Capitalism treats every registerable difference as a potential resource which can capitalizes or from which a surplus can be extracted. Capitalism targets always the ears because we are never not listening, and therefore listening is never unproductive to some extent. In the overproduction of everything no should be unheard. That might the fate of every avantgarde.
Click & Glitch
Today, the metastasis of musical production, circulation and technology makes music always available and collapses any distinction between background and foreground music. Music simulates a vital activity, is omnipresent and thus hyper-audible. Music is administered as a permanent drone and thus also becomes inaudible again. There is a scenario of music, sounds and noises that you don’t necessarily have to listen to. The noise generated by radio, the internet and smartphones, which is subtly integrated into everyday routines by invisible transformers, drives music and the system, according to Baudrillard, beyond its own end, so that there is simply no reason to listen to or perceive music any more. For Baudrillard, hi-fi music is already associated with a purging of sounds and the apparent liberation from noise and thus degenerates into integral music. Flawlessly merging into its own model, music liberates itself from music precisely by restoring the sound to technical perfection. This technical perfection means that an artificial noise is added to the signal to make it more musical again. Therein lies the danger of glitch music, which merely modulates frequencies, exploits errors and corrupts signals. The homogenizing indifference of boredom expressed in serial experimental music must be transformed into a state of minor interest. Instead, non-music is often enough no longer anti-music, but an art of simulation that aims to erase the space of reality while preserving the image of its disappearance. (Baudrillard)
With Deleuze or Boulez, we can speak of rhythm in terms of transversal disjunction or non-periodic clicked music. When we listen to a piece, we always hear other things, which Deleuze describes as forces, duration, sensation, and lightness, depending on how tempi, rhythm, and sound are varied. For heterogeneous temporalities and spatial components that overlap and coexist in a track, the click, in its invincible evidence, opens up different possibilities to go on, since the signal is short and without contextual reference, thus does not require a rememberable association.
Glitch music is usually characterized by a transformation of sound artifacts caused by malfunctions of digital technologies – a malfunction of electrical fuses due to a change in voltage – such as bugs, crashes, system errors, hardware noise, CD skipping, and digital distortion. Failure was developes in the arts into a cutting-edge concept, while at the same time it became codified by technolgy and business as a model for improvement and success.
Dark glitch is instead the non-signal or even non-failure – used not to capitalize the click or the glitch as a quasi-cause of the excess for a successful objective, but to conform the non-successful swimming in the black noise of the non-music. it does not give a structure to the formless or making order out of non-sense. Failure or glitch is not a critical resource against hardcore power structures (which would be a matter of function) but part of a relation which continually modulates formlessness as a constant change to sustain failure. Dark glitch includes a polyrhythmic and polyvocal way of interrogating formlessness. In this way it opens for a black thought music which opens for the improbability of being written. “We eat black noise and black noise eats us, and what remains is neither us nor black noise, but an opening from which a new worm could emerge, a new blackness for a new meaning … What if ILOVEYOU is the same as IEATYOU or IBOREYOUTODEATH or IMONETIZEYOURSOUL or IBURYYOUALIVE?” Gary J. Shipley
Ultrablack is the sound of formlessness, as black sound it takes on a form as a something, which is also a nothing – to prevent anything from belonging to music. Black is the something that is also nothing, it has to get liquid and catastrophic, ultrablack, a nothing that cannot be adequately grasped in the precinct of music. Ultrablack is the nihilistisc abyss. How, then, is nothingness transformed into black? Or better how then is black transformed into nothingness/ultrablack? Again: How is the nothing or formless that interrupts music (its grammar and conceptualization) as form? There is no formlessness per se. The formless, objectless, faceless or whatever you want to call this chaos, can only be thought in relation to form, object, face; if there is no hold, then the formless can be no longer be any question of thinking, but only of delirium. But you can`t ignore the energetic conditions and entropic processes that lead to any given musical form and expression. We can speak of A-forme, like the ambiguous moment of this non-form or even formless sound, is self-defeating or catastrophic but has also an expressive moment in its own confusion. A meta-stable or ultrablack music is unstable – there are always multiple series of events that pass through it. But an event that has happened without adequate consequences is a kind of non-sense. Not-being-musical can be a kind ofcatastrophe for the listener who expects to hear sounds that behave kind of musically.
