Where Do You Stand?

As a Twitter user I am able to sit and watch my timeline scroll away as all those I have followed (a few hundred) tweet and retweet things into it. Quite often these things are political things as people share their own interests or, sometimes, positions that they find dangerous, wrong or even laughable. These are not always things I agree with but they are things I can put up with. I guess like most users of social media I am very self-selective in the choice of those I choose to follow. I could not follow someone tweeting race hate into my timeline on a constant basis, for example. But then neither could I follow someone constantly tweeting either feminist dogma or other single agenda issues either such as climate change. Last year in Scotland there was a referendum of the Scottish people to determine if that country should leave the UK and become independent. The eventual vote was 55/45 in favour of no. It was a very active debate online and I found that I couldn't follow people from either side because it was a constant barrage of one-sided views. I was looking for information though not opinion.

When it comes to politics, then, I have my beliefs and sometimes they are moderate and sometimes they are quite extreme. But, by and large, I keep them to myself. I avoid overtly political accounts (or getting into political discussions) no matter in what direction their politics tends. This is because politics very quickly descends into a shouting match and a pit of contention. Nothing is to be achieved by shouting across the Twitter void at people. Some feminists laud the ability to shout at all of course and they feel that a regular dose of "shouting at the devil" is good for the soul. I disagree because, in my pragmatic way, I want to ask what it achieves. I think it achieves nothing beyond maybe making the shouter feel better. But feminist goals are about more than making individual women feel better and so I look for progress on social goals rather than women who feel better.

All of us live in political situations and are affected by a whole host of political decisions, processes and jurisdictions. So a quietism like mine cannot be the end of the story. If you can live with most things that are going on in the world then it might start to be suggested that you don't actually care what happens to it. Some political decision somewhere must be affecting you and, as one who wants to know what goes on, that gives me more ability to find out what those things are. Of course, it is often the easy way out to then say that you can't do anything about it. You are small and the forces of political power are big and strong. But this is defeatism. Politics has always been a numbers game. But the relevant numbers here are not economic ones. They are the numbers of people prepared to stand up and say "No!" to something or "Yes!" to something. No political policy of any government anywhere would pass if 10 million people were stood in the streets. Activism counts and activism works. Ask the Suffragettes, for example. So often, it seems to me, politicians are happy to sneak things by a population that is snoozing or misdirected so that their attention is elsewhere. Politics is the practice of stealth as much as anything else.

But there are occasions when I feel that I must tweet about political things. This is not because I am a political animal or any kind of activist. As with most things, this is a more instinctive thing with me. Its also probably because the things I tweet about in this way I feel I have some connection to. Politics is partly a reaction to the world around us and we can only act or react in relation to things we see or become aware of. (This is one reason why politicians often try to hide things. You can't have a view on something you aren't aware of.) Now I lived in Germany for a number of years in the recent past and my eyes became open to a number of things, living in a different kind of society and culture to the one I was used to. Travel broadens the mind they say and its very true. Whilst there I worked with people from pretty much every country of Europe and was exposed to completely new views and outlooks on the world. 

And so yesterday many of my tweets could have been regarded as of a political nature. Why was this? Its because yesterday was November 9th. A number of things happened in Germany on November 9th in years gone by. Two of the biggest things that happened were the fall of The Berlin Wall in 1989 and Kristallnacht, the pogrom (coordinated violent attacks) of 1938 carried out by the Sturmabteilung (who were literally "Stormtroopers"), which left over 1,000 synagogues and 7,500 Jewish businesses damaged or destroyed by fire. In addition 30,000 Jews were rounded up and taken to concentration camps. Around 2,000 of these people never left them, the rest being released on condition that they left Germany and Austria. (These two countries were at that time joined together in what was called "Anschluss".) And so you can see that these are pretty big events, events which I think bear out being remembered. So yesterday morning I tweeted a number of factual things about the fall of the Berlin Wall and last night I tweeted about Kristallnacht. I wanted it to be remembered and, for those of thoughtful mind, to be thought about. One of the uses of history, after all, is to remind us not to repeat ourselves. This is especially relevant when world powers even today profile people by race and presidential candidates talk about building walls between people.

