Composed Silence: Microsound and the Quiet Shock of Listening

Composed Silence: Microsound and the Quiet Shock of ListeningAuthor(s): Thomas PhillipsSource: Perspectives of New Music, Vol. 44, No. 2 (Summer, 2006), pp. 232-248Published by: Perspectives of New MusicStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25164635 .

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Composed Silence: MlCROSOUND AND THE

Quiet Shock of Listening

L__7fa 1

Thomas Phillips

I

would like to begin this paper on composed "silence," in contradis tinction to the traditional decorum of scholarly discourse, with the first

person singular pronoun. It is widely acknowledged in contemporary aca

demia that the authorial "I" is implicated in its discursive practices, not to

mention its inevitable brush with what Julia Kristeva calls intertextuality. The same can be said of the composer in terms of the particular subject position and historical context through which his or her music is inevit

ably filtered. Extending this argument a bit further, it is not the "I" of the artist alone whose subjectivity, whose dimensions of perception and capac ities for creativity and personal development are at stake. The reader, viewer and listener are likewise implicated in an experience, or, one might say (as I will argue in relation to the genre of microsound), a practice of textual consumption. The underlying idea behind such practice is, of



Composed Silence 233

course, that it may be active rather than passive, an activity that is doubt less prompted by some "texts" to a greater extent than it is by others.

In terms of music, those compositions that are organized according to an aesthetic of relative silence are particularly operative in such a manner as to leave (aural) space in which the "I" of the listener may confront himself or herself as a listener. In other words, microsound, by virtue of its sparsity of sound, amongst other qualities, elicits a unique subjectivity (in the context of general music appreciation) and is thus as much about the perceiving self as it is about sound and sound design. Among the authors whose works can help us to understand various angles of what it

might mean to compose and to listen to microsound are Walter

Benjamin, composer and theorist Kim Cascone, and a number of other writers who focus on both the politics and the aesthetic(s) of the genre. Additionally, I shall discuss an example of microsound that is representa tive of the specific qualities of the music that interest me, namely, Richard Chartier's homage to Morton Feldman, "How Things Change."

As is commonly recognized by scholars of art and new technologies, Benjamin is a useful starting point for such exploration in so far as many of his ideas paved the way, at least theoretically, for the centrality (and acceptance) of technologically infused art. Concerning sound, he offers the following advice:

In your working conditions avoid everyday mediocrity. Semirelax

ation, to a background of insipid sounds, is degrading. On the other

hand, accompaniment by an etude or a cacophony of voices can

become as significant for work as the perceptible silence of night. If the latter sharpens the inner ear, the former acts as a touchstone for

a diction ample enough to bury even the most wayward sounds

(Benjamin 1986b, 80).

This passage, taken from a sub-section of Benjamin's "One-Way Street"

entitled "The Writer's Technique in Thirteen Theses," is at once charac

teristically ambiguous and pragmatic. Its terminology remains unex

plained, thus allowing for contradiction to arise between seemingly kindred phenomena, "a cacophony of voices" and "wayward sounds." And yet, Benjamin is clearly pursuing a didactic line in an attempt to

establish the ideal working environment for the serious writer. A crucial element of this environment, Benjamin suggests, is music, or rather, sound. Gershom Scholem has testified to Benjamin's ongoing battle with unwanted noise that disturbed his work in numerous residences, lending weight to Thesis Three's argument for the importance of auditory com

patibility with intellectual labor (25). Unfortunately, however, we are



234 Perspectives of New Music

given no further explanation of what constitutes "insipid sounds" or how these might differ from "an etude [ironically, perhaps, a mere exercise in

technique] or a cacophony of voices," all of which could be considered

"wayward" sound in contradistinction to "the perceptible silence of

night by a writer in the midst of his or her work." On the other hand, if viewed within the context of the early twentieth

century avant-garde, specifically the musical avant-garde, the passage reveals Benjamin's inclination, in contrast to earlier, pre-industrial gener ations, to accept the validity of a larger palette of sound as music, or, at

the very minimum, as suitable auditory accompaniment to the task of

writing. The well-known Futurist manifesto of 1913 by Luigi Russolo, The Art of Noise, for example, which heralds the introduction of industry inspired "noise-sound" into the traditional concert hall, would most

likely have been familiar to Benjamin through his contact with experi mental art movements of his own time. From this passage alone, then, we are able to catch a glimpse of how Benjamin's notions of art and the

technologies that serve to generate and inspire art might affect the cre

ation and perception of music as an increasingly amorphous component of daily life.

