Transfigured States

How does the this world’s reality differ from our everyday reality? This is a question of how reality itself works. It's about the extent to which the storyworld depicts events, beings, forces, etc. invisible from within the normal world, bringing the invisible into sight. There are infinite possible answers. (Perhaps musical diegesis is always an altered state of some kind.) So we’ll focus on just two forms of departure from our everyday reality.

The Voice of All Things

The millenium-old elephant Zunesha speaks

Zones without people, at their most expressive extreme, veer beyond the picturesque into animism. At this point, the assertion that “nature, machines, data streams . . .  sing songs of their own'' is more than a cute turn of phrase; it's a literal description of what’s happening in the music. What you discover in this state is the unvoice: a layer in the mix that’s not a human voice, yet has an eerie resemblance to speech. It's a matter of both timbre and movement, of the sound's articulation of vowels/consonances and its rhythmic cadences. Reaching this level of mimicry without electronic means is difficult but not impossible (c.f. two moments in John Fahey's "Voice of the Turtle"). As a listener, you’re free to interpret these moments of sonic pareidolia as coincidental or in more fantastical ways. The latter is of course more fun.

Basic Channel - Lyot Rmx is a vision of a world so posthuman it feels like another level of reality. There are no traces of nature as we know it. Buildings are distant geometric shapes with bases that must span miles. Energy fields and floating trains of machinery snake through them against the pitch black sky, like clouds moving through a mountain range. Arcs of electricity run in parallel to the moving skyway that carries you along. Each element drifts independently, yet they’re all in perfect sync; the world’s now a completed puzzle. But Lyot Rmx is more than a 12 minute establishing shot, it’s a meeting. We hear the unvoice first as an ephemeral murmur in the distance, perhaps an auditory hallucination. After a minute it reaches the foreground and becomes more constant, allowing us to better discern its texture. Instead of resolving anything, this close encounter heightens the mystery. Whatever’s speaking isn’t some cute 90s computer voice, nor does it possess our mere squishy vocal chords. Its speech pops and fizzles and above all resonates in irregular yet calm, thoughtful cadences. It’s probably not speaking to you, too insignificant to merit attention; it’s speaking beyond you—you’re simply allowed to hear. This being is a denizen [or perhaps guardian] of a world in which all traces of dirt and decay were expunged, transcended long ago. Although it’s devoid of emotional “fire”, Lyot Rmx offers an incredibly vivid depiction of a certain archetype of dream-utopia, rendered in a perfect color palette. 

Tetsu Inoue - “Low of Vibration” in another product of the analogue “filter science" of the mid 90s, but occurs in a different sort of transcended world. Here the earth is still intact: you hear chimes, bubbling water, and occasional rumbling deep underground. Starlight shimmers off a lake, and sparks of prana cast wispy, slightly delayed bursts of steam. Shadowy, undefined shapes dart in and out, most notably a minor deity that speaks in gurgling tones. This universe doesn't move in a master design; it’s a universe of happy accidents. You spend a long time waiting, still and observant. Then finally, the moment comes; something's here. When the unvoice shows up, you immediately grasp its importance. Whereas the being in “Lyot Rmx” was indifferent toward you, this one cares about you. It wants to heal you. It sings a slow, repetitive lullaby, a song of the earth and waters. 

In / Away: The Magic Portal  

There are magic moments in which the portal opens or closes. It’s here that music’s ability to evoke a different kind of reality most comes through. The world around you bends, stretches, changes color, changes substance, switches to somewhere else entirely; previously undetected forces and beings become perceptible on entry, melt away on exit. The process itself can range from a violent shock to a gentle wake up. 

While there are many great moments of portal-opening in electronic music (for example, the first ten seconds of Laserdisc Visions - "Mind Access"), it's rarer to get an unforgettable moment of Closing. Take “Bohor” by Iannis Xenakis, which is a 20 minute field recording of a haunted treasure room. You hear strange bells and shouting in the distance, implying that the room itself is incredibly vast, and that there's a ceremony of some kind happening on the other side. This cacophony seems to draws closer at times, but it's not an event you'd want to be caught intruding upon. Still more concerning are the beings roving through the pyramids of metal trinkets around you in sinuous paths. (Their motion doesn't seem to be that of human footsteps.) There are many other flickers of otherworldly activity. So when you first hear a rippling noise in a far corner, you don't quite realize what's happening. It's only when the process spreads to other regions of the cave that it becomes apparent: the mirage is dissolving. This process continues until, for the last few minutes of the piece, you're left in a cold wasteland decorated by sheets of plastic roaring in the wind. With it's title's allusion to a lesser-known Arthurian knight, "Bohor" employs modernist aesthetic sensibilities toward a mythical vision. The space you've spend 20 minutes (or much longer) in floats, invisible, throughout the world in which this story occurs, materializing and soon disappearing at unexpected places and times. To find it (and there must be some good reason to want to reach a place so terrifying), you have to wander deep into the tundra of plastic and hope a miracle occurs.

As far as Openings go, the soundscape compositions of Barry Truax offer both a beautiful realization and a cautionary tale. By the late 80s Truax had made a name for himself in the world of academic electronic music with experiments like “Riverrun”, a James Joyce-themed work of granular synthesis macro-evolution. But it’s his work with field recordings in the following decade that's really interesting. Beneath their academic facades, these compositions stem from a yearning to travel off the map, reach lands never glimpsed beyond a small grainy photo buried on page 847 of a geology textbook…  obscure, lush climates with no memory.

