EEAH Series Retrospective (ft. Heronbone)

The following correspondence about my blog series Esoteric Experiences at Home (1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14) was conducted with Luke Davis, poet and author of an influential 2000s Grime blog.

Generally when people think of a blog they think of a place where you jot down an idea or an impression and move on. What you've written has moved along at a much slower pace. What was the ongoing impetus behind this project?

It stemmed out of conversations we had on Dissensus, and the books that influenced those conversations, mainly Energy Flash and More Brilliant Than the Sun. I found that thinking about this stuff made music more exciting and vivid. It made me realize what qualities I most valued and responded to in music. But by the time I wrote the first half of this series, it felt like the conversations had died down, had run out of momentum. Rather than abandoning all the interesting tangents they'd generated, it seemed like there was an opportunity to sort of step back and take stock of where my brain had ended up. A chance to go, ok, maybe they’ve obvious, or maybe they’re nonsense, but here are the thoughts I’ve found useful. This is the stuff I don’t want to forget. And that process involved trying to structure them and put them in context: that of a relationship with music which was and mostly still is entirely internet-mediated.

I didn’t get around to writing the second half, the part about audio animation, until now. Why? Well, obviously the main reason is laziness. I'm not nearly as good at writing as I am at wasting time. What probably rekindled the project was an increasing frustration with the split nature of the discourse around music I was interested in. On the one hand there's stuff about “cinema for the ear” but it's mostly an enclave of academics writing papers about a narrow subset of compositions in the musique concrète tradition. There's often this rhetorical frame of it being a fundamentally different artform than other electronic music. But for me the initial pull of this way of hearing came from other stuff. The first music I heard as cinema for the ear was probably Selected Ambient Works 85-92, or maybe the opening minutes of Future Days. Or, as another example, I always found it eerie how Suicide's "Rocket USA" evoked a very specific scene in my mind's eye: the perspective of driving down a highway at night, maybe along Manhattan, sort of crossfaded with moving through a long, dilapidated apartment hallway. But it hit me at some point that two sound characters you hear in the song are quite relevant to that storyworld: the drum machine, with its motorik propulsion, and this omnipresent droning synth that sounds a bit like the hum of fluorescent lights.

In Energy Flash and More Brilliant than the Sun and Neon Screams, as well as certain Dissensus threads, there are moments where this discourse emerges around music to which it's ostensibly irrelevant. Obviously there is an awareness of some of the more academic stuff. Eshun in particular quotes people like Stockhausen, Michel Chion, and R. Murray Schafer in his book, even describing Public Enemy's music as "acousmatic" for example. There aren't many references to this world in Blissblogger's writing from the same period, but it's become a substantial part of his blog repository since then. Woebot, with his writing about "physics" in jungle also fits into this. Even Kit Mackintosh was subjected to some cinema for the ear against his will. But all this wasn't quite part of the older conversation. So I've thought for a while that there could still be more to discover by putting all this stuff on the same listening plane, as you so easily can when you’re discovering it through the internet. So I tried to organize some thoughts from that angle and get a bit past where threads like “Phenomenology of Electroacoustic” trailed off in the past. 

Strictly adhering to the pronouncements made in this series isn't the point. But I’ve seen how even artists themselves can seem to intuit these lessons and then forget them, losing some of their powers without noticing. To some extent I can accept this forgetting as an inevitable part of life, the cost of movement and change. But maybe chronicling your intuitions and revelations at a particular point in your life, not letting them get lost immediately in the rearranging of the sand dunes, is a good idea. It’ll benefit you later, or maybe someone else who you’ll never meet or know about. This project is a retrospective, in a way, but it’s driven by a desperate urge to build a more lasting base from which to explore deeper and farther. A desire to advance.

I think it’s an important effort, because music does map experience. I’ve tried to explain this to Edmund* but he refuses to believe that music works in this way. He says that once a sound appears in a tune, it’s just a note and nothing else. How would you defend your theorizing to Edmund?

I have a lot of respect for the lens of absolute music. Super important, intelligent figures like Pierre Schaeffer and John Cage arrived at doctrines of listening which, roughly speaking, take that stance. But I think the most interesting artists influenced by them, from Maryanne Amacher to Francois Bayle, studied their approaches really intently and managed to combine the insights they’d gained from that with a respect for music's ability to evoke extra-sonic qualities. For me it's at this point of convergence that listening gets especially exciting.

Sometimes people who favor the absolute music lens will actively object to the view that music is evocative. In my experience, there are two main ways people tend to say this. The first is, you’re weighing the music down with all this extra baggage, you're letting irrelevant concerns block your view of what's really there. Stop overthinking it and just listen. The other is, oh, if music was about other things that would just make it less unique, less special. 

With responses like this I begin to wonder if something’s getting lost in translation. Like maybe I'm not properly getting what's happening across. To me it seems instinctive to hear sound and have it trigger your imagination as to what might’ve made it. When our ancestors were hunting in a forest and heard a growl from behind some bushes they didn’t go, oh, nice tessitura in that sound object, nice diminished triad (although that may have registered on some level too). They probably went, oh fuck, there's a monster. So it's not some kind of aberration to hear the strange sounds of electronic music in this way. If anything it’s absolute music that's a recent development. 

At its core I think Music, capital "M" Music versus music, to use Pierre Schaeffer’s distinction, is basically magic speech. But audio animation is just taking that interpersonal process and combining it with what McLuhan called acoustic space, this outward, predator-sensing, oriented listening. So it's about taking advantage of inbuilt psychological abilities rather than applying some cut and dry intellectual process. To quote Rob Brown talking about Autechre’s artistic output:

there can be resemblances of these real sounds, but not really a pursuit to 'model' stuff. the grey area between familiarity and not, is more interesting , more unsettling, wakes you up. . . to me this acts like a cognitive glue in music. a binding agent. same with speech patterns and all that.

If someone read all this stuff about audio animation and concluded that it was instructing them to treat music as some kind of rote matching game of pinning sounds to known, nameable sources, I’d be horrified. No, the descriptions I come up with are just fumbling attempts to describe very visceral reactions. These are the vision-making tools, the basic orientations that allow the dream to come to life.

I agree with what you’re saying. When I listened to Bernard Parmesan in 2018 for instance drugs really opened my ears to the physicality of the sound. But I have to admit that in what you’ve written, the constant foregrounding of what you call “diegesis” makes me a bit antsy. This is an important way of mapping the experience definitely but it’s not the only level of play. I think there are other questions worth asking. For instance how does music convey a sense of personal identity or style, a way of carrying oneself in the world. Electro comes up in what you've written, and I do have certain memories of it from when I was very young. What struck me then wasn't the science fiction aspect, which I came to appreciate later, it was seeing kids breakdancing in the tube stations and the indifference of the commuters stepping around them. I sensed that they were openly defying an oppressive grey reality that London was mired in at the time. Later you got an even more potent energy with 2step then grime, it was mysterious but we all knew this music was the heartbeat of the city. For people who’ve grown up on the internet, this dynamic doesn’t exist, never has. This is what music being canceled means. There are still people making electro but it’s embarrassing and pointless. When you take this very real cultural and historical urgency out of the equation, what you’re left with is going through the motions, cosplaying as music. 

Hopefully it's obvious that this series is not some kind of polemic against music operating in the way you're describing. I'm very very very in favor of that. All three of the books I mentioned earlier are foremost about that, about chronicling a new force taking shape right in font of you. But you're right, that's not been my experience with music. If that sort of direct social contact is the only valid way to understand the medium, then I have no business talking about it. And maybe I don't. But I don't think that premise is true. Rouge's Foam has an incisive line about this issue. His position is as follows:

Music has always been a complex, highly ritualised social game steeped in centuries of convention, which cannot interact with, modify or reject the external world through anything as direct as art's visual iconicity. Music is certainly not the 'equivalent' of art, and one shouldn't expect it to be - it's a socio-cultural game, not an object.

What I find so interesting about this assertion is that, for me, music always has been an object. I’ve always made the mistake of treating music like I would a book or a film or a painting. Something to be poured over on your own. And so it always seems strange to me when people draw these double standards where if an author writes something dense and experimental it’s cool and venerable but if a musician does this it’s wank, it’s only for nerds. But he’s absolutely right, it’s my view that’s weird, not theirs. 

