound and vision in inspiring ways. thinking (along with many others) about Xerophonics was released on the how noise could be interpreted, not Seeland label, which was stewarded by just as malfunction, but also as critique, the group Negativland, famous for, as an opening to questions about among many other things, being sued “proper” functioning. I think now, most by U2’s nineties record label, Island immediately, about a sound piece called Records, for releasing an album they ARCTICNOISE, in which sound artist called U2, which featured a hilarious Geronimo Inutiq remixes an Indigenous sampladelic version of “I Still Haven’t media archive (fig. 4)—the Igloolik Found What I’m Looking For” Isuma Video Archive (which has recently (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= come into the hands of the National dV3hfdf01Xc). Xerophonics was also Gallery of Canada)—in juxtaposition meant as a rip-off of Oswald’s with and as a critical interruption of Plunderphonics (1989), a work that had Glenn Gould’s famous 1967 radio essay appeared on the Seeland label (though, “The Idea of North.” In a recent article as it happened, it had been circulating in an anthropology journal about prior to its Seeland release in the this work, Kate Hennessy, Trudi Lynn company of a photocopied booklet of Smith, and Tarah Hogue examine collaged copy art, making the cross- fig. 3 Photograph of Sled Dog, Nicolas’s Collins’ hand- Tone’s compositions for “wounded” or damaged scratchable hacked CD player, 2001. Collins is CDs, and the gentler, more ambient-leaning among the earliest figures associated with the music of Oval (Markus Popp), Jan Jelinek, and 9. Julian Orr, Talking About Machines: An 10. Kate Hennessy, Trudi Lynn Smith, and Remixes the Igloolik Isuma Archive,” Ethnography of a Modern Job (Ithaca, NY: Tarah Hogue, “ARCTICNOISE and Cultural Anthropology 33, no. 2 (2018): 215. musical genre of “glitch,” which encompasses Christian Fennesz. Photograph by Simon Lonergan. Cornell University Press, 1996), 98. Broadcasting Futures: Geronimo Inutiq both works of extreme noise, such as Yasunao

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/thld_a_00686 by guest on 24 September 2021 media resonances between photocopy WD: In the fifteen years that have passed since art and sample art explicit). you released Xerophonics, certain currents in WD: You released Xerophonics under a “copyleft” electronic music have, strangely enough, come license, effectively encouraging listeners to emulate exactly the sort of sounds you to remix and repackage it. What motivated brought together on the CD. (See, for example, this decision? the rugged “noise techno” of Powell, Eric SH: It was very much about inviting Copeland, Container, and Prostitutes.) These work and play around questions of fair new acts also gravitate, as you did, toward use and fair dealing, about critiquing the occasional instability and dysfunction of corporate ownership of popular culture, machines—in their case, sampling decks particularly in sound and music. I only and analog synthesizers. What might account ever came across a few remixes of the for this trend? Did Xerophonics hit upon a Xerophonics pieces, though. One mashed latent impulse (aesthetic or otherwise) that’s up my “Toshiba 2060” track with just now being embraced? an ad for sneakers—that one was pretty SH: It felt at the time like it was an cool and very much in the spirit of attempt to use a mundane machine to appropriating corporately created sounds do what others had been seeking to (maybe the ad was for Nike?) in order do with grittier and more undisciplined to make new work. Another was machines. Xerophonics modulated into by someone called DJ Morsanek, who the key of the office those sounds that incorporated one of my tracks into a such noise-ish bands as the UK’s piece called “I Made a Mess of Frank Throbbing Gristle and Germany’s Denyer.” My favorite was not so much Einstürzende Neubauten had earlier a remix as a reuse. A South Korean rendered with more frightening materials. dance troupe called the Laboratory (By the way, the name of Einstürzende Dance Project worked with filmmaker Neubauten—which translates as YuSik Hwang to produce a time- “collapsing new buildings”—turned out stuttering dance movie to the tune of to have an upsetting resonance in “Matrix 12510-12” (https://www.youtube. New York City in 2001, around the time com/watch?v=X1BGlLP2yiE ). I was making the Xerophonics album. Interestingly, a few years after One of my friends thought that the track Xerophonics came out, I got an inquiry called “Minolta EP 6001 CS Pro” was from Xerox—not a cease and desist order, about the collapse of the Twin Towers.) but rather a question about whether As for what what’s happening I would be interested in the company nowadays, with the sometime posting Xerophonics tracks on their convergence of noise and techno? My corporate website. I wrote back and said, first impression is that the technoise “Fine!” Though I also observed that folk are a pretty white crew. I suspect many of the tracks were not actually made that is important. My thoughts run from Xerox brand machines. I pointed immediately to Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel them, too, to Creative Commons licenses White Noise, which is about, among and more particularly to the provisions many other things, whiteness and unease: of “share-alike” licenses, which give about everyday white innocence licensees the right to do whatever they as a structure of feeling that depends want to do with a track (like put it on a upon the denial and forgetting of website, and so on), but specify that history—denial and forgetting that are whatever is rereleased also works under always glitching—about whiteness as the same license . . . inviting further a simulation of serene social happiness— fig. 4 Installation views of Geronimo Inutiq (madeskimo), ARCTICNOISE, at grunt gallery, copying. I never heard back from Xerox, a simulation that is always, à la The Matrix Vancouver, BC, 2015. Photograph by and I never checked to see whether they movie (maybe its time for me to revisit Henri Robideau. Courtesy of grunt gallery. used any of the work. the track “Matrix 12510-12”), de-rezzing

