Sounds Reviewed #6/2013: African Audio Documents - Effacer le Tableau

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Sounds Reviewed #6/2013

African Audio Documents - Effacer le tableau

(AAD01, CD-r, XI/2013)
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§1 An agencement - pour percer le mur.

Already a few minutes of attentive listening convinced me: this is really an awesome, baffling, mysterious and important release. It is a blast on all levels. Pierre Ndoki's "Effacer le tableau" (the first release of his project "African Audio Documents") combines serious aural research with poetic inventiveness and imagination that has no equal (cf. maybe it is comparable to Dominik Fernow's most recent project "Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement") . It brings the serious and essential minimalism back in. It is a hybrid, that re-connects and re-channels several important streams in modern Sound/Art from electro-acoustics, sound-installation, audio-documentary, minimal music, audio-auto-biographics, musique concrète and other relevant and serious forms of sonic spectrality, pure sounds and microtonality.

Already the poly-valent and clever use of the title "Effacer le tableau" shows that Ndoki knows what he is doing and aiming at. Effacer le tableau (putting the real meaning and its (brutal) african context aside for a moment) could be read as an audio-poetic imperative inviting the listener to put in brackets everything s/he thinks to know about sounds (mostly too much !). Effacer le tableau, premièrement ! Electro-Acoustic-Music and other forms of (Electro-)Minimalism need different and well trained listeners, because an unattentive, ill-informed and untrained listener is completely lost in this field of non-anthropomorphic sounds.

If you are willing to follow Pierre Ndoki's golden rule - Effacer le tableau, premièrement ! - listening could be the perfect tool to "percer le mur" (van Gogh) of representational ideas of sound and art in general. Eye-deology, so to speak. Helping to discover lines of flight out of the capitalist world of sound, music and visible commodities.

In this sense Deleuze/Guattari wrote in "Mille Plateaux": "L'art n'est jamais une fin, il n'est qu'un instrument pour tracer les lignes de vie, c'est-à-dire tous ces devenirs réels, qui ne se produisent pas simplement dans l'art, toutes ces fuites actives, qui ne consistent pas à fuir dans l'art, à se réfugier dans l'art, ces déterritorialisations positives, qui ne vont pas se reterritorialiser sur l'art, mais bien plutôt l'emporter avec elles, vers le régions de l'asignifiant, de l'asubjectif et du sans visage. (...) Défaire le visage, c'est la même chose que percer le mur du signifiant, sortir du trou noir de la subjectivité: cherchez vos trous noirs et vos murs blancs, connaissez-les, connaissez vos visages, vous ne les déferez pas autrement, vous ne tracerez pas autrement vos lignes de fuites."

"Effacer le tableau" is definitely a subtle composition: im-pressive, massive without mass (in the physical sense), an aural materiality without matter, vibrating, monochrome, imploding/exploding, thoughtfully folded back in time and space. 

§2 The Magic of Expectation: playing with masks

Relevant art is always a play with masks and background narratives - or call it the space for de-personalisation - ask Artaud, Nietzsche or Kierkegaard. Consequently it should be no surprise, that an artist deeply indebted to Africa - t h e  m a s k e d  a n d  v i r t u a l l y  u n k n o w n   c o n t i n e n t  p a r  e x c e l l e n c e  - uses masks and complex background narratives and artistical strategies in his project. This is by far one of the very few absolutely convincing HNW-background-narratives and conceptual framings that worked for me completely. It should be also mentioned, that the complete design and concept of the project is absolutely outstanding and thoughtful.

This is an ultra-poetic and thoughtful melting of form and content. Pierre Ndoki is opening all neurones of the brain for remembrance, reinscription, silence and, repetition. A short look on Ndoki's blog (click here) shows that his narrative and soundworld will expand thematically and aesthetically (see §11 of this review) in all kinds of directions. So it is really an intellectual pleasure for any future listener to un-pack all the intricacies and implications of this project.

Since my blog is build as a landing site for all kinds of surprising and refreshing artifacts, I was very glad, that Ndoki contacted me to sent the first parts of his immense audio-poetic invention. Ndoki shows that HNW (= as always this blog uses this acronym for serious Electro-Acoustic-Minimalism only and for nothing else ) is not a style. It is from time to time (!) a neccessary tool for deeply thoughtful and private expressions produced by artists that keep the dimension of futurity open ....  

§3 Afrikanische Spiele / Jeux Africains / Somber dreams

Pierre Ndoki's African Audio Documents invites you to experience your own innermost and outermost - intimate and extimate - Africa. An artificial implant - because there is no Africa as such. But he also relates your imaginary or imagined Africa to the horrors of the most recent history of Africa. So it is really rewarding (if not essential) to follow all the traces Ndoki has laid out so carefully. There is a real historical background behind all his recordings. It is one of the most carefully and thoughtfully conceived HNW-projects - so pay attention !

