Territories
of Sound
by Jonathan Marshall
During a recent trip to Europe and America
I mused on the sonic experience of travel. A low, white
noise buzz permeates the hermetically sealed cabin, a windy
physical and sonic tremor which one can cover (but not altogether
escape) by judicious use of the head phones. The dialectic
between the intermittent tremor of the vehicle and the sonic
envelope of listening describes the experience of modern
travel. Sound and space are constructed so as to normalise
traveling, to the reduce the spatio-temporal shock of movement
by wrapping one in a constant, FM acoustic space that represents
everywhere and nowhere at once. The airplane is the paradigmatic
‘non-place’ of contemporary experience, a spatial
shell devoid of specific character that lies between actual
geographic spaces and times. Like the station, the shopping
mall, the anonymous hotel room and even the recording studio,
the airplane (and the score that accompanies it) is a standardized
realm designed according to universalized models of efficiency
and flow. Vectors of human, economic and cultural traffic
are funneled in and streamed out. The full terrifying vision
of space, its expansive illimitability and variation, is
collapsed and contained by its mediation through familiar,
universalized places like the transit lounge or McDonalds,
their anonymity sustained by soothing, familiar muzak. These
non-places are defined by their lack of geographic fixity
or sonic specificity. They are like Tardises of Dr Who lore,
dotting the landscape and enabling us to carry our own space
and sense of place with us as we negotiate the potentially
unfamiliar. The space of travel is a layered space, of sounds
on top of and contained by one another, of different ways
of feeling at home hierarchically arranged and stratified.
I listen to the headphones and stare distractedly out of
the window at gaseous matter, barely aware of the hissy,
foamy sound of unseen motors, air circulation and diffuse
structural stresses.
The way in which contemporary travel contains spatial complexity
and variation has been allied to both utopic and distopian
conceptions of global economics. On the one hand, the spatial
universalism and lack of fixity of non-places like the super-highway
offer a sense of freedom, of the transcendence of spatial,
economic and psychological restrictions. This McLuhan-esque
vision is expressed such popular works as “Around
the World,” by French house group Daft Punk. The cheesy
mantra of the title is repeated endlessly as though the
global transmission of its radically de-territorialised
sounds, devoid of acoustic or cultural specificity, offers
a positive end in itself. Sound travels around the world
through the non-place of the modern night-club, a far cry
from the fiercely territorial, marginal black and gay venues
from which disco and house first emerged. Space, video and
sound are not however as free as the experience of the WASP
consumer or bourgeois backpacker might suggest—“as
the many Rodney Kings of the world will tell you,”
Samuel Collins points out.
The contemporary experience of travel, the non-place, global
capitalism and “Super-Modernist” architecture
(the same efficient 7 Eleven blueprint deployed in old Paris
or modern Johannesburg) are based on an indifference to
spatio-cultural complexity and difference. The construction
of the non-place facilitates the ‘free’ exchange
of goods—individuals, passengers, culture and capital—across
boundaries in ways that benefit some more than others. The
ubiquitous use of looped pygmy vocals for example—popularized
by World Music group Deep Forest as a strategy for the representation
of Rosseau-esque ideals of ‘ancient primitive wisdom’—has
had little if any positive consequences for those sampled
and disseminated in the realm of ‘free’ musical
exchange. In the context of this metaphoric (and sometimes
literal) strip-mining of cultural capital from the margins
of global power, the re-territorialisation of space, sound
and the bodies that move through them takes on political
significance. Sound and the architecture of the body act
as sites for the dramatization and contestation of global
commodity exchange.
The work of French/UK electro trio Battery Operated (Chases
Through Non-Place and Vecuum) offers an example of these
practices. Their music draws upon the history of music in
the workplace, commerce and architectural theory, leading
them to describe their acerbic, grating funneling scores
as “inverse-muzak.” Unlike the acoustically
‘pure’ sounds of house music (and French house
in particular) Battery Operated explore the simulation and
deformation of acoustic space. This is not the clean, abstract
electro sound of Brian Eno’s Music For Airports or
Kraftwerk’s Trans-Europe Express, but the mulched,
muddied, screaming tones of contemporary electro-acoustics.
The only ‘space’ that one imagines to accommodate
“Around the World” is that of the anonymous
club or the video’s flat images of equally anonymous
bodies moving in unison to the global beat. The extruded
noises of Battery Operated though create a complex virtual
geography defined by linkages across realms, and squashed
bleed-throughs from one acoustic space to the next, of environments
varying from the oppressively dense, shattering overload
of the distopian city, to abstract yet disquieting non-places
characterized by dispersed, uneven muzak.
Battery Operated deploy the metaphor of “the chase”
to describe these spatio-sonic deformations. The intermittent
drum’n’bass beat establishes a musical pattern
which metaphorically charges and stumbles through the score,
pursued and opposed by other sonic textures but never fully
arrested by them. This is not the idealized vision of travel
as facilitated by the non-place, but rather a representation
of the sonic violence that such a conception entails. For
space to collapse into the familiarity of the universalized
non-place, other sounds must be hammered out of one’s
consciousness. The listener must succumb to the desire of
the muzak programmer and fail to notice the variations and
localized characteristics of the realms one moves through.
Battery Operated encourage the listener to cease to simply
be seduced or distracted, and to listen carefully for the
patois of the supermarket patrons or the sounds of an ocean
storm upon the roof—to ‘say no to muzak’
as the dominant sonic presence within social, spatial and
acoustic environments.