Russolo's Futurist project was essentially reactionary. With instruments of an original design, it was his intention to "excite our sensibility" (5) in

opposition to the "boredom stemming from [the] familiarity" (7) of tra ditional symphonies. He wished to "enrich men with a voluptuousness they did not suspect" (10) from the incidental noise of modern industrial life. The obvious irony of finding "voluptuousness" in mechanical or oth erwise neglected sound could not have been lost on him. At the begin ning of the twenty-first century, however, such irony is relatively, though not completely passe. In the age of computers and sampling devices, we have grown accustomed to the importation of previously foreign sounds into the repertoire of standard musical vocabulary1

This development reached a new level in the late nineties with the advent of glitch music, a genre that is almost entirely dependent upon computer technology in so far as it employs the conventionally unwanted sounds of the computer, its hums and pops, the crackles that erupt when the machine is pushed beyond its limit, as primary source material. A

sub-genre to arise out of glitch, microsound actually redirects Russolo's noise imperative to precipitate a return to silence in the postmodern world. In so doing, it initiates a complication of traditional concepts of both music and performance and thus calls into question the auratic con tent of what Benjamin may very well have referred to as "insipid" music.




The Birth of a Genre

One could argue that the entrance of John Cage's 4'33" (1952), a piece consisting of a musician sitting still at a piano without touching the keys for four minutes and thirty-three seconds, into the canon of twentieth

century experimental music set the boundary for minimalist explorations as far as the audio medium is concerned. More importantly, however, it constituted both the end and the beginning of music, by which I mean

that conventional (I use this word in the broadest sense possible) struc tures and timbres had become just that, the hackneyed tropes of a popu lar or even "experimental" aesthetic; silence being the inevitable (and

perhaps primal) conclusion. On the other hand, recent technology has made it possible to compose out of that silence (as did Cage, to some

extent, in later compositions), to retain the immediacy of quietude whilst

allowing sound to emerge as a compositional frame. Of course, one may ask the question as to how a minimalist aesthetic is to evolve after com

plete silence has been legitimated as a composition. The answer lies in the fact that Cage's piece serves a primarily performative function. Even as a

recording that is packaged and released (there are several recorded ver

sions), 4'33" is delineated by indeterminacy, the indeterminate sounds that emanate from the audience, whatever form this takes, or the general (in fact, all-encompassing) ambience of the performing space. The com

position is therefore not entirely bereft of noise; so the boundary of

silence that it implies is an illusion, a conscious illusion on the part of

Cage, one would suspect, signifying the pervasiveness, and musicality, of ambient "field" sound, an obvious reservoir of material for microsound

composers in addition to purely digital sources.

Microsound has clearly developed out of a Cagean aesthetic and, in some cases, philosophy. Its roots in Russolo's Futurism are apparent as

well, dependent as it is upon the appropriation of both technological advances and the auditory manifestations of new technology. As com

poser and theorist Kim Cascone states,

[t]he "post-digital" aesthetic was developed in part as a result of the

immersive experience of working in environments suffused with

digital technology: computer fans whirring, laser printers churning out documents, the sonification of user-interfaces, and the muffled noise of hard drives. But more specifically, it is from the "failure" of

digital technology that this new work has emerged: glitches, bugs, application errors, system crashes, clipping, aliasing, distortion,

quantization noise, and even the noise floor of computer sound




cards are the raw material composers seek to incorporate into their music (2000, 12-3).