For something to remain entirely outside of form, an object must remain a process that prevents the imposition of form at all stages. The attempt to be pure becoming can onlyfail, and this failure is formless. But maybe the notion of form must be replaced with Simondon which information which presupposes the existence of a system in a state of metastable non-equilibrium that can individuate itself; information, unlike form, is never a unique term, but the signification that springs from a disparation and dissipation. Ultrblack of music is permanent under tension, a wave-quantum, self-superimposed and heterogeneous towards itself.
Ultrablack is the sound of formlessness, as black sound it takes on a form as a something, which is also a nothing – to prevent anything from belonging to music. Black is the something that is also nothing, it has to get liquid and catastrophic, ultrablack, a nothing that cannot be adequately grasped in the precinct of music. Ultrablack is the nihilistisc abyss. How, then, is nothingness transformed into black? Or better how then is black transformed into nothingness/ultrablack? Again: How is the nothing or formless that interrupts music (its grammar and conceptualization) as form? There is no formlessness per se. The formless, objectless, faceless or whatever you want to call this chaos, can only be thought in relation to form, object, face; if there is no hold, then the formless can be no longer be any question of thinking, but only of delirium. But you can`t ignore the energetic conditions and entropic processes that lead to any given musical form and expression.
In opposition to the form is non-modulation, a continuous notion of form between the properties of the material and the concrete action of the form. It`s a non-form and with Harney/Moton we can write:
“Animaterial riddim that cuts the rhythm, cuts the method,- the overpopulation of meter by microtonality, the bridle* that cuts the space* with an extrarational, hyperganjic, dancehall-sanskritic, anachorasmiatic, al-Mashian, all-Manschian hum, the ersatz groove we find ourselves in, the devalued and unvaluable local uprising – does not obey our most loving invocation. This gift of spirit gives itself away, and zero-one/one-two is left embittered.”
It is the simulacra that is meant to hide the absence of truth. But the absence itself cannot be articulated. This inarticulability defines the boundary between hyperreality and the glitch, a flaw in the code that is irreparable because of its transience. The process of dark glitch is to interrupt, specifically to interrupt a digital representation in such a way that its simulation of the analog can no longer remain obscured. The glitch interrupts the code not by undoing digital solipsism, but by highlighting it. The glitch exposes the exstatics of the simulation as simulation. A glitch is not an ordinary malfunction due to an error from the outside, but a slippage of the system due to an internal change. The glitch can cause a system to collapse from the inside, which only reveals that it is really a system. On the one hand, the glitch prevents progress because it interrupts the intended development (anti-finality), and on the other hand, it enables an unintended development that leads to new possibilities that disregard the accepted rules of the game. The glitch does not reveal the true functionality of the computer; rather, it indicates the ghostly conventionality of the forms by which digital spaces are organized. The glitch questions the functionality of the code, but it does not destroy the code; rather, the hyperreal world created by the code is exposed as a simulacrum that dissolves into nothingness. This is a different kind of nihilism than the “neutralization of the system” (Baudrillard). The glitch does not invite resistance, because resistance implies active participation, whereas the glitch is not created or produced; it is triggered. One has no control over the occurrence of a glitch; rather, it emerges in the aleatory movements of the code itself. And so the glitch exists on a ghostly plane between appearance and hyperreality. As a ghost that interrupts in its opacity to demand silence or noise, the glitch becomes “weird,” it becomes a horror or a “thing in itself” that obstructs insight by a subject. However, the media objects that populate supernatural horror today are not broken, in fact they work quite well, often perhaps too well.
Lets talk about noise. Noise should not simply be understood as an unwanted sound or signal, but with Michel Serres as turbulence, as order and disorder at the same time – order that dissolves and re-forms itself through repetition and redundancy, while disorder is generated by new events, madness, uncertainty and the unpredictable. Noise is the fundamentally unstable ground on which machines and human existence are based. Order is then the form of an appearance that permanently massages the turbulent background and is massaged by it. All models are only approximations of something that is constantly in motion.