A resident of the Pacific Northwest, Truax must’ve felt the call of the Pacific Ocean (with its gray infinity, ant-sized cargo ships on the horizon, prehistoric canoe routes)—the same feeling I got as a kid looking out at it, the feeling that something’s out there awaiting you. It’s the mystery of this force that he brilliantly evokes with “Pacific Fanfare”. The piece begins with a bricolage of shipyard sounds. It’s a compelling soundscape, but more or less everyday reality. Suddenly, after 30 seconds of this, you’re in: the opening foghorn returns, but this time its texture is strangely different, and instead of ending the sound elongates into infinity, setting in motion a continuum of coarse yet diaphanous textures that envelops your surroundings. The continuum changes with a slowness approaching complete suspension. From its fractal depths voices murmur. Certain sound events moving at a more human speed pass by; at times recognizable from the dockyard, but in altered forms. Finally, another nautical horn from the opening sequence returns, now in a lower register, coalescing into a brief yet majestic melody that signals the journey’s end. Just as the vision's fading away, you hear the most beautiful sound yet, an unchoir on the horizon. Despite all that’s been revealed, the mystery remains, calling you from farther still beyond the coast.

“Pendlerdrøm”, composed the following year, explores the same basic premise in a different setting. By Truax’s own account, the piece follows a train ride away from Copenhagen in which you, the commuter, drift out of reality, into a dream-state, and then wake up. (This happens twice.) Whereas “Pacific Fanfare” is the length of a 60s pop song, “Pendlerdrøm” is spread out over 12 minutes, and much of that time is spent on the mundane: train doors opening and shutting, luggage being stowed, footsteps, small talk, someone blowing their nose, etc. And the dreamstates themselves are underwhelming, never reaching the strangeness or beauty of “Pacific Fanfare”. With it’s easily discernible narrative, “Pendlerdrøm“ was no doubt the more carefully constructed piece. But sometimes a deeper magic reveals itself in the tossed-off, unclarified, and intuitive. On “Pendlerdrøm”, Truax makes the mistake of confusing a basic tenet of how we perceive electronic music for the idea for a specific composition. It’s a reminder that none of the concepts we’ve discussed are enough to justify a work of music on their own. For the listener and the creator alike—they’re the dream-making tools, not the dreams.

Vanishing Visions and Unknown Memories

“And phone calls don't cost a dime
In the caverns of your feeling where the sun will never shine” The Meat Puppets

“As someone else said, the fact that all these years have gone by and we still haven't found most of the samples for this album is incredibly eerie for some reason. Almost as if this album shouldn't exist” Carl Wagner

If we linger on the issue of how history and memory play into the listening experience, things start to get weird. So far we’ve established a basic dichotomy: on the one hand, musical worlds that are shrouded in mist; on the other, musical worlds that are filled with lares et penates. We understand that first impressions can be deceptive on this front. But what’s more, history and memory themselves are malleable, and that can have a profound impact on musical diegesis. 

It’s possible to reach the zone of affect known as the uncanny, where the familiar and the unfamiliar blur into one. This feeling is neither the comfort of nostalgia nor the shock of the new. It’s the feeling of encountering something that seems to have been excavated from the subterranean rivers of your unconscious. Make no mistake, you are in for a shock. But the shock of the experience comes from the familiarity as much as it does from the strangeness. It’s like you’re getting a glimpse of a dream you had a long time ago, or an important memory you forgot… Or maybe it's someone else's dream, living on long after it should've faded away, and miraculously reaching you just before it’s finally gone. 

These experiences can be triggered by artifacts that are recognizably old, yet not canonical. That is to say, they were obviously born out of a bygone era, yet their essence didn’t make the jump into whatever narrow set of tropes now define that era in cultural memory. We can make an analogy here with photography. When I look at an iconic photo of a famous historical event that happened in 1951, any sense that that seeing what I’m seeing ought to be impossible—given the temporal chasm between me and the captured moment—is negated by how the image reads like a larger-than-life cliché, a museum piece rather than a memory. But when I view the same view that someone living in Ham Lake, Minnesota saw when they looked out their window one morning in 1951, I feel as though I’m confronted with a vision to which I shouldn't have access. That’s when these basic recording technologies really do become dark magic. This applies tenfold to music, where what a given work conveys feels even more specific, in that it seems to carry more of an interiority and spirit unique to the period of realization.

important bit of internet mythology

The shock of the subterranean doesn’t have to come about incidentally. It can also work as an aesthetic target. Success requires the artist to be so in tune with the shadowy corners of our heads that they can create a kind of forgery. The most lasting examples of this are the works that both channel a magical “lost” quality and create a sort of Borgesian conundrum where the music points us to an aesthetic thread running under the radar through the past. But the draw of this stuff isn’t historiographical, it’s visceral.

Even so, isn’t this tactic a kind of retreat, a shirking of our true responsibility to reach for the shock of the new? I don't think so. A discovery is a discovery. That’s true whether it’s an uncharted island or a rumored ancient city that’s been buried underneath us all along. Don’t you feel an urge to explore Tartarian ruins concealed from our sight by the Mudflood? 