I thought about this and my own political quietism and my reasons for it. I see political strength as being found in unity. This is not a new belief or an uncommon one. Many workers' rights movements or unions have similar mottos and beliefs. The workers' rights movement from Poland led by Lech Walesa and started in 1980 as the first trade union not run by The Communist Party was known as "Solidarity", for example. 

The belief common to all these groups of people is that strength is in their togetherness and that against the will of the mass of people private or individual or even corporate or state interests cannot stand. I think that, in the end, this is surely right. But it then becomes a question of where you stand and who you support. You can, of course, be quiet and stand idly by. But then you merely abdicate responsibility and play no part in the result. You get whatever the outcome is whether you want it or not. I do think that at the end of the day even quietists like me have to plant their flag somewhere. For to be a quietist is to let things happen. No one should be so naive as to think that things happen all by themselves though. Things happen because people do them and because other people let them. There is no truer saying in the political sphere than that which says "All it takes for bad men to flourish is that good men do nothing". That applies to good and bad women too.

So political quietism is all well and good and I very much understand it. But it cannot be enough in a world with so many bad things happening, where people need a food bank to feed them and worry about being able to pay for health care if they get sick. (The list is endless. I noted just two basic things.) It is a struggle and people will, in general, do what they are allowed to get away with. In a world in which many are motivated primarily by the private acquisition of wealth, people are not top of the agenda and some become blinded to the facts of their lives. We should remember that it is only by action that things can change. They will never change all by themselves. You won't wake up tomorrow to find a political utopia. But you can try to build one. In truth, only action will ever move us nearer to one, whatever you think that looks like. So the question is Where Do You Stand? and What Are You Prepared To Do About It? You can be sure that those with different values, aims and goals will be doing things about it even if you aren't.

So where do I stand? I've thought about it and tried to pin it down. I think back to those standing at the Berlin Wall in 1989 shouting "Tor auf!" (open the gate!) at the East German border guards. I think back to the night of horror in 1938 when Jews going about their business were suddenly attacked, killed and incarcerated. And then I know where I stand: 

I stand with the underdog. I stand with the innocent victim.

This blog is one of a series in my new project #IndustrialSoundsForTheWorkingClass which you can also follow under that hashtag on Twitter.

Individual or Community?

I am working on a new project for about the next 2 months and that project is called INDUSTRIAL SOUNDS FOR THE WORKING CLASS. It is an overtly political project with things political, cultural and social to say about our world and our species. It has been borne in on me this year more than ever that we humans are all human beings together on this planet. We are the same but we devise bureaucratic, cultural and social ways to divide us one from another. This, to me, seems like self-defeating craziness. Others will say that it is only the state of nature and will then go on to delineate some "nature red in tooth and claw" ideas about how all life progresses only by antagonism and by setting one being against another. But all of these ideas, whichever side of the notional divides we invent you find yourself on, are just ideas. And ideas are not compulsory. We can swap the ideas we have now for other ones. We can change the way we live now and live other ways. It would be a very foolish person who said there is only one way to live and this is it. 

Today, as part of a series of articles that will build up to the release of INDUSTRIAL SOUNDS FOR THE WORKING CLASS, I want to showcase and somewhat discuss two ways of looking at people, human beings, our species. These I have called "individual" and "community" in an attempt to not use partisan language of any kind. For some the use of partisan terms will be a stumbling block to actually reading what I say, so locked up in various kinds of rhetoric will they be. Political partisanship is a great problem today as many people only ever hear the viewpoints they approve of and feel to be right. There is a general lack of willingness to see that every way of doing things is in some sense a compromise and that other ways are always possible. People get caught up in their own fantasies of personal identity and put this before the actual lives of people with disastrous results. I, however, hope that I am aware enough to recognize the fallibility of all human thinking and the need to have an appropriate humility in all things.

But there is a further point to be made here. Society, that thing which Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s said does not exist, does not operate with equal benefit to all. Structures of power do not favour everyone equally either. There will be winners and losers. And there will be ideology in operation. For some, their ideology will be that there should be winners and losers and this will have consequences for other people. The point I'm trying to make here is that in political, social and cultural contexts we are required to take a stand here and take a stance towards all the other people that are around us. This is what newspaper owners do when they brand unemployed people "scroungers". This is what politicians do when they describe refugees as a "swarm". This is what presidential candidates do when they say they want to build walls along their borders. They are making their personal position in regard to everyone else known.