I will return to Cascone's notion of "digital failure" later. For now, how

ever, it is important to emphasize this historical development both in terms of microsound's reliance upon technology and the minimalist ten

dency towards a nearly inaudible abstraction. It is this return to silence, to the relatively "naturalistic" ambience of pre-industrialization that dis

tinguishes microsound from kindred genres, from the comparatively louder "noise" associated with the over-arching category of glitch, from the rhythmic, techno-inspired minimalism of "clicks and cuts," and that

ultimately links it to the philosophical and social implications of 4'33". While it is impossible to determine the intentions of a given composer (though some, such as Cascone, are known for their theorization), a

work that evolves out of sharp sine-wave tones, digital bleeps and blips, spare field recordings that have been processed beyond recognition, or

nearly inaudible sub-bass rumblings, all at very low volume levels, auto

matically generates inquiry into its status as music and the validity of its

performance in a public sphere. Such performances are generally presented in a format that is akin to

the minimalist musical aesthetic?spare stage set-ups with few or no

visual accoutrements (with the exception of some performers who

employ visuals, usually quite abstract, to accentuate the sound). A typical

stage will include a table behind which the performer sits or stands while

staring into the neon blue of a laptop screen, perhaps making the occa sional gesture of a knob turn or the raising of a fader on some external device (not too far removed from the interpreter of Cage's 4'33'*). Light ing tends to be dim, if not entirely absent, aside from that which illumi nates the face behind the screen. The choice of venue for microsound

performance is of increasing concern. Performers soon realized that the

average rock club, with its lack of chairs, its bar sounds and its conven tional function as a site of sociality, was detrimental to the audience's

ability to focus on the music. Alternative venues have been found in art

galleries or in private lofts whose relative formality precludes the kinds of intrusions characteristic of a standard club. The performance of

microsound, then, is conceptually and aesthetically as far as one can get from more traditional musical performance (which necessarily produces an aura of spectacle) without simply doing away with the performer subject altogether.




Noise as Failure, Noise as Art

In reference to Stan Link's "The Work of Art in the Mechanical Aging of Art: Listening to Noise," Brady Cranfield claims that "the history of recorded sound is also the history of the reduction of noise" (2002, 44). By this he means that the modus operandi of recording has always involved an effort to capture only the intended sound, be it a piano sonata or a

president's speech. The hiss or fuzz that is inevitably produced in a

recording is simply unwanted sonic material that obscures the full realiza tion of the initial target. The same may be said of microsound, though the

genre marks a transition in recording history in that it uses such unwanted sound as primary material.2 To the extent that the sound is unwanted and exists in even the most proficient recording at some level, it signifies fail ure not unlike the auditory failure that results from computer malfunc tion. When Kim Cascone speaks of "concepts such as 'detritus,' 'by product,' and 'background'" (2000,13) that make up the sonic palette of

microsound, then, one is reminded of Benjamin's validation of Dadaist art in his "The Author as Producer" essay: "the tiniest authentic fragment of

daily life says more than a painting" (1986a, 229). Indeed, the traditional

conception of noise consigns it to the category of refuse, to failure, and

yet it is "authentic" in its inevitability and thus, for the Dadaist and microsound composer alike, worthy of artistic foregrounding.

The subject of Cranfield's article, German composer Markus Popp, otherwise known as Oval, is particularly relevant to a consideration of the nexus of noise, failure and artistic production. As an innovator of glitch music, Oval began working with the actual material of the CD itself in the

early 1990s, transforming its recorded surface by defacing it to affect a

skipping aesthetic that mimicked the skipping that occurs on a malfunc

tioning CD player (Cascone 2000,13). His project is ongoing and is rem iniscent of earlier innovations in turntablism whereby the composer

manipulates the phonograph as an instrument in and of itself; the differ ence being that the latter is conceived as originary sound creation, while Oval is appropriating the sound of failure as his starting point. Cranfield

explains that "by using the sound of skipping CDs, something prosaically and familiarly unwanted, Oval's work self-consciously explores the socially mediated nature of noise and the outward indifference of technology" (45). There is in Oval's work, then, as in the glitch genre as a whole, including microsound, a determination to confront and manipulate that

which escapes auditory perception through socially-contrived negation. The same may be said of fellow German sound and installation artist,

