Ryan O’Connell Sound Studies Tufts University December 2015
The Prism of Perception: Death Grips’ Position in the Expanded Perceptual Field Don’t you wonder sometimes ‘bout Sound and Vision? – David Bowie
When experimental punk/hip-hop trio Death Grips “called it quits” in the summer of 2014, they let their fans know via an image of a napkin with the announcement scribbled down, posted to their Facebook page. When they cancelled a 30-show tour, they told everyone (including their managers and promoters) with a few cordial words on Twitter. When the record label EPIC gave them a multi-thousand dollar advance between record releases, they checked in to (or infiltrated) the legendary Chateau Marmont in West Hollywood and blew through the money in two months, then went back to being homeless. When they leaked that album EPIC had been waiting for (without EPIC’s permission or knowledge), listeners raised their eyebrows when they saw the album’s cover art: a very racy selfie taken by the group’s drummer, Zach Hill (google search at your own discretion). EPIC’s subsequent, frustrated emails to the band were, as a matter of course, posted to the Death Grips public Facebook page. Indeed, Death Grips is (I say is because they are back on the scene in 2015 after their “break up”) full of surprises, in their music as well as their social activities. Just as each one of their tracks keeps the listener on the edge of his/her auditory seat with the knowledge that anything can happen next, the moves they make in the public sphere and
the ways in which they present their work and themselves as an artistic entity keep fans equally off-balance, with an addicting uncertainty and unpredictability. When taking into account all aspects of Death Grips that can be experienced by a listener, the question arises as to whether “band” is really an appropriate term. Although their music is unique and calls for discussions of new terms and descriptions by itself, it is not simply the group’s “sound” that suggests the possible reconsideration of them as existing in an extra-musical realm, categorically speaking. Rather, it is 1) their treatment of the visual in conjunction with their created sounds, especially in regard to the huge and carefully constructed collection of music videos that can be seen on the band’s YouTube channel (the way most people probably experience Death Grips), and 2) the way they conceive of each new work (almost always in terms/lines of thought that come from the visual art world) that force the dialogue that attempts to define the band either as “music” or, alternatively, as the (potentially more suitable) “sound art.” In the ensuing discussion, I aim to: 1) Address the problem of categorization and categorical placement regarding Death Grips from a listener/viewer and Sound Studies perspective1 and with a focus on the line between music and sound art, and 2) propose what I believe to be the most correct mindset for the future consideration of art and artists (musical or otherwise) that can not be easily placed in one artistic category, genre, or medium-based description. Specifically, I will argue (using Death Grips as a vehicle for my argument) that the utilization and imposition of pre-constructed categories in the reception of a work or
1 A Sound Studies perspective, in this case, refers to an investigation of exactly what — as Jonathan Sterne phrases it in the introduction to The Sound Studies Reader (2012) — sounds do in the human world, and what humans do in the sonic world (here, of course, relating to the sounds and interactions created by Death Grips). Additionally, there will be an ongoing dialogue with texts and ideas considered to be part of the emerging field of Sound Studies.
body of works negatively affects the experience of that art, and that the better mode of reception is one relatively free from concerns of categorical terms, labels, and genres. To begin, in order to gauge whether/where to place Death Grips in relation to the concept of Sound Art (as opposed to simply music), it will be useful to briefly review the recent history and shifting definition(s) of Sound Art. In writing about Sound Art, it is difficult to make concrete statements about origins, developments, or timelines. As Alan Licht explains, “Sound art holds the distinction of being an art movement that is not tied to a specific time period, geographic location or group of artists, and was not named until decades after its earliest works were produced.”2 As Licht shows in his article “Sound Art: Origins, development and ambiguities,” there have been many different attempts at a definition of the genre, though no one definition is considered the right one. For example, David Toop calls sound art “sound combined with visual art practices,”3 while the definition from the glossary in the anthology Audio Culture refers to it as “a general term for works of art that focus on sound and are often produced for gallery or museum installation.”4 Author Seth Kim-Cohen defines sound art as “art that posits meaning or value in registers not accounted for by musical systems.”5 Still others refer to it in terms of spatial relations or architecture.6 The exact history of sound art is equally as fuzzy, as there is disagreement surrounding the precise moment(s) sound art emerged as a practice. For example, while 2 Alan Licht, “Sound Art: Origins, Development, and Ambiguities,” Organised Sound 14, no. 1 (2009): 3. 3 David Toop, Sonic Boom, in Sonic Boom exhibition catalogue (London: Hayward Gallery Publishing, 2000) 107. 4 Christoph Cox and David Warner (eds.). Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music. (New York: Continuum, 2004) 415. 5 Seth Kim-Cohen, “Sound Today (Is No Longer a Function of the Ear),” Non-cochlear Sound, October, 2010. http://noncochlearsound.com/?page_id=101. 6 Bernhard Leitner, interview by Bernd Schulz, Stadgalerie Saarbrücken, September 11, 2002.
