Whose Afraid of The Art of Noises?

One of the foremost music producers of the 1980s was the British musician and producer, Trevor Horn. Horn, known for his utter fastidiousness and attention to detail, first came to prominence with The Buggles, briefly joined Yes and then settled into a role producing the most sumptuous, crafted pop of the decade. ABC's The Lexicon of Love, The Pet Shop Boys's Introspective and Yes's 90125 are all examples of his work as are Relax by Frankie Goes To Hollywood, Duel by Propaganda and Slave To The Rhythm by Grace Jones. Between 1983 and 1985 Horn could do no wrong. He was named Producer of the Year in two of those three years and, besides much of the stuff I've mentioned here, he also managed to sign and be involved with a band called The Art of Noise. How much he was involved with them is now a matter of dispute as the team Horn had put together, Anne Dudley, programmer J.J. Jeczalik and Gary Langan, would acrimoniously split with him and the pretentious journalist, Paul Morley, who, on his own admission, had forced his way into the collective as he liked the name so much. 

The Art of Noise did have some high points. Wikipedia describes them as an "avant-garde" group. Their name was taken from a pamphlet written in 1913 by an Italian futurist painter called Luigi Russolo, "The Art of Noises". (Jeczalik had insisted The Art of Noise dropped the "s".) Perhaps their best album (because most original) is their first, Whose Afraid of The Art of Noise? which contains their well known tracks Beat Box, Close (To The Edit) and Moments in Love. Their sound had first appeared in the Yes album 90125 as the core workers in the group had been the team Horn had put together to help him with his production work. It was based around use of sounds or noises and facilitated by the Fairlight computer which enabled sounds to be input and then manipulated to musical purposes. Horn and The Art of Noise weren't the only ones doing this at that time though. Peter Gabriel and Jean-Michel Jarre were amongst others enthusiastically embracing this technology. The 1980s was really when the sampling revolution took hold as devices were invented which made the tape manipulations of earlier decades of the 20th century obsolete.

Quite what Luigi Russolo would have made of this himself we will never know but we can read his futurist manifesto on the future of music and make an educated guess. As stated above, Russolo himself was a painter and the immediate temptation is to imagine that he thought of sound much as he thought of paints, things to be mixed and used on a canvas in innumerable combinations to create textures and mixtures as yet unthought of. This seems to be the way he is thinking when he writes in The Art of Noises that "We must break at all costs from this restrictive circle of pure sounds (by which he meant the conventional orchestra) and conquer the infinite variety of noise-sounds." This thought in itself gives away at least one motivating factor in Russolo's writing on this subject: he conceives of music in terms of its constituent parts, as sounds. I think this is a very important thing to note and probably more so then the actual text of The Art of Noises, although there is much in it that is noteworthy too. Music is made up of sounds. It is to me a revolutionary thought and something that I think needs to be thought about and meditated on again and again by all musicians. 

But what of the content of The Art of Noises itself? Well, the pamphlet is in the literary form of a letter addressed to an acquaintance of Russolo's and only takes about 25 minutes to read. Its not long but a concise argument for how music should proceed in the future and what it should focus on. In even such a brief treatise Russolo manages to criticize a music he sees as standing still based on orchestral sounds a number of times and seems very animated that musical art should not mark time but move forward. This lazy fixation with conventional sounds Russolo links back to The Greeks "with their musical theory mathematically determined by Pythagoras, according to which only some consonant intervals were admitted." This, according to Russolo, has "limited the domain of music until now and made almost impossible the harmony they were unaware of." What strikes me about this description is Russolo's recognition that any definition of canonical sounds or sound-making devices (such as the instruments of the orchestra) leaves out a whole world of sounds. Why should they not find musical uses too? Russolo perceives of a greater harmony than any traditional orchestra is capable of.

This strikes a suitably disharmonic chord with me for in this manifesto for noisy music from over a century ago I see still today glimmers of what a truly avant-garde, forward-thinking and exploratory, experimental music should be: a study of sound. Russolo already here talks about "the timbre that characterizes and distinguishes" sounds and much of the treatise is about bringing this to the fore and using it musically. And it is not a matter of taste either for as he says:

"Some will object that noise is necessarily unpleasant to the ear. The objection is futile, and I don't intend to refute it, to enumerate all the delicate noises that give pleasant sensation. To convince you of the surprising variety of noises, I will mention thunder, wind, cascades, rivers, streams, leaves, a horse trotting away, the starts and jumps of a carriage on the pavement, the white solemn breathing of a city at night, all the noises made by feline and domestic animals and all those a man's mouth can make without talking or singing."

This is, of course, but a short catalogue of many other possibilities. Russolo's point is that noises previously thought of as "unmusical" are not simply "unpleasant" and much less undesirable. His point is that some noises are pleasant in any case, if not currently connected with musical purposes, and that the musical uses of sounds stretch further than a tiny number of canonized instruments and the sounds they can make. This latter point was the thing The Art of Noise took up in their work utilizing the possibilities of the Fairlight to integrate these so-called non-musical sounds into their productions. Such sampling is today a commonplace occurrence and can be done on numerous devices or any home computer device with suitable software installed. But it is not the case that Russolo sees the future of music as the reproduction of noises in the environment for he goes further than reproduction. Indeed, he explicitly warns that "the art of noises must not be limited to a mere imitative reproduction". This opens the door to the creation of noises - new sounds!

It is hard to read this as anything new when you are reading it in 2016. There are numerous devices available now which can make "new sounds" at the push of a button. If you have the Absynth software synthesizer you will know it has a button at the bottom of its interface labeled "Mutate". Push it and one of the synth's presets will be mutated by an amount of random mutation that you have set by moving two sliders. You could push this button forever getting an endless supply of variations on the sound you started with. Or you could switch to another sound as starting point and get another limitless set. But for Russolo such a device would have been a far off dream. But what he had that a piece of fancy technology today does not have is an imagination and some ideas. I find this passage from The Art of Noises particularly inspiring:

"Noise accompanies every manifestation of our life. Noise is familiar to us. Noise has the power to bring us back to life. On the other hand, sound, foreign to life, always a musical, outside thing, an occasional element, has come to strike our ears no more than an overly familiar face does our eye. Noise, gushing confusely and irregularly out of life, is never totally revealed to us and it keeps in store for us innumerable surprises for our benefit. We feel certain that in selecting and coordinating all noises we will enrich men with a voluptuousness they did not expect."