The shock of the subterranean appears inseparable from the rise of the internet. How many meatspace genres center upon it? Zero. And what about internet genres? A conservative estimate would be 75%. Hauntology, chillwave, vaporwave, seapunk, and dungeon synth are some of the classic examples. Even when the genre isn’t predicated on the lost-to-time, the feeling tends to creep in. The rediscovery of early 90s Triple Six Mafia, mid 90s DJ Screw, etc. in the early 2010s, and its subsequent influence on hip hop attests to this. The appeal wasn’t just in the music’s prescience, it was just as much in its obsolescence, in the strange emotional colors it evoked to the ears of internet proselytes. Ironically, the playfully ahistorical experimentation of internet music coalesces into a kind of history of people discovering new auditory liminal spaces. This is art enabled by creative mode.

Vektroid’s ultra influential run of releases under various pseudonyms in the early 2010s is worth a close look. The most infamous “surfacing” of the subterranean ever, “Lisa Frank 420/Modern Computing” had nearly 50 million views on Youtube before it was taken down. But to a more attentive subset of listeners it's accepted wisdom that the memed-to-death Floral Shoppe wasn't necessarily even its creator's best work that year.

Let's focus for a moment on New Dreams Ltd. - Initiation Tape - Part One. The title's a fitting one, evoking grainy corporate training vhs tapes from the 80s. But it doesn't prepare you for the tape itself. What’s most striking is the deathly nocturnal aura that hangs over the whole thing. The opening minutes deserve a lot of credit in establishing this tone: the first presence you encounter is the fearful, doomed voice of a ghost that’s been lost in lightless backrooms for uncountable years; then a looped radio news tag appears, one which wouldn't be so unsettling if it weren't cut in such a way that it begins with an enigmatic growling noise. This is followed by a transition into the CBC Late Night theme (which a youtube commenter accurately describes here as being “terrifying”); this is followed by an escape outside into the city night air with the feverish siren-like guitar of “Timecop”. A romantic yearning emerges in the following tracks, culminating in “hydrocodone / prom night” and then “you appeared / you didn't”, in which the glow of “Bette Davis Eyes” is warped and intensified into a delirious swooning. The last section has a solemn, ceremonial atmosphere: weighty voices, punctuated by a window into the void (“Upper Spheres of Consciousness”). The End is upon us.

Initiation Tape wears the influence of Chuck Person’s Eccojams Vol. 1 on its sleeve. But although Lopatin was no doubt aware of the esoteric emotions instilled by his fragments of kitschy radio pop, Eccojams feels like a collection of experiments united more by their methodology that any deliberately cultivated atmosphere. Initiation Tape goes further by deploying this formal technique to carve out a very specific vision. It evokes the feeling of being alone and madly in love on the last night, the eve of the end of the world... if this feeling was somehow preserved and reached another world many years later, a message in a bottle. Despite the tongue in cheek connotations, the promise of the title is genuine: if you listen you’ll be trained in, initiated into the cult of the subterranean. 

Another more daunting Vektroid case study is Peace Forever Eternal - Nextcentury. Released half a decade later, the album reflects a creative shift in the wake of viral “success”. Among critics and casual listeners alike, she was hailed as a conceptual provocateur—the musical equivalent of an artist who's paid millions of dollars for stacking a pile of cinderblocks in the middle of an art gallery. Not the reputation a teenager who grew up idolizing the tech wizardry of Autechre, Aphex, and BoC must've wanted.

It’s tempting to hear an implicit challenge in the sampladelic mazes of Nextcentury. If earlier releases like Initiation Tape borrowed from the more famous side of Eccojams, the parts where fleeting moments of truth in pop songs are converted into perfect mobius strips, Nextcentury borrows from the moments of breakdown, of destruction of form… and cranks them up a hundredfold. The music is so jagged and dense that it makes John Oswald sound naturalistic. (Vektroid beta tested this approach with the comparatively restrained Eden a year earlier, and may have also been influenced by her friend Internet Club’s ░▒▓ New Deluxe Life ▓▒░ --▣ Freed from the World ▣, a shockingly crude and unsettling work that gained infamy in corners of the internet like 4chan for being “cursed”.) It’ll infuriate the same people who were infuriated by Vektroid’s earlier work, but for the opposite reason; there's not too little done with the samples—there's too much. Yet there’s an alien logic running through the whole thing, particularly an attention to background harmonic color that comes through in maneuvers like the album spanning meta-motif wherein a sample repeats twice, then once in a transposed register, then once more at the initial pitch.

The result is subterranean shock of a different flavor than Initiation Tape. The music’s utterly counterintuitive handling of its persistently half-familiar source material invites you to imagine an explanation. Again, the title seems to offer a hint. Maybe it’s the product of AI combing through the detritus of human culture after some disaster wiped out our species. (A late 20th century nuclear conflict in an alternate timeline? But then, how the hell did that "I wanna be a cowboy, baby" vine get in?) If the AI’s attempting to reconstruct the original artifacts, it’s failing miserably. But in the process it’s discovering emotions and sensations from our deepest, most addled electric age dreams. 

Palimpsestscapes

“You ought to make an effort . . .” She pauses. “To clear your mind of such . . .” She pauses again. “Echoes.” The Handmaid’s Tale

Has this world been lived in? This question's similar to the one we started with. But it’s more advanced, taking a greater amount of cultural literacy or detective work to answer. It requires you to recognize the extent to which old histories swirl about in the music, the extent to which you can feel the pressure of accumulated memory-fragments in the present experience.

