LMJ13_02body_005-096 11/25/03 2:57 PM Page 79 CD COMPANION INTRODUCTION Splitting Bits, Closing Loops: Sound on Sound Every artistic practice, it seems, maps itself grammatically, as if a part of speech. Documentary photography, the most literal application of an already empiricist medium, privileges the noun, the thing itself. Action painting, tautologically speaking, is all verb. Impressionism? Adjectival. More and more, contemporary music—from the pop charts to the world of academic computer music and gallery installations—positions itself preposition- ally: It is meta-music, music about music, sound about sound, and process about, well, pro- cess. None of this is news, of course. Properly postmodern, we are surrounded by the products of meta-culture, from the films Being John Malkovich and Adaptation to the array of versions, mash-ups, remixes, shoutouts, lyrical putdowns and experiments in genre that comprise the pop music universe. Increasingly, contemporary music is itself simultaneously, in a phrase made famous by VH1, “behind the music”—that is, when it is not over the music, within the music, around the music. What is new, however—or if not new, then at least in the ascendant—is the degree to which music has come to concern its own process, its own materials, its own making. As Nic Collins noted in the call for papers for the issue of Leonardo Music Journal that occasioned this CD, “The rise of the DJ in the last two decades has signaled the arrival of the medium as the in- strument—the crowning achievement of a generation for whom tapping the remote control is as instinctive as tapping two sticks together” [1]. And as Kim Cascone has noted, Marshall McLuhan’s famous formulation, “The medium is the message,” has given way to a new phe- nomenon: “The tool is the message” [2]. In his poem “Axe Handles,” Gary Snyder quotes Ezra Pound: “When making an axe handle / the pattern is not far off” [3]. The artists featured here break with Snyder’s and Pound’s cycle, as if turning their blades against the very handles that support them: not using their tools to make faithful reproductions, but carving the selfsame utensils into new forms. From AGF’s spoken code to Institut fuer Feinmotorik’s improvisations upon prepared, “empty” turntables, the works here attend not simply to the matter of sound but to the mate- riality of all phases of musical creation and playback in the age of mechanical (and digital) reproduction. Attending to belt drives and runout grooves might seem to run counter to the increasingly virtual condition of contemporary media, as music flees the prisons of vinyl, aluminum and magnetic tape for a fleet-footed existence of pure circulation, enabled by fiber optics. The materialist tradition runs deep, however, from John Cage’s incorporation of turntables in his 1939 piece Imaginary Landscape No. 1 to the Jamaican sound systems that provided the founda- tion for the recombinant culture of hip-hop. Since the world has gone digital, artists have dug even deeper into the guts of their gear. In 1994, some electronica fans were startled to hear the German post-techno producer Oval create an album entirely out of samples of skipping CDs [4], but they needn’t have been: Yasunao Tone had been manipulating aluminum discs since shortly after their introduction, and Nic Collins had incorporated the technique in compositions as early as 1988. Toshimaru Nakamura’s No-Input Mixing Board seems an even more radical—in the literal sense—act of © 2003 ISAST LEONARDO MUSIC JOURNAL, Vol. 13, pp. 79–81, 2003 79 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/096112104322750845 by guest on 02 October 2021 LMJ13_02body_005-096 11/25/03 2:57 PM Page 80 auto-generation, “playing” a mixing desk with no inputs aside from its own output [5]. With- out recourse to any external sound source, Nakamura’s strategy utilizes only the device’s own internal feedback, creating a purely latent music that might be considered to be always- already present in the machine. William Basinski’s shortwave compositions in the 1980s treated the radio spectrum itself as an audio source, ignoring particular “musical” content in favor of the formless static between stations [6]. More recently, the dance artist Akufen has incorporated the same idea, replacing techno’s drum sounds and synthesizers with bursts of white noise spun off the radio dial [7]. Name a recording medium or transmission mecha- nism—turntable, film, DAT, videotape, minidisc, cell phone, hard drive—and it is likely that one artist or another has taken the material itself as his or her source. It would be a mistake to call this a movement. There is no rulebook, no standard set of practices; artists from academia, the underground and even (occasionally) the pop charts are equally likely to pursue these sorts of meta-processes. This compilation, hardly an exhaustive survey