This paragraph is fairly dripping with the idea that in a music of noises is a vitality that will not be denied. I thought of this paragraph when reading a question that was recently posed in my Facebook group, Electronic Music Philosophy. There someone recently asked about avant-garde music and what the other members of the group thought it was. I think that what Luigi Russolo talks about is, a music focused on noises and sound. A music that wants to explore timbre, that is avant-garde. It may be that such a music is not recognized by some even as music. And there's nothing at all wrong with that. Such a music should not feel comfortable with the popular praises or the disguises of mainstream thinking and ideas. It should aim to serve as a stumbling block for those who cannot see past their conventions. Even today in 2016 with our synths with "mutate" buttons a music of noises is yet to fully build on the impact that people such as Russolo himself made.

And so we come to the conclusion of The Art of Noises and its worth quoting many of Russolo's main points in his own words:

1. "We must enlarge and enrich more and more the domain of musical sounds... This need and tendency can be totally realized only through the joining and substituting of noises to and for musical sounds."

2. "We must replace the limited variety of timbres of orchestral instruments by the infinite variety of timbres of noises obtained through special mechanisms."

3. "The musician's sensibility, once he is rid of facile, traditional rhythms, will find in the domain of noises the means of development and renewal, an easy task, since each noise offers us the union of the most diverse rhythms as well as its dominant one."

4. "Each noise possesses among its irregular vibrations a predominant basic pitch. This will make it easy to obtain, while building instruments meant to product this very sound, a very wide variety of pitches, half-pitches and quarter-pitches. The variety of pitches will not deprive each noise of its characteristic timbre but, rather, increase its range."

6. "This new orchestra will produce the most complex and newest sonic emotions, not through a succession of imitative noises reproducing life, but rather through a fantastic association of those varied sounds."

7. "The variety of noises is infinite... We will not have to imitate these noises but rather to combine them according to our artistic fantasy." 

8. "We invite all the truly gifted and bold young musicians to analyze all noises so as to understand their different composing rhythms, their main and their secondary pitches. Comparing these noise sounds to other sounds they will realize how the latter are more varied than the former. Thus the comprehension, the taste, and the passion for noises will be developed. Our expanded sensibility will gain futurist ears as it already has futurist eyes. In a few years, the engines of our industrial cities will be skillfully tuned so that every factory is turned into an intoxicating orchestra of noises."

Recently when looking through a Facebook group focused on modular synths I came across a person who had asked a question of the group. He was new to modular synthesis but had noticed in his researches that, to paraphrase, "not much music of the song variety" seemed to be made with this equipment. He had presented his question as one looking to move forward in his own music making in equipment terms and yet it seemed that his thinking about music had not similarly been given the necessary kick from behind to accompany this. Perhaps this was an example of a phenomenon I have covered before - the fixation on equipment. If so, it would be a perfect example of how fixation with things takes over and stunts the growth of ideas which is vital to a forward-thinking musical outlook. Here was a man who wanted to get hold of new equipment, modern technology the likes of which many electronic pioneers would have begged for, but he wanted to restrict it to fairly basic ideas of what music even was. It did not even occur to him that with new equipment he could explore new ideas or maybe even forget the things he thought and go off down some dark, musical alley and find himself a new set of ideas.

Such a person was Luigi Russolo, the futurist painter with an interest in future music. His manifesto for enriching, expanding and learning from a new palette of sounds is still relevant to music makers today. This is the area in which I think avant-garde composers and music makers should be focusing on, particularly in the electronic arena with which I am primarily concerned. It is pitched at a level far below concerns with melody or counterpoint or harmony. It is focused on sounds and noises themselves in all their difference and similarity, in all their possibilities for combination, comparison and juxtaposition. To make such music will be risky. It will be to be seen as maybe even being unmusical. But, especially with all the tools now at our disposal, it is a task that we electronic music makers would be irresponsible to ignore. 

The art of noises is still the future.

Eureka!

The human mind is an enigma. You can think about an issue for years, decades, and make little progress forward. But then, one day, seemingly for no reason, something clicks. At that point the mental thorn in your side, the niggle that wouldn't go away, the itch you couldn't scratch, becomes resolved. 

Such, for me, has been the issue of the apparent meaninglessness and purposelessness of the universe. Throughout the course of my life I've tried out various solutions to this question but none satisfied. There was still, appropriately enough, a hole at the center of my thinking about this. This hole is a meaningful symbol for what, more generally, might be described as The Void. The Void is where our existence is located and where we have our being. Its best expression is space itself, vast and inscrutable, a vast nothingness which reduces everything within it to just some more inconsequential detritus. It is impossible to place yourself in the context of the mass of space and imagine you are anything important or necessary at all. You just are. Remember that next time you imagine your views matter so much or that things around you must take notice of you. You are literally nothing special.

People, for as long as they could think, have wanted to ascribe some meaning to this vastness. Often they have wanted to ascribe some overarching purpose to it or give some reasoning which explains why everything is and how its all of a piece, a oneness, and to give it some reasonable basis for being. But people have always failed in this and this is why other thinkers have explored its emptiness and what that means for us as thinking people. But this is a clue to where we should be looking for answers. The Void is often conceived as everything out there and, in a spatial sense, it is. But this void of meaning, this void of understanding, is not out there. This particular void is inside each one of us. My "Eureka!" moment is realizing that, actually, we are the void. We have an absence of presence, a presence and substance we try to give things with our descriptive schemes in our role as engineers of a meaningless universe.

For what is it that creates this void of meaning and sets up the questions to which we can find no satisfying long-term answers? What is it that means that all we can ever do is relate things one to another, both giving them context and allowing them to fit into a map of our understandings and beliefs? It is us, us as the universe has given us life. This form of life of ours which must make meaning, must understand, must hold beliefs, it is this which creates the void that we cannot fill. It condemns us to relate things one to another in some great mental act of dexterity so that we can even survive. We must believe things. We must hold what we regard as understandings. Things must mean. Without these operations we would die. They animate us and give us purpose. And so its not some void out there that needs to speak to us and explain itself (and that's good because it never will). The void is in us. The Void is us. We are the ones who create the problem we then cannot solve. Just by being the beings we are. With this form of life we condemn ourselves to explanations but never to an explanation much less the explanation.

