The title of Douglas Rushkoff‘s recent book, Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age, is in essence — true to all such high-concept titles — a cheat sheet for the full text. Spend more than a minute pondering the four words that precede its colon, and you pretty much know what’s coming: Today we live in a world that is increasingly mediated by digital technology; people who fail to educate themselves about how that technology is controlled risk leaving themselves open to manipulation — i.e., to being controlled. As for those “commands” to the right of the colon, they provide the book’s structure, a coy nod to the Ten Commandments. Rushkoff’s isn’t really comparing himself to Moses. He’s comparing himself to, or acting as, a Talmudic-style scholar. He’s explaining how the written word shapes, informs, and provides a means to understand human existence. In this case, the written word is the hand-typed code that is the programmed back-end of digital technology.
While Egypt is seized by historic disruption and protest, thoughts turn to what has been disrupted, what culture is on hold. The websites of two instrumental contemporary electronic musicians, Hassan Khan (at hassankhan.com) and Mahmoud Refat (at 100copies.com), are currently not quite offline, but not quite online, either. This may entirely be a coincidence (I hadn’t been on either site recently), but as of this morning, the Khan has been reduced to a holding page, and the links on Refat go to a server error. At times, the Refat doesn’t load at all. Web searches that lead to deeper pages on the Khan site have partial yields (such as one for his excellent 2002 album Tabla Dubb, though its embedded MP3 URLs, which direct to cairobus.com, are no longer functioning).
Fortunately, there are numerous YouTube videos and, at archive.org, an hour-long set in Berlin by Khan (pictured above) from January 2008 (MP3). The set seems to have been given the title “Incidence.” The concert was held by the organization salonbruit.org.
[audio:http://www.archive.org/download/salonbruit_25_01_08/HassanKhan_64kb.mp3|titles=”Incidence (Live January 2008)”|artists=Hassan Khan]
It’s an almost haltingly quiet performance, with what sound like melting pianos set against rough breezes, cicada rhythms channeled into techno dirges, oscillating synthesizers, industrial churn, and more. A brief liner note gives some context:
For tonight’s evening Khan presents a seamless continuous mixture of older and newer music pieces including: lust, figure and ground, KOMPRESSOR (music based on translating sets of dreams), lamptone, G.R.A.H.A.M., beautiful music and host. The Pieces are accompanied by different video sequences specially shot by the artist (a monochorome Red that slowly shifts color, vertiginous dream-like tracking/crane shots of solitary public lamps at night, a portrait of a photographer, a Lynchian moment where a desk lamp is transformed into something else etc..).
More on the performance, which dates from January 25, 2008, at archive.org. Also playing at the event were Tron Lennon and Tetsuya Hori.
Despite a name that suggests otherwise, the Grand Canonical Ensemble makes modest linear music that sounds like one person working concertedly at a laptop.
Apparently hailing from Cardiff and Manchester in the UK, it released a three-song, pay-as-you-will EP at the very start of the year, available at grandcanonicalensemble.bandcamp.com (and pay-as-you-will includes paying nothing, which is why this is being listed in the Downstream section, but don’t let that deter you from slipping them a few euros).
Titled Saying Goodbye, it comes highly recommended, and all but the title cut should appeal to regular Disquiet listeners (that the title one being fairly deep in pop territory).
In fact, this post was written right around the same time yesterday’s was (“Offworld-weary”), and shortly after yesterday’s went live, a reader rightly critiqued it for positing a clearcut distinction between music and sound design. Part of what that error in judgement was based on was a rumination on the first track on this record, and what distinguished it as seeming less, for lack of a better rubric, Downstream-y than the other two. It comes down to it putting its melodic content far ahead of its sonic content; it comes across far more like a fun little rendition of a song than as a piece for which the sonic material is its core concern. It isn’t technologically mediated sound; it’s a technologically reproduced song. (That distinction, by the way, is why not much so-called electro-pop pops up on Disquiet.com.)
