Rain Song

Rain Song by entschwindet und vergeht
Digging around on my clogged hard drive I found this recording that I once made. A few years back I experimented for a while with a technique whereby through a process of filtering, certain specific frequencies could be extracted from a source recording, without affecting their timbre. Sounds that had a wide range of frequencies and yet some rhythm and texture were best for this, and the rain was especially useful. This was all pre-hauntology, but the idea was quite similar - melodies could be found that were like ghosts within an existing sound, and the pieces sometimes automatically sounded like faint human voices. Unfortunately this was a very time consuming technique, involving the filtering of individual harmonic frequencies for each note, and overall I had better things to be doing. But here's one for you, created from the sound of the rain during a thunderstorm, I think sometime in 2009.

E&V - Driven Home Wasted

Driven Home Wasted by entschwindet und vergeht
Isn't it strange how the last few years have proven Mark and Simon right to a level I'm sure even they didn't expect? Hauntology has become such a significant part of the pop landscape that it's strange to think that it was less than five years ago that they first started to identify the ghostly tendency. The method, exemplified along one axis by Burial and along the other by Ariel Pink has gone on to spawn such a massive proportion of the phantasmagorical pop that currently dominates the critical consensus.

One of the more significant poles of the current state of the tendency is Tri-Angle records, whose artists mostly delve into woozy memories of a certain branch of eighties synth pop, drowning in the usual dreamy half-recollections, although now it seems to be bad Simpson/Bruckheimer movies that are providing the material for twisted reminiscence.

On the one hand, it feels as if people are finally, finally making good postmodern pastiche rather than kitsch, but then at the same time it's as if there really isn't a single crack in culture that would allow anything 'new' to break through, as everyone just wrings the last drips of aesthetic satisfaction out of old forms, desperately not trying to look the future in the face.

With that in mind, and in conversation with my flatmate, (who it must be said keeps abreast of all of the latest shit, going to all the clubs etc, perhaps not quite sharing my despairing outlook), I decided to get back in on the act. So I made an example of your typical melancholy hypnagogic pop song. It's not so hard!

On the Ephemeral in Photography

Right now there is a rather excellent exhibition at the Hotshoe Gallery, which is on until the 5th of March. It's a mix of contemporary and historical photography, curated by Daniel Campbell Blight and Brad Feuerhelm. I also had something to do with it, so this post counts as a bit of a plug, but I'd be impressed with the show even if I wasn't marginally involved, so there! My contribution is a text in the show catalogue / newspaper, which I've posted below with kind permission from the gallery.

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Sigmund Freud's short essay of 1915, 'On Transience', offers us what might be described as a formula for the ephemeral: "Transience value is scarcity value in time". By this he means to assert that decay and disappearance need not be a source of anguish, indeed, he suggests that the perishable nature of objects makes them all the more valuable and worthy of our contemplation. Freud states that even though we are able to comprehend and fear that there will come a time when there is no longer any human consciousness remaining to comprehend anything whatsoever, this should only increase our enjoyment of what we create and what we examine. If we are to contemplate the ephemeral qualities of photography, we could do worse than to begin with Freud's assertion that the veridical fact of disappearance makes objects of desire all the more valuable.


David Maisel, 'Library of Dust',

But we must admit that things are perhaps not quite as simple as this - the ephemeral haunts our being more profoundly than just through our admiration for the preciousness of fleeting beauty. At a fundamental level, self-consciousness is the simplest quality of human life, the perception of a totality of thought, the singular there-ness of being. But we are constantly alienated, not only by our bodies, subject to the dragging weight of matter in time, but also by knowledge, or more particularly the awareness of the inevitability of things that are also impossible to imagine. Think of Samuel Beckett's famous statement at the end of 'The Unnameable' - "I can't go on, I'll go on." - our undead drive mocks us, whispering to us that we are everlasting. As humans, we find transience both inevitable yet simultaneously unthinkable.


Mikael Gregorsky, 'Untitled',

Things are complicated even further by the fact that we make marks, we create. We mark because we are subjects to the will, it is our very vitality exceeding us, but as soon as a mark has been made it is filled with death - it belongs to its maker but it is independent of them, it makes them both more than they were and less than they were. It creates a ghostly body of knowledge, an archive which depends upon consciousness for its ability to mean but is capable of existing beyond it, without us. Derrida once argued that "the structure of the archive is spectral", meaning that the marks we make are inextricably bound up with a logic of ghosts, that representation is in itself haunted, as in the ghostly trace of human presence, but also that our own haunted finitude is made clear in the making of the mark. In short, our history is the history of our own haunting. Derrida - as a thinker of the archive or of the 'body of knowledge' - argued that the ghost was a more appropriate figure for our being than any fully present human subject: instead of ontology, he proposed a hauntology.


Rut Blees Luxemburg, 'Black Sunrise', 2010

But this was not an entirely abstract or poetic observation; it describes a concrete condition. We can expand upon Derrida's statement thus: all media, in some way, are spectral. All marks made create a fragmented image of the human who inscribes them. All forms of media, or representation in general, proliferate spectral images and resonances that create fragments out of single identities. All media evolve as methods of recording, of externalising our memory. The archive begins when a mark or an image is stored in some way that it becomes repeatable. We write because our memory degrades at a faster rate than an imprint in inert material, for example. But all forms of media are still subject to that fragmentary condition that defines memory - as mentioned before, all material is still transient, prone to disappearance, even the archive itself is made up of ephemera.

So against an naïve romantic notion of transience, whereby a decayed object is a simple memento mori, aestheticised and thus somewhat neutralised (we could say sublimated), and beyond Freud's notion that the knowledge of its disappearance multiplies the pleasure one can take in an object, even in its perfect condition, 'spectrality' is the dual and simultaneous process whereby the marks humans make both extend their memory and rob them of their very presence.


Julian Stallabrass, 'Untitled'

Each medium or technique necessarily has its own particular spectral characteristics. Writing might be thought of as the petrified voice, the setting of speech into stone and symbol. A psychoanalyst might tell you that speech itself is evidence of a phantom, both irreducibly personal and somehow alien. The introduction of the phonograph and recorded sound is perhaps one of the more perfect examples of spectral media - the disembodied and projected voice is inherently uncanny, in the sense that its repetitions occupy space and time in almost perfect fidelity to their original occurrence.

