Click & Glitch
With Deleuze or Boulez, we can speak of rhythm in terms of transversal disjunction or non-periodic clicked music. When we listen to a piece, we always hear other things, which Deleuze describes as forces, duration, sensation, and lightness, depending on how tempi, rhythm, and sound are varied. For heterogeneous temporalities and spatial components that overlap and coexist in a track, the click, in its invincible evidence, opens up different possibilities to go on, since the signal is short and without contextual reference, thus does not require a rememberable association.
Glitch music is usually characterized by a transformation of sound artifacts caused by malfunctions of digital technologies – a malfunction of electrical fuses due to a change in voltage – such as bugs, crashes, system errors, hardware noise, CD skipping, and digital distortion. Dark glitch is the non-signal used not to capitalize the click as a quasi-cause of the excess for a successful objective, but to conform the non-successful swimming in the noise of the non-music.
It is the simulacra that is meant to hide the absence of truth. But the absence itself cannot be articulated. This inarticulability defines the boundary between hyperreality and the glitch, a flaw in the code that is irreparable because of its transience. The function of the glitch is to interrupt, specifically to interrupt a digital representation in such a way that its simulation of the analog can no longer remain obscured. The glitch interrupts the code not by undoing digital solipsism, but by highlighting it. The glitch exposes the exstatics of the simulation as simulation. A glitch is not an ordinary malfunction due to an error from the outside, but a slippage of the system due to an internal change. The glitch can cause a system to collapse from the inside, which only reveals that it is really a system. On the one hand, the glitch prevents progress because it interrupts the intended development (anti-finality), and on the other hand, it enables an unintended development that leads to new possibilities that disregard the accepted rules of the game. The glitch does not reveal the true functionality of the computer; rather, it indicates the ghostly conventionality of the forms by which digital spaces are organized. The glitch questions the functionality of the code, but it does not destroy the code; rather, the hyperreal world created by the code is exposed as a simulacrum that dissolves into nothingness. This is a different kind of nihilism than the „neutralization of the system“ (Baudrillard). The glitch does not invite resistance, because resistance implies active participation, whereas the glitch is not created or produced; it is triggered. One has no control over the occurrence of a glitch; rather, it emerges in the aleatory movements of the code itself. And so the glitch exists on a ghostly plane between appearance and hyperreality. As a ghost that interrupts in its opacity to demand silence or noise, the glitch becomes „weird,“ it becomes a horror or a „thing in itself“ that obstructs insight by a subject. However, the media objects that populate supernatural horror today are not broken, in fact they work quite well, often perhaps too well.
Porn Music
Therefore, paraphrasing a Baudrillard quote, one could write: The music industry sprinkles and excites the excited and at the same time exhausted nervous system, makes people listen until they themselves want to listen more and more and more often, and they would actually like to listen to much more. This does not mean that they have a taste or believe in the meaning of music – on the contrary, it expresses a boulimic desire to hear: The music system is voraciously and excrementally devoured and digested. One gets rid of it by excess (not by rejection, but by indigestion) – the whole system is transformed into a huge white musical belly.The music porn, its haunting atmosphere. arises from the ultra-listenability of dead music (the melodic and harmonic junk) and makes the sexuality of any other music seem superfluous. Take, for example, Baudrillard’s arguments about pornography, in particular the so-called vaginal cyclorama, through which Japanese workers try to stick their noses up to their eyeballs inside a woman’s vagina in order to see better. For Baudrillard, the point here is to remove seduction and distance in order to see the „thing-in-itself“ that does not exist. This is the reason for the endless study of female genitalia. As Baudrillard says, if the obscene is a matter of endless representation and not sex, then even the interior of the body and viscera must still be explored. And if the obscene of today’s garbage music is a matter of endless proliferation, then the search for a living weirdness in music goes on and on.
This means, first of all, that the retro mode has become ubiquitous in music. „The future no longer exists unless it exists as a reconfiguration of the past; the ghosts of the past haunt the present in the form of remixes, sequels, and remakes. The new has almost no meaning anymore. Hyperstimulation and repetition already eliminate the possibility of the end. It is pure repetition without distinction; the nothingness of simulacra“ (Alessandro Sbordoni).
