The Art/ Act Of Political Listening

'Musical distribution techniques are today contributing to the establishment of a system of eavesdropping and social surveillance [...] The monologue of standardised, stereotyped music accompanies and hems in a daily life in which in reality no one has the right to speak anymore.'

Jacques Attali- Noise: The Political Economy of Music

Music and politics mix on an illicit frequency. Listener C is a crafty, educated political listener. What concerns her, unlike her disconnected friends A and B, is each track's background noise, its sonic subtext that echoes other systems, structures, functions and types of wiring.

Our musical systems and structures aren't Cagey, formalist or theoretical but they do predetermine certain things. First we remember the capitalist system (and of course, its encoded structure), which creates a strict hierarchy of commodities, exposure and style. It's a monetary system. Every time C, the political listener, hears anything, she's aware of this system, how it determines the shape of the band, the recording studio and the end product.

Each band is structured around an outdated model where the Voice is allowed tremendous power and the remaining sounds are nearly muted. The producer who foregrounds the Voice writes a sonic synecdoche of government, allowing a single person prominence over all others, at their expense, while they silently work within like civil servants. There are echoes of political structure again as patterns of behaviour are enforced. Research indicates particular qualities within the Voice that need to be tapped, amplified and looped. Certain behaviour must be avoided, a selling point (a capitalist necessity) must be located for successful continuation of the product and it must be endorsed by past candidates to achieve the correct level of exposure. The contours of capitalism can grafted onto the artistic process without a slight hiccough.

It's alright cos the historical pattern has shown

How the economical cycle tends to revolve [...]

Bigger slump and bigger wars and a smaller recovery.

Stereolab, Ping Pong

The product's function isn't clear. C knows the intention is to plug a void, to provide a Voice for the Voiceless, but usually there are the sensations of multi-tracking, of sampling, looping, performing cover versions. C knows these Voices are familiar, have been heard before, and are only slightly different from their ancestors... perhaps the pitch's shifted a little but who can say? Wiring is the shadowiest element of all. The wires in machines are invisible: they run power back and forth, they maintain power and they lurk behind, within, the other systems and structures. C knows that corporations own the wiring, they control how the machine operates: all wiring leads to a singular power source. But political listening doesn't create transparency. We know that awareness of the machine's deficiencies (solidity in an age of steam) doesn't speed its collapse.

Political listening is a kind of violence. The political listener, our beautiful C, isn't a participant in mass culture and its fake images of togetherness. She knows listening is political, ethical, an act of disquiet. It means attack, escape and rejection. The substance of political music isn't always superficial. The audio-incendiary noise of Rage Against The Machine is, yeah, political but it doesn't represent a disengagement from conventional politics or any alternatives other than the stratified, straitjacketing microcosm of 'alternative' invented by the market place. The political act lies with the listener. It's the heavy-puffing Christian Slater of Pump Up The Volume, secretly transmitting in his bedroom, who can fuck things up, mangle the system and start fires in the miserable Reagan '80s. And perhaps Eisenstein's collaboration with Prokofiev, with its scarcely-hidden attack on Stalin's terror, via his love of musicals, is a great political act, one where all the wiring is viciously made visible.

The political listener takes the noise, the reverberations, the desolation of contemporary sound and reforms them as a violent act or thought. Once the standards and stereotypes are rejected by the individual then she can speak for herself and her listening become political.

1. Stereolab- Ping Pong

2. Robert Wyatt- At Last I Am Free

3. My Bloody Valentine- Sueisfine

Untitled piece by Hermann Nitsch. No copyright infringement intended.

Only The Good Die Young

His aging face hardened and weathered by the unflinching Missouri sun. His old bones wrapped round his 1869 Schofield. A wheezy breath filling his lungs. Coughing on exhale. Eyes brimming with hate and remorse. Weary and tired Jesse Woodson James rots into the dust on which his house is built on.



Rage Against the Machine - Renegades Of Funk

Photo of Vietnamese Buddhist Monk setting himself alight in protest. Photographer unknown. No Copyright infringement intented.