But what of photography?

To return to Derrida, he notes -

"It is the modern possibility of photography (whether art or technique matters little here) that combines death and referent in the same system […] the immediate proof given by the photographic apparatus or by the structure of the remains it leaves behind are irreducible events, ineffaceably original." - Derrida, 'The Deaths of Roland Barthes'.

For Derrida, after Barthes, the photograph haunts us with its effortless likeness. This perception of photography as brute, unadulterated representation is what allows it to work as an archival process - the strength of photography qua document or evidence testifies to this quality. But at the same time, photography and its mute realism freeze at an irreducible, irretrievable point. Compared to cinema (once described by Derrida as "the art of ghosts"), which unfolds as both sound and image in time, the stasis of photography has a different phantasmic quality. Photography's arrested likenesses provokes in thinkers such as Derrida and Barthes a pierced experience of death in its very impossibility, but simultaneously the infinite weight of the present in all its reality. Or, to put it another way, the spectrality of photography is not only that of seeing a ghost, but of seeing the ghost in oneself.


Jefferson Hayman, 'More Unfortunate than Criminal', 2009

But of course, photography is not half as 'truthful' a process as it might appear. If anything, however, its artefacts only make it more spectral. For example, it is worth recalling that among the very first to make intentional use of the flaws of the photographic process were mediums and ghost hunters, who were able to play games with exposure to create the illusion of semi-present spectres on film (in fact; ghosts are perhaps the most enthusiastic pioneers of each new communication technology!).


Roger Schall, 'Soho', 1935

The material substrate of archival material also creates its own distortions. Fading, scratching, these distortions upon the surface of historic material alienate us from the image depicted, they veil it - they become figures in their own right. This is where 'spectrality' becomes an aesthetic quality in itself, when the degradations of material become figures for work.
An example, a vulgar one at that: consider that the attraction of the degraded image may be found in the applications that mimic Polaroid photography for digital cameras. This process does indeed use spectral qualities as an aesthetic condition, but it is born of dull nostalgia, the attraction of the 'vintage'. It is a reactionary manoeuvre, the equivalent of having an old-fashioned telephone sound emanating from one's state of the art mobile telephone.


Roger Schall, Nuremburg Cathedral of Light, 1936

But this fuzzy, cuddly, aesthically lukewarm effect is indeed a symptom of a genuinely critical aspect of digital culture. As I have mentioned, each medium is spectral, and almost none is so in a more troubling way than digital media. In fact, we might say that digital media tends towards a limit condition of spectrality. Digital media and storage are fast approaching a point where the archive is effectively absolute. Of course, this absolute condition is impossible, insofar as all material is guaranteed to disappear eventually, but when compared to the cognitive capabilities and comprehensible timescales of the human observer, the minimal decay of digital material, its functionally infinite reproducibility and its functionally infinite capacity for storage spell the practical end point for our own capacity to experience the decay of the archive, which is what connects it to our own experience of memory - a perfect and unchanging body of past knowledge is by no means the same thing as history. But at the very same time, the immateriality of digital media is the very experience of this ephemerality taken towards its limit. Digital media is the both the end and the triumph of spectrality, in that the digital is both the most immaterial yet faithful reproductive apparatus.


Rut Blees Luxemburg, 'Faith in Infrastructure', 2010

This full spectrality of digital culture - the end of the ephemeral - is a deferred promise of modernity. Recall Marx & Engels’ description of capitalist abstraction: “All that is solid melts into air.” The digital archive is the latest, perhaps one of the last stages of this process of spectralisation, and its effects are complex. One can trace this spectral abstraction in the forms of media themselves, but also in how artistic works relate to these processes. The last decade has seen great critical focus on 'haunted' practices in experimental and art music, with the sounds of decayed media being brought into the foreground of the work, or with references being drawn from half-remembered utopian histories, phantasmagorias of other futures. To trace this out within photography: moving on from the digitally simulated fake ‘vintage’ aesthetic, we might consider the attraction of the obsolete, which can be witnessed in the fascination with superseded equipment, which are minor monuments to a different regime of materiality. We might see it in the attraction of ephemera (in the historical sense), lost postcards and trivia, fragments in the Benjaminian sense, like withered corpses, testaments to disappearance, while simultaneously totems to ward it off. Jefferson Hayman's images are testament to this mood, slyly inhabiting the historical garb of the 19th century. But if we can take this dialectic further, it is possible for work to further abstract these qualities; one approach might be to introduce decay into photography. This could be abstracted in a narrative sense - the lurid colours of David Maisel's 'Library of Dust' take on an unbearable weight when one learns of their provenance. But decay here might be a controlled and abstracted figure – take Mikael Gregorsky’s photography, with its dusty phantasms. Gregorsky's portraits, although entirely contemporary in terms of setting, dress, character, technique, cannot but help to bring to mind Victorian ghost photography, as the dust introduced into the development process becomes akin to the ectoplasmic expulsions of a channelling medium. And we might find also think of ghosts of history, whether that be images of long lost objects, buildings, places, or the mute horror of scenes of historical tragedy - this spectral sublimity can be witnessed in the image of the 'Cathedral of Light', Albert Speer's horribly stunning climax to the Nuremburg rallies of 1933, the ultimate point of modern architecture as a dematerialized space of communion. But spectrality also deals with the ghosts of the future, which we can understand through the fixation on resonant utopias that we see in Rut Blees Luxemburg, whether that be in the post-war architecture of the welfare state, transfigured by long exposure to the night, or in the encounters with the skeletons of World Expositions, temporary monuments to the future, now dilapidated; left behind. They represent material promises of a different, better modernity, haunting in their very refusal to vanish.


Steffi Klenz, 'Untitled', 2010

To think of media in this spectral fashion is to attempt a synthesis of approaches to history, psychology, memory and technique that is undeniably post-modern, but offers the chance to escape the trap of irony that this might normally suggest. The figure of the ghost identifies an aspect of human existence that can be traced variously through space, the individual, the collective, and time. It is compelling way of theorising mediation and our relationships to the labyrinthine archive of human work that we are always lost within.