So please take the name of his project African Audio Documents seriously. But draw the conclusions yourself ! And please try to enrich your image of Africa with books like Raymond Roussel's "Impressions d'Afrique" (1910), Michel Leiris's "L'Afrique fantôme" (1934), the artworks and theories of Jean Dubuffet, the last dreams of Arthur Rimbaud, Joseph Conrad,  or to give a more recent example Yannick Haenel's novel "Les renard pâles" (2013) based on a central-myth of an african tribe called the Dogon.

For me, the release "Effacer le tableau", was a good opportunity to revisit the famous novel "Afrikanische Spiele" by Ernst Jünger written in 1936. It is about a very young man dreaming of discovering "his" Africa, the river Nil and the Congo. In a key passage Ernst Jünger wrote: "Es gibt eine Zeit, in der dem Herzen das Geheimnisvolle nur räumlich, nur auf weissen Flecken der Landkarte erreichbar erscheint und in der alles Dunkle und Unbekannte eine mächtige Anziehung ausübt. Lange, halb trunkene Wachträume während meiner nächtlichen Spaziergänge durch den Stadtwall hatten mir jene entfernten Länder so nahegerückt, dass nur noch der Entschluss in sie einzudringen und ihrer Genüsse teilhaftig zu sein. Mich zog vielmehr eine Zone an, in der der Kampf menschlicher Gewalten rein und zwecklos zum Ausdruck kam. Auch die zweite Nacht verbrachte ich auf meinem Segeltuch. Früh wurde ich von Benoit geweckt; er forderte mich auf, Afrika zu sehen."

Ndoki delivers somber dreams of dark continents: it is a "double promenade (...) le voyage extérieur géographique des distances indecomposables, le voyage historique intérieur suivant des intensités enveloppantes. (...) elle porte le réel hors de son principe où il est exactement produit par la machine désirante." (Anti-Oedipe, 104).

§4 The Dogon-Egg: Intensities 

The crisp minimalism of "Effacer le tableau" opens and amplifies feverish fantasies and daydreams. It is a pure cerebral music with a massive narrative floating in between the sounds like in the Dogon-Egg:

(L'oeuf de dogon et la répartition d'intensités,)

§5 L'homme au point zéro / Humanity at point zero

Sadly the image of the cradle and point-zero of civilisation co-incide in "Africa". "Africa" could also be seen as an reflecting image of European underworlds and hells. Look at "Africa" and tell me what you see ? Somber and uncanny dreams of a violent Africa are evoked on "Effacer le tableau" and the subsequent releases. To call this a documentary about an African tragedy would be an insult and a sedative, because it projects worn european theatrical forms on real exploitation, violence and poverty. Something else it at work here.

In an essay with the title "L'homme au point zéro" written by the french poet-thinker Maurice Blanchot dedicated to his (then deceased) friend Georges Bataille we can read the lines: "Monde barbare, sans respect, sans humanité. Il nous vide atrocement de tout ce que nous aimons et aimons être, nous chasse du bonheur de nos refuges, du faux-semblant de nos vérités, détruit ce à quoi nous appartenons et parfois se détruit lui-même. Effrayante épreuve. Mais cette contestation, précisement parce qu'elle nous laisse pauvre de tout, sauf de la puissance, nous donne peut-être aussi la chance qui accompagne toute rupture : quand on est contraint de renoncer à soi, il faut périr ou commencer ; périr afin de recommencer. Tel serait alors le sens de la tâche que représente le mythe de l'homme sans mythe: l'espoir, l'angoisse et l'illusion de l'homme au point zéro" (Maurice Blanchot, L'homme au point zéro).

A few lines to support the intricacies of the poetic-audio-documentary character of the project "African Audio Documents" - and something to think about, when you listen attentively.

§6 Grids and Frames

The crisp, rigorously de-naturalized and dry sounds on "Effacer le tableau" work like a kind of contrast-liquid, or conceptual grid or frame to open a more artificial and sophisticated TIME/SPACE-articulation. Making the medium of sound - the air or simply matter if you like - nearly tactile and visible. These sounds  point towards a tension between visibility, tactility and audibility. This recording is relevant, because it opens a huge space in which prominent ideas of the anti-mimetic character of modern art could resonate. This recordings delivers also very good arguments to re-inscribe HNW into the history of radical minimalism and anti-mimetism in the Fine Arts (let's say at least since Mondrian) and spectral, micro-tonal, electronic and electro-acoustic music. HNW is not a derivative of HN. PERIOD.

In her now famous paper on "Grids" the american art-historian Rosalind Krauss wrote: "There are two ways in which the grid functions to declare the modernity of modern art. One is spatial; the other is temporal. In the spatial sense, the grid states the autonomy of the realm of art. Flattened, geometricized, ordered, it is antinatural, antimimetic, antireal. It is what art looks like when it turns its back on nature. In the flatness that results from its coordinates, the grid is the means of crowding out the dimensions of the real and replacing them with the lateral spread of a single surface. 

In the overall regularity of its organization, it is the result not of imitation, but of aesthetic decree. Insofar as its order is that of pure relationship, the grid is a way of abrogating the claims of natural objects to have an order particular to themselves; the relationships in the aesthetic field are shown by the grid to be in a world apart and, with respect to natural objects, to be both prior and final. The grid declares the space of art to be at once autonomous and autotelic. 

