Phonic art and the futurist ear

Phonic art and the futurist ear: the avant-garde can’t dance. Drew Hemment, 1998.

EXPLODERS, CRACKLERS, BUZZERS AND SCRAPERS
Through their various ‘Noise Intoners’ Russolo and the futurists sought to sweep away the constrictions and claustrophobia of nineteenth century sound with the expansive field of noise suggested by the crankings and grindings of twentieth century machines. Their vision was to free music from the expectations of our audio sense, dislocating perception and leading to the development of the futurist ear. The same audio insight into the potential of noise - of sound as such - would come to animate the avant-garde expressions of Boulez and Cage many years later, and yet I would claim that the futurist’s vision was only realised in a sonic domain that was itself prefigured in the phonic inscriptions of Edison more than thirty years earlier.

The futurists looked forward to a practice of music based upon the exploration of the materiality of sound, but it was not until recording technologies made possible the manipulation of prerecorded sonic matter - a field some term ‘Phonic Art’ - that such a practice began to develop. Whilst experiments such as atonality kept sound locked in a dialectic with order, the art of noises the futurists imagined required a prior dislocation in the functionality and the modality of perception. And whilst it was the tape splicings of Musique Concrete that had the greatest impact (and whilst it is the soundbyte science of hip hop and drum ‘n’ bass that most excite the music intelligencia today), it was the phonograph that initially ruptured the metaphysics of sonic presence and opened the intersticial spaces of copies and recordings: ‘prior to the invention of the phonograph no one had ever heard themselves before except through momentary echoes and reverberations.’ The production of an aural likeness previously depended upon ‘an ability to imitate through the voice and through the construction of instruments’, and thus nurtured the development of musical discipline and later the representational technology of notation. The instanteneity of recording sundered the economy of imitation and replaced it with one of simulation, where distortion came to supplant fidelity as the guiding aim.

Technologies designed for the storage of live music have been worked against themselves and turned towards an audio production of their own in the development of the recording aesthetic that has come to dominate the art and music of the twentieth century. Perhaps the earliest example within mainstream pop music is the Elvis Presley recordings at Sun Studios which utilised various tricks and techniques to add effects to the original recording, such that the effects rather than song structure came to define the resultant sound. There has subsequently been a general displacement of the site of creativity from the moment of ‘live’ performance to the no-place of the studio, and a corresponding drift from the creation of original audio statements towards the production of simulacra through the processing of previously recorded sounds (both found and synthetic).

The persistence of phonic art may be related to the transmission of an oral culture where ‘new’ works are repetitions of elements or themes taken from a shared collective memory. Contemporary remix culture in particular similarly circulates shared codes through a networked body of performance, recording and engineering. In many cases this is strictly moored to the economic and institutional constraints of the record company’s marketing strategy. But conversely in d&b, for example, a single breakbeat can be the basis of multiple sonic departures, each working with and against the same shared resource. Indeed, one break can make or break an entire genre. The breakbeat is a monad that envelops an entire world of possible sound within its inflexive folds. As opposed to the modernist conception of evolution as the progression of unique works, here the involution of a genre consists in the turning of a prism on a singular work to reveal differing perspectives latent within its virtual field of possibility. Where this is distinguished from traditional oral and folk traditions is the speed of transmission and the motility of connection.

Sound is of necessity embodied, and yet upon the plane of simulation it is deterritorialised and set loose within a virtual domain of inscription. When music was dislocated out of an economy of performance and originality and into an economy of recording it became inscribed within a system of writing which, after Derrida, we might say both differs and defers. Phonic art persists as a deconstructive trace, both real and ideal, both more than and less then any particular instantiation, relayed by various forms of minor media: pirate radio, specialist record shop, dub plate, mix tape, narrow-cast audio stream, and even sample CD, sound module, net-cast, shareware. Whilst like rock hip hop retains the presence of performance (the DJ scratch and MC toast), dance music and drum ‘n’ bass are perhaps more insidious, and less easy to contain - they are pure contagion.

Within the logic of the simulacrum is locked an economy of difference-in-repetition that exceeds both the vagaries of fashion and the nostalgia of imitation, a production of ‘bad copies’ that has become unmoored from the realm of the real. In the field of sound the difference-in-repetition of the simulacrum may found in the inter-rhythmic spaces between heterogeneous plateaux. In what follows I will seek to excavate such a thinking of difference in the materiality of music and the productivity of noise. This will be located in the synthetic and simulated cultures of recorded music and amplified sound, where difference might be heard to enter quite literally in the spaces between the beats.