of the field, offers an entry point; it is itself like a spin through a radio dial, a grab bag of tactics, intentions, effects. Nostalgia weighs down the low-end of some of these pieces, like M. Behrens’s revisitation of the dead wax on his mother’s old 45s; elsewhere, as in Stephan Mathieu’s (un)lucky meltdown, or DAT Politics’ error-prone pop, whimsy takes center stage, along with the frisson of failure. Still, despite the variety of methods, it is hard to dispel the sense that something unifies these pieces, a singular intensity born of the process of scraping sonic residue out of the folds of the machine, the grooves of the record, the craters in the tape. This is the sound of sound sloughing off its skin, the fizz of contingency crystallized and contact-miked. These composi- tions are grave-rubbings of recorded life, casts of casts. Like epiphytes nestled in the branches of the recording apparatus, these stubborn, self-reliant blossoms are the digital equivalent of Walter Benjamin’s “blue flower in the land of technology,” offering a rare glimpse of the im- mediate amidst so much mediation [8]. PHILIP SHERBURNE LMJ13 CD Curator 1122 Church Street San Francisco, CA 94114 U.S.A. E-mail: Ͻ[email protected]Ͼ References 1. Nic Collins, “Call for Papers: LMJ 13 (year 2003),” Ͻhttp://mitpress2.mit.edu/Leonardo/lmj/lmj13call.htmlϾ; Groove Pit and Wave: Recording, Transmission and Music, special issue, Leonardo Music Journal 13 (2003). 2. Kim Cascone, “The Aesthetics of Failure: ‘Post-Digital’ Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music,” Computer Music Journal 24, No. 4 (Winter 2000) p. 12. 3. Gary Snyder, “Axe Handles,” in No Nature: New and Selected Poems (New York: Pantheon, 1992) p. 266. 4. Oval, Systemisch, Mille Plateaux CD MP009 (1994). 5. Toshimaru Nakamura, No-Input Mixing Board, Zero Gravity CD ZGV-026 (2000). 6. William Basinski, Shortwavemusic, Raster-Noton LP vyr012 (1998). 7. Akufen, My Way, Force Inc. CD FIM336 (2002). 8. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1968) p. 233. Selected Discography AGF. Head Slash Bauch, Orthlorng Musork CD Musork08 (2001). Akufen. My Way, Force Inc CD FIM060 (2002). Basinski, William. Shortwave Music, Noton LP VYR012 (11982/1998). Behrens, M. Elapsed Time, Instransitive CD INT017 (2001). Brinkmann, Thomas. Klick, max.E CD 1 (2000). Cascone, Kim. cathodeFlower, Ritornell CD RIT06 (1999). Cascone, Kim. Dust Theories, Cycling ’74 CD c74-004 (2001). 80 LMJ13 CD Companion Introduction Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/096112104322750845 by guest on 02 October 2021 LMJ13_02body_005-096 11/25/03 2:57 PM Page 81 Collins, Nicolas. Devil’s Music, Trace Elements Records LP TE1013 (1986). Collins, Nicolas. It Was a Dark and Stormy Night, Trace Elements Records CD TE1019 (1992). Collins, Nicolas. “Microstoria.snd Remix,” track on Microstoria: Reprovisers, Mille Plateaux CD MP37 (1997). Collins, Nicolas. Sound without Picture, Periplum Records CD P0060 (1999). DAT Politics. Tracto Flirt, Tigerbeat6 CD 7 (1999). Gendreau, Michael. 55 pas de la ligne au no3, 23five CD 002 (2002). Institut fuer Feinmotorik. Penetrans, Staubgold CD 25 (2002). Jeck, Philip. Vinyl Coda I-III, Intermedium CD 002 (2000). Jeck, Philip. Vinyl Coda IV, Intermedium CD 008 (2001). Jeck, Philip. Stoke, Touch CD TO 56 (2002). Jeck, Philip; Yoshihide, Otomo; and Tétreault, Martin. Invisible Architecture #1, Audiosphere CD ASO 01 (2002). López, Francisco. Untitled #92, MEGO LP mego 034 (2000). Lucier, Alvin. I Am Sitting In a Room, Lovely Music CD 1013 (1980). Mathieu, Stephan. Wurmloch Variationen, Ritornell CD RIT16 (2000). Nakamura, Toshimaru. No-Input Mixing Board, Zero Gravity CD ZGV-026 (2000). Nakamura, Toshimaru. No-Input Mixing Board 2, A Bruit Secret CD 02 (2001). Oval. Systemisch, Mille Plateaux CD MP009 (1994). Roden, Steve. Forms of Paper, LINE CD LINE_007 (2000). Schaefer, Janek. On/Off, audiOh! LP audiOh!09 (2001). Schaefer, Janek. Skate/Rink, audiOh! LP audiOh!11, Staalplaat 3-inch CD StmCD023 (2003). Tétreault, Martin. La Nuit Où J’ai Dit Non, Audioview CD AUDIO 03 (1998). Tétreault, Martin, and Charles, Xavier. MXCT, Vand’Oeuvre CD VDO 0121 (2001). Tétreault, Martin, and Yoshihide, Otomo. 21 Situations, Ambiances Magnetiques CD 069 (1999). UBSB. Traceroute, Ash International LP Ash 4.7 (1999). Various. Turntable Solos, Amoebic CD AMO VA01 (1999). Various. Clicks ϩ Cuts, Mille Plateaux 2xCD MP079 (2000). Various. Clicks & Cuts 2, Mille Plateaux 3xCD MP098 (2001). Various. The Conet Project: Recordings of Shortwave Numbers Stations, Irdial 4xCD ϩ book 59ird tcp1 (1998). Vitiello, Stephen. Sounds Building in the Fading Light, Creamgardens 10-inch LP VS-R-1 (2000). Yoshihide, Otomo. Sound Factory, Gentle Giant CD 021 (1997). Yoshihide, Otomo. Vinyl Tranquilizer, Sonic Factory CD 01 (1997). Philip Sherburne is a journalist and critic based in San Francisco.