[01] 1+9=10 | 0+9=9 || 10+9=19

Every utterance we make is an impeded stutter, a malfunction, a glitch. Every time we shriek or howl, every time we express reason, interject or propose, every time we vocalize an order, an instruction, or snap back a refusal or a counter argument we are doing so via a system born of violence. We are the croaking possessed; emitting tics, clicks, glitches, whirrs and morbidly rattling breaths of affect. We were mutilated till we spoke:

“the muttering sickness leaped into our throats, coughing and spitting in the silver morning. (…) dumb animal eyes on ‘me’ brought the sickness from white time caves frozen in my throat to hatch in the warm streamlands spitting. (…) Sick apes spitting blood bubbling throats torn with the talk sickness. Human faces tentative flicking in an out of focus. We waded into the warm mud-water, hair and ape flesh off in screaming strips. Stood naked human bodies covered with phosphorescent green jelly. Soft tentative flesh cut with ape wounds. Fingers and tongues rubbing off the jelly-cover. Body melting pleasure-sounds in the warm mud. Till the sun went and a blue wind of silence touched human faces and hair. When we came out we had names”

But even despite this visceral tragedy of linguistic progress, hidden forces still haunt the territories between our languishing origin and mechanized destination; deformed animalistic spectres often stalk the arena of tortured cries, but they haunt talk too. For despite our physical perversions – our own twisted contortions into the spluttering jackhammer of logos and language - we cannot shake off the past, we cannot shed our flesh, our knuckles are still scarred from our previous life – this life before the head -smash.

We bent our spines, cracked our thorax, dropped our larynx and then smothered our howls and gagged our screams. But we still cannot transform all the phlegm, bile, blood, saliva and vapor into zeros and ones, order and disorder, positive and negatives, clicks and cuts. In our coded parlance, of chittering teeth, lisping protocols and phoneme processes we may still wretch and howl through our phylogenetically makeshift apparatus – our fathers injuries - paleotrauma; after formatting there is a strange ancestral remnant.

We may find a rogue sonic, an outcast grain, there is something outside the code – a cthulhu com set glimpsed in rogue noise. Echoing in the order we find an ethereal qubit.

The more we bind ourselves to the rotting cadaver of logos, the more we breath in digits, and voice ourselves through our fingers, the more we blacken ourselves and become one, a la nupta cadavera the more we may find potentialities and possibilities of ourselves and past selves.

There are histories of disfigurement behind our current jabbering, language was a vociferous virus, voice a morbid curse. To find the vital being before the punishment of talking took its toll -before the differing rope burns of logos lacerated our throats- we must first talk more, faster, in numbers, jibber in code till we talk disjointedly and erratically (erotic era esoterix via error error error). We can numb(er) our language pains, emancipate ourselves from this brutal regime, escape one code and find salvation in another. Spiraling Tic-Talking between ancient and infinite codes. Voicing syzygy…… till 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377, 610, 987, 1597, 2584, 4181, 6765, 10946, 17711, 28657, 46368, 75025, 121393, 196418, 317811, 514229, 832040

As Professor Barker explains

“Due to erect posture the head has been twisted around, shattering the vertebra-perceptual linearity and setting the phylogenetic preconditions for the face. This right-angled pneumatic-oral arrangement produces the vocal-apparatus as a crash site, in which the thoracic impulses collide with the roof of the mouth. The pipedal head becomes a virtual speech impediment, a sub-cranial pneumatic pile-up, discharged as linguo-gestural development and cephalization take-off. Burroughs suggests the protohuman ape was dragged through its body to expire on its tongue. It’s a twin-axial system, howls and clicks, reciprocally articulated as a vowel-consonant phonetic palette, rigidly intersegmented to repress staccato-hiss continuous variation and its attendant becomings animal. That’s why stammerings, stutterings, vocal tics, extralingual phonetics, and electrodigital voice synthesis are so laden with biopolitical intensity – they threaten to bypass the anthropostructural head-smash that establishes our identity with logos, escaping in the direction of numbers”

Barker’s understanding of the potential to numerically re-discover our pre-logos essence within the possibilities in the gaps, cracks, ruptures and hemorrhages of formatting is, I would say, a form of accelerationist positivism. But the formulation feels similar to Barthesian grain – that behind, in and inbetween the current language there is something older, truer…..and it is in these gaps – in exploring these gaps that potential is generated. Automalumizing, auto-asphysiating – electro-trauma vo-coding is the path.