AMPLIPHONICS
Phonic Art has not been reserved to the avant-garde and art academy but has reverberated throughout a much wider cultural sphere. As recording technologies came to circulate through ever more far-flung networks and be turned towards unforeseen applications they provided a natural conduit for it to infect a wide variety of practices and places, mutating as it spread. This not only altered the textures of art but also fragmented the art object itself, as recording smeared the site of creativity across the previously disparate domains of production, distribution and consumption. This opened new zones of creative productivity, but also had corroding effects within the established musical industry, unsettling certain marketing strategies but also further undermining the claims of, say, black, female session musicians to any royalties.

Recording and broadcasting have fundamentally altered the nature of the production and consumption of art. A common reading of this shift is presented by Alan Durant:
‘Investment, development and commercial application of the gramophone, radio broadcasting, and, later, tape recording have radically altered ways of listening. A focus of attention has moved away from an active presence in performance into controlled, mechanical reproduction.’

I would argue that the sonic simulation of the sound system both exceeds this mechanistic horizon and enacts a departure from the individualised relation to sound identified by Adorno as an inherent characteristic of the culture industry. The diffuse audio field of the sound system opens immersive, participatory spaces which we might compare to the street poetics of break dancing made possible by the ghetto-blaster, or even the surreal ‘walkman party’ noted by Hosokawa, both of which open a communal participation in sound.

Whilst this resulted in a general diffraction of artistic practice, the sound system - consisting of turntables, mixer, graphic equaliser, amps speakers, DJs, MCs, and sound crew - crystallised the different planes of audio engagement within a singular, motile event. The sound system became a key point of intersection of these different networks, solidifying the materiality of the dancefloor within a unified machine.

Just as recording precipitated a mutation in sound type the increase in decibel level made possible by amplification initiated a dislocation of musical participation and set the terms for a new relationship to art. This in turn fed back into the composition of the music in a feedback loop which I have elsewhere termed ‘ampliphonics’. In tune with the beats aesthetic forged by the early deck pioneers, ampliphonics spawned a mode of music dominated by rhythm and texture where vocals became disconnected fragments, sounds tactile shapes, and music an immersive environment.

MICROTEXTURE
It was when the recording aesthetic of phonic art was passed through the audio machine of the sound system that it took the engagement with the materiality of sound beyond the cerebral contemplation of the avant-garde. Geared towards the production of sound rather than the composition of music, ampliphonics initiated a sonic sensibility based in the exploration of noise and directed towards the body poetics of the dancefloor rather than the discipline of instrumental virtuosity or compositional complexity. In this sense we might compare the tactility of reggae, dub, dance and drum 'n' bass with the immediatism of Dada:
‘the work of art of the Dadaists became an instrument of ballistics. It hit the spectator like a bullet, it happened to him, thus aquiring a tactile quality.’ (Benjamin)

In this way phonic art and ampliphonics inaugurated the exploration of the microtextures that occupy the spaces between the beats. Recording, synthesis, sampling and amplification open up an audio unconscious, much in the same way that Benjamin saw the cinema open up the optical unconscious. We might term this a microperception that operates on the totality of the body, rather than being reserved for the cerebral contemplation of musical compositions by the distanced subject.

The sound system opens a zone of sonic space, which we may contrast to the dominant visual spatiality of modernity. McLuhan defined sonic space as ‘boundless, directionless, horizonless, the dark side of the mind.’ Visual space on the other hand is structured by a perspectival grid whose specific vanishing point is dictated in modernity by the propriety of subjectivity as well as by capital and private property. Light is far easier to contain than sound. It can be blocked out or fenced in, and is thus at one with the compartmentalisation demanded of our individuated lives. Sound, on the other hand, is essentially leaky. It seeps round corners and flows through walls, paying scant regard to the geographical, legal or even conceptual barriers that are placed in its way. It fills a space like a gas, and can echo in all directions at once. It refuses to be bounded as the object of our gaze, but permeates our sinews, reverberates through our vertebrae, and infuses the giroscope of the inner ear.

(In the diffuse space of the club you literally rub shoulders with difference whilst in a state of distraction that obviates the contemplative repose demanded of the modern subject and maintains an opening onto alterity and change. Contemporary dancefloors also involve a microphysics of space and PA design every bit as intricate as that of the modernist concert hall. But in this case it is no longer channeled towards the affirmation of the autonomous self, but is rather a diffuse and open participatory field.

