this essay was written by katsy pline aka america’s favorite bad blonde babygrl of the Field Reording Working Group circa summer 2015 in Oakland, CA. it seems to be about how field recording opens up new ways to think through the politics and poetics of social n sonic recomposition in this weird, violent moment. we’re in cahoots with total mope magazine.
find us on the internet or w/e: 1. https://soundcloud.com/fieldrecordingwg 2. https://fieldrecordingworkinggroup.bandcamp.com/releases 3. http://totalmope.squarespace.com email: fieldrecordingworkinggroup@gmail.com
k thanx
alli yates did the formatting and graphic designing. shout outs to justin hogg and chloe stamper for pushing this elsewhere. zac gunter is tops and edited this biz more than once. daniel shubat provided generous conceptual and grammatical feedback. enclosed in the back is a cd with all of the sounds from the sample pack.
The Genesis Device: Notes on ‘Microblocks, vol. 1’ PREFACE “Microblocks, vol. 1” is a sample pack composed from the percussive sounds of everyday life in Santa Cruz, California. Field recording entails an altogether different type of listening to the soundscape than the ways ‘we’ have been disciplined and trained to hear ‘it’. Protocol: decolonize the ear. To listen to the sounds of everyday life is to hear the mundane activities, the labor, the work, through which the social is reproduced. A trash can gets shut by an underpaid university janitor, waste water from a grass lawn flows down a drainage ditch, a redwood tree on stolen Ohlone land cut down for new development snaps underneath walking feet. Field recording, here thought as critical-poetic practice for making the everyday strange. Sample packs are points of passage and departure. Comprised of short (~1-4 seconds) sonic blocks, their aim is to provide building materials for musicians to compose with. In themselves, they are incomplete; they circulate not as finished works of art, but rather as means to produce organized sound.
Re-composition: to glean moments of aesthetic possibility from the wreckage of the commons, with the hope that another kind of life can and already is in the process of being built. Microblocks: tiny sonic bricks for re-composing the collective commons. Visceral chunks of rhythm and movement for disorienting the necessity of the heteropatriarchal present. Protocol: plug-in, modulate, transfigure. To re-orient our relation to the everyday soundscape is to open up the potential of an ‘Otherwise’: other ways of desiring, other ways of listening, other ways of living together (Crawley, 2014). Social relations become the content of ‘music’; ‘the background is the front’ (Rhine, 2000). Milieu music, ambience. Using field recordings as a means and impetus for organizing sound makes the social processes (police brutality against communities of color, the circulation of commodities, the exploitation of workers) through which the everyday soundscape is produced a site of invention and transfiguration. In the shuttering whoosh of a bus stopping, we hear the dismantling of public transportation labor unions, the movement of laborers necessary to keep the city functioning, the excitable whirr of anthropogenic climate change. Extend, compress, distort, reverberate, slice, syncopate: take a point and turn it into a line. Transform the gendered and racialized violence of social life into something else. Open music up to that which it is not: a stop sign, a bird song, a concept, an argument. We do not yet know what music is capable of. It is this queer undecidability and indeterminacy, this opening to a sensory and political future that might be, where we can hear an Otherwise. The Field Recording Working Group distributes these sounds
in the hopes of contributing construction materials to sonic cultures of resistance and experimentation. Resistance against empire, against state-sanctioned police murder, against the exploitation of workers, against the unfolding ecological catastrophe. Experimentation with other ways of relating, other modes of listening, other means of organizing sound. Elsewhere. In solidarity,
FRWG
INTRODUCTION Aesthetics of/and/as Resistance
‘For what is the aim of a militant inquiry but world-making,’ Ultra-red, 2012 Our question is this: how to construct a compositional machine with revolutionary capacities? The 20th century saw a proliferation of composers, junkies, instrument-makers, black revolutionaries, cultural commentators, queers, improvisers and gender rebels challenge the naturalization of traditional Western music and the political-economic system that underpinned it. They sought, in vastly different ways, to situate traditional Western conceptions of harmony, melody and rhythm as an historically contingent symbolic order, as a relative, rather than universal, mode of organizing sound. Many pointed out that the move to universalize Western musical practices was intimately tied up with racialized and colonial logics that painted non-western cultures as primitive, inferior, savage,
and thereby in need of the West’s civilizing influence. Still others noted the centrality of heterosexuality, masculinity and gender dualism in the conception and practice of musical composition (Oliveros, 1965; Rodgers, 2010; Thompson, 2013). Some sought to understand European colonization as a sonic event, critiquing the spread of industrialized society as a kind of ‘acoustic imperialism’ with disastrous ecological and auditory results (Schafer, 1993; Westerkamp, 2002). Pretty much everyone thought that the distinction between ‘noise’ and ‘sound’ was fucked up on every level and had to go. And yet for reasons that we fail to comprehend, the dominant histories of the experimental musical avant-garde in America systematically erase the voices of women, queers and black radicals whose critiques of white supremacy, colonization, heteronormativity and patriarchy within composition are essential for understanding just what exactly was at stake. Or perhaps we understand the reasons too well, and the story is old and heavy, and we were taken by surprise that such a deeply political erasure would go unnoticed within a community that is ostensibly ‘radical’ in its politics and art. ‘Microblocks, vol. 1’ places itself within the radical electronic tradition, whose emphasis on experimental aesthetics is deeply intertwined with a critique of white supremacist, heteropatriarchal capitalism. Their visions of what Ashon Crawley calls an “Otherwise,” are marked by a commitment to re-imagining what sonic and social relations could be. In a contemporary moment marked by the intertwining of anti-black state-sanctioned murder, racialized economic exploitation, gendered violence, environmental
catastrophe and on-going colonization, electronic music’s practices for re-composing the acoustic commons are prescient, timely and necessary. “And we have to say, ‘No!’” (Carmichael, 1966). The refusal of the necessity of the way social life is organized around black, trans, queer, brown and indigenous death, coupled with practices that construct alternative modes of being in the world, is necessary in the social and sonic domains. Radical electronic composition is ‘untimely,’ (Deleuze, 1983): it heralds a rupture with and radical critique of the status quo in the name of other possible worlds. We seek to create and sustain this rupture by providing sound construction materials culled from ordinary soundscapes, and we invite others who find heteronormative, culturally appropriative spectacular EDM pop musics sickening and life-threatening to do the same. This text was written in the midst of a “crisis of imagination about the future,” (Berardi, 2012). Our contemporary juncture is marked both by multiple, overlapping global crises and an inability to imagine pathways of escape. Lauren Berlant calls it ‘the impasse’: ‘a time of dithering from which someone or something cannot move forward,’ (Berlant, 2011). Moored in situations where life is unlivable, yet unable to desire or imagine an alternative configuration of sociality, we wander aimlessly, work too much or not enough, our bodies wearing down into thin filaments of electric grease and slouched shoulders. The sample-pack seeks to spark imaginative modulations of the ordinary sounds of urban public spaces as one possible way to re-imagine what sociality could be. Producing new patterns from the percussive sounds of quotidian life is about generating a ‘new rhythm for being in the social,’ (Berlant,
2011) new ways of being-together, after the impasse. If electronic music has historically been associated with imagining futurity, then perhaps its compositional practices and concepts can be re-worked for creating other ways of life outside modernity’s extraction and growth-based model of ‘the future,’ a ‘future’ that has precipitated ecological catastrophe and suffering on a global scale (Berardi, 2011). The sample pack and accompanying writings are a map, not a treatise. A map is practical and experiential; it’s a tool, an instrument for getting from one place to another. Our soundanalysis works to chart the space between this world and a potential one in order to provide materials that facilitate the actualization of potential worlds beyond capital. Plus, we’re young homies trying to figure out what the fuck is happening in this violent, fucked up world and how we can contribute, as genderqueer/cis white accomplices/pseudo-composers/ non-musicians in the struggle to dismantle white supremacist capitalism, to a re-organization of social life. In what follows, we argue that thinking-with electronic composition as a process without end orients sound-practice around experimentation with the material organization of life. We situate the ‘field’ that the microphone records as a hierarchically organized space structured by relations of domination and exploitation. ‘Listening’ is an historical achievement, a sense-formation indexed by hierarchical social stratifications (race, gender, class, ability and sexuality), and is comprised of at least three modes: habitual, historical and aleatory. The field recording practices used to create this sample-pack separate into two modes: participatory and metallurgical. Following Benjamin, we argue that the mechanical reproduction of
ordinary soundscapes simultaneously amplifies the historical conditions through which urban soundscapes emerge and creates a new realm of resistance and experimentation. Reproduction produces alienated listening, whereby the received values and associations attached to sounds are liquidated, thereby creating an opening to criticize the organization of everyday life and imagine alternatives. We then criticize the dogmatic image of recording as representation, situating it as the technological-ideological means of the musical commodity. Sampling practices open up an alternative way of thinking through recorded audio and electronic composition as a process without end. Sampling and electronic composition can be thought of as a process without end by virtue of the way it self-reflexively composes around the material, technological and social conditions it works within. Composition is then defined as experimentation with the social, sonic and material conditions of its own possibility. We then take up the work of Underground Resistance in order to explore questions of futurity, texture, the extra-musical, modulation, anti-black racism and social re-composition. The field recording sample-pack ties this notion of composition-without-end to experimentation with the material organization of life in order to engineer a necessarily incomplete compositional machine with revolutionary capacities.
