Modulating between the abstract/(in)aesthetic through the rhythmic/4-to-the-floor and back again, Transmètic is a night of schizo-disciplinary interchange.
After creating a technologically augmented ASMR piece for the English Heretic event with Carey I've been thinking about the reasons why intimacy and strange feelings are conjured. For ordinary ASMR I expect this is mostly due to misguided and unacknowledged reactions to occularcentric, heteronormative and tertiary capitalism norms. For an example of the fodder for such bad conflations of innocent autonomous responses and an aesthetic and affect indebted to a conditioning from the worst tropes of hegemony see the below:
But is there a cyborg ASMR voice? In an apt conceptual reversal of feigning closeness the whisper voice synthersizer (available on all text to voice readers) is just what the typical ASMR whisper is. The synthetic whisper voice is essentially a de-toned and noised out voice - noise is added. This should create a distance - but in an odd way I feel that it creates a closeness. But making a synthetic voice hide behind a gauze of noise a longing intimacy is conjured on cyborgian terms. I feel this resonates with the deluded fans of actual ASMR whisperers - despite the whisperers delivery being shot through with occularcentric and tertiary service conflations - the fact that their whispering is delivered though a lonely youtube channel must be considered. Is the intimacy of ASMR due to the format of isolation that spawned its popularity? See a nice dramatisation of this in Kate Bush's video for Deeper understanding:
So here I approach the cyborg whisper of intimate distance - the synthetic whisper effect that is a voice hidden behind a gauze of noise. Two particular pop videos come to mind but I'm sure there are more - (I almost feel this cyborgian distance intimacy of the whisper noise effect is a trope.)
Is the distance, the silent, un-admitted distance, mute distance of the isolated position of the listener the object voice of the cyborg?
The voice that:
"embodies the very impossibility of attaining auto-affection, it introduces a scission, a rupture in the middle of the full presence and refers to a void" (Dolar)
"the true object voice is mute (...) and what effectively reverberates is the void: resonance always takes place in a vacuum - the tone as such is originally a lamentfor the lost object. The object is here as long as the sound remains unarticulated ; the moment it resounds , the moment it is "spilled out," the object is evacuated, and this voidance gives birth to the barred subject ($) lamenting the loss of the object" (Zizek)
I feel that both ASMR and the cyborg whisper trope in music afford an intimacy through technological distance, the lamentation for the distance between object and subject evokes the strange intimacy.
See two nice examples of the cyborg whisper below:
technologically manifested distance keeps the voice feeling close...
A nice remix - If I heard that bark in a club I would have a nervous breakdown - in body and mind.
...and one of my favourite old Warp Records tracks - Chris Clark, Gob Coitus (the LP version has more..... much much more metallic grained timestretch in it - but for some reason both the Richard Fenwick and Lynn Fox videos use edited versions with a more click-hoppy choppy ending rather than the dragged out ableton death-rattle on the original - which is amazing - can't find the LP version online though)
"The voice is the human instrument. Almost everyone has a voice, unique and custom built within them. A voice is personal, political and controllable. Some voices are heard more than others. In expanding the meaning of voice, listening to and deconstructing it, we learn about our body, our kind. We grow and gain awareness through this process.
Composing in a unique way with her voice makes AGF’s work a way to consider humanity. On Source Voice, all sounds are derived from artist’s voice and the room around her. The collaboration with Richard Chartier’s LINE label is based on mutual admiration and follows the aesthetics of minimalism. Source Voice is the second LINE SEGMENTS release.
Inspired by the ancient folk practice of yoik, AGF started to imitate and voice along with her surrounding wind and weather. Yoik is a mostly wordless form of singing/vocalization by the Sami tribe of northern Scandinavia and considered one of the longest living music traditions in Europe.
Through her careful study and work with pioneering composer Eliane Radigue for the past 10 years, AGF further experiments with highly contained and organized sound in the wide field of vocal expression. AGF has worked with Radigue while performing Elemental 3 as The Lappetites, and has now created OCCAM 7, a new composition by Radigue for solo voice.
While only the composition “Kaamos” is pure untreated voice, digital processing was used to bend our imagination of what our voice is and can become."
Inevitability a life long love of Singing in the Rain (1952) will probably mean I end up writing my flipping essay about it....apologies in advance.
Some random clips, notes and trivia....
Don and Lina are thrust from the safety of silence into the talkies. Their emergence from a mute state lends something uncomfortable to their spectacular status. It's not simply a case of turning the volume up on business as usual (although Lena comments positively "It sounds good and loud!") - somehow the revelation of their voices creates something of a 'generalized catastrophe in the sphere of gestures' as Agamben would say. ('Notes on Gesture' in Means without End: Notes on Politics). The voice PLUS the expressive body creates an unbearable over-spill that is not so noticeable when they are silent and the body has to compensate. The voice is “plus de corps: both the surplus of the body, a bodily excess, and the no-more body, the end of the corporeal" as Dolar puts it. (AVANM p71). It is more than - so contaminated with presence and meaning that the body and voice end up working against one another even when technically in sync as in the clip.