The dancefloor is an intersticial space between numerous discourses, the point of intersection of material, electronic, aesthetic, commercial, cultural, libidinal, pharmaceutical and corporeal flows. In particular, dance is a process by which sound and body reciprocally transform and modulate each other: music becoming embodied in dance, dancers becoming disembodied as music. The space of dance is characterised by interference in the transmission of mediated messages and codes. Rather than the proper, it is a space of the alien - understood as ephemeral effect or ecstatic disclosure emerging out of static and between discourses. It is a space of noise, where noise is understood not as the temporary suspension or inversion of order, but as a conditioning interruptance that comes before any statement of propriety.

As such this space is both opened by and opened to genders, sexualities, colours and classes that have otherwise been forced to the margins. The jouissance of this sensibility of sound resonated in particular within the black and gay clubs of New York, Chicago, Manchester and London. The immersive participation in sound combined with the intensive insistent rhythms of disco invited a collective, participatory celebration of the body aside from the phallic posturings of rock and the territories of heterosexuality. This sensibility was reanimated within a more heterogeneous musical field initiated by the astro funk of house and techno, setting the basis for the multiple audio and cultural departures since witnessed on and off dancefloors across the globe.

Whilst Bob Dylan won notoriety for introducing amplification into his stage performances, the first sound systems were the dancehalls of Jamaica. These were parasitical (‘parasite electric’) upon the musical output of North America, but in putting it through the remix machine of studio and sound system they radically altered its nature, changing ballads of authenticity into growling walls of sound. This initiated the tradition of synthetic culture and audio abduction that runs through the intergalactic electronics of Sun Ra and George Clinton, the dub echo chambers of Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry and King Tubby, the turntable terrorism of Kool DJ Herc and Grandmaster Flash, the electro funk of Africa Bambaata and Man Parrish, the incipient techno of Cybotron and Model 500, the jungle and drum 'n' bass of DJ Hype and the Reinforced label, and the futuristic horizons of Photek and 4 Hero and beyond.

This tradition arose outside and apart from the European art academy that through the eighteenth century and nineteenth century had claimed jurisdiction over sound as such. In particular ampliphonics amplified and transmitted the sonic sensibility of black music. It both continued and broke with a tradition that was carried from Africa in the secret resistance rituals of the slaves and that infiltrated mass culture (black and white) through gospel, soul and funk. This is not about any ‘primitive’ musical sense neither does it relate simply to skin colour. Rather it marks the conflictual field of a political identity forged against the racism of European society intertwined with a sensibility that pervades the sinues and the senses. Significantly this tradition has been persistently futural in its orientation, in particular in the way in which it has animated the electronic sublime through the reappropriation and misuse of the black boxes of corporate electronic machine, abandoning hand-books in the search for the new, leading to what Mark Dery has termed the black electronic.

SINE WAVES AND THE MYTHOLOGY OF MISUSE: THE 303 STORY
‘the tendency to “stretch” the limits of the instrument may have been aleady there since the wail of the first blues guitar, the whisper of the first muted jazz trumpet or the growl of the first jazz trombonist.’ (Snead, 1990: p.222)

Machines which failed in their representational function of simulating real instruments were used to construct a new paradigm characterised by intensive, insistent rhythms. A special case is the Roland TB-303 which functioned by breaking down: notoriously bad at what it was designed for (simulating bass-guitar lines), it was very good at making mistakes. Its programming procedures were so complex that the operator’s intentions would become lost and unexpected results appear out of the confusion - with the mistakes proving more interesting than what was intended. Soon the misuse became the norm, as the unique squelching sounds produced by its filters came to define a whole genre of music - acid house. Like the drum-machine which kick-started the house revolution, the Roland TR-808, it was bought cheap on the second hand market following its premature discontinuation because of its failure to emulate real instruments. Similarly, just as the genealogy of house is intimately related to the accessibility of synthesisers and drum-machines, so is the development of jungle intimately related to the availability and creative application of digital sampling technology.

