I'm going to talk about two songs, two songs that are not as they seem.
When alone, especially in headphones, I often think about the reasons why I listen to noise, or noise music. The reasons are both new and not-new (but not old); the first time I heard anything that could be really considered noise was in sixth form, and I was on my own at a computer. I often attribute many characteristics of my personality (insomnia, walking, writing, vocal inertia, (attraction to) the sea, (love of) solitary time, (connection to) loneliness, etc.,) to the fact that I am an only child, and I think this initial noise connection is probably important in the same way. I remember listening to a few of these people from a certain city scene, I don't remember which city, I remember switching to something more palettable pretty quickly. But still, it remained somewhere. Of course it did. I had never heard anything like it.
In the first year of uni, I remember sitting in one night when all my new friends had gone home for a week. I was left alone in the flat with Nick, a student over from france. We got on well enough, but he was just getting into poker, whereas I was not. He stayed out late with a tall blonde swede, and another guy from kent. I stayed up late with a bottle of wine, the window open (the same Nick told me that my room was "cold and dark, like death"), reading this and that in whichever way the internet leads one; one of those nights where you are lead from one article to the next, or to several others, and you are constantly learning new things, very very quickly, things which open up new vistas, and new articles, and new interests. I finished listening to a CD, wondered what to listen to next, and put on the noise I had downloaded two years previously.
Oh my god. I remember sweating.
I remember reading an article, when I was mildly obsessed with Harmony Korine, by a guy who had seen Gummo in the cinema and started to jump up and laugh, much to the annoyance of everyone else in the quiet auditorium. Later, a few years later, the same author would find his way into an award ceremony and punch Harmony Korine in the face.
I knew, at that moment (I had never had such a visceral reaction to Gummo, but my experience with Julien Donkey-Boy came close), what that young american was talking about. I was sweating with excitement or adrenaline - are they seperate? - soon after that I did a 'noise special' on a radio show I had on the university airwaves. I remember sweating, laughing on my own in the studio. All the lights out, rendering the webcam impotent, registering only the red lights of the mixing board and the ocassional mad bottle silhouette over the computer screen. Jack, the only other ideologically-sound member of Livewire (we once had, soaked in cheap whisky, an on-air discussion about Planck time), switched the light on in Studio B, looked at me and pointed to the speakers, with what can only be described as a quizzical gaze. I gave the universal 'rock out' sign, greasy neck sweat surely visible in the harsh strip light, and a shit-eating grin. He responded with a look that I knew meant that he understood, even if he didn't totally understand.
Since then, it has been a gradual and incessant interest. About four months ago, I wondered what would happen if I listened to nothing but noise for an entire day. I have a few days off from uni in a week, and amy is at work, and I usually get up when she leaves at 8am. This gives me a solid ten hours, until she gets back at six, of self-imposed confinement.
That experiment has passed now, a hundred times or more, mostly by luck rather than judgement. Noise is my first choice, and I now spend most of my music-listening time on my own, so first comes first.
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So. Onto the subject at hand.
There is an album by the Goslings, called 'Grandeur of Hair' (a fantastic title), which is a lot different from their other albums - it has these hints, these barely perceptible hints. There are two reasons why these hints are perfect:
1. The album was issued on a label called archiveCD, which releases
beautiful beautiful packages which contain CDs, in limited numbers, and beautiful packages really deserve beautiful music and, even more, vice versa, music that is not only beautiful but is
special, and these beautiful packages rarely receive special music.
Grandeur of Hair is special.
2. The first hint sets you up for the second hint, and the second hint is actually not a hint, but a small, perfect crystal of light.
The first hint is a song called 'croatan', which has this quite heavy-handed way of introducing a distinctly traceable melody back into the Goslings songbook.
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Wait. This is coming out all wrong.
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I want to talk about two songs, which are not as they seem.
The difference between the poststructuralists and deconstructionists is one that is almost completely arbitrary until a point can be made from the distinction; the difference exists in the same way as quantum mechanics, which is to say that it changes on observation, which is to say that each subjective distinction exists only to elucidate a certain point, and more or less ceases to exist after the metaphor has been played.
Hear me out.
