Anne Finegan

first published for  Sound Particle - curated by Torben Tilly & Jasmine Guffond

on the occasion of the Sound Particle Concert event at

The Cell Block East Sydney Technical College. Solo performances by

Carsten Nicholi - Michael Greaves - Dion Workman

supported by Artspace Sydney.

Composed of planes and blocks of consistencies, this is music of unconcern, gently insistent, and coming from the side of the thing.  Less derived from a principle of found sound, product of chance, like Joyce's famous "shout in the street', it has been developed from a systematic appreciation of the order already inherent in the pulse of familiar electronic equipment. Consider it as formed through the close association of being-alongside machines of electronic relay and transmission, and resulting from the paying of close attention to the sounds of transmission itself.  Amplify, cut up, and distort the sounds of feedback, blur, blips and beeps, there's an authenticity that can't be disguised, a machinic origin which, in spite of human intervention, belongs to the shift which Deleuze signalled towards the side of the thing. 

Composers of this music assume a relation of attention and attending to, rather than assuming the role of 'creator'. Michael Graeve cites an inbuilt element of boredom, fascinating in itself, in his work with the static of loudspeakers which, one day, will wear themselves out.  This redundancy of boredom belongs to a machine which doesn't really care but insists nonetheless.

The composer, as facilitator, supervises electronic flows and predicated consistencies, tweaking regularities into cadences and rhythms.  The relationship is one in which subjectivity yields to the machine, to its pulses and its tones.  The composer adjusts sounds which come predetermined; if some are replete with musical qualities, that's for the artist to decide.  Artistic impulse, however, defines itself in terms of sensitivity to the machinic source.  In this, there's an undisputed intimacy of contact, a deep familiarity, that is the result of such an attentive being alongside.  Often working with the barely audible sonoral presence which couldn't be engineered out of transmission devices - that little hiss, the hard-drive's hurried phrases of whispered ticks - these artists work with the incidental material remainder of sound which is surplus to design, but nevertheless, regular, formed, determined and characteristic.  If, like Michael Greave, they often prefer to work with decayed equipment, no longer quite so silent, it is because the machine is beginning to evidence itself: to emit its own rhythms, tones and beats.

The nature of these electronic pulses introduces a new set of musical possibilities - compulsion, consistency, insistence, regularity, infinite sustain.  Feedback can hang like density itself, and stay there with an intensity of lingering we normally associate with matter.  We're presented with the possibility of durations which exceed the physical limits of producing sound with fingers and breath.  The electronic pulse (or crackle) is regular and consistent, subject to modulations and cut-ups rather than the harnessing of the swelling and fading energies of voice and instruments where variance is the key.  With music composed of electronic transmissions themselves, it's possible to talk of planes and vectors, even of straight lines and mass, geometries and place without any loss of the relevance of descriptive's like colour and tone.  Therefore, this music can intentionally lose the sense of temporality, one note, or collections of notes, following one upon the other, to achieve energetic consistencies which stake out territories in space rather than passing through it. Carsten Nicholai's music can fill out blocks of unrelated planes (sometimes locked grooves), each track composed of tones consistent within themselves.  Within a segment, emissions can be contracted and lengthened, sped up and slowed down to achieve the timbres and pitches of recognizable planes.  The musical territory insists rather than disappearing into the unfolding of time (follow the bouncing ball).

Modes of affect are, therefore, determined by the principles of segmentation and flow:  a plane of sweetness repeating the touch of a stylus recording its own sound (Castern Nicholai); the insistence of near silence ( Dion Workman and Rohan Thomas).  However, these expressive qualities lie less with the composer than with the "in itself" of self-consistent musical planes which have no direct care for human concern.  Irrespective of the shadings we find in colour, emotion, depths and light, this music has already been inherently programmed by variables of matter and resistance.  The result is a near post-human music of facilitated immanence.