Noise is full of distortions, a formless form of dissonance. There’s no such thing as formless music per se, or for that matter, a formless “thing” as such. Formlessness in musical terms refers to a conspicuous lack or absence of the structural and/or semiotic cues given by the familiar elements of metre, cadence, harmony, theme-variation, melody, and so on. But its also no longer possible to think of matter and form in an asymmetrical relationship in which the latter plays a predominant and active role.
Living noise as a negative potential which is not yet capitalized, but as soon as it is integrated into the system, it ceases to be noise: it is noise when it interferes with a system, but as soon as it is integrated as a stabilizing element into the system, it becomes a living corpse. Beyond the reference to unwanted sound, noise is conceptually polymorphous, because it is never about measures of phenomena that qualify noise as a certain kind of disturbance, but about the relationship between contingency and control. (Malaspina) Even the tons we actually hear have a certain amount of noise, because a mathematically perfect tone would sound strange to our ears. Nature produces irreducible forms of chance in every process and borders on the unpredictable.
But how the analysis of the relation between computerization and trade shows, material practices of human-machine hybrids use noise as a means to make profits, and fourth, how the problem of speed escalates dramatically, transforming the race for risk-free profits into a race to zero.
Noise thus becomes a vital component of the system, an unpredictable activity that paradoxically can also support the equations that underpin modern financial theory. This is a binary – those who possess information and those who do not, with the latter as noise traders taking advantage of traders who trade on the basis of real information.
However, a strict distinction between information and noise is not possible, as all markets are permeated by noise to some degree, insofar as transactions in space and time are not without friction. Noise is an aspect of trading as part of an embodied, material world – embodied in the sense of people trading or writing algorithms, material in the sense of the human-machine relationship in real systems and not in idealized equations.
At the end maybe ultrablack music must produce a kind of black noise. Eldrich Priests speaks of music that keeps its expressions/non-form of informe from sinking into the mud of mere sound. Like noise music, music noise needs keeps its failure, its failure to fail, in ear. Music noise has to divide itself from musical practice that it cannot do without in order for its points of deformation to express the nonsense it wants to become. But this might be not enough.
Porn Music
Therefore, paraphrasing a Baudrillard quote, one could write: The music industry sprinkles and excites the excited and at the same time exhausted nervous system, makes people listen until they themselves want to listen more and more and more often, and they would actually like to listen to much more. This does not mean that they have a taste or believe in the meaning of music – on the contrary, it expresses a boulimic desire to hear: The music system is voraciously and excrementally devoured and digested. One gets rid of it by excess (not by rejection, but by indigestion) – the whole system is transformed into a huge white musical belly. However, Eldricht Priest has interjected: Where there is only input and output – sensation as information – there is only swallowing and shitting: no memory, no digestion, no gathering of consciousness into a difference that makes a difference. A worm, because it has no distraction apparatus, loses the purity of sensation to the bureaucracy of its living organism. The technicality of the global apparatus orchestrates the conditions under which one moment uneventfully replaces the next, drawing the force of consciousness that would otherwise bring a just-perceived change to punctual attention into the next moment, and then the next, and the next, and so on. (Priest) Accordingly, distraction is a technologically displaced continuity, and our 24/7 routines are a technique of attention that abstracts from the flow of experience a veritable span of distraction. (Crary)
According to the logic of the overproduction and simulation music is everywhere, but being everywhere is the same thing as being nowhere, The hyperreality makes no real difference anymore between the real and the unreal. There is now the danger, that even ultrablack sound gets a by-product of the hyperreal.
