PhIL Final Thoughts & Mix
First off, thanks to all of you for a phenomenal five weeks. I’ve learned, read, written and thought more than I *thought* possible, and have fuel/food for continued explorations of several topics, themes, and ideas at the nexus between music, philosophy, politics, culture, history, et al, to last me more than a lifetime. Thank you for all your contributions and shared thoughts/ideas.
So we traversed most everything we could *in our condensed semester* in the veritable landscape of Western music/its relationships with Western philosophy, and there were several concepts/properties/patterns – teleological, repetitive, and emergent – that struck and stuck with me. If asked to sum them up in one *severely overgeneralized* sentence, I’d have to go with neoliberalism: it’s here, it’s got its thumb on our world, and where/what can we/music go/do about it?
We all seemed to get on the same page about the language/logic of “resistance” not cutting it ("resistance" as escaping/subverting the transcendental, sovereign powers of modernism/classical liberalism). Our questions and conversations kept coming back around to asking what is/could be “resistance” to/from/in neoliberalism--does it even makes sense to try to find or build a proxy?
If we read neoliberalism as co-mingling hetero-genealogies of social/political/cultural economies and norms that want and push us toward perceiving of ourselves as, now and inescapably, homo economicus – always and forever subjects-toward-economy – then an (undeniably difficult, yes) *ethical* place to start is exactly *not* that. We cannot think of our response/set of responses as a “place to start”—even that marks us, sends us back into the unworkable and unmistakably *modern/humanist* language/logic of “progress”. The heterogeneity of neoliberal forces of power can’t be resolved/undone/understood by such a classically teleological approach.
This is where Latour’s “compositionism”--an idea of creating/exploring “prospects” for the creation of a common world--comes in: we’ve got to try all sorts of things. Several different, differently coherent, *not nearly as immediately revolutionary/revolutionarily ruptural as we’d like* sorts of things. We’ll sometimes use the logic of (neo)liberalism as a “counter-veiling force to (its) calculation” (Peter Gratton in his response to Shannon Winnubt’s “A Biopolitics of Cool: Neoliberalism, Difference, Ethics). We’ll have to give up the ghost of fixed/separate subjectivities/objectivities, holistic/determinate selves/identities, and humanistic lifestyles/politics/priorities. “Our (un)common responsibility…calls us to reduce violence, which ironically…comes with the call for any means necessary…we strategically align and…occupy ourselves with our communist, anarchist…liberal (*and nonhuman*) friends” (Gratton again; *and nonhuman* addition/emphasis mine).
How? Through experimentation. Through gradual processes. Through explorations that excavate our implicit understandings and epistemologies of ignorance. In multitudinous ways.
As I was working on my final project/SoundCloud set, I initially set out to collect Steve Reich-ian process pieces. More specifically, I tried to think about and find examples of sound art and music that draws attention to things we’re ordinarily not thinking about when we listen. I had a conversation with a stranger while working on the SC earlier this week. When I described Reich’s “Pendulum Music” to him, his response was a fairly standard one: “that’s not music.” When I pressed him to flesh out his statement, he went on to say “I want something that sounds ‘musical’…to me, a piece like that is just an item in a sound bank for me to make ‘real music’ with.” In other words, “Pendulum Music” is just a source for sampling—it isn’t/doesn’t belong in the world of “real music” because it doesn’t automatically appeal to our socialized aesthetic sensibilities—it doesn’t “sound good”.
Thinking about this helped me realize something that shifted the trajectory of my playlist: though Reich’s work, and “minimalist”/“noisy” pieces like it can have something of an unsettling effect—they don’t operate in the way we expect/desire music to operate, and so have the *potential* to cause us to think about the ordinarily-implicit elements of music/sound (what’s different about them? What’s causing the phasing/feedback that I find so disruptive? What’s that sound in the background, and why is it there? What’s the material makeup of that weird thing I’m hearing?)—so, too, can other approaches to music-making and musicality. Recognizing—not resisting—our relationships with/positions within neoliberal hetero-genealogies can be accomplished through a number of strategies, tactics, and (a)musical methods. These prospects/potentialities manifest in myriad ways and cause us to (re)think music, musicianship, materiality; affect, association, and agency; pleasure, the political, and participation; even thought and teleology. In other words, music doesn’t have to be avant-garde, unpopular, or unpleasant to “remix the remix”. I built the playlist with this shifted and multivalent view in mind. Though my late-game realization opened up a whole new world of “prospects” and possibilities for my project, this iteration had a deadline [and @doctaj, though seemingly superheroesque in her listening capabilities and personal/professional productivity, certainly has other and better things to do] so I cut v1 off at 12 sounds [about 1.25 hrs]. I’ll probably keep adding tracks that augment my ideas on process/compositionism until I hit SC's set length limit. In the meantime, my annotations for the original set are included below.
PhIL 1.0 [or “It’s Gonna Rain on Dem Watermelons”]
1. It’s Gonna Rain/Piano Phase – Steve Reich/SoundCloud User
I started with an abbreviated, SoundCloud-user generated version of the playlist’s namesake. It’s about three minutes long, has some synth sounds layered over Reich’s tracks, and phases over into a segment of another Reich composition, “Piano Phase,” about midway through.
2. Music for 18 Musicians – Steve Reich/Coldcut
Coldcut’s reiteration of Reich preserves the original mallet percussion melody and adds some simple, soft electronic swells over top. The result’s a soothing, accessible electrojazz akin to a lot of contemporary instrumental post-rock—there’s repetition, but a satisfactory amount of tension and release.
