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LOOPS
MEMORIES and MEANINGS |
University Liege, 2013. Loops , Memories and Meanings. I’m not looking for balance, I’m making a negative
case. The issues are complex but I just want to draw
particular attention to
implications that are usually ignored or glossed over since, I
think, the short
loop – the obvious loop – is a key to the knottier question of
the loop in
general, which in turn speaks to the wider social phenomenon
of an accelerating
loss of presence.
I. First I should clarify what I mean by a loop: To
be
consciously performed, or recognised, repetition requires
recall because,
for us, repetition is a function of memory. But it’s an
inescapable fact that
human memory is by its nature profoundly unreliable so -
whatever our
intentions - acts of repetition are inevitably realized as a
chain of
uncontrollable mutations. I
can say it this way:
since all human action is locked into a present that is
always immediately lost
and can never be recovered, repetition is inevitably a
process of creative
reconstruction because,
although we may try to repeat something, there’s no way to
know whether we have
failed or succeeded since there’s never anything left of any
original to which
our rendition might be compared. At least there wasn’t until
sound recording delivered
the loop. No kind
of re-performance,
a loop is a mindless, mechanical re-iteration; an artefact,
not an activity. Since
their discovery, loops have quietly colonisied the aural
arts, releasing in the
process a powerful corrosive that has progressively
unsettled
all of our inherited experiential, existential and
theoretical musical
routines. In
this
short talk, I want to argue that loops change us because,
even though they
may sound like the riffs and repetitions of traditional
music, they are not. Loops
are the walking dead - and it’s this side of their
personality that I want us
to be more aware of. 2. It’s
1875 - and what do we think we know about the ontology of
sound? We know it has no substance; we know it has no
permanence; we know it does
have duration and quality, and we
know that we encounter it as an event or a process but never
as a thing. And since
we know that sound exists only in the present, we also know
that any sense we
may have of its articulation or continuity must - in fact –
be an artefact of
psychic, or somatic, memory.
That’s
my first statement: music, narrative and structure are
perceived and created only through the action of memory. And
when that memory
is biological,
then repetition is
necessarily re-creation since, if I remember a tune and sing
it again, I am
bound by nature to rebuild it, because that’s the way
biological memory
works. And it has,
in part at
least, been through this faulty mechanism that music - in
the absence of
writing –lived and evolved, since the immediate context of
our recollections
makes us instinctively bias our reconstruction to the
aesthetic benefit of the
situation we are remembering in[1].
This is why - in every form of music mediated by biological
memory - forgetting
has been a vital engine of
change. It is also why, in a universe
of
immediate presence, although there may be endless
repetitions there can never
be loops because, so long as human agency is involved, the
same thing is always
going to be different. As Heraclitus has it: ‘no man can
step twice into the
same river.’ Loops,
on the other hand, are the
expression of an altogether different form of memory: an inhuman form. Where biological systems are creative but unreliable,
mechanical or electronic systems are mindless but unerringly
accurate. And
this makes them spookily
fascinating.[2] 3. Although loops occurred, mostly accidentally - from
the beginning of recording history, in general they were
regarded as unwanted
malfunctions and avoided or ignored.
I think it’s fair to say that intentional – and
aesthticised - loops only
appeared in the sonic arts at around the same time that
multiples appeared in
the visual arts - that is, in the early 1960s. And certainly
there were superficial
resemblances between the two since both lived through
accumulated iterations of
the same event or object. Multiples, however, have their
root in simultaneous
presentation, while loops work through a disruptive
sequentiality. Space
is the medium of the multiple, time
the medium of the loop. And while
multiples open our sense of space, loops close our sense of
time. It’s this closing that sets my alarm bells ringing.