If, in voice, there is a history of repression, mutilation- then to contemplate any emancipatory automalum we must first examine the socio-politcal scars of our voco-political encoding. We must look back, relish the ticks, map out the pheno-song from the geno-song, first, before escaping in the direction of numbers.

“Suborganizational pattern is where things really happen. When you strip-out all the sedimented redundancy from the side of the investigation itself - the assumption of intentionality, subjectivity, interpretability, structure, etc - what remains are assemblies of functionally interconnected microstimulus, or tic-systems: coincidental information deposits, seismocryptions, suborganic quasireplicators (Echo-DNA, ionizing nanopopulations), plus the macromachineries of their suppression, or depotentiation.”

These efforts are already well underway….In algorhythms, global cybernetix networx and rhythmic shifts independent from language or geologies. In music…

There is a process of formula flaying. A rhythmic carnage…. Synthesizing and streaming screaming strips of old code – V.2. Vocal vivisection to suture cthulhu to the future…..

The violence of verbal automalumizing coding itself is overtaken, by a new code, a machinic, cyborg virus – a portal to plotting both spirals. The cthulhu coms kernel or post cyborgization digital epiphany. A negotiation across geotrauma, the talk sickness of walking apes, from before to after.

Through syncope, cutting and scratching the injury of voice is broken – harmed - once more and a new code is plotted, extrapolated. An unseen rhythm. The ghostly, subconscious, subliminal voice that sings and raps between the violence logic of chops, cuts and beats is a new voice. A voice born of the relations between absence and presence – between two different spirals - syzygetic voice. This new voice, fragmented and fleeting is as much a set of chronosensitive relations as it is ‘old language’ - these relations have enormously complex implications and need to be excavated further. It is between the two spirals in the Barker spiral system that a profound syzygy exists, heard on record as strange looped coincidences and odd doublings….

-----

Odd links -

Sociophonetic sound file archive (Eric R. Thomas)

Celestial Music at SETI Institute

Hyperstition forum comments on Spirals and Decadence

Northanger  - Decadence, Barker Spirals- daemonic diplozygotic necromancies etc etc

some posts about rap

I've been blogging about rap. Most of it relates to or heralds from stuff in our Vocalities discussions. My research (if you can call it that) has kinda spiralled (0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377, 610, 987, 1597, 2584, 4181) a little since then but I think some posts will resonate strongly with particular essays from course and also previous posts here.

There are 6 parts, the footnotes and bibliography are all in part 6. If anyone has any comments I'd like to hear them.

Links:

Trill Shit: Cacophonies Part 1
Trill Shit: Cacophonies Part 2
Trill Shit: Cacophonies Part 3
Trill Shit: Cacophonies Part 4
Trill Shit: Cacophonies Part 5
Trill Shit: Cacophonies Part 6

In retrospect I think my treatment is a little scatty and un-thorough, but some of the connections are cool and there are lots of rap videos.

♰𐌞▲

Here's an ODB a capella

The Angry-dad-ification of Marshall Mathers

Having been twelve and amidst a large cohort of urban white kids, I remember vividly Eminem's dramatic entrance onto the national scene in 1999. For the first time, it seemed, the familial, oedipal, self-harming psychoses of a white youth were placed alongside the gangstafied funk and soul revivals of a black producer-icon, Dr. Dre. It was as if Kurt Cobain had been reborn, in a black neighborhood, with a sense of humor. A perverse kind of musical cotton candy, it became the quintessential youth "headmusic," to borrow Kodwo Eshun's phrase. For the entirety of my 13-year-old life I could remember men in the neighborhood blasting hip hop from huge, lumbering American cars as they passed my house. Eminem seemed to be the first massive rap artist who was immune to this type of broadcasting. Yet every private-school boy, mostly white and asian, had a copy, bootleg or genuine, of the Slim Shady LP and its darker followup, the Marshall Mathers LP.

Hey, kids! Do you like violence?

Eminem's appeal seemed solely male, a sort of musical accompaniment to the first-person-shooter game, each track repeating, in explicit and gory detail, a series of assaults and overdoses (See, for instance, "Brain Damage"). It was their outlandishness, their absurdity, that made them OK to us, and this appetite for the fantastic may have been Eminem's way of refusing the compulsion to prove his "street cred"--the stories, like those of Slick Rick, were often so entertaining that nobody cared to ask if they were true or not. At the same time, though, there were stories about his relationship with Kim that made people hope they weren't true. One of the moments in Eminem that I loved the most was his hook on the track "Role Model":

I came to the club drunk with a fake ID
Don't you wanna grow up to be just like me!
I've been with 10 women who got HIV
Now don't you wanna grow up to be just like me!
I got genital warts and it burns when I pee
Don't you wanna grow up to be just like me!
I tie a rope around my penis and jump from a tree
You probably wanna grow up to be just like me!!!

