Pauline Oliveros

Pauline Oliveros sits on stage in the Starr Auditorium at Tate Modern, exuding an air of serene consideration. She briefly looks around, while a charged silence builds up. … [continue reading]

Listening to Noise and Silence / review

The Journal of Sonic Studies, vol. 2, features my review of Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art (Continuum, 2010) by Salomé Voegelin:

I would like to focus my attention on what has been left, in previous reviews of Listening to Noise and Silence, in the margins: the writing voice of Salomé Voegelin. I would like to consider this writing voice as the embodiment of Voegelin’s philosophy of sound – not a separate element, but one ingrained in her modus operandi. By doing so, I would like to support and expand on Voegelin’s claim for a renewed approach to listening, one that necessarily affects the approach to writing: ‘A philosophy of sound art must remain a strategy of listening rather than an instruction to hear, and thus its language itself is under scrutiny’ (Voegelin, xiv). I would like to look at what happens if the activity of writing is considered parallel to the activity of listening, defined by Voegelin as ‘the invention of sound’ – where writing appears as yet another layer in such an invention. … [read more]

Informing Aural Memories. A Diptych

I was invited by or-bits to contribute a text to their current Informal programme. Part 1 is now online, Part 2 will follow later this month.

1. Woman with Chainsaw and Time
Over, she thinks. The sky, slate gray and uniform. Outside, at 7.30am, the man with the chainsaw cutting a tree bears an annoying promise: noise through the day will creep inside the room. The sound of the chainsaw cutting a tree annoys, yet the space cut away from that stubborn, uneven knot of sound is absorbing … [read more]

2. The Next Day
An aural experience past, tangled with the forming and the informing of a memory: what is retained of it in writing? What does writing do to the aural memory?
Today I read a sentence by Paul Klee from 1928: ‘There are some problems to be posed, such as: the construction of the secret’ … [to be continued]

writing, drifting, silencing, choking

Early morning today spent reading The Relationship with Text by Arnold Schönberg, an essay published in Der Blaue Reiter almanac in 1912, advocating the primacy of intuition in musical perception beyond instructions and interpretation. The flow of thoughts and words by Schönberg in these pages is at its most Swedenborgian mixture of rigour and vision. In any point you pin music, he says, it will bleed. However you might want to analyse or dissect it, you will see the same blood. At the time Schönberg was writing against programme music, intended as a faithful, point-by-point correspondence between a prescriptive text and subsequent sounds. In his text he put forward an idea of music as a living entity supported by a singular driving force – hence the blood metaphor. I like to turn the issue upside down and think of the relationship between sound before, and the words that may or may not come after.

So what happens when I write after listening, when I write in a foreign language that I find demanding to articulate clearly, and that often leaves me speechless, helpless? Can I shift the trite question I am often asked, ‘Do you dream in English or in Italian?’ into something a bit more twisted: ‘Do you listen in English or in Italian?’ And then, write.

The fact that I am more willing to write of my listening experiences in English – a language that bears a lot more opacity to my eyes and ears, not being my mother tongue – tempts me to make the opacity between sounds and words even more obvious, without attempting any gentle fade-ins between the two, just considering them as different entities trying to look at each other through a thick fog, half-guessing each other but never clearly. They call for each other but the closest they can get is an unsteady unison, soon to be disrupted. In other words, I’m trying to leave aside the old point, ‘it’s impossible to write about sound’, and to think instead of ‘writing away from sound’. To stop considering writing as derivative of sound, hence constantly frustrated by not being sound, or watered down because it cannot be of the same essence: to consider the writing not as a document, but as a self-standing entity carrying as much presence and possessed by a singular driving force as much as sound does. Like music for Schönberg, if you pin the words they will bleed too.

Words exist in the porous, half-empty space of my listening in a foreign language, and struggle to be anchored to anything definitive or clear: because maybe the only steady anchors belong to another language, to another listening, another thinking – which are gradually drifting away, becoming more and more ambiguous. Can this writing be seen as a silencing – to which extent can these words be soundproofed, half-recalling the inner soundings of references, tradition, history?