The two attitudes I want to showcase today, then, are that way of looking at us which regards us as individuals all responsible for ourselves as men and women alone in the world and another way which regards us all as people, members of the same species with far more in common than will ever divide us. For avoidance of doubt and to make clear where I'm coming from I choose the second one. Of course, I do have to choose because in life we all have to choose. And we all do choose, if not in a ballot box then in the regular decisions of our daily lives and in our habitual practice. You cannot be politically neutral. If you refuse to share your beliefs then you act them out every day anyway in every choice that you make. To take part in society is to make choices that affect the lives of others. To go along with a system is to give it the support of your practice.

It was Ayn Rand who said "I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask for another man to live for mine". Rand is a poster girl for a politically right of centre individualism which lauds the individual as the basic unit of life itself. You should rely only on yourself and to rely on others is an abdication of this responsibility. You are nothing more than a lazy burden if you need things from other people. This creed is quite powerful and thorough-going in today's world, not least in political circles. There is also a very common political rhetoric which really springs from this kind of original thought. This is the rhetoric which lambasts those without a job, immigrants, the poor, the sick and generally anyone who is, for reasons of their own making or not, economically unproductive. For this mentality if you cannot look after yourself then there is something wrong with you. You fall into a kind of sub-human category and need to reclaim your dignity by looking after yourself. 

Of course, this ideology has problems. Have you ever noticed how all these private individuals with their Ayn Rand beliefs who run companies are more than happy to take government money to help their business or subsidies to provide this and that service? They don't believe in society, especially when it is giving money to other people, but they will happily take any benefits that come their way and use facilities built with public money. But I thought life was all about looking after yourself and pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps? Not so, it seems, if the money is being put into THEIR pockets! Of course, in business it was always this way. Business, as we now know, and especially in terms of manufacturing things, began when wealthy people needed the mass of common people to move into towns and cities and work in their factories. This social upheaval from about 1750 onwards changed the way of the world. From the beginning, workers were always exploited and had to fight for their rights. 

Now I don't mean to deny it is very true to say that those on each side of the divide see things their own way. In researching my project yesterday, for example, I came across the following meme:

The first thing I noted about this meme is that it uses a certain rhetoric. The bad guys here are "socialists" and the good guys are "capitalists". Those familiar with political argument will be well aware of these terms. This argument is reduced to a discussion about nice houses. I picked this meme out because I am familiar with pretty much the same point being restated in almost the opposite way. There was a famous football manager in England called Brain Clough (manager of my home town team, incidentally) who was also famously a socialist. He once stated that the difference between the two parties this meme addresses was that the capitalists wanted something nice to keep it for themselves and that the socialist was the one who believed that everyone should be able to have nice things equally. Remarkable how the two positions can be swapped around, isn't it? My own view here is that the meme writer has swallowed his own rhetoric a little bit too much. I've never met a "socialist" who thinks no one should be allowed to live in a nice house. (Clough himself had a very nice house.) But I have seen many who do actually live in nice houses and get criticized for doing so! Often this is by very rich individualists who have a confused understanding of what it is their opponents are meant to believe. But it  is also true that I don't know of many "capitalists" who think that everyone should have a nice, big house. Of course, they believe in this theoretically and they sell things like the so-called "American Dream" as a support of the idea that one day they might. But, as has been said, "Its called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it."

Opposed to the individualist view is the community view. This is that view which looks at people all together as the same, members of a common species, having a common dignity and worthy of equal treatment. For people who hold this view a person's worth is not measured in Pounds Sterling, Dollars or Euros. It is measured in a simple human dignity it is believed we all have just by being here. Rather than imagining that any station in life is achieved by you and you alone, this mentality accepts that we are all in some sense related and stand or fall together. Such people would tend to believe that "An injury to one is an injury to all" which is a far cry from the ethics and philosophies of Ayn Rand. Such people might smile to themselves approvingly when hearing the French motto "Liberté, égalité, fraternité" - Liberty, equality, fraternity.

Of course, the main difference between the two views I'm talking about here would be, from my point of view, that the first takes a "devil take the hindmost" view of life whereas the second thinks that since we are all linked together as inhabitants of the same planet then, in some sense, our fates are linked too. Therefore, we should help our neighbour because, in doing so, we are helping ourselves. The individualist seems in some way scared that by helping others he somehow lessens his own position or disadvantages himself. The community person I describe does not. The individualist sits in his home oblivious to the world outside his front door, hoping that it will not invade his peace. The community person recognizes that for the world inside his house to be ok then the world outside it needs to be somewhat ok as well. The individualist thinks about his advantage, the community person everyone's advantage.