At the same time, though... if you’re willing to concede that even though oral storytelling is great, a book can contain an electric charge—I don't think this possibility should be too difficult to accept. I think it’s already resulted in great stuff. Sometimes. Even if it’s a misunderstanding of how music "should" work, it’s one that can have interesting consequences.  

You're probably right that there is a double standard in how we assess music compared to books and visual art. But I'm not sure that we can reason our way out of these biases. One difficulty for this vision is that music that takes direct influence from fictional worlds tends to be nerdy in a repellent way. A lot of internet music is like that. It ties in with Barty’s notion of bladerunner jungle as well. Once jungle starts aiming to be science fiction it becomes flat and lifeless. Its vital essence drained.

Ironically I like jungle that isn't "bladerunner jungle" for a lot of the same reasons I like the movie Bladerunner. Both give you futures where weathered remnants of past cultures stubbornly persist amongst the new and cold and inhuman. Broken statuettes next to holograms... you can get a comparable feeling from something like the "I'm on my waaaaaaaaay" fragment in DJ Ron's "Canaan Land"—and DJ Ron is "Kool FM jungle". The point being that it's possible, at least in other media, to create a kind of imaginary lived-in density, and instill all sorts of complex emotions from that. But yes, I agree that all this ultimately depends on results. "As long as the music's good."

Do you have any predictions about the future of music? Are music as diegesis and audio animation useful tools for what’s next?  

I have absolutely no idea. I don't even know what’s going on right now. The thing about creative mode is that it’s atemporal. Current music gets no precedence over old music in terms of visibility and accessibility. Which is the biggest obstacle for getting something new going. 

But the contention that the best music is evocative, and the lens of music as diegesis, seem very applicable to a lot of what’s been going on with internet music for over decade, the orienting around multimedia aesthetic “cores” and “waves” rather than real life scenes. Internet jungle posits it as the soundtrack to y2k virtual worlds, pairing it with video games instead of dancehall singers. You also get these releases that are hoaxes, generative ambient pieces supposedly made by some mythical computer programmer in Alabama who mysteriously vanished in 1991. The Underground Resistance model of the release as, in Eshun’s words, “an object from the world it posits” feels quite relevant to the current musical landscape. It seems to me that music as diegesis is, if anything, on the rise.

Audio animation is trickier to predict. The difficulty is that a lot of the initial modernist audio animators were inspired by the sounds of the world around them. In particular, by the unprecedented sounds of modern war. Luigi Russolo said that the “strangest and most powerful noises are gathered together” there. For people like Stockhausen and Xenakis the soundscapes of WWII likewise registered on an aesthetic level. Most producers of weird electronic music in 2024 have never even thought about going outside, let alone heard any sounds that didn’t come from their computer. Vektroid, I imagine, lives with nothing but a bed and a computer in some kind of Mary’s Room-esque sensory deprivation chamber deep inside a lab.

Obviously that's a glib way of putting it, but I do think it’s fair to say that a lot of people, certainly the people exploring music in the same way I am, spend a lot of their lives in what you might call dematerialized acoustic space. So the question is, how does this affect audio animation? Will this impoverish the canon or lend it new inspiration? I can think of a few strategies for creating a distinctly internet era audio animation.

One would be to draw on the unique sonic properties of these conditions. For example, I remember being quite struck during quarantine by some of the weird feedback effects you’d get on video calls with a lot of people. For a while my extended family got in the habit of having big Zoom gatherings every few weeks, and there would always be moments of auditory chaos. There could be people in one channel talking amongst themselves while people in two different channels were talking to each other, someone in the background of another unmuted channel using a blender, and so on. This mess of distorted sound that made the idea of new technology being frictionless and characterless seem absurd. Francois Bayle apparently premiered a new work recently called Zoom! that has something to do with "overlapping spaces". So some people noticed these weird internet soundscapes. Although music by a nonagenarian is unlikely to set any major trends.

Another source of new audio animation could be what Kieran Press-Blissblogger termed shitpost modernism. Memes at their best are the closest thing we have to an avant garde. A few years ago I put together a sort of meme megamix that's now actually regarded as quite seminal, called Pathways of Vernacular Morphology: A Retrospective of Independent Acousmatic Composition 2012-2019 that highlighted a few exemplary works of shitpost modernism.

Another source of inspiration could be video games. The soundworld of a video game might seem to pale in comparison to the real world, but I think there’s something here. Well, there's already influence, going back decades to stuff like Power Pill, but I'm talking about something deeper. For a while Vektroid was tagging her releases with the game descriptor "bullet hell"—so there's room for more of that sort of inspiration. Video games have been the most exciting form of visual animation for several decades, and are the central artform of our time. You can build an imaginary reality from the atomic level up, like you can in audio animation.

Obviously you'd hope that machine learning is leading to mind-blowing stuff. Lee Gamble’s Models and Debit’s The Long Count felt exciting to me. The memes people come out with can be especially mind-bending. It does seem like there is a historically unique chance to siphon the power of the archive into something new.

* Through extensive combing of old newspapers and Usenet threads, my research team was able to determine that the “Edmund” Luke refers to here is in fact Woops, the underworld explorer and universal sandwich purchaser referenced several times in the preceding text. Incidentally, last September I went up against Woops in an inebriated arm wrestling match, and for anyone wondering, yes, the match was incredibly high-level.

Floating Upward

So we’re back where we started: roaming freely across the musical landscape. Aware, now, of three lenses we carry with us, through which we can experience this landscape in different ways. These lenses are abstraction, performance, and diegesis—plus a variation on the third lens (less versatile but more fine-tuned), called audio animation. We’ve explored diegesis and animation, the fiction lenses, in greater depth, because I think they’re the most beautiful tools available to us. But there’s been a glaring omission. There’s another indispensable lens that you may have noticed I’ve never mentioned. And in order to appreciate the fiction lenses, we have to finally take this last lens out. 

This way of listening concerns music’s relation to the epochs of our own lives. Those instances where the work becomes inextricably entangled with the circumstances of the encounter. Intensely personal experiences get pulled into songs through accidental proximity, and live on as musically triggered memories afterward. The music doesn't just evoke fiction anymore, it evokes lived reality. We could call this way of hearing Music as Autobiography. It seems only fitting to elaborate on this lens by recounting a personal experience...

Long before I starting writing this series, I came across Evocative songs + crude photoshop approximations of their aesthetics as seen thru my mind's eye. The page is long gone, and was probably dashed off in a few hours of inspiration. But the basic premise and several images really resonated with my own intuitions, and seemed to validate them in a strange way. A few years ago, I randomly asked the author why they'd taken the page down. They generously explained that while Evocative songs had reflected how they felt at the time, the project seemed embarrassing in retrospect. I wish I still had their exact words, but essentially they felt that it had been a kind of imposition on other people’s subjectivities. The shift was evident in their newer posts, in which music wasn’t discussed so much as used as a springboard for what felt more like diary entries—funny and insightful, but inarguably person-specific. And I'm sure they're far from alone in feeling this way. Many take autobiography to be the ultimate listening lens. The wiser, more mature cousin of diegesis. 

It's true, autobiography avoids the arrogance of the second tense—that tyrannical imposition that I make constantly on this blog of informing you, the reader, what you're imagining and feeling when listening to something. Of all the music descriptions in this series, did a single write-up capture your experience exactly? I'd be shocked if there wasn't a single case where my exegesis appeared utterly wrong or irrelevant. Maybe, unlike me, you didn't hear Diversions 1994-1996 for the first time on the same night that you watched Akira—so my comparison between the two made no sense. As Borges observed, a person sets out to draw a map of the world only to find that they’ve drawn a map of their own face. The beauty of the autobiography lens is that it celebrates the resulting portrait. It acknowledges that exploring music is exploring your own psyche.

