Anish Kapoor - ‘descent into limbo’ (Kassel, 1992 )
Dear Readers,
I am very proud to present the HNW-Q No.8 featuring Romain Perrot also known as Vomir. I discovered his HNW in 2010 during a lengthy period of research for more recent and more radical forms of free form minimalism than those I have already encountered in the works of Giacinto Scelsi, Luigi Nono, Morton Feldman, Pauline Oliveros, Eliane Radigue, Helmut Lachenmann, James Tenney, John Cage, Walter Marchetti, John Cage and LaMonte Young. My desire for reasearch found further support in my deep interest in ascetic and anti-capitalist forms of thinking that I found at least methodologically embodied in the works of Martin Heidegger, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Meister Eckhart, Lao Tse, Dôgen Kigen and the Desert Fathers (from Ancient Egypt to Edmond Jabès) and also in certain forms of Modern Art represented in the works of Ad Reinhardt, Robert Ryman, Donald Judd and Barnett Newman.
Consequently it was only a question of time for me to discover the works of Romain Perrot (in my case "Renonce" and "Proanomie") that should be read and inscribed in these lines of tradition. Let's say - for the sake of simplicity: his works are post-Cage, post-Noise and post-Duchamp. Sadly, this background of HNW was not seen. The result: the HNW-brand was captured, ruined and nearly destroyed almost over night by brainless nerds with UKW-radios and tape-recorders and equally ill-informed self-proclaimed fanboynerds. Or by the countless others that wanted to pump in more content into HNW. How ridiculous, annoying, pointless and totally pathetic ! Nevertheless Vomir's HNW will remain as an immense and ultra-smart entry in the logbook of essential experimental music and noise (comparable maybe to the inventions of Hijokaidan, Incapacitants or Masami Akita). His HNW is not a petitesse. It is a mature and adult invention: nothing that could have been invented by a teenager. So please keep this in mind, that you have to grow up if you are into negations and negativity, because negations are worthless without (an in depth) knowledge of the negated and affirmations are equally worthless, if they remain unrelated to a well conceived set of negations.(I postpone the writing about Perrot's immense (also still unnoticed) scope of literary allusions that reaches from Hölderlin, Corneille, Céline to Ribemont-Dessaignes and perhaps secretly to Artaud, Bataille, Blanchot and Deleuze).
I am very proud to present the HNW-Q No.8 featuring Romain Perrot also known as Vomir. I discovered his HNW in 2010 during a lengthy period of research for more recent and more radical forms of free form minimalism than those I have already encountered in the works of Giacinto Scelsi, Luigi Nono, Morton Feldman, Pauline Oliveros, Eliane Radigue, Helmut Lachenmann, James Tenney, John Cage, Walter Marchetti, John Cage and LaMonte Young. My desire for reasearch found further support in my deep interest in ascetic and anti-capitalist forms of thinking that I found at least methodologically embodied in the works of Martin Heidegger, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Meister Eckhart, Lao Tse, Dôgen Kigen and the Desert Fathers (from Ancient Egypt to Edmond Jabès) and also in certain forms of Modern Art represented in the works of Ad Reinhardt, Robert Ryman, Donald Judd and Barnett Newman.
Consequently it was only a question of time for me to discover the works of Romain Perrot (in my case "Renonce" and "Proanomie") that should be read and inscribed in these lines of tradition. Let's say - for the sake of simplicity: his works are post-Cage, post-Noise and post-Duchamp. Sadly, this background of HNW was not seen. The result: the HNW-brand was captured, ruined and nearly destroyed almost over night by brainless nerds with UKW-radios and tape-recorders and equally ill-informed self-proclaimed fanboynerds. Or by the countless others that wanted to pump in more content into HNW. How ridiculous, annoying, pointless and totally pathetic ! Nevertheless Vomir's HNW will remain as an immense and ultra-smart entry in the logbook of essential experimental music and noise (comparable maybe to the inventions of Hijokaidan, Incapacitants or Masami Akita). His HNW is not a petitesse. It is a mature and adult invention: nothing that could have been invented by a teenager. So please keep this in mind, that you have to grow up if you are into negations and negativity, because negations are worthless without (an in depth) knowledge of the negated and affirmations are equally worthless, if they remain unrelated to a well conceived set of negations.(I postpone the writing about Perrot's immense (also still unnoticed) scope of literary allusions that reaches from Hölderlin, Corneille, Céline to Ribemont-Dessaignes and perhaps secretly to Artaud, Bataille, Blanchot and Deleuze).
Yes. Perrot's HNW is radical, but not in the way it was usually perceived. His sounds are radically anti-capitalist, radically anti-communitarian and radically de-capitated. There is no HNW-movement and there will be never one: only disconnected bands of outsiders. His sounds are directed
violently against the unconscious mantra of capitalism to dwell, own, consume and destroy. Perrot is consequently enough to fold this mantra repeatedly back against his own invention until there is nothing left to consume or to assume but absolute nothingness. Épater le bourgeois is no longer his point ! He is turning the usual idea of production and consumption upside down. Perrot produces like an anti-productive and anti-expressive factory or demonic force totally cut-off the market desiring to produce a commodity factor of zero and below. He is producing anti-matter (in all senses of this compositum). He is the non-master of anti-matter, of course, but he is very polite and generous as if
he is whispering silently in the direction of the sounds: après vous ! The "listeners" are deliberately consumed and virtually
destroyed by the sounds. And the sounds remain absolutely indigestible.