THE SCRATCH: PLAYING AGAINST THE GRAIN
The phonograph has played a pivotal role in the story of phonic art both because of its originary intervention, but also by virtue of its continued cultural and audio significance. Whilst it was tape splicing that first mapped out the simulated spaces of phonic art, and sampling that currently generates the most excitement for its morphing potential, still it is the phonograph that has both defined the ontology of twentieth century sound and provided the most vibrant site of artistic genesis. It is vinyl that has been the medium that has precipitated the gradual shift of the primary site of artistic production from the stage to the studio. And it is the turntable that has staged the most radical artistic and cultural manoeuvres of the last thirty years, both in the direct way that hip hop artists have created the street art of turntabalism and in the less direct but equally significant way in which the action on the ones and twos has shifted attention away from the action of a band on stage and towards the particpatory acoustic spaces of the dancefloor. / the shift to recording they inaugurated changed the ecology of music …. music to be played in the mix.

In the networks of material, technological, audio and cultural flows that have defined this shifting field one object in particular stands out. The Technics 1200 turntable has been one of the most significant cultural products of the twentieth century. From the block parties of Brooklyn, to the warehouses of Lancashire, to the beaches of Thailand, the Technics 1200s have supplied the platform on which the audio manoeuvres have been fought. Immensely robust they could survive extremes of heat and cold and function in damp warehouses or dusty beaches / [almost be imagined surviving with the cockroaches into some post-apocalyptic dawn. ....survive anything from the most cold and damp to the most hot and dusty environments and function in abandoned warehouses or tropical beaches]. (I even had one thrown 2.5 metres off the back of a truck by Michael Eavis at Glastonbury for unauthorised and unharmonious audio production, but I was able to just pick it up, plug it back in and go right on playing.) But what really set them apart was the power of their direct drive motor, which could return the .... to full speed (revs per min) instantaneously after being stopped or spun back. With a slipmat between deck and vinyl the record could be worked into the ground without harming it or the deck. This laid the basis for the techniques of cutting and scratching that would define the growth of hip hop through the early eighties and indirectly reverberate through the aesthetic of nearly all forms of dance music to come.
In this story one culturrecord decks that
The cultural biography of the Technics 1200 turntable: Few cultural objects can have such distinguished biographies as the Technics 1200 turntable.... From innocuous beginings it has risen to the status of the ....-Fender guitar, coming to be the impliment of choice for soul rebels and wannabes.

CUT/FLOW
Whilst the walls of bass of Reggae and the echo chambers of Dub were first to explore the acoustic potential of ampliphonics, it was the turntable terrorism of the early deck pioneers such as Kool DJ Herc and Grandmaster Flash that elevated the process of directed playback onto a plane of recomposition. Building on the practice of cutting between rhythm sections on different tracks (or two copies of the same track) to expand the output into extended percussive textures, scratch mixing (or ‘turntablism’) developed into a profusive repertoire of techniques for moulding and morphing the sound: cutting, scratching, stabbing, transforming, juggling, spin-backs, flares, orbits, crabs, rubs, echos, drills. This approach to the production of sound would later animate the application of sampling technology within electronic music. But more generally the sensibility of sound that these techniques produced would come to define all dance music to follow. The inheritance of old skool hip hop in breakbeat forms such as trip hop, drum ‘n’ bass and contemporary hip hop is clear, and yet I would argue that, in addition, even forms not themselves based on such clear techniques of montage or juxtaposition are marked by the beats aesthetic forged by the early deck pioneers.

Much is made of the split between the smooth flow of house and the rupture and dislocation of breakbeat science. And it is certainly true that certain strands of house music in the early nineties maintained a very rigid time structure, the music forced to conform to the shape of a rigid 4/4 meter with very little variation in the beat. However, whilst disco and house are based in blending or seguing different tracks into one smooth compound still a simplistic opposition to the rupture of the cut or the breakbeat is ultimately misguided. For it is only at their most whitewashed that these musics ... flatten out the inherent disturbance of the beat, the unease of the rhythmic plateaux. Many house tracks play with the sounds or tug and pull at the rhythm in ways which consistently confound expectations. And the DJ adds a further layer of disruption which, in some cases, may be every bit as radical as that found in breakbeat forms. One example is the Californian house DJ Mark Farina. He uses techniques such as allowing two identical records playing at the same time to go slowly out of phase so that the beats and sounds become doubled (flamming) as they slowly diverge. This opens out the track creating spectral spaces between the two copies. He then cuts between the different channels to syncopate the beats, or uses volume or EQ to switch the emphasis on each track and so change the main beat. Similarly a DJ set by Carl Craig is anything but a slide into a disco trance. Raw techno is cut up and broken down as beats and fragments are injected from one track into another. Admittedly these levels of complexity and involvement are rare, and even they still pale before the dynamic hip hip turntabalism of the likes of the X-ecutioners and the Invisibl Skratch Picklz. But the important point is that at a more general level even the smooth flow of non-breakbeat dance forms works within and against a microrhythmic functionality of sound. Thus whilst (at least) two parallel evolutions in sound may be traced I would argue that it is the recording aesthetic of phonic art that has driven the audio ecology of the twentieth century.

