Idioms and Idiots
Ray Brassier, Jean-Luc Guionnet, Murayama Seijiro, Mattin
CD 500 copies with 36 pages booklet in English
download zip (3 flacs + pdf)
Released 7 May 2010
w.m.o/r 35
250 copies edition in Spanish will be published by Taumaturgia (A Coruña)
250 copies edition in French will be published by Enculer (Rennes)
Recorded 2 August 2008 Live at NPAI festival Niort
Mix & Diagrams by Jean-Luc Guionnet
Mastered by Rashad Becker
Idioms and Idiots
11 Paragraphs on an improvised concert
Improvisation:
1786, “act of improvising musically” from Fr. improvisation, from
improviser “compose or say extemporaneously,” from It. improvvisare,
from improvviso “unforeseen, unprepared,” from L. improvisus,
from in- “not” + provisus “foreseen,” also “provided,” pp. of providere
“foresee, provide” (see provide).*
0 – WHAT HAPPENED?
We did something
together: a concert. We want to try to explain it to ourselves: What
happened exactly? How did it happen? And why? … We want to recount the
story of the process, but not only that; we also want to recapitulate
all the discussions that took place before and afterwards (right up to
the present), articulating the questions posed by the concert –
questions that are both abstractly theoretical and very concrete. Our
hope is that in doing so, the experience of the concert will allow us
to attain a better understanding of the representation of art in art. We did something
together: a concert. We want to try to explain it to ourselves: What
happened exactly? How did it happen? And why? … We want to recount the
story of the process, but not only that; we also want to recapitulate
all the discussions that took place before and afterwards (right up to
the present), articulating the questions posed by the concert –
questions that are both abstractly theoretical and very concrete. Our
hope is that in doing so, the experience of the concert will allow us
to attain a better understanding of the representation of art in art.
1 – BEFORE THE CONCERT
We are all
interested in philosophy. One of us is a professional philosopher
interested in music. The others invited him to collaborate on a
project. The precise nature of this collaboration is to be determined:
he is not a musician and has never participated in any sort of musical
performance. He agrees to collaborate but neither he nor the others
have any idea what form the collaboration will take.
There is
something interesting about the sound of words in a musical context –
even though most of the time the results are terrible. The sought-after
emotion often results from the contrast between 2, 3, or more
simultaneous levels of logic, or levels of thought. Thus for example,
the commentary which actors provide about their own acting within a
film can be powerfully moving: consider Bergman’s A Passion, or the way
in which Chris Marker provides a commentary upon his own film in Level
5, or the way in which Sarahang, the Afghan singer, commentates upon
his own song within the song (even if one doesn’t understand a word he
is saying).
The first
difficulty arises over the role of words. Although unsure about how to
proceed, the philosopher is sure about what he does not want to do: he
does not want to perform the role of academic theoretician commentating
on a musical performance by the others. And he fears that if his
participation takes the form of him speaking about the music in his
capacity as a philosopher, the result will only be a banal and stilted
academic exercise that remains beholden to certain dubious assumptions
about the relation between sounds and concepts. Principal among these
is the notion that the thinking embodied in music is some form of
sub-conceptual content that must be given explicit conceptual
expression through an act of theoretical reflection on the music. This
schema is unacceptable on three counts: first, the resort to speech
threatens to re-envelop sound in signifying tropes that cannot but
attenuate the latter’s material opacity; second, it assumes that music
means in a way amenable to subsumption by ready-made conceptual forms
and theoretical categories; third, it implies a division of labour
between verbal conceptualization and sonic production that seems to
reiterate the ideological distinction between theoretical-cognitive
reflection and practical-aesthetic production. Improvising musicians
who really think about what they are doing are far better qualified
theoreticians of their own musical-artistic practice than any
philosopher could ever be. Professional accreditation as an ‘academic
philosopher’ does not automatically entitle one to the role of
‘designated theorist’.
This presents an
immediate dilemma: three of us are experienced performers-improvisers;
but if the other is unwilling to perform as an academic theorist –
reflecting upon, commentating on, or otherwise providing a second-order
accompaniment to the performance – then what exactly is he going to do?
Given that he has abjured all recourse to commentary or speech, there
seems to be no other option but for him to somehow perform alongside
the others. Mime and tap-dancing having been ruled out, it becomes
difficult to avoid the resort to an instrument. But which instrument?
After some hesitation, the choice of electric guitar presents itself
for purely practical reasons: there is the dim memory of having being
taught the rudiments of guitar playing long ago at school, and even
though he has not picked up the instrument since, there is the feeling
that he has at least a vague idea of how to coax sounds from the guitar
– no such modicum of confidence is possible concerning any other
instrument.
However, the
choice of guitar is problematic. We have agreed that we want to do
something unfamiliar not only for ourselves but also for any audience
that might be present. Yet the presence of an electric guitar
immediately threatens to undermine this imperative. On one hand, the
instrument brings with it a whole host of associations with the rock
idiom – associations which we have agreed are best avoided. On the
other hand, the use of electric guitar in free improvisation is
associated with renowned players like Derek Bailey or Keijo Haino,
whose distinctive styles might be caricatured through incompetence
rather than design. Inability risks resulting in an inept pastiche of
‘free improvisation’: incompetence can breed familiarity as surely as a
surplus of competence. The potency and impotency concomitant with
incapacity will prove to a decisive factor in the concert. It is not
just that one of us does not know how to play according to the
technical conventions governing recognizable musical idioms; he does
not know how to ‘free improvise’ either. The question is whether this
double incapacity can nevertheless yield something besides
banality.
2 - DON'T START IMPROVISING FOR GOD'S SAKE
We take
improvisation as an axiom, in the sense that one cannot really define
when one is or is not improvising (since so many questions arise around
individual free will, subjectivity, and ideology; questions which we do
not think can ever be satisfactorily resolved). By adopting this
axiomatic approach to improvisation as a domain to which one can bring
ideas, decisions, and concepts as ways of narrowing down or focussing
where the improvisation is going to happen, one can look closely into a
specific area.
In speaking of
improvisation, we’re not just talking about the production of
particular sounds or events but the production of social spaces as
well. We invoke this as both a strategic term and a conceptual tool.
Improvisation can therefore refer both to experimental music making as
well as mundane everyday practices. But wherever it is applied,
improvisation should bring about glimpses of instability. If it works,
its elusive qualities should evade solidification and commodification –
at least in the moment. The goal would be to apply to whatever
discourse one is in the process of articulating those quibbles
developed with regard to the world so as to always understand discourse
in the exteriority of the world – though ‘world’ is not the right word
here; perhaps it would be better to say “what one ‘is’ not”?
Is it possible
to have a non-representational relationship to reality in the context
of art? If so, this would surely be achieved by acknowledging all the
specificities of the room. One should try to activate the room as much
as possible and disrupt previous habits and behaviours in order to
create different ones. In other words, one should strive to work
against the normalization process. We have found improvisation to be a
practice that requires taking into account everything happening in the
room. It is not just the creation of something new that could be used
later elsewhere, but a way of intensifying the moment by changing
social relations. Improvisation can be an extreme form of
site-specificity as well as a radical, intimate and immanent
self-criticality. Since there is no need to defend or construct a
position for future situations, improvisation always tends towards
self-destruction.
Thus, we could
see improvisation as pure mediality with no outside; as a pure means
with no end, countering every form of separation, fragmentation, or
even individuality. When does this activation of the space take effect?
When one has succeeded in generating a dense atmosphere capable of
engendering the awareness that something important is at stake. Since
there are no predetermined categories or words to describe this
experience, what is at stake is very difficult to articulate. Because
of the difficulties of assimilating it or immediately understanding it,
this strangeness counters the normalization process. When this dense
atmosphere is produced, the people involved become painfully aware of
their social position and standardized behaviours. When the density of
the atmosphere reaches a certain threshold, it can become physical,
disturbing our senses and producing unfamiliar sensations in our
bodies. Through a disruption in the appearance of neutrality, one gets
the sense of being in a strange place – not really knowing where to
stand. Every movement or word becomes significant. What is created is
not a unified sense of space or time, but a heterotopia where one’s
location contains different spaces and temporalities. Previous
hierarchies and established organizations of space are exposed. The
traditional time of the performance and distribution of attention (the
audience's respectful behaviour towards the performers, etc.) are left
behind. If one goes far enough, these hierarchies could be diffused,
not to give a false sense of equality, but to produce alternative
social relations of time and space.