This makes them look and
sound under the
capitalist optic at the same time totally useless and absolutely dangerous, because they interrupt und subvert all reasonable ideas of labour and
connected ideas of shareholder value and material surplus value and consumption. (Maybe one could relate this to Georges Bataille's idea of an unrestricted economy and expenditure developed in "La notion de depense"(1933) and later in "La part maudite" (1949))
Perrot's HNW is outrageous - it atomizes everything - leaving behind only ashes and scars. His sounds are in a very radical sense non-directional, inaudible, indifferent, self-consuming and inexistent. They annihilate the subject of perception. These sounds are neither related to aesthetics nor to aesthetic judgements or systems. They are rather an excess for, or a collapse for the aesthetical apparatus or the senses themselves. Consequently it is (and should be) equally impossible to be a-part or to be no-part of the HNW-sound (cf. Bataille's idea of the proletariat as a part of no part). If you are still able to discern between sound and self you still have an aesthetic approach to HNW and you are still "listening" ! So even the formulation "I" listen to HNW is a ridiculous contradiction. Experiencing HNW is impossible and has to be a massive counter-experience. Counter-experiences are keeping the asymmetry alive between my conditions for reception and the anhuman or inhuman nothingness or abyssal otherness that appears to me (here !) as "sound".
Without this radical asymmetry HNW would still be a part of the distractions of the global Kulturindustrie. Any attempt to re-fill HNW with aesthetic contents, intentions, or qualities is not HNW, but popmusic ! Real HNW is anti-aesthetic or better: anti-anti-aesthetic, because it is not related to aesthetical questions at all (e.g. is it loud enough ? is it ugly ? is it nice ? --- these are futile questions asked by idiots !). HNW is virtually in-finite, because it is "beyond" the perceptive horizons and cognitive possibilities of humans. HNW is beyond the programmable duality of expression-impression (cf. the title of his 2012 release Le Mur Bruitiste Est Non Programmable, Il A Une Fonction Heuristique: Il Révèle; Il Ne Représente Pas: Il Présente) This "beyond" could even open new channels for "perception" different to the industrialized programs that aim at a total "proletarianization of the sensibility" (Bernard Stiegler). Something of Perrot's deeply serious anti-anti-aesthetics embodies herself in the black plastic-bag Perrot wears over his head during his anti-performances with his back to the audience or simply lying on the floor. Perrot's "style of performance" as-if-already-dead could be deciphered with the help of Blanchot who once wrote: "Penser comme on meurt: sans but, sans pouvoir, sans unité (...) pensée de chaque côtée, en déséquilibre, en excès de sens et en excès sur le sens - sortie, dehors." And one last remark: only Perrot has the legitimate right to produce serially and almost automatically (maybe like On Kawara's daily paintings). This is his idea - he has invented it - and it will remain his idea.
In a way the photo (of an installation by Anish Kapoor) above visualizes Romain Perrot's initial idea: the desire to re-insert or fold-in a dangerous void in our homes and daily surroundings, that's desperately missing. This void is dangerous, because it is extimate (a neologism coined by Lacan) it is an intimate exteriority, an internal exclusion, or a foreign void at the heart of the familiar. If this void would not be something at the same time intimate and extimate - the void would have no interruptive force. The void has to interrupt "la société de contrôle" (a concept developped by Gilles Deleuze following a syntagma by William Burroughs and Michel Foucault's book "Surveiller et punir"). And in a way, Perrot desperately - but joyfully - seeks for nothing else but an absolute and resolute interruption of our daily, always already corrupted and exploited lifes. In a poem that accompanied his 2010 "master"piece "Renonce" we could or should have read:
Perrot's HNW is outrageous - it atomizes everything - leaving behind only ashes and scars. His sounds are in a very radical sense non-directional, inaudible, indifferent, self-consuming and inexistent. They annihilate the subject of perception. These sounds are neither related to aesthetics nor to aesthetic judgements or systems. They are rather an excess for, or a collapse for the aesthetical apparatus or the senses themselves. Consequently it is (and should be) equally impossible to be a-part or to be no-part of the HNW-sound (cf. Bataille's idea of the proletariat as a part of no part). If you are still able to discern between sound and self you still have an aesthetic approach to HNW and you are still "listening" ! So even the formulation "I" listen to HNW is a ridiculous contradiction. Experiencing HNW is impossible and has to be a massive counter-experience. Counter-experiences are keeping the asymmetry alive between my conditions for reception and the anhuman or inhuman nothingness or abyssal otherness that appears to me (here !) as "sound".