Battery Operated’s net site (www.batteryoperated.net)
provides a critical gloss on these sonic interventions in
global transit and how this translates to musical tropes
like the intermittent beat. The oppositional qualities of
the rather different aesthetics of drum’n’bass,
hip-hop and Afro-American music are invoked in this context
to justify a political reading of the otherwise chaotic
sounds produced by Battery Operated. While this has a certain
merit for those who catch the references, it fails to account
for the most striking aspect of Battery Operated’s
strategies—namely the deployment of noise.
The manipulation and invocation of musicological history
and its elements makes up the language of music. Sound on
the other hand is pre-linguistic. Isolated sonic events
devoid of context, place or musical order have no inherent
meaning in and of themselves. Noise therefore has the potential
to act as a pre-linguistic babble, an amorphous onomatopoeic
jumble similar to the speech of babies. When realized through
a powerful sound system such as Battery Operated used in
Melbourne, this has the potential to disrupt not only the
global implications of muzak, but musical logic itself,
generating a sonic assault so strong as constitute raw anti-meaning.
Only such a radical challenge to sono-musical structures
can come close to hinting at the immeasurable variation
of space, time, geography and culture that travel negotiates.
It is not therefore at the level of music that Battery Operated
most forcefully contest the ideal of the non-place, but
rather at that of sound itself.
The aim of muzak is to marginalise noise, the uncontrolled,
that which has the potential to divert the individual from
such acts as shopping in the mall, work in the office, or
indifference in the train carriage. To return noise to the
act of social movement and travel is to break down the walls
of the non-place and let the full, illimitable potential
of cultural difference, space and politics into one’s
consciousness. Once one has become aware of the hiss in
the headphones, the idealized acoustics of FM transmission
can no longer hide the other sounds and sensations emanating
from both inside and outside of the aircraft. To take off
one’s headphones and listen to the jet-stream takes
on a political content here, announcing the individual’s
refusal to go with the disinterested flow which is facilitated
by the non-place and the vectors it houses.
If a refusal to ‘go with the flow’ of global
economics and its sonic manifestations constitutes an act
of resistance, then theatre company Not Yet It’s Difficult
offers a somatic version of these strategies. NYID work
with the forms of space sustained and endured by the body.
Director David Pledger’s physical explorations may
be thought of as an ‘acoustics of the body.’
Just as sounds bounce off hard surfaces or are deflected
by softer ones, causing noises to inhabit each space in
a characteristic way, so the sensorium of the body is affected
by the materials about it. It is no accident that Pledger
has been using the scores of Japanese minimalist Ryoji Ikeda
for recent performances. The rhythms of the body are highlighted,
its contingent features and responses are dramatized and
manipulated.
Pledger too uses the metaphor of the chase to explore the
potentially oppressive effects of social and cultural space.
NYID’s most recent work Scenes From the Beginning
of the End began with the choreographed flight of the performers
from the startling, red emptiness of the desert environment
near Lake Eyre projected behind them, into another apparently
uniform space—the ‘cultural desert’ of
Australian suburbia. In the literal desert a certain abstract
poetry possessed the body, a potential openness which was
nevertheless threatening for these urban subjects (black
or otherwise). As they charged down the road however an
even more disturbing threat became manifest, the hyper-mobility
of urban spaces and highways, an excess of roads, signposts,
vehicles and urgency. The bodies quaked and gestured in
response. Little wonder then that so many Australians come
to rest in the suburbs, a region characterized by a quiescence
and seeming sameness which enables one to escape both the
threat of empty space and the overabundance of urban space.
Though the suburb does not promote flow or movement in a
significant fashion, perhaps its appeal lies in it being
the ultimate non-space of contemporary Australian experience.
- Jonathan Marshall
Net sites:
http://www.batteryoperated.net
http://www.nyid.net
http://www.cocosolidciti.com
http://radiantslab.com/stichting_mixer/index.html
Jonathan Marshall is an M.A. graduate and Ph.D. candidate
of the University of Melbourne working on the dramaturgy
of late 19th century French psychiatry. His writings on
performance, dance, theatre, circus, new music, the avant-garde
and cult film have been published in RealTime, Antithesis,
IN Press, The Big Issue and The Age.
ADDENDUM:
September 11 witnessed a brutal caesura
in the non-place of contemporary aero-travel and Western
capitalism. The sonically standardised models offered by
the non-place and traditional muzak were however quickly
marshalled to fill the void. The World Trade Centre attack
has been endlessly rehearsed and discussed as an event without
precedent, as though multilingual murmurs and screams have
not been incessantly emerging from American cities, the
Middle East and elsewhere. The Bush administration has attempted
to cover this gap in public historical consciousness, this
interruption in the flow of capital, sound and lives, with
national anthems and allegedly unanimous, orchestrated soundings
of support for the state-sponsored terrorism proposed as
a just response to the crime. Sonic strategies have ranged
from Congressional applause to pop music benefits, or disturbingly
uniform reportage endlessly repeating the same dialogue.
Images of the towers, shot from every angle, have been widely
distributed and transformed into a newly standardised iconography
of 21st century Western tragedy. Yet few of the original
recordings were accompanied by sounds. Where sound was included,
it was that of the spectator reacting—not that of
the event itself. Despite governments and commentators attempting
to provide a soundtrack to this disaster, the attack continues
to lie at the boundary of human comprehension precisely
because no sound can match it (TV news’ saccharine
string scores notwithstanding). Here at least the sonic
non-place has yet to become established and we have space
to reflect and mourn. Perhaps it is time to listen to the
clash of languages emanating from regions such as Palestine,
rather than forcing these voices back to the sono-political
margins by blithely returning the headphones to our ears. |