Carsten Nicolai, who works under the name of Noto and Alva Noto. While not engaging in the manipulation of tactile material that results in




the "unwanted" noise characteristic of an Oval CD, Nicolai has nonethe less carved his own niche with the orchestration of sharp, minimal clicks and tones into the sparse rhythms that would otherwise be comprised of

softer, and therefore more socially acceptable, timbres. Martin Pesch affirms the affiliation between the two pioneers: "[j]ust as the music by Oval is based on the production errors on CDs . . . Nicolai's music relies on frequencies and modulates them. ... By advancing this process, he makes the listener aware of the non-perceptibility of the remaining spec trum of frequencies" (91). In both cases, music is constructed out of pre

viously neglected auditory sources and thus makes such noise apparent to

the listener in a different way; the noise is defamiliarized, to use Viktor

Shklovsky's term, so as to grant it meaning within a new context.

The listener to whom Pesch refers here, as I intend to demonstrate, is of central concern?certainly to Benjamin, who was interested in the film and photography audience that would be (ideally) informed by the polit icized, non-auratic art forms?but also to the theorists of microsound.

Benjamin intended to cultivate listeners who, rather than concentrating and being absorbed by art, would confront the work in a state of "distrac tion" and absorb it into their modus vivendi (1969, 239). To provoke such listening, Benjamin argues, is the task, and perhaps the fate, of tech

nology. Microsound fulfills the demands of this task by virtue of its theo retical and aesthetic eschewing of itself as the medium that is necessarily replaced by an inherent identification with its primary tool, the laptop and various software programs, for communication.3 As Cranfield puts it in relation to Oval, "by making the consequences of digital technology obvious, Oval's work . . . draws attention to its own constructed form,

ideally returning listeners to a human level of engagement, albeit amidst the ruins of digitized sound?a social truth hidden in the most compli cated and beleaguered technology" (46). In other words, in lieu of a

purely self-reflexive "aura," microsound enlists the listener's attention with the clarity of its ruination and appropriation of conventional sound to the point that social truth (what he earlier refers to as the "socially

mediated nature of noise") is revealed in the process of listening. Cranfield's statement may be further clarified in light of Benjamin's

own claim about the fate of concert music in the wake of current tech

nology. He asserts that "the task . . . [consists] of an Umfunktionierung [functional transition] of the form of the concert that [has] to fulfill two conditions: to eliminate the antithesis firstly between the performers and listeners and secondly between technique and content" (1986a, 231). Clearly, both of these conditions are met in the case of microsound, probably beyond what even Benjamin could have imagined. For each of the dichotomies becomes one?the technology of microsound is its con




tent, and vice versa. Likewise, the listener who, to paraphrase Cascone, is

positioned within the space of the music so as to participate in the pro duction of meaning (2001, 2) becomes a performer, a surrogate for the

relatively docile body that opens this space with the gentle clicking of a mouse in the dark.

Before going any further, I will take a moment to clarify the immediate links between Benjamin's theories of art and technology and current

practices of microsound. To begin with, microsound lacks "aura" in so far as it is obviously reproducible in the form of CDs and thus, like a pho tograph or a film, involves no original product. It also provokes "distrac tion" on the part of the listener in its use of background sound or sonic detritus that compels the listener to renegotiate his or her relationship with traditionally unwanted noise. And finally, by diminishing the ele ment of spectacle that is common to conventional music performance, microsound emphasizes a reciprocal relation between performer and lis tener wherein the latter's experience of listening may be generative of

meaning.4 For Benjamin, such reciprocity, which is inextricably tied to the conflation of art and technology (as in microsound), is necessarily politicized. The extent to which microsound succeeds or fails in realizing a political ideal of Benjamin's project, in the form of what I have termed a unique subjectivity (a subjectivity that is necessarily based in the social

by virtue of its investment in a shared art form) will occupy the remain der of this analysis.