1. Habitual, Historical and Aleatory Listening
a. I’m on my way to work and pissed. It’s way too early and most folks on BART seem to agree with me. Sleeping, nodding off, diddling on an iPhone, music turned up so loud on earbud speakers i can hear the bass-line in ‘Some Type of Way.’ shit gets weird when the train goes underwater to take me to teach some tech overlord’s kid. The cabin pressure is painfully intensified and a low, gnarled rumbling clocking in at 80 decibels fills up the space. A tinny, high-pitched roll of the train grinding on the tracks painfully rubs on my earholes. ‘Some Type of Way’ gets turnt way the fuck up to mask the sound and i bob my head languidly, still pissed that i’m here at 645 on a Tuesday. Why do the most commonplace, mundane and ordinary sounds in urban environs register, if at all, unconsciously? If sound, in other cultures and other places forms a significant
source of symbolic and practical importance, what is it in this time that produces distracted listening, that renders the vast majority of sounds one hears throughout the day as unimportant? What constellation of forces, institutions, trainings and ideas produce the kind of listening most common in post-industrial, neoliberal California? Listening is a capacity produced through training and discipline to interpret, decode and make meaning out of what is heard. Listening is selective: out of the many sources of sound at a party, you single out the voice of the person you’re talking to. You hear the ping of a snapchat on the BART train and pick your phone up. Some folks call it the cocktail-party effect: the capacity to focus on one particular sound at the exclusion of others. Listening is more like a sieve, a filtering system for sorting out what is meaningful from what is unimportant. Our interest here is in mapping out the constellations of ideas, institutions, forces and forms through which a particular mode of listening comes to be hegemonic. The aim is to understand the ‘historical conditions’ that underpin the dominant ‘mode of human sense-perception,’ (Benjamin, 1968) in our contemporary juncture. It is our wager that our habitual mode of listening is a result of a) the organization of work under post-industrial capitalism b) the discourse of the ‘rational human’ that emerges during the Enlightenment as a one who can keep promises, a discourse tied symbiotically to c) the colonization of the Earth by Western capitalist pigs and d) the distinction in popular music and music theory between sound and noise, a separation that works to maintain the hierarchy of values, practices of commodification and ownership of the cultural commons and private property. Of
course, such an undertaking is way beyond our capacity to write at the moment. Apologies. The dominant forms of listening in contemporary urban soundscapes are normative and habitual. They are normative in the sense that the ear is trained to make value judgments about what kinds of sound are and are not important. One does not, however, consciously decide what kinds of sound she should or should not listen to. The ear is disciplined and trained to such an extent that our mode of listening becomes habitual. Habit here means an ‘acquired automatic self-regulation,’ (Massumi, 2002). Acquired and trained to the point where we don’t even choose to listen in the ways that we do; it becomes automatic. Importantly, it is selfregulatory; it is not imposed from above constantly by a shadowy authority figure. Rather, it is a part of a process of ‘subjectivization’ (Butler, 1990) whereby the subject is produced through this disciplining and can, in turn, selfregulate. Habitual listening names the hegemonic form of listening imprinted upon the nervous system to such a degree that the way we listen happens without conscious intention. The autonomic character of listening, the way it sculpts the body’s capacity to hear, is developed to such an extent that it appears to us as natural and given, rather than historical and contingent. ‘Listening’ is for us an historical activity, an achievement of cultural training that in turn shapes and forms the body’s capacity to hear. The training of the ear, we might say, ‘resides in the matter of the body, in the muscles, nerves and skin,’ (Massumi, 236). It is not the case that ordinary soundscapes just aren’t heard at all. The curious thing here is that they are so commonplace that they no longer register consciously.
These sounds register, but they register as what Massumi calls ‘micropercepts’: sounds that register, but register unconsciously. ‘Micro awareness without actual awareness, gnats of potential experience,’ (ibid, 196). This interpretive dimension, this sieve, of listening is noninnocent and structured by various relations of power, dominance and exploitation. It is quite clear that in our contemporary moment the experiences, opinions and beliefs of communities of color, poor, queer and trans folks are marginalized and go unheard by those who benefit from their oppression. And even when they are heard due to a massive upsurge like what we saw in Ferguson and Baltimore, the state responds not by proposing structural changes to problems like mass incarceration, police brutality against communities of color and economic inequality (problems that require the dismantling of capitalism, the abolition of prisons and police, indigenous self-determination and decolonization), but rather by addressing elements of their critique that can ostensibly be addressed with slight reforms that leave the structure intact (police wearing body cameras, indicting an occasional police officer, etc.). If a riot is the language of the unheard, the neoliberal state cannot hear it because riots against police brutality and mass incarceration call for a radical re-structuring of society that the status quo cannot hear, let alone listen to; it can only ignore, strategically appropriate through a partial recognition, or crush through repression. b. Kick that Habit, Man And yet something escapes capture. ‘Microblocks, vol. 1’ seeks to explore the molecular and micro perceptual realm of ordinary soundscapes as one way among many to imagine
alternative compositions of the social and the sonic. It is our wager that listening to and recording the molecular realm of soundscapes are some ways in which alternative modes of listening, composition and politics can be imagined and practiced. Aleatory listening is a mode of listening that seeks to be attentive to the unthinkable heterogeneity of the molecular variations in soundscapes. Unthinkable. Aleatory listening begins with the premise that we do not yet know what urban soundscapes are capable of. Its medium is the naturalcultural city, its transportation the feet, its method the sound-walk. Ambulatory, itinerant, the sound-walk can be programmatic, or not. it can have a strict protocol, a vague plan, a general sense of its direction, or not. you can go alone, but it’s much more preferable and enjoyable to go with friends. Above all, it requires an undisciplining of the ear: Listen to that which escapes capture, to the infinitesimal, to the impractical, to the harsh and ugly. In this sense, aleatory listening cultivates non-normative ways of relating to urban soundscapes that lie outside of the dominant and hegemonic mode. c. Aleatory listening, however, is devoid of content without radical critique. Historical listening is a mode of listening that seeks to historically situate urban soundscapes as the audible result of the differentially distributed conditions of exploitation and oppression under capitalism. “The noise of the reproduction of life,” is read through the “relations of ownership and control,” through which it is produced in order to analyze the “materiality of status and power,” (Berlant, 2011) in everyday life. It reads listening as perspectival, shaped by class, gender, race, sexuality and ability, constructive, selective, non-neutral. It is critical and
negative in its movement. As Terre Thaemlitz puts it, “what is ‘resistance’ if not a negative push against domination?” (Thaemlitz, 2013). The politicization of the soundscape, the historicization of listening modalities and the invention of new ways of relating to urban soundscapes form the methodological building blocks of our lil’ sample-pack. Now that we’ve clear-cut the ideological debris a bit, we can attend to the ways in which these recordings were made.
2. Participatory and Metallurgical Recording
‘Listening for the least differences possible to perceive perception at the edge of the new.’ Oliveros, 1999
Two method of engaging with ordinary soundscapes were used to produce these recordings: participatory and metallurgical. a. Participatory recording is really simple: we walk around and record what happens. The protocol is this: plot a general route and walk around. bring headphones to hear what the microphone is picking up. you can go alone, but it’s much more preferable and enjoyable to go with friends. The aim is to capture the ambient and aleatory sounds of a given sonic environment. ‘Bus Block 2,’ for example, was recorded on M. Ray’s derive in San Francisco. He walked around, listened intently and sometimes distractedly, and occasionally hit record. It can be programmatic, but it doesn’t have to be. Drugs may or may not be involved. We call it ‘participatory’ recording in order to highlight the ways in which the ‘observer’ is implicated and constitutive
of the scene of recording. Recordings do not capture an objective and external moment that exists independently of the observer. The situated and historical character of the one who records, indexed by class, race, gender and ability, interpellated by a contingent material-ideological organization of society, embedded in the mud and shit of time, is incredibly important to emphasize and think through. Recording is perspectival: located in a particular social position, embedded in an historically specific cultural milieu, archived with certain kinds of sound equipment and not others. The microphone is a constructive, rather than neutral, apparatus. It’s a ‘technoscientific object,’ (Haraway, 1997) socially and historically specific, emerging from a complex constellation of commercial, scientific, communicatory, artistic and militaristic interests (Robjohns, 2010). It matters who was funding these technological developments and for what reasons. Cui bono? (Star, 1990). The history of the microphone requires an account of the historical, and not just epistemic, conditions of possibility of its emergence. Follow the flow of capital. Amplification and recording do not capture an objective image of an external, independent world; rather, it creates an object shaped by the social position of the listener with recording technologies endowed with certain capacities and not others. Take microphone polar patterns. Simplifying a great deal, a microphone’s ‘polar pattern’ is the direction and shape of how it picks up sound. There are two main pick-up patterns: omnidirectional and ‘figure-eight’ (White, 2007). Omnidirectional microphones pick up sounds from all directions. Figure-eight microphones pick up sounds from
the front and rear of the mic. The other kinds of microphone polar patterns (cardioid, hypercardioid, and shotgun) combine these two patterns in different ways. Polar patterns demonstrate the selective nature of microphones. Different microphones possess different kinds of capacities to record the world in particular ways, each suited and designed to hear specific kinds of acoustic phenomena. Their placement, position and environment matters a great deal: the distance between the microphone and the source, the direction the microphone is facing in relation to the source, the architecture of the room/space one is recording in, the amount of other sounds besides the one trying to be recorded, and so on, all determine how the recording will end up sounding. Will someone please write a decent STS monograph or article on the microphone already? Jesus. b. Metallurgical recording is also quite simple: interact with elements of the built environment in different ways to produce recordings. The protocol is this: pick an object you can carry (a stick, a finger, a skateboard, a brush, ad infinitum), a general route and walk around. bring headphones to hear what the microphone is picking up. you can go alone, but it’s much more preferable and enjoyable to go with friends. approach an element of the built environment and use yr object to play it. tap it with varying degrees of force. touch different parts of it, with different sections of yr percussion tool. percuss it with as little space between hits as possible, then with as much space as it takes to let the sound decay. see what happens if you muffle the sound. record from different angles, from close and from