After reading Schönberg today I listened to a London morning:

This coming to a foreign place: to be able to say its name correctly, to be at home. Around are plants whose name I do not know, and this broken weather, that I might be listening to with ardent quiet, and void between my listening and my words. See, nothing here is literal. Maybe a snap of thought uncovered something elsewhere: a note. This opacity of words of sounds begins to look like an uneasy special place. Deprived of proper words and of horizon I have no voice here, nor song, but a tongue tied to a thick rope of hemp right in my throat. It chokes me inside the barrel of my every London morning, in sawdust days of tea and tar.
‘Keep the words worn out, listless by this choking, keep the ruptured breathing’.

This sonorous writing of nowhere. (Or: To go back to words and sounds. To forget about Deleuze)

‘I think that if there is any value in hearing writers talk, it will be in hearing what they can witness to and not what they can theorize about’.

Reading these words by Flannery O’Connor on the train back to London from Whitstable after a day at the Off the Page festival, prompted me to gather some thoughts on Simon Reynolds’ ‘intellectual profile’ of David Toop presented as part of the event organised by Sound and Music and The Wire.

For if the slogan ‘We are all David Toop’, skilfully placed by Reynolds at the beginning of his talk, worked well to endear the audience and to warm them into condescending smiles as they tweeted it all over, one issue remains: throughout his presentation Reynolds seemed more inclined to theorising about Toop’s writing than witnessing to it, not quite looking at who we all supposedly are and Toop is – and leaving the writing, and what makes the writing, more or less absent from the scene.

I am always fascinated by how writers speak, by how they read their words aloud; by what types of space they create when they talk – wittingly, or in spite of themselves. The space of Reynold’s words was outlined by an angular delivery that frustrated what he introduced as a comment on ‘flow motion’. Despite its talks of shifting plateaux, the presentation was obstructed by its thwarted attempts to clamp down the ideas behind Toop’s writing, whilst overlooking its presence and spirit. As if you could detach the ‘ideas’ from the actual writing, from what shapes and informs it: other words, music, soundmaking, image-looking, listening. In Reynold’s talk Toop’s writing was replaced by a refrain of Deleuze-Guattari jargon. All the scrupulously arranged references to ‘deterritorialisation’ attempted to scrutinise the subject of the talk as if it was motionless. Suddenly ‘the rhizomitisation of writing’ appeared like a nightmare anticipating some obscure surgical procedure on a subject that eventually was not there – because you can’t dissect what is alive and flees.

Toop’s writing always meant for me the freedom – as a writer – to actually leave aside Deleuze, or any theorist du jour as canonised frameworks of legitimisation, and to explore instead unexpected, incorrect and incidental references. In Toop’s words, to write of music arises out of a search into ‘uncollected archives, those that gather like loose sand in the unofficial corners of culture’ and ‘teeter dangerously on the brink of vanishing’. Not certainly the safety of the Deleuzeian idiom.

So, I would like to witness now to this writing, to the space of Toop’s writing.

***

Every time I enter it, it’s as if I found myself in the Pitt Rivers Museum after a major earthquake – first overwhelmed, then gradually attracted by an array of curious and mysterious objects and signs, whose function is not always clear but that I can spend time with re-arranging. And then: a breadth of vision, multiple pasts crashing into now, lost histories, debris, dust and charms. They all prompt the forming and re-forming of a disjointed self in the manner of ‘ethnographic self-fashioning’, which is inextricably tied – James Clifford showed it – to the process of writing.

This writing: the recurring clusters of splintered loops; the self-corroding prose toward the end of Sinister Resonance, consuming the space of anticipation and hesitation reflected in listening. The animated rhythms against a canvas of stillness. Memories arranged in a rhapsodic manner. This writing moves and can seem to lead nowhere, and what really matters is that we are there – inside – and it still speaks. Read the loosening up and syntactical surrender in Burning Fuse, last year’s landmark article on mellow soul in The Wire: read the locked groove toward the end of the article, reciting ‘I am thinking’ six times, six long and ticking times, until the thinking is un-thought and its timing gives way to a feel, makes a point for an exclusion.