The Politics of Microsound

There is, of course, a dilemma that arises from speaking of generalized notions of an artistic medium when it (as both art object and practice) is more or less accessible to a mass audience. As numerous examples dem

onstrate, such art can be utilized with various intentions. One need only compare the incriminating video footage of Rodney King being beaten in

1991, an example par excellence of auteur documentary filmmaking, to

any number of vacuous Hollywood productions of the same year; or the

illuminating photographs by Eugene Atget to advertising images that

poster the expansive landscape of Western culture; or finally, microsound, to the increasingly thoughtless, homogenized expressions of "glitch" and E.A. in much contemporary computer-based music. So the arts are sub

ject to commodification and crudity as much as they are the province of more noble instincts and inspiration. Such is the paradox, it would seem, of "art for the people." Benjamin addresses this concern, albeit under

comparatively dire historical circumstances, when he warns of the fascistic




appropriation of art. He states that "[t]he logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life. The violation of the masses,

whom Fascism, with its Fuhrer cult, forces to their knees, has its counter

part in the violation of an apparatus which is pressed into the production of ritual values" (1969, 241). This concept of ritual refers to "the loca tion of its [the art object's] original use value" (224). Though there is no

original film or photograph or compact disk due to the capacity of repro duction, the specific technologies that make them possible are vulnerable to the "violation" of propagandizing forces.

To combat fascistic appropriation, Benjamin calls for a politicized art that is political in so far as it is the product of technology. "Technical

progress," he asserts, "is for the author as producer the foundation for his

political progress" (1986a, 230). Political art, then, must reach the public with its technologically-inspired revelation of the "unwanted" and do so

in a way that does not simply cater to the desire for the auratic contempla tion (of the remote, unique object) or superficial entertainment. It must

seek to transform the public. Ironically, the tendency in some microsound

theory is to do just that, though I would contend that its motivation is less political and more aesthetic?and ultimately, more individualized.

In his "Laptop Music - Counterfeiting Aura in the Age of Infinite

Reproduction," Cascone explains the problem of "recycling signifiers" (2002, 58) in relation to the laptop as a music tool. As microsound has

developed out of the spectacle-laden subculture of dance music, as well as

other genres that I have already mentioned, it has been to some degree dependent upon the visually-oriented signifiers or codes of that sub

culture?flashing light, the dancing body/self in the club environment. Hence the more recent relocation of microsound to less flamboyant ven ues. And yet, the signification of the laptop is confused by its increasingly apparent use in mainstream pop, in the work of Bjork, for example. Cascone concludes: "In order for the signifier of the laptop to stabilize there needs to be a recuperation of codes that move away from the use of

spectacle, that establish aura, and show the audience how to differentiate

'representation by the machine' from 'repetition of the machine'" (my italics, ibid.). Essentially, he is calling for a "recuperation" of the laptop's original signification (after glitch music appropriated it from the machine's initial bourgeois office use), its original aura. So here, too, we find a defense against "fascistic" appropriation (or pop-culture ideology, not all of which is fascistic, obviously) and yet it is a defense based upon a reinvestment in aura. The same may be said of Graham Miller's "The Real Deal: Toward an Aesthetic of Authentic Live Electronic Dance Music." As he charts the historical cycle of performed vs. recorded music and the seemingly unending search in each for a privileged signification,




Miller is ultimately intent upon establishing authenticity, aura, in the domain of performed electronic DJ music. This, in opposition to any

variety of appropriation that circumvents the primary tool of the turn

table. Though he is concerned with a different genre, the aesthetic

imperative is the same as Cascone's: return the aura to its original site.