His joy at the prospect of his own imaginary castration set him far apart from other hip hop artists, even Dre himself, for whom the mention of one's own penis could only be a metaphoric reference to size and power. Eminem's antics were all in the service of the overarching philosophical journey towards "just not giving a fuck".




I would not, then, have guessed that Eminem's career would proceed the way it has, although, looking back, I really can't imagine how else it could have gone. Nowadays, his tracks are inevitably put together by superstar producers and played almost as a kind of "urban easy listening," that is to say, everywhere that plays hip hop music--malls, convenience stores, salons. His new ("post-addiction-metamorphosis") tracks lack the utter Dionysian destructiveness of his early ones, but are no less angry or violent. Nowadays, he yells like a middle-aged alcoholic, his voice devoid of the mischief and humor of the bleached-blonde days. His tracks have always, since "My Name Is," been mainstream, but now they occupy a different mainstream, one which includes middle-aged people, black people, and women. That's not to say that black people never listened to Eminem at the beginning, but I remember the moment when D12 came out as a turning point, at which a black kid I knew told me he thought the early stuff wasn't very good, but this new stuff was better. At the beginning he really was Elvis to many people, the white guy stealing the art form and making a lot of money off of it. Now he's just another abusive dad, his anger completely uncontroversial, the pitched rage of his voice used to "balance out" the soulful harmonies of the female singer he accompanies. I don't mean to suggest that his anger was more controversial when he directed his vitriol toward Christina Aguilera, Fred Durst, Insane Clown Posse, and Mariah Carey. But in those days it fooled people for whom the entire world consisted of MTV into thinking that he really was rocking the boat. Nowadays he's another jealous, over-the-hill lover, yelling at Rihanna: "I'ma tie you to the bed and set this house on fire!!"

Respiration

What's the aesthetic consequence of iPhone culture? A culture of text messages, tweets, one night stands, one year marriages, CEO turnovers, volatile stocks... You might want to say these phenomena lead necessarily to anarchy, total disorder, total breakdown. And speed does kill. But there are, also, ways of adapting to brevity. The culture of the mixtape, of rapping over someone else's beat, often leads to songs which are unusually short, and we will begin to see an increase of songs produced to be the same length, which somehow fit within a smaller frame.

If the hip hop song can support itself without needing a hook, the dance performance can shorten itself as well. From London one might think that things in the arts are better in the states, considering the enormous government cuts and the privileging of 'hard' (erect?) subjects like engineering. But non-Americans may not realize that the American arts have never, really, had the public-funding advantage that they've had in Europe for several decades. There are very, very few public grants available, so artists like the Turf Feinz are compelled to shorten their performances and distribute them over a broader cultural terrain.



The brevity of "Respiration" may have to do with the shooting location. The atmosphere, the car lights and the metal bars, the street lights and the dilapidated buildings add a sense of heaviness. It is moving you toward the pressure of East Oakland, an area which, although it is right next to the bay, feels landlocked, because it has been so reduced by economic drought. Driving or taking the bus through it, one realizes how enormously sprawling it is, how it was designed as a place of retreat for white families, a suburb. Now it has entered the suburban winter, the white people have fled decades ago, to suburbs further removed, and then, recently, returned, to other neighborhoods.

"Respiration" stresses that even in less than two minutes, a meditative moment is not only possible but crucial. To breathe again, to prevent an asthma attack, you need to take a minute or two, and even that small increment is enough to release some of the pressure. After a puff of smoke, Dreal touches his heart. At 22 seconds, the production itself breathes as he drags his foot forward after a backflip. This foot drag is synchronized exactly with a syncope in the song, to borrow a phrase from Catherine Clement: the music itself is cut, its consciousness goes under, its heart stops, and in the background you hear the faintest synth whose ominous minor key evokes Mel-Man's production on The Chronic 2001. Dreal displays the incredible ability of the human body to engage with technology, to deliver itself into a machinic operation. At 40 seconds, the film looks modified: he has appropriated a filmic device. His feet levitate as he shifts weight from one to the other.