far away. use microphones with different acoustic pick-up patterns. play a rhythm out, strictly in-time. you can do some of these, or just one, or none. It can be programmatic, but it doesn’t have to be. Drugs may or may not be involved. We call it ‘metallurgical’ recording in order to highlight the ways in which this style of sound walk takes experimentation with the material dimensions of sounding to be its terrain of musical investigation. It concerns itself with creating sounds through an engagement with an object’s material organization. It names an approach to composition whose emphasis is on the development of texture, dynamics and non-tonality, a radical and decisive re-imagining of what ‘music’ could be. Metallurgical recording is a process that seeks to create a wide variety of sound objects by engaging with the physical characteristics of the built environment in different ways. take, for example, ‘Woodsistance #1-3.’ A fallen branch is used to play an electrical generator out in the woods behind UCSC. The branch hits a different point on the generator in each of the recordings. Different levels of force were applied each time. Different parts of the branch were used to play the metallic box on each recording. In each case, while the attack remains constant, the relative pitch, the overtones expressed, the duration and the volume shift in subtle and dramatic ways. Approaching objects of the built environment in this way turns the material processes through which sound is produced into an area of inquiry. By ‘changing the intrinsic form of the object,’ (Schaeffer, 2012) through changing the way it produces sound, the material process through which particular sounds emerge changes from a presupposition and into a process of transformation. The aim is to create ‘a
continuous variation of matter’ (Deleuze and Guatarri, 1987) whereby the production of sound, rather than transcendental musical principles of harmony, melody and rhythm, becomes the focus of musical composition. This is precisely what the non-musician Pierre Schaeffer was after in his attempt to create ‘sound objects’ (Schaeffer, 2012) through variations in how the sound was produced materially. Sound objects are just bits of recorded audio. Schaeffer created these objects by experimenting with different materials, microphones and ways of causing said materials to resonate. The aim was to produce singular sound objects that varied in timbre, dynamics and frequency range (ibid, 193). Hence his emphasis on technique: variations in the ways in which sound is produced materially generate vastly different kinds of sound objects. Different kinds of microphones yielded vastly different results. The matter of sound becomes an open question, a process of continuous variation, rather than that which is presupposed and subordinated to the development of traditional music ideas. We by no means invented this approach. You could tell a story about how it emerges as a self-reflexive compositional practice with the prepared piano. Henry Cowell’s Aeolian Harp is a decent starting point. The piece was written on piano. Cowell, however, had the ingenious idea for the piece to be played by plucking on the piano strings. He called it the ‘string piano.’ Cowell notates the precise gesture in which the strings should be played: ‘swept’ or ‘plucked’ (Cowell, 1930). He specifies the exact place where the strings should played (‘near the center of the string’ or ‘near the tuning pegs’). Finally, he indicates which part of the finger the parts should be played with (‘the flesh of the finger,’ ‘the back of
finger-nails’ or the ‘flat of hand’). Cowell’s The Banshee and Aeolian Harp create new areas of inquiry in composition: material processes and texture. Aside from investigating alternative ways to play the piano, Cowell introduces a new way to think about sound and a new method for sonic experimentation. First, material processes. Rather than approach the piano purely as a means for expressing harmonic and melodic ideas, Cowell thinks the piano as a material object. He notices that the physical characteristics of the piano, i.e. the properties that allow it to make particular kinds of sound (the length of its strings, where the hammers hit the strings to resonate, the way that the hammers hit the string, the chamber that amplifies the string’s resonance) could be taken as points of departure and sites of inquiry. whereas previous composers presupposed the material organization of the piano, taking it as static and given, Cowell transforms it into a terrain of experimentation. He re-organizes the way in which the piano physically makes sound at all. For example, plucking or sweeping the strings gives the piano a remarkably different timbral and over tonal quality than the piano hammer. Changing the object and mode of attack produces subtle and obvious changes in the decay, sustain, texture and volume of the piano. The real kicker here is just how specific Cowell gets with which part of the finger the performer should use to pluck the strings with. The subtle differences of the piano’s sound between the ‘flesh of the finger’ and the ‘back of the finger-nail’ illustrates the importance he placed upon experimenting with intervening at the level of matter. The tiny gradations in timbre, the barely-perceptible molecular differences: molecular composition. Cowell’s approach
here is metallurgical: follow the flow of matter, experiment with its form, transform. After Cowell, it became possible to make variations in how the performer engages with the material structure of an instrument a primary, rather than secondary and accidental, element in composition. Second, texture. Playing with the different material elements of the piano does three things to the relationship between music and texture. First, textural and timbral variation becomes a central aspect of composition. Harmonic, melodic and rhythmic development are still absolutely central; however, the quality of sound (timbre), which Cowell situates as arising through the material organization of the piano, is explored with as much development and emphasis as the more traditionally musical elements of these two works. Texture is transformed into a problematic rather than a presupposition. Second, the introduction of texture into the domain of composition demonstrates the necessity of engaging with the extra-musical elements involved in the production of sound. If sound arises from particular kinds of material processes that can no longer be subordinated to the purely ‘musical,’ then composition can and must insist on investigating the material conditions of its own production. This means that the ’non-musical’ social processes (the gendered and racialized division of labor, the ownership of the means of production, the production and circulation of commodities, the capitalist system of exchange, colonization, and so on) that make organized sound possible can come under critical interrogation. While Cowell and his inheritors generally failed to do so (Christian Wolff, Cornelius Cardew and Pauline Oliveros being notable exceptions), we can, in our
contemporary moment, take up their practices and ideas in order to help fashion ‘the formulation of revolutionary demands in the politics of art,’ (Benjamin, 1968). The introduction of the extra-musical through texture also highlights the relationship between sound, embodied practice and queerness. Highlighting the material production of sound emphasizes musical performance as an embodied, gestural practice. Cowell’s score can be read as an attempt to problematize the dominant relation between the body and the piano. How? Learning to play the piano is a matter of disciplining the body into being able to repetitively reproduce gestures with certain effects: the fingers must rest on the piano in a particular way, the feet pressing with a certain amount of pressure down on the sustain and hold pedals, fingers knowing how to press down keys according to rhythmic divides of eighth, quarter, half and whole notes and with a certain amount of pressure, etc. Re-orienting this relationship of the body to the piano, introducing new gestures to the repertoire of established techniques, highlights the normative and contingent essence of such training. It situates embodiment and materiality as central sites of performance and composition. Plucking the piano strings in this instance is a performance of resistance to the normalization of dominant approaches to the piano, and in this resistance one could draw a relationship between queerness, discipline and embodiment. Cowell was arrested in the late 30’s for having sex with a 17-year old man, pled guilty, and was sentenced to 1-15 years in prison, serving four in total. He never publicly identified as a homosexual, and rejected the term wholesale. A certain desire to read this resistance to the dominant disciplining of
the body in music as a queering of composition exists here in this text. Can the Aeolian Harp be read as a gestural protocol for an undisciplining of the body and an invitation to imagine new, non-normative ways of connecting flesh, sound and matter? Can Cowell’s emphasis on experimenting with the material production of sound be read as an opening to produce queer timbres? Can his own negation of queerness as identity be read as a strategic attempt to subvert the logic of sexual identity and essence that underpins contemporary belonging in the Western polis (Foucault, 1978)? Cowell’s emphasis on materiality and queering texture helps us to approach objects in the built environment in a new way. Field recording becomes metallurgical when one takes experimenting with the material processes through which sound is produced and recorded as central. the way you hold yr percussive instrument, the type of microphone, the ‘non-musical’ object as sound source, the intensity with which you tap the object, the placement of the microphone, the speed: varying these elements produces intriguing and singular sound objects. Queer the relation between body and built environment. Vary the ‘mode of attack…the speed of rubbing…the pressure’ (Schaeffer, 136) in order to generate new sonic forms. Matter is plastic, malleable and historical. Composition begins with the realization that the material organization of sound is historically contingent and can be changed in kind. Before we can explore the notion of composition as experimentation with the social and sonic organization of matter, it is necessary to analyze the medium that these percussive soundscape objects exist in; namely, the digital reproduction of sounds.
3. Mechanical Reproduction and Alienated Listening
a. Field recording is an art form whose existence is dependent on mechanical reproduction. From the BBC ’Sound Effects’ vinyls to our digital bits of weird ordinariness, field recording is marked as a genre of sound that emerges in the age of mechanical reproduction. for us, this requires thinking through reproduction as an essential aspect of field recording, for the mechanical and material processes of reproduction are what make possible this genre of sound in the first place. in this section, we will argue that recordings help us to simultaneously analyze contemporary forms of domination in white supremacist, heteropatriarchical capitalism and imagine alternative forms of sociality/social composition. Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ is particularly helpful for conceptualizing the relationship between sound, the conditions of (re)production and politics. For now, we’ll extract the parts of his analysis that are useful for our purposes here (as there are already a billion summaries of the essay).
