Gracyk points out that even at the primal origin of rock ’n’ roll – the Sun Sessions – studio artifice was involved, in the famous echo that Sam Philips slapped on Presley’s voice. The brilliance of late sixties psychedelia derives from the way artists like The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix and Pink Floyd combined gritty ‘feel’ (live, interactive playing between a seasoned band) and the fantastical (hallucinatory effects, ultra-vivid timbres, an artificial sense of space conjured using echo and reverb). Digital music abandons all those elements of ‘feel’: the inflections and supple rhythmic interplay that communicate the fact that flesh-and-blood humans physically shaped this sound together in a real acoustic space. But by way of recompense, it dramatically intensifies the trompe l’oreille side of psychedelia: its fictitious psycho-acoustic space, its timbres and textures and sound-shapes to which no ready real-world referents attach themselves. At its most inventive, sampladelia lures the listener into a soundworld honeycombed with chambers that each have their own acoustics. This music is ‘like walking through a maze whose walls rearrange themselves with every step you take’ (James Gleick’s description in Chaos: Making a New Science of fractal theory’s nonlinear equations).
If rock phonography uses multiple takes and overdubs to create a quasi-event, something that never ‘happened’, what you hear on record usually sounds plausible as a real-time occurrence. Sampladelia goes further: it layers and concatenates musical fragments from different eras, genres and places to create a timewarping pseudo-event, something that could never possibly have happened. Different acoustic spaces and recording ‘auras’ are forced into uncanny adjacence. You could call it ‘deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence’; you could also call it ‘magic’. It’s a kind of time travel, or seance: a conference call colloquy between ghosts-in-the-sampling-machine.
Sampladelia is zombie music: dead sound reanimated like the zombi – a Haitian corpse brought back to robot-like half-life by a voodoo sorcerer, then used as a slave. Disembodied beats, licks, cries and riffs – born of human breath and sweat – are vivisected from their original musical context and then literally galvanized, in its original meaning; when electricity was first discovered, physicians would electrocute cadavers to make their limbs and facial muscles twitch, for the public’s ghoulish delectation. Early hip-hop sampling was like Frankenstein’s monster, funk-limbs crudely bolted together, the stitching clearly audible. With its quasi-organic seamlessness, today’s sampladelia is more like the chimera, that mythical monster composed of the parts of different animals. Its chimerical quality parallels digital video effects like morphing, where faces blend into each other imperceptibly, and human bodies distend and mutate like Hanna-Barbera animations.
In their jeremiad Data Trash: The Theory of the Virtual Class, Arthur Kroker and Michael Weinstein warn that the ‘archivalism’ of cyberculture is hatching ‘monstrous hybrids’, that ‘archived body parts are disguised in the binary functionality of data and pooled into larger circulatory flows’. This could be a description of the process of converting the vinyl-encoded musical energy of flesh-and-blood musicians into the zeros-and-ones of binary code, which is then disseminated as currency throughout contemporary pop culture. ‘Ours is a time of non-history that is super-charged by the spectacular flame-out of the detritus of the bounded energy of local histories’: this is the fin de millennium sampladelic supernova, where the last eighty years of pan-global recorded sound is decontextualized, deracinated, and utterly etherealized.
Ghosts in the Machine
In The Third Wave, Alvin Toffler wrote of ‘blip culture’, where ‘we are all besieged and blitzed by fragments of imagery, contradictory or unrelated, that shake up our old ideas and come shooting at us in the form of broken or disembodied “blips” ’. Sampladelia can be seen as a new kind of realism that reflects the fact that the late twentieth-century mediascape has become our new Nature; it can be diagnosed as a symptom of, but also an attempt to master and reintegrate, the promiscuous chaos and babbling heteroglossia of the information society.