But there's something missing from this account. What about... the universal sandwich? It’s a harrowing story, as Luka tells it. Woops was in a Pret a Manger one day when the realization struck him that, across the world, billions of people were biting into the exact same sandwich as him. Yes, it's true that you life is an unknowable mystery to me. I've never been to Pret a Manger. But it's also true that I have been to Panera Bread. Our experiences aren't always so different. And when I'm listening to music, I'll sometimes get a sort of eerie, exhilarating encounter where my subjectivity seems to sync with someone else's. Often it's an alignment with the artist. I'll read some comment in an interview and go, I fucking knew it! Or some small musical decision will strike me as perfect. But it can also happen between listeners, when I hear something the same way someone else does.

Creative mode poses an obstacle for this sort of meeting. Encountering music as part of a real world subculture gives us a shared basis of experience through which to interpret what we're hearing. But if we all take radically different paths to get to a song, our assessments will be more atomized. Under these conditions, someone else's listening experience is only interesting as a window into their life. Not as a window into the art.

The magic of diegesis is that it's sharable subjectivity. Our imaginations are separate, but they can work together. That's the irony with Evocative songs—far from being an imposition, it stayed with me for almost a decade because of how well it aligned with my own psyche. By applying the fiction lenses, we can fumble toward a consilience of imagination. If recorded music is landscape, then this shared space is the shifting atmospheric layer that floats above it. We're simultaneously its vernacular architects and explorers. In an atomized state, perhaps it can be this public domain that makes music magic, that offers a sense of music's importance that we can share. 

END OF PRELUDE 

Fog of War

"I might have a cassette. . . and it might be a copy of a copy of a copy of a tape and there's all these weird nuances and distortions that have affected what I know as the truth, if you like, of that track. And I'll go and download or buy that original 12 and get it home and go, "Whoa, it sounds flatter than my version, the one that I've had for 15 years in my head is actually more exotic than had originally been intended in the studio at the time of making it. So I know that there's a lot of room to maneuver in those kind of ghostly musical spheres, you know what I mean?" Autechre

Artifacts created by sound recording and generation technologies can be great imagination fuel—contributing to immersion, rather than breaking it. Unintentional phenomena like distortion, over-compression, tape hiss, radio static, background noise, and feedback are all possible to hear as diegetic sound. These effects, which we'll cumulatively refer to as fog of war, can bring extra vividness to animated atmospheres by imbuing them with greater sonic complexity. A subliminal chaos that makes the experience more immersive, suggesting the movement of air, the hum of machines, or subtle flickers of activity. Fog of war can also imply intervention: worlds violently or gently overlapping, or reality jumping forwards and backwards.

Fog of war is felt in the nebulous depth of countless rave tapes from the second phase. As the technology proliferated, so did the sound-mysteries it created. If there's any official historical evidence of this vernacular galaxy, it's volume one of Selected Ambient Works. Especially conducive to immersion is the airiness of tracks like “Tha". Subtle spectral fluctuations lurk in the recording's distances—a haunted monotony that never disrupts the central journey. This oneiric physicality is also present in the foreground; it's as though percussive impacts are sounding through high altitude sky rather than a bedroom studio. If this vastness of space seems like just a matter of reverb, compare "Tha" to the more recent SAW I pastiche “T16.5 MADMA with nastya+5.2”. There's no shortage of reverb, but the results (although beautiful) feel clinical and close-up by comparison, lacking the mythic, living-breathing atmospheres of SAW I. This cassette-era sense of saturated atmosphere was more recently exploited to magical results in Lee Gamble’s early work, particularly the audio absorption classic Diversions 1994-1996. Sound characters in tracks like “Emu”, “Digbeth”, and “DTI” hiss in spurting and droning motions, evoking the rush of wind through underpasses and ventilation tunnels in an Akira-esque megalopolis. 

Creative echoes and extrapolations from the tape era can be found in the music of Autechre (to whom tape was “probably the best format that was ever made”). Moments of world-overlap manifest hallucinatory voices in tracks like “IO” and “Ipacial Section” (starting around 7:35). Fog of war is further abstracted in tracks like “TMB2”—which centers around a plodding electric body reminiscent of those engineered in the mid 80s. The simplicity of the core design is deceptive, however. Closer inspection reveals the structure to be haunted by an ecology of irregularities: mercurial distortion-currents dance, subtle morphologies accumulate in the machine loop, and ghostly vocalizations are somehow audible amidst its heavy impacts. It might not be accurate to read the track title as “tomb”, but the association fits, given the track's unearthly near-stillness. The dense atmosphere conditions hinted at by Selected Ambient Works are also found in a more sophisticated form in tracks like “bladelores”, in which a storm gradually gives way to a fractal rainbow glow of resonance so miraculously animated that it sounds different each time you hear it. (A much longer stay in the same storyworld would later be granted with “All End”.) Even more tempestuous, “freulaeux” is at its core an acid track, morphing unstably between riffs like Jaquarius’ “Love Is Happiness (Acid Rain)”. But around this core driving force swirl weather conditions far denser than the thunder claps of “Acid Rain”. The electric body itself seems affected by these outside conditions. Its motion is reminiscent of the skipping of a faulty tape, but the effect is utterly diegetic: a feeling of forward motion jostled by turbulence.

Fog of war can also work retroactively, turning music from bygone eras into audio animation. Even Édouard-Léon Scott’s reconstructed 1860 “recording” of "Au Clair de la Lune" works on this level: it's like hearing a ghost in the midst of a sandstorm. This illusion of a lone performer engulfed by elemental noise persists in at least half a century's worth of recordings. In old American folk recordings, it's as though you can literally "hear" the Dust Bowl storms hissing around the performers. A lifelong collector of old records, John Fahey channeled this figure-landscape juxtaposition in some of his late work. (The parallel may not have been conscious, but as Fahey said, music comes from the unconcious.) “Hope Slumbers Eternal” consists of a lone steel string guitar amidst mechanical droning, a weary voice from the mythical old America now all but drowned out by the cold industrial hum of the suburbs.

The most ambitious exploration of fog of war in recent years remains The Caretaker's Everywhere at the End of Time. In the first three stages, what you're hearing is unmistakably ballroom music, but uncanny in its sequencing and sense of space. These are not complete performances but obsessive ruminations on fragments, insistent mirages. And you're hearing them not in an intimate setting, but in a cavernous dream space. Echoes and reverberations intensify the textures of the music, but also add uneasy dissonance. Rather than bringing you into the ballroom in an act of aural time travel, these effects physicalize the disconnect between you and the music. You're not inside the memories; the experience is more like watching a candle from across a dark room. And there are moments of added strangeness, like the opening tracks of Stage 3, in which the warping of acoustic space fearfully intensifies, and “Slightly bewildered” from Stage 1, in which the central pianist is incoherent and barely audible, and more ominous aural characters hiding at the edges become the focus of attention. In Stage 4, these mirages open up into an inferno. The sounds of ballroom performance transform into gust front wind and a cacophony of unvoices—the audio equivalents of the figures in Goya’s black paintings. Now, rather than occupying a small, distant area of stereo space, sound characters can be anywhere, yelling from a distance or muttering nearby, roaring above you or rumbling below the ground. It's at this point that fog of war truly takes hold. Recording imperfections become the sparking and spurting of surreal geological features. Tape hiss becomes endless forms of wind pressure. Throughout stages 4-6, you hear variations on these basic forces. By the time “A confusion so thick you forget forgetting” rolls around, the voices are mostly gone, leaving you’re alone in a cold, windy, spark-emitting landscape. The only other inhabitant is a huge subterranean growling, a semi-corporeal presence circling acoustic space with the predatory swiftness of a shark. In “Long decline is over” the ballroom memories of the first half return as reverberating comets that detonate through a windswept void, containing so much pathos that they change the air pressure. Close up wind gives way periodically to a more distant gust; whereas the first character is dynamic, the latter is ambiguously flat. The piano comets resound with a kind of stochastic monotony, rarely and randomly flaring up in unique crescendos of intensity—the last traces of once-important memories bidding farewell. About midway through “Place in the World fades away” these atmospheric conditions clear up, replaced by new harmonic sound characters that move with a gentle iridescence. The following minutes are slow trip through a luminous nowhere. Maybe deep underwater, maybe high up in the clouds. The sudden switch to recording realism in the work’s final moment means, unmistakably, that you’re finally outside the dream landscapes in which the rest of the work has transpired. As popular interpretation goes, it's a case of terminal lucidity. Everywhere at the End of Time's references to dementia are impossible to ignore as an imagination prompt. But waxing about this thematic choice alone doesn't quite do the work justice on a sensory level. Far more than any previous Caretaker release, Everywhere reimagines its weathered materials so vividly that they're transfigured into poetic sound climates. As much as this Dantesque journey can inspire fear and sadness, the uniqueness and intensity of its animated scenes can also inspire awe. Previous Caretaker releases hinted at "A last glimpse of the land being lost forever"—but it's only in Everywhere that you finally set foot in this landscape of inner sublime.

