Fever Ray - "The Wolf"

New single, which will serve as the theme song for my Vocalities-essay entitled Fever Ray - Thinking in Sound.

Fever Ray: Towards a Diagrammatic Conception of the Voice

A few notes, in relation to my writings on the course, as well as an earlier post on my personal blog. Hopefully, I will be able to organize this into more coherent pieces soon.

• Music is a molecular deterritorialization and machining of the voice, which pushes it away from language/signifying chains, and molar segments of man/woman.

• There is a question of a fully-real becoming other, which has nothing to do with imitation or symbolic representation.

• Taking DeLanda's reading of D&G's concept of the body without organs as a virtual body plan, out of which fully formed species and organisms differentiate, we have the basics for a diagrammatic conception of the voice (in the form of a neo-materialist idea of the genesis of the voice, opposed to the psychoanalytic idea of the maternal voice pre-birth).

• The problem is, then, how to differentiate the voice; to unfold its immanent virtualities, as opposed to (as Kaja Silverman does) localize points where it produces sexual difference.

• This, in turn, means conceiving of new media technologies not as "acoustic mirrors" (Silverman), or as the "analysts room" (Penman), but rather as a "possibility-space" (DeLanda), which is diagrammatic rather than fantasmatic, and which is characterized not so much by symbolic representation as by (what I'd like to call) electronic differentiation.

• In other words, it is all about rendering imperceptible forces perceptible (D&G).

• Fever Ray, in her music, uses sonic media in this way, in order to differentiate her voice electronically.

• It is no longer the voice of Karin-Dreijer Andersson, but a voice of a pure otherness, beyond the realm of fantasmatics.

• We do not yet know what a voice can do (modification of the Spinozist-influenced premise that Steve Goodman takes as his starting point in Sonic Warfare).