Pop music that has a central, strong melodic component — a riff for example, a verse-chorus-verse mode, a sung lyric — isn’t by any means unwelcome in this site’s coverage, but it’s the rare non-hip-hop/r&b track or non-new-weird-folk track that ends up sounding really conscious of its sonic material, conscious of how it is shaped technologically, conscious of how sound is a component unto itself. Hip-hop (and much modern r&b production) uses a studio-based cut’n’paste method that emphasizes its artificiality; such sampling is a populist manifestation of musique concrete. New-weird-folk, at its most mantra-like, tends to feature melodies that dissolve into something ethereal, more background than foreground, more sound than song (a distinction that I was going for yesterday, when I mistakenly and erroneously conflated “song” and “music”). That was a very long (and at this stage somewhat of a sketch of a) digression. Thanks for bearing with me.
Now, back to the scheduled Grand Canonical Ensemble coverage: “Months Pass” is a drowsy synthesized hum, with hints at vocal source material — likely an aural illusion, but there’s something in the frictionless end result that makes a rough randomness at its origin seem plausible. And “Summer Clothes” has a momentum that seems to contradict itself, artfully. On the one hand there is a pitter-patter beat that will have your head tipping side to side within seconds (it’s a bit like an especially upbeat Ryuichi Sakamoto movie-score cue), but it plays against this slow, blunted, underlying beat that sounds less like an alternate rhythmic element and more like a melody striving to make itself heard.
Direwires‘ release Insomnia’s Grin/Sleep Reprieve is not as dire as it sounds, but certainly as wired. It’s also the rare piece of music for which a thorough reviewer risks complaints of revealing a spoiler.
Ontario, Canada-based Direwire (born Adam W. Young) recommends headphones. This is as much, one imagines, for the stereo play, the way sounds ping back and forth across the continuum that connects one ear and the other, as for the immersive sense of offworld weirdness, the sci-fi resonances, the overarching hints at inhuman sentience. Headphones serves as suffocation proxies.
Perhaps more than offworld, this is offworld-weary: muffled, rank, troubled. Those words are compliments, they are descriptions invoked by cues purposefully placed in the music. Its two sections are clearly divided, moving from the burbling-vat sounds of the first half to the vapor trails of the second, the beat reduced to an occasional, life-confirming blip. It’s more sound design than music, consisting of synthesized whirring that gives way to a surprisingly life-affirming aura, complete with birdsong, like some Eden discovered at the end of a dark alien tunnel. That is not at all what’s expected after what preceded it, and the pursuit of narrative-based music is praiseworthy, especially since that sense of if not surprise then at least of a story in motion reasserts itself on repeat listens.
At nearly half an hour in length, the single-track release is downloadable as a Zip file. More on the work at vagueterrain.net. More on Young/Direwires at direwires.com.
NB, per the liner note: “The track contains edited portions of field audio by Rob Danielson and Daniel Schiller ”“ courtesy of soundtransit.nl. Licensed under a Creative Commons License Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0).”
In the city’s Financial District, there is an institution called swissnex San Francisco, which bills itself as a science/education/art/innovation platform. Last Wednesday, January 19, it welcomed Zimoun to town for a performance, just prior to the opening of his solo show at Gray Area Foundation for the Arts on Saturday, the 22nd. He was paired with local innovator Jim Haynes, each playing solo. Haynes played with fire, Zimoun with cardboard. And ping pong balls.
Zimoun, who hails from Bern, has gained deserved renown for his precise, mechanically implemented installations, in which myriad tiny devices combine to suggest a robotic mix of sound and motion that verges on the life-like — not necessarily sentient, but resembling simple and vibrant animals or natural environments: insects, blades of grass, amoebas. They are vibrant to the point of chaos, chaotic to the point of ecstatic. I was delighted that GAFFTA had featured a paragraph I’d once written (“Maximum Effort for Minimal(ist) Impact “) about Zimoun’s work in its exhibit announcement:
“Zimoun’s primary instruments are entirely of his own making, each a large-scale installation of small mechanical devices — tables lined with whipping little bits of tubing, small sets of fetishistically situated mini-motors. They are architecturally precise and their beauty is forged by that precision. The meticulous engineering of Zimoun’s work is a set-up — not an end unto itself, but a staged step toward its end result, an orderly step enacted so as to let chaos flourish. His chaos takes place in close settings, in carefully defined spaces, in systems as thoroughly considered as a laboratory experiment. And the sound emitted by them is not an after effect, or an afterthought. It’s a core principal of his practice.”
I wrote that (and some earlier appreciations) as a long-time admirer of Zimoun’s work, and as one who had only experienced it thanks to Internet-sourced videos and some audio recordings. This concert was my first opportunity to see his work in person. Particularly of interest was how the setting blurred the line between installation and instrument.