And so I ask myself "What is our form of Being?" and I reply "Chaos giving expression to itself." And then I ask "What is my existence?" and the reply comes back "A partaking in my form of Being." All our questions find an answer not out there, not from some God figure, whether personal or metaphorical, but in us, in our form of life, who we are. This form of life offers us up meanings but never the meaning. It gives us beliefs but never the truth. It proffers knowledge but never that thing beyond knowledge in which all talking and thinking would cease because, finally, we have found something that could speak for itself. If there was something (and it would be divine in the truest sense) that could speak for itself then we would have found what human beings have always searched for: something beyond their creative self-understandings with which they could get in touch and about which there would finally be no words, the thing that was not just another thing to relate to something else. But we don't have that. We never will. There are no divinities and, much as we would like it, no God substitutes either. All we have is a void we cannot fill but must, nevertheless, keep trying to.

Given this background, my mind wanders. I think about the Transhumanist agenda I've been interacting with for a year now. Transhumanists want to "improve" the human form of life and they think of this primarily in physicalist terms. So this means they want to stop bad physical outcomes like disease and illness and, eventually, even death itself. Obviously, overcoming death, that decay until life becomes impossible for an organism, is no small task. After all, the laws of the physical universe seem to be that all things decay and die on a long enough timeline. So Transhumanists are happy to go with extending life significantly as a starting point. But I have a huge problem with this and its there in a play by a French existentialist called Jean-Paul Sartre. The play is called No Exit. In this play there are but three characters and they have died. They are in a room and they, so the play seems to suggest, must spend their eternity together. The play focuses on their relationships (which in life were complicated) in this scenario and ends with the comment "Hell is other people".

This comment needs unpacking. Sartre is not saying there, at the climax of his play examining the idea that you would be in the public gaze for all eternity, that everyone else is a shit. That may or may not be the case from your point of view. Sartre's point is more that a life in the gaze of others that does not end is not a life in which people can be themselves. Its like this: imagine you yourself in your public life. You are constantly aware of other people in these types of situations and your behavior is molded to this scenario. You wouldn't do some things in public that you would do when you are home alone in your own place and you imagine no one is watching you. The point there is that the gaze of others changes your behavior and your consciousness of yourself. You often hear a related complaint made about social media where some people act like asses and are then told that they wouldn't act like that if we knew who they were. Exactly! The gaze of other people affects your behavior. Public CCTV cameras (of which the UK has amongst the most in the world) work on the same basis. You are being watched and its affects you. And so you become a socialized version of you and not the you you are by yourself. So why is Hell "other people"? Because it would be to act out that socialized, bad faith version of yourself that is a performance for public consumption forever.

And so how does this relate to Transhumanist dreams of radically extending life and to my "Eureka!" moment? I think its because the Transhumanist understanding of the human being, by which I mean the human form of being, is not adequate to the task. Primarily thinking of us as biological organisms in need of a pep up is not, I think, good enough. Its like thinking of us as a car and saying that if we had a more powerful engine we'd be a better car. Well, we might be. Or you might just ruin the car you had in the first place. Crucially, to my mind, such understandings do not take into account who we are and how we live in terms of our life and existence. And it needs to. Instead, it focuses quite narrowly on the perceived downsides of being physical, that we can be hurt, that we die, and says that if we could solve these things then, somehow (and this point is largely assumed and not explained) things would be better. One thousand years of you is better than eighty years of you, right? Really? Is that what being you is about? Are you just meat that needs to avoid hurt? I think that Transhumanists, either wittingly or unwittingly (and some seem more tuned into this consequence of their thinking than others, to be fair) want to actually supercede a human form of being for a post-human form of being. They want, I think, to head off into the "we are become gods" direction. They want the end of human being.

And this is the problem when, as I see it, we are The Void. Wanting to live forever and cure all diseases is just another way of trying to escape what fate has given us. (And being fated beings is yet another aspect of our being.) This is not to say that we shouldn't try to escape. Its not to say that we shouldn't do any of the things that Futurists or Transhumanists want to do. Its merely to contextualize it. It is, as Richard Rorty said, just one more way to try and escape "time and chance". Its another effort in the on-going plan to escape being human with all its flaws and failures, its pains and struggles. It doesn't, I think, understand or even examine what human being and human existence is at all. I don't think it is to glory in the physical flaws like some masochist to say this. But I see this as the real essence of humanity (in a descriptive and not an actual sense). The human being is the suffering animal, the animal that is aware but never sure of what it is aware. It is the animal that always lacks something. And knows it. It is the finite animal who can see death from almost the beginning of its days. It is the animal that wants and needs and desires. And knows it. Behold, it is become The Void.

I don't think that we will ever become gods. Far too much in this chaotic universe is out of our control. It seems that Dr Stephen Hawking is convinced we will kill ourselves and that some man-made disaster is inevitable at some point. There are many foreseeable future scenarios for this but its just as likely that an unseeable one gets us too. We don't have eyes in the back of our heads. But even if this didn't happen there is too much going on out there for us to control it all. Even the most arrogant of people wouldn't think we could account for everything (another human failing, incidentally). So I do not think that a divine life will ever be something we can approach. Indeed, I think that the urge for divinity is internally generated and part of this form of life that we have now. It is a way to fill The Void with meaning, as we must, as we are impelled by our existence as an expression of our form of being. We are more than biological organisms. Even if you do not think we are in any sense "consciousness" you can at least admit that we have a consciousness. This, too, is part of our being, part of who we are. And its who we are that concerns me when I read philosophers telling me that to become who you are is to find the most meaning that we can in life. 

But when you look into the mirror what do you see? 