Although there have been fashionable retro tendencies in pop from the beginning, for a time, until the 1990s, according to Mark Fisher, it was possible to distinguish „retro“ from so-called contemporary music, which captures the moods of an era. Today, all retro styles are sold as contemporary precisely because there are no truly contemporary alternatives. That’s really scary. So the retro mode has become the standard, meaning styles, fashions, and objects that are retro are sold as contemporary precisely because the real innovation is no longer in the present. When everything is retro, on the one hand, it is meaningless to call certain phenomena retro, and on the other hand, nothing is retro anymore. Time becomes white.
Fisher also claims, however, that for a situation in which nothing happens, suddenly everything is possible again. But doesn’t it behave rather as Alessandro Sbordoni writes: „Nothing is possible anymore because nothing is impossible anymore.“ And Baudrillard concludes, „The apocalypse is over, it is today the precession of the neutral, of the forms of the neutral and of indifference.“ Baudrillard circulates between passive nihilism and complete nihilism. Passive nihilism refers to the meaninglessness of the system, the simulacra that simulate meaning, and the neutralization of signs. However, complete nihilism is the final stage of nihilism in which one is no longer a nihilist because nihilism itself has lost its meaning. This is the situation to which digital solipsism leads, the overproduction of truth in the form of simulacra that disguise the fact that there is none. The will to truth turns on its hyperdrive and produces the real over and above the real to compensate for its lack of reality.
Music and Time
We are very close to Heinrich Kleist’s suggestion that in order to produce powerful rhythms, the puppeteer must himself become an automaton, insofar as a machinist must shift into the machine’s emphasis, emphasis here endowed with a new attraction that correlates with what follows: When non-frequency politicians listen to the clock, they hear „tic – toc – fuck the clock“ instead of „tik – tik“ because they know that the beat or meter must be emphasized: the relation between the different speed of the waves and the maxima of intensity or the timeless degree of the different waves constitutes a dispersion that cannot be measured. Outside the clockban, non-frequency politics is the super-track, is the tracing of the immanent rhythmicity of the rhythm in the hearing-in-rhythmu, it is „flow in itself“ or the quantum, because the generators of non-frequency politics always span the beat of the significant „ding ding ding ding“. The relationship between the varying speed of the waves and the maxima of intensity (or the timeless degree of the varying waves) involves dispersion. This is an axiom of Rhythmight, which means that the philosophical distinction between theoretical and practical aspects of thought has lost its force. For example, the theoretical practice of music that invents new oraxioms uses as its material the sample policy that oscillates between an actual pool of samples and the ability to generate new samples.
Invisibility
Anonymous, dark, black, hidden, obscured, encrypted, opaque, obscured, incomprehensible. The concepts of invisibility work against the wars of appearances. „Escape from visibility. Turn anonymity into an offensive position“ (The Invisible Committee). We also return to Deleuze-Guattari’s politics: the nomad, the stranger speaking in a small language, the non-musician caught between countries. Ultrablackness calls for the radical attack on obscenity.
Hyperreality, in which seduction has no place, overstretches the visible and produces obscenity that stands for a maximum of visibility. More visible than the visible, that is obscenity. In contrast, the abyss preserves the secret, which in turn is more invisible than the invisible. Seduction is about the abysmal play of visibility and invisibility that can produce the visible and the invisible, where there is no instance that produces the abyss positively as mystery or negatively as obscenity.
The outside
Ultraback is not the opposite of the black radical tradition, but its outside. Like Afro-pessimism, we pursue the alternative path of darkness. What is the Ultraback sound if not a project of political-aesthetic profanation? We use darkness/blackness to signify the outside. The outside has many names: the disturbance, the contingent, the unexpected, the collapse, the void, the catastrophe, the noise. From quantum physics comes the idea of quantum fluctuations, the notion that the emptiest imaginable space is defined by noisy, unimaginable motion, indicating the aesthetics of emptiness as noise rather than silence.