the program notes written by Barbara London for a sound art-based exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (called “Soundings”) refer to developments in the field “from the 1960s to the Present,”7 Kim-Cohen states in the introduction to his book In the Blink of an Ear: Toward a Non-Cochlear Sound Art that “sound art, as a discrete category of artistic production, did not come into being until the late 1980s,” though he does (as many others do) trace sound art’s historical precedents back to the first examples of musique concrete, and to Marcel Duchamp’s non-retinal visual art. Alan Licht dates the term “sound art” back to William Hellermann’s Sound Art Foundation, which began in the late 1970s. The first work from this foundation was produced in 1983 at the sculpture center in New York, and was titled Sound/Art. Since then, there have been many more works of art that are considered to be sound art, including pieces/exhibitions by René Block, Germano Celant, Laurie Anderson, Christian Marclay, Jacob Kirkegaard, and the aforementioned Susan Philipsz, among others. 8 In all of these artists’ displays of sound art, sound and vision both play integral roles in the work, are both part of the piece’s fabric. One of the things that leads them to specifically be called “sound art” is that the sonic aspects of each work are not given, as they historically have been in works that live in art galleries, less attention than the visual aspects. What is perhaps more telling for our purposes than looking at various definitions of the practice of sound art is looking at the differences between the ways in which people separate sound art from music. What does a work of art need to have or do to be one or the other? Licht makes the distinction by saying that “unlike music, which has a fixed 7 Barbara
London, “Soundings: From the 1960s to the Present,” Museum of Modern Arts Program Notes for “Soundings: A Contemporary Score.” (2013): 8–15. 8 Ibid.
time duration…a sound art piece, like a visual artwork, has no specified timeline; it can be experienced over a long or short period of time, without missing the beginning, middle or end.”9 Andy Hamilton separates music from sound art by asserting that music must include some form of tonal organization, and that sound art does not.10 Salomé Voegelin characterizes music as primarily “visual,” while describing sound art as primarily “conceptual.”11 Brandon LaBelle notes that “music is sound production but it doesn’t necessarily ask us to think about sound.”12 Some thinkers question the validity of sound art as a category of practice altogether. Brian Kane asserts that some current theories of sound art (i.e. those of KimCohen and Voegelin) fail to “develop appropriate and salient terms for considering the relationship of sound art to music,”13 and Max Neuhaus argues that it is an unnecessary term, likening it to a hypothetical introduction of the term “steel art,” to be used for any work of art that uses steel as a medium (which, he explains, would be ridiculous and never accepted by the very same curators who use the term “sound art”). Theodor Adorno explains his hesitation by pointing to the inextricability of sounds and society, of concepts and perceptions.14 Conceptually, philosophically, it may simply be impossible to separate with a solid line the notions of music and sound art. What sounds or experiences can/should we consider music, and what ones should be put in a different 9 Licht, p.3 10
Andy Hamilton, “Music and the Aural Arts,” British Journal of Aesthetics 47, no. 1 (2007): 46. Voegelin, Salomé, Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art. (New York: Continuum, 2010), xi. 12 Brandon Labelle, interview by Mark Peter Wright, Ear Room, Soundandmusic.org, November 25, 2011. 13 Brian Kane, “Musicophobia, or Sound Art and the Demands of Art Theory,” Nonsite.org no. 8 (2013). 14 Theodor Adorno, Philosophy of New Music (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 100. 11