We do not want
to be misunderstood. We are not talking about any variant of
‘relational aesthetics’ where a little injection of audience
interactivity adds cultural capital to bland artworks executed by very
concrete artists with dubious ideologies. Rather, we want to
interrogate the limitations of performing on stage: To what extent is
it possible to use the parameters that define the spectacle (i.e. the
divisions between audience, performer, stage, expectations) as material
for improvisation? The issue about expectations in this concert is
important because many people were expecting a philosopher: What would
a philosopher do in an improvised music concert? Something involving
speech… But he played guitar instead ―badly! To what extent did the
tension produced by these expectations influence and intensify our
playing?
In the
conversations leading up to the concert we talked a lot about trying to
be ‘in’ the performance as much as possible. Lately, we have discovered
that the way to do this is by pushing towards the borders or limits of
the framework that one is working with. These borders, which are often
simply accepted without question, actually contain all the problems,
contradictions, and conditions that determine the concert situation,
but not in any obvious way. One has to deal with them very carefully if
one is to be able to identify how they constrain us to behave in
certain ways, and the extent to which they affect us. Here we are not
just talking about whether or not the room is hot or cold, etc., but
about those unwritten yet binding conventions that we comply with out
of habit: those rules which are not supposed to be challenged. The
simple question often overlooked in improvisatory practice is: How does
the social context of the concert frame and limit our scope of action?
What is required
to go beyond such limitations? The refusal to fall back into a practice
that reproduces established conventions or reiterates stereotyped ways
of music making, even those accepted as part of what one is supposed to
do in order to be recognized as an ‘experimental musician’. Take for
example the convention governing the acceptable distance between
performing and being in the audience (this relates to the allocation of
passive and active roles among performers and audience). If one is
performing or has made the commitment to perform a concert, it means
that s/he has a proposition, something to offer. But if one’s
proposition consists of being the audience, then the risk is that such
a proposition will just become an everyday, casual situation. Yet what
is arguably most interesting about the concert situation is that it
provides an opportunity to create a different social space: people who
attend a concert want to be affected, touched; they want to receive
something ― or perhaps they don’t? In which case the performer’s
decision not to offer would frustrate the audience’s desire not to
receive... Although it is very problematic to accept this passive role,
it also provides the performer with the opportunity to do something
‘extraordinary’; to create a situation that goes against the grain of
our everyday social interactions. The most interesting concerts any of
us have played were those where this position and these accepted roles,
which both audience and performer inherit from the conventions of the
concert situation, become twisted or developed into something else as a
result of the audience assuming a more responsible and active role so
that they come to believe that they could do anything.
We appreciate
the problematic nature of terms such as ‘activity’ and ‘passivity’; we
are also aware of how easy it is to lapse into a patronizing stance.
But we have observed that concerts which do not challenge or affect
anyone just leave everything as it is, failing to generate anything
with which anyone might actively engage: in such cases, it is as though
nothing had happened. Other concerts – and Niort was one of them –
might provide food for thought for long afterwards (a year and a half
in this particular case); precisely because it remains difficult to
judge whether or not it was a ‘good’ or a ‘bad’ concert in any musical
sense. This is what spurs us to try to think ‘in between’ these terms:
in this context, a ‘good’ concert would be one wherein any judgement
executed in conformity with established dichotomies between ‘good’ or
‘bad’, ‘success’ or failure’, would be absurd. In such cases, extant
standards of judgment are suspended and we are forced to question the
basis of the parameters by which we judge – previous standards and
values collapse.
It is not just a
matter of dissolving judgement and of liquidating those constraints
that allow one to distinguish artistic success from artistic failure,
but of ratcheting up the challenge inherent in the ideal of ‘free
improvisation’ to the point where it is the very nature of the concert
situation that is at stake in the performance. Plinky-plonking is not
enough. The plinky-plonk mode of reacting to one another in
improvisation is long gone; our goal is to try to problematise what
‘reacting to one another’ might mean by exploring different ways of
almost not reacting as a way of reacting. But the point is not to
substitute a 'non-reaction' for a 'reaction'; it is to seek out a mode
of reaction or non reaction that would overtake any kind of latent or
'hidden' imitation; precisely the kind of imitation that doesn’t reveal
itself as an imitation – the latter applies to most of what gets called
'reacting' in music, whether composed or improvised.
We each bring
our own tools to the concert situation: instruments, ideas, timing,
craft, knowledge ... To believe that one could break with all this all
at once is unrealistic to say the least. So what does it mean to
react to one another? We think it has to do with striving not to do so
in any obvious way; with forcing oneself to attempt something that has
not been attempted before; something that incurs some fragility, some
anxiety, some tension that might feed the other players, in the hope
that everyone might thereby be rendered maximally alert. The goal would
be to attain a mode of interaction that would allow each player to
appropriate a personalised sense of time: there is a very specific way
in which the passing of time is experienced in special concerts, and
there was definitely something like this going on in Niort.
3 – DURING THE CONCERT
Just before the
concert, while doing the sound-check, there was a realization that we
needed to do something about our mode of interaction, since the way we
were engaging with each other was too obvious. So we conceived a
structure that would impose constraints on our interaction. The concert
was going to be 45 minutes long. We divided these 45 minutes into 3
parts, each of them lasting 15 minutes. Each of us could decide to play
in one or two parts, but not in all three. But we also allowed
ourselves the decision not to play in any of the three parts. So not
only was there the possibility of 15 minutes of silence occurring
during the concert; there was also the possibility of 45 minutes of
silence should all four of us coincidentally decide not to play in any
of the three sections… Of course, for one reason or another we
broke the rules, but still this structure generated unusual ways of
reacting to one another.
One of our
principal aims in approaching this concert was to try to render the
atmosphere as ‘dense’ as possible. In Niort, each of us strove
individually to realize this quest for density. Yet in doing so
separately, we managed to achieve a collective mode of intensification
that could never have been realized had we resorted to stereotyped
modes of interpersonal communication. For instance, one of us chose to
use nothing but a very reduced electronic device and his voice, neither
of which he usually uses; playing alone during the second third of the
concert’s duration was a very powerful experience. This density was
experienced by another in the form of a gamble, not only about when to
play, but also about whether to play at all. The possibility of not
playing was envisaged as a powerful temptation, since it provided an
easy way of avoiding the risk of ridicule that inevitably accompanied
the decision to play. This decision assumed the form of a challenge,
like the decision to leap from a great height without knowing what lies
below.
4 – CLINICAL VIOLENCE
When we began
discussing what we wanted to achieve during the concert, we talked
about trying to attain a cold or clinical violence. We set ourselves
what is, on the face of it, an absurd (not to say dishonourable) goal:
we wanted to make people cry. And in fact one member of the
audience―unprompted―did cry. It might be that this is what
happens when the density of the atmosphere becomes too much and is
rendered oppressively physical. Why did we want to achieve this?
Because we wanted to do something that would go beyond the production
of more or less aesthetically pleasing abstract sounds, the ‘liking’ or
‘disliking’ of which is concomitant with the reaffirmation of one’s
musical taste.
Of course, we do
not believe that music harbours some sort of intrinsic affective
dimension and we fully embrace the Modernist critique of sentimentalist
romanticism. But this critique on its own is insufficient; it has too
often encouraged a sort of aestheticized formalism. We wanted to cut
through the paralyzing double bind: either emotional impact via
rhetorical expressionism or reflexive lucidity via safely disengaged
formalism. We wanted to achieve something that would be at once
theoretically and viscerally exacting. The problem is one of forging
modes of musical expression that incur some sort of psychic as well as
cognitive challenge while abjuring affective stereotypy and the
recourse to facile emotional gratification, whether the performer’s or
the audience’s.
What passes for
violence in music too often consists of a series of shock gestures:
dissonance, volume, noisiness; theatrical threats and
imprecations… We wanted to try something else: to subject
ourselves and the audience to an obscurely unsettling test; to force
them and ourselves out of any recognizable comfort zone by withholding
displays of improvisatory craft as well as of musical technique.
‘Violence’, but of a peculiarly studied kind. Obviously, it need not be
physical (though this is not to say that it cannot or should not be
physical). Often it is psychological and deals with expectations and
projections. It is born of the refusal to satisfy the former while
interrogating the motives of everyone involved until the level of
self-reflexivity is pushed to the point of positive feedback.
