Re: [-empyre-] quickies for the panelists

["Trace Reddell" <treddell@du.edu>]

greetings all. playing catch-up, so a few blasts from the past mixed up with
samples from more recent thread developments.

Glenn:
> Trace, could you talk more about your interest in seeing microsound
> existing as simply one element in a larger mix, about how microsound
> functions as an unseen layer, as an agent or catalyst?  (I'd also like
> to hear your thoughts on Debord's derive we talked about off-list.)

mixing microsound typically yields two intriguing phenomena: 1) creation of
recurring rhythms from noise; 2) EVP (electronic voice phenomena). This is
what I work toward in working with software to produce microsound tracks or
when DJing and bringing in microsound loops and layers, the constructing of
a field int which these two events may occur. Hearing voices is particularly
intriguing. I'm not interested in Joe Banks-style "debunkings" (LMJ 11) of
EVP but rather want to pursue the phantasmagorical in sound. While I'm not
trying to understand this as supernatural phenomena, but I want to avoid the
pitfall of Banks's rationalism and naturalism. The effect of mixed
microsound -- perhaps of any mixed media -- recalls that of the material
interaction of mind-expanding drugs and brain-meat, a biochemical mix that
often exerts its own rhythms and hallucinated voices through the senses and
into the immersive network that is the imagination, which broadcasts its
assemblage to us. I've inherited too much of the materialized-romanticism of
the early drug writers like De Quincey, Coleridge, Baudelaire, and Hugh
Ludlow. Practicing what Abrams has labelled a hybrid "natural
supernaturalism", these writers perpetually hover on the border of animism,
viewing drugs as agents, "almost-entities" that engage the user in measured,
cellular dialog ... first at a material level, then through senses and into
imagination. They thought of this phenomena as the material reconstruction
of the phantasm, but at the same time they didn't abandon romantic idealism
to rationalism, and so provide a way to get into these unusual phenomena in
the spirit of weird science.

Microsound reconstructs ghostly impulses. Microsound catalyzes intricate
rhythms, communications fashioned out of knocks, clicks, and rappings, and
it acts as agent for mysterious messages spun out of noisewebs. As a user of
microsound, I put myself into situations where I'm hoping to achieve the
right composite of ingredients for the desired effect: hallucinations of
more detailed patterns. Microsound, ambient, and field recordings are so
complex as to create a house of sound around the listener, an immersive
world. I think this is partly why there's such a strong connection between
microsound and sound art installations; it's all very spatial stuff. At once
scale, the only time event that remains in such works is duration. But these
works are also about exploring the produced space in search of minute
rhythms, unintended melodic sequences, and voices. The microsound agent
sense-mixes into imaginative "involutes" (DeQuincey's term for convoluted
clusters of image, sound, memory, emotion -- such as dreams or
opium-influenced reveries -- that exist in imagination) in which the
listener can move around.

Debord/situationism come into this because what's going on in the production
of this space is also the production of a situation. The creation of
navigable music through which the listener drifts over a period of time.
Each drift through the space will be different from another; forces of
attraction during the drift have much to do with the detection of those
rhythms, melodies, voices (messages) mentioned earlier, and duration is
largely determined by the attention span of the drifter. Situationist
drifting often incorporated heavy drinking and arbitrary rules/games (e.g.,
using a map of London to navigate Berlin), in either case using something to
muddle the sense of usual patterned and directed behavior, to jog unusual
associations, to forge a different path in search of the unexpected country.

I think that microsound remixes space for mental drifts for detection of the
unexpected and in some cases unexplainable.

-=trace