My V*ntage P*rn Soundtrack

Waltz in eb major (vintage pornography) by entschwindet und vergeht

Well! Thanks to Soundcloud and their lack of time limit (at least on individual tracks), you now have the dubious honour of being able to listen to all sixteen minutes of the vintage pornography soundtrack that Kino Fist commissioned from me, more than 3 years ago now (mein Gott!). It was entirely composed and teased out of a single recording I made of the sound of rain, using my own secret compositional recipe.

Some listening.

Here's a few things that I have been listening to lately. You might enjoy them too.
Marcus Fjellstrom
the disjointed by miasmah
This guy is an excellent composer of original haunted compositions.

Holy Other

Holy Other 'Yr Love' from FAMILY on Vimeo.

Some haunted disco. This, to me, feels like a cross between Decasia and a Burial record.


A little recording I made recently, with some shockingly anachronistic rubato.

The Fall - Hit the North

This has been a recent favourite after hours in our flat.

Fennesz - Before I Leave

An old favourite of mine.

Thomas Hampson / Leonard Bernstein / Wiener Philharmoniker, Mahler : "Ich bin der welt abhanden gekommen."

Oh! This is so unbelievably lush.

Moseivitch plays Wagner/Liszt

Crackle!

Rudge plays Wagner/Liszt

Crackle!

Salem - King Night

This is what the 'hip cats' are listening to. Personally I reckon this is the only really good track off the album. Disregarding all else, I like the histrionic quality it has.

Kristen Flagstadt - Wagner : Im Treibhaus

Another pinnacle performance, this is most notable for its very slow tempo.

And...

This is an ultimately futile attempt to cheer up.

Worstward Ho!

Nothing much to report, apart from the accelerating downward motion of what Laurie Penny aptly calls 'kamikaze capitalism'. I for one don't really see how we can't be in line for the most ugly of outcomes, considering not only the fact that organised labour is in disarray, but also that we've got an almost 'accelerationist' government in charge. Say what you like about these vicious scum, but they're just the most avant-garde ticket in town.

Anyway; here's some deckchair shuffling.

ICON

You may know that I'm 'architecture correspondent' at Icon magazine. This month there's more of my words than usual: There's a short feature on Ball-Nogues, who are primarily installation designers out in California. They're affiliated with Sci-Arc, and I suppose that what they do is exemplary digital architecture, in the sense that it's humorous, playful, and perhaps most importantly , it's clever without being overwrought. There's also a larger feature about BIG's '8 House', a rather massive 21st century version of a streets-in-the-sky megastructure. Although Bjarke Ingels himself was (perhaps understandably) quite evasive about having his work compared to something like Park Hill or Robin Hood Gardens, the over-arching concern is remarkably similar; the introduction of traditional (or at least regular) patterns of street life into much larger structures and arrangements.


The day trip to Copenhagen was certainly a somewhat depressing one, but basically for reasons of London's continuing malady than anything else. It really is beautiful, all rugged Scandinavian civic architecture (the old stock exchange (pictured) being a particular highlight), the seemingly effortless modernism, the water everywhere, the obviously slight wealth discrepancies compared to the UK, combined with that old cliche of relaxed and healthy looking people cycling everywhere. BIG have a lovely office, even if it's clear that they're as stuffed with over-stretched interns as anywhere in less relaxed parts of the world, but they have a lovely kitchen. Even Ørestad, the brand-new neighbourhood built to the South of Copenhagen, which is still mostly credit-crunched, even this place had a sense of insouciance and life to it. Add to this the accidental stumbling upon an iron and glass winter garden, the sheer thrill of a nearly deserted airport at the end of the day (bringing to mind Mirabele, that great white elephant) and the pleasures of making the acquaintance of a charming fellow traveller, and it was enough of a pleasurable experience to put one into a really foul mood upon return.

BLOGS
Carl at the Impostume has started / is part of a new group blog abut the 70s, which is thus far excellent. There was a recent post about growth and decline, and about how the 70s prefigured much of what we've been hearing about ecological catastrophe in the last 10 years. The following passage is utterly fascinating, and worth mulling over:

Because of course, the end of growth, and consequent decline, doesn’t need to lead to starvation, anarchy, totalitarianism or genocide. Between a techno-grandiose future of plenty and the apocalypse, there lies a "third way" - decade after decade, century after century, of drab, dilapidated crapness; a distended Seventies stretching over the horizon, where it may only give way to a similarly distended Fifties, and then a Thirties and so on. This is the future most unacceptable to the Western mind, but alas the one it appears most likely to encounter.

Found Objects continues to be excellent, and I was very flattered to see something wot I did pop up on the site. Thanks, (mostly) unknown hauntologists!

I wrote something about Cory Arcangel before, where I noted his ability to tease out the utterly abject side of internet culture. Well, he now has a blog dedicated entirely to 'sorry I haven't posted in a while' blog posts. It's hilarious and abject, which is a delicious combination.

FILM

I've seen Patrick Keiller's new film, 'Robinson in Ruins'. I'm due to write a review of it, but I'll most likely write something on here as well, perhaps at length. It's going to be abject.

TALKS AND WALKS
E&V is due to be doing a bunch of walks and talks in the next couple of months; I'll let you know what happens.

BOOKS
I'm currently reading the correspondence of Samuel Beckett. I feel like I'm 19 again.

More from the vaults.

This is probably one of the first pieces of music that I recorded when I moved to London. At this point I was listening a lot to the music of Colleen, and was discovering the world of low-key improv that used to be based around the Sound 323 shop that used to sit up in Archway.

Around that time I recorded quite a few of these improvised drone-pieces, which were made by looping up tiny little guitar gestures which would coalesce into a much larger aggregates of sound. Listening back to this recently, and generally thinking about the time of my arrival in the 'Great Wen', what has changed since then and what hasn't; it's quite a painfully nostalgic feeling. And what with the sense that this whole country is currently being driven over the edge of a cliff, then it's quite a difficult time to be feeling enthused about the problem that is London.