Blackness
Black usually occurs only in alternation with white, just as silence is punctuated by noise. We know black-versus-white, black-versus-color, and black-versus-sound. But our vision is only vision when we look into the blackness of night. Music will never be music until it stops representing and starts sounding like non-music or monochrome.
Darkness can be gloom, opacity, shadow, or shade. It can be twilight, night, or twilight. One could speak of dark materials insofar as they are asleep.
But there is another kind of darkness. It is no longer simply dark, but it is about a deep blackness. It is the general blackness of the abyss, of emptiness and vacuum, the blackness of more than silence, of catastrophes and cataclysms. It is a cosmological blackness, the blackness of absolute evil, the blackness of non-being. Such a blackness is a world without us. Blackness is a crypto-ontology, a crypto-sound absolutely closed to being. Blackness is the basis of a non-music, a new musical utopia rooted in the generic black universe. We say with Laruelle: simplify the color! …See black, think white! …Don’t see, be a seer. Stop seeing and start visioning. Be a visionary.“ The one who sees and hears black is the true clairvoyant.
Nico Mas pointed out that minimalism is most often reinterpreted as „less is more.“ „Less is more“, however, is quite unsatisfactory , rather, less is not „more“, but less is just less. The mistake with the statement „less is more“ is that it still uses „more“ as a representative measure of virtuosity. But if less is good, then less is also less. There is a virtuosity of less and reasons for its virtuosity that connects minimalism with Zen.
Non-music is non-communication
Profound music demands blackness, not silence. When Bataille speaks of communication or mediation, he always refers to the mystical tradition of via negativa; for him, mediation and communication always imply the dissolution of sender and receiver, leaving perhaps only the uncanny message that is the chasm or abyss. (Eugene Thacker)
Ultrablackness as the perfect crime against digital music.
Non-music must resist digital objectification. For Baudrillard, the stereo effect has already reached the point where hi-fi becomes so uselessly refined that music is lost in the obsession with its fidelity. Where is the point where the social becomes so uselessly refined that it itself goes stereo and is lost in the obsession for safety? Today, the obsession for that perfect technicality leads us away from music altogether. It creates a false destiny for music, just as it creates a false destiny for the social – namely, to see its fulfillment simply as a matter of perfect programming, which is already inscribed in the computer.
Baudrillard’s point is that there is a point in the development of electronic music at which the increasing sophistication of programming and playback no longer improves the quality of music, but degrades it. By any possible technical definition of musical quality, the standard keeps getting better. Baudrillard’s critics would rightly accuse him of a certain nostalgia: The quality he laments as lost to high-tech never existed in reality. But it is precisely this tautology, this self-definition – the fact that the only criterion for musical quality in relation to the computer is the computer itself – that Baudrillard disputes. It is not so much an actual quality that he claims has been lost – in which case his critics would be right – but a kind of virtuality that is excluded by perfection.
But what if the music is an event, thus introducing a non-objective form of music. For Nico Mas, events are not objects, they are rather collisions, folds or alignments between objects or actors; they are temporal and experienced. Moreover, it implies that music is about participation and not reception; it is not received, but one participates in it. The production or conception of musical events thus depends on the producer, the listener, and the technology. (Nico Mas)
Non-music is like a kind of black box; it is a music box of and for blackness. There is to tell of a non-musical triangle: The (multiple) producer who produces the transversality of the black sound; the jukebox as the infinite sound of the intangible/black; the listener who hears parts from the infinity of the black jukebox. The immensity of this triangular relationship is itself part of the boundlessness of music. In this sense, the black of the music is the basis for the Ultrablack. Producer and listener share the imperfection that only the black can authenticate. Neither can the producer assume that his activity will ever end, nor can the listener assume that he will ever stop tearing fragments from the music. Ultrablackness then points to continuing the search beyond black, never giving up and seeking the ultrablack of black – while the black jukebox pretends to be hyper-playing and/or silent.
translated by deepl.
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