3. Call Me Maybe (147-Time Overlay Mix) – Carly Rae Jepsen/Dan Deacon
American electronica darling Dan Deacon’s cover of Carly Rae Jepsen’s superhit “Call Me Maybe” starts layering the track upon itself in the opening seconds of the song and continues doing so throughout the 4-minute, 14-second version of the track. It starts phasing almost immediately, becomes practically indecipherable about 2 minutes in, with Carly Rae’s voice coming in and out of discernibility, until the last minute just becomes a big buzz of feedback and noise.
4. Excerpt (Live) – Jelena Glazova w/Constantine Katsiris
Glazova is a Latvian experimental sound artist who builds drone and ambient soundscapes, usually out of processed vocals. Her live shows are a combinatory 4D experience of installation/mixed media/projection art, poetic text, and live constructions of feedback/activity fields.
5. Spread Eagle Cross The Block – Death Grips
Emcee Stefan “MC Ride” Burns fronts this experimental hiphop outfit, accompanied by producers Zach Hill and Andy “Flatlander” Morin. Burns and DG gained notoriety for their intensive stage shows and racy cover art and “anticommercialism,” but I picked “Spread Eagle Cross The Block” specifically because of the lyrics. Johnny brought DG up in an in-class convo about appropriation by/co-option into neoliberal social and political economy (specifically, that DG’s counter-cultural presentation is exactly what neoliberalism wants/figures out how to capitalize on), but Burns isn’t unaware of this—far from it. He’s rapping about and making a mockery of neoliberal intensity and the 21c music industry: “I fuck the music, I make it come…I want some more of it, I want too much…What is it, where is it, how will it affect me”. Burns knows what the “hustle” is, how to do it and use it—even “counterculturally”—but also recognizes the latent “othering within inclusion” that takes place when he participates in/masters the “game.” Burns’ conclusion--“Shit is mine, it’s all mine/All the time, shit is mine”—is jointly an acknowledgment and a claim to mastery. He’s figured out the logic of the system, he knows that there are multiple ways he can work within/out of and *fuck with* it, and he’s reveling in that—his ability to win the game in a way that shines a light on the fucked-up nature of the game and its rules.
6. Bop – The Brandt Brauer Frick Ensemble
“Bop” is the biggest single off Berlin-based BBF’s breakout albumYou Make Me Real and a super-accessible example of their signature techno-with-analog-instruments model. Like several of BBF’s compositions, “Bop” simulates “traditional” techno and house techniques. I chose a live version of the song because BBF meticulously tweaks tracks for their albums, so thought a live iteration would better capture the “process” idea/ology – there’s “indeterminacy” in the materiality and performativity of the track’s (re)presentation.
7. marimba and shit-drums – Moonface
Spencer Krug [known more for his role in several bands from a Canadian collective, mostly housed by Moonface’s label Jagjagwar Records]’s solo project Moonface has released a series of variously experimental and collaboarative EPs, the first of which was Dreamland: marimba and shitdrums. It’s a 20-minute track that sounds like it could be either a loop/set of loops, or just Krug sweating over the vibraphone in a semi-stupor, but the length, looping effects, and instrumentation conjured Reich’s phasing techniques and his homages to Ghanaian drumming in “Nagoya Marimba” to me—and whether Krug knows it or not, he owes the space for his masturbatory dream-journal-to-shitdrums to Reich, Reich’s influences, and the pieces/patterns other SR-related predecessors have gifted him along the way.
8. To Here Knows When – My Bloody Valentine
Irish shoegaze staples MBV found multiple ways to make the “tension-toward-naught” in repetitive song structures and stylistic elements work for them—guitars strummed with a tremolo bar, sampled drum loops, and “muffled”/underemphasized vocals directed the band’s move from punk to post, created a soft but striking sound, and arguably spawned countless bands and a space for their genre. “THKW” was released on both the Tremolo EP and MBV’s magnum opus Loveless.
9. Tu non mi perderai mai – Johann Johannsson
Icelandic composer/producer Johannsson is known for slow builds and haunting melodies in his works, many of which pay structural homage to Reich’s canon. “Tnmpm” can be categorized through this lens.
10. Disintegration Loops 1.1 (excerpt) – William Basinski
Basinski’s 2002 Disintegration Loops is the outcome of Basinski’s attempt to salvage 20-year-old recordings on magnetic tape. When Basinksi tried to transfer the tapes to a digital format, the ferrite on the tapes fell off because of the extent of the material deterioration. Basinski, who lived in New York City during the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center, set the first loop [which this segment is excerpted from] to a videorecording he took that focuses on the smoke where the towers had fallen on the last hour of daylight on 9/11.
11. Charlotte Street at Night – Hannah Levinson
This is a one-minute iPhone audiorecording taken outside on a suburban street near Independence Boulevard at approximately 9 p.m. The sounds include a muffled sound of Basinksi’s Disintegration Loops, typing, ambient outdoor/street sound, and two other musical recordings that were playing from different parts of the street—one at the end of the street, about two houses away, and another at a similar distance but in the opposite direction.
12. Make it Rain – citation:obsolete & PHIL 4050/5050
An iPhone audiorecording of "Make it Rain," a citation:obsolete-generated process piece inspired by Steve Reich's 1965 composition "It's Gonna Rain." This piece was made with six laptops/tablets, two Bluetooth speakers, and an iPad. We moved the devices from the third-floor atrium down two spiral staircases to the ground-floor atrium. You should be able to hear some phasing between the tracks during the last minute and a half of the recording.