In the temporal dimension, the grid is an emblem of modernity by being just that: the form that is ubiquitous in the art of our century, while appearing nowhere, nowhere at all, in the art of the last one. In that great chain of reactions by which modernism was born out of the efforts of the nineteenth century, one final shift resulted in breaking the chain. By "discovering" the grid, cubism, de Stijl, Mondrian, Malevich . . . landed in a place that was out of reach of everything that went before. Which is to say, they landed in the present, and everything else was declared to be the past.

If we open any tract - Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art or The Non- Objective World, for instance - we will find that Mondrian and Malevich are not discussing canvas or pigment or graphite or any other form of matter. They are talking about Being or Mind or Spirit. From their point of view, the grid is a staircase to the Universal, and they are not interested in what happens below in the Concrete. Or, to take a more up-to-date example, we could think about Ad Reinhardt who, despite his repeated insistence that "Art is art," ended up by painting a series of black nine-square grids in which the motif that inescapably emerges is a Greek cross. " (Rosalind Krauss 1979)

Keep this in mind - when you listen to Pierre Ndoki's "African Audio Documents". His works are a constant play with framings and un-framings, focussing and un-focussing. An elegant floating in between thinking and listening, inside and outside: a conceptual grid or filter-system that's moving through space and time enflaming dark fantasies and desperate awakenings. 

§7 Electro-acoustic textures - Essential minimalism.

Pierre Ndoki's project "African Audio Documents" is an essential and serious research in the field of electronic and electro-acoustic minimalism. It could be easily reconnected to the contemporary non-anthropomorphic soundworlds of Carsten Nicolai, Ryoji Ikeda, Emptyset, Eleh, Basic House, the sadly deceased Zbigniew Karkowski, Francisco López to name a few - but also to the worlds of the classical minimalisms of Eliane Radigue, Pauline Oliveros, Edgard Varèse, Gottfried Michael Koenig, Pierre Schaeffer, Karlheinz Stockhausen, LaMonte Young, Walter Marchetti, Luigi Nono, Giacinto Scelsi, etc, etc. [All references are deliberately chosen from different contextes to open the eyes and ears for different viewpoints and to extract essential soundworlds out of the context of the "noise-scene" (for me a deeply pejorative and useless term)]

This project understands that sounds are absolutely non-anthropomorph, non-natural, non-related to the interiority of the listener or the composer, rigorously non-mimetic - they are almost like colours in monochrome or abstract paintings. There are no natural receptors for sounds or pre-given, pre-configured , symmetrical human correlates to sound-emissions. But who stated that sounds are related to humans - alone ? The late capitalist music-industry, who else ? Obviously it is not enough to have ears to listen - listening is a question of training - like everything else. There are no guarantees here: Whoever has ears ought to hear ! 

§8 Subtle Bass-Undercurrents.

If you are the owner of a multi-speaker soundsystem with a seperate subwoofer please play it in 3D Surround. Press play and switch-off the lights. Let the composition resculpture and alter the Time-Space of your room ... bass .... slumbering bass .... subtle bass-undercurrents ... out of my subwoofers .... so cleary composed com-ponents ... never heard something like this before ... bass at the edge of existence ... nearly unperceivable .... at certain volumes carved out .... like a stone ....

Like a good monochrome - or a so called abstract painting - the composition reacts. It has different effects on the listener if you experiment in terms of loudness or volume. I would prefer the term "volume" because it is more related to the space in which the sound is played in. It describes the extension (also a title of a marvellous composition by the german composer Mathias Spahlinger) of the effect the sound has in a given room. 

"Effacer le tableau" focusses on the aesthetic aspects of resonance, time, sound and listening. It is no secret that this blog is seriously (!) interested in the research of basic acoustic phenomena at the edge to be perceived as "music". This blog is a plea to discover the complete sonic field without any reserves. This record here is a good exemple for an absolutely sensitive musician ! This is a recording you will listen to more than once - absolutely exceptional in this field ! 

§9 Explosante-fixe et magique-circonstancielle

Another collector of African Art, the french poet and father of surrealism André Breton wrote in the final passage of his book "Amour fou":

"La beauté convulsive sera érotique-voilée, 

explosante-fixe, magique-circonstancielle, ou ne sera pas".

Take this as a hint when you listen to Pierre Ndoki's soundworlds frequently and attentively ! This is also the title of a brilliant composition by Pierre Boulez - risk an ear ... or two ! By the way the acronym A.A.D. for African Audio Documents points also back to the good old days when analog recordings and codes were recoded or transcoded into digital CD-codes. One of the codes was A-nalog A-nalog D-igital - which meant analog source, analog mixing, digital recoding. Another proof for the deeply thoughtful character of this project ... 

§10 Effacer le tableau: an African Aural Suprematism.