Thus the type of
violence we are interested in is not spontaneous. It is disciplined and
calculated. It is purposefully motivated. In this sense, it bears a
certain affinity to what people refer to as ‘political violence’. It
comes from the core of our subjective engagement in our practice and
when it hits home, it touches something very deep. It falls outside the
reproduction of stereotypes or ready-made categorizations of
expression. Who carries it out? It might well be the idiot trying to
express him/herself, coming from a totally different angle, cutting
through the warm shit, the familiar comfort zone. The idiot feels
cornered by the non-idiots; there is an elastic band tying them to
him/herself. This elastic band is the pressure exerted upon one’s self
by all the conservative properties of the context with which one is
engaging. At some point, this elastic band is slightly too tight and
there is always the risk it might snap but the idiot has a lot of time
to reflect upon the nature of this pressure, and why s/he feels this
way. In the middle, there are the accepted norms; anything that
represents the status quo proper to the context one is working with. In
the context of free improvisation these might be: craft,
aesthetics/taste, certain preconceptions about what it means for
performers to react to one another or to the audience, habits that
condition and reproduce the concert situation.
After one has
been thinking through these issues for a long time; when at last what
one wishes to cut or break with has become very clear; when one is no
longer prepared to wait, one turns into a slingshot. Of course, this
might entail shattering some of the foundations supporting the values
that are taken to be constitutive of an improvised music concert. An
incalculable risk has occurred and while this description might sound
desperate, there is no desperation involved in such violence. Even when
the pressure in question is that of the status quo, once this violence
occurs it becomes indifferent to it; it supersedes it in the simplest
way imaginable, as though nothing extraordinary were happening. One
might feel as though one were in the dark, but when people are
comfortable with the light and someone questions that light, then
people become fearful and they perceive the threat of enforced
obscurity as violence. This is the sense in which it is a clinical
violence. The precision involved is that of the sniper or surgeon
cutting through the veneer of normality; some may experience this as an
act of violence but for the idiot it is simply necessary. The scalpel
cuts through the foundations that provide the unquestioned or unstated
rules of improvisation holding the concert situation together. Unlike
the surgeon however, the idiot has no clear goal, nor an identifiable
cyst to excise. The importance is in the cut. From there we can all
draw our own conclusions. The idiot looks upon reality from an
unstructured or uncategorised point of view. His or her intervention is
without a foundation: an-archic. There is no general consensus or
general understanding: this is the sense in which we are idiots.
5 – ELEVEN WAYS OF SAYING NOTHING
1. From ‘having nothing to say’ to ‘finding something to say’ by shifting one's position with regard to that movement.
2. Around the
question of the concert, music and philosophy met, without knowing why.
In any case, we wanted to change something about it.
3. We exchanged
ideas about “what a concert is” in order to find an efficient practice,
mainly by defining what we would not like to do in any given concert.
4. The
conventional frame of the concert was thereby displaced (which would
have created possibilities for the opening of vision and for a renewed
listening). Nevertheless, we did not know what we might do.
5. By putting
this in parenthesis, we performed a kind of concert, a non-concert. But
in any case, what is the relation between A and non-A?
6. The decision
taken by thought and psychological tension were our sources of energy.
This project also undermined the identity that makes of us musicians or
philosophers. One is a musician only when one succeeds in giving a
presence, a life to music. The same holds for a philosopher. Let us be
musical, philosophical, etc., at the same time… (In the word
‘collaboration’ one finds the word ‘labor’. It usually means a
collaboration in which each finds him or herself in his or her habitual
position, as a musician, philosopher, etc., without any subversion of
identity or attempt to slip towards other identities, towards
X.)
7. By putting
philosophy and music in parenthesis, by separating our profession from
ourselves, we simply felt ourselves to be human beings who feel, react,
and reflect: the experience of not feeling ‘ourselves’ anymore (don’t
we feel too tied and sometimes even imprisoned by our professions?).
8. The profound
silence within us, filled with the immense energy that threatens to
explode when blocked: this unnameable zone would be the basis of our
experience with language. There we were.
9. The audience
was thereby invited to share this experience and some of them seemed to
feel the direct impact of the tension that was flowing from us,
forgetting their own expectations of the concert set-up
10. Once the
non-concert was finished, our work began again, and we had to try to
put this unsayable experience into words. This text is part of that
attempt.
11. To dare to do each time without falling into routine, in order to renew, to stimulate, to dynamize the everyday.
5 – NON
We think there
is a particular relationship between the NON of Derek Bailey’s
‘NON-idiomatic’ and the NON of François Laruelle’s ‘NON-philosophy’.
NON-philosophy is the theory or science of philosophy, treating
philosophy as a material. NON-idiomatic playing is supposed to be able
to treat all music as a material.
Derek Bailey:
“[T]he main difference I think between freely improvised music and
[other musics] is that they are idiomatic and freely improvised music
isn't. They are formed by an idiom, they are not formed by
improvisation. They are formed the same way that speech vernacular, a
verbal accent, is formed. In freely improvised music, its roots are in
occasion rather than place. Maybe improvisation takes the place of the
idiom. But it doesn't have the grounding, the roots if you like, of
those other musics. Its strengths lie elsewhere. There are plenty of
styles – group styles and individual styles – found in free playing but
they don't coalesce into an idiom. They just don't have that kind of
social or regional purchase or allegiance. They are idiosyncratic.”
Of course, one
can understand Bailey’s statement as one strategy among others to
affirm an individual position in the music world. But although these
kinds of strategies are usually simple (and sometimes stupid), the
non-idiomatic one seems to us to be very dynamic and full of
interesting questions and problems – even if Derek Bailey is not
necessarily the best exemplar of his own idea (but isn’t that the sign
of a good idea? When one’s idea or theory completely overtakes one’s
practice or subjectivity?).
There is a
similarity between the trajectories of Laruelle and Bailey: they seem
to be engaged in trying to free philosophical and musical practice
respectively from their institutionalized idioms. Both have very
similar relationships to their own historical background. ‘NON’ as a
prefix means that you are not part of something but dealing with it
from some kind of exteriority―yet one which involves the immanence of
practice rather than the transcendence of reflection. As a negative
prefix, ‘NON’ also means that you are supposed to have some kind of
immanent general point of view: not from above but from within the
practice of music itself―the most immanent point of view possible. It
entails that you add a layer of representation such that it either
subtracts the previous layer or even unifies all the layers.
Laruelle:
“Philosophy is always at least philosophy of philosophy”;
“non-philosophy is the science of philosophy”. Why is non-philosophy as
the science of philosophy not a metaphilosophy? Laruelle claims that
philosophy is constitutively reflexive: every philosophical claim about
X (whether X is an artwork, a scientific theory, or a historical event)
is always at the same time a reflection on philosophy’s relation to X.
In other words, the philosopher is never just talking about this
object, but also about how every other philosophy mediates her
relationship to this object. Non-philosophy represents an attempt to
ascend beyond this level of reflexive mediation while simultaneously
descending beneath the level of irreflexive immediacy. It does this by
operating in the medium of what Laruelle calls ‘real immanence’: this
is an immediacy that is radically irreflexive, but one that generates a
kind of pure practical transcendence (mediation through practice rather
than theory). ‘Real’ as opposed to wholly idealised or conceptualised
immanence boils down to the question of the use of theory: the real
immanence evoked by Laruelle entails a strictly disciplined practice of
philosophy. Instead of exacerbating reflexivity by ascending to a
meta-metalevel, non-philosophy adds a third layer of auto-reflexivity
that is also a minus (an a + that is a -) – a subtraction that allows
us to view all philosophy from a vantage point that is at once singular
and universal. Mediating abstraction is concretized and unified through
a practice that, as Laruelle puts it, allows it to be ‘seen in-One’.
This is not some mystical rapture but a practical immersion in
abstraction; a concretization of theory that precludes the sort of play
‘with’ different philosophical idioms indulged in by postmodern
ironists.
We brandish the
NON as the marker for an incapacity that adds a layer of knowing and
subtracts a layer of self-consciousness from reflection in such a way
as to eliminate complacent gestures of reflexivity: the player’s
knowing wink to the audience (“you know that I know that you know…”).
NON rescinds the complacent reassurances of such ironic distancing by
driving an inalienable wedge between the player’s intellectual and
affective capacities and his technical craft: it pits practice against
craft in a gesture of uncrafting.
Non-idiomatic
music exemplifies a similar agenda: it is informed by knowledge of
music and musics, but adds a layer of non-knowledge that would allow
the music to be taken ‘in-One’ (something like a phenomenological
époché applied to the whole of music), thereby forestalling the
typically postmodern gesture of ‘playing with’ idioms. NON supposes the
impossibility of any second-order discourse ‘on’ music; it indexes the
impossibility of interpretation: one may view all the music of the
moment through the filter of electroacoustic music; one may also view
the viewing through the window of improvisation.