Audio Absorbtion

“Skratchadelia phaseshifts music into a new phonoplastic alloy. Voices are molecularized into chattering, gibbering textures, into globules of pitch that grumble and shift along the spectrum of TechniCS speed, phased and panned by the transformer switch.” Kodwo Eshun

“I’m the pacman, eat everything I can” opening words of Street Sounds Electro Vol. 1

Audio animation consumes other forms of music. Recordings from the concert hall provide an effectively endless supply of raw material from which to create three dimensional diegesis. Once tossed into a world of sound characters, a fragment of traditional music gains new life, recontextualized as within the sounding vision rather than apart from it. The effect heightens exponentially when this raw material is altered into strange new forms—audio events impossible under the old laws of music. The most exciting and poignant results occur when these transformations work like sonic fun mirrors: the original identity is still there, but distorted in shape and persona. Mundane reality warps, folds, disperses. 

When John Oswald coined the term “plunderphonics” he was already operating in a quasi-tradition contributed to by the likes of Stockhausen, Parmegiani, and Carl Stone. Perhaps the earliest masterpiece of audio absorption was “Collage #1 ('Blue Suede')”, by Oswald’s teacher James Tenney. In "Blue Suede", Elvis’ hit song is fragmented into a thousand new forms in a three minute explosion of cursed cartoon sounds—the roars, crashes, and squeals of Boschian Elvis-creatures. At 1:16 these hallucinations cut out and Elvis-proper appears as a gibbering, satanic fool. In the final third he’s joined by the cacophony of mutants in a climax of surrealism and delirium. While Oswald’s works also have a surreal humor, they offer less to the mind's ear as far as audio animation. A major exception is “Dab”—particularly the second half, in which, as described in Retromania, “a strobing swarm of micro-Jacksons billows back and forth across the stereo field”. First phase animation continued to absorb other music, but moments like the one in Stockhausen’s “Hymnen” where performers reciting "La Marseillaise" transform into warbling, deliquescent small animals became increasingly rare.

 

Another school of absorption arose independently in Jamaica during the transitional phase. Delay, in particular, proved capable of transforming any earthly source material into surrealism. The scenes it can conjure up are endlessly varied. Mad Professor’s “Kunta Kinte Dub” turns hand-played drums into a cascade of objects colliding in zero gravity. Whereas the morphing second-suspensions of Scientist’s Heavyweight Dub Champion fire off with the precision force of heat-seeking missiles. As with a boxer’s punches, you never know exactly how or when the attacks will occur. Sometimes the effect dies abruptly, other times it extends, or fades away then surges back into the foreground. The technique of a"developing" echo later became a favorite effect for a handful of second phase animators. In Eon's “Final Warning (Raucous Dub Mix)”, an announcement of a deadly, soon-to-arrive “heat flash” suspends into a burning echo continuum that modulates until its texture no longer resembles the initial voice. (Whatever's happening to the announcer each time he speaks can't be pleasant.) Developing echoes also appear some first phase music. A particularly unsettling instance occurs in Region 3 of “Hymnen”, in which the Swiss national anthem casts off infinite, pitch-fluctuating echo trails that haunt the stereo field for minutes on end, circling it like a kettle of vultures. However, most uses of delay pale in comparison to early dub, lacking its richness and UFO-in-the-countryside contrasts.

The early years of the second phase were a golden age of pop-absorption. The likes of the Latin Rascals, Omar Santana, Carlos Berrios, and Chep Nuñez regularly transformed ordinary songs into audio animation. The reality-bending quality of dub was matched, ironically, by going in the opposite aesthetic direction. Instead of making sounds splinter off, drift away from the musical center—the cut up techniques of mid 80s hip hop evoke a kind of gravitational pull. The original songs are not so much dispersed as taken deeper in, caught up in the kinetic thrashing of the rhythmic engine. Take tracks like Corina's “Out of Control (L'amour East Mix)" and Sa-Fire's “Don’t Break My Heart (Hot Mix)” (which, in a touch of literalism, adds what sounds like a fireball getting hurled around as well). The sense of the voice getting pulled into the motorik flow of the electric body persisted into the 90s. Roger Scruton aptly described one mix of GTO’s “I Wanna Be a Hippy” as “a little human voice trapped somewhere inside . . . churned over and over by the unstoppable machine”. While that repurposing of an old song is comical, the incongruity of an ancient folk song in DJ Seduction’s “Sub Dub” is absurd but serious—a moment of ancestral analepsis in the midst of an interplanetary drag race.

The Art of Noise's “Owner Of A Lonely Heart (Special "Red & Blue" Remix Dance Version)” stands out for the grandeur of its transformations. The opening vocals appear in their basic state several times for reference—but then, suddenly transposed and suspended, morph into a chorus of angels flying through the stereo field. Fragments of the original percussion accented by snippets of voice become violent, solid impacts that slam into the foreground, creating vast reverberations. When absent, these characters are occasionally hinted at by faint glimmers of reverb that emerge in the distance without cause. In short, the cut up, mechanical attack of hip hop and the floating, ricocheting attack of dub are synthesized. Pop music breaks down into sound characters that take flight through the stereo field. 

A more recent absorption phrase occurred at the peripheries of early 2010s internet music. One of the epoch’s masterpieces, Sacred Tapestry's Shader is a journey past the outer limits of ambient and vaporwave that arrives at audio animation by accident. The first half of the release has only hints of diegetic sound (tropical bird calls, a colossal eccojammed voice). For the most part, its ennui and mystery laden virtual sanctuaries are suggested through traditional songcraft. It’s in the last two tracks (constituting the second half of the release) that the aesthetic possibilities of the eccojam are pushed so far that something else materializes before your ears. It’s possible to hear the shimmering, twinned flute in “新たな夢Spirited Child (Color Ocean Sky)” as serving a similar function to the flutes in Bayle’s works like “Mimaméta”—a kind of shamanistic anchor to human scale, dueting with and magically influencing outside forces. Semantically charged fragments of “It’s Your Move” travel in a procession of weightless stumbling, glitching video game objects floating through digital sky. At 7:20, the flute characters move in a slow descent from the uppermost part of the frequency spectrum. This one-off incantation has no immediate effect on its musical surroundings. But subtle atmospheric changes soon begin to set in. In the ending stages, a flood of pressure and light gently envelops the other sound characters; the delirious, uneasy soundworld is engulfed by heavenly energy. "凍傷" begins, like the album’s opening, as a contained time loop. Yet this loop isn’t fully stable, and lurking its temporal peripheries is a particularly vicious sound character somewhere between a big cat’s growl and a jet engine. When at 1:12 the initial loop attenuates down to a single syllable and percussive impact, a sense of forward motion begins to emerge—further strengthened by what sounds like the hiss of pneumatic suspension starting at 2:52. This constantly restarting climb toward cruise control velocity goes on for several moments, apparently in limbo, until a sudden massive surge of reverb around 6:02 announces that the music is arriving somewhere. New fragmentations follow. Around 7:20 the central loop attenuates even further, and spectrally dense reverb rises in the spatial peripheries. A world physics is emerging. The space is cavernous and aquatic, and teeming with activity. Audible traces of the initial looped voice are felt in the watery surroundings. The last sound character to be introduced is a lone recurrent bell chime. Its tolling pierces through your surroundings with an unknown yet unmistakable significance. The culmination of vaporwave’s preoccupation with the subterranean, this trip, like Jeîta, takes you to the oldest places, the underground seas. But Shader seems to reach this territory by miraculous accident. An arrival born out an urge to transgress the horizon.