But sampladelia may also be prophetic, offering hints of future forms of human identity and social organization. Cyber-theorist Arthur Kroker confronts the prospect of ‘digital recombinant’ culture with a weird mix of manic glee and dystopian gloom. In Spasm: Virtual Reality, Android Music, Electric Flesh, he hails sample-based music as the cutting edge of consciousness, a preview of post-human life in the age of virtual reality. ‘Just like virtual sound-objects in sampler music technology, subjectivity today is a gaseous element, expanding and contracting, time-stretched, cross-faded, and sound-accelerated.’
Kroker’s belief in music as portent is shared by Jacques Attali, author of Noise: The Political Economy of Music. Attali traces a history in which each stage of music-making is a ‘foretoken’ of future social transformations. Music begins as sacred noise, the accompaniment to sacrificial ritual, a bacchanalian clamour in whose creation everybody participates. The next stage is the age of Representation, where music-making is the preserve of specialists (composers, professional musicians), and takes place at special events that have a symbolic, socially stabilizing function. The modern age is characterized by Repetition: the mass-mediated circulation of music-commodities (records). Reified as product, tarnished by everyday currency, and ‘stockpiled’ by isolated collectors, music loses its magical aura. Individuals in the twentieth century are exposed to more music in a month than someone in the seventeenth century heard in a lifetime, but its meaning is increasingly impoverished.
The fourth era of music is the age of Composition: ‘a music produced by each individual for himself, for pleasure outside of meaning, usage and exchange’. Attali is vague about what this music would sound like. Noise was published in 1977; subsequent commentators have argued that punk’s do-it-yourself creed fits Attali’s criteria, while others have suggested free jazz. The Karaoke craze, where the consumer displaces the star vocalist, could be seen as industry-sponsored, top-down attempt to involve the listener; other future half-measures will involve playback equipment that allows you to remix tracks (a form of music-customization already approached by some CD-ROMs).
Lo-fi rock and electronic dance are the two contemporary genres that come closest to Attali’s notion of ‘composition’. Both are usually created in home-studios and are either self-released or put out by tiny independent labels, in small pressings sometimes as low as 200; both reach the public via marginal distribution networks and specialist retailers. And both are marginal scenes appealing to audiences who pride themselves on being more than ‘mere’ consumers. In lo-fi, a high proportion of the audience are in bands, while in dance music there’s a high ratio of DJs (professional and amateur) to punters.
DJ culture represents that threshold stage at which repetition morphs into composition. DJs are chronic consumerists and collectors, who nonetheless use their stockpiling expertise as the basis for composition in its literal sense, ‘putting together’. They create a metamusical flow by juxtaposition and segue. As an extension of DJ cut ’n’ mix, sample-based music at its best is fully fledged composition: the creation of new music out of shards of reified sound, an alchemical liberation of the magic trapped inside dead commodities. Attali claims that the age of Composition will be characterized by a return to music’s ancient sacred function. DJ cultures fit the bill; surrounded by ritualized festivity, they emphasize participation and the democratization of noise (ravers blowing their whistles and horns rhythmically).
If music is prophecy, as Attali contends, what kind of social organization or disorganization is heralded by dance music? The transformation of music into a mass-marketed commodity (sheet music, records) anticipated the late twentieth-century triumph of what the Situationists called ‘the spectacular-commodity society’ (with its alienated, passive consumer/spectators). Rave culture’s decentred networks – cottage industries, micro-media, temporary one-off gatherings – may herald some post-corporate hetero-topia of the late twenty-first century. Th
en again, sampladelia might equally be a component of a Krokerite dystopia of ‘cold seduction’: ‘a cool hallucinatory culture of special effects personalities moving at warp speed to nowhere,’ a virtual-reality pleasuredome where the self is a will-o’-the-wisp buffeted by ‘ceaseless movement in the eddies of cultural matter.’