We postulate an
equivalence between NON (‘non-philosophy’/‘non-idiomatic’) and UN
(‘un-conscious’/‘un-craft’). Both are about releasing the potency
proper to impotence, the capacity proper to incapacity. The practice of
uncrafting does not just imply the negation of technique, but the
unleashing of a generic potency proper to incapacity, of which
technical/practical capacity would be merely a restrictive instance.
Our performance
in Niort pitted uncrafting against the aestheticisation of
improvisatory technique. The latter results from the tendency to
abstract the sonic or auditory dimension of performance from its
non-aesthetic envelope, exemplified by the social framework and the
concert set-up, and to grant pride of place to sound according to the
aestheticism of the ‘pure’ listening experience. In doing so, free
improvisation risks degenerating into an aestheticism of technique in
which the skill exhibited by the free-improvisation virtuoso is
fetishised just like that of the idiomatic virtuoso. The immanent
critique of aestheticism will not be accomplished by collapsing music
into ideology or injecting it with an extra layer of
self-consciousness. It is rather a question of levelling the
hierarchical difference between immanent practice and transcendent
theory by re-implicating theory into practice but in such a way as to
precipitate a crisis wherein convulsive conception interrupts
complacent sensation. The goal would be to effectuate a critique that
no would longer depend on the security of critical distance; a critique
that would remain inside. This would no longer really be a critique but
rather the discovery of an outside through the inside.
6 – REPRESENTATION
Represent:
late 14c., "to bring to mind by description," also "to symbolize, to be
the embodiment of;" from O.Fr. representer (12c.), from L.
repræsentare, from re-, intensive prefix, + præsentare "to present,"
lit. "to place before" (see present (2)). Legislative sense is attested
from 1650s. Representation "image, likeness" is from c.1425;
legislative sense first attested 1769.**
In the 1980s,
Claude Levi-Strauss, voicing his strong objection to what was then
contemporary art, exclaimed: “They think they can paint like birds
sing”. As so often happen when thinkers criticize art, the sharpness of
their thoughts points to something that is supposed to be negative, but
which from another point of view can be seen as a potentially positive
dynamic. We can connect Levi-Strauss’ remark to the non-idiomatic. If I
simply know, I am in ‘pure presence’ (animality); if I know that I
know, I am in representation (double layer/idiom). The human is
supposed to be sapiens-sapiens, the animal that knows that s/he knows;
this means that human beings can never exit representation; in other
words that ‘we’ will never be able to paint or sing like birds because
we’ll always be bound by our cultural constructions and background. But
adding a layer to the two previous ones (I know that I know that I
know), especially if this layer is nominated as not-something
(knowledge), can mean attempting to return artificially to the first
layer: the non-idiomatic would be the (long and subjective) process of
constructing an ‘artificial bird’.
The sequence would be the following:
1 - First layer: bird song
2 - Second layer: vernacular accent
3 - Third layer:
either the super-idiomatic (playing with the multiplicity of idioms);
or the non-idiomatic: taking the music ‘in-One’ (= aproblematic layer).
Representation
can be envisaged as a thousand-layered cake (mille-feuille), each layer
being re-injected into itself and more or less into the others (there
being a more or less powerful filter between the output of one layer
and the input of all the others). To be able to situate oneself
relative to an idiom is to take up a position within the thousand-layer
cake; to work through the question is to operate upon the
thousand-layer cake while forcibly subjecting it to an irremediable
modification: here, the interaction with the object is particularly
dynamic (even requiring some security measures) – whether to lose or
not to lose one’s accent (but what is the absence of accent)?
NON is a layer
added to the thousand layers, but one imparted from the vantage of a
practical ‘vision in One’: it is the thousand and oneth. This is a new
layer that is a function of unknown knowledge: the immanence of
practice as an addition that is also a subtraction; a plus that is also
a minus. So long as one thinks that to know always already implies a
power of knowledge and that knowledge is a regression in those powers
that bring us back hypothetically to mere knowing, without knowing that
one knows – then one will continue to insist that it is not possible
simply to know (=knowing) – yet it is precisely to this condition to
that we accede through the NON…
The question is
whether representation is a flattening out from below or levelling out
from above; which is to say, an elevation… The ‘reality’ of influence
in an improvisatory context consists in acceding to one less level of
representation (this is the reality of synchronicity). Things happen
and are as little represented as possible.
Why not then
consider the rumour around, in, or outside the work as constituting its
real matter? What do we mean by rumour? The flux/afflux/influx of data
and signs generated by the form of the work; since the latter is itself
a particular point within a huge flux of data and signs. Rumour is the
claim that a piece of art cannot resist the flux it generates, and of
which it is made. The problem then would be to bend a previous flux
towards another one in such a way as to prevent the piece from being
rendered transparent to the flux: transparency=YES; work=NO. This is
not to say that a work should be more conceptual than material: it
could still be anything, and even more (or less) than anything… Of
course, what we are calling ‘rumour’ could be designated differently
since the word’s semantic proximity to ‘gossip’ could invite
misunderstanding. But we think this proximity is or can be important:
consider the history of art, or the debates and commentaries
surrounding any artistic event, including those promulgated by the
so-called artist herself. Nevertheless, according to this logic, every
work of art would be a way of saying NO to rumour, all the while
knowing that rumour makes its living from every such NO. This would
mean that the shape and the process of the music have something to do
with the shape and process of the rumour surrounding the music itself –
even if rumour is also a way of resisting. In the context of composed
music, the influence (among other factors) is often represented as
something that happens to sound as something subsisting in itself.
To say that
improvisation always has at least one less layer of representation is
to say that it is the deployment of influence in the real – this is
where the immanence of music resides, rather than in the immanence of
the performance or the immanence of the context to or with the music.
And to say that the influence happens ‘for real’ just means that it is
not represented as an influence. ‘Real’ here is to be understood quite
straightforwardly, as what happens ‘for real’ simply because it’s
happening here and now. It’s connected to the sense in which one can
have a real pain, and behave as though that pain were real: indeed,
this is an interesting characteristic of children’s playing. This is
not to say that ‘real’ in its everyday adjectival sense doesn’t harbour
a powerful but complicated connection with the real as noun, whether
Laruelle’s or Lacan’s.
Criticism, in
art, or of art, invariably consist in superimposing a layer. This layer
could be described as follows: it transforms everything into the
theatre of its own representation, even in those cases where everything
is already theatre. In other words, the indication of representation
has always already been accomplished and yes, it is always being
forgotten. To indicate representation is to frame the frame: a doubly
redundant gesture. Ultimately, critical distance ends up converting
everything into fodder for sociological analysis and an object of the
human sciences (the latter amounting to a grotesque caricature of what
is most distinctive about the scientific stance). Being aware of the
fact that you represent the art you are supposed to create is simply
the engine that drives any historical process in art.
NON: the trap
consists in believing that the contemporary is always the ultimate;
that it is contemporary with us; that it is our contemporary: that we
are contemporary! To break history in two, to want to do so, to declare
it by doing it, is already a sign that it is not being broken, that one
is just praying… The impossibility of a discourse ‘on’ ultimately
entails that of a discourse ‘with’ or even ‘in’: all that remains is
discourse’s feedback, re-injected into itself (and what this cry
renders possible relative to cry/non/…): a discourse re-injecting
itself into itself on the pretext of having to integrate its own
conditions of possibility.
In this sense,
NON would be a tabula rasa: the degree zero of cognition. It presumes
knowing and at the same time the non-use of what is known as an object,
as a material. Art is a school that teaches you about what a ‘material’
is, but it tends to repeat the same lesson over and over again: “Either
there’s no material, or one must redefine it to obtain a radically new
sense of what it is”. But we are always already implicated in the
material because there is no possible position from which we could
obtain an ‘objective’ vision of it as a whole. The latter is of course
precisely what the concept of ‘material’ presupposes; but it does so
because it assumes the transcendence of vision (and hence a veritable
exit from the blind immanence of the real). Of course, non-philosophy’s
claims with regard to its material is that such an immanent posture can
be realized without exiting from the element of radical immanence that
is constitutive for its thinking. Nevertheless―and it is our conviction
that this is what art teaches us―the taking up of the material in
immanence entails the end of the material: we exit from the semantic
field concomitant with the name ‘material’. There is something
incompatible between the NON and the material.
