Sounds Reviewed #4/2011: Askell Groc'hen - Cri.

 Sounds Reviewed #4/2011

Askell Groc'hen - Cri

(Slow Death Records 2011)
(10/10 Admiration-Points)

(written by S.K.G. in July - October 2011)

[I]

Since I have listened for the first time to the unique HNW-sounds invented by the french duo Askell Groc'hen (= bat in breton, a constant collaboration of the amazing HNW-artists Bördel Noir and Younx Grounioc'h) on their first release "Cri" a few months ago, I was deeply impressed by the unique psycho-acoustic and transgressive force, the conceptional strength and the intellectual depth of this HNW-project.

During one of my several listening sessions, I was reminded of a passage by the french poet/thinker Maurice Blanchot, who once described the cry as a means to transgress humanism, when he writes: "le cri (c'est-à-dire le murmure), cri du besoin ou de la protestation, cri sans mot sans silence, cri ignoble ou, à la rigeur, le cri écrit, le graffites des murailles. Il se peut, comme on aime à le déclarer, que "l'homme passe". Il passe. Il a même toujours déjà passé, dans la mesure où il a toujours été approprié à sa propre disparition. Mais, passant, il crie; il crie dans la rue, dans le désert; il crie mourant; il ne crie pas; il est le murmure du cri. [P]ar le même mouvement, fut tel qu'il ne vécut jamais que pour affirmer une haute mesure d'équité sans secret; ce qui est aussi l'attente sans espoir qui se brise dans le cri humaniste."

Something of this spirit seems to lie in the sounds of Askell Groc'hen; their will to reveal, that  humanity is always already in a  process of erosion, transgression, breakdown and self-destruction. For Askell Groc'hen our ears are the best sensory organs to induce and provoke unconscious processes of self-dissolution. Consequently our ears should be seen as our oldest and weakest sensorium - with our ears we can reach and touch classical animal territory.

Askell Groc'hen is one of the very few HNW-projects with a clear understanding of how the HNW-sound should be like: absolutely insignificant, non-mimetic, pure, simple, infinite, inhuman, transgressive, trans-life-death and self-destructive. HNW is a pure sound - and nothing else. The best HNW-sound is ab-solute, cut-off and abstract. Consequently, it is a severe mistake to suggest, that the real HNW sound should be interested in mimesis and an invulnerable interiority.

The sounds of Askell Groc'hen communicate - pretty close to the cries of animals - with our brains in tonalities without significance. Askell Groc'hen's HNW-sounds are cut-off from their sources; they transcend and transform their sources into something radical different. This artistical procedure is lightyears away from the usual incoherence, purposelessness and mindlessness of the majority of the HNW-releases. Art and thinking are always close friends. Art without concept is not Art, but rubbish. It should be the distinctive mark of a real HNW-artist, that he/she invents new (!) musical instruments and procedures, because he/she is tired of using the old-fashioned soundwaves based on the very limited possibilities of classical musical instruments.

Real HNW like the HNW of Askell Groc'hen widens the perceptive, the receptive and the aesthetic possibilities of the listener. In this, it is an heir of the revolutionary ideas of i.e. John Cage. Real HNW is not (!) a boring revival of the silly monumentalism of the musique concrète of the early sixities of the last century. It was and it will be forever boring to record a motorbike, a car, a cat, a dog, the rain  - without a musical and psycho-active purpose, without transforming the sound into something radical different and new.

Askell Groc'hen's sounds are not composed in a traditional manner, they are more likely a fierce, glowing and blistering sonic material, an unstable sonic bloc (like some works by Edgard Varèse). They are a pure sonic matter - always in touch with their own abolition. A deterritorialized music which always exceeds signification. What counts here the most is a monotone intensity, a non-formed kind of expression - the micro-repetitions and morse-codes of a suffering machine.

[II]

The sounds fall like stones into our consciousness. They build up interferences of soundwaves in our brains. They appear and disappear like clouds in the sky. Building up sonic mirages without center. Hundreds of sparkling, rotating, imploding, micro-percussive and diaphanous sounds fill our brains. They seem animate as the sound changes. The sounds merge into one another into clouds of white noise. Then all of a sudden they are bursting forth into a new sparkling individuality.They are static yet dynamic, absolutely still but changing constantly. The unstable forms plunge our brains into the deepest and most suffocating darkness.

Askell Groc'hen see the body not only as an entity inhabiting space. They also see the body as an interior space. As the location where a consciousness inheres. The body is itself a container of space, in which the relation between interior and exterior space can be subverted, when the boundaries between inside and outside are suspended. 

The will to interiorize the sounds during an attentive listening, orients us inwards and outwards at the same time towards the frightening infinity of the physical universe and the tragic finitude of our own being. The will of the listener to interiorize and exteriorize at the same time opens up a very strange sonic architecture of an interior exteriority. All of a sudden a moment of fusion of internal and external spaces becomes possible, which is nearly alchemically embodied in a physical form.

The whole body and the surrounding cosmos is saturated with sounds. The possibilities of listening are pushed far beyond themselves until the breakdown of vision - to a hyper-blindness. A hyperbolic blindness from excess not from defect, becoming a sight, that cannot see, because it is blinded by a dazzling dark light, that exceeds all limits. There is no longer an object given to a subject to listen to or intuit, but rather an excess that pushes us past intuition. A really strange experience. 

An inpenetrable continuum of sounds opens the attentive listener up to the possibility of a massive counter-experience. Counter-experience means, that there is some asymmetry between my condition for reception and what is appearing to me. "La musique offre le mouvement même de son advenue, son effet sur moi qui la reçois sans la produire, bref son surgissement sans contenu réel. Aussi m'advient-elle en sorte de m'affecter directement, comme pure donation que ne médiatise presque aucun donné objectivable et qui m'impose donc une effectivité immédiatement sienne. L'offrande musicale offre d'abord le mouvement même de son advenue - elle offre l'effet de son offrande même, sans ou au-delà des sons qu'elle suscite. Nommons cette extrémité phénoménologique où l'advenue déborde l'advenu un paradoxe." wrote Jean-Luc Marion.