God Games

“His machines are extensions of his body that give him superhuman powers, he frankly admits that working in his studio, ‘it’s like your own world and you become like the god’. . . With its synaesthetic textures and three-dimensional, audio-maze spatiality, Gerald’s music anticipates virtual reality.” Simon Reynolds

“Additional acoustic dimensions are created as settings the Sound Stars inhabit, the environments they meet and interact in—the changing acoustic atmospheres of their world.” Maryanne Amacher

Now our focus can zoom out from individual characters to the world level. When you listen from this vantage, a kind of meta-character emerges. This meta-character, which we could call the storyworld's god, doesn't appear to the listener directly, but implicitly, in the cumulative shaping of what you can hear. It comes through in the storyworld's underlying conditions. Whether its constituent sound characters roam freely or adhere to set structures. Whether their actions are independent or interdependent. Meta-character also comes through in how world conditions change perceptibly over time. The most abrupt changes register as intervention, while the most gradual changes register as evolution. In a moment of intervention, the inaudible hand of the storyworld god reaches into the music, throwing events off their natural course. Over a period of evolution, the governing deity adjusts the greenhouse settings and waits.

In the early years of the second phase, turntablism was the premier method of divine intervention. Both versions of Trevor Horn's "Hobo Scratch" (1 2) construct an electric body around which free-floating sound characters appear and disappear. What's most striking about these characters, often human voices, is their violent malleability; it's as though they're being twisted like play-doh by telekinetic force. The disorienting effect of "Hobo Scratch" was intensified by DJ Yella in "Scratch Party #1". The mix opens with "Hobo Scratch" running on one side while more reality warping occurs on the other, generating a stereo-field-spanning storm. As the second phase continued, turntablism went the way of the electric guitar. But not everyone forgot about its disruptive potential. New manifestations of scratching can be heard in tracks like Autechre's “curvcaten”, which establishes an advanced, constantly adjusting electric body, and then ruptures it. From 4:32 on, it's as though the structure is being attacked by some hungry outside force, pushed and pulled but never destroyed—an added excitement to the ride.

There are many styles of environment design. The simplest, but often most effective, is to make space for natural drift. A sustained climate of subtle fluctuations, where sound characters emerge and recede on their own timescales. Worlds of this kind can be found in longform Chain Reaction works like Vainqueur's Elevation. “Elevation 1” opens with the brittle pulse of a machine still running even as it sparks and sputters, then generates vast, billowing phosphorescent winds, and a pressurized forcefield that bounces and sways slowly in midair, counteracting the winds like a mass damper. For the remaining eighty percent of the track, no new characters are introduced, leaving you alone in a power station on Olympus Mons. 

A more sophisticated approach is to create specific inter-character relationships, and then allow them considerable freedom of motion, creating aural butterfly effects. In Bayle’s “Mimaméta” several forces are organized in lead-follow patterns: one character makes a move, then a chorus of similar characters respond with their own multiplied version of the move. This is especially apparent in a section from about 4:38 to 7:12, where lead flute plays a quasi-birdsong, and a flute chorus responds at a higher register with dense avian chatter—a blurring of source-recognition that’s intensified once “real” birds reappear. The result is a paradise in which pastoral chime and flute song and the sounds of the forest flow together, an ecosystem out of Ovidian myth.

Another advanced approach is to establish a climate and then flip the dials—shaking up world physics and letting consequent evolution unfold. In Stockhausen’s “Gesang der Jünglinge” the climate settings are radically changed three times: a sky-world becomes a sea-world, then a sort of nowhere-world, and finally outer space. In various moments throughout “Kontakte”, a centripetal force emerges, pulling surrounding characters into its vortex like a tornado. Perhaps most unusual of all, “Telemusik” features a parallel world in the uppermost frequency range. Sound characters heard in the main dimension can be faintly heard passing through the upper world. About halfway through, a rapture occurs. Every sound character shoots up one by one. After a moment of lower-world silence (except for a straggler, an innocuous character that speaks in short arcs), the miracle is reversed: characters can be heard swooping down from the heavens. 

There's also the possibility of creating responsive continuum. A static forcefield that's interrupted by rapid events which, rather than simply disappearing, alter the continuum in some way. The attacks are what cause the garden to grow. Parmegiani explains his use of this technique in De Natura Sonorum:

These incidents are "foreign bodies" that interfere with the development of the sound; taken from a material different from the continuum (for example a crystal strike in a long metallic resonance), the foreign body perturbs the continuum in different ways; in general by modifying the harmonic web, thickening, doubling, … sometimes completely changing the continuum.

In the work’s opening movement, this world design is tested in a simplified form. Then it's reused in the second movement, which features a much wider array of attacking sound characters, with the forcefield pressured much farther, until its initial stasis is replaced with protean instability. A similar yet more serene organization shapes Michel Redolfi’s “Too Much Sky”, in which sound characters flit in and out of a resonance continuum that shifts in their wake. There’s a sense of being in a wide open space on another planet, with UFOs shooting through the peripheries of the sky and leaving subtle changes to the planet’s atmospheric conditions in their wake. Responsive atmospheres can also be found in Laurie Spiegal’s Unseen Worlds. Tracks like “Sonic Space II”, “Sound Zones” and “Riding the Storm” include a sound character that has the texture of an instrument yet gets fired off in impulsive bursts. As the pitch and acceleration of the instrument changes, so does the air of a vast space. It’s as though a kind of harpsichord machine gun is being fired off to adjust ozone conditions.

An especially powerful deity may cast a spell on the sound characters of its realm. Something like this happens near the end of “Kontakte” when various characters gain a purer harmonic character, as though imbued with transcendent energy after their trials. A similar spell is cast in the final third of “Sud” by Jean Claude Risset. Several highly naturalistic sound characters from the opening section take on a strange resonant harmonicity. It's as though the seas and birds have turned into gold. Another form of spellcasting is present in the opening moments of Francois Bayle’s La Main Vide. The incidental rumbling of what sounds like a miniature windstorm is gently allowed to unfold—then abruptly stopped and restarted twice. You can almost imagine a wizard summoning the sounds you’re hearing, creating a contained storm before the palms of his hands, then finding something unsatisfactory about the results and starting over.

Sound Characters

"At the heart of [Disney’s] appeal was yet another development, one that was not widely recognized in the 1930s and is still little understood today: personality animation. Almost from the beginning of his career, Walt had urged his artists to go beyond the simple mechanics of animation and create characters who moved, gestured and walked in ways that expressed their personalities." J.B. Kaufman

"The lead characters are five or more major sound shapes, staged architecturally, and interacting dramatically with each other—the stars of the Mini Sound Series. Their interactions, and those of the supporting characters, other sound shapes appearing in different Episodes are developed in the storyline. (What happens to Wave #4 when it’s set up to meet The Fright? Deep and Deepest Tone disappears. Was it really shot down by The Hardbeat Force? Will it reappear? When it does, two weeks later, it’s supporting The Coast, who we know has fallen in love with God’s Big Noise.)" Maryanne Amacher

The building block of audio animation is the sound character. A character being a continuity of material and motion from which a spirit distinct within the musical whole arises. Sound characters can be predator or prey, recurrent or rare, animal or elemental. They can range from static—existing in a state of immaculate flatness, like a cartoon or a religious icon—to dynamic—exhibiting subtlety and mercuriality, like sonic ships of Theseus. They can act as foils to one another, or work together to create larger structures. They can move in murmurations which become characters in their own right. In traditional terms, sound characters are closest to motifs, or more specifically, leitmotivs. But rather than being mere notes, these motifs are fleshed out into worldly and otherworldly forms.

 

In the first phase, methodological differences between the Paris and Cologne schools produced two different styles of sound character. In musique concrète, character was conveyed through direct resemblance to existing sounds. "Monstres" might be implied by altering human or animal voices—keeping an audible connection to real world events yet rendering them fantastical. In early elektronische musik, character is conveyed less through source recognition than synaesthetic association. The purity and smooth continuousness of a consonant sine wave drone might evoke the glow of light. Of course, such characters will always be far more nebulous, more open to interpretation than those established the first way. But their presence can greatly enhance the aural storytelling. This approach makes it possible to musically represent forces that are physically present in a diegesis but not, on an unelevated level of perception, audible. But this effect works best when sound characters of the former sort are present as well, since they are, I find, what prompt you to listen in this way in the first place. 