Slaved to the Rhythm
Critiques of digital music usually focus on the fact that, despite the rhetoric of ‘infinite possibilities’ that surrounds it, most music made on computers sounds awful samey. Some of the acutest criticisms have come from Brian Eno. Although he pioneered many of the techniques taken up by sampladelia – loops, found sounds, the obsession with timbre, the creation of ‘fictional psycho-acoustic space’ – Eno is disenchanted with almost all the music currently made using computer technology. Speaking to Wired magazine, he complained that digital, sequenced music had merely resurrected many of the inherent limitations of classical orchestral music, with its hierarchical ranking of instruments in the mix, its rigid sense of pitch and its locked rhythms tied to the conductor/timekeeper. ‘Classical music is music without Africa,’ he complained, adding later, ‘the problem with computers is that there is not enough Africa in them . . . A nerd is a human being without enough Africa in him or her.’
In a later interview with Request, Eno looked to African percussion music – which is based not just around polyrhythm, as is much rock and dance music, but around multi-tiered metres that coexist in a sort of loose interdependence – as a model of liberation. ‘I like different layers to be going on simultaneously and not to necessarily be locked . . . what I like is when they sometimes lock, so there’s this dramatic moment when all of those things suddenly come together, then they drift again.’ Africa’s poly-metric perversity has a utopian, democratic charge for Eno. By comparison, house and techno producers are ‘slaves to their machines, just as most of us are slaves to [the machines we use] . . . This is a music that’s particularly enslaved . . .’
This politically charged analogy – Africa versus slavery – is ironic, since it is part of the terminology of computer-based music, where instruments are ‘slaved’ to MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface), the timekeeper machine which triggers all the different sequences and keeps them in synch. As pop culture theorist Andrew Goodwin has pointed out, this sort of critique of musical standardization echoes the notions of anti-capitalist thinkers like Theodor Adorno, who characterized the products of the pop culture industry in terms of ‘part-interchangeability’ and ‘pseudo-individuation’: superficial novelty within rigid formats (in pop terms, think 4/4 metre and verse/chorus/ middle-eight structure). MIDI and other digital technologies promise infinite potential for individual expression, but only within the parameters of a rigidly structured matrix for organizing sound.
‘Part-inter changeability’ certainly applies to the bulk of dance music, in so far as most producers operate rather like the car-freaks who cannibalize auto parts, hot-rod their engines, and customize the vehicle’s body in order to personalize the mass-produced. Similarly, dance producers build souped-up rhythm-engines using an often rather restricted repertoire of components, derived from sample CDs or sound-modules which contain hundreds of breakbeats, a cappellas, synth-patches, etc. Although the sampler does indeed offer ‘infinite possibilities’ for resequencing and warping these samples, most dance producers are constrained by the funktionalist criteria of their specific genre. Tracks are designed as material for the DJ to work into a set, and so must conform in tempo and mood. Creativity in dance music involves a balancing act between making your tracks both ‘music and mixable’ (as Goldie put it). Simon Frith points out that one of the defining qualities of digital music is the sense that this music ‘is never finished and . . . never really integrated’ as a composition. It is precisely this ‘unfinished’ aspect – the sockets, as it were – that enable the DJ to plug tracks into the mix-scape.
Reinventing the Machine
‘The street tries to find its own uses for things.’
– William Gibson, Count Zero
More than in any other genre, electronic musicians articulate what they do in terms of their tools. Ironically, despite this technophile rhetoric, the most radical electronic dance music is often made with relatively low-level equipment and outmoded machinery; the Roland TB 303, source of the acid-house bass, and Roland’s 808 and 909 drum machines are prime examples of the way in which techno musicians find new possibilities in obsolete and discontinued gear. State-of-the-art, top-of-the-range equipment is more likely to be found in expensive recording studios, where it’s used in the production of conventional-sounding pop and rock. Indeed, the most widespread use of sampling is pretty prosaic: it’s a means of cutting corners and costs, a way of procuring ‘authentic’ instrumental colours without hiring session musicians or of ‘saving’ a good sound without having to go through the bother of, say, repeatedly miking up the drums in a particular way. Generally, there’s more space-age technology involved in the making of MOR shlock like Celine Dion than in tracks by avowed futurists like Jeff Mills.