Come And Shake Bones

She looked like a piece of meat. Not in the sexist sense, at least that would could have been taken as a compliment in a twisted misogynistic way. She however looked like a piece of pork, greased up and freshly tied with string ready for the oven. Her uncompromising thighs, bloated under the pressure of a 16 year old burden. He face reddened by a thousand blocked veins. Her sagging breast lay strewn across her chest unsupported like Dali's eggs dripping down her front. I danced with her for a short time, she tried to keep up but the beat to the commercial sound that suffocated the airways was too fast, staccato . Excited by the faintest of sexually charged attention, determined not to put a trotter wrong this time. Her slightly rosy quality was a endearing for a short time, but i soon grew weary of her. Pushed to the back of the room, she now sat alone and there she'll stay, and breathing cliche of repulsion. Sitting alone at the back, an endless monument to the forgotten masses. She soon turned to stone, granite I think it was.

Photograph by Paul Strand Entitled Blind. no copyright infringement intended.

Playboy Tre - Sideways (SALEM Drag Chop remix)
Big Boi - Shine Blockas (feat. Gucci Mane)
Gucci Mane - Dangers Not a Stranger

People Of The Sun

Mud fills your Lungs, with every heavy breath. Lost in a swap of loathing and obsession. I would pay anything just to get in through the doorway, and stand amongst the mess of people, with flailing limbs, elbows to my face and into my side. Sweat dripping down my brow, I don't want to take my coat off. The devil sits on his arm chair in middle England watching Saturday night television, flicking through the endless channels of filth and plastic; nothing really takes his fancy. He just ends up putting on a radio station and falling asleep: there is no greater blasphemy then having the radio on television. What would your mother say? Abstract thoughts scribbled down to fill a page. Dogs eat their own tails and cats shed their skins in the world hazy with fumes and sounds like strange hands forced into to my ears. I pretend to listen, and nod with a vacant smile draped across my face, and a balding woman with cracking skin tells me about her weekend. Perched on my chair with wheel, with my unironed shirt and father's tie burning into my skin. When they say, Jump, I say, Fucking jump yourself, you capitalist swine. That great canyon of silence growing between us, after all this is just a stream of consciousness. Sleep, Wake Up, Sleep Again



Painting Titled Execution by Yue Minjun. No Copyright Infringement Intented.

Pink Priest - Those Paws
Biopolar Bear - Graves
Salem - Frost

Art And Music

'I don't have to prove that I am creative!

'I don't have to prove that I am creative!

All my pictures are confused

And now I'm going to take me to you.'

Talking Heads- Artists Only

Here's 'One Hundred Live And Die' by Bruce Nauman.

Its linguistic permutations play my mind like music. Scanning down, I think of Delia Derbyshire's recordings of ghostly voices discussing horrid dreams as they stumble through glum electronic fog. If I scan across I think of the dizzying incantations of Einstein On The Beach based on the fractured, shape-shifting language of an autistic man.

Remembering Einstein On The Beach means remembering Philip Glass, an old friend of Nauman's- they used to make music together. I remember the cover of the CD: a scary neon tube buzzing with Lynchian nastiness; crackling with the secret life of machines. As I flick around the one hundred statements, I remember the drifting, drugkissed drones of Spiritualized's '200 Bars' and how a tired girl's voice forces them forward, counting 'one, two, three, four' like a frightened child tiptoeing towards Mister Wolf or like an analgesic, slow-motion remix of Glass' choir, who recite digits with amphetamaniac intensity. I see language with the chugging rhythm of a hospital respirator; language with sinister intensity. I think of the shaking German girl in Paths of Glory who gradually silences American soldiers, I think of cattle, war poetry, the words of Wittgenstein, the motorik beat of Neu!, the hellish pulse of industry, tyranny, and what music would look like as a manipulated light source. I think 'One Hundred Live And Die' comes closest to articulating real 'metal machine music' and does this, paradoxically, without making a single sound.

What can we make out of this other Nauman work, Self-Portrait As A Fountain?

Now all that neon has worn off. Here we have a skinny young aesthete. He's presenting himself in a role, as a thing, a fountain, an object which swollen organs of the art world fall upon as meaningful. So here is R. Mutt playing around through Bruce Nauman, a ready-made man producing a recirculated stream of piss? Nope, no way. I cross that out. But Duchamp's contemporaries, the Futurists, who adored speed, metal fusing with flesh, industrial rhythm and fascism, loved noise, too. Luigi Russolo built 'noise machines' which he incorporated into dissonant musical scores. He coined and developed the idea of the 'Art of Noise' in a manifesto. Paul Morley names his anonymous electronic music collective after this text in the 1980s and Nauman later transforms language into pure sound and denatures it into noise with his late installation Raw Materials.