The audio storyworld of Bayle’s “Jeîta” (1 2) makes full use of this sound character spectrum. The surge of high frequencies in the opening half minute is less sonic than psionic, a blast of psychic energy conveyed through sound. As this piercing force attenuates, leaving only its highest frequencies, physical surroundings come into focus: the “water murmurs” alluded to in the title are not lapping waves, but the “vertical water” of stalactites, falling in multilayered cascades that form an incidental dance. Other characters intermittently appear, especially a faint watery rustling, accented by ritualistic percussion hits. A semi-physical character appears, similar to the opening force in texture—but with a different motion-personality, darting and surging in lively bursts. After a pause for a “fossil bell” incantation, exploration continues. Passage through an area guarded by“stone bees”, whose undulating buzz reverberates eerily through the caverns, gets interrupted by another, longer psionic rush: this time, the surging currents carry faint shouting voices. This shining later becomes more intense, enveloping you in dense interweaving waves for minutes at a time. Sometimes, this develops into a sense of vertigo: your sense of place falters, with past rooms becoming briefly audible again, and psionic synths dive downward, creating a sense that you’re falling without actually moving. As you journey deeper into the caves, the sound character encounters become increasingly unsettling. In places, you hear the voices of “oracles”—but a million miles from the elegant, fabric-draped maidens of Victorian paintings, these presences are feral, possibly cannibalistic. When the sounds of vertical water reappear, their initially enigmatic character feels comforting. A return to the safer regions of the cave system. After several more trials, the work ends with a final magic bell incantation, the most beautiful yet; it's as though the bells have sunk beneath dark underground waters. Collectively, all these characters generate a musical experience that's meditative yet harrowing, like surviving some kind of ancient rite of passage, a journey down into the spirit realm.

In the second phase, the salient distinction was between the electric body and the forces outside it—forces floating independently or orbiting the avatar as it hurdles forward. The first category is larger than it might initially seem. Beyond the obvious central frame of the rhythm section, you can sometimes catch other sounds that suggest a complex mechanism at work. For example, the Isao Tomita sample that opens and blares agressively throughout Joey Beltram's remix of “Dominator” sounds like some kind of 3000 AD train horn. Even the memetic hoover sound of Beltram's track “Mentasm” contains the teenage excitement of a futuristic engine revving. Or take the cold, eerie oscillating drone that underlies anthems like “Warp Drive” and “Here Come the Drumz”—the latter of which Ed Rush was particularly struck by, likening to the hum of a spaceship. Similar characters would soon appear in his own productions, first in “Bludclot Artattack” (around 3:07). Yet sometimes the most striking characters are the ones at the ship's peripheries. Luke Slater’s “The Opening” includes a particularly mysterious and evocative voice fragment: thin and grainy in texture, and stuck in an erratic loop, like the sputtering of a broken transmission. The words are difficult to make out, but to me it sounds a bit like “Should I try to—” as though you’re hearing the recorded remains of an ill-fated distress call. 

Characters beyond the cockpit are often more conventional, but at times they can be brilliant in terms of audio animation. In particular, how they’re set in motion can make them more physical. Take the pads in Infiniti’s “Game One”: when they first appear at 2:06, nuanced panning (with the sound seeming to come from multiple areas of the stereo field at once) and subtle fluctuations of volume heighten the euphoric feeling that you’re not just hearing but actually moving through them, like an airplane caressed by clouds. At times these outer characters can feel closer up: the morphing acid patterns of 808 State’s “Flow Coma” might not quite be part of the electric body, but they float around it, each in its own orbit pattern, acting as a composite outer forcefield.  

This brings us back to the matter of sound characters that change over time. In acid house, the 303 baseline can glow in lava-lamp stasis: constantly shifting in exact characteristics, yet retaining its underlying form and feeling. But sometimes the transformation process becomes a character arc. One of the best extrapolations of acid aesthetics, LFO’s “Loop (Journey Mix)” is such a case. The central sound character cycles through all sorts of tactility transformations, melting, smoldering, and brightening at various stages of the journey. By the final minute, it’s charged to a triumphant energy apex. Reverb and delay aren't establishing space so much as radiating off it, trailing it like the luminous aura of a comet.

Audio Animation (A Chronological Survey)

Before we move on, I'd like to expand on the idea of there being an audio animation canon. What follows is just a sketch. A test run. But even a woefully incomplete charting of this history may be of interest. I've organized my thoughts in terms of "phases" because different generations have discovered different ways of animating. Of course, there's always diversity within a generation. But the trailblazers who emerge during a certain era tend to share an underlying angle of approach. In the next few posts, we’ll investigate more specific listening principles. But for now, an attempt at taking in the big picture...

Free Flowing Environments: The First Phase

The early masterpieces of audio animation were fever dreams of high modernism. It was during this epoch that the inchoate tradition was least tempered by compromise with conventional notions of musicality. Motion was wild and utterly free. Flurries of audio shot at hyperspeed across vast distances; disjointed audio fragments acted as flashing vision-sequences; sounds cascaded up and down, chirped melodiously in mechanical birdsong, and slept in slowly undulating drones, like waves on an alien ocean. The music has a visceral pull, but it’s a physicality that takes you outside your own body. The listening experience is like astral projection or soul flight, disembodied travel through elemental and supernatural forces. And in the space age imagination, this sort of travel can take you far beyond Earth's atmosphere. As in prehistoric cave paintings, the cosmos is foregrounded while the human subject is barely there.  

The simplest form of audio animation is the sound effect. As lofty and uncompromising as this epoch was, its roots were in a more utilitarian notion of diegetic sound. Pierre Schaeffer had years of experience creating effects for radio by the time he formally began the project of musique concrète, and his early collaborations with Pierre Henry often reflect the narrative and imagistic beginnings of his work with sound. The BBC Radiophonic Workshop followed a similar trajectory, with origins in simple effect-generation evolving into more elaborate musical projects. In America, Tod Dockstader designed sounds for Tom and Jerry during his fledgling years as a composer. Louis and Bebe Barron were also heavily involved in film; their experiments blurred the line between soundtrack and sound effect.

If any of the earliest institutions appeared totally removed from the foley aspect of electronic music, it was the WDR studio in Cologne. This school of artists, led by Herbert Eimert, tends to be characterized in the history books as dogmatically idealist: a group of fanatics devoted to pure, unworldly abstraction. Yet even in Cologne, the medium's evocative properties were noticed and discussed. In the first issue of Eimert’s flagship publication Rie Reihe, the composer-critic H. H. Stuckenschmidt identifies the same dynamic that we're now discussing:

As spokesman for [the WDR], Eimert has repeatedly drawn attention to the creative possibilities of electrically generated sound, but has disassociated himself from the “fashionable and surrealistic” Musique Concrète produced at the Club d'Essai in Paris, and any incidental manipulations or distortions haphazardly put together for radio, film or theatre music. He is opposed to all metaphorical synaesthetic interpretation—that is, he is opposed to the idea of composition and interpretation by association and reference. Aesthetic understanding of the new art is not facilitated by this attitude. It cannot be denied that this associative effect, which the initiator denies as being of any relevance, has been the principal reaction of the majority of listeners faced for the first time with electronic music . . .

In that nothing pertaining to electronic music is analogous to any natural existent phenomenon of traditional music, associations have to be evoked from elsewhere . . . The sound mixture is heard in such a manner as to associate it with phenomena experienced by any perceptive listener; it is associated with reverberating projectiles from the mineral domain, with sounding metals, with the music of cylinders . . .