Welcome aboard this short flight into the future and
the first fully automated and pilotless service. Please
relax, ladies and
gentlemen, this plane is protected by no fewer than nine
failsafe systems and
nothing can go wrong… go wrong… go wrong… go wrong… Now
we
know we’re in trouble. It’s
hard
not to notice, isn’t it, that the iconography of the loop –
especially in its
short form - is infused with a sense of madness, futility
and death? A camera
panning from a corpse on the floor to a gramophone needle
stuck in an endless
groove; that beat-up truck with its locked steering wheel
trundling around in a
mindless circle at the end of Werner Herzog’s Strozzek; Vincent Van Gogh’s depiction of The Exercise Yard with its hopeless ring of prisoners grimly
trudging around in an endless loop… to quote the Chorus in TS Eliot’s The Family Reunion: ‘We do not like to walk out of a door and find
ourselves back in the same room’ What
that
stuck record seems to express instinctively is the fact that
while time
rolls forward for the living, the dead remain frozen in the
past. Unable to
move on, they are powerless to act and now can only be acted
upon. You could
say that a loop marks the point at which an infinity of
possibilities collapses
into one, mindless, inevitability. And while the real world
goes on about its
business, whatever gets trapped in a loop goes nowhere. As
Ludwig Wittgenstein
observed: ‘a wheel that turns and nothing turns with it, is
not part of the
mechanism’. 4. Loop,
loop,
loop, loop, loop, loop, loop, loop, loop, loop, loop, loop,
loop. If
you
repeat anything for long enough, it quickly disintegrates
into meaningless
noise. And since our brains are programmed to blank out
information that
doesn’t change – apart from pain – that information will
quietly cease to be
significant. So, at first, a loop is an irritant and then it
becomes a kind of
disorientating drone; finally it turns into a species of
semiotic silence. Such
is
the ontology of the death loop.
Let’s
call
the death loop an extreme case, because of course loops come
in many
forms. I’ve concentrated on the obvious - because its
obvious - but the picture
becomes both more complicated and more instructive if we
take one step back. After
all, whenever we listen to any
recording, we are listening to a loop because, without
exception, recordings are,
by definition, sonic revenants brought technologically back
to a simulacrum of
life. Even if that’s not how we think of them; generally we
feel very positive
about recordings: we think they have changed our lives for
the better because they
have made it possible for us to have instant access to any
sounds we want,
whenever, wherever and as many times as we want them. More
than that, recordings
have finally given sound a history
and have made that history universally available. Far from
thinking of them as
dead things, we think of them recordings as miraculous
extensions of life. So
perhaps it’s worth probing a little further into the
ontological implications
of the power to record? 5. A
sound is an event. That means it unfolds in time. A picture
or a novel is an object.
That means it exists in space. The
visual arts, therefore, concentrate on the construction of things – the building of fixed objects independent of their
authors’ bodies. Writers and painters construct rafts to
ferry their creations across
time and take as read the continuing accessibility of those
works to be
studied, copied and consulted. In these media, artists
produce in full
awareness of the permanence of their work. Musicians
and
composers, on the other hand, orientate themselves toward
the production of
events; their
goal is to aestheticise
finite but precious durations of shared time.
For them, performance and body are inseparable and they
produce in the full
awareness that nothing of what they do will survive its
execution – other than in
the form of unreliable echoes precariously embedded in the
memories of whatever
witnesses are physically present. So
far, so straightforward - until
1877 when the transubstantiation of sound into a species of
object effected by
the invention of sound recording,
brought the sonic arts to a kind of parity with the visual
arts. Unlike a
performance, a recording is an object. And it will endure.[3]
I agree it’s not an ordinary object because its existence is
temporal rather
than spatial. So let’s call it an event-object.
With
the
advent of the event-object
sound
could - for the very first time in human history - be
approached – and, more
importantly, be thought about - as a material;
as a thing that could be moulded, free of the flow of time,
until it was ready
to be frozen into a permanent work, a work which, like a
painting, could then be
copied, consulted and accumulated. And it’s this enormous
benefit that informs
the general understanding of what recording means, and not
the rather academic
and theoretical recognition of its deadness and existential
absence. Of
course, there have been Cassandras
who - like Plato in the face of writing - warn of its
destructive influence, but
in general it’s hard to see past the obvious benefits that
recordings bring in
their train. But today, as recordings accumulate beyond
enumeration and as the
legions of the dead begin conspicuously to outnumber the
living, some of their
more dubious and antisocial effects are beginning slowly to
be felt. Should we
worry? Aren’t novels just as dead as recordings? Hasn’t reading been a solitary activity for thousands of years? Is there
anyone here who misses epic storytelling ? Of course not,
because that world is
lost and long forgotten. But the social reality of what
Christopher Small
called musicking[4]
is still very much with us - and we are still able to see,
as Plato saw in the
early years of writing, exactly what is being lost as well
as what is being gained
as we adapt ourselves to the demands of the new technology.