This writing is an instrument of nowhere. An attempt – always forestalled, always reinstated – at reflecting what Jankélévitch called the charm of music. It resists paraphrasing. It points at freedom on the edge of a line. It cannot be canonised because it exists in metamorphosis. Toop’s ‘impure’ mode of writing mixes personal reverie, biography, accounts, descriptions, fragments and quotes, meanderings. It is born out of the erratic density of notebooks constructed around the sensing of a living person. It speaks a hybrid language, attuned to heteroglossia. It does not explain, judge, claim to give value, impose interpretation. A lot is hidden: losses, voids against which the words are even more present as they hover on the disintegrating boundary of a self, that’s constructed and destructed polyphonically. The gathering of these elements is fleeting and non-scientific and unpredictable. This writing exudes no uplifting or secure strategy: it wants to be contaminated, it listens closely, in all the details, to the off-track moments of singular stories. This writing is not arranged according to the linear structures of a theorist, but according to the singular cadenzas of a musician. Like Toop says, this writing is gathered from vanishing sources, ‘the small print of record sleeves; oral history picked up (like a sexually transmitted disease) in a motel or bar; the obsessive-compulsive lists of fanatics; the outgrowth of analysis, discourse, accumulating factoids, gossip and rumour that clusters around their core activity, the workings of sound and listening that we call music’. It is precarious, frayed because alive. It leaves me longing to be mesmerised to listen, it makes me want to write.

This writing shows that to write is arbitrary, but demands to construct the arbitrariness with rigour: a rigour true to one’s own life. If it has to do with understanding, it does so literally by standing under the layered substance of experience – which is not authority, but attention. It carries the responsibility of making a shape.

This writing hallucinates sounds into words.

‘We listen to feelings; we listen to music. Both torture us with their resistance to language’. This writing is tainted and fickle, just like any listening moment. It is not a crystal-clear system of analysis. It does not call for deciphering, it has no key or code. It wants to be read; it exists on its own and needs no other justification than its very existence. It wants you to say, ‘I want to be here’, an act of volition that constructs its own world and place: a leap of faith.

So in this writing I like to read the night and shades before this leap of faith, generating precarious and alluring constructions. As a reader, I like to believe that in those words lies the nocturnal agony of doubt and of beginning, from which the words – and I with them – can’t be healed. Although drenched in music, art, poetry, this writing has visited many places and known people who stray from what’s commonly regarded as ‘art’.

This writing unveils and covers sounds at once. In the spaces in-between I have encountered from time to time: distant percussions, ruffles, soft voices, a sigh; the afterimage of a painting recalled; ecstatic rhythms; stories told, reinvented and interconnected; dust and ashes of songs; the unbearable lashing of a silence in a room, in a place that – I knew this from the start – is many-whered.

In this volatile space it is a solace to think, like Seneca once said, that ‘to be everywhere is to be nowhere’. That’s all there is, and where all we are: in this sonorous writing of nowhere, and it’s plenty.

Reading

David Toop, Sinister Resonance, New York and London: Continuum, 2010

David Toop, ‘Burning Fuse’, The Wire. Adventures in Modern Music, n. 327, May 2011, pp. 30-35

Flannery O’Connor, ‘Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction’, in Mystery and Manners, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969, p. 36

James Clifford, ‘On Ethnographic Self-Fashioning’, in The Predicament of Culture, Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1988, pp. 92-113

Vladimir Jankélévitch, Music and the Ineffable, trans. Carolyn Abbate, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003 [1961]

Pasolini in En abîme

Pier Paolo Pasolini in En abîme is a lyrical presence.

I wasn’t interested in dissecting his oeuvre but in showing how some very specific accents of it modulate my landscape. He is never at the centre of discussion – rather, he is at the edges of a series of scenarios, as a fading-out frame around Gramsci, the Protestant Cemetery, via Appia, Giovanna Marini, Pontormo. Out of this frame his voice appears, either in absentia – disembodied in La ricotta, evoked in Giovanna Marini’s Lament for the Death of Pasolini – or by means of verses, of poems, of rhymes taken from The Ashes of Gramsci and from Poetry in the Shape of a Rose.

 

writing sound, part 6 (the end)

[...]

Listening and writing are bound to remain strangers to each other, and writing sound inhabits the space of this otherness. There is no prescriptive way of being in such a space because it is ultimately the space of memory, personal and constructed in the present.

I think of writing sound as the space of an absence, strictly tied to the act of remembering: and how does memory take shape? To remember means to construct an impression of a lost presence; moreover, often memory has to do with the desire of a memory, thus questioning any claim for an origin that prescribes a one-sided faithfulness to it. Think for example of that part in Proust’s Recherche when the narrator recalls his first meeting with Gilberte, and says: ‘If her eyes hadn’t been so dark, I would have not loved in her, as I did, especially her blue eyes 12’. Here the presumed authenticity of Gilberte’s black eyes fades in the authenticity of the narrator’s vision of blue eyes, and both merge in a memory that is written and constructed through the experience of a place: the hiss of the wind, the hues and smells of the pink hawthorns, all contributing to the construction of the recollection.

