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| | | matchless (uk) #mrcd49 cd sakada “undistilled” compact disc - audit - 20.01.02 (20:45)
- worm - 27.02.02 (31:45)
- baggage reclaim - 24.03.02 part (8:51)
| | matchless press release... |
| sakada: undistilled (2002)
mattin - computer feedback
rosy parlane - computer, radio
eddie prévost - percussion
track 1 recorded at audit club, london on 20 january 2002
track 2 recorded at worm, rotterdam on 27 february 2002
track 3 recorded at baggage reclaim, london on 24 march 2002
front cover by mattin
mrcd49
...
undistilled was recorded at live performances in london and rotterdam in january, february and march 2002.
components are a restricted range of percussion (eddie prévost), electronic sounds confected earlier for intuitive, tweaked release (rosy parlane), and nervous hyper-attention to every noise present, allowing spontaneous digital transfiguration of some (mattin). the product is a formidably dense mesh of textures and a subtle alignment of urgency and stasis, persistence and interruption. a sound-body exalting in its raw and varied outer abrasions, tormented by heaving intestinal bass and pierced irregularly by silver screeches, yet somehow concealing a few inner surfaces of all but languid smoothness. needless to say (or to continue demonstrating), it is wholly incommensurable with any attempt at verbal description.
to accompany the cd release, mattin requested a text building on recent conversations between various musicians and others about music and ideology. as should be obvious, the writing can in no way be regarded as a commentary on the recordings, or even as a tentative gesture towards one. nor, under any circumstances, should the music be imagined as having been played with the remotest intention of exemplifying quasi-ideas like these.
thirteen dubious theses on music/freedom/time
1. a long-serving accusation against 'free' music is back in local circulation lately, thanks to two well-known 'destroyers of the professional field'. their case, more or less, is this: "it's only music!" that is to say, it's (all but) incapable of bearing polemical discursive content. therefore it's a reactionary, specialist bourgeois indulgence.
2. of course those who rehearse this quarter-assed 'critique' need only be reminded of the difference between real and symbolic politics. we live with a perpetual superabundance of 'communication' about every nuance of continuous crisis; spectacular machinery welcomes infinite indictment, the multitude flexing its right to self-expression, the very exercise of which confirms that we are 'free', and therefore (now as for an 18th century tory poet) that 'whatever is is right'.
3. the sweaty vocabulary of 'protest' can be grafted easily enough onto any kind of sound, but if this is to be the limit of music's historical ambition doesn't that make role models out of, say, rage against the machine or joan baez? a career path which some of us continue, however irresponsibly, to scorn.
4. yet having easily established grounds for mockery of this demand, (that music should not only 'speak' to and about the world, but that in doing so it should be something other than a laughable, narcissistic failure as a socially disruptive/constructive force), we're still left with a question less easily answered than entrusted to the realm of tacit, provisional understanding. namely, just what kind of non- symbolic, non-discursive intervention in the real might the acts of producing and distributing noises aspire to?
5. it would be quite reasonable to respond to this by talking about the social and logistical elements of long-term commitment to hearing, making and exposing unmarketable sound, the forms of human contact that go with part-avoidance of capitalist means of seduction. and these things are undoubtedly necessary, hard-won and fragile. however only the blindest and timidest kind of anarchism imagines that friendly, local forms of exchange (or for that matter those 'intimately' networked across an asymmetrical globe) can be in any way corrosive of the larger, colder economy they provide makeshift shelter from.
6. rather than trying to celebrate such an inevitable compromise, then, really stubborn desire for musical practice that at least generates interference somewhere might turn with fractionally more hope towards the production of subjectivity.
7. traditionally 'production of subjectivity' has referred to the fact that in order to expand and thereby survive, capital has always had to produce not only goods and services, but also workers, managers, capitalists, etc., disposed or at least resignedly willing to function as such. in the last few years, of course, the outward reference points have changed, as working- class populations in 'advanced' countries assume the cultural self-perception of what giorgio agamben calls a 'planetary petit-bourgeoisie' at the same time as sliding into sub-proletarian economic vulnerability. attributes sacred to today's think-tanks are no longer obedience for workers and rationality for bosses, but on both sides of the hazy line, dynamic opportunism: 'flexibility', 'personal responsibility', 'communication skills' and other similarly abstract images of affliction.
8. and so, in an outburst of desperate, palsiedly wavering 'optimism of the will', i contend that at least in a few freakish cases, 'free' music can require and consequently reproduce in single or collective subjects attributes hostile if not actually destructive to the qualities of the flexible, 'entrepreneurial' worker and 'communitarian' post-modern citizen.
9. this intuition presumes that 'freedom's' embodiment in musical practice may differ radically from the prevailing understanding of the term. when attached to 'improvisation' the way it's meant here, the word 'free' is far from implying omnipotence of the individual will, with the correspondingly unlimited personal liability for misfortune so familiar in a post- welfare, post-fordist world.
10. instead, the musician has no choice but to act, to affect things, against a densely nuanced horizon of partially and wholly unintelligible 'outside' forces. players' and listeners' freedom consists of their power as partially autonomous agents to bring about the sound event despite their inability ever fully to 'possess' it, to become 'responsible' for it.
11. more fundamentally still, the 'freedom' in 'free' music never means 'do what you like, it doesn't matter'. it lies at the utmost remove from the indifference of the marketplace, the outrageous equivalence of hours sold as labour-time. peace- lovers (appeasers of the given suffering) imagine freedom as an inconsequentiality of action akin to children's play (or more precisely the aspect of play by which children are most frustrated, its failure to become explosively, immediately 'real' on the dazzling wide screen of adulthood). in this music the opposite is true: freedom means maximum consequentiality. everything is at stake in every indivisible moment, movement, breath.
12. having no recourse to a score/code/algorithm or other such authority able to delimit the scope of action and immediately interpret it, the player is indefinitely bound to musical (i.e. continuous, productive) temporality. as each variation in the sound recasts or at least resituates what came before it, the player produces the music's past as well as its continuous present. s/he also already produces its future, in determining now the conditions of possibility for what comes later.
13. such is the extreme anti-nihilsm of this rare thing of which undistilled is an example: fully realised 'free' improvisation. the intimate, reciprocal binding together of temporal phases lies at the opposite pole from the 'gambler's dice throw' which walter benjamin saw as the model for commodified 'experiences' - utterly disjunctive, exchangeable items in a sequence, incapable of shedding the least glimmer of meaning on one another. the freedom incarnated in music 'like' sakada's, founded on the obscure indivisibility of sensual realities normally caricatured as 'past', 'present' and 'future', is the antithesis of 'living for the moment', and an insult to indifferent 'flexibility'.
matthew hyland august 2002 |
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