Benjamin argues that film’s technological capacities, particularly it’s extended visual capacities and ability to record and play back movement at different speeds, both ‘extends our comprehension of the necessities that rule our lives,’ and creates an ‘immense and unexpected field of action,’ (Benjamin, 237). ’Necessities’ for Benjamin here are the social relations of capitalism: the division of labor, ownership of the means of production, social classes, the institution of private property, wage-labor, the commodityform and the distribution of resources (insert reference to Marx here from something, probably capital vol.1). Film, for Benjamin, extends our capacity to analyze the complex ways in which relations of domination and subjugation under capitalism are produced and maintained. And yet through these same capacities film also creates a realm of resistance against these necessities. The ‘immense and unexpected field of action’ is produced by film through ‘the close-up’ shot and ‘slow motion,’ (ibid). These two techniques visualize the molecular realm of infinitesimal detail: the particular way Bogart ashes cigarette, the subtle way Drake’ uncomfortably shifts position in the back of a Rolls Royce after partying all night. Film’s technological capacities create a new realm of resistance and experimentation: the ‘taverns and… railroad stations’ that appear ‘to have us locked up hopelessly’ are ‘burst… asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second,’ (ibid, 237). The structuring forces of capitalism may be determining and constitutive of the subject, but they are not ‘totalizing,’ (Butler, 1990) or all-encompassing. Mechanical reproduction creates a visual space focused on singularities that exceed their structural determinations. This capacity, of course, is
not inherently liberatory or politically radical; nonetheless, it opens up the possibility for ‘politicizing art,’ (ibid) at the level of the molecular. b. The field recording microphone, much like the camera lens, explores ‘commonplace milieus’ by ‘focusing on hidden details of familiar objects,’ (ibid, 237). It amplifies elements of a sonic event that are not audible to the ear alone: a leaf rubs against another leaf while the hot air from an oil refinery breezes by. These ‘hidden details’ produce recordings of astonishing variety in a sonic space that seems boring, uninteresting and overdetermined. The microphone is a prosthetic device that helps us to undiscipline the ear and open up listening to that which was beyond its comprehension. Listen for the least differences possible to perceive: micro-sound. a grain. Queer the ear. Field recording investigates and intervenes within this world of sonic microdetail in order to generate heterogeneous and dynamic recordings that lie outside of the sphere of traditional musicality. And yet one cannot get lost in the near-infinite play of tiny differences. Not when the neoliberal state has decided black and brown lives are expendable and killable. Not when the Oakland mayor institutes a protest curfew to repress black and brown voices objecting to racist police brutality and racialized economic inequality, ostensibly in order to prevent ‘vandalism of property.’ Not when property damage is prioritized over black life, queer and trans life, undocumented life. Field recording becomes just another aesthetic game without a historical analysis and compositional practice that situates the sonic field as a socially stratified and violent sphere. The necessities that rule our lives do not dissipate
in the molecular realm; they crystallize. It is only when listening is politicized, when the sonic field is read as a historical site of struggle against exploitation, that field recording gains traction. How, then, can field recording contribute to the construction of other worlds? c. Mechanical reproduction produces an entirely different mode of listening. By ‘extracting’ (Schaeffer, 136) sound from its unique location in time and space, reproduction divorces a particular sound from its given meaning and social significance. Reproduction ‘detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition,’ (Benjamin, 221), thereby allowing new interpretations and uses to proliferate. Mechanical reproduction produces alienated listening: the previously stable associations, values and experiences that congeal around the bleep of a crosswalk signal are liquidated. Meaning, as well as the form of a given sound, becomes malleable and open to revision. Alienating listening allows for our habitual mode of listening and its concomitant political underpinnings to ‘spring into view,’ (Brecht, 1964) by unsuturing everyday sounds from the context that renders them commonplace. Changing the way commonplace sounds are perceived from microperceptual to conscious awareness does more than make audible sounds that generally are filtered out of what we hear; it renders the very perceptual mechanisms through which we listen audible. It highlights, through utilizing an alternative mode of listening, the contingency of hegemonic forms of listening. The presupposed naturalness and inevitability of normative listening can now be considered as an effect of historical conditions, as one particular mode among many.
Demonstrating this contingency allows for the possibility of historicizing our received habits of listening. Alienated listening politicizes the ear by situating listening in a hierarchically organized field of action. The recording and mechanical reproduction of ordinary soundscapes is not inherently politically radical (take, for example, alarm clocks that play ocean sounds or frogs or some other bullshit); it must be tied to an analysis of the material conditions through which certain kinds of soundscapes emerge. Alienated listening thus has strong affinities with historical materialism, cyborg feminisms, queer and trans theory. The ear can become a site of struggle only when we conceptualize alienated listening as a method for historicizing the production and audition of urban soundscapes. Field recording ordinary soundscapes becomes a ‘pedagogy of the ear,’ (Ultra-red, 2008) when its training occurs with bodies in the street, in organizing meetings and in direct actions involved in the revolutionary struggle to dismantle white supremacist heteropatriarchal capitalism. Further, alienated listening transforms the ordinary soundscape from a given to a dialog and conversation. It transforms sound from an object we know so well that it is not heard into an open question. Divorced from the ‘audiovisual complex’ (Landy, 2007) that allows the listener to trace the sound to its source, mechanically reproduced sound-objects from ordinary soundscapes transform the question from what a sound is (its cause) into what associations and meanings it conjures up for the listener. We don’t hear ‘sound-in-itself,’ divorced from its social and sonic contexts, but rather the ‘terms of the relation’ between the sound-object and the listener (Ultra-red, 2012). The values
and meanings the listener brings to the listening situation are transformed from a presupposition and into a site of inquiry. ‘What we heard,’ as Ultra-red notes, ‘was our encounter with the object,’ (ibid). Differences in interpretation, contradictory meanings, previously submerged by the overdetermining ordinariness of everyday soundscapes, are made audible. ‘Making audible’ these contradictions allows for the necessities that rule our lives to spring into view, thereby creating a shared space of struggle and a possible site of coalition-building. Alienated listening thus allows for composition to ‘begin to be based on another practice—politics,’ (Benjamin, 224). ‘Microblocks, vol. 1’ seeks to create a space whereby the ordinary and quotidian spaces of urban life are turned into sites of imagining an alternative configuration of sense, sociability and belonging. But rather than stopping at dialogue, it makes the wager that electronic composition can re-configure, through modulation, beat-making and sound design, our sense of the possible in the public sphere. Alienated listening and mechanical reproduction open onto questions concerning sampling, repetition, essentialism, the commodity-form, difference and supply chains, whose reverberations are felt in the on-going reproduction of the social under neoliberalism.
4. Sampling, Music as Commodity and the Critique of Recording as Representation ‘All contemporary musical life is dominated by the commodity form,’ Adorno, 2002 ‘Illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential,’ Haraway, 1990
a. Recorded audio performs a kind of stabilizing capture: freezing the movement of sound into a mechanically reproducible form that returns each time the same. It attempts to reduce the movement of a musical line to a fixed and punctual point, strictly localizable in time and space, transfixed, overcoded, overdetermined. Repetition without difference. It works to produce, through means spatial, auditory, commercial and electronic, a boundary between a given sound and the ‘acoustic ecology’ (Schafer, 1993) it resides within. In audio engineering lingo, recording produces an ‘idealized representation’ of a given sound through technical means that work to insure the
empirical accuracy of the ‘audio image’ (citation from that one recording book). The audio engineer works to ensure that Sinatra, all casual misogyny and heteronormative melancholia, will always be Sinatra. Sound, isolated and closed in on itself. This image of recording as representation is indelibly tied in with the logic of the musical commodity and the underlying ideologies of cultural production in the United States. Recorded audio is a capitalist art par excellence; its very existence as an art form is predicated upon mechanical reproduction, circulation and distribution in the commodity form. A complex network of legal, musical, technological, electrical, advertising, manufacturing and distribution forces work to produce and maintain the internally consistent, unique and fixed musical commodity. An in-depth analysis of this multifaceted process is outside the scope of this essay; for now, we’ll focus on copyright and mechanical reproduction. The musical copyright act of 1976 defines a work as copyrightable if it ‘is sufficiently permanent or stable to permit it to be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated for a period of more than transitory duration,’ (section 101). Recording, mixing and mastering utilize technical means in order to ‘stabilize’ and ‘fix’ a composition as a means of creating a unique, isolated object that one can claim ownership over. And this, after all, is precisely what copyright is about: ownership and property. Recorded audio copyright is concerned not just with what makes a particular musical composition unique; it is concerned with maintaining the right to mechanically reproduce copies. Copy-right. The ‘owner of the copyright’ has the ‘exclusive right’ to ‘duplicate the sound recording in the form of phono records,’ (section 114b). The right to make copies is the right to
produce and distribute music in the commodity-form: the vinyl, the cassette, the mp3. Recorded audio thus has an essential relationship with the commodification of music, as it is one of the main technological means through which this process of commodification takes place. Interestingly, the U.S. government makes a distinction between the composition and the recording (US Copyright Office, 2012). The musical composition is defined as a ‘work of music’ that becomes copyrightable once it is ‘in the form of a notated copy,’ (ibid) i.e., sheet music. Musical composition then is defined and protected legally only once it has been notated on a form that can be reproduced and distributed. On both the musical and audio technical level, composition is understood by industry and the law as concerning centrally the reproduction and repetition of a fixed form. This, according to Adorno, in turn feeds back into performance: ‘The flawlessly functioning, metallically brilliant apparatus’ of the then-contemporary orchestra ‘presents it [composition] as already complete from the very first note. The performance sounds like its own phonographic record. The dynamic is so predetermined that there are no longer any tensions at all. The contradictions of the musical material are so inexorably resolved in the moment of sound that it never arrives at the synthesis, the selfproduction of the work,’ (Adorno, 2002)