Other writers, however, take a more rigidly Benjaminian stance. In ref erence to the work of Carsten Nicolai, Pesch notes "the intention to ren

der formless matter malleable and to consider the resistance this material

has to becoming a defined form" (90), in contrast to the definitive, one

might even say ritualistic ideals of Cascone and Miller. He goes on to

consider the CD packaging of Nicolai's record label, Raster-Noton, and its characteristically minimal aesthetic that abandons, in certain of its

series, extensive text and imagery, making the disks virtually indistin

guishable from one another. "The presentation . . .

negates the notion of

high-profile representation of the individuality of the artists involved"

(93) and, it is clear, of the CD itself. And yet Pesch is interpreting the role of Nicolai's products rather than his performance. It is the latter, I

believe, that generates the peculiar paradox found with the other theo rists. For in performance, regardless of genre, it is not only the legitimacy of the genre itself that is at stake, but the performing subject whose iden

tity is more or less invested in the genre as well. Hence my contention that some theory seeks not the political transformation of the audience for the audience's sake but, rather, the re-negotiation of the listener's investment in the aura of the performer himself or herself. This re

negotiation finally results in the education of the audience in the con

sumption of auratic art.

There are a number of aspects of microsound performance that compli cate its status as non-auratic art and thus substantiate the performer's claim to authenticity and ritualistic "tradition." For example, the fact that the performer is alit by the glow of the computer screen puts him or her in the spotlight, so to speak. Furthermore, because the performance often takes place in a gallery setting, it may be related to other art objects on

pedestals, hanging on walls, psychologically "distanced" from the viewer.

Ultimately, however, it is the music that takes center stage, of which, in

the case of microsound, there really is no center. The still body aglow in

light offers no sustained spectacle and compels the listener to look else

where or, more likely, to look nowhere, to close his or her eyes. In such a

performance, the object is the music in and of itself and it pervades the

space of the venue so as to be at once nowhere and everywhere. As I state

above, microsound brings the performer and the listener into the same

sphere of performativity in so far as the music is (or can be) about listen

ing alone, stripped of spectacle and the compulsion to animate bodies in




ritualistic movement. And it is in the centrality of Ustening, in the gallery or in the home, that we may locate what I perceive to be the variety of

"politics" specific to an attentive experience of microsound.

The Aura of Silence

John Cage states in an interview that "it used to be thought that the function of the artist was to express himself and therefore he had to set

up particular relationships [between sounds]. I think that this whole

question of art is a question of changing our minds and that the function of the artist is not self-expression but rather self-alteration, and that the

thing being altered is not his hands or his eyes but rather his mind"

(quoted, Nyman 1993, 210). Cage is discussing the transitions that are

indicative of twentieth-century experimental music. First, he notes the traditional mode of composition entailing specific forms of orchestration that dictate the boundaries of notational relationships. This mode gave

way to a more indeterminate method of composition in Cage's work in which the composer is more of a participant in a process than the abso lute "hero-artist" of modernism. By extension, the self-expression of the latter segued into the new composer's self-exploration that evolved from the interplay of conscious choice and chance methodologies in Cagean composition.5 What is most crucial in this passage in relation to the pos

sible political dimension of microsound is the focus on transformation or

"alteration." While it may be argued that this notion of self-alteration

merely reinforces the autonomy of the composer, signaling a return to

Romanticism, I would like to suggest that in the case of microsound (and certainly in Cage's 4'33"), the listener as well as the composer is subject to change. Furthermore, it is the silence of microsound that is the agent of this change, a transformation that is illuminated in light of Benjamin's notion of "presence of mind" in the utilization of art.

In "The Work of Art" essay, Benjamin maintains that film is akin to Dadaist art in that it confronts the viewer with shocks (the constant movement from frame to frame) that parallel those encountered in mod

ern, particularly urban life. In Dadaism, these shocks take the form of "waste products" being presented as art, thereby precluding the "con

templative immersion" that may occur in the viewing of traditional art

(1969, 236-7). Both phenomena, Benjamin claims, are effective in so far as "an unconsciously penetrated space is substituted for a space con

sciously explored by man" (ibid.) on the part of the viewer, the uncon scious being privileged as a kind of storehouse for what is genuine in the individual relative to bourgeois ideology. The two art forms "penetrate"