The reason deconstruction and poststructuralism are so interlinked is because so many of the theorists came from the same background, and when talking to certain people about certain things, they assumed the terminology was pretty much the same, even if different words were used. The truth is that poststructuralism was born out of lacan, of lacan's use of the word 'real' to mean precisely everything that was opposed to the real (or was unreal), and then out of (people like, and including) derrida, who liked lacan's counter-intuitive reasoning, and decided that he was going to try out a method of critique that would take lacan's theory of the opposite meaning, and tie it up with sasseur's (sp?) distinction of a 'sign' as being made up of a signifier (e.g., the word 'dog'), and a signified (the four-legged hairy thing we recall whenever we hear or think about the word 'dog'). He took the words that we associate with things, and flipped them over...much like Foucault's conception of history, poststructuralism developed into a schema of recognition that defined things by what they
were not rather than what they were. Some nice visual metaphors - sasseur said that the signifier and the signified were like two sides of a piece of paper: logically inseperable. This is the structuralist image. On one side is the word 'dog', and on the other side is a picture of a dog. You know what I mean. As soon as your ears hear it, your mind's eye can see it...etc., etc., etc. Simply put, the poststructuralist image is a piece of paper with a picture of a dog on one side, and then on the other side is every word that does not mean 'dog'.
I'm rereading the paragraph above, a few months later, and I'm not sure how much of it is true. But, seriously, I think I'm going somewhere with this.
The word 'deconstruction' has more of a violence associated with it than poststructuralism; a seperate thing, where the thing is a kind of birth-canal-existentialism. Are the two connected? I have no idea, but this is a little narrative that I have recently come across, and is (I think) kind of relevant:
Hegel wrote a load of stuff, and one of the books he wrote was called 'The Phenomenology of Spirit'. The book is so, so, so dense. I have routinely spent three hours in a group trying to decode five pages, and the book is nine hundred and something pages long. There are at least 5 thought-stopping ideas on every page; and then, after ten pages or so, he has a little flurry of poetic philosophy and creates beautiful images that slide off into a colour wheel of possibilities, making all the previously incomprehensibly dense passages completely forgiveable.
Later on, Karl Marx read a load of Hegel, and read the work of people who had read Hegel, and said - wait. These people are all wrong, Hegel was saying something else! He then tries, for ages, to convince people of the political-left side of Hegel rather than the more obvious-ham-fisted political-right side.
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One more time. Sorry. That last section would have worked, if I had finished it all at once.
So.
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I want to talk about two songs, which are not as they seem.
I.The (assumed) difference between poststructuralism and deconstruction is that one inhabits the other; and then the assumption is that they are the same thing; and then, at some point, the difference is felt on an intuitive level. The difference, as I tried to say in the previous bit, is violence.
II.There has, I think, been a lot of application of these ideas to music, but a lot of the time I have come across it through avant-garde/orchestral pieces, or music that is really trying to be 'out there' in one way or another. There have been less applications to popular music.
III.This is where the difference between poststructuralist and deconstructionist conceptions of music really matter for my purposes -
A.Wilco, with Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, made an album that took a typical album structure, a typical chord structure, a typical song structure, a perfect and imperfect cadence, and took them apart and put them back together, not always in a logical way. Well, like a flat pack - they took it apart, and some screws were left. But the difference between that album and a flatpack is the fact that they had seen the building before they took it apart, before they rebuilt it: they knew what they could take out. And then, once they had taken it apart and were putting it back together, it became even more obvious what they could leave out. Why do we need this? We don't, that's all. We don't need a bridge here, but we need something that seems like a bridge. We need a bridge filler, and what we can do is take the filler from the bridge and make it interesting - fill a different mould, or wait until the filler is nearly ready, and then fuck with it a bit.
Poststructuralism keeps one on one's toes. It happened again in the third movement of Nico Muhly's Mothertongue (The Only Tune, specifically part two - The Old Mill Pond), and it replaces what you know with the pure essence of what you love about an album, or about a song. In the original sense - in the sense that means a dog is not necessarily a dog - highlighting this fact was enough. With music, highlighting that fact and changing it is the logical extension.
B.If poststructuralism (this mould is very specific and not altogether true), in this guise, treats the traditional song-form with a certain benevolence, promising to put it back together in some form or other, what does deconstruction do?
IV.The Goslings have a song called 'Overnight', which is big and noisy, very noisy, probably even 'noise music'. I had the same reaction to it as my reaction to...
[[this is where I got to when I last left this post, and I have no idea what I was going to say. But I think I have a point, so I'll carry on with something.]] I had the same reaction to 'Overnight' as I had to My Bloody Valentine, which was an experience of being assaulted, in a good way, by pop music.