There is Nothing Necessary About The Human Being

Earlier this week I wrote a blog about what I called "human exceptionalism". I could also have referred to "speciesism", it later occurred to me. The term would have done equally well for the phenomenon I was talking about. But it occurs to me that I can go further in my thinking than I did in that earlier blog, a blog which asked why we find it relatively easy to denominate some beings as lesser beings than ourselves and then commit atrocities upon them. The direction that we can go further in is that one which asks us to address human beings as a species in themselves. We can do this whilst at the same       time recognizing that our species, the human being, is just one of millions that this planet has produced, the vast majority of which have been and gone again, vanished from the planet that once gave them birth. Indeed, a wide spectrum view of life on Earth, if not elsewhere in the universe, seems to suggest that life forms in general have their time and then they vanish, a cosmic version of Andy Warhol's "famous for fifteen minutes".

Outside of the pride and ego of the human consciousness there is no reason to think that we, the humans, will be any different. But due to the way we have developed, and the higher brain functions that have come along with it, we can imagine other futures, ones in which the humans survive. Indeed, some imagine futures in which the humans become the first creatures to leave this planet and colonise others, heading out into the vastness of space. As time passes by there will certainly be an increasing urgency to do that and a scenario somewhat like the plot for the film Interstellar may arise. This is because space, that still, quiet, unchanging void, is actually none of these things. Things are changing in space all the time, constantly. Its moving. Its just that this change occurs over such unimaginably long periods of time that our tiny species, that lives for a few decades, never really lives long enough to notice the difference. One of the changes that will have occurred in what we would call the far future is that our sun will have grown in luminosity to such an extent that the heat it gives off will terminally threaten our existence. 

And this is what the universe is like. Its a dangerous, changing, chaotic place. From a universal perspective what are human beings but just another form of life? What are you and I but just individual examples of this "just another form of life"? You and I are as an individual ant is to us. Or a worm. Or a slug. There is, from this perspective, nothing special or remarkable about us. There's no reason to want to treat the humans differently to the worms or the slugs. We can be sure that the rest of the universe, in all its physical processes, will not spare us over them either. It would also be quite easy to imagine that other forms of life on other planets would not share our high regard for ourselves as well. Indeed, from an alien perspective we might not even be the dominant form of life on our own planet because who knows what they might see with their eyes? Perhaps, for them, the insects are king. Or the rats. My point is that our vision is uniquely human-shaped. We are prepped and primed by our human form of life to value and prefer human things and to weigh things to human advantage. But no other form of life is.

Imagine, for a moment, that humans had never come to pass. This is a live scenario because the fact that humans did come to pass is not to say that they had to. Evolution is a blind process and has no purpose. Neither is any divine figure guiding it. So our species did not have to be. It is contingent. It just happened because it could, because earlier versions of us survived that became us. And, who knows, some contingent event may yet wipe us out in one fell swoop. If that happened who in this universe of ours would miss us? No one would. Our planet wouldn't. The universe wouldn't. Both would just carry on. We are not necessary to everything else that exists in order to give it some meaning and purpose. Indeed, as far as we know, meaning and purpose are things unique to our species. When a dog sees a ball we do not imagine it asks itself what a ball means even though the dog may link the ball with play through memory. We do not think that the cat that sits purring in front of the fire is asking itself about its purpose in life as it purrs. We as humans have a tendency to think about things by analogy to ourselves. This is perhaps understandable. But it can also be somewhat arrogant and its certainly wrong-headed.

There are those among us who like to accentuate the progress our species makes. Five hundred years ago, however, there were very powerful bodies who thought that our planet was the centre of the universe, then thought of as God's creation, a place he made for human beings, his finest achievement and pinnacle of his creation. But our growing capabilities shattered such notions and now we know we are but a pinprick in a vast void. We are not in the centre of anything. Indeed, there is nothing special or remarkable about us or our solar system. We just are, one of billions like us, lost in the anonymity of it all. And yet the notion that we are somehow different, special, persists. Perhaps we may regard this as but the ego necessary to survive. It can be imagined that if you thought of yourself as nothing special and had a kind of species-based lack of self-esteem that this would be to the detriment of our primary evolutionary purpose which is to exist long enough to multiply. And maybe this is so. But does this mandate the ideas of some who see us as future lords of the universe and, worse, lords of our planet right now? On what basis is a human being lord of anything? 

So what I have a problem with here is a speciesist egocentrism that we humans possess. I want to see we humans as but another animal, something as contingent as bees, sharks and those horrible crawly things that come out from under rocks. We had as much to do with our existence as they did. We are largely as powerless in the face of an uncaring universe as they are. We live and die (so far) as they do. In short, we share very much in common with all other living things on planet Earth. But I don't think we have the required humility that that should entail. And that becomes a problem when you start to regard the planet that birthed you as your own species' bank of resources such as we clearly do. Of course, there is little, at this point, to stop us. "Nature is red in tooth and claw", "survival of the fittest", "might is right" and all other such vulgar notions spring to mind and do so because there is a grain of truth in them. But we can, perhaps, turn the argument of those who think humans are special and different back on them. For if this is so then maybe, just maybe, we have a responsibility to use our specialness, our special powers over and above those the rest of this planet's inhabitants have, for good.

It is not impossible to imagine that our increasing technological knowledge will bequeath us ways to extend our lives. We even have members of our species, the Transhumanists and Futurists of which I have spoken earlier in the year on this blog, who are actively looking at how technology may both extend and transform our lives. But, if this is so, then surely some of these technologies will be useful for the rest of our world. It would be a very solipsistic vision of the future if it did not. We, as humans, have always, up until now, been biological beings that lived in a biological world. This presents problems to be sure (disease and decay being just two pressing ones) but it also constitutes the only situation of life we have ever known. We appreciate the fact of sun and rain on our skin, the feel of the wind, walking across a grassy field, interaction with other animal species, and these sensations engender feelings and emotions and constitute part of what it feels like to be a human being. Any future iteration of the human consciousness, whether that be as some kind of robot or even as a computer program, must account for this if we are to retain any link to our past human development. So I would argue that the human future is not just about preserving a personal human identity, or even a collection of personal human identities. It is about preserving our world in all its biological variety. 