(It's also interesting to me that I had an interest in poor quality recording and decayed media for quite a while before ever reading about sonic hauntology, although I was already reasonably well versed in Derrida by that point).

Metaphysics of Crackle

Dear reader, tonight I have been mostly listening to Mark 'K-Punk' Fisher's mix for Pontone. I really cannot recommend it enough. It's stuffed with tracks from the likes of the Caretaker, Black to Comm, William Basinski and Philip Jeck, and it features a track by Asher, who I had never heard of before tonight but now am VERY interested in.

I suppose you might want to listen to this alongside the mix that Kode9 and Burial did for Mary Anne Hobbs' last show at the BBC a week ago, which, if you can find it, is excellent. Mark's mix is of course firmly within the aesthetic of hauntology, but if anybody is allowed to do hauntological mixes then it's the very man who resurrected(!) the term... Here's what he has to say:

What you hear in a recording is not there. It is a spectre. You always hear more and less than was ‘there’ at the time and place of the recording. With vinyl records, the more that you often hear is crackle, the sound of the material surface of the playback medium. When vinyl was ostensibly superseded by digital playback systems – which seem to be sonically ’invisible’ - many producers were drawn towards crackle, the material signature of that supposedly obsolete technology. Crackle disrupts presence in multiple ways: first by reminding us of the material processes of recording and playback, second by connoting a broken sense of time, and third by veiling the official ‘signal’ of the record in noise. For crackle is of course a noise in its right, a ground become a figure. Listen to it for a while and you start to hear patterns; you become susceptible to audio hallucinations.

Excuses, excuses...

So, I really haven't written anything of length for a long time on here. This is puzzling, and of course disconcerting.
I started writing something about Chris Petit's incredible 'Content', but it stalled. It's a film which you really ought to see, if you're the sort of person who might hang around here on this blog. It is a work firmly located within the 'Architectural Melancholy' mode, experimental and haunting. I let out a sigh when reading the description of Petit as a "lugubrious aesthete fixated with the increasing intangibility of a post-industrial world" in Owen's Icon review, it seemed so tailor made to the E&V sensibility. If I can drag my fingers to the keys properly, then I'll write up the full length thing, which was to be about investigating Petit (and Ian Penman, who collaborates in 'Content') attitude to the spectrality and loneliness of the internet, the yawning absence of a true modernity, and the troubling form of the distribution sheds. In the manuscript wot I just wrote, I touch upon the distribution sheds in terms of their resemblance to hi-tech architecture, but I never really investigate further. But if I'm serious about an 'ugly functionalism', or the 'fantastic dreariness' of Cedric Price, then I'll need to tease out some kind of meaning from these objects.

I haven't been writing quite so much outside of the blog either, although at the moment I'm fairly busy with a few interviews and even a forthcoming cross-european visit to write about a new building, which is either a work of solutionist charlatanry or perhaps the first time someone's done something new with the housing estate in a long time. There might be a few more public appearances and drips & drabs of teaching, which I'll tell you about in due course. And, if you need someone to write, I can wrote proper good word.

But I have actually been reading a lot - blogs even. My Google Reader list has been getting quite large, and actually quite depressing. Day after day certain websites throw another twenty or so press releases out into the world, a seemingly endless stream of quite-ok work, which you either like or you don't, before promptly forgetting about it seconds later. I remember the thrill of the very early days of file sharing (Napster, Audiogalaxy, that kind of thing) where two regimes of cultural accumulation overlapped for a while - the genuine joy of finding something rare, something you might have heard about but never been able to find, and the sudden abundance of anything and everything. Nowadays of course the very notion of rare culture is disappearing. We might call it democratic, but there is of course a deadening of mystery that comes from this accessibility. If we know anything about desire it is that its easy and immediate satisfaction is not particularly healthy. Or maybe I'm just losing my edge.
I've also been reading more novels recently. After going through the ordeal that was 'The Kindly Ones' I'm currently reading Lanark, which has managed already to be very moving. It's such a strange feeling to be reading about Glasgow from the perspective of an exile, albeit one only six hours away by train, but today it was so very very strange to be reading Gray's quasi-autobiographical description of attending the Glasgow School of Art. Although he's describing the '50s, it didn't stop floods and floods of my own memories hammering down on me like the storm that was battering my train carriage as I read.

Music is another thing that has been keeping me from writing here recently, although a wounded index finger had put a stop to that for a while. You might have had a listen to my Wagner / Iron & Glass thing the other day, and most of what I've been playing has been along those lines, although it has been a mixed bag. I'll probably start trying to record more of these pieces, if only to document the quite possibly 100+ nearly-finished arrangements that I've got sitting around. I suspect that most of the people who read my architecture stuff aren't particularly interested in German Late Romantic music being played badly on an instrument to which it is not suited, but those are the perils of the self-published internet after all. Which brings me to...

I must say that I nearly jumped out of my skin when heard about this record, and came minutes away from getting it on vinyl, despite not being a DJ, or having a turntable in my room. I'm not a huge fan of Matthew Herbert, although I appreciate his conceptual approach to music making. I generally find some of his dance/pop music to be a little bit twee at times in its mannered funkiness. But an album, part of Deutsche Grammophon's Recomposed series, that digitally re-imagines Mahler's Tenth Symphony? Mein Gott! It's almost as if they had made it just for me!
So: what is it? It's basically a recording of the Adagio first movement of the tenth symphony, acoustically situated. The only aspect of it that is recorded anew is at the beginning, which features the opening melody played on a single viola, apparently at the composer's graveside. Over the course of the next forty minutes or so, recordings of the piece are played into various acoustic settings - notably the inside a coffin and behind the curtain at a crematorium. All of the conceptual re-recordings in some way relate to Mahler's death-fixation, which is an over-stressed theme, but did of course exist.
Each re-recording changes the acoustic qualities of the record, sometimes sounding tinny, occasionally as if it's underwater. You can sometimes hear vehicles and animals in the distance. In this sense it relates strongly to Gavin Bryar's "The Sinking of the Titanic", which conceptually recreates various acoustic properties derived from the story of the Titanic and the performance of 'Nearer My God to Thee' which supposedly continued as the band sank with the ship. Unfortunately some of the Herbert recording works well, while some of it doesn't. When the piece has the high frequencies lopped-off, and one can hear the sounds of rain, it's a successful example of some of the things that I try to achieve when I write music. But when Herbert takes the gigantic 9-note chord from late in the movement, his way of destroying seems underwhelming; a throbbing noise over a rat-a-tat-tat rhythm that fails to live up to the expanded palette that Herbert seems so keen to achieve.
It also seems strange that Herbert has steered clear of hauntological territory here; he's surely not unaware of that now rather distended genre, which at its best in, say, Philip Jeck, is some of the most conceptually interesting and yet also gut-wrenchingly moving music of the last decade, but that also has the capacity to lapse into the decay-chic Wagner of Indignant Senility. But Bryars, who worked with Jeck on the most recent recording of 'Sinking of the Titanic' seems to have appreciated the resonances of crackle, of decayed media, of haunted sounds, while Herbert's is remarkably clean, mannered. It just seems that a lot more could have been done with this record - they should have gotten me to do it!