"Effacer le tableau" is the starting point for an African Aural Suprematism. In a famous passage written by one of the "fathers" of Suprematism Kasimir Malevich distinguishes two basic types of creation: "one, initiated by the conscious mind, serves practical life, so-called, and deals with concrete visual phenomena; the other, stemming from the subconscious or superconcious mind, stands apart from all practical utility and treats abstract phenomena" (Malevich, The Non-Objective World). Abstract phenomena are related to the ineffable. The primary goal of suprematist art is to provide the occasion for the latter form of awareness in the viewer to appear by evoking the ineffable. The experience of the ineffable helps to overcome the plagues of representation and mimesis. Since the awareness of the infinite is sub- or super-conscious, it cannot be represented figuratively but must be presented nonobjectively.

It should be obvious, that Ndoki's work "Effacer le tableau" is informed by all the intricacies of Modern Avantgarde Abstractionism(s) and Minimalism(s). I would even risk to say, that he takes the suprematist abstraction on step further from the visual to the aural and from Europe to Africa - that's the reason why I would like to call his Sound-Aesthetics an "African Aural Suprematism". In the words of Malevich again: "The black square on the white field was the first form in which non-objective feeling came to be expressed. The black square = feeling, the white field = the void beyond this feeling" (Malevich, The Non-Objective World).

So please follow the radicalized minimalism(s) of Ndoki and cut off the ear from the eye ! Let the frequencies alone structure your "thoughts" - let them effacer le tableau ... black and white, white and black, white on black, black on white, zeros and ones, ones and zeros, zeros projected on ones, ones projected on zeros - contrasts .... and primordial differences ... this piece ought to be imagined to have been played in a remote cabin made of clay with flickering rests of electricity causing these sounds - morse-codes from an abyssal Inner-Outer-Africa. Or maybe a secretly registered concussion, or repercussion of age old earthquakes, or cochlea-memories from an antilope.

This is really an Abstract-Anti-Expressionism - open only for a different plane of consciousness - close to Malevich's, Artaud's and Deleuze/Guattari's ideas of it. Antonin Artaud wrote in this sense in his famous text "Les Tarahumaras" quoted and included in an important passage of "Mille Plateaux": "Artaud pèse et mesure chaque de ses mots: la conscience "sait ce qui est bon pour elle et ce qui ne lui vaut rien. (...) Elle sait surtout jusqu'où va son être, et jusqu'où il n'est pas encore allé (...) Plan où la conscience normale atteint pas mais où Ciguri nous permet d'atteindre, et qui est le mystère même de toute poésie. Mais il ya dans l'être humain un autre plan celui-là obscur, informe, où la conscience n'est pas entrée, mais qui l'entoure comme un prolongement inéclairci ou d'une menace suivant le cas. Et qui dégage aussi des sensations aventureuses, des perceptions"(Les Tarahumaras). [...] Ce n'est plus un Moi qui sent, agit, et se rappelle, c'est "une brume brillante, une buée jaune et sombre", qui a des affects et éprouve des mouvements, des vitesses." (Mille Plateaux).

§11 Une cartographie africaine, un voyage sur place

The best you can say about soundworlds is that they travel to your ears and make you travel accordingly. These soundworlds are like soundcards from strange, unknown continents. Pierre Ndoki's Sound-Art project African Audio Documents is such a project of multi-dimensional soundcards (understood in analogy to postcards) he sends us from "his" "Africa".

Soundcards are game-cards and geo-graphic, geo-politic and geo-aesthetic cards at once. These cards are not re-productive or re-presentational. They are productive. They produce the territory in the act of description or transcription. A card - write Deleuze/Gauttari: "ne reproduit pas un inconscient fermé sur lui-même, elle le construit. Elle concourt à la connexion des champs, au déblocage des corps sans organes, à leur ouverture maximum sur un plan de consistance. Elle fait elle-même partie du rhizome" (Mille Plateaux).

In this sense Pierre Ndoki's project African Audio Documents delivers a complex audio-haptico-spiritual-fictional cartography of Africa - no more, no less. It is an intriguing complex of real facts from the most recent entanglement of African-French and African history, feverish dreams of somber continents, and subtle audio-poetic-reflections about the nature and conditions of minimal electro-acoustic soundworlds.

Ndoki's soundcards open up immense and unheard of possibilities of immobile voyages. His soundcards let secrets travels through the labyrinths of your cochlea supported by uncertain and risky "musical" forms and frequencies. "Voyage sur la place, c'est le nom de toutes le intensités, même si elles se developpent aussi en extension. Penser, c'est voyager (...) Voyager en lisse c'est tout un devenir, et encore un devenir difficile, incertain." (Mille Plateaux).

During the writing of this review Pierre Ndoki was so kind to provide me with the three subsequent releases of his immense project African-Audio-Documents  entitled "Cellule Africaine" (AAD02, CD-r, 40 min.), "Hermetica"(AAD05, Mini-CD-r, 10 min. ) and "Loi fondamentale" (AAD04, CD-r, 50 min.).The spectrum goes from raw analogue HNW ("Cellule Africaine"), to an intricate Audio-Documentary-Sound-Collage ("Hermetica") or fantastic Electro-Acoustic-Minimalism ("Loi fondamentale").