the unconscious and expose its contents to the individual. The aggressive nature of the verb here is not an accident, for we must read "shock" to

include its conventional signification as a form of emotional or physical violence. In order that the shock effect of the film or art does not become

excessively detrimental, Benjamin concludes, it "should be cushioned by

heightened presence of mind" (238). What he means by this is somewhat

confusing when read in relation to his final comments on the value of film in "The Work of Art" essay. He states that "the film makes the cult

value recede into the background not only by putting the public in the

position of the critic, but also by the fact that at the movies this position

requires no attention. The public is an examiner, but an absent-minded one" (240-1). The choice of "absent-minded" here is most unfortunate since it appears to contradict the "presence of mind" that enables the

illuminating experience offered by the work of art. I will attempt to clar

ify this dilemma by turning to Benjamin scholar Susan Buck-Morss and further thoughts on microsound's capacity to meet the criteria of

Benjamin's politicized aesthetics. Buck-Morss makes the elucidating claim that Benjamin "[demands] of

art [the] task ... to undo the alienation of the corporeal sensorium, to

restore the instinctual power of the human bodily senses for the sake of humanity's self-preservation, and to do this, not by avoiding the new

technologies, but by passing through them" (5). The restoration to which

she refers comes in the wake of the numbing of what she calls the "syn aesthetic system" (13), the human consciousness that extends beyond the

boundaries of mind and skin into the external world, by modern life.6 In other words, the bodily senses are restored through art that provokes them by way of "distraction," which I would argue is a more appropriate term than "absent-minded." The viewer/listener is "distracted" to the

point of heightened attention and critical thought (a difficult task indeed in contemporary life). She goes on to add that "[i]n this situation of'cri sis in perception,' it is no longer a question of educating the crude ear to

hear music, but of giving it back hearing. It is no longer a question of

training the eye to see beauty, but of restoring 'perceptibility'" (18). There is perhaps no better affirmation of the aesthetic and political

practice/experience of microsound than this. At this point, my own contention should be obvious; namely, that

"self-alteration" is inherently political to the extent that transformation

of the embodied individual is the most valid groundwork from which to

launch political and social transformation. Where art is concerned, as

Buck-Morss makes clear, the (political) function of the artist as producer is not simply to educate the individual listener/viewer in terms of (mass) taste. Rather, a "crisis in perception" requires a restoration of the ability




to be present in the experience of art?to hear it, to see it from a "height ened presence of mind." Of course, this view departs from Benjamin's ambition to conceive an art that transforms the masses rather than just a

few scattered individuals. Considering the uses to which film and photog raphy have been put since Benjamin's death, however (despite their

reproducibility), his ambition seems untenable. One could, in fact, go so

far as to say that mass access to each medium has led to its debasement in the form of over-saturation.

Microsound, on the other hand, nurtures perception in the listener by way of its investment in relative silence and minimalism. For it is in silence that one is confronted with oneself, one's history, thoughts, emotions, sensations, the unconscious detritus of a life span. Thus the aura of

microsound lies neither in its presentation, its packaging, its tools, nor in itself as a medium. On the contrary, its aura emanates from the space in

which the listener is mirrored. This may sound dangerously close to the

"contemplative immersion" so repugnant to the Dadaist and to Benjamin himself, though such immersion must be qualified by the music's overt

appropriation of noise and the distraction that it produces. So, again, the immersion is not in the art per se, but in the act of listening. The aura of silence is deafening to the extent that this immersion reveals the "noise" that is always already on the periphery of consciousness. To put it another

way, the listener "passes through" the music and the technology that informs it in a process of restoration of the periphery, of his or her senses

and humanity?the self-preservation of which may not necessarily require art, though it most certainly requires embodied self-awareness.