Each memory, hence each memory of a sound, is mediated, filtered, deferred – and yet, present every time it is written. Sounds cannot be separated from a sense of place, and writing sound in turn is not concerned with abstractions only manifested to the ears, detached and purely aural: writing embraces sound as it calls for the participation of deepest perceptions, desires and further recollections, and possesses us to the point when we no longer know what we heard and what we think we’d heard. Ultimately, what we know is what we write.

Sounds as sounds will stay as such. To write sound has to do with our not being in sounds; our memories of them speak of the places where we experience them in time. What we exchange as humans are our reports mixed with our longing, our words and the words of others: stories of stories, constructions of constructions.

The landscape of writing sound appears like a mise en abîme with blurred margins, where the frame of each new scene fades into the next and is not clearly defined: where memories and words from the past are renewed into the now. As I write sound, what I outline cannot be but a layered construction of all the thoughts and words and images that have been with me through the years within the landscapes of my listening, and that load my every return. There is no claim for authenticity, it doesn’t matter what is real and what is fake in the texture woven in such a hybrid operation. Rather than interrogating the provenance and aim of the resulting text I’d lose myself in its patterns of recalled, reinvented and revisited scenarios, in words. What matters is what is here / what I hear today, when I construct my writing sound as a mise en abîme of eroding and revived experiences, anticipations, recollections.

To conclude, I go back to Calvino’s lonely king. Despite of the illusion of dialogic space encountered in his duet, at the end he wakes up in a cave underground. Once more alone, once more with his buzz in his head, once more uncertain of his status and place. The circularity of reaching out, through words, and yet being entrenched in the uniqueness of each listening moment, is the space of writing sound. It is prompted by a question: ‘Where am I?’. It enquires about a place, and it constructs over and over the landscape in which I locate myself, or lose myself – personally, culturally – every time I set out to write after listening. It opens incremental horizons through the singularities of each telling. It doesn’t have to do with prescriptive ways, all-encompassing categories or defining reasons, but with the presence of an experience and of a place, in the intermittences, the raptures and the falls of every other today.

 

---

12 Proust, Marcel. (1985). Dalla parte di Swann. Milan: Biblioteca Universale Rizzoli, p.231. Translation from Italian is mine.

writing sound, part 5

[...]

So the question here seems to be: how do I occupy the space between listening and writing? I think of reference in Writing Sound as I read Chapter Two in Pandora’s Hope by Bruno Latour, entitled Circulating Reference 7: the French sociologist describes the procedures carried out by soil science experts and geographers to translate soil samples from a forest into a map of a forest, and compares such procedures to the use of reference: to ‘pack the world into words’ 8, he says. In the same chapter Latour shows how ‘in losing the forest we win knowledge of it’ 9. I would like to draw a parallel between the transition from forest to map, and the transition from listening to writing, with particular regards to the function of reference: that is, packing into words the world of listening, while being removed from it. 

In losing a sound we gain knowledge of it: in words.

In Latin the verb ‘referre’ means ‘to bring back’, and this bringing back occurs across layers of transformations. Latour further clarifies such process of transformation in a recent article 10, looking at how the correspondence between territory and map does not occur as an abstraction, but in practice and through reference. He writes of the navigator, who works out a route not based on some abstract correspondence between map and territory, but on the detection of cues on site and in real time between one steppingstone and the next. Each detection is not a ‘deadly jump’ but a ‘deambulation’: a walk through and about a number of steppingstones 11. The gap between two steps is packed with reference to layers of experience and observations; with laboured operations, detours or even falls and dead ends. Likewise when I write sound I navigate, I walk around the changing landscape of a listening experience as it is recalled in words, through reference to layers of knowledge, moments of being, of forgetting and of undoing. Writing Sound advocates variety and it opens up to multiplicity of outcomes. It presents and propagates one’s history. It is shaped across one’s personal experiences, collections and recollections of words and sounds and places.

To stop walking around them means they will no longer be audible.

[...]

---

7 Latour, Bruno. (1999). Circulating Reference. In: Pandora’s Hope. Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, pp. 24-79.

8 Ibid.

9 Ibid.

10 Latour, Bruno, November, Valerie and Camacho-Hübner, Eduardo. (2010). Entering a Risky Territory: Space in the Age of Digital Navigation. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 28, pp. 581-599.