Iron, Glass & Wagner

Iron & glass architecture had a very strange relationship with music. This played out in a number of different ways, some of which I discuss in the manuscript for my book, or have written about here in the past. Take the 'discordant display of loyalty' as the two organs at either end of the Hyde Park palace failed to play 'God Save the Queen' in time with each other, or the very first recorded music, created by the Edison Gramophone Company at the gigantic Handel festivals which were held triennially at the Sydenham Crystal Palace. Listen to it again here, because it's absolutely stunning, if you're interested in that sort of thing.


On the other hand, another aspect of the musical life of the late 19th century was revealed to me during my studies, as my searches for material threw up more and more cheap and cheerful fodder, otherwise thankfully lost. The British Library has reams and reams of throwaway Victorian sheet music, all compiled into big fat volumes, all of it dirge, and in a few cases composed in honour of some new edifice that had just been thrown up. Hence 'the Albert Palace Grand March' above, one of two pieces composed in honour of the ill-fated iron & glass building off Battersea Park, which I previously depicted in what you might call a quasi-ruined state, driving friends, colleagues and lovers to near-total distraction.

So imagine my surprise when, inamongst the vulgar kitsch of Crystal Palace Waltzes and such like, I found the following passage, regarding the Philadelphia Exhibition of 1876:

“The Women’s Centennial Executive Committee […] commissioned the Centennial Inauguration March from Richard Wagner which was played at the opening ceremony on 10 May 1876. Joseph Wilson, Henry Petit’s Partner, felt that ‘to one who is an enthusiastic admirer of Wagner, it must be confessed that it is somewhat disappointing. Still, it is Wagner. None can dispute that. The grand clashes, swelling up and up until they almost overtop the heaven’s themselves’”.

Allwood, John. The Great Exhibitions. London : Studio Vista, 1977, p.54

Was this some example of a decent piece of music being composed to go along with an iron & glass building? Well, I had a look at it when in the library, and I must say that, lo and behold, it wasn't particularly impressive. In fact, it was as dirge-like as any other piece of shit throwaway music from the period. (If you have access to spotify you can hear all thirteen achingly dull minutes of it here). Indeed - Allmusic have an interesting anecdote about the piece:

Meanwhile, the United States was preparing to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence and, at Christmas 1875, commissioned Wagner to compose a commemorative march for the occasion. By February 1876 it was completed, as music for the Flower Maidens in Parsifal sprang to mind -- perhaps they wanted to be Americans, he quipped. Wagner was obviously correct when he said of this vacuously pompous effusion that the best thing about it was the $5,000 he was paid for it, which funded -- despite a festival deficit of 150,000 marks -- an Italian vacation.

From here.

So we have here two opposed logics regarding the music of the exhibition palaces. On the one hand the music that accompanied them was altogether vulgar and unrefined, totally in keeping with the pomp and naivety of their popular reception, but on the other hand we can look back and collect reverberations, echoes and distorted memory artefacts, coming to understand the haunted qualities of their musical cultures, much as we understand the strange dreaminess of their spatial qualities, both dream qua hope and dream qua phantasm, in accordance with Walter Benjamin's analysis.

But in fact, we have not yet exhausted Wagner's contribution to iron & glass and its cultures. First I'd like to note here his minor appearance in Kenneth Frampton's excellent 1970s essay Industrialisation and the Crises in Architecture, where Wagner comes to represent a similar bourgeois reaction to industrialisation (which Frampton describes as 'The Crisis of 1851'):

In short, Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk became the aesthetic model for a wholesale bourgeois retreat from the barbarisms of an industrialised world. From Morris’ Red House, built at Bexley Heath in 1859, to Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde of the same date was but a step.

Oppositions reader : selected readings from a journal for ideas and criticism in architecture, 1973-1984 New York : Princeton Architectural Press, c1998. p.51

In this case Wagner strongly represents the whole-hearted rejection of technology, and of course it's very easy to draw lines between the Pre-Raphaelites, with their medievalist aesthetic, and Wagner's own pagan nonsense. I'm certainly no expert on Wagner's work but generally I don't think that there's really any machines in there - the utilisation of myth as some kind of universal doesn't make much sense when you consider that industrialisation was already near-fully established: by 1844 Charles Valentin Alkan had already composed 'Le chemin de fer', a rather mental etude depicting a railway journey. The universality of myth in this instance can only really point backwards.

But it's actually more complicated than that. Wagner, while working on 'Tristan und Isolde', was living in a house in the garden of his patrons the Wesendoncks. He, being Wagner, got rather too close to Mathilde Wesendonck, although nobody is quite sure whether they 'got it on', so to speak. While he was there he composed the Wesendonck Lieder, some of his only music that isn't set to one of his own texts. The poems that he set were ones written by Mathilde, including one called 'Im Treibhaus' (In the Greenhouse), which is a substantially more modern subject than what we might be used to from Wagner.