The sounds of Askell Groc'hen mark the profound difference between the sounds and me, that opens me up to an even more profound counter-tuning. With poetic poignancy Askell Groc'hen reveal our precarious rootedness in the world and brings us in contact with the invisible. To reach the uncanny zeropoint of perception where invisibility, inaudibility and death meet. 

It is like a sojournment in an enclosed sonic space into which one can listen, but cannot gain access. By using micro-repetitive codes for a/voiding subjectivity, they finally force our selfs into surrender. Askell Groc'hen lead the listener into the destruction of the egological foundation of the self in order to reveal, that the innermost self is nothing but a dark, void and empty chamber. 

In this sense Askell Groc'hen's "Cri" is the darkest and at the same time the most silent chamber-music you can ever imagine. Askell Groc'hen barr, cross out, suspend and negate the usual bond between intuition and concept with their sounds. Several times during my listening sessions in bright daylight all of a sudden my eyeslids closed, fell down like a curtain to seperate me from my outer surroundings and my thoughts. There seems to be no more simple correlate anymore between sound, image and concept to achieve. A total black-out comes over the processing brain. 

The radical minimalism and abstractedness of Askell Groc'hen's sounds bring them close to the ideas arte povera, concept art, action painting or monochrome paintings - or close to the conceptions of microtonal, stochastic or spectralist music like in Julio Estrada, Giacinto Scelsi, James Tenney, Edgard Varèse, Iannis Xenakis, Tristan Murail or Gérard Grisey.

In the end this recording reveals in a very strong, stunning and poetic manner, that we still do not know what the essence of listening is, and what the real purpose and the real significance of sound is. Sounds are only sounds and nothing else. But why are pure meaningless sounds and our soul so deeply intertwined ? Maybe this is the only real secret about music. Abyssus Abyssum Invocat.

[III]

It should be clear that the bat on the cover of this recording is not a matter of mere decoration. The bat is the emblematic and enigmatic animal Askell Groc'hen have chosen to represent themselves, their sounds and their conception. The bat should be seen as the HNW-animal par excellence, because it is the uncanny incarnation of HNW-principles. Under the banner of the bat Askell Groc'hen open up time and space for new sounds. They invent new receptive and perceptive possibilities. They reveal new transgressive situations for their listeners. Under the banner of the bat they force the open-minded listeners in an uncanny process of dehumanization and becoming-bat.

But what could it mean for the listener to follow Askell Groc'hen in this process of dehumanization and becoming-bat ?  Could there be a use for HNW-music for a becoming-bat ? But isn't it impossible for a man to become-bat ? Isn't it pure non-sense to believe in a radical change of human nature ? Isn't the human nature the most stable thing on this planet ? But what is it like to be a bat, if the human nature cannot be stabilized ?

The reflection on what it is like to be a bat usually leads us to the conclusion that there are facts that do not consist in the truth of propositions expressible in a human language. We can be compelled to recognize the existence of such facts without being able to state or comprehend them. Bats, although more closely related to us than those other species, nevertheless present a range of activity and a sensory apparatus so different from ours that the problem I want to pose is exceptionally vivid. Anyone who has spent some time in an enclosed space with an excited bat knows what it is to encounter a fundamentally alien form of life.

We know that most bats perceive the external world primarily by sonar, or echolocation, detecting the reflections, from objects within range, of their own rapid, subtly modulated, high-frequency shrieks. Their brains are designed to correlate the outgoing impulses with the subsequent echoes, and the information thus acquired enables bats to make precise discriminations of distance, size, shape, motion, and texture comparable to those we make by vision. Bat sonar, though clearly a form of perception, is not similar in its operation to any sense that we possess, and there is no reason to suppose that it is subjectively like anything we can experience or imagine.

The bat perceives the surrounding world by a system of reflected high-frequency sound signals; and that one spends the day hanging upside down by one's feet in an attic. In so far as I can imagine this, it tells me only what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves. But that is not the question. I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat. When I try to imagine what is it like to be a bat, I am still restricted to the resources of my own mind, and those resources are inadequate to the task. I cannot perform it either by imagining additions to my present experience, or by imagining segments gradually subtracted from it, or by imagining some combination of additions, subtractions, and modifications. Even if I could by gradual degrees be transformed into a bat, nothing in my present constitution seems to enable me to imagine what the experiences of such a future stage of myself thus metamorphosed would be like.

But is this really the truth about the always unstable difference between animal and man ? Is it really impossible for man of becoming-animal ? What would happen, if we do not take man as the starting point and the bat as the final point of a huge transformational process ? What could it signify to "become-animal" or to "become-bat" ?

It is extremely helpful for the purpose of a deeper understanding of Askell Groc'hen's first release to relate their unique HNW-style to the ideas of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.  In their philsophical masterpiece "Mille Plateaux" they have formalized this difficult concept. For them a becoming-animal is neither becoming one concrete animal, neither producing an animal, neither ressembling an animal, neither imitate an animal, nor believing that one is an animal nor disguising as an animal. It is neither imaginary nor abstract. An animal needs no identification - in the end it is not necessary to know which animal one becomes. It is desire, affect and multiplicity. The becoming-animal creates new alliances between man, world and animal.

[IV]

Becoming-animal means to enter the dangerous zone of indiscernability where the usual distinctions of man and animal are no longer viable, in order to unify the velocities and to deplace the articulations. To mix up one's bodily molecules with the molecules of the unconscious, the wolf, the bat or the cloud. It means to become a living particularized material in order to live in-between identities. A becoming-animal opposes the numeric multiplicity to the uncanny multiplicity of the pack. The pack is composed of  a multiplicity of homogenous mouvements. The call of the pack is the call of wild nature.

