I remember being incredibly annoyed recently by the way an older man talked about music. He said, talking about the use of a Peruvian flute by a Western post-rock band, that “it just takes me back to South America”. Zoviet France are performing a particularly toothless sort of electro-acoustic and new-age adjacent drone music and there is what sounds like a sample of such a flute.¹ It perhaps is taking some of the audience members here in the Barbican back to South America. I am only thinking of how it is that South America has been stolen and brought here. Not in the form of “cultural appropriation” of course, but in that the ideology of “world citizenry” that informs music of this nature is the same ideology that sees South America stripped of its copper ore, its gold, its lithium deposits, and its labour. The default way to view this cultural translocation is that we, the Westerners, are transported away, because the ancient and mystical culture of Peru is that of an essentially static and sedentary civilisation of Orientals. To the Western bourgeois music listener, nourished on a diet of absolute slop from The Wire and NME, Peru cannot be a living and organic political and social system. Peru can only be visited, or copies can be made of it. The possibility that Peru is touched—that orientalist visions are part of a reciprocal and dialectic relationship, is beyond the possibility of consideration.
Every time I hear new Autechre music, I find myself thinking that the coin has come up heads twelve times in a row, surely it can’t again. But then it does: they have produced another masterpiece. This new show develops the layered and subtle mixing of their onesix tours, but emphasises the kick drum front and centre. The rhythmic conventions of electro still reign: moment to moment sound development emphasises the breakbeat of kick and snare in patterns which are sometimes natural and sometimes alien, but the sound profile throughout is that of kick drums which are somewhere between a thump in the chest and the muted colossus of a distant depth charge. It sounds like a blue whale beatboxing. Like onesix, there are pervasive waves of continuous sub bass which move in swells through the venue, feeling less like discrete moments and more like a texture that is present in the space. But the kick drums that emerge from this sound field feel like they were moulded and pinched points from this bedrock of ooze. The kick drums and the sub bass belong to the same sonic continuity, but one belongs to an atemporal, spatial sort of sound that happens in simultaneity, and the other belongs to the realm of discrete moments happening in succession. Autechre’s genius is to break down these two modes of time’s expression in the form of living dance music.
In my collection of footnotes to On the Internet I make a point of examining the spatial metaphor of referring to different parts of a text as above or below, depending on where they fall sequentially within the text.
What perhaps needs to be pointed out is that the above / below metaphor really doesn’t make sense in the form of a set of footnotes. In footnote number 28 I refer to something in footnote 27 as above, and it is true that that is where the thing is located in the web page. But then, there is an equivocation in the above / below metaphor, which sometimes refers to physical spaces on the page and sometimes refers to something that the reader has read in the past. Often these are one and the same thing, but footnotes are often read out of order. No one just sits and reads a list of footnotes in order, they tend to be read after one has been pointed out to it—interspersed through the main body of a text.
Marx’s Capital is very extensively footnoted, and my physical copy of Volume 1 is formatted such that often more than half of any given page is taken up with footnotes. When I read a sentence with a footnote in, I drop down to the note, read it, and then jump back up to carry on where I left off. Some of the longest footnotes even crawl over to the opposite page because the content of the footnote itself doesn’t fit on one page, which means that in these cases I am stopping near the top of one page, dropping slightly down to read a note, turning a page to finish reading, and then turning back to carry on reading in the middle of the last page. This is a rare instance of when a print book has a more non-linear layout than a web page.
Anaxagoras’ most important metaphysical doctrine was that of universal mixture. Present in all things are an infinite arrangement of substances, with each part representing a smaller and smaller proportion of the overall mixture, while the relative predominance of one substance over the others is what actually produces what we see as essence. The only substance that is not present in all things is nous, the mind-like motive cause of the universe. Anaxagoras does a worse job of anticipating the modern physics than Democritus and Leucippus, but his universal mixture remains a conceptually fertile way of modelling the ideal topology of a text.
Phrases and ideas always have an implied directionality to them. Some describe a flow, which might be from subject to object, from cause to effect, or any other sort of movement between asymmetrical things, between non-identities. Ideas and phrases not of this type are reciprocal, in which case the dialectic of their reciprocity contains contradictions whose resolution implies the generation of other ideas which have an asymmetrical relationship with their parents. As a directly physicalist explanation for essence, Anaxagoras emphasises proportion: relative predominance of one mass over another, or the relative preponderance of regions of space of one sort over a different sort. In translating the material to the ideal, we might want to emphasise the coexistence of forces that is implied by a text of different ideas, qualities, or influences.
In a very long work like Marx’s Capital, the difference in vintage between some parts of the text and others could be multiple decades, as mature fragments from the 1870s are interlaced with notes drafted during the early 1850s or earlier. If we include quotations, the potential collage begins to range across multiple minds, and multiple millennia. Capital includes quotations from as far back as Aristotle, which means that the complete range of word age in that work is well over two thousand years. Hundreds of different minds are subsumed into the mixture. Anaxagoras wrote what I quote above a century before Aristotle was born, and I am writing more than a century after Marx’s death. This short text has a good 200 years on Capital, Volume 1.
Linearity as a measure of reader participation can be compared with the linearity of the writing process. The Korean illustrator Kim Jung Gi can sometimes compose his pieces without planning or sketching, turning the process of drawing into a time art spectacle where he appears to bring an ideal, already completed work into material reality stroke by stroke. The piece already exists as an arrangement of ideal stuff within the ordering principle of Kim’s nous, and we just watch as his hands follow the instruction that principle necessitates. It is made spectacular because it takes time to happen.
It has been said that how he composes would be like writing a novel without ever using the delete key—writing each word following another in sequence the way the book would be eventually read. Kim’s process is in fact not as linear as this, since he jumps around the page rather than composing in scan lines like a printer, but reflecting on this proposed impossible process for writing a novel reveals the extent that reading a book is a kind of ideal time travel, where words are arranged linearly according to their meanings but in a collage of different temporal vintages.
Surrounded by the Barbican complex, a dystopian cathedral in the heart of the Imperial core where every part feels like the bridge of a different kind of starship, I wanted to think of a synthesis of these trains. Critiques of the way orientalism informs middlebrow music and critiques of these two modes of time in Autechre’s music are both examinations of dislocated things. I want for there to be a place in my work for a blue whale beatboxing. The blue whale beatboxing belongs to a continuity with a music criticism which is unequivocally anti-imperialist and communist, because images of that sort are a reflection of the experience of living. We can take an Anaxagorean approach to interpretation, as we consciously reckon with broader and broader social, political, and conceptual networks that contribute to the specific and frozen image that is a single text. For this text, that involves recognising that marks are drawn from a non-contiguous multiplicity of time into a stream which purports to represent a single train of thought. This is more or less true of all writing. It is an absurd thing to write about, but it is an absurd thing to write at all.
¹ Zoviet France have contacted me to tell me that the sound I was hearing was not a sample of a flute. The band themselves are not to blame for the impression I got—the fact that I was reminded of the work of that post-rock band and was moved to consider the orientalism of their work has more to do with my own biases than anything Zoviet France was doing in that specific concert.
Two Qualities: of Silence, and of Putting Words in Order
The Shining Ice
AE_Live: Twenty-Eight Love Letters to Autechre