Musically the piece is a sketch for the Prelude to Act III of Tristan und Isolde, with Tristan's leitmotif, the ascending four notes that govern the entire opera, stretched out across a minor scale, and a lushly abject voicing of the tonic chord. This alternates with short passages of more bittersweet character, although still quintessentially Wagner; those slippery, wandering minor chords sliding in and out through tight chromatic voice leading. Overall it's a small-scale and less bombastic side to Wagner and thus is far more palatable than one might normally find him, although it's no less brilliant as a result.

But the lieder as a whole is what is most interesting here. The protagonist is in a winter garden considering the lot of the plants, which have been uprooted and brought to this horticultural museum:

Hochgewölbte Blätterkronen,
Baldachine von Smaragd,
Kinder ihr aus fernen Zonen,
Saget mir, warum ihr klagt?

High-vaulted crowns of leaves,
Canopies of emerald,
You children of distant zones,
Tell me; why do you lament?

The protagonist compares the alienation and suffering of life to the strange-nature of the greenhouse:

Wohl, ich weiß es, arme Pflanze;
Ein Geschicke teilen wir,
Ob umstrahlt von Licht und Glanze,
Unsre Heimat ist nicht hier!

I know well, poor plants,
A fate that we share,
Though we bathe in light and radiance,
Our homeland is not here!

Indeed, the lugubriousness of the scene is encapsulated in what must be one of the darkest lines I've ever come across in a Lied:

Und umschlinget wahnbefangen
Öder Leere nicht'gen Graus.

And embrace through insane predilection
The desolate, empty, horrible void.

Gosh.

Anyway, it's worth looking just a tiny bit closer at this. The setting for the poem is not a public greenhouse like the Jardin d'Hiver or Kew Gardens, although they did exist at this point. Instead, we can assume that we are inside a private greenhouse. The earliest winter gardens, originating around the beginning of the 19th century, were not public buildings, but rather spaces attached to aristocratic houses. Public winter gardens would only start to be built from around 1848, of course, but once they were on the scene the era of the private winter garden was in decline, accompanied by a deepening, you might say thickening of the Romantic aesthetic. Kohlmeier and Von Sartory's amazing Houses of Glass outlines this condition in the following passages:

With the change from family- based enterprises to the anonymity of twentieth-century monopoly capital, the era of the private winter garden came to an end […] the winter garden [w]as a place beyond the reach of ordinary mortals, an unreal world where amid rarities and rituals the nobility prepared to make its departure from the historical scene. As the nobility was relinquishing the acquisition of nature to the bourgeoisie (which, moreover, began to buy up the castles and mansions), it developed a sense of Romanticism for which the winter garden was the last refuge.
Kohlmaier, G & von Sartory, B, Houses of Glass, Cambridge, Mass. London : MIT press, 1986.p.31

So, on the one hand this piece of music can function as a lament for cultural decline as seen from the endangered aristocracy. In this sense, the fragility of the alienated plants is a metaphor for the beauty and delicacy of a vulnerable way of life being threatened from below by the ascendant and uncouth bourgeoisie. Proust, of course, bases so much of the Recherche on this botanical image of the aristocracy - too beautiful and rare to survive in this new world.

But I would prefer to read this differently. The alienation of the poem might be understood with the benefit of conceptual hindsight. Here we can think that the fragility of the plants in their artificial environment forces a reframing of concept of nature, an obvious artifice that reveals an underlying artifice. In this sense we are closer to what is more interesting and radical about Romantic attitudes to nature - indifference rather than harmony, fragment over totality. This already-alienated nature universalises in a way no anti-industrial grasp at timelessness could ever possibly achieve.

With this piece in consideration, we now have what is almost a perfect musical correspondence to the three main different cultural readings of Iron & Glass architecture that I'm trying to understand. There is the naïve and the glorious, as represented by the Victorian pap that accompanied the pomp. There is also our archived perception of the memory of the iron & glass world, as testified by the haunted recordings and images of the buildings that are long gone, and indeed were barely there in the first place. To this we can add the strange romantic attitude whose melancholic gaze does not look back wistfully, but confronts its technologised setting and reframes itself accordingly.


King Ludwig of Bavaria, Wagner's eventual patron, had this large winter garden built on the roof of his palace in Munich.

hypnagogia

Well, at the end of the day hauntology can be a funny old thing, more than a little open to satire. I've already noted that Enigma's 'Sadness Part I' has a video that is almost a pastiche of the Derridean imagination (scholars, dust, ruins, etc...), but then there's other ways you can play this game. At the Wire 'salon' mentioned in the previous post, Tony Herrington mentioned a video by Oneohtrix Point Never, shown below, which highlights the 'American' branch of the sensibility, hypnogogic pop, with MOR rather than municipal modernism as its material.


Fair enough, there is actually something there, but then the next video also has something there as well, the amnesiac loops, the nostalgic childhood material, the safe past reformed into something noisy and confrontational.


Quite why the Long Good Friday theme is necessary I can't quite work out, but there it is, which is no bad thing. I think it works as an interesting companion piece to the video from the previous post.

Hauntological Record Breaking

I didn't get a chance to go the Wire's Hauntology Salon a few weeks ago, but I recently listened to the recording of the event from the Wire's website. I was struck by something that Adam Harper said, which was along the lines of "'Indignant Senility's Wagner project is the furthest back that Hauntology has gone". Now, personally I don't think the Indignant Senility record is particularly good, as it brings absolutely nothing to the table that isn't already done better in the Caretaker, and acts as a continuation of the reduction of the interesting aspects of hauntology into a kit of aesthetic parts. This is despite Harper's protestations regarding the 'utopian' aspects of Wagner, which I'm not buying, especially after having just read Adorno's book on Mahler. Adorno's ideas about the inclusive nature of Mahler's sound world are a lot more suitable to Harper's notions of sonic collage, which he points out in Charles Ives, than the doubtless universes of Wagner. Hauntology, when it is interesting, is defined by weakness, a quality almost completely absent in Wagner but continually present in Mahler. While in hauntological music this weakness is often manifested in crackle, dust etc, in the pre-recording music of Mahler it is manifested not only by the use of common tunes inamongst his high art, but also in a continual refusal to make a definitive statement; his pieces are often arguments with themselves, making doubt into a creative force.