Music, striated, captured, closed off. This constitutes the composition’s ‘reification,’ (ibid) because it resolves the temporal dimension of music-as-becoming by assuming the piece is a fixed, repetitive organization. Compositions are rendered as Platonic ideals; a performance of a piece, stripped of interpretation, is merely a particular instantiation
of a universal, fixed form. No wonder Adorno dismissed the whitewashed popular jazz of his day (which he mistakenly conflated with the entire genre) as boringly repetitive in its musical structure and harmonic development: its verse-chorus structure replicated the logic of the musical commodity at the level of its composition. b. The percussion sample-pack, however, undermines this notion of recorded audio as representation. A ubiquitous genre of electronic music, the drum sample-pack is a collection of short (1-5 seconds) audio clips whose explicit purpose is to provide sound organizers with resources for building compositions. The sample-pack as a genre is a result of the invention of ‘sampling.’ Sampling is a method of composing songs by taking chunks of previously recorded audio material and making something new with them. As a practice, sampling emerges first within the modernist avant-garde: Pierre Schaeffer’s musique concrete, Burroughs’ tape cut-ups, Cage’s experiments with turntablism, Derbyshire’s concrete-pop tape loops. Those who still insist that ‘electronic music’ originates with Luigo Russolo or John Cage seem to be looking for a Father, a petty colonial despot, to provide an existential anchor for their ‘explorations’ into ‘unknown sonic territories.’ These two fools are commonly referred to as the ‘fathers’ of electronic music, or as brave ‘pioneers’ of a new humanity (e.g. the documentary Modulations). The colonial and patrilineal logic of this rhetoric is not at all difficult to spot. That’s one way to tell a story. It p boring and overplayed though, hecka cliché, etc. We can start from somewhere else, with different means, alternate ends, re-mix the archive;
electronic composition, after all, is in principle and practice against fidelity to origins. Anyways. One way to tell the story of sampling as pop form is through the work of Delia Derbyshire. Delia Derbyshire’s experiments with tape loops, tape delay, musique concrete and synthesizers still astonish 50 years later. Her ‘White Noise’ project is particularly prescient because it combines musical techniques associated with avant-garde music with the harmonic and melodic structure of pop music. Whereas previous composers strictly rejected traditional Western harmony in the name of an elitist progressivism, Derbyshire tied new ways of producing sound with the native British idiom of electronic, recorded pop music. The idea of ‘pop’ here is crucial. The radical electronic tradition has insisted on connecting its future-oriented composition with audiences outside the institutional citadel of the university (think Phillip Glass renting out rock halls to perform his music, or DJ Sprinkles performing at large, commercial electronic spaces). Sampling, realized in its pop-form, becomes ‘capable of communicating with the broad masses,’ (Brecht, 1964) and thus generating new senses of the possible in a wider swath of ‘the public.’ The desire is change the form of pop and the possible from within, write for a people who do not yet exist, decolonize the sonic imagination. Take the track “Love Without Sound.” The ‘percussion’ of the track is an assemblage of found sounds, percussive instruments, guttural voices and synthesized ‘sound effects,’ spliced together into long tape loops and processed with electronic effects. A synthesizer line occasionally bubbles through the mix. A highpitched, thin voice sings throughout the majority of the track in
a British ‘folk’ style: verse-chorus-verse structure, the harmonic and melodic structure is built around chordal movements in the Western well-tempered scale, the lyrical content is abstract but nonetheless focused on romantic attachment, and so on. The voice is processed throughout with varying amounts of reverb and occasionally tape-delay. The tape-looping technique allows for sounds that previously lay outside the domain of ‘music’—ambient noise, sounds whose frequency range could not be mapped into Western tuning systems, and so on—to be incorporated into composition. The previous understanding of music as a closed tonal system is thrown out in favor of an expansive, widened field that sees composition as embedded within an acoustic surround that includes the active participation of nonhuman entities. ‘Pop music’ takes on a very different vector here: ‘the masses’ that populist music incorporates includes environmental sounds, machines, pavement. Brecht’s populism, exploded machinically, transformed from a human-centered, class-based abstraction into a post-humanist ecology of machines, bodies, terrains, processes. The subject is no longer pre-supposed as ‘the human’, divorced and distinct from ‘Nature,’ (Haraway, 1990). Derbyshire’s approach here is ecological: connect traditional Western tonal systems to their enabling sonic contexts in order to subvert from within their underlying logic. What can composition do if it can think outside the distinctions human/non human and nature/culture? What lines of social solidarity become possible when ecology is thought with class, technology, gender and race? Another way to tell a story of how sampling becomes a pop
form is with the development of DJ culture in New York. Most musicologists seem to agree that DJ Kool Herc invented the practice in its pop form some time around 1974 (Rose, 1994; Toop, 1984). Herc would take extended chunks (~30 seconds- 1 minute) from a record and loop it with a turntable. Most often, these loops would emphasize the rhythmic elements of a track (drums, percussion and bass) in order to facilitate dancing, partying and other awesome shit. ‘Pop form’ is by no means a condescension; it’s when sampling is realized in its highest form. Their compositional style already embodies what Kodwo Eshun calls a ‘pop analysis,’ (Eshun, More Brilliant than the sun) of sound, politics and materiality. Herc and Grandmaster Flash herald a new approach and philosophy of composition that is modular and molecular. Scratching and looping transform recorded audio from a foreclosed final product into one point in an-going process. Records are modular, not static: plug them into the deterritorializing rhythm machine of turntables, giant amplifiers, dance floors, block parties and transform their meaning, form and texture. Electronic, recorded audio is understood as an assemblage, a plastic differentiating machine, of which audio information is but a part. Sampling musicians and electronic composition in general self-reflexively composes around the amplification technology available to it in a particular historical moment. Recorded audio necessitates a system of amplification in order to be heard at all. it is thus in itself incomplete and requires relation in order to be heard. electronic audio is networked sound. it is also the case that amplification systems are constructive, rather than neutral, apparatuses of reproduction. amps have particular frequency ranges that emphasize certain aspects of sonic information
over others. MacBook speakers, for example, have a decidedly different frequency range than a Sub1 speaker system. one of the key differences is in the bass (~20-120 Hz) frequency range. laptop speakers do not have the electrical capacity nor speaker size to make this frequency range audible or visceral in the same way large speakers can. this has the effect of drastically changing the texture , as well as emphasizing different harmonic, melodic and rhythmic elements of a given piece. take for example DJ Rashad’s ‘I don’t give a fuck.’ the composition is based entirely around a heavily syncopated subkick/bass line. listening to this tune on laptop speakers erases the rhythmic, textural and visceral center of the track. its like listening to Debussy with the piano turned all the way down. Electronic composition is thus in itself necessarily incomplete. It requires, in its compositional practice, a thinking through of the extra-musical: the electrical, the architectural, the social. Composition becomes molecular. Taking the smallest chunks of audio from a previously recorded tune is both a matter of scale and a re-definition of composition outside of the unique, selfsame, independent work. Arrangements are but one possible ordering and realization of a series of possibilities; Herc and Flash seize upon this insight and push it outwards towards another sonic future outside of copyright’s property-identitybelonging essentialism. By treating the vinyl as a material object embedded within an electric network whose function, order, texture, pitch and meaning is infinitely malleable, Herc and Flash radicalize the queer compositionism of Cowell. Re-organizing previously recorded sounds, tying the practice to social gatherings, composing around the visceral possibilities (e.g.
emphasizing drums and lower bass frequencies) proffered by new amplification technologies is an invention of machinic composition. DJ as meaning-hacker, sonic metallurgist, black revolutionary, as movement builder. They take the alienated character of listening in the age of mechanical reproduction and double down: liquidate received meaning, destroy all that is sacrosanct, re-route racist narratives of blackness from the colonial Other to the maker of a post-capitalist futurity. The imperative is clear: build a post-human compositional machine from the ruins. The advent of the sampler (a machine that can record audio from any source, store it, play it back, sequence it, etc.) and its subsequent massive distribution and comparatively low cost enabled a democratization of what had previously been the purview of the academic elite. Any sound, from any recorded sound source, could now be fucked with, re-arranged, recomposed. The sampling artist has an altogether different conception of the purpose and capacity of recorded audio. Recordings are here figured as manipulable materials, dynamic patches with the capacity to bend into unwieldy shapes, sonic micro blocks. Rather than an end point, recordings are transformed into points of passage in an on-going process of re-composition. Recorded audio in its various mediums become points of departure and sites of continuous, intensive variation. Audio recordings become scenes of generative difference that are not concerned so much with ‘what’ they are as with ‘how’ they might be transformed, re-organized, decomposed. What’s interesting here is that the very same tools used to capture audio, to bind it and make it consistent with itself, to
transform it into a commodity (vinyl records, compressors, EQ, distribution lines and supply chains) are also what open it up to radical transformation on a different scale. The circulation of recorded audio as self-consistent isolated objects has, paradoxically, given composers with particular technological means (samplers, whathaveyou) the tools and materials to produce a radically ecological and malleable conception of sound and composition in general. The very point at which the hegemonic conception of ‘music,’ composition and recording are cut into technomateriality becomes the site of inventive opposition. ‘Microblocks,’ vol. 1’ places itself in the lineage of Kool Herc by emphasizing percussive, quotidian sounds of movement. Combining the near-infinity of the digital sampler (any sound can be used) with the emphasis on rhythmic elements of ordinary soundscapes situates it within the genealogy of those who imagined ‘pop’ as an expansive, experimental and futurist genre of music.
5. Plastic Alignments, Counterpublics and Electronic Composition as Process ‘Philosophy is no longer synthetic judgment; it is like a thought synthesizer functioning to make thought travel, make it mobile, make it a force of the Cosmos,’ Deleuze and Guattari, 1987 ‘Whatever the future will be, or whatever name we want to label the path to it, there is one realization that is facing us: it must be post-capitalist,’ Deterritorial Investigations Unit, 2015
Sampling makes possible a conception of composition as a process without end. ‘Microblocks, vol. 1’ seeks to tie this practice with field recording in order to construct a compositional machine capable of experimenting with the material organization of life. Let’s be clear: take these sounds and fuck with them. Build, distort, slice, syncopate: do anything but leave them be.