11 Latour calls the outcome of this process ‘the miracle of reference’.

writing sound, part 4

[...]

I think of Writing Sound as I read A King Listens 4 by Italo Calvino, a short story published posthumously in 1986 as part of an unfinished collection dedicated to the five senses. It is the story of a king who lives alone in a constant state of surveillance, capturing every acoustic signal in his palace as a sign of a plot against himself and his status. By writing of listening as an isolated act, Calvino points right at the heart of the paradox of writing sound. I would like to look more closely at the very distinctive voice in this story.

Throughout his text Calvino uses the second person, a powerful singular ‘you’, and by doing so the reader is placed constantly on the edge: that ‘you’ is highly ambiguous and one is never sure if it’s the writer addressing the king who listens, the king’s mind addressing the listening king, the writer addressing the reader-as-king as he or she listens, Calvino using his text as a mirror to reflect his words unto us, the readers.

Alone, the king listening to the silence around him and in turn, the reader reading and the writer writing the story and its threatening silence, become the figure of a solipsistic exercise verging into the buzz of paranoia. The king’s palace is but an ear. He sits lonely on top of his throne. Around, silence swarms with voices as he listens to ‘time as it goes by’ and its ‘sonorous numbers’ 5. Inside, silence is not the absence of signal, but the absence of a space articulated outside of the experience of listening as such. In one of his moments of doubt the king/narrator wonders, ‘Is there a story that links one noise to another?’ 6. Listening then needs to be articulated, attached to something outside of itself, otherwise it falls into a status of isolation and self-referentiality. The ‘you singular’ in Calvino’s story signifies the hesitancy of the narrator between the elusiveness of the aural dimension as such, and the necessity to extend it across words.

At last the king goes out of his palace and his ear is caught by a melody. He hears a woman singing and he no longer pays attention to the plotting of his lonely mind. He reaches out and sings a duet with her: his experience of listening now takes place in an articulated, rounded dimension. The sense of precariousness, the hovering site of the listener represented by the lonely king and by that ambiguous ‘you’, slippery and placeless, is resolved by Calvino by shaping the listening experience of a ‘singular you’ in a story that reaches out to many ‘I’s, ‘she’s and ‘he’s.

But this is not to say that they reply.

[...]

---

4 Calvino, Italo. (1986). Un re in ascolto. In: Calvino, Italo. Sotto il sole giaguaro. Milan: Garzanti, pp.51-77. Translation from Italian is mine.
The Italian philosopher Adriana Cavarero wrote a detailed analysis of this story with regards to the relational nature of what she calls ‘the vocalic’; that is, the sounding quality of a voice before its semantic connotations. Cavarero, Adriana. (2005). For More Than One Voice. Toward A Philosophy Of Vocal Expression. Translated from Italian by Paul A. Kottman. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

5 Calvino, Italo. (1986). Op. Cit.

6 Ibid.

writing sound, part 3

[...]

I think of Writing Sound as I read Philosophy of Landscape 3, a text published by Georg Simmel in 1913. He shows how landscape perceived as a unity is in fact the result of an activity of the human gaze – of the artistic gaze in particular – that fills in a number of discreet signals and constructs a landscape, every time anew. Simmel uses the German word ‘Stimmung’ meaning ‘atmosphere’, ‘mood’, and ‘tuning’. For him, mood, atmosphere and tuning do not portray a landscape as a whole still entity but make it over and over, across fluctuations and nuances that register how we situate ourselves in it: a construction that does not have to do with permanence, but exists and changes culturally and historically.
I would like to expand this notion of ‘Stimmung’ from looking to writing, as an activity shaped by the impermanence of sounds and by how we tune in them. I would then think of writing sound as a landscape insisted upon and modified by personal instances of listening, and of remembering listening; a collection and a recollection of places, mixed with invention but true to the score drawn by each singular experience.

I think of writing sound as the trace of the experience that makes it.

It conveys the sense of shaping, step by step along the journey of the listening and the writing ‘I’, words into places at once familiar and strange.

[...]

---

3 Simmel, Georg. (2007). The Philosophy of Landscape. Translated from German by Josef Bleicher. Theory, Culture & Society. [online]. First published in 1913. http://tcs.sagepub.com/content/24/7-8/20.citation  (accessed 24 May 2011).