Sounds Reviewed #4/2011
Askell Groc'hen - Cri
(Slow Death Records 2011)
(10/10 Admiration-Points)
(10/10 Admiration-Points)
(written by S.K.G. in July - October 2011)
[I]
[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."
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.
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.
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.
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:
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 ,