7 – EVERY MUSIC IS IDIOMATIC
The proposition
“Every music is idiomatic” is the affirmation of a point of view rather
than an affirmation about the music itself. It says a lot about who is
saying it and nearly nothing about the music itself. By way of
contrast, the proposition “It is possible for music to tend towards the
non-idiomatic” says a lot about what music’s inner dynamic might be. To
believe that, regardless of all your efforts, whatever music you
produce will always be idiomatic is to assume that you have a point of
view from above, an aerial perspective or a kind of general map of all
existing and possible musics. It is to assume that your playing or
composing or performing is unfolding on the basis of that map, as an
immediate part of it ― that you are playing with or on that map. To
integrate one’s self into the idea of a non-idiomatic music doesn’t
mean that one is without such a map; it means simply that one’s self is
not located in the same place in one's intellectual activity and in
one's artistic practice.
On another
level, this can also mean that what one considers to be an idiom is
simply the set of influences, imitations, or authorities from which it
is possible to generate any musical proposition. This is an all too
historical point of view, in the most impoverished sense that history
can assume. The human being does indeed seem to be the greatest
imitator among all the animals we know. To then go on to claim that
“all music is nevertheless idiomatic” is to point out this imitative
skill. But to say “music can tend towards the non-idiomatic” is not to
assert that one can, as a musician, operate apart from any imitation or
influence; it is merely to point out that it is possible for music to
occur independently of any play upon those relations; or that music
itself provides a powerful vehicle from which one can attain a critical
point of view upon what could be called the prison-house of
self-referential imitation. Quite apart from anything else, the impetus
towards the non-idiomatic prevents improvisation from lapsing into a
series of private jokes and the citation of musical references only a
select few could properly appreciate.
In some ways,
the concept of the non-idiomatic is connected to the Deleuzean notion
of ‘becomings’ (devenirs). Consider in this regard the link between the
idea of ‘minority’ and that of ‘idiom’ (there is the example of
creoles, where the non-idiomatic is not necessarily where one might
have intuitively supposed to it to be). If genre is truly obsolete,
then ‘we’ are faced with a huge potential disjunction between that
which would separate the play on or with genres (which assumes a
private joke aimed at those ‘in the know’ about genres, just as it
assumes that universality is not truly universal), from that which
manages to play without worrying about any idiom. It is the idea of
universality as a genre itself that the non-idiomatic must avoid. This
is not to say that non-idiomatic musicians think of their own music as
universal; rather, it means that even if it is impossible to ensure
that a non-idiomatic musician isn’t surreptitiously trafficking in
hidden messages about genre, and thereby exercising some sort of
judgment about what music should or should not be, such judgments
should be pushed to the paroxystic point at which they usurp their own
parameters, exposing these as invisible operators that have
become illegitimately naturalized due to custom, habit, or convention,
whether conscious or unconscious, individual or collective. The
destruction of assurances as to what music should be doesn't cancel all
critical interdictions about what it should not be allowed to remain: a
spiritual balm, a token of good taste, a lifestyle accessory, a luxury
good…
Derek Bailey:
“Freely improvised music is different to musics that include
improvisation. When I put the book 'Improvisation' together, I found it
useful to consider these things in terms developed in the study of
language. And the main difference I think between freely improvised
music and the musics you quoted is, that they are idiomatic and freely
improvised music isn't. They are formed by an idiom, they are not
formed by improvisation. They are formed the same way that speech
vernacular, a verbal accent, is formed. They are the product of a
locality and society, by characteristics shared by that society.
Improvisation exists in their music in order to serve this central
identity, reflecting a particular region and people. And improvisation
is a tool – it might be the main tool in the music, but it is a tool.
In freely improvised music, its roots are in occasion rather than
place. Maybe improvisation takes the place of the idiom. But it doesn't
have the grounding, the roots if you like, of those other musics. Its
strengths lie elsewhere. There are plenty of styles – group styles and
individual styles – found in free playing but they don't coalesce into
an idiom. They just don't have that kind of social or regional purchase
or allegiance. They are idiosyncratic. In fact you can see freely
improvised music as being made up of an apparently endless variety of
idiosyncratic players and groups. So many in fact, that its simpler to
think of the whole thing as non-idiomatic. “
Question: How
can someone imagine that their own speech is unaccented? Even a
non-idiom is idiomatic! But the tendency towards it (or the vis à vis)
is a very specific energy that provides a powerful source for the
music, as for example, in most of those cases that prevent one from
playing on or with genre as established forms, through the affirmation
of a total incorporation of the musical experience into the interiority
of each musician. What is culture? Something like a very resistant core
of knowledge that one can’t help having anyway, and that one has to
deal with in every day life (without having to know about this
knowledge). But music is never completely idiomatic: non-idiomatic
playing is playing that does not seek to represent what one thinks
music should be or how music should work. In this regard, idiom itself
is radically a-subjective. It becomes subjective when it becomes the
representation of a particular idiom: this is music as idiocy… It’s a
question of inserting the idiocy of the real into human being: you
don’t choose to have the accent you have but you can work with or
against it. A non-idiom is an ingenious way of separating music from
linguistic metaphors and of insisting that “No, music is not a
language”. One never notices one’s own accent in one’s own language.
There is
something programmatic about the very idea of the non-idiomatic: to
impose a name on a practice is not necessarily to describe what it is
in the name of some (short-sighted) pragmatics; it can also serve to
name the dynamics of this practice – partly no doubt in the name of
some sort of vitalism, but also, quite possibly, of a profound
dialectic, inaugurated by the nomenclature itself, between that which
is the result of a given practice and that which is its motor (where
practice and theory are one and the same). NON is what gives force to
this dialectic. There is on one hand the decision to do this rather
than that (knowing why one is doing so); but there is also the
inability to do otherwise (and even to regret it).
What assumptions
are implicit in the idea of being an idiomatic musician? That to
‘inhabit’ an idiom is to play in that idiom without questioning it;
that to be bound by an idiom is to have failed to attain an aerial
point of view upon one’s playing: one is inside, there is no possible
outside, much as one is only able to speak in one’s mother-tongue. In
this regard, there is a connection between an idiom and a popular
culture or knowledge. An idiotic form is a specific form that one can
find only here and there: language is such a form; accent is an idiotic
form included within another idiotic form. Consequently, the idea of
the non-idiomatic would seem to entail the obligation to reflect on
one’s own idiom(s) …
Nevertheless,
non-idiomatic means quite the opposite. Non-idiomatic presumes that in
a modern or post-modern culture one can’t inhabit an idiom without
having a strong representation of it. This means: one can’t play in an
idiom without (somehow) having the feeling that one is representing
that idiom (showing an image of it). Furthermore, one can’t really
inhabit one idiom alone; one also has to know more or less about many
other idioms… This means that one has the possibility of an aerial
point of view. An idiom presumes a simple knowledge that may be as
profound as possible, but which is not supposed to engender knowledge
of this knowledge. To have a representation of the idiom is to presume
that one possesses knowledge of its knowledge (that one knows that one
knows it). Popular culture is supposed to ‘be’, without representing
itself (that’s why, at the simplest level, pop-art is not popular). But
‘non-idiomatic’ means: to play minus this second-order knowledge about
what one is playing. Thus, since all idioms are representations of
themselves, the task of the non-idiomatic musician would be to escape
from the representation of music in music.
In a way,
non-idiomatic supposes both that one can be devoid of any accent and
that one can have an accent such that no one knows where it is from. In
this regard, non-idiomatic music would be a way of producing what
should be popular music; which means that it’s not popular music.
There’s an ‘as if’ at work here but one that is not of representation:
“I play what I play, where and when I play it, knowing what I know, as
if I were a real popular (i.e. ethnic which is not to say ‘popular’)
musician”. Thus the non-idiom supposes an ‘as if’ that is close to the
one scientists use with regard to their own work: “Every thing happens
as if…”. It’s strange that popular means ‘well known’ rather than
‘ethnic’ (rumour again). The only way to produce something like a
‘popular music’ would be by being a non-idiomatic musician.
Non-idiomatic = popularity against the popular (idiom against fame).
Yet doesn’t the fact that improvising musicians are supposed to be able
to play with any musician in any context mean that their non-idiom is
in fact a ‘super-idiom’ that includes all others? No: by adding a layer
that is a ‘minus one’, NON precludes the idea of a super idiom. The
immanent ‘One’ indexed by Laruelle’s NON is precisely not-All. In the
last instance, to be a non-idiomatic musician is actually to be a
contemporary idiomatic musician.