category? Debates and discussions could be had over this question indefinitely, but as it stands, the real division between the two practices is, in reality, a practical and logistical one. In 2015, a work is still often considered a piece of music if it is released in CD or Mp3 format, even if it lacks some of the “defining characteristics” we historically associate with “music.” (i.e. tonal organization, rhythm, distinguishable pitch, etc.). Conversely, if a work of art that might be quickly and primarily thought of as music is placed within the walls of a museum or is given a nameplate, it will more likely be considered by listener/viewers as a work of sound art. For example, although Susan Philipsz’s prize-winning work Lowlands (2010) was a recording of sung music, it came to be considered as “sound art” because of its presentation and logistics — the recordings were played under bridges in Scotland, open to the public. True, the architecture that became an integral part of the piece did alter the sound in a drastic way, adding gorgeous reverberation and whatever external noises might occur, but recording technologies and concert venues do the same things. One could also argue, as Licht does, that viewers of this work are typically just walking through, and so it adheres to the practice of sound art because it does in fact take the form of a museum installation, to be experienced at leisure, with little or no importance placed on temporal concepts of beginning, middle, and end. Philipsz is singing a real, written-out song, though, and her recording will come to an end and start over again. Could we not, then, think of “busking” in the same way? Pedestrians tend to stroll by when street performers are singing songs or playing instruments (sometimes under bridges), without much regard for when the songs being sung or played started, or when they will end. Why, then, is that street performer not thought of as a living piece of sound art? Could she be?
Similarly, when I went to the New Museum in Manhattan this past October and saw/heard Wynne Greenwood’s exhibition Kelly (2015), I immediately imposed my own mental-framing upon it, seeing it as a work of sound art (even though in the exhibition’s compiled VHS-tape videos Greenwood’s “band” Tracy + the Plastics is clearly playing songs) rather than simply taking it in as a collection of pieces of music with music videos attached as I might have done had I been viewing/hearing the collection on YouTube or iTunes. Somehow, the recognition that this “distinction” between music and sound art is so grounded in logistical and presentational factors leads us to question that distinction more carefully — if I realize while walking through Kelly that the museum location is the thing that is making me view the work as “sound art” rather than music, I am more likely to reassess that viewing and consider the experience more objectively, with less categorical persuasion from any pre-conceived, subconscious biases regarding what belongs in a museum (we are so used to experiencing visual/installation art in museums that we expect something at least related to those practices when we are in one). With this frame of mind, then, how are we to categorize the installation Death Grips created for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 2012? Commissioned by the museum, True Vulture is comprised of visual art by Galen Pehrson, a score by Death Grips, and a voice-over by actress Jena Malone, and can now be seen on MOCAtv, the museum’s YouTube platform. For this work, visual and sonic elements seem to have relatively equal importance. As with the rest of Death Grips’ work, the music is impressive, but is more rightly heard with the attached images and social positioning (it is significant that a group that is not concerned with “high society” or the
“accomplishments of other men”15 has a relationship with a museum, an institution that is historically concerned with both of those things…). In addition to their involvement with the MoCa, there are numerous other parallels to visual art in Death Grips’ work that also force the question of categorization, with the possibility of sound art as the appropriate placement. Zach Hill explains: “We approach a lot of things more in how visual artists do.”16 In 2014 the group released a double album called The Powers That B, the first half of which was created using Bjork’s voice as a “found object.” Pieces of recordings of the singer were chopped up and manipulated then assigned to pads on an electric drum set, which Hill played (the only instrument on the album, aside from MC Ride’s voice). Hill explains that the band views each album release as a new museum show, rather than simply as a new record. They compare their album The Money Store to pop art, and explain the variation in aesthetic from that to the subsequent release No Love/Deep Web by calling the latter “Andy Warhol’s Nightmare.” MC Ride elaborates on Death Grips’ visual mindset by echoing the band’s belief that “strong visuals enhance the sonic experience,” and explaining repeatedly to interviewers that: “Zach, Andy and I are all visual artists. We see the music and are attempting to create the world we envision. The visual aspect must be arresting in every way imaginable.”17 Death Grips’ online presence is also deeply rooted in the visual. Each music video shows painstaking attention to detail, and has a unique artistic concept of its own that corresponds with the song in some way (specifically, Burnett explains that every musical 15
