BREAK/FLOW versus DATACIDE

…once desire is specified as sexuality, it enters into forms of particularised power…
Felix Guattari

Libidinal Musics

Electronically composed sound, communally celebrated has the effect of some collective plateau phase. Music becomes a device, a prosthetics that leads to a hypersensitization – an overspill that establishes a field of flow between listeners. This incessant repetition with its controlled highs and lows, its deep grindings is nothing other than the continuation of erotics by other means, an erogenisation without object or delimited locale. The carefully placed touches of digitalised breaks, tips of searing reverb and the conducting of frequencies through skins plays the body to effect a libidinal response… to take us elsewhere. The desire for music is the desire for erotic communication as diffuse sensuality.

Dancing becomes the means of expending the build-up of energy that wells up as a result, not only, of sound stimulus but of the general confinement of social desires. Electricity abounds. Tension and friction. The walls are silver. Desire manifests itself in the broadest social field. Channels are opened up for the release of energies which are not necessarily directed towards the genital figure of pleasure but toward a prolongation through repetition of an endless deferral of accomplishment. Tracks that never end. The night that goes on without run-off.

Machinic Mayhem

Wires, jackplugs, sockets, circuits, entangled cables. We are building a desiring-machine with no one aim other than the continuation of the various processes we can bring into further relationship with it. Dancefloor. Mixing Desk. Groove. Just as sound is made to run through treatment chambers in an effort to ward off its formation and solidification as ‘music’ so we enter into these relays to become unlimited, to ward off the formation of a distinct identity.Then something begins to vibrate, begins to function. Rhythms appear…

Both sound and subjectivity become a network of actual and possible relations. A-signifying. Unidentifiable. Promulgating the urge to produce something. Because we cannot return to a fixed point of reference, because the sound no longer strives to represent anything, it can only unleash surges of intensity that correspond to an ever changing subjectivity that challenges the passivity inducing effects of models. We are always moving away from subjugation. We are always resisting the institutional control of intensive flows.

Cycle 1, Cycle 2, Cycle 3, Psychic War

A repeating loop loses all sense of place and time. An attainable plateau firmly rooted within shared biological and psychic realities. The world turns round, the world turns round, the world turns round, the world turns round. There is a pursuit of devices and techniques that take us on the verge of our local and intimate edges – the cliff-top of repetition-compulsion induces the necessary vertigo and loss of footing ascribable to the pull of the unconscious. That repetition is meaningless in light of normative, melodic musics is exactly what we are after.

It can take us beyond pleasure and unpleasure, to which the ego fearfully clings, and bring to light unconscious drives and desires that strive for actualisation and proliferation. Ecoute et Repete. If the unconscious is an orphan then this repetition-compulsion obliterates the ego: our boundaries are loosened, we are in-process and the cycles of sound make of identity nothing other than a ceaseless pleasure constantly to be undertaken afresh. The prohibition of a continuing engagement of psychic warfare – access to the unconscious is prohibited, identity must be inherited.

Ministry of Identity Defense

The prohibition of a ‘succession of repetitive beats’ is simply the authorities’ answering salvo in a continuing engagement of psychic warfare. What is at stake is a battle over access to the new territories made accessible by the collision of identity and desire with machines. A manic-inducing cocktail that moves at lightening speeds to create an a-signifying scrawl on managerial control grids.

Falling short of the final frontier of micro-biological implants, this penultimate frontier, this existential territory is made accessible by linking up to machines that unleash the non-discursive: a child playing with shit in the darkened glades of a forest where dancers burn money. These machines are personalised, made malleable, taken out of their rigidified context, and made to experiment and express. Machinic-sound conducts a collective proliferation of de-organised erotics, an exploration of unconscious potentialities. Listening to this. The sound of desire. The active composition of several selves again and again, the Ministry of Identity Defense must pass a law.

Libidinal Musics (2): A Guide

To come to a point of libidinal intensity whilst listening to electronic dance music it is simply a matter of reversing the cultural outlook which considers that penetration is the pinnacle of sexual gratification. This fits into the whole process whereby our energy and therefore ourselves are subjugated to easily representable and mediated images that can then be disseminated as the only path to pleasure. The phallic symbol is the cultural norm. We are continually pushed in this direction. If we maintain this mono-dimensional outlook on pleasure then we become easy prey to brainwashing and conditioning through the industrialised manipulation of libidinal energy.

If there is only one path towards release then this insinuates into our consciousness that there is only one zone where we can feel pleasure and by extension that our identity is limited to a single Self. What we aim for is porno-stereo. Others may call it the body without organs. Others still may call it the great ephemeral skin. Libidinal musics is another approach to polymorphous perversity where the intersection of bass surges with syncopated kicks and spectral strings can make the skin into a field of goose bumps. This spreading of feelings of pleasure all over the surface of the body, the way it avoids centering on the genital region still makes it a libidinal sensation. Onanism? A fetishism of black vinyl? How can it be possible that music is not a desiring-machine?

GROOVE NOTATION: “there’s only 24 hours in an evening”

Flint Michigan @ Break/Flow

• Other texts by Flint Michigan on datacide-magazine.com

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