Another way to say this is that as we destroy our world we destroy ourselves, piece by piece, tree by tree, hedgerow by hedgerow, field by field, river by river, sea by sea. Of course, things change over time. But changes have consequences and there is all the difference in the world between things that happen and things you cause, perhaps by not thinking it through or even not thinking at all. We recognize the difference in human thought between an accident, something unforeseen and something done as a deliberate act of vandalism. My argument here is that we, as a species, have some humility, recognize our contingency and how bound up we are with the planet that gave us life and even now sustains us, and use the advantage our evolution has given us to make the world better for everything that lives here. Because, in the end, helping others is really just helping yourself. Its a recognition that you are truly not an island, you're part of a bio-system, a circle of life, a community of life. A life without everything else this planet holds would not be a human life at all because we do not and have never existed in isolation. 

We may think we can throw off such notions and that our ingenuity can prosper us even whilst everything else is sacrificed or fails to survive. Should that happen then it may yet be, as some say, that the "human beings" were only a phase and the post-humans, beings who once were us, take our place instead. If that did happen it would be yet another demonstration that the universe doesn't need us and that all things must pass.

Electronic Music: An Interview with Rory McCormick

A couple of days ago, through a Twitter contact retweeting a link, I came across the electronic music of Rory McCormick. I was immediately drawn to the sound he had created for himself and (what seemed to me) the fearless way he went about doing what he had done. His album WAVE IX is a mixture of melancholic electronica and performance poetry (with sometimes near to the knuckle content). It was, at the very least, something that made me sit up and take notice. Having listened to that I went on and listened to his albums Colony and Edgespace which continued the musical theme but without the poetry. It seemed to me that here was an artist, someone who had ideas behind what he did and I determined to see if he would consent to an interview to be published here so that I could learn more about it and, also, publish the results to a wider audience. I'm happy that Rory agreed. Printed below are the questions I sent him and the answers he sent back.


1. How long have you been making music and what is your setup? (i.e. what do you use to make music?)

I've been making music since 2013. To begin with I worked as one half of a duo under the pseudonym '6&8', I was responsible for the music, and she wrote words/poetry to go with that music. We released a number of digital albums and EPs on a net label called Xylem Records (http://www.xylemrecords.co.uk), and also one album that involved another collaborator, a music producer who works under the name 'Day Before Us', on Auditory Field Theory (http://www.auditoryfieldtheory.org). That all happened between May 2013 and March 2014, then later in the year 6&8 split up and I fell out of love with making music for a while. Plus various things going on in my life at the time seemed to take most of the focus away from my hobbyist attitude towards it. I started working on some bits I had begun but not finished in that period earlier this year, May-June time, and then wrote more in a similar vein and before I knew it I was hooked again and now don't want to stop. I think I must have needed to fill that gap of more than a year by releasing three things in one month – it takes the likes of Coldplay years to get one album together, I'm knocking out three a month, I think I know who's winning.

Due to financial and space restrictions, I don't have any outboard equipment or interesting boxes, I've always been drawn to hardware as a means for electronic music, it's the deliberately limited scope of possibilities (hardware depending of course, I'm thinking of analogue stuff here really) and the physical interactions that I feel would be more engaging when it comes to navigating the tumultuous creative process in search of inspiration. Anyway that said, I don't have those things, I mainly use a computer as a sound source, loaded with a selection of software instruments and environments. I guess the feeling is that software doesn't have any soul, but actually I don't think that's true at all. I like instruments/FX from U-he and Madrona Labs best, the Madrona stuff in-particular is really quite characterful. My main environment for sketching, composition and mixing is REAPER, but I have used Renoise in the past, and also Pure Data and SuperCollider, but I tend to steer away from coding now as I always feel so much further from the music due to the learning curve and program debugging that comes with that sort of environment. If I'm getting a syntax error I'm probably about 10 minutes away from going for a walk instead.

For my recent solo releases I have succumbed to my interest in the analogue approach and purchased a reel-to-reel tape recorder, a Tandberg 3300X. I also have a Technics cassette deck, for when I want to keep some of the clarity of the digital domain, as the Tandberg really does smear frequencies all over the place. Anything that is fed into that is a glorious lo-fi mess on the way back out. There are other small portable cassette machines laying around, as well as a Tascam DR-100mk2 for field recordings as well as two AKG C1000S mics. For my next release I have picked up a small collection of acoustic instruments: zithers, guitar, bass, xylophone, melodica, flutes etc. Which I will use to create source material for digital manipulation at a later stage. That's a fair bit of stuff I suppose. Maybe I'll just fill the wall behind my bed with rack analogue modules after all.

2. What are you making music for? Is there anything behind it?

It's a form of expression, it's interpretation of the world around me and my experiences: feelings, moments, awareness. It's also more abstract though, for example I take a trip to London to look at the architecture of the Barbican estate, all those edges and blocks of raw concrete, what senses do they evoke? What might they sound like? How could I communicate this appreciation of form and style with the timbres within my grasp as a musician? I want to depict shape, space and form with rhythm, timbre and melody in a way only a human being could. I will practice this until I stop.


3. When you approach making a track what is important for you?

I find that a track will begin in one of two ways:

1) I will be led by a melody I have found on the guitar, and then transplant this into the digital domain and build and orchestrate on it with other instruments.

2) I will be led by technology, some aspect or functionality of a computer program will start an idea and I will follow it purely with the digital techniques at my disposal.

Of the two I find much more satisfying, and likely to result in a finished track that I am proud of, is music with its genesis in method 1. When I play something on a guitar I can almost 'hear the future' of that riff or melody straight away, a developed piece of music appears like an abstract concept and I have greater success in following those abstractions than if they materialise during a session solely exploring software. When using method 2 I find that moment to moment my creative abilities are muddied by the task of navigating the software itself: 'How do I pitch the sample down?' 'What is the best method to automate this or that?' 'Wait, where has that toolbar gone?' 'I didn't mean to delete that' etc. That's not to say that purely software techniques aren't responsible for amazing music, you've just got to get a grip of them as well as I have of my guitar over the last 20 odd years. The reality is that methods 1 and 2 will blend during a writing session, sometimes seamlessly, but sometimes the gears will grind to a halt. I guess what's important is being able to get what's inside my head, outside my head with flow and accuracy, making use of any surprises along the way.

4. Your three albums on Bandcamp, WAVE IX, Colony and Edgespace seem thematically and musically linked. What are you trying to express with them?