You can see where I am going with this and maybe extrapolate in different ways what this might mean. Where you stand changes the game and each position leads to consequences. I write this blog only to point up this basic difference in outlook. Of course, I'd be the first to admit that its much more complicated than this. No doubt people on many political sides are already calling me all names under the sun and thinking that I have misunderstood them. Well, I wasn't trying to understand them. I was putting forward my view. If you have Twitter you will be finding more of my views on this as I tweet under the hashtag #IndustrialSoundsForThe WorkingClass as part of my current creative project.

We live in a world of the extremely rich who live in gated mansions and the extremely poor who live in boxes or under bridges. This did not happen because it is nature's way or because some principle decreed it must be so. Neither is it the case that things must be this way. It is also true that fairness and equality are not principles that operate all by themselves. They only operate by the actions of human beings, human beings who can also choose to act neither fairly or equally. Similarly, what we value - money, principles, wealth, power or people - are also our choices. And choices always have consequences - and never just for us. The last word here goes to Dr Martin Luther King who criticizes individualist thinking:

The project INDUSTRIAL SOUNDS FOR THE WORKING CLASS will be published in January 2016. Further blogs will follow this one in the lead up to its release.

A Change is As Good As A Rest

This week has been a reinvigorating and refreshing one for me in a creative sense. I predicted some weeks ago that my creativity would inevitably break down and that what I had been doing for 9 months would quite organically collapse. And so it has proved to be. A combination of being constitutionally unable to continue repeating myself and the dreaded month of October, in which my world always seems once more to descend into the depths, with the vanishing light and the increase of night, have made my premonition come true.

And so the Berlin School-influenced music has now vanished. This week, in its place, came experiments with noise and sound. In a strange way I'm still locked into the same German influences that I have been following all year though. Listen to the first album by Tangerine Dream from 1969 (Electronic Meditation) or to the first couple of albums by Cluster (who were then called Kluster) or Popol Vuh's first album (Affenstunde) and what you hear is musical experimentations with sound. Nothing more and nothing less. There is no song structure here. Its merely playing with sound until you decide to stop. Fast forward into the 80s, 90s and 00s and people like Coil, Autechre and Aphex Twin are found doing pretty much the same thing but with different tools.

                Kluster (later Cluster) - Dieter Moebius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius

I have this notion in my head, thats been growing for some time now, that a fixation with making a tune is a great deceiver in making music. There is, of course, a mainstream bias towards it. No piece of noise art would get into a popular chart. Even the great names of noise genres were never popular in a mainstream sense. Tangerine Dream only did one album playing with sounds before developing into the makers of evolving electronic music that they came to be with their many TV and film soundtracks to keep them going. Industrial acts like Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire or Test Dept, who similarly wanted to play with sound, are niche bands with artistic or political things to say. They are not mainstream acts. Even the aforementioned Aphex Twin, the hero these days of fanboys everywhere, is not a popular artist in a mainstream sense. Most people would not know who he is. But people do know who any number of artists are who will knock out the lamest of tunes. Its music you can hum. Arcade Fire and Coldplay are popular. IDM artists and old German noise experimenters are not.

Aphex Twin

Autechre

And yet it quickly becomes clear to any musician with any sense of adventure whatsoever that the world is full of sounds both imaginable and unimaginable. And, as I've said over and over again, there are no rules in music. And you cannot "go wrong". "A mistake" only exists if you conceive of the idea that there is something you should have done instead of what you actually did do. But what if you forget the idea of having an antecedent plan for where you want to go and, instead, you just throw things together? What if you made up some arbitrary rules and just followed them? What if pitch and tune became completely irrelevant to the process? What if the only thing that matters in music is not that you can save it and repeat it (my current pet hate) but that you can manipulate it, twist it and mangle it into insensibility right now in this moment which is all that matters? No two performances of music (even when its meant to be the same piece) will ever be the same anyway. So why keep trying to replicate?