Since this blog is a voice for the singular and the unique, it would be a violation of my own working principles to treat these three releases in an overhasted manner. Each of these releases would deserve an attentive listener and a different review. As you can see Effacer le tableau is the starting point of one of the most interesting, inventive, fascinating and conceptually thick and strong projects in HNW. It is a  strong recabling  of Electro-Acoustic-Minimalism(s) with other Avantgarde-Sound-Art-Formats. It will be surprising and rewarding to watch this rhizome grow over the next years ! A quote from the first e-mail Ndoki sent me, gives a good summary of his ideas:

"I have ties to the African Continent and as time went by I found out that HNW was the best way for me to express the different thoughts and emotions that arose in me when confronted to the violent magic of Africa."

(10/10 Admiration-Points)

(written by S.K.G., XI-XII.2013)

African Audio Documents
Effacer le tableau 
(AAD01, CD-r, XI/2013)

Support and contact 
Pierre Nkodi
here and here

Highest possible recommendation !

Sounds Reviewed #5/2012: A View from Nihil - The Eternal Present

Sounds Reviewed #5/2012

A View from Nihil - The Eternal Present

(Sweet Solitude 2011)
(10/10 Admiration-Points)

(written by S.K.G. in October 2011 - February 2012)

[I]

In the best musical works sounds are like compressed thoughts. In these seldom cases thoughts are like sounds, and sounds are like thoughts. Listening to these works is at the same time an intellectual challenge and a sensual pleasure. A View from Nihil's The Eternal Present is one of the very  few subtle, uncompromising and innovative HNW-compositions this year, that  recombines thoughtfulness, well conceived conceptualism, sonic depth and poetic viscosity to a new astro-acoustic and cosmodelic synthesis or reformulation of HNW.

The unique astro-acoustic alignment of The Eternal Present makes it to one of the very few HNW-compositions, that can be used as a quality-filter against the inflation of unoriginal, insubstantial and mindless repetitions of HNW patterns and ideas invented and developped a felt century ago by Romain Perrot and Sam McKinlay.

Maybe only a thoughtful progression from HNW to a more open-minded Static Minimalism combined with a radically deconstructed, imploded, burned-out and skeletonized Drone-ism, which can be also traced back to the classics of modern experimental, electronic and microtonal music, has a chance to subvert the seemingly so safe, stable and in the end all to complacent identity of HNW.

[II]

The main weakness of the majority of HNW-releases lies in their unreflected and at least undercomplex form and content relation, which leads to boring, unimaginative and unidentifiable sonic results. The genre would be far more interesting, if more artists would start to reflect their sounds and their artistical purposes in tracktitles, artworks and projectnames (like i.e. Lungwash, Ghost, Ruine, Figures of Solitude or A View from Nihil), instead of following the all too regressive and dominant inclination of the HNW-scene towards untitled titles, pointless analogies, senseless violence, childish performances, misconceived nihilism and conceptualism,  or other form of adolescent antics.

It is always very easy to mimic an already existing musical idiom and to follow its formal logic, instead of inventing a stable and at the same time new, variable, courageous and expressive form/content relation.  It is sad to observe, that many of the HNW-artists are already unable to give an interesting musical answer to the question: What is HNW ? and to understand, that only intellectual and conceptual depth and hard work on the complexity or simplicity of soundwaves are truly anarchic and subversive and nothing else.

Always remember that musical minimalism died the day Philip Glass opened his factory. If you want to ruin the subversive potential of HNW in one year, then go ahead and open your own little self-repetitive and unimaginative HNW-factory and be the Philip Glass of HNW. All of your immature HNW-mimicry will lead to a devastating quality levelling effect in the HNW-scene. The unpleasant result will be, that the origin and the purpose of HNW will be more and more obfuscated and absorbed by a happy-go-lucky overflooding of the market with pseudo-HNW products.

[III]

The soundworld of microscopic rhythms, sonic stasis, sound spectra, sound waves and musical ascesis is a far more complex and demanding musical phenomenon, than most of the HNW-artists are able to perceive, to conceive and to conceptualize.

The result: most of the HNW-artists are trying to hide their lack of musical experience and compositorial skills behind a curtain of downright ridiculous undifferentiated and uninspired loud sounds. To be perfectly frank: they absolutely fail to reach an outstanding experimental quality and to re-inscribe themselves in the already existing complex  history of musical minimalism. But fortunately there are several very promising and deeply philosophically conceived HNW-projects around, that speak for a positive prediction about the future of HNW.

Real HNW-projects see HNW as a serious tool for the research of the constructive logic of microsounds. Consequently a good HNW-composition is distinguished by the conscious design of its micro- and nanostructures of sounds and their relation to time and space.

All sounds have a clearly defined internal micro-structure and nano-identity. And HNW-sounds are no exception to this rule ! Even the sound-design of a vacuum-cleaner has a distinct pitch ! It makes no difference at all who or what produces a sound, be it a machine, a dog, the wind or a human voice. All sounds can be consciously re- or decomposed (as i.e. Cage, Varèse or Messiaen have shown in their compositions of the early 40's of the last century).