The body, that is willing to enter this process, becomes intense, fluid, open for depersonalizations and probably bestializations and in this capable of new cosmic alliances. The exploration of a becoming-animal is not an end in itself. It is the first step in a process to dissolve and aggrandize the self in putting it in relation with larger fields of affects, velocities, sensations, perceptions. A becoming-animal is transgressive or it is not a becoming-animal. In a becoming-animal one has the possibility to experience the joy and the ecstacy of still not having a form. Our sensorium starts to work out new connections between pure lifeless matter and living beings. All of a sudden it resonates with all atoms in the cosmos.

One of the main tools to unleash a becoming-animal for Deleuze and Guattari is music. Deleuze and Guattari wrote: "la musique est celle d'une puissance de déterritorialisation qui traverse la Nature, les animaux, les éléments et les déserts non moins que l'homme. (...) C'est même, le contraire d'un privilège; à travers les (...) devenirs-animal ou molécule, la nature oppose sa puissance, et la puissance de la musique, à celle des machines de l'homme, fracas des usines et des bombardiers. Il faut aller jusque-là, que le son non musical de l'homme fasse bloc avec avec le devenir-musique du son".

I think, that it is not an exaggeration to surmise, that Askell Groc'hen are absolutely interested to unleash processes of de-personalization and destruction of egologics. Through the rhythms and sounds on their first release "Cri" animals and man can start to mutate and become secret allies. The listener can try to escape the logics of gravity on the wings of the bat. The eyes will follow soon with "hyper-blindness". The ears will react a little later with "hyper-deafness".

The sensoric impact of Askell Groc'hen's sounds negates all forms of representation, but not all forms of expression. The body starts to modulate and opens itself up to the flux of the elementary sounds of Askell Groc'hen. The attentive listener can try to enter the microscopic infinities of the invented sonic microstructure to become-animal. The becoming-animal opens new affective connections and demands the sensibiliy of a really embodied consciousness. The becoming-animal of the body is a presence - fragile like a sound. The becoming-animal happens all of a sudden, it is a direct experience, that turns around all the habitualities of our usual perceptive apparatus.

Askell Groc'hen should be seen as the first HNW-project, that build a machine for a "devenir-animal" a "becoming-animal". Their HNW-sound is an almost unbearable monstrosity, because this musical machine aims at the destruction of our egologics. With the artistical means of very abstract and pure HNW-sounds,  Askell Groc'hen opens up possibilities for a deeper understanding of the philosophical implications and groundations of the real HNW-sound.

Are these sounds the first music for a becoming-animal, the first music for the ears of animals ? Is this the first music for an immobile voyage on the wings of the bat? One thing is sure: this is one of the most precious artistical statements about HNW this year, because the sounds of Askell Groc'hen point at the zeropoint of perception, where blindness and insight, life and death, animality and humanity collapse. Maybe this is the point every great artist want to reach at least once in a lifetime. I want to leave the final words of this review to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, who seemed to have summed up everything which counts in real HNW and in Askell Groc'hen when they write:

"Plus rien que le monde des vitesses et

des lenteurs sans forme, sans sujet, sans visage.
Tout un travail rhizomatique de la perception,
le moment où désir et perception se confondent.
Devenir-clandestin, partout faire rhizome, pour la merveille,
d'une vie non-humaine à créer.
Continuum de toutes les substances en intensité,
mais aussi de toutes les intensités en substance.
Continuum ininterrompu du CsO."

(10/10 Admiration-Points)

(written by S.K.G. in July - October 2011)

Askell Groc'hen - Cri

(Slow Death Records 2011)

(78 min., Limited to 30 copies)

Support and contact Askell Groc'hen here ,

Bördel Noïr here and Younx Grounioc'h here.

Thoughts of the Day #31/2011: Robert Smithson (2)

Robert Smithson (1938-1973)

(copyright owners please read: p.s. at the bottom of this post, thank you)

Dear Readers,

today it is time again for a few thoughts by one of the greatest american artists of all times: Robert Smithson. This time I have chosen a few passages about mirrors  (for the connection of HNW and mirrors, see my review ):

Why do mirrors display a conspiracy of muteness concerning their very existence ? When does a displacement become a misplacement ? Those are forbidding questions that place comprehension in a predicament. The questions the mirrors ask always fall short of answers. Mirrors thrive on surds, and generate incapacity. Reflections fall onto the mirrors without logic, and in so doing invalidate every rational assertion. Inexpressible limits are on the other side of incidents, and they will never be grasped.

*******

The mirror itself is not subject to duration, because it is an ongoing abstraction that is always available and timeless. The reflections, on the other hand, are fleeting instances that evade measure. Space is the remains, or corpse, of time, it has dimensions. "Objects" are "sham space", the excrement of thought and language.

*******

Only when art is fragmented, discontinuous and incomplete can we know about that vacant eternity that excludes objects and determined meanings. The mirror and the transparent glass brings us to those designations that remain forever abolished in the colorless infinities of a static perception.

*******

The artificial ingenuity of time allows no return to nature. Mirrors in time are blind, while transparent glass picks up reflections in this spaceless region of inverse symmetry and shifting perspectives - the mirror reflects the blank surface in the suburbs of the mind. There is nothing to "understand" about such a region except the consciousness that makes understanding impossible.

*******

A mirror looking for its reflection but never quite finding it. 

*******

Timelessness is found in lapsed moments of perception, in the common pause that breaks apart into a sandstorm of pauses.

- Robert Smithson

P.S. All texts by Smithson are taken from the volume: Robert Smithson, Slideworks. Carlo Fura 1997.

(MFoP #5/2011): Cyanistes caeruleus (1)

My Favorite on this Planet #5/2011

Cyanistes caeruleus

(photo: S.K.G.)

Thanks for reading my blog !

Have a nice weekend !

Stay tuned and expect the unexpected!