Anyway, I was digging around my hard drive today and I found the above piece, which surely must be the earliest hauntological source, unless somebody wants to do Palestrina or John Dowland... It's based on a fragment of Bach's Komm Süßer Tod, (Come, Sweet Death) which is also the source for Knut Nysted's utterly amazing 'Immortal Bach', which I've written about before, and is a lot more interesting than my simple and derivative sketch.

Haunted Piano

This is exceptionally interesting.

What is happening here is that a chap has written a patch and designed a machine to mimic human speech patterns. The composer starts by recording a sound, in this case a child bizarrely reciting a document from the European Parliament. This sound can be analysed spectrographically, with particular regard to the speech formants, which are the resonant frequencies of various parts of the mouth and throat that allow us to create and distinguish the different vowel sounds. Speech generally doesn't have a specific 'tone', and so the defining character of the sound will be these formants, of which two are usually enough to distinguish any particular vowel. What the composer has also done is created a 'map' of the potential resonances of a piano. Each of the piano's 88 sets of strings vibrate at numerous different frequencies, in an arithmetic sequence (x,2x,3x,4x,5x... etc), diminishing in amplitude as the vibration rate increases (it is the clash of the logarithmic sequence of apparent pitch (octaves at x,2x,4x,8x,16x,32x... etc) and the arithmetic sequence of vibrations that makes harmony possible in the first place). By mapping out the potential frequencies of the piano as a sort of 'palette' of sound, and then constructing a machine that is capable of highly sensitive fractional nuance of tone, the original sound can be retroactively mapped onto the piano and then reproduced.

Now; this stimulates a number of little ideas we like; one - This ability to hear the voice through only partial recreation is known as 'auditory pareidolia', a sort of sonic 'gestalt' whereby a mostly random pattern is interpreted as a recognisable voice. Familiar as 'EVP', this is H-logy in a nutshell; the uncannily possessed technology (i.e. the machine inhabited by spirit, the non-present in presence etc etc.), which has been discussed at much length in various places.
two- one of the standard tropes in criticism of musical performance is what is often called 'the cry'; especially with woodwind, brass and string players, the ability to mimic human voice patterns is considered to be one of the most important paths to excellence of performance. What the video above suggests to me is that in the technique of 'great' pianists, there might already be barely conscious variations in fingering pressure that shape the overall tone slightly towards the timbre of vowel sounds, which would partially explain the emotional power of certain performances.

ps- this double coding of sound is something that I've done a fair bit of research into...

Dust to Digital

Au Clair de la Lune from Dust-to-Digital on Vimeo.

I featured this before when it was first discovered, but now there it has been released on vinyl by Dust-to-Digital. Basically; it's the earliest recording of the human voice ever made. It was made by Éduoard-Léon Scott de Martinville using a phonautogram - basically a one way microphone, and it was literally engraved into dust on a piece of paper, with no real way of replaying the sound. What has now been done is that the image of the sound has been scanned, and then reconstituted into sound. It's funny, because when it was first replayed, they got the speed very wrong and thought it was a recording of a peasant woman, when in fact it was Éduoard-Léon recording himself.

It does bother me, though, that there's no real information on exactly what programme was used to rebuild the sound. There are numerous bits of software such as coagula or metasynth which allow you to generate sound from an image, and I'm suspicious that this is all that they've done, which would make the resulting sound a very tenuous recreation of the original (even on a good day, if you take a sound, store its spectrogram and then input that back into the image-synth, the decay is substantial...) Basically, to call it the earliest recorded music is to be highly dismissive of this, something I've also featured before:


At the Crystal Palace they used to hold a triennial 'Handel Festival', with around 700 musicians, and 3,000 singers, and an audience of 20,000, and in 1888 this was recorded for the Edison company, which is the music above (note; the photograph was taken at the last festival in 1926).

If this wasn't haunto enough for you, a wee quote from the Musical Times, found in Musgrave's 'The Musical Life of the Crystal Palace' is telling. It regards the installation of a new ceiling for the concert hall, in the main transept of the palace, in order to solve the reverberatory problems of all that iron and glass:

Some of the chorsuses are no doubt heard with better effect than others; but the fogginess and uncertainty incident to the manifestations of the former festivals are wholly got rid of.

reverberations = fog and uncertainty. It's like a ghostly formula.

Chopin, op.35 part III, played by Raoul Pugno

Circa 1903. Thanks to Al for drawing this to my attention.
Apparently "the sound is distorted because the record was cut on a defective turntable with fluctuating speed" (see also)...

The Accidental Invention of a Whole New Genre...

Is this not the best thing ever? I'm so impressed I can barely even begin to discuss it... Seen via FJ, who provocatively calls it 'Instant Hauntology'. I must have a wee think about that...

Haunted Funk

Went to see Ariel Pink tonight, which was, somewhat surprisingly, an excellent gig, thoroughly dance-able, touching upon ill-remembered Fleetwood Mac, Dire Straights, with even a hint of Nirvana creeping in there as well. But looking at the videos, I spotted a conceptual similarity - the question is of course, is Snoop Dogg the Hip-Hop-Hauntologist?

ps- watch the two videos simultaneously, they synchronise rather well...

He's come about the reaping..?

I’m reading Christopher Belshaw’s Annihilation at the moment, a hearty jaunt through the philosophies of death. It seems that most (or at least a lot of) contemporary thanatology seems to come from that strange section of Anglo Saxon philosophy that deals in no-nonsense, common sense language, useful perhaps in ethics and for lawmakers, dealing with cases of comas, persistent vegetative states and so on, but often infuriatingly complacent with norms and full of assumptions and simplifications about what makes a subject.

In works like this, or the more entertaining Better Never to Have Been by David Benatar, the writers often struggle with words like ‘harm’ or ‘asymmetry’, attempting to cram subjectivity into charming little logic tables with columns and rows entitled ‘Unsatisfied (bad)’, ‘Absence of pain (good)’, or ‘Presence of sickness (bad)’, and other laughably inadequate descriptions of states of being.