As with all the distinctions we’re making, this isn’t a matter of innovation, it’s a matter of evocation. It’s London vs. Dubai. It’s the kipple-cluttered future of Blade Runner vs. the amnesiac-pristine future of Star Trek. In the rhetoric that surrounds electronic music, critics and fans often fall into the trap of equating a lack of reference to the past with creativity or futurism. To the contrary, a blank slate may be just that: blank, technically distinct from the past yet lacking the discovery of anything truly resonant. And it can be an incredible feat of creativity to transmute inherited relics into new yet equally timeless forms.

Each side of the coin has its own charm. Worlds of the former kind allow us to experience through a child’s eyes (or perhaps an explorer’s)—curious and impressionable, encountering everything for the first time. The latter kind allows us to experience through an elder's—attuned to allusions, and to the meaning and power of familiar things. (Perhaps cultures start at the former and move toward the latter… but maybe it’s not that simple, and their evolution is more like a tug-of-war.) To complicate things, these poles of experience can blur: music that first seemed to offer a clean break can gradually reveal itself to contain echoes of the past. Since we’re beings forged by the past, we need these echoes… although to exactly what extent is forever up to debate. 

No genre’s shifted as dramatically from clean slates to palimpsests as East Coast hip hop did between the mid 80s and early 90s. We can hear this by comparing two tracks produced by one of the genre’s early legends, Marley Marl. Production-wise, “The Bridge” is nothing but rattling multi-ton machinery and a cold war apocalypse siren that’s cut in and out in an aggressively unnatural manner. Even if you catch all the references in the lyrics, the track’s mysterious sparseness gives it the air of an artifact stolen from some cold, unplaceable brutalist future. So much hip hop that came out of the same time and area has a similarly posthuman sheen. In any subsequent decade, a track from Krafwerk’s Computer World would sound hilariously out of place next to the latest NYC rap… but “Numbers” and “Tour de France” sound perfectly congruent in hip hop mixes from the mid 80s. Marl’s production half a decade later on “She’s Dope! (EPOD Mix)” is much closer to home, unabashedly sampling the familiar sound world of the 70s, rather than just drawing on its grooves as latent structural inspiration. In truth, old sounds were always present in hip hop. Marl twisted a 70s horn sample into the siren wail heard on “The Bridge”, and ironically Kurtis Mantronik’s ultra-futuristic production on Music Madness went further back in time than anyone else in the era by sampling big band music. But in the 80s these artifacts were more likely to appear in an altered or otherwise defamiliarized form, functioning as sonic scrap material, not as warmth-giving heirlooms of the past.  

Yet the sonic conservatism of 90s East Coast hip hop also created a new region of affect. It's exactly this memory-laden quality that makes its production so evocative. There’s a powerful juxtaposition of beautiful old melodic fragments of jazz and funk with grim, unblinkingly detailed stories of poverty and violence. In the remnants of a metropolis fallen into decay, where what little upward momentum the government had granted the least advantaged in the mid century—not coincidentally, the same era that 90s hip hop producers sampled so much—had been reversed by escalation of austerity measures and the war on drugs, this sound world carries the historical and visual density of NYC itself. The architecture of the music evokes the architecture of the city.  

Take Mobb Deep's quotation of Norman Connors’ “You are My Starship” in “Trife Life”. The latter starts with the exact same sparkling keyboard run that opens the former, and also transposes up the song’s bassline, transforming it from a weightless gliding into an ominous creeping. Given how anti-romantic the lyrics of “Trife Life” are, you could interpret this as ironic mockery of the head-in-the-clouds romanticism of "Starship". But artists are always less motivated by irony than critics like to assume. There's an implied reverence in how little they fuck with the fragments lifted from the original song. What this reference evokes is a harder to place emotion; the echo serves as a dream-warmth that haunts you as you as you return to cold reality. A mirage you can't forget. (The song reaches a natural close… and then, after a brief silence, the beat starts up again, like an object in a haunted house moving of its own accord.)

Hip hop is by no means the only music of “roots and future”. It's present even in the most fervently modernist artistic cultures. When he was asked to create a work celebrating musique concrete’s 50th anniversary, Francis Dhomont was uniquely qualified for the job. He’d experimented with a kind of proto-concrete before the term existed, and had been quietly present for all the discoveries and conflicts that arose along the expedition led by Pierre Schaeffer. One of the central recurring motifs in “Cycle of Sound” is a sequence lifted from the opening seconds of Schaeffer’s “Etude in Objects”. What’s striking is how Dhomont takes these sound objects, now rusty ancient museum pieces, and enchants them into a shimmering material which casts unpredictable trails of light in its wake. It’s a beautiful effect which elevates the original sounds to a higher plane. The cycle is dedicated to “musique concrete’s unfortunate creator”, which itself is a quotation… it’s how Schaeffer, the burningly curious yet forever disappointed explorer, once referred to himself. With this context in mind, Dhomont’s magician tricks with Schaeffer’s sounds feel like a touching rebuttal to the latter’s pessimism, a way of saying, “Don't despair! Look how far we’ve come, thanks to the possibilities you opened up!” The work is rich with other allusions, like the spooky recurring presence of medieval choral music (probably related to Dhomont’s contention that musique concrete was the Ars Nova of the 20th century), and a drone passage interrupted by blink-and-you’ll-miss-it flashbacks to classic works of concrete—ephemeral yet potent phantoms. A former student of Nadia Boulenger, Dhomont absorbed both the aesthetics of the “old world” and European modernism through lived experience. While the initial impression that “Cycle of Sound” generates is one of blinding futurism and alienness, the work's inventiveness is inseparable from the cultural erudition and lived memory that went into it.