Sounds Reviewed #3/2011: Lungwash - By Myself to Myself Sacrificed.

Sounds Reviewed #3/2011

Lungwash  - By Myself to Myself sacrificed

(self-released tape 2011)

(10/10 Admiration-Points)

I.

"Mark Time’s Finist Joke. Putting Allspace in a Nutshall“ wrote James Joyce in his famous book “Finnegans Wake” . If you are willing to follow this thought, it could be easily extended to a definition of the faculty of imagination. The faculty of imagination should be defined as the gift to interpolate in the infinitely small. The poetological advice given by Virginia Woolf to "saturate every atom" seems to be absolutely crucial here. In one of her notebooks she wrote: "Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fell, let us trace the patterns, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness. Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small".

This excerpt can easily be used to describe Lungwash's musical procedure. Where the naivités of natural theology have the audacity and stupidity to seek God's presence in the infinitely big and the so called sublime, Lungwash searches for the sparks of infinity in sub-atomic regions deep beyond the reach of God's will. With his third release Lungwash blessses us with one of the most beautiful HNW-titles ever "By Myself to Myself Sacrificed", and with the most carefully and thoughtfully crafted and composed microsound-world of this still young musical genre. 

A lot of time was invested in this tiny and precious tape. A careful listener will be pleased with one of the best designed HNW-compositions this year. I would even risk the formulation,  that this tape contains one of the best HNW-compositions ever, because it allows a pars-pro-toto analysis. To say it simpler: this tape is at the same time absolutely unique and a paradigm how HNW should be structured and sound like.

But you should take your time with this tape, because it is constantly growing. It goes deeper and deeper after each listening session, but devotion, abandon and attentive ears are absolutely necessary to discover the immaterial substance of this music. This music reveals its secret in the dark with a really good HiFi-equipment and very good headphones to minimalize the distractions. In any case this music - like any good music should do - establishes its own space-time. The total time of this tape may be "only" 18 minutes, but in the end, this is nothing more than a technical approximation.

The real extension of these sounds only reveal themself to the devoted listener. They give the listeners a deep and concentrated impression of the paradox of temporal contraction and nearly infinite sensual expansion. So dear HNW-Listeners, go ahead, train your ears ! Get ready to envision the metaphysical in the physical and the immaterial in the material when you listen to Lungwash's unique HNW-brand. The admirably intricate and dense aesthetic of microsounds needs a really developped sensorium for micro-perceptions like Deleuze / Guattari formalized them in "Mille Plateaux".

Already the use of the tape format is well calculated. The A side of this tape is marked, but after repeated listening I got the impression, that this is only a random starting point for a huge transformative process, which the composer calls "sacrifice" . But who wants to decide where this composition begins or ends? Who wants to decide what a musical climax really is ? Is this tape dramatic or anti-dramatic ? Is it Hi-Fi or Lo-Fi? But who is willing to use these silly categories anyhow ?

Lungwash generates with a slightly differing total time of the two sides of the cassette (9:50 / 9:55) some kind of strange symmetry or a "crippled symmetry" to use the title of a famous composition by Morton Feldman. But maybe the choice of the tapeformat has also more practical reasons: it makes it easier to really introduce the cruel force of a general pause.  

With the choice of the tapeformat even the physical act of taking the cassette out of the player and turning it around in the hands and putting it back inside again, became an event. Pressing the start-button brings back the memories of the good old LP-days, when listening to music has had so many haptic and visual aspects. (Ah! The good old LP-melancholia is back !). 

II.

The poetic and thoughtful title "By Myself to Myself Sacrificed" opens your mind up to the deep existential dimensions of this composition. The title contains some kind of user's guide. It is giving the advice, that the listener should depersonalize or should at least reduce his more variegated personality to listen to this tape properly, in order to enter the psycho-active dimension of this work.

The greek word psyche has a multiple meaning. In the art-historical epoche called Empire the word psyche also names a standing man-high cheval-mirror, which was used mainly in the boudoir. If you are willing to bring the two meanings of psyche together in a highly speculative manner, it is quiet easy to suggest, that the tape itself provides a kind of cheval mirror for the soul of the listener. It helps the listener to enter the uncanny spiral of loss and re-appropriation of the self.  It is a strange and uncanny mirror-play, that seems to provide a closed circle of reflection, but this circle remains open and uncanny, because the tain of the mirror will never ever show up.

In order to make the idea of the mirror-play a little bit stronger here, I want to cite to passages from one of the greatest artists of our times Michelangelo Pistoletto. In his works he has often referred to mirrors or used images of mirrors and mirrors themselves. In a brilliant text entitled "Art takes on Religion" he wrote:

"The mirror is a symbol which is at the same time an antisymbol. It is simply the physical and intellectual extension of the human phenomenon: from the eye to the mind, to action, the human being is an entire series of reflections. In the mean time, possibilities of mirroring are not containable within a limited dimension; a mirror can potentially reflect every places and goes forward reflecting even where and when the human eye is absent."

"The mirror (...) within the realm of art, becomes the meeting point between the human mirroring and reflecting phenomenon and the universal reality which the mirror itself is able to reflect. That is, the mirror is the mediator between the visible and the invisible, carrying sight beyond its normal possibilities. "

" I think there is only one mirror, which is divided and therefore multiplied in every other mirror. Man’s dimension must be seen in terms of this power to embrace the universal and the particular at the same time. An original creative sensitivity gave birth to the divine images of antiquity, and this transfiguration stimulated, through imagination, a unifying perception and a common understanding. Individual freedom and responsibility, as symbolized by the mirror, don’t generate a still image of man or God, but a creative movement that can be extended to everyone. "  (Pistoletto 1978)

III.