In
fact,
for millennia, musicking
played
a pre-eminent part in the expression and re-entrenchment of
social being, since
it works intrinsically through entrainment
– which is about as linked
as human beings get. Indeed,
until recently entrainment was thought to be a uniquely
human biological
adaptation: since only we, it was said, can hear or see a
rhythm and lock into
it, only we move in time, keep in step and align ourselves
to things that are
not ourselves, to arrive, collectively, at shared operating
tempi that unite
and bind us [as a species][5].
The efficacy of conversations and the practicalities of
physical navigation,
for instance, are built on such consensual rhythms - of
which music and dance form
our most harmonious and evolved expression. Hence, of
course, their central
place in the practice of ritual, religion and virtually all
formal and informal
social ceremonial. It
is
this loss of social engagement – mirroring the solipsisms of
the i-phone,
the i-pad, the i-pod, the computer and the myriad selfish
pleasures that
today’s flesh is heir to – that our collective intelligence
is beginning now to
register. It’s clear for instance, that recordings have
played a significant
role in the fragmentation endemic in contemporary life. It’s
in the nature of
recordings, after all, that there's nobody
there. Added to which the instant availability of
recordings on demand
leaves little sense of occasion attached to the musical
experience, while their
perfectibility has led to invidious comparisons with live
performances. And
since we can turn recordings on and off at will - and pick
and choose what we
listen to - there is increasingly less call to exercise the
already too rare
generosity of aesthetic hospitality. 6. In
the
course of the last half-century, I have watched the Western
world steadily
move away from what was still – in the late 1960s - a fairly
integrated musical
culture, the broad contours of which would have been
familiar to any generally
interested citizen. Today, by contrast, we face an
impenetrable thicket of
specialised subcultures, most of which we know nothing about
and will never encounter
even by accident. So, yes – there is
much
more information - and much, much more music - out there,
but it’s already so
much that nobody can keep up even with
a fraction of it. And in the face of such excess our focus
tends to narrow since
the same is easy to access and is duplicated
endlessly, while the
different is
obscured and silenced underneath a chaos of noise. This is
no reason to come
over all luddite, but neither is it something we can safely
ignore. If we are
going to jump into a volcano let’s
do it - like
Empedocles - knowing
what we are up to, rather than just because we’re too lazy
to look where we’re
going.
Don’t
get me wrong. I love recordings. And the world is better
place because of them.
But there’s no dodging the fact that they represent an army
of the dead. For
now, it’s an army we still control, so it’s more like an
army of zombies, that
is, dead things that are doing
our
bidding. And certainly, for composers and performers,
recording has
appeared as an almost unprecedented
boon. I can now craft sounding objects without the
now-or-never breath
of time setting fire to my shirt; I can compose with my own
performances - in
fact I can compose with anybody’s performances - or even
with the wind and the
rain and the sound of traffic[6].
In the span of a few decades, recording has created entirely
novel aesthetic
fields such as sound art, soundscape, electronic and
concrete musics, installations
and plunderphonia - immeasurably expanding our aesthetic
horizons. Music, once
the only sonic art, is now just one of many - all of which
flow from the
ability to capture and petrify sound. So
the
things that are great about recordings – that they are
unable to forget and unable
to adapt - are also what is dangerous in them: I’ll hit my
instrument one way
in cathedral and another way in the living room, but the
recorded me just
bashes on regardless of where it is. Recordings are a
one-way street: we listen
to them while they remain completely deaf to us. We have to listen on their terms, not ours; and we can
exercise choice
but not influence.
But it remains a very benign
form of dictatorship with extraordinary offsetting benefits.