Contemporary listeners hear music today in passing. Listeners no longer stay with music long enough to be affected by gradual or progressive changes in tempo, harmony, melody and rhythm. Modulation now comes in discrete packets, in “quanta”. (Eldritch Priest) What happens specifically from Muzak’s perspective is that listening in packets organizes perception; attention is conditioned by the non-conscious rehearsal of perception. Micro-events that populate small pause in consciousness have the ability to modulate the formation of a coming perception. The stream of audible modulation aims to modulate the interests that guide perception by introducing a discrete change in the perceptual field – from muzak in shoppingmalls to techno club music – that will condition the way attention can unfold. For music to affect perception in a culture where attention is more often defined by its divisiveness and changeability, (music) must not cut so deeply into the already notated fabric of daily consciousness, but cut quickly and decisively. The musical sound must introduce a change that opens a gap in a rapidly blurring and only partially active attention, where its structures can be “pre-rehearsed” on a non-conscious level in the form of emerging patterns. (Priest) Rhythm, tempo, title, artist, genre etc. are today quantified by sound architects. By indexing these values the same intensity can be maintained even if the music seems to change; its an acoustic space with an absolutely consistent identity and unchanging mood. This kind of muzak produces atates of distraction or diversion or even nonfunctional thinking, which are now reconfigured by a system of productivity that views these mental events not as inconsequential states but as expressions of creativity. The order of productivity inscribes what was previously inscribed as and through negativity. The technological stream of music is characterised by accelerating pulverization, which is dominated by the simulation of novelty. A particular track or set of tracks are merely a background element of allday life, which club-life is a part of. The loopy song of hyper-music, in which its end is simultaneously its beginning, cannot be exchanged for anything other than itself, and at the same time the difference that should be demonstrated (in relation to other songs), is only simulated. Songs have nothing to say except the naked display of interchangeability and circulation. They are ongoing examples of the culture industry and its desire for a sensation that proceeds without obstacles. But also a lot of experimental music tends to be boring and completely formless and it is hard to distinguish it from the low-level dullness that activities such as some screen work, watching television or constantly checking one’s email. repetitive music that is meant to be experienced without sensation expresses a sense of boredom that aligns with the dimensions of depression and simulation in contemporary capitalism.
The music porn, its haunting atmosphere. arises from the ultra-listenability of dead music (the melodic and harmonic junk) and makes the sexuality of any other music seem superfluous. Take, for example, Baudrillard’s arguments about pornography, in particular the so-called vaginal cyclorama, through which Japanese workers try to stick their noses up to their eyeballs inside a woman’s vagina in order to see better. For Baudrillard, the point here is to remove seduction and distance in order to see the “thing-in-itself” that does not exist. This is the reason for the endless study of female genitalia. As Baudrillard says, if the obscene is a matter of endless representation and not sex, then even the interior of the body and viscera must still be explored. And if the obscene of today’s garbage music is a matter of endless proliferation, then the search for a living weirdness in music goes on and on. This means, first of all, that the retro mode has become ubiquitous in music. “The future no longer exists unless it exists as a reconfiguration of the past; the ghosts of the past haunt the present in the form of remixes, sequels, and remakes. The new has almost no meaning anymore. Hyperstimulation and repetition already eliminate the possibility of the end. It is pure repetition without distinction; the nothingness of simulacra” (Alessandro Sbordoni).
Although there have been fashionable retro tendencies in pop from the beginning, for a time, until the 1990s, according to Mark Fisher, it was possible to distinguish “retro” from so-called contemporary music, which captures the moods of an era. Today, all retro styles are sold as contemporary precisely because there are no truly contemporary alternatives. That’s really scary. So the retro mode has become the standard, meaning styles, fashions, and objects that are retro are sold as contemporary precisely because the real innovation is no longer in the present. When everything is retro, on the one hand, it is meaningless to call certain phenomena retro, and on the other hand, nothing is retro anymore. Time becomes white. Baudrillard describes music in which the sounds are clarified and purified and freed from all noise as integral music.
Fisher also claims, however, that for a situation in which nothing happens, suddenly everything is possible again. But doesn’t it behave rather as Alessandro Sbordoni writes: “Nothing is possible anymore because nothing is impossible anymore.” And Baudrillard concludes, “The apocalypse is over, it is today the precession of the neutral, of the forms of the neutral and of indifference.” Baudrillard circulates between passive nihilism and complete nihilism. Passive nihilism refers to the meaninglessness of the system, the simulacra that simulate meaning, and the neutralization of signs. However, complete nihilism is the final stage of nihilism in which one is no longer a nihilist because nihilism itself has lost its meaning. This is the situation to which digital solipsism leads, the overproduction of truth in the form of simulacra that disguise the fact that there is none. The will to truth turns on its hyperdrive and produces the real over and above the real to compensate for its lack of reality.