Lungwash's music floats in a certain sense between immaterial and material things. The sounds vibrate in between, they are the vibrance of the In-Between. His sounds cut through space and time like the lightning cuts through the sky. These sounds open up your ears to the usually hidden non-spot between heaven and earth, where nothingness appears as nothingness. Maybe this site is closely related to sound, because only sounds have this deep relation to the non-visual and the secret, because the secret of soundwaves can only be perceived, but never be revealed. During the listening of this tape I felt like wrapped in an unheard of immaterial fabric of white linen and stardust. Almost like a monk of a secret order dedicating his life only to the production and perception of minimal and static sounds.

In his brilliant book called "Inner Rhythms" DovBer Pinson wrote: "There are those who through proper meditation become sensitive to the sound of the spheres above. A sixteenth century Kabbalist wrote that he heard of a person in India who actually went deaf, from the sounds of the spheres above, from the sounds generated by the motion of the sun. Although these sounds are very subtle, in heightened states of consciousness, even the smallest, faintest sounds can ring like claps of thunder."  

Everything seems to be in total silence, but when you are willing to transform your sensorium, you can detect life and movement even on a subatomic level on this recording, where all particles interact and are being created and destroyed continously. Once these particles are created, they do not remain static, but continously move in rhytmic motion. Sounds are produced by a wave with a certain frequency; thus, with each movement, new sounds waves are created. In this sense, every particle on Lungwash's tape is constantly singing songs in its own unimitable frequency. Sounds are made by other objects; even abstract sounds and thoughts have a tune that they sing. Everything in this world, an object, an idea, or a moment, has his unique tune that is connected to and inspired by it.

But you will need a lot of asceticism to learn to perceive the power of minimal and static sounds. I surmise, that Lungwash affirms this ascetic orientation - albeit an asceticism that is expressed through and not by the rejection of the body. Since no one can listen without a resonating body. And no one can listen without recognizing that his/her body is vibrating and resonating. The ethereal aspect of the sounds are always manifest in the most mundane. And the brightest light can be found in the darkest pit. The sounds evoke a feeling of containment, but not utter withdrawal as into sleep. The image of looking from the inside of a cave seems to be a more appropriate description for the act of reception. 

Almost in levitation or light as a feather, the attentive and imaginative (!) listener could - for example - take the opportunity to listen to the echoes of the monks of an unknown order, walking barefoot down the endless corridors filled with age-old gravel. Until they reach the dramatic sonic architecture of self-reversal (processio and reversio) at the end of the side B of this tape, where they can learn to divest their corporeality, in order to reach the point, where the corporeal encasement can be transcended in and through minimal and static sounds.

This ecstatic experience is necessary to ensure the return of the soul to the world. The eradication of the corporeal comes to fruition in the apophatic realization, that there is no thing outside nothing. And that the finite world itself is consubstantial with the unsubstantiality of the infinite universe. In the oscillating light of the sounds the necessity of sacrifice occurs. When there is nothing but nothingness around us - the attentive listener could ask himself - how can there be anything substantial to take possession of ? 

It is time to unknot the usual co-implication of world, body and mind - to cast off body-mind. And to breathe free and unhindered maybe for the first time ever. I think, that this is the subversive meaning of  the name Lungwash: it is a vehicle for in-spiration, re-spiration or con-spiration.

IV.

Lungwash's sounds try to find a sonic approximation to the connection between asceticism, minimalism and sacrifice. And in this brings out an important aspect in HWN: the sacrificial aspect.The nullification of something into nothing, and nothing into something. During the listening to real HNW you can experience the inaugural egression of nothing into something and the future regression of something back to nothing.

The formula ex nihilo nihil fit can become forever ridiculuos. But in order to understand this and to become a novice of HNW, you must already be proficient in an aptitude, I would designate as a disciplined search for a state of equanimity, which is the prerequisite to experience the depth of nothingness. This discipline consists in the suppression of the impatience of the ego, in order to open up the psyche to the more immaterial dimensions of reality, towards experiences related to intensity, vibrancy or those dealing with fleeting or lasting impact.

Our growing dependence on things and consumption makes it nearly impossible to have an experience with absolute nothingness. This fact entails the necessity of a sacrifice, that is the withdrawal of libido, the severance of ties with the commodity world, in order to break through to the true essence of the world. This sacrifical trans-appropriation is the appropriation in which the subject penetrates itself in the utmost negativity and learns that there is nothing outside nothingness. The fascination for sacrifice resides in this desire for self-transfiguration. Self-transfiguration is always bound to an ecstasy directed to an absolute and uncontrollable Outside. All these aspects are deeply engraved in Lungwash's world of micro-sounds.

Lungwash's HNW-sound - and real HNW-sound in general - can be used as a vehicle to replace the limited and stultified mind and body with superior forms of the mind and body, whereby a new sense of selfhood develops: compassionate, wise and pure. The highest level of achievement comes about - as I said above -  by the act of self-negation or self-sacrifice. This negation of ego-centricity is above the understanding of the intellect, insofar as it leads to the transcending of the distinction between compliance and defiance, worthiness and culpability.

Consequently the realization of the emptiness of the self should not be seen as a way to obliterate the self. It just means the contrary: it is a means to unleash the innate capacity for pure motivation and expulsion. This can only be done, if the meditation is clear and steady. Only then the naught will be a creative void, which produces an even stronger activism afterwards. Go on to subdue your heart to still more silence, truth and seclusion. Be ready for ascending and descending (via passionis - via perfectionis) during your attentive listening. 

But is not the possibility of repeated sacrifice which Lungwash's tape provides for every listener - in the end nothing else but the sacrifice of sacrifice ? Or will there be ever an end to sacrifice ? You may auto-reverse the mirrors of your soul ad infinitum, but is this act of sacrifice really the end of all reversal and mirror-play ? Maybe the sacrifice will be transformed into something else in the stoic repetition of By Myself to Myself Sacrificed. To leave the final words to Al Cisneros:

 Premise of pained experiencer attained.
Now shifts before the salving sun.
Cherubim stands.
The pilgrim kneels.
In tears immerse.
Identity negated.
Reacher of the state of non return;
The stream attained in non-duality.
Ensues yogic benediction.
Grace of the luminary prevails.
Astral, causal realms relinquished.
Into unmodified state reclaimed.