And since we
control the on-off switch, recording is a loop that I am
happy wholeheartedly to
embrace. While being mindful. We should still approach
recordings with an
awareness of their dual nature and the recognition that they
are reorganizing
our minds and our culture. The less cognisant we are of
that, the more the
changes will go their way, which is the way of absence. 7. Nevertheless,
I
think recordings per
se, while they
come with caveats,
are hardly the
death loops of popular iconography. And neither is simple
repetition, which
forms the basis of most jazz, rock, and popular music.
So what is it about these short,
regular, unmodified, mechanical reiterations that I find not
only
intellectually but viscerally bothersome? I think it’s the
way they throw their
deadness in my face. Riffs and beats are human repetitions
and they speak to the
present – loops are not and do not. In fact, loops willfully
ignore the
present, and everybody in it. Perhaps
that’s
why so many of the early loop explorers - while still
investigating the
unique possibilities of the new phenomenon, worked so hard
to undermine their
essential loopness? I think of Steve Reich’s tape phasing
pieces, in which two
identical loops – either of which would quickly become
intensely boring if heard
alone – are marginally offset to produce a constantly
modulating and engaging
river of sound; or Alvin Lussier’s I
am
sitting in a Room, which uses room acoustics and tape
degradation to
similar effect; or the work of Pierre Shaeffer and Harry
Chamberlin, who looped
single sounds, not so much to repeat as to extend them,
turning short
percussive noises into longer, unusual, pitches; or Terry
Riley, who piled
loops on top of one another to create constantly modulating
textures. The list
is long.[7] The
naked,
brutal, looping that concerns me here only came later, when
the deadness
of loops ceased to be a quality to be undermined and became
– like deafening
volume or quantized rhythms – a thing to be accepted and
embraced for what it
was. And
strangest
of all in some ways was the way that, from the late 1970s
onwards, loops
came to dominate dance music. Late disco, techno, house,
rave, hip-hop and
their endless variations and tributaries were all built on
the back of loops.[8]
As a spur to dancing it seemed that the young and the
would-be young preferred
their music to be mechanical, inhuman and unforgiving.
Certainly, that’s what
brought them back together en
masse
to the dance-floor. Not rock, not salsa, not African pop,
not bands of any sort
or any of the many musics performed by human beings - but
automated, programmed
beats - with or without a human topping. I can’t believe
this is accidental.
There seems to me to be a clear shift away from the old
socialised desire to be
part of a mutual enrichment of time - which is what happens
when musicians play
for dancers – to the desire to be held in a spinning cage
somewhere outside the
rush of time; a cage from which, as individuals, we are
unable, temporarily, to
shake free. Indeed, the more we shake the more helplessly we
become embedded. The
attraction seems no longer to experience human-to-human
entrainment, but rather
human-to-machine
entrainment. That
is to say, not to adjust, locally, to
one another in
unique configurations,
but to be entrained at
a distance to
a universal template. In this, the brutalism of loops seems
not to be
incidental but instrumental since, from the human side, the
goal is not socialization
or musical appreciation, but a kind of controlled
obliteration. 8.
One possibility is that priming the psychic immune system to survive in a world made by zombies and computers might require such a lethal cocktail of deafening jackhammer precision and relentless repetition. But at this point, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish malady from cure. [1]
Hence
genuine
aural folk music (if any still exists) is always
contemporary music.