The swissnex San Francisco show took place in the rear room of its ground-floor space, a large white rectangle with a few support columns, the walls lined with acoustic tile. The head of swissnex San Francisco’s Interdisciplinary Programs, Luc Meier, introduced the evening with one of the most polite admonitions ever directed at a concert audience: “Please turn off or at least down your phone.” He spoke briefly of a scientific component of Zimoun’s work, and thanked Haynes and his 23Five collaborator, Randy Yau, for helping set up the evening.
Bankers Beatbox: One of Zimoun’s quintet of carboard music-making devices
Zimoun played for 20 minutes straight, his instrument being a set of five apparently identical devices of his own design. This notion of hermetic, parallel procedures is quite characteristic of his work overall, which takes a systems-oriented approach. To witness a Zimoun work generally involves watching and listening to a batch of similar automatons. The appearance of machine-produced similarity initially masks and eventually reveals a machine-produced cacophony. And then the work takes another turn, as from the cacophony emerges something that a sympathetic ear will liken to a musical experience.
Motor City: While the constructions differ, the materials and sonic effect in this Zimoun video are similar to those employed at the swissnex San Francisco concert.
Each of the devices was a plain, brown-cardboard banker-box cover, on top of which a long, stiff, thin wire was attached on one end to a motor and the other to what seemed to be a ping-pong ball. He started up one initially, the vibration of the ball echoing in the box below, resounding off the hard surface of the table and summoning up a low level frenetic effect. (I confirmed with Zimoun after the concert that no audio processing was employed, other than equalization.) The percussive sound was like that of some distant drum corps, like a Brazilian Carnival parade right through Dr. Seuss’ Who-town.
In time, a second and then a third box was added to the mix, eventually all five thrumming at once. Zimoun achieved this combination by maximizing the chaos yet somehow minimizing the sense of accrual. The noise was increased so slowly that only when, toward the end of the performance, he began to turn off individual boxes did it become apparent just how energetic the work had grown since he had initiated it.
Balls to the Wall: Zimoun in performance at swissnex San Francisco
Jim Haynes could not have provided more of a contrast, his table looking more like something from a laboratory, packed with various devices, including a matrix of speakers in a piece of dark wood, and a crusty suitcase that wouldn’t be out of place in a production of Death of a Salesman. After an unfortunate bit of unintended ear-rattling, arm-hair-raising feedback, he moved into a sinuous haze whose fluidity and ether-like quality contrasted with the rough collection of materials from which it was made.
Key among those tools was flame, an item under-utilized by electronic musicians. As the smell of candle smoke and spent matches filtered into the room, flames flickered coyly from behind some beaker stands (which would later, it appeared, pour sand near a contact microphone for what must be the most literal interpretation ever of the phrase “granular synthesis”). The sound of these flames then emerged from the swissnex speakers as that peculiar noise that seems, contradictorily, at once like water and fire, and crumbled paper. There were sounds of irregular radio signals, and raw and filtered field recordings. In time the source material became less recognizable, subsumed as it was in Haynes’ real-time production of a lingering near-hush that complemented, in a kind of theater, the way the smoke had made its way through the room. (A look at the mad-professor table after the show revealed a tape recorder, a Dr. Sample machine, an MP3 player, an effects pedal, and more.) The flames notwithstanding, the strongest impression came from an ambient torque, the sense of a sound being contorted in real time like a piece of bent metal.
Have Sampler …: Jim Haynes’ set-up from the swissnex San Francisco performance
The title of Douglas Rushkoff‘s recent book, Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age, is in essence — true to all such high-concept titles — a cheat sheet for the full text. Spend more than a minute pondering the four words that precede its colon, and you pretty much know what’s coming: Today we live in a world that is increasingly mediated by digital technology; people who fail to educate themselves about how that technology is controlled risk leaving themselves open to manipulation — i.e., to being controlled. As for those “commands” to the right of the colon, they provide the book’s structure, a coy nod to the Ten Commandments. Rushkoff’s isn’t really comparing himself to Moses. He’s comparing himself to, or acting as, a Talmudic-style scholar. He’s explaining how the written word shapes, informs, and provides a means to understand human existence. In this case, the written word is the hand-typed code that is the programmed back-end of digital technology.