Stefan Burnett. Pitchfork Weekly, interview by Pitchfork Media. November 19, 2012. Zach Hill. Atractivoquenobello, interview by Jean Kay, aqnb.com, April 23, 2012. 17 Stefan Burnett, Clash, interview by Alec Empire, clashmusic.com, May 10, 2012. 16
work by Death Grips is a collective liberation of the id, a naked and unadulterated representation of the band members’ minds. Each video attempts to capture the atmosphere that best represents the state of mind at the song’s inception). And while most musical groups follow the traditional formula of “write, record, perform, promote,” while adhering to the expectations fans have of what each of those things looks like in practice, Death Grips goes beyond the traditional format to include other artistic expressions as part of who they are. The dark and painful performances that appear in their videos reference visual artist Chris Burden, and others. The format for their live performances (many of which end up on YouTube) is unpredictable (once, Hill performed via Skype, his digital image projected onto a giant screen). As referenced above, the cover art for their albums always carries extra-musical meanings (No Love/Deep Web’s is a personal spiritual liberation and expression of fearlessness as well as a reaction to listener’s felt preconceptions of the band as being ultra-male, or misogynistic and sexually aggressive based solely on their intense sound. The Money Store’s is an assertion of the band’s inclusive pro-homosexual and pro-individual ideology). Indeed, Death Grips maintain that they “think outside of what you’re thinking about when you’re thinking of a band.”18 The inclusion of such great attention to visuals, process, and sociality by the artist certainly makes it difficult to call what they do simply “music,” without any further qualification. Facing similar issues while talking about sound art and searching for a most effective way to confront them, Seth Kim-Cohen looked to Krauss’s Expanded Field of Sculpture as a reference point, to more systematically sort out what should and should not
18 Zach Hill, Pitchfork, interview by Jenn Pelly, pitchfork.com, December 4, 2012.
be defined as sound art:19
Working within the same quadrilateral, binary-referencing complex, Kim-Cohen reworked Krauss’s model to handle the relationship between music and sound art (or, more precisely, non-cochlear sonic art), calling his update the “Expanded Sonic Field”:
19 Seth Kim-Cohen, In the Blink of an Ear: Toward a Non-Cochlear Sonic Art (New York: Continuum, 2009), 151.
Kim-Cohen realizes that this model for categorizing works that include sound is “far from perfect,” and cautions that it should “function allegorically or synecdochically” rather than purely practically. He displays the diagram in order to “highlight certain presumptions” and “imagine future directions for the still-nascent practice of sound art.”20
20 Ibid., p.155.
Although he does admit that this diagram is based in part on “preconceptions” (his? Others’?), and understands that the binaries it employs are not definitive, working with it or using it as a guide to discuss future directions or readings of preexisting works is problematic because it fails to incorporate one essential element: the variation in categorization that results from the variation in perception (i.e. by different people). The binaries that the above models operate under do not apply to every mind (i.e. some listeners may consider sound with noise and speech as pure music, etc.), and so cannot be
used broadly. For this reason, I propose an alternative model for considering works of art with sound, which includes — as an integral part — the listener/viewer’s perception: In this model, which I refer to as the “Expanded Perceptual Field,” the notion of interpretation or perception acts as a dispersive prism21, skewing the existing line(s) of categorization to reveal (just as a dispersive prism reveals all the composite wavelengths of one light beam) all the possible categorical interpretations of an artwork, including combinations of categories. Indeed, it is most practical to consider these real possibilities 21 Just as a physical prism is comprised of several angled pieces of material (often glass), the perceptual prism is intended to be a metaphor for the collective perception, made of the minds of all those who view/hear a work of art, not simply the perception of one person.