Jon Rose, personal correspondence. [2]
It
was, after all,
a stuck record that reportedly led Pierre Schaeffer to
the mediations and
experiments that came to fruit in the invention of Musique Concrete – a discipline in which loops came to play a
prominent and important role. [3] Subject to the availability of reproduction
technology, durability of materials and, if necessary
copying or transferring
to new media. [4]
‘To
music is to take part, in
any capacity, in a musical performance, whether by
performing, by listening, by
rehearsing or practicing, by providing material for
performance (what is called
composing), or by dancing. We might at times even extend
its meaning to what
the person is doing who takes the tickets at the door or
the hefty men who
shift the piano and the drums or the roadies who set up
the instruments and
carry out the sound checks or the cleaners who clean up
after everyone else has
gone. They, too, are all contributing to the nature of
the event that is a
musical performance’. Christopher Small; Musicking. [5] More recent research has shown that some birds and
a scattering of other animals, elephants, for instance,
also exhibit this
ability, in particular those capable of vocal mimicry,
which may be a
precondition for rhythmic entrainment. Research is still
at a relatively early stage. [6]
Or you
can. There’s no time to go into this here but recording
conspires – amongst
many other options it hold out – with the Cagean notion
that it is the listener
and not the composer who should make the music. This
overturns all
communicative norms, and conspires in its turn with a
gradual shift,
accelerating as the century progresses, away from the
simple acceptance of the
primacy of social meaning and toward an exaggerated
sense of equality of
choice. Leaving
aleatorics – an obvious relinquishment
of meaning – aside, here is a deeper, and so far
generally ignored,
implication: in an interview, Cage said that he recorded
a walk in the park,
which he listened to over and over again for weeks. It
became a composition for
him, in the sense that he knew what was coming next – he
could sing along. I
other words, recordings provide the means by which a listener alone can turn the most unintentional and random of sounds
into a composition, just by listening repeatedly until
the sound carves itself
into memory. No intentional or communicative input is
required. I still hear
musicologists authoritatively asserting that musical
effects work through the
operation of subverting expectation: we are led to
anticipate X and we hear Y.
But in the age of loops, this is manifest nonsense: its
musical affect works
precisely because we do
know exactly
what’s coming next. [7] Though it is significant that these were still
analogue loops, as faulty and fallible as the
technologies that drove them:
records are scratchy and don’t always jump at the same
spot; tapes deteriorate
and fluctuate: nothing runs at a perfect speed - and the
content of a loop is
an impression taken directly from its source: linear and
continuous, like a
face pressed into wax. The new loops, the improved
loops, are digital, flawless
and have no moving parts - and the sounds they reiterate
are no longer direct
impressions but scan-based analyses, coded in ones and
zeros, that constitute a
recipe – a set of instructions
– that
programme the electronic reconstruction
of the sound analysed. A digital file, curiously, is
more like a score: a set
of instructions - except that now no human interpreter
is required to sonify
them. Like a biological memory, a digital memory doesn’t
take an impression but
reconstructs
what it remembers, only
with no human input – infallible and mindless. [8]
The four to the floor beat, at 120 bpm cuts the loop
time down to 500Ms. That’s enough to drive you mad.
As I recall, there were many conversations; a lot of them centred around "free", but I noticed that although - or because - we could do what we liked, no one much cared. How free we were was only a perspective - another was that to be ignored might be as draining, and as effectively neutralizing, as being proscribed. The relative luxury we experienced of being at no physical risk seemed to come at the cost of a kind of immateriality, while, in those places where stepping outside the boundaries of what was officially acceptable brought serious existential consequences. The kind of consequences that could affect your entire life, even your physical freedom. Refusal to conform appeared to carry considerably more weight, on both sides of the artist-state divide. In fact, the evident bother misfits gave the apparat was one of the things that made what they did matter so much - one of those rare instances of power that police and politicians occasionally - and usually inadvertently - lend their critics. Artists knew that there were at least two minorities who would take them very seriously indeed, in spite of the fact that they might be restricted to, say, only two concerts a year, both of them unofficial and both to an invited, private, audience - a circumstance that might appear from the outside to indicate a terrible defeat. But the immense resonance those two concerts had - the extent to which they could really matter - tells another story altogether. There were certainly musicians from the anything-goes 'free-world' who would have given almost anything to be taken as seriously as that. On the other hand, how many of them would have been prepared to pay the price? That's the strength of difficulty. To be brutal, such high costs act as a filter, a powerful environmental mechanism that eliminates all but the most serious, or the most driven, of artists: the ones who are unable not to do what they have to do. In order to agree to pay, there has first to be some compensating satisfaction. Money is easy to understand, or fame. But what kind of satisfaction