[IV]

The outstanding HNW-compositions seem to follow more or less consciously Karlheinz Stockhausen's famous formalization of the time/sound-relation in his essay "Wie die Zeit vergeht" (1957) or Iannis Xenakis' famous essays on stochastic music written in the early 50's during the crisis of serial music or post-dodecaphonic music.

Consequently the real conceptional roots of HNW should be dated back to the early 50's or late 40's of the last century. The Official Musical Tradition is far more complex, inventive and radical than the musical underground is willing to see. HNW is not a subgenre of HN and it is not helpful at all to repeat this pseudo-derivation over and over again, because this derivation lacks contrast, intellectual depth and musical competence. The combination of the aformentioned derivation of the real conceptual roots of HNW and the insight in the complexity of the Official Music History is the only way to come to serious quality evaluations in the field of HNW.

Is it not quite obvious, that it became more and more impossible to give rational arguments for or against the quality of a given HNW-work? Is there not an internal relation observable between the inflation of HNW-sounds and the seemingly impossibility to rate them in an objective manner ? But can a new musical phenomenon really survive without any rational criteria and the definition of internal and external quality standards ?

Should HNW not be seen in relation to the quality standards of the infinitely rich tradition of experimental music as a whole instead of seeing it solely in relation to the very short tradition of HN or HNW? Is it not better to use the classical intention-and-result categories as a basis for the critical evaluation of the handling of the musical processes in HNW-compositions instead of becoming absorbed in boring pseudo-descriptions of sonic textures and almost religious fanboy-attitudes for all times ?

[V]

Andrew McQuaid's A View from Nihil is maybe the cruelest antidote against this boring fanboy-devotionalism, because it challenges the standardmodell of HNW with its unorthodox synthesis of sound and conception. With his brilliantly mastered relation between expression and expressed, he manages to express  transhuman intelligence as and in sound. In this he seems to follow Blaise Pascal's famous fragment: "All things proceed from the Nothing, and are borne towards the Infinite. Who will follow these marvellous processes?".

When you listen to "The Eternal Present" it is like an awakening from a deep dogmatic slumber. It's like a cosmic refeshing for our brains almost numb from too much gravity and simple minded planetarism. Our attentive ears are pleased by the invention of a new HNW-paradigm, which I would like to call cosmodelic and astro-acoustic. It is cosmodelic and astro-acoustic, because it helps us to perceive, that the earth is already in space. There is no need for spaceflights and spacemissions anymore. Spacemissions are soundmissions now. And listening is in itself transgressive.

For A View from Nihil's cosmic look on HNW in the beginning was the sound. And the sound was one, undividable and eternal. And the sound was lost in space, because the one is imperceivable without the two. Out of nothing the sound expanded and extracted space and time by moving out of himself in nearly unperceptible and infinitely small steps to make himself perceivable. The sound moved from one to many, from interiority to exteriority, from stasis to kinesis, from identity to difference and from nothing to something and back to nothing. 

The movements of the sounds on "The Eternal Present" were cleverly dramatized and designed  by McQuaid as a constant passage from the infinite to the finite and back to nothing. Consequently the sounds on "The Eternal Present" are constantly fluctuating between the stasis of finitude and death and the kinesis of infinity and cosmic re-beginnings and re-openings. The universe rocks its little chair forwards and backwards  above the void like a little playing child during the 68 minutes of "The Eternal Present".

The intricate compositorial handling of the micro- and macro-repetitive structures by A View from Nihil is heading towards the sublative transformation of our all too human ideas of a space/time continuum. Through the medium of astro-acoustic sounds Andrew McQuaid prepares our minds to perceive the transitory and nearly unperceivable non-temporal instant of the eternal present.

[VI]

The "Eternal Present" is the traditional nickname for the anhuman and in this indescribable space/time structure "after" the sublation of time and space. This instant is subverting all temporal order, because it takes non-place as the event of the sublation of time. This event  takes its nonplace in the moment of the collapsing of the threefold division of time. It is a moment that is ONE and therefore outside the parameters of partition. It must be a direct and immediate vision of the intellect, that occurs in one moment and not in a temporal sequence, which is so characteristic of our sensory and mental apprehension.

The Eternal Present is not subject to the triadic dissection of the timeline. Therefore we can speak of the eternal present as an atemporal present in which all three modalities of past, present and future coalesce. This moment of timeless time is entirely above time and the chain of concatenation. It is the moment of conjunction  of the unlimited and the limited, the everlasting and the transitory.

From the standpoint of the infinite, all time is comprised in the "little while" , the smallest of demarcations, the infinitesimal point that contains all difference indifferently. The Eternal Present is the interlude of time that cannot be measured in time. The insinuated tenselessness of the intersection of the three temporal modes in this moment renders it meaningless to speak of the now in terms of the passage of time, because the quality of that instant is too instanteaous to be arrested by any instance of time. For the infinite there is no difference between a small and a large number, as before him everything is considered nothing in actuality. 