The aesthete spits water playfully, nude, like a figure in Dionysian revelry. As he self-consciously performs a cover version of Duchamp's great work, I wonder about post-punk and its desire to deconstruct, play around with signification, meaning and convention. What's exciting about the piece is how it distorts representation and shuns interpretation. I can force this frozen Nauman through loads of archetypes and there's still a lurking sense of aporia: meaning is blocked and I can't say why. He's a classical figure in Dionysian revelry; or an actual fountain from a terrifying future... a man with metal veins, with a transformed system of pipes; he's a rich postmodern boy constructed and conversant in metalanguage, repeating gender theory, addicted to the sensorily-disordered sex practiced in the toilets of weirdly Dionysian discos. He makes me think of Momus' playful, literate pop. I want to place puns and parentheses around the image, around everything, like a good deconstructionist and accept the inherent failure in my attempts to interrogate its meaning. When I ask the young man questions he spits in my face.

As an interlude, here is Sadie Benning ravenously consuming critical theory in a confined space.

Her films exist on this invisible wavelength in minute static-scarred pieces so we'll have to abandon her video work for the information which orbits it and its key subject, Benning herself. The snatches of her films I've seen are full of self-loathing, fear, despair and a litany of other miserable nouns. It's easy to parallel Benning's adolescent confessional/diaristic impulse with the unceasing self-recording of outsider musicians like Jandek and Daniel Johnston. Much as they record on Dictaphones (or used to anyway), Benning expresses herself with her own lo-fi technology: the Fisher Price Pixelvision camera. These studies of isolation, dominated by deterioration, find sonic analogues in the nihilism of groups like Flipper or the doomsaying of the GZA; the same self-awareness and removal from the masculine in the work of The Slits (where compulsory heterosexuality is the consequence of capatalism, 'just another marketing ploy.') The riot-grrl lineage persists in Benning's own group, Le Tigre with their songs about Minimalist praxis, John Cassavetes ('genius? misogynist?') and ecstatic, electroclash breviaries of feminism.

Nausea makes me balk at that milk cream, separates me from the mother and father who proffer it. 'I' want none of that element, sign of their desire. 'I' do not want to listen, 'I' do not assimilate it, 'I' expel it.

Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror

Then I'll turn the last gasp of focus onto Nam June Paik's Electronic Television and the work of Tim Hecker. I will try to say things simply. I will try to finish quickly. I'm aware as I write of very difficult and confusing noises. I'm also aware of the failure of one of my speakers. My music has lost one dimension: it is flatter, more like an image than ever before.

What I like about Tim Hecker's work (and I don't really think this is an original thing to say) is how it sounds old and new. I like that this is a familiar sensation which other people have. How the white noise crashes, how everything ends, in delirious shortwave, conjures old video footage of the solar system, Brothers Quay ballets and again, slightly Lynchian sensations. Who is Hecker, the listener wonders, working away in the digital wilderness? There he is on television in Canada, deliberately destroying records, stabbing equipment until it malfunctions, just like Christian Marclay used to. And Nam June Paik, a member of the Fluxus group, had the same desire to deform modern technology and mangle electronic devices. In listening to Hecker we hear the decline of civilization playing out; we move towards the zero... everything eventually shuts down. This is not a particularly Fluxist thing to think. The tenets of play are observed but Hecker's work is not short or comic. He is the ghost in the machine. He sounds like a fridge buzzing on a multiple-substance comedown.

This narcotic bliss he supplies us with is very Fluxist, though. The movement demanded change and progression. This is what Hecker does, his work represents a break in ambient music and minimalism: it doesn't create the sonic environment but repeats it. The sound of Hecker is understood ineffably, hypnagogically, like car alarms, like language down a bad phone, we all recognise the sounds of machines, of industry, of malfunctioning equipment, because these things litter our lives and lurk in our heads. Hecker is performing a kind of mimesis. He is, if you like, electronic television.

I'm asking art and music questions. They always resist, never want to answer. They speak together, sit together in contorted mirrors, joining hands. Here are two sisters on conflicting medications, each mishearing the other's thoughts.

1. Le Tigre- What's Yr Take On Cassavetes?

2. Philip Glass- Knee Play 5

3. Art of Noise- Close (To The Edit)

4. Tim Hecker- I'm Transmitting Tonight

5. Daniel Johnston- I Save Cigarette Butts

'One Hundred Live And Die' and 'Self-Portrait As A Fountain' by Bruce Nauman, photograph of Sadie Benning by Monique Jean and 'Living Inside' by Sadie Benning and 'Electronic Television' by Nam June Paik. No copyright infringement intended.