is there that can compensate someone for being harassed, censured, ostracized, even imprisoned? For most sensible get-along sort of people, the answer is none. Likewise for those with fame, cash or career in mind: in fact anyone unable to understand that it might be unthinkable not to put your nose out of joint for music or art. Or solidarity. In a way, then, one could argue that the E-W art fracture didn't just run along the line of freedom and proscription (as Westerners tended to see it), but equally, and maybe more essentially, along the line of need and cost. This is the line where the unwilling step back the minute the price goes up too much. In fact I suspect this probably constitutes an evolutionary mechanism since it's universal; only the nature of the obstacles confronted actually varies according to circumstance. Fifteen years ago, we could divide around which of these fractures exercised us most. Today the first has gone: all overt opposition has evaporated and, along with it, the clarity and focus it once engendered. Now all of us have to deal with indifference and market forces. Nothing is proscribed any longer, it's just ignored. 2. The E-W border was porous - but in one direction only; it was more like osmosis than diffusion, with information flowing essentially West to East and not back. On my first visit to Prague, I remember being amazed at how informed about Western culture an interested circle of people was, and not only about what was popular and overground, but unpopular and underground as well. On the other hand, I knew almost nothing of what was going on in any of their half-dozen countries. In the free world, information was supposed to be just lying around waiting for someone to pick it up. It may have been there, but it was left pretty much undisturbed while, in Prague, information was valued to the extent that anything of interest was immediately copied and circulated. Eastern cultures had a far more social, and less commodified, approach to knowledge; it was an approach born not merely out of scarcity but also from a real sense of community. This was always rather a hard fact for Westerners to grasp, since community was a category we had more or less succeeded in eradicating - or at least rendering incomprehensible (that's why we fantasize about it so remorselessly). Quite as much, then, as the obvious and insidious differences in working conditions, it was this social grounding, this sense of responsibility, that divided the experience of Eastern and Western artists, or at least that came out in those rare moments when they had an opportunity to communicate. The community I encountered in Prague was not - like our small networks of friends at home - a loose gathering of musicians and artists. It also took in mathematicians, dissidents, physicists, architects, Christians, philosophers, drunks and presidents-in-waiting. Not an intelligentsia exactly, but a collection of people bound by their desire to be in and of a wider world denied them; people who refused to have their lives defined by idiots. While they worked in full knowledge of the world outside (although of course dealing with their own problems first), no comparable flow returned to the West, whose vision was, paradoxically, made narrower and smaller by an official belief in the theoretical availability of everything on demand (rather like smokers who will never quit because they know they can quit any time they want). It is a sad fact that knowledge of the possibility of infinite access makes actual access less urgent, and obscures the fact that the marginal is always and inevitably inaccessible without work. (It is a lesson coming around again as the 'total access' internet gears up for business). What is really accessible - however much it is dressed up as choice - is only what is obvious. It appears different from dictat because the mechanisms of its delivery (advertising, media, money) are more subtle, and therefore less visible, than official exclusion or propaganda. Ours is a better system of control and censure, built on smoke and mirrors, rather than sticks and bars. It makes our future sausages so secure they can be trusted to run the abattoir on their own. Important things were happening in the East, but we ignored them. Mostly out of arrogance: we just knew we didn't need to know. Like colonialists declining to learn the local language while dismissing the bilingual (usually multilingual) natives as ignorant savages. Just so in the eighties; it was denigrated Easterners who acted out of knowledge while incurious Westerners remained ignorant of the wider picture. This is an oversimplification of course, but behind it lies an important, and unfinished story - as CDs such as New Czech Music of the 60s' demonstrate. At least one can say that there is a great work of recuperation still to be completed. What the few - the outsiders - shared; both in the East and in the West (not that they saw that way) was their marginalisation, their symmetrical rejection each of their own systems and, at a deeper level, of the tyranny in general of all Procrustean structures. Both, typically, also displayed an exaggerated sympathy for the regime the other rejected. I recall on that first visit to Prague having a long discussion with Vaclav Havel in which he told me how terrible socialism was and how wonderful Ronald Reagan and the market economy were - while I was busy explaining to him how terrible Western politics and market economies were and how I thought, for all its faults, socialism had to be the better way. My general observation now is that (Havel aside) friends who were oppositional in the old regime find themselves oppositional in the new. And that, I think, is one of the things we all had - and still have - in common. September 2000
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