 

(written by S.K.G. in May-June 2011)

Lungwash's composition "By Myself to Myself Sacrificed" is one of the most intricate, inventive, thoughtful and elevating HNW-releases this year. This tape should be a part of every serious HNW-collection.This tape really captures the essence of HNW and delivers one of its deepest interpretations. It clearly links its sonic appearance with the deepest tradition of musical minimalism. Consequently this adds up to 10/10 Admiration-Points. I hope, that Lungwash will release a lot more in the future, because I really can't wait to listen to more of this. Every serious HNW-fan should put this artist on his list of favorite projects.

Lungwash - By Myself to Myself Sacrificed.

(self-released tape 2011, C20, limited to 40 copies)

Support one of the most remarkable,

singular and innovative artists

of the HNW-scene here.

Contact: Lungwash@gmail.com

Thoughts of the Day #19/2011: Epicurus

Epicurus (341-270 BCE)

Rom, Museo Baracco

(photo: Alinari)

(Copyright owners please read p.s.

at the bottom of the post )

Λάθε βιώσας.

Live secretly !

Thoughts of the Day #16/2011: Elliot R. Wolfson (2)

Elliot R. Wolfson (*1956 -  ) 

Today, it is again time to present a long passage from a book by Elliot R. Wolfson. Last time (click here) I have already informed my dear readers, that he is one of my most admired scholars, who should be known and read around the globe. Often, when I want to refocus my thoughts, I pull out one of his books or essays by chance  out of my book shelf and start to read. Nearly instantly, my thoughts were absolutely revitalized.

Yesterday I have chosen his book "Open Secret" (Columbia UP 2009) again, which should be considered as one of the most important books about Habad and the secret ever written. Its lecture is even more rewarding than the lecture of  Derrida's often awkward reflections on the secret.

The passage that I would like to present today is taken from the "Introduction" entitled "Behind the Veil Unveiled" of the aforementioned book:

"Consider for example, the formulation of the sixth Rebbe: "It is impossible for there to be a disclosure of the intellect without the garment of thought, and thus, when the light of the intellect is disclosed, letters are produced, but above there can be a disclosure of light without any garment."

The phenomenological question that beckons to be asked, however, concerns the nature of what is disclosed in this disclosure of light without any garment. Can such disclosure be anything but occlusion?

I think it is closer to the spiritual marrow of Habad, as it were, to surmise that the seeing without a garment consists of coming to see that there is nothing ultimately to see but the garment that there can be a seeing without any garment. The very notion of removing all garments, in other words, is the ultimate garment, and, consequently, what is seen of the light without any garment is the very garment through which the light is (un)seen. The soteriological promise of a gnosis that consists of the disclosure of the essence (gilluy ha-asmuth) does not betoken the revelation of an entity subject to representational replication, but rather the event of unconcealment in which the manifest ceases to be hidden in its manifestation.

In the epochal metamorphosis of the eschaton, the concealment, as such, is unconcealed, the withdrawal itself withdrawn, and hence the nature of being will not be thought of as what abides as concealed in its unconcealment but as what transpires in the concealing of the concealment. [...]

As Epstein put it elsewhere, in the days of the week, which figuratively symbolize the fragmented time of history, "the divine light is intentionally hidden and concealed", so that there might be the semblance of an autonomous nature, but on the Sabbath, which symbolizes the atemporal time of redemption, one can comprehend the light in its essence, and the differentiated beings are revealed to be, in truth, aspects of the Infinite, which yields the paradox that "in relation to the Infinite, concealment is also disclosure, as disclosure is infinite".

To be exposed, the Infinite must be camouflaged, to be forthcoming, it must be withheld. Envisioning the essence in Habad tradition may be cast as apprehending the "absolute nonbeing of the event", which "results from an excess of the ultra-one", the oneness beyond the distinction of one and many.

The unicity consigned to the end is a visual attunement to the void of all being, the void of all things fully void, the breach of unity by which the unity of the breach (dis)appears in and through the cleft of consciousness. In this temporal crevice and spatial hiatus, the symbolic is imagined as real, the real as symbolic."

Thanks for reading my blog !

Have a nice week !

Stay tuned and expect the unexpected!

(P.S. This photo is used with the very kind permission of Prof. Elliot R. Wolfson. Thank you very much)

(HNW #6/2011): The HNW-formula (1)

Dear Readers,

this is my first tentative draft to formalize the Art of HNW. This is my first HNW-formula. But more formulas will follow soon. In the nearer future I will give here a new definition for the acronym H.N.W.. I think, that the usual translation as "Harsh Noise Wall" is absolutely misguiding.

HNW =

(Minimal Music + Concept Art + Field Recording + Secrecy ) 

(Singular Approach to Sound and Time + Trance-Ability)

Thanks for reading my blog !

Have a nice day !

Stay tuned and expect the unexpected !
And please respect the copyright of my texts !

For more texts about HNW click here

Sounds Reviewed #2/2011: Vargrwulf - Release

Sounds Reviewed #2/2011

VARGRWULF - Release

(Sweet Solitude 2011, Infinity Project 1)

(10/10 Admiration-Points)



Minimalism in Art is the attempt to achieve the most intense artistical results with the most minimal artistical means. Joseph Gates' work on the important UK based label Sweet Solitude should be seen in this tradition, since "Release" presents the most minimal and at the same time most beautiful music you can imagine. John Cage would have loved it, because the sounds are nearly inexistant. They constantly oscillate between Being and Nothingness. This constant oscillation makes "Release" to a really great work of cosmic noise, since our cosmos is also always incipient and never ever ending.  Something or maybe nothing of this cosmic oscillation between Nothingness and Being seems to be preserved on "Release".