Stuckenschmidt’s prescient forecast of audio animation—which he terms “the third stage” of music’s evolution—was by no means the end of the matter. Compelling marriages of the WDR’s prized formalist rigor with diegetic evocation came from Rie Reihe's coeditor, Karlheinz Stockhausen. At a time when most works of electronic music amounted to intriguing sketches, Stockhausen’s major works offered glimpses into fully formed universes capable of refracting parts of our world under alternate rules of physics. And, in an enigmatic twist that, as far as I can tell, no one’s ever commented on, it was Eimert himself who authored the WDR’s most cinematic work of electronic music, “Epitaph für Aikichi Kuboyama'' less than a decade later—in which bursts of machine sound swoop through the stereo field like dive bombers from the future, and distant shards of rustling metal coalesce into a foreground storm filled with synthetic voices. 

collage by Bernard Parmegiani suggesting the journey from studio to mind's-ear landscape

It was the Paris school, however, that instigated the most interesting work in the long run. An early student of musique concrète (albeit an insubordinate one), Xenakis was one of the few composers in the early days operating on a level of imaginativeness approaching Stockhausen's. Over the course of a decade his electronic music scaled up from the intriguing microverse of “Concrete PH” to the terrifying sprawl of “Persepolis”.  Schaeffer’s appointed successor, Francois Bayle, tellingly began his career as a composer with a work entitled “Uninhabitable Spaces". During his tenure, the Paris school became a kind monastic order where advanced knowledge was developed and passed along in secret.

On the other hand, in what would prove to be a tragic pattern in the history of audio animation, many of the era’s most renowned magicians prematurely abandoned their work. Ligeti, who created one of the most vivid works of 50s audio animation with “Artikulation”, never returned to the medium. Berio—who did likewise with the haunting "Omaggio a Joyce"—followed a similar path. Stockhausen, as well, pursued other aesthetic ends after the 60s, only occasionally drawing on its power—most notably in composing the aerial battle of the archangels Lucifer and Michael in Dienstag aus Licht.

Premonitions of Motor-Music: The Transitional Phase

As the prevalence of electronic music increased, its free-flowing aesthetics made contact with an antithetical force: the percussive heartbeat driving popular music. This cultural confluence produced intriguing effects. In some cases, pop musicians would temporarily sacrifice the beat, their guiding principle, in order to dabble with the new medium. More prescient, however, were the moments when the audio animation ethos began soaking into their primary style of music.

While the older generation acted at times as mentors, or at least supporters of this experimentation, there was no need for direct guidance. Sure, there were groups like Can, who had permission to use Stockhausen's studio during his off days. But aside from Can (or The United States of America, or White Noise...) there were other less connected yet equally adventurous acts. Take The Red Crayola, who hailed from the cultural wastelands* of Texas, yet created an audio animation classic with Parable of Arable Land. The album was made with limited technology—just conventional instruments, various noise-making objects (such as a motorcycle), and extreme use of panning, reverb, and delay. But the results sound like they were recorded near an entryway to a parallel dimension, a space of acoustic overlap in which the central band is constantly interrupted by cacophonies as murky and strange as Art Bell's alleged audio recording of Hell. The previous generation had opened portals to imaginary worlds in a small handful of high tech labs, but by the late 60s this magic was spreading through the air.

It was during this period that the cult of the electric guitar formed a fragile yet occasionally brilliant alliance with audio animation. The alliance was first and most vividly apparent in the music of Jimi Hendrix. “Voodoo Chile (Slight Return)” is a miraculous moment in which lead guitar becomes an airship in blazing atmospheric entry. The giveaway is the use of space: wild panning creates an illusion of rapid movement that would be impossible for a performer to match onstage. Once you’ve heard Stockhausen’s electronic music, it’s tempting to draw comparisons between Hendrix's guitar and moments like the one around 5:28 in “Kontakte”: UFOs morphing in timbre and pitch as they careen through space. The comparison isn't totally arbitrary, either. Stockhausen had a lifelong fascination with the sounds of airplane flight, and Greg Tate describes Hendrix as similarly obsessed:

He was always interested in recreating these huge industrial sounds. Like the sound he heard the wind make when he jumped out of airplanes. The sound those jet engines made. And, I'm sure, the sound you hear of your own body dropping through space when you're parachuting. He was a paratrooper . . . And, then, he also wanted to recreate what he imagined to be the sounds of spaceships and water sounds—all these kind of huge, roaring, environmental sounds.

The most famous case of this being his rendition of "The Star-Spangled Banner" at Woodstock. The overpowering sublime found in the soundscapes of modern war was a huge (if usually more tacit) source of inspiration for both this generation and the previous one.

The brilliance of this foray into guitar-led audio animation was never duplicated, but its aesthetic tendencies were extended further by krautrock bands like Neu!. The notion of “motorik” drumming seemed to pick up on a latent implication of music like “Voodoo Chile (Slight Return)” and "1983... (A Merman I Should Turn To Be)": if you could hear the guitar as diegetic, why couldn’t you hear the drums that way? Hendrix surely would've approved of the flanged jet engine guitar in “Negativland". (He'd instantly recognized flanging as a revelatory technique, perhaps for how it simulates the rapid movement of air.) Yet just as important to the song’s diegesis is the unflappable forward glide of the drums: machine-like rather than human. Of their contemporaries, Kraftwerk developed this new line of imagination the farthest. The utopian journey of “Autobahn” still retains audible roots in familiar styles, particularly its doo-wop chorus. Yet the sense of motion the song conveys is perfectly in sync with its highway muse, right down to the simulations of cars zooming by. The spirit of audio animation never left rock music entirely, surviving at its peripheries. But a more old-fashioned sort of virtuosity was prioritized in shredding culture. Overall, the 60s and 70s generation proved amnesiac of its audio animation powers. After Kraftwerk, the most exciting developments would happen elsewhere.

The Electric Body Installed: The Second Phase

track-sketch by Autechre

 

 

In the 80s, audio animation became folk music. The epoch was characterized by two major shifts. First, the motions produced by new technology became more rigid, giving the resultant audio a more robotic character. And second, for this generation (which was by far the largest and most diverse yet), the heartbeat pulse of dance music was a matter of first principle. The beat, rather than the stuff around it, became the center of experimentation and advancement. The combined result of these changes was a new style of audio animation that didn't render an environment so much as an avatar: an enhanced mechanical body enfolding the listener. At times these structures hovered in stasis, but mostly they took you on a ride, hurtling eternally forward. It wasn't always clear exactly what these machines were—cars? spaceships? mechs? But regardless, their construction was endlessly varied. Like Iron Man’s suits, the early marks were heavy, lumbering, and awkward, while the later marks were dizzyingly fluid, flexible, and light. Some barely held together as they moved, others maintained motion with total precision. Some could rearrange into new forms mid-flight, or attack their surroundings with slashes and gunfire. Whereas first phase music coveted naturalism, second phase music went for maximum style, conveying diegetic motion the way wildstyle graffiti conveys language.

The question of who invented the electric body is unsolvable, and all the more fiercely contested because of it. The style’s evolution would have been vastly different without the influence of 20th century titans like James Brown and Parliament. But for all the influence their sensibilities had on audio animation, their music was still something older. On the other hand—there’s no shortage of experiments retroactively hailed as proto techno that, however prescient, had little or no impact on its development. In this respect, Kraftwerk are particularly interesting. Although “Autobahn” was a milestone, it was with “Trans Europe Express” that they fully arrived at motorik avatar animation. Less lush and nuanced in its motion-rendering than “Autobahn”, the track streamlined their aesthetic into a pitiless, angular exoskeleton. A closed circuit of axle bearings and pistons, lit up by rhythmelodies and punctuated by vast doppler effect chords. And yet “Trans Europe Express” would’ve been just another intriguing experiment if not for its resonance in cities like New York and Detroit. The connection with Detroit was particularly deep and long lasting. As Kraftwerk's Ralf Hütter put it, "the industrial sound of Motor City and Kraftwerk on the autobahn, there’s a spiritual connection. Automatic rhythms, robotic work, robotic music — all kinds of fantasies are going on." Even if Kraftwerk and Afrika Bambaataa and Cybron hadn’t spread this newly possible marriage of groove and sci fi mechanism, it's likely that the broader shift would’ve happened anyway. But, contingent or not, these artists were catalysts, and their breakthrough moments retain a special aura. The electric body template would be modified in every possible direction afterwards, made more and less austere, simpler and more complicated, slower and faster, squishier and sharper. “Trans Europe Express” wasn’t so much an origin point as a bottleneck, an aesthetic narrowing after which a new body of music expanded outward.