In so far as it provokes such awareness or "perceptibility," microsound functions as a praxis of embodied listening. Nowhere is this more appar ent than in the music of Richard Chartier. I have chosen his "How

Things Change," a tribute to Morton Feldman, to exemplify his work and microsound in general because it both reflects an exemplary aesthetic of silence and locates itself within a historical context, in relation to a pre decessor, which has been one of the tasks of this analysis.

"How Things Change" (an apt title in light of the vicissitudes of sub

jectivity) opens with a flutter of sound, the faintest resonance of a distant event from which all lower frequencies have been removed. It is followed

by the slow fade-up of a mid-range drone, barely perceptible. A more

audible bass swell lands in the sparse territory of the drone and is

repeated approximately every 25-30 seconds. At 3'25, there begins a

segment of the composition that is most "musical" in so far as it intro duces notes in the form of two sustained drones that move from one to

the other (E to D). At 5'25, the mid-range drone is left to fade out to the

point of complete silence, a silence that is quickly occasioned by a high




frequency sine tone lasting for 15 seconds. The repeating bass swells that

had dropped out prior to the silence return, as does the initial "flutter." At 8'15, the mid-range drone fades back up to it original volume and is soon accompanied by an even lower bass that slowly pans from right to

left. At 10'30, the E to D drones are repeated once. As the D note fades

out, the pulse of the lower oscillation is left to conclude, until, quite sur

prisingly, a final bass swell closes the piece. The listener is thus left with what may be characterized as one of Benjamin's productive "shocks."

Conclusion

Microsound may not be precisely the culmination of the politicized art

that Benjamin would have desired, but it is a marriage of aestheticism and

technology that "liquidates" the standard obstacles to perceptibility. If it

is to endure in this capacity, its composers must strive towards greater levels of attention to compositional structure, to the rich dynamics of silence. The alternative is, at best, the kind of homogeneity that has

already evolved from the increasing numbers of laptop owners who, like millions of ordinary people with still and video cameras in hand, seek to

employ technology, often with the consequence that it employs them. At

worst, the glitch aesthetic will be, indeed, is already, appropriated for cap italistic ends. Microsound composers such as Chartier, however, push the

genre further away from mass consumption through the continued

exploration of silence and noise amidst a culture besieged by Music with a capital M. The revolutionary potential of their efforts awaits listening.




Notes

1. This is even true in popular music (the sound of "the street" sampled into rap; nature recorded or re-presented in New Age music that

wall-papers bookstores and bourgeois boutiques), not to mention more obscure manifestations such as musique concrete, electro

acoustics, and the industrial music of the 1980s.

2. This is equally true of Futurist music or musique concrete, though microsound differs in that it deconstructs the social material directly connected to the very technology that makes the music possible.

3. Hence, one of Cascone's central arguments that "the medium is no

longer the message; rather, specific tools themselves have become the

message"(2000, 12).

4. As opposed to more traditional music that, I would argue, "colonizes" the listener by fulfilling (indeed, overfilling) his or her expectations of standard melodies and timbres of sound, thus providing no space in

which one can participate beyond a conventional foot tap, dance or blank stare into a void of popular fantasy or solipsistic memory. On the other hand, I do not wish to imply that all music in relation to

microsound is without value. Some forms, modern classical or impro visational jazz, for example, are relatively engaging and challenging.

5. Cage based some of his composition on the I Ching, for example, thus allowing chance to guide the relationships between sounds. See

Cope 2001, 88-102.

6. Another way to view the effect of modern life on consciousness is via "its anaesthetizing [of] the organism, not through numbing, but

through flooding the senses" (Buck-Morss 1992, 22). Such is the

faculty, for Buck-Morss, of phantasmagoria that "tricks the senses

through technical manipulation" (ibid.).




References

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Buck-Morss, Susan. 1992. "Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter

Benjamin's Artwork Essay Reconsidered." October 62 (Autumn): 3-41.

Cascone, Kim. 2000. "The Aesthetics of Failure: 'Post-Digital' Tenden cies in Contemporary Computer Music." Computer Music Journal 24, no. 4 (December): 12-8.

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Composed Silence: Microsound and the Quiet Shock of Listening

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