On "Release" there is almost nothing to listen to. But this almost nothing is so intense, bright and pure, that I got the impression, that the whole spectrum of light was refracted through the prism of sound. The splendor of the sun also becomes only visible through the fact, that it is refracted by the layers of the atmosphere of our planet Earth. The internal flickering of the sounds dissolves over 75 Minutes into a vibrant haze, which produces a hypnotic luminosity and an almost tactile immediacy. The sounds seem almost like painted with the subtlest shades of desert sand or ice and snow.  Joseph Gates seems to be the Robert Ryman of sound when he makes all shades of white audible for us.

Ecstatic tranquility would be the most appropriate name for the state, in which the mind of the listener dives in. This music is a Dive-Through and not a Drive-Through. This music provides a stairway to your inner and outer galaxies. Its inward aesthetic opens your senses up to the cerebral pleasures of proportion, of light, of touch, of colour, of sound, of light and of silence. The radiance of the sounds releases the spirit, but the spirit always remembers the body. It almost feels like lying on a very sunny location on the beach, watching with half open eyes into the blue nothingness called sky, only slightly blinded by the sunlight. And in the end, everything will dissolve itself into a mirage and a deep slumber. Sounds will appear and disappear like cloud formations on the deep blue canvas of your innermost sensorium.

Hardness and softness, stasis and movement are in a constant but always surprising tension. An inattentive listeners would integrate the sounds into one wall, but you have to listen to this record more than once, to perceive what is going on here. Where the classical monolithic HNW-Sound tries to eliminate the time-axis of a composition by shockfrosting time to an eternal now or by stretching time almost like a balloon to produce some kind of time-bubble (or a nunc stans - if you like latin terms), Gates delivers a strange stasis in horizontal motion. He is extending the time-axis or to use another picture: he stretches a time-atom until it explodes or bursts into pieces to produce a HNW-wall fractured by light. So you can prepare yourself to listen to the most lucid, translucent and transparent HNW-sounds ever.

If you are willing to let yourself fall into a dreamlike mindstate you will be rewarded with evocation of the flickering beauty of a landscape. All of a sudden a landscape seems to appear before the eyes of your imagination.This must be the grandeur of an american landscape: from a promontory to a rock to a grain of sand. You can almost feel the inscription of a sonic microclimate of a landscape with the most elementary sound like: water, wind, fire. Or to say it simpler: you can listen to inhuman sounds, sounds that were produced by our cosmic machine called Earth. It's like the modulation of wind and the sound of the land full of the same wind that is blowing in the same bare place. One should speak of an almost geological stratification of sound. Robert Smithson wrote somewhere about the co-implication of earth, mind and thinking: "one's mind and the earth are in constant state of erosion, mental rivers wear away abstract banks, brain waves undermine cliffs of thought, ideas decompose into stones of unknowing, and conceptual crystallizations break apart tiny deposits of gritty reason"

When you take off your headphones after 75 minutes of pure nothingness, it seems as if all of your senses have become a lot more attentive to the sounds, which are around you all of the time. You will be surprised by the richness of these sounds. You will maybe try to listen to the "music" of your daily surroundings more closely. The sounds of cars, trains, birds, bees, dogs, cats, trees, the wind, the rain, the ringing telephone, the noise of a building site and maybe church bells will probably mix up to a very unique HNW-composition. What more can and should music achieve than sharpening our senses to listen to the human and inhuman sounds of our cosmic machine called EARTH ? 

To say it with a poem by Allan Afterman called "The Desire for White":

The shell

is form -

is the dome

the skull

is the density of nothingness, 

its intensity

is this thought 

a wind hiding silence. 

(written by S.K.G. in April/May 2011)

Since this is one of the most unique releases in HNW this year, I can only give the highest possible recommendation for Vargrwulf's "Release". I hope, that Joseph Gates will "release" a very large Multi-CD or Multi-Tape-collection full of these wonderful minimal sounds really soon. After 75 beautiful minutes and repeated listening I will need a lot more of it.

(10/10 Admiration-Points)

Vargrwulf - Release

(Sweet Solitude 2011, Infinity Series 1)

Support one of the most remarkable artists
in the HNW/PE/N-scene HERE.

Thanks for reading my blog !

Have a nice day !

Stay tuned and expect the unexpected!

Artwork of the day #7/2011: Shin Takamatsu (1)

Shin Takamatsu (*1948 - )

Shin Takamatsu, Moon Tower Project

Shin Takamatsu, Moon Tower Project

Shin Takamatsu, Moon Tower Project

Thanks for reading my blog !

Have a nice day !

Stay tuned and expect the unexpected!

P.S. Dear copyright owner of the picture, please contact me, if you don't want to see your picture above in this context! Your picture will of course be instantly removed! Thank you. S.K.G. The pictures are taken from the book "Shin Takamatsu. Architecture and Nothingness" L'ARCAEDIZIONE 1991.

Thoughts of the day #10/2011: Elliot R. Wolfson (1)

Elliot R. Wolfson (*1956 -  ) 

Today's thoughts of the day come from one of the greatest scholars of our times: Elliot R. Wolfson. He is one of the leading scholars in the field of kabbalah, mysticism and the pheno- menology of mystical experience. He is professor at the New York University. He has written several admirably deep and thoughtful books and essays in this field, but he is also a philosopher, a painter and a poet. His publications have won several prestigious awards for Excellence in Scholarship. Today I have chosen a few lines from the postface of his impressive last book called "Open secret" (Columbia UP 2009). Here Wolfson writes about the paradoxical figure of the Messiah, who is always to come but never ever arrives:

"The pledge about the messianic future is, invariably, a put on, the putting off of what is forthcoming. At the most extreme, one might be tempted to think of the eschatological drama as a cover-up, a dogmatic cloak in which to envelop the truth that there is no Messiah for whom we must wait, the cloak that lays bare the final divestiture of the cloak, the pretense of describing the end as the full disclosure of the essence without any garment, a seeing of the divine light as it is manifest in the garb of the material world, which (dis)appears, finally to reveal its concealment. The concluding exposé at the fringe of time is the hierophany of this occlusion."