8 – THE POLITICS OF ESTRANGEMENT
Why does society
need free improvisers? We are little entrepreneuriats; very good at
managing ourselves and acting as our own little bosses and workers,
producers and consumers. There is a sense in which the improvised music
context provides a little laboratory prefiguring capitalism’s future
development, since being an improviser requires many of the
characteristics prized by the capitalist economy: self-motivation;
strong individuality; hyper flexibility and adaptability; the ability
to adapt quickly to different circumstances; the ability to perform in
public (for customers); constant self-promotion (look at my individual
qualities, my particular way of playing my instrument: what I provide
is something that you cannot get elsewhere).
For all these
reasons, we think it important to try to reconnect free improvisation
to the politically engaged atmosphere in which it emerged in the 1960s.
This is necessary in order to understand the connection between the
development of capitalism and the ideological shifts from the
historical moment of free improvisation’s original inception to its
current status in contemporary capitalist culture. We need to grasp why
previous leftist perspectives on improvisation failed to recognise the
problems that this practice harboured (such as the fact that the free
improviser provides a model of the ultimate capitalist); we need to
expose the Romantic idealisations that generated this political myopia;
and we need to understand why improvisers often promulgated such
excessively crude and over-simplificatory accounts of the political
potential of improvisation as a form of praxis (assuming of course that
free improvisation does in fact harbour a progressive aspect, which we
think it does).
Let us consider
the political subtext implicit in the concert set-up in relation to the
theatrical machinery of representation. Brecht's Verfremundungseffekt
(poorly translated as ‘estrangement effect’) tries to eliminate the
fourth wall in the theatre by distancing and disrupting the illusion
separating the audience from the stage and performer, rendering evident
the audience’s ‘passive’ and ‘alienated’ condition. This in turn is
supposed to make the audience understand how artificial the situation
actually is. In improvisation, the estrangement effect is doubled, for
the condition of the performer is also disrupted. Since both the
performer and audience find themselves in a condition that they could
not have previously anticipated, the separation between them is no
longer so clear.
Question: Right now, whatever situation you find yourself in, how much would you be willing to give up?
The point of
triggering a dense atmosphere in improvisation is to reveal the
conservative construction of the situation (one that involves the
audience, the performance, the manager, the curator) and to produce the
desire for a new set of conditions. There are no prescriptions for
improvisation. The goal is to create an unprecedented situation; one
that is strange for everybody; without a didactic or prefabricated
agenda. In his text The Emancipated Spectator, Jacques Rancière uses
the example of Joseph Jacotot, a 19th Century French professor who
tried to teach his students what he himself did not know. In doing so,
Jacotot took as his starting point the equality of intelligence,
negating claims to epistemic mastery. In Rancière's words, Jacotot was
“calling for intellectual emancipation against the standard idea of the
instruction of the people”. Performing the authority of knowledge (like
Debord's criticism or Brecht's didactics) reproduces the logic of
mastery, even as its deconstruction is intended.
Brecht plays off
certain strategies against each other (i.e. introducing social realism
into an epic or romantic scenario) in order for their specific
techniques and effects to become apparent. However, his didactics
continually distance the viewer from what they do not know, from what
they still “have to have learn”. Rancière advocates thinking
differently about seeing and hearing – not as acts of passivity but
“ways of interpreting the world”, of transforming and reconfiguring it.
He is against this pedagogical distance as well as any idea of genre or
discipline, but doesn't go far enough in explaining how this opposition
could be enacted. Rejecting these inequalities is not enough. We need
an alternative model of experience, one which would be indifferent to
hierarchical knowledge claims insofar as it fuses a deficiency as well
as a surplus in what counts as relevant knowledge within a situation.
It is not a matter of interpretation―as when cognitive authority is
supposedly contested by interpretation: interpretation requires
mediation, through which one reflects upon the situation as a way of
consciously mitigating one’s own immersion in it. The goal would be not
so much to oppose performative immediacy to interpretative mediation,
but to identify the point of indifference between knowledge and
ignorance, capacity and incapacity, and to occupy it in such a way as
to convert their indistinction into a focal point concentrating the
most explosive contradictions of the situation. Estrangement and
idiocy.
9 – STRANGER AND IDIOT
If one becomes
(or comes to be) a non-idiomatic musician by being aware of the fact
that idioms are a representation of idioms, then to become a
non-idiomatic musician would be to become a (super)stranger (in the
same sense as Whitehead’s subject is a ‘super-jet’).
If one becomes
(comes to be) a non-idiomatic musician by pushing one’s own accent to
an extreme, then to become a non-idiomatic musician would be to become
a (super)idiot (in the same sense as Whitehead’s subject is a
‘super-jet’).
Basically, the
stranger is the one who has ‘another’ idiom, while the idiot is one who
has no idiom or an exclusively idiosyncratic one: if the idiot has an
idiom, that idiom will be used only by him/herself.
Consequently, if
we define background noise as everything in sound that is
unrecognizable and/or undefined as a form, and/or uninteresting (for
the listener); and if we define rumour as noise composed of signs
(forms and/or informations and/or influences); then the stranger is the
one for whom the border between rumour and background noise is
‘different’, while the idiot is the one for whom the border doesn’t
exist: background noise and rumour are a whole that is manifested
in-One to ‘him/her’ and that can also be an information and/or a form
and/or a sound and/or etc. … Undifferentiating the sonic world as one
sound and/or the sonic world as one information.
‘Super-stranger’ = ‘solar stranger’ in the sense that this stranger casts light upon idioms (sun).
‘Super-idiot’ =
‘nyctalopic idiot’ (one who sees in the dark), in the sense that this
idiot has his/her very own idiom, and can speak in a non-speaking
environment (s/he creates light for her own sake in total obscurity):
s/he speaks with a non-linguistic instrument.
The non-idiom is
idiotic! But the tendency towards it (or the vis-à-vis) produces (non
idiotic) music. Audience and performer becoming strangers together…
10 – TEXT-LANGUAGE, NON-LANGUAGE
I, the origins of music according to Curt Sachs:
According to Curt Sachs, music has two sources of origin: the vocal and the instrumental.
The vocal seems
to us to possess a vector heading towards language, whereas
instrumental music in its origins pertains to non-language.
We are now talking about the concert, and the concert was conditioned by some conversations that we had before.
We are more interested in bringing language and music together rather than separating them.
The fact that
one of us was presented as a philosopher on the program, the fact that
he refused to say a word in the concert, all the words surrounding the
concert (the discussion before, the discussion after, this booklet) …
All these facts
point to a lack of words in the concert itself, and a strong
expectation of language from the audience (and also from the three of
us) …
II, non-language
= the pre-linguistic state, historical yet always actual within us,
rooted in solitude, silence, and depth; under the sway of the
interminable and the incessant (Blanchot): the background noise:
Levinas’ ‘there is’, non-language possesses the force and potential to
overcome the impossible (bringing about the creation of language).
III, an
inconceivable impetus from non-language to language. Man’s creation of
language was driven by his need to socialize himself, to communicate
with himself, and to live communally.
IV, language: segment; formulate; organize.
A saturation of
language results in its dysfunctioning, its death: if everything was
formalized, it would be too much. Language requires an injection of
non-language in order to open up, breathe, and maintain its
equilibrium.
V, the two structures of man’s linguistic activity are:
the supra: language
the infra: non-language
VI, the
non-idiomatic according to Derek Bailey: to distinguish oneself from
those instances of idiomatic improvisation encountered in the history
of music.
VII, actual situations around music:
The domination
of music insofar as language, which brings about the alienation of
music, and consequently the alienation of men, with forces that are
difficult to distinguish, to expel non-language.
A music industry and concert-system based on capitalism, a culture for the masses.
The cerebral acceptance of music, various virtual modes of access to music (the personal stereo phenomenon, hi-fi, etc.)
They dissimulate reality.
VIII, first-generation improvisers:
More concerned
with musical games and with action than with listening, they revealed
to us the importance of non-linguistic force (particularly change and
speed), but ultimately they have a noticeable tendency to become
captivated by this force (once one gets caught up in it, one no longer
knows how to stop)
IX, the subsequent or contemporary generation as antithetical tendency:
The musical
exhaustion, the boredom that crept up little by little from the first
generation, on account of our evolving ears, created a motive force for
a radical change from one music to another.
Now, in place of speed, slowness.
In place of change, the quest for depth.
The question of
listening is more focused than that of musical games; or perhaps the
former is determined by the latter: feedback.
A particular attentiveness to a non-linguistic aspect, in a way that differs from that of the previous generation: silence.