Music and Time
We are very close to Heinrich Kleist’s suggestion that in order to produce powerful rhythms, the puppeteer must himself become an automaton, insofar as a machinist must shift into the machine’s emphasis, emphasis here endowed with a new attraction that correlates with what follows: When non-frequency politicians listen to the clock, they hear “tic – toc – fuck the clock” instead of “tik – tik” because they know that rhythm must be emphasized: the relation between the different speed of the waves and the maxima of intensity or the timeless degree of the different waves constitutes a dispersion that cannot be measured. Outside the clockban, non-frequency politics is the super-track, is the tracing of the immanent rhythmicity of the rhythm in the hearing-in-rhythm, it is “flow in itself” or the quantum, because the generators of non-frequency politics always span the beat of the significant “ding ding ding ding”. The relationship between the varying speed of the waves and the maxima of intensity (or the timeless degree of the varying waves) involves dispersion. This is an axiom of Rhythmight, which means that the philosophical distinction between theoretical and practical aspects of thought has lost its force. For example, the theoretical practice of music that invents new oraxioms uses as its material the sample policy that oscillates between an actual pool of samples and the ability to generate new samples. The end which is no end is no time at all – rotting away like a soundless non-music that cancels out music.
Already the meter is a wave phenomenon, and like other kinds of wave, metric waves are not about equality but about kinetic impulse: 1-2-1-2 etc. where ‘2’ is not number two but ‘away-from-one’. Metrical order is still a dynamic order – while melody is motion in the dynamic field of tones, rhythm is motion in the dynamic field of meter. But thats not all:
Invisibility
Anonymous, dark, black, hidden, obscured, encrypted, opaque, obscured, incomprehensible. The concepts of invisibility work against the wars of appearances. “Escape from visibility. Turn anonymity into an offensive position” (The Invisible Committee). We also return to Deleuze-Guattari’s politics: the nomad, the stranger speaking in a small language, the non-musician caught between countries. Ultrablackness calls for the radical attack on obscenity.
Hyperreality, in which seduction has no place, overstretches the visible and produces obscenity that stands for a maximum of visibility. More visible than the visible, that is obscenity. In contrast, the abyss preserves the secret, which in turn is more invisible than the invisible. Seduction is about the abysmal play of visibility and invisibility that can produce the visible and the invisible, where there is no instance that produces the abyss positively as mystery or negatively as obscenity.
The outside
Ultraback is not the opposite of the black radical tradition, but its outside. Like Afro-pessimism, we pursue the alternative path of darkness. What is the Ultraback sound if not a project of political-aesthetic profanation? We use darkness/blackness to signify the outside. The outside has many names: the disturbance, the contingent, the unexpected, the collapse, the void, the catastrophe, the noise. From quantum physics comes the idea of quantum fluctuations, the notion that the emptiest imaginable space is defined by noisy, unimaginable motion, indicating the aesthetics of emptiness as noise rather than silence.
Ultrablack
Black usually occurs only in alternation with white, just as silence is punctuated by noise. We know black-versus-white, black-versus-color, and black-versus-sound. But our vision is only vision when we look into the blackness of night. If black is mainly the absence of white, dark the absence of light, then we remain trapped in a world of relations, reflections, continuities and convertibilities. Black-as-white and white-as-light. Music will never be music until it stops representing and starts sounding like non-music or monochrome.-
Darkness can be gloom, opacity, shadow, or shade. It can be twilight, night, or twilight. One could speak of dark materials insofar as they are asleep. But there is another kind of darkness. It is no longer simply dark, but it is about a deep blackness. We do not ask if the world will become dark, but the blackness points to a world without us. Only by subtracting from the system of light and color can one see the generically real of blackness. There is a transition from the color black that can be seen to black as a non-color that cannot be seen, even more, a transition to a nothing-to-see that can in turn be seen. The black is the non-color, the non-existence of a non-universe that precedes the possibility of the universe. According to Laruelle, this idea of black is a cosmological principle. It is a cosmological blackness, the blackness of absolute evil, the blackness of non-being. Separated from the world of which we form a human, all-human image, and from the earth on whose surface we live, there is an indifferent, opaque, black universe. The black that precedes the light is the substance of the universe, that which fled from the world before the world was born into the world. But we are always led to think of the universe as something that is out there, the factory of the universe that can be seen and felt, or a color, a purely phenomenological blackness. In contrast, the blackness is to be thought of in the non-universe, which was not temporally before the universe, nor will come in a kind of cataclysm. It is always already there, but one cannot see it, although one sees it. The black stands for radical infinity or nothingness, best of all for subtraction, and is always already ultra-black.