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/thld_a_00686 by guest on 24 September 2021 to reveal its dependence upon racialized of Thresholds, that repetitions recruit CARLOS AMORALES The conversation charts some of the early social inequality. So . . . if techno “ever new publics and functions, INTERVIEWED BY SARAH RIFKY discussions I had with Walker Downey that originated as a primarily black cultural accreting multiple lives and an unruly shaped this volume of Thresholds. form in the work of people like Juan tangle of genealogies.” Listening back What about frogs? Atkins, Derrick May, and Kevin to Xerophonics has made me reconsider On Frogs and Butterflies Saunderson (influenced, to be sure by it as an historical document and think AVATARS WITHOUT AUTHORS their repurposings of Kraftwerk), some about the multiple genealogies within technoise might be interpreted as, in which one might put it and toward which Black Cloud (2007), one of artist Carlos Amorales’s I started reading this book called Kill all part, one recent white detour of the form. it might yet be animated. I want to thank most iconic works, is inspired by the migration Normies and I was really shocked: is this really And all this makes me think that you for providing that opportunity of monarch butterflies from Canada to Mexico. happening? It made me start researching. Xerophonics can, from a certain angle, and for your really provocative questions, The work has been praised for its contemporary I started finding these boards, like 4chan and also be interpreted as irradiated by which got at all kinds of stuff I hadn’t gothic aesthetics and picked up as a motif other alt-right sites, some of which feature a glow of whiteness—and, just to be considered before, generating all sorts of on everything from Dior Homme to unbranded these characters, like Pepe the Frog. Originally clear, I’m a white cis man, so certainly useful new noise for me to ponder! underwear and generic furniture. When it was this frog was illustrated for something else— part of the demographic I’m aiming presented at Axiomas para la acción (1996–2018), an internet comic or a children’s story. But these comments at. The sampling play the retrospective on Amorales in Mexico that posts on alt-right boards appropriated and politics of Xerophonics were not was curated by Cuauhtémoc Medina at this character, slowly transforming it. The the sampling politics that hip-hop artists the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo character, the frog, gradually becomes twisted. like Public Enemy and others grappled in 2018, it hit the Instagram circuit with user posts No longer friendly, the frog becomes aggressive. with back in the nineties, when so marking the numerous visits to the exhibition. Then, the frog is joined by the illustrated many black artists’ recontexualization The thirty thousand butterflies that comprise figure of a white man. The frog and the man of samples was framed by racist Black Cloud are made from black, laser-cut paper. start to become slowly deformed. The commentators as theft, instead of homage The cutouts are then hand folded to form characters’ poses are copied and pasted. They or critique.11 Xerophonics enacts a kind one of over thirty species of winged insects that are crudely altered. People start to make of white-collar crime, you might say, with populate the work. The swarm they form appears memes. The frog and the white man become stakes in its sampling that only partially randomized and chaotic. One encounters it super grotesque figures. The original overlap with other sampling histories. as a magnificent behemoth storming through the illustrator and owner of the frog tries to claim There are many, many genres, colors, white-cube halls of a museum or gallery. him back, but the anonymous collective of tints, shades, and hues of noise. Since 2007, Amorales has closely followed online users proclaim him dead. They took the The word history is probably doubly the many lives of his Black Cloud (fig. 1), once an frog, deformed him, and cast him as a series of important, too, since 2018 is a really art installation and now a common motif. The characters or puppets (fig. 2). different moment for sampling politics story of Black Cloud departs from the anxieties than was 2003, with practices that used of an artwork’s predicament, posing questions Who is doing this? to be edgy now the common coin of on the reproduction and appropriation of art There is no real author, just hundreds of commercial cultural production. As for over and against considerations of the thousands of people doing this. musical interest in the occasional authorship and originality of the present instability and dysfunction of machines moment. What happens when a form is There is a political and economic value in asking that you point to, I’d say that isn’t so new repeated? Is this repetition necessarily always a about the ways in which forms migrate. It is to technoise, and I’d point to Bevin copy? What are the parameters of authorship scary to think that shielded by anonymity, Kelley and Kristin Erickson of Blectum when configured outside of the paradigm that any image, figure, or icon can be reproduced from Blechdom or to Jessica Rylan presents originality as value? to politically incorrect ends, stripped of of Can’t or to Antye Greie (aka AGF) as I sat down with Carlos thinking that we would its intentions; anything can come to uphold composers who have been bending talk about butterflies. Instead, he started telling misogynistic, racist, and anti-queer ideas. circuits in rhythmic ways for a good me about his fascination with a grotesque and while now.12 politically incorrect frog and his friend (a creepy Everybody is anonymous. You don’t know who I like what you and your coeditor white man), as well as the evolution of anonymous is writing. But everyone, for example, is Pepe wrote in your call for papers for this issue authorship and the alt-right on the internet. the Frog.

11. Regarding hip-hop sampling as theft and and Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and 12. See Tara Rodgers, Pink Noises: Women CARLOS AMORALES is an artist interested Liquid Archive, a project composed of lines, on contemporary sub- and pop-culture, homage see, respectively, Nelson George, Black Culture in Contemporary America on Electronic Music and Sound (Durham, in signs, codes, and communication, across shapes, and nodes; he has also developed his traditional craft, and the history of art. Hip-Hop America (New York: Viking, 1998); (Hanover, NH; Wesleyan University Press). NC: Duke University Press, 2010). different media. Since 1998, he has maintained own alphabet systems. Amorales’s work draws

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