Super Hostile vs. Super Docile

Is this world hospitable? The answer impacts your experience of diegesis more drastically than anything else. A trip through the Pacific temperate rainforests would feel quite different than a journey across the volcanic plains of Venus, regardless of the details of each expedition. Places can feel as though they have attitudes towards us, and this influences our own emotions when we're in them. It's difficult to feel bad in a place that seems to heal you, equally difficult to be carefree in a place that has your doom written all over it.

A soundworld can be hostile or docile in many ways. "Hostile" can mean gloomy or violent... "Docile" can mean cozy or ethereal... The terms don't correspond to specific inner states so much as broader clusters of emotion and sensation. Your reaction to a given diegesis may vary depending on the day, but once you understand it's climate it'll never fail to resonate with you.

Sometimes the most compelling music is a heterogeneous mixture of the two. A tropical island shoreline past which you glimpse catacombs obscured by vines. A wasteland of scrap metal populated by Robocop-style toxic sludge mutants, in which you eventually discover a monastic order maintaining an irrigation-channeled garden…

Resist the facile equation of hospitable with good music and inhospitable with bad music. Both areas of affect can be amazing; hell is as timeless a muse as heaven. What makes for a bad experience is finding yourself in a world where there’s no atmosphere of any kind.

I’d contend that the most vivid, poetic examples of hostile worlds aren’t found in the obvious genres—the ones with the word “dark” in their name, etc.—but are rather the forbidden planets of the 50s and 60s avant garde. Nearly all the canonical works in early electronic music radiate dark energy: aural depictions of the monsters and winds of Hades (Schaeffer and Henry - "Orpheus 53"), howling city-sounds cast into the night with Pollockian abandon (Varese - "Electronic Poem"), ruins haunted by spirits and sirens (Xenakis - "Orient-Occident"), dreams of World War III as glimpsed through astral projection traveling along powerlines and radio waves (Stockhausen - "Anthems"). Even depictions of Heaven itself are deeply eerie (Stockhausen - "Song of the Youth"). And why would we expect otherwise? These composers grew up in a musical context culturally (and in some cases, temporarily) closer to that of Schumann than our own. If this stuff is startling and unfamiliar to us, imagine how it must have sounded to even the people making it back then.

Luc Ferrari’s “Visage V” is a lesser known but exemplary case study. Right out the gate you’re assailed by an industrial-machine drone of suffocating pressure. Layers constantly fade in and out, but through these changes in color and intensity this force never dissipates; at times it disconcertingly resembles the human voice. At intervals it lets up for just long enough to allow various species of feral mechanical creatures to burst in, snapping and barking in their own dialects. You soon find that these chrome and gunmetal hell-creatures are capable of accelerating into near-unfollowable flashes of violent, unpredictable movement—getting the way would result in grave injury at best. Through all the fluctuations that follow, you never get more than a few seconds to relax; even at its most subdued the piece bristles with tension and inhuman malevolence. On three occasions, descending swarms of nanobots envelope you then evaporate into trails of steam. After the third attack the work abruptly ends. Whatever alien intelligence was controlling events has pushed you out of its world. 

The lesser known truth is that many of these same artists went on to construct wonderful audio-utopias. In the late 60s, Ferrari himself was one of the very first to leave the era of forbidden planets behind. He spent the following decades developing an unassuming yet prescient style somewhere between the open-world sample collages of chillout and a kind of proto-ASMR. These works reveal equal sensitivity to areas of the experience-spectrum that couldn't be more opposite to the ferocity of his earlier work. As a great thaw spread across the ivory towers, academy-affiliated composers like Michael McNabb, Michel Redolfi, and Laurie Spiegel pioneered what could (almost paradoxically) be described as avant garde new age ambient. Or take Pierre Schaeffer’s appointed successor Francois Bayle, who gradually shook off all traces of the austerity associated with his area of music in favor of a twinkling, enchanted warmth. Whereas 70s compositions like “The Acoustic Experience” foreground shrill brutalist synth tones, works from the 90s and 2000s like “Fables” and “The Form of the Spirit is a Butterfly” have sound palettes evocative of computer-age fairy tales.

Among the record collector types who tend to listen to this stuff, the turn to lightness and lushness is sometimes conflated with a fading of the visionary intensity of high modernism. But what if the greatest results of this shift are proof of exactly the opposite? These works vindicate their creators’ risky investment in the rejection of longstanding musical conventions. They’re proof that the vocabularies Schaeffer et al developed amount to more than a means to shock and obfuscate audiences, a rejection of traditional beauty for novelty’s sake—but rather to a new sound-poetry that can go anywhere.

Take Bayle’s "Mimameta". With a swift gesture the curtains open, and the ever-shifting glow of sunlight filtering through leaves envelopes you. Wistful chimes stir in an unfurling melody that’s somewhere between lyrical and incidental, introducing and later bookending the piece. This serene garden-world is not asleep, it’s bursting with activity. As your senses adjust to the delicacy of the environment, the ornateness of micro-motion and spatial positioning becomes overwhelming. Floating silver objects collide and cascade. Descending gusts of magic wind sporadically fall throughout the atmosphere. Colonies of birds begin chattering, fall silent, resume to reach a crescendo. Strangely tuned flutes that behave like birdsong babble and flutter. The rustle of plucked instruments, played by unseen faeries or fauns mischievously intrudes. This is a living tapestry that’s both a sanctuary and a riddle. We’ll return to investigate it further.

For subsequent generations of producers, navigating between hostile and docile climates was not so much an ability to be gradually and arduously developed as an assumed right. In the 90s in particular, the culture of a) working under multiple quasi-anonymous aliases rather than cultivating a singular brand or cult of personality, and b) releasing multiple mixes of the same track put producers in an ideal position to experiment. The UK techno duo GTO are maybe my favorite exemplars of the era’s spirit. Their rave anthem “Pure (Pure Energy)” is a survival game after nightfall, but “Pure (Beautiful Mix)” is a cave pond of healing. Aphex Twin is an other great exemplar, with work ranging from the wide open sky and ancient protean yearning of "i" to the physiological assault of "Ventolin".

Zones Without People

"And in all of nature, in trees for instance, I see expression and a soul, as it were." Van Gogh

“Rave music doesn’t so much abolish ‘soul’ as disperse it across the entire field of sound.” Simon Reynolds

Is there anyone in this world? Consider the options: you could be somewhere densely populated, surrounded by a cacophony of voices; you could be somewhere intimate, alone with a single person; or you could be in a world that’s deserted or uncharted. Sometimes the third possibility is the most exciting.

That belief won’t make sense to all listeners. Some will be lost without the overt auditory presence of another human (conveyed via singing, breathing, studio chatter, etc.) and decry music that inhabits this region of affect as soulless, devoid of feeling or meaning.

But listening to music as diegesis reveals the wrongness of that assumption. Just as in visual art, where skies, oceans (or Bob Ross’ “happy trees”) are imbued with emotional qualities, so too can soundscapes that offer little to no overt signs of human life take on expressive resonances. The performer is no longer the only one who can speak to us; nature, machines, data streams—in music all of these and more can sing songs of their own. This music does not reject everyday emotions so much as venture beyond them.

You can encounter ghosts in these worlds. Peripheral mirages of human presence creep in when you least expect them. Too fleeting and distant to satisfy listeners who long for music to come from a clear, corporeal “speaker”, these presences can nevertheless have a haunting beauty. They imbue your surroundings with a sense of buried mystery—a sense that you’re at a boundary between one world and another.

No genre contains more zones without people than the sleepy countrysides of ambient. When Brian Eno coined the term, he was referring to music that could function as ambience. But, looking back on decades of music assigned the label, has the salient quality of ambient music in general really been that it’s “as ignorable as it is interesting”? Arguably, no. Selected Ambient Works Volume II remains the masterpiece of the genre, yet it’s difficult to ignore when used as background noise. A friend described the album with my favorite adjective, “unsettling”, within about two seconds of hearing it in such a context. (Yet music from the old master of dramaturgy and pathos, Beethoven, seems to be quite easy to tune out for most people.) Rather, what makes ambient so interesting is its use of ambience as subject matter: the musical equivalent of landscape painting. Its slow-moving pads and sparingly placed real-world sounds evoke the mysterious quietude of dream environments. In a way, Eno himself embraced this reinterpretation of the term’s meaning with the place-themed Ambient 4: On Land, his best work. The more we treat ambient as immersive close-listening music—rather than like an automatic Philip K. Dick-style mood-altering machine—the more beautiful it becomes.

Take the seventh track on Selected Ambient Works Volume II for instance. First impressions are of light and motion: nighttime and gentle undulation. There are distant gleams of moonlight, or some other light source. Occasionally, tape distortion murmurs in the background—ancient, dusty wind from the peripheries sweeping through. Slowly, the swaying back and forth takes on a musical sense of swing. In these dream pastures and forests, at once cozy and disquieting, the grass is dancing, as though ancient memories of boisterous celebrations are still reverberating through the landscape. 

Dance music should be antithetical to what we’re talking about—it’s what DJs play at gatherings of people, after all—yet this dichotomy was permanently shattered in the 80s by the machinic precision of techno, house, and electro. Anything beyond clockwork drum machine patterns and bursts of quasi-harmonic noise became optional, superfluous to the groove. In the following decade, the sci fi introversion suddenly possible in dance music lead to the rise of ambient techno, which combined the pastoral landscapes of the former with the mechanized propulsion of the latter, allowing you to tour extraterrestrial rainforests in airships and relax in space stations orbiting at the edges of foreign solar systems.

Psyche’s “Crackdown” is a classic example of dance music entering zones without people, evoking melancholic space travel, a lonely commute along an interplanetary highway. The BPM is firmly within danceable range, yet there’s a sense of moving forward slightly too fast, as though you’re speeding to get to a destination. The constant neon glow of the pads illuminates the floating road ahead. Later, the universe’s drowsiest alarm goes off. Yet there’s a bounciness, a stylishly syncopation that makes the journey fun. Underneath is a baseline mantra that radiates a calm sense of purpose. Flickering holograms of a romantic conversation keep appearing; visions seem to appear of their own accord out here where it’s just you, the highway, and the stars and planets.