Varied and
subtle strategies are required in order to tame language and
non-language, while at the same time evading their captivity: it is a
matter of delicate balance: not too close, not too far.
One must await the arrival of a sound by plunging into sound or silence, by hearing the interminable and the incessant.
There is no longer an author.
For this
generation, non-idiomatic could take on a new meaning: non-idiomatic
music frees the listener’s hearing because it does not oblige him to
acquire any musical idiom or syntax in order to understand it.
Non-idiomatic
music is addressed to personal listening rather than to a collective
listening rooted in the notions of categories and idioms.
X,
our strategy straddles two paths (language and non-language): it is
important not only to question the actual system surrounding music from
a political, social, cultural, etc., viewpoint, but also to propose a
radical music capable of unmasking the hegemony of music as language;
it is from non-language that music derives its essential force, which
renders it capable of overcoming difficulties and of going beyond
itself.
*
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=improvisation
**
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=representation
Ray Brassier, Jean-Luc Guionnet, Murayama Seijiro, Mattin
April 2010
Anti-Copyright
Reviews:
The Sound Projector (Ed Pinsent, London)
Idioms and Idiots (W.M.O/R 35) is the latest item sent to me by Mattin,
an event which you should all by know is the equivalent of receiving a
bottle of nitro in the mail. I’m not sure yet but it might be another
ingenious anti-music statement that manages to be totally innovative
and poisonously destructive at the same time. Hereon, Roy Brassier,
Jean-Luc Guionnet, Seijiro Murayama and Mattin are doing something
which human minds cannot comprehend. It seems to have been recorded
live at a festival in Niort in 2008, perhaps working to diagrams (or
perhaps not) by Guionnet, and it’s bolstered by a textual mini-essay
inside the package which I think explains something of how it came to
be. I can’t face digesting that mass of words at the moment, but there
seems to be a set of very convincing ideas about keeping normal
expectations and conditioned behaviours at bay, in the same radical way
that MEV used to do when they were inventing their unique form of
improvised noise (ideas and discussions…always a good approach). At
least, that’s my understanding of the heading for paragraph 2 “Don’t
start improvising for God’s sake”, which in my opinion is very good
advice indeed. This is without doubt one of the most perplexing and
confusing records I have heard this year, which can only be a good
thing; packed with strange sawing noises, inept guitar strums,
inexplicable passages of nothing happening, and odd irruptions of
screaming metallic shrieks. I hope to revisit in due course and try and
figure out what this all means.
The Watchful Ear (Richard Pinnell, U.K.)
I’ve really been struggling of late to fully get my head around the thirty-six pages of text entitled Idioms and Idiots
and its accompanying CD released on Mattin’s w.m.o/r label by the
quartet of Ray Brassier, Jean-Luc Guionnet, Seijiro Murayama and Mattin
himself. Ignoring the actual music for a moment, the text, which
apparently took two years to develop, its a complex, often rather
high-brow evaluation of an entire musical event, which took place as
part of the NPAI Festival in Niort, France in 2008. The text details
the challenges presenting the group before performing, their intentions
for the music, and then a set of thoughts about how it went, and some
detailed analysis of the music as a piece of non-idiomatic
improvisation. A whole host of references are made, from Lacan,
Levi-Strauss, the non-philosopher Francois Laruelle and on several
occasions Derek Bailey. This is a serious piece of writing, not a
throw-away gimmick. Whether it holds any weight beyond the impressive
nature of the effort behind it will depend on the individual reader of
course.
The leaning of the text towards quite heavy philosophical analysis
clearly stems in part from the inclusion of Ray Brassier as part of the
quartet. Brassier is a philosopher, a thinker and writer, and not a
musician. Yet he has been brought into the quartet to play the guitar
here, despite having had only a very distant past relationship with the
instrument and having never improvised in front of an audience before.
In doing this the group challenge the notion of the improvising
musician, but also they were determined to separate him during the
concert from what an audience might expect from a philosopher placed in
this position – no speech, no reading, just trying to improvise
alongside the others. The group sought to remove notions of success and
failure and instead just attempt to achieve a state of improvisation
that would seek to avoid standardised idioms or the expected aesthetic
decisions and just exist within the moment of the improvisation,
approaching the performance with the concept of “uncrafting” very much
in mind.
So all four musicians have contributed to the text, but I suspect
the bulk has come from Brassier. I found the booklet easy to read in
places, tough to penetrate in others, but at the heart of everything
sits the notion of creating music that avoids the idiomatic, strives
for something that the musicians hope to be as close to really
improvised in the moment as possible, and avoids listener expectations.
The end product of this process, the music recorded and released on CD
(and also available for free here)
does not seem to matter to the musicians as much as the process and
thought that has gone into creating it. Mattin has long strived to make
work that strives to alter the usual balance of the performer /
audience relationship. With this project he and his companions seek to
evaluate it, consider its impact on the music, and so seek to alter
that balance. They decided to set a structure for the music that would
impose restraints on the musicians’ interaction. The music was divided
into three fifteen minute parts, with any one musician only allowed to
play in a maximum of two of the sections. They also then set themselves
a goal of achieving some kind of “cold or clinical violence” and in
fact set about trying to make the audience cry. They apparently
achieved this when one member of the audience did indeed shed tears.
These restraints and slightly absurd goal were designed not to dictate
where the music went, but to try and keep it from falling into
traditional or comfortable patterns.
Before describing the music I should say that I am generally
speaking very much in favour of this form of more conceptual musical
experimentation as a way of pushing the envelope, keeping the music
alive and indeed stopping it from always fitting our preconceived
pigeonholes. I should add that I also enjoy listening a great deal to
thoroughly idiomatic music, and can enjoy the emotional or purely
aesthetic pleasures of improvisation just as easily as I can enjoy the
challenge of music by Mattin and his contemporaries. For some reason
there seems to be a feeling that we should fall on one side of the
fence or the other, that if you allow yourself the time and space to
consider a Mattin or Taku Unami or Loic Blairon or whoever’s
performance then you can’t possibly also enjoy other music that perhaps
complies with our ideas of what we expect it to sound like, but thrill
us in the moment. For me personally these opposing approaches to
listening to music can sit side by side, with each informing and
perhaps validating the other. Sometimes it is great to be made to feel
uncomfortable, or in the case of the Idioms and Idiots essays
made to think about the music we are presented with, but then
sometimes its just great to shut your eyes and listen and wallow in the
sheer beauty.
In some ways the texts here render the actual music presented on the
CD here irrelevant. If we are to forget the idea of creating an
aesthetically pleasing product and just consider the thought processes,
concepts and rules that lead to the creation of the Niort concert and
its subsequent release as a CD then does the music matter anyway? Once
we are listening in the knowledge that an “uncrafting” approach has
been taken, and an attempt to move away from generally accepted
aesthetic beauty is the goal, then beyond the novelty factor of the
music the actual sounds presented become just a small part of the whole
exercise. Considering the merits of the music alone sits in opposition
to the way the text asks us to respond.
So the recorded concert is, as you might expect, a fractured, often
thoroughly ugly but strangely energised forty-five minutes of amplified
simple percussion (Murayama) blasts, cracks and clouds of rough
electronics (Mattin and Guionnet) and disjointed twangs and smashes of
electric guitar (Brassier) Mattin and Murayama also scream and wail
often, Murayama acoustically, Mattin directly into a laptop microphone,
the heavily amplified and distorted screech often appearing from
nowhere to sit very uncomfortably in the music. It all sounds chaotic,
but perhaps it just sounds like an improv gig that isn’t flowing
properly. There are many of the usual accepted standards of improvised
music happening here even after every attempt has been made to avoid
them. The gig still ends with applause. So does the music inspire? Does
it even sound different? To some degree this CD is a bit of shock, the
screamed voice in particular, along with the most aggressive approach
to percussion I have heard from Murayama yet lead you to think that
way. Does the music avoid standard improv expectations? Well yes to
some degree it succeeds here, though still I can hear traces of
call-and-response improvising here and there, it is impossible to get
completely away it seems.