Thanks for reading my blog !

Have a nice week !

Stay tuned and expect the unexpected!

(P.S. This photo is used with the very kind permission of Prof. Elliot R. Wolfson. Thank you very much)

(HNW #5/2011) Listening to HNW is like a seated meditation.

A Zen-Monk practizing Zazen.

(photography by Hiroshi Moritani, Kyoto, cf bottom of this posting)

Listening  - sitting - meditating - solitude - seclusion - emptyness - silence - repetition - monotony - eternity - seclusion - prayer - liturgy. When you hear these words, you are immediately associating a deep religious context. But it seems that in our modern times all of these things are lost forever. Maybe only in attentive listening to good music some of these age old religious practices are really preserved, at least in a secular form.

Especially in the case of the HNW-sound and performance the parallels to religious rites and practices are absolutely striking. This should be absolutely clear, when you remember how Romain Perrot performs and talks about HNW. Since HNW in its original form has always to do with revealing absolute nothingness at the core of our inner self, it is clear that it can be closely related to zen-buddhist pratices and rites. So it is only consequent to relate the act of listening to HNW to the buddhist technique of Zazen.

The aim of zazen is just sitting and opening the mind. This means to suspend all judgmental thinking and letting words, ideas, images and thoughts pass by without taking notice of them. Zazen is a meditative practice to calm the body and the mind, and be able to concentrate enough to experience insight into the true self, which is nothing more than nothing. This experience of breakthrough to absolute nothingness is also an awakening to absolute nothingness. This awakening (satori) can only be achieved through really hard work and cannot be attained by reading books about it. So please stay away from all the new-age-rubbish about satori.

Bankei Yotaku writes about the difficulties of zazen and of the achievement of satori: "I pressed myself without mercy, draining myself mentally and physically; at times, I practiced deep in the mountains, in places completely cut off from all human contact. I fashioned primitive shelters out of paper, pulled that over me, and did zazen seated inside; sometimes I would make a small lean-to by putting up two walls of thick paper boards, and sit in solitary darkness inside, doing zazen, never lying down to rest even for a moment. For a whole week I was unable to swallow anything except some thin rice broth. I felt a strange sensation in my throat. I spat against a wall. A mass of black phlegm, large as a soapberry, rolled down the side. Suddenly just as that instant. I realized what is was that had escaped me until now: All things are perfectly resolved in the Unborn. After fourteen years of incredible hardship, he had achieved decisive enlightenment, his doubts and uncertainties disappearing like a dream." (Bankei Yotaku, trans. Norman Waddell). 

The posture of zazen is seated, with folded legs and hands, and an erect but settled spine. The legs are folded in one of the standard sitting styles The hands are folded together over the belly. In many practices, one breathes slowly from the belly. The eyelids are half-lowered, the eyes being neither fully open nor shut so that the practitioner is not distracted by outside objects but at the same time is kept awake. Dogen says, in his book Shobogenzo, "Sitting fixedly, think of not thinking. How do you think of not thinking? Nonthinking. This is the art of zazen."

During Zazen you try to cut yourself off (like in the husserlian technique of phenomenological reduction) from the innerworldy phenomenons, in order to break through to your true innermost self. An old master has once said: "Take one step beyond the top of a hundred-foot pole". This means that you must cast away body and mind, as though climbing the top of a hundred-foot pole and letting go of with both hand and feet.   But always remember how hard it is to achieve satori or to say it simpler: to break through to absolute nothingness. To encounter absolute nothingness means in the end to realise that we are made out of  nothing but nothing and nothing else but nothing.

The non-variational, unforgiving, static and in the end micro-repetitive character of the real HNW sound seems to circulate like pure, sometimes deep black and sometimes deep white nothingness in your head. There seems to be nothing to focus on: except pure nothingness. The sound of HNW seems almost like a mirage; the longer you listen to and the longer you try to penetrate the sound, the deeper it goes. It is almost like an artwork by James Turrell, which is painted completely with light, so that the canvas becomes a deep abyss when you try to touch it.

When you listen to HNW it totally depends on your own singular (!) state of  mind, what you can perceive during an attentive listening-session and what not. Confronted with your innermost self, it could be either heaven or hell, darkness or light, memory or total amnesia, landscapes or dungeons, madness or sanity,  concentration or distraction. I think this explains the difficulties, that some totally unconcentrated  listeners have with HNW. They can't stand the intensity of nothingness in HNW and the danger to see, what it is really hidden deep inside of them.  If YOU are unable to concentrate yourself, don't make the music responsible for it.

Can 80 minutes of  HNW be so bad ? Remember that Bodhidharma bursted out into laughter as he finally achieved satori after seven years of seated meditation without pause in a cave in front of a wall. So stop the crying and the complaints about the monotony and the monstrosity of HNW right now. Stand up, buy good headphones and stay away from the now so boring and uninventive Harsh-Noise-Conservativism. Try to get more and more good (!) HNW-records until your record shelf breaks apart under the weight!

Maybe you will also finally burst out into laughter, maybe after seven years of constant seclusion in HNW-sounds. Then you will maybe find yourself just sitting there smiling - most probably deaf like an old donkey - in the eye of the storm.

Of course, this is not the only possible interpretation of HNW, but one! More interpretations and reviews will follow soon on this blog. A preview of the forthcoming reviews will be posted in the next days. The VARGRWULF-Review is following real soon...    

Thanks for reading my blog !

Have a nice day !

Stay tuned and expect the unexpected !
And please respect the copyright of my texts !

P.S. Dear copyright owner of the picture, please contact me, if you don't want to see your picture above in this context! Your picture will of course be instantly removed! Thank you. S.K.G: