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 guess the track title translates as “tomb”, but the results are supernatural science fiction. 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 give way to a fractal rainbow glow of resonance so intricately 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 and more nuanced 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.