None of this is new of course. The musical avantgarde of the 40s, 50s and 60s were already embracing such ideas 60 or even 70 years ago. My favourite of these people is John Cage with his chance operations in which he would arbitrarily follow some rules or ideas he had made up or that the I Ching (an ancient Chinese divination text utilizing cleromancy) had ordained he must follow. This was music at random. Brian Eno is famous for his "oblique strategies" which are his own way of following a random rule or idea and just seeing where it takes you. David Bowie has always utilized random ways of writing lyrics for his songs, either with paper and scissors or in electronic ways. Throbbing Gristle often seemingly had no guide at all other than choosing an instrument and then playing it exactly the way you were not intended to. Cosey Fanni Tutti, the guitar player, would often play the electric guitar sitting down by hitting it with something or bowing it rather than strumming the strings or playing recognizable chords. (She still does this today together with fellow former TG member and her partner, Chris Carter, in their current musical endeavours.) She also had a cornet she couldn't play, not that it mattered. Autechre's increasing uses of software to make music has often resulted in outcomes that were not predictable to the musicians themselves and has given much of their work the flavour of sound abstraction.

                                             Cosey Fanni Tutti and Chris Carter

So why do this? In my own mind its because not doing things "properly", not being able (or wanting) "to play" or just saying "fuck the rules and expectations" is actually a very freeing thing to do. There is no bigger boundary to artistic freedom than being told there is a way that you should  do something or that there is an expectation it needs to have a certain structure, style or expected outcome. I don't think that people who play up to these standards are being particularly artistic nor are they really doing anything other than joining the dots. It is relatively easy to write "a song". Anyone, even if they don't know it, can write a simple repeating pattern of notes. Repeat it for three minutes and you have a song. Easy. But why do it? There are, of course, many who have long and enduring commercial careers based on their ability to bash out the same thing for years. But who said that commerce or getting rich were the goals of musical art? All things must pass, including your incredible wealth and lame, mainstream and very popular music. But what did you stand for?

Let's get to what I've been doing this week. I have this notion that ideas are the currency of artists. It is then for the artist to use whatever skill he or she has to bring the ideas they have to fruition. But the idea is key. My idea this week has been relatively simple: take a number of sounds or pieces of music or noises and just juxtapose them on a sequencer timeline. Do this unconsciously and in no way deliberately (that means often not even knowing what the music or sound or noise is) almost like throwing playing cards on to a table and letting them fall where they may. Then, once you have given each sound a track, play with them. Change their speed, reverse them, chop them up, add effects to some but not others (reverbs, distortion and delays are favourites here). None of this is new. Its all been done before. But its freeing because no one, especially not you, even knows what you will get at the end. Often I didn't even listen to what I had got at the end. I just made sure the sound level was tolerably OK and recorded what was there. Listening back to the album was the first time I heard the whole piece. Its amazing and interesting that often what you get is a strange kind of preternatural beauty as sounds combine and contrast in unexpected ways.

You, of course, may be sitting there thinking this is all noise with no redeeming features and that art is deliberation, a product of an artist using their talents to create something on purpose that conforms to rules. But consider this: no one made the countryside but I bet you find it beautiful to look at. The universe itself is random in the most radical way it could be. And isn't it full of wonder! What I've done this week is the same principle applied to sounds as I juxtaposed things without any real care for what they were or how I did it. And my attitude in making it was to allow the random sounds to reveal their inner beauty in the process of simply placing noises into a relationship with each other. And for that to happen you have to be open to it and not bounded in by notions of the "right" way to do things or what in the end are themselves completely arbitrary notions of right and wrong in any case. So what I did this week was part therapy, a break from the norm, part philosophy, an opening of my mind to possibilities, and part music, a creative playing with sound.

I've made 7 albums of this stuff so far because its relatively quick and easy to do. A couple of hours can easily produce 8 tracks and 30-40 minutes of music. In vinyl days that was a whole album. Of course, there will be a further bias at play here and that is the bias towards the thing that is difficult and takes effort over the thing that that is easy and quick and takes little effort. "It can't be worth much if it was so easy to do" will be the thought of some. And yet many of us humans are the result of a 2 minute fumble in the back of a car. Are we worth nothing either because of the easy circumstances of our creation?

In music and in life it might often be beneficial to think differently - just to see what could be rather than meekly accepting, in the most conservative way possible, what "is".