Yes they are linked, in fact Wave IX only exists because I didn't manage what I originally set out to do with the material on Edgespace and Colony. The music on those two should have been the back drop to the spoken word of Wave IX but when I put it all together much of the music just didn't gel well with the words and I was making compromises all over the place to try and make it work. So just decided to let Edgespace and Colony go without the words and put other bits together for Wave IX.

But once I decided that, it did feel good to have instrumental tracks that appeared to link with the spoken themes on Wave IX, e.g 'Survey Team' on Colony is the sonic description of the brave men and women that descended back into the mining network we hear about in 'Faces in the Strata' on Wave IX, the auxiliary team on the surface is referenced in the title and the spoken word. 'In the Betweens' is in fact a description of Edgespace, heard on the release of the same name. There are further connections but I'll leave them to be discovered. It all seemed to work well splitting the work across three releases like this, like it was meant to be.

The stories told on Wave IX are linked to some degree, the themes seem to be to transcend the human consciousness/form, (In the Betweens, The Exchange, Prayer for a Sunken Lime, The Configurations), I think 'Faces in the Strata' strays furthest from that theme, perhaps as the survey team strayed themselves from their own world.


5. If you had unlimited freedom to make whatever music you wanted to make what would you like to do that you can't do now?

Since I realised electronic music was the gin in my tonic (early 2000's, camping trip to Cornwall, The Richard D James album on repeat in the car) and I started to delve into the culture and technology, I've always felt that Heaven would be a room full of modular analogue equipment. I still do - perhaps to a slightly lesser extent now – maybe that's because I'm making the most of the resources available to me rather than desiring things I'll likely never have. The money and the impracticality involved does put me off enough for it to remain a fantasy. I have a desire to perform music in a live setting, and as a hobbyist/nobody, hauling a tonne of oscillators, sequencers and voltage dividers around just seems stupid now. Laptop, mixer, speakers, ears, done.

As for music I'd like to make with the resources I have to hand, but have yet to, algorithmic and generative music is high on the agenda. Beat oriented music that one could consider moving to.

I do have some musical ideas that currently seem hard to realise. I'd like to make detailed environment recordings of industrial locations such as processing plants, data centres, and manipulate them subtly with almost imperceptible glitches and additions. But in my mind that would depend on having good quality, detailed, multilevelled location recordings of areas and installations that I would likely not be permitted to enter.

Similar to this, is the desire to make mock recordings of occult events, to stage a séance or pseudo-ritual for example and mix multiple recording sources. Not music so much as an audio play, scripted with a cast of voice actors, but perhaps with musical elements, unexpected rhythmic repetition, or low frequencies added to unsettle.

The perceived scope of such projects (maybe just the knowledge that I would have to involve others) has meant it has not yet moved from being an abstract idea into an achievable goal.

6. What music and artists have influenced you? (Maybe your influences aren't musical, of course.)

Mike Patton, Jimi Hendrix, Jack Kerouac, Helmet, Therapy?, pre-turn of the century Marilyn Manson, Stanley Kubrick, Aphex Twin, Autechre, Squarepusher, Clark, Dave Monolith, Laurel Halo, Grimes, Morbid Angel, Boards of Canada, Blade Runner, Yes, Vangelis, David Lynch, J.G Ballard, Brutalist architecture, Shane Carruth Giorgio de Chirico and Calvin Harris (not really).

7. What would you like to achieve musically in the next 12 months?

I have several album projects to work on, next is something vaguely related to Wave IX, but instrumental (there is no further spoken word on the horizon right now, but all it takes is a second of inspiration for that to change. Hey it may have changed by 3pm this afternoon). Also I have what I hope to be a series of releases employing algorithmic techniques that takes its inspiration from plant inflorescences (see the Wikipedia article on that topic and you'll probably already be in the same sonic ballpark as I am) that will likely be far more rhythmic than anything I've done before. I am fascinated by the way plant stems branch off from one another, like a network of decisions from root to bud. Also not too far off is a project that takes great influence from the novel High Rise by J.G Ballard. I have a copy of that book packed with my own annotations and highlights that elude somehow to the sense of hearing, or that collide in an aesthetically pleasing way with my own sense of what is awesome.

As for other achievements, I'd like to release work on net labels again and have my material played on various online radio shows, just get it out there in ways. I don't do this for fame or money obviously, but it's a form of expression, of communication, so nothing I make can be fully realised unless others hear it. A major milestone as momentous as the alignment of the planets would be to play or perform my music in a live setting of any description, that would be a real achievement for me. To collaborate again is possibly on the agenda too, but we'll see.


I'd like to thank Rory for taking the time to answer my questions. Personally speaking, I think its great to find such thoughtful electronic music that has ideas behind it.

You can hear the three albums referred to in this interview, WAVE IX, Colony and Edgespace at Rory's Bandcamp, https://rrymc.bandcamp.com/

Existenz²: A Fable of The Inhuman Future

What does nihilism mean? That the highest values devaluate themselves. The aim is lacking; “why?” finds no answer. (Nietzsche)

I have been writing for a number of months now about human being both as a musician and also more philosophically too. At the same time I became interested in matters of consciousness and also future technology, initially because of an online contact with similar interests. Simultaneously, I have had an interest in our species and how it is changing in modern times. I have always been interested in standing back and taking a larger view of things and asking myself how things have developed or are developing. I find it good to ask myself the questions "How did we get here?" and "Where are we going?". A specific interest in this time has been the worlds of technology and social media and how they have changed us. Because they have changed us. Today I was looking at a stream of tweets and it struck me as totally bizarre the messages that people just send out into the ether. Its like somebody in public suddenly blurting out to everyone what is on their minds. You would think that person was crazy if they did that in public.

The problem is that all these simultaneous concerns are complex and large topics even in themselves. It requires some serious thinking and some kind of conceptual framework to even attempt to make something from all of this. But I am nothing if not ambitious and, crucially, I am one of those people who sees a need to think things through to come to some sort of serious conclusion. So I apologise in advance if what follows seems to only skim the surface of the issues or be a little shallow. I put that down to the fact that these subjects could each take up many books in their own right and this is but a little blog where I doodle my thoughts. However, if it is the case that any of us regular Joe’s should be thinking about the world we live in, and reaching reasoned positions about that, well then please count this as one of my first hesitant attempts.