This generation, far more than the previous one, were at ideological odds with the first generation and their disciples. It's tempting to dismiss the latter as mere snobs, eggheads who couldn't comprehend the urge to dance. Yet only a couple of decades earlier, the first phase pioneers had been far more receptive to audio animation’s reach into popular culture. (Pierre Henry, evidently, even felt there was enough aesthetic affinity between rock music and his own work to combine the two in compositions like "Psyché Rock" and "Machine Danse"; Francois Bayle later noted that everyone in his circle in the 60s had been listening to the likes of Hendrix.) So what was different this time? Most likely, that audio animation’s aesthetic departure from their early conception of it was now complete. During the transitional period, beats had been introduced, but the unbounded conception of motion so obsessively developed by the first generation had still been primary. But now the loop-logic of the machine had taken over. From the first generation’s perspective, audio animation had not advanced in these new hands, but regressed. Stockhausen, tellingly, compared Aphex Twin’s track “Didgeridoo” to Pierre Schaeffer's earliest train-loop experiments, describing it as “old fashioned”. Contrary to his reputation these days, Stockhausen was a believer in dance music (even recommending that would-be composers go dancing several times a week). How to reconcile that with his dismissive attitude towards techno, and deeper conviction that we are “imprisoned in our bodies”? Perhaps what was so offensive to the older generation wasn’t so much the proposition of the electric body as the claustrophobia of being eternally stuck inside it.

And yet, as the second phase progressed, it did recover a certain freedom of movement. The production of motorik exoskeletons continued. But these transport vehicles became more and more complicated. Even in the early to mid 80s, when the electric body was at its clunkiest—the slashing sound-arcs generated by scratching brought an otherwise absent flexibility of motion into the mix. This effect had a profound impact on many of jungle's lead animators. Former b-boys like Dj Hype, Aphrodite, and A Guy Called Gerald integrated turntablism's agility into the central frame. As jungle led to drum and bass, drill and bass, and IDM, the electric body gained supersonic propulsion and ultra-finetuned steering capabilities. Comparing Aphex Twin's remix of "Box Energy" to DJ Pierre's already exemplary original illustrates this drastic increase in firepower. Motion reached heights of nuance unheard of since the first phase—making it unsurprising that around this time, the likes of Aphex, Squarepusher, and Autechre started citing old masters like Dockstader and Parmegiani as influences. (Aphex Twin's track "Gwarek2" is an unmistakable pastiche of first phase animation.) Autechre, in particular, developed a unique synthesis of first and second phase aesthetics. Their music become intricate enough to compete with the first phase on its own terms, yet remained steadfastly loyal to early hip hop at its core. Dispersed and complexified to the point of secrecy, the electric body remained the underlying template.

However, like the previous generations, this one was desertion-prone. Kurtis Mantronik held out long enough to upgrade “King of the Beats” to a more high-tech model called “King of the Beat 3.0”—but eventually came to view his early acts of kinetic wizardry as played out party tricks, rather than the foundations for a new kind of music. Other luminaries like Ann Dudley, Robert Haigh, and Photek went further, leaving the frontiers to compose orchestral soundtracks and piano music. 4hero likewise moved away from animation efforts like Parallel Universe, especially “The Paranormal in 4 Forms”—returning back down to the concert hall after their pioneering joyride in space.

Other Phases, Past and Possible

All the above only brings us to the turn of the millennium. And even then, it glosses over major developments, particularly ambient, dub, chill out, industrial. While these areas of exploration produced audio animation classics (some of which are mentioned in subsequent posts), my intuition is that the phases identified above were the central developments. For now, we won't get into the first quarter of the 21st century. But it would be a mistake to assume that no more upheavals have happened since the 90s. 

My favorite interpretation, advanced in Neon Screams, is that we're reached a new phase of animation centered on the voice. I've argued before that "vocal psychedelia" can be found throughout the history of electronic music. But in the first and second phase, voice-animation usually had a depersonalizing effect. The voice was just another sculpting material. Whereas the "humanized future" that Neon Screams identifies does the opposite, enhancing the vocalist's idiosyncrasies until they reach deity level. Rappers become "radiant and radioactive". Lil Gotit becomes a mutant whose lower jaw is melting off; Travis Scott becomes a posthuman made of vapor and light; Playboi Carti's voice echoes amidst the chattering spirits of the polyconscious Cloud. Neon Screams posits an audio animation in which every master of ceremonies is made out of a different glittering alloy and encircled by different psycho-atmospheric conditions. First animated environments, second animated avatars, third animated selves.

Adverse Reactions

Throughout all this, audio animation hasn't always gone uncriticized. It seems only fair to let these critics get a few words in before we go back to callously ignoring them. Here are just two examples. In 1968, Morton Feldman expressed his aversion in the following terms:

I couldn't use electronic music, or electronic sounds, because they are not anonymous in character. . . Everytime you hear electronic music it's as though you always have to hear something. And sometimes I like a content that doesn't have the significance of something. That physical world of electronic music gives the impression that something is always happening.

[But do you think that's really due to the quality of electronic music--or just the people who produced it?]

I think it's inherent in the quality. It's that kind of: WOW. It's very "thingy." ZING and ZANG and WOW!

In 2016, Mark Fell took a more pointedly anti-animation stance:

Seeing the medium as a way of representing something else is not something I really do, like the idea of using paint to represent a landscape. I would rather get a bunch of colors and put them on the canvas and see how that works; just a presentation of shapes and colors. Representational aspects creep into music production in terms of how sound is processed to create the illusion of space. . .  But in the end, it’s a kind of ideological stance. Like if an architect is building a wall out of concrete, they wouldn’t go and paint bricks on it to make it look like bricks. If I make something that exists in a computer environment, why make it sound like it’s in a cathedral or something?

[So reverb is kind of the trompe l’oeil to the abstract expressionism of pure synthesis?]

Yeah. It’s like the “Truth to materials” slogan in architecture. But in academic electroacoustic music, the approach is very different. If you read Denis Smalley, who’s a prominent electroacoustic composer, you’ll see he talks about sonic forms in terms derived from real world landscapes—for example a river with points of bird song along it, and things moving in and out of focus, et cetera. What I do isn’t entirely formal—rather, it’s a critique of that kind of approach.

Feldman's take strikes me as the wiser of the two, because he acknowledges that the problem lies in the medium itself. Fell is less imaginative. He associates audio animation with only a narrow set of techniques explicitly intended to be representational. As Fell surely knows, it is possible to hear a "cathedral" reverb setting as nothing more than a bunch of frequencies generated by a computer—it's just that the temptation to hear it through the animation lens is usually there. But the temptation can also arise from listening to electronic music made without any explicit aim to model or represent. This applies to a lot of the music we've covered, and it applies to Fell's own music, too. I once asked Version (an avowed Fell fan**) to describe what he heard in one of Fell's tracks, and he offered this highly evocative description: “the whole thing sounds like a sheet of metal folding in on itself and being repeatedly compressed, like a piece of metal with the qualities of both metal and rubber.” Fell's scrupulous avoidance of reverb does little to prevent representational associations from emerging in his music. He might intend to "critique" such illusions, but his music still creates them.

If anything's hindered the canon's development, it's not criticism but defection. This tendency we've noted for animators to return to the musical logic of the concert hall becomes concerning in aggregate. You might even take this as evidence that audio animation's merely a novelty. But there are artists in each generation who keep going, and they tend to create their best work in the process, which suggests otherwise. As does the generational cycle of rediscovery and renewal that we've been investigating. It's possible that a contributing factor is shortsightedness. When you're doing something different, it's easy to mistake the one small section of the new territory that you've found for the entire thing. In other words, maybe there comes a point at which many animators feel that they have nowhere to go except back. Who could blame them for finding inspiration and comfort in the old ways? But the truth is that even at its most uncompromising, the best audio animation goes forward while drawing on inherited musical wisdom. The most beautiful results are probably still far beyond us. The task isn't to replace music, but to make it three dimensional, to finally bring it to life.

 

* no offense Wes  

** I think, right? I mean, if you're not, can you at least go along with it so I don't have to change this part