Music as Diegesis

“Future mankind will develop a power of imagination, independent of identifying continuously how sounds are bowed, plucked, blown or struck. The sound is the medium, not the jumping jacks on stage . . . it is a precondition that electronic music and musique concrète are created with fantasy.” Karlheinz Stockhausen

The best music is vividly evocative. It goes beyond pushing certain enjoyable buttons (for example, a bass drop or a harmonic cadence) and creates a diegesis in your mind’s eye. Music can conjure up landscapes, memories, premonitions, sensations, characters, climates, and so on—which affects how it resonates with us. This, at least, isn’t an esoteric notion in the slightest. People wouldn’t make Youtube compilations like “A playlist for a 19th century villain scheming against his enemies” if they didn’t feel so. But that’s not to say it’s ubiquitous. Plenty of listeners don’t imagine this stuff much or at all, and musicians can get so caught up in the technical workings of music that they forget to listen in this manner. 

Foregrounding these evocative qualities—paying close attention to them so as to feel them more intensely—constitutes a distinct way of hearing, one that I’ll refer to as “music as diegesis”. Of course, part of the magic of music’s evocativeness lies in how you never know exactly what a given work is going to make you think of and feel before you actually hear it. But without tethering ourselves to a reductive definition, perhaps we can flesh out what “music as diegesis” is a bit further. We can do this by considering the question: what is it not?

The most obvious answer is the formalist notion of absolute music. This viewpoint posits engagement with music as a game of rote classification of various sequences and combinations of frequencies as inherently beautiful or ugly. Absolute music has many highly intelligent proponents, including my old philosophy advisor and even the iconic poet, novelist, musician, and London underworld explorer Woops. But despite these lofty endorsements I find it so absurd on an intuitive level that I won’t discuss it any further… not even past the blatant strawman I just offered.

The other competing way of hearing, and the one that I’m more interested in due to its greater prevalence, posits that we should interpret music as performance. The gist of this viewpoint is that music’s inextricably tied to the “real life” personality, appearance, actions, and circumstances of its performers and/or creators. The person making the sounds you’re hearing is reciting an intensely personal monologue about their life. Playing the violin is a substitute for spilling to your therapist. If the music is a recording created by a bedroom producer, we ought to picture said producer tearfully holding down synth keys and joyfully pushing faders as we listen. Unlike absolute music, this usually isn’t a consciously formulated position—it’s an unexamined assumption. At worst, this way of hearing constitutes a failure of imagination, a refusal to raise one’s mind from the prosaic underpinnings that allow the listening experience to occur.

man, i love music so much!

But these ways of hearing are not truly incompatible so much as they are different levels of the experience, levels between which we can constantly move as we listen. In 1972, the pioneering musique concrète composer Ivo Malec described this process (as it relates to his music) as follows:

In order to understand this piece, it [is] possible to follow two paths, quite different if not divergent. The first one relies on an imagery whose roots I would gladly trace back to Lautréamont's "deserted swamps" and "emanations" and to which I would add boiling lands, wet forests, volcanic landscapes and all kinds of entrails. The other path is that of the realities of a studio where, like a craftsman, the composer manipulates, stretches and releases with his fingers a (magnetic) tape, facing the ears of a (magnetic) head, trying to find the narrow door for the "real" sound to pass through. The rest - is mere work, stewardship . . . the second [path] precedes the first one, whilst the first one transcends the second one.

We’re still not yet in esoteric territory. Allusion to these parallel levels of listening even appears in the lyrics of Enya’s song “Orinoco Flow”, the origins of which are as follows:

In the song, Enya shouts out both Dickins (“We can steer, we can near with Rob Dickins at the wheel”) and her engineer Ross Cullum (“We can sigh, say goodbye, to Ross and his dependencies”). “Orinoco was the name of the studio,” said Dickins, “and I think they saw me as the captain of the ship.”

Both artists acknowledge in their own ways not just the multiple levels, but also that diegesis in some way transcends performance. The former says so himself, and in the latter's song the evocation of sailing to faraway places takes precedence, while the references to studio personnel are fleeting winks.

Why does music as diegesis transcend the other two ways of hearing mentioned? I think the answer’s that it opens up an infinity of listening experiences. "Absolute" and "performance" are more limited in that they force your mind within specific bounds: you can’t acknowledge extramusical associations that might actually enrich your experience of music under the former, and, again, you’re limited to extramusical associations gleaned from the performance (or your mental reconstruction of the performance) under the latter. When we're transported into the music, none of these imposed barriers hold. 

Although we can listen to any music through each of the lenses we’ve discussed, sometimes it’s possible to infer from external clues if a musician—perhaps unconsciously—favors the same listening lens as you. This can be helpful for explaining why, given two apparently similar artists, one’s music hits whereas the other’s falls flat.