These sounds are resources for composers to take and transform into something else. This, after all, is one of the legacies of sampling: the world is plastic. In what follows, we’ll trace out the consequences of this plasticity in the hope that it can provide useful heuristics for hacking the heteronormative and racist regime of common sense. a. Sampling insists on recorded audio as a plastic and malleable medium whose form is an open question. In practice, it is tied in with a series of other electronic techniques focused on the radical plasticity of recorded sound. ‘sound effects’ such as reverb, delay, chorus, flanger and so on change the quality, or timbre, and form of the sound-object. Digital audio workstations like Logic and Ableton, as well as samplers, allow a sound artist to ‘chop up’ and re-arrange the start point, end point, duration, pitch and playback direction of a sample. different synthesis engines (re-synthesis, granular) allow audio to be manipulated at the micro (millisecond) level. ‘Electronic composition’ is the collection of technological methods focused around transforming the form and texture of recorded audio. In what sense does sampling instantiate composition as a process without end? Sampling as a practice insists that compositions are temporary and finite stabilizations of a series of relations (harmony, melody, rhythm, timbre, amplitude and duration). Against the dogmatic image of recorded audio as representation and mechanical reproduction as infinite repetition of the self-same, sampling asserts the inventive possibility of other orderings, other relations, other tonalities. The logic of the musical commodity is thereby subverted from within by taking its means (recording and mechanical reproduction) and ends (the distributable commodity-form) and using them as
starting points for something else. The practice of sampling thus introduces becoming back into music at the very moment music was thought to have finally been rendered static and repeatable. Sampling insists on a widened sense of composition: the symbolic, the sonic, the economic, the spatial, the technical, the sexual. The distinction between ‘noise’ and ‘sound,’ is a ‘meaningless problem,’ (Rorty, 1979); the real question here is the specific relationship enacted between politics, materiality and composition. What, its practitioners ask, are the historical conditions of possibility for producing electronic sound? Who owns the means of production and distribution? How do discourses surrounding gender and sexuality shape the social spaces of performance? And how can composition experiment with and organize around each of these domains? In previous eras, composers wrote music within the problems of harmony, melody, rhythm, duration and amplitude. Each term was a ‘series’ with a set of pre-determined borders the composer would work within. The composers’ problem, then, was music qua music. The electronic musician’s problem, however, is not ‘music’ but composition: the ways in which social and sonic relations are organized and held together. Distribution, production, ownership, economic exploitation, texture, materiality, social space and amplification all become problematics around which sound is organized. Whereas music draws a distinction in practice between itself and the sociohistorical field it takes places within, electronic composition concerns itself with the material production of sound as a political and aesthetic
site of intervention. The electronic musician as genderhacker, speculative anti-capitalist, spatial organizer, sound manipulator. Composition as ‘re-composition,’ (Berardi, 2011) as the autonomous, collective re-organization of social and sonic relations outside of neoliberal nihilism. Electronic composition is concerned with plastic alignments. Its methods for organizing sound insist on the radical plasticity of sound’s form, texture, pitch, duration and dynamics. For electronic composition, organizing sound is a process of organizing relations according to sonic and social variables. First, the sonic. In reference to musique concrete techniques, Pierre Schaeffer discusses a ‘plastic type of alignment,’ whereby the compositional process is organized around ‘arranging objects in relation to each other,’ (Schaeffer, 137). Composition is here thought as the practice of arranging relations between sonic events. It would be a mistake here to read this to mean that composition consists in connecting discrete and independent sound-objects in particular ways. Instead, we read this as thinking composition as a relational process without end in its production and ordering of sound-objects. Sound-objects are the result of temporarily stabilizing a particular ordering and set of relations between recording technologies (microphones) the built environment (the idealized space of the studio or the field), the resonating object(s) (the sounding objects), mechanical reproduction (analog tape machines, DAWs) and the encounter between the musician and the sounding object. The ‘sound-object’ produced through electronic means is always already embedded within and is a result of a cluster of relations. Secondly, ordering relations between sound-objects insists on composition as engaging with specific ways of organizing
relationships according to frequency, harmony, rhythm, timbre, duration and amplitude. Composition does not deal with independent parts that form a larger whole; it deals with organizing relations in order to transform these ‘independent’ parts into something else. The sonic context, the sonic environment within which a sound-object is situated, is constitutive of and cannot be separated from the sound-object. The aim is to transform sound-objects into something else through the specific ordering of their relating. Composition follows the logic of ‘intra-action,’ where ‘relata do not precede relations,’ (Barad, 2007). Composition lies in the interstices, in the space of the in-between. Electronic composition can be thought of as an ecological process of sonic transfiguration whose endpoint is not the fixed form of a mechanically reproducible copy but the process of composition itself. Second, the social. Electronic composition’s emphasis on context, relation and transfiguration means that it engages with its social, historical, technological and spatial conditions of possibility within its compositional practice. There is an essential relation here with ‘the outside,’ the extra-musical, that forms its singular compositional praxis. At the level of ideological content, a cursory survey of the radical electronic tradition demonstrates this: DJ Sprinkles’ spoken word introduction to her record Midtown 120 Blues, which situates house music as emerging from poor, queer and trans communities of color; Old and New Dreams highlighting the connection between the black revolutionary communism of the Black Panthers and dreams of communist China on ‘Chairman Mao’; Holly Herndon’s schizo-meditation on surveillance culture and digital life in ‘Home’ on her record Platform; Underground Resistance’s insisting that the needs of the
many outweigh the needs of the few on ‘The Theory;’ Pauline Oliveros sampling Puccini’s ‘Madame Butterfly’ in ‘Bye, Bye Butterfly’ to critique the institutionalized oppression of women. More radically, it insists on politicizing the form of recorded audio itself. It insists that its form (the production, distribution, amplification and circulation of recorded audio) is situated within material and symbolic relations of domination and exploitation, indexed by race, gender, sexuality, ability and class, that ought to be challenged and subverted. It then takes it upon itself to imagine alternative configurations of space, sense and sociality outside of capital’s domination, and works to construct networks of resistance and experimentation against empire. Underground Resistance is emblematic of electronic composition as a revolutionary social and sonic process. Its distribution channels exist in a parallel, subterranean and resistant relation with hegemonic forms of media distribution. They run their own label. They self-publish their music. They own the “Submerge” distribution company. Cultural and economic autonomy are the means, ends and process. UR’s 23rd 12’ is titled “Message to the Majors.” On the vinyl sleeve lie the words, “Fuck the majors!” Inscribed on the vinyl itself is another message that complicates the simplistic reading of the vinyl as a critique of the cultural hegemony of major labels: “Message to all murderers on the Detroit Police Force - We’ll see you in hell!” (UR, 1998). Dedicated to Malice Green, an unarmed black man murdered by white pigs in Detroit, UR connects economic exploitation to racialized police brutality, highlighting the connection between racist
police brutality and racialized dispossession. It highlights the intersections of multiple forms of oppression; in this case, race and class. The culture industry, dominated by major labels built off of the exploitation and appropriation of black artistry, is a form of cultural and economic racism. UR charts an alternative path to distribution that seeks to create conditions of economic and cultural autonomy that resists the connection between composition, commodification and black death. Politicizing the form of recorded audio entails alternative strategies for composition in both the political and sonic realms. It imagines an elsewhere, creates and sustains a context for its elaboration, cuts into the fabric of the real with its compositional machines. This is a primary, rather than secondary, attribute of their electronic composition process. There is no distinction made between sonic and socio-economic experimentation. If electronic sound is concerned with the material production and organization of sound, then it follows that we ought to consider these distributing and methods as necessary for understanding the group’s singular approach to machining composition. This is not to say that UR makes some kind of fundamental break with the commodification of music, or that they create an autonomous zone of cultural production wholly independent of information capitalism. To say such a thing would be the height of idealism and political stupidity. The relationship here between UR and the social relations underlying the production and distribution of music is antagonistic and imaginative. It recognizes distribution and production as problematics to experiment with; the soundlabel as utopian incubator. It is an attempt to imagine an
otherwise in the midst of an overwhelmingly violent present with the means available. It is utopian, Afrofuturstic, alien and practical. UR are a nomad collective of speculative machine pragmatists. They seek to re-engineer the way relations are organized in the present, creating “sonic fictions,” (Eshun, 1998) that both speculate and create alternative ways of living and sounding together. Electronic composition is thus fundamentally concerned with the construction of what queer scholar José Esteban Muñoz called ‘counterpublics.’ In Disidentifications, Muñoz defines counterpublics as ‘communities and relational chains of resistance that contest the dominant public sphere,’ (Muñoz, 1999). Counterpublics situate resistance against the dominant sphere of heteropatriarchal white supremacy as an aesthetic and political question. Importantly, they are concerned with constructing social and sonic networks that subvert from within economic and political relations of dominance and exploitation. “The Theory” is a hot track, so let’s talk about it, intellectualize the groove, etc. It was released in 1992. The main portion of the track welds together synthesized percussion/keyboards and a vocal sample saying “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few” that a YouTube commenter claims is from Star Trek. Stark and uncompromising in its revolutionary insistence that ‘the people,’ subjugated and exploited at every turn, deserve the fruits of what they produce. A fairly straightforward framing of the situation, maybe, but still vital in a time when the neoliberal state seeks to absolve itself of any responsibility to protect the most precarious and marginalized folks in society. Then, around 2:15, something strange happens. A voice starts