A slightly daft aside but came to mind in reference to Tristam's discussion of vowels and consonants in relation to the Barker text. Here Cosmo visualizes the difficulties of getting your face around languages patterns and vowels encased in the codified alliteration of consonants. (0.00 - 0.14 for example - thereafter for pure joy).
The entire film hinges on the possibility of voices being able to bounce around from body to body. It literally doesn't seem to matter - as long as they can deal with the problem of synchronicity.
Arguably, Kathy Selden's smooth purr of a voice fits better with the golden, movie star persona than Lina Lamont's own squeaky New York brogue. It's interesting that having experienced the unfortunate reverse disacousmatisation of her voice in the earlier scenes of the doomed 'Duelling Cavalier' - audiences are willing to accept that while her speaking voice may grate, she was in fact an accomplished songbird all along. Even when she makes her ill-advised speech (raw and unprepared with no dubbing possible) there is still the call for her to 'sing!' telling us more about the transformative possibility of the singing voice that Barthes discusses and that crops up in Kafka's reference to piping - something transporting, soothing and unbound to logos?? A body can be split not only by the voice therefore but also by the mode of the voice..
The crux of the film basically is the general opinion that Lina's voice does not fit in her body and that someone should really do something about it (leaving aside for now the additional fact that Lina's voice sounds totally different inside her own head - an extreme example of which disconnect can be found in this Radiolab podcast) . The real killer for Singing in the Rain is the fact that even this allegoriesd rearrangement and reassigning of voices to bodies is completely constitutive in the making of the film.
Jean Hagen (the actress portraying Lina) actually had a beautiful voice which was in fact used as the supposed dubbed speaking voice that Kathy gives to Lina. Kathy's own singing voice, the prized discovery that saves the day was actually dubbed for actress Debbie Reynolds by an un-credited Betty Noyes (Noise?!?) The clip "Would You" above actually restores Reynolds' own version of the song. Not quite as good at fit as the disembodied Noyes but still not far off the mark..
So, bodies and voices flying around unconnected all over the place. Interesting that they are mainly female voices - is the film telling us that these are are easier to relocate?
OK less voco-centrism, upon the music tip now. I have noticed a lot of intriguing histories around music in the Dolar text and also through the greek myths, probably sharing a similar genesis to the history of 'dealing' with the exo-irreducible remnant part Voice (as discussed in the Dolar essay). I keep stumbling across examples of people struggling to except, or come to terms with, or just fearing the un-coded remnant side of musical communication, by musical communication I think it's fair to say that musics (I say musics, because I am not just referring to pop songs, or rock, or classical but everything that either has a system notation or can be employed as a form of musical communication - be it western or otherwise) are coded, so entrenched in this code, that it can be used in the same manner as a matrix of signifiers to 'talk', this example of Deliverance is a great:
This is pure musically coded communication, both instruments are fretted I think, there is a call and response part too - quite obvious.
However when this code is broken, or an un-coded sound dominates (shofar springs to mind here, alongside fender squalls, and football chants) we may feel uneasy, over excited, angry or worse - politically motivated. The history of classical music riots is worth recalling here, as is The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 to which Autechre infamously responded... Music is littered with spontaneous reactions to the uncoded, the ghostly remainder.
So whilst Dolar traces our 'problem' of dealing with the Exo-remnant in Voice, the endless shackling of the voice to logos, the feminization, the sexualization of this sonic 'other' (resembling mirroring our literal repression of women over histories), or on the other hand the thunderingly masculine sounds of the shofar or gods voice etc.... I wonder if there are similar enquiries or studies into the history of music, stepping outside of logos, of the irreducible a-logos facet of song?
There must be. See Sirens, Mermaids, Pan, Orpheus, Plato's dislike of the flute (the un-coded instrument, the instrument that is most open to sound, the flute Plato refers to would be a small free sliding 'scale' wind instrument), The Puritans organ burning. Infact, to kick up a rather corny pop culture relic - The Beatles. After Lennon made his infamous 'bigger than Christ' comment a good old fashioned furore of burning The Beatles record broke out across some southern American states.
OK, so whilst the The Beatles records themselves are not stritchly a-logos, they are not totally uncoded, I feel it's fair to say the 'X-factor', the special appeal (sonically) may have been the anomalous sonic remnant outside of musical codification - perhaps their live shows had that extra zing that erects goosebumps, the je ne sais quoi, that special something - but lots of fantastic musicians have this, this something is not exactly ubiquitous but there are certainly a lot of sublime and inspiring musicians and performers for every generation.