The absolute non-being of this event of the Eternal Present demands instantaneous action, since it can takes its non-place at any point in time. This instant would not be hemmed by the burden of retention or the buoyancy of protention. It points  to the eternality of the temporal and the temporality of the eternal. Maybe the only hope for this maddening and highly paradoxical existential situation is the breakdown of the temporal order as such. The Eternal Present is this timeless moment, which cannot transpire temporally and therefore must always be capable of occuring (in)temporally.

It invades a space that cannot be measured chronoscopically. Consequently McQuaid works with micro-repetitive patterns of nearly infinitely small sound units, to show that eternity can arrive always in between - any nanosecond. So, you have to be really attentive ! But even if the sounds only last for nanoseconds, they have the power to show that eternity coexists with even the smallest and most fragile fragments of time.

In his famous Pensées the french anti-philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote: "Notre âme est jetée dans le corps où elle trouve nombre, temps, dimension, elle raisonne là-dessus et appelle nature, nécessité, et ne peut croire autre chose". We can assume that redemption from the burden of time (or the nirvana-experience) as well must come forth in the moment, that is at once, too small and too large to be calculated temporally. This moment must be the instant in which the almost unbearable pain of falling in time will find an eternal relief.

[VII]

A View from Nihil's brilliant HNW-composition translates the uncanny archi-texture of the Eternal Present into a giant size moebius strip of primordial sounds, which subvert the classical ideas of time and space, interiority and exteriority, life and death, finitude and infinity, beginning and end.  Time is projected into Space and Space into Time. "Du siehst mein Sohn, zum Raum wird hier die Zeit". The sounds of "The Eternal Present" work like a very clever conceived spacetime-vaporizer or timespace-atomizer.  

The almost frightening fractal self-similarity of the sounds on "The Eternal Present" reveals the abyss of a pitch-black void, which is governed by the paradoxical architecture of an infinite finitude and a finite infinity. This microsonic topology which extends over two brilliantly conceived tracks has something of the cosmic and emanative breath of Terry Riley's In C (1964), Karlheinz Stockhausen's classics of cosmic music like Inori  (1973/74) or Oktophonie (1991) , LaMonte Young's The Second Dream of the High-Tension-Line Stepdown Transformer (1962) and of Hiroshi Hasegawa's post-C.C.C.C.-projects like Astro or Astral Travelling Unity.

With seemingly giant size antennas McQuaid has received, recorded, structured and mixed cosmic ur-sounds. His HNW works like an electron-microscope for primordial sounds. It is the transmitter and compressor for the primordial groove of the universe. From the first seconds of pure sonic stasis  to the following landscapes of ant-like sound-formations and sound-transformations Andrew McQuaid explores the relation of time, sound and listener. In this A View from Nihil's "The Eternal Present" gives a deep insight into the cosmic paradoxes of life and death, because it makes the forces of time audible. In the beginning time invades all things, injecting death and finitude into the cosmic order.

For A View from Nihil time makes all things hollow and abysmal. Time breaks the primordial sonic stasis of pure beginnings apart into infinitesimal small parts and in this destroys the idea of a capsuled and anti-rhythmic time/space continuum. The sonic stasis breaks apart into an infinitely big amount of sonic atoms only carried forward by a nearly imperceptible and brilliantly conceived ur-cosmic groove. Time reveals and transports this primordial cosmic groove and makes music possible. Music is the art of time par excellence. Time is the condition of possibility and impossibility of Music. Music articulates time and finitude and sometimes eternity.

Music is the coloration of time. It is a Chronochromie to use a title of a famous composition by Olivier Messiaen. By inventing a really fantastic sound/titles/concept-syngergy A View from Nihil forces the listener to perceive the cosmic drama of a really frightening finite and humane temporality and a seemingly eternal  expansion of the cosmic order. But A View from Nihil is only seemingly following the aesthetics of an absolute beginning. To the contrary, The Eternal Present shows that it is heading towards an aesthetic of absolute rebeginnings. For A View from Nihil atoms are born never ending, every second, every minute, every hour,  every day, every week,  every year and every eternity.

One can detect life and movement even on the subatomic level, 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 rhythmic motion. Sounds are produced by a wave with a certain frequency; thus with every movement, new sounds were created and older ones destroyed. It is like the text-insert to the first track illustrates it: "The nature of anything is its own momentary stasis and destruction" (cit. Santaraksita, 800 CE). On "The Eternal Present" you can learn to perceive sounds as the pulsation of the cosmic heart and to ask yourself: where do beginnings really begin ? And what happens before and after beginnings begin or end ?

For A View from Nihil's cosmodelic worldview an ancient indian text called the Brahma Vaivarta Purana (added as an insert to track two) clearly articulates this problem: "Beyond the farthest vision, crowding outer-space, the universes come and go, an innumerable host. Like delicate boats they float on the fathomless pure waters that form the body of Vishnu. Out of every hair-pore of that body a universe bubbles and breaks. Will you presume to count them ? Will you number the gods in all those worlds - the worlds present and the worlds past ?".

[VIII]

It should be clear now, that on "The Eternal Present" we have the pleasure to listen at the same time to the sounds of a galaxy and to a galaxy of sounds. It is at once a composition about the mystery of artistic and cosmic creation, which is always a creatio ex nihilo. All things are made out of nothingness and made for nothing. Nothingness is the substance of all things created and existing.