What I tell here is a fable of the present, where time means nothing or is absurd, something we are totally conditioned by but feel completely lost in. In this world innocents are crushed beneath the wheels of instrumentality, all value gone. Disappointment is inbred from birth here and dreams and hopes are but memories. We enter The Inhuman Age as humanism multiplies humanism and, as it must, devalues and devours itself and ends in nihilism. Men, the loci of a supposed rational agency, subvert their own descriptions of themselves. The more they insist on their rationality, the less it seems evident. Knowledge, truth, science and technology are venerated as our saviours but we are blind to their fallibilities.

In this fable our culture becomes about mass media, mass culture, social media, mobs, primitive emotions that shove thinking aside.  Everything, all our thinking, our whole narrative and its meaning, must be squeezed into 140 characters or less, or a picture or an instant message. Needs are mediated through what ever source. Politics here is in the service of base desire rather than people. Survive as anything or die as nothing is the rule. Speak up or be ignored. The more you have a voice through various media platforms the less your voice actually counts and the more anonymous you become. The more homogenized things are, the more fractured they become. Die in a corner and without any fuss. All fall into your liberal democratic camps to argue for your point of view whilst half the world population still live in huts and eat basic crops, a serious and on-going divide.

This is a fable about the humans who magnified themselves and magnified themselves and in that magnification they destroyed themselves, revealed themselves to be not exceptional but animal, just cleverer apes, a biological phase in the life of an unimportant planet. Eventually, they evolved beyond their biological origins and became pure technology. Humans were never heard from again.

Of course, this is a very 1st World fable. I am a first world person and have never set foot outside of this world. The populations of Europe and the USA come to something just over 1 billion people. This is basically the pool of views that any of us reading this now might ever hear from. Give or take. Social networks report 1 billion members and we sit and draw breath at the enormity of it. But the fact remains that far more people have never heard of Facebook or Twitter or Instagram than have ever used them. There is an unheard of and unconsulted population of the earth that numbers billions. Why do you think that Facebook, for example, are building super drones that can carry free internet around the world? To increase their membership and bring the “benefits” of Western society to other places and new populations.

In so doing I think its not too wide of the mark to say that they will be hastening the demise of the humans. I think this demise is being hastened on its way by the rise of a 24/7 world of social media interconnectedness in which each of us connected is expected to have an opinion on everything. In this world you are basically anonymous (even though you may have given yourself an amusing handle). People on these networks become anonymous anyones, nothings that replace the something you might have to genuinely look at and respond to (a physical person). People online are not real people, at least not while they remain there. They are cyphers for real people but ones you can block, mute, ignore, insult, threaten or abuse without any real consequences in the main. This removal of consequences is just one of the traces of a barely perceptible change, a change which in my thinking takes us from humanity to inhumanity.      

Should one wish to find an example of inhumanity in progress it is not hard to find. This Internet world of interconnectedness affords many places where one can egotistically proffer ones views as the fount of all knowledge in the face of others who demur and argue, to the contrary, that it is their views that should actually hold that place. One is left wondering, having observed such goings on, if any real communication ever took place. The Internet has allowed us people on the way to inhumanity a space where we may be brutes expressing our heartfelt urges and base thoughts, a place where we may offend others for the purposes of reinforcing our own identities. I imagine that some bright spark somewhere has invented bots that go online and run through a whole playbook of arguments to no purposes. Many people have probably interacted with them not even realising that they weren’t even talking to a person. It was just an agenda all along. But I validated who I am as a person so who gives a rat’s.

But what does this do to the humans? It pushes them one step further to becoming inhumans. Knowledge is not now about deep thought anymore. You cannot express a deep thought in 140 characters and certainly not unless you have had practice at doing so. Wittgenstein and Nietzsche did not develop their pithiness by tweeting or posting a Facebook post but by thinking. And this is precisely the activity that social media does not promote. It promotes instant response, the sharing of your gut feeling or your opinion. But it does not promote you giving a thought out, considered response. Social media promotes “feelz” as the new kid in town. Saying what you feel is now what matters. This changes us in terms of attention span too. We learn to expect instant solutions and instant answers. Now, now, now. The next thing. Repeat. Thinking becomes something strange and foreign.

But let’s switch focus from the content to the hardware. Technology. Devices. Everyone in the 1st World today knows that you have to keep in touch with everyone else. You need to be on top of things and know what is going on in the world. You need something to play games on and listen to music on. This is where you need to be at. If you don’t have a smartphone or a tablet you are literally not part of the human race anymore. Pretty much every day now as I take my daily exercise I will meet people staring into screens as they walk along in the street. I should declare at this point that I am old enough to remember when these devices didn’t exist at all. Its not that long ago really. Unless you are 25 or under in which case it probably seems ages ago. If you have lived both sides of this technological divide you are in the perfect position to be able to sit back and see how things have actually, demonstrably changed in real time as you lived.

When I was a lad (cue violins) if you needed to tell someone something you went round to their house and asked if they were in. Or you picked up your home telephone, if you had one (we didn’t), and spoke to them that way. In addition, all the people you knew would be from your locality. They were the people fate had decreed you were to grow up with. But then technology came along and everything changed. Now you can speak to people in every continent every day. If you want to you can even speak to them while seeing them. Technology has changed the horizons. You may think this is good but, ask yourself, where does it stop? In another article I wrote recently I mused about the possible future technology that, who knows, someone somewhere may well be working on right now. It makes sense that these communications devices we carry around with us actually become a part of us. Google Glass and other wearable tech is a step in this direction. One day someone will figure out an implant that gives us the global communications we say we need but not just as wearable technology but as technology integrated into our bodies. There are Futurists out there right now who dream of this.

When this happens, as I’m sure it will, it will be a big step. It will be a step along the technological road we have already headed down even though, maybe, you don’t realise that we have. Technology that changes us forever will not be presented as such. And this is part of my argument here as I talk of us going from humans to inhumans. None of this will be overt. The technology will be presented as beneficial, helpful, benevolent. You will almost certainly want it just as you want your smartphone and your computer right now. If you don’t have it you will even feel left out. I remember going for a job some years ago now when I didn’t have a mobile phone. The prospective employer asked for my mobile number and I replied that I didn’t have one. The look on his face spoke a thousand words. I didn’t get the job and I’m convinced that was a large part of why. Not taking part in societal norms can have consequences.