I'll speculate that the catalyst for such a wax inferno was Lennon's comment. Or rather, the sonic-logos implications behind the comment. To strictly juxtapose The Beatles with Christ created an unnerving dichotomy. The uncoded sonic of The Beatles appeal, something they had and could culturally surf, against or opposed to the word, logos, the book, the Bible. One was living, moving, globe trotting and inspiring and communicated on levels that were, arguably, unbeknown previously, the pandemonium of live music, the fandom of the record etc. The charming, charismatic liverpudlians had something the good book didn't, they were alive and touching people through music, emotionally in a way that a bunch of dead symbols never would, and never will do.
This brief dominance of musicality (along with it's a-logos appendage) over logos/the good word coupled with Lennons ill founded comments about being bigger than jesus maybe made the more logosphilial people in southern american states uneasy, some to such a degree they felt compelled to burn their own Beatles records.
I accept that a large proportion of the outrage was due to Lennon criticising Christianity. However I do wonder, even though we'll never be able to gather an empirical basis for this sequence of events and myriad subjective agendas, metaphysical, political, peer led or other (quite fittingly considering the phenomena in question), I wonder if there is not a reasonable basis for the assumption that the mixture of theological criticism, music, hysteria and uncoded a-logosonic aspects of The Beatles songs was a large part of the reason why such events occurred.
"A change to a new type of music is something to beware of as a hazard to all our fotunes. The modes of music are never disturbed without unsettling the most fundamental political and social conventions. It is here, then, I said, that our guardians must build their guardhouse and post of watch. It is certain, he said, that this is the kind of lawlessness that easily insinuates itself unobserved.
Yes, said I, because it is supposed to be only a form of play and to work no harm.
Nor does it work any, he said, except that by gradual infiltration it softly overflows upon the characters and pursuits of men and from these issues forth grown greater to attach their business dealings, and from these relations it proceeds against the laws and the constitution with wanton license, Socrates, till it finally overthrows all things public and private."(Plato, Republic IV)
and...
"Bacchic frenzy and all similar emotions are most suitably expressed by the flute" (Aristotle, Politics VIII)
Is there anything for the uptight logos lover to fear today? As soon as something is deemed 'new', it is absorbed into capitalism and commodified. There are economic problems now, and subsequently political problems and music feels boring and coded like never before. Is it because I am no longer a wide eyed teen reliant solely on HMV for music? Or is it because torrent sites have spoilt me and ipods jaded me? Is there anything exciting to come? Musophobia as relic - I fear.
EDIT - I'm tuggin at something here, not sure what, if it reads like i'm wringing my hands and mincing my feet to and fro it maybe because it's late and the post has drifted onto more questions than answers. I'd really like someone to recommend me some nice music analysis text around the subject I'm scraping (clumsily) at... Maybe it's just because i'm bitter that Shackleton (who programs each individual beat, so the tracks sound lifelike and organic - I wanted to work this into one of my theories) has released an eponymous LP with Pinch and it is the most anaesthetizingly dull record I've heard for some time now.
1) Mladen Dolar, "The Metaphysics of the Voice" from A Voice and Nothing More
2) Lacan, "The resonances of the Time of the Subject in Psychoanalytic Technique", Part III of "The Function and Field of Speech and Language" in Ecrits
3) Jacques Derrida, "The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing" from Of Grammatology
4) Roland Barthes, "The Grain of the Voice"
5) Luce Irigaray, "The Dialogues" and "Plato's Hysteria" in Speculum: of the Other Woman
6) Kaja SIlverman, "Disembodying the Female Voice: Irigaray, Experimental Feminist Cinema, and Femininity" from The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema
7) Sherry Turkle, "The Flight From Conversation" (New York Times article) and Franco Berardi, "Info-Labor and 'Precarization" from Precarious Rhapsody: Semiocapitalism and the pathologies of the Post-Alpha Generation
8) Mikhail Yampolsky, "The Voice Devoured: Artaud and Borges on Dubbing"
9) Professor Barker, "Barker Speaks" and William Burroughs, "Cross the Wounded Galaxies"
10) Avital Ronell, "The Deaf" in The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia and Electric Speech
11) Michel Chion, "Raising the Voice" and "The Voice that Seeks a Body" from The Voice in Cinema
12) Freya Jarman-Ivens, "'I Feel A Song Coming On': Vocal Identification and Modern Subjectivity"
13) Susan McClary, "This is not a Story My People Tell: Musical Time and Space According to Laurie Anderson"
14) Ian Penman, "The Shattered Glass: Notes on Bryan Ferry" from Angela McRobbie ed, Zoot Suits and Secondhand Dresses: An Anthology of Fashion and Music
15) Kodwo Eshun, "Inner Spatializing the Song" and "Programming Rhythmatic Frequencies" from More Brilliant Than The Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction
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