We look for the general ultrablack of the abyss, of emptiness and vacuum, the ultrablack of more than silence, of catastrophes and cataclysms. Utrablack is a crypto-ontology, a crypto-sound absolutely closed to being. Ultrablack is the basis of a non-music, a new musical a-topia rooted in the generic black universe. Ultrablack could be described as non-black in the sense of Laruelles Uchromia. Ultrablack escapes any resemblance with a black that derives its blackness from any dualism of White/Black.
Think of Sun Ra`s intergalactic music – broader than interplanetary music – which evidences Ra’s continual vigilance towards the impossible, the un-thought, the not and the alter.
Nico Mas pointed out that minimalism is most often reinterpreted as “less is more.” “Less is more”, however, is quite unsatisfactory , rather, less is not “more”, but less is just less. The mistake with the statement “less is more” is that it still uses “more” as a representative measure of virtuosity. But if less is good, then less is also less. There is a virtuosity of less and reasons for its virtuosity that connects minimalism with Zen.
Non-music is non-communication
Profound music demands blackness, not silence. When Bataille speaks of communication or mediation, he always refers to the mystical tradition of via negativa; for him, mediation and communication always imply the dissolution of sender and receiver, leaving perhaps only the uncanny message that is the chasm or abyss. (Eugene Thacker)
Ultrablack is a materialism that is based on movement and matter, that flows and folds. The indeterminacy of a black hole points to an interpretation in which matter manifests itself relationally and immanently. Matter is not a passive or random object, but is formative, creative and creative. However, one could also argue with Görnitz or Simondon that the initial nucleus is not a form or matter, but a structural constitutive potential, i.e. that it carries a kind of information that determines the basic conditions for an event to occur. Meaningless information – which is carried by quibuts – is close to noise. It does not make sense to understand information as a reduction of Rauschen or uncertainty, because the uncertainty remains unlimited, since the number of different possibilities for the development of every system is infinite. The Music of the Universe is noisy and full of quantum fuctuations.
Ultrablackness as the perfect crime against digital music.
Non-music must resist digital objectification. For Baudrillard, the stereo effect has already reached the point where hi-fi becomes so uselessly refined that music is lost in the obsession with its fidelity. Where is the point where the social becomes so uselessly refined that it itself goes stereo and is lost in the obsession for safety? Today, the obsession for that perfect technicality leads us away from music altogether. It creates a false destiny for music, just as it creates a false destiny for the social – namely, to see its fulfillment simply as a matter of perfect programming, which is already inscribed in the computer.
Baudrillard’s point is that there is a point in the development of electronic music at which the increasing sophistication of programming and playback no longer improves the quality of music, but degrades it. By any possible technical definition of musical quality, the standard keeps getting better. Baudrillard’s critics would rightly accuse him of a certain nostalgia: The quality he laments as lost to high-tech never existed in reality. But it is precisely this tautology, this self-definition – the fact that the only criterion for musical quality in relation to the computer is the computer itself – that Baudrillard disputes. It is not so much an actual quality that he claims has been lost – in which case his critics would be right – but a kind of virtuality that is excluded by perfection.
But what if the music is an event, thus introducing a non-objective form of music. For Nico Mas, events are not objects, they are rather collisions, folds or alignments between objects or actors; they are temporal and experienced. Moreover, it implies that music is about participation and not reception; it is not received, but one participates in it. The production or conception of musical events thus depends on the producer, the listener, and the technology. (Nico Mas)
Non-music is like a kind of black box; it is a music box of and for blackness. There is to tell of a non-musical triangle: The (multiple) producer who produces the transversality of the black sound; the jukebox as the infinite sound of the intangible/black; the listener who hears parts from the infinity of the black jukebox. The immensity of this triangular relationship is itself part of the boundlessness of music. In this sense, the black of the music is the basis for the Ultrablack. Producer and listener share the imperfection that only the black can authenticate. Neither can the producer assume that his activity will ever end, nor can the listener assume that he will ever stop tearing fragments from the music. Ultrablackness then points to continuing the search beyond black, never giving up and seeking the ultrablack of black – while the black jukebox pretends to be hyper-playing and/or silent.
translated by deepl.
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