blabbering some straight-up sci-fi shit: ‘put simply, genesis is life from lifelessness. it is a process whereby molecular structure is re-organized at the sub-atomic level into life-generating matter of equal mass. stage one of our experiment was conducted in the laboratory. stage 2 of the series will be attempted in a lifeless underground. stage 3 will involve the process on a planetary scale. it is our intention to introduce the genesis device into a pre-selected area of our lifeless space body, a moon or other dead form. the device is delivered, instantaneously causing what we call the genesis effect. matter is re-organized with lifegenerating results,’ (UR, 1992)
What does placing the needs of the many over the needs of the few have to do with re-organizing the ‘molecular structure’ of life? UR here highlights the ways in which ‘life’ and ‘matter’ have become, in our contemporary moment, sites of power and domination. The ‘molecular structure’ of life, the organization, structure and maintenance of the body’s fleshiness, has become, down to the smallest aspects, a deeply politicized sphere. One could point to the proliferation of pharmaceuticals that work to produce and maintain a healthy, productive, desiring body; the explosion of molecular technologies (estradiol, testosterone, Viagra, estrogen) that excite, construct and constrain bodies into legibly male or female hetero/homonormative bodies; or to the transformation of social interaction into a site of value-production on social networking sites; experiments in making access to water dependent upon ability pay in places like post-bankruptcy Detroit; resource-extraction and purification techniques of the petrol industries to produce molecular power; regulation of the body’s health and capacity to reproduce by medical, pharmaceutical and state experts;
the displacement of responsibility for survival from the state to the individual in post-Fordist capitalism; these are but a few of the ways in which power over life has become a main site of politics in our contemporary moment (Dumit, 2012; Foucault, 1978; Preciado, 2011). The matter of the body, the ways in which life is sustained and maintained, have become important sites of power, production and exploitation in contemporary capitalism. In a time when ‘life’ is the political category par excellence, and capital organizes itself around simultaneously managing the ‘health of the population’ while strategically situating black and brown bodies in a constant near-relation with death, generating life from lifelessness has never been so urgent (Agamben 1998; Foucault 1978; Klineberg, 2011). From “Message to the Majors” and “The Theory,” UR critically highlights the connection between this politicization of life, racialized dispossession, and police violence in order to understand the contemporary terrain of struggle against empire. UR radically critiques the organization of social relations under capital as a form of racialized violence. “The Theory” highlights the ways in which contemporary capitalism has colonized the realm of the infinitesimal: the tiny ways we perceive, the style of our walk, the timbre of our voice. This situation is described as a state of ‘lifelessness’: our tiny gestures of social belonging on Facebook, transformed into a site of profit-production through statistical aggregates and consumer profiles. The mundane occurrence of stop-andfrisk policing that disproportionately targets black and brown bodies, a molecular psycho-political act of state terrorism. At every level, in every moment, neoliberal capitalism declares
that the needs of the few outweighs the needs of the masses; UR’s appropriation of the classically Marxist assertion that the opposite is the case declares this to be intolerable and unacceptable. They do not, however, stop at this critique. Indeed, they affirm a radical vision of the possibility of other forms of organizing life. They talk of a machine called the ‘Genesis Device’ that has the capacity to ‘re-organize’ life at the ‘subatomic’ level by re-shaping the ‘molecular structure.’ The ‘molecular structure’ that needs to be re-organized is at once a problem of matter and perception. First, matter. There is the classically Marxist claim of the need to re-organize the social relations undergirding the material conditions of production. Only a total re-organization of these relations, i.e. transferring ownership of the means of production from capitalists to the workers, i.e. challenging black exploitation, can instantiate a system where the needs of the many truly outweigh the needs of the few. Then, there is the re-organization of the material production of sound: from the ‘acoustic’ to the implosion of the acoustic/synthetic distinction with electronic instruments and methods of modulating recorded audio (‘sound effects’). There is then the molecular element of sampling, where UR takes a small chunk of audio from Star Trek, effectuates its transformation with electronic effects and plugs it into a sequencer to repeat the phrase. And finally, there is the emphasis on non-repetitive modulation of synth and drum textures, where the sounds are changed in slight ways each time repetitive phrases on which the track is built repeat. Second, perception. If the molecular is thought as the realm of ‘microperceptions,’ then these infinitesimal changes in the texture of the voice, the synth and the drums work at the level
of molecular perception. Even as the macro elements of the track (the rhythmic pattern of the drums, the phrase lengths of the synths and voice) remain constant, they modulate slightly in order to induce a feeling of movement within the listener. This attention to the molecular realm of perception is, in many ways, the focus of the track’s development. The track, then, requires a new kind of listening, in order to hear what is singular about it. Aleatory listening, attentive to textural development, tactility and the embodied nature of listening, is needed to hear the molecular compositional developments. Thus, the track necessitates a mode of listening and analysis that can map out the realms of molecular power that dominate social life. In this way, UR simultaneously highlights the ground of social domination and possible avenues of subversion in the sonic and social realms. The ‘genesis device’ in this case is a veiled allusion to the UR’s compositional machine: it connects ‘music’ with what lies ‘outside’ of it (social relations, production, distribution, amplification systems, commodification, racist police brutality); it engenders the creation of alternative forms of sociality; it critiques and denounces the world as is; it imagines an Otherwise in sound and life. Thus, they situate this molecular realm as a site of struggle and invention. The ‘and’ here is particularly important because it insists on the real possibility of a revolutionary re-organization of social and sonic life. Against the nihilist cynicism of this moment where nothing seems possible, UR asserts the possibility of ‘the impossible’ and seeks to create, not just critique, revolutionary ruptures on the molecular and
macro levels. This inventive creation is not biblical; it does not spring forth from the void fully formed, replete with patriarchy and heteronormativity. It is cyborgian, without Father or Mother, Phallus or phallus. It is done, by dint of sobriety and deranged intoxication, machinically. Strategically connect the molecular realm of synthesized texture with the revolutionary macro antagonisms of class, race, gender, sexuality and ability. Decompose the circulation of the sounds of spectacular society by re-appropriating its means for deviant, unknown ends. Organize sound, organize collectivities, recompose the acoustic-collective commons. The ‘genesis device’ re-organizes matter ‘instantaneously.’ Thus, its effects cannot be pre-determined in advance. UR does not call on a specific, already-existing group that can revolutionize social relations and overthrow capitalism; it does not hold itself up as a paradigm of a revolutionary organization. It calls instead on a ‘people to come,’ (Guattari and Deleuze, 1987) a revolutionary collectivity in the making that does not subscribe to the logic of identity, belonging and representation. The collectivity UR calls upon does net yet exist; it must be built. The imperative is clear: build a posthuman compositional machine from the ruins. They liquidate stereotyped images of ‘blackness’ that constitute it around a logic of static identity, and instead align black aesthetics with the terrifying power of inhuman futurity. Futures beyond the human, beyond statistical identity, beyond anti-black racism. They developed a machinic protocol for re-engineering subjectivity, hacking common sense, re-configuring sensory formations; to engender, in short, a re-composition of the social.
‘Microblocks, vol. 1,’ asks you to take these ordinary sounds and turn them into something else. the point isn’t to represent the world through sound; the point is to change it. using field recordings of everyday soundscapes in composition isn’t simply about representing the processes of exploitation that constitute the soundscape, nor to create novel aesthetic experiences, but rather to transform and transfigure the mundane into a space of radical political and aesthetic potential. Re-imagine, at the level of the social and the sonic, what public, urban soundscapes can be. thinking of sound as representational isn’t wrong, it just has a limited sphere of application. it cannot think recording because it freezes recording into one moment (its first form) of its process, binds it, makes it permanent. Modulation and transfiguration, on the other hand, are operations of permanent oppositional inventiveness. They insist on the mutability of the sonic and the social, on the immanent potential for something else. We have our own methods, our own means, some of which we’ve shared here, partial and ignorant as they may be. As an artistic project, it is necessarily incomplete. It requires circulation, critical engagement, imaginative re-configurings. We hope to provide worthwhile materials to cultures of resistance and experimentation, to connect with folks whose skills, interests, methods and conclusions differ from our own. Only a machine capable of plugging-in and modulating in different contexts has any chance for basically anything. The question these notes began with remains, in principle, to be answered. our question is this: how to construct a compositional machine with revolutionary capacities?
Works Cited Adorno, Theodor W. Essays on Music. Ed. Richard D. Leppert. Trans. Susan H. Gillespie. Berkeley, CA: U of California, 2002. Print. Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1998. Print. Barad, Karen Michelle. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2007. Print. Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968. N. pag. Print. Berardi, Franco. After the Future. Oakland: AK, 2011. Print. Berardi, Franco. The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance. New York: Semiotext(e), 2012. Print. Semiotext(e)/Intervention Ser. Berger, Edmund. “(Re)Build: A Call for Contributors and Participants.” Deterritorial Investigations Unit. N.p., 21 Mar. 2015. Web. Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke UP, 2011. Print. Brecht, Bertolt. “The Popular and the Realistic.” Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic. Trans. John Willett. New York: Hill and Wang, 1964. N. pag. Print. Brecht, Bertolt. “Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting.” Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic. Trans. John Willett. New York: Hill and Wang, 1964. N. pag. Print. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. Print. Carmichael, Stokely. “Black Power.” Black Power. UC Berkeley, Berkeley, CA. 1966. Youtube. Web. 12 Apr. 2015. Cowell, Henry. The Banshee and The Aeolian Harp. 1930. Score. Los Angeles. Crawley, Ashon. “That There Might Be Queer Sound.” Pcah.us. The Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, 29 Oct. 2014. Web. Deleuze, Gilles. Nietzsche and Philosophy. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson. New York: Columbia UP, 1983. Print. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota, 1987. Print.