(The moon is so close to perfect right now. I read some Proust, and there's a bit where he says that when the moon appears in the sky in the daytime, such as on a hot sunny day, it's like an actress. It's like an actress, before she is supposed to be on stage, coming out of a side door to view the performance with the rest of the people in the theatre - but trying to stay silent and invisible, so as not to break the half-illusion. Those who make eye contact share some singular connection.)V.I read a reflection of noise music recently, and it was actually the first time I've realised and acknowledged what it means - it is what 'they' think 'we' listen to. But it would be wrong to leave it at that - we revel in what 'they' think. 'we' also think it, to a certain extent; it's undeniable, that we love the selfperception as much as the perception: there is always a moment when we are surprised with what we hear. the nuances. the jazz. at what point, before this moment, did we think we would be so subjectively inclined towards one type of drone over another? we can describe one as full, and layered - we can describe it as interesting, as not another clone. we want to describe it in these pedestrian parallels because we cannot believe how much it seems to sing with the strings buried throughout our body. we feel it like tendons: it is not everything, we might not even know how to use it. but it sure as hell keeps everything together.
VI.I can't discuss the first song without the second: The Gosling's 'Overnight' is loud, and has a melody, but in these ways it is explicable. Emerald's 'Damaged Kids' is different, but helps to explain both.
Damaged Kids starts off, and it starts off how its supposed to start off. This is the only way to say it. It starts off how you think it will start off; it starts off like so many tapes, like so many garage projects. The important thing here is that it starts off like a simulacrum of every noise or drone or ambient track you have ever heard; it's got those so-distinctive blobs of mixed reverb and delay, and it's got that underground hum that you can sine-wave to the artist's amusement until you run out of battery. We've all done it. But just as you think this is going to be everything else, it takes what you've heard and completely recontextualises it. It puts it in this volume - and it's a synth, but I think the most important point is the fidelity and the volume - it sounds so unlike what has come before. I read an interview with one of the members of Emeralds, where he said that the main difference between a tape and a full cd album, for him, was the reception: the tapes are experiments, and the cd is a statement, the revision and conclusion of everything that has ocurred in the gap.
The theatre director Michael Thalheimer always tries to reduce plays to their essential element. To revitalise their striking power by removing the history or, possibly, by removing their verissimilitude. He takes everything that could possibly divide human emotion, and slices it off like a fillet from the cartiledge. In
an interview, David Levine cut him against Castorf, to which Thalheimer replied:
"Castorf is often regarded as a deconstructionist, whereas the opposite is true. Rather than condensing pieces to the minimum, he’s pressing them together. The piece remains intact; it’s denser, rather than being taken apart or reassembled."
Within the context of the interview - and I may be wrong here, let me know - this is a criticism. The observation in itself could be seen as something different, could be seen as a vague compliment, or a tipping of the hat. The sentence itself is conservative, but everything underneath it is cutting. But I don't mean to analyse the sentence here - I just mean, why is there such a difference?
'Overnight' takes a song and stretches it over a longer period - it's as simple as that. We enjoy the riff for longer, simply because it is longer. But it stretches it over this rough drum, so, in essence, it is cut. And what is she singing about? The song has a speed and a silence that is almost impossible to decode. We know it is happening, and we know that this melody is just a louder version of something else. I have no idea what she is saying. In one section, it sounds as if she says 'I'm on the way down', which seems like a perfect disintegration.
I think i've got it: we expect disintegration. So many albums are to do with falling apart, but they rarely do. We want performative songs. We want songs and albums that do what they say they are about; we want them to finish in a death, or in the collapse of one building into another until the song cannot recognise itself. This is what Overnight provides. 'staying overnight', as in, at someone else's house, is not only slow, it is incomparable - i hope i'm not the only one - it is a constant battle, even in sleep. Everything in your body tries to organise and calculate the situation of the relationship, everything tries to make it special and bearable.
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One more time.
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Here are two songs. Both songs are a dream. Both songs stretch at the seams.
Both songs are pop songs. Both songs are pop songs in the sense that they are a history of pop-songs. 'Overnight' does this by condensing the history into one solid, glorious mass; 'Damaged Kids' is more like a textbook, with an ethereal chapter on The Future when we close the pages on history-so-far. When we read it again, we can see something different. Maybe the text is glowing. Maybe the pictures move around the page. Wherever it goes, we get it all.
They either succeed in eliminating all the high points of pop music and condense what really hits the button into a finite statement, or they take all the failures and do the same. It's really a personal decision. Everything that has happened before leads up to these moments, these songs. Wait, did I say performative earlier?
The history of pop music is the intertwined history of noise; the double helix of what is acceptable and unacceptable. Damaged Kids is at the top of the arc - it can see the mirror image across a canyon of dead air, it can look at a distance and say: this is what it is. Overnight is the middle of the decline, the acceleration, the moment when the chicane crosses over. The crash.
The crash.
'You can go blind, waiting'
- Michael Dickman, Seeing Whales
The Goslings - OvernightEmeralds - Damaged Kids
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