I have spoken a lot in the past few months about a technological future some see for humans. This is one reason why I see the future for humans as becoming inhumans. I read the futures mapped out by Futurists and Transhumanists and I concede to myself that it is foreseeable, one day, that some of the things they dream of will come to pass. Of course, as I’ve said before, a lot of their hopes are mere speculations that are yet to be proved possible but it is clear to me that there are significant funds and personnel tied up in making various technological futures happen. Those who hold out the hope of a pain free, disease free world will always be able to attract a certain audience too. For my purposes I have been content to point out that their future dreams of “techno-humans”, to my mind, leave the humanity part behind. (Our mass media, 24/7 society is part of this development and has effects as I am arguing in this very blog.) And this is what I’m explicitly saying in this blog now. Technologically advanced humans won’t be human anymore. Human beings are defined by their imperfection, not by their increased, increasing or actualised perfection.

There is another angle from which to view our progress along a scale from humanity to inhumanity and that is in terms of a focus on subjectivity. In our modern age we have very much been encouraged to be in control of things, primarily through the technology that we carry with us. Even our currency, money itself, is now being taken from the physical world and “contactless payment” is taking its place. On our TVs we have for some years now been encouraged to think that our views count as we are invited to vote in various popularity contests. The message is that we, as subjects, matter. The metanarratives of yesteryear are gone and even forms of intersubjectivity are shunned. You, the thinking subject, are what counts.

The flip side to this is that things have become rapidly de-centred and now its really just you on your own. Or a helpline in a country where the person speaks your language with a thick, ununderstandable accent. Nevertheless, the subject has become the focus of all things but it is as an anonymous, anyone kind of a subject. There is a sense in which we are all just subjects sitting in our homes in need of purpose, control and something to do. Its very disjointed. There is a move away from social cohesion to social isolation. People to turn to recede to online or difficult to access worlds where an actual person with a face does not exist. In a real sense our age is the age of the world going online which forces you to access it a certain way as nothing else exists. Is it really so hard now to imagine that we become cyber-beings, code with a personality? We are daily creating a world in which being a physical being matters less and less.

What is the symbol of this modern age, of the human becoming inhuman? I want to get in first and say that this symbol should be masturbation. This is the age of the masturbator. There are a number of reasons for this, not least that at any one time millions of us will be online masturbating to something. But my analysis is a bit more profound than this. Masturbation is a non-social way of giving yourself pleasure. It is, for now, a physical act but, in the end, that will be overcome since sexual pleasure is really only a matter of tickling the right neurons. It has nothing to do with penises and vaginas in our inhuman future. Masturbation is the symbol of our age because it is the ultimate subjective experience. Its you with yourself imagining. Its the thrill which reminds us that we are still alive, that there is more than a humdrum world largely devoid of meaning. It is the moment that means par excellence. Before it recedes and is lost again. And its only purpose is that thrill which lasts less and less the more you do it. But masturbation is also a disguise. Its there to cover over the fact that you are all on your own. Its another nothing that covers over where a something should be. No one would masturbate if they could have sex instead.

So this is my modern, badly explained fable. It is that our race, which has taken itself as the measure of all things and called it humanism, is on the way to making itself obsolete by means of itself, its own values and its own progress. It is a reminder that nothing stays the same and that things are always moving on down the pipe. Things always come from somewhere and always go to somewhere else. Standing still is not an option. In this, “inhumanity” and “inhumans” are not moral judgments. They are merely words which express the idea that humanity is changing and is fated to become something else. The animus of our age is technological and its effects upon us both now and into the future are fundamentally changing both us and our world. This will continue, in my fable, up until the point when there are no humans left any more. There will just be the inhumans that we have become. 

What form of life these beings will take is not yet clear but they will not be biological for biology is but one weakness that needs to be overcome. This Futurists and Transhumanists know well and I think they have a chance to succeed in their aims. As I have tried to show here, though, its not just a matter of turning our thoughts and memories into code and building a robot. Our form of life right now is changed by the devices we use and the networks we insert ourselves into. Humanity is already changed and continuing to change because of these technologically enabled networks and the media and opinion they dispense. 

My conclusion is summed up by the term Existenz². Existenz² is an idea, the idea that humanity, humans and humanism, through their excess and the superfluity of themselves and their values, thereby devalue and degrade themselves to nothing. They cause their own destruction and annihilation. Existenz squared is the end of humanity and the beginning of inhumanity. Think of it by analogy to sound which can be overdriven until the point at which it is pure distortion and the sound you began with has been annihilated. At that point you have just another sound. My message is that more and more of humanity does not equal a better humanity but the end of humanity. All values devalue themselves whether truth, love, compassion, knowledge or whatever. To all things there must be limits.

We as humans are defined by time, by our contingency in time and our finitude as beings in time. This is our lot, to be imperfect, fallible, weak and powerless. But we are also innocent beings, beings who strove to know and valued knowing but could never know enough or truly know anything at all. We were forever stuck with our own descriptions for things and our reasons for needing them, creatures who always wanted more but were always unable to get it. This realisation, naturally enough, leads to terminal disappointment and, in some, a blind refusal to accept the truth. This truth leads to the fact that the project of humanism will come to an end and we humans, the measurers of all things, will, eventually, become inhumans governed by a new project of inhumanism in a context bigger than our world, the world that has defined us but that we could never leave. Human beings are thus revealed as a phase of biological life on planet Earth, one that was always temporary and destined to be succeeded.

I do not know what it will be like to be an inhuman but it will surely not be like this. For just as to a person from 1500 who, were he stuck into the middle of a modern city 500 years later, would be overwhelmed by the world he found himself in, so would we be overwhelmed by the world of an inhuman. We cannot imagine what it would be like to be a machine for machines do not feel, cannot know pain, nor do they need to eat or drink. Should some future humans find a way to transfer our minds and personality to machines then our journey to inhumanity would be complete and we would die out for a superior form of life would have been born.

PS There is, of course, one huge rider to all this. And that is that we do not wipe ourselves out completely first before the inhumans we are fated to become have fully come to be.

This is written in support of my latest album called simply Existenz². You can listen to the sound of the approaching inhumans HERE!