'On The Lower Frequencies': Rock Music's Gradual, Terrible Death

'Words move, music moves

Only in time; but that which is only living

Can only die. Words, after speech, reach

Into the silence.'

T.S. Eliot- Four Quartets

Rock music and Death are very close friends.

They live together now that rock music is dead.

That rock music is dead is nothing new. For a long time now it has spoken of Death, desiring his arrival and dancing with his sickly sylphs and weary footmen. Rock music has invoked Death endlessly: on the radio, in the bedroom, in miserable buildings, here, everywhere, rock music has transmitted Death like a virus. We have all seen Death on television. A rock group take along their radio ghost in wires and plastic and perform before the camera.

Here the radio ghost plays. The group don't have to play as their recorded ghost plays for them. Real ghosts have radio ghosts. Jimi Hendrix is dead but I watched him at Woodstock on video. I listened to his performance on my computer. If I do this he isn't really dead. I can resurrect him in fifteen seconds.

Jimi Hendrix is a ghost. We can't call him a corpse.

In the 1960s, Soviet Russia banned rock music. Recordings by The Beatles and other Western subversives were bought on the black market by rebellious youths. The illicit material was often duplicated by holding a radio tuned to a pirate station playing a popular track to the microphone of a recording booth. The low-grade vinyl would then be replicated on X-ray plates stolen from hospitals. As a grim memento mori, the eager youth would ask for 'two Beatles ribs' and then resurrect the group by placing the needle on the cancerous lungs or the busted skeleton of some oppressed Soviet man. The youth listening to rock music is listening to death.

Now all those ribs are rotting; all that music is legal, and that tyrannical government is gone.

Rock music survives on the tyranny of the star, the carefully constructed image of the impossibly sad prince who can't be soothed and so must be gradually drugged.

This drugging, this proximity to death, neutralises the star, nixes their intensity, their creativity. As existence drags on, the threat of silence grows ever greater. The listener has to acknowledge that the star has nothing to say.

The rock star tests voices in front of the mirror.

Death enters through the mirror.

'The source of the depression is not that rock music today is Dead but that it refuses to Die.' Greil Marcus, The Life And Death and Incandescent Banality of Rock N' Roll.

What is different now when we talk about rock music and Death together is that their relationship isn't particularly threatening or even exciting.

Rather than dying or being dead ('being dead' is almost playful. It makes me think about 'being an animal' or 'being miserable', something desired and also a little transient), rock music is now just senile. It dribbles, lives in limbo, not alive but not-quite dead.

So where is Death, we have to ask? Why won't he come? It has to be the worst thing in the world to wait for death.

We're watching the long, drawn-out death of a particular music. As culture loses its centre so does sound. As the world becomes stranger, more confusing, more unnatural, we have to ask not for mirrors and analogues but digital denaturings. What we hear in rock music now is a hollow voice, one which imitates unsure of its sources, singing an uncertain sorrow, enacting a kind of anaemic pastiche. And pastiche, as every good critic of postmodernism knows, is

'The wearing of a stylistic mask, speech in a dead language [...] it is a neutral practice of mimicry. Pastiche is blank parody, parody that has lost its humour.'

Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism and Consumer Society

Let's go deep down a hole now, to finish.

The protagonist in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man has been living underground, hibernating after a riot, living in a Deathlike state. At the end he asks

'Being invisible and without substance, a disembodied voice, as it were, what else could I do? What else but try to tell you what was really happening when your eyes were looking through? And it is this which really frightens me:

Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?'

In a world where music is a series of disembodied voices, without substance, endless and invisible, the singularity is less important, it is quickly replaced. It's these 'lower frequencies' away from the mainstream, against convention, that we must locate and lock down to record, repeat and redefine sound.

In writing about Death we must leave pauses, spaces, silences, passages without communication.

Rock music, when singing about Death, must remember these lapses, this static, those cracks; that each signal eventually fails. Rock music must remember each friendship soon ends once the dialogue has finished; once the virus' work is complete.

And that's all I have to say.

1. McCarthy- We Are All Bourgeois Now

2. Autechre- Flutter

3. The Velvet Underground And Nico- The Black Angel's Death Song

'Piss Christ' by Andres Serrano, Sonic Youth mid-80s (photographer unknown) and Mick Jagger and Michele Breton in 'Performance' by Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell. No copyright infringement intended.