When Belshaw discusses the possibility of ‘defining’ death, a definition being necessarily true in all cases, he (rather charmingly, and not entirely ignorantly) blunders across the field of aesthetics in an attempt to stress the inadequacy of absolute definitions; a passage which includes the following sublime nugget:

“We know that the Mona Lisa is a work of art, that bombing Fallujah is not, and we know these things even while being uncertain what to say about a number of problem works. Perhaps if we discovered certain further facts – Leonardo copied, Fallujah was planned by the Chapman brothers – then these judgements would need to be revised.”

At which point I nearly spat out my coffee.

Clumsy rhetoric notwithstanding, Belshaw is quite right when he points out that death cannot be reduced to a definition based on organisms, functioning and irreversibility, although his dealing with each of these cases lacks thoroughness: his difficulty with defining ‘organism’ (how much can you remove from an organism to change its identity? Can there be organisms within organisms?) puts me in mind of DeLanda’s New Philosophy of Society (not a great work by any means, but it does at least present an attempt at working through this problem), his definition of functioning – a thing doing what is supposed to – is inadequate, leading to him making statements such as;

“you and I are functioning organisms; Tutankhamen and Lenin are not”

when we could just as easily say that Lenin is the most functional out of the four of us, in terms of how much the organism effects other organisms or networks of organisms. But of course that is a bit too meta... Eventually Belshaw admits;

“it is beginning to look as if we cannot define anything unless we can define everything”

which sounds a bit like a desperate cry for phenomenology.

Perhaps it’s just the angle of approach I’m making towards this branch of thought, perhaps I’m too used to psychoanalytical or ‘Continental’ (ewww…) philosophy to really feel comfortable with the style, but one often feels that a bigger scope would be better for this kind of subject. Here’s some early Lacan, in a rare discussion of death, basically hitting the nail on the head – the problem of death is not death, the problem is life. Everything is dead, apart from these heaps of matter that somehow decide that they are selves.

“That is what life is – a detour, a dogged detour, in itself transitory and precarious, and deprived of any significance. Why, in that of its manifestations called man, does something happen, which insists throughout this life, which is called a meaning? […] A meaning is an order that suddenly emerges. A life insists on entering into it, but it expresses something which is completely beyond this life, since when we get to the root of this life, behind the drama of the passage into existence, we find nothing besides life conjoined to death.”

Of course, this is part of a discussion of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and comes at an early point before Lacan fully developed his concept of drive, but it thinks in the same direction that (oh here we go again) Derrida thinks spectrality: life and death are not opposites – there is death in everything, and if we are to deal with extinction as truth, the misrecognition of being, the concatenation of life-meanings as generated and perpetuated by the Symbolic (Lacan) or traces, archives, writing (Derrida) is already dead also. All being is haunted matter.

Anyway, I’ve got a little more Belshaw to read, perhaps the last chapters are on Meillasoux, Brassier and Metzinger, although I reckon that’s distinctly unlikely.

It's All Forgotten Now...

V/Vm are rebuilding their web presence, and have recently been uploading lots of their music onto youtube.
In case you hadn't heard it, the Caretaker project is one of the best ideas in recent electronic music, a concept based on Kubrick's use of Al Bowlly in The Shining, which over the last couple of years has developed into a truly excellent exposition of some of the central aspects of hauntological culture. So now is a great time to get on your haunted ballroom shoes and strictly come ghost-dancing...

Deathprod - Imaginary Songs from Tristan da Cunha

One artist who I'm very surprised has never been mentioned in various discussions of hauntology in music is Helge Sten. One time member of Norwegian band Motorpsycho, and currently one quarter of quasi-anonymous prog-improv group Supersilent, between 1991 and 2004 he created a unique body of work under the name Deathprod, alas one of the silliest monikers I've come across.

The music he creats is electroacoustic, slow and minimal. It conjures forth allusions; to expansive skies, to enveloping fogs, to faded old photographs. Sten works with fragments of sound and brings forth the dirt and grain within them, using mechanical means to create an organic sound of disintegration. The music has a character that is at once monumental and totally vulnerable.

A selected output was released in a non-more-black box by Rune Grammofon in 2004, and I remember it being in the top 5 records of the year for '04 in the Wire. I might discuss other aspects of his work at another point, as it's certainly a point of reference for certain E&V musical projects, but at this point I'll focus on one part, the four 'Imaginary Songs from Tristan da Cunha'.

Tristan da Cunha is officially the most remote human settlement in the world. An active volcano situated half-way across the Southern Atlantic, it has been home to a permanent population since the early 19th century, a population which now numbers around 270, all descended from the original seven families. Of course by now they all have satellite TV, but the symbolic value of the remoteness is undeniable - it is said to be possible, once on the island, to be unable to leave again for a year. Deathprod's compositions use this remoteness as a thematic organising principle; the songs are named after different parts of the island; Burntwood, Stony Beach, Hotentott Gulch and Boatharbour Bay, and the mood of desolate isolation is palpable. The compositions themselves have no literal representative quality, however, preferring to focus on isolation as a broader concept.

The mode of creation of the four short compositions (lasting around two minutes each) is remarkable, and an excellent example of a proto-hauntological conception of musical composition. Sten travelled into the woods of Norway to record fellow Rune Grammofon artist Ole Henrik Moe's violin. These recordings were then edited by Sten, who then, and this is the most remarkable aspect, had them transferred onto wax cylinders, the Victorian forerunners of the vinyl record, whose deteriorated sound quality Sten then re-recorded to create the final pieces.

What a number of possible reference points this method provides us with: we can look back to Edison's original wax cylinder recordings, hauntingly distant to us now, or perhaps we can find parallels in Alvin Lucier's I Am Sitting In a Room, with its use of decay as a way of understanding, or characterising a specific space. The Disintegration Loops of William Basinski are a definite point of reference with their use of degradation as a generator of a kind of thematic development, and then of course there is the foregrounded audio decay of The Caretaker or Philip Jeck.

The pieces themselves ache with fragility, as if they were made entirely from ash (with all of the Derridean implications), ready to disintegrate with the slightest touch, yet possessing a clawing intensity. Along with the rest of Deathprod's oeuvre, the Imaginary Songs... deserve to be acknowledged as significant works of Ghost Music.