Consider the big four of IDM. Squarepusher’s tendency to overdub uproarious applause onto tracks that were created without a live audience present indicates that he favors the lens of music as performance. Aphex Twin’s exasperation at this in a Soundcloud comment—“he added crowd noise etc to the recording, wtf!”—gives the impression that he either dislikes this lens or just has taste. Autechre’s tradition of holding live shows in complete darkness intentionally diverts attention away from the performance, revealing an affinity for either absolute music or music as diegesis. Boards of Canada’s track titles often seem like phrases pulled from a secret story… so it’s obvious where their heads are.

Looking for clues in this manner, we’re reminded of techno's historical connection to music as diegesis. Cybotron wasn’t just a band name, it was the name of “a super-sprite . . . [with] certain powers on the game-grid that a regular sprite didn’t have”. Underground Resistance didn’t just put out EPs, they presented themselves as rebel soldiers in an interplanetary conflict. Drexciyans were, by Kodwo Eshuh’s estimation, “water breathing, aquatically mutated descendants, webbed mutants of the Black Atlantic, amphibians adapted for the ocean's abyssal plains, a phylum disconnected from the aliens who adapted to land”. These imagination-prompts do not amount to a refusal to engage with the real world so much as a refusal to be tied down to it. A look at Rik Davis’ Youtube channel will give you a great glimpse of the spirit that techno was founded on.

Creative Mode On

 

The internet makes a sort of engagement with music possible that’s incredibly expansive in its reach yet utterly introverted in its nature. In order to appreciate this strange predicament, consider the following analogy...

A lot of us seem to share an intuitive sense of recorded music in its entirety as a landscape that we can inhabit and explore. Genres, idioms, and epochs make different regions within the whole. The output of specific artists can form distinctive spaces within these regions, and specific works can function as landmarks.

In this “space”, just like in the real world, there inevitably are some areas with which we’re more acquainted than others. We each have our childhood stomping grounds, places we regularly visit, perhaps even somewhere we’d call home. For each of us there are also regions too remote or daunting to explore, requiring long treks beyond all familiar ground, or the scaling of difficult terrain. At least, there used to be areas like that.

The internet hasn’t changed this space itself so much as changed the way we move around in it. In the old days, you had to explore along the dirt roads of physical object acquisition. This kind of travel meant ingratiating yourself with the locals any time you wanted to feel out a new region. If you wanted to learn about punk rock, hear all the best obscure singles and live recordings, you had to hang out in the right social spheres at the right venues, be initiated into the guild. Having unrestricted internet access grants something similar to what typing “/gamemode 1” did in Minecraft. You can leave slow, grounded methods of travel behind and go anywhere you want… without directly interacting with a single person, let alone investing in a particular community. Each of us can sail over forests and villages, dropping in at opportune times, yet remaining undetected.

 

choose your Guild

It’s easy to forget that this is a miraculous development. With the exploration process now so much less arduous than before, we can each explore with so much latitude, make incredible discoveries that we never would have imagined from our old parochial confines. And we can do so without having to play elitist, cliquey games of access. Whoever you are, whether you’d fit the guild’s admission criteria or not, you get to experience this.

(Reading music discussions from the pre-internet era, or from its early days, it’s both amusing and slightly frustrating how much conversation space is devoted to trading now-redundant advice on how to hear the damn stuff in the first place. Tiktok influencer Luke Davis described one early thread as “a nice period piece in that you’ve got the top record collectors in the world at the time tentatively feeling out a terrain that every 14 year old in the world now knows”.)

 

There are also losses in this new mode of engagement. First, there’s a reason video games sometimes withhold cool instant travel methods until the late stages. The excitement of unlimited options can give way to ungratefulness and in turn boredom; when you could be anywhere, it’s easy to lose interest in what’s actually in front of you. And second, involving yourself with local communities isn’t all bad. Getting a feel for the culture of a place enriches your appreciation for it. Cultural context has the potential to enhance both the directness and depth of art.

Maybe this historically new type of listener will bring about the death of music. But I’m hoping that instead we’ll carry it to unprecedented heights. Whatever the case, once you can float off the ground, sticking to the footpaths seems absurd. Who are you fooling? Your relationship with the land has irrevocably changed. So if I and many other listeners are stuck with this mode of engagement, we may as well explore it, or rather explore with it. 

Imagination is what can save us in this state. Factual knowledge, the old currency, is now easy to come by and therefore of diminished value. That sort of information is out there for you to find if you think it'll help your travels. No, the bigger concern is that you “see every detail clearly, but can’t grasp the meaning”. If, as suggested above, our enhanced freedom of movement comes at the cost of cheapening the world around us, it’s on us to figure out how to overcome the sense-dulling impatience that comes with too many options and too little investment. Instead of waiting for music to enter us, we have to enter it. So close your eyes and let the prosaic details of your bedroom melt away! Calibrate your psyche and let yourself get carried away to a new reality! You may be different when you get back. (Or is it the world that's changed?)

Everything that follows is a search for—and a hopelessly incomplete log of—the ways in. We’re looking for concepts that allow us to not just hear but immerse ourselves in the music, concepts that make the landscape overwhelmingly vivid. My focus is firmly on electronic music (nonvocal stuff from America and Western Europe, at that), but this discussion is surely relevant to other kinds of music, as well as other artforms entirely. 

 

 

(I’ll also make plenty of sweeping historical claims and speculative claims about artists’ intentions... as is fun to do. Just keep in mind that this isn't supposed to be proper journalism or scholarship. It’s all in service of our true goal: putting the imagination's gears in motion.)