Without this radical asymmetry HNW would still be a part of the distractions of the global Kulturindustrie. Any attempt to re-fill HNW with aesthetic contents, intentions, or qualities is not HNW, but popmusic ! Real HNW is anti-aesthetic or better: anti-anti-aesthetic, because it is not related to aesthetical questions at all (e.g. is it loud enough ? is it ugly ? is it nice ? --- these are futile questions asked by idiots !). HNW is virtually in-finite, because it is "beyond" the perceptive horizons and cognitive possibilities of humans. HNW is beyond the programmable duality of expression-impression (cf. the title of his 2012 release Le Mur Bruitiste Est Non Programmable, Il A Une Fonction Heuristique: Il Révèle; Il Ne Représente Pas: Il Présente) This "beyond" could even open new channels for "perception" different to the industrialized programs that aim at a total "proletarianization of the sensibility" (Bernard Stiegler). Something of Perrot's deeply serious anti-anti-aesthetics embodies herself in the black plastic-bag Perrot wears over his head during his anti-performances with his back to the audience or simply lying on the floor. Perrot's "style of performance" as-if-already-dead could be deciphered with the help of Blanchot who once wrote: "Penser comme on meurt: sans but, sans pouvoir, sans unité (...) pensée de chaque côtée, en déséquilibre, en excès de sens et en excès sur le sens - sortie, dehors." And one last remark: only Perrot has the legitimate right to produce serially and almost automatically (maybe like On Kawara's daily paintings). This is his idea - he has invented it - and it will remain his idea.
In a way the photo (of an installation by Anish Kapoor) above visualizes Romain Perrot's initial idea: the desire to re-insert or fold-in a dangerous void in our homes and daily surroundings, that's desperately missing. This void is dangerous, because it is extimate (a neologism coined by Lacan) it is an intimate exteriority, an internal exclusion, or a foreign void at the heart of the familiar. If this void would not be something at the same time intimate and extimate - the void would have no interruptive force. The void has to interrupt "la société de contrôle" (a concept developped by Gilles Deleuze following a syntagma by William Burroughs and Michel Foucault's book "Surveiller et punir"). And in a way, Perrot desperately - but joyfully - seeks for nothing else but an absolute and resolute interruption of our daily, always already corrupted and exploited lifes. In a poem that accompanied his 2010 "master"piece "Renonce" we could or should have read:
Quand je me retrouve
La solitude
Quand tout sont éloignés
La solitude pénétrante
Je me recroqueville dans le fini
Je me fige
Mon bruit interne me clarifie
Je suis pur
La solitude
Quand tout sont éloignés
La solitude pénétrante
Je me recroqueville dans le fini
Je me fige
Mon bruit interne me clarifie
Je suis pur
[written by SKG,
21.2.-27.2.2015]
21.2.-27.2.2015]
This is the HNW-Q No.8
brilliantly completed
brilliantly completed
by Romain Perrot:
The HNW-Q No. 8
[1] I discovered and invented HNW for myself, when I fully let built the sound I had in my head.
[2] The initial radicality of HNW would be preserved, if nothing happens.
[3] HNW is Harsh Noise Wall.
[4] HNW is not to have fun.
[5] I discovered the acronym H.N.W. on the releases from The Rita's label, Militant Walls.
[6] HNW is pure love, hate, magick, sex, witchcraft, giallo, nylon, reclusion.
[7] The sounds of machines are the streets, the futurist's music or from the industrial related culture.
[8] HNW helps the inner self to be revealed.
[9] Monolithic Walls are good experimental music.
[10] The Future of HNW would be no future.
[11] The Death of HNW would be in ecstasy.
[12] HNW should be related to harsh noise to understand it better.
[13] Singularity and Originality in HNW are none.
[14] HNW should be called Static Minimalism, because...
[14] HNW should be called Static Minimalism, because...
[15] HNW should not be called Static Minimalism, because static does not include necessarily harshness. HNW is no drone.
[16] The permanent repetition of the HNW-Mantra (No ideas, no change, no dynamics, no development etc.) leads to some rules I did put in my first manifesto. But that was not intended to become rules for the genre. I am no guide.
[17] Volume in HNW is of some effect.
[18] Distortion in HNW is a part of it.
[19] My Unconscious is comfortable in HNW.
[20] Narratives, Analogies and Metaphors in HNW are some possibilities.
[21] Time and Space in HNW are some possibilities.
[23] My HNW amplifies my mind.
[24] Minimal Music and Cosmic Drones are other genres of music, and Harsh Noise is the main genre of HNW.
[25] Conceptualism is the bad word of HNW.
[27] The purpose and the concept of my HNW are No ideas, no change, no dynamics, no development, in static harsh noise sounds.
[28] The distinction between ANW / HNW is in the harshness of the noise.
[29] The philosophy of HNW can change from one to one.
[30] My first words about HNW were 'static shit'. This is what I called my sounds before I embraced the HNW letters.
[31] My final words about HNW would be not now.
[32] The phrase I would like to add to this questionary is....
Merci beaucoup, Romain !
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