DJ Sprinkles. Midtown 120 Blues. 2007. Comatonse Recordings. Web. Dumit, Joseph. Drugs for Life: How Pharmaceutical Companies Define Our Health. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2012. Print. Eshun, Kodwo. More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction. London: Quartet, 1998. Print. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1. New York: Pantheon, 1978. Print. Haraway, Donna Jeanne. Modest₋Witness@Second₋Millennium. FemaleMan₋Meets₋Onco Mouse: Feminism and Technoscience. New York: Routledge, 1997. Print. Haraway, Donna Jeanne. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991. Print. Henry Cowell. The Aeolian Harp. 1963. Youtube.com. Web. 1 Feb. 2015. Henry Cowell. The Banshee. 1925. MP3. Klineberg, Eric. “Bodies That Don’t Matter: Death and Dereliction in Chicago.” Body and ociety 3rd ser. 7.2 (n.d.): 121-36. Web. Landy, Leigh. Understanding the Art of Sound Organization. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2007. Print. Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2002. Print. Modulations. Dir. Iara Lee. Caipirinha Productions, 1998. Moten, Fred. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota, 2003. Print. Muñoz, José Esteban. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota, 1999. Print. Oliveros, Pauline. Bye Bye Butterfly. 1965. MP3. Oliveros, Pauline. “Quantum Listening: From Practice to Theory to Practice Practice.” Plenum Address for Humanities in the New Millennium. Chinese University, Hong Kong. 2000. Sound Art Archive. Web. 1 Apr. 2015. Preciado, Beatriz. Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era. N.p.: Feminist, 2011. Print. Rhine, Dont. “The Background Is a Front.” Ultra-red. Ultra-red, 2000. Web. <http://www.ultrared.org/lm_background.html>. Robjohns, Hugh. “A Brief History of Microphones.” Microphone Data Ltd. N.p., 2010. Web. Rodgers, Tara. Pink Noises: Women on Electronic Music and Sound. Durham: Duke UP, 2010. Print. Rorty, Richard. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: Princeton
UP, 1979. Print. Rose, Tricia. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. Hanover, NH: U of New England, 1994. Print. S. 101- 810, 94th Cong. (1976) (enacted). Print. Schaeffer, Pierre. In Search of a Concrete Music. Trans. Christine North and John Dack. Berkeley, CA: U of California, 2012. Print. Schafer, R. Murray. The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. Rochester, VT: Destiny, 1993. Print. Spade, Dean. Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law. Brooklyn, NY: South End, 2011. Print. Star, Susan Leigh. “Power, Technology and the Phenomenology of Conventions: On Being Allergic to Onions.” The Sociological Review 38.1 (1990): 26-56. Web. Thaemlitz, Terre. “We Are Not Welcome Here.” Charming for the Revolution: A Congress for Gender Talents and Wildness. The Tate Modern, London. 1 Feb. 2013. Comatonse Recordings. Web. 1 June 2015. Thompson, Marie. “Gossips, Sirens, Hi-fi Wives: Feminizing the Threat of Noise.” Resonances: Noise and Contemporary Music. Ed. Michael Goddard, Benjamin Halligan, and Nicola Spelman. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. N. pag. Print. Toop, David. The Rap Attack: African Jive to New York Hip Hop. Boston: South End, 1984. Print. Ultra-ed. 10 Preliminary Theses on Militant Sound Investigation. New York City: Printed Matter, 2008. Print. Ultra-red. Five Protocols for Organized Listening, with Variations. N.p.: Ultra-red, 2013. Print. Underground Resistance. Message to the Majors. 1998. MP3. Underground Resistance. The Theory. 1992. MP3. United States. United States Copyright Office. Copyright Registration of Musical Compositions and Sound Recordings. 1st ed. Vol. 56. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Copyright Office, 2012. Print. Vorhaus, David, and Brian Hodgson. By Delia Derbyshire. Love Without Sound. White Noise. 1968. MP3. Westerkamp, Hildegard. “Linking Soundscape Composition and Acoustic Ecology.” Organized Sound 7.1 (2002): n. pag. Print. White, Paul. “Using Microphone Polar Patterns Effectively.” Sound on Sound. N.p., 2007. Web.
track listing 1. Bus Block #2 00:07 2. Typing Madly 00:07 3. Bus Blocks 00:02 4. Metal Hand Fence 00:05 5. Fucking up #3 00:01 6. Fucking up #2 00:01 7. Sign Games (That We Play) 00:01 8. Sub Hand Running 00:01 9. Bastion/Ballast/Pure Facade/Skein 00:02 10. Apparition 00:03 11. Sign Bending 00:02 12. Drawn Out Machine Sigh 00:01 13. Bieber Clip 00:01 14. Haywire Cleaning Apparatus #2 00:07 15. Haywire Cleaning Machine #1 00:05 16. Distorted Dap 00:01 17. Flick #2 00:01 18. Flick 00:01 19. Blammmmmmm! 00:02 20. Sawwwwwing/Sobbing 00:06 21. Pebble Step n Poke/Broke Bees 00:02 22. Pebbling 00:04 23. Tiny Ass Pebbles 00:02 24. Woolen Conked 00:04 25. 'Nature' 00:04 26. Outdated Pinging Singe Notification 00:01 27. Low Tech Humanoid Chair Laborer 00:04 28. Arcade Mash Mesh 00:02 29. Metallic Discomfort 00:01 30. Changing Currency Standards 00:01 31. Air Hockey Swamp 00:02 32. Delicate Business Matters 00:01
33. Bureaucratic Surprises 00:01 34. Bitter Mittens 00:02 35. Hanging Air 00:02 36. Hahn Kick #2 00:01 37.Hahn Kick #1 00:01 38. Sandwich Clones 00:02 39. Improv Sneaker Solo 00:07 40. Twitching Lockplay 00:01 41. Crow Cah Clank Clap 00:01 42. Clipped 00:01 43. Plastic Tank Top of the Pops 00:01 44. Sickly Turnts 00:01 45. Velcro Sliced Chunks 00:02 46. Too Many Closed Thistles 00:01 47. Financial Mistakes 00:02 48. Mechanical Openings/Heartfelt Wanderings 00:04 49. Reverberation Lowkey Clampdown on the Funds 00:02 50. Clang Without Pity 00:02 51. Cheedy Bow! 00:04 52. Business Door 00:04 53. Water Fountain #4 00:02 54. Water Fountain #3 00:01 55. Water Fountain #2 00:02 56. Water Fountain Steps 00:02 57. Church Bells in the Meadow in a Time When the Church had Dissipated 00:01 58. Foxtails' Melancholic Close 00:02 59. High and Ungrounded #2 00:01 60. High and Ungrounded 00:01 61. Higher and Higher Metals 00:02 62. Percussed and Metallicized 00:02 63. Pitched n Down n Out 00:01 64. Rolling Wood 00:02 65. Sad Bells in the Dust 00:02 66. What/ 00:01
67. Woodsistance #1 00:01 68. Woodsistance #2 00:01 69. Woodsistance #3 00:01 70. Beer Bottle Lights 00:05 71. Crate Digging 00:02 72. Fire Tanks 00:01 73. Gaining 00:01 74 Kitchen Lamping 00:02 75. Metal Stick Found in the New Growth Redwoods 00:01 76. Metsal Rubbing 00:01 77. Omnivorous Kitchen Lamp 00:02 78. Plastic Bounce #4 00:01 79. Schwlack Pop! 00:01 80. Tunnel's Edge 00:02 81. Walk Walk Walk 00:02 82. Plastic Bounce #2 00:01 83. Plastic Bounce #3 00:01 84. Plastic Bounce 00:01 85. Pulling Levers 00:01 86. Tunnel Walking 00:02 87. Waste Rumble 00:04 88. Blunt Sign 00:02 89. Canned Crash 00:02 90. Crate Scrape 00:01 91. Crate Steppin' 00:01 92. Electric Coin 00:02 93. Jacket Jar #1 00:02 94. Jacket Teens 00:02 95. Light Pole Rattle 00:02 96. Shit Bowl #1 00:02 97. Shit Bowl #2 00:01 98. Triangle Wave Sign 00:01 99. Bottle Cap Glitch #4 00:01 100. Bottle Cap Rocket 00:01 101. Clapping Wooden Hands by the Blooming Ice Plant 00:01
102. Tractor Beam #1 00:01 103. Tractor Ping #1 00:01 104. Tractor Ping #2 00:01 105. Tractor Ping #3 00:01 106. Water Bottle Clang 00:02 107. Bottle Cap Glitch #1 00:01 108. Bottle Cap Glitch #2 00:01 109. Bottle Cap Glitch #3 00:01 110. Coney Basshead 00:02 111. The Ballard Bounce #1 00:01 112. The Ballard Bounce #2 00:01 113. Canteen Breath 00:01 114. Canteen Pluck #1 00:01 115. Dirty Old Wooden Table Creaking Hulking Break 00:02 116. Double Bubble Pop 00:02 117. Fever Canteen 00:01 118. Popping Bubbly #1 00:02 119. Standing Visitor Plang 00:01 120. The Ballard Ball 00:04 121. Visitor Stand Pling! 00:01 122. Chain Hat 00:01 123. Chain Snare #1 00:01 124. Chain Snare Wiggle 00:02 125. Chain Sound #1 00:01 126. Chain Sound #2 00:01 127. Cone Bass Distorted 00:01 128. Cup on Rail 00:01 129. Cup Rail #2 00:01 130. Cup Rail #3 00:01 131. Dropping Crate 00:01 132. Trash Can Echo 00:02 133. Trash Can Roll 00:02 134. Cone Bass Clean 00:01 135. Waiting Pole 00:02
lil bio:
The Field Recording Working Group began in spring 2013 on a whim. We met in santa cruz, ca and now live in the East Bay. We’re interested in the production of ordinary soundsapes, but we also do work around soundscapes of struggle and the new forms of collectivity these spaces can engender. We’ve done projects around the privatization of the UC, this hot mess right here, and struggles against racist police brutality. ‘Microblocks, vol. 1’ is the first volume in a series of field-recording based sample-packs and can be downloaded on our Bandcamp page. kisses.