So purely as a piece of music the CD isn’t something I will listen
to often. there is little sensual pleasure to be taken from the music,
little in there that suggests human emotion at work, but taken as a
companion to the essays it throws light onto the writing and completes
the circle. I didn’t cry when listening, but I often shuddered when a
scream appeared, felt frustrated when two sounds that might have fitted
together nicely were not joined by a third, or fourth… This just
underlines the entrenched ways we listen normally, the expectations we
have of what should be issued on a compact disc, or how a musician
should behave in a live concert situation. Idioms and Idiots
is really great for those that like to be able to think about the
conception of music, and are concerned by the way we currently seem to
try and fit things into easy, usually subconscious boxes. If reading
about improvisation and its underlying inspirations is your kind of
thing then you might really enjoy this disc. If you prefer your music
fluid and beautiful then maybe not. If like me though you can
appreciate both sides of the coin, and you accept that to create a coin
in the first place both sides are needed then you will probably find
this an interesting and inspiring project. Its free to read and hear as
well, so go get it.
‘Non' & ‘Un'
Howard Slater on Mute Magazine (London)
A new wave of post-reductionist improvisers seem to be experimenting
with this combination of ‘telling inarticulacy' and minimum mediation.
At times it appears to have an autotraumatic import. It wants to run
the ‘risk of ridicule', it wants to ‘leap from a great height' to
‘subject ourselves and the audience to an obscurely unsettling test'.
This move from taking the audience as an object to affront becomes a
self-affronting abjectness of unworthy ‘performers' before the ‘total'
subject and multiple criticalities of the audience. The offer of
participation, or immersive engagement of the audience, is, somehow
sidled away by the creation of a ‘dense atmosphere' or ‘lateral depth'
that makes any perfectly formed discourse object of critique seem
weighty with its own self-mediating bid for power. If an immanence is
created in the stead of the known knowledge of expectation, it is a
kind of ‘unthought known' that can fill the reductionist silence, not
with the delayed intention of the musicians, but with a distributed
vulnerability and palpable tension. What does such music sound like? In
Paris on 1/12/2009 it was the sound of two people sobbing. In a studio
in Berlin it was a sound of blastering noise followed by a whimpering
that reduced a Wire journalist to hateful invective. On
29/2/2010 in Dundee it was described as ‘creepy' or, later, as being
like a group therapy session. On 2/8/2008 in Niort it contained the
‘disintegration products' of several psyches and a passage of crawled,
close-up mutterings pierced by phylogenetic screams of refusal. In a
booklet accompanying the latter it is possible to read ‘telling
inarticulacy' in a description of an intentional process of
‘uncrafting': ‘The practice of uncrafting does not just imply the
negation of technique, but the unleashing of a generic potency proper
to incapacity'. With no plan (‘we did not know what we might do') and
often with no props (four microphones/an unfamiliar instrument, etc.)
the self exposure of these performers is akin to a ‘deterritorialising
turbulence' in which the child screaming quietly ‘the emperor has no
clothes on' is not in the audience but in the performative space. In
this moment if no sound is communicated then what could well be
communicated is the shared incapacity (how we've been spectacularly
incapacitated): ‘I can only be what these inarticulate words make of
me: a broken subject, un-unique and spurning the edited time to
pretend; a spoken subject: exposed, banal, bereft and plummeting before
acculturated expectation'. Music 
poetency?
Les sons du arisli
Enregistré au NPAI Festival de 2008, Idioms and Idiots – projet de Jean-Luc Guionnet, Mattin, Seijiro Murayama et Ray Brassier
– est de ces disques dont il faut expliquer les causes, croit-on
comprendre. Dans un livret, les musiciens s’expliquent – ces
explications peuvent aussi être trouvées là.
Ici donc, on parle de musique (non-idiomatic de Derek Bailey) et de philosophie (non-philosophie de François Laruelle)
pour en appeler aux conséquences du contact recommandé d’un vocabulaire
arrêté (musique dans son acception courante) et de pratiques « rebelles
» (improvisation en trois actes). D’autres conflits peuvent naître
malgré tout : Brassier en philosophe inquiet de
langage musical invité par un trio d’improvisateurs complices poussant
ceux-là mêmes à tout refuser en bloc, encore plus qu’à leur habitude.
Ainsi, le droit de réponse peut accoucher d’une non-intervention et le
désir de dire peut conseiller aux musiciens l’option d’une fuite
silencieuse. Pour faire plus vite encore, disons que le duel Activity / Passivity n’a qu’un but avoué et qu’il promet même, baptisé « clinical violence ».
Musicalement, maintenant ? «
Non-musicalement », peut-être ? La mise en place tient d’un supplice de
la goutte d’eau aux charmes évidents : peaux frottées puis cordes
défaites avant ce cri inattendu ; place donc accordée aux mots s’ils
saturent, s’ils peuvent donner un peu de fond aux cris multipliés sur
le ronronnement « clinique » en effet de machines qui n’en sont pas. Le
troisième acte célèbre longtemps une note de guitare et le roulement à
billes d’une autre mécanique qui finira par avaler l’un de ses
concepteurs – le dernier cri de Mattin est féroce et met un son sur son expérience d’homme broyé net.
Là se termine la pièce d’un théâtre
philosophique fait d’accords de guitare lasse, de couacs d’altiste, de
silences et de bourdons commandés sur caisses plus ou moins claires, et
de vociférations saturant ; la démarche est libre et les questions,
sait-on jamais, posées seulement ensuite ? L’esthétique a changé il y
a longtemps déjà la forme des beaux-arts, la « non-philosophie » n’a
plus qu’à s’occuper de celui de la « non-musique » : le résultat
pourrait-il être étrangement musical ?
Ray Brassier, Jean-Luc Guionnet, Seijiro Murayama, Mattin : Idioms and Idiots (w.m.o/r35 / Metamkine)
Vital Weekly (The Netherlands)
Improvisation recorded at the NPAI festival Nirot
in 2008 would be to begin to locate something in
what we understand, however here is the
difficultly, whether you like it or not if you've
blithely accepted this "review" so far then I can
immediately point to you and shout - "Kant". And
the shadow of François Laruelle crosses the
landscape. (The full text can be downloaded @ the
address) Non- philosophy, correlationism . and
the subject of "improvisation" makes a review in
any meaningful sense impossible- as impossible as
"improvisation". The best task of such artists
where the ontologies are ripe is to ignore all of
this and behave like suicide bombers, which is
precisely what they might be doing
metaphorically. It certainly at times seems both
dangerous potentially to self or audience - self
and audience and a criminal act, a crime against
certain ideas, as fundamental as time and space,
that's your Kantian assumption. What is music,
art, philosophy without time and space? As an
idiots guide then, me being the idiot, a world
view which is such is as holy as the Koran, there
is a fundamentalism everywhere which this release
not only documents but also attempts to overcome,
in such a way as failure itself is like a failed
suicide bombing, a success of sorts to some, but
only a success if dismissed not by ignorance, a
primitive ignorance is immediately at one with
improvised performances, but the shocking
reality of only thinking at second hand through a
dead german philosophers head. OK in a "line" in
a sentence, anyone interested in - now I was
going to say music, but I'm even afraid I'm
unable to finish this line - why? Deleuze -
"With the Kantian transformation .. time becomes
straight .. " of .or.. in a more general
problematic which includes both Deleuze and Kant
- doesn't "this kind of" improvisation eschew or
face up to "decision" which all previous (before
Laruelle?) philosophy was blind to? (jliat)
Address www.mattin.org/recordings.html
Harsh Media
by Harold
Schellinx
Three improvisers (Mattin
,
Murayama Seijiro, Jean-Luc
Guionnet) and a philosopher (Ray
Brassier) together performed in August 2008 at the 'Nouvelles Pistes
Artistiques Inclassables' Festival in Niort, France.
"What would a philosopher do in an improvised music concert? Something
involving speech... But he played guitar instead - badly!"
The foursome took on the challenge, and then, for one and a half years after,
gave the 3 x 15 minutes result deep thought. Both the recordings and
36 pages of accompanying deep thoughts were recently released under the title
Idioms
and Idiots.
"[E]ven if it is impossible to ensure that a non idiomatic musician
isn't surreptitiously trafficking in hidden messages about genre, and thereby
exercising some sort of judgment about what music should or should not be,
such judgments should be 
pushed to the paroxystic point at which they usurp their own parameters,
exposing these as invisible operators that have become illegitimately naturalized
due to custom, habit, or convention, whether conscious or unconscious, individual
or collective."
...
"Why does society need free improvisers?
...
[T]he improvised music
context provides a little laboratory prefiguring capitalism's future development,
since being an improviser requires many of the characteristics prized by the capitalist
economy: self-motivation; strong individuality; hyper flexibility and adaptability;
[...] the ability to perform in public (for customers); constant self-promotion [ ... : clearly, ]
the free improviser provides a model of the ultimate capitalist [...]"
Ben Watson on Out Late Lunch With Out To Lunch, Resonance FM