when confronting the general problem of art categorization, as their inclusion provides the framework for the most substantive discussions of a given work’s nature, while their exclusion leans toward a more constrictive, narrow-minded discourse that conceptually relegates works to perceptions built (in part) by pre-conceived notions and assumptions attached to categories. In other words (and to use the inverse of the previous example), refusing to consider the possibility of a mind thinking of “”non-noise” and “non-speech” sounds as sound art rather as than music pushes aside a potential and totally valid interpretation of those sounds (namely, as music) that should come into play in the discussion of them. When thinking of categorization (and, more specifically, sound categorization) with this now broader and more inclusive model, the question naturally arises: if no one perception or categorization of an artwork is forced by a set system of rules based on qualities (i.e. via the previous diagrams of Krauss and Kim-Cohen) and every categorical interpretation is legitimate and in play, how do we handle the moments that come after our initial/natural perception — which inevitably includes some sort of categorization based on a variety of factors, including expectation, mode of viewing, previous knowledge of the work, the author’s conception, etc. — when we start to think about the possibilities of shifting our own categorizations in one direction or the other (i.e. from sound art to music, etc.)? What do we gain or lose from actively choosing to consider something like Death Grips as “music,” or as “sound art,” or as “visual art accompanied by sound”? This question, much like the broader question of categorization, can also only be answered on a case-by-case basis; each person will gain and lose different things when
doing their own internal “category-shifting.” Personally, I can say (as a general assessment) that when I approach Death Grips as solely “music,” I sometimes gain an awareness of some of the nuances that exist within their studio recordings, and I am often more struck by the boundaries of form that are pushed, especially in regard to sounds employed that are grating or aurally exhausting. Conversely, I find that I lose an arguably crucial piece of the “world” that the band is trying to create (the visual piece, of course), the atmosphere they intend the listener/viewer to inhabit (this realization is especially prevalent when I watch the video for a track after having only heard it). On the other hand, if I interpret Death Grips as “sound art” instead of “music,” that set of categorical connotations leads me to focus more intensely on the visuals I am experiencing, and allows me to think of the sounds I am hearing in terms that are not just tied to “music” and that do not carry with them expectations of what happens in “music.” It allows me to, at a certain level, think of what I am simultaneously seeing and hearing as one unified work, both parts potentially conceived of simultaneously, rather than as the subtly different version I typically associate with music that implies videos conceived of and created after the song is written and recorded (which is, of course, not always the case in music — nor is the opposite always true of sound art — but a connotation I have nonetheless). Conversely, I sometimes lose the awareness of those aforementioned nuances and formal qualities, and I partially lose my own mental image of Death Grips as a group of musicians (who write, craft, practice, perform, etc.). These gains and losses are solely my own, and will not remain static as my own thinking evolves. All of this discussion is not to dismiss the practice of categorization entirely. Indeed, just as theory most often follows practice in art and music, so too does
categorization follow creation, and both are useful tools for discussing and understanding works, styles, etc. What I am arguing for instead is a general mindset that is less concerned with immediate and definitive categorization and labeling, especially when confronting art or artists that, by their nature, more easily span or float around in the already-existing list/spectrum of categories we use. It is my fear that we necessarily impose biases and pre-existing ideas about what a work of art should be when we attach categories to them. True, I only just spoke of gaining certain things intellectually when considering works to be in one category or the other, but I only gained those things because access to them had been previously blocked by the invisible walls that separate our categorical terms, the inherent though not always noticed mutual exclusivity that they’re balanced by. I couldn’t have discovered what I did by thinking of Death Grips as “sound art” had I remained within the confines of “music.” Had those confines never been there, however, any such discovery would have been achievable. Just as modern artists now approach the creation of art with/from a broader mindset (artists are rarely ever trained and practice in one very specific style anymore, i.e. only oil painting), we as listener/viewers must interpret art with a broader mindset, paying less attention to segmenting terms, receiving things more evenly and without categorical assumptions. When we do this, we let each new work live up to its fullest potential, allowing it to work its way in to our minds and bodies more organically, impacting us however it may, existing with all its constituent parts, not parsed down or filtered through genre-based expectations. Categorical terms and references will never disappear, and even referring to a group like Death Grips as a “band” carries meaning and expectation. But that term is only
a starting point, and once a listener/viewer can get past that point and into the art at a deeper level, he/she will have a chance to discover its true essence and meaning. When I put on headphones and explore Death Grips’ YouTube channel for a couple hours, I will do my best to forget about the categorical labels I could use, allowing myself to get lost in all the different “worlds� I encounter, swimming in uncertainty and loving every minute.
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