The picture is further complicated by the fact that techno artists sometimes have a confused idea of what constitutes ‘progress’ for electronic music. Too often, this is conceived in terms of ‘musicality’. Within the terms of genres like house or jungle, ‘innovation’ or ‘maturity’ for the genre can involve steps that, from an external avant-garde perspective, seem regressive: a move away from noise-and-rhythm minimalism towards greater harmonic/melodic complexity; ‘organic’, quasi-acoustic textures; highly finessed arrangements and the incorporation of ‘live’ vocals or ‘real’ musicianship.
Self-consciously ‘progressive’ dance music has an unfortunate tendency to repeat the mistakes of progressive rockers like ELP, Genesis, Jethro Tull et al, who sought to legitimate rock by aping the grandiosity of nineteenth-century classical music. The results, in both prog rock and prog dance, are bloated song-cycles and concept albums, ostentatious musicianship, a prissy obsession with production values. Just as the truly ‘progressive’ bands of the late sixties and early seventies had more in common with twentieth-century avant-classical composers (electro-acoustic, musique concrète, the New York school of drone-minimalism), similarly the truly radical sampladelic artists are engaged in expanding our notions of what ‘music’ can be. This involves the exploration of timbre, chromatics and ‘noise-sound’, the prioritizing of rhythm and repetition over melodic/harmonic development, and the elaboration of virtual space using the studio-as-instrument.
How does this project relate to technology? I believe that this music’s cutting edge is tied to its technological underpinnings. Firstly, it’s about finding out what a new piece of equipment facilitates that wasn’t previously possible or even thinkable. This involves locating and exploiting potentials in the new machines that the manufacturers never intended. A frequent claim that you hear from techno producers is that the first thing they do when they’ve acquired a new machine is to throw away the manual and start messing around, blithely indifferent to the manufacturer’s helpful hints. Above all, the truly progressive edge in electronic music involves doing things that can’t be physically achieved by human beings manipulating instruments in real-time. Rather than using techniques like step-writing to mimic traditional ideas of musicianship (frilly arpeggios, solo-istic meanderings), it’s about inventing a new kind of posthuman virtuosity. A prime example is the way jungle producers use sampling and sequencing software to create fantastically complex breakbeat rhythms that are too fast and convoluted for a human drummer to achieve, yet still retain an eerie ‘feel’.
Techno-phobes often argue that electronic dance music rapidly becomes dated because it is so tied to the state-of-the-art technology of the day, making ‘timeless art’ an impossible goal. But rock and pop are equally susceptible to being trapped in time, because of the vogues for particular production styles and effects. These ‘period sounds’ are often alluring precisely for their nostalgic
charm or the way they capture a specific pop Zeitgeist. At various points in rock history, the leading edge of music involves a strategic retreat from the state-of-the-art towards more limited technological set-ups. Examples include 1968’s retreat from 1967’s psychedelic studio excesses to a more gritty, blues-and-country influenced sound; grunge’s rejection of eighties rock’s crystal-clear production in favour of the muddy naturalism of early seventies heavy rock; lo-fi’s fetish for four track recording and distortion. As techno has become more self-conscious about its own history, it has staged periodic returns to period sounds, like the Roland 303, or electro’s gauchely futuristic textures and stiff, geometric drum machine beats.
Songs Versus Soundscapes
Just as they are sometimes overdeferential towards conventional notions of musicality, techno artists often talk about what they do in the seemingly inappropriate language of traditional humanist art – ‘expression’, ‘soul’, ‘authenticity’, ‘depth’. This ‘false consciousness’ can be attributed partly to timelag (discourse failing to keep pace with technology), partly to the industry/media’s need for singular auteur-geniuses (as opposed to the collective creativity of scenes, with their anonymous flows of ideas), and partly as an attempt to contradict those critics who denigrate techno as cold, inhuman machine-music.
Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture Page 49