The soundworld of A view from Nihil is in itself cosmogonic. Under the optic of a view from nihil all things emanate out of nothingness and all falls back to nothingness. This is the ur-groove of the universe I have spoken about earlier in my review.

In analogy to Sergej Eisenstein's Technique of Intellectual Montage Andrew McQuaid seems to have tried to superimpose the two tracks of "The Eternal Present" in order to evoke a nearly eternally lasting third track in the minds of the attentive listeners. Anyone who has really listened attentively to this composition on headphones, will understand what I mean, because the effect of one listening-session is really immense.

The sounds are so immense, that they will stay for hours and hours in your mind like a static sculpture almost like in LaMonte Young's Dream Houses. The sounds are causing an uncanny, menacing and very material Blackbody Radiation in your mind (to use a term from Astrophysics metaphorically), which should be seen as a radical cosmic re-opening of the HNW-standardmodel.

In this "The Eternal Present" is a tool for a/voiding place, but it is also a unique soundtrack to challenge your innermost compass and sensorium. It is an expanding and exploding mind-matter-relation. In difference to the HNW-standardmodell which seems to see the necessity of a re-spiritualisation and re-interiorization of micro and nano-sounds, McQuaid works on a materialistic, anti-mimetic and in the end totally anti-metaphoric exteriorisation of astro-acoustic micro- and nano-sounds and sound-sources. Consequently to think, that NOISE is only an unpleasant and mostly unintentional assemblage of sounds is a very sad, common and boring misconception. Noise is a lot more than an audible/sonic phenomenon.

[IX]

It is a pleasure to discover this genuinely inhuman soundworld with A View from Nihil. It is an expedition into the micro- and nano-dimensions of space, time and sound. In this McQuaid seems to deconstruct the most dominant concept of classical HNW: the misanthropic idea of seclusion with an almost childish and romantic idea of an an-archic and non-preformed interiority. But isn't it almost ridiculous and oldfashioned to believe in the possibility to stay at home in the time of space flights to Mars ? Far calls, coming far !

The unique alignment of A View from Nihil's pitch-black cosmodelic sound helps perhaps to overcome these boring and inflationary used ideas and redefine the central points of HNW. After a careful listening to A View from Nihil's HNW-soundworld it should be considered as a radicalisation, minimalisation and abysmal intensification of the Drone- and the Stochastic-Music-paradigm. HNW in general should consequently be seen as a soundworld, in which sonic maximalism should be minimalized and the sonic minimalism should be maximalized.

Following the unique cosmodelic and astro-acoustic alignment of Andrew McQuaid's brilliant project A View from Nihil, I would tend to re-translate the acronym H.N.W. now as: H.emispheric N.oise W.elcome and remind the attentive listener of the dedication of this recording to Stephen P. McGreevy (well known for his recordings of real cosmic sounds) and of his/her obligation to think cosmodelic and astro-acoustic. This brilliant recording is the starting point of something p r i m o r d i a l in HNW - so take your chance to discover A View from Nihil.

With his primordial HNW-sounds Andrew McQuaid transforms the all too subjective and humane expressionism of the HNW-standardmodell into something radical different. Under the heading of a cosmodelic artistic procedure he tries to use the synergetic and amplificatory effects of sound, world and mind to establish a new concept of cosmic solitude, which seems to be situated in an infinitely large cosmic hermitage.

The usual idea of ego dissolution through sound, which is equally dominant in classical HNW, is expanded and transcended by the idea of the dissolution of cosmic boundaries. This is the end for all totally autistic approaches to HNW. In time's of space flights, quantum physics and quantum gravity and string-theory it is almost ridiculous to have the wish to stay at home alone. It is time to realise, that the way of HNW goes from the HOUSE to the UNIVERSE and nowhere else.

[X]

In the end this composition really helps us to take a view from nihil. To take a view from nihil has nothing frightening. To the contrary:it has something re-leasing, it is a breakthrough to the senseless, non-final and forever unstable materiality of the world. In Japan, this non-temporal moment of breakthrough would be called Satori : the sudden achievement of buddhahood.

This achievement reveals, that Eternity is always infinitely close and infinitely far away. Nevertheless we are always desperately trying to get a taste of eternity or nothingness, because eternity is nothing else but the being of nothingness and the nothingness of being. 

To see this naked truth is to perceive the void of all things fully void. To plumb into the depths of this emptiness is in the end a nearly heavenly delight, because we have learned to embrace the view from nihil and to start ex nihilo all over again. To say it with the words of the famous poem by the Sixth Patriarch Hui-neng:

Satori has no tree.
The mirror has no stand.
Originally, there was not a single thing.
So where should the dust settle ?

(10/10 Admiration-Points)
(written by S.K.G. in October 2011 - February 2012)

A View from Nihil - The Eternal Present
(Sweet Solitude - Infinity Series  18 - 2011)
(68'34'' min., Limited to 15 copies)

Support and contact A View from Nihil here ,
listen to A View from Nihil here.

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.

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