Within the bass bins and participatory spaces of ampliphonic audio may be heard distant echoes of the aesthetic of West African polyrhythmic drumming. Black music today is still dominated by the ‘cut’, the break or rupture at which a track loops back to the beginning of a refrain or jumps to another plateau. This does yield a distinct functionality of sound to the continuity of the disco trance, and yet by placing it within the perspective of African polyrythm we see that the distinction need not be as absolute as it might seem. For what emerges from a study of African music is firstly that it is as much the subtle ‘turning’ of rhythmic units as the jumping between them that yields dynamic openness, and secondly that the iterative units are cannot be considered as isolated units but are rather additive and must be considered in terms of the tapestries or plateaux of sound that they comprise. It is the heterogeneity of these plateaux that it as stake, and the cut is only one way to achieve this. More generally it is the attention to the intension of the textural surface that is at stake, much in the same way that we found to be the case in phonic art above.

West African polyrhythm too is based on the strict repetition of discrete units. Effects are generated by gradual and subtle variation of these units as much as by abrupt change. We may therefore draw an unexpected parallel between machine music and this particular percussive practice, one which suggests that both flowing house and broken down drum ‘n’ bassmight operate on the same plane of composition and complication.

Discussion of electronic music often focuses on its avant-garde credentials whilst forgetting the wider field of forces of ampliphonics. The audio interventions considered above pushed new expressive frontiers, but without lapsing into the intellectual irrelevancy that characterises much experimental music. Rather than make a statement or match a trend, the music explored new zones of experimentation whilst always engaging with the body and maintaining the groove. Therefore, in contrast to the modernist obsession with the autonomy of art, these forms of music are integrally marked by the heteronomous relations between music and motion, form and embodiment.

KINESONICS AND AUDIO INSURRECTION
One perspective on the embodied engagement of phonic art and ampliphonics might be gained from what I have termed ‘kinesonics’, the study of the relations between music and motion. But whilst this might open onto a discussion of the cybernetics of sound, it is enough here to note that the dissemination of ampliphonics only proceeds through particular points of synthesis and modulation, by which the audio flow both constructs new territories and is itself reconstructed. Ampliphonics always operates within and upon specific milieus, even while it continually sweeps those territories up within a plane of simulation.

For this reason the emissions of ampliphonics are immediately political, both in the way that they reconfigure the internality of the modern subject and in the way in which they disturb the silent idealities of urban planning. The geography of the modern city may me imagined in terms of visual space where a general spatiality leaves no room for the temporal disturbance of the unknown. And yet this general orientation fails to take into account the intersticial spaces of echoes and reberberations: ‘nothing temporal can be silent” (Gawthrop). In particular the diffusity of sound may be related to the specific condition of the modern city: the ubiquity of noise.
‘Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it we find it fascinating.’ (John Cage).

The cacophony is the reality of urban life, the remix is its possible future. But under the conditions of modernity the composition of sonic geography is strictly subordinated to the external constraints of audio hygiene, and in particular the dictates of privacy. The boundaries of the private individual could be almost defined in acoustic terms, as that amplitude and diffusion which may be attained without invading the legally determined audio environment of one’s neighbour. In this sense, the contagion of amplified noise is an immediate disruption of the bounds of the self, a threat witnessed in the at times obsessive measures taken to contain it, from the seizure and destruction of equipment to prison sentences for perpetrators of audio graffiti.

This containment has spawned a culture of resistance, which we may trace back as far as the spatial dissension of the Diggers at the birth of the modern age when for the first time enclosure as such became a site of struggle. This tradition is continued in the audio insurrection of the sound system. The sonic city is a battle ground. Pollution is never neutral, and noise is a cultural weapon in a war whose lines are already drawn. Whilst city slickers beep their car alarms and business class jets skim low-rent roofs, the urban dispossessed unleash their